FOLLOW THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD I

FROM HARVARD TO ENRON PART ONE 

by Linda Minor 

© 2002 (updated 2026)

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.

Catherine had recently suffered the failure of her business enterprise (Hamilton Securities Group), as she later described in a book published online called "Dillon, Read & Co., Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits."

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.

In late 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, May 9, 1982, Palmieri was best known for "directing Penn Central's reorganization efforts," adding that "Victor Palmieri & Company, which he started a dozen years ago [1970] to manage real estate owned by pension funds, now manages $1 billion in assets, and has its own special brand of big money management. Unlike most professional portfolio managers, Palmieri and crew move in and take over. They put in their own board and their own people to run a property."

Palmieri's company was paid $21 million, according to Hayes, for reorganizing Penn Central, and many members of his team "stayed as top executives with the new corporation or subsidiaries that were sold, [and] received $1 million bonuses." Victor himself had been named "president of the Janss Investment Corporation when it developed Snowmass in Aspen, Colo., and refurbished Sun Valley, Idaho" while working for his law firm's client, the Janss corporation. The land on which Sun Valley ski resort was built in 1964 was bought from the Union Pacific Railroad, whose major stockholders were, of course, the sons of railroad tycoon, E.H. Harriman.

The Palmieri approach to reorganizing companies was not unlike the way Brown Brothers Harriman--the investment bank created out of the New York investment bank Brown Brothers and W.A. Harriman & Co.--found Neil Mallon, a buddy from Skull and Bones days, to be president of Dresser Industries.

One cover picture for the book, Wreck of the Penn Central, written by Joseph R. Daughen and Peter Binzen, showed a fitting image of the state of railroads at that time--a garbage can filled with railroad cars.

"Railroad stocks belonged in the dustbin," the cover screamed. 

Palmieri had independence in choosing his crew for the project, giving a nod to John Hector McArthur, then dean of the Harvard Business School, one of the bankruptcy trustees for Penn Central. McArthur's idea of how to handle  his resuscitation of failing businesses was this: 

"His small team of business rescue specialists could seek out troubled companies, buy them at discount with cash from pension funds and then sign on as well-paid managers to steer the companies back to health."

So was the cash really derived "from pension funds"? Perhaps blog writers tend to be more cynical than Hayes, who suggested in an article published by the New York Times that Palmieri, by partnering with the managers of Mafia-linked pension funds, Palmieri may have continued using mobbed-up connections as he expanded into other areas:

Today his [Palmieri's] company manages $575 million in tax-exempt assets, and Pensions and Investment Age ranks it seventh in tax-exempt asset management. Altogether the company's portfolio includes $300 million in Penn Central property; $140 million in real estate that it bought in a partnership, VPCO Properties, with the seven pension funds last year, and $550 million for the Teamsters union's Central States Southwest and Southeast Pension Fund, including the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. In the case of the Teamsters' fund, the Government brought Mr. Palmieri in during the late 1970's as a trustee for the scandal-scarred fund. Sun City Center, a retirement community of 8,000 people south of Tampa that Palmieri & Company took over last year, illustrates the company's expanded role.

What became apparent to me many years after conducting my initial research was that Palmieri was following the same steps as had Democrats Robert McNamara and 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 Council started 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?

 

(to be continued)