Quixotic Joust

Hot Stocks in the 1950s

2012-03-08T11:06:00.000-06:00

MAY 25, 1954

Uranium Boom Hits

Salt Lake City Brokers

SALT LAKE CITY (AP)—A uranium boom swamped Salt Lake City brokerage firms yesterday, with an estimated five million shares of uranium stocks changing hands in over-the-counter trade—which accounts for most of the uranium stock business. Issues listed on the Salt Lake Stock Exchange also were active and made substantial price gains. E. N. Bagley, manager of the J. A. Hogle and Co. office, attributed the brisk trade to demand that has been "building up for several days." He said "a lot of outside money," coming mostly from Texas, New York and California, boosted the volume and also the prices.

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The Steen family in 1952

THE OGDEN (UTAH) STANDARD-EXAMINER

SUNDAY MORNING, JUNE 13, 1954

Old Hands Laughed at Charlie Steen's Ideas

On Uranium, but He Hit It Rich on Second Try

MOAB (AP) — Pockets are jingling on the Colorado Plateau today as miners, speculators, prospectors and a score of amateurs pour cash and sweat into a mushrooming uranium boom.

Mining men place the plateau, a desert area fanning out from the point where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico come together, just behind Africa and ahead of Canada in uranium production. But they'll tell you that despite rosy prospects and a booming industry, putting money into uranium is speculative at best.

If you want to invest, you deal with men who are optimists, who feel that lady luck is just around the corner. But uranium ore isn't everywhere on the plateau. A section of land next to one major new strike reportedly sold for one million dollars. But nobody has found uranium on it yet.

Money is being made here in two major ways: Actual mining, or getting into a development at the prospecting stage and later selling or leasing land where a strike has been discovered.

He Made A Fortune
Charlie Steen made his fortune the first way. Until he made his strike, Steen was just another youthful prospector with visions of wealth, tramping through the sagebrush and scrambling up and down gulches. He had theories about ore deposits, based on his training at the Texas College of Mines. Old-timers listened to them—and shook their heads, or chuckled derisively.

But Steen, a smallish 34-year-old Texan, stuck to his ideas. He rented a shack for $15 a month—it was home for him, his wife and four young sons. On his second try for uranium, Steen made his strike. His mother had grubstaked him to $1,000 and early in 1951 he staked out a dozen claims in the big Indian country, 40 miles from here.

He got some more backing and managed to build a crude road into the area so drilling equipment could move in. The core drill first bit into rock July 3, 1952. Three days later Steen struck ore. "It was July 16 before we knew what we had," Steen says.

Things Happen Fast
Production finally got under way in December, 1952. The first ore was shipped to mills two days later. Since then things have happened fast to Steen. "With his mother, Mrs. Roselie Shumaker, he formed the Utex Exploration Co. Later they set up three more: The Mi Vida Mine, Inc.. Big Indian Mines, Inc., and Moab Drilling Co.

Steen branched out into merchandising and banking and is prominent in a syndicate planning a new uranium mill to be built here. It will be the largest in the United States when completed. He's also in on a housing development, has an interest in an airport and is leveling and above Moab for a new home. Steen's fabulous mine, which he calls, with feeling, the "Mi-Vida" (my life) is turning out some 7,000 tons of high-grade ore every month. He envisions the day, not too far in the future, when it will yield 1,000 tons a day.

Causes Grief For
But the m i n e has brought Steen more harassment than happiness. "It was a lot of fun finding it," he says. "But I've had grief ever since." Steen has become a controversial figure here—mostly because of envy. And he is constantly badgered with potential backers and buyers. "I can't walk down the street without two or three people talking to me about one thing or another," he says. "A lot of their ideas are good ones, but I could use up 10 million dollars If I tried all of them."

In his neat, paneled office here, Steen tries to keep his fingers on his various enterprises. He keeps in touch by short wave radio with his mine and the planes he has flying around the area. He sees 39 to 40 people a day, darting from conference to conference and making frequent trips to a mining laboratory he maintains.

Mechanical Operation
Steen considers mining "a mechanical operation." The actual recovery of ore bores him, and a lot of experienced miners think thousands of dollars are slipping through his fingers because of some of the methods at "Mi Vida."

Neither Steen nor the Atomic Energy Commission will agree to that. Both feel he knows what he's doing. It was a year after the strike, Steen says, "before I did any good financially." Money—in six figure amounts —goes through his hands every month. Only about 10 per cent of it stays with Steen.

"I'm getting enough to live on —damned well," he says. He refers to Uncle Sam as "my silent partner" because of taxes. "I don't think anyone in uranium has a bigger stake than I have," Steen argues earnestly. "I'm mining and paying most of it out in taxes. I could have sold and taken advantage of capital gains."

He Won't Sell Mine
But Steen makes it clear that Mi Vida "is not for sale for a million dollars, or 10 million or 150 million. I'll sell anything else I own, if the price is right, but not the mine."

While they're waiting for their new home to be built, Steen, his wife, "M.L." and their sons Mark, 4; Charles, 7; Andy, 5; and John, 8, live in a comfortable house here. He likes inexpensive shirts and trousers, and looks anything but a mining baron as he sits nervously in his office, clean shaven, bespectacled and serious. Most uranium men say Steen's case is something of an exception; more cash is being made trading claims and floating companies than from actual digging of ore and selling it to government-licensed buyers.

Companies Being Formed
Mining and allied companies, they point out, are being organized by the dozen and assorted stocks are finding their way to the public. You can buy some of them for a dollar a share, or a dime, or even a penny. Demand is good. Many investments come from people who want either to make a quick profit or who want the thrill of being in on one of the great booms of our time. In a few years, some of this stock will be worth a lot of money. Other shares will be only worthless pieces of paper to recall faded dreams. More money is coming in from big business, looking for investments to cut immediate tax bills. It's a loose financial situation and a lot of reliable uranium men are worried about it. They caution prospective investors to go slowly.

Men like Steen are operating against a background of great tax pressures and the big promoter. Successful miners and prospectors are selling out to companies, many of them newly formed, because of the heavy burden of federal taxes. This gives the promoter a big chance. In a legitimate enterprise, the promoter plays a useful and necessary role. But there are complaints here that some promotions are running wild.

There's a story that one promoter asked to buy a few claims to get a couple of shipments of ore out of it so he could sell stock on the strength of the shipments. But the men who are striking it rich in uranium are, for the most part, plowing a lot of their earnings back into the industry. Because of expansion, many of them still owe money to banks, but it doesn't seem to bother them.

Many like the attitude of Steen. A geologist by training and a prospector at heart, Steen looks wistfully at the hills and says: "We've only scratched the potential of the Colorado Plateau."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AUGUST 3, 1954
Utah County, Utah DAILY HERALD
Restaurant Habitues Trade In Utah Uranium Securities
By MURRAY M. MOLER
United Press Staff Correspondent

Boys in the back room?

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah (UP)—When they see what the boys in the back room will have at a certain men's restaurant here, it's probably uranium stock, not food. The back room at the "Grabeteria" used to be adorned with pictures of bathing beauties. But it's been turned into a brokerage office, and where the pin ups used to hang you find lists of stock offerings.

These are less shapely than beauty queens, but just as exciting.

It's all part of the boom in "penny" uranium shares that has been sweeping Salt Lake City, the focal point of uranium production in the vast Colorado Plateau of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and Nevada.

At the Grabeteria you can order your coffee and doughnuts and take your change as a few shares of your favorite company. Hanging on the wall beside the menu is a list of 39, uranium companies offering shares from as little as two cents up to $1.62. Thousands of Salt Lake City residents have dug into their savings to buy stock. They are warned by federal and state stock exchange officials that their investments are extremely risky, but trading has boomed.

As many as seven million shares have been sold in a single day. Most of the companies have never produced any uranium. They own mining claims in various parts of the Colorado Plateau, and it's yet to be seen whether their parcels of windswept land contain anything but rocks and rattlesnakes. The uranium which Uncle Sam is buying for atomic bombs and their nuclear projects is produced mostly by old, established companies whose stock is not for sale on the open market.

Even the more conservative stock brokers who take a dim view of the recent feverish buying and selling, admit uranium holds a terrific potential for the Colorado Plateau. They say a lot depends on the future use of uranium as a fuel for generating electric power. "It's just a question of separating the cats from the mink," one expert said.

Turning Gold into Uranium and Vice Versa

2012-03-05T13:34:00.000-06:00

Yellow Mud

South Africa's Prime Minister Daniel Malan pressed a stubby finger to a small gold button one day last week and touched off a $112 million uranium industry. There had been hints that South Africa was in the atomic business, but this was the first firm news that the country was producing uranium on a scale that is expected to net $84 million a year.

Back in 1945 the late Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts phoned Calvin Stowe McLean, president of the Transvaal Chamber of Mines:
"Is it true that there's uranium in our gold mines?"
McLean told Smuts: "Yes, but it is of no commercial value."
Said Smuts (who knew about the Manhattan Project): "I want to know how much there is and how we can get it out."
General Smuts in uniform: Canada, So. Africa, UK, NZ and Aus. Prime Ministers

From this conversation grew a plan to combine uranium production with gold production (both from the same ore). In his Atomic Energy Act, Smuts put a clamp (20 years in prison, $15,000 fine) on all discussion of the project, so that South African newspapers did not dare even reprint articles from overseas newspapers. The area chosen for the development was the West Rand Consolidated gold mine on the Witwatersrand field near Johannesburg.

After removal of the gold by the cyanide process, the tailings (i.e., waste) are treated by a secret chemical process to produce uranium oxide, which in its exportable form looks just like yellow mud. The project will extend to all other Rand mines, which will jointly share a giant uranium refinery. Chief buyer of South African uranium oxide will be the U.S., with Britain, which put up some of the capital, making purchases on a smaller scale. Said Prime Minister Malan: "It must give satisfaction to our partners in America and Britain that this valuable source of power is in the safekeeping of South Africa."
[Source: Time Magazine 10/20/1952, Vol. 60 Issue 17, p42, 1p]

Although the first nuclear weapon was built on American soil, it was not without a great deal of help from men from other countries, and the uranium used in those first devastating bombs was all derived from sources in Canada and the Belgian Congo. Although uranium had been detected in gold tailings at the Witwatersrand gold mines as early as 1921, South Africans ignored its significance until in 1944, according to an article by C.S. McLean and T.K. Prentice on the history of uranium mining in South Africa:

an American geologist, Weston Bourret, visited the Witwatersrand when on his way to Madagascar, and he submitted a secret report to the United States Government on the occurrence of uraninite in amalgamation barrel residue. This led Dr. G. W. Bain, Professor of Geology at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and consultant to the United States atomic bomb undertaking, the Manhattan Project, to make a radiometric examination of two specimens of Witwatersrand ore in his possession, which confirmed the presence of radioactive minerals in these ores. He made a secret report to the combined American and British Authorities and, as a result, these two Governments approached the South African Government in 1945 about the possibility of extracting uranium from Witwatersrand gold ores. At the same time, Dr. Bain and Dr. C. F. Davidson, Chief Geologist of the Atomic Energy Division of the Geological Survey of Britain, visited South Africa. The first quantitative assessment of the uranium potentialities of the Witwatersrand goldfield in the light of modern requirements was made by these two men and Dr. Davidson's report in October, 1945, to the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in London ended with these significant words: "Present evidence appears to indicate that the Rand may be one of the largest low-grade uranium fields in the world." The findings of Bain and Davidson indicated that the uranium in Witwatersrand ores was many times more plentiful than gold.

This same basic story was later told by General Leslie R. Groves in his autobiography, Now It Can Be Told.

The covert nature of the cooperative effort among the Allies during those war years is revealed by Stephen Dorril in his book about the British equivalent of the CIA--
MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service--in which he recounts that the Combined Development Trust, code-named "Murray Hill Project," was in charge of "allocating scarce and vital uranium ores," and was often referred to by insiders as the "insecticide committee."

British Banker Sir Charles J. Hambro was appointed to represent the project on behalf of Britain, having already been knighted in 1941 for outstanding service in obtaining war materials. A director of the Bank of England, he was sent to Washington, D.C. as the head of the British raw materials mission, succeeding Sir Clive Baillieu, in January 1944. One goal in the spring of 1945 was to find and confiscate the uranium ore (over a thousand tons) the Germans had seized from Belgium in the early days of the war and had removed it to an area deep in the Russian Zone, Strassfurt. Not only did Hambro and his men recoup this ore, as Dorril says in MI6, he and his associates found a nest of German bomb-making scientists dubbed "Hitler's Uranium Club"--giving them a "heaven-sent opportunity for Britain to get back into the atomic intelligence game." (p. 139)

Excerpt from MI6 by Stephen Dorril, p. 139

The "Farm Hall Transcripts" were never declassified until recent years, and these transcripts appear to reveal how little the German scientists captured and housed near Cambridge, England really knew.

Getting Back on Track

2012-02-24T14:47:00.000-06:00

A little update is in order, just so you don't think the windmills that Quixotic Joust has been chasing, besides flapping their arms, are jumping around as well. There is, in fact, some method to our madness.

The phase of research now being pursued began with the intention of determining who the Morris D. Jaffe connected to LBJ really was and what he was up to. During that initial effort, QJ found that Jaffe owned a uranium company with headquarters in Dallas. While investigating that tidbit, QJ discovered that D. Harold Byrd also owned a uranium company operating in Utah, which was sold to Canadians with strong ties to Israel at a time when Israel was building its own nuclear weapon. That fact led to connections between one of the associates of the Byrd uranium company's buyers, Bryan Newkirk, and Permindex associate and Bobby Kennedy nemesis Roy Cohn.

Since Roy Cohn was mentioned significantly in the Torbitt Document, QJ then determined to learn more about its author, David Copeland, writing under the alias of Torbitt. That research was interesting but seemingly a dead end, requiring QJ to backtrack a few steps and pick up a new trail. That brings us up to date and explains the reason for this new tack.

Hopefully, that at least partially explains the reason for QJ's fascination with the fictional book by Chinle Miller shown below, recently read by this writer on Kindle. Uranium Daughter was recently featured and proved to be an excellent read, as well as providing insight into the American lands within the uranium boom of the 1950's. But more history is in order and available, thanks to Raye C. Ringholz:

***

Raye C. Ringholz in Utah History Encyclopedia

Prior to World War I, radium mining dwindled but a new bonanza was identified in the tailings dumps of the mines. When it was determined that the discarded vanadium added to molten steel would greatly increase the tensile strength and elasticity of the metal, Utah's vanadium industry flourished. One of the dominant figures in the resultant boom was Howard Balsley of Moab, who sold carnotite ores to Vitro Chemical Corporation of Pittsburgh for medicaments and luminous paint.

It wasn't until twenty-five years later, as a result of the atomic age and subsequent arms race of the Cold War, that uranium, previously considered a waste product of the vanadium mines, came into demand as a key element for nuclear weaponry. In the beginning, almost 90 percent of the United States' uranium supply was imported from the Belgian Congo and Canada. But scanty amounts being filtered from abandoned radium and vanadium dumps on the Colorado Plateau gave promise of an untapped domestic source. The Manhattan Project of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, charged with development of an atom bomb to end the war, instituted a covert program to mine uranium from the vanadium dumps and sent geologists to scour the region in search of new lodes.

With the end of World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission replaced the Manhattan Project and launched the first federally-sponsored mineral rush in history. The AEC constructed roads into the back country, promised $10,000 bonuses for new lodes of high-grade ore, guaranteed minimum prices and paid up to $50 per ton on 0.3 percent ore, constructed mills, helped with haulage expenses and posted geologic data on promising areas tracked by federal geologists using airborne scinillometers and other sophisticated radiation detection instruments.

The Four Corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, suddenly teemed with prospectors in the greatest ore search since the gold fever days of the previous century. Amateurs and experts, alike, followed AEC guidelines and used radiation detectors called Geiger counters to test promising sandstone formations for uranium deposits. Concentrating on exposed outcroppings along canyon rims, they searched primarily for the grayish Salt Wash member of the Morrison formation. When a likely claim was located, they used diamond drills to core test holes to determine if mineable ore was present.

I've begun to suspect that the author, Chinle Miller, was a pseudonym used by someone who knows more about the history than she feels free to state as fact, much as David Copeland was afraid to use his real name when talking about Division Five, the enforcement unit from the FBI which worked to control uranium products as early as the 1930's when the Tennessee Valley Authority was created. Oversight originally fell under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers and only after the Manhattan Project ushered in the atomic age on Japan did the Feds create the above-top-secret Atomic Energy Commission, then connected to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. All these details led me to inquire about the beginnings of this uranium boom in the Four Corners area in the 1950s, and about Charles Augustus Steen, the Uranium King.

Steen aka Utex sells to Atlas in 1962.

Steen did well for a time, but then the AEC turned off the spigot, and the Steen family plummeted.

Click to englarge

This is a lot of information to absorb at one sitting. Stay tuned for the next installment.

Update on David Copeland

2012-02-17T17:54:00.000-06:00

After catching a brief glimpse into the life of the Torbitt Document's alleged author, David G. Copeland in a previous post, we now turn to the document itself, written under an alias as early as 1970, describing the "cabal" which worked together to kill President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

In the "About the Author" section of the Torbitt Document, Copeland told us that he prosecuted criminal cases during 1949, 1950, and part of 1951, but the only details he furnished were that this occurred:

"in the southwestern part of the United States ... where professional Mexican assassins have been used to commit political murder. He has also participated in the trial of cases in the southwest involving gunrunning activities through Mexico to Cuba, both before Castro was successful and after Castro succeeded and became the subject of overthrow by gunrunners from the southwest."

To the above, he added:

Close relatives of the gambling syndicate members have used the legal services of Torbitt in complicated cases involving tracing of financial dealings of organized crime in Texas and their foreign connecting links."

Certain other tidbits of information we have learned without help from his book. For example, a son, Kippie, born in Waco during his first marriage, died before his third birthday in 1953. Between then and January 1960, when he married Jayne Baker, a divorce occurred.

About Copeland, however, through newspapers we learn that in 1962 as head of the campaign for liberal candidate Don H. Yarborough (no relation to the U.S. Senator, Ralph Yarborough), he organized a group called Texans for a Two-Party Texas following the primary elections, attempting to force conservative Democrats into the Republican Party. This group would unwittingly make it possible for George H.W. Bush to be elected as a Congressman in Texas.

Copeland knew, or thought he knew, facts proving that LBJ and Governor John B. Connally had been involved in the murder of President Kennedy, and he campaigned repeatedly after 1963 for their more liberal opponents, in 1968 calling LBJ's war on poverty a political gimmick.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The cogent questions, phrased in Watergate-ese, are: What did Copeland know, and how did he know it? Was he told by an insider, or did he simply make conclusions based on a combination of stories he heard and his own research?

We know from our research into his background that Copeland was married to Aline, a teacher, while living in Fort Worth (Tarrant County) in 1946, according to this page from the City Directory that year:

Click image to enlarge.

He was a student, perhaps in law school at Texas Wesleyan School of Law, which was located a few blocks from their residence. Seven miles to the west was the bomber-making plant where Aline had worked during the war before obtaining her teaching position at the junior high school. Nevertheless, he says in his self-published manuscript that he had a law degree from the University of Texas at Austin. The manuscript also claimed to be "an enlargement of a working paper furnished to Torbitt by two agents -- one with the Customs Department and the other with the Narcotics Bureau. This is wholly at odds with what Tex Marrs claimed in his book about who Copeland's federal sources were.

The Fort Worth Bomber Plant

In attempting to discover who the two agents were, we have gone back through Copeland's life to review where he was at certain times in order to determine with whom he was in contact. For example, the plant where Aline Copeland worked while her husband was a student would become an important tool leading up to the NASA space program.

Tarrant Field Airdrome originated in 1941 and became Fort Worth Army Air Field on January 2, 1942. The site of the base was originally selected in 1941 as a Consolidated Vultee factory for the production of B-24 bombers. A separate contract was let for a landing field, Tarrant Field, to be built to support the aircraft factory. The construction of an air force base on the east side of Tarrant Field was authorized after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Tarrant Field Airdrome was assigned to the Army Air Forces Flying Training Command in July 1942.
The base became one of the first B-24 transition schools to begin operation. After more than 4,000 students were trained in B-24s at the base, its mission was changed to B-24 transition because of the nearness to the Consolidated factory. In 1945 the mission was changed from B-24 to B-29 aircraft training. The base was assigned to the newly formed Strategic Air Command in March of 1946.
Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation was formed by a merger of Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, founded by Reuben H. Fleet in 1923 in Buffalo, New York, and Vultee Aircraft, a California airplane builder. In Texas it operated a mile-long facility, known locally as the Bomber Plant, built in 1942 on 563 acres on the west side of what is now Carswell Air Force Base at Fort Worth. The company used the site to fulfill contracts for planes it had no room to build at its San Diego factory and produced more than 3,000 B-24s, as well as C-87 cargo planes there.

Vultee Aircraft, based in Downey, California, had acquired the assets of Consolidated Aircraft Corporation, which had been dissolved in bankruptcy, and became Consolidated Vultee Aircraft, commonly known as Convair for short. Between 1942 and 1948 the Vultee Field division of Convair was awarded government contracts that gave it a step ahead in designing long-range missile weapons systems for the military. Project MX-774 would study a subsonic, jet engine cruise missile and a rocket-powered supersonic ballistic missile. Vultee's engineers in California focused on the ballistic missile concept, taking data about the German V-2 rocket with plans to build a guided missile that would carry power equipment allowing it to travel outside the atmosphere of the earth--described as a "streamlined" version of the German V-2. The Downey/San Diego plant was the headquarters location for the Fort Worth plant, where Copeland's first wife Aline had been employed during the war years.

We do know, however, that Aline Copeland returned to Waco before her second marriage and that she was apparently working at James Connally AFB, a bombardier and navigator flight training center between 1951 and 1962--the most likely place for Aline to have met and marry an Air Force officer who had been a prisoner of war in Germany during WWII. An officer by that same name was Communications Officer for the 601st Aircraft Control and Warning Squadron at the radar work site, "Gunpost,' in Rothwesten, Germany in 1959. Nothing could be found on where Aline and Campbell met, or on whether that Major Campbell was in fact married to an exceptionally attractive German woman named Erika Horn, mentioned at the 601st ACWS website.

If anyone has any other information about how all these details came together, please comment below.

David Copeland--the Man Behind the Torbitt Mask

2012-02-16T09:31:00.000-06:00

According to Jim Marrs, William Torbitt, writer of the underground manuscript known as the Torbitt Document, or Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, was an attorney in Waco, Texas, whose real name was David Copeland and who, Marrs claims, told him in an interview that the information written under the alias had been given him by two federal employees, one with the Secret Service and the other with the FBI. We have also heard that Copeland was a prosecutor of criminals and may have learned details from men he represented who were connected to organized crime or hired as assassins. But was all this cover to protect the real source of the information?

The following research into who David Copeland, alias William Torbitt, was shows us that:

B-24 Bomber made in Fort Worth, TX

His first wife designed B-24 bombers in Fort Worth for Convair. It was this very plant where she worked during World War II, while she was married to Copeland, where Max Clark headed the security at the time he told George De Mohrenschildt that returned defector, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a "harmless lunatic."
After his divorce from Wife No. 1, she married a former prisoner of war who had been held in Germany before war's end and then advanced to the rank of Lt. Col. in the Air Force during the cold war, stationed in German outposts.

Fashion Logo

Wife No. 2 became a fashion designer/manufacturer for children's apparel and was often in Dallas, the center of the Texas cotton textile mart, which employed a number of "White Russians" known to have been somehow connected, if only collaterally, with the Kennedy assassination--people who were discussed in the Torbitt Document.

The curious reader wants to know:

Who was David Copeland?

David Copeland's Family

David Goddard Copeland died in 1981. We can piece together his life from various studies and notices that appear online. His parents James P. Copeland and Sarah "Sallie" Goddard married in 1909 in Belfalls, a small farming community in Falls County, east of Temple, Texas. He died in 1967 in Kerrville, Texas, not far from LBJ's ranch in Johnson City. Sallie had been born in 1886 in Bosque County near Waco and was the youngest daughter of Dr. Andrew Goddard, from Chattanooga, Tenn., who came to Texas after being a prisoner during the Civil war. In Alabama he married Nancy Parker and brought her to Cedar Bayou, Texas near present-day Baytown, where he taught school. Together they reared fifteen children. After two of their children died from whooping cough, the Goddards relocated to the Bosque River area west of Waco. In 1880 Dr. Goddard was elected president of the Sunday School Institute of Waco Association, and according to the 1897 history of that organization, he and his wife were

"members of Dr. [B. H.] Carroll's church. Their residence is No. 1904 South Seventh street."

Dr. Goddard was a medical doctor but in later years wrote an astronomy column for the newspaper in Waco. He also was county surveyor, in which he was succeeded by his son Joe Goddard.

A Waco news article in 1955 reported on a family reunion held at the home of David Copeland's mother -- 425 University Avenue--close to the Baylor campus. David, already an attorney, and his wife Jayne then lived at 4217 Erath in Waco, some miles west of Baylor. David was a criminal defense attorney whose name sometimes appeared in the Waco paper owned by LBJ's close supporter Charles Marsh. She and the Goddard family were also the subject of a feature article written by Helen Baldwin that appeared in 1964.

