The Texas State Network--in More Ways Than One

Elliott Roosevelt and TSN Radio

In the beginning of the summer of 2012 I was working on research involving Elliott Roosevelt's radio station in Fort Worth, leading up to revealing how the men who had initially supported his father, FDR, rallied around him in the hope of sucking power from the Presidency to themselves. This is the next segment of the research at that link.

Elliott's first introduction to radio, it is said, came through his work in advertising—handling radio accounts for Albert Frank company, Paul Cornell, Inc., and Kelly, Nason and Roosevelt, Inc. in New York. As sales manager for three stations owned by Alva Pearl Barrett through his Southwest Broadcasting company, Elliott became director of the Southwest division of Hearst Radio, Inc. bought the stations in 1936, then made him its president until January, 1938 when he began forming his own network. At Texas State Network, which began operation on September 15, 1938, Elliott also had a two-day-a-week show called "Texas in the World News" over KFJZ, which was quickly added to TSN.

A Texas Strategy Flouted

It had begun in 1932 with the political strategist, Colonel E.M. House of Texas , who had worked from behind a curtain in 1912 to select, elect and reelect in 1916 the last Democrat to national office, Woodrow Wilson.

Col. House also chose Franklin Roosevelt and encouraged him early on  to run for office. House knew Sara Delano Roosevelt from visits to his summer home in Essex County, Massachusetts, about three miles away from his friend, T. Jefferson Coolidge, of Manchester, whose father had worked for Russell and Company with Warren Delano, FDR's grandfather.

The Delano and Coolidge families had both been steeped in the opium trade in the previous century. But Colonel House died in 1937, and neither Roosevelt nor Garner saw the need to continue the misformed relationship merely to keep a dead man happy.

After two terms as vice president, Garner was fed up with both the President and with being his subordinate. So too were the money men who had accumulated the capital at the instigation of House in 1932, alas, a story reserved for another day! Garner, through his supporters, was prepared to pour the bucket of warm piss which was the vice presidency on FDR's son, if not on the President himself.

When Radio Was New

FDR assigned Elliott "the task of putting in place an infrastructure from which to launch FDR's final run for the Presidency in 1940," although, of course, the younger man's first love was really air transportation.

The Associated Press reported in August 1938 as follows:

The state of Texas today granted a charter to the Texas State Network, Inc., Fort Worth Broadcasting company incorporated by Elliott Roosevelt, Harry A. Hutchinson and Raymond E. Buck. The firm, which has 1,000 shares of no par value capital stock ($50,000 paid in), proposes to operate 23 Texas stations tied in with 108 stations of the Mutual Broadcasting company.

...The president's son bid last spring for managership of the Dallas station but the commission renewed its contract with Mgr. John Thorwald instead. Roosevelt then advanced the counter proposition. Thorwald said in Dallas the network's key stations would be WRR in Dallas and KFJZ or KTAT of Fort Worth.

A.P. Barrett

The KTAT call letters came from Texas Air Transport (TAT), an airline company whose stock was purchased in 1928 by Alva Pearl Barrett, a former state senator, who years earlier had sold the San Antonio land which became Fort Sam Houston to the U.S. Army. Barrett then moved to Fort Worth and became a pioneer in commercial aviation in that city.

The competition to capture contracts to carry federal airmail was fierce as early as 1925, and it was Mayor H.C. Meacham and his ally, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, who fought for it the hardest. Their vision of owning an international mail route was achieved when TAT became the third U.S. transport company to deliver mail to a foreign country by establishing a route via Laredo, Texas, to Mexico. Don Pyeatt has written an excellent history of the development of this airline, in which he states:

In February 1929, Alva Barrett incorporated Southern Air Transport (SAT) in Fort Worth as a holding company for the purpose of acquiring numerous independent transportation related companies. SAT bought Gulf Air Lines (GAL), TAT Flying Service, Airports Engineering and Construction Company and Dixie Motor Coach Bus Lines and merged them into the new company. SAT's headquarters was in Barrett's Aviation Building in downtown Fort Worth and operated from terminals at Meacham Field at Fort Worth and Love Field at Dallas. C.R. Smith of Fort Worth was named vice-president and treasurer of SAT and Tom Hardin became a vice-president and general manager of both TAT and SAT. Silliman Evans, a former political writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a personal friend of Amon G. Carter, was named Public Relations Director.

