Crime

The Detroit Kid made his move when IOS began to feel a liquidity crunch. There was a certain irony to this: while IOS controlled an unfathomable sum of money, it was not always readily accessible for above-board economic purposes. Vesco offered to bail out IOS in exchange for a high degree of control over the company. What happened next was described by Jim Hougan as “a masterpiece of unarmed robbery.… A newly created Bahamian subsidiary of International Controls – ICC Investments, Inc. – was the lender to IOS. What Vesco did was have ICC Investments borrow five million from a Wall Street brokerage house, the money to be repaid in six weeks. He then convinced the owner of Butler’s Bank in the Bahamas (also undergoing a liquidity crisis) to lend ICC Investments five million dollars to repay the six-week loan.”151 From here, Vesco structured the loan agreement to IOS so that it would extend the five million to ease the liquidity crunch, minus $350,000 – which was used to cover the financing cost of the Wall Street brokerage. With the remaining money, Vesco took control of IOS and then directed the company to repay the loan that had been taken from Butler’s Bank. Vesco, in other words, had used IOS’ own funds to finance its takeover. Next, he began to systematically purge the board of older Cornfeld loyalists and effectively consolidated control over one of the world’s largest offshore financial institutions. Finally, through a bizarre web of shell companies and fronts – organized with IOS money – Vesco began to sell off IOS assets, call in debts, and simply pocket large sums of money. The systematic looting of IOS quickly caught the attention of Stanley Sporkin, head of the SEC’s Enforcement Division. The way that Sporkin has told the story, the resulting SEC investigation was a noble effort that had been greenlit by his boss, William Casey. The SEC began to freeze Vesco’s accounts abroad, with the goal of slowing the torrents of money that were flowing out of IOS (and by extension, the pockets of those who had bought IOS mutual funds). Yet, these successes were short lived. There was the matter of a $250,000 campaign contribution Vesco had made to Nixon’s Campaign for the Re-Election of the President. Incredibly, a portion of this contribution was used to finance the Watergate break-ins.152 Almost immediately, Casey began to pump the brakes on Sporkin’s efforts. Vesco, meanwhile, sought a one-on-one meeting with Casey.

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Vesco, known as the “Detroit Kid,” targeted troubled, mid-sized industrial outfits for his early acquisitions. One of his first ventures was Captive Seal, a manufacturer of parts for missile technology. The company had been floundering, but Vesco managed to turn it around by courting an investment capital firm called HH Industries – a co-owner of which was Baron Edmond de Rothschild.148 To illustrate the incestuous nature of these business networks, this was the same Baron Rothschild who had organized the Israel Corporation – “Israel’s largest investment company,” designed to “encourage large-scale private investment in Israel” – with none other than Tibor Rosenbaum.149 It seems to have been the Rothschild connection that put IOS on Vesco’s radar sometime between 1967 and 1968. According to Arthur Herzog, Vesco’s biographer, Baron Rothschild had bragged to Henry Buhl III, then the newly minted president of the International Investment Trust, of the successes of Captive Seal.150 Shortly thereafter, George Karlweiss – an agent of Edmond de Rothschild’s Banque Privée – brokered an introduction of Vesco to Buhl. From there it was off to the races: at Buhl’s discretion, IOS began to purchase ICC shares. Vesco was being propelled upward.

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Radford, who had acted as a document courier and aide to members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council, was subjected to a polygraph test by a Pentagon interrogation specialist.71 When it came to questions concerning the theft of confidential memoranda from diplomatic pouches and burn bags, the yeoman became agitated. “The cause of his concern was a very sensitive operation,” writes Colodny, which Radford “could not discuss without the direct approval of Admiral Welander.”72 Welander had initially kicked off the investigation into Radford. With allegations of a secret operation surfacing, however, he moved quickly to try to squash the investigation before it went any further. The attempt did not succeed, and Radford ended up revealing his role in a military-led espionage ring. The yeoman had pilfered confidential files and made copies of “uncounted documents – just thousands, thousands of documents.”73 He made notes on reports of Kissinger’s meeting with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai and other sensitive documents related to the “China initiative.” These were then turned over to people working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who used them to learn the inner workings of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy, bypassing the carefully constructed blockages on the flow of information within the top tiers of the US government. Radford would turn the documents over to Admiral Welander who, in turn, gave them to Admiral Moorer. According to Radford, his contribution “put Admiral Moorer in a very powerful position [to] anticipate what Kissinger was going to do and say” in National Security Council meetings.74 Welander later hinted that Alexander Haig was involved in the ring as well. There was little doubt, he suggested, that Haig had known of Radford’s meddling with the diplomatic pouches – and Haig himself had, at times, assigned Radford to accompany Kissinger on diplomatic trips. According to Radford, the whole operation was designed to thwart a wide-ranging conspiracy that was taking root at the highest levels of the foreign policy establishment. At the center of the conspiracy was Kissinger himself, here appearing as an alleged agent of the Rockefeller family and the institution where the Rockefellers carried so much weight, the Council on Foreign Relations. “The purpose of this alleged conspiracy,” writes Jim Hougan, “was to win the Soviets’ cooperation in guaranteeing the Rockefellers’ ‘continued domination’ over the world’s currencies – in exchange for which, Radford insists, Kissinger was to construct a foreign policy that would ensure eventual Soviet hegemony and a one-world government.”75 The source of his knowledge about this conspiracy, Radford said, was Welander and Moorer. The accusations being made by Radford echo those being made by the John Birch Society and other groups and actors operating in that same milieu – many of which were also intimately connected to the KMT–China Lobby. (The aforementioned Charles Willoughby, for example, made this world his primary haunt.) Many of the accusations made by John Birch Society affiliates – that Kissinger himself was a Soviet mole – appeared later in the 1970s, with Frank Capell’s Henry Kissinger: Soviet Agent and Gary Allen’s Kissinger: The Secret Side of the Secretary of State. (Capell, in the 1960s, had worked for Willoughby’s Foreign Intelligence Digest.) What makes this important is that Moorer himself had maintained extensive ties to the John Birch Society and related groups. These ideas intensified in the later part of the 1970s and the 1980s, when he became affiliated with the American Security Council, the preferred outpost of military hawks who laid the intellectual groundwork for the so-called Reagan revolution.

