SPECIAL REPORT: BENEATH ZORRO

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.narativ.orgEddy Aragon broadcasts from Albuquerque on KIVA — “The Rock of Talk.”When Jeffrey Epstein died in August 2019, the FBI searched his Manhattan townhouse, his Palm Beach mansion, and his Caribbean island. One Epstein property was left alone: Zorro Ranch, in the high desert south of Santa Fe. The local ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates would not touch the story. The people who had worked on the ranch called Aragon’s station instead. His AM signal carries to the small towns around the property — Edgewood, Moriarty, Stanley — and for seven years the leads came to him because there was nowhere else for them to go.In November 2019, three months after Epstein’s death, one of those leads arrived as an email. The sender said he was former Zorro staff — “a person that has been there and seen it all.” He said he had taken material from Epstein’s home “as my insurance.” And he wrote one sentence: two foreign girls had been buried in the hills outside the ranch, on the orders of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.Aragon did what a citizen is supposed to do. He took the email to the FBI in person, sat for a formal intake — name, Social Security number, a background check — and handed it over.The Bureau did nothing with it. For six years.That was not the only door Aragon tried. In 2019 and 2020 he helped convene a citizens’ grand jury on behalf of Chauntae Davies, an Epstein survivor who has said she was raped at Zorro Ranch. The filing was stamped and delivered to the Santa Fe courthouse. It was never examined — not by the county sheriff, not by the state Attorney General.The work cost him. Aragon says his FM tower on the Sandia ridge was taken down, and his videos were stripped from every social platform he was on. The more he said about Zorro Ranch, the more the pressure came.He was also right to keep going. The New Mexico Truth Commission now investigating Zorro Ranch — the first official inquiry into the property in its history — exists, Aragon says, because of the email he forwarded in 2019. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury found that email in the public Epstein files and carried it to the state Attorney General. The tip the FBI buried for six years became the document that reopened the case.Aragon’s instincts run further than the documents, and on Narativ Live we drew that line plainly: the speculation about ritual and the occult is not something our reporting rests on, and Narativ’s investigation of the Epstein files has found no evidence for it. What Aragon has earned is narrower and harder. He received a credible insider’s allegation of bodies buried at Zorro. He handed it to the federal government. And he watched the government do nothing for six years.What is actually beneath Zorro Ranch — who built the house, why the wells were drilled far past anything a ranch could use, who owns the land that rings it, and what one survivor says was done to her in a room below ground — is the subject of our investigation. THE GREATEST HEIST, Book 3, Part 2: ZORRO, publishes this week.Aragon has one wish for the property, he told Narativ Live. If he could walk it, he would go straight to the mechanical rooms. “I know,” he said, “that everything is in those mechanical rooms.”Thanks to everyone who came here in good faith — you’re the reason this space exists. The conversation on this post has run its course, so I’m closing the comments here. The rest of Narativ stays open, and I’ll see you in the next one.