Texas Air Transport and KTAT

In 1930 Raymond E. Buck moved into Fort Worth's brand-new Aviation Building at the corner of Main and 7th Streets, built by his client, Texas Air Transport, which also owned its own radio station, KTAT.

Glasscock memorial

Buck's civil law practice began in Fort Worth soon after WWI ended. The son of an eminent appellate judge whose paternal roots were planted in Forth Worth in the 1860s, Raymond was also related to another group of Fort Worth attorneys named Lattimore, one of whom was married to Judge Buck's sister Emma Buck Lattimore.

In 1921 Raymond E. Buck married Katherine Camp of Fort Worth, a granddaughter of Catherine Glasscock, whose birth in Texas in 1837 made her an eligible candidate for the Daughters of the Republic of Texas (DRT); thus their sons could easily have joined the Sons of the Republic of Texas (SRT).  Katherine Buck's grandmother was a niece of George Washington Glasscock, who arrived with his brother, Joseph Milligan Glasscock, in Texas (then part of Mexico) in 1835. Both men fought in the Siege of Bexar, which began the year prior to the battle at the Alamo, and Joseph died a hero in 1839. We have written many times here about the SRT, a secrecy-loving fraternity that linked Texian descendants all over the state.

In 1938 KTAT became KFJZ Radio when newspapers reported it had been purchased by the wife of Elliott Roosevelt. She acquired 313 shares, Elliott one with one share going to Harry A. Hutchinson, a resident of Benbrook, who was listed in the city directory for Fort Worth as the general manager of the Elliott Roosevelt Properties. 
 
Legal paperwork may have been handled by R.E. Buck, whose father, Judge Raymond Halbert Buck, had long been close politically to Vice President John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner. Years later Buck himself told Jeb Byrne, an advance man for the 1963 Presidential visit of JFK, that he himself had been friends of Vice President Lyndon Johnson for many years.

Buck had acquired an interest in the radio station in his own name (possibly as a front for Barrett). Barrett's office was located in the Aviation Building, which was later called the Trinity Life Insurance Building.

In addition to his law practice, he owned interests in other businesses in insurance, banking and corporate matters. He was, for example, vice chairman of Fred Korth's Continental National Bank in Fort Worth. A brief summary of his major clients was furnished by long-time secretary, Mary Marett, given in 1975:

• General counsel and director for Southern Air Transport (SAT);
• Associate counsel for American Airlines (of which Amon G. Carter was the largest shareholder, and Cyrus Rowlett Smith was chairman);
• Associate counsel for General Dynamics; and 
• President of Midway Airport Corp., a corporation set up in 1942, before it evolved into today's D-FW International Airport.

JFK's stetson from Ray Buck

In 1963 Raymond Buck, a longtime friend of Lyndon Johnson, was president of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, which sponsored a "non-partisan" breakfast as the central event of JFK's presidential visit to Fort Worth. It was Buck who presented President Kennedy with cowboy boots and a stetson hat shortly before he traveled to Dallas, where he was assassinated.

Elliot's radio network was operated from KTAT as the flagship, with its offices in the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth, while the Roosevelts made their home west of town at a ranch in Benbrook. He had divorced his first wife in 1933 to marry Ruth Googins, the daughter of a Swift meat-packing magnate who helped to create Cowtown. The Hotel Texas, where President Kennedy spent the last night of his life, was a couple of blocks west of the packing plants. The plants remained there until the 1970s, when the area became the popular Stockyards District.

When the Rich Marry Up, War Follows

In June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Woodrow Wilson was President and declared the United States to be neutral, as one after another country in Europe entered the war on the side either of Austria-Hungary or Serbia. Wilson's position would persist into 1917, while capitalists and speculators saw opportunities to cash in on the demand, possibly even selling to both sides in Europe.

