The Strange Connection Between Mark Leiti's Death, Corey Comperatore, and PETN Explosives from Butler to Lebanon
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The Strange Connection Between Mark Leiti's Death, Corey Comperatore, and PETN Explosives from Butler to Lebanon
A series of seemingly unconnected deaths and explosive attacks spanning from a Pennsylvania backyard to Butler to Lebanon reveals a troubling pattern involving PETN explosives. Mark Leiti, a supervisor at Surefire Wireline who handled PETN explosives professionally, died in a mysterious burn barrel explosion in August 2022. His best friend since high school, Corey Comperatore, didn't believe the official story, particularly after Mark allegedly confessed to stealing explosives from work just a week before his death. Two years later, Corey himself would die at the Butler rally on July 13, 2024, after being mysteriously escorted to the front row by an unknown woman. Just months after Butler, the world witnessed a sophisticated PETN-rigged pager attack in Lebanon that killed 12 and wounded over 3,000. This investigation explores the troubling connections between these events, the properties of PETN explosives, and the unanswered questions that continue to haunt the families left behind.
On August 23rd, 2022, Mark A. Leiti died in what authorities called a bizarre accident. The 48-year-old was in his backyard working with his burn barrel when something suddenly exploded. According to the initial story, they didn't know exactly what exploded in that burn barrel, but something did, causing a piece of shrapnel to hit his neck and end his life.
Local news coverage presented it as a freak accident. Mark's brother, Chris Leiti, was still trying to process what happened. "He was burning papers or whatever. This was the story that I got and something was in there. Something exploded and a piece had come up and you know that was it. I'm still in shock. At some point I will try to put my arms around it but at this point now I can't," Chris told reporters.
The Leiti family still didn't know what ignited inside the barrel that caused the explosion. But Mark's brother clearly had questions about the narrative, and he wasn't the only one.
The Friend Who Didn't Buy the Story
Mark Leiti's best friends had questions as well. One of his friends in particular, who he had known since high school, did not fully accept the burn barrel narrative. The first reason was due to what Mark Leiti did for a living.
What wasn't mentioned in the news clip was that Mark Leiti was a supervisor for a company called Surefire Wireline LLC in Kittanning, Pennsylvania. Surefire Wireline works with oil and gas companies and they specialize in what's known as pump down perforating of oil and gas wells. Essentially, this means they punch holes so that oil and gas can flow through horizontally.
Why does this matter? Because that technique requires the use of a very specific explosive known as PETN. Think back to the old Bugs Bunny cartoons with the Roadrunner and TNT explosives. Things have been updated since then, and now the preferred explosive used is PETN.
Mark Leiti's high school friend, one of his best friends, did not believe that he had died because he just burned some random stuff in a barrel. He knew that Mark had access to very dangerous explosives and that Mark knew how to deal with them. He was particularly careful with those explosives—he knew how to handle them.
A Confession One Week Before Death
Then there's this: allegedly, Mark A. Leiti had confessed to his longtime high school friend just a week before he died that he had illegally taken some explosives from his job. The ATF was apparently investigating him for this, at least according to what was confided by a former ATF agent named Courtney Thief.
This raises an obvious question: why would any person want to steal explosives from work? To be clear, just a tiny bit—a couple of grams of PETN—causes a massive explosion. So it begs the question: what could a person do with larger amounts of it? Is there a black market for those types of explosives? Otherwise, why risk blowing yourself up, taking it from work, getting into trouble, being investigated by the Feds? Was there somebody on the outside seeking to buy it in larger quantities on the side?
The answer is unknown. What is known is what happened on July 13th, 2024, just 30 minutes away from Kittanning, Pennsylvania, in Butler, Pennsylvania, where Trump survived an assassination attempt while on stage at his rally.
The Death of Corey Comperatore
The sad part is that Mark Leiti's longtime high school friend who didn't exactly buy the narrative of the barrel did not survive. Mark Leiti's friend's name was Corey Comperatore.
