Rise of Centex Construction in Texas

Murchison Brothers in Construction

The post World War II era of housing construction sponsored by the federal government and given the title of "affordable housing" began with the National Housing Act of 1949, which went into effect only a year before the Korean War heated up. That law created an urban renewal program with the power of eminent domain to force land within a so-called slum area to be sold to a public entity with the aim of redeveloping the land for a public purpose.

Credit to Parliament of Whores website

As a result, certain friends of some of the politicians involved in the legislation became quite wealthy. We have no doubt some of that wealth was kicked back to the sponsors of the legislation. In bidness (as Texans say business), "You scratch my back; I'll scratch yours."

The Wherry Act, introduced by Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, gave the Farmers Home Administration authority to finance construction of military housing--264 Wherry projects for three military departments, totaling 83,742 units. By 1951 friends of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson were in on the act:

Construction of 612 housing units costing $5,700,000 at Randolph Air Force Base is scheduled to get underway by Aug. 1. Engineering surveys on the huge housing project, to be erected under the terms of the Wherry Housing Act, are now being completed. The units will be erected on the both sides of the main road leading to headquarters building. The project is expected to be completed around Jan. 1.

There will be 90 buildings with 360 dwelling units for airmen and 63 buildings with 252 housing units for officers. Base civilian personnel will also be permitted to make application for accommodations in the two and three bedroom units. An acute housing shortage now exists on the base. Playground areas, parking facilities and all utilities are included, in project plans.

Murchison Brothers are sponsors of the project, and Centex Construction Co. will build the units. Architects for the project are Milam and Roper. All are from Dallas. [Source: San Antonio Express, July 12, 1951]

"Murchison Brothers," as referred to in the above article, was originally a partnership set up in Dallas between Clint Murchison, Sr. and one or more of his brothers, but in 1949 the portfolio was transferred to his two sons. Clint Sr. -- the grandson of Thomas Franklin Murchison, and son of John Weldon Murchison, Sr. -- had three brothers who were also Texas businessmen:

• John Weldon Murchison, Jr., donor to Trinity University in San Antonio
• T. Frank Murchison, long-time trustee of Trinity
• Kenneth Murchison, in 1924 a banker in New York for International Banking Corporation, returned to Texas, living in Dallas where he operated his own insurance company. As I wrote in a 2012 post: 

He married Helen Claire Delaney, daughter of oil producer Michael Joseph Delaney of Bowling Green, Ohio, in 1929, and they set up housekeeping in Highland Park, north of Dallas, where he worked for his brother Clint. Years later they lived at 3525 Turtle Creek Blvd., and Kenneth ran the Insurers Corporation in Dallas. Growing up in an assortment of states, Helen Delaney Murchison had moved from Ohio to South Boulder Avenue West in Tulsa, Oklahoma by 1910, and lived a couple doors away from  oilman, Charles John Wrightsman, and his son Charles B. Wrightsman who was four years older than Helen. 

Kenneth's daughter, Mary Murchison, married and later divorced Richard Ohrstrom. In 1966, at age 35, she married 67-year-old Viscount Rothermere (Esmond Cecil Harmsworth), whose previous wife, Ann Geraldine Mary Charteris, had been in a long-term relationship with Ian Fleming. 

 

When Ann became pregnant with Fleming's child, Rothermere divorced her in 1951, allowing her to marry Fleming, whose novels about James Bond were soon to become very successful. 

 

The viscount himself remained single for 14 years before his marriage to Mary Murchison Ohrstom. Mary gave birth to a son in 1967, the year after they married. Kenneth Murchison died in November 1969--five months after his brother, Clint, Sr. Mary's marriage to the Viscount lasted until his death in 1978. Mary herself died in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1993.

Dec. 22, 1963 Nevada State Journal

DALLAS, Tex. — Edward W. (Eddie) Lebaron Jr. has been named executive vice president of the Nevada Cement Co. of Fernley. The announcement was made by Tom Lively, president, Centex Construction Co. Inc., the parent firm of the Nevada Cement Co. and the board of directors of the Nevada Cement Co.

Construction on the over-all $125 million cement plant complex was started in August, 1963, and is slated for completion in June, 1964, as originally scheduled. It is the first cement plant to be built in Nevada.

"We have been considering this opportunity for quite tome time now," said Lebaron. "And feel that this post with Nevada Cement Co. is not only appropriate with my background, but is just the kind of thing we have wanted. It is especially attractive in view of the fact that my parents now live only 140 miles from Reno."

Lebaron is 33 years old, and is a graduate of the College of the Pacific at Stockton, where he earned All-America honors in virtually every major poll. He served as an officer in the Marine Corps in Korea in 1951 and was awarded the Purple Heart, Bronze Star and a Letter of Commendation. Following his release from the Marine Corps, Lebaron played professional football with the Washington Redskins for seven years.

While in Washington, he attended George Washington Law School and received his LLB degree in 1959. Since 1960 Lebaron has been associated with the Dallas law firm of Wynne, McKenzie, Jaffe and Tinsley. Lebaron was in his fourth year as quarterback of the Dallas Cowboys football team of the National Football League when he announced his retirement this year.

Lebaron will assume his post at the Nevada Cement Co. effective immediately and will move his family shortly after the first of the year. 

The primary market area of the new plant is the rapidly growing northern Nevada and northeastern California area. Heretofore both government and private builders have faced a tremendous building materials transport problem in these areas. The idea for Nevada Cement Co. stemmed from talks more than two years ago between Basil Georges of Dallas and A. J. Anderson of Reno, a nationally known consulting engineer specializing in the design construction and operation cement plants. 

