George Herbert (G.H.) Walker Early Business

Banker in St. Louis

G.H. Walker son-in-law, Prescott Bush

As our readers are undoubtedly aware, Prescott Bush moved to St. Louis after completing his Yale diploma and his military service in WWI. Tapped for Skull and Bones in 1917, Prescott became fast friends with Bunny Harriman in his class, as well as with Bunny's older brother, Averell, scions of E. H. Harriman's railroad empire. E.H. Harriman's successor after his 1909 death, R.S. Lovett from the Baker & Botts Houston, Texas law firm, also had a son in the secret society around the same time. Prescott took a job with Simmons Hardware, owned by the family of other Bonesmen of the same age at Yale.

Another kind of merger

Within a few short months, Prescott had met and then married Dorothy Walker, daughter of the railroad's president, G.H. Walker, who had been born and reared in the Missouri city. 

One year before the wedding, which took place, not in St. Louis, but at the Walkers' summer home in Maine's Kennebunkport, "Bert "Walker, as he was called, had been made president of Averell Harriman's new investment bank--W.A. Harriman & Co.--and had moved to Wheatly Hills, a close-knit community within Old Westbury, Long Island. The "community" consisted mostly of members of Jock Whitney's polo team.

In 1922 Bert and Averell formed a horse-breeding and racing partnership (Log Cabin Stud) near Harry Payne Whitney's estate at Manhasset, Long Island. The estate was so large that at times it was said to be located at Rosslyn, NY, or identified as the Wheatley stables.

What I never realized before starting my research into the background of Prescott Bush's father-in-law was that Bert Walker had long been involved with the New Orleans, Texas & Mexico Railway Co. (NOTM, or Gulf Coast Lines) from as early as 1902, ensuring first that his investor-clients' railroad stock would prosper; navigating it through bankruptcy and into private operation, finding a buyer, and, later, protecting the interest of bondholders who held the debt.

Walker oversaw the Frisco's sale to the Missouri Pacific in 1925, agreeing to accept 5% gold bonds as part payment to the former shareholders. The infamous Van Swearingen brothers of Cleveland, assisted by loans from J. P. Morgan banks, such as Bankers Trust, had obtained control of various railroad assets through their holding company, Alleghany Corporation, in 1930, but then were forced into bankruptcy two years later when MOPAC could not pay its bonds.

The default brought on a resulting sale of control in 1935 at bargain prices, according to a U.S. Senate inquiry, at an auction conducted by J. P. Morgan officials, of its collateral worth over $3.5 billion securing a $48 million loan. Thus control of the railroads went into the hands of George A. Ball (Mid-America) for less than one-third of a million dollars. In 1938, Bert Walker was again one of a five-member protective group ensuring the viability of those bonds.

We know that two years after George Herbert Walker Bush, Bert's grandson, was discharged from the U.S. Navy in September 1945, he decided to move to West Texas to go into the oil business, with help from his maternal uncle, Herbie Walker--Bert's son--who advised him about potential investors. We have to wonder how many of those potential investors in Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana had been known to George Herbert Walker through his connections with the railroad to which much of his career had been linked.

Frisco Branches in Texas and Oklahoma

The Rio Grande Valley of Texas extends along the river that has served as the border between Texas and Mexico since the terms of the Mexican War were settled in the mid-1840's. The western extension begins just southwest of Uvalde, Texas, and travels southeasterly to the tip of Texas at Brownsville. The valley stretches out from the Rio Grande River.
It was first developed into irrigated farms by agents of the St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway, the stock of which was controlled by a syndicate of primarily St. Louis businessmen, who also later controlled the New Orleans, Texas & Mexico Railway Co.

 

As early as 1902, that syndicate included G.H. "Bert" Walker of St. Louis, stockbroker and private banker, who was named president during receivership of the railroad in 1914. In 1918 officers of the New Orleans, Texas & Mexico Railroad included the following:

• Frank Andrews from Houston, Texas, was Chairman of Board, and he was the senior partner in what was then Andrews, Ball & Streetman, though it would soon become the more recognized name of Andrews, Kurth & Campbell.
• J. Samuel Pyeatt, president and general manager, had been born in Arkansas and married Myra Loy in St. Louis in 1912, the same year he was hired as a vice president of the Frisco lines--New Orleans, Texas & Mexico; Beaumont, Sour Lake & Western; and St. Louis, Brownsville & Mexico--with his headquarters at the Union Station in Houston. In 1923, he applied for a passport to take his family on a European tour, giving his address as 518 Union Station Building in Houston. That building when I worked in downtown Houston in 1990 stood vacant, merely another boarded up building taking a space reserved for a new stadium for the Astros baseball team. The location had been preserved for Houston's modernization just as Enron (formerly Houston Natural Gas) imploded in 2001. Pyeatt, however, had moved to Denver in 1930 to head another railroad.
• G. H. Walker, vice president, from St. Louis, Mo.; 
• Roy Terrell, vice president, and H. Generes Dufour, secretary, both from New Orleans, La.;
• J. H. Lauderdale, Treasurer and assistant secretary, who left in 1920 to work for the United States Railroad Commission; 
• George E. Warren, of Columbia Trust, assistant secretary and assistant treasurer, from Houston, Texas;
• J. W. McCullough, auditor, from Houston, Texas; and
  J. E. Anderson, Purchasing Agent, from Houston, Texas. 

 The Executive Committee was comprised ofFrank Andrews and J. S. Pyeatt of Houston,

• G. H. Walker of St. Louis, Mo.,
  Henry Sanderson and Elisha Walker of New York.
  In 1920 G. H. Walker became chairman of the company, most of whose officers still lived in Houston. That is the year the receivership ended. It's also the year Bert Walker moved to New York.

St. Louis Railroad Builders

Years earlier, in 1902, directors of the Frisco had been:

• Stedman Buttrick, Boston, Mass., broker at Estabrook & Co.;
• Henry Sanderson,
• Lorenzo Semple, graduate of the Naval Academy and retired from U.S. Navy, an attorney with Coudert Brothers law firm;
• Carl A. deGersdorff, attorney with Cravath, Swain;
• Elisha Walker of Blair & Co.,
• Willard V. King, president of Columbia Trust in New York;

• G. H. Walker,
• Albert T. Perkins,
• Neill A. McMillan

  

  Bert Walker of Walker Cup Fame

  , originally from Waxahachie, Texas, who ran the St. Louis Union Trust Co. and that city's clearinghouse until the trust company merged with the Third National Bank in 1919, located at Broadway and Olive Streets in St. Louis, Mo.;
• J. C. Harvey, St. Louis, Mo., friend and associate of Augustus Busch;
• Alexander Berger, Maryton, Va., friend and associate of William Jennings Bryan;
• J. D. O'Keefe, president of Whitney Bank, New Orleans, La.;
• C. B. Fox, New Orleans, La.;
• Frank Andrews and John Samuel Pyeatt of Houston, Tex.

Frisco Investors

The list of the directors tells us a great deal about the railroad's investors as well as their political connections. Wealthy businessmen often use their attorneys and bankers as debt collectors in the event of default. When the legal system is not successful, they traditionally lobby their political representatives to change the laws to give them greater enforcement rights. What we see when we look at the above names are the men who consolidated their interests to rescue the railroads' hard assets as well as the contract rights of the merged railroads to their maximum benefit. 

For example, Frisco director Carl A. deGersdorff, once a partner in the law firm known for a time as Cravath, Swain & Moore, in 1913 was a banker at William Salomon & Co. The Cravath firm was also home for a time to Thomas K. Finletter and John J. McCloy, both of whom wielded considerable clout after WWII. In 1902 deGersdorff was a virtual unknown, but in 1905 he was nominated as an overseer of Harvard, and in 1913 he was named to the protective committee for holders of the Frisco's gold bonds, as was Bert Walker.

