Coral Gables Developer of the Early 1920's Linked to Uranium Scam of the 1950's
Admiral Telfair Knight, a lawyer from Jacksonville, Florida, became an associate of a man previously researched here in connection with uranium stock scams of the 1950's in Canada to Robert Kennedy's nemesis Roy Cohn. This 1950's-era Canadian uranium stock broker Bryan W. Newkirk, appeared in a 1925 William Fishbaugh photograph, tagged 'portrait of real estate salesmen in Coral Gables, Florida.'
The QJ post from August 2011 contained a hodgepodge of information centered around Roy Cohn's indictment by Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department in October 1963, only a month before JFK's murder. Another QJ entry that same month delved more into the uranium stock scams being run out of Toronto, in which the following excerpt from a syndicated Red Smith sports column appeared six months prior to Kennedy's election as President:
APRIL 6, 1960 -DUCK KEY, Fla. — This is a sunny blob of coral and money 95 miles from Miami down the Overseas Highway toward Key West. The coral was here when Blackbeard sailed the Spanish Main; the money was trucked in by Bryan W. Newkirk, the wolf of Canada's penny stock market, who had a hand in developing Coral Gables, has one foot in Canadian gold mines and another in uranium. With his remaining hand he directs the Florida-Southern Land Corp., which has transformed this pelican roost into a flowering hideout for the over- privileged, complete with yacht harbor, fresh and salt water swimming pools, a nine-hole long-iron golf course, and a spang new hotel of simple elegance.
Shifting Gears
Following money trails mandates that a researcher have the ability to shift gears. When we first discovered Bryan Newkirk, the penny stock king of Toronto, involved in Roy Cohn's Florida empire at Duck Key, we were primarily concerned with figuring out how Florida land development fit into all the uranium hype in Texas the decade prior to the JFK assassination, if you recall, as we peered into the ins and outs of the Torbitt Document. At that time we researched David Copeland, alleged author of the document, pursuing what he knew and when he knew it about nuclear power in the Dallas and Fort Worth region and focused, in particular, on the Byrd Uranium Corporation, whose president, D. Harold Byrd, had sold stock in his corporations to Toronto scammers with whom Newkirk was somehow linked, before Newkirk returned to his established roots in southern Florida. In the back of my mind, however, even before the curiosity about who killed JFK, there has always been the question of who engineered the savings and loan scandal in Texas in the late 1980's--the seminal series of events which led QJ's blogger into her initial conspiracy research. The two interests seemed inextricably intertwined; solving one would help to solve the other. It's the money behind the scene which lights up the trail. The conspirators are those who control the money, the knowledge about its illicit sources, and the plan for its ultimate use.
Since Bryan Winslow Newkirk II connects several sites of where such illicitly generated money emerged, it is helpful to track his entire life to see with whom he made contact.
He had been born in 1888 in Wilmington, N.C., where he worked for awhile for the Atlantic Coast Railroad. He went to work in advertising for an Atlanta newspaper, married Lucile Rebecca King, a Georgia girl, in about 1913, and before long was handling financing for a car dealership in Atlanta (Newkirk-George Motor Co.), which sold Chalmers and Chandler cars--two up and coming models quickly submerged into the General Motors brand.
In today's digital economy, it's difficult for us to visualize the days when hardware was the king of modern technology. Car bodies, though designed by many different "brands," were almost all manufactured by the Fisher Body Corporation--60% of whose stock in 1919 was controlled by General Motors. William C. "Billy" Durant had advised GM to buy Fisher, just as John J. Raskob, who worked for E.I. Du Pont de Nemours, had advised his boss, Pierre S. du Pont, to purchase Durant's GM stock when the GM executive needed an infusion of capital just as World War I was ending. The du Pont family was loaded with cash from selling munitions throughout the war years.
In 1923 Pierre du Pont, who then held the controlling shares of GM, removed Durant as president of the company and replaced him with DuPont minion Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. It was during these transition years, we have been told, that Pierre's cousin Alfred was so incensed with his family's machinations that he moved all his many assets to Jacksonville, Florida.
Intriguingly, Bryan Newkirk left Atlanta for Jacksonville at about that same time. He switched from Chalmers-Chandler cars to Hupmobiles--acquiring Black-Newkirk Motors (eventually called Thompson-Newkirk Motor Co.),located at 314 W.
Monroe in downtown
Jacksonville, facing the big federal Post Office Building across from the City of Jacksonville's office building, which bears the name of Alfred du Pont's brother-in-law, Edward
Ball. (We found it by googling the address and looking at the street view, which makes one feel just like an NSA analyst sifting through its own software.)
Newkirk's interest in Hupmobiles apparently waned even before the Hupp Corporation, under its post-WWII chairman, William S. Knudsen (who had moved from Ford to General Motors in the early 1920s) diversified Hupp into electronics and
kitchen appliances before its name faded away completely.
Newkirk and Telfair Knight-- Land Sales in Florida
In the McLemore
article inset above, Newkirk gave a brief biography of his life up
to 1960, revealing that he was enticed into Coral Gables real estate
sales by a man he met in Jacksonville--Telfair Knight--and says he went with Knight to work at George Merrick's Coral Gables development just outside Miami as early as 1921. But he apparently kept up his interest in his car dealership (see 1924 ad to the right) while he says he had 4,000 real estate salesmen working for him!
Coincidences like this make one wonder: Is there one overriding factor connecting Telfair Knight, George Merrick, Chalmers, Chandler, Hupmobile and Jacksonville, Florida? Of course. It's money, and Alfred I. duPont, who had more money than he could spend from munitions sales during WWI, suffered a brief dip in fortunes as a result of family disputes and business setbacks. Only five years after his third marriage, to Jessie Ball, he shifted from war to peacetime activities in Florida:
In 1926 Alfred and Jessie decided to move their principal residence from Nemours [in Delaware] to Epping Forest in Jacksonville, Florida. He opened offices in Jacksonville and founded Almours Securities, Inc. At this point his assets were reported to total over $34,000,000 and his business enterprises virtually dominated the economy of Florida [emphasis added].