Copeland was campaign manager for Democratic nominee for state attorney general, Tom Moore from Waco, who was supported by former U.S. Senator Tom Connally, also from Waco.

When Copeland ran for a place on the Texas Supreme Court in 1964, he was described as "a former Waco assistant district attorney, campaigner for Houston attorney Don Yarborough and a member of the Texas Association of Plaintiffs Attorneys." Four years later he opposed the favorite-son status of former governor John Connally, while leading the Texas campaign of anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy.

David Copeland's First Wife, Aline

Copeland was married first to Aline Buehrer, who died in 2010:

Aline Doris Campbell August 26, 1920 - October 22, 2010 Aline Doris Campbell of Alamo, formerly of Waco, passed away Friday, October 22, 2010 at St. Catherine Center. Graveside services will be 11:00 a.m, Nov. 13, at Waco Memorial Park. Aline was born August 26, 1920 in Brenham, Texas, the only child of Fred and Flora Buehrer. She graduated from Brenham High School in 1938. She attended Baylor University and graduated in 1942 with a Bachelor of Music Degree. To support the War effort, she worked in the design department of Consolidated Aircraft in Fort Worth, which produced the B-24 bombers. Following the war, she was a Registered Music Therapist at the VA Regional Medical Center in Waco and Director of Morale, Welfare and Recreation programs at James Connally AFB, Waco. She was preceded in death by her parents, Fred and Flora Buehrer of Brenham; her beloved son, David G. (Kippie) Copeland, Jr.; her late husband, Lawson D. Campbell; and her first husband, David G. Copeland. She is survived by her first cousin, Franklin Raschke and wife, Genevieve, of San Antonio; niece, Kathy Copeland Papke of Austin; nephew, Randy Copeland of Houston; cousin, John Toland and wife, Deborah, of Tucson, AZ; cousin, Nancy Fontaine Woods of Braddford, England; and cousin, John Barrett of Austin. Memorials may be made to the Wounded Warriors Project.

Aline's grandfathers were Swiss and German, though both men married Americans.

The history of the Consolidated Aircraft plant is described as follows:

Air Force Plant 4 was opened in 1941. It was operated by the Fort Worth Divisionof Consolidated Aircraft Company (later Convair) for assembly of the B-24 bomber. In 1942, during World War II, Air Force Plant 4 became operational when Consolidated Aircraft began manufacturing the B-24 Liberator bomber. Over 3,000 B-24s were constructed in the first 2 years of operation. Later, the plantproduced 124 B-32s, the successor to the B-24. Later, the plant began producing aircraft components, as well as delivering completed aircraft.
Many innovative aircraft were produced at AFP 4, including the first intercontinental bomber (B-361, the first supersonic bomber (B-58), and the first swing-wing aircraft (F-111). In 1953, General Dynamics took over operation of the manufacturing facility. Since then, Air Force Plant 4 has produced the B-36, B-58, F-111 and F-16 aircraft. Between 1947 and 1954, 383 B-36s were built, and afterwards the Mach-2-capable B-58. By 1966, the plant had expanded to 4.7 million square feet, and by 1968 it had expanded further to 6.5 million square feet, to accommodate production of the F-111.

B-24 Bomber plant in Fort Worth

After Aline and David Copeland divorced, she married Lawson D. Campbell, who would retire from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel and, upon his death in 2008, be buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery, San Antonio. He enlisted in the Air Force in 1942 and was held as a prisoner of war in Germany beginning in 1944 for almost a year. He was an Air Force communications officer, whose photo and one of his German wife, Erika Horn, are shown at a website dedicated to the 601st-615th Aircraft Warning Battalion stationed in Germany during the 1950's:

Captain Campbell, our next Communications Officer, was also reveredby many who worked for him. At the 601st reunions there are always storiestold about how he handled various situations. He was humorous, but couldalso be very firm. Arthur Harman wrote:
"...a snapshot taken of, then, Major Lawson D. Campbell, around 1959or, perhaps, 1960-61. It was taken in his office at Ramstein Germany wherehe commanded the local communications organization and facilities." ...

Erika Horn. Later Erika Campbell
Long-time German National employee. Officially, a civilianclerk/typist Unofficially, the Commander's secretary
Wrote and spoke idiomatically perfect American English with no traceof a German or British accent
Married Capt. Lawson Campbell, 610st [sic] Communications Officer, in Kasselin 1959 and went to live with him in the States.

Jayne Copeland--David's Second Wife

Copeland's second wife, Jayne Baker Copeland, would get into the news when she started her own clothing manufacturing company several years before Kennedy's assassination.

David and Jayne Copeland divorced in 1978, three years before he died. In 1981 Jayne married Milton Douglas Solomon. Both are now deceased. According to Milton's obituary, he was

"General Manager for Barber Boats and Motors inDallas, Texas. Following a long and successful tenure at Barber Boats, Miltonretired with his wife, Jayne Baker Solomon, to the city of his birth and hiscircle of cherished friends."

The obituary for Jane's mother, Lillie Baker, stated:

"She partnered with her daughter and only child Jayne in the design and manufacturing of the Jayne Copeland line of children’s wear. She later opened and operated Lillie’s Bridal and Formals on South 8th Street where customers fondly regarded her as 'Miss Lillie.' She retired at age 80 after 25 years in the bridal business to devote her time to her great-grandchildren. Lillie is survived by her daughter Jayne Solomon and son-in-law Milton Solomon, grandchildren Kevin Copeland, Michael Copeland and Kasey Frederick. She leaves four adored great-grandchildren: Jessica Steakley, David Copeland, Kristin Copeland and Max Pfeiffer-Frederick, as well as brothers Robert, Eldridge, and Charles Blain."

From this information about Lillie's surviving siblings we learn that Lillie Mae Blain had married William Judson Baker, who died in 1950. Jayne's name was listed in Texas birth records as Evelyn Jane Baker. In 1930 the Waco directory listed W. Judson Baker and wife Lillie living with his parents, two brothers and two sisters, at 1912 Franklin Avenue. Judson and Lillie worked at an ice cream stand, which sold "frozen custard." Four years later the couple lived at 1000 S. 8th Street, and his parents lived on the same street a few blocks to the east, an address now within the Baylor campus. Before his in 1950 at age 40, Jayne's father, Judson Baker, was a used car dealer in Waco who had started a Christmas "fling," in 1946 by throwing dimes off the roof of his office to the scores of children below. In 1947 he switched to pennies, throwing 40,000 off his roof.

The Jayne Copeland line of clothing continues, as does the widespread fame of William Torbitt's document.

Desperately Seeking Truth

2012-02-15T20:46:00.000-06:00

Researching history to find the truth about what REALLY happened is not unlike looking for a specific destination when all one has is its address, while traveling on a highway littered with flashing billboards, each offering diversions and false promises pointing the way to the same destination by a different route. Billboards, like most advertising, lie. I always have to remember my modus operandi--the true route to the destination is to follow the money.

I began my most research into Morris Douglas Jaffe after reading a blog by John Delane Williams, Why is Morris Jaffe Interesting? This phase of my research required me to

begin with assumptions Williams had made, compared with facts I uncovered about Jaffe's background. (The Fed Mart allegations)
My next blog about this research revealed what I thought may have been a significant link between the Jaffe family in San Antonio and Lyndon Johnson's close friend and attorney from the Texas hill country, "Judge Moursund." (Old San Antonio)
It was the next step in my research that led me to inquire into Jaffe's uranium exploration, found in a blog post called "Other Uranium Explorers in Texas in the 1950's."

What I knew for sure at that point were the following details:

Lyndon Johnson's San Antonio friend, Morris Douglas Jaffe, was involved for a time in uranium exploration;
Another Morris D. Jaffe was a lawyer in Dallas.

My initial goal was to sort the two men out and determine which had a uranium company, what happened to it, and with whom he was connected or, perhaps, who was investing in his company. I also needed to know whether either of the two Morris Jaffes was, as John Delane Williams alleged, the son-in-law of Sam Bloom, an advertising man who "was enlisted to handle public relations for Judge Joe Brown for the Jack Ruby trial."

Williams also stated in the same post that

"Mort Freedman was a brother-in-law to Sam Bloom and the owner operator of Morty Freedman Inc. at 2135 Lamar in Dallas. More importantly, he shared the telephone number with the Dallas Uranium and Oil Company on the third floor of the Dal-Tex Building."

Continuing with my metaphor, I knew what I wanted to know, but I had to follow money maps to reach my destination, while ignoring all the billboards (statements Williams made as truths), attempting to divert me from a successful completion of my journey. It took many twists and turns, and for that reason, I am pinpointing for readers the stops made along the way, intersections as it were with other money trails, that eventually led to the correct path to the discovery of the role uranium played in the plot to kill the Kennedy brothers.

In September I decided to look into the background of a Waco attorney named David Copeland, the man behind the mask of William Torbitt and the "Torbitt Document," as well as a major source of information secretly supplied to Penn Jones, Jr., an early researcher in the JFK assassination. Copeland's wife, Jayne Copeland -- daughter and partner of Mrs. Lillie Mae Blain Baker -- was a children's clothing maker who traveled within circles of the fashion and textile industry in Dallas, New Orleans and New York. This was the same industry engaged in by many of the backstage characters in the Kennedy assassination--people like Abraham Zapruder and Jeanne LeGon De Mohrenschildt. Did Copeland learn what he knew through his wife's contacts or from other sources?
The Torbitt Document took me back to research I had begun years before but never completed--a fascinating look at a trial of two Mexican assassins arrested by Alice District Attorney Sam Burris in the mistaken killing of the son of a lawyer from south Texas named Jake Floyd.
Researching the background of Sam Burris was a step necessary in determining how close he may have been to a relative named Howard Burris, lurking inside the excellent research of Richard Bartholomew's treasure, Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used In the JFK Conspiracy.
Within Bartholomew's manuscript was revealed a connection between Howard Burris and the notorious Edward G. Lansdale, an Air Force Major General at the time of his retirement on November 1, 1963, who headed Operation Mongoose during the Kennedy years.

Only recently did I discover that Jack Ruby was aware of the book written by J. Evetts Haley before his death of a fast-growing cancer in 1967. Ruby wrote a letter, addressed only to "John," which can be seen at page 104 of a book written by William P. Litynski and uploaded to Scribd:

While Ruby is in jail, he writes this letter: [image of note] It reads:

"you must believe me that I know what is taking place, so please with all my heart, you must believe me, because I am counting on you to save this country a lot of blood-shed. As soon as you get out you must read Texan looks at Lyndon [A Texan Looks at Lyndon by J. Evetts Haley], and it may open your eyes to a lot of things. This man is a Nazi in the worst order."
Further on in this letter Ruby writes:

... isn't it strange that Oswald who hasn't worked a lick most of his life, should be fortunate enough to get a job at the Book Building two weeks before the president himself didn't know as to when he was to visit Dallas, now where would a jerk like Oswald get the information that the president was coming to Dallas? Only one person could have had that information, and that man was Johnson who knew weeks in advance as to what was going to happen, because he is the one who was going to arrange the trip for the president, this had been planned long before the president himself knew about, so you can figure that one out. The only one who gained by the shooting of the president was Johnson, and he was in a car in the rear and safe when the shooting took place. What would the Russians, Castro or anyone else have to gain by eliminating the president? If Johnson was so heartbroken over Kennedy, why didn't he do something for Robert Kennedy? All he did was snub him.
This letter and Ruby's remarks to the press, suggest that Ruby became only later convinced that Johnson was a power behind the scenes. During his Warren testimony he shows no inkling of this conviction.

Upon investigation, we learn that the above letter was printed in an issue of Ramparts magazine with the following lead-in:

The letter which follows is one of two unsigned letters handwritten in pencil on slips from a memo pad confiscated by one of Ruby's guards and subsequently smuggled from the jail. They were sold at auction in the Astor Gallery in New York on January 31 1966 by Charles Hamilton, a reputable autograph dealer who vouched for their authenticity. The purchaser of this one was Texas editor Penn Jones Jr., author of the book Forgive My Grief. He paid $950. Ruby's younger brother Sam immediately contacted Jones and confirmed that Ruby had admitted writing the letter.

With Jones' permission we are publishing most of the letter (33 pages in its original handwritten form) This is its exclusive publication and it is presented as Ruby wrote it without correcting his errors in spelling, grammar, or punctuation, without attempting to clarify its ambiguities, contradictions, and evident factual errors. It will be remembered that Ruby never went beyond the eighth grade in school.---by David Welsh

The letter can be read as it appeared in Ramparts by looking at the file on Jack Ruby at the Mary Ferrell website. The complete file is 204 pages long. I will be glad to email a pdf of the file to anyone requesting same.

Jim Norman on Mossad Role in Inslaw Theft

2012-02-14T14:52:00.000-06:00

Danny Casolaro

Quixotic Joust decided to reprise the Jim Norman interview after reading Cheri Seymour's recently published updated printed version (by TrineDay) of The Last Circle.

Cheri posted her original investigative report online under the pseudonym Carol Marshall to protect herself from being "suicided" like Danny Casolaro, who had kept the results of his own findings secret. Those extensive materials he had accumulated and analyzed were forever lost when he died.

It was Cheri's intent to retrace Danny's steps until she could put a face (or faces) on the OCTOPUS. It must be our purpose to continue their work. Only by knowing the components of that many-tentacled metaphorical beast, can we ever hope to prevent the head of the national security state from secretly reaching into the slimy depth of lucrative criminal enterprise to feed the vile creature it has become.

Radio Interview of James Norman by Jim Quinn, DJ of WRRK 96.9 FM in Pittsburgh

The following is a Radio Interview between James Norman, a former Senior Editor of Forbes Magazine and now with Media Bypass Magazine and Jim Quinn, DJ of WRRK 96.9 FM in Pittsburgh. In this interview from December 7th, they discuss issues of national importance and STUNNING IMPACT. Essentially they give out the reason for Vincent Foster's Death, and the fact that the "resignations" of the Congress-persons are NOT for policy reasons but because they have been caught with millions in corrupt funds in Swiss Banks. Read this to learn what the "mainstream media" doesn't ever tell you...

Jim Quinn's Interview with Jim Norman

QUINN: Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine, and currently writing for Media Bypass Magazine after having uncovered Caspar Weinberger's Swiss bank account (we do get punished for some of the truths we uncover, do we not?). Jim is on the phone with us this morning. Good Morning, Jim.

NORMAN: Hi, how are you?

QUINN: Pretty good. I want to give people a chance to get an idea of what it is we are going to launch into after 8 o'clock, and I want to give some background into this. Is it fair to say that since Iran-Contra that the government has sort of been involved in the drug business?

NORMAN: Yes, it goes way back before then, actually. It goes back even to the Vietnam War days -- remember the Golden Triangle, Laos, Cambodia and all that, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it was always on a much smaller scale. What apparently happened was that in the 80s we got into it in a big way, basically nationalizing the wholesale importation of drugs from Central and South America. The idea was that we control it somehow that way; instead, it has just become the tail wagging the dog, I think.

(from left to right) Secretary of State Alexander Haig, National Security Adviser Richard Allen, President Reagan, Deputy Secretary of State William Clark, Chief of Staff James Baker III and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. 5/28/81. photo: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

Arms and Drugs -- Government's Funding Source for Covert Ops?

QUINN: It's become the funding source for just about anything that the government covertly wants to do, and for the moneys that various elements of the government don't want to ask the Congress for, nor do they want Congress to know about.

NORMAN: Right. And it's an arms business, too. They are kind of all tied up together.

QUINN: So it's arms and drugs?

NORMAN: Right.

What did Gary Cartwright and 'Mad Dog' Know in 1963?

2012-02-14T12:28:00.000-06:00

Notes on Mad Dogs

On Being Young, Talented, and Slightly Insane in Old Austin

By Clay Smith, Fri., Jan. 26, 2001

Originally published in The Austin Chronicle

Anyone who has tried to write about Mad Dog, a bizarre moment of this state's literary history, can lay claim to the same feelings Susan Sontag experienced when she wrote "Notes on 'Camp'" in 1964. "It's embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp," she declared right off the bat, and proceeded to sketch the sensibility of camp in the form of descriptive notes because "to snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble." The essay form is too definite, too knowing, perhaps, to snare a sensibility. Mad Dog is not a sensibility that is alive and powerful, but it was at one time. But the rules are the same for snaring lost or living sensibilities, and in the case of Mad Dog, for which there is not an abundance of recorded history, the effort of resuscitating its lost sensibility can be addressed most effectively by making notes about it.

These notes are for Bud Shrake.

"There were people who refused to join Mad Dog. ... I think they thought it was too elitist. So we decided it was: It was too elitist for them."
-- Bud Shrake being interviewed, Jan. 13, 2001

Defining "Mad Dog"

1. An attempt at definition: Mad Dog is the chosen name of a band of rebellious artists -- mainly writers and journalists but also musicians and painters -- who lived in Texas, mostly in Austin, in the late Sixties and early Seventies who partied and wrote in an identifiably Texan, outlaw manner. Members include

Texas Monthly senior editor Gary Cartwright and his wife Phyllis;
novelist and screenwriter Bud Shrake (Shrake and Cartwright were the founders);
Dennis Hopper, who starred in Kid Blue (1973), a movie that Shrake wrote;
Marvin Schwarz, who produced the movie;
actors Peter Boyle and Warren Oates, also in Kid Blue;
Willie Nelson;
Jerry Jeff Walker (and later, his wife Susan);
Peter and Jody Gent (Peter Gent is the author of the classic football satire North Dallas Forty and a former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver);
Bill Brammer, author of The Gay Place;
painter and sculptor Fletcher Boone;
labor lawyer David Richards and his wife Ann, who would become the governor of Texas;
Larry L. King; and
Threadgill's proprietor Eddie Wilson, among others.

Once a Mad Dog always a Mad Dog, but the hotbed of Mad Dog activity has long since passed. The unofficial anthem of Mad Dog is said to be "Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother," by Ray Wylie Hubbard, but the Jerry Jeff Walker version.

Holding a book-signing at Scholz Garten (in this case, for Larry L. King's … and other dirty stories in 1968) is the epitome of Mad Dog style: a little beer with your books. The man smoking behind King (seated) is artist Fletcher Boone, and behind him, Bill Brammer. (Larry L. King Archives, Southwestern Writers Collection, Southwest Texas State University)

Trying to define the sensibility of Mad Dog in one statement would betray the spirit of the group, since harboring anything as sophisticated as a "sensibility" is not what Mad Dogs were after. There was no purpose to Mad Dog (more on this later); its motto was "Doing Indefinable Services to Mankind" and its credo was "Everything that is not a mystery is guesswork."

Canadian Radium and Uranium Role in American Conspiracy and Crime

2012-02-12T13:54:00.000-06:00

It seems helpful to review the history of oil, radium and uranium production in Canada before proceeding with research into what was going on in southern Florida in 1959 and later. All history is a study of what people DO, not just what they admit to doing. The best way to figure out what they actually did is to intersect dots showing who they make connections with and then explore how those connections fit into an historical timetable.

Below are excerpts extracted from a paper called "Grandfather and the Bear," presented by H. J. M. Spence at the Fourteenth International Symposium held by the Uranium Institute in London, September 1989.

Click to enlarge

Gilbert Labine, a partner with his brother and others in a relatively flush but young and momentarily mineless mining firm called Eldorado Gold Mines Limited, spotted the site of what was to become Canada's first uranium mine from the air in 1929. Following up on a tip from a fur trapper and other rumours, characteristic of the times, he was looking mainly for silver, and was attracted by cobalt bloom and other coloured stains, which were easily visible from the aircraft while overflying the Great Bear area....
Gilbert Labine at Great Bear Lake mine

Labine discovered pitchblende, as well as the silver he was seeking, at what was to become Port Radium on Labine Point....

Initial confirmation of what Labine had found - ore containing up to 53 per cent uranium oxide - came by radio in August following analysis in Toronto of hand-picked samples flown out from the site by a rival firm. The message was in code, which was common in the mining industry of the day, but which could not disguise the word 'uranium'....

The prize, of course, was radium, a gram of which was then valued at more than 50 times the average Canadian's annual income. This miracle substance had captured the fancy of the world for its proven use in the battle against cancer. We shudder today in the knowledge that it was also touted for use in treating such things as birthmarks, eczema, ringworm, psoriasis, acne, warts and neuralgia, and was even claimed 'to cause the menopause to be prompt and not distressing'....

In any case, it was the demand for uranium for weapons development that revived the Port Radium mine in 1942. The project was given government priority for men and materials, and it took just four months to recommission the workings. The immediate, urgent requirement for uranium was met by collecting the bagged ore and concentrates which had been abandoned at the mine and various points along its access waterway in 1940.

After a year and a half of intrigue and manoeuvering, on 28 January 1944 the government announced in the House of Commons that Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited, and its Port Radium mine, had been nationalized 'in the interests of military secrecy', which must have caused distress amongst the Allies' security and intelligence communities. It is well known that, at the urging of the United States, security surrounding the uranium bomb project was extraordinary. As a consequence, mistrust strained the relations between friendly nations, and those involved with the work were kept on a short leash - to the extent that one of the small band of US Army scientific experts with the Manhattan project was followed on a visit to his Canadian fianc?by what could only have been a security agent.

The activities at Great Bear Lake retreated into shadow for some three years, while the world sorted out the good guys from the bad....Following the war, uranium mining in Canada was characterized by a boom-bust-boom cycle reflecting the effects of politics and technological developments on the world marketplace. Amateur prospecting really took off in 1948 when the government lifted a partial ban on private involvement in uranium exploration and replaced it with a guaranteed minimum price for acceptable uranium ores. The advent of the Cold War meant there was a market for as much uranium as Canada could produce. There were many promising uranium discoveries in the decade after the war, one of the most significant being that at Beaverlodge on the north shore of Saskatchewan's Lake Athabasca.

Occurrences first reported in 1934 were pursued in 1944, and underground development began in 1949. The discovery of uranium deposits in northern Saskatchewan was the beginning of a major expansion of the uranium mining industry in Canada, including the establishment of the first open-pit and the first private enterprise uranium mine in the post war period, the Gunnar mine, which was discovered in July 1952. The Bancroft area occurrences first picked over by grandfather Spence in 1922 were tapped for development beginning in 1949....
[Note: see Mr. Spence's references at above link.]

It should be noted here that Bryan W. Newkirk made a huge discovery of uranium at Bancroft in November 1954 through his company, Faraday Uranium. In 1943 it had been reported in the press that monopolistic control of the Vermilion oilfield, had been alleged by Elmer E. Roper, a Canadian representative from Edmonton in an address in the legislature. The charge had been denied in a telegram from Bryan W. Newkirk, Toronto, member of a group operating the field, stating: "there is no monopolistic control of the Vermilion field."

Newkirk had also been involved with companies named Marigold Oils Limited and Barclay Oil Company, Limited, reputedly licensed by an Israeli man named Arie Ben-Tovim, a chemical engineer by profession, who, after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 had been appointed consul of Israel in Canada during 1949-50, and then as consul in New York during 1951-52, when Ben-Tovim returned to his professional and private occupation and to engage in a joint oil project with Newkirk, with T. R. Harrison (of Trans-Era Oils Limited and Wilrich Petroleums Limited), and with A. M. Abernethy (of Minerva Mining Corporation Limited). Abernethy was in business with James Crisona of New York, with whom he had purchased controlling interest in the uranium company owned by D. Harold Byrd of Dallas, Texas, in 1956.

A few years after the Israel venture, Newkirk would also be connected with stock promoter /hockey player Eric Cradock in Marigold Oils Limited, while another Canadian representative made allegations in the legislature that stocks were being rabidly promoted by gangsters who were associated by Cradock and others in sports clubs. These gangster/ gamblers had invaded Canada following a crackdown on organized crime by the United States following Robert F. Kennedy's participation with Roy Cohn on the Senate Committee staff chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and then his appointment to the position of Attorney General under his brother, President John F. Kennedy in January 1961.

Robert Kennedy had resigned from McCarthy's committee and became Lead Council in the Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Racketeering and Corruption in the Teamsters Union. As Gordonskene reported at Crooks and Liars newstalgia website:

During a panel interview on Meet The Press from 1959, Kennedy is asked by Lawrence Spivak if he was worried regarding Hoffa's threat to sue, from some remarks Kennedy made during a recent Jack Paar Show appearance.
Robert F. Kennedy: “I feel that in our investigation that we have shown that Mr. Hoffa has made collusive deals with employers, that he’s betrayed the Union membership, that he sold out the Union membership, that he’s put gangsters and racketeers in important positions of power within the Teamsters Union, that he’s misused Union funds. I say that and I will say it again. If Mr. Hoffa wishes to sue me I think we can take that to a court and allow it to be decided by a jury. ...That if he loses that case, that he should resign as President of the Teamsters. Because if he is guilty of any one of these things he is not worthy to be International President of that Union.”
Needless to say, the news didn't get any better for Hoffa when Kennedy became Attorney General a little over a year later.

