EPSTEIN'S MICROWAVE RADIO TOWERS Part Two
How a New Mexico telecom operator, a Nevada shell company, a satellite earth station, and a sitting probate judge connect to Jeffrey Epstein's still-functioning secret communications network
When federal investigators released Jeffrey Epstein’s grand jury records last year, most readers focused on the names. I looked at the checks.
Buried in the financial exhibits — Bates-stamped EFTA, marked CONFIDENTIAL pursuant to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e), drawn on Deutsche Bank and signed by Zorro Development Corp. out of a Red Hook, St. Thomas address — was a line item that has received almost no public attention. Under Project #21, category: Microwave & IT, Epstein’s ranch operation was making payments to a company called Sierra Nevada Property Management LLC, PO Box 70931, Las Vegas, Nevada 89170.
Property management. In Las Vegas. For a ranch in the high desert of central New Mexico.
I started pulling the thread.
Sierra Nevada Property Management LLC has no visible business history, no web presence, no employees, no properties under management. What it does have is an FCC registration — FRN 0008077471, filed December 12, 2002, last updated December 8, 2021, contact listed as “Kristy Carbon-Gaul,” email SierraNevadaPM@aol.com, phone (702) 338-3500. That registration links Sierra Nevada Property Management to a microwave radio tower at a location in Clark County, Nevada called Rats Nest Spring, on Christmas Tree Pass Road in Searchlight Township — a remote, unmanned site deep in the Mojave Desert. FCC tower registration records confirm the structure at coordinates 35.2483, -114.7436, registration number 1059484, file number A0366260. Structure type: Tower. Constructed: January 7, 1999.
Property management companies don’t own microwave towers. Especially not ones way the hell out here:
A second FCC registration connected Carbon-Gaul to TeleBEEPER of New Mexico, Inc., a paging and wireless communications company based at 4545 McLeod NE, Suite C, Albuquerque.
TeleBEEPER was founded in 1986 by a man named Philip W. Vanderhoof, known to everyone in his life as Dallas, born in August 1954. For three decades, he built one of the more significant private wireless infrastructures in New Mexico — including a communications tower on Sandia Crest, the 10,678-foot peak that dominates Albuquerque’s eastern skyline and serves as the primary relay point for communications across the entire region.
But Vanderhoof’s infrastructure extended beyond towers and microwave links. FCC International Bureau records show that TeleBEEPER of New Mexico held satellite earth station license E940533 continuously from September 1994 — the year after Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch. The license was actively renewed and amended in 2011 and 2012, in the period immediately before the microwave link between Zorro Ranch and Sandia Crest was installed. A satellite earth station license authorizes direct transmission to and from orbit. Combined with the documented microwave path from Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest, where Vanderhoof’s tower stood, the architecture of what Epstein was paying for comes into focus: a communications chain running from the ranch, up to Sandia Crest, and from there — potentially — to satellite. From there, anywhere in the world, easily.
So who is “Kristy Carbon-Gaul”? And why is the the registered agent on Vanderhoof’s companies that were doing business with Epstein? I googled the name, and nearly fell out of my chair when the search results appeared.
Christy Carbon-Gaul (with a C, not a K), as we speak, is the sitting probate judge for Bernalillo County, New Mexico — the state’s most populous county and home to Albuquerque and Sandia Crest — a position she has held since January 2019, the same year Epstein died.
Carbon-Gaul was also Vanderhoof’s attorney — and more than that. When Dallas Vanderhoof died, he left a will designating her by name as personal representative of his estate. She accepted the appointment on April 15, 2021 — while serving as the elected Bernalillo County Probate Judge, a potential conflict of interest and ethical violation. In Bernalillo County, there is only one probate judge. Cristy Carbon-Gaul is that judge. She is the court.
This created a structural problem the estate filing could not cleanly solve: the Vanderhoof estate could not go to Carbon-Gaul’s own court. Instead it was filed in Albuquerque District Court — case D-202-PB-202100266, assigned to District Judge Erin B. O’Connell. The workaround routed the case away from the court Carbon-Gaul controls, but it did not resolve the underlying conflict. Carbon-Gaul remains a sitting judicial officer simultaneously serving as personal representative and attorney of record for an estate — practicing law in her own subject-matter jurisdiction. Under the New Mexico Code of Judicial Conduct, Rule 21-100 requires judges to uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary. Rule 21-300 prohibits conduct creating an appearance of impropriety. Rule 21-400 restricts extrajudicial activities — including the practice of law — when those activities conflict with judicial duties.
The estate has been open since April 2021. It has been dismissed for lack of prosecution three times — March 2023, January 2025, and February 2026 — and reinstated each time by Carbon-Gaul herself as personal representative. As of February 26, 2026, nearly five years after filing, it remains open. The assets of the Vanderhoof estate — including the FCC licenses, the Nevada tower, the satellite earth station authorization, and Sierra Nevada Property Management LLC — have not been publicly accounted for.
No complaint against Carbon-Gaul appears to have been filed with the New Mexico Judicial Standards Commission.
A call I placed to Carbon-Gaul’s office for clarification of her relationship to Vanderhoof and to the shell company in Nevada went unreturned.
Here is what Epstein was actually paying for.
Starting in 2012, Richard L. Boltz of Advanced Communications & Electronics — a small Albuquerque firm — began negotiating a new communications installation with Epstein’s representations. In 2014, Boltz submitted a quote to Zorro Ranch for a 6 GHz fixed microwave link. The design: transmit from the main residence at Zorro Ranch, coordinates 35-16-01.7 N, 105-58-13.2 W, from an antenna mounted nine meters up on a building at the ranch — and receive at Sandia Crest, coordinates 35-12-59.3 N, 106-27-07.3 W, elevation 3,246 meters. Vanderhoof’s tower.