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During the Watergate affair, Henry Kissinger appeared as something of an outsider, even though he had entered the administration as a favored intellectual scion of the Rockefeller-dominated “Eastern Establishment.” His positions on the easing of tensions with the Soviet Union, arms reduction, and opening to China put him out of step with the robust, semi-covert network of spooks, lobbyists, power brokers, and businessmen who were oriented toward the Nationalist Chinese, toward rolling back the Soviets through military means, and increasing defense budgets. Until the Watergate scandal, the lines seemed starkly drawn. But, as time wore on, the battles between liberal reformers and hardliners reached a fever pitch, and certain lines seemed to bend and blur.

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Kissinger, in particular, appeared to have undergone something of a geopolitical reorientation, retooling his commitments to reflect the new power bloc. In the latter part of the 1970s, he took up a post at the Center for the Institute of International Studies. As Jerry Sanders has noted, the Center and its partner organization, the American Enterprise Institute, “set themselves up in competition with such august bodies as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.”1 The Center’s director was Ray Cline, an old China Lobby hand, OSS veteran (having served in the China theater alongside notables such as Paul Helliwell, E. Howard Hunt, and John K. Singlaub), and a high-ranking CIA officer. Cline had been a consistent critic of the Nixon-Kissinger policies of detente and opening to China. To acclimate properly to his new affiliations and associates, Kissinger adopted a harsh line on the ongoing arms reduction talks with the Soviet Union. It was indicative, he said, of a “defeatist consensus” accepted by the “traditional establishment.”2 By this point, a robust network of New Right activist groups, think-tanks, advocacy groups, and their conservative backers had formed to push back against detente policies and arms reduction, calling instead for an increase in military spending and more hawkish orientation toward the Soviets. Many of these were organized from classic centers of power like the American Security Council, an entity described as the “heart and soul of the military-industrial complex,”3 the Committee on the Present Danger, the Heritage Foundation (where Robert Keith Gray maintained a post), and the AFL-CIO. New groups such the Conservative Caucus, the Coalition for Peace through Strength, and the Free Congress Foundation also dotted the landscape, drawing on money unleashed by philanthropies such as the Scaife, Olin, and Koch foundations. Other active players in this world included Reverend Moon’s Unification Church, which was tied very closely to the China Lobby and to the KCIA. Two of the Unification Church’s top US allies were Ray Cline and Alexander Haig.4 Managing a sizable portion of the Unification Church’s promotional campaigns and serving in a secretarial role in many of its front groups was the political direct-mail mastermind Richard Viguerie. A member of the George Town Club, Viguerie was associated with numerous groups during this period, carrying out work on behalf of the Conservative Caucus and the various anti-disarmament campaigns launched by organizations such as the Committee on the Present Danger and its allies. All of these activities were run from Viguerie’s headquarters, a building he owned at 7777 Leesburg Pike in Falls Church, Virginia. It was a location that came to play a fundamental role in the world of Ted Shackley, Edwin Wilson, and Thomas Clines. Reformist efforts, nevertheless, continued to build. One such reformer was Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who had risen through the ranks to become director of Naval Intelligence in 1974. He followed this with stints as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and then, briefly, as deputy director of the CIA under William Casey. Inman privileged signal intelligence – intelligence acquired via electronic means as opposed to human intelligence gathering methods – and had a strong distaste for what he perceived as waste, inefficiency, and redundancy within the intelligence community. He was also seen as a something of a moderate, a counterpoint to those fixated on covert operations and assassination programs such as those favored by Shackley and his clique. In 1976, Task Force 157 was on the chopping block. For Inman, “it was an expensive unit of dubious benefit to the Navy.”5 There were also the rumors and hints that TF-157, via Wilson, had become embroiled in covert operations quite different from its stated mandate. In 1975, for example, Wilson entered into a series of curious business arrangements with Bernie Houghton of Nugan Hand, a bank headquartered in Australia whose management consisted predominately of supposed former US intelligence officials.6 Houghton himself was no stranger to the circle of individuals around Wilson, having worked in Vietnam in close proximity to the primary operators in Shackley’s secret wars.7 At the time that Houghton was meeting up with Wilson, the Nugan Hand Bank appears to have been involved in brokering the sale of arms to paramilitaries in South Africa. The financing of the arms was arranged through a web of banks such as Nugan Hand’s Hong Kong subsidiary. Yet, when it came to purchasing and shipping the arms, Houghton and his partner, Michael Hand, turned to Edwin Wilson. According to an official Australian government report on the criminal activities of the Nugan Hand Bank:

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There was a number of meetings between Wilson, Houghton, and the others over a relatively short period of time. Subsequently, under the cover of Task Force 157, Wilson placed an order for something like “10 million rounds of ammunition, 3,000 weapons including machine guns, M-1 carbines, and others.” The shipment is believed to have left the US from Boston. The End Users’ certificate indicated that [Wilson’s TF-157 front company] World Marine was the US purchasing agent while the middle company or buyer’s agent was an Australian company but not Nugan Hand. The name given as the buyer was Portuguese, and was a name that had been used previously and possibly after by World Marine in other unrelated covert operations.8

