“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.
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 18th
birthday andreturned 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 1st 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 19th
birthday. During the months at sea, he added Pharmacy Mate 3rd 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" byCalifornia 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?
I began the research for this essay shortly after the crash of Enron in October 2001, less than a month after airplanes rammed into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon near Washington, D. C. and in Johnstown, Pa.
I was friends at that time with Catherine Austin Fitts, whom I met as members of a social media forum back in the day before Facebook or Twitter existed. "CIA Drugs," as the forum was called was an e-mail based list run by Kris Millegan. Daniel Hopsicker and Michael Ruppert, among many others, were also members.
At that time I was a lawyer, having spent 25 years of my life examining real property titles at several abstract and title companies in Texas, as well as working for the County Attorney's Office in Harris County. I attempted on several occasions to become involved in a traditional law practice but found the interaction not to my liking. I enjoyed digging into the history of a piece of land, sorting out the various owners and changes over a period of decades.
Catherine, with her knowledge of corporate capitalism, introduced me to a new aspect of history. She motivated me to find out what I could about one man she believed was at the core of the "conspiracy" which had destroyed the company she had built.
I saw my mission as being not unlike Dorothy's objective in "The Wizard of Oz," to retrace the steps from her farmland home in Kansas to the foreign territory of Oz. As she set out to find her way back home, everyone she encountered along the way told her, simply, "Follow the yellow brick road. These well-marked bricks will take you to the wizard, and the wizard has the power to get you back home."
It is hard to believe more than two decades have passed since I cobbled the bricks together to create what was first published online at news-makingnews.com. Kate Dixon, a disbarred California attorney from Oakland, whom I never met, worked as an investigator for another California attorney named Virginia McCullough. A financial consultant named Lois Battuello wrote an anonymous column for the Newsmaking News website based on knowledge she had about Napa Valley where her family had owned vineyards for generations. Somehow the website began putting online the "data dumps" I referred to as "my research".
Lois had an MBA from Stanford Graduate School and had worked in a bank in San Francisco controlled by former CIA Director McCone. It was her opinion that McCone, through his CIA connections, was involved with Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt in shenanigans in the wine country. I didn't understand any of that at the time and have only gained an inkling about it in all the years since.
Lois worked as a researcher for Daniel Hopsicker before his second book, Welcome to Terror Land, was published, but even he was not allowed to use her name. They eventually became estranged, as I wrote in Gangster Planet, Daniel's last book, which I completed the year after his death. By the time it was in print, Lois too was deceased.
Each "brick" of the research I compiled led me back to a piece of history I wouldn't otherwise have learned. Catherine visited me numerous times at my little Texas lake hideaway to which my husband and I moved to care for elderly parents. She taught me about "the pop," which is how corporate money is made on the stock market by opening branches of a public company. What I did not fully realize at the time is that what she described was Moneylaundering 101.
Catherine wanted me to help her learn who Pug Winokur was and why he had been used to destroy Hamilton Securities, which she created after leaving the George H.W. Bush White House, serving in the Department headed by Jack Kemp. I obliged, working naively by instinct as I stepped from one brick to another, using the tools I'd acquired by that time.
Pug Winokur and his Father
Enron's board of directors had all resigned during 2001 and 2002 with one very notable exception--Herbert Simon "Pug"
Winokur, Jr., about whom very little was known at the time.
We set out to learn his background and how he--and seemingly nobody else--survived Enron's collapse.
Pug was born in 1943 in Columbus, Georgia, while his father--H. S. Winokur, Sr.--was stationed at Fort Benning. Frederick William Winokur, Pug's uncle, had been married there in 1941 to Eleanor Lipman in a high society Jewish wedding in which Herbert Sr. was best man
and Eleanor's sister, Marjorie, was her maid of honor. Herbert married Majorie a year later, while serving in the U.S. Army Air Force at Fort Benning, and their names appeared in the Roaming 'Round gossip column by Ima Roamer in the Columbus (Georgia) Ledger of February 6, 1944.
Pug's dad had been awarded the Order of the Cloud and Banner (China), which indicated his involvement
in the China Burma India Theatre--an honor presented from the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek,
who fled to Taiwan
when the Red Chinese took over China.