In 1913 the bondholders' attorneys--Carter Ledyard & Milburn--were the same attorneys who handled Payne Whitney's estate in 1927, and the firm's partner, John G. Milburn, handled Standard Oil of New Jersey legal business for John D. Rockefeller. De Gersdorff was also closely involved with both the Frisco and the Missouri Pacific railroads, which his firm represented. (The Cravath Firm and Its Predecessors, 1819-1947, Volume 1 - By Robert Taylor Swaine, p.338)

Elisha Walker was a banker for Blair & Co., where James Grant Forbes, John Kerry's grandfather had been a director. Blair & Co. was sold to A.P. Gianinni in 1929 and merged with Bank of America, renamed Transamerica. A few years later, Gianinni filed a huge lawsuit to get all his stock back from Elisha Walker. [See Moira Johnston's The Tumultuous History of the Bank of America, p. 42]

Walker and his colleagues had done an admirable job of satisfying the creditors and stockholders alike who made an inspection of the various Frisco railroad lines in 1915 before agreeing to allow it out of receivership. So happy were they that they elected Walker president in charge of continuing the Frisco operations. By 1925 the New Orleans, Texas & Mexico Railroad, as well as the San Antonio, Uvalde & Gulf Railroad in which three members of H.D. Byrd's father's family were directors, was sold to Jay Gould's Missouri Pacific Railroad.

G.H. Walker and the Harrimans

Partners in Brown Brothers Harriman

In 1926 the Harrimans were set to put huge infusions of capital into Brown Brothers (with the late Eugene Delano as a former partner), which had managed the stock portfolios of members of the Forbes and other families invested in Russell & Co., the opium company in China. Russell & Co. had ties to both Harvard and Yale.

In 1931 Harriman made an infusion of capital into investment bank Brown Brothers to create Brown Brothers Harriman, while G.H. Walker continued to run the brothers' first investment bank called W.A. Harriman & Co. at the original office. 

R. S. Lovett's son, the Texas-born Robert Abercrombie Lovett, married Adele Q. Brown, daughter of the senior partner of the old Brown Brothers firm. The Brown family's early American genealogy was traced at a sister blog, Minor Musings, some time ago: Alexander Brown had relocated from Ireland to Baltimore, Maryland in 1800.

Alex. Brown and sons

Alexander Brown had begun investing in cotton and linen markets, but his bank expanded into commodities and manufacturing which were of interest to the capitalists around him. They were the first to invest in American railroads, such as the Baltimore & Ohio and the Chesapeake in Maryland. The daughters of George "Brook" Brown married wealthy men from Chicago (Palmer, Keith and Field), who undoubtedly had investments in railroads in that area.

Alexander Brown & Sons, Bankers

The third and fourth generations of Alexander's family, who remained in Baltimore, gave up management of the bank to outsiders. They hired Buzzy Krongard as president in July 1991. Kongard fought hard to keep from selling, but in 1997 agreed to merge with Bankers Trust in New York, but Bankers Trust lost $350 million in Russian market trades in 1998. Those Russian trade losses led to its acquisition by Deutsche Bank on June 4, 1999. By then Krongard had left the bank to work for the CIA, promoted to executive director (third man in charge) in March 2001, still in that position when
9/11 occurred.

Krongard resigned from the CIA in 2004, however, and soon popped up, according to Jeremy Scahill, "as a paid consultant for Blackwater," at the same time his brother, Howard "Cookie" Krongard, Inspector General at the State Department, clearly "impeded a Justice Department investigation into Blackwater over allegations the company was illegally smuggling weapons into Iraq." 

 

Scahill stated that Buzzy and Erik "go back at least to 2002, when Buzzy helped jump-start Blackwater’s ultra-profitable role as a provider of soldiers-for-hire in the 'war on terror'.”

The question is whether Krongard had any insight into the workings of Deutsche Bank, which possibly even in the late 90's was working trades with Russian oligarchs, as Bankers Trust had done.  

 

Timothy L. O'Brien in Bloomberg declared: "Deutsche’s executives, dealmakers, bond salesmen and loan officers have kept in step with Trump — despite misgivings and sometimes lackluster or disastrous results — for about two decades"--that is, since its acquisition of Alex. Brown & Sons in 1999.

Meanwhile, the sons who did not remain in Baltimore made names for themselves in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, attracting wealthy investors in those areas. In Boston they became friends and married into wealthy families who had made fortunes in shipping, including opium fortunes from the China trade. John Crosby Brown had died in 1909.

By the 1920's, however, James Brown and his partners were elderly and wanted to retire. Partner Eugene Delano died in 1920. An uncle of then-future President Franklin Roosevelt, he had married a granddaughter of Massachusetts shipbuilder Thatcher Magoun.

It was at about this same time that a man of few words, thus dubbed "Silent Cal" became noted for saying "The business of America is business." Calvin Coolidge knew of what he spoke. Behind every philosophical aphorism and tirade about religion or morality, the underlying concern of those who elect America's leaders is the issue of money--how to make it and how to keep it.

Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster

The CIA's website informs us that during this time there was a counter-intelligence vacuum, even though Treasury had the Secret Service, Justice had the Bureau, and the Secretary of State also was involve in domestic counter-intelligence to some extent. The APL was intended to fill the vacuum, but soon got totally out of hand, according to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, the uncle of the Dulles brothers.

The Byrd Relationships in Missouri

Both of Byrd's sons spent much of their careers at Alsop Process Company, but also operated private banking through A.R. Byrd & Sons Investments in St. Louis, with offices in 1908 in the Union Trust Building on Olive Street. Later they moved to 420 Olive (possibly in the Rialto Building). J. Hunter Byrd's home was 4211 Westminster Place in St. Louis, approximately a mile from the G.H. Walker home at 12 Hortense Place. J. Hunter Byrd's first cousin, William C. Byrd, Jr., met and married Lillian Vandiver, of 4207 Westminster, across the street from his cousin. 

The Byrds undoubtedly became aware of their fellow Missourian, G. H. Walker, who was promoting his railroads in Texas as early as 1902. George Herbert (G.H.) Walker had first established his brokerage firm in St. Louis in 1901 at 810 N. 4th, eventually moving the office to 307 N. 4th Street, the latter address being across the street from the Byrds' offices on Olive--both within a couple of blocks from the huge Federal Reserve Bank Building.

In 1911 these sons of Abram Byrd set up another investment company to invest in Georgia land and to build a railroad, buying up 90,000 acres in three states. Their plan not only fizzled into ruin but subjected them to a decade of litigation, fighting allegations of fraud as they did with the Alsop Process.

Both A.R. Jr. and his brother Joseph Hunter Byrd moved from St. Louis to New York City, opening an office in the new Equitable Life Building at 120 Broadway during the WWI years. In that building the American International Corporation (AIC) could also be found. It was a premise of Anthony C. Sutton, author of Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, that "two of the operational vehicles for infiltrating or influencing foreign revolutionary movements were located at 120 Broadway: the first, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, heavily laced with Morgan appointees; the second, the Morgan-controlled American International Corporation."

According to passport applications, A.R., Jr. spent several months during 1921-1923 in South American countries of Colombia, Panama and Venezuela handling unspecified investments. It was reported by the UT daily newspaper in 1922 that he maintained an office in New York City on Fifth Avenue while he was out of the country.

Byrd invested in Colombia, Panama, Venezuela before 1923.

His father's passport application in 1919 indicated he had a cattle business over an extensive part of northern Mexico (Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas), and trade journals reported he had a winter residence in "Old Mexico," possibly because he owned the franchise rights for the Alsop Process there.

A 1906 issue of the Modern Miller alleged that Abram R. Byrd had health problems and found spending time in Mexico therapeutic, and in another section mentioned that he had retired, replaced by his son J. Hunter Byrd. This branch of the Byrd family would eventually live in Tucson, Arizona, after becoming involved in various mining ventures.