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For those that may find it hard to believe that such an operation would take place with the involvement of the FBI director, there are also other, related allegations to consider – that American intelligence operatives and organized crime had competed and then collaborated to blackmail Hoover years before Kaufman witnessed these events at the Plaza hotel beginning in 1958. Lansky was credited with obtaining compromising photos of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sometime in the 1940s, which showed “Hoover in some kind of gay situation,” according to a former Lansky associate, who also said that Lansky had often said of Hoover, “I fixed that sonofabitch.” Meyer Lansky’s widow also later claimed that her husband had acquired “hard proof of Hoover’s homosexuality and used it to neutralize the FBI as a threat to his own operations.”59 The photos showed Hoover engaged in sexual activity, specifically oral sex, with his long-time friend, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson.60 There is considerable, separate evidence from the period that the close, professional relationship between Hoover and Tolson was also intimate and that this was an “open secret” in Washington.61 At some point, these photos fell into the hands of CIA counterintelligence chief James J. Angleton, who later showed the photos to several other CIA officials, including John Weitz and Gordon Novel.62 Both Weitz and Novel later stated that the pictures they had seen showed Hoover engaged in oral sex on a man who Angleton identified as Tolson; however, only Hoover’s face was recognizable in the photographs.63 Angleton also claimed that the photos had been taken in 1946.64 Angleton was in charge of the CIA’s relationship with the FBI as well as Israeli intelligence until he left the agency in 1972. Angleton was also a CIA figure who had pushed for the Agency to forge ties with Meyer Lansky, raising the possibility that Angleton could have received the photo from Lansky. However, Anthony Summers, in Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, has argued that it was not Lansky, but William Donovan, the director of the OSS, who obtained the original photos of Hoover and either he, or another person at the OSS or early CIA, had later shared them with Lansky. Summers also states that “To [gangster Frank] Costello and Lansky, the ability to corrupt politicians, policemen and judges was fundamental to Mafia operations. The way they found to deal with Hoover, according to several mob sources, involved his homo-sexuality.”65 With the mobster associates of Rosenstiel being under significantly more pressure during the 1950s, in large part thanks to the Kefauver Committee, it’s possible that Hoover’s appearances at The Plaza Hotel may have served as additional “insurance” for these interests. Hoover, for his part, was likely already used to the realities of being blackmailed by this point, given that his private sex life had been known to the mob and US intelligence community for years. He likely saw the opportunity to partake in the scheme as a means of amassing his own, massive collection of blackmail. With thick dossiers on friend and foe alike, Hoover’s office contained “secret files” on numerous powerful people in Washington and beyond, files he used to gain favors and protect his status as FBI director for as long as he wished. Even former OSS veterans like Richard Helms have made such claims, alleging that Hoover “played ‘a very skillful game’ with knowledge of the sexual habits of prominent people.”66 Further evidence for this comes from journalist and author Burton Hersh who alleges in his book Bobby and J. Edgar: The Historic Face-Off Between the Kennedys and J. Edgar Hoover That Transformed America that Hoover had also been tied to Sherman Kaminsky, who helped run a sexual blackmail operation in New York that involved young male prostitutes.67 Kaminsky claimed to have been New York-bred, but federal investigators later stated he was originally from Baltimore. Some reports claim Kaminsky had ties to Israel, having served in the Israel Defense Forces.68 The ring, which was called “The Chickens and the Bulls” by the NYPD, targeted prominent men who were closeted homosexuals throughout the United States, many of them married with families. Among those who had been blackmailed were a Navy admiral, two generals, a US congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor and well-known actors and television personalities.69 That operation was busted and investigated in a 1966 extortion probe led by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan, though the FBI quickly took over the investigation and photos showing Hoover and Kaminsky together soon disappeared from the case file.70 Kaminsky successfully avoided arrest for 11 years, having “disappeared” from a New York courthouse undetected during his sentencing hearing.71 Why would Hoover have been involved with the activities of Kaminsky? There are only a few possibilities. One possibility is that Hoover had been blackmailed by Kaminsky, though it’s more likely that Kaminsky instead had ties to figures in organized crime that had already blackmailed Hoover long before. Another possibility is that Hoover was cozy to a second sexual blackmail operation targeting closeted homosexual men because he sought to pad his own library of blackmail for personal and professional gain. What does seem clear is that Hoover was well aware of the power that amassing blackmail afforded and was willing to indulge in taboo behavior at the “blue suite” because he was no longer concerned about being extorted or manipulated with sexual blackmail in ways that would end his career or destroy his public image. He had fallen in with the very crowd that had reportedly blackmailed him, later developing a symbiotic relationship with that same network. The most obvious, and troubling, symptom of this symbiosis was Hoover’s reluctance to tackle organized crime as FBI director. Hoover repeatedly declined to use the Bureau to target organized crime networks, referring to organized crime as a “local” problem in which the FBI did not need to intervene for most of his nearly fifty year stint as the top law enforcement administrator in the country.72 According to congressional crime consultant Ralph Salerno, Hoover’s apparent aversion to targeting organized crime networks, such as those in which Rosenstiel and Lansky figured prominently, “allowed organized crime to grow very strong in economic and political terms, so that it became a much bigger threat to the wellbeing of this country than it would have been if it had been addressed much sooner.”73

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Intra Bank was formed in 1951 by Yousef Beidas, a Christian Palestinian refugee who had been born into a prominent banking family. Just over a decade later, what began as a modest operation ballooned into a sprawling empire, at which point Beidas forged agreements with leading American banks. These included Bank of America and Chase Manhattan, and Beidas then placed branches of Intra Bank in the world’s important hotspots for hot money: London, Geneva, and the Caribbean. At home, in Lebanon, Intra held “20% of the country’s total deposits” and “56[%] of all the country’s banking assets.”31 There was also a deep relationship between Intra Bank and illicit activities of all types. As Jonathan Marshall notes: Smugglers of all sorts availed themselves of Intra Bank’s services. It was a prime depository for many of the world’s leading arms traffickers, who received financing from Lebanese traders for illegal weapons sales in the Southern Arabian peninsula (Yemen and Aden), Cyprus, Sudan, Nigeria, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Kurdish communities in the Middle East. Wealthy Arabs with too many petrodollars on their hands, looking for a savvy bank in the region to look after their wealth, fattened its deposits further.… Lebanon was prized as a “haven for cash for anybody with a balance to hide – U.S. tax evaders, oil-rich sheiks who want to lay something by for the rainy day of revolution, and assorted racketeers and purveyors of stolen or smuggled wealth from all over the world,” observed LIFE magazine in 1967.32