Adm. Telfair Knight
Jacksonville attorney, Telfair Knight, to work for him. Merrick had become involved in land development after growing up on a citrus plantation and fruit packing plant, run by his father, which Merrick subdivided for residential development beginning in 1913, the same year Maude Fowler and her husband relocated from Oklahoma to Jacksonville, Florida. The Fowlers began selling real estate for Artesian Farms, a company linked to the Securities Underwriters corporation set up to finance the sale of swamp land in the Florida Everglades.
There were several phases of development in Florida, and waves of investors from various locations who descended upon Florida with hopes of making many times their initial investment in marshy, virtually worthless lands. We have previously shown how Paul Helliwell's father had settled in Tampa, an area that grew before 1900 from the manufacture of cigars, to work as an inspector for U.S. Customs.
Flagler's Alchemy, a Model for Turning Swampland into Gold
The land development model was set up in 1888 when Standard Oil magnate Henry M. Flagler completed Hotel Ponce de Leon in the northeast part of Florida. With the success of the hotel, he envisioned further travel along Florida's east coast by building a railroad down to West Palm Beach, across from the island of Palm Beach, where another hotel would be built--forming an American "Côte d'Azur," as it were.
At the time the Royal Poinciana opened in 1894, soon supplemented by another hotel on the beach, called The Breakers, Flagler had become acquainted--possibly through Henry Walters, president of with the the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad--with the Kenan family from Wilmington, N.C., the city where the railroad was then headquartered. William Rand Kenan, Jr. was an 1894 graduate of the University of North Carolina and his sister, Mary Lily was 24 in 1891 when she and Flagler first met in Newport, R.I., while he was still married to his second wife. In 1901, two years prior to the death of her father, a Wilmington, N.C. broker, they were married.
Alchemists must have seen Florida as a way to turn, not lead, but swamp land into a gold mine. However, as Flagler quickly learned, the railroad was a necessary step before his hotels could be enjoyed by the wealthy vacationers in search of luxurious holidays without traveling abroad. After building the first two hotels Flagler moved into railroads as a means of bringing more travelers to them. One essayist in 1925 described the initial development in this way:
The unknown firm of Carrer and Hastings, New York, was awarded the job of building the Ponce de Leon and the spot Flagler picked for its location was typical of his developments along the East Coast. It was a swamp.
So his first hotel was rapidly built from below the ground up. Before it was completed in 1888 he had the Alcazar under course of construction. Two mammoth hotels, gorgeously appointed, were springing up in the marshes and no means by which the tourist might reach them except by river steamer, ocean voyage or over the ramshackle, narrow-gauge line running into St. Augustine from Jacksonville. With $2,000,000 tied up in what he had announced would be the world’s finest hotel and another million being sunk in the Alcazar across the street, Flagler was precipitated by the course of events into railroad building. And it was in this field that he won fame as great as that of any captain of industry, not excepting James J. Hill, termed the empire builder of the West. All negotiations with the owners of the Jacksonville, St. Augustine and Halifax River Railway Company failed to convince these men that their road should be standardized and enlarged to meet anticipated traffic requirements. So Flagler bought the road outright, made it standard gauge, rebuilt the track system, added better equipment and made a railroad of what had been a streak of rust through the wilderness.
Flagler's residence in Palm Beach
Construction of the hotels helped make the lumbermen of the Jacksonville area--which included most of Telfair Knight's relatives--wealthy. In the late 1890's Flagler decided to keep going farther south to Miami. The mansion built for Mary Lily Kenan Flagler was completed in Palm Beach a year after their marriage. By then Flagler envisioned more wealth through Cuba and Panama, former Spanish possessions acquired as a result of the Spanish American War which ended in 1898.
Miami then had no port, and that was what Flagler sought--an outlet to the sea and a line of communication with South America. He also anticipated the construction of the Panama Canal several years. Key West was the nearest deepwater port--a key to the National defense and a communication point within six hours of Havana... In May, 1886, he had bought his first railroad in Florida; in 1888, the St. Augustine and Palatka line, with a twelve mile branch leading to Tocoi. The same year he acquired the St. Johns and Halifax running from East Palatka to Daytona--a narrow-gauge road which he standardized in 1889. The same year he bridged the St. Johns river at Palatka and the following year he spanned the same stream at Jacksonville with a bridge which is now being rebuilt and double-tracked....On January 22, 1912, the Key West extension was opened to traffic-with Flagler’s special train running from Jacksonville to Key West where a gigantic celebration had been prepared for “The Chief’s” birthday, celebrated twenty days late.... In May, 1913, Mr. Flagler died....
All the money that built his dream had been created out of air, of course--in the form of paper sold to others in the form of stock or bonds. It is not unlike the theme of the Kevin Costner flick, "Field of Dreams," which imparts the ideal: "If you build it, they will come." And of course the implication is that, if they come, they will bring money to pay off what you spent to build it.
Flagler and wife
It should be remembered that Henry Flagler had no formal education, but he did have "educated" friends. When he died, he also had an extremely young wife, his third, Mary Lily Kenan, whom he met in Newport, R.I. in 1891 while still married to second wife, Alice Ida Shrouds, his children's nanny, whom he married when the first wife died.
Mary Kenan's family lived in Wilmington, N.C., then headquarters of the Atlantic Coast Railroad, operated then by Henry Walters, and later by Lyman Delano, whom we will return to shortly.
Flagler's marriage to Mary occurred in 1901, and as his surviving widow, she and her siblings in Wilmington were the chief recipients of the Flagler estate (apart from $5 million) that went to Kentucky attorney, Robert Worth Bingham, whom she married in 1916. Author David Leon Chandler in a book delayed by a copyright dispute with Bingham's son:
A second book, written by William Ellis, "charges that he contributed to the death of his second wife, an heiress
whose bequest of five million dollars helped purchase the Louisville Courier-Journal and Times, followed him to the grave."
A little update is in order, just so you don't think the windmills that Quixotic Joust has been chasing, besides flapping their arms, are jumping around as well. There is, in fact, some method to our madness.