One of these ventures, Campana Gold Mines, Inc., a Delaware corporation, promoting stock in a gold mine in Sonora, Mexico, resulted in the indictment for mail fraud of both A.R. Byrd, Jr. and his first cousin, D. H. Byrd, in 1940. Co-defendant, William Socrates Deree, a Greek who lived in Chicago, pled guilty in 1945, leading to dismissal of the Byrds and others. Elmer E. Pope of Parkersburg, W. Va. was shown as the company's president and Philip J. Kealy of Chicago, stock distributor. Prosecutors alleged the defendants had rigged the value of common stock by making false claims on gold vein discoveries, a classic pump and dump scheme.

Edward Byrd's Family

The youngest of Stephen Byrd II's sons, Edward Byrd, orphaned at age 12, was living at his brother William's farm in 1870 but by 1879 had found a wife. When and how they met, we have no clue, but his wedding to Mary (Mollie) Easley, daughter of Robert MacDonald Easley, took place September 24, 1879 in Blossom Prairie, Texas.

Vice Pres. Garner with FDR

D. Harold Byrd's uncle, R.J. Easley, 1932

The bride's father had resettled his family from their previous home in Hot Springs, Arkansas, just as the Texas Pacific Railroad made Blossom a stop on its line. Extensive research does not reveal how the couple met, but we know Mollie soon gave birth to their first child, Ruddell Jones Byrd, who was called Leo. Their youngest child, the subject of all this research, David Harold Byrd, was born in Red River County in the small town of Detroit, Texas, in 1900. In this same town 32 years earlier (1868) a Texas icon, John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner, had been born, and he grew up with the Easley family into which Ed Byrd had married in 1879. Jack Garner relocated to Uvalde in South Texas in 1892, shortly thereafter entering a career in politics that would take him one step from the White House, his title being U.S. Vice President from 1933 to 1941. Garner nevertheless retained ties with his birthplace. When their only child, Tully Charles Garner, was born in 1896, his mother went to Detroit, Texas, to have her baby.

Mollie Easley Byrd's family were among Garner's earliest and most avid supporters for President, her brother R.J. Easley acting as chairman of his hometown campaign in 1932, and remaining loyal even when he began contesting FDR for the 1940 Democratic nomination in 1938. Garner and his supporters never forgave Roosevelt for running for a third term, nor for choosing Henry A. Wallace as his replacement as Vice President.

 

 

Vanderbilt Ranch in Southwest Florida

In Part One, we learned that the Vanderbilt brothers bought 35,000 acres of land in Sarasota and Charlotte Counties, Florida, for which they paid a whopping $700,700 in December 1951. 

Only three years later an adjoining tract of land was sold by the man they bought their acreage from for $2,300,000. Didn't anyone happen to wonder at the time who did the appraisals?

Maule Industries

Why would Maule Industries, Inc., affiliated with the Florida West Coast Development Co., pay $33,000 an acre for land worth only $20,000 per acre three years earlier?

What do we know about Maule Industries?

James Herman Buchanan, who lived at 77 La Gorce Circle in Miami, had been president of Maule Industries in June 1953 when it merged with  Alfred Destin, Co. The two corporations completed a merger by issuing new Maule stock worth about $2,000,000 and each corporation traded its old stock for shares in the new corporation. 

By 1959, the Miami directory listed him as the president of Ridgeway Corp. 

Born in a small town southwest of Dallas, Texas in 1898, Buchanan had grown up near Graham, in Young County, Texas, where he had worked as a bookkeeper for a bank before WWI began. He enlisted and spent six months training at the Naval Training School in San Pedro, CA before receiving a discharge in October, when his father died. The following January, 1919, he was named an assistant cashier at Beckham National Bank in Graham, where he was still employed in July when he married Helen Lawrence of Adams County, Illinois. 

The 1920 census shows the newlyweds and his mother living as lodgers in the home of a Graham building contractor. At some point during the 1920's Herman and Helen moved to El Paso, Texas, where he was a partner in Western Purchasing Co., which handled accounts for railroads and mining companies operating in Mexico. Employees had the use of a Mexican airline called C.A.T. which flew daily between El Paso and Mexico City's Toluca airport.

The purchasing company went into bankruptcy in 1930, but the Buchanans remained there for a time after that. In 1932 their only daughter Barbara Jean was born in El Paso, where Herman had found new work until at least 1935, but in 1940 they were living in Evanston, Illinois (just outside Chicago). Buchanan had begun working for Atlas Powder Co. there before 1940, being promoted to district manager by 1948.

Atlas was housed at 135 S. LaSalle Street, known by a variety of names, including the Marshall Field Building, LaSalle Bank Building, and Bank of America Building.

When daughter Barbara married in 1952, the Buchanan home had been Miami, Oklahoma, in the far northeast corner of the state, since early 1948 when they bought a lead and zinc mine in the area. As operator of the Nellie B. Mining Company, Buchanan was the owner of a lead and zinc mine sold in 1951 to American Zinc. After Barbara's wedding, the Buchanans moved to La Gorce in Miami Beach.

According to his 1976 obituary, he owned 19,000 acres of land in Florida and a 2,000-acre farm in California. His career had begun with Chemical Research Corp, which was linked with the Gyro Vapor Process of refining gasoline.

Alfred Destin company had been controlled by Max Orovitz, also from Miami, who acquired the stock in 1945 for $30,000. Orovitz had shortly before acquired a cement company in Broward County. 

New directors included Fred Hooper, a heavy construction operator and horse race owner; and Hubert E. Howard, a Harvard-educated attorney, Chicago financier, and former coal producer, who had served as chairman of the U.S. Munitions Board and of the joint NATO Munitions Board in the late 1940's.

At the time of the merger, the corporation's address was 1780 Purdy Avenue in Miami Beach, where Maurice Gibb Memorial Park is today. That location is 2.6 miles from where a man known as Billy Klein would be arrested in 1974 for conspiracy to import drugs. Also living within a one or two miles radius were the parents of Kenneth G. Burnstine, who would turn out to be a person of great interest.

Kenneth Gordon Burnstine

NACL Archives

As it happened, Klein's initial arrest was the result of a plane crash that had occurred the previous January near an airstrip just south of some land that the company which bought the Vanderbilt property had been attempting to develop since 1969.

The airplane that crashed was found to be ultimately owned by none other than Kenny Burnstine through an airline and corporations he controlled.

Kenny actually had made his home in Fort Lauderdale since about 1960, a few years after he returned from his enlistment with the Marine Corps (1954-1957). Rather than returning to Chicago, where he had spent the first years of his life, he settled first in Mobile, Alabama. There he married Ann Mitchell, daughter of real estate office manager Joseph Mitchell. She was the youngest of four children, including two brothers--Abe and Mayer.

Ann's brothers were about the same age as Kenny, and had also fought in the Korean War. Mayer Mitchell was a "go-getter, becoming president of Phi Epsilon Pi fraternity at the University of Pennsylvania and graduating at 20 from its Wharton School of Finance. 

"He married a Penn coed from Atlanta, Arlene Friedland, and served as an Army first lieutenant in Korea. The young couple settled in Mobile. Motivated by a personal philosophy of 'the harder you work, the luckier you get,' Mitchell founded a real-estate development firm, The Mitchell Company Inc., in 1958 with his brother and Bill Lubel. In his memoir, Mayer Mitchell wrote, 'We built over 25,000 houses, over 20,000 apartments and 175 shopping centers.' The company expanded beyond south Alabama, with Mitchell Company offices in New Orleans, Pensacola, Tampa, Atlanta and Raleigh, N.C.' "

 At any rate, Burnstine became engaged to Ann in June of 1956, having only recently mustered out of the Marine Corps, though he remained in the Reserves, attached to the Naval Training Center in Glenville, Illinois. The wedding took place in August, and he immediately found work with her family's real estate companies--Gulf Coast Realty Co., the Mitchell Company, and a variety of mortgage companies for the first several years of their marriage.