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KINGS OF THE CASTLE On the forty-fifth page of the most-well known of Jeffrey Epstein’s two black contact books are the names and numbers of two individuals from the same prominent Chicago family: Nicholas and Thomas Pritzker. Epstein listed two addresses, five phone numbers and one email address for Nicholas; for Thomas, he had two addresses, one email, and twelve phone numbers ranging from his main office number to his farm to his emergency contact line. Under Nicholas Pritzker, Epstein placed the name “Hyatt Development Corp” – the Hyatt hotel company had been taken over by the Pritzker family late in the 1950s – while under Thomas he cryptically noted “Numero Uno.” The Pritzkers have long been a potent force in local, state and national politics. Penny Pritzker, a cousin to Thomas (and a board member of the Council on Foreign Relations), had met Barack Obama in the early 1990s, and the future president’s political career has long relied on lucrative donations made by her and her family. Obama repaid his debt by making Penny Pritzker a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. During Obama’s second term, Penny was nominated – and confirmed – as his Secretary of Commerce. Penny’s brother J.B. Pritzker, meanwhile, served as the co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign before working to broker an agreement between Clinton and Obama. In 2019, he was elected Governor of Illinois. The third sibling, Anthony Pritzker, has avoided taking public office, but maintains a post on the advisory board of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy at the RAND Corporation. Travel up the family tree and one begins to find that the Pritzker family’s wealth and influence might have originated in darker corners. Take Abram Nicholas Pritzker, grandfather to Nicholas, Thomas, Penny, J.B. and Anthony. One of three sons of Nicholas J. Pritzker, Abram had worked with his brothers at the family law firm, Pritzker & Pritzker, where he specialized in business law. In the 1930s, he decided to dip into the world of business himself, and he and his brother Jack invested in a string of companies across Chicago. One of these was Hyatt, which would help the family secure lasting influence. As was the case with Henry Crown, the Pritzkers had to deal with the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union – where Sidney Korshak was the labor negotiator. Then, there was the case of the Frontier Finance. As Gus Russo writes: Jack Clarke, a renowned Chicago private investigator, recently recalled what he heard on the streets: “Frontier Finance was used and owned by the Pritzkers as a holding company and is believed to be the secret to the origins of the family’s involvement with criminals. Pritzker lent to immigrants ‘five for seven,’ or five dollars lent against seven dollars repayment with interest. It was started on the West Side and the Pritzkers let the mob run it for them. This company office was where the mob held their meetings.” Frontier Finance was a state-licensed loan company, with a number of legit investors, such as the postmaster of Chicago, a former chairman of the Cook County Republican Party, and a retired Chicago police captain. But curiously, the president of the firm was Frank Buccieri, brother of the notorious Fiore “Fifi” Buccieri, one of the Outfit’s top gambling bosses and a dreaded “juice” collector.93

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It may seem strange to think of a positive correlation between narcotics trafficking and the stock market, but consider … the proceeds of crime need to find a way into legitimate, that is, legal, channels or they are worthless to the holders. If one further imagines that the banking system earns a fee of one per cent for handling this flow (rather low considering that money laundering is a seller’s market) then the profits for banks from this activity are of the order of $5 to $10 billion. Applying Citigroup’s current stock market multiple of 15 or so to this yields a market capitalisation of anywhere from $65 to $115 billion. One can thus readily see the importance of the illegal drug trade to the financial services industry.71

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After Billy did make a trip to Libya, he helped arrange for a Libyan delegation to visit Georgia in early 1979. He acted as something of a “goodwill ambassador,” and promoted plans for the formation of a “Libyan-Arab-Georgian friendship society.”164 Plans were also hatched for a commodity exchange program, where Libyans would purchase goods produced in Georgia and Billy would use his connections to help Libya sell its own commodities – namely, oil – on the open market. To help facilitate these arrangements, the Carter administration’s director of the Office of Budget and Management, Bert Lance, recommended the services of a “knowledgeable London banker.”165 Lance would later tell investigators that he had recommended the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI).166 As previously noted and as will be discussed in detail the next chapter, BCCI was an incredibly corrupt institution, with deep ties to a web of intelligence agencies and linkages to various covert operations, terrorist organization, drug smugglers, and money launderers. The presence of BCCI suggests that more was likely going on behind the scenes – and Joseph Trento, in his history of the Shackley network, concurs. According to his sources in the intelligence community, “Israeli intelligence decided to compromise the president through his brother, Billy.”167 The job was outsourced to the private CIA, with Thomas Clines making arrangements to convince the Libyans “that Billy Carter should be put on their payroll as a goodwill ambassador. This would be devastating to President Carter and very useful to the Republicans in 1980.”168

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The same year as the stock swap, Mason and Ball toyed with the idea of purchasing IOS. Just like the Occidental Petroleum affair, this buy-out never took place. According to Robert Vesco’s biographer Arthur Herzog, Ed Ball had told Vesco “I had a dream. You and I slept together on a cold night. In the morning, you had all the blankets.”175 Still, Mason and Ball maintained close ties to Vesco, who, after becoming an international fugitive, cozied up to Gaddafi’s government in Libya, which was an important source of crude oil for Charter. Interestingly, Armand Hammer was also a player in the world of Libyan oil – to quote from Edward Jay Epstein’s book Dossier, the oil magnate: …managed in the 1960s to obtain a huge concession for Occidental in Libya by paying a multimillion-dollar bribe to a key official in the Libyan court. It was one of the few concessions in the Middle East not controlled by major international oil companies, and Hammer made a fortune that he then used to finance immense barter deals with the Soviet Union. He also used his Libyan oil to undermine the power of established oil companies, and in doing so, he radically changed the rules of the international oil business.176 How Charter entangled itself in the complex world of Libyan oil affairs cuts right to the core of the “Billygate” scandal, and possibly links to the wider web of “renegade” intelligence operations and private intelligence networks that have been the subject of this chapter. The lynchpin here, however, was a company called Carey Energy, headed by Edward Carey – the brother of New York governor Hugh Carey and the mob-linked petroleum seller Martin Carey. Hugh and Martin Carey are both discussed elsewhere in this book: Hugh in chapter 11, and Martin in chapter 7. Alan Block notes that Carey and his oil business were “exceptionally close” to the Kulukundis clan, the Greek shipping dynasty, and its patriarch, Elias J. Kulukundis, who at this time was managing the Burmah Oil Tankers Corporation (a subsidiary of the major British oil concern, Burmah Oil, from which British Petroleum sprang).177 As discussed in chapter 3, the interests of the Kulukundis family interlocked with those of Bruce Rappaport, while the family’s in-laws and business partners, the Mavroleons, were later linked to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell (see chapter 15 for more on that connection). Through Elias’ position at Burmah Oil Tankers, the Kulukundis family maintained a presence near the center of power in the Bahamas. Burmah Oil and the Bahamas Development Corporation co-owned an oil transport facility, located in Freeport on Grand Bahama, while Kulukundis “maintained an apartment in New York for the use of Bahamian government officials.”178