The crackdown against organized crime by Bobby Kennedy led first to the flight of the criminals into Canada and later to Bobby Kennedy's enforced impotence cause by the murder of his brother, the President. Did Bobby's old nemesis Roy Cohn have a hand in that? Was he assisted in any way by his friend and associate Bryan Newkirk, who developed the island resort of Duck Key south of the most southern tip of mainland Florida, one of the closest points to Cuba, where Roy Cohn was often in residence? Were Newkirk and Cohn connected by their relationship with other Canadian and Israeli members of organized crime who were incidentally out to regain control of Cuban gambling by Meyer Lansky? These questions are yet to be answered.

Canadian Organized Crime and Florida Land Development

2012-02-11T15:14:00.001-06:00

WINNIPEG FREE PRESS- APRIL 14, 1952

EDMONTON, April 14 (CP) —Hon. N. E. Tanner, mines minister, has announced the first entry of Quebec mining interests into the Alberta oil picture. Quebec mining interests are financing Marigold Oils limited, which has an interest in 10,612 acres of oil rights in the Barrhead area, about 60 miles northwest of Edmonton. The group financing Marigold includes:

East Sullivan Mines limited,

Louvicourt Goldfields corporation,

Bibis Yukon Mines limited,

Eric Cradock and Bryan W. Newkirk.

So, who were those guys?

NOVEMBER 29, 1961 Ontario Legislature

Mr. Wintermeyer: —Mr. McNamara was a defence witness, so to speak, at closed hearings on February 11, 1960, and on February 17, 1960, before the Deputy Provincial Secretary to show cause why the Centre Road club's provincial charter should not be cancelled on the ground that it was being used for illegal gambling.

Perhaps the hon. Provincial Secretary will remember the fantastic story Mr. McNamara told at those hearings about how the president of the army, navy and air force veterans association had conducted an investigation into allegations against the club and had given it a clear bill of health and how he took his position in the club to keep an eye on things because it had been more or less forced on him as the decent thing to do. And perhaps the hon. Provincial Secretary can explain why no cancellation was ordered for months and that, in fact, the charter was not dissolved until June 14, 1960, after Robert Wright was arrested and everybody knew the jig was up.

Perhaps Mr. McNamara can explain how the vice-presidency of the gamblers' mining company was forced on him in February of 1961, several months after it was known that everything had not been so decent at the Centre Road club after all.

Mr. Speaker, one of the characteristics of organized crime demonstrated by the New York crime commission was the use of violence. The commission said that beatings and even murder were the consequences of the presence of organized crime in a community. There has been evidence in Ontario that physical violence and murder are associated with the activities of gamblers. I will cite several cases:

On March 21, 1961, Max Bluestein, a convicted gambler, was savagely beaten by a number of men in the Town Tavern in downtown Toronto. He was beaten with brass knuckles, iron bars and fists. He was knocked down and kicked and a broken bottle was ground into his mouth and face. According to reports, Mr. Bluestein was beaten by a group of men acting for rivals who wanted to share the enormous profits of Bluestein's illegal gambling enterprises in Toronto.

Mr. Speaker, let me outline a little of Mr. Bluestein's background. In December of 1960 he was convicted along with Sam Binder of operating a common gaming house in the Lakeview club on Bathurst Street near Eglinton Avenue. Magistrate Addison in passing sentence of a fine of $15,000, or four months in jail estimated Mr. Bluestein's Lakeview club did an annual volume of gambling in excess of $13 million with a profit to Mr. Bluestein of more than $1 million. Mr. Bluestein obviously could pay the fine but it was reported in the press that he chose to go to the Ontario Reformatory at Mimico because paying the fine would cause him an income tax problem. While at Mimico a trusted lieutenant told him that rivals wished to take over four large floating crap games which Mr. Bluestein controlled in Toronto hotels. At this point Mr. Bluestein decided to pay his fine in order to gain his freedom and the opportunity to meet the challenge to his gambling empire. It was curious that when Mr. Bluestein came to pay his fine, it was discovered that a clerical error in the court record made him liable only for a fine of $4,000 and not $5,000.

It was reported in the press at the time of Mr. Bluestein's beating at the Town Tavern that almost half of the hundred people present had been invited to witness what subsequently took place. This was a public demonstration to the gambling fraternity of Toronto that violence would be used to capture and control illegal betting here. Despite the fact that a hundred persons were in the tavern no one came forward to give evidence to the police. The tavern's hat check girl and doorman, as well as the customers were thoroughly intimidated.

One month later, after the police held in camera hearings with 12 witnesses, warrants were issued for men— for four men— on a charge of assault causing bodily harm. These men were Jack Weaver, Frank Marchildon, Fred Gabourie and John Papalia. The first three, arrested April 23, 1961, have already been identified as convicted gamblers and members of various social clubs convicted or suspected of being gaming houses. The fourth man, Johnny Papalia of Hamilton, gave himself up to police on May 12, 1961, 48 days after the Bluestein beating and at a time when the New York State police had a warrant for his arrest in connection with the largest narcotic ring ever uncovered in the United States.

Mr. Papalia was a member of the veterans club, he was convicted of beating Max Bluestein and is now serving a sentence of 13 months in an Ontario reformatory.

Mr. Speaker, the New York crime commission pointed out that the three principal fonts of revenue for organized crime were illegal gambling, trafficking in narcotics and labour racketeering. In Johnny Papalia we have a direct link between the gamblers and the dope pedlars. The New York District Attorney charged 20 men, four of them Canadians, as being part of the conspiracy which smuggled drugs worth $150 million on the black market into the United States in the course of the past several years.

Of the 20 charged several left the United States forfeiting bail of $20,000 to $50,000 each. One man was murdered in Brooklyn, New York, last summer, another tried to commit suicide, a third was declared insane, and unfit for trial. A fourth was Alberto Agueci of Toronto, whose beaten, strangled and burned body was found last week near Rochester, New York. Some of the men charged in New York have been identified by federal narcotics authorities in the United States as members of the Mafia.

Another characteristic of organized crime as revealed by the New York State commission was that of extortion. Do we have examples of extortion in Ontario, Mr. Speaker? Last April, Toronto Daily Star columnist Pierre Berton published stories about gangland beatings of Toronto stockbrokers who refused to pay protection money. Beatings have been reported in Hamilton. Gwyn Thomas in the Toronto Daily Star on April 10, 1961, reported that beatings and shakedowns had been going on in Toronto for the preceding two years. Attempts to corrupt law enforcement authorities is another characteristic of organized crime.

I have already related the extent to which gamblers corrupted the Ontario Provincial Police anti-gambling squad. Gamblers have also attempted to corrupt magistrates in the Toronto area. It has been widely reported, Mr. Speaker, that Magistrate Fred Thompson was threatened some few years ago on the day before he was to hear a case against a well-known gambler. Magistrate Thompson reported this to the hon. Attorney-General. It would be interesting to know what the hon. Attorney-General did about it.

It has been reported that an attempt to bribe Magistrate Addison with $50,000 was made prior to the trial of another well-known gambler. It would be interesting, Mr. Speaker, to know what steps, if any, the hon. Attorney-General took in this matter.

I have cited the murder of Earl Atwood in connection with the Roseland club, and no doubt the hon. Attorney-General is familiar with that case. I wonder if he is familiar with the case of Peter "Scrit" Mitchell, one of the gang in the old Ramsey club. According to evidence in court Mitchell held his position in the organization by reason of his alleged ability to provide the club with political protection. According to evidence his position became somewhat tenuous and he is said to have talked too much. It is no secret, Mr. Speaker, that Scrit Mitchell disappeared suddenly and has not been seen for a long time. I wonder if the hon. Attorney-General would know where Mitchell is.

Mr. Speaker, physical violence, extortion, intimidation, bribery and attempted bribery, drug trafficking, and even murder, have all accompanied the growth of illegal gambling in Ontario. They are the inevitable corollary of organized crime. In recent years, however, a new and equally frightening aspect has appeared to this relationship between professional gambling and other illegal activity. It is the use of illegal gambling revenues to promote fraudulent stock deals. I will not weary the House with the complicated details of any particular case. Instead I would simply cite some cases of record in which evidence of syndicate money has been found.

There was the case some two years ago of Shoreland Mines Limited, a dormant Toronto firm. There was the case of Manor Securities Limited in the Maritimes. There was the investigation and report of the acting administrator of The Securities Fraud Prevention Act in New Brunswick last year into the activities of Canam Investments Limited, and of a number of related companies and individuals. This investigation found links with racketeers in Toronto and New York.

If time permitted I could show the House an association between some of these racketeers and some of the professional gamblers I have named earlier in my remarks. I have cited the shakedown and attempted shakedown of certain stockbrokers. It is no great secret, Mr. Speaker, that the culprit here, certainly one of the culprits, was Johnny Papalia. It is no great secret that the stockbrokers concerned were really so-called stockateers, the high pressure brokers and dealers who live on the fringes of securities law. At least two of the men coerced by Papalia were frequent visitors at the Centre Road veterans club.

I had occasion to mention Eric Cradock and J. B. Ryan [Joseph Bernard Ryan], the operators of the James Bay goose club. They are associated in Cradock Holdings Limited, Toronto, and both have poor records, to say the least, with the Ontario securities commission. Cradock offices were once used by Jack Weaver and Fred Gabourie for a big backend booking operation.

I can cite the case of Jaylac Mines Limited, a stock promotion which resulted this month in the cancellation by the Ontario securities commission of the registration of two Toronto stock dealers. The commission identified one Ivan Gordon as a representative of Jaylac interests who disappeared in 1960 following the removal and probable disappearance of all Jaylac's liquidated assets. Here again a detailed examination would reveal an association with ventures in which professional gamblers were and may still be involved.

If for no other reason, Mr. Speaker, a Royal commission is necessary to discover and expose the use of illegal gambling revenues in the participation of professional gamblers and their associates in fraudulent stock promotions.

I now come, Mr. Speaker, to the fifth and final question. The New York crime commission found that one of the characteristics of organized crime is its penetration into legitimate business. What evidence is there that this has happened in Ontario? I could give the House a number of references but I will detail only one because it is a classic example of what has happened and what can happen.

Rent-a-Plane Service

On June 27, this year the chief of police of Metropolitan Toronto told a meeting of law enforcement officers in Buffalo that a questionable group of men were operating an airline service from Toronto to the United States and the Caribbean area. Mr. Mackey said that although no criminal activity had been discovered the airline would be watched closely because of the ease with which private aircraft can cross international borders and evade customs inspections and regulations.

Mr. Speaker, the name of that airline is Airgo Limited and it was run for a considerable period of time by Vincent Feeley and Joseph McDermott. Airgo Limited was incorporated by federal charter on August 11, 1958. The original owners were a Toronto lawyer and his brother-in-law who allegedly were interested in operating a rent-a-plane service at Toronto Island airport.

On July 3, 1959, the Air Transport Board issued a licence authorizing Airgo Limited to operate a flying training school and a commercial passenger and freight service in Canada. This licence became effective when the federal Department of Transport issued an operating certificate on August 21, 1959. On September 15, 1959, the Air Transport Board issued another licence to Airgo Limited authorizing it to make flights to and from the United States. This became effective when the federal transport department issued an operating certificate on October 13, 1959. Mr. Speaker, on October 19, 1959, six days after Airgo Limited was in business to make flights to the United States, the owners sold the airline to two Toronto lawyers who said they were acting for undisclosed principals. Those lawyers were David Humphrey and Hugh Locke of the firm of Humphrey and Locke. The deal was consummated in the lobby of a downtown Toronto bank when Mr. Locke handed over a large sum of cash money to one of the original owners.

Mr. Speaker, in the course of their investigation of Feeley and McDermott on other matters the police executed a search warrant for the law offices of Humphrey and Locke, and it is no great secret that among the other documents seized was a record of meetings in those offices concerning Airgo business. This record shows that those present at the meeting were Hugh Locke and his accountant, Charles Philips, the operations manager of the airline and Vincent Feeley. The Aviation Directory of Canada, a private publication which compiled its listings on the basis of information supplied by the airlines themselves, also listed David Humphrey as vice-president and Hugh Locke as secretary of Airgo Limited for 1960 and 1961.

Nor is it any great secret, Mr. Speaker, that police seized a document in the law offices of Humphrey & Locke drawn up in May of 1960. This document is a conditional sales document whereby David Humphrey, Hugh Locke, Joseph McDermott and Peter Fielding agreed to sell Airgo Limited to Robert S. Wong, subject to the approval of the Air Transport Board and other conditions. Peter Fielding is an alias used by Vincent Feeley and Robert S. Wong is a manager at Toronto Island airport. The deal apparently fell through but the document is at least indicative of the substantial financial interest in Airgo Limited by Vincent Feeley and Joseph McDermott.

I can also tell the House that Feeley and McDermott were frequently seen about Airgo's offices at Toronto Island airport, and that they identified themselves to the employees as the owners and operators of Airgo Limited. Further I can say that George Reid, the trusted lieutenant of Feeley and McDermott in gambling club operations, was placed on the Airgo payroll after the Centre Road veterans club closed down.

Joseph McDermott took a chattel mortgage for $20,000 on certain aircraft when Airgo Limited was sold to the present owners some time last winter. Yet despite all this evidence of participation by Feeley and McDermott in the ownership and control of Airgo Limited for a period of over one year there is no record with either the Air Transport Board or the federal Department of Transport of the sale of the airline from the original owners in October of 1959.

In August of 1960, and I point out, Mr. Speaker, that this would be shortly after Robert Wright was arrested and the gamblers had discovered the police had had an undercover agent in their midst, the Air Transport Board did receive a vague letter from Humphrey and Locke indicating there had been a transfer of ownership, not to Feeley and McDermott, but to the current owners.

Clearly, Mr. Speaker, a serious evasion of law occurred in this case. Federal regulations provide that the air transport board must be informed of any sale or transfer of stock exceeding five per cent of the total stock, and must approve such sale or transfer. Failure to do so can mean cancellation of the airline's licence and legal prosecution. Clearly, the regulations were violated in this case and there can be little doubt the law was evaded in order to conceal Feeley and McDermott's participation in Airgo Limited.

I shall say nothing, Mr. Speaker, about why they wanted to run an airline, nor shall I say anything about the present ownership of Airgo Limited. Chief Mackey's statement can speak for itself. But I do suggest most strongly, Mr. Speaker, that here again is the type of illegal activity requiring investigation by a Royal commission.

Mr. Speaker, this speech has been long and full of detail. The material is complex and technical. For those reasons it presents a special difficulty for the hon. members of the House to grasp all its meaning readily and easily. I am also aware that much of the material is sensitive in nature. However, I want to emphasize, Mr. Speaker, that I have made no charges of culpable wrongdoing against any person. I have not made and I do not now make any judgment about the legal or moral guilt of any man. What I have done is to present in this House a number of facts which I am convinced demonstrates that organized crime exists in Ontario and requires investigation.

I believe that the only satisfactory investigation can be that of a Royal commission.

The characteristics of organized crime which were demonstrated by the New York State crime commission are all manifest in Ontario. I think it is obvious that an investigation of organized crime by the department of the hon. Attorney-General would be in the nature of an internal house cleaning.

That is needed, but it is not sufficient. I think it is obvious that a Royal commission, independent of government, is the only adequate device for investigating organized crime.

Mr. Speaker, I believe that this Royal commission should be headed by a Justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario. He should be aided by a counsel who will be empowered and directed to investigate all aspects of the problem of organized crime. The commission's terms of reference should require investigation into the extent of organized crime in Ontario; the link between professional gamblers and their counterparts and associates in the United States; the records of the department of the hon. Provincial Secretary in its handling of social club charters; the failure of the department of the hon. Attorney-General to carry out government policy and to enforce the laws relating to gambling; the link between illegal gambling and other criminal activity; especially links with trafficking in narcotics; the penetration of legitimate business by professional gamblers; the contamination of our processes of law enforcement by attempts to influence courts and their operation; and finally the use of legal fronts for illegal activities.

The commissioner and chief counsel should be assisted by adequate staff of trained investigators. The commissioner should have the power to subpoena witnesses and to hear their testimony under oath and if necessary at times in camera. The commission should also be empowered to hold public hearings if deemed advisable as a means of bringing home to the general public the nature and scope of the menace which organized crime presents. The commission should be required to prepare a report of its findings for presentation to this House.

Mr. Speaker, I and my party will not be satisfied with anything less than the type of commission and inquiry which I have outlined. I appeal directly to the hon. Prime Minister (Mr. Robarts), to appoint such a commission and to give it terms of reference that encompass the matters I have enumerated. I wish to assure him and all the hon. members of the House that if the present government does not undertake to appoint such a commission and to direct it to undertake such an inquiry, the next Liberal government will do so at the earliest opportunity.

Applause.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lethbridge Herald - 12-1-1961

Challenges Political Leader

TORONTO (CP) — Joseph Ryan, general manager of the Edmonton Eskimos football club,
Thursday challenged Ontario Liberal Leader John Wintermeyer to come outside the legislature and repeat remarks he made about Mr. Ryan and stockbroker Eric Cradock.
Mr. Wintermeyer in a speech on gambling to the legislature Wednesday said Joseph McDermott of Port Credit, whom he identified as a notorious gambler, was host to a group of Detroit men at a Moosonee-area hunting club owned by Mr. Cradock and Mr. Ryan.

Mr. Wintermeyer also said that Mr. Ryan and Mr. Cradock were associated in the firm of Cradock Holdings Limited, Toronto, "and both have poor records, to say the least, with the Ontario Securities Commission."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Winnipeg Free Press - June 10, 1961

Ont. Men Face U.S. Drug Trial

TORONTO (CP)— Three Toronto men Friday were ordered extradited to the United States
to face trial on charges that they were involved in a ring that smuggled millions of dollars
worth of heroin into the country from Italy.

Judge Robert Forsyth directed that Alberto Agueci, 59, his brother, Vito, 41, and Rocco
Scopolletti, 26, be sent to jail for at least 15 days pending possible application before the
Supreme Court of Ontario to decide the merits of the case. A lawyer representing the
U.S. justice department told the court the drug smuggling operation, which involved 110 pounds of heroin valued at between $14,000,000 and 822,000,000, began in 1958.

Part of FBI Report

An Italian baker from Brooklyn, N.Y., in a sworn statement read in court, told how heroin
was sewn into quilted blankets and brought from Italy on boats which he met in New York.
Some of the drugs were hidden in false trunk bottoms. The baker was described as the man
who named the Agueci brothers and Scopoletti as being part of the operation.

Ed Reid wrote about these cases in The Green Felt Jungle and in this issue of the weekend supplement:

Click on the image you would like to enlarge.

Sandusky the Tip of an Iceberg

2012-01-31T12:57:00.000-06:00

Listen to Nick Bryant interview.

Nick Bryant - The Franklin Scandal, Child Abuse and Cover-up

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Originally published in USA Today magazine, January 2012, pps 46-47.

Sexual Abuse’s Second Shame

BY NICK BRYANT

"The reality is that many perpetrators are not shady men in dirty, threadbare trench coats living in seedy hotels, but are, in fact, pillars of our community."

THE RECENT scandals at Penn State and Syracuse universities, Brooklyn's Poly Prep Country Day School, Fenway Park, and now the Amateur Athletic Union, along with the intimations of possible cover-ups of child sexual abuse, have citizens shocked and outraged. However, these recent allegations only are the latest variations on a theme of abuse by churches and respected organizations like the Boy Scouts.

Sandusky Arrested for sexual child abuse

Pedophilia seems to exist in a distant parallel universe that is antithetical to the universe of Little League, Disneyland, and the other hallmarks of wholesome, youthful Americana, but the current allegations of pedophilia and the possibility of its cover-up just may be waking up Americans to the reality that this universe may not be as distant as they once thought.

I have shared the outrage at the reports of sexual abuse but, unlike most people, I have not been shocked, because of my research over the last decade. Prior to 2002, I had written extensively on children's issues, and then I stumbled across a 1987 U.S. Customs report on a "child abuse investigation" that that the agency was conducting, and it described child abuse of the most horrific nature.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Mugshot of Terrell, arrested in Florida

On February 7th of 1987, the Washington Post ran an interesting story that did not at first seem to have any particularly national significance. The article concerned a case of possible kidnapping and child abuse, and material discovered in the Washington area that they say points to a 1960s style commune called the Finders, described in a court document as a "cult" that conducted "brainwashing" and used children "in rituals." DC police who searched the Northeast Washington warehouse linked to the group removed large plastic bags filled with color slides, photographs and photographic contact sheets. Some showed naked children involved in what appeared to be "cult rituals," bloodletting ceremonies of animals and one photograph of a child in chains.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Two men connected to the investigation had been arrested and charged with multiple counts of child abuse, and six children, whose ages ranged from two to six years old, had been placed in Florida's child protective services. The investigation ultimately was quashed by Federal authorities (who should not have had jurisdiction in this situation), and the two men were released from jail and the charges dropped. I was stunned by the report, and it triggered my prolonged odyssey into the depths of child trafficking in America.

Although witch-hunt hysteria is to be avoided when these accusations come to light, it is important to consider that the cover-up of child abuse may be rife in our society. Sexual-abuse victims often are very reluctant to come forward because they frequently are branded as liars, opportunists, and gold diggers. Such denunciations already have been leveled against the alleged victims of Penn State's Jerry Sandusky and Syracuse University's Bernie Fine.

Many specialists in the field of child sexual abuse have concluded that it is rare for individuals to fabricate accusations of these crimes. In 2002, The New York Tunes interviewed Patrick Schiltz, former associate dean of the University of St Thomas law school in Minnesota and now a Federal judge, who had defended Catholic dioceses against sexual-abuse lawsuits in more than 500 cases. Judge Schiltz expressed the belief that "fewer than 10” of those cases were based on false accusations.

Likewise, I have spoken with scores of men and women who claim to have been sexually abused. I also have concluded that the overwhelming majority are telling the truth and, of all the victims I have interviewed, I am not aware of a single abuser who has been indicted for his or her alleged abuse.

After determining the authenticity of that Customs report, I started to investigate a second pedophile network that reportedly had been sheltered by entities within Federal law enforcement. It was then that I truly entered a parallel universe that encompasses the refined destruction of children along with its cover-up by the very state and Federal authorities who have pledged to protect them from the depravity of evil men – a universe where lies masquerade as truth, shadows reflect light, and innocence is condemned.

I spent the next seven years researching and writing a book documenting a nationwide pedophile ring that pandered children to a cabal of men with power and prestige.

The ring's pimps were a pair of political powerbrokers who used a distinguished orphanage as a pedophilic reservoir.

With access to thousands of documents that were sealed by two grand juries, as well as the sealed testimony of one, I demonstrated that state and Federal grand jury processes in Nebraska played an integral role in the cover-up.

Instead of indicting the alleged perpetrators, these grand juries indicted the victims who would not recant their accounts of abuse on charges of perjury. In one case, a 21-year-old who bad been abused since adolescence was indicted on eight counts of perjury by both state and Federal grand juries. Facing more than 300 years in prison, she still refused to recant. Her travesty of a trial resulted in a prison sentence of nine to 15 years. She spent nearly two years in solitary confinement.

This individual was released from prison in 2000, and she has become a model citizen: she is happily married and gainfully employed. Conversely, one of the ring's pedophilic pimps, who was not charged with a single count of child abuse, moved halfway across the country. By 2009, he had enmeshed himself among a new brood of economically disadvantaged children.

Larry King

Before the book came into print, I attempted to publish an article on the subject matter. After I felt I had collected clear proof of the child abuse and its cover-up, I distilled the information into an article and submitted it to numerous mainstream magazines, but none would go with it. The magazine editors rejected it without even looking at the thousands of pages of corroborating law enforcement and social services documentation I had collected. Although I was put off by the editors' apparent callousness or perhaps fear for their careers, I thought the main problem may have been that I shoehorned such a sprawling story into an article.

Undeterred, I wrote a rather lengthy book proposal and gave it to the major literary agency representing me. Within weeks, I was dumped as a client. Still determined, I found a second agent who tried to sell the book proposal, but he found no takers. I did meet with one publisher, however; his primary concern was any potential libel action, not the destruction of numerous children. Finally, I found a small publisher on the West Coast who had the fortitude to publish my book, which, in addition to more than 500 pages of narrative, provides 100 pages of documentation, but no one in the mainstream media would review or even mention it I managed to get copies to the producers for television personalities who are child-welfare advocates, and they would not touch the story, either.

Possibly, most media were scared off by the fact that two grand juries declared that the perpetrators had not abused a single child and a jury had found the young woman guilty of fabricating her story and convicted her of perjury. Juries, after all, are the finders of fact in our system, but it also is true that her charges and those of the other victims implicated some very powerful figures. I also believe that many editors looking at the summary concluded that my tale could not possibly be true, and there was no reason to even look at the book.

These circumstances, though, are quite different from what we know of the situation at Penn State. If the Sandusky allegations are true, I would guess that his leverage there was the potential besmirching of the reputations of Penn State and his coaching associates. Penn State has prestige, and rightly so. It has done a lot of good. Institutions, however well-intentioned, are made up of individuals. Pedophilic predators are attracted to environments full of prey: schools, churches, youth groups, etc. The mandate of these institutions must be to protect the children in their charge, and to put that imperative ahead of the protection of their own reputations.