In either 1959 or 1960 the family relocated to Fort Lauderdale, where Ken and Ann created a series of real estate, land development and mortgage companies similar to those the Mitchell family was operating in Mobile. Their first home was located just north of E. Oakland Park Boulevard on NE 35th Court.

They became members of the Reform Jewish synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, then located at 1801 S. Andrews--about a mile north of the airport--where Ann was active in the Sisterhood in 1962. By 1963 Ken's name also appeared in the local paper as its president. By that time the congregation had grown to almost 500 families, too large for its existing facilities. When Temple Beth El was started in Hollywood, it attracted enough of the membership to leave 260 families in the Fort Lauderdale temple, of which Ken was president from 1963 until 1965. Ann Burnstine was co-chairman of the Sisterhood for Emanu-El. 

It is impossible to know at this late date whether those who were active in the congregation may have included members of the Jewish Mafi, but it is well known that Mayer and Jake Lansky had made their home in Hollywood for over two decades by that time. Jake's home was about 7 miles from Burnstine's temple. In a recent article Dan Sweeney wrote:

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Hallandale Beach was filled with casinos — “carpet joints,” they called them. Broward County Sheriff Walter Clark, who held his position through most of the two decades despite being thrown out of office by Florida’s governor in both 1939 and 1950, turned a blind eye to the gambling dens. But while their business was in Hallandale, the mobsters lived in Hollywood.

“They raised and had families here, so they kept that somewhat clear of their doings and the clubs were in Hallandale,” said Hollywood historian Joan Mickelson. “[Vincent] Alo used the Hollywood Yacht Club as a meeting place, and they got together and played cards or something, but that wasn’t a major place....Alo lived in the 1200 block of Monroe Street in Hollywood. Alo operated the places in conjunction with Meyer and Jacob Lansky....Jake lived in the 1100 block of Harrison Street in Hollywood....

Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano served as point man in South Florida for the Genovese crime family. He lived at two houses on Palm Drive in Hallandale Beach from 1974 until his arrest in 1978. He died in prison 11 years later, serving a life sentence for murder and racketeering charges.

 The South Florida Sentinel in 2010 indicated that although many of the earlier mobsters had died, the criminal element was still active. 

By 1968, a state crime commission concluded, "South Florida, especially Dade and Broward counties, has become a haven for many known Mafia figures and associates, though their activities know no local boundaries within the state."

In more recent years, "The Teflon Don," Gambino boss John Gotti, maintained a residence in Fort Lauderdale. So did Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, the brutal head of a Mafia family operating in Philadelphia and Atlantic City....

They still get involved in gambling, loan sharking, strip clubs, prostitution, drug dealing and extortion, but have gravitated toward more sophisticated crimes — such as stock and Medicare fraud — that don't carry the same risks.

They have faced increased competition from Israeli organized crime and Russian mobsters.

"The biggest change has been the Russian mafia," Mangan said. "The Russians started moving in after the fall of communism. They primarily set up in South Beach. They started opening banks in Antigua and Aruba."

The first corporation they had formed was the Kenann Investment Corporation in January 1960, set up for them by a young Miami lawyer, Burton Richard Levey, the son of Ben Levey--an officer of Sterling Equipment, a metal fabrication company founded in Miami in 1939.

Burton R. Levey

Burt Levey went to Miami High, then completed college and law school at the University of Miami, where he was elected president of the student body his junior year of law school. One of his fraternity brothers, Jerry Kogan, would later practice with him, along with another lawyer named Max Kogen.

Levey married an Ohio girl, Fran Bloom, who had attended college in Miami. The wedding was a Jewish ceremony held in September 1954, the same month Burt was licensed to practice law. His first office was in the Ainsley Building in Miami at 14 NE 1st St., #500. After a couple of years he had moved up to the 7th floor.

Burnstine's professional relationship with Levey would last for the next 16 years, until his death in 1976. 

There were five mortgage companies they were doing business under besides Kenann Mortgage Co., Inc. In 1961 he filed fictitious named certificates--called Assumed Name Certificates in Texas--for Burnstine and a partner named Jay H. Weiss, originally from Baltimore before he had participated in the Korean War.

Burton Levey had incorporated Kenann Insurance Company in 1960 very early in his legal career. Levey's engagement to Fran Bloom had been officially announced in June 1954 when he was a senior in University of Miami Law School. He had served in the Air Force prior to the engagement and his return to law school. His father, Ben Levey, also lived in Miami, but Fran was from Akron, Ohio. Levey died at age 81 in 2013.

In 1961 he also incorporated Consumer Finance Corp. of America for Burnstine and Weiss, whose address was given as 3000 N. Federal Highway, catty-corner from where they were building the circular building that became their headquarters, called the Kenann Building. At that time, Gate City Realty was located at the address, and in 1962 Kenny's brother, Irving Richard Burnstine, became an agent there.

Irving had been married in 1961 to the former Miss Massachusetts, Barbara Gale Feldman, a 1960 graduate of the University of Massachusetts. Irving, however, went to the University of Illinois and had a Master's degree from Wharton Finance in Philadelphia. So, how and where exactly did they become acquainted.

Kenny and Irving's parents had only recently relocated from Chicago to 1500 Bay Road in Miami Beach--the Flamingo Hotel, demolished that same year.

A 1963 article in the Fort Lauderdale newspaper filled in a few of the financial details, revealing that Consumer Finance Corp of America was a holding company for numerous subsidiary corporations. It had apparently bought the strip center located as 3000 N. Federal Highway, where Gate City Realty had its office and was providing financing for the construction of the round building to the northwesMost telling of all, however, is the strange fact near the end of the article stating that Consumer Finance had branched out into a Panamanian corporation--setting up a fish importing business. Seafood would be FLOWN into Florida from Central America by PESCADORES IMPORTADO INTERNATIONALES, S.A.

We've all done enough reading and research to recognize a CIA proprietary when we see one, especially one operating just outside Cuban territory in 1963.

 

 

George Herbert Walker in NY

Have you ever wondered why George Herbert Walker moved to New York in 1920 after living his entire life up  to that point in St. Louis? That momentous event occurred only one year before his favorite daughter, Dorothy Walker, married a  young graduate of Yale (Skull and Bones 1917) named Prescott Sheldon Bush, who had spent most of his life up to then in Columbus, Ohio.

As World War I persisted and bankers watched the Tsarist monarchy collapse in Russia, American business men saw only new opportunities and dollars signs ahead of them. Less than five years after the death of J.P. Morgan and the birth of the Federal Reserve private banking system, bankers were vying to fill the role J.P. Morgan had played for decades. Morgan's affiliated banking, insurance and industrial corporations--comprising American infrastructure--would soon be targeted by a major competitor from another elite group.

George Bush's Grandfather--1920

Prescott Bush's first-born son was named for Dorothy's dad, George Herbert Walker, while Prescott and Dorothy lived in Milton, Massachusetts. He was allegedly working for a vinyl flooring company there on the eastern coast of Massachusetts on Adams Street, almost next door to the museum of one of the Forbes brothers who spent numerous years engaged in the China Trade for Russell  &  Co. Houqua's investments began as $1,000,000 worth of tea sent to John Murray Forbes in the 1840's.

 

When Russell & Co. filed bankruptcy in 1891, it was primarily due to its inability to reconcile the books on behalf of what it called "The Houqua Trust," according to an online treatise called Global Trade in the Nineteenth Century:

The House of Houqua and the Canton System.

The investments had actually been entrusted to the partners in J. M. Forbes & Co, who used the value to increase their percentage shares in Russell & Co. In 1879, however, the descendants of Houqua, who had withdrawn from commercial trade after his death in 1843, had gradually lost their company trade name, Yihe, to Jardine & Matheson & Co., particularly the trade in opium. 