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One such target was James C. Day. A former Texas state representative, Day had become a lobbyist on Capitol Hill for ANICO, and had also cultivated deeper organized crime ties. For example, one of his business partners was Leonard Capaldi, who was “alleged by law enforcement … to be a major representative of the Houston [Texas] interests of several Mid-west and Eastern mob families.” During the early 1980s, he would again emerge as a major borrower at Houston’s Mainland Savings, where – as will be discussed in the next chapter – Adnan Khashoggi and others tied to intelligence operations could be found.187 Day had cultivated contacts deep within the halls of the Carter administration, and in April 1978, he told Brewer that White House Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan and DNC chairman John C. White “were not too confident that Carter was going to make it again and they were interested in deals to make money.”188 The details of what happened next are muddled. Brewer claims that Day asked him to contact Vesco to try and arrange something for Jordan and White. However, according to Day, the plan to bring Vesco into the mix was Brewer’s idea. Regardless, Brewer, Day, and another ANICO aide named James Wohlenhaus traveled to the Bahamas to meet personally with Vesco. It was the first of several trips, with the issue of the planes becoming an increasingly important focus for this unlikely crew. Day brought the issue to White’s attention and, immediately following an October trip to the Bahamas, the State Department released a handful of the planes – and with the FBI, all the while, quietly observing the succession of events. Yet, there is also the possibility that the FBI had a hand in instigating these very events. After the release of the planes, Vesco claimed to Day that the Libyans had not paid him, and therefore Day himself could not receive his agreed-upon cut. Day, meanwhile, suspected that Vesco had in fact been paid. At this point, Day hoped to extricate himself from the affair – but Brewer, perhaps at the request of the FBI, kept Day in play by arranging for one of his associates, a man named James Feeney, to pay him the money owed in exchange for a cut of future profits in dealings with the Libyans, Vesco, and Carter administration officials. Incredibly, Day himself knew that Brewer was an FBI informant.189 What neither Brewer and Day knew, however, is that Feeney himself was soon to become an informant himself, this time for the Southern District of New York, which was hoping to get a chance to nab Vesco.190 There’s also the question of why ANICO featured so prominently in this operation, with three associates of the company and the Moody family – Brewer, Day and Wohlenhaus – acting as the intermediaries between Carter administration officials like White and Vesco. As previously mentioned, the Moody family had ties into the old power structure of the FBI via Hoover ally Roy Cohn and Shearn Moody Jr. was said to supply “many little boys of the night” to Cohn and other guests visiting his ranch who were so inclined. Cohn, by the time of Billygate and the plane affair, was gearing up to act as an informal advisor to soon-to-be president Ronald Reagan. As will be mentioned in chapter 10, Cohn was also reportedly involved in an effort to blackmail Carter during this period, via his chief of staff Hamilton Jordan over Jordan’s alleged cocaine use at New York’s Studio 54. Importantly, both Shearn Moody and Cohn popped up in the course of the scheming: Cohn’s law partner was representing Kevin Krown, who was under investigation along with Feeney by the Southern District of New York. In September, 1979, Brewer attended a dinner with Moody, Cohn, and Wohlenhaus, where both the investigation into Krown and Feeney and the plane affair were discussed. According to a Senate report, “Moody told Wohlenhaus that they ‘were gonna go to the Federal D.A. and try to make a deal to get them off the hook on the hot check charges by telling the Libyan plane story and adding a bit to it.’”191 Subsequently, “Krown wrote a scenario ‘about all the players, the Brewers, the Feeneys, the Days, the Vescos,’ and gave it to John Doyle, the Chief of the Criminal Division in the Southern District.”192 Given the political connections and orientation of Cohn and Moody, one cannot help but wonder if much of this was carried out to embarrass an already flailing Carter administration. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long at all for word of these schemes to reach the press. Vesco himself directly leaked information to Jack Anderson, who wrote twelve columns on the subject between September and October 1979. “They described how Vesco tried to wriggle free of the Justice Department’s extradition requests by seeking the assistance of high level Carter officials including Hamilton Jordan.”193 To make matters worse for the administration, recordings Feeney made of his conversations with various conspirators were shown to the press by aides of Senator Orrin Hatch (who, as we will see, was connected to Adnan Khashoggi, the Bank for Commerce and Credit International, and other intelligence assets). As the Washington Post reported: An exotic cast appears in the tapes. The names, spoken by Feeney, Vesco, at least two other convicted swindlers, and Libyan diplomats, include Billy Carter and John C. White, chairman of the Democratic National Committee … Hatch, in a phone interview, said he wanted, no dissemination of unsubstantiated allegations, but thought reporters should be able to sample for themselves the technical“quality” of the tapes. The quality of the segment was excellent. The obviously sensitive tapes – raw files with a high potential to besmirch the reputations of possibly innocent persons and even to affect the presidential election campaign – had been closely husbanded by federal prosecutors for an investigation that began 19 months ago and has involved formal presentations to a grand jury since last fall.194 Vesco himself had told Senate investigators about the existence of the tapes, effectively widening the probe – just as he had done earlier with the Anderson leak. This raises the possibility that Vesco’s role here was aimed at getting the US to drop its extradition efforts against him. Yet, if there was more to it than that, the next question is: who was Vesco working for or with? One possibility is that he was aiding Shackley’s “private CIA” network, which of course maintained a deep presence in Libya throughout this whole period, allegedly had information concerning Billy Carter’s business there, and had been involved in dirty tricks against the Carter administration.