Yes, it was Corey Comperatore to whom Mark Leiti had confided his secret—that he had done something he wasn't supposed to. But again, the question remains: to what end? Did he tell Corey more about what he was doing with those explosives? Sadly, neither man is alive today.
As we know, Corey and his family had quite an odd evening the night of the Butler rally in Pennsylvania. They weren't supposed to be in the front of the audience to see President Trump speak. In fact, Corey had grabbed regular tickets for he and his family. They were amongst the crowd, so they were quite surprised when, while waiting in a large crowd, an unknown woman asked them if they'd like to be escorted to the very front.
Who was this woman? Surely with so many cameras reporting live from the rally, someone must have captured this moment. Who was it that had the authority to make such a move happen? That's a significant authority.
Corey Comperatore was then shot in the head.
A Small Town Connection
It's worth noting that Mark A. Leiti was also friends with various members of the Crooks family on Facebook. That could just be a small town coincidence. We can't really extrapolate anything from that—it's just mentioned as a fact because it is one.
The Lebanon Pager Attack
Fast forward again. Just two months after the Butler shooting, after Corey Comperatore lost his life, a never-before-seen terror attack was executed with precision involving PETN explosives.
On September 17th and 18th of 2024, there was a massive series of pager explosions across Lebanon and Syria, wounding more than 3,000 people and killing 12 people, including two children.
On a normal day in September 2024, Hussein Teny was playing at home in southern Lebanon when an unfamiliar noise rang out from his dad's pager. In another home in southern Lebanon, Sar Jafal had no time to respond after picking up a family member's pager. She has undergone 45 surgeries in 9 months with additional procedures to come, including reconstructive surgery on her face and fingers. She has lost four fingers in the attack, two of which are now fused together, and is waiting to receive a prosthetic right eye.
While Hezbollah admitted that most of the dead and wounded were its fighters or staff, the explosions also seriously injured many civilians.
The Mechanics of the Attack
The pagers were rigged with PETN explosive. The intended targets were Hezbollah operatives, but what's important to note is the trajectory of their injuries. These people heard the pager go off. Whether it was their dad's pager or their uncle's pager, they went to grab it. They held it in their hands, and to get it to go off, they had to hit the okay button. Upon hitting the button, it subsequently exploded.
This is why it took off their fingers. In one case it took off a person's nose because of its trajectory going from hand to face. In many cases it took out their eye because they were looking at it. PETN exploding with shrapnel, and because of the shrapnel, they had cuts all over their faces.
We know who did this because they were very proud that they did it—it was Israel. How did they do it? They interrupted the supply chain of pagers by creating a bunch of fake shell companies and selling the rigged pagers to people who were affiliated with Hezbollah. Admittedly, it was kind of genius. The thought of how they infiltrated was that pagers are very dated technology, and there are only so many people who are mass buying pagers—not many people are bulk purchasing them.
But the exact details of where they interrupted the supply chain, how they manufactured these pagers, how they amassed the PETN explosive, where that assembly took place—all that information remains unknown.
The Mossad's Admission
What is known is how proud the Mossad was and is of their ability to infiltrate specifically companies and organizations. Following the pager attack, one Mossad agent explained their capabilities:
"We have an incredible array of possibilities of creating foreign companies that have no way been traced back to Israel. Shell companies over shell companies who affect the supply chain to our favor. We create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay. We're the directors. We're the producers. We're the main actors. The world is our stage."
When asked if the company in Taiwan, Gold Apollo, knew they were working with people from Mossad, the agent replied: "Gold Apollo had zero clue that they are working with the Mossad, and neither did Hezbollah. When they are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad. We make like Truman show. Everything is controlled by us behind the scene. In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher including businessmen, marketing, engineers, showroom, everything."
It's remarkable that when stated plainly, it sounds like conspiracy theory, but when they say it themselves, they're simply taking credit for what they do, proudly proclaiming their sophistication on programs like 60 Minutes.