Indeed, Penn State has refused to release records from its 1998 inquiry involving Sandusky, and the state's Office of Open Records recently upheld its decision. The school's refusal to release these records certainly suggests it still is putting its reputation ahead of the alleged victims when common decency demands transparency at this point.

Another factor that dooms many investigations, and abets corrupt ones, is that victims frequently are from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the adult luring the child frequently introduces the underage individual to drugs or alcohol, further eroding that victim's credibility. Moreover, the abuser often has powerful allies in law enforcement, government, and the media, who decide that the sordid details are too hot to handle. Add into the mix the public's understandable squeamishness toward the entire subject of pedophilia, and we arrive at the perfect recipe for cover-up.

The reality is that many perpetrators are not shady men in dirty, threadbare trench coats living in seedy hotels, but are, in fact, pillars of our community. Until our society addresses these facts and its institutions are willing to face embarrassment, instead of heaping more abuse upon victims, our national shame of rampant child abuse and its cover-up are unlikely to end.

Nick Bryant interview 21709 : The Franklin Scandal part1of4 MP3 Download

* Nick Bryant is coauthor of Americas Children: Triumph of Tragedy and The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse, and Betrayal.

Is There a Houston Nexus to Newt's Sugar Daddy?

2012-01-30T13:30:00.000-06:00

Does anyone besides me remember the rise and fall of Michael Milken--that epitome of Wall Street greed during the 1980s, the King of Junk Bonds? You can learn at Wikipedia, if so inclined, that

"Milken was largely involved with kick-starting investments in Nevada, which for many years was the fastest-growing state in the United States. Milken funded the gaming industry, newspapers and homebuilders, and among the companies he financed were MGM Mirage, Mandalay Resorts, Harrah's Entertainment and Park Place."

Milken was busy cheating death by overcoming advanced prostate cancer at about the same time his friend and bond client, Sheldon Adelson, was creating the old Sands Exposition Center -- a venue in Las Vegas for Bill Gates to promote the idea of personal computers. More about that later. First we need to understand how money works in this type of business deal.

Kuffernan and Freedman

The Sands hotel was a rather small casino started by Jakie Freedman of Houston, Texas; his partner was Mack Kufferman. According to Marguerite Johnston, when he lived in Houston, Jakie Freedman--a professional gambler who had a huge casino on South Main near where the Astrodome would be built--was the largest depositor at Houston's City National Bank, founded by James E. Elkins, an attorney who was one of the named partners in Vinson and Elkins. Freedman was known to accompany Elkins and his friends, members of the Suite 8-F Crowd, to the Kentucky Derby every year. Governor James Allred once said: "Judge Elkins doesn't practice law, he practices
influence." As proof of that, the Elkins firm would take influence peddler John Connally as a partner of the firm upon his exit from the Governor's mansion in Austin in 1969. Elkins died in 1972.

Quoting from Chapter 69 of Marguerite Johnston, Houston: The Unknown City, 1836-1946:

“By the 1930s, Judge James A. Elkins was a quiet power in Houston. One of his admirers once said, ‘Judge doesn’t practice law, he practices influence.’…LBJ sometimes lamented the fact that he was often called a ‘tool of the oil industry’ outside of Texas and ‘a wild-eyed liberal’ when he sought campaign funds in some quarters of his own state. The 8-F endorsement would help him, both in votes and in contributions.
“Johnson ran for the Senate with full 8-F backing. ‘One of his best fund-raising sessions was held on the top floor of the Kentucky Hotel in Louisville, as the group gathered for their traditional weekend at the Kentucky Derby,’ Dr. [Patrick James] Nicholson wrote.
“Judge Elkins was famous for putting a bet on every starter. He had just come out ahead after severe losses in the traditional crap game. When Jet Pilot won, Judge Elkins was so pleased that he gave all his winnings to Herman Brown for the LBJ war chest and promised a substantial contribution as well. Everyone else followed suit. Congressman Johnson became Senator Johnson in the famous eighty-seven-vote win over Coke Stevenson.
“ ‘Every year 8-F went to the Kentucky Derby,’ Posh Oltorf said, ‘Jim Abercrombie, Judge Elkins, Jesse Jones, Gus Wortham, Jakie Freedman, George and Herman Brown, Milo Abercrombie, Naurice Cummings, William Smith. They would stay two or three days, and LBJ and Senator Russell and maybe one or two other senators would fly over and join them.’ "

When George and Herman Brown decided to buy the Big-Inch and Little-Inch pipelines from the government after the war, the plan was hatched in Suite 8-F, and all the members were in on it. The legal work was handled by Charles I. Francis of the Vinson and Elkins firm.

Augie in later years

Financing was arranged by August Belmont IV of Dillon Read—no doubt working through contacts with N.M. Rothschild of London to sell the securities. It could have been at the same time that Rothschild's Five Arrows Group acquired an interest in Elkins’ bank, according to the 1976 Report issued by the House of Representatives Committee on Banking and Currency, which was investigating connection in of United States chartered banks to International Banking networks.

Now the connection between some of the owners of the Sands Hotel with bankers in Houston, Texas is fascinating, to say the least, especially given the fact that in the mid-1960s, Howard Hughes purchased the hotel and added a 500-room circular tower (pictured below) in 1967.

The Sands, as modified by Howard Hughes

K.J. EVANS in a Las Vegas Review-Journal article, using the CIA-connected Robert Maheu as his primary source, writes:

In 1966, the Desert Inn rented Hughes its entire top floor of high-roller suites, and the floor below it, for 10 days only. Check-out time came and went, and Hughes didn't move. Moe Dalitz and Ruby Kolod, co-owners of the Desert Inn, were furious. New Year's, one of Las Vegas' busiest holidays, was looming, and the suites had been promised to high rollers. The squeeze was on Maheu.
"Get the hell out of here or we'll throw your butt out," growled Kolod.
"It's your problem," Hughes told Maheu. "You work it out."
Maheu called in a favor from Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa, who phoned the DI boys and asked them to leave "my friends" alone. The reprieve lasted into the new year of 1967, when Maheu told the boss he had played out his options with the DI guys.
"If you want a place to sleep, you'd damned well better buy the hotel," Maheu told Hughes.
To most investors, negotiating a purchase is the means to an end. To Howard Hughes, it was recreation. After months of arduous log-rolling, Hughes and Dalitz agreed on a price of $13.25 million....
The next purchase was the Sands, then a Strip showplace. Dalitz was consulted, and allowed that it "would be a good acquisition." Hughes paid $14.6 million for the Sands, which included 183 acres of prime real estate that would become the Howard Hughes Center. That was followed by two smaller places, the Castaways and the Silver Slipper, then the Frontier. All three had one thing in common, they came with enormous parcels of empty land. He made a deal to buy the Stardust for $30.5 million, but was prevented from closing by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which was worried about Hughes holding a monopoly on Las Vegas lodging....
"Once he was in both (the gaming and hotel business) he didn't want anyone bigger than he," said Maheu. "That's why he tried to stop Kirk (Kerkorian) from building the big place. But he was not willing to do it at the expense of himself continuing to build, or expanding the ground that he had. It doesn't make sense, but it happens to be the truth. He wanted to be the biggest; he didn't want Del Webb to ever be as big. When he bought a piece of land, he wanted all the land around it. He wanted to control. He would have been very happy to be the biggest if no one got bigger than that."
Kerkorian's International Hotel (now the Las Vegas Hilton) began to rise in early 1968. So did Hughes' anxiety. He announced plans for a $100 million "Super Sands," hoping Kerkorian would flee into the desert at the news. He didn't.
Hughes saw the solution to "the Kerkorian problem" in the Landmark. The tower, a fat concrete cylinder topped with an oversized saucer, rose in the early 1960s, but sat dark most of the decade. Its problem was its design. It had too few rooms, too little casino space. But at 31 stories, it was slightly taller than the International. For that reason, Hughes wanted it.
"A lot of people have given me credit for paying 100 cents on the dollar ($17.3 million) for it." said Maheu. "It wasn't my idea, it was his. He was on a public relations kick at the time." Hughes said he would personally direct planning for the grand opening.
"I knew from that point on that I was in trouble," said Maheu. "He was completely incapable of making decisions."
Kerkorian's camp had announced that the International would open July 2, 1969....
But no one could quell his fear of disease and germs, perhaps his mother's most profound phobia. If Howard sniffled or coughed, he was rushed to a doctor, lavished with attention and sympathy. Allene Gano Hughes saw every playmate as a disease carrier, and discouraged her only son from socializing....
During all his years as a recluse, there were only a handful of people who saw him personally each day. This was the so-called "Mormon Mafia," which took orders from Bill Gay, chief of Hughes' Los Angeles office. Its mission consisted of feeding Hughes occasionally and drugging him regularly.
On Nov. 5, 1970, Hughes was carried from the Desert Inn and put on a jet for the Bahamas. It was, according to Maheu, a coup.
"The reason I know, is that that they tried to get me to join on two occasions," said Maheu.
In April 1976, Hughes died at age 70 aboard a plane en route to Houston, ostensibly of kidney failure. However, his dehydration, malnutrition and the shards of broken hypodermic needles buried in his thin arms suggested other factors.
"If sheer neglect qualifies as a weapon," said Maheu, "they killed him."
Because no Hughes' will was ruled legitimate, his empire was divided among his many cousins. The company, now renamed Summa Corp., finally began to show a profit.

Mrs. Howard Hughes, Sr. before her marriage was Allene Gano, and her closest relative was a sister, Annette, who married Dr. Fred Lummis. Dr. Lummis' mother had been born Minnie Rice, daughter of Frederick A. Rice, from an old established family in Houston closedly related to William S. Farish, one of the most important founders of Humble Oil Company, which eventually became Exxon. Howard Hughes, Jr.'s "cousins" mentioned above--who inherited his properties and control of his foundation when he was officially declared dead in 1976--were these Texans related to the Rice family, and primarily consisted of Annette's son, William Rice Lummis, an attorney and partner at Andrews, Kurth, the law firm which controlled the Hughes Tool drill bit patent. Lummis became chairman of Summa Corporation and moved to Las Vegas where he supervised the operation of the Hughes companies, including the medical research foundation he had set up for his cousin before his death.

***

All this brings us back to Newt Gingrich and Sheldon Adelson.

Thanks to Michael Milken's junk bonds, Kirk Kerkorian (MGM) had the funds to buy the Sands in 1988, transferring these funds to the beneficiaries of Hughes' estate. Then, only seven months later in 1989 the old hotel was purchased from Kerkorian by Sheldon Adelson's holding company, the Interface Group. According to Jeff Burbank in License to Steal: Nevada's Gaming Control System in the Megaresort Age, Adelson had a 58.8% interest in the holding company, and five other men involved in his businesses each had less than 15%.

The Milken Connection to Sheldon Adelson and The Sands

A FRESH STACK OF CHIPS

Adelson bet on conventions just as that market exploded in Vegas. If the same happens in Macau, there's a pile to be made away from the tables there as well.

GAMBLING BIG ON MACAU
By Rik Kirkland
Fortune, 10/17/2005, Vol. 152, Issue 8

Sheldon Adelson, the shrewdest investor in Las Vegas, has a new bet: turning Macau into the biggest, glitziest gambling mecca the world has ever seen.

Sheldon Adelson has made billions of dollars by seeing things others do not. But even he was stumped three years ago [2002] when he first laid eyes on the real estate that Chinese officials were offering him to build a new casino in Macau. "It's very nice, very picturesque," he thought. "But it's underwater! They've relegated me to the boonies!"

Like every other bigtime casino developer, he was well aware of Macau's potential: The former Portuguese colony south of Hong Kong is the only place in the Chinese-speaking world where betting is legal. It's located a short drive or plane ride away from a billion-plus Chinese--who, by the way, are the world's most ferocious gamblers. But out here? On a future landfill project several miles from the crowded downtown peninsula where the action had always been?

Still, the more Adelson thought about it, the more he became convinced that he had spotted something glittering beneath the blue water of the South China Sea. More than glittering: a gold mine. A bustling gambling boomtown. "What I saw was as plain as the nose on my face," he says.

And so he dove in. To grab a beachhead, learn the ropes, and--not the least of it--make some money, Adelson first cut a deal with the Chinese government to erect his "temporary casino." The $265 million Sands, a gleaming Vegas-style palace, opened downtown near the ferry terminal in May 2004. The traffic is so high--40% of the 16 million people who visited Macau in 2004 passed through here, according to the research firm CLSA--and the action so intense that Adelson recouped his initial investment in 12 months.

In the year ahead the gambling operation at the Sands is on track to generate north of $320 million in pretax cash flow. That's more than Adelson made last year from the 4,000 hotel rooms and the restaurants, showrooms, shops, gaming tables, and slots at his highly profitable Las Vegas flagship, the Venetian.

But the real money spinner, Adelson believes, will be on that lonely expanse of freshly poured landfill. It's the only spot in Macau--the most densely populated place on earth--with enough room for what Adelson has in mind: a brand-new Chinese Vegas, complete with a long boulevard of casinos, hotels, shops, deluxe theaters, the works. The first big development on the Cotai Strip (the name was concocted from Coloane and Taipa, the two former islands that border it) is Adelson's $2 billion Venetian Macau, now under construction. It will boast the world's biggest casino (some 600,000 square feet of gambling space, about five times the size of your state-of-the-art Vegas gaming floor), 3,000 hotel rooms, acres of pools, 850,000 square feet of shopping, a 15,000-seat showroom, and a 1.2-million-square-foot convention center. Beyond that, Adelson intends to invest another $2 billion or so to put up hotel-mall-casino complexes that will open alongside the Venetian around the end of 2007 and be run by leading hotel operators, such as Four Seasons and Shangri-La. (He will retain control of their showrooms and casinos.) And although it took at least 30 years for Vegas to become Vegas, he figures it'll take about five for Cotai to become Asia's--and thus the world's--biggest gambling and entertainment mecca.

ODDS ARE you've never heard of Sheldon Adelson, 72, chairman and CEO of Las Vegas Sands Corp. (You may not even be too sure about Macau--except maybe as one of the locales in the James Bond movie The Man With the Golden Gun.) In the creation myth of modern Las Vegas, mobsters Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel get credit for building it. Then comes Steve Wynn, 63, the dashing dream merchant who reinvented Vegas as an adult Disneyland by developing the casino-as-destination--places like the Mirage, Treasure Island, and the Bellagio. A low-profile newcomer, Adelson didn't even own a casino until 1989. But within the industry, he's known as the man who, more than anyone, made Vegas boom as a destination for conventioneers and business travelers--a less sexy but even more lucrative market. He's right up there in the pantheon alongside Wynn. But unlike Wynn, the pugnacious Adelson isn't trying out for the role of industry statesman.

"I was never part of the old-boy network," he says. "I wasn't swaddled in green felt cloth."

And there are a few other things Sheldon Adelson would like you to know. First, this whole recreating-the-Vegas-Strip-in-Macau thing is going to be far bigger than anything he's ever done before. "I've never been involved in something like this," he says. "I don't know of any entrepreneur who has."

It was his idea: "It was my dream. My vision. When I laid it out for [Macau's chief executive] Edmund Ho, he said, 'If you do this, you will put us ahead 20 years.' "

And it cannot fail: "This is the best bet I've ever made in my life--the best. It's a no-risk, no-brainer bet."

COMMAND CENTRAL of Adelson's empire is a sunlit, spacious, but sparely furnished office on the third floor of the Venetian hotel, right on the Vegas Strip. Part of one long wall holds blow-up pictures of his family: his second wife, Miriam, an Israeli internist whom he married in 1991 (her specialty is treating drug addicts), and their two young sons.

Closer to his oval-shaped working table hangs his gallery of fame--some 25 magazine covers, mostly from the likes of Computer Reseller News, Casino Journal, Travel Agent, Meeting & Conventions, Expo, and other trade publications. They capture the decidedly non-glitzy career that propelled him into the celebrity- and power-laden world he now occupies, a world reflected in the photos on the wall across the room: Sheldon (and Miriam) with George Bushes 41 and 43, with Ariel and Bibi, with Rudy and Arnold, and with other notables.

We're lunching at his table, and I'm wrestling with first impressions. Pale, balding, a barrel-chested 5-foot-7, Adelson has been plagued for the past four years by plexitis, a rare nerve inflammation that has temporarily left him unable to walk. (He gets around in a motorized chair and uses a walker for short distances.) Taking two unaided steps, he observes, "That's the most I've done in a long time," but then insists that through daily physical therapy he's going to lick this thing. He dotes on Miriam and her two grown daughters by a first marriage; they wander in and out of our meetings. He tells some touching stories about his father and a fascinating tale about going bust in his late 30s and getting depressed. Contemplating people jumping out of buildings, he looked out the window of his Boston estate, imagined himself "lying scratched in the shrubbery," laughed at his self-pity, and got back to work. The force of his personality has long since dispelled any notion of frailty.

As lunch wraps up, Adelson is getting increasingly frustrated. He wants to show me what he's doing in Cotai, and no one can find the right map. Aides rush in and out. Are we about to witness an explosion? No. An assistant walks in with a cup of forbidden ice cream. (Miriam has been getting him to improve his diet.) He smiles, says thanks, and lifting his spoon, looks over at me with a smile: "Like the little boy said, 'I can resist anything except temptation.' "

I've heard too many stories about Adelson the over-the-top battler to doubt that reality. But the truth, as usual, is more complicated. Is he a tough, demanding boss with a healthy ego? Yes, but he's not driven by Trump-like self-absorption so much as by a desire to get things done yesterday. "My objective," he says, "is singular: Win." He has had a loyal team around him for years. He can be funny and charming. (Accused of being a micromanager, he replies, "My job now is producing strategy. They lock me in a room at nine in the morning, give me a Ouija board and a crystal ball, feed me lunch through the mail slot--I insist on a hot lunch!--and at five o'clock they unlock the door and say, 'Okay, where's your vision for the day?'")

Most of all, what I'm struck by is the truth of something real estate investor Tom Barrack of Colony Capital told me before I flew out to Vegas: "This company runs above all else on the stupendous size of one man's gut."

LIKE MANY golden guts, this one started out hungry. Adelson grew up in a poor Jewish neighborhood near Boston, where his Lithuanian immigrant father drove a cab and his mother (her parents were from Ukraine) ran a knitting shop in the living room. He got beaten up as a kid by the Irish from South Boston; sold newspapers and ran his own business, the Vend-a-Bar candy company, while still in high school; skipped college to learn a trade (court reporting) before serving in the Army; moved rapidly through a series of jobs as an executive assistant, ad salesman, investment advisor; and finally emerged in his late 30s as a low-tech venture capitalist with a $5 million net worth. Still, there was little to suggest that Adelson would ever become anything more than another successful, small-time multimillionaire.

But five decades of hard-knock entrepreneurship taught him a couple of key lessons. Unlike a certain type of company founder who feels he is born to launch only a biotech or a publishing or a software firm, Adelson early on figured out that for him the bottom line on building a company was, well, the bottom line. On a road show in the mid-1990s to raise money to build his first hotel, an analyst asked what the theme of his new place would be. "How about 'making money'?" Adelson replied. "Where does it say in the Bible 'Thou shalt have a theme' when you build a Vegas hotel?" (Later, at Miriam's suggestion, he settled on Venice, where they had gone on their honeymoon.) "I've started more than 50 businesses," Adelson says. "For me, businesses are like buses. You stand on a corner and you don't like where the first bus is going? Wait ten minutes and take another. Don't like that one? They'll just keep coming. There's no end to buses or businesses."

By the late 1970s Adelson had developed a clear vision of what all successful businesses have in common--and more important, a growing belief in his own knack for spotting such opportunities. Call them Adelson's Rules: "It isn't enough to have a good product. The most important thing is to understand the direction of the industry." And "Study any industry, and you inevitably hear two things: 'I've always done it this way,' or 'Everybody does it this way.' When you hear that, know there's an opportunity to do something different and add value."

Adelson's first big score came as he approached 50. He had gotten a whiff in the late 1970s of an industry changing direction:

Computers were starting to go personal, and sales were shifting from direct salesforces to new third-party channels. "It was a very, very strong fragrance," he says. "It smelled to me like the early auto industry, where no company had the scale to set up national distribution, so they invented a distribution system called dealers."

His idea for breaking the industry pattern: Start an independent trade show to bring together buyers and sellers at a time when only industry trade associations ran such things. He launched Comdex (for Computer Dealers Exposition) in Vegas in December 1979. Comdex exploded from 157 exhibitors and 4,000 attendees that year to 2,200 exhibitors and 225,000 attendees by the mid-1990s.

Bringing Comdex to Las Vegas generated another big contrarian insight: The town's establishment, by focusing mainly on drawing high rollers and Middle Americans out for a few nights on the wild side, was missing a huge opportunity. Why not lure even more conventions and corporate meetings to Fun City? The suits would fill the hotels and casinos from Sunday to Thursday, while leisure travelers would pile in on weekends.

In 1989, Adelson paid $128 million for the old Sands hotel, the only place in town with enough room to build what he was really after--America's largest private exhibition center. This approach is now conventional wisdom in Vegas, which welcomed fewer than 300 conventions in 1970 and today hosts more than 4,000 a year. But when he first built his 1.2-million-square-foot Sands Exposition Center, it was revolutionary. "What Sheldon did by seeing what the convention center could do for the hotel was unique in my 30 years of doing business in Vegas," says Michael Milken, who raised junk bonds to finance the deal.

A few years later Adelson concluded that he could use his rising tide of business travelers to fill a far larger, all-suites resort. So once again he rolled the dice.

He blew up the Sands, sold Comdex in 1995 to Japan's Masayoshi Son for $862 million, borrowed up to his eyeballs, and at age 66 opened his first luxury hotel, the $1.5 billion Venetian, across the Strip from Steve Wynn's Bellagio.

"People didn't just think I was nuts--they knew I was nuts!" Adelson recalls. Today the Venetian is consistently the first- or second-most-profitable hotel in Vegas, with the first- or second-highest occupancy rate--alongside the Bellagio.

Even as he built his fortune, Adelson's combativeness--especially when he feels wronged--maintained his outsider status. The man can hold a grudge the way Dean Martin held liquor, and he's got tenacity to match. He engaged in a bitter fight with the Culinary Workers to win the right to open the Venetian in 1999 as a non-union shop, which didn't go down well in this strong union town. Later he battled the construction company Bovis for half a decade over costs at the Venetian. Most of all, he has fought with Steve Wynn--his next-door rival in Vegas and the other foreigner with casino rights in Macau.

In those verbal duels, Wynn deploys a rapier; it's sharp but so smooth you barely feel it going in. "I took the long-term view and decided not to compromise the brand by confusing people," says Wynn, whose $1.1 billion copper-sheathed twin of his new $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas won't open in downtown Macau until mid-2006. "It was costly in the sense that you could've done something like the Sands and made $300 million or $400 million more. But I'm not there for that kind of money. By having the discipline to wait and make sure we expand, enrich, and deepen the market by delivering a higher-quality building, a higher quality of service, we'll be rewarded with a better reputation."

That kind of talk exasperates Adelson, who wields the rhetorical equivalent of a lead pipe. "Wynn is very good at creating mystique," he says. "He's in it for fun and design gratification. My creativity extends to matching my tie to my suit. But I'm very good at making money, and that's what an economic enterprise is all about. I'm simply a much better businessman."

On this, the points on the scoreboard back up Adelson. Based on his 86% ownership of the Las Vegas Sands, which he finally took public last December in one of the year's hottest IPOs, Adelson today has a net worth of more than $10 billion, which makes him much richer than Wynn (whose estimated fortune is just under $2 billion). His company also plays in a different league. With only two casino properties and one expo center, some 11,000 employees, and projected annual revenues of roughly $2 billion next year, Las Vegas Sands enjoys an $11 billion market capitalization, which is more than twice as big as Wynn's and just behind that of the two much larger, merger-fattened industry giants: Harrah's and MGM Mirage.
Which brings us back to Macau, where, if Adelson is right, the biggest bus of his career is about to barrel into his stop.

IT'S A SAFE BET THAT Broken Tooth Koi isn't reading Austrian economists these days. Koi, a notorious Macau mobster, helped lead a 1930s-style gangland war during the run-up to Macau's handover by Portugal in 1999. More than 30 people were killed in the fighting among the triads, criminal secret societies with deep roots in China. (One of the great moments in PR: A police official reassured wary tourists by noting that the city had "professional killers who don't miss their targets.") The arrest of Koi, a notorious triad kingpin who was sent to prison for 15 years, signaled that Beijing was in charge and that Macau's Dodge City phase was over.

But if Koi wants to grasp why Macau will look so radically different when he gets sprung a decade from now, then Joseph Schumpeter's famous concept of "creative destruction" provides the answer. That's the process the Communist Party has repeatedly unleashed in recent years by inviting foreign capitalists to spur innovation--and inspire local champions--in industries ranging from semiconductors to autos to big-box retailing.

Now it's gambling's turn.

Until the Americans appeared, the standard in Macau had been set by Stanley Ho Hung-sun, an 83-year-old homegrown multibillionaire who for 40 years held the local monopoly on gambling--and who also owns the ferry, the largest department store, a bank, luxury hotels, acres of real estate, and stakes in the local airline, airport, racetrack, and TV station. That empire, which generates two-thirds of Macau's tax revenue, explains why no one was shocked that the old lion landed one of the government's three new gaming concessions.