More than 30 of such decorations were also awarded to the
Flying Tigers of Clare Chennault.
American troops in the China-Burma-India
Theatre were
commanded by Fort Benning's General Joseph Stilwell, the Deputy
Allied Commander under
Lord Mountbatten of Great Britain—the last viceroy of the British
colonial
empire in India, who was then assigned to Burma.
Of the numerous books
written about American activities in that area during the war, including that of the Office of Strategic Services, the best one, in my opinion, was the book written by Alfred W. McCoy, first published as The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia in 1972, which was updated in 2003 as The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. McCoy wrote:
During the early 1950s the CIA had backed the formation of a Nationalist Chinese guerrilla army in Burma, which still controls almost a third of the world's illicit opium supply, and in Laos the CIA created a Meo mercenary army whose commander manufactured heroin for sale to American GIs in South Vietnam. The State Department provided unconditional support for corrupt governments openly engaged in the drug traffic.
Inlate 1969 new heroin laboratories sprang up in the tri-border area where Burma, Thailand, and Laos converge, and unprecedented quantities of heroin started flooding into the United States. Fueled by these seemingly limitless supplies of heroin, America's total number of addicts skyrocketed.
Unlike some national intelligence agencies, the CIA did not dabble in the drug traffic to finance its clandestine operations. Nor was its culpability the work of a few corrupt agents, eager to share in the enormous profits. The CIA's role in the heroin traffic was simply an inadvertent but inevitable consequence of its cold war tactics. (emphasis added)
The blurb for the new edition states "Maintaining a global perspective, this groundbreaking study
details the mechanics of drug trafficking in Asia, Europe, the Middle
East, and South and Central America. New chapters detail U.S.
involvement in the narcotics trade in Afghanistan and Pakistan before
and after the fall of the Taliban, and how U.S. drug policy in Central
America and Colombia has increased the global supply of illicit drugs."
Back in Philadelphia Peter Winokur, who was the father of three sons--Frederick William, Herbert Simon and Peter, Jr.--and a daughter Maxine (later famed poet laureate Maxine Kumin) was a wealthy pawnbroker living in a posh Germantown residence at 152 W. Carpenter Lane with his wife, Belle Doll Simon Winokur. When Herbert returned from war with his bride and small son "Pug," his father was still working
for the pawnshops founded by his grandfather.
Herbert had worked for the family's loan companies before his enlistment and returned to his career in consumer
finance--first at Federal Loan Co. and also to Rettew's Money Loan beginning in
1958, and Executive Consumer Discount Company founded in 1967. All were in Philadelphia.
These work
relationships ended in 1974, followed by his short association with George S.
May International, a business consultancy originally formed to promote golf. Also in 1974 H.S. Winokur Associates began operating a firm called Commercial
Utility Consultants, to "advise corporate clients on matters of
electrical and telephone usage." In many ways this business became a a model for what
Enron did with natural gas.
Marjorie's parents in Columbus, Georgia, had operated Paramount Chemical Company for many years. Ralph and Bess Lipman Winokur worked with Bess'
unmarried brother, Meyer Goldstein, who lived with the family both before and after Ralph Lipman's death in 1934, until Meyer's own death in 1942. The
company manufactured cleaning supplies and pesticides.
Marjorie
Lipman, born in 1919 shortly after her parents
moved to Columbus, Georgia from Detroit, Michigan, had driven a truck to
support the war
effort while her husband (Pug's dad) was deployed to India during World
War II.
Pug, A Harvard Man
Pug himself went to Harvard, where he received a bachelor of arts in 1964, masters in 1965, and Ph.D. in 1967 in
applied mathematics (decision and control theory). His first job out of Harvard, thanks to the war in Vietnam,
was with the U.S. Army, assigned to the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C., then headed by Robert S. McNamara, who had first served President Kennedy, remaining in office after Kennedy's assassination, in Lyndon Johnson's Administration.
McNamara
left the office in March 1968 to head the World Bank, and Clark Clifford, whose early government career had been tainted because of accusations of ties to Truman's clique from Missouri, was appointed to succeed him.