October 1915

What led up to a "takeover" of Remington Arms actually began in the fall of 1915 with Midvale Steel. A syndicate of money desiring to buy a company to make war weapons contacted investment banker William A. Read to negotiate the purchase of assorted companies involved in steel production to combine into ordnance making. 

Midvale's owner had refused to violate the neutrality by selling to belligerents but was enticed into selling his stock to men who had no such compunction. William E. Corey of U.S. Steel, which had been put together in 1901 from Carnegie Steel by the Morgan banking group, headed the new Midvale Steel and Ordnance company, in which Marcellus Hartley Dodge (who controlled Remington Arms and Ammunition, maker of hunting rifles) also owned stock. Dodge had in 1907 married a sister of Percy Rockefeller of Greenwich, Connecticut, not a great distance from Bridgeport where the munitions plant would be built starting in November 1915.

Years earlier Remington Arms, a company which manufactured sporting rifles, had combined with UMC, a maker of cartridges for those guns. Texas historian John Mason Hart tells us in his highly recommended 2002 book, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War:

[T]he merchants were not men to trifle with: their influence exceeded the mere sale of weapons. Marcellus Hartley, part owner of Schuyler, Hartley, and Graham, served as the president of the Union Metallic Cartridge Company and as a director of Remington Arms. As a director of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States he was also connected to the highest levels of finance. Using his access to large amounts of capital, he eventually assumed control of Remington and merged it with Union Cartridge. He was a close associate of [James] Stillman, [Cleveland] Dodge, Beekman, and [Moses] Taylor. All of them avidly supported Romero and the Mexican Liberals against the French.

Both Percy and brother William G. Rockefeller were married to daughters of banker James J. Stillman, the major stockholder of what was then the National City Bank (now Citigroup). These siblings and spouses thus joined their interests with those of their uncle and cousins at Chase Bank which was, of course, controlled by the other Rockefeller brother's family (John D. of Standard Oil).

Merchants of Death Know: War Pays

Business was good at Bridgeport.

Thus, the capital which helped to make Remington bigger and better came from men who used war profits from the U.S. war against Mexico and the Civil War to build the National City Bank in New York City. The merger resulted in the largest munitions company in America just in time to supply Europe with materiel  to meet their World War I demands. The huge factory was located in Bridgeport, CT, not far from Greenwich and New Haven, home to the famous Skull and Bones secret society. 

The stock of Remington and United Cartridge fell into the hands of a 31-year-old scion of New England wealth, whose grandfather, Marcellus Hartley, had purchased the two companies outright in 1888. He just happened to be Percy Rockefeller's brother-in-law and was described in a January 1916 feature in the NY Times entitled "Our Greatest Arms Plant," as follows:

Marcellus Hartley Dodge is the sole proprietor, and it was he as a young man of thirty-two—who looks like a youth of twenty-one—who waved the magic wand over the swamplands of Bridgeport and created almost overnight one of the greatest manufacturing plants in the country and a contribution for the military preparedness of the United States that is of incalculable value. Mr Dodge is an enthusiast over the great enterprise of which he is the head. His mother died in his infancy, and he was brought up in the home of his grandfather, Marcellus Hartley, the owner of the Remington Arms and the UMC [United Metallic Cartridge].

The article details how this one plant employed 50,000 workers in 38 building built as a city within the city of Bridgeport in only eighteen months.

Grandfather Hartley's death had occurred in 1902, two years after Percy Rockefeller (Skull and Bones) graduated from Yale. Five years later, on April 19, 1907, newspapers announced the marriage of Percy's sister to the weapons magnate:

VAST FORTUNES UNITED
Dodge-Rockefeller Wedding Brings
Together Eighty Million Dollars

Marcy and Gerrie go to the dogs...show.

New York, April 19 - The wedding yesterday afternoon at the bride's home of Marcellus Hartley Dodge and Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller gives the two young people upward of $80,000,000 with which to start their life together. The bride is a daughter of William Rockefeller and niece of John D. Rockefeller, while the groom came into a fortune on the death of his grandfather, Marcellus Hartley.