Alyse, Whitney. One Nation Under Blackmail - Vol. 1 (pp. 360-364). Trine Day. Kindle Edition.

What can members do?

There is some evidence, albeit circumstantial, that a young Bill Clinton might have had contact with these forces while he was growing up in Arkansas. The man that Clinton had often referred to as “the most commanding male presence in his life” and a “father figure” was his uncle, Raymond Clinton.32 Outwardly, Uncle Raymond ran a profitable car dealership, but he was also known to have engaged in various vices and backroom wheeling and dealing. According to a former Arkansas FBI agent, Raymond “ran some slot machines that he had scattered about town,” while close business associates have admitted that the car dealer had “considerable dealings in the underworld.”33 Along the way, Raymond began to collect political power. He cultivated ties to the state’s Democratic Party, but also political figures in surrounding states, like Alabama’s George Wallace. These ties paid off in a big way for Bill Clinton in 1968. It was a big year for Bill: he had just won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and he was on the verge of being drafted. Being shipped off to war in Vietnam would have derailed Oxford entirely – and so Uncle Raymond leapt into action. Using his political connections, he was able to secure for Bill a draft deferral.34 Uncle Raymond tended to crop up at opportune moments such as these, where Clinton’s political destiny seemed to hang in the balance. In 1974, when Bill embarked on his first political campaign for Arkansas’ House of Representatives, Raymond arranged for a $10,000 loan for his nephew from the First National Bank of Hot Springs. While Bill would lose the race, two years later he secured a position as Arkansas’ Attorney General. This was the springboard for his next venture, the 1978 campaign for governor. This campaign was a success, thanks in no small part to loans and donations from Arkansas’ economic elite. Here, once again, one could find the name of Raymond Clinton. In addition to the assistance provided by Uncle Raymond and his friends, Clinton may have had other benefactors who helped shape his early political education, if not his career itself. There are hints, rumors, and intimations of a relationship with the CIA during the 1970s, particularly during his year at Oxford, which had been secured with the aid of Raymond. A former CIA officer told Roger Morris and Sally Denton that he had seen Clinton’s name on a list of informants used by the Agency’s Operation CHAOS – the surveillance program aimed at the anti-war and civil rights movements. Another officer stated that “part of Clinton’s arrangement as an informer had been further insurance against the draft.”35 Reportedly, Clinton was regularly debriefed by the CIA, who he supplied with information concerning activist groups on British campuses. The underworld figures like Barry Seal who haunted Mena seemed to always operate with much less than six degrees of separation from Clinton during his time as the state’s governor. In his 1999 confessional exposé, Cross-fire: Witness in the Clinton Investigation, former Arkansas policeman turned personal driver and security guard for Bill Clinton, L.D. Brown, recounts how Clinton encouraged him to seek out a post at the CIA.36 Clinton allegedly went so far as to edit the essay Brown wrote for this employment application. The essay topic was drug smuggling in Central America. Upon receiving his application, the CIA put Brown in touch with none other than Seal.

Alyse, Whitney. One Nation Under Blackmail - Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, VOL.1 (pp. 520-521). Trine Day. Kindle Edition.

Other millionaire collectors, such as Nelson Rockefeller and the late J. Paul Getty, have hired former Secret Service, CIA, and FBI agents to handle a variety of sensitive assignments within their organizations, protecting not only their property and commercial secrets but their persons as well. Working for the very wealthy can be hazardous to your health, however, as former FBI agent Paul Rothermeil claims to have discovered. In conversations with reporter Peter Noyes, and subsequently with myself, Rothermeil described his peculiar past association with the fabulously wealthy Hunt family of Texas. While employed in the secret service of the patriarch, H. L. Hunt, Rothermeil said that the old man’s son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, approached him in connection with a plan to form a paramilitary group for “political purposes,” a killer force that would train on desert estates in the West. A connoisseur of racehorses and right-wing causes alike, Nelson Bunker Hunt is an important contributor to the John Birch Society and a confidant of its Maximum Leader, Robert Welch. He is also one of the world’s richest men, having at one time held title to all the oil in Libya. According to Rothermeil, however, Hunt was not content with mere riches, and therefore organized the so-called American Volunteer Group (AVG)—organized it, that is, with supposedly lethal intent. Recounting the story, the former G-man contends that Hunt planned to recruit his private army from the ranks of General Edwin Walker’s Birch Society cell in Dallas. The weapon of choice, Rothermeil claimed, was to be a type of “gas gun” imported from Europe, a weapon whose singular virtue was that its victims would appear to have died of heart attacks.* Asked to join the paramilitary unit in a war on liberals and the Left, Rothermeil says he refused. It was then that he found his telephone had been tapped by other spooks in Hunt’s employ, and began to fear for his life.†

Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents (pp. 55-56). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

“Mr. Bond, power is sovereignty. Clausewitz’s first principle was to have a secure base. From there proceeds freedom of action. Together, that is sovereignty. I have secured these things and much besides. No one else in the world possesses them to the same degree. They cannot have them. The world is too public. These things can only be secured in privacy. You talk of kings and presidents. How much power do they possess? As much as their people will allow them . . . And how do I possess that power, that sovereignty? Through privacy. Through the fact that nobody knows. Through the fact that I have to account to no one.” —IAN FLEMING, DR. NO

Beaty, Jonathan; Gwynne, S.C.. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (p. 20). Beard Group, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Dr. No, the island monarch with thin, cruel lips and immodest designs on the fate of the Western world, would have been fascinated by the scandal that blossomed around the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in the summer of 1991. It was a conspiratorialist’s conspiracy, a plot so byzantine, so thoroughly corrupt, so exquisitely private, reaching so deeply into the political and intelligence establishments of so many countries, that it seemed to have its only precedent in the more hallucinogenic fiction of Ian Fleming, Kurt Vonnegut, or Thomas Pynchon. As tales of its global predations were spattered across headlines all over the world, its apparent influence reached almost absurd proportions. This was a bank that had taken the popular notion of a “global electronic village” and made a mockery of it, a bank that was at once everywhere and nowhere, whose dirtiest secrets were hidden deep in the impossible tangles of its offshore networks.