Exhaustive engineering and market studies proved the project highly desirable in all aspects, the decision to build was reached and construction was started in August, 1963.

Tom Lively, president of the giant Dallas-based Centex Construction Co., joined the organizing group during the early stages, adding his background as head of one of the largest construction companies in the nation.

Ultimately the plant will draw its natural rock raw materials from a huge limestone deposit available to the plant site. Some deposits also are available at the site and iron ore from commercial mines near Lovelock. Engineers say all needed raw materials are readily available for production of the five types of cement now in common use.

LeBaron with Cowboys owner Clint Murchison, Jr.

LeBaron had his law office is on the 28th floor of the Southland Center where he worked as a tax and corporation lawyer. The firm in 1961 was called Wynne, McKenzie, Stroud, Jaffe & Tinsley. His "understudy" as quarterback at that time was Don Meredith, who was given an off-season job in a training program with American Liberty Oil Company, according to a story that appeared in the Big Spring Daily Herald on March 12, 1961.

Another Murchison company--Tecon Corporation--employed Jerry Tubbs of the Cowboys football club, which was owned by Clint Murchison, Jr. Mike Falls, besides playing football for the Cowboys, also worked on its public relations staff. Don McIlhenny sold insurance for a Dallas firm, and Dave Sherer was an SMU student. According to the same article:

L. G. Dupre and defensive tackles Don Healy and Bill Herchaman—are cement salesmen and spend their working hours traveling around Dallas' booming building industry bidding on construction jobs. Other Cowboys scattered around Texas include Gene Babb, the former Austin College fullback, Houstonians Billy Howton and Dickie Moegle and West Texans Mike Dowdle and Wayne Hansen. Bob is working the San Antonio area for Tecon Corporation, after spending a month in Dallas as a substitute teacher in the city's senior and junior high schools....[Howton] is in the construction business and is currently building a shopping center in Houston. The Cowboys' most recent  acquisition, Moegle will lend experience to their youngish defensive secondary. He is assistant manager of the Tidelands Motel in Houston.

The Southland Center where Lebaron had his office was the home of the Southland Company, incorporated in 1941 by Clint Sr. and his long-time friend and associate Toddie Lee Wynne, joined by Eugene Constantin, Jr. Constantin's father, a New Orleans sugar tycoon and banker-turned oil man, had struck oil in Oklahoma and incorporated the Constantin Refining Co. in Tulsa in 1912.

According to the 1922 Moody's Manual, Constantin Refining stored its oil southwest of New Orleans at Avondale, Louisiana, and a large minority of the company stock was owned by the Pure Oil Company. Throughout WWI, Constantin's Export Oil Corp. had been heavily involved in selling oil to Great Britain. The 700-acre facility was located near the rail terminals of Southern Pacific and Texas & Pacific railroads, as well as having wharf frontage on the Mississippi River. The T&P route could transport cargo northwest to Shreveport and thence across Texas to El Paso. The Southern Pacific took a more southerly route through Texas to El Paso, continuing west to California, where it turned north to its termination in southern Washington.

Over production in East Texas

It was announced in late November 1921 that the Avondale storage facility (held in the name of Export Oil Corp.) was to be sold to Standard Oil of Louisiana, a subsidiary of Jersey Standard, and a few days later a sale by the independent refining company to Standard Oil of New Jersey was announced, pending litigation filed by Pure Oil. Then in 1925 Constantin was arrested for income tax fraud, allegedly owing the IRS half a million dollars. In 1931 Constantin, operating in the East Texas oil fields, was so angered by Governor Ross Sterling's declaration of martial law to enforce proration orders that stopped production that he and others successfully appealed to the Supreme Court.

Centex Construction History

Tom Lively was the Dallas man, who (along with an older man named Ira Lee Rupley) had founded the Centex Construction Co., which "built whole towns, including Elk Grove Village," a 34,000-person community  near Chicago.

Rupley was born near Victoria, Texas but grew up in Houston and worked for the Theo. Keller wholesale grocer and cotton factor in his youth. He then moved to San Antonio, working for D. F. Peyton Co., women's clothiers, in Alamo Plaza. During this time, Rupley became active in civic affairs and acquainted with eminent families (such as Mayor John Tobin) in the city. By 1929 he was vice president of the Flagg Oil Company and made the announcement that the National Bank of Commerce in San Antonio was to be named trustee of the trust funds of the Texas Osage Co-operative Royalty Pool, which controlled many oil leases on Indian land in Oklahoma.

QJ came across Osage oil properties while following Carl Dresser, shortly before Dresser's family's company was sold to W.A. Harriman & Co. Carl Dresser had gone to Oklahoma at the request of Theo Barnsdall, whose thousands of acres of Indian oil lands ended up in the control of Standard Oil of New Jersey. While in Tulsa, Dresser's wife Pauline made friends with high society people, such as Charles B. Wrightsman, whose father had sent him away from the rural Osage towns of Oklahoma to Phillips Exeter Academy for schooling. C.B. later joined the Aero Club in New York where he was introduced to New York's polo fraternity--at that time centered at Long Island's Meadow Brook.  G. Herbert Walker settled his new residence in that same vicinity around 1920, after becoming associated in business with Averell Harriman, son of the late railroad tycoon.

In those early days of WWI, polo was the sport of multi-millionaires, so that was where the money was. Where the money is, government power always follows. "The government" is not an abstract machine which seizes control, in my observed opinion, but it is a machine created by men who have become obsessed with becoming richer and more influential than their own fathers. Averell Harriman was such a man. G. Herbert Walker was Harriman's silent partner behind the scenes for many years.