Clifford, already a lawyer in St. Louis when he entered the Navy in 1944, he was assigned to the Pentagon as an aide to Truman's controversial non-Annapolis educated Naval Aide Capt. James K. Vardaman, also from Missouri. Before Clifford joined the Navy, he had been a private attorney, who sold the Vardamans' St. Louis residence under a power of attorney [St. Louis (Mo.) Globe-Democrat, June 13, 1943].
Vardaman and Clifford had known each other for years as trustees on the board of the opera guild in that city, and their wives were invited as "Matrons" to the annual Veiled Prophet Ball. The Queen in 1941 was Barbara Wear, whose father, James H. Wear, was a brother of Mrs. George Herbert ("Loulie Wear) Walker, an investment banker, who left St. Louis for New York in 1920 and lived at Old Westbury, Long Island.
Democrat--Clark Clifford--Dupe or Dope?
The James H. Wear family lived in the same small section of St. Louis as Clark Clifford, a Democrat, who was given major credit for drafting the National Security Act of 1947 (creating the Central
Intelligence Agency and Defense Department) for President Truman. According to the Truman Library:
In the Spring of 1948, Palestine became embroiled in American domestic politics. Jewish votes were important to President Truman in the coming election. Key advisers, especially Clark Clifford, pushed him to stand firmly for UN partition to win those votes....He
was urged to recognize the new Jewish state that was certain to be
proclaimed when partition occurred. Others counseled against
recognition, arguing it would antagonize Arab states and jeopardize
American access to oil.
President
Truman's regard for Secretary of State George C. Marshall was
tremendous. The Secretary's opposition to recognition of a new Jewish
state in Palestine troubled President Truman and resulted in the
sharpest disagreement the two ever had.
Ironically, since Clifford had been the one person most responsible for convincing President Truman to oppose the State Department's advice not to recognize the new State of Israel in 1948, this same man, three and a half decades later in 1982, secured a banking license for a group of Arab investors who first sought him out in 1978. Could he possibly get a license to operate their Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) through First American Bancshares of Georgia?
Victor Palmieri
Lucky Lester, 1951
As Nixon took office in January 1969, Pug and two other Defense Department analysts started a private
consulting firm in Washington, D.C. called Inner City Fund with a Black man as the figurehead. Clarence D. “Lucky” Lester, a former Tuskegee airman, was
its president, ostensibly to promote minority entrepreneurship. Lester was a military
science instructor at Howard
University while still in
the military, retiring as a colonel in 1969. Col. Lester was then assigned to
the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the same time the Inner City Fund was
created. (See Obituary 20 March
1986 Washington Post)
In the spring
of 1968 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) issued its Report following the Watts race riots in Los Angeles, predicting more violence in the inner cities. According to an essay called "The War for Living Space" by Frank Morales:
It was during the early stages of staff recruitment that commission Deputy Executive Director Victor H. Palmieri "described the process as a war strategy." And so he might, given the overwhelming presence within the commission by the US military and police. Some of those commissioners, consultants and advisors included: Commissioner Charles B. Thornton, Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, Litton Industries; Commissioner Advisor on Private Enterprise, John L. Atwood, President and CEO, North American Rockwell Corporation; Commission Director of Investigations, Milan C. Miskovsky, "formerly connected to the Central Intelligence Agency.
Victor Palmieri
Several years after that report, Pug Winokur went to work for the man who was in charge of getting the report written--Victor H. Palmieri--who served a year as Ambassador-at-Large and U.S. Coordinator for Refugee Affairs in Jimmy Carter's Department of State under Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
Palmieri's family had relocated to Pasadena, California in 1934, and he grew up poor in the Los Angeles area before attending Stanford Law School and later working for law firm O’Melveny & Myers, which represented Los Angeles's oldest land developers, Janss Investment.
Janss Investments
Janss developers had first focused on model irrigated farms in the San Fernando Valley,
originally acquired for development by a syndicate led by Harry Chandler,
business manager of the Los Angeles Times. The syndicate included Isaac Van Nuys, Hobart
Johnstone Whitley, and James B. Lankershim. Chandler was also closely aligned with William Randolph Hearst. Together they built the infrastructure that allowed Southern California to survive. California's further expansion, however, was dependent at that time upon acquiring more land to build upon.