Beaty, Jonathan; Gwynne, S.C.. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (pp. 20-21). Beard Group, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

BCCI suddenly bloomed as a sort of supermetaphor for the 1980s, the decade that celebrated the likes of Robert Maxwell, Ivan Boesky, and Michael Milken and unleashed upon the United States a horde of freebooters in the banking and thrift business. But nothing in the history of financial scandals even approaches the $20-billion-plus heist at BCCI, which sixty-two countries shuttered forever in July 1991 in a paroxysm of regulatory vengeance. No single scandal had ever involved such vast amounts of money. Superlatives were quickly exhausted. BCCI was the largest criminal corporate enterprise ever, the biggest Ponzi scheme, the most pervasive money-laundering operation in history, the only bank—so far as anyone knows—that ran a brisk sideline business in both conventional and nuclear weapons, gold, drugs, turnkey mercenary armies, intelligence and counterintelligence, shipping, and commodities from cement in the Middle East to Honduran coffee to Vietnamese beans. Though it was fundamentally a financial fraud, BCCI itself was not a bank in any conventional sense. Or, more precisely, banking was only a part of the global organism, the ingeniously constructed platform from which its other lines of business were launched. Taken collectively, it was more of an armed Renaissance city-state of Machiavelli’s era than a modern corporation. This “bank” possessed its very own diplomatic corps, intelligence network, and private army, its own shipping and commodities trading companies. And BCCI itself was so thoroughly enmeshed in the official affairs of Pakistan that it was often impossible to separate the two.

Beaty, Jonathan; Gwynne, S.C.. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (p. 21). Beard Group, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

BCCI was bigger even than that: It was the unsettling next-stage evolution of the multinational corporation, the one the theorists had been predicting for years but which never seemed to be able to shed its sovereign boundaries. (General Motors and Mitsubishi are both good examples of this—huge companies with holdings and operations all over the world that nonetheless persist in being fundamentally American and Japanese entities.) In taking that step, BCCI became truly stateless and very nearly invisible to the authorities in each country where it did business. The BCCI scandal shows what sort of frightening mischief can be made in a world where trillions of electronic dollars routinely wash in and out of international financial markets.

Beaty, Jonathan; Gwynne, S.C.. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (pp. 21-22). Beard Group, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Nor was BCCI a conspiracy. In much of what it did, BCCI reflected the way the world works. The organization was designed to mimic the way the world’s largest corporations and banks move and hide their money. It was no accident that BCCI was incorporated in Luxembourg, one of the least regulated nations on earth and a favorite haven of the money men at the Fortune 500. It was no accident that it ran its wildest manipulations through what amounted to a branch in the Cayman Islands—a place long favored by major banks to hold offshore money away from the ken of the IRS and banking authorities. BCCI had mastered these black arts so well that it became the bank of choice for the intelligence agencies of the Western hemisphere, who found its deeply secretive methods more and more useful. BCCI was necessary to them; it was part of the way they worked, too. It was those alliances, along with bribery on a grand scale, that allowed the criminal bank to flourish for two decades with effective immunity from the law.

Beaty, Jonathan; Gwynne, S.C.. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (p. 22). Beard Group, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

This is the story of how the wealthy and corrupt in Latin America managed to steal virtually every dollar lent to their countries by Western banks, creating the debt crisis of the 1980s; how heads of state such as Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, and others skimmed billions from their national treasuries and hid them in Swiss and Caymanian accounts forever free from snooping regulators; how Pakistan and Iraq got materials for nuclear weaponry and how Libya built poison-gas plants. BCCI is also the story of how governments manage to put together arms deals with supposedly hostile governments, as in the case of Israel’s clandestine trades with Arab states, or the United States’ supplying weapons to both Iraq and Iran in violation of its own laws. BCCI is a paradigm of how our national borders have been rendered porous, despite the best attempts of law enforcement; it is about terrorism and how terrorism is financed; it is about how drugs enter the United States and Europe and how the drug lords disguise and conceal their ill-gotten gains. The BCCI scandal affords a rare and representative glimpse at the trillion-dollar-plus underground market of secret money that moves at will in and out of the world’s most sophisticated and highly regulated economies. For all of these reasons, no authorities anywhere were in a hurry to shut down BCCI: The bank was as useful to governments as it was to crooks, and indeed, governments became active participants in the fraud. In the United States BCCI became the subject of a massive and decade-long cover-up. For the investigators and the reporters who finally cracked it, the most difficult task of all was breaking down the formidable walls erected by their own law enforcement agencies. Penetrating the cover-up became the key that finally unlocked the BCCI scandal.

Beaty, Jonathan; Gwynne, S.C.. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (pp. 22-23). Beard Group, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Though born into the Shiite sect of Islam, he later drifted into the religion of the secretive Sufi sect, which claimed a direct and personal relationship with God based on love. By contrast, mainstream Islam was built around fear and submission. The business style he created—the management theory of the bank—was unlike any ever seen before in a large company. He incorporated his Islamic mysticism into the palpable driving force of the bank: Advancement was based on spiritual progress, and Abedi took Islam’s emphasis on the good of the family and society ahead of individualism and transmuted it to an intensely democratic theory of management. All would devolve into corruption, and Abedi’s mysticism would eventually sound like a hodgepodge of California New Age gobbledygook and Dale Carnegie. Yet it was a powerful original vision, and it constituted the early strength of the bank.