The phase of research now being pursued began with the intention of determining who the Morris D. Jaffe connected to LBJ really was and what he was up to. During that initial effort, QJ found that Jaffe owned a uranium company with headquarters in Dallas. While investigating that tidbit, QJ discovered that D. Harold Byrd also owned a uranium company operating in Utah, which was sold to Canadians with strong ties to Israel at a time when Israel was building its own nuclear weapon. That fact led to connections between one of the associates of the Byrd uranium company's buyers, Bryan Newkirk, and Permindex associate and Bobby Kennedy nemesis Roy Cohn.
Since Roy Cohn was mentioned significantly in the Torbitt Document, QJ then determined to learn more about its author, David Copeland, writing under the alias of Torbitt. That research was interesting but seemingly a dead end, requiring QJ to backtrack a few steps and pick up a new trail. That brings us up to date and explains the reason for this new tack.
Hopefully, that at least partially explains the reason for QJ's fascination with the fictional book by Chinle Miller shown below, recently read by this writer on Kindle. Uranium Daughter was recently featured and proved to be an excellent read, as well as providing insight into the American lands within the uranium boom of the 1950's. But more history is in order and available, thanks to Raye C. Ringholz:
Prior to World War I, radium mining dwindled but a new bonanza was identified in the tailings dumps of the mines. When it was determined that the discarded vanadium added to molten steel would greatly increase the tensile strength and elasticity of the metal, Utah's vanadium industry flourished. One of the dominant figures in the resultant boom was Howard Balsley of Moab, who sold carnotite ores to Vitro Chemical Corporation of Pittsburgh for medicaments and luminous paint.
It wasn't until twenty-five years later, as a result of the atomic age and subsequent arms race of the Cold War, that uranium, previously considered a waste product of the vanadium mines, came into demand as a key element for nuclear weaponry. In the beginning, almost 90 percent of the United States' uranium supply was imported from the Belgian Congo and Canada. But scanty amounts being filtered from abandoned radium and vanadium dumps on the Colorado Plateau gave promise of an untapped domestic source. The Manhattan Project of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, charged with development of an atom bomb to end the war, instituted a covert program to mine uranium from the vanadium dumps and sent geologists to scour the region in search of new lodes.
With the end of World War II, the Atomic Energy Commission replaced the Manhattan Project and launched the first federally-sponsored mineral rush in history. The AEC constructed roads into the back country, promised $10,000 bonuses for new lodes of high-grade ore, guaranteed minimum prices and paid up to $50 per ton on 0.3 percent ore, constructed mills, helped with haulage expenses and posted geologic data on promising areas tracked by federal geologists using airborne scinillometers and other sophisticated radiation detection instruments.
The Four Corners area, where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet, suddenly teemed with prospectors in the greatest ore search since the gold fever days of the previous century. Amateurs and experts, alike, followed AEC guidelines and used radiation detectors called Geiger counters to test promising sandstone formations for uranium deposits. Concentrating on exposed outcroppings along canyon rims, they searched primarily for the grayish Salt Wash member of the Morrison formation. When a likely claim was located, they used diamond drills to core test holes to determine if mineable ore was present.
I've begun to suspect that the author, Chinle Miller, was a pseudonym used by someone who knows more about the history than she feels free to state as fact, much as David Copeland was afraid to use his real name when talking about Division Five, the enforcement unit from the FBI which worked to control uranium products as early as the 1930's when the Tennessee Valley Authority was created. Oversight originally fell under the auspices of the Army Corps of Engineers and only after the Manhattan Project ushered in the atomic age on Japan did the Feds create the above-top-secret Atomic Energy Commission, then connected to J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. All these details led me to inquire about the beginnings of this uranium boom in the Four Corners area in the 1950s, and about Charles Augustus Steen, the Uranium King.
Steen aka Utex sells to Atlas in 1962.
Steen did well for a time, but then the AEC turned off the spigot, and the Steen family plummeted.
Click to englarge
This is a lot of information to absorb at one sitting. Stay tuned for the next installment.
It seems helpful to review the history of oil, radium and uranium production in Canada before proceeding with research into what was going on in southern Florida in 1959 and later. All history is a study of what people DO, not just what they admit to doing. The best way to figure out what they actually did is to intersect dots showing who they make connections with and then explore how those connections fit into an historical timetable.
Below are excerpts extracted from a paper called "Grandfather and the Bear," presented by H. J. M. Spence at the Fourteenth International Symposium held by the Uranium Institute in London, September 1989.
Click to enlarge
Gilbert Labine, a partner with his brother and others in a relatively
flush but young and momentarily mineless mining firm called Eldorado
Gold Mines Limited, spotted the site of what was to become Canada's
first uranium mine from the air in 1929. Following up on a tip from a
fur trapper and other rumours, characteristic of the times, he was
looking mainly for silver, and was attracted by cobalt bloom and other
coloured stains, which were easily visible from the aircraft while
overflying the Great Bear area....
Labine discovered pitchblende, as well as the silver he was seeking, at what was to become Port Radium on Labine Point....
Initial confirmation of what Labine had found - ore containing up to 53
per cent uranium oxide - came by radio in August following analysis in
Toronto of hand-picked samples flown out from the site by a rival firm.
The message was in code, which was common in the mining industry of the
day, but which could not disguise the word 'uranium'....
The prize, of course, was radium, a gram of which was then valued at
more than 50 times the average Canadian's annual income. This miracle
substance had captured the fancy of the world for its proven use in the
battle against cancer. We shudder today in the knowledge that it was
also touted for use in treating such things as birthmarks, eczema,
ringworm, psoriasis, acne, warts and neuralgia, and was even claimed 'to
cause the menopause to be prompt and not distressing'....
In any case, it was the demand for uranium for weapons development that
revived the Port Radium mine in 1942. The project was given government
priority for men and materials, and it took just four months to
recommission the workings. The immediate, urgent requirement for uranium
was met by collecting the bagged ore and concentrates which had been
abandoned at the mine and various points along its access waterway in
1940.