 

No further profits arose from that trade between J.M. Forbes & Co. and any of the Houqua sons. The Forbes brothers died, and the firm was operated at the time of the dissolution of the trust by John Murray Forbes and his sons, William Hathaway and John Malcolm Forbes. They were all named in the release signed by Houqua's legal heir under Chinese law.

We are told, however, that the release did not end the relationship with Russell & Co., which continued to hold investments of the Chinese family until 1891, the year it filed bankruptcy. At that time, according to the Forbes Family Papers, it included as partners grandsons of James Grant Forbes, the older brother of John Murray and Robert Benet Forbes, the original partner:

John Murray Forbes, Jr. (1844-1921) and Francis "Frank" Blackwell Forbes (1839-1908). 

See the Forbes Family Tree chart.

 

Several members of the Forbes family were still living in Milton during the years Prescott and Dotty lived there in the early 1920's.

 

***

 

Prescott Bush had become George Herbert Walker's  son-in-law in 1921, one year after Bert, as Walker was known, realized he could be of more service to the wealthy families of St. Louis by working from the Wall Street section of New York.

Unnamed investment bank announced 1920

He would combine his St. Louis clientele into a larger group of equally wealthy citizens of other parts of the country. 

 

Taking his friend, Charles L. Holman, president of Laclede Gas in St. Louis, with him, he announced he already had the support of the following men from various parts of the nation, as named in the New York Tribune in January 1920:

 

• Frederick Baldwin Adams (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1900), married to Ellen W. Delano, daughter of Warren Delano, Jr.;
• Eugene G. Grace, president of anti-union Bethlehem Steel;
• W. Averell Harriman (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1913)
• Henry Lockhart, oilman and banker;
• William Chapman Potter, President of Guaranty Trust and former son-in-law of Paul Morton (former Secretary of the Treasury under Teddy Roosevelt);
  
• Samuel F. Pryor, formerly of St. Louis
• Percy Avery Rockefeller (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1900), son of William Rockefeller of National City Bank;
• Eugene W. Stetson, then Guaranty Trust vice-president and future president and chairman of the same banking institution;
  
• Joseph Rockwell Swan Yale, Skull and Bones, 1902); future president of Guaranty Trust;
• Harold Stanley, vice president of Guaranty Trust;
  
• Malcolm Whitman, professional tennis player ranked higher than Dwight F. Davis, the St. Louis man for whom Bert Walker set up the Davis Cup;
  
• J. Ogden Armour, meat packer from Chicago;
  
• Elton Hoyt of Cleveland;  and
  
• Joseph E. Uihlein, head of Schlitz beer company, of Milwaukee.
  

First dubbed "Morton & Co," the new company that Bert Walker went to work for eventually bore the name W.A. Harriman & Co. This change came also after the St. Louis Star had reported Bert's new firm was to be a division of the Guaranty Trust Company, a subsidiary to be named simply "Guaranty Company, " that would sell securities to wholesale brokers, rather than to individual members of the public.

 

Why was it Bert didn't take that job? Perhaps he just decided he didn't want to do that kind of work. Or possibly he had a better offer from the Harriman family. Most likely, however, there was dissension in the ranks of the Morton family, and both of Paul Morton's sons-in-law wanted to be in charge.

 

In October of 1920 the opening of the Guaranty Company was formally announced with a different president, Charles H. Sabin. The vice presidents, interestingly enough, included Joseph R. Swan, Eugene W. Stetson, and Harold Stanley, three of the men who had backed Walker in January for the position. Sabin was married to one of Paul Morton's daughters, while William Chapman Potter was married to her sister, Caroline Morton. Before long, though, Caroline divorced Potter to marry Harry Guggenheim, whose wealth was managed by the Guaranty Trust.

Wheatly (Wheatley) Road in Long Island

 

Apparently there was quite a bit of horse-trading going on in the wings after Walker moved to his new home, either the one at Sutton Place or the one in Wheatly (sometimes called Wheatley) Hills next door to Harry Payne Whitney's family. Wheatley Stables was nearby--a business set up by Ogden Mills and his sister Gladys, married to Henry Carnegie Phipps. According to her New York Times obituary, she named her horse stables "Wheatley for the Westbury road on which her marble home was situated."

 

The father of H.C. Phipps had amassed a fortune as a partner of Andrew Carnegie in their steel plant in Pennsylvania, which had been capitalized by the Morgan Bank. Phipps had then invested heavily in land in Florida, becoming one of the first millionaires with a residence in Palm Beach. Gladys Mills Phipps' son, Henry C. Phipps, Jr. built the town of Gulf Stream, where he also built a golf course and polo grounds.

 

In Manhattan Bert acquired a home at Sutton Place, but he also had a country home on Long Island, on Wheatley Hills Road in Old Westbury.

W.A. Harriman & Co.

 

In 1920 Averell was a young man divided--watching his wartime passion of shipbuilding morph into a passenger-service partnership with the defeated Germans who had founded the Hamburg-Amerika Line. While Averell jumped from one avocation to another, he left Walker in daily charge of W.A. Harriman & Co. offices at 39 Broadway.

Gaston, Williams & Wigmore, 1918

Thirty-Nine Broadway is a story in itself: the ownership history of both the site and the improvements built upon it. It was reported in 1916 that a massive fight was raging between the Morgan interests and those of the Rockefellers for international trade and commerce. Morgan's forces were then camped out at the offices of Gaston, Williams and Wigmore's five-story building recently constructed at that time facing 35-39 Broadway, extending back almost 200 feet to Trinity Place.

Britain's shipping company, the Cunard Lines, was nearby at 29 Broadway, at the intersection with Morris Street. At 31-33 Broadway, between Cunard and Gaston was the Hamburg-Amerika passenger office, previously where the Russian shipping passenger service had been located.

On the northeast corner of the block in which 25 Broadway sat, in the early twentieth century, the Russian-American Line Steamship Company was located was located. By the time construction began on the Cunard Building, New York had become the largest city and busiest port in the world. 25 Broadway was built in 1920-1921 by the Twenty-five Broadway Corporation, an affiliate of Cunard Steamship Line Ltd. The building was constructed under the agreement that Cunard would be the principal occupant. 

Cunard was founded in 1840 by Novia Scotia businessman engaged in banking, lumbering, shipping, and shipbuilding, Samuel Cunard. The Cunard Company pioneered transatlantic shipping and travel. Since the mid-nineteenth century, Cunard has maintained a presence on or near Bowling Green, a park at the lowest end of Broadway. Cunard was initially based out of 4 Bowling Green, where it remained for many years. The site was known as “Steamship Row” for ticket-booking agents that were located there. 

Steamship Row was replaced by the United States Custom House in 1899-1907. Consequently, Cunard moved offices to 29 Broadway and later to 21-24 State Street before relocating its headquarters to 25 Broadway in 1925. Architect Benjamin Wistar Morris III in partnership with his former employer architecture firm Carrere & Hastings designed 25 Broadway, which was completed in 1925. In addition to Cunard, several other large businesses signed leases in the new building including the Atlantic Gulf & West Indies Steamship Lines, Merchant Shipbuilding Corporation, Consolidated Steel Corporation, and international Motor Truck Corporation. While the limestone façade is elegant, imposing, and stately, the main building’s most impressive asset is the grand ticketing hall located in the lobby, which was designed for Cunard. It is inside this lobby where passage aboard such liners as the Queen Mary and the two Queen Elizabeths was purchased.

Not long after the building was completed, Cunard suffered during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Cunard merged with White Star Lines in 1934 and together the company carried over of North American passengers.

The import-export firm known as Gaston, Williams & Wigmore (GWW), with offices in the Morgan Guaranty Trust building at 140 Broadway, needed to expand because of all the commerce brought to it from the war in Europe. The partnership bought three lots on Broadway from the Hemenway estate in 1917 and turned the existing structures into one building--completed in 1918 and destined to house the Globe Steamship Corporation, which GWW owned.