Miss Rockefeller has $20,000,000 at least in her own name and Dodge inherited $60,000,000, which he has not decreased, yet the wedding was devoid of all ostentation. There were only the closest friends present, hardly a half hundred of them, and the bride wore an extremely simple white satin gown cut in princess fashion.

Thus, while Percy Avery Rockefeller and his brother William Goodsell married the daughters of the banker, James Stillman, their sister (Ethel Geraldine "Gerrie" Rockefeller) married the man whose family had supplied the weapons for the Stillmans to sell during the wars in Texas and Mexico. It is what bankers call "keeping the money in the family."

Mr. Dodge, known to family and friends as "Marcy," was the son of Norman White Dodge, whose father, William Earl Dodge married Melissa Phelps (1809-1903), the daughter of Anson Greene Phelps and Olivia Egleston. In 1833, William E. Dodge and his father-in-law founded the mining firm Phelps, Dodge, and Company, one of America's foremost mining companies. More importantly, he was heir to the Hartley fortune. The two became for a time the wealthiest couple in the nation and were the hub of a family wheel with spokes made of powerful Skull and Bones members with names such as Stillman, Rockefeller, Phelps, Stokes and Dodge.

Prior to the war, steel had been primarily sold for railroads, whose companies may have seen a future market with the growth of the automobile industry, which would also make use of petroleum, to the glee of the Rockefeller family. Morgan had not foreseen the automobile's expansion to individual consumers and instead concentrated his efforts upon the electric street railway industry. Which direction investment monies would flow was still in limbo in 1914, and war speculation thus came at a good time for the likes of these "gentlemen.

When White Russians Invaded Florida

Bertha Palmer

A considerable area of western Florida was once owned by a Chicago woman, born Bertha Honoré in 1849. Married to a wealthy retailer and hotelier named Palmer Potter, twice her age, Bertha used her wealth to connect with some of the most powerful people in finance and politics. When in 1874 Bertha's sister Ida married Frederick Dent Grant, the son of President Ulysses S. Grant, she attempted to make Chicago an international center of influence, and her personal contacts ranged as far afield as London and Paris. 

Ida Grant's daughter, Julia, whom Bertha had taken under her wing, in 1899 was married in Beaulieu, the William Waldorf Astor cottage in Newport, R.I., which her aunt Bertha Palmer had leased for the summer season. In a small, private Russian Orthodox ceremony Julia was wed to Romanov Prince Michel Cantacuzene of Russia, a diplomat who became Chief of Staff to Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, according to a book Julia published called Revolutionary Days Including Passages from My Life Here and There 1876-1917.

Julia and her husband then settled in the Ukraine until Bertha's dream of royal fame was destroyed by the Bolshevik revolution. The Cantacuzenes fled from Russia to live in Sarasota, Florida. There they remained for some time following Bertha's death in 1918. Julia's mother, Ida Grant, lived in "The Acacias," a residence built by an uncle, not far from Bertha's home in Sarasota, "The Oaks." Although Julia divorced the Russian prince in 1934, her son still went by the title Prince Michel Cantacuzene, as he was engaged in selling real estate in Chicago in 1930.

The elder Prince Cantacuzene, whose kingdom was seized by the Bolsheviks in 1917, would also work with his wife's cousins in their real estate company, even after he cheated on their sister with a Sarasota bank clerk Jeannette Draper, who got a job at the Palmer National Bank in 1929. He divorced Julia Grant and quickly married Jeannette in 1934. The Cantacuzenes' home at 870 S. Palm in Sarasota is now the museum building for the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens.

Cantacuzene was also involved in the Palmer brothers' bank. While his ex-wife moved back to Washington, D.C., her former husband continued working in the real estate development company with Bertha Palmer's sons, Potter Palmer, Jr. and Honoré Palmer, who inherited the personal estate of $1.6 million with the balance estimated at $20 million held in trust. Who managed all that money for the Palmers? A good guess would be an investment manager connected to Brown Brothers, related to Mrs. Grace Brown Palmer.