After a year and a half of intrigue and manoeuvering, on 28 January
1944 the government announced in the House of Commons that Eldorado
Mining and Refining Limited, and its Port Radium mine, had been
nationalized 'in the interests of military secrecy', which
must have caused distress amongst the Allies' security and intelligence
communities. It is well known that, at the urging of the United States,
security surrounding the uranium bomb project was extraordinary. As a
consequence, mistrust strained the relations between friendly nations,
and those involved with the work were kept on a short leash - to the
extent that one of the small band of US Army scientific experts with the
Manhattan project was followed on a visit to his Canadian fianc?by what
could only have been a security agent.
The activities at Great Bear Lake retreated into
shadow for some three years, while the world sorted out the good guys
from the bad....Following the war, uranium mining in Canada was characterized by a
boom-bust-boom cycle reflecting the effects of politics and
technological developments on the world marketplace. Amateur prospecting
really took off in 1948 when the government lifted a partial ban on
private involvement in uranium exploration and replaced it with a
guaranteed minimum price for acceptable uranium ores. The advent of the Cold War meant there was a market for as much uranium as Canada could produce. There were many promising uranium discoveries in the
decade after the war, one of the most significant being that at
Beaverlodge on the north shore of Saskatchewan's Lake Athabasca.
Occurrences first reported in 1934 were pursued in 1944, and underground
development began in 1949. The discovery of uranium deposits in
northern Saskatchewan was the beginning of a major expansion of the
uranium mining industry in Canada, including the establishment of the
first open-pit and the first private enterprise uranium mine in the post
war period, the Gunnar mine, which was discovered in July 1952. The
Bancroft area occurrences first picked over by grandfather Spence in
1922 were tapped for development beginning in 1949....
[Note: see Mr. Spence's references at above link.]
It should be noted here that Bryan W. Newkirk made a huge discovery of uranium at Bancroft in November 1954 through his company, Faraday Uranium. In 1943 it had been reported in the press that monopolistic control of the Vermilion oilfield, had been alleged by Elmer
E. Roper, a Canadian representative from Edmonton in an address in the legislature. The charge had been
denied in a telegram from Bryan W. Newkirk, Toronto,
member of a group operating the field, stating: "there is no monopolistic
control of the Vermilion field."
Newkirk had also been involved with companies named Marigold Oils Limited and Barclay Oil Company, Limited, reputedly licensed by an Israeli man named Arie Ben-Tovim, a chemical engineer by profession, who, after the establishment of the
State of Israel in 1948 had been appointed consul of Israel in Canada during 1949-50, and then as consul in New York during 1951-52, when Ben-Tovim returned to his professional and private occupation and to engage in a joint
oil project with Newkirk, with T. R. Harrison (of Trans-Era Oils Limited and Wilrich Petroleums Limited), and with A. M. Abernethy (of Minerva Mining Corporation Limited). Abernethy was in business with James Crisona of New York, with whom he had purchased controlling interest in the uranium company owned by D. Harold Byrd of Dallas, Texas, in 1956.
A few years after the Israel venture, Newkirk would also be connected with stock promoter /hockey player Eric Cradock in Marigold Oils Limited, while another Canadian representative made allegations in the legislature that stocks were being rabidly promoted by gangsters who were associated by Cradock and others in sports clubs. These gangster/ gamblers had invaded Canada following a crackdown on organized crime by the United States following Robert F. Kennedy's participation with Roy Cohn on the Senate Committee staff chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and then his appointment to the position of Attorney General under his brother, President John F. Kennedy in January 1961.
During a panel interview on Meet The Press from 1959, Kennedy is
asked by Lawrence Spivak if he was worried regarding Hoffa's threat to
sue, from some remarks Kennedy made during a recent Jack Paar Show
appearance.
Robert F. Kennedy: “I feel that in our
investigation that we have shown that Mr. Hoffa has made collusive
deals with employers, that he’s betrayed the Union membership, that he
sold out the Union membership, that he’s put gangsters and racketeers in
important positions of power within the Teamsters Union, that he’s
misused Union funds. I say that and I will say it again. If Mr. Hoffa
wishes to sue me I think we can take that to a court and allow it to be
decided by a jury. ...That if he loses that case, that he should resign as President
of the Teamsters. Because if he is guilty of any one of these things he
is not worthy to be International President of that Union.”
Needless to say, the news didn't get any better for Hoffa when Kennedy became Attorney General a little over a year later.
The crackdown against organized crime by Bobby Kennedy led first to the flight of the criminals into Canada and later to Bobby Kennedy's enforced impotence cause by the murder of his brother, the President. Did Bobby's old nemesis Roy Cohn have a hand in that? Was he assisted in any way by his friend and associate Bryan Newkirk, who developed the island resort of Duck Key south of the most southern tip of mainland Florida, one of the closest points to Cuba, where Roy Cohn was often in residence? Were Newkirk and Cohn connected by their relationship with other Canadian and Israeli members of organized crime who were incidentally out to regain control of Cuban gambling by Meyer Lansky? These questions are yet to be answered.
Previously in this blog, we have researched a man named Patrick Joseph Frawley, long-time chairman of the Schick and Eversharp corporations, who, more than any other individual, was the primary bankroller of INCA(Information Council of the Americas). At this point it becomes necessary to examine other persons involved in the same corporations Frawley controlled for a time to determine who other major (but hidden) shareholders may have been.
The overriding PURPOSE of this exercise is the determination of who was the primary supporter of Dr. Alton Ochsner in New Orleans, the surgeon who was training doctors to go to countries in the southern hemisphere of the Americas and provide medical care to dictators beholden to their wealthy neighbors in the United States.
After pieces of this puzzle are collected, this blog will have more to say about what it all means in terms of American history. Readers' thoughts and comments are appreciated and welcomed if relevant in achieving this purpose.
Lawrence Cowen, Former Schick Chairman
This blog first noted a connection between Schick, Inc. and the family of Robert Kennedy's nemesis, Roy Cohn. Roy Cohn's mother, Dora Marcus Cohn, was the daughter of Joseph S. Marcus,a man of Russian ancestry, but born in Germany. He had married Rachel Celia Cohen, a sister of Joseph Lionel Cowen (who had changed his name from Cohen). His sister, Rachel Cohen, was born in England before her marriage to Joseph S. Marcus. Their daughter, Dora Marcus Cohn, mother of Roy Marcus Cohn, was thus the niece of Joshua Lionel Cowen and first cousin of his son Lawrence Cowen.