However, only a year later the firm, which was heavily invested in the Russian trade, had to write off voluminous losses resulting from the Bolsheviks' revolution and the collapse of the tsarist government. 

 

 

Alice Glass and Her Marriages

 

Ralph Ingersoll in 1952 was in the process of retiring. He'd spent years heading Luce publications like Time and Fortune before he formed his own magazine called PM. 

 

He bought a 426-acre tract at Castleton, Virginia, in May1951 from Alice Glass Marsh Skolovsky--for only $16,000. This tract was fifteen miles from the home Charles  Marsh had built for Alice called Longlea at Boston, Virginia.

The beautiful Alice had been married in New York in August 1947, not to an old white-haired conductor, but to a vibrant pianist born in Vancouver, B.C. in 1923 to Russian immigrants. Photos of the Zadel Skolovsky in newspapers in 1947 and 1953 showed an attractive man with dark hair and a sensitive face--a total opposite of her former husband and lover. But  the marriage ended in divorce in 1953. It was finalized in Tallahassee, Florida.

In 2001, a collection of tens of thousands of documents made by POND organization were discovered in a barn in a small Virginia town in safes at a site of the American Security Council Foundation's former Freedom Studies Center. Clare Boothe Luce ran the Freedom Studies Center from her Farm estate in Virginia. [As shown in the news clipping below, this farm had previously been the home of Charles E. Marsh, Lyndon Johnson's friend and handler, the man who gave the future President access to Marsh's wife, LBJ's alleged mistress, Alice Glass.]

Click to Enlarge

Clare Boothe Luce was twice elected to Congress as a Republican and supported Republican Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. After Goldwater lost to Lyndon  Johnson, Luce founded what was called the "Cold War College" (aka United Freedom Academy) to train young men and women to suppress popular leftist movements in non-aligned Third World nations.

The Cold War College was to be part an anti-Communist operative training center established with the assistance of 63 higher education institutions and other organizations in 1966 to counter what Luce called "various schools run by the Communist Party, the Black Panthers, and other revolutionary groups."

The Freedom Studies Center was headed by John M. Fisher, a former FBI special agent under J. Edgar Hoover, another center supporter, who became head of security for Sears, Roebuck & Company in Chicago to bust up communist infiltration of Sears' affiliated labor unions.  Sears, of course, was controlled by Gen. Robert E. Wood, who had interesting connections to Texas oil interests. His daughter had married W. S. Farish, Jr., deceased in 1943, son of William Stamps Farish, chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Will Farish III married the daughter of a du Pont heir, whose parents owned the Gasparilla Inn at Boca Grande, Florida, where they often entertained the family of George H. W. Bush. In fact, Will Farish was trustee of George Bush's blind trust.

 

In 1958 Fisher founded the American Security Council Foundation, originally known as the Institute for American Strategy. The New York Times reported that the American Security Council had gathered files of more than one million supposedly subversive US citizens and that the group was collecting names of rate of 20,000 per month.  (Source:  Old Nazis, The NewRight and the Republican Party, by Russ Bellant).

 

American Security Council

 

Among the American Security Council's original file collectors were several right-wing activists who had actively opposed US participation in World War Two. These included Sears Roebuck Chairman Robert E. Wood and publishing magnate William Regnery, both involved with the America First Committee; Harry Jung of the American Vigilant Intelligence Federation (an anti-Semitic group); and John Trevor of the pro-Nazi American Coalition of Patriotic Societies.  (Roads to Dominion, Sara Diamond, pgs. 46-47)

American Legion

 

Excerpt from  Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 244-245):

 

"During World War Two the American Legion built up a network of confidential information contacts. The key man in this effort was FBI agent Lee Pennington, Jr.  

 

"In 1953 he resigned from the FBI to work for the Legion where he began to develop a massive library of information on alleged subversives. CIA officer James McCord who searched for subversives made his first contacts in the 1950s with Pennington, his library, and Lou Russell of US House of Representatives' Un-American Activities Committee.

"Pennington thus became a CIA consultant, a status which continued when he transferred his by-now massive files in September 1954 on Americans from the American Legion to the American Security Council. However, the principal users of his library were large corporations, including defense contractors and large oil companies, which consulted the American Legion file-card index when screening employees as part of their industrial-security program."

It has been learned from these files that POND spied on such domestic organizations as the Civil Rights Congress and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The POND produced some reports pertaining to domestic security.

Grombach banked on his close connections with Senators Joseph McCarthy, William Jenner, and other members of the extreme Republican right to propel him to national power.  Grombach used his networks primarily to gather political dirt, sexual dirt, and any kind of compromising information at all. Grombach collected scandal, cataloged it, and used it carefully.

Sources:

1. Christopher Simpson,  Blowback - America's recruitment of Nazis, and its disastrous effect on our domestic and foreign policy by Collier / Macmillan, 1988 
2. Col James W. McLendon, USAF, Information Warfare: Impacts and Concerns
3.   Mark Stout, The Pond: Running Agents for State, War, and the CIA: The Hazards of Private Spy Operations
   

Just after the Sandy Hook murders we began hearing that a private weapons conglomerate called Freedom Group would be dismantled. Almost a year later, however, we learn the panic to sell was premature.

Freedom Group was formerly set up in 2006, two years before the end of George W. Bush's second term, although it first came on the scene prior to Dubya's election, in 1998, just as he was putting together the financing to spearhead his 2000 campaign. 

Cartoon from devinlong

Before 9/11/2001, we had no idea (did we?) that planes would eventually fly into the World Trade Center and allow Georgie the opportunity to charge into Saddam's Iraq to get even for what the bully had done to his daddy. 

We couldn't have known then about the future War on Terror. Could we? 

Unless ... there were members of his team who remembered how their own trust funds had been created by war. Were they, even then, whispering in Georgie's ear?

It was in September 2002 that he made a speech in Houston about Saddam, saying, 

"After all, this is the guy who tried to kill my dad at one time."  

The attempted assassination of former President Bush had occurred back in April, 1993, only two months after the elder Bush left office. Seventeen perpetrators, who had hidden explosives in a Toyota Landcruiser were caught and arrested before the Bush family even arrived in Kuwait. The visit itself took place and continued without noticeable incident, only being announced by the newly installed President Clinton after the trip was over. Two of the Bush sons, who were never named, were with their parents, as well as John Sununu, Houston lawyer James A. Baker III, and Dillon Read banker, Nicholas Brady. 

Dubya Bush was never satisfied with what he felt were Clinton's weak efforts at containing the Iraqis. He was looking for an excuse, even a flimsy one, to go back into Iraq, guns blasting. But the bankers had to get the money together to elect him to office. They would want to arrange capital investments in order to replenish their expenses as well.

Donald Rumsfeld jumped on the Cerberus bandwagon before January 2001, according to his financial disclosure form that year, which shows he owned a limited partnership interest in Cerberus Institutional Partners valued at more than half a million dollars, from which he earned $51,000 income during the disclosure period. The private equity fund had been managed by the ultra-secretive Stephen Feinberg since 1992.

Rummy's tax form in 2001

In an August 2012 issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi quoted the founder of the private equity firm as follows:

"We try to hide religiously," explained Steven Feinberg, the CEO of a takeover firm called Cerberus Capital Management that recently drove one of its targets into bankruptcy after saddling it with $2.3 billion in debt. "If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper and a picture of his apartment, we will do more than fire that person," Feinberg told shareholders in 2007. "We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it."

John Snow and Dan Quayle also became involved with Cerberus, helping steer it to invest in 2004 in IAP Worldwide Services, Inc., which provided logistics for the Defense Department and  disaster-relief services for federal and state agencies. IAP's chief executive, Al Neffgen, was hired from Kellogg, Brown and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary Dick Cheney had chaired before leaving to help the second George Bush become the 43rd U.S. President.