Grace Greenway Brown Palmer's Family

In 1903 Honoré had married Grace Greenway Brown, one of the daughters of George "Brook" Brown. Whether or not young Palmer knew about the shameful scandal brought to the Brown family by Grace's late grandfather, Alexander Davison Brown (known back in Maryland as Col. A. D. Brown), probably didn't really matter because of the banking importance of the family as a whole, which was written up in the Peerage and Baronetage of Great Britain and Ireland, compiled by Henry Colburn in 1880.

The Colonel, who stabled his racehorses on his Brookland Wood estate, about seven miles outside Baltimore, had been known to race against August Belmont and Pierre Lorillard at Pimlico and seemed to keep himself out of the limelight until, following his wife's death in 1879, he appalled the local Presbyterian congregation of which he was a member by making the notorious Laura Hobson his second wife in a ceremony held a block from the White House at the St. John Episcopal Church facing the Hay-Adams Hotel in Washington, D.C., no less. Laura, allegedly the daughter of his father's lodgekeeper, ran a house of ill repute in Baltimore. 

Grace Potter's father, George "Brook" Brown (click to enlarge)

Eight years later he filed a divorce suit against her, which also made headlines, and the Chicago Daily Tribune wrote on June 14, 1889 that A. D. Brown had himself been indicted on a charge of "keeping a disorderly house." That was not to say he was untidy; he was being called a pimp! A legal separation became final in 1891, only a year before her grandfather's death which occurred when Grace was ten years old. 

Grace was one of eight children born to George Brown, who married in 1866, more than a decade before the scandal erupted. They had remained at A.D.'s Brooklandwood estate , a historic mansion lost by Grace's brother, H. Carroll Brown. A broker who married the daughter of Marcus Daly, often referred to as "the copper king," of Anaconda mining fame, Carroll Brown was forced to convey it to his brother-in-law, Marcus Daly, Jr. because of debts he owed to his estranged wife and her family.

The Chicago Connection

Grace Brown's sister, Fannie, had earlier married Chicagoan Walter Woodruff Keith in 1896. Walter, whose name appeared in the Chicago Blue Book as a resident of the Prairie Avenue district, (George Pullman, Philip Armour, and Marshall Field--both Sr. and Jr.--also lived on the same street) was a grain merchant and member of the Chicago Board of Trade. 

Walter was a long-time friend of  Honoré Palmer and swore on a passport affidavit he had known Walter for more than 20 years, having grown up with him in Chicago, in the Winnetka area, where they were members of the same clubs, such as the Baltimore Club. By 1906 both Palmer and Keith were also listed in the Baltimore Blue book, where their wives had lived. 

Walter Keith died before 1940, and his widow Fannie moved in with her sister, Grace, in Sarasota, where six live-in servants took care of the three adults. The home they had in Chicago was even more magnificent, having been created by Potter Senior years earlier after the Chicago fire, and it remained until 1950.

Palmer Castle in Chicago

Another Brown sister, Sara Carroll Brown,  married Stanley Field, nephew of Marshall Field of Chicago. According to one website:

Stanley was close to his uncle, often playing golf together. When Marshall Field died in 1906, Stanley assumed management of the company. He also served as President of the Field Columbian Museum of Chicago, created by a one million dollar endowment from Marshall Field. The museum, now known as the Chicago Museum of Natural History, has sponsored research and exploration, catalogued thousands of species, and continues to be a museum of world-class distinction.... [The Palmers'] Sarasota estate, known as “Immokalee,” took in the land that would become the Field Estate. Sister Fanny married Walter Keith and built a mansion south of Immokalee on Philippi Creek. A niece of the Browns, Harriet Wentworth, built a mansion on Sarasota Bay just south of the Field Estate called “Kimlira.” A niece of the Keiths, Katherine, was married to architect David Adler, who designed the Field Estate. Mrs. Potter Palmer’s estate (now demolished) was further south in Osprey, and is now the historical and archaeological research center Spanish Point at the Oaks.... Adler designs for wealthy Chicagoans included the homes of William McCormick Blair, Albert Lasker, Marshall and Stanley Field, Potter Palmer, and Cyrus McCormick.