Lawrence Cowen was involved with the Schick company before Cohn took over the Lionel train empire in 1960, as previously noted:
Lawrence Cowen, 52, president of Lionel Corp. from 1946 until last fall, was named chairman and chief executive officer of Schick Inc., makers of electric shavers. Cowen, who bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange at the age of 21, was ousted from Lionel when a new group led by Lawyer Roy M. Cohn took control of the company founded by Cowen's father (who gave his middle name, Lionel, to the toy electric trains he created).
Gene Tunney of Connecticut A Tool of British Intelligence?
Gene and Polly Lauder Tunney
Before discussing what role boxer Gene Tunney had in the corporations, it is first mandatory that we understand how important Tunney was during the decades from the late 1920's until well into World War II. Anthony Summers, in his book Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover reveals the following information about Tunney's involvement as liaison between British and American intelligence in pre-CIA days:
For Edgar [Hoover], the war really began nearly two years before Pearl Harbor, with a letter from a retired boxer. Gene Tunney, the undefeated world heavyweight champion of the twenties, had often met Edgar and Clyde [Tolson] on their frequent visits to Yankee Stadium. Now, in early 1940, he found himself passing on a discreet message from a man he had first met at military boxing events in his youth, a man who had since become a top-level British secret agent.
This was William Stephenson, known to millions today as the protagonist of A Man Called Intrepid, the best-selling book about his achievements in World War II. Stephenson, a Canadian the same age as Edgar, was an extraordinary figure...[whose] mission, when he asked Tunney to make contact with Edgar, was under the personal command of Winston Churchill ... [then the] First Lord of the Admiralty, [who] had been engaged in secret correspondence with President Roosevelt for months.
So it seems that, leading up to WWII, Tunney was being used by British Intelligence to make contact with the man who then headed FDR's primary medium of civilian intelligence--both foreign and domestic--with regard to either getting help with Britain's need for weapons to fight the Nazis or with regard to getting the Americans into the war. The question is whether Tunney was interested for patriotic or financial reasons. To answer this questions requires more insight into his personal as well as business relationships.
Sam Pryor's Role
The British were--at that time when Tunney was being used (1940) to carry messages to J. Edgar Hoover--fighting for their life, hoping to draw the United States into the war against Germany.
The excerpt which follows appeared in an article entitled "The 'miracle man' of 1940: a look at the behind-the-scenes intrigue that catapulted unknown Wendell Willkie to head the Republican ticket in 1940--and guaranteed FDR an unprecedented third term," published by The New American, a bi-weekly magazine associated with the John Birch Society, one of the first purveyors of what is now commonly known as "conspiracy theories". It serves to clarify how the British saw their role in the war vis a vis the United States government:
British agent Bickham Escott, who said that when he was recruited he was told: "If you join us, you mustn't be afraid of forgery, and you mustn't be afraid of murder." In light of these admissions, is it outlandish to ask if some of the unexplained and "convenient" deaths of the period may have been "assisted" by the BSC's [British Security Coordination] operatives? In the context of the Willkie nomination, the sudden death of convention manager Ralph Williams (a Taft man) and his replacement by Sam Pryor (a Willkie-Rockefeller-FDR-BSC man) [also Tunney's best friend] now looks suspiciously propitious. Wild speculation? Perhaps. But, perhaps not.
"Clearly," writes Prof. Mahl, in Desperate Deception, "the major purpose of BSC was to conduct aggressive offensive operations against those it saw as enemies of Britain." However, he notes, this "included not only Hitler's agents in the United States, but those who simply wished to remain uninvolved in the European war." That included American citizens, especially prominent politicians, who were tagged with the pejorative label of "isolationist."
This false label grotesquely implied that Americans who adhered to the traditional view of our Founding Fathers against foreign intervention and entanglement were somehow trying to retreat into a fantasy world in which our country would be sealed off from all intercourse with foreign nations. Even worse, the BSC cabal did everything possible to associate the isolationist tag with Naziism and fascism.
James Joseph ("Gene") Tunney is a New York City boy who became one of the great celebrities of the years between the wars.... Gene Tunney made several million dollars in the ring, and after he quit, he put it [the money$] to work for him. He is a director of such companies as the Schick Safety Razor Company, Independent Bank of Commerce, Quaker City Life Insurance, Technicolor, and Eversharp, Inc., as well as others. Gene commutes to his New York office from his Stamford, Connecticut, home daily. [Source: "My Fights With Jack Dempsey," a chapter in The Aspirin Age 1919-1941, (1949).]
Tunney's office, like Candy Jones', in Yale Club
Tunney's New York office was mentioned in a book written by Donald Bain (hardback published by Playboy Press in 1976) called The Control of Candy Jones. Candy, a beautiful model for the Conover Agency (where Gerald Ford, incidentally, had worked as a male model after his days as a football hero), married Harry Conover and then took over as owner of the agency after their divorce in 1959.
Located on the 8th floor at 52 Vanderbilt Avenue in Manhattan, the office was directly opposite Tunney's. The address was a 22-story office building located at the southwest corner of 45th Street and Vanderbilt Avenue, opposite Grand Central Terminal, and in the same building as the Yale Club, which gave its address as 50 Vanderbilt. It's an old trick used by FBI spy types, including former FBI man Guy Banister, who helped to set up Lee Harvey Oswald as a "Communist" patsy, to use alternative addresses for the same location.
According to Candy Jones, "Tunney was a very private man, and all the years they spent across the hall from each other resulted in little more than casual pleasantries. Tunney did not seem to be conducting a business from the office, and Candy surmised that he used it as a convenient location from which to handle his personal investments." [page 55] It would not be a surprise to find that Tunney had links to the Yale Club, since he had played golf in Palm Beach with Prof. William Lyon Phelps in January 1928 and addressed his Yale lit class one month later.