At Ho's flagship Lisboa, low-ceilinged VIP rooms that cater exclusively to "whales" (high rollers) are sprinkled along winding hallways that vibrate with enough glass, jade, colored tiles, pink and black marble, and twinkling lights to make St. Vitus jitterbug. The place hasn't changed in years. In many of these rooms and others like them, triads still extend--and collect--credit, an important function, since the legal limit for bringing in currency from the mainland, $5,000, is about the minimum bet in such spots.

But to meet the new competition, even Ho has been forced to play a new game. Across the Avenida da Amizade, near where Wynn's place is rising, MGM Mirage has begun building a 600-room, $1 billion resort-casino in a joint venture with Ho's daughter Pansy. Behind the Lisboa is a hole in the ground where Ho is erecting a more lavish whale catcher, the Lisboa Grand. Down by the Sands, construction is well along on his new Fisherman's Wharf joint venture--a mass- market attraction that will feature replicas of the Forbidden City, a Portuguese fort, a Colosseum, a giant volcano ride, and of course lots of gaming tables and slots.
How big can the market get? This year Macau will surpass the Vegas Strip and generate more than $6 billion in gambling revenue. That's with 1,400 gaming tables and just under 10,000 hotel rooms (vs. 2,600 tables and 135,000 hotel rooms in all of Las Vegas). Aaron Fischer, an analyst at CLSA, projects Macau's gambling revenue could top $12 billion by 2010, as the number of tables rises to 4,000 and hotel rooms roughly triple. By then Macau could be attracting 37 million visitors a year (up from ten million in 2003)--about the traffic Vegas draws today. If all goes as planned, this mostly Chinese crowd will also be sticking around longer (the average overnight stay in Macau today is barely one night, vs. nearly four in Vegas) and spending a lot more on shopping, eating, and shows. To grease this red-hot engine, the government is spending billions on infrastructure, including a second ferry terminal and a new light-rail system. Later this fall should come the biggest announcement yet: a $4 billion, 18-mile bridge that will link Macau, the mainland, and Hong Kong's Lantau Island, where the new Disneyland just opened to overflow crowds.

The bedrock of this market's bright future, everyone agrees, is the Chinese passion for gambling. Last year, with just 4% of the slot machines in Vegas and 40% of the gaming tables, Macau generated roughly the same gambling revenue. (That also reflects the difference in risk-taking propensity between a market currently reliant on high-rolling whales and one dominated by blue-haired ladies pulling slots.) What explains this intensity? You hear the same answers again and again--luck is a central concept in Chinese culture; look at all the ways they try to shape and discern fate through lucky numbers, feng shui, I Ching, and the like. (Navigating a street near the Lisboa, I'd nearly tripped over a woman who had arranged a roast pig, a raw chicken, flowers, and an urn of burning incense outside a new jewelry store--offerings for a truly grand opening?) But until you walk into a place like the Sands, you can't fully grasp what one Asia hand told me: "The difference between Westerners and the Chinese is that for Westerners gambling is about entertainment and calculating probabilities. For the Chinese it's a battle with destiny."

THE SANDS BUZZES with a good vibe on a Saturday night. Its cavernous main floor is stuffed with baccarat tables, the game the Chinese favor. Here the typical minimum is just $40. The goal in baccarat is to see who gets closest to nine (face cards and tens count as zero) with a maximum of three cards. At the first table, I watch what I assume is one player's unique style. While the dealer waits, he's slowly peeling back the corner of one card until…ahhh, the eight of clubs. He then repeats this ritual with his second card. Hardly anyone drinks anything stronger than the tea served up in highball glasses from carts pushed by ladies in brown and gold Mao jackets. But you could cut the cigarette smoke with a bent Jack of diamonds. I watch for a few minutes. Suddenly I look up and realize the exact same battle with destiny, including the card-bending routine, is going on at every table. There's nothing like this in Vegas.

The only real debate about Macau's future is over how quickly the market evolves. Skeptics think the new boys are getting way ahead of themselves. "This is not Las Vegas; Asians want to gamble, not go shopping or see Celine Dion shows," insists Anthony Carter, a Brit who's spent 35 years in the region and is CEO of Hong Kong's Galaxy casino group, itself a recent arrival in Macau. "That will come in due course. But right now I just don't see that the demand for these new facilities the Americans are building will meet the cost."

To which both Adelson and Wynn--and here we finally discover a point they can agree on--reply, Nonsense. "To look at the high level of shopping and consumer taste in Shanghai and Hong Kong and still suggest that the Chinese won't care about luxury is a ridiculous denial of reality," says Wynn. "The transformation of Macau in the next 60 months will be the most remarkable metamorphosis in modern history." Told that Galaxy's Carter believes the correct "Asian price point" for a hotel room is under $100, Adelson snorts, "I'm going to have five price points in Cotai! I want the mass market and the high-roller market. My target is to maximize every opportunity." That includes MICE--as in meetings, incentives, conventions, exhibitions (a.k.a., the group-travel business). "My guy just came back from ten days on the mainland checking out the MICE market," Adelson continues. "The words he kept using were 'mind-blowing' and 'blown away.' It's like a firecracker. They've lit the fuse, and it's ready to explode."

What's also certain to explode is the Cotai Strip, whose virtues Adelson has championed louder and longer than anyone. Among the prominent recent converts: Stanley Ho. Ho's youngest son, Lawrence, heads a new family joint venture with Australia's richest man, Kerry Packer. Ho and Packer's project in Cotai, the $1 billion City of Dreams, will be designed very much with Adelson in mind. Rather than go "head to head" with the neighboring Venetian, Lawrence has dropped a convention center and large retail complex from his original master plan to focus on building "a special casino" that will sit beneath a giant aquarium.

"In conventions, Sheldon Adelson is the master," Lawrence Ho says.
"Why would we want to compete with him?" Wynn told me he too will soon be announcing plans to add to his Macau stake with some major new projects in Cotai.

Might there be something a bit bubbleicious about this stampede--which is driving property prices into the stratosphere and causing labor shortages and infrastructure bottlenecks? Maybe. There's also the "anchovy theory" espoused by a top American financier with China experience. "In a Caesar salad," he warned me right before I flew out to Macau, "the anchovy is the first thing to get chopped up. That's what we foreigners are in China: the anchovy." The major blow would come if gambling, which was everywhere in China until the Communists took over in 1949 and promptly banned it (along with prostitution, private property, and other capitalist vices), were suddenly made legal on the mainland. But that strikes most analysts as a bridge too far for the current leadership, who seem happy for now with a dynamic, growing, cleaned-up Macau. The more pressing problem is the kind of regulatory confusion that has swirled up in a recent dispute between Adelson and one erstwhile partner, Hong Kong's Regal Hotels group. Regal is now petitioning the government to develop a site that Adelson claims as his own. He says he's "completely certain" he will prevail.

At our final dinner Adelson waves a hand to dismiss once and for all the "naysayers" I keep bringing up who question his vision. He then mentions he'd just that day seen a June 1955 Life magazine cover. Over a photo of showgirls ran this headline: "Las Vegas: Is the Boom Overextended?" Point taken. We're not talking, after all, about the late, great Internet boom, where a Pets.com or Webvan spent billions to meet needs no one had. We're talking about investing multiples of that to soak up travel dollars and leisure spending in the middle of the richest region in the fastest-growing part of the world. Barring catastrophe--war in the Taiwan Straits, some horrific new plague--how can it not work?

IN THE YEARS AHEAD, Adelson expects to put a lot of miles on his personal Boeing 767. (He upgraded earlier this year from a 737, and now that he's public, only charges the Las Vegas Sands for the cost of a first-class ticket.) Beyond Macau, gambling seems set to go global--just as it exploded out of Nevada and across the U.S. Singapore, Thailand, Britain, and Korea are among the countries that once banned casinos and are now either taking bids on new concessions or considering doing so. Like his rivals, Adelson is chasing hard after every opening.

What drives a guy entering his eighth decade to place the biggest bet of his career? Adelson's old friend Mike Milken answers by putting him in context with other aging megamoguls he's known. "I didn't even meet Dr. Armand Hammer until he was 80," says Milken, "and we raised more capital for him after that than we did for anyone in the world. John Kluge was 70 when we did the biggest financing ever up until then so he could take his firm private. Kirk Kerkorian just did the biggest deal of his life at 87." That's the kind of eternally energetic, entrepreneurial company Adelson has bulled his way into.

One last thing: Despite his congenital focus on the bottom-line, Adelson is playing for more than just the bucks. What he's really burning for is a little credit. Does he feel he doesn't get enough acknowledgment, certainly compared to Wynn, for his role in reinventing the business model in Vegas? "Absolutely." Does he worry the same thing could happen again in Macau? Damn right. "Nobody had ever thought of recreating Las Vegas in Cotai," he says. "Nobody. They all decried it. Ho and Wynn dismissed it. Now they're all coming out of the woodwork to be part of it." So take a note, you future historians: Mr. Sheldon Adelson respectfully requests that you put this caption next to his photo: The Man Who Built the Las Vegas Strip--in China. If he delivers on all or even most of what he's promised, he deserves it.

Darrell Issa Should Represent His Real Constituents!

2012-01-25T13:28:00.001-06:00

Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) is chairman of the House Committee for Oversight and Reform, which has the responsibility of conducting open hearings into the release of documents concerning past political assassinations.

Please share the following note from William Kelly and do all you can to demand that Issa do his job:

I ask those with an interest in open government and political assassinations to devote that effort towards helping to release the government assassination records, including those of the MLK House Select Committee on Assassinations and the remaining JFK Assassination records. To do this we need Congress to do their duty and hold JFK Act oversight hearings, which can only be scheduled by House Oversight Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R. Calf.). Towards that end we have requested that people write to Issa (fax him at 202-225-3974) and sign a petition requesting the hearings. Please ask five or more of your friends who are sympathetic to this cause, and ask them to please sign on and join this effort. Thanks,

William Kelly

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

Quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.,
while he OCCUPIED the Birmingham, AL Jail

Butt-Whipping for Darrell Issa: At Congressional Hearing

Dems. support OCCUPY DC

By Brett Redmayne-Titley

Brett Redmayne Titley

The plan, by Darrell Issa (R-CA), to remove the face of the Occupy camp at McPherson Park did not go as he planned. In an effort to embarrass the National Park Service for their decisions in allowing the Occupy protests to flourish in Washington DC, Issa, Rep Trey Gowdy (R-SC), and Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) called for a hearing of the House Committee for Oversight and Reform. The hearing was titled "Who Made the Decision to Allow Indefinite Camping?"

The cards, however, quickly turned on these three GOP champions.

Instead of eliciting responses helpful to their quest for new legislation requiring the National Park Service to ban all camping Director Jonathan Jarvis offered articulate First Amendment obligations of his position. He noted that the National Park Police handle more protests than in any place in the country and they take a "measured" and "reasoned approach." Regarding the McPherson Park Occupation Jarvis concluded that this free speech is "unique," Continuing, he said that Occupy is, "unprecedented in that the core of their First Amendment activity is that they occupy the site. We have developed a rapport at the site with demonstrators," he added, explaining that Occupiers have come to work with the agency to assist in maintaining the site's safety.

During the hearing, Jarvis remarked there had been two previous instances where there had been long-term protests in DC. In 1979, six thousand family farmers drove to DC to protest farm policy and were on the National Mall for seven weeks. In 1968, the Poor People's Campaign set up a shantytown for a month called "Resurrection City."

At the end of the exchange, Jarvis noted that the Supreme Court has afforded the National Park Service a great deal of discretion as to how to enforce this rule on camping. This is unprecedented, and we're working through it," he said.

Eleanor Holmes Norton, whose district McPherson Park lays within, was vehement in her praise of the director and the Occupiers. In refering to the Arab Spring this past year, she declared that " our Nation's Capitol is the place nations look to for their example of the First Amendment rights." This praise came as a stinging rebuke to the intentions of Issa and company who were to repeatedly receive a reminder of the historical precedent of civil disobedience in America. As a career civil rights leader Eleanor Holmes Norton was adamant in her criticism noting that no one from McPherson Park was allowed to testify despite some 75 occupiers being in attendance. Norton pointed out that there is money that can be used to pay for the cost law enforcement is incurring from monitoring the Occupiers. It is in an annual appropriations bill for federal government and has been for the past ten years.

Additionally, she pressed Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice Paul Quander on whether Occupiers had been escalating tactics, as he suggested they could do. Quander could give no examples of escalation, outside of maybe the construction of the wooden structure that the Park Police had removed. To this, Norton suggested the Occupiers be commended for "self-policing."

Issa continued to get nothing useful from Jarvis who maintained throughout the questioning that he had the " Broad Discretion" of his duties in balancing civil rights with GOP concerns. Jarvis refused to admit that new legislation is needed to prohibit camping and "24 hour vigils." Jarvis continued to be a cool customer under pressure leaving Issa so flustered he left the hearing under the pretense of a vote in another committee chamber. Rep.Gowdy attempted to march on, but was assailed by representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD).

Cummings, who also has a good memory of the need for civil disobedience, delivered his left-handed swipe at the two remaining antagonists of free speech, Rep. Gowdy and Rep. Walsh. Every comment by Norton and Cummings served to highlight the divisiveness of these men's intentions. Rep. Cummings condemned the "tone and tenure of this hearing" and called it "rather disturbing."

In a direct rebuke to Issa, who sits on the House Finance Committee, Cummings admonished "I wish we had as much concern about the people who have lost their houses," adding that there had now been 118 hearings with 342 witnesses and, when a banker is asked to come testify on robo-signing, the committee cannot get them because Chairman Issa doesn't want them to "come in to explain why they have illegally put people out of their houses." As the committee's ranking Democratic member, Rep. Cummings of Maryland, praised Jarvis for his 35 years of service.

"You really understand what it means to have freedom of speech," Cummings said.

Issa returned and, again, made plain his desire to change existing legislation in order to stop further and future protests in Washington DC. Visibly agitated Rep. Gowdy gaveled the hearing to a close after one last ominous exchange:

Rep. Gowdy asked Jarvis to name the most famous protest letter in US history to which Jarvis responded, Martin Luther King's "Birmingham Jail."
"That's right," said Rep. Gowdy. "That's where all protests that violate the law should be held. From jail."

~~~~~~~~~~~

The author spent his formative years growing up in Australia, Ghana, the Bahamas and Alaska.He also traveled extensively through out the developing world in the era before globalization.His experiences have shaped him into a World Citizen who sees.... [See more about Brett Redmayne Titley.]

Gene Tunney's Schick/Eversharp and Yale Connections

2012-01-07T15:22:00.001-06:00

Frawley

Previously in this blog, we have researched a man named Patrick Joseph Frawley, long-time chairman of the Schick and Eversharp corporations, who, more than any other individual, was the primary bankroller of INCA (Information Council of the Americas). At this point it becomes necessary to examine other persons involved in the same corporations Frawley controlled for a time to determine who other major (but hidden) shareholders may have been. This is what I do to "Follow the Money."

The overriding PURPOSE of this exercise is the determination of who was the primary supporter of Dr. Alton Ochsner in New Orleans, the surgeon who was training doctors to go to countries in the southern hemisphere of the Americas and provide medical care to dictators beholden to their wealthy neighbors in the United States.

After pieces of this puzzle are collected, this blog will have more to say about what it all means in terms of American history. Readers' thoughts and comments are appreciated and welcomed if relevant in achieving this purpose.

Lawrence Cowen, Former Schick Chairman

This blog first noted a connection between Schick, Inc. and the family of Robert Kennedy's nemesis, Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn's mother, Dora Marcus Cohn, was the daughter of Joseph S. Marcus, a man of Russian ancestry, but born in Germany. He had married Rachel Celia Cohen, a sister of Joseph Lionel Cowen (who had changed his name from Cohen). His sister, Rachel Cohen, was born in England before her marriage to Joseph S. Marcus. Their daughter, Dora Marcus Cohn, mother of Roy Marcus Cohn, was thus the niece of Joshua Lionel Cowen and first cousin of his son Lawrence Cowen.

Lawrence Cowen was involved with the Schick company before Cohn took over the Lionel train empire in 1960, as previously noted:

Lawrence Cowen, 52, president of Lionel Corp. from 1946 until last fall, was named chairman and chief executive officer of Schick Inc., makers of electric shavers. Cowen, who bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange at the age of 21, was ousted from Lionel when a new group led by Lawyer Roy M. Cohn took control of the company founded by Cowen's father (who gave his middle name, Lionel, to the toy electric trains he created).

Eventually, we will add a timeline, following the money from one group to another, and hopefully highlighting the hidden money behind the front men. That is always the goal of this blog's author--to follow the money!

This process of following the trail of money will begin prior to 1960, continuing to look into a famous director of what later became the Frawley corporations -- the well-known boxing champion, Gene Tunney during the era beginning in 1928.

Gene Tunney of Connecticut
A Tool of British Intelligence?

Gene and Polly Lauder Tunney

Before discussing what role boxer Gene Tunney had in the corporations, it is first mandatory that we understand how important this man was during the decades from the late 1920's until well into World War II. Anthony Summers, in his book Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover reveals the following information about Tunney's involvement as liaison between British and American intelligence in pre-CIA days:

For Edgar [Hoover], the war really began nearly two years before Pearl Harbor, with a letter from a retired boxer. Gene Tunney, the undefeated world heavyweight champion of the twenties, had often met Edgar and Clyde on their frequent visits to Yankee Stadium. Now, in early 1940, he found himself passing on a discreet message from a man he had first met at military boxing events in his youth, a man who had since become a top-level British secret agent.

This was William Stephenson, known to millions today as the protagonist of A Man Called Intrepid, the best-selling book about his achievements in World War II. Stephenson, a Canadian the same age as Edgar, was an extraordinary figure...[whose] mission, when he asked Tunney to make contact with Edgar, was under the personal command of Winston Churchill ... [then the] First Lord of the Admiralty, [who] had been engaged in secret correspondence with President Roosevelt for months.

So it seems that, leading up to WWII, Tunney was being used by British Intelligence to make contact with the man who then headed FDR's primary medium of civilian intelligence--both foreign and domestic--with regard to either getting help with Britain's need for weapons to fight the Nazis or with regard to getting the Americans into the war. The question is whether Tunney was interested for patriotic or financial reasons. To answer this questions requires more insight into his personal as well as business relationships.

Head of "BSC Cabal,' Code Name Intrepid

Sam Pryor's Role

Before looking more into Tunney's friends and associates, therefore, we want to emphasize that the British were--at that time when Tunney was being used (1940)--fighting for their life, as clarified by:

British agent Bickham Escott, who said that when he was recruited he was told: "If you join us, you mustn't be afraid of forgery, and you mustn't be afraid of murder." In light of these admissions, is it outlandish to ask if some of the unexplained and "convenient" deaths of the period may have been "assisted" by the BSC's operatives [BSC = British Security Coordination]? In the context of the Willkie nomination, the sudden death of convention manager Ralph Williams (a Taft man) and his replacement by Sam Pryor (a Willkie-Rockefeller-FDR-BSC man) [also Tunney's best friend] now looks suspiciously propitious. Wild speculation? Perhaps. But, perhaps not.

"Clearly," writes Prof. Mahl, in Desperate Deception, "the major purpose of BSC was to conduct aggressive offensive operations against those it saw as enemies of Britain." However, he notes, this "included not only Hitler's agents in the United States, but those who simply wished to remain uninvolved in the European war." That included American citizens, especially prominent politicians, who were tagged with the pejorative label of "isolationist."

This false label grotesquely implied that Americans who adhered to the traditional view of our Founding Fathers against foreign intervention and entanglement were somehow trying to retreat into a fantasy world in which our country would be sealed off from all intercourse with foreign nations. Even worse, the BSC cabal did everything possible to associate the isolationist tag with Naziism and fascism.

"Whatever Became Of...Gene Tunney?"

James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney is a New York City boy who became oneof the great celebrities of the years between the wars.... Gene Tunney made several million dollars in the ring, and after he quit, he put it [the money$] to work for him. He is a director of such companies as the Schick Safety Razor Company, Independent Bank of Commerce, Quaker City Life Insurance, Technicolor, and Eversharp, Inc., as well as others. Gene commutes to his New York office from his Stamford, Connecticut, home daily. [Source: The Aspirin Age 1919-1941 "My Fights With Jack Dempsey," by Gene Tunney 1949 (originally appeared in Sport magazine) - Quoted in article by Richard Lamparski, 1967.]

Tunney's office, like Candy Jones', in Yale Club

As it turns out, Tunney's New York office was mentioned in a book written by Donald Bain (hardback published by Playboy Press in 1976) called The Control of Candy Jones. A beautiful model for the Conover Agency (where Gerald Ford, incidentally, had worked as a male model after his days as a football hero), Candy married Harry Conover and then took over as owner of the agency after their divorce in 1959.

Located on the 8th floor at 52 Vanderbilt Avenue in Manhattan, the office was directly opposite Tunney's. The address was for a 22-story office building located at the southwest corner of 45th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, opposite Grand Central Terminal, and in the same building as the Yale Club, which gave its address as 50 Vanderbilt. It's an old trick used by FBI spy types, including former FBI man Guy Banister, who helped to set up Lee Harvey Oswald as a "Communist" patsy.

According to Candy Jones, "Tunney was a very private man, and all the years they spent across the hall from each other resulted in little more than casual pleasantries. Tunney did not seem to be conducting a business from the office, and Candy surmised that he used it as a convenient location from which to handle his personal investments." [page 55] It would not be a surprise to find that Tunney had links to the Yale Club, since he had played golf in Palm Beach with Prof. William Lyon Phelps in January 1928 and addressed his Yale lit class the next month:

Since Candy always kept her office door open when she was there, on several occasions she noticed activity across the hall which she reported to Tunney--and later the FBI man ("Ted") who questioned her--as suspicious. Thus began a relationship with the FBI which included lending "Ted" her state-of-the-art microphone recorder as well as allowing the FBI to use her address as a mail drop. At about that time, Tunney relocated his office to 200 Park Avenue, and within a few months (in November 1960), Candy was recruited in by the CIA. The real subject of the book concerns her work as a covert operative in the Far East. According to author Bain: "What she didn't bargain for, however, was becoming a human guinea pig in a secret CIA scientific project in which mind control was the goal," involving a "Dr. Gilbert Jensen" of Oakland, California.

But that's another story best told by reading The Control of Candy Jones.

~~~~~

Tunney

"A Comparison by One Who Knew Him - Now andThen"

by Paul Gallico, Sports Editor and SportsColumnist

of The News (New York)

Feb 18, 1931

***

Best Buddy with Sam F. Pryor, Jr.
...He lives with Polly Lauder Tunney in a wanderingwhite Colonial farmhouse perched on a glacial ridge in thewoods many miles back of Stamford. The road runs back country, scenic-railwaystyle, over the giant furrows plowed by the last visit ofthe great ice cap, through wild stretches where, if you go quietly, youwill suddenly come upon a white signal tail raised in alarm and thensee its owner, a young buck or fawn, bound stiff-legged away. If you haveno one to show you the way you won't find it.

The road runs past lovely old houses and glimpsesof hidden waters; it is companion to a brook for a mile or soand then leaves it to begin a climb that carries it along the face ofa crest, and here, a little back from the narrow path, sits the old farmhouse.It is a temporary residence. Behind it the ridge still rises,thickly wooded, and there, deep, sequestered, and high, the Tunneys willsome day build their permanent home. From it they will look overthe wood as it falls away to the blue Sound, and the Sound itself, andon clear days to a distant haze that will be Long Island.

The present dwelling is in the delightfulhaphazard manner of the early American farmer, who built himself andhis family a white house in which to live, and then as the family grewand prospered thrust out a wing here, added a room there, another upstairs,another offshooting from the second story, until treading theaging floors many years later you may almost trace the arrival of the first-and second-born, the advent of the hired man, the strong rootingand spreading of the American family.

And, as in old houses near the sea, you willfind in Tunney's home, scattered here and there among the plain,lovely lines of the austere Colonial furniture, rich and clashing objectsbrought from the other side of the world by wooden ships.

The living room is in two wings that foldthemselves around a double fireplace. Over the fire mantel arelustrous pewter dishes and candlesticks. The fireplace is made of threesingle slabs of stone, likely enough quarried out of the ridgesideby the original builder.

The wallpaper is the Anne Hathaway design,gentle scenes about Stratford-on-Avon -- Polly picked it. And oneof the fireside seats is a monstrous red-leather marshmallow of a cushionfrom Morocco. It is so big you could perch on it with your legs curledup under you. Upstairs, too, in the library -- you see, itis just that quaint, rambling type of house where the library couldbe put upstairs.

Oriental trophies mingle with Colonial pieces,and there are a lovely reclining porcelain hunting dog and a large,powerful sculptured head suggestive, but not replica, of Tunney. Thereare more enormous cushions from Morocco and two Berber guns,their gas-pipe barrels richly chased with silver, and silver to the endof the stock, silver inlaid curved daggers, a rich red rug, and the wholelong side of the wall lined from floor to ceiling with books, bookswith fine, exhilarating titles, books that I wished greedily and enviouslythat I owned. On the walls are fine hunting prints in red, white,and black, and pictures of ships in full sail. Too, there is a curiousdark statue, a slim figure rising four feet high from lotus petals, strangeand disproportionate.