The FCC license for this link, WQUT488, was filed under Boltz’s name in October 2014 and remained active through April 2016. Two months later, in July 2016, two new bidirectional licenses appeared: WQXY316 and WQXY300, filed under the name of Zorro Ranch manager Brice Gordon. Boltz — the outside contractor who built the system — was out. Gordon, operating inside the Epstein organization, had assumed control of the licenses.
Sierra Nevada Property Management LLC — Vanderhoof’s Nevada shell, registered by Carbon-Gaul, overseeing the radio tower in remote Nevada — starts getting billed.
For what, I’m not sure.
But the payment was routed through a Las Vegas, Nevada, PO box, administered by an Albuquerque attorney specializing in wills and estates, and gay adoptions, who founded Q House, a home for troubled LGBTQ teens. She is now the probate judge for Bernalillo County.
The peak of the Sandia Mountains is home to a communications infrastructure serves military, governmental, and commercial functions across central New Mexico. Every major carrier and government agency running infrastructure in this region routes through towers at that elevation. Nonetheless, a massive, private fixed microwave link pointing from Jeffrey Epstein’s compound directly into that hubis far from any typical vacation ranch communications management infrastructure — even for a rich guy.
What was moving through that link? Where did whatever Epstein was sending out of Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest go once it got to Sandia Crest?
Who was on the receiving end?
The geometry of this network answers part of that question — but not all. I promise to keep digging.
The Rats Nest Spring tower in Nevada (the one with the sitting probate judge listed as its contact) sits at coordinates 35.2483, -114.7436, deep in the Mojave Desert near Searchlight, Nevada. Running the bearings between the three documented points in this network (Zorro Ranch, Sandia Crest, and the Nevada tower) produces a striking result.
The bearing from Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest runs at 262.8 degrees — due west. The bearing from Sandia Crest to Rats Nest Spring runs at 272.7 degrees — also due west. The angular difference between those two legs is 9.9 degrees across nearly 500 miles of desert.
These three points are very nearly in a straight line.
Zorro Ranch to Sandia Crest — 27.4 miles. Sandia Crest to Rats Nest Spring — 467.8 miles. A corridor running due west from Epstein’s locking prison-like outbuilding, through the relay hub adjacent to New Mexico’s nuclear weapons infrastructure, to an unmanned tower in the Nevada desert, constructed January 7, 1999 — three years after Epstein purchased Zorro Ranch, fifteen years before the formal FCC microwave license appeared.
I do not believe this alignment could possibly be accidental. Relay networks are designed to run exactly like this. Towers are placed where the geometry requires them. And the shortest distance between any two points — well, you get it.
Dallas Vanderhoof’s operation had a documented history of crossing lines — literally. In December 2001, the FCC took enforcement action against TeleBEEPER for operating an unauthorized transmitter at Franklin Mountain in El Paso — within 2.5 miles of the US-Mexico border — without the cross-border notification and authorization legally required for transmitters that close to an international boundary. The company was transmitting toward Mexico from Sandia Crest, from the tower Epstein would later piggyback off of, without authorization to do so. For what it’s worth, I believe “TeleBEEPER” was stupidly named on purpose, to make it sound like a lame-ass old beeper company, just as “Sierra Nevada Property Management” was named to sound like something it was not. I believe Dallas Vanderhoof was in the business of secret military and intelligence communications in New Mexico.
Dallas Vanderhoof’s son, Gary Alan Vanderhoof, works today as a project manager at G2i Construction, an Albuquerque firm whose president is Emile Gonzales. G2i holds multi-year military construction contracts at Kirtland Air Force Base, Peterson Space Force Base, Schriever Air Force Base, Fort Carson, Buckley Air Force Base, F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Cheyenne Mountain/NORAD, and the Otowi Bridge West Entrance at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The company has also built a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility — a SCIF — for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
Dallas Vanderhoof’s granddaughter is Erin Vanderhoof, meanwhile, a staff writer at Vanity Fair, where she covers culture and, notably, the British royal family — including, in recent years, Prince Andrew.
Vanity Fair killed investigative reporter Vicky Ward’s story on Jeffrey Epstein’s victims in 2002, removing the accounts of women who had come forward with allegations against him. The magazine’s editorial leadership at the time later acknowledged the decision. The piece ran without those accounts.
Prince Andrew’s documented ties to Epstein were among the most extensively scrutinized in the entire network. That Erin Vanderhoof wrote a glowing profile of him in Vanity Fair — a magazine Epstein was obsessed with being portrayed well in, according to his emails with his publicist Peggy Siegal, seems a little too on the money to be coincidence, all things considered.
Whether Erin Vanderhoof knows anything about the infrastructure her grandfather built in the New Mexico desert, or its connection to Jeffrey Epstein, is not known. She has not been contacted for comment.
What is documented: the Vanderhoof name connects the physical infrastructure of Epstein’s secret communications network, the next generation’s classified military construction contracts, and the media institution that suppressed Epstein victim accounts — with the royal figure most closely linked to his crimes as the subject of family coverage.
That might be coincidence. Or not.
Like everything else in Epstein’s New Mexico web.
Phew! You made it to the end. Yeah, I write long. Thanks for hanging in there. I offer all my posts freely, but your support is necessary and appreciated. Just four $25 tips per day keep me writing full time. Thanks so much!
I lived for years in Ocala, Florida. A place that often hosted these people. Horse farms are very popular and billionaire “compounds” abound. I have seen private Lakes. Private golf courses, Private airports capable of landing a 747 even their own ZOO.
Microwave relay comm stations? Not even the Saudi King had one of those.
Alisa, this reporting and analysis is beyond belief. As you stated, you were born for this work and your moment is now. Know that your readers are in awe and so grateful for your brave exposition of the truth. It is having an impact.