Prof. W. L. Phelps
Since Candy always kept her office door open when she was there, on several occasions she noticed activity across the hall which she reported to Tunney--and later the FBI man ("Ted") who questioned her--as suspicious. Thus began a relationship with the FBI which included lending "Ted" her state-of-the-art microphone recorder as well as allowing the FBI to use her address as a mail drop. At about that time, Tunney relocated his office to 200 Park Avenue, and within a few months (in November 1960), Candy was recruited in by the CIA. The real subject of the book concerns her work as a covert operative in the Far East. According to author Bain: "What she didn't bargain for, however, was becoming a human guinea pig in a secret CIA scientific project in which mind control was the goal," involving a "Dr. Gilbert Jensen" of Oakland, California.
But that's another story best told by reading The Control of Candy Jones.
by Paul Gallico, Sports Editor and Sports Columnist
of The News (New York)
Feb 18, 1931
***
Best Buddy with Sam F. Pryor, Jr.
...He lives with [Josephine] Polly Lauder Tunney in a wandering white Colonial farmhouse perched on a glacial ridge in the woods many miles back of Stamford. The road runs back country, scenic-railway style, over the giant furrows plowed by the last visit of the great ice cap, through wild stretches where, if you go quietly, you will suddenly come upon a white signal tail raised in alarm and then see its owner, a young buck or fawn, bound stiff-legged away. If you have no one to show you the way you won't find it.
The road runs past lovely old houses and glimpses of hidden waters; it is companion to a brook for a mile or so and then leaves it to begin a climb that carries it along the face of a crest, and here, a little back from the narrow path, sits the old farmhouse. It is a temporary residence. Behind it the ridge still rises, thickly wooded, and there, deep, sequestered, and high, the Tunneys will some day build their permanent home. From it they will look over the wood as it falls away to the blue Sound, and the Sound itself, and on clear days to a distant haze that will be Long Island.
The present dwelling is in the delightful haphazard manner of the early American farmer, who built himself and his family a white house in which to live, and then as the family grew and prospered thrust out a wing here, added a room there, another upstairs, another offshooting from the second story, until treading the aging floors many years later you may almost trace the arrival of the first- and second-born, the advent of the hired man, the strong rooting and spreading of the American family.
And, as in old houses near the sea, you will find in Tunney's home, scattered here and there among the plain, lovely lines of the austere Colonial furniture, rich and clashing objects brought from the other side of the world by wooden ships.
The living room is in two wings that fold themselves around a double fireplace. Over the fire mantel are lustrous pewter dishes and candlesticks. The fireplace is made of three single slabs of stone, likely enough quarried out of the ridgeside by the original builder.
The wallpaper is the Anne Hathaway design, gentle scenes about Stratford-on-Avon -- Polly picked it. And one of the fireside seats is a monstrous red-leather marshmallow of a cushion from Morocco. It is so big you could perch on it with your legs curled up under you. Upstairs, too, in the library -- you see, it is just that quaint, rambling type of house where the library could be put upstairs.
Oriental trophies mingle with Colonial pieces, and there are a lovely reclining porcelain hunting dog and a large, powerful sculptured head suggestive, but not replica, of Tunney. There are more enormous cushions from Morocco and two Berber guns, their gas-pipe barrels richly chased with silver, and silver to the end of the stock, silver inlaid curved daggers, a rich red rug, and the whole long side of the wall lined from floor to ceiling with books, books with fine, exhilarating titles, books that I wished greedily and enviously that I owned. On the walls are fine hunting prints in red, white, and black, and pictures of ships in full sail. Too, there is a curious dark statue, a slim figure rising four feet high from lotus petals, strange and disproportionate.
"It doesn't mean anything to me," says Polly.
"It does to me," says Gene. "I . . . I . . . can see what the fellow meant when he made it. . . ."
The dining room is tiny and dark and made to reflect candlelight and old silver. There is a fireplace in it, and a fireplace in the huge bathroom built next to the bedroom that faces the northeast and the rising sun. Did you ever soak in a warm tub with a good book and an open fire crackling and blazing in the room? Or rub down after a cold shower with the heat licking out at you, and the smell of burning pine mingling with the steam? Then you have never lived as Gene Tunney does now -- and as I mean to some day.
It is a house through which you can hear an outside storm, the rain rushing against the roof and down the eaves, and the wind down the chimney, and that is something most people deny themselves in their dwellings of brick, stone, steel, and concrete. They shut out the weather and miss the sense of peace and contentment that comes when the elements are wild outside the window and the rain sluices over the panes, fragrant smoke from the fireplace blows into the room, and inside all is snug and sheltered and warm and dry, and the logs burn brightly and throw off yellow and blue shoots of flame.
Here dwells the grown Tunney. Freshman and sophomore years are past. He has entered upon the junior's estate, still unsettled, but calmer, better educated, ready for the final assault upon life....
For the first time in his life, I suspect, he is enjoying himself.
Fine days are given over to tramping the countryside, the woods and the farm country, with Polly. Both love to hike, to walk, nowhere in particular, finding strange and unused paths, scrambling over the low stone walls of New England from beneath which the chipmunks scurry - well, one could write a book about the delights of such aimless, friendly wanderings.
Too, there are his friends,
the Gimbels,
the Pryors,
the Dick Byrds [Adm. Richard Byrd],
the Jim Bushes,
pleasant, cultured people, men like William Lyon Phelps [the Yale professor Tunney met in 1928, whose genealogy dates back many generations in New Haven] to stimulate him, to develop his mind. Who can now in good faith criticize him for preferring this company to the frowsy crew from which he tore himself? Life is too short to spend a second of it with unpleasant people, the rewards for such sacrifice too uncertain. Years and advancing discretion have taught me to admire Gene Tunney very much for the people he avoids and the thoroughness with which he does the job of avoiding them.