According to Thomas C. Hayes, who published a profile of Palmieri in the New York Times,
"Railroad stocks belonged in the dustbin," the cover screamed.
Charles Bates "Tex" Thornton of California. Thornton, the head of
Litton Industries, had cornered the market on a vast number of different categories of government contracting. Another Harvard MBA white shirted executive was CEO of North American Rockwell, John L. Atwood, who had been on the
Industry Advisory Councilstarted by Robert McNamara in 1962.
Ironically, McNamara had been President Kennedy's second choice, behind a Republican, whose father had run E.H. Harriman's railroads for years:
"Robert Lovett, who declined the Defense post when offered him by Kennedy, was the most prominent of those who brought McNamara's name to the attention of the Kennedys. Lovett remembered the young officer from his World War II Pentagon days as the brightest of the management group that he had brought down to Washington from the Harvard Business School. He told Clark Clifford, another veteran of the Truman administration, that he saw McNamara as "the prize of the lot, and the Kennedy people ought to consider him for either the Treasury or Defense." [Lawrence S. Kaplan Ronald D. Landa Edward J. Drea, Volume V of HISTORY OF THE OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE, Alfred Goldberg, General Editor]
So was Robert Lovett--a partner of Senator Prescott Bush, Averell and Bunny Harriman, Knight Woolley and others--just being helpful when he advised President Kennedy to put Robert S. McNamara in charge of the Department of Defense, where he served during all of Kennedy's tenure and continued into that of Johnson's?
Call me a cynic. I think there was much more to the recommendation.
Inner City Fund (ICF)
One modern writer, who has clearly bought what the establishment has been selling us for decades, wrote a piece I came across while editing my old research. In introducing Oliver Thomas, the preface states:
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk employed a “hyper-logical” method by which they believed they could correctly assess the outcome of an engagement in Vietnam. JFK’s stellar advisors adhered to a genealogy that found its roots in the “Wise Men” who were also considered the best advisors of their time during and after World War Two. Their names were William [Averell] Harriman, Robert Lovett, Dean Acheson, John McCloy Jr., George Kennan, and Charles Bohlen. Having found themselves in high ranking positions as lawyers, diplomats, and bankers after graduating from Ivy League institutions such as Yale and Harvard, they held an infallible air about them that made them extremely trustworthy.
I needed the laugh I had after reading that paragraph, dripping with hagiographic propaganda. Those in power thought they could trust the whiz kids and the wise men because they believed in the institutions that spat them out. They believed that men who worked for $1 a year actually forfeited any other income available to them from insiders trading on power. Those were the days before Donald Trump took office and played his hand out in the open, for all the world to see.
After Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and LBJ had served one elected term, Nixon was inaugurated in 1969--the same year Pug Winokur's next employer--the Inner City Fund--was reconfigured into ICF International, which would be renamed ICF Incorporated in 1972. ICF was a successor seeking to take the place of many of the Litton-sponsored entities contracting with President Johnson's "war on poverty," not to mention the real war then building up in Vietnam, which fell into McNamara's bailiwick as Secretary of Defense.
Robert McNamara had received his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1939, where he returned to teach from 1940 to 1943. Then he joined the Air Force as a Captain in the Office of Statistical Control. He analyzed the efficiency and effectiveness of bombers, leaving us to wonder whether he may have been used by Joseph Heller as the prototype for General Peckham and his enthusiasm for bomb patterns.
Another younger Harvard Graduate School of Government professor, Richard G. Darman, later became a partner in ICF
Inc., by then called a management and economic consulting company. Darman had loads of government experience, having served previously under Nixon from 1970 to 1977 in five Cabinet
Departments (HEW, Defense, Justice, Commerce, and State).
Then there was James O. Edwards, who got an MBA at Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1967 two years after getting his degree in Industrial Engineering (Operations Research) from Northwestern University. He went on to work in the Office
of Management and Budget (OMB) and was a deputy assistant secretary at the Department
of Health, Education and Welfare under Nixon, joining ICF in 1974.