In 1920 Stanley filed suit for divorce, but the couple reconciled. Newspapers claimed he filed again in 1923, charging her with desertion, but we read nothing further after that. Most likely Stanley was not happy having his wife living in England while the children were there for their educations. The eldest daughter left in 1920, followed by Daphne in 1921.

Stanley had been chosen in 1906 to run the department stores upon the death of his uncle. The dry goods business had originally been founded by Potter Palmer in 1852, but only 13 years later the tycoon sold shares to Marshall Field and Levi Leiter. One of Potter Palmer's sons was given his mother's maiden name, Honoré Palmer, and married Grace Greenway Brown, a sister of Sara Carroll Brown (Mrs. Stanley) Field. Not only did the families live near each other in the gold coast section north of Chicago, but they socialized together and intermarried with their "class" of wealth.

But who would have thought there was so much wealth in mere retail? 

Maybe they were selling something that became illegal in 1920 with passage of the Volstead Act, the same act which gave birth to a national crime syndicate? Only more research will tell.

Three Degrees of Separation from the CIA?

Paul Helliwell could have boasted, much to Kevin Bacon's chagrin, that there were closer to three degrees of separation between himself and every known money launderer or land fraud artist in Florida.


It would be impossible to dispute such a claim, as we attempt to show here. Possibly by examining the earliest of Helliwell's relationships, we can understand the later ones where he serves as the link between U.S. intelligence agencies, drug running and money laundering.

NY Evening Post, 1909

One Degree of Separation

The earliest fraudster linked to Helliwell was Maude C. Fowler, mentioned in an earlier post. With only one degree of separation from Helliwell, Fowler's biography often states she was known in Kansas City, Mo. as the head of the Women's Athletic Club. Pure hogwash, as we can see here. The actual founder and head of that club was Viola Dale McMurray. In fact, Maude Cody Fowler never even lived in Kansas City!

Maude Cody was married in rural Shelby County, Tenn. in 1890 and moved with her husband to Oklahoma in 1901 when their son Cody was nine. Orin Scott (O.S.) Fowler, her husband, had grown up in St. Louis (not Kansas City), Missouri, where he and his father, Napoleon Fowler, both worked first for John V. Lewis and Co., a pioneer cottonseed oil producer, and later for the American Cotton-Seed Oil Company, known as the cotton trust, which bought Lewis' company.

O.S. Fowler seems to have lost interest in cotton oil after moving to Tennessee. Instead, he moved the family to El Reno, OK in 1901, started a bus line there, and then got into motor cars, founding "Fowler Auto Livery" in Oklahoma City. From there he spent some time in the Texas panhandle before he and Maude settled in Jacksonville, Florida by 1913. Their son had in the meantime attended law school in St. Louis, located 250 miles east of Kansas City, where the land scam connected to Security Underwriters allegedly originated.

Fowlers in Miami 1921

Maude and her husband moved to Florida from Oklahoma and resided in Jacksonville, Florida, as early as 1913, managing the Artesian Farm Land Co., owned and operated in 1910 by Sherman Bryan Jennings, a cousin of often-defeated presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan.

Governor Jennings helped to pass laws granting land to people who would promise to drain and develop what was then mostly swampland. To disguise his own ownership of corporations set up to hide his name, he hired advertising companies to handle the sales on his behalf.

Maude and Orin Fowler's names appeared in the Miami city directory in 1921, as shown above. That happens to be the same year they showed up in Tampa, leaving in their wake the brewing scandal involving the Florida governor.

Enter the Palmer Family

Cody Fowler home built around 1921

Maude Fowler moved to Tampa around 1921 and became one of the founding developers of Temple Terrace, according to photos and history in Temple Terrace, a book by Lana Burroughs, Tim Lancaster, and Grant Rimbey:  

"... On May 25, 1925, the City was incorporated, with D. Collins Gillette, one of the founding developers, serving as the first mayor, and Maude Fowler, serving as vice mayor. Her son Orin Cody Fowler relocated from Oklahoma City with his wife, also named Maude, at or before 1925, when his name appeared in Tampa’s directory, and he practiced at the firm of Fowler, White in Tampa. Maude Fowler died suddenly in Tampa on April 7, 1942."