Tunney's mind and education have leaped ahead since his groping days of the training camps. He no longer fumbles for words, he no longer lets fly a gem from the dictionary in the manner of Little Jack Horner producing the plum from the Christmas pie, he no longer as a matter of fact speaks written English, which is the more formal and stilted language that one reserves for letter paper or the thesis. His gesture with a cocktail shaker is facile and natural, and he has the inborn gentleman's instinct against the wearing of the sly expression that has become habitual with this normal function in American circles.
Charles V. Bob was, according to an online biography of DEAN IVAN LAMB, an aircraft promotion entrepreneur and stock market financier, involved in a fraudulent stock market and mining scam that fleeced members of New York society and also many small investors of their money. Bob had been one of the biggest contributors to Admiral Richard Byrd's expedition to Antarctica.
James Irving Bush was vice president of the Equitable Trust Company and lived in the penthouse at 885 Park Avenue in New York City when he gave Tunney an engagement party for members of the Madison Square Garden Sporting Club.
Bernard F. Gimbel was largest shareholder and chairman of Gimbel Bros. Inc. department stores. He and his wife, Alva, lived in a mansion on 96 acres in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Wilton, Conn. Bulletin of April 21, 1954 informs us that there was a Garden Tour to be held in May of that year and that:
The gardens to be shown will be those of [Sam Pryor's sister and brother-in-law, who was in the Yale class of 1926] Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Verner Reed, Quaker Ridge Road, Greenwich; Mr. and Mrs. Edward J. Beinecke, Ciff Dale Road, Greenwich; Mr. and Mrs. Bernard Gimbel, King Street and Sherwood Avenue, Greenwich; Mr. and Mrs. Whitelaw Reid, Mr. and Mrs. Horace C. Flanigan, and Mrs. Arthur Lehman, all on Anderson Hill Road, Purchase.
~~~~~~~~~~~
"Boxing and Wrestling" magazine article
"Gene Tunney-the fighter who quit with a million"
Sept. 1956 or 57
by Oscar Fraley
***
The handsome, six foot plus ex-champion is a director of many successful companies, perhaps more than he can recall off-hand. Among other things, he is chairman of the board of the Denham Tire and Rubber Company of New York. He is a director in the famous Eversharp, Inc., the Clinchfield Coal Company and the Brown Paper Company. Gene also is president of the Stamford, Connecticut, Building Company and has holdings in various other concerns.
Tunney's career is a complete Horatio Alger story. It's a tale of a poor boy born in New York's Greenwich Village section who rose to become heavyweight champion of the world, retired undefeated with two million dollars and married a beautiful heiress. Born James Joseph Tunney on May 25, 1898, Tunney was a spindly youth but began sparring while attending various public and parochial schools. He boxed at neighborhood clubs up to the time he enlisted in the U. S. Marines at the outbreak of World War I. The war gave Gene his big push into the prize ring. Tunney proved so successful boxing his fellow marines he was put forward to fight for the A.E.F. light heavyweight championship, which he won in Colmbes Stadium at Paris. After the war, jobs of the right type were scarce and he elected to make boxing his business with cold-blooded approach never equalled before or since.Gene still was unimpressive, physically. Yet he realized he had to build both his body and temperament to succeed. By driving himself, Tunney developed into a beautiful fighting machine and often he has said that during these times he even discovered that courage is a force that can be learned. In 1922, Tunney won his first title, winning the American light heavyweight crown from Battling Levinsky. Four months later, Harry Greb lifted it in the only fight Tunney ever lost but Gene won it right back in 1923.... Thereafter, Tunney picked up just one more big purse by flattening Heeney a year later and called it quits. For his last three fights, twice with Dempsey and then Heeney, Tunney collected a sum said to have been $1,700,000! Once out of the ring, Gene turned to the finer things he had been pursuing all through his career -- books, art, travel. He set out on a walking trip through Europe with author Thornton Wilder and visited such literary lights as George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. In Rome, the tour came to an end on October 3, 1928, when he married Miss Polly Lauder of Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the heirs to Carnegie steel millions.
The Tunney's now have four children, three strapping sons and the youngest child a daughter, Joan, aged 12. Gene, the oldest son, is in the army. The others are Varick and Jonathon. Although Tunney had little success in certain public crusades. he prospered in business. He became an executive of the American Distilling company and the Morris Plan bank, connections he later relinquished. His ventures spread to many fields and still do.
The company became American Distilling Company in 1942. This certificate was printed in the 1928 and has the names William S. Kies, Richard H. Grimm and Philip Publicker imprinted on it. 1928 - American Commercial Alcohol Corporation is formed with the merger of American Distilling Co., David Berg Industrial Alcohol Co. (Founded 1911 in Philadelphia), and the S. M. Mayer Alcohol Co. (founded 1926 in Gretna, Louisiana).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Was Gene Tunney the finest boxer who ever lived?"
in "The Complete Book of World Heavyweight Champions From John L. Sullivan to Larry Holmes"
Clay Communications Group: Spring, 1981
*** On August 1, 1928 Tunney announced his retirement at New York's Biltmore Hotel, quickly sailed off to Europe, where he was to meet his fiancee Polly Lauder, grandniece of billionaire Andrew Carnegie. They were married in October.
In many ways, Tunney didn't fit into the boxing world. He was a handsome, clean-living man, self educated, who could write poetry, read Shakespeare, pontificate on all worldly subjects -- didn't even curse.
"Let's have fighters with more wallop and less Shakespeare," laughed humorist Will Rogers, echoing the sentiment of fight people who labelled Gene as "uppity", "a snob". They found it unsettling that a prominent fighter would carry a book of poetry in his equipment bag along with his jockstrap and gloves. Neither did they like the fact that Tunney used "front men" as managers.
"The state says I need to have a manager," Tunney scoffed. "Otherwise, I wouldn't use one."
But Tunney won their grudging respect through the years with his slashing fists and giant fighting heart. Some experts feel he was the best pure boxer in heavyweight history. Gene was a successful businessman -- and a close friend of Jack Dempsey's -- till he died....
Polly Lauder Tunney, a Connecticut socialite and Carnegie heiress whose secret romance and subsequent marriage to the former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney was one of the most sensational love stories of the 1920s, died Saturday at her home in Stamford, Conn. She was 100.