The name Cerberus comes from Roman mythology. It was the name given to the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to Hades (Hell), to keep the living from gaining access to their dead loved ones imprisoned there. Capturing this ravenous beast was the last and most difficult of the twelve labors Hercules was sentenced to perform. The symbolism seems above and beyond any intellectual acumen one would expect from Dubya Bush. Perhaps his Skull and Bones brothers at Yale were backing him up?

This is all simply part of how the military-industrial corporate complex we have often been warned about really works. Wall Street operatives see dollar signs whenever government does anything, and they insist on getting commissions when the government privatizes those functions and steers the contracts their way. Lobbyists are chosen from retiring military personnel and former Congressional staffs to promote the government's need for more and more contracts which they can capture. 

Actually, however, only the legal forms have changed from prior days. The process by which those with banking connections, i.e. inherited capital to invest, use their family and social ties to pool funds to elect political sycophants to do their bidding has not changed. The new corporate structure, however, does assist these elite banking types in keeping the names on the accounts hidden. 

Transition of Private Banking

Bert Walker III

George Herbert Walker III (Yale, Skull and Bones, 1953), was the son of Poppy Bush's favorite Uncle Herbie--G.H. Walker, Jr. After Yale Bert got his law degree from Harvard, then enlisted in the JAG Corps in the Air Force for two years, before joining his grandfather's investment bank, G.H. Walker and Co. in 1958. He became the bank's chairman in 1972 and helped raise funds for his nephew to run for President.  

The private banking company had been founded in 1900 by Prescott Bush's father-in-law, Bert's grandfather, who was also a grandfather of Bert's first cousin, Poppy Bush. With 14 offices by 1973, G.H. Walker and Co. acquired the Laird brokerage firm at about the same time the events that led to the Watergate scandal were unfolding. Shortly thereafter the newly merged investment bank merged with White, Weld in 1974, only to be taken over by Merrill, Lynch within four years' time. 

Ten years younger than Poppy, Bert III was named the Missouri Finance Chairman for President Nixon in 1972, the year following Poppy's appointment to head the U.S. delegation to the United Nations in New York City.

Bert's Yale and Bones classmate, William Henry Donaldson, got an MBA from Harvard and took his first job at the Walker family's bank. Then in 1959 Donaldson had left Walker to start Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette (DLJ), which he co-headed until 1973. 
 

"Donaldson's first job on Wall Street was at the old brokerage G. H. Walker and Co, run by Bush's uncle Herbert Walker," we were informed in December 2002, just over a year after the Enron scandal erupted. Pres. George W. Bush apparently felt the need to send Donaldson to head the SEC at that time--not surprising, since researchers like Malcolm S. Salter have discovered many strange dealings going on at Enron through DLJ maneuvers. 

The Financial Times (FT) wrote in a 2002 special report:

"Chase and Citi both underwrote a lot, but the advisory work and the real brains behind [the partnerships] was from CSFB and DLJ," says a former Enron employee. As a result, they were well rewarded. CSFB and DLJ were the leading underwriters of Enron securities, managing $7.4bn of the $25bn of stocks and bonds it issued, according to data from Bloomberg News.

The Zurich subsidiary of White, Weld and Co. AG was subsequently renamed Clariden Finanz AG (and later still Clariden Bank). In 1970 Credit Suisse and White, Weld set up a holding company for Clariden called WW Trust. Four years later Credit Suisse became the largest shareholder in WW Trust, which was renamed Société anonyme financière du Crédit Suisse et de White Weld (CS andWW).


In 1978, when Merrill Lynch bought White Weld and Co., White Weld dropped out of its Eurobond partnership with Credit Suisse, prompting CS to approach Dillon Read, which turned it down. First Boston then stepped in, creating Financiére Crédit Suisse-First Boston, a 50-50 joint venture widely known as Credit Suisse First Boston. 


a couple decades later was acquired by Swiss Bank Corporation, to form the core of that firm's U.S. investment banking business. Swiss Bank Corporation itself subsequently merged with Credit Suisse arch-rival Union Bank of Switzerland to form UBS AG.


Swiss-born Robert L. Genillard became a general partner of White, Weld and Co. in 1958 and a member of its management committee in 1964. He moved to Geneva to establish in the early 1960s, as Chairman and Chief Executive, the firm of Credit Suisse White Weld. Genillard is regarded as one of the main architects and developers of the Eurocapital market (Eurobond) in which the firm he led played a dominant role, along with his colleague, John Cattier, of White, Weld in Zurich. His professional writings and accomplishments have been widely published. During the last twenty years, Genillard has also been quite active in industry, notably with ties – since 1970 – to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group

Three men from the Credit Suisse branch at Chiasso were arrested in 1977 in a bank fraud scandal that initially estimated losses of at least $100 million. A month later prosecutors raised it to $400 million, and the scandal would eventually incur total losses of $1.2 billion.

Charged with "misrouting" fiduciary accounts to a Liechtenstein-based holding company that invested the money in three Italian businesses, it seems likely the bank branch could be connected back to the 1973 kidnapping of the son of J. Paul Getty, when it was reported
that "ransom money from six Italian kidnappings, including that of Getty, grandson of the man reputed to be among the world's richest men, had been found in two banks in Chiasso" after a government magistrate had given the banks a list of names of people believed to have been behind numerous kidnappings in the border area. Events that led up to the scandal were described as follows:

In an operation that apparently has been going on for several years but was only publicly disclosed by the bank on April 14, more than $800 million in Italian lire had been transported illegally out of Italy by wealthy residents who were trying to hide the money, beat the taxes or protect their capital against a Communist take-over. The funds were deposited in the Credit Suisse branch at Chiasso, a picturesque Swiss village "within suitcase-carrying distance" of the Italian border. There, branch manager Ernst Kuhrmeier and two deputies allegedly put the funds into trust accounts that were not recorded on the bank's official books. They then allegedly funneled them, along with loan guarantees, to a front operation — nothing more than a mailing address — in the tiny principality of Liechtenstein.

Three Chiasso lawyers who acted as front men for the Vaduz, Liechtenstein, holding company named Texon-Finanzanstalt, were also arrested. Rainer Gut, a former partner in New York’s Lazard Freres, was second in line of those remaining, and he became chairman in 1983 following the retirement of Otto Aeppli.

In May 2007 a private equity firm with an intriguing name, Cerberus Capital Management, stepped in to relieve German car manufacturing corporation giant Daimler of an unsuccessful nine-year attempt to merge with Chrysler. Credit Suisse First Boston had represented the American company in that 1998 merger, while Daimler-Benz sought advice from Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. 

Credit Suisse Bank, based in Basel with a New York branch, had, since 1962 often partnered in London Eurobond trades (a market in which companies raise funds by issuing bonds denominated in currencies other than their own) with White, Weld & Co., an investment bank with longstanding ties to Harvard, founded in Boston during the days of the old China trade. The partnership continued through a long chain of events that ended with a takeover in 1978.

In 1975 the scion of the Weld family, William Weld, a litigator at the Hill and Barlow firm in Boston, married Susan Roosevelt, a Harvard-educated attorney with the Boston law firm of Gaston Snow-Ely Bartlett. Susan's father, Quentin Roosevelt II, son Theodore Roosevelt Jr., was a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and first cousin of the famous spy Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt, Jr.

Susan Roosevelt Weld was born in 1949, shortly before her Uncle Kim, Middle Eastern expert in the Central Intelligence Agency, was up to his neck in Arab intrigue.

Copeland

A review of 1969 book, The Game Of Nations, written by Miles Copeland--a State Department employee and officer in the O.S.S. who allegedly helped set up the CIA--stated that it was an "open secret that Washington has been up to the elbows in Middle Eastern plots and counterplots but the degree of involvement and specific details are now for the first time exposed in a book just published in London." Delving into the CIA's role in the 1953 Iran coup, reviewer C.L. Sulzberger wrote for the NY Times Syndicate:

Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt, a C.I.A. Middle East expert, was loaned to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to supervise "Operation Ajax" in August 1953, physically ousting the Mossadegh government of Iran and restoring the Shah. An American military attache helped arrange for a Nazi officer, Lt. Gen. Wilhelm Farmbacher, to assist Nasser in training his army. American officials were instrumental in getting to Cairo the famous Otto Skorzeny, an SS officer, and during his short Egyptian stay Skorzeny brought in "about a hundred Germans." 

