Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Nixon's Blackmail of a Few Good Men

The day after I put the last post online, I got a phone call from my friend Kris Millegan, publisher of Trine Day books. He wanted to remind me that, whether or not Richard Nixon met George Smathers or Bebe Rebozo in Miami earlier than has been documented, he really went to Congress shortly after the war because he had blackmailed certain government and Wall Street attorney/bankers with documents he discovered amongst captured German financial documents he reviewed during his years in the Navy.

In America's Nazi Secrets (published by Trine Day in 2010), John Loftus added a short footnote on page 221, not as a citation but a mere addendum to help explain why Vice President Nixon may have "received one Belarus leader in the White House...a major war criminal...," but the real meat of the discovery that gave rise to what Millegan call's Nixon's blackmail appears in the earlier book, John Loftus wrote with Mark Aarons (Secret War Against the Jews),which has been excerpted for convenience with the most relevant portion printed below:

Nixon's blackmail.
 
 

 




~~~ 
AGNOSTICS FOR NIXON, Part One
by Kris Millegan
"I am being the devil’s advocate … "         
                                                          —President Nixon, White House Tapes, March 13, 1973

Nixon's Beginning in Politics

Richard Milhous Nixon tried to be his own man, yes, sometimes he was the creature of others, but at the end of the day, he attempted to run his own show … and lost. You see, Tricky Dicky was a blackmailer.

July 1947 - HUAC
Nixon’s political career began when he was elected to the 80th Congress in 1947 along with 107 other freshmen representatives, including future rival John F. Kennedy, future speaker Carl Albert and future senators Jacob Javitts and George Smathers. There they joined future president Lyndon Johnson, who had been in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1939. In 1949 LBJ moved on to the Senate, just when another future president Gerald Ford showed up to serve in the House of Representatives.

Just as Richard Nixon tells several different stories about where he was when President Kennedy was assassinated, there are several different tales about how Nixon became involved in politics. In the 1979 Memoirs of Richard Nixon, he writes about receiving a letter from the manager of the Whittier branch of the Bank of America, Herman Perry:

Dear Dick, Do you want to run for the Republican ticket? Airmail me your reply.
HL Perry


And at the Nixon Library website they glorify the anniversary date of the famous letter of September 29, 1945 and Nixon’s reply of October 6, 1945, where he writes, “I feel very strongly that Jerry Voorhis can be beaten and I’d welcome the opportunity to take a crack at him.” 

The website states “Nixon was a young up-and-coming attorney, a graduate of Duke University Law School, and a naval officer during World War II who had returned to his hometown of Whittier to work at an established law firm.”

Conrad Black writes in 2008 in Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full, that Nixon telephoned Perry on October 1st and then wrote his letter on October 2.

From Nixon admirer Ralph De Toledano in his book, Nixon, written in 1956, we learn about an ad placed in 26 newspapers by a "Committee of One Hundred Men":

WANTED – Congressman candidate with no previous political experience to defeat a man who has represented the district in the House for ten years. Any young man, resident of district, preferably a veteran, fair education, no political strings or obligations and possessor of a few ideas for betterment of country at large may apply for the job. Applicants will be reviewed by 100 interested citizens who will guarantee support but will not obligate the candidate in any way.
De Toledano says the first contact was by phone while Nixon was still living in Maryland and in the Navy. Nixon received this telephone call from Herman Perry, in which he asked, "Are you a Republican, and are you available?" 

What did Nixon do in the Navy? 

Again there are many different versions.