Harriman, however, was not the only man who craved power. There were many like him who had a more humble start in life, but who were more than willing to network with others equally ambitious to leverage their wealth through investment syndicates or corporate power.

Thomas Harve Lively, Jr. seems to have been one of those ambitious men for a brief time--until late June of 1965, when, at the age of 45, his body was found floating in Lake Garza-Little Elm, a lake between Dallas and Denton. The local powers that be "surmised" he drowned while exiting his boat after an unnamed business associate, who left him there alone, went to make a phone call. Who was that associate, and what had they talked about?

It could not have been former partner, Ira Rupley, who had been chief assistant city engineer in Oklahoma City for 10 years prior to formation in 1947 of the Rupley-Lively Construction company, predecessor of Centex, which they incorporated in 1950. Rupley had died at the ripe old age of 80 in 1960, leaving Lively in business alone with the Murchisons.

The groundwork for the Murchison brothers was laid by their father in 1948, working with his childhood friend, Sid Richardson, both of whom grew up in small-town Athens, Texas.

QJ revealed the story of how John Connally had been paid off in a sister blog, Where the Gold Is (WTGI):

Beginning in 1948, just after Sid’s long-time friend Lyndon Johnson took his new seat in the U.S. Senate, LBJ’s former aide John Connally moved to Fort Worth to work for Sid [Richardson] and Perry [Bass] in their business ventures. When Sid died in 1959, Connally, as attorney, and Bass, as executor, handled the estate, for which Connally received $800,000 — to be paid out over a period of years long after he was elected Governor of Texas in 1962. The scheme by which Connally’s remuneration was paid is not dissimilar from the one designed to net Sid’s friend, Robert B. Anderson, a million dollars when he left his employment at the Waggoner Ranch to work in the Eisenhower administration,[3] and became a point of inquiry during 1971 Senate hearings to approve Connally as Richard Nixon’s Secretary of the Treasury.[4]

 Footnote [3] in the above quote shows how Robert B. Anderson had been paid for giving up a larger salary [at the Waggoner Ranch] to work for the Eisenhower administration:

Robert Sherrill, The Accidental President (New York: Pyramid Books, 1967), described the scheme (page 236) as follows:

1. Standolind Oil Company, Kirby Oil Company, Phillips Oil Company, and Sun Oil Company held farm-out property belonging to Richardson in Texas and Louisiana.

2. Richardson asked those companies to assign a royalty interest to F.J. Adams, a Fort Worth oil man who had been a vice-president of Gulf Oil Corporation. Adams’ role was simply that of a go-between.

3. Adams assigned his royalty interest to Anderson for one dollar and “other valuable interests.”

4. Anderson sold his interest in the property to Dalada Corporation for $900,000, half cash, half from future earnings. (Dalada was run by Toddie Lee Wynne, an old friend of Richardson’s who accompanied him to a stag dinner at the White House in November, 1954.) Also, Anderson had already earned $70,000 in production before the sale.

5. Finally, Perry Bass, Richardson’s nephew (John Connally’s law partner [sic]), bought back Dalada’s interest.

Thus the property went full circle, with Anderson grabbing his $970,000 as it went past.

However, there was an earlier foundation laid in 1937 by Sid and Clint when they, like Constantin, had violated the Hot Oil Act, which was being enforced by the Texas Governor. This author wrote in WTGI:

Internal Revenue Service investigators learned that, three days after his [1937] meeting with FDR, Murchison entered a plea of nolo contendere to a then-pending charge of violating the federal “hot oil” provision (interstate transportation of fuel in violation of the National Industrial Recovery Act), which FDR’s Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes had been pressing for several years in order to conserve petroleum.[7] During the 1945 IRS investigation Richardson testified that, a short time following the May 1937 fishing trip, he made a $20,000 loan to Elliott to purchase a radio station, followed by capital purchases of stock in a radio and additional loans for its operations and expenses. Elliott admitted to borrowing a total of $600,000 — including the loans from Richardson, Fort Worth oilman Charles Roeser, Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea heir John Hartford and others.[8]

Putting events in chronological order:

• Elliott Roosevelt marries Ruth Goggins and moves to Fort Worth;
• Elliott introduces Fort Worth oil men to his father at a Matagorda vacation.
• FDR visits Elliott at his Dutch Branch Ranch near Fort Worth four times (1936-1944).
• Elliott sells ranch in 1944. 
• Sid Richardson buys ranch 1946. 
• FDR dies in 1946.
• U.S. Government condemns ranch for Benbrook Lake and begins construction in 1947.
• Lee Oswald lived with mother and stepfather, Edwin Ekdahl, in house near Elliott Roosevelt/Sid Richardson Ranch in December 1946.
• Marguerite Oswald catches Ekdahl in affair and in January 1948 orders him out of the home.
•  Ekdahl hires Fred Korth to file divorce. Korth's office was across the street from Ekdahl's, and Ekdahl's employer TESCO was a Korth client.
• Marguerite hired John A. McLean to represent her.
• Divorce case tried before jury with judgment dated June 24, 1948.

In January 1952 the San Antonio Express reported on the ceremony to dedicate the opening of work on Randolph Field, which would again be important in the Korean War. President Eisenhower's Secretary of the Air Force Finletter flew into San Antonio that night, a Sunday, in order to conduct the groundbreaking of the $5,700,000 construction project, reportedly being rushed up because of an "urgent need" for the B-29 combat crew training program taking place there.

In 1955 John Dabney Murchison and Clint Murchison Jr. acquired stock in the Centex company when a joint venture between Centex and Murchison Brothers built Randolph Village in San Antonio--the Murchisons contributing only their influence with political cronies of their father to get the contract to build homes for military families at San Antonio's Randolph Field.