Copeland says: "A certain well-known major general of the American Army" played a part in this affair.

Copeland's most fascinating revelations concern the Nasser revolution in Egypt. According to him Washington decided in 1952 that "Egypt was the place to start" an attempt to produce forward-looking, pro-American Arab governments. That February Roosevelt tried to organize a "peaceful revolution" under the umbrella of King Farouk. In March — four months before Nasser's coup — Roosevelt met representatives of Nasser's conspiracy. The plan to change things under Farouk was dropped.

American officials and Nasser's representatives reached "a private understanding that the preconditions for democratic government did not exist and wouldn't exist for many years" in Egypt. In July Nasser seized power (with no American assistance) and Nasser's right-hand man, Ali Sabri, immediately informed Ambassador Jefferson Caffery that Nasser wanted
"friendly relations" with Washington.

Copeland says Caffery arranged with Nasser "for the loan to the Egyptian government of perhaps the leading practitioner of 'black' and 'gray' propaganda in the western world, Paul Linebargcr," a former expert for the O.S.S. (forerunner of the C.I.A.).

Nasser asked for limited American military aid — up to $40 milhon. Copeland observes: 

"As I will show later on, it was the State Department's delays in granting this comparatively small amount which caused Nasser to turn to the Soviets — with the result, that he got many limes over the $40 million which he originally asked from us."

In August 1953 Roosevelt was sent on a secret mission (says Copeland) to try and end the impasse between Egypt and Britain on Suez base negotiations. In November 1954 two U.S. colonels, Albert Gebhardt and Wilbur Eveland, discussed an arms deal with Nasser "for internal security purposes."A tentative military agreement was announced in January 1955 but by September, when Washington had done nothing, Nasser sent a personal warning to Roosevelt that he was about to make an arms accord with Russia. Roosevelt and Copeland flew to Cairo.

 See also two excerpted interviews with Miles Copeland.

Cerberus paid $7.4 billion for the Chrysler shares.

Cerberus in mythology

Further details in the article revealed some history of Cerberus activity involving Canadian corporations:

Talks begin soon between the United Auto Workers and Detroit’s car makers on a national contract and analysts expect Cerberus, headed by former U.S. treasury secretary John Snow, to push for radical changes at its money-losing Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge operations.

The announcement sent shudders through much of Chrysler’s work force, despite assurances from Chrysler CEO Tom LaSorda that there are no major plans under discussion with Cerberus to cut jobs beyond a previously announced restructuring plan.

Magna chairman Frank Stronach formally announced last Wednesday his firm had teamed up with Toronto-based buyout firm Onex Corp. (TSX:OCX) to make an offer for Chrysler that was rumoured to be valued at about US$4.6 billion.

However, the partners were outbid by more than $2 billion by Cerberus, a company well known in Canada after leading a buyout of Air Canada (TSX:AC) and becoming the Montreal carrier’s largest shareholder.

The sale of 80.1 per cent of Chrysler to Cerberus Capital Management LP unwinds the messy $36-billion marriage in 1998 that was set up to create the ultimate global automotive powerhouse.

 Krisher hinted in the article, which was only one of many on that page concerning the deal, that it was concern about the responsibility for paying workers' pensions that led to the surprise agreement with Cerberus:

Germany-based DaimlerChrysler AG said it would keep a 19.1-per-cent stake in the renamed Chrysler Holdings LLC. The private company will be run by Cerberus, which said it would keep the present management in place.

So anxious was DaimlerChrysler to end the transatlantic tie-up that it could be on the hook to pay as much as $650 million — in exchange for being absolved for $19 billion in retiree healthcare costs that will be the responsibility of the new Chrysler owners.

The $7.4-billion deal works this way:

Cerberus will invest $5 billion in the new Chrysler’s automotive operations, $1.05 billion in Chrysler’s financial arm and pay $1.35 billion to DaimlerChrysler.

But the German automaker agreed to absorb $1.6 billion in restructuring-related costs and loan the new company $400 million. Depending on whether the loan is repaid, its out-of-pocket costs could ultimately total $650 million.

Cerberus has steadily been building strength in the automobile business. It led a consortium that bought a majority stake last year in General Motors Acceptance Corp., the financial arm of GM, and planned to invest in ailing auto parts giant Delphi Corp.

One of the other stories revealed powerful names connected to United States Republican political leaders during the post Nixon-phase that led up to the first President Bush:

 

Chrysler Bldg.

Research tells us that, historically, the car manufacturing company founded by Walter Percy Chrysler in 1925 acquired the Dodge Brothers Company three years later. Walter owned a huge estate on Long Island and also built in Manhattan what was then the world’s tallest skyscraper, named for himself, and was named by Time as the 1929 Man of the Year.

When Chrysler (a "minnow") bought Dodge (the "whale") in 1928, he "rescued a failing business which was barely meeting its payrolls" from the investment bank of Dillon, Read & Company, which was "unfamiliar with the automobile industry and as absentee owners were not able to keep the firm operating efficiently." One year before the great crash which served as the death knoll of many financial fortunes, 1928 was a year which saw Clarence Dillon climb steadily higher as he linked his investments to the family whose wealth rose exponentially as demand for petroleum, the automobile's fuel source, climbed ever higher.

Dillon had bought the Dodge manufacturer in 1924, accumulating $55 million in debt owed primarily to the Dodge family heirs, which Chrysler assumed in 1928, as well as giving Dillon, Read & Co. $170,000,000 in Chrysler stock. This transaction thus assured Anna Thomson Dodge Dillman, a widow of one of the Dodge Brothers, of being able to purchase the former residence of Samuel Prescott Bush in Columbus, Ohio.

Hugh Dillman McGaughey, an actor who had dropped his last name, had lived with his parents near the Bushes' Marble Cliff mansion--at 1903 Concord Road in Upper Arlington. Prescott Bush's father, Samuel P. Bush, president of Buckeye Steel Casting, had purchased a 2.7-acre building site at 1550 Roxbury Road in 1907 and the following year completed construction of the family's home overlooking the bluff of Marble Cliff in Columbus, Ohio. The two homes were less than a half mile from each other, and the McGaugheys moved to the Roxbury home following the purchase by the new Mrs. Dillman.

When Dillman [McGaughey] married Mrs. Dodge in 1926, newspapers speculated that "her share of the $145,000,000 estate left by her husband is believed to have made her the richest woman in the world." Mr. James B. McGaughey had been a tailor in Columbus, where his daughters worked with him in his business. Perhaps he had gone to school briefly with Flora Bush's brother, Robert E. Sheldon, Jr., who was a year or two older and lived at 1599 Roxbury, just down the street from the Bush residence:

Samuel built his family’s home, one of the first to be built in Upper Arlington, in 1908. All of the Sheldon siblings lived within walking distance from Flora and Samuel, and they all belonged to Arlington Golf and Riding Club, later to be known as Scioto Country Club, of which Samuel, along with developers of the new suburb, was a founding member.  By far the grandest home was the mansion at 1599 Roxbury, owned by Flora’s brother, Butler Sheldon, who also served as mayor of the community in 1909. Butler succeeded his father as President of Columbus Railroad, Columbus Light and Power, Columbus Traction and  Sheldon Dry Goods.  Their sister, Mary Sheldon, married Carl J. Hoster, a grandson of a native of Germany and operator of the family brewery in downtown Columbus.  He also was president of the Hoster-Columbus Associated Breweries, the U.S. Brewers Association, vice-president of the Ohio Trust Company and director of Columbus Railway & Light Company—no doubt a result of his marriage into the Sheldon family.