Temple Terraces, Inc. was incorporated in 1920 to develop the land that had previously comprised Bertha Palmer's hunting reserve in Hillsborough County. She bequeathed the lands to her brother, Adrian Honore, who also acted as trustee for the trusts covering her Sarasota County lands left primarily to her sons.

The earlier history of Tampa was centered around the families who founded the law firm of  MacFarlane, Pettingill, MacFarlane--which hired Cody Fowler when he relocated to Florida from Oklahoma. It was while a member of this firm that Fowler and Paul Helliwell worked together in 1933 at Cuban Rum.

Palmer Development of Sarasota and Tampa Area

When Bertha Palmer visited southwest Florida in 1910, she purchased what she would name Riverhills Ranch in Hillsborough County for a hunting preserve. She left the acreage to her brother Adrian Honore in her will before her death in 1918. He wasted no time turning 7,000 acres of it into Temple Terraces, Inc., incorporated in 1920. 

The men associated with that company then recruited the Fowler family to move to the area. Adrian sat on the Temple Terrace board with all of them for years, at the same time he lived in Sarasota and supervised his development of citrus grove farms and residential subdivisions.

Honore was also named as trustee over all the other lands she owned in the area, most of the trusts created for his sisters two sons, but others for grandchildren and other family members. He was also president of the Sarasota-Venice Company.

Bertha had her winter mansion, called "The Oaks" near Osprey in Sarasota County, which passed to a trust for her two sons, Honoré Palmer and Potter Palmer, Jr., and their wives. Bertha's sister, Ida Honore Grant, also had a home nearby, called "The Acacias," located just north of what is now called Centennial Park on Sarasota Bay, west of 10th Street downtown. Ida died in 1922, survived by her daughter, Princess Cantacuzene, and a son, Ulysses S. Grant III.

Bertha's brother, Adrian Honore, was trustee for the estate, and it was he who sold the Hillsborough County land to Burks Hamner, Vance Helm, D. Collins Gillette, and Maude Cody Fowler (mother of Tampa Attorney O. Cody Fowler). Adrian kept a seat on the corporate board of Temple Terraces, Inc., so we can assume the Palmers and Honores retained stock in the company. 

They wanted to "foster the realization of Mrs. Potter Palmer’s citrus and golf course community vision," and make a few dollars in the process.

According to one historical website of the area, the new owners developed a golf course with residential areas surrounding it, as well as 5,000 acres of orange groves. 

Within that enclave, in 1922 Cody Fowler, son of Orin Scott Fowler of Oklahoma City, built for his family a five-bedroom home, where they resided until a similarly styled home was built on Davis Island's Baltic Circle, looking out on Hillsborough Bay.

The Fowler law firm (MacFarlane, Pettingill, MacFarlane and Fowler) was located at 706 Franklin in Tampa, on the 10th floor of the Citizens Bank Building. Fowler subsequently formed a firm with Morris White, now called Fowler White Burnett.

Mayor Gillette, a Tampa associate of Maude Fowler, thus had three degrees of separation from Paul Helliwell, who worked with Maude's son, Cody, in the Cuban Rum importing firm. Could there be a political or intelligence connection Helliwell may have acquired at this early point in his career? That question spurs us to dig deeper into the Palmer family.

Alchemy, or Turning Swamps to Gold

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.

Click image to enlarge.

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.

W. M. Walker wrote in The Greatest Men of Florida, the essay quoted above:

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:

The Binghams of Louisville: The Dark History Behind One of America's Great Fortunes, theorizes that family patriarch Robert Worth Bingham founded the family fortune in 1917 when he "murdered his second wife for money," according to a statement by Crown [the publisher].

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."

According to a blurb for the Ellis book:

In some accounts, Bingham drove his first wife to suicide and gave syphilis to the second before murdering her to gain control of her inheritance.

The things some people will do for money! But we digress. We'll attempt a new start in the next post.