Edwards took the company from being one with only $300,000 in annual revenue to a company that made $14.3million a year by 1982, mostly from federal contracts on energy and environmental issues. He also helped the company acquire 13 other firms as subsidiaries, which added their revenues to the holding company's total income.
That year, 1982, seems to have been the exact time Reaganites began looking for ways to transnationalize government contracting. At the same time the ubiquitous term "new world order" was raising suspicion that something extraordinary was about to take shape. It was also while George H.W. Bush was Vice President and put in charge of raising funds for President Reagan's foreign policy agenda of fighting an undeclared war in Central America.
Globalization, or Transnational Business
Meanwhile, in Australia, a company which would help to expand ICF's international horizons was also broadening its scope--Elders IXL--consisting of 35% of the equity in Elders Brewing, Elders Agribusiness and Elders Finance Groups. It was being floated by Elders Investments Limited, based in Hong Kong. Elders IXL had just acquired Courage Breweries (UK) and Carling O'Keefe Breweries (Canada), to make "Elders the sixth largest brewer in the world with Foster’s Lager fast becoming a global brand," according to the Financial Times of London.
What we discover, actually only now as we write this blog, is the following:
Kaiser Engineers Group, Incorporated, a construction, engineering and
design firm, operated in Oakland, CA, in 1973. Herbert F. Wulfekamp was
appointed Manager of the Architectural Department, Commercial and
Institutional Division of Kaiser Engineers in early 1973. (See
"Notices," Progressive Architecture, vol. LIV, no. 2, 02/1973, p. 132.)
Kaiser performed engineering work in Australia under the name of its subsidiary, Elders Group IXL Limited.
On
06/17/1988, Kaiser President Granville W. Holman announced that the
firm had agreed to a buyout by the Fairfax, VA-based firm, American
Capital and Research Corporation, for about $50 million.
The Washington Post
reported of this acquisition: "Kaiser, which had sales last year of
$550 million, participated in building such famous projects as the
Hoover Dam and the San Francisco Bridge. Both Kaiser Engineers and ACR
are privately held companies. Elders, a partner in the deal, will retain
control of Kaiser Engineers' Australian and Asian operations, while ACR
will take control of the rest of the engineering firm. Kaiser
Engineers, which has experienced financial difficulties in recent years,
will benefit from the money and contracts that ACR and its subsidiaries
will bring to the merger. For ACR, the acquisition of Kaiser will
provide additional engineering and manpower expertise.
Kaiser Engineers,
established in 1814, has expertise in solving problems involving
hazardous and nuclear wastes." (See Washington Post.com, "American Capital Acquires Kaiser Engineers Group," published 06/17/1988, accessed 11/04/2019.)
The American Capital and Research Corporation (ACR) was formed in Delaware on February 2, 1988, with its address shown as 9300 Lee Highway, Fairfax, Virginia. It was in the same building, no longer extant, as Triton Systems, which later moved to 10201 Fairfax Blvd, Ste 300, Fairfax, VA. Before a year was up, ACR was made a subsidiary of ICF, Incorporated. According to the Los Angeles Times on March 2, 1989:
"Kaiser
Engineers Group, one of the largest engineering firms in the West, is
being merged with another subsidiary of its corporate parent, American
Capital & Research, the holding company announced Wednesday. Kaiser
will combine with ICF Inc., a Fairfax, Va., consulting firm, and the
resulting company will be called ICF Kaiser Engineers. Its headquarters
will be in Oakland, where Kaiser is now based. American Capital &
Research, also of Fairfax, acquired financially troubled Kaiser last
June from a consortium of banks led by Bank of America. Kaiser’s
Australian and Asian operations were then spun off.
ICF Kaiser Engineers
will be a subsidiary of another new firm, ICFcorp International, which
is wholly owned by American Capital. Before the merger, Kaiser
had apparently been losing $1 million per month, but was earning that
much by March 1989. In 1984, Kaiser Engineers Group erected the Raymond Kaiser Engineering Building at 1800 Harrison Street in Oakland, CA.
Phoenix Rising out of Rubble
Henry J. Kaiser, the man, was an engineer, who was once known for a car he invented. My family owned a used one for a year or so, and I swear I [born in 1948] used to ride in its folding back seat, though I can't find any pictures online today showing anyone sitting in such a seat.