"It doesn't mean anything to me,"says Polly.
"It does to me," says Gene. "I . . . I . . . can see what thefellow meant when he made it. . . ."

The dining room is tiny and dark and madeto reflect candlelight and old silver. There is a fireplace in it,and a fireplace in the huge bathroom built next to the bedroom that facesthe northeast and the rising sun. Did you ever soak in a warm tubwith a good book and an open fire crackling and blazing in the room?Or rub down after a cold shower with the heat licking out at you, andthe smell of burning pine mingling with the steam? Then you have neverlived as Gene Tunney does now -- and as I mean to some day.

It is a house through which you can hear anoutside storm, the rain rushing against the roof and down the eaves,and the wind down the chimney, and that is something most peopledeny themselves in their dwellings of brick, stone, steel, and concrete.They shut out the weather and miss the sense of peace and contentmentthat comes when the elements are wild outside the window and therain sluices over the panes, fragrant smoke from the fireplace blowsinto the room, and inside all is snug and sheltered and warm and dry,and the logs burn brightly and throw off yellow and blue shoots of flame.

Here dwells the grown Tunney. Freshman andsophomore years are past. He has entered upon the junior's estate,still unsettled, but calmer, better educated, ready for the finalassault upon life....

For the first time in his life, I suspect,he is enjoying himself.

Fine days are given over to tramping the countryside,the woods and the farm country, with Polly. Both love to hike,to walk, nowhere in particular, finding strange and unused paths,scrambling over the low stone walls of New England from beneath whichthe chipmunks scurry - well, one could write a book about the delightsof such aimless, friendly wanderings.

Too, there are his friends,
the Gimbels,
thePryors,
the Dick Byrds [Adm. Richard Byrd],
the Jim Bushes,

pleasant, culturedpeople, men like William Lyon Phelps [the Yale professor Tunney met in 1928, whose genealogy dates back many generations in New Haven] to stimulate him, to develop his mind.Who can now in good faith criticize him for preferring this companyto the frowsy crew from which he tore himself? Life is too short to spenda second of it with unpleasant people, the rewards for such sacrificetoo uncertain. Years and advancing discretion have taught me toadmire Gene Tunney very much for the people he avoids and the thoroughnesswith which he does the job of avoiding them.

William Lyon Phelps

Tunney's mind and education have leaped aheadsince his groping days of the training camps. He no longer fumblesfor words, he no longer lets fly a gem from the dictionaryin the manner of Little Jack Horner producing the plum from the Christmaspie, he no longer as a matter of fact speaks written English, whichis the more formal and stilted language that one reserves for letterpaper or the thesis. His gesture with a cocktail shaker is facileand natural, and he has the inborn gentleman's instinct againstthe wearing of the sly expression that has become habitual with thisnormal function in American circles.

Charles V. Bob was, according to an online biography of DEAN IVAN LAMB, an aircraft promotionentrepreneur and stock market financier, involved in a fraudulent stock market and mining scam that fleeced members of New York society and alsomany small investors of their money. Bob had been one of the biggest contributors to Admiral Richard Byrd's expedition to Antarctica.

James Irving Bush was vice president of the Equitable Trust Company and lived in the penthouse at 885 Park Avenue in New York City when he gave Tunney an engagement party for members of the Madison Square Garden Sporting Club.

Bernard F. Gimbel was largest shareholder and chairman of Gimbel Bros. Inc. department stores. He and his wife, Alva, lived in a mansion on 96 acres in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Wilton, Conn. Bulletin of April 21, 1954 informs us that there was a Garden Tour to be held in May of that year and that:

The gardens to be shown will be those of [Sam Pryor's sister and brother-in-law, who was in the Yale class of 1926] Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Verner Reed, Quaker Ridge Road, Greenwich; Mr. and Mrs. Edward J. Beinecke, Ciff Dale Road, Greenwich; Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Gimbel, King Street and Sherwood Avenue, Greenwich; Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Mr. and Mrs. Horace C. Flanigan, and Mrs. Arthur Lehman, all on Anderson Hill Road, Purchase.

~~~~~~~~~~~

"Boxing andWrestling" magazine article

"Gene Tunney-the fighter who quit with a million"

Sept. 1956 or 57

by Oscar Fraley

***

The handsome, six foot plusex-champion is a director of many successful companies, perhapsmore than he can recall off-hand. Among other things, he is chairmanof the board of the Denham Tire and Rubber Company of New York. He isa director in the famous Eversharp, Inc., the Clinchfield Coal Companyand the Brown Paper Company. Gene also is president of the Stamford,Connecticut, Building Company and has holdings in various otherconcerns.

Tunney's career is a completeHoratio Alger story. It's a tale of a poor boy born in New York'sGreenwich Village section who rose to become heavyweight championof the world, retired undefeated with two million dollars and marrieda beautiful heiress.

Born James Joseph Tunney onMay 25, 1898, Tunney was a spindly youth but began sparring while attending various public and parochial schools. He boxed at neighborhoodclubs up to the time he enlisted in the U. S. Marines at the outbreakof World War I. The war gave Gene his big push into the prize ring.

Tunney proved so successfulboxing his fellow marines he was put forward to fight for the A.E.F. light heavyweight championship, which he won in Colmbes Stadiumat Paris. After the war, jobs of the right type were scarce and he electedto make boxing his business with cold-blooded approach neverequalled before or since.
Gene still was unimpressive,physically. Yet he realized he had to build both his body and temperamentto succeed. By driving himself, Tunney developed into a beautifulfighting machine and often he has said that during these times heeven discovered that courage is a force that can be learned.

In 1922, Tunney won his firsttitle, winning the American light heavyweight crown from BattlingLevinsky. Four months later, Harry Greb lifted it in the only fightTunney ever lost but Gene won it right back in 1923....

Thereafter, Tunney pickedup just one more big purse by flattening Heeney a year later and calledit quits. For his last three fights, twice with Dempsey and thenHeeney, Tunney collected a sum said to have been $1,700,000!

Once out of the ring, Geneturned to the finer things he had been pursuing all through his career-- books, art, travel. He set out on a walking trip through Europewith author Thornton Wilder and visited such literary lights as GeorgeBernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. In Rome, the tour came to an end on October3, 1928, when he married Miss Polly Lauder of Greenwich, Connecticut,one of the heirs to Carnegie steel millions.

The Tunney's now have fourchildren, three strapping sons and the youngest child a daughter,Joan, aged 12. Gene, the oldest son, is in the army. The others are Varickand Jonathon. Although Tunney had littlesuccess in certain public crusades. he prospered in business. Hebecame an executive of the American Distilling company and theMorris Plan bank, connections he later relinquished. His venturesspread to many fields and still do.

Alcohol Corporation (American Distilling Company) - 1928

The company became American Distilling Company in 1942. This certificate was printed in the 1928 and has the names William S. Kies, Richard H. Grimm and Philip Publicker imprinted on it. 1928 - American Commercial Alcohol Corporation is formed with the merger of American Distilling Co., David Berg Industrial Alcohol Co. (Founded 1911 in Philadelphia), and the S. M. Mayer Alcohol Co. (founded 1926 in Gretna, Louisiana).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Was Gene Tunney the finest boxer whoever lived?"

in "The Complete Book of World HeavyweightChampions

From John L. Sullivan to Larry Holmes"

Clay Communications Group: Spring, 1981

*** On August 1, 1928 Tunney announced his retirementat New York's Biltmore Hotel, quickly sailed off to Europe,where he was to meet his fiancee Polly Lauder, grandniece of billionaireAndrew Carnegie. They were married in October.

In many ways, Tunney didn't fit into the boxingworld. He was a handsome, clean-living man, self educated,who could write poetry, read Shakespeare, pontificate on all worldly subjects-- didn't even curse.

"Let's have fighters with more wallopand less Shakespeare," laughed humorist Will Rogers, echoing thesentiment of fight people who labelled Gene as "uppity", "asnob". They found it unsettling that a prominent fighter would carry a book of poetryin his equipment bag along with his jockstrap and gloves. Neitherdid they like the fact that Tunney used "front men" asmanagers.

"The state says I need to have a manager,"Tunney scoffed. "Otherwise, I wouldn't use one."

But Tunney won their grudging respect throughthe years with his slashing fists and giant fighting heart. Someexperts feel he was the best pure boxer in heavyweight history. Gene was a successful businessman -- and aclose friend of Jack Dempsey's -- till he died....

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Polly Lauder Tunney, 100, Fighter’s Widow, Dies

By JACK CAVANAUGH

Published: April 15, 2008

The New York Times

Polly Lauder Tunney, a Connecticut socialite and Carnegie heiress whose secret romance and subsequent marriage to the former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney was one of the most sensational love stories of the 1920s, died Saturday at her home in Stamford, Conn. She was 100.

Her death was confirmed Monday by her son John V. Tunney, the former United States Senator from California. His mother had had several strokes in recent years, including one about a week ago, he said.

For Mrs. Tunney, who had grown up in a world of wealth and privilege reaching from Greenwich, Conn., to Versailles, meeting and falling in love with a prizefighter, even a famous one, seemed unlikely. But Gene Tunney was no ordinary prizefighter.

Though he had grown up relatively poor in Greenwich Village as the son of Irish immigrants — his father was a longshoreman — Tunney, a high school dropout, had developed an insatiable appetite for classical literature, especially the works of Shakespeare. Handsome and articulate, he lectured on Shakespeare at Yale and befriended George Bernard Shaw, Thornton Wilder and other writers, earning the scorn of the boxing establishment and many boxing fans.

Polly Lauder, a striking beauty, met Tunney shortly before he won the heavyweight title from Jack Dempsey in one of the most stunning upsets in boxing history on Sept. 23, 1926. Tunney had originally been introduced to Miss Lauder’s older sister, Katherine Dewing, by a longtime friend, Samuel Pryor Jr., who also lived in Greenwich.

Katherine Dewing in turn arranged for Tunney and her sister to meet at a dinner party that Mrs. Dewing and her husband gave at their Manhattan apartment. Over the next two years, a romance blossomed, though only a few close friends and relatives knew about it.
In August 1928 — less than a month after the last fight of Tunney’s career, a technical knockout of the New Zealander Tom Heeney — Polly’s mother, Katherine Lauder, announced from the family’s summer home on Johns Island, off the coast of Maine, that Polly and Tunney had become engaged. (Tunney had promised Miss Lauder that he would quit boxing after fulfilling his contractual obligations, which included the Heeney fight and, earlier, a rematch with Dempsey, a fight that became memorable as Tunney’s “long-count” victory.)

The engagement was front-page news across the country and touched off a frenzy by reporters and photographers eager to interview the couple. “Wedding Gong Calls Gene,” declared a headline in The Los Angeles Times. But the couple remained out of public view.

In September they went to Europe, separately, and were married in a small ceremony in a hotel in Rome on Oct. 3, 1928. She was 21 when they wed. The New York Times said the scene after the wedding “looked mighty like a riot” as clothes were torn and cameras smashed in a melee of photographers jostling to capture images of the couple.

After spending 14 months traveling in Europe, the Tunneys returned to the United States and moved into a house in North Stamford built in 1742 and began restoring it. Known as Star Meadow Farm, the house sits on 200 acres, where the Tunneys raised Hereford cattle and sheep.

Tunney, who had little to do with boxing after he retired as the undefeated heavyweight champion July 31, 1928, became a successful businessman in New York. He died in 1978 at 81.

Born Mary Josephine Lauder in Greenwich on April 24, 1907, and known since childhood as Polly, Mrs. Tunney was the granddaughter of George Lauder, a first cousin of Andrew Carnegie, with whom he had grown up in Scotland. An engineer, Lauder became, in his 30s, a confidential adviser to Carnegie and a director and shareholder of the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh shortly after Carnegie founded it in the 1870s.

Lauder’s son, George Jr., inherited much of his father’s fortune and became a well-known yachtsman, owning a 136-foot two-masted schooner. He was a director of Presbyterian Hospital and the Manhattan Ear and Eye Hospital in New York and died of influenza at 37, leaving a fortune estimated at $50 million to his wife and to his children, Polly, Katherine and George III.

After attending private schools in Greenwich, Polly Lauder graduated from the Lenox School in New York and the Finch School in New York and Versailles. She was an accomplished equestrian, sailor and swimmer and remained vigorous into her 90s, driving a car until age 93. A patron of the arts, she was a former vice president of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and a major benefactor of the Audubon Society and the Wildlife Federation.

In addition to her son John, of New York, Mrs. Tunney is survived by two other sons, Gene, of Hawaii, and Jonathan, of New York and Roxbury, Conn.; a daughter, Joan Tunney Cook, of Omaha, Ark.; 10 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren.

Greenwich, Conn., July 28, 1928.—(AP)—Gene Tunney, who successfully defended his heavyweight title against Tom Heeney at the Yankee stadium in New York on Thursday night, will make announcement "of the greatest importance" next week, according to Sam F. Pryor, Jr., one of the champion's closest friends.

Although Tunney is known to be in Greenwich and is undoubtedly staying at his friend's home, Pryor declared today that the champion preferred to remain in seclusion until such time as he makes his announcement.

Pryor intimated that Tunney's announcement will be to the effect that he has retired from the ring and will not again defend the title which he won from JackDempsey on Sept. 23, 1926, at Philadelphia.

Pryor said that the champion was fully aware of the rumors and reports that he would retire and leave the heavyweight title open, and that his announcement of next week will answer these reports.

The champion recently purchased a farmhouse and several acres of land in Stamford and will take occupancy when alterations which he ordered are completed. It is reported that he will open a gymnasium on his property for the training of boxers and will give his personal attention to it. Tunney's immediate plans call for a tour of Europe with Thorton Wilder, the novelist, after which he will probably go south for the winter, and then return to his Stamford place which he intends to make his permanent home .

The Schick network

2012-01-04T20:07:00.000-06:00

In the 1970 California Republican primary race for the U.S. Senate seat, the incumbent, former entertainer George Murphy, was challenged by businessman Norton Simon. The following excerpt appeared in THE MACHINIST, APRIL 30, 1970:

California's June 2 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate will pit two candidates, each from a giant business corporation. The contest matches business genius Norton Simon, 63, head of the billion-dollar-a-year conglomerate, Norton Simon, Inc., against 67-year-old U.S. Sen. George Murphy, an employee of another huge business complex, Schick-Eversharp-Technicolor.

Simon's firms owns the companies that make or distribute Canada Dry beverages, Johnnie Walker Scotch whisky, Wesson Oil, Hunt's tomato and fruit products, Ohio Blue Tip matches and Mc-Calls, Redbook and Saturday Review magazines.

The group employing Murphy [Frawley's group] controls the companies making Eversharp pens and pencils, Taxi ball point pens, Schick blades and electric razors, Technicolor movies and TV shows and Twin Circle TV and radio programs. Those are the firms dominated by far-right Patrick Frawley, Jr. Frawley's Schick-Eversharp-Technicolor group has about $200,000,000 of annual sales, while Norton Simon's complex sells about a billion dollars worth of goods each year.

Frawley has been identified with many right-wing groups. His views are reflected by Murphy in the Senate. Before he entered the Senate in 1965, Murphy was a $40,000-a-year Technicolor vice president. Recently he revealed that since his election, he has been receiving a $20,000 annual retainer as a public relations consultant for Frawley's Technicolor. The Frawley firm also gives Murphy an annual air travel card and pays half the rent on his $250-a-rnonth Washington, D.C., apartment.

Frawley got into the political columns in 1964 as a result of an attack on the liberal California Republican, former U.S. Sen. Thomas Kuchel. A Schick public relations man, J.T. Fergus, and another far rightist, Frank Capell, were caught distributing a phony affidavit falsely accusing Kuchel of homosexuality. In court, Fergus and Capell pleaded nolo contendere and were each fined $500. Simon is generally regarded as a moderate Republican. His publications are in that vein. He is a trustee of Reed College, Portland, Ore., member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, and a member of the board of the Los Angeles Museum of Art. During the 1940s and 1950s he parlayed several smaller food companies and Ohio Match Co. into giant Hunt Food and Industries, Inc. Murphy, like his patron, Frawley, is ultraconservative and his U.S. Senate voting record reflects it.

Time magazine reported five years earlier about the incident in the Kuchel campaign:

Last June, when Kuchel was campaigning against Barry Goldwater's candidacy in the California presidential primary, a vicious document was circulated around the state. It purported to be an affidavit signed by a Los Angeles police officer and saying that in 1949 he had arrested Kuchel, then state controller, on a drunkenness charge. But that was only the beginning. The document went on to say that when arrested, Kuchel had been in the midst of an act of sexual perversion. Kuchel's fingerprints, the document said, had been sent to the FBI.
Kuchel did not learn of the accusation until October, when his Los Angeles office came into possession of a copy of the affidavit. The Senator denounced the document as "a monstrous falsehood," demanded an investigation by Los Angeles police. They reported that they had no record of any such arrest. Neither did the FBI, said Director J. Edgar Hoover in a personal letter to Kuchel. Kuchel then demanded criminal proceedings, which resulted in last week's indictments.
The four men indicted were: Norman H. Krause, 44, bar owner and ex-Los Angeles policeman, who in 1950 did arrest two employees of then-Controller Kuchel's office for drunkenness; Jack D. Clemmons, 41, a Los Angeles police sergeant until his resignation two weeks ago; John F. Fergus, 47, until recently a public relations man for Eversharp, Inc., who in 1947 was charged with possession of a concealed weapon and given a suspended sentence, and Francis A. Capell, 57, of Zarephath, N.J., publisher of a rightist newspaper, Herald of Freedom, and author of a pamphlet entitled The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, which suggests that Marilyn met death at the hands of Communists. In 1943, as an investigator for the War Production Board, Capell was fined $2,000 for "agreeing to take a gratuity from a clothing manufacturer." If convicted, each of the accused could be fined $5,000 and sentenced to three years in prison.

Whoever instigated the dirty trick, reminiscent of what Donal Segretti's team involved during the Nixon presidential campaign in 1972 would call "rat fucking," seems to have had an ax to grind against Robert F. Kennedy who was then serving as Senator of New York, as another account of this incident stated that Capell's book, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe, "asserted Sen. Robert F. Kennedy ordered 'Communist agents' to kill the actress."

Four months earlier, 23-year-old Dennis P. Mowrer (identifying himself as the "founder and

president of the Southern California Freedom Councils"), had marched into Senator Kuchel's office with two other men, demanding to show the Senator an affidavit. As he phrased it, "We have something that relates him to Walter Jenkins." President Lyndon Johnson's aide, Jenkins, had been arrested in October 1964 charged with making "disorderly (indecent) gestures," at the same time as a retired army sergeant named Andy Choka, who in one newspaper was said to have been from Communist Hungary. Mowrer's ties to the Southern California Freedom Councils would help to identify who was behind this ploy to cause a scandal for Senator Kuchel. Intriguigingly, a small news item appeared in the Reno Evening Gazette on August 13, 1964 which stated:

VAN NUYS (AP) — The local council of the Knights of Columbus says it is cancelling plans to rent its hall to the Southern California Freedom Councils for a speech Friday by Troy Houghton, regional director of the Minutemen. Ed Filia, grand counselor of the lodge said the reservation was cancelled Wednesday because it hadn't been confirmed.

Schick and Patrick Frawley

2012-01-03T23:10:00.000-06:00

Building and financing the bomb in Tuxedo Park, NY

Ralph Austin Bard was appointed by FDR early in 1941 to be undersecretary of the navy and would serve at that post until his resignation early in 1948. Reporting on his initial appointment, the Racine Journal Times in 1941 had said:

Bard is president of an investment banking house bearing his name. He also is chairman of the board of the Wahl company, Chicago, manufacturers of fountain pens and pencils.

After the merger of Wahl into Eversharp, Bard was named chairman of Eversharp Inc. In 1947 President Truman appointed him United States deputy representative on the United Nations commission for conventional armaments two years after Truman had first been briefed that the Manhattan Project team was about four months away from completing its development of the atomic bomb. Members of the Interim Committee, set up to decide about whether or not to drop the bomb, included:

George L. Harrison, President of the New York Life Insurance Company and special consultant in the Secretary's office;

James F. Byrnes, President Truman's personal representative;

Ralph A. Bard, Under Secretary of the Navy;
William L. Clayton, Assistant Secretary of State; and scientific advisers
Vannevar Bush,
Karl T. Compton [president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology], and
James B. Conant [president of Harvard].
General George Marshall and
Manhattan Project Director Leslie Groves also participated in some of the committee’s meetings.
Henry L. Stimson chaired the Committee.

Bard had previously organized and directed several investment corporations in Chicago. He was the only one on the Interim Committee who showed any reluctance about killing Japanese people without warning:

On June 1, 1945, the Interim Committee recommended that that atomic bombs should be dropped on military targets in Japan as soon as possible and without warning. One committee member, Ralph Bard, convinced that Japan may be seeking a way to end the war, called for a two to three day warning before the bomb was dropped.

During World War I Bard had been an investment banker located at 39 S. LaSalle in Chicago, the same address where Dawes and company, investment bankers, was located. In 1934 he was a vice president of the Pure Oil Company, controlled by the Dawes family, who had been most instrumental in assuring the payment of reparations by Germany to both Britain and France. In 1933 he was named to the board of directors of the American Shipbuilding Company.

Charles Gates Dawes of Pure Oil Co.

At the time of his appointment by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 to succeed Lewis Compton as assistant secretary of the Navy, Bard was said to be a "Republican and long-time friend of Secretary [William Franklin] Knox," the Secretary of the Navy at that time. Following Knox's death in 1944, Bard was promoted to undersecretary of the Navy, the post vacated by James Forrestal when he moved up to replace Knox.

How did Ralph Bard manage to fit the chairmanship of Eversharp into the midst of all these government appointments? A brief history of that company during the relevant time-frame reveals the following details: "In 1945, Eversharp (having dropped the Wahl [Adding Machine] name completely) invested heavily in the manufacture of the latest technological innovation -- the ball point pen. Unfortunately for Eversharp, the Reynolds Company came out with a competing ballpoint just before the Eversharp models were released, and Eversharp ended up losing millions. The fiasco crippled the company more than it could withstand, spiralling the company into a decline that ended in 1957 with the sale of the company to its longtime rival, Parker, who used the name on what could only be called weird products before selling off the remaining assets of the company in 1961."

Detailed Eversharp History

JANESVILLE DAILY GAZETTE

December 19, 1957

Eversharp Pen-Pencil Division to Become Parker Property Jan. 1

Announcement Is Made of Purchase by Janesville Firm

An important development in the history of the Parker Pen Co. was made public today when it was announced officially that Parker has purchased the writing instrument division of Eversharp Inc., one of the major firms in that field, and will assume control of it on Jan. 1.

The board of directors of each company has ratified the sale contract, Eversharp on Dec. 6 and Parker at a meeting Dec. 17. No purchase figure was made public but it is understood to be a cash sale. Formal announcement of the completion of the transaction was made this noon at a press luncheon at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago, with representatives of both companies present.

The announcement confirmed rumors current in the trade for several weeks that such a deal was pending. The report of the probable sale first appeared in newspapers on Dec. 4.

Official announcement at today's luncheon was made by Bruce M. Jeffris, Parker president, and Thomas J. Welsh, executive vice president of Eversharp. Included in the sale are all the patents, trademarks, inventories and facilities of Eversharp in the field of writing instruments and related products.

Acquire California Plant

Neither Eversharp's shaving equipment division nor any other phase of the Eversharp organization is involved in this sale as it is limited to the writing operations only.

Included in the sale is a three-year-old modern plant of the Kimberly Corporation at Culver City, Calif. Kimberly , has manufactured writing instruments for Eversharp, Inc., for the past 10 years in the 22,500 square foot plant. Kimberly will remain a separate corporation subsidiary to the Parker Pen Co.

Also involved are office and plant facilities at Arlington Heights, III., and Toronto, Canada. At Arlington Heights, 1440 E. Davis St., the Eversharp Pen Co. has leased a 12,000 square foot plant to contain administrative offices, service and shipping functions. At Toronto is a plant with approximately 3,000 square feet of manufacturing space.

Jeffris stated that his company's purpose in acquiring the Eversharp writing business was to "continue to diversify operations within our industry." The Eversharp acquisition permits Parker to enter the lower price market immediately and with a solidly entrenched brand name, he pointed out.

Parker feels that the new Eversharp Pen Co., operating autonomously with top level staff and research assistance, will sharpen competition within the industry, and lead to broader product improvements in the utility writing tool field, it was announced by Jeffris.

Concentrate on Razors, Blades

Welsh emphasized that only the Eversharp writing instrument division was involved in this transaction.

"This move," Welsh said, "will enable the Eversharp management and personnel to concentrate their efforts and resources on further development of our very profitable shaving instrument division which markets the Eversharp-Schick and Eversharp Hydro-Magic Injector Razor and Blade products.

"Declining sales in our writing instrument division in recent years, coupled with increased costs of production and distribution, have led to a profitless operation," Welsh added. "This loss can be overcome by Parker with its solidly-established merchandising program which has proven it-.....

52-Year-Old Company

Eversharp was founded in 1905 as the Wahl Adding Machine Co. In 1915 Wahl purchased a controlling interest of the Eversharp Pencil Co. and began manufacturing pencils at 1800 Roscoe St., in Chicago. In 1917 the Boston Pen Co. was also purchased and moved to Chicago. The Wahl Co. had a five-story factory there and by 1923 was able to achieve a daily production of 50,000 pencils, 7,000 pens and 1,250,000 sticks of lead.

The adding machine portion of Wahl had been sold in 1919 to the Remington Typewriter Co. In 1940, the Wahl Co. became Eversharp, Inc. Extensive promotion of writing products was undertaken. Writing instruments made up Eversharp's entire business until December 1945, when it acquired working control of the Magazine Repeating Razor Co., manufacturers of the Schick Injector Razors and Blades. (One year later, it acquired all of the razor company.) In less than four years it fought its way from a very small segment to a major factor of the domestic razor market.

Enter Ballpoint Field

The ballpoint market was entered by Eversharp in 1945 with the purchase of American rights to the Biro (Argentina) ballpoint pen patents. Within two years, sales volume reached an all-time high. Currently, Eversharp's writing instrument division is manufacturing a well-rounded line of ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils.

U.S. manufacturing' is done by the Kimberly Corp., Culver City, Calif. (Kimberly manufactured pens for Eversharp exclusively beginning in 1947; in 1955, Eversharp acquired controlling stock in Kimberly.) A Canadian manufacturing plant is located in Toronto. There are also subsidiary companies in England and Australia. Eversharp, Inc., has main offices for both divisions in New York City. It recently sold its Climax Engine Division to the Waukesha Motor Co. Several notable "firsts" are claimed by Eversharp's writing instrument division: First in the development of the mechanical pencil; first mechanical pencil leads as used in today's pencils; first successful ball pen; first in the propel-repel-expel pencil mechanism, and the now-famous "Magic-Feed" principle.

Parker Founded in 1888

The Parker Pen Co, was founded in Janesville in 1888 by George S. Parker and has had an amazing growth, especially since 1920 when it completed its big factory building on Court street which has since become completely an office building with the building of the beautiful Arrow Park plant in 1951. Its products are fountain pens, ballpoint pens, desk sets, liquid lead and mechanical pencils, and inks. Product trade names include the 61, 51, 41 and 21 fountain pens, T-Ball Jotter, Liquid Lead pencil, Superchrome and Quink inks. Most recent developments of the company are the 61 capillary filling pen (1956) and the T-Ball Jotter nonskip ballpoint (1957).

World sales for the fiscal year ending Feb. 28, 1957, totaled $35,000,000. Earnings before taxes, for United States and Canadian companies only, were $3,394,171, or $2.08 per share, a 31 per cent increase in net earnings over the preceding year.Foreign subsidiaries are operated in Toronto, Canada; London, Dover and Nehaven, England; Hamilton, Bermuda; Capetown, Johannesburg and Durban, Union of South Africa; Paris, France; Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia and Mexico City, Mexico.

Domestic subsidiaries include the Trent Engineering Co., East Troy; Oilman Engineering and Manufacturing Corp., Janesville, and Parker Pen Service Inc., operating in eight U. S. cities.

Officers are: Kenneth Parker, chairman; Bruce M. Jeffris, president; Daniel Parker, executive vice president; Norman Byford,Philip Hull, Frank W. Matthay and Chester C. Holloway, vice presidents; John G. Mack, assistant vice president; G. Earl Best, secretary-treasurer; Alfred P. Diotte, assistant secretary; Helen A. Morrissey, assistant secretary; Robert E. Burmeister, assistant treasurer.

Over 50 per cent of Parker sales are derived from the export field. Parker pens are sold in all free countries of the world.

THE RHINELANDER (WIS.) DAILY NEWS

DECEMBER 4, 1957

Pen Companies Merger Rumored

NEW YORK (AP) — Officials of Eversharp Inc. had no immediate comment today on trade reports that the big pen and pencil manufacturer was considering a merger with Parker Pen Co, of Janesvllle, Wis. Rumors have been current in trade circles here that Parker Pen was interested in acquiring Eversharp, whose sales and earnings are down sharply from a year ago. Eversharp's profits for the six months ended Aug. 31 dropped to $525,428 from $1,170,302 in the like period last year.

The New York Times reported this morning that negotiations between the two concerns have been under way for some time and a decision on whether or not to merge is expected by New Year's.

Eversharp makes mechanical pencils and pencil leads, ballpoint pens and other writing instruments and accessories. It also manufactures safety razors and blades. Its Climax Engine Manufacturing Co. division produces internal combustion engines for use in oil drilling and farm irrigation systems.

Parker makes fountain pens, ball-point pens and mechanical pencils. In the six months ended Aug. 31 the Wisconsin company earned $582,000 compared to $569,000 in the same 1950 period. Parker's sales for the year ended Feb. 28 totaled $25,372,871.

JANESVILLE DAILY GAZETTE
January 15, 1958

Frawley Heads Eversharp, Inc.

NEW YORK-Patrick J. Frawley Jr., was elected president, chief executive officer, and a director of Eversharp, Inc. Frawley founded the Paper Mate Pen Co. in 1949 and was president of that firm until it was sold to the Gillette Co. in November, 1956. His election is effective immediately. Frawley succeeds Fred J. Young [president of Eversharp since 1954], who resigned as president and chief executive officer in May 1957. Thomas J. Welsh, executive vice president, had been acting as chief executive officer since that time. Welsh will remain as executive vice president and chief executive officer. The writing instrument division of Eversharp recently was sold to Parker Pen Co., Janesville.

Walter Winchell - Man About Town

September 28, 1955

Headline: "Paper Mate sold to Gillette For $15,500,000"

Patrick Frawley's original investment (in the pen firm) was only $15,000 six years ago. He is 33 ... He was 27 when he started. A Nicaraguan, he joined the Canadian Air Force, then became a U.S. citizen.

By 1930 Patrick J. Frawley, Jr., born in Nicaragua in 1923, was living in San Francisco at 771 34th Avenue) near the Presidio, where his Irish-born father was a merchant involved in import-export. His mother, Marie Therese Peugnet Frawley, though born in Nicaragua, had parents who were Irish and French.

The San Francisco city directory for 1945-46 lists the family living at 30 Entrada Ct. (several blocks east of Lake Merced).

While Patrick Jr. was general manager the D.J. Dalton exporting company at 268 Market, his father was running San Francisco Import and Export Co., Martinez Export and H.R. Hall and Co. All these exporters operated out of Suites 160 and 161 in the three-story Hansford Building at 268 Market Street on the Embarcadero in San Francisco; the interior of this building was destroyed by fire in 1947 and again in 1957. A few doors away, in Suite 141, other importers were carrying on business under the following names:

American Overseas Trading Co.;
Gabuardi and Co. of California;
International Company of America;
International Mercantile Co.; and
Majestic Fashions Co.

Adolfo and Luis Gabuardi were engaged in importing from Nicaragua and were nephews of Raul and Jorge Lacayo, with whom they lived in Los Angeles in 1930. Luis Gabuardi managed the import-export company in San Francisco; his brother was Adolfo, about whom the following news item appeared:

Bakersfield Californian, July 31, 1954

NICARAGUA CHIEF
CHALLENGED TO
DUEL TO DEATH

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (UP)—The newspaper Diario Latina published a letter from one Adolfo J. Gabuardi challenging Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza to a pistol duel "to the death." The letter did not identify Gabuardi except by name, nor did it give any reason for the duel.

Also living at the Entrada residence was Patrick Jr.'s wife Geraldine (married 1944), as well as his sister Agnes, the company bookkeeper, and Louise.

Frawley's name appeared in former FBI agent William W. Turner's book, published by Ramparts Press, Power on the Right, chapter 10 of which was entitled "The American Security Council: Free Enterprise Wages the Cold War." Patrick Frawley was described as one of the executives of ASC's national strategy committee and also men;oned as a donor of $100,000 in an award competition to the person who could write the best essay about the cold war.

He was the only son, born in the middle of four girls--all of whom first arrived in the U.S. in 1928. News articles that appeared at various times indicated that the parents left their children with a relative to be educated, while they themselves returned to their large estate at Managua, eventually left to their son Patrick, whose schooling in California had ceased when he was 16. At that time he chose to work with his father's coffee business. A sister married David Schindler and moved to Managua after her her divorce, taking with her all except her two elder sons. Another sister, married to John P. Seyer, remained in the U.S.

An Intimacy with the Elite

2011-12-08T13:38:00.000-06:00

Arthur E. Carpenter,

"Social Origins of Anticommunism:

The Information Council of the Americas,"

Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Spring, 1989), pp. 117-143

Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.

PART II

Continued from Part 1

Morrison complied, advising citizens to "support INCA with vigor." Similarly, Hale Boggs, U. S. congressman from the New Orleans area, helped INCA win tax-exempt status and praised it as "a prime example of making constructive use of our private citizens in the ideological and psychological struggle against communism."32

Blaffer

Although reliant on this local elite during its early years, INCA tried to expand beyond the city. It met with mixed results. Occasionally its appeals brought forth contributions. In 1964 Ochsner reported a $2,000 donation from the chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey, [in 1964 the chairman was M. Jackson Rathbone, but note footnote 63 below; R.L. Blaffer was one of the founders of Humble Oil in Texas, partner of W.S. Farish, charged with trading with the enemy during World War II through Standard Oil of New Jersey, which had been a hidden shareholder in Humble Oil.] and in 1966 American & Foreign Power Company, most of whose Latin American subsidiaries had been nationalized, gave $1,000. INCA also hoped to attract funds from H.L. Hunt, the Texas oilman who was a generous patron of the ultra-right. In 1966 board member H. Eustis Reily traveled to Texas to tell Hunt about INCA. Afterwards Ochsner thanked the Texan for meeting with Reily, stressing the urgency of INCA's mission "because of the recent race riots and communistic infiltration." Apparently, though, Hunt did not assist INCA.33

California proved more lucrative. Dudley Swim, a California resident and chairman of National Airlines, was a major benefactor. As noted, Swim was Ochsner's friend, and he was familiar with New Orleans's Latin American program. Back in 1960, after visiting Guatemala on an International House trade mission, he declared he was "acquiring about 6,000 acres of land in Guatemala for agricultural development."

The most important Californian was Patrick J. Frawley, Jr. [photo above courtesy of Ghost of Mansion Past] Frawley joined Butler and Ochsner as INCA's most influential members. Beginning in the mid-1960s INCA depended increasingly upon the largesse of this Los Angeles businessman who was then an executive of Eversharp, Schick Electric, and Technicolor. Frawley was partial to rightist groups and causes. Among others he lavished large sums upon the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, the American Security Council, and the Young Americans for Freedom. He was a generous supporter of Ronald Reagan's early political career. And he often added prominent conservatives to his corporate boards; Ochsner was an Eversharp director, for example.34

These elite patrons were drawn to INCA, at least initially, because it offered a way to strike at the Cuban Revolution. INCA vowed to use its propagandistic skills to help prevent that revolution's spread elsewhere in Latin America. It devoted its first couple of years to producing and distributing Truth Tapes--anti-Castro recordings designed to be broadcast on Latin American radio stations and to sway the Latin American masses. To convey strong emotion on the tapes, INCA often enlisted Cuban refugees who, in Butler's words, spoke "in the unmistakable argot of their occupation, with the unimpeachable dialect of their class, and with the sincerity bred of bitter experience." By mid-1964, it claimed over 120 cooperating stations in sixteen Latin American nations. According to INCA, the tapes worked. Ochsner boasted, for instance, that one featuring Juanita Castro, Fidel's sister, helped Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei defeat socialist Salvador Allende in Chile's 1964 presidential election.35

Then an apparently fortuitous event encouraged INCA to take up other forms of anti-Cuban propaganda. On August 21, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, then a New Orleans resident, appeared on a local radio program with Butler and several others. Their discussion narrowed quickly to Oswald's professed Marxism, his sympathy for Cuba, and his defection to the Soviet Union. Several months later when President Kennedy was assassinated, the hunger for information about Oswald magnified the radio program's importance. Realizing this, INCA issued two records based on a recording of that program.36 In these records and in its literature, INCA described the assassination as tragic confirmation of its analysis and methods. Communist propaganda, argued Butler, had conditioned Oswald and then had incited him to violence. Communist "hate-conveyed always by words from communists to their sympathizers--finally moved the mind, that actuated the trigger, that killed the President of the United States. The links of guilt are visible and obvious." Claiming to have exposed and driven Oswald from New Orleans, Butler believed an INCA branch in Dallas might "have professionally neutralized Oswald there and perhaps saved the President's life."37

The Oswald episode provided raw material for another mode of propaganda: film. In 1965 INCA produced the lurid "Hitler in Havana," which equated Castro with Hitler and which blamed the Cuban leader for Kennedy's death. In the fall and winter of 1966 Frawley underwrote television showings of the film in several large cities. These showings elicited favorable comment. "This is the first time I have seen a TV documentary accurately depicting the tragic situation of post-Castro [sic] Cuba," the executive vice president of American and Foreign Power wrote Butler. And in December 1966 at New Orleans City Hall a rally of several hundred Cuban exiles and their supporters, including the mayor, saluted INCA's film. But "Hitler" appealed only to the convinced. New York Times reviewer Jack Gould ridiculed it as "the crudest form of propaganda," as a "tasteless affront to minimum journalistic standards."38

Angered, Ochsner complained to his friend Turner Catledge, executive editor of the New York Times, that Gould had slurred INCA and anti-communism. Catledge tried to soothe Ochsner, assuring him that his newspaper's editorial page was "unequivocally anti-Communist," and that Gould had only suggested that "politically motivated programs such as 'Hitler in Havana' should be advertised as such and not presented simply as documentaries with disinterested commercial sponsorship." Ochsner was not pacified. Forwarding a copy of Catledge's letter to Butler, he commented that "it just goes to show we are up against real problems when it comes to fighting the leftist press."39