A year after John and Clint Murchison, Jr. came into Centex, the future seemed bright for Tom Lively, who was quoted saying they "were only beginning" and had a "limitless future." He found his limit, however, only nine years later in the waters of a Texas lake.

Before landing in Oklahoma, Ira Rupley moved from Houston to San Antonio, Texas, where he worked for the Flag Oil Company, which in the 1960s was a party to litigation in the District Court of Karnes County, Texas. Henry Kellner, Sr. and wife, Mary Kellner had deeded in 1929 one-half of the oil, gas and other minerals in lands located in Atascosa and Karnes Counties, to Flag Oil Company of Texas, a Texas corporation, and others. The deed was found to be valid, but the Kellners appealed, contesting the validity of the trust set up by Rupley and his oil royalty partners--the Texas Osage Cooperative Royalty Pool.

Newspapers announced 27 days after Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as President that Centex had been awarded a $14,000,000 contract near Mexico City to build homes for the Alliance for Progress, the Agency for International Development (AID), and various American and Mexican labor unions, and also that it was "sharing in the development" of 32,000 acres of land near New Orleans.

Officials of the Centex Construction Co., including Tom Lively, president; F. G. Lippott, executive vice president; Ira L. Rupley, vice president and F. G. Lippott, Jr., secretary-treasurer, and of the Murchison brothers — Clint, Jr., and John Dabney Murchison and Bob Thompson—will be introduced following a brief message from Finletter. The construction company officials, all from Dallas, are co-sponsors of the Wherry Housing Unit project.

A TALE OF TWO DANNYS--HOPSICKER AND CASOLARO (Part One)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS of Gangster Planet 

“Scandal in contemporary U.S. life is an institutionalized sociological phenomenon. It is not due primarily to psychopathological variables, but it is due to the institutionalization of elite wrongdoing which has occurred since 1963. Many of the scandals that have occurred in the U.S. since 1963 are fundamentally interrelated: that is, the same people and institutions have been involved."

—Prof. David Simon, Elite Deviance (6th edition) 

 

Linda Minor, Co-Author

Linda Minor 1990

I first met author, Daniel Hopsicker online before Barry and 'the Boys' was published. My best guess is that it was 1996. The Internet was then newish. 

My job as an Assistant Harris County Attorney in Houston, Texas, was in its sixth year, and I had just received my first ever computer, loaded with Windows 95. A few months later a county official I represented, Bruce Austin, taught me how to use the Internet, probably calling it the Worldwide Web. I was in total awe.

Kris Millegan

One of the first people I discovered after buying my own PC shortly afterwards was Kris Millegan, who had set up a couple of “list-servs”: Conspiracy Theory Research List (CTRL) and CIA-Drugs List, which we could reach by dialing in to an AOL phone line to connect. 

Suddenly, my life began to take on two separate personas—family life, with a husband and stepdaughter was real enough. To that I added a separate “research reality” with a whole new set of friends interested in the same subject that was uppermost in my mind—how the world really worked.

This new faceless phenomenon had brought together many diverse individuals, all looking for answers to myriad questions we wondered about—contradictions between what we saw with our own eyes and what we were being told was true.

The first member I met in person was Catherine Austin Fitts, who was then crisscrossing the country in an effort, she said, to stay alive. She had been impressed by my ability to do research online and asked me to help her figure out who had destroyed an investment business she had created. I was happy to do so, even though much of what she told me I did not understand.

Catherine, 2012

Over a period of years beginning in 2002, Catherine would stop off at our small home to stay and visit, sometimes for up to a week at a time. Even though her priorities were not the same as mine, I felt we had the same goal—“seeing the world whole,” as she phrased it.

I interpreted that to mean she wanted to integrate the reality we found in our research into our personal lives. The last time I saw her was just before the election in 2016. She was coming through my town, and we met at Starbucks. When she left after an hour of talking, I was crying. She told me reluctantly that she would be voting for Donald Trump, but the explanation she gave me for doing so has since been forgotten. That was the last time we spoke, other than a possible email or two she forwarded to me. Today she has a podcast that informs listeners about “financial transaction freedom and the building of wealth.” The goal we did not share was her desire to be rich.

Through Catherine, however, I had met, online and by telephone, Lois Battuello, whom Catherine called “the Goddess of Research.” Lois wrote an anonymous column posted at Newsmakingnews.com and helped other members of Kris’ CIA-Drugs list, notably Michael Ruppert, with research projects. She also did research with Sander Hicks for a time, Craig Unger, and even the notorious Gerald Posner.

Michael Ruppert

Ruppert, a former Los Angeles Police Department detective, was also a member of CIA-Drugs. He attended a town hall meeting in South Central Los Angeles and confronted CIA Director John Deutsche about the CIA’s involvement with selling drugs in that community.

Kris Millegan hosted “CIA - Drugs Symposium” in Eugene, Oregon on  Saturday, June 10, 2000, to allow the various email acquaintances to finally put a face to the folks they’d been in contact with for the previous three years.

CIA - DRUGS SYMPOSIUM Sat, 06/10/2000 - 12:00pm

I did not attend. Daniel did, along with an assortment of other members of the internet-based email group called CIA-Drugs. Daniel wrote an introduction for himself for the symposium  with these words:

Daniel Hopsicker has spent a career in business television, producing “Inside Wall Street” and “The Emerging Growth Stock Report,” among others. He was the executive producer of a business news magazine airing on NBC inter-nationally when he went to Bill Clinton's Arkansas to film a story for a new series pilot and discovered that “things ain't always been jes' right down here,” in the words of a famous Mississippi lawman.