Nixon was eligible for an exemption from military service, both as a Quaker and through his job working for the OPA, but he did not seek one [exemption] and was commissioned into the United States Navy in August 1942. He was trained at Naval Air Station Quonset Point, Rhode Island and was then assigned to Ottumwa Naval Air Station, Iowa, for seven months. He was subsequently reassigned as the naval passenger control officer for the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command, supporting the logistics of operations in the South West Pacific theater. After requesting more challenging duties, he was given command of cargo handling units. Nixon returned to the United States with two service stars (although he saw no actual combat) and a citation of commendation, and became the administrative officer of the Alameda Naval Air Station. In January 1945, he was transferred to Philadelphia's Bureau of Aeronautics office to help negotiate the termination of war contracts. There he received another letter of commendation, this time from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal. In October 1945, he was promoted to lieutenant commander. He resigned his commission on New Year's Day 1946.
According to Mae Brussell, in “How Nixon Actually Got Into Power” from The Realist, Aug 1972, Nixon was working under “special orders”:
Nixon's 15 months in the South Pacific ended when he was transferred to Fleet Air Wing 8 at Alameda, California, and from there he was assigned on special orders to the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics. The Navy assigned him to "winding up" active contracts with such aircraft firms as Bell and Glenn Martin.(19)
As a Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, Richard Nixon's next task was that of "negotiating settlements" of terminated war contracts in the Bureau of Aeronautics Office at 50 Church Street, New York City.(20)
[Note from editor at QJ: This address was one of the Hudson Terminal Buildings near the World Trade Center, which has since been demolished. On the third floor was the office of the American Rocket Society, whose president at one time was Robert Truax, whose obituary in 2010 stated: "Mr. Truax was a career naval officer lent to the Air Force for top-secret projects, and later a corporate aerospace executive and an entrepreneur. His early research for the Navy laid the foundation for the liquid-propelled rockets that are the centerpiece of American space efforts, and he was a leader in developing the Thor, Viking and Polaris missile programs.When Wernher von Braun and other German rocket experts came to the United States, Mr. Truax led the team that debriefed them. As president of the American Rocket Society, he was an early, vigorous advocate of the American space program."]

Jay Gould castle site for Nazis
That year was 1945, when importation proceedings began for the 642 Nazi rocket and aerospace experts and scientists from Germany to the U.S. Through the "generosity of the Guggenheim Foundation they obtained a suitable site – a huge medieval castle, built by financier Jay Gould on a 160-acre estate at Sands Point, Long Island. Here the Germans began work on a secret project for the Navy's Office of Research and Inventions.(21)
19. Alameda, air contracts
          Ralph De Toledano (Duell, Sloan, Pearce), 
Page 37
20. New York, Contracts
         My Sir Crises (Pyramid Books, 1962), Page 81

21. Importation of Germans
        Project Paperclip: German Scientists and the Cold War
          Clarence Lasby (Atheneum Press, 1971), Pages 4-5

Nixon's Big Break

In Nixon's carefully crafted creation story, his 1945 decision to enter politics was triggered when the young Navy veteran, working on the East Coast, received a request from an old family friend, a hometown banker named Herman Perry. Would he fly back to Los Angeles and speak with a group of local businessmen looking for a candidate to oppose Democratic congressman Jerry Voorhis? They felt he [Voorhis] was too liberal, and too close to labor unions.

The businessmen who summoned Nixon are usually characterized as Rotary Club types–a furniture dealer, a bank manager, an auto dealer, a printing salesman. In reality, these men were essentially fronts for far more powerful interests. Principal among Nixon's bigger backers was the arch-conservative Chandler family, owners of the Los Angeles Times. Nixon himself acknowledged his debt to the Chandlers in correspondence.
"I often said to friends that I would never have gone to Washington in the first place had it not been for the Times," he wrote.
Though best known as publishers, the Chandlers had built their fortune on railroads, still the preferred vehicle for shipping oil, and held wide and diverse interests.
Yet Voorhis appears to have recognized that forces even more powerful than the Chandler clan were opposing him. As he wrote in an unpublished manuscript, "The Nixon campaign was a creature of big Eastern financial interests ... the Bank of America, the big private utilities, the major oil companies." He was hardly a dispassionate observer, but on this point the record bears him out.