The car had been built by the engineering unit of Henry J. Kaiser's industrial empire, and after its acquisition by ICF, the old company became an ICF subsidiary, operated as "ICF Kaiser," maintaining its consulting
unit largely intact. ICF planners, getting set to issue its IPO within two years, added three high-powered outsiders, all known for their ability to raise
money, to its board of directors:
1.Canadian
investor Samuel Belzberg, who also
owned 500,000 shares of the company's stock;
2.Frederic V. Malek, a former Nixon White
House staffer who was part of an investor group that acquired Northwest
Airlines; and
3.Tony Coelho, a former Democratic House
Whip who once ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and later became managing director of the investment banking firm Wertheim Schroder & Co.
Inc.
Richard G. Darman’s entry in Who’s Who
indicates he was the principal director of ICF, Inc., in Washington, D.C. during 1975 and again from 1977 through
1980, having begun his career in government at the Dept. of Health, Education
& Welfare in 1971-72 during Nixon’s first term in office. He went to
Defense in 1973 and soon moved to work in the special assistant’s office in the
Justice Department during Watergate investigation.
During Gerald Ford’s tenure, Darman became a fellow at the Woodrow
Wilson International
Center before moving into
ICF after Pug Winokur left there. A Harvard graduate from the class of 1970, “Richard Gordon Darman grew up in Wellesley Hills, Mass.,
the son of an industrialist who owned textile mills and marketed oil and gas.
After graduating from Harvard
College and Harvard Business School,
he began a career that has taken him through five Cabinet agencies.” (Phil Gailey, The New York Times 11 January
1985)
The Intelligence Advisory Committee (IAC) meetings (which Pug may have attended) were usually
conducted by the Deputy Secretary of Defense—William Putnam Bundy at that time—whose
Yale and Harvard and family background was closely aligned with the
opium-running Cabot, Lowell and Acheson families, as well as being molded by
the Skull and Bones society to which the Harriman, Bush, Lovett and Bundy families
belonged.
ICF, ostensibly a venture capital firm, did not finance any
minority businesses but was, however, awarded numerous consulting government contracts as
a sole-source provider without competitive bidding. It reorganized into a
consulting group in 1972 and began branching into engineering as administrations changed from Democratic to Republican.
Pug left ICF in 1974, the same year that the Defense Industry
Advisory Council (otherwise known as the "Blue Ribbon Defense Panel," chaired by insurance executive, Gilbert Fitzhugh, and appointed by Melvin Laird, disbanded because its secret meetings were thereafter required to be open to
the public. The panel included James R. Kerr, president and
chairman of the Executive committee of Avco corporation. Kerr also served as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Aerospace Industries
association. Two years earlier, Kerr had been desperate to find ways to diversify his company, even to the extent of creating a subsidiary called Cartridge Television, Inc. (Cartrivision) in Indiana. It clearly had gone the way of Betamax before we heard of it.
ICF issued its IPO in 1988--14 years after
Pug left--at about the same time it became ICF-Kaiser through a merger
with Kaiser Engineering, spun off of another of Henry J. Kaiser's companies, Kaiser Aluminum company, sold in 1988 to Charles Hurwitz as Maxxam, Inc. Hurwitz acquired the land assets of the McCulloch company, renamed as MCO Holdings Inc.
Despite his riling up "Frank Sinatra and other wealthy denizens of Rancho Mirage, Calif., ... and building a $75-million resort hotel amid scenic hills of the wealthy desert playground, Hurwitz avoided personal publicity," according to Al Delugach of the LA Times on May 30, 1988. Everything was handled through his private development company, Federated Development Corp., which eventually built the Ritz-Carlton Rancho Mirage Hotel.
Charles Hurwitz of Maxxam
Hurwitz and Maxxam were often in the news just as the writer of this blog, Linda Minor, was living in Houston and just beginning her historical research. Charles Hurwitz had been attracting public attention, motivating Texas Monthly to do an in-depth study of him for its September 1994 issue.