The initial result was a two-hour TV special, “The Secret Heartbeat of America,” which he was told “would not air while Clinton was President.”

(“They” were right: it airs next winter, after Clinton leaves office.)

He has just completed the first full-length look at the career of CIA agent/drug smuggler Adler Berriman Seal called “Barry and 'the boys,'” as well as a TV documentary detailing some of his findings called “In Search of the AMERICAN Drug Lords.”

The shocking true story of American 'super-spy' Barry Seal—the inspiration for the 1966 hit “Secret Agent Man.” written by his long-time friend Johnny Rivers—is the story of what happens when guys we pay to protect us—CIA guys—go into business with guys we're paying them to protect us against: “Made" guys. Mobsters...Organized Crime.”

Daniel Hopsicker

Gangster Planet is Daniel Hopsicker’s third and final book. Researched and written for his website between 2006 up until his death on August 22, 2023, it covers more years of work than his first two books combined.

Needless to say, it took a great deal of thought and work to organize all the threads that went into it. Although the book was, unfortunately, delayed numerous times, the publication of Daniel’s magnum opus completes his mission in life.

His Back Story 

Danny H.

Daniel was born on July 16, 1951, at Grant Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, to Harold J. “Harry” and Rita Jean Garry Hopsicker, who had married eleven months earlier. A year later a sister, Carol, was born, followed in 1959 by the youngest, David Hopsicker.

Harry joined the U.S. Navy on his 18^th birthday and returned from World War II after an eventful year. His rating changed several times between the dates of May 5, 1945, and his discharge at San Diego the following year. He rose from Hospital Apprentice, 2nd Class to 1^st Class while berthed on the USS Haven, a hospital ship which sailed for Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on July 6, 1945. From there, the ship departed for Japan, assigned to pick up Allied  troops, who had been prisoners of war held by the Japanese, in Okinawa. From there the Haven advanced to Nagasaki, Japan, by September 11, taking on new patients suffering from the effects of the atomic blast. Once these troops were added to the hospital ship’s patient list, the Haven began its return voyage to San Francisco, stopping at Guam, Saipan, and Pearl Harbor, on its way to San Francisco on January 31, 1946.

Harry Hopsicker by then was looking forward to his 19^th birthday. During the months at sea, he added Pharmacy Mate 3^rd class to his rating.

Along with a teen-age Harold Hopsicker, the USS Haven also carried, on that same voyage that left San Francisco, radiological equipment and scientific researchers to participate in “atomic tests” in the Pacific as part of Operation Crossroads. The tests were part of a high-level plan being set up by the future head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, and Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, according to a declassified memo in which Strauss wrote: “If such a test is not made, there will be loose talk to the effect that the fleet is obsolete in the face of this new weapon and this will militate against appropriations to preserve a postwar Navy of the size now planned.”

Even without a college education, Harry qualified for a good job with Victor Chemical Works at its headquarters plant in Chicago Heights, once he returned to Chicago. It would be the only job he had until his retirement in 1980. Initially, the only chemical the plant produced was monocalcium phosphate, one form of baking powder, but the company expanded into other products as time went by.

 Harry Hopsicker’s only background in chemistry was what he’d been taught while he was in the Navy, but he did qualify to be Victor’s personnel director and hiring manager. He was also used to resolve disputes in the event of a threatened strike.

Harold and Rita had undoubtedly become familiar with southwest Florida as a result of his inspection of the Tarpon Springs plant, which had been built by Victor as early as 1947 “to burn phosphate ore and turn it into elemental phosphorus for use in foods, fertilizers and ammunition,” according to a story by Diane Steinle, published in the Tampa Bay Times in 2014, who added that the “furnace produced toxic smoke and radioactive slag. The plant, purchased by Stauffer Chemical in 1960, shut down in 1981.”

Harry made trips to inspect plants as a member of Victor Chemical’s inspection committee during the ‘50s. Photos of the committee appeared in newspapers in cities with phosphate plants the committee maintained over the years before it merged into Stauffer. Harry’s last ten years with the company—after it became Stauffer—could not have been pleasant, though Daniel had no idea what his father may have been dealing with.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) called the Tarpon Springs site “a public health hazard due to harmful levels of air pollutants, primarily sulfur dioxide and particulate matter, released from the Stauffer plant while it was in operation.” Set aside in 1994 as a Superfund Site, it is still managed to prevent the elemental phosphorus, arsenic, antimony, beryllium, thallium, and radium-226 found in both soils and groundwater samples from leeching into nearby water wells.

Diane Steinle stated in her 2014 Tampa Bay Times article that the Tarpon Springs plant’s “contaminated soil — hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of it — wasn't removed. It's still right there, pushed into mounds and covered with a water-tight cap that supposedly will contain it indefinitely. Groundwater under the property, which is now fenced off with barbwire and covered with green grass, will be monitored for pollutants forever.” As a result of a series of corporate mergers, AstraZeneca eventualy became owner of the Superfund site.

The Hopsicker Heritage

Whether or not Daniel Hopsicker had any inkling of the problems within the corporations where his father spent thirty years, we don’t know. He was aware, as he indicated in one letter back home while he was a student at UCLA that he had noticed remarks they had made about money being tight.

Dan always felt closer to his mom than to his dad, repeating what he’d been told by his aunts that he had Rita's same temperament. As the youngest of four girls and one boy, Rita, as Danny was told by his aunts, “was always a little flighty,” especially while she was pregnant with him. Although online military records were not found that support it, Daniel had been told his dad was away in Korea during that pregnancy, which, in his mind at least, partially explained symptoms that led to his 1987 diagnosis of ADD.