The Technical Specifications
Reuters provided a graphic demonstrating exactly how they were able to rig the pagers with the explosive. According to Reuters' estimates, they used just six grams of PETN explosive to accomplish this far-reaching attack. Just six grams put inside of a functional pager. That's important because they actually had to make sure that they didn't put in so much as to render the pager ineffective. They had to put in just enough that it would explode. The detonation material was tiny—a very thin amount placed near the battery cell.
Why does this matter? Assuming Reuters is accurate, we can reasonably assert that six grams of PETN is not enough to confidently kill someone. They only killed 12 out of 3,000 people. We can also confidently assess that they would have to use more if they wanted to guarantee more fatalities. In that regard, the operation was kind of a failure because while it demonstrated without question their precision and was psychologically damaging, in terms of real world consequences, you don't want to just take off the fingers of your enemies. That's only going to strengthen their resolve against you while they are still very much alive.
Testing PETN's Lethality
This got the question going: if six grams could take out fingers and eyes, how much PETN explosive would you need to guarantee a fatality? What would that look like? What would the size of that injury look like on a person?
Research into YouTube channels dedicated to demonstrating doubled or tripled amounts led to a remarkable discovery. The very first video found by simply typing in "PETN explosive" showed guys using 20 grams of PETN explosive within a tiny capsule, testing it against bulletproof glass to see what would happen. Pay close attention to what this person says:
"20 gram booster PETN charge. We're going to use it against the transaction window to see what the results are. This is the first one that went the way I expected it to go. Yeah, I didn't expect a half pounder to make like a laser beam through the guy's head. It's about the same as a gunshot. This is NIJ4 rated glass. From a 30-06. And it's about the same foot diameter."
He said it clearly: it's about the same as a gunshot from a 30-06 if you shot it against that bulletproof glass. Twenty grams of PETN mimics the punch of a 30-06 bullet. Unbelievable.
To be clear, this video was not posted to prove or debunk any conspiracy theories. In fact, it was published back in May of 2024, a full four months before the Butler incident. This was merely par for the course on a channel that focuses on testing explosives and guns. There's no agenda for them—this is what they do, how they have fun.
So it is fascinating that they are saying it mimics the diameter of a 30-06 bullet, especially given the persistent conspiracy theory that has circulated. However, enough of speculation—let's return to the facts.
Netanyahu's Peculiar Gift
Fast forward to February 4th, 2025, just a few weeks after Trump's inauguration into his second presidential term. Benjamin Netanyahu enters the White House and presents President Trump with a gift: a golden pager, a nod to the Mossad's pager operation.
But why? What is the context of that? Is that an inside joke? Is that a threat? Because Donald Trump was not president when the pager operation took place—President Biden was. So why would he gift this to Donald Trump? American troops were not involved, so far as we know. Why would he gift this to Donald Trump? What is the significance of this?
This is not a traditional gift. This does not make sense in a traditional sense. Japan gifts samurai helmets. Saudi Arabia gifts jewelry and crowns. Switzerland appropriately gifted a Swiss watch. What's up with the golden pager, Bibi?
Frankly, it was crass and off-putting. Children were murdered in this operation. And one would like to think that America had nothing to do with it, but there are reasons to know better. We are, after all, supplying Israel with white phosphorus, the chemical to burn Lebanese civilians alive. Did we know more about the pager attack than we let on? Did we assist somehow in this invisible supply chain that was happening?
The Butler Investigation
Suffice it to say that Butler now fascinates many observers. Most of all, Dan Bongino's strange reaction to it, and Trump's reaction to it. He's satisfied. He wants it shut down. That's not how a man would act if it was an assassination attempt against him. Was it an assassination attempt, or was it something else? Was it an assassination complete?
Perhaps the only good portion of this story is that, on authority, the widow of Corey Comperatore and the family of Corey Comperatore are not like Trump. They are not satisfied with the investigation. They are not happy with the fact that Secret Service agents never lost their jobs. They are not satisfied with the answers that they are receiving about how Corey Comperatore was killed.
Imagine that. Imagine a widow who has questions. And last informed, that particular widow didn't take over her husband's career in the blink of an eye. Imagine that.