Nixon partisans would claim that "not a penny" of oil money found its way into his campaign. Perhaps. But a representative of Standard Oil, Willard Larson, was present at that Los Angeles meeting in which Nixon was selected as the favored candidate to run against Voorhis.

Voorhis, Littell, and Tommy the Cork ?
Representative Voorhis had caused a stir at the outset of World War II when he exposed a secret government contract that allowed Standard Oil to drill for free on public lands in Central California's Elk Hills. But the establishment’s quarrel with Voorhis was about more than oil.
While no anti-capitalist radical, Voorhis had a deep antipathy for corporate excesses and malfeasance. And he was not afraid of the big guys. He investigated one industry after another – insurance, real estate, investment banking. He fought for antitrust regulation of the insurance industry, and he warned against the "cancerous superstructure of monopolies and cartels." He also was an articulate voice calling for fundamental reforms in banking. He knew Wall Street was gunning for him. In his memoir, Confessions of a Congressman, Voorhis recalled:
The 12th District campaign of 1946 got started along in the fall of 1945, more than a year before the election. There was, of course, opposition to me in the district. There always had been. Nor was there any valid reason for me to think I lived a charmed political life. But there were special factors in the campaign of 1946, factors bigger and more powerful than either my opponent or myself.
And they were on his side.
In October 1945, the representative of a large New York financial house [emphasis Baker's] made a trip to California. All the reasons for his trip I, of course, do not know. But I do know that he called on a number of influential people in Southern California. And I know he "bawled them out." For what? For permitting Jerry Voorhis, whom he described as "one of the most dangerous men in Washington," to continue to represent a part of the state of California in the House of Representatives, This gentleman's reasons for thinking me so "dangerous" obviously had to do with my views and work against monopoly and for changes in the monetary system.
It is not clear whether Voorhis knew the exact identity of the man. Nor is it clear whether Voorhis knew that his nemesis, the Chandler family, had for several years been in business with Dresser Industries. The latter had begun moving into Southern California during the war, snapping up local companies both to secure immediate defense contracts and in anticipation of lucrative postwar opportunities.
One of these companies, Pacific Pump Works, which manufactured water pumps, later produced components for the atomic bomb. The Chandlers were majority shareholders in Pacific Pump when Dresser acquired the company, and so gained a seat on the Dresser board, along with such Dresser stalwarts as Prescott Bush. But there was even more of a Bush connection to the movers and shakers behind Nixon's entry into politics.
In October 1945, the same month in which that "representative of a large New York financial house" was in town searching for a candidate to oppose Voorhis, Dresser Industries was launching a particularly relevant California project. The company was just completing its purchase of yet another local company, the drill bit manufacturer Security Engineering, which was located in Whittier, Nixon's hometown. The combined evidence, both from that period and from the subsequent relationships, suggests that Voorhis's Eastern banking representative may have been none other
than Prescott Bush himself. If so, that would explain Nixon's sense of indebtedness to the Bush family, something he never acknowledged in so many words but clearly demonstrated in so many actions during his career.
A Basis for Blackmail?

And then there is the tale former Justice Department investigator and author John Loftus tells in  America’s Nazi Secrets, 2010:
When Richard Nixon was a naval officer, he was assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to review captured German financial documents, some of which, according to legend, involved the Dulles brothers and their clients. The Dulles brothers promptly financed Nixon’s first run for Congress and then prevailed upon Eisenhower to take him on as Vice President. Australian intelligence records confirmed that President Nixon used the eastern European Nazi vote as his ethnic counterweight to the Jewish vote for the Democrats in five key states.
Nixon getting brimmed by Prescott Bush, a good friend and business partner of the Dulles brothers … and a director of a Nazi Bank.

Hmm, if Nixon is blackmailing the Dulles brothers, that could explain a few things. 