Besides funding this film, Frawley helped INCA establish a presence in Los Angeles. In 1966 Schick and Technicolor, both headed by Frawley, invited Butler to counsel their "top management on the significance of current revolutionary conflict and their probable effects on the corporate future." Together the two firms would require one-third of his working time. In return, they would pay him a monthly retainer of $2,000, provide him a furnished home in Los Angeles, and allow him to continue his INCA duties. Butler accepted. Given his fascination with media and his ambitions for INCA, the chance to operate in Los Angeles under such generous patronage must have been irresistible. This decision, he explained, would benefit INCA. His new position would help the organization spread beyond New Orleans and would put him "on the ground floor in the midst of the communications center of America." And he pledged that INCA's headquarters and his own primary residence would remain in New Orleans.40

But changing circumstances were drawing INCA away from its Latin American orientation and from its New Orleans birthplace. While INCA was refining its propaganda capabilities and was expanding to the West Coast, a second threat was disturbing its elite social base. Gradually, opposition to the Vietnam war, student radicalism, and black rebellion were supplanting the Cuban Revolution as sources of elite alarm. Again addressing its patrons' anxieties, INCA devoted itself more and more to combating domestic radicalism, an insurgency whose flames burned brightest far from the Crescent City. INCA explained this shift as a mere tactical adjustment of its founding strategy. Because Cuba supposedly directed a concealed hierarchy of subversion that instigated and then manipulated domestic disorder, INCA's original purpose remained valid. Having earlier parried a Soviet-Cuban thrust into Latin America, INCA now engaged the same enemy within the U. S. The war had come home, thanks to the Cubans, when Oswald [sic] assassinated Kennedy and then, as the 1960s unfolded, when black and student radicalism raged. "Castro switched the major emphasis of his campaign from a Latin American encircling movement to a strike at the heart of the U. S.," wrote Butler.41

An especially disturbing expression of this external subversion was student radicalism. As Ochsner argued, "the drive to seize college campuses and convert them into staging grounds for urban revolt, is the current manifestation of Castro's campaign. The campuses are decisive." In 1966 Ochsner reported that Butler had "investigated the TEACH-IN at U.C.L.A. last week. Vicious material advocating everything from perversion to treason is being circulated to the youngsters there. He says that the situation is similar but worse than the Tulane SPEAK-IN." Similarly, Butler warned Frawley about "the present plans to capture the campuses and

convert them into staging grounds to attack white neighborhoods."42

INCA set out to douse these flames flickering across U. S. campuses. In the fall of 1967 Ochsner and another INCA member obtained a list of former Junior Achievers then attending colleges in New Orleans. From this list INCA hoped to assemble a nucleus of conservative students on each campus. INCA's executive committee recommended starting a "fight against communism on the campuses and in the colleges of New Orleans and gradually spread this out." Local high schools also concerned INCA. In October 1968 Richard E. Warren, an INCA staff member, offered assistance to the principal of John McDonogh High School. "For some time now," Warren wrote, "Dr. Joseph Schwertz (Fortier High School) and I have been communicating in order to prevent disruptions by radical students in his high school." Recently some McDonogh students had asked Warren for help at their school against similar disturbances and against organizing efforts by the leftist Students for a Democratic Society.43

Meanwhile on the West Coast, Butler was trying to intervene among rebellious youths. He faced imposing cultural, generational, and political obstacles. Whereas he represented an organization of white, conservative, older businessmen, radicals drew upon generational solidarity, upon revulsion with racism and intervention in Vietnam, and upon a common counter-cultural idiom manifested in the underground press, music, and other media. Butler thus confronted a tough problem: How to make INCA's stale anti-communism palatable to young Americans? INCA could not serve this purpose. It was, in Butler's mind, a conflict corporation, not a mass youth movement. Seeking an imaginative organizational form, Butler created the SQUARE Movement. Adapting Maoist ideas, he explained to Ochsner that every revolution walked on two legs: education and action. INCA handled the former, but its nonprofit status forbade it straying from "educational purposes."

Consequently, he was trying "to attract rank and file 'Activists' who will set up SQUARE Circles to practice what INCA teaches." Armed with INCA's ideas, SQUARE activists would battle the left for the minds of young Americans. Borrowing counter-cultural forms, Butler produced SQUARE posters, bumper stickers, buttons, and other artifacts. In the spring of 1968 he launched a magazine, the Westwood Village SQUARE, as an antidote to the underground press. Further heeding Mao's advice, Butler tried to swim as a fish in this youthful sea. Although well past thirty years old, he tailored his appearance to countercultural norms. "I have been working right in the middle of the mess," he wrote an INCA member back in New Orleans, "and so my hair is longer and my suits sharper. But the same old super-patriotic, American revolutionary heart beats beneath the bright threads." INCA had a national presence as well: In the late 1960s and early 1970s it organized annual conferences to train young Americans in conflict management; it intervened in the antiwar movement; it established a campus news service to help students print "freedom newspapers"; and its monthly information service reported on leftist activity.44

Notwithstanding its own boasts, INCA accomplished little on campuses. Its old-style anticommunism, even when dressed in hip fashions, was unable to deflect youthful discontent over U. S. foreign policy and domestic problems. The SQUARE Movement, admitted Butler early in 1971, "has been a generalized force, with little or no organization."45 This failure contributed to a larger pattern of decline. By the late 1960s INCA's earlier promise and confidence were fading. Its troubles stemmed partially from anticommunism's loosening grip upon American thought. The very issues that aroused INCA's supporters-revolutionary nationalism abroad and strife at home-caused many other Americans to question anticommunism's crudely reductionist assumptions. INCA's facile politics offered little historical grounding or analytical insight for those then trying to understand the war in Vietnam or the problems faced by U. S. blacks. Nonetheless INCA clung stubbornly to its ideas and thereby found itself increasingly at odds with prevailing political discourse.

Indicative of INCA's vulnerability was the trial of Clay Shaw. Ironically that trial occurred in INCA's New Orleans stronghold and centered on the Kennedy assasination, the source of INCA's major propaganda success. On March 1, 1967, Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested Shaw, the former general manager of the International Trade Mart and a key figure in the city's Latin American program. Garrison charged that in September 1963 Shaw, David William Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, and others met in New Orleans and conspired to kill President Kennedy. Whereas INCA had blamed the assassination on communism, Garrison pointed to a conspiracy from the right.46

Garrison's investigation disturbed INCA's leaders. Apparently in May 1967 INCA's general counsel, Gibbons Burke, advised Butler to secure the organization's files. Subsequently, Butler reported the records had been "air expressed out here to Los Angeles.... They arrived in good order two weeks ago, and I have put them under lock and key."47

Ochsner even feared his own arrest. In the summer of 1967, William Gurvich, who had just resigned as one of Garrison's investigators, claimed the district attorney was preparing a number of arrests, including that of a doctor. "I wondered whether he might mean me," Ochsner wrote Butler, "but did not think he did until Bill Helis, a good friend of mine, who knows Gurvich very well, called me [said Gurvich] and told him it was I and he was going to have me arrested as an accessory to the fact."

Rumor had Ochsner treating Jack Ruby, discovering a hopeless cancer that convinced Ruby "he had nothing to lose by killing Oswald," and then destroying Ruby's record, thereby withholding evidence. Two weeks later he wrote Butler that Garrison "is still going wild." Gurvich had told the press that the district attorney was about to arrest "a number of people in New Orleans, including a doctor, a coffee man, and a hotel owner." Allegedly those to be arrested were Ochsner, a member of the Reily family, and Seymour Weiss, formerly managing director of the city's Roosevelt Hotel. "I have heard nothing about it, but I would not be surprised if he would attempt to do it," wrote Ochsner.48

Doctors had been known to inject healthy people with viruses.

Garrison's probe therefore challenged INCA's version of the assassination and threatened to implicate Ochsner in a sensational trial. Predictably, Ochsner and Butler responded by trying to make communism the issue. Bearing the brunt of the attack was Mark Lane--whose book Rush to Judgment had placed him among the leading critics of the Warren Commission and who was then conferring with Garrison. In a public statement the two INCA leaders branded Lane an unscrupulous communist, "a professional propagandist of the lunatic left who has been inferring Oswald was innocent and Kennedy was the victim of a right wing plot, since four weeks after the assassination." Communists were manipulating the issue to create distrust of the government and to cause the U. S. to "crumble from within."49

They turned to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) for more information. Ochsner asked F. Edward Hebert, a U. S. representative from the New Orleans area, to "get whatever information you can from Congressman Willis about Mark Lane." Edwin E. Willis, also a U. S. representative from Louisiana, was HUAC chairman. Hebert sent Ochsner a report culled from HUAC files, which cited "Communist Fronts" with which Lane had been associated between 1952 and 1967.50

Ochsner also obtained a five-page intelligence report about Lane. Although its sources were unspecified, this report was preceded by an unsigned memorandum attributing the report's information to "the files of the New York City Police, the FBI, and other security agencies." The memorandum charged that Lane "is and has been a dedicated Communist; is and has been a sadist and masochist, charged on numerous occasions with sodomy." This suggestive prelude was followed by the familiar listing of membership in "front" organizations, civil-rights arrests, and involvement in the assassinationi nvestigation. The "numerous "sodomy charges shrank to mention of a 1962 inquiry by the Queens County District Attorney, without detailing its outcome.51

Armed with such material, INCA tried to discredit and isolate Lane. In December 1967 Ochsner scolded the presidents of both Tulane University and the Young Men's Business Club for allowing Lane to speak at their respective institutions. Later that month he appealed to an executive of Time, Inc., to expose Lane and other alleged subversives. New Orleans had been invaded, complained Ochsner, by a "legion of lunatic left-wing extremists,"w ho were "launching the most outrageous innuendoes, all aimed at undermining public confidence in the FBI, the CIA, the Office of the Presidency, stigmatizing Cuban refugees, and anti-communists and obtaining classified information." Yet, he lamented, "not one national news medium has had the courage to expose their deep-seated political bias, despite the fact that they have track records which read like the indexes to the WORKER."52

Unable credibly to denounce Garrison as a communist, Ochsner and Butler instead whispered that mental instability left the district attorney prey to communist manipulation. "As you know," Butler wrote Ochsner", Garrison is a sick, sick person mentally but clever enough to manipulate public opinion." Ochsner agreed: "People generally in New Orleans are losing complete faith in the man and most people think he is completely nuts, which I believe he is, and before long he will crack up." At least once, Ochsner spread apparent evidence of Garrison's problems. During an election campaign for district attorney, an opponent had obtained Garrison's military medical records, which documented treatment for psychological disorders from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. Ochsner possessed a transcript of these records and sent a copy to a friend who was the publisher of the Nashville Banner. "It shows why he is doing what he is," Ochsner observed. "Of course, it is a shame that he is playing into the hands of the Communists because he is being advised by Mark Lane and [Harold] Weisberg."53

Eventually in 1969 the jury rejected Garrison's case and acquitted Clay Shaw. Although INCA and its leaders avoided implication, the episode was revealing. Unlike the nurturing circumstances of the early 1960s, INCA felt beleaguered by the decade's end. In addition to these external pressures, it was weakened also by internal conflicts that eroded its most valuable asset, elite support. Although its members never abandoned INCA's principles, they grew dissatisfied with its ineffectiveness. Much of their discontent stemmed from Butler's alleged managerial shortcomings, especially in financial matters.

INCA had been plagued by a chronic shortage of funds--an anomaly for an organization blessed with such wealthy patrons. Payments to staff, landlords, and creditors often were delayed or missed altogether. In 1966, for instance, Butler advised INCA's landlord that only $200 of its $380 office rent would be forthcoming, while at the same time he pleaded with the previous landlord to delay collection of unpaid rent.54 Blaming INCA's shortcomings on the staff's amateurish methods, some members suggested adopting business-like procedures of accounting and office routine. Such measures, they argued, would generate regular income from supporters and thereby end the worrisome deficits. Emerging as their spokesman was

INCA treasurer Maurice W. Grundy, the president of two lumber companies.

More the publicist and promoter than the manager, Butler resisted these seemingly innocent and sensible suggestions. His argument hinged on the related assumptions that INCA was a combative propaganda organization and that the conflict manager must possess financial control. Business norms, he said, would deprive a conflict organization of its flexibility, disarm it before communists, and transform it into a social club spinning harmless platitudes. Defeating communists required innovation and daring, not the predictable routine of an accountant. In revealing words he summarized his differences with Grundy: "Suffice it to say that it was based on a Military Management, rather than the Business Management approach."55 This tension between professional anticommunist and businessmen patrons threatened to tear INCA apart.

Continuing financial embarrassment sharpened this conflict. In June 1966 a frustrated Butler told Ochsner that electricity at INCA's office had been shut off due to delinquent bills. For this and other ills he blamed Grundy for "tieing strings" to the thousands of dollars in INCA's bank account. Blinded by business orthodoxy, Grundy tried "to reduce the financial foundation to the cut and dried concepts of the lumber industry." The conflict, insisted Butler, was irreconcilable. But Ochsner rejected this implied ultimatum, defending the need for revised office procedures and advising Butler to "get over your persecution complex as far as Mr. Grundy is concerned."'56

This particular crisis subsided, probably because a chastened Butler dared not antagonize Ochsner further. But the underlying problem still chafed Butler, and his factional opponents still demanded changes. By the fall of 1967 Butler's position seemed precarious. Ben C. Toledano, an attorney and prominent local conservative, wrote his fellow INCA directors that he had been" considering simply resigning from the INCA Board for this would be the easiest way to remedy my displeasure with the way things have been going." The executive committee, which included Grundy, began using T. Sterling Dunn--formerly the area manager for Sears, Roebuck--as a consultant. Dunn reported that membership confidence was eroding due to sloppy operational methods. At one executive committee meeting Ochsner stressed that INCA must function in a businesslike fashion, and at another the executive committee decided "we must have a businessman in the INCA offices to constantly supervise the business end of the organization and to see that the members were properly billed and followed up." A defensive Butler believed Grundy was using Dunn "to interfere in the INCA office by remote control."57

Yet Butler somehow reversed this momentum and drove Grundy from the organization. Their final confrontation occurred at a board meeting in April 1968 when Butler suggested INCA cosponsor a conference of conservative youths that summer. Grundy countered that INCA should instead plan an alternative program for September, that money should be conserved for office management, and that a fund drive should be prepared. Butler exploded: Delay would be disastrous and, besides, Grundy was unqualified to decide the issue. His patience exhausted, a weary Grundy gave up. Reminding everyone that he had tried to quit two weeks earlier, he now insisted t he board accept his resignation. It did, whereupon h and Dunn quit the meeting and INCA.58

Butler's victory did not, however, slow INCA's decline. Especially damaging were Frawley's business misfortunes. In May 1970, for example, dissident Technicolor shareholders charged him with investing more than $ 9 million of Technicolor funds in other companies he headed. In a proxy battle a month later the dissidents ousted him and arranged purchase of his Technicolor stock. "Pat's ability to help is going to be severely curtailed for awhile," Butler observed. Indeed, the rich vein that had been opened so generously by Frawley now contracted. Butler noted that his own "income from Frawley Enterprises has been curtailed."59 In this dispirited setting INCA, in November 1970, finally formed an area council in Los Angeles. But the council either lost or failed to recruit its indispensable patrons: Dudley Swim died and Frawley declined to serve as cochairman. With a grim show of determination, Butler resolved to reestablish the council "promptly and begin methodically recruiting Anti-Communists as we did in New Orleans, gradually building up the Big Names." Instead, financial deficits widened and the council died.60

Late in 1972, cut off from Frawley's patronage, Butler resumed permanent New Orleans residence. Prospects were no better in the Crescent City. As always, financial pressures harried and demoralized the staff. Richard Warren, a key staff member, complained to Ochsner that his four years with INCA had left him with "a destroyed marriage, a ruined credit rating, and drastic change in my personality." He would stay with INCA only "until I can find something else that is not as demanding."61

INCA weakened further as the 1970s unfolded. Its ineffectiveness continued to alienate its remaining elite members. Years later Captain John W. Clark recalled that the Delta Line, of which he had been president, had given "substantial sums in the way of contributions . . . and I personally underwrote some notes when they needed it." Yet, INCA "never really got off the ground." It was "more of a fundraising organization to pay for the expenses. And they constantly have been from one crisis to another." Similarly, one of Ochsner's sons said supporters "dropped off because they just didn't see INCA doing what it used to do." "I don't know how effective INCA was," he said. "I've talked to a lot of people in Central America particularly, and I can't find anybody that's heard... Truth Tapes."62

Perhaps INCA also suffered from its devotion to a single issue. In its early years that focus had been an advantage. Bruised by Castro's revolution and alarmed about its spread, New Orleans's elite had gathered under INCA's apocalyptic banners. The immediacy of the Cuban spectre had encouraged a heterogeneous elite to unify around a single issue. But as the Cuban threat receded, it probably became increasingly difficult to sustain such cohesion. Then perhaps the dependence on one issue became a liability, robbing INCA of whatever vitality and clarity might have been gained from a broader conservative program. As resonant and powerful as it remained, anticommunism could not fit every situation. Over-reliance on it forced INCA into increasingly cranky positions. Thus Ochsner and Butler perceived the Watergate imbroglio through the reducing spectacles of communist conspiracy. Ochsner informed a Houston supporter that INCA had uncovered proof of "a definite link between the communists and the people who are trying to impeach the President." And Butler explained to a friend that "the disinformation campaign on Nixon may go down in history as even more decisive than the Kennedy assassination enterprise. It is much more easily laid at the CPUSA's [Communist Party, USA] door, although the mass media has neglected to probe for the underlying facts."63

By the late 1970s, only a handful of loyalists held INCA together. In 1978 a subdued Butler told Ochsner that the directors had "unanimously decided to try to keep INCA alive." "I've had to devote most of my time just to keeping doors open at INCA for the past six months," he complained. When Ochsner, pleading the debilities of age, tried to reduce his commitment to INCA, Butler begged him to remain at the helm as his "departure would be a disaster." Ochsner relented, though he gave up the presidency for the titular position of chairman. "Unless we can get the support of more people," Ochsner wrote, "it is difficult to see how we can keep it viable." On September 24, 1981, he died at the age of eighty-five.64 INCA was then a palsied twenty years old.

INCA declined, but its brand of anticommunism remained potent. In 1982 several influential New Orleanians helped form the Caribbean Commission, an organization that resembled INCA. Dr. Alton Ochsner, Jr., a son of the late INCA leader, served as the commission's chairman; Samuel G. Robinson as president; and, until his death, Ernest Burguieres, Jr., as executive vice president. Ochsner and Robinson had been INCA members. As INCA had fixed on Cuba, the commission dedicated itself to discrediting the Nicaraguan Revolution. It portrayed itself and the Nicaraguan contras as defenders of democracy and of a revolution betrayed, as opponents equally of the Somozas and of the Sandinistas. Arguing that communists had usurped the democratic revolution against Somoza and had installed an oppressive regime that served Soviet and Cuban masters, it demanded the U. S. government "give enough aid to the Nicaraguan freedom fighters to permit them to complete their revolution and eliminate Sandinista oppression." Besides propaganda, the commission provided the Contras with food, clothing, and medicine, and Ochsner treated wounded Contra soldiers without cost in New Orleans.65

Much like INCA, though, the commission's democratic rhetoric and its judicious criticism of both Somocistas and Sandinistas obscured the amicable relations that the commission's leaders or their families had enjoyed with the Somozas. As noted previously, this had been true of Ochsner's father. And the son rallied to the Contras before they acquired the trappings of a democratic insurgency. Just weeks after the 1980 U. S. presidential election, he appeared before Reagan advisers on behalf of Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries, whom a UPI dispatch described as "pro-Somoza Nicaraguan exiles." Robinson and Burguieres had similar connections. The former was an executive of the family company, Robinson Lumber, that had possessed extensive interests on Nicaragua's east coast. He admitted he "personally knew all three Somozas, and they were well educated and thoughtful people." Burguieres, a New Orleanian of elite background, had lived in Nicaragua as a businessman for several years after World War II and had maintained friendly ties with the Somozas.66

Complicit with a social structure that invited revolution, the commission's leaders tried to bury their past by appropriating a democratic idiom and by defaming revolution as the work of a global conspiracy. In short, the history of INCA and the emergence of the Caribbean Commission suggest a persisting intimacy between anticommunism and elite citizens.

ENDNOTES:
32 Butler to Morrison, June 21, 1961, Morrison Collection; Morrison to Members of
the Information Council of the Americas, June 24, 1961, carton S61-11, Morrison
Collection; Hale Boggs, "Congressman Warns of Apathy in Wake of Nuclear Test
Treaty," Clarion Herald, October 10, 1963.

33 Ochsner to Clayton Nairne, February 25, 1964, folder 3, box 51, Ochsner Papers;
Information Council of the Americas, INCA Cash Receipts, December 14, 1966, folder 1,
box 53, Ochsner Papers; H. Eustis Reily to H. L. Hunt, January 5, 1967, folder 6, box 105,
Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to Hunt, December 31, 1966, folder 1, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

34 Dudley Swim to Ochsner, December 24, 1970, folder 6, box 144, Ochsner Papers;
Swim to Neville Levy, November 28, 1960, International House Papers; Moody's
Industrial Manual, 1969, p. 1224; William W. Turner, Power on the Right (Berkeley,
1971), pp. 172-184, 191-194.

35 House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International Organizations
and Movements, Winning the Cold War: The U. S. Ideological Offensive, Part V, 88th
Congress, 1st session, 581; Ochsner to Joyce Hall, July 7, 1964, folder 2, box 51,
Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to George St. John, December 28, 1964, folder 1, box 51,
OchsnerP apers.

36 These records were titled Oswald: Self-Portrait in Red and Oswald Speaks. On
Oswald's New Orleans sojourn, see Michael L. Kurtz, "Lee Harvey Oswald in New
Orleans: A Reappraisal," Louisiana History, X XI (1980), 7-22.

37 Edward Scannell Butler, "INCA vs. Oswald: The Motivation of an Assassin,"
Victory, (December 11, 1963), n.p.

38 Butler to INCA Membership, December 7 , 1966, folder 1, box 53, OchsnerP apers;
H. W. Balgooyen to Butler, November 2, 1966, folder 2, box 53, Ochsner Papers;
Times-Picayune, December 19, 1966; New York Times, October 28, 1966.

39 Ochsner to Turner Catledge, November 15, 1966, Ochsner Papers; Catledge to
Ochsner, November 22, 1966; Ochsner to Butler, November 26, 1966, folder 2, box 53,
Ochsner Papers.

40 John F. Seyer to Butler, March 3, 1966, Ochsner Papers; Patrick J. Frawley, Jr., to
Butler, March 1, 1966, folder 4, box 53, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Ochsner, March 9,
1966, folder 4, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

41 Butler to Friend of INCA, August 22, 1967, Information Council of the Americas,
Political Ephemera Collection, Tulane University; Butler to Wallace M. Davis, January
15, 1966, folder 4, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

42 Ochsner to INCA Supporter, n . d., Information Council of the Americas, Political
Ephemera Collection; Ochsner to Percival Stem, March 31, 1966, folder 4, box 53,
Ochsner Papers; Butler to Patrick J. Frawley, Jr., November 4, 1968, folder 1, box 121,
Ochsner Papers.

43 INCA Executive Committee, minutes of October 17, October 31, November 28,
1967, meetings, folders 1 and 3, box 105, Ochsner Papers; Richard E. Warren to Joseph
Abraham, Jr., October2 8, 1968, folder 1, box 121, Ochsner Papers.

44 Butler to Ochsner, December 18, 1970, folder 6, box 144, Ochsner Papers; Butler,
Revolution, p. 115; Butler to Dudley Swim, May 9, 1968, folder 4, box 121; Butler to
James Richards, January1 6, 1970, folder 4, box 145, Ochsner Papers;" INCA Fact Sheet:
Ten Years, 1961-1971," Information Council of the Americas, Political Ephemera
Collection; Ochsner to INCA Member, January 12, 1970, folder 4, box 145, Ochsner
Papers.

45 Butler to Richard E. Warren, February 20, 1971, folder 7, box 165, Ochsner Papers.

46 Rosemary James and Jack Wardlaw, Plot or Politics? The Garrison Case and Its
Cast (New Orleans, 1967), p. 58.

47 Butler to Gibbons Burke, June 12, 1967, folder 4, box 105, Ochsner Papers.
48 Ochsner to Butler, June 29, 1967, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to Butler, July 12,
1967, folder 4, box 105, Ochsner Papers.

49 "An Unrushed Judgment of Mark Lane: Statement by Alton Ochsner and Ed Butler
of INCA," April 5, 1967, folder 3, box 105, Ochsner Papers.

50 Ochsner to F. Edward Hebert, April 10, 1967, folder 2, box 105; Hebert to Ochsner,
April 19, 1967, folder 6, box 105, Ochsner Papers. This report was titled "Information
from the Files of the Committee on Un-American Activities, U. S. House of
Representatives, April 14, 1967, For: Honorable F. Edward Hebert, Subject: Mark Lane."

51 This report is located in folder 1, box 134, Ochsner Papers.

52 Ochsner to Herbert Longenecker, December 12, 1967, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to
Milton L. Fletchinger, December 12, 1967, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to James Linen,
December 28, 1967, folder 1, box 105, Ochsner Papers.

53 Butler to Ochsner, July 15, 1967, folder 4, box 105, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to
Butler, July 19, 1967, folder 4, box 105, Ochsner Papers; James and Wardlaw, Plot or
Politics?, pp. 102-103; Ochsner to James G. Stahlman, January 17, 1968, folder 7, box
121, Ochsner Papers.

54 Butler to Paul Dastugue, November 19, 1966, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Barney
Maloney, November 19, 1966, folder 2, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

55 Butler to Bruce Baird, Jr., May 5, 1968, folder 4, box 121, Ochsner Papers.

56 Butler to Ochsner, June 17, 1966, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to Butler, June 21,
1966, folder 4, box 53, Ochsner Papers.

57 Ben C. Toledano to Board Member of INCA, September 27,1967, folder 4, Ochsner
Papers; INCA Executive Committee, minutes of October 17 and of December 5, 1967,
meetings, folders 1 and 3, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Ochsner, November 17, 1967, folder
3, box 105, Ochsner Papers.

58 INCA Board of Directors, minutes of April 8, 1968, folder 5, box 121, Ochsner
Papers.

59 Wall Street Journal, May 20, 1970; June 18, 1970; Butler to Ochsner, August 31,
1970, folder 7, box 144, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Ochsner, February2 9, 1972, folder
3, box 172, Ochsner Papers.

60 INCA Board of Directors, minutes of December 21, 1970, meeting, folder 6, box
144, Ochsner Papers; Richard E. Warren to Mr. and Mrs. Patrick J. Frawley, Jr.,
November2 4, 1970, folder 6, box 146, OchsnerP apers;B utlert o OchsnerF, ebruary2 9,
1972, folder 3, box 172, Ochsner Papers; Butler to Ochsner, August 5, 1972, folder 2,
box 172, Ochsner Papers.

61 Ochsner to Butler, March 14, 1974, folder 4, box 194, Ochsner Papers; Warren to
Ochsner, December 16, 1971, folder 5, box 165, Ochsner Papers.

62 John W. Clark, interview with author, Gulfport, Miss., May 29, 1984; Alton
Ochsner, Jr., interview with author, New Orleans, June 10, 1984.

63 Ochsner to Mrs. R. L. Blaffer, April 4, 1974, folder 2, box 194, Ochsner Papers;
Butler to Eugene H. Methvin, September 11, 1974, folder 3, box 194, Ochsner Papers.

64 Butler to Ochsner, November 27, 1978, Ochsner Papers; Ochsner to Butler,
December 1, 1978, folder 5, box 235, Ochsner Papers.

65 Caribbean Commission Newsletter, November 1, 1982; Times-Picayune/States-Item,
January 16, 1984; August 6, 1983; April 20, 1985; Times-Picayune, September 30,
1984; Alton Ochsner, Jr., letter to the editor, Times-Picayune/States-Item, April 13,
1984.

66 Times-Picayune/States-Item, November 19, 1980; S. G. Robinson, letter to the
editor, Times-Picayune/States-Item, July 27, 1983; Virginea Burguibres, interview with
author, New Orleans, May 15, 1984; Erest Burguieres, Jr., to Victor H. Schiro,
November 1, 1967, carton S67-2, Schiro Collection.

Clint Murchison's Condition in April 1961

2011-12-03T16:46:00.001-06:00

We can only wonder whether he was in any condition to host a party on November 21, 1963 in Dallas at a mansion on Turtle Creek. The biggest question we need to ask, if we're following the money, is "What was the Alleghany Corporation?"

Drew Pearson Column

4/29/1961

Texans Raid Wall Street

WASHINGTON — It won't make the headlines of the recent invasion of Cuba, but a Texas invasion of Wall Street is now taking place. It's a proxy fight, the biggest in history, to take over the management of the giant Allegheny holding corporation. At stake are the New York Central Railroad, the Missouri Pacific, and Investors Diversified Services, a $2 billion mutual funds empire, all controlled by Alleghany. The cast of characters in this battle of financial titans is:

The Murchison family of Texas, including the once rugged, now ailing, Clint Murchison Sr., and his two sons, Clint Jr., and John Dabney, now living at the Carlyle Hotel in New York.

Allan P. Kirby, parsimonious Scotsman who eats crackers and milk at his desk in Wall Street and commutes nightly to New Jersey.

Clint Sr.

The fight for the Alleghany Corporation climaxes one of the most amazing in a series of Texas Raids on the north—political and otherwise—ever seen In a state famous for its old-time border raids. Clint Murchison Sr., has been raiding the north ever since he sent $10,000 into Maryland (with his wife) to help the late Joe McCarthy defeat the late Sen. Millard Tydings; also sent money into Connecticut lo help McCarthy defeat Sen. Bill Benton. Murchison's Maryland contribution, which was not reported to "appropriate authorities," was also found by a Senate committee to have been used to pay for a tabloid featuring a faked picture of Tydings posing with Communist leader Earl Browder. This the committee described as part of a "despicable back - street" campaign which "disregarded simple decency and common honesty." The Murchison money which raided Connecticut, helped McCarthy defeat the one senator—Bill Benton—who had the courage to demand McCarthy's senate censure.

Murchison also sent money north to help finance McCarthy's 1953 Chicago telecast in which he charged that Adlai Stevenson would continue "the suicidal Kremlin- dictated policies of this nation." Murchison's far-flung operations were made possible by the 27 ½ per cent oil depletion allowance which puts him and other oilmen in a more favored position than other taxpayers. They can use their money to influence political thought and dominate Industry as most taxpayers can't. This oil depletion allowance, incidentally, is one of the major loopholes In the tax structure which President Kennedy did not recommend plugging when he sent his recent tax message to Congress.

* * *

By taking advantage of it, Clint Murchison has amassed not only on oil empire valued at some $300 million, but an insurance company in Richmond, Va., Atlantic Life; a bus company, Transcontinental Bus System, second only to Greyhound in size; a publishing company, Henry Holt; a candy company, Martha Washington; a sportsmen's magazine, Field and Stream, West Coast steamship company; The Royal Gorge Bridge and Amusement Company in Colorado; various motels, and at one time two race tracks at Charlestown, W. Va., and San Diego, California. At the latter, Del Mar race track, Murchison also owns a motel at which he lavishly entertained J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI chief, and Joe McCarthy. In the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico, Murchison also owns a 75,000-acre ranch valued at $1 million, where he takes guests on hunting junkets. Clint Murchison Sr., once described as a "bold and rugged Texas Democrat," is now not as rugged as he used to be. Confined to a wheel chair, Murchison, according to his family physician, is now "able to speak only a few words at a time and these words are frequently difficult to understand and to interpret."

* * *

The family physician. Dr. John L. Jenkins of Dallas, filed a sworn affidavit Feb. 20 of this year in

the U.S. District Court of Southern New York on another legal battle involving the Murchisons.

The affidavit states:

"The stroke Mr. Murchison suffered in April 1960, caused partial paralysis of the right side of Mr. Murchison's body and caused an impairment of the nerves of the speech center, making it very difficult for him to speak. As a result of the stroke Mr. Murchison's memory has failed to the extent that even as to recent events he sometimes has no recollection at all and when he has some recollection of events it is often faulty. Mr. Murchison has been for some time and is now unable to walk unaided. "It is impossible to predict or give an opinion as to whether Mr. Murchison's condition will change in the foreseeable future."

Perhaps because Clint Murchison Sr., is ailing, and because his two sons are not the rugged individualists their father is, the Murchison financial empire has been searching frantically for funds. The Murchisons owe several millions to Mrs. Robert Young, widow of the late New York Central executive, and, according to SEC records, have borrowed $3,000,000 from Arnold S. Kirkeby, who owns the Kirkeby hotel chain and who once borrowed indirectly from "Longy" Zwillman, the New Jersey gangster, to acquire the Sherry-Netherland in New York. It's a frantic battle between the new Texas oil millionaires and the old Scotch Wall Street millionaire. Whoever wins out on May 1 will control two major railroads and the biggest mutual funds empire in the world. The battle will be worth watching.

Truth Be Told

2011-11-22T08:44:00.000-06:00

I met Justin Crann in Toronto this year at a press conference at the Women's Bookstore on Harbord near the University. He was one of several intrepid reporters who had turned up there to talk to Judyth Vary Baker about her book, Me and Lee, which had been selling in hardback for a year and was being released in soft cover on October 20, 2011, the day Lee Oswald would have been 72 years old.

Judyth knew Lee from April until November in 1963 and has never forgotten who he really was, though she has had to fight hard to stay alive once she began telling her story in 1999. She has been either castigated or ignored by many in the "research community," people with no sense of what community really means.

Justin Crann's story in the Gleaner Community Press, however, was a refreshing change. Open, eager, and enthusiastic, Justin reported what he saw and heard without bias. In fact, all the reporters in Toronto met Judyth with open arms, and minds, questioned her objectively as a witness to events leading up to JFK's assassination and that of Lee Oswald two days later. Researchers who seek the truth are not afraid of listening with open minds and hearts. Thanks to Justin Crann for this accurate report:

Lee Harvey Oswald’s lover visits Toronto Women’s Bookstore

October 20th, 2011

Judyth Vary Baker, 68, made a rare North American appearance at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (73 Harbord St.) to promote the paperback release of her memoir and celebrate what would have been her lover’s 72nd birthday. Justin Crann/Gleaner News

Lee Harvey Oswald was a patriotic American, a government agent fiercely loyal to his President, and a patsy framed by the conspirators who really killed John F. Kennedy.

That’s the truth according to Judyth Vary Baker, author of Me and Lee, a 600-page memoir recounting her teenage years and brief romance with Oswald. Baker was at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore (73 Harbord St.) on Oct. 18 to promote the paperback release of her book and celebrate Oswald’s 72nd birthday.

“I love my country, and I love the truth, and I want the truth to come out that Lee Oswald did not kill Kennedy,” Baker, 68, said to a small crowd of reporters, JFK enthusiasts, and devotees.

During what was billed as a “rare media appearance,” Baker spoke extensively about her involvement in a secret government program attempting to create an injectable form of cancer and a short-lived tryst with the alleged presidential assassin.

Baker also talked about her passion for her country, which she said she hasn’t been able to visit in years for fear of her own life and the wellbeing of her family.

But Baker’s self-imposed exile hasn’t prevented her from making friends in the United States, and some of those friends were in attendance at the paperback release.

Linda Minor, a Texan who said she has researched Judyth’s story and a friend of her publisher, traveled from Tennessee to see them and attend the release.

“When I heard that they were coming, I had just known them through email and various Internet facilities, and I thought, ‘This is my great opportunity to meet them both at one time,’” said Minor, “and I just couldn’t pass it up.”

Jeff Worcester, a political science student from Rochester, New York, said he has been talking with Judyth for over four years.“I’d been familiar with her story ever since she was featured of the Men Who Killed Kennedy series, and I had been put in touch with her and we’ve corresponded since.

“I always look at things and try and follow-up as much as I can no matter how much I believe and I just came out saying, ‘Yeah, this lady is the real deal.’”

Jerry Lasky, a resident of Toronto and JFK enthusiast, took the day off of work to attend the release. “I’m glad that I came here, I guess because my hero [JFK] led me here,” said Lasky. “I didn’t realize it was Oswald’s birthday today.”

Me and Lee is available for purchase at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore and other select retailers. For more information about Judyth Vary Baker and her memoir, visit meandlee.com