Beaty, Jonathan; Gwynne, S.C.. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (pp. 24-25). Beard Group, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

“I know you’ve worked with him for years,” Gwynne said when Beaty finally ran down. “But this guy is talking about a worldwide conspiracy nobody has ever heard about. Bankers who pay off presidents. A bank that just moves money and doesn’t make real loans and doesn’t have any real capital. And why did he wait for almost two years to tell you about the Kerry investigation getting derailed?” “I don’t know yet. Look, let’s just talk to him, and you make your own judgments. But, one way or another, this is starting to break.” He waved a copy of The Washington Post Blum had given him, now five days old. A small headline on the front page read: WHO CONTROLS FIRST AMERICAN BANKSHARES? AFTER 9 YEARS QUESTIONS LINGER ON FOREIGN TIES. Inside, a large picture of Clark Clifford dominated page 3. The story was by Jim McGee, a reporter neither of them knew. Gwynne had already scanned the article. “All right, there seems to be a connection between First American and BCCI, but this doesn’t even hint at the stuff that Blum told you about. Why would the feds ignore information he says these witnesses gave them?” Beaty grinned broadly and fished in his briefcase for a large brown envelope. He had been saving the best for the last. “So look at this.” Gwynne pulled a sheaf of typewritten pages out of the envelope and began to read, looking up at Beaty from time to time in growing amazement. It was a report of a debriefing of a BCCI officer. The older reporter was smiling like a Cheshire cat. “Don’t look smug. How in the hell did you get this?” Beaty explained that he had visited an old government source the night before. He described the source’s job and why the source had decided to be helpful but didn’t name him. “We can’t use any of this in print yet, and if anyone discovers we have it, we’ve got to say that it just came in over the transom. But the guy being interviewed in that report has to be the same guy Blum calls Ali Mirza. Keep reading: Blum didn’t even begin to tell me all the stuff this Mirza dumped out for the feds.” Beaty and Gwynne met with Blum the next day at the McPherson Grill, a Washington version of a trendy New York restaurant imitating a trendy ferns-and-blond-wood West Coast restaurant. The place had been chosen with care. It was loud, crowded with younger Washington technocrats, lawyers in starched white shirts, and secretaries from the Securities and Exchange Commission building next door. In the darker, more exclusive capital watering holes, power players closely eyed neighboring tables to see who was talking to whom. The three men took a table in the back, and at Beaty’s prodding, Blum summarized. For Gwynne’s benefit he focused on what he called “the biggest Ponzi scheme ever pulled off by anyone, anywhere.” The notion of a financial institution playing a Ponzi game was not a new concept. In the 1980s some of the renegade savings and loans that had done the most damage in the United States had operated this way, soliciting government-insured $100,000 brokered deposits by offering interest premiums and using the stream of new money to cover old losses. That was the way a financial Ponzi worked: As long as the deposits kept coming in, holes in the balance sheet could be patched up and the regulators kept at bay. The first difference between BCCI and those savings and loans, Blum said, was scale. Agha Hasan Abedi had spun a global Ponzi, operating out of the unregulated havens of Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands. Nobody had ever done anything on this scale before, nor had anyone ever danced so artfully through the interstices of international regulation. For all practical purposes this was an unregulated bank. And the word was that a billion dollars, perhaps far more, had gone missing. “But the far weirder difference,” Blum continued, “is that this bank has no capital at all. As far as I can tell, it never did have any. And it’s not in the business of making loans.” To Gwynne this sounded implausible. He had only Beaty’s word that Blum knew what he was talking about, and Blum was already pushing the limits of credibility. A bank without capital—a bank that had never had any significant capital—was not imaginable, nor was a $20-billion international bank that was not in the lending business. How did it stay afloat? “You can’t run a bank in that many countries without capital,” Gwynne said. “I can’t see it.” “That’s the magic of BCCI,” Blum calmly pushed on. “The bank got its start-up money when the ruler of Abu Dhabi let Abedi handle the remittances from expatriate Pakistanis working in the Gulf. There were hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of these guys all sending money home every month. It was enough money that it shored up Pakistan’s entire economy, and Abedi got the float—and the float meant that he always had a few million dollars sitting in his bank, on the way from a Pakistani worker in the Gulf to his family back home. The slower the remittance, the bigger the float. Abedi treated it like capital.” That was a good answer. “But what about the shareholders, the people who bought stock in BCCI? What happened to that money?” “That’s the brilliant part. Apparently, the bank put loans on the books to wealthy Arabs to buy stock in itself but never handed over the money. The bank would hold on to those shares as collateral for the loans, which were, of course, never repaid. At some point they liquidate the loan and seize the collateral. Nothing actually moves anywhere, but millions in assets have been created on paper. It’s circular. And in the process BCCI appears to be underwritten by some of the most wealthy people in the world. See?” The notion, Gwynne thought, was breathtaking. Banks were by nature highly fictitious entities: Most of their “funds” were imaginary units of value, and even financial idiots knew that they did not actually keep their deposits on hand. But what Blum was talking about sounded like an entirely fictitious bank—a work of pure imagination. Deposits became capital; deposits became profits; deposits were used to cover losses and patch holes. There was, in short, nothing but deposits, and many of the deposits were not in fact deposits at all; they had been whisked down this or that offshore sinkhole, never to be recovered. As for lending, Blum said loans were used primarily as a tool of control, or to buy influence. BCCI lent money to powerful politicians and their families. There were certainly loans, but they were not the bank’s main purpose. Blum embarked on a description of the bank’s big depositors, shareholders, and front men. This was the glamorous part: Abedi had assembled a glittering group of the richest and most powerful people in the Middle East, the rulers of four countries, fabulously wealthy commoners, and princelings from Saudi Arabia. His deposits came rolling in from the petrodollar-rich treasuries all over the Middle East.

Beaty, Jonathan; Gwynne, S.C.. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride Into the Secret Heart of BCCI (pp. 48-52). Beard Group, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

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