Those Nasty Nazis

Such as this from Howard Blum’s Wanted: The Search for Nazis in America, where we again run into Mr. Herman Perry of Whittier, California:
The gray farmhouse was surrounded by shouting men. A rock crashed through a window. Other stones slammed against the front door and roof. Stefan Feraru tried to call for help, but it was useless: The telephone lines had been cut. At least a hundred men crowded the finely shaven green lawns stretching from the road to the main house. Most were just observers, up from Detroit for a fine summer's day in the country. The crowd, though, had been drinking and the alcohol and sun mixed to make them restless and aggressive. Many, waving their bottles in the air, started chanting in a tough, loud cadence: "Com-mun-ists ... Com-mun-ists ... "
At the head of the lawn, directly in front of the farmhouse, was a more menacing group of approximately thirty men. They were neither drunk nor merely restless. They had planned the assault on the Rumanian Orthodox Episcopate in Grass Lakes, Michigan, as if it were a military operation: first the phone lines would be cut, a barrage of rocks, and then the final push ­ – the seizure of the Vatra. In fact, many of these men were trained soldiers. They had been trained twenty years ago in Rumania when they fought with the Iron Guard.

These men, some brandishing broom handles, advanced toward the house. A priest's new Buick directly in their path became an easy target: Windows were smashed and tires slashed. Another volley of rocks was thrown as they moved closer. Inside the farmhouse, Bishop Moldovan and his priests began to panic. "We were scared," Stefan Feraru remembered. "We had come to the Vatra a few days early to prepare for the annual church congress. We knew there would be some discussion, some debate, but we never expected an attack. These men were wild."

Father Oprean, a short priest with a long, gray beard, decided he could stop the assault; he believed no one would attack a priest dressed in his black cassock, a cross hanging from his neck. He walked out to the front porch and raised his arms, appealing for quiet. "Fellow Christians," he began. But before he could continue, he was dragged from the porch. Clutching the priest's beard, the attacker spun the priest as if he were a child's top into the crowd. Men surrounded the priest, pushing, punching, and kicking until Father Oprean fell to the ground. He lay dazed, a small, old man, his black cassock spread about the green grass like a discarded rag.

Bishop Moldovan had no choice but surrender. If a battle were to be fought, he would have to wage it in an American court. On Independence Day – July 4 –1952, he surrendered the two hundred-acre-farm in northern Michigan to the priests and supporters of the newly chosen dissident bishop – Valerian Trifa.


The Reverend Vasile Pascau, Bishop Moldovan's secretary, had been inside the farmhouse during the assault and later wrote: “… a group of Iron Guardist hoodlums … invaded our property … beating an old priest ... creating terror among our women, children, and old people, exactly as Hitler did once in Germany against the Jews. After this kind of ordeal, they took over our property by force, chasing us out."

On Wednesday, May 11, 1955, Bishop Trifa had the honor of offering the opening prayer before the U.S. Senate … Trifa's presence had been requested by Vice President Richard M. Nixon. … it was no political accident that Richard Nixon invited Trifa to the Senate. It seemed more than coincidental that Richard Nixon had a rather incriminating history of involvement with another Iron Guardist who had also immigrated to America – Nicolae Malaxa.

In his June 1941 trial, Viorel Trifa was identified as "commandant of the student Iron Guard corps; he has organized this corps and supplied it with arms." But it was another trial held that same month which named Trifa's source for the tanks, guns, and munitions used in the revolt and pogrom. The source was Nicolae Malaxa, the chief contributor to the Iron Guard and the wealthiest man in Rumania, if not all Eastern Europe. Both Trifa and Malaxa were convicted and both shared the same eventual fate – sanctuary in the United States.
During the 1930s, Malaxa had perceptively invested a sizable loan from the Rumanian government intended for his locomotive factories into other industries, By 1939, he had purchased controlling interests in numerous steel, rubber, munitions, and artillery factories; Malaxa had seen the future of Europe and had realized the next decade's profits were to be earned from guns, not butter.