Rita and her siblings, 100% Irish, were, actually reared by their mother and stepfather, John Slepicka—from a family mix of Austrian, German, Polish and Czech ancestry. Rita’s Irish birth dad died in 1932 at the young age of 36, leaving Rita fatherless when she was three, and her mom, Myrtle Garry, married Slepicka in 1938. He would be the only father Rita and her four Garry siblings remembered. He was a Swift Meatpacking Co. employee and supported all five children to adulthood, dying in 1966 after all were married.

Two years after John Slepicka's death, Dan’s family left their comfortable Chicago Heights home, where Dan had played basketball, baseball and football at Marian Catholic high school. Harry was transferred to Concord, California eight years after his long-time employer, Victor Chemical Works, merged into Stauffer Chemical Co. of San Francisco.

The move placed Dan in public school at Ygnacio Valley High, the most profound change of his life up to that point. California represented freedom to him, as he landed near the hub of the counterculture movement in the late 1960s:

“Haight-Ashbury was the most notable San Francisco neighborhood that drew in almost 100,000 youths during the summer of 1967, who soon became the heart and soul of the counterculture movement. This summer of youth migration became known as the Summer of Love, which marked the prominence of a movement that would impact decades to come.”

After two years in Concord, his dad told him he’d been transferred again, and the family would be moving to the East Coast. Dan wouldn’t accept it. He told his coauthor he had devised a plan. Realizing San Francisco was the center of the peace movement, he thought he would have more success convincing his dad to let him go to college in Los Angeles. It was not at the time associated with Berkeley’s revolutionary ideas. Then he cajoled, begged, and promised that he would be an ideal son. He’d do anything if his parents would just let him stay in California.

His mother saved every letter he wrote home during that time. One was postmarked Jan. 24, 1972, with the only return address: “Heir Apparent.”

He argued his case:

“Dear Folks,

“Just a quick note to let you know what’s happening. Not too much. The weather today [remember it’s January, and he’s writing to people in Connecticut] is beautiful. I’m sitting out on the grass in front of the Theater Arts building basking in the 65-degree sunshine and hoping it will stay like this for awhile.

“I happened to think of something last night which I thought I’d pass along to you. I figured it out, and you are paying not one cent more for the move [to an apartment from a frat house], you are also not paying it one second sooner! So where’s the gripe?—except that my residency at any one place is somewhat more than unstable. Well, I’ve got to go to class. Will give you a fuller review of things later in the week.   Love, Dan”

When he’d started UCLA in the fall of 1970, his parents had him safely ensconced at the Zeta Beta Tau Fraternity house across the street from the campus. But during his second year he moved unannounced with his then-best friend Rick to a house “in the hills” a mile and a half north of campus. A letter he wrote home tried to put what he’d done in a positive light:

“And now here’s the financial news. Hopsicker, Very Limited, a subsidiary of the parent company Hopsicker Enterprises, Inc., is presently at 50, with a forecast of slow dissipation for the next two weeks until a consolidation takes place with a food concern known as The Great American Food & Beverage Co.  Hopsicker, Sr. preferred stock, on the other hand, has shown definite upswing due to the liquidation and transfer of 125 shares from Hopsicker, Limited to the parent company.”

Inside the envelope was a carbon copy of his list of classes, which included History of Art, an English class on Shakespeare, another called Special Studies English, Introduction to Theater, and a Workshop in Theater. He had already developed an interest, it seems, in becoming a playwright.

He got his degree in English Lit, participating in the Creative Writing program. He’d loved books and reading all his life, but he was also introduced to music by his friend Tommy Kane in Chicago Heights. Not classical music, of course. It was the ‘60s and ‘70s when rock and roll became every Baby Boomer’s passion.

He would visit the family from that point in Westport, Connecticut, until his father retired ten years later. After that, he would visit them at their retirement community in Venice, Florida, where Rita’s three older sisters, each living with her respective spouse, also lived.

The Times, They Are A-Changing - 1968 

When Harry Hopsicker moved his family to California in 1968, he had been transferred there by Stauffer Chemical Co., Victor Chemical’s owner since 1960. Stauffer produced polyvinyl chloride (PVC) at its plant near San Diego, and researchers in 1973 found carcinogenic ingredients in the smoke it emitted into the air, which California’s Air Reserve Board (ARB) chairman, Dr. Arie Jan Haagen-Smit of Caltech, linked to cancer. Dr. Haagen-Smit, first appointed by Governor Ronald Reagan to the ARB in 1968, retired in 1974, at about the same time Reagan replaced the entire board with people recommended by Edwin Meese III.

Meese, a former Alameda County official from Oakland, California, began working for Ronald Reagan, the politician as early as 1966, serving the former movie star turned governor as his executive assistant and chief of staff. He remained Reagan’s “counsellor” after election to the Presidency, heading the transition team, then being named Attorney General.

Daniel Hopsicker during protest at UCLA

Meanwhile, Harry's eldest son Daniel was discovering California, graduating high school in Concord, California in 1969. The teen-age Dan fell in love with California at first sight, determined he'd never leave. Thus began his campaign to convince his dad to finance his education at UCLA, a university then approaching its peak of anti-war activism during LBJ's last and Nixon's first term. 

Those years saw Edwin Meese III having returned to Oakland after his cold war stint in military intelligence and law school at UC Berkeley. He became a prosecutor under Oakland's Alameda County district attorney J. Frank Coakley, serving alongside fellow deputy D. Lowell Jensen, who was elected D.A. in 1969.