Her death was confirmed Monday by her son John V. Tunney, the former United States Senator from California. His mother had had several strokes in recent years, including one about a week ago, he said.
For Mrs. Tunney, who had grown up in a world of wealth and privilege reaching from Greenwich, Conn., to Versailles, meeting and falling in love with a prizefighter, even a famous one, seemed unlikely. But Gene Tunney was no ordinary prizefighter.
Though he had grown up relatively poor in Greenwich Village as the son of Irish immigrants — his father was a longshoreman — Tunney, a high school dropout, had developed an insatiable appetite for classical literature, especially the works of Shakespeare. Handsome and articulate, he lectured on Shakespeare at Yale and befriended George Bernard Shaw, Thornton Wilder and other writers, earning the scorn of the boxing establishment and many boxing fans.
Polly Lauder, a striking beauty, met Tunney shortly before he won the heavyweight title from Jack Dempsey in one of the most stunning upsets in boxing history on Sept. 23, 1926. Tunney had originally been introduced to Miss Lauder’s older sister, Katherine Dewing, by a longtime friend, Samuel Pryor Jr., who also lived in Greenwich.
Katherine Dewing in turn arranged for Tunney and her sister to meet at a dinner party that Mrs. Dewing and her husband gave at their Manhattan apartment. Over the next two years, a romance blossomed, though only a few close friends and relatives knew about it.
In August 1928 — less than a month after the last fight of Tunney’s career, a technical knockout of the New Zealander Tom Heeney — Polly’s mother, Katherine Lauder, announced from the family’s summer home on Johns Island, off the coast of Maine, that Polly and Tunney had become engaged. (Tunney had promised Miss Lauder that he would quit boxing after fulfilling his contractual obligations, which included the Heeney fight and, earlier, a rematch with Dempsey, a fight that became memorable as Tunney’s “long-count” victory.)
The engagement was front-page news across the country and touched off a frenzy by reporters and photographers eager to interview the couple. “Wedding Gong Calls Gene,” declared a headline in The Los Angeles Times. But the couple remained out of public view.
In September they went to Europe, separately, and were married in a small ceremony in a hotel in Rome on Oct. 3, 1928. She was 21 when they wed. The New York Times said the scene after the wedding “looked mighty like a riot” as clothes were torn and cameras smashed in a melee of photographers jostling to capture images of the couple.
After spending 14 months traveling in Europe, the Tunneys returned to the United States and moved into a house in North Stamford built in 1742 and began restoring it. Known as Star Meadow Farm, the house sits on 200 acres, where the Tunneys raised Hereford cattle and sheep.
Tunney, who had little to do with boxing after he retired as the undefeated heavyweight champion July 31, 1928, became a successful businessman in New York. He died in 1978 at 81.
Born Mary Josephine Lauder in Greenwich on April 24, 1907, and known since childhood as Polly, Mrs. Tunney was the granddaughter of George Lauder, a first cousin of Andrew Carnegie, with whom he had grown up in Scotland. An engineer, Lauder became, in his 30s, a confidential adviser to Carnegie and a director and shareholder of the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh shortly after Carnegie founded it in the 1870s.
Lauder’s son, George Jr., inherited much of his father’s fortune and became a well-known yachtsman, owning a 136-foot two-masted schooner. He was a director of Presbyterian Hospital and the Manhattan Ear and Eye Hospital in New York and died of influenza at 37, leaving a fortune estimated at $50 million to his wife and to his children, Polly, Katherine and George III.
After attending private schools in Greenwich, Polly Lauder graduated from the Lenox School in New York and the Finch School in New York and Versailles. She was an accomplished equestrian, sailor and swimmer and remained vigorous into her 90s, driving a car until age 93. A patron of the arts, she was a former vice president of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and a major benefactor of the Audubon Society and the Wildlife Federation.
In addition to her son John, of New York, Mrs. Tunney is survived by two other sons, Gene, of Hawaii, and Jonathan, of New York and Roxbury, Conn.; a daughter, Joan Tunney Cook, of Omaha, Ark.; 10 grandchildren and 9 great-grandchildren.
Greenwich, Conn., July 28, 1928.—(AP)—Gene Tunney, who successfully defended his heavyweight title against Tom Heeney at the Yankee stadium in New York on Thursday night, will make announcement "of the greatest importance" next week, according to Sam F. Pryor, Jr., one of the champion's closest friends.
Although Tunney is known to be in Greenwich and is undoubtedly staying at his friend's home, Pryor declared today that the champion preferred to remain in seclusion until such time as he makes his announcement.
Pryor intimated that Tunney's announcement will be to the effect that he has retired from the ring and will not again defend the title which he won from Jack Dempsey on Sept. 23, 1926, at Philadelphia.
Pryor said that the champion was fully aware of the rumors and reports that he would retire and leave the heavyweight title open, and that his announcement of next week will answer these reports.
The champion recently purchased a farmhouse and several acres of land in Stamford and will take occupancy when alterations which he ordered are completed. It is reported that he will open a gymnasium on his property for the training of boxers and will give his personal attention to it. Tunney's immediate plans call for a tour of Europe with Thorton Wilder, the novelist, after which he will probably go south for the winter, and then return to his Stamford place which he intends to make his permanent home .
Admiral Telfair Knight, a lawyer from Jacksonville, Florida, became an associate of a man previously researched here in connection with uranium stock scams of the 1950's in Canada to Robert Kennedy's nemesis Roy Cohn. This 1950's-era Canadian uranium stock broker Bryan W. Newkirk, appeared in a 1925 William Fishbaugh photograph, tagged 'portrait of real estate salesmen in Coral Gables, Florida.'
In the McLemore
article inset above, Newkirk gave a brief biography of his life up
to 1960, revealing that he was enticed into Coral Gables real estate
sales by a man he met in Jacksonville--Telfair Knight--and says he went with Knight to work at George Merrick's Coral Gables development just outside Miami as early as 1921. But he apparently kept up his interest in his car dealership (see 1924 ad to the right) while he says he had 4,000 real estate salesmen working for him!