Malaxa, though, was not just a businessman. He also was a political force in Rumanian politics, an agent who actively worked and conspired with the Nazis and the Iron Guard. From his factories, Malaxa hoped, would come the weapons which would win the New Order.
Albert Goering
In 1936, Malaxa went to Berlin to meet with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering and the two men parted as business partners. This personal agreement became formalized in the 1940 Wohlstadt Pact which integrated Malaxa's industries with Germany's. Directing this new Nazi industrial coalition were Nicolae Malaxa and Albert Goering, younger brother of the Reichsmarschall.

Malaxa's partnership with the Nazis also intruded into domestic Romanian politics with his staunch support for the Iron Guard. A telegram sent on January 8, 1941, by the German minister in Ruwallin to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin accurately documents the financier’s relationship with the Guardists: "In this fight between the General [Antonescu] and the legionnaire command, one man plays a role who even earlier played a secret part in Rumanian politics: … the present financial mainstay of the legionnaires, N. Malaxa. The legionaires let the clever, big industrialist finance them. He has in his plants the leader of the legionnaire labor organization, Ganeu, and their green flags flutter above his factories.... Malaxa has even again supplied with arms the legionnaire police.... " Just two weeks after this secret diplomatic telegram was sent, the Iron Guard revolt broke out, and Malaxa's complicity became even more conspicuous: His house served as the Bucharest Guard headquarters and munitions depot.

Malaxa, however, was more successful in business than politics, and after the revolt failed he was convicted and jailed by the Antonescu government. He remained in jail for only six months and, under pressure from the Nazis, the Rumanian officials were forced to begin returning Malaxa's industrial properties. By April 1945, all of Malaxa's holdings were restored.
Declassified by CIA 2004-2006

With the defeat of the Nazis, the adaptive Malaxa was ready to make new alliances. Grady McClaussen [phonetic?], head of the American Office or Strategic Services (OSS) in Rumania, signed personal contracts and became an employee of Malaxa's while still stationed in Rumania as an agent of the OSS. These contracts stipulated that McClaussen would be paid certain sums once Malaxa arrived in the United Slates. Ten years after these contracts were signed, immigration officials would argue that these agreements were actually bribes: money to be paid to the OSS agent if McClaussen got Malaxa into the United States.
Obituary in New York Times, July 2, 1950
[Note from editor at QJ: This OSS agent "McClaussen" was actually a war-time intelligence officer named Grady Cameron McGlasson, who died suddenly in July 1950 and was buried in Arlington Cemetery. See the obituary to the right, which reveals that he graduated from the Naval Academy, only to become an Army Colonel, an intelligence officer at the head of a group of Greek guerrillas, parachuting behind the enemy lines in the Balkans during WWII. McGlasson was a member of the American delegation to the Allied Control Commission for Rumania, which dealt with Malaxa's factories after flying from Athens in the fall of 1944, according to an essay written for Foreign Affairs magazine in 1952 by Barry Brannen called "The Soviet Conquest of Rumania".]
It's Not Rocket Science, Is It?

Malaxa's dealing with the OSS did not preclude, however, his making similar overtures to the Russians. For reasons never disclosed, the Communist government of Rumania in April 1945, issued decree without precedent: Malaxa received $2,460,000 in American money for steel manufacturing plants which had been appropriated by the new Rumanian government and then given to the Russians as reparation payment.

But, despite this ability to make unique deals with the Communists, Malaxa remained intent on immigrating to the United States. On September 29, 1946 Malaxa arrived in New York as part of a Rumanian government trade mission. He was never to return to Europe.
See "FDR and the Holocaust" in FDR Library
In 1948, Malaxa formally applied for permanent residence in the United States, appealing for admission under the Displaced Persons Act. For the next ten years Malaxa was to fight a legal battle to remain in America – the best legal battle his money could buy. Malaxa's first step was to claim millions of dollars