Jensen had prosecuted Black Panther Huey Newton in the late '60s, as well as the kidnappers of Patty Hearst in the '70s, while Meese moved on to Sacramento to work on Gov. Ronald Reagan's staff.

Danny Casolaro

Twenty years later journalist Danny Casolaro, shortly before his bled-out body with slashed wrists was found in a bathtub in West Virginia in 1991, had placed Meese at the center of a plot involving a secret operation dubbed “the Enterprise,” overseen by retired Air Force major general Richard Secord, who cut his teeth on covert operations in Laos in the ‘60s. Working for the CIA-owned Air America, Secord learned how to launder opium drug profits into private enterprise, as described in a variety of Iran-Contra documents that came out of Reagan's time in offie.

 

Casolaro had taken his research a step beyond official reports by zeroing in on then-current activities of private individuals with connections to former Reagan officials still making money by supplying products secretly to George Bush’s Defense Department. Danny’s death occurred in the final days of Bush’s term, but the activities would continue with President Bill Clinton, who had been complicit with the Reagan and Bush administrations engaged in covert drug drops and money-laundering in Mena, Arkansas in the ‘80s. Clinton used the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority to launder the drug money proceeds after setting up a re-insurance company (Coral Reinsurance) in Barbados, according to the Staff of the Ozark Gazette's research project called "Gray Money." See Mark H. Gaffney's book, Black 9/11 for the full story.

Edwin Meese III was the third generation of his name to run political affairs in Alameda County, and he was a natural in overseeing Reagan’s political affairs in Sacramento after the new governor’s inauguration in early 1967, the same year, incidentally, that the Hopsicker family left Chicago Heights for their move to California.

During the 1970’s--while the primary author of Gangster Planet, was studying at UCLA--a ban was issued by California's Air Resources Board (ARB) on sulphur dioxide emissions from industrial facilities. The ban was followed by a complaint for injunctive and declaratory relief filed by Daniel's dad's employer, Stauffer, joined in by other plaintiffs, including Chevron U.S.A., Inc., and Allied Chemical, as well as the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The fact that Harry’s company was "under attack" by  California while he was paying his son’s California tuition may help explain the generational conflict that arose between father and son at the time.

Harry Hopsicker officially retired from the company in 1980, three years before Stauffer’s executives and accountants got in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a “multimillion-dollar fraudulent scheme to overstate its 1982 and 1983 earnings.” Stauffer entered into a consent decree—settling the case without admitting wrong-doing. By this time, of course, Harry and Rita were making plans to move from Stauffer’s headquarters in Westport, Connecticut to Venice, Florida.

Stauffer and Phosphorous Trichloride 

Harry may not have known that Stauffer had sold the design for a phosphorous trichloride chemical plant it owned in Pennsylvania to a Swiss company, Krebs A.G. Sale documents acknowledged the design would be used by El Nasr Pharmaceutical Company of Egypt, a fact that alarmed even the Bush administration in 1989. Besides pesticides, phosphorous trichloride was also a key ingredient for “Sarin, a deadly nerve gas and is on the Western core list of precursor chemicals.”

Deadly sarin gas nerve agents

Sarin gas was used during the Iran-Iraq war begun in 1980. This use resulted in a ceasefire and an agreement designed to prevent Egypt from manufacturing the gas in another plant. Consequently, Krebs was forced to sell out to Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) of the UK. 

ICI's interest in toxic chemicals first rose in 1948, according to a book by Dan Kaszeta (Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents, From Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia. Oxford University Press 2021, p. 89), while doing research on pesticides. A long-winded article in the Harvard Business Review in 1995 analyzed why ICI had, in 1987, “demerged” its businesses. ICI kept the part of the company that made industrial polymers, paints, and explosives, but it sold the part that made drugs, pesticides, and specialty chemicals to Zeneca—now merged into AstraZeneca.

Stauffer was in the process of leaving the scene by 1987, as we learned in a piece by the New York Times on June 23, 1987, printed here in full:

Imperial Chemical Industries P.L.C. said today that it would sell the specialty chemicals part of its soon-to-be-acquired Stauffer Chemical Company to the Dutch chemical group Akzo N.V. for $625 million. (emphasis added)

I.C.I. announced on June 5 that it would acquire Stauffer from the British-Dutch conglomerate Unilever N.V. for $1.69 billion. Analysts then predicted that I.C.I., the world's fifth-largest and most profitable chemical company, would soon sell off parts of Stauffer and concentrate on agrichemicals. Stauffer is based in Westport, Conn.

Aarnoud Loudon, the chairman of Akzo, said the deal fulfilled several of the group's goals by increasing its business in the United States. Akzo's activities include basic and specialty chemicals, salt, man-made fibers, coatings, pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, and consumer and other industrial products.

Chemical Company Rabbit Holes

Akzo, intriguingly, led me from the chemical company from which Dan Hopsicker’s dad retired to a research laboratory Danny Casolaro’s dad helped set up. Yet neither of the sons realized how closely tethered their respective fathers were to the octopus they were searching for. 

While searching for Akzo, I made what to me was a discovery not to be ignored. Two years before Akzo acquired Stauffer, the Dutch company's subsidiary, Organon Teknika, bought half of Bionetics company which Dr. Joseph D. Casolaro helped found, and which Litton Industries bought in a stock swap in 1968, acquiring all of the more than 536,000 shares of Bionetics in exchange for 11,002 shares of Litton common.

Dr. Joseph D. Casolaro's name was included in a list of “organizers” given credit for founding Bionetics Research Laboratories (BRL) in 1960. Casolaro was the only medical doctor named in the list, all the others seemingly having non-medical Ph.D's. Discovering that Danny's dad was involved in Bionetics, later a division of Litton Industries, took me from one rabbit hole (Stauffer) into another (Bionetics). 