"Maxxam headquarters, from its vast and sparsely decorated waiting room
on the twenty-sixth floor of an office building in Houston’s Galleria
area to the conference room on the twenty-seventh floor, where CEO
Charles Hurwitz is demonstrating the art of reticence to a visiting
journalist. The opening subject is the Houston Rockets, one of Hurwitz’s
few loves outside of his work," the writer, Robert Draper, began without going very far after that. His interview was short but not very sweet--at least on the first day.
Whether the subject is his childhood in Kilgore, his acquisition in
1988 of Kaiser Aluminum (which accounts for 85 percent of Maxxam’s
revenue), the redwood clear-cutting practices of Maxxam’s Northern
California firm, Pacific Lumber, or his pivotal role in bringing horse
racing to Texas, Hurwitz maintains a genial demeanor that is defensive
to the core.
The lightest moment comes when the controversial
Maxxam boss is asked whether he’s tired of all the bad press. His smile
widens. “I’d rather have neither bad press nor good press,” he fairly
booms. “I’d rather have no press.”
The second day of Robert Draper's 1994 interview of Hurwitz brought up a subject I had in fact been somewhat versed in as one of several assistants of County Attorney Mike Driscoll, Houston's County Attorney for Harris County--the newly constructed Sam Houston Race Park being built on a new segment of the Sam Houston Toll Road northwest of the sprawling city. Draper reported that Hurwitz owned 34% of the stock of the racetrack, making him the principal owner.
Driscoll's office had been the bane of existence of whoever had instigated building the racetrack with financing from the county. I was at one meeting between a few colleagues of mine and county officials, who brought in a few outside attorneys to discuss why our office had opined that the financing project was illegal. It was not authorized by any existing Texas statute, we explained.
Their attorney from Vinson & Elkins, whose name I've forgotten for the moment, said, paraphrasing here: "No problem. We can get that changed by the Legislature. We do that all the time." My reply was that I had seen some of their custom-made legislation, which I described with one word--sloppy. They had simply "incorporated by reference" one prior statute dealing with a different subject into a new statute, without bothering to make sure the old text applied to the new situation. Sloppy!
Since I had begun working for the County Attorney in December 1989, I had observed how the County was used by movers and shakers then living in Houston, in particular the county judge, Jon Lindsay, but that's a part of the story explored in Land and Loot on this blog.
Litton Industries
Charles Bates "Tex" Thornton, mentioned previously, had been Robert McNamara's boss at
Ford Motor Co. in Detroit. Both men had similar educational backgrounds to Pug Winokur. They and eight other
people hired in 1945, answering directly to Henry Ford II, arrived at Ford straight from the U.S.
Army Air Corps' unit of Statistical Control.
The Army had created "a joint program with the Harvard Business School to manage the burgeoning logistics around the air war effort. The Air Corps’ air force statistical control program was managed by Charles B. 'Tex' Thornton, an officer with close ties to an assistant secretary of war Robert A. Lovett." (Source: Abhijnan Rej, "The Other Legacy of Robert McNamara," June 10, 2016)
Thornton had eventually convinced McNamara to join Ford Motor Company "to aid in applying war-time management techniques to the reorganization of a large corporation," according to Indian scholar Rej. The unit's method of "treating industrial and defense bureaucracies with the same set of analytical techniques" is what was desired at that time before computers were widely available. That same ability, as we've since learned, is what caused so much excitement when the PROMIS software was created a decade or two later. After beginning their post-war careers in Detroit with Ford, the whiz kids branched out, experimenting in an assortment of industries, often utilized by the federal government which sought to accomplish the policy goals of whichever administration was in power.
The significance of this combination of military and business school intellectual experimentation was lost on me at the time I was first writing the Yellow Brick Road project. It only began to hit home after Gangster Planet was almost ready to print. I was engaged in writing what was supposed to be a brief summary called "About the Authors" for the book. Anyone who has read my work knows what an impossible task that was for me. "Brief" is not my middle name. Daniel Hopsicker aptly described my writing as "prolix," a term with which I was then unfamiliar. But it does fit me to a tee--"lengthy, protracted, long and wordy."
What better place to end this segment before readers nod off to sleep?
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.” 
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.