Bionetics was not created as a chemical company, but its origin stemmed from a need for research animals for use in the space program being developed during the Kennedy administration's attempt to put a man on the moon.  

The Space Race

New Mexico top-secret sites

The research laboratory was rooted in Air Force testing then being conducted at the highly secret Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, New Mexico. As part of that testing program, Lt. Col. John Paul Stapp, a Texan, had been painfully subjected to 35 and 40 times negative gravity during a deceleration test that took place at Holloman, 90 miles across the desert from Fort Bliss, Texas. 

 

Only nine years earlier, a joint program of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps, called “Operation Paperclip,” a “rocket-pioneering group of German scientists and engineers,” had been brought in May 1945 to Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. The group consisted of Dr. Wernher Von Braun and 350 other German scientists who had worked for the Nazi Government. Their first job would be the Manhattan Project, building the bombs dropped on Japan. Their sights were next trained on the moon.

 

Dr. Ernst A.Steinhoff, who was part of that group, had been captured at Peenemünde, Germany, at the close of World War II. As the Director of Flight Mechanics, Ballistics, Guidance and Control, and Instrumentation at the Reich’s Army Rocket Research Center, Steinhoff worked on both submarine-launched and on V-2 rockets. His new job in the United States was to engage in rocket research focused on building “the platform from which America launched rockets to the Moon in the late 1960s.” (See above link.)

 

In 1959, the Holloman crew acquired a new recruit named Ham. Born in Cameroon, Africa, the chimpanzee joined Nick and Vickie at the "animal colony" at Holloman. His name was an acronym derived from Holloman Aeromedical Research Laboratory. Lt. Col. James Ellsworth Cook was a "veterinarian who went to Cameroon to purchase the first 20 baby chimpanzees for the Space program." When he left New Mexico for his last Air Force duty station at Walter Reed Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., the "animal colony" was moved to nearby facilities in Virginia and Maryland. Bionetics Research Laboratory (BRL), incorporated in 1961, was located close to the Pentagon as well as to the National Institute of Health, within close reach of its government clients. Dr. Cook retired from the military in 1969 and became a professor in Kansas.

 

BRL was first mentioned in newspapers in March 1962 when it received a contract from the National Institute of Health to induce cancer in monkeys.  An ad had been placed in the classified section of the Washington Post the previous month for animal handlers and others to work for the Falls Church lab at 205 West Jefferson Street. There were zoning issues in Falls Church, which were quickly resolved. The lab had been up and running for a year when another problem arose in the form of unwanted publicity focused on Bionetics. 

 

 

A cute wire-service photo of two baby rhesus monkeys spread to newspapers all over the country, informing people that these innocent animals were the subject of cancer testing. It was bad enough that animal-rights activists in the United States learned of the testing, but the uproar also could be heard in India, then the sole source for that type of monkeys, said to be considered too sacred there to be sold for cancer research. 

 

When India soon forbade further purchases, Bionetics acquired an uninhabited island in South Carolina on which to breed the animals for research purposes. (Val Palmer, "Monkeys take over Morgan Island," Beaufort, S.C. Gazette, Dec 17, 1979.) Bionetics by then was a division of Litton Industries.

Area surrounding CIA HQ

Bionetics, which "arose out of" the Holloman project, according to Oldfield in a footnote on page 118, had its government contracts to keep it afloat before it became necessary or desirable to bring in revenue from the public. Once animals were no longer being used in the space program, however, the research lab sought to become an independent private corporation. Several of the men Oldfield named as organizers of Bionetics Research Lab were BRL presidents during its early history—Francis E. Miller and Arthur J. Pallotta were two—while another, Richard Guttmacher, was executive vice president in 1967, the year prior to the acquisition of the lab by Litton.  

Guttmacher came from a Jewish family consisting of numerous doctors, notable in a variety of fields of medicine. One of them--a member of the faculty of the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and previously a clinical professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York--was Dr. Alan Guttmacher, who acknowledged the role of  Charles B. Thornton, president of Litton Industries with a merit award by the Einstein Medical School in March of 1963.

The Einstein Medical College had opened in 1955 after four years of fund raising work headed by Dr. Samuel Belkin of Yeshiva University. It was named for the scientist who created the theory of relativity, Albert Einstein, who had died in 1952 and left his papers to Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Although called an ardent Zionist, Einstein's desire in 1946 was for Israel's “secured bi-national status in Palestine with free immigration,” adding that it defies common sense to “ask to be given the political rule over Palestine where two thirds of the population are not Jewish.”

Another man mentioned as a Bionetics organizer was L. P. Gray III, whom we realized was the Louis Patrick Gray III, who had been a special assistant to Vice President Nixon in 1960 as well as an assistant to Robert H. Finch, who managed Nixon's first Presidential campaign. Finch got his law degree from USC in Los Angeles (where he was a classmate of Herbert Kalmbach). Finch met Gray at George Washington University in 1947, the same year Gray met Nixon, who was then a Congressman. Finch was working for Rep. Norris Poulson while he attended graduate classes at GWU. Finch later served as Lieutenant Governor of California during Ronald Reagan's first term as Governor in 1966.

It is the connect-a-dot philosophy obvious in the foregoing paragraph which results in conclusionary conspiracy theories, with good reason. It assumes because the men (all were white men at the time) were drawn together there was a secret plan in operation. I do not endorse that theory. I believe each of the men had good intentions and had worked hard to attain his career status. So what went wrong? 

 

 

 

End of Part I  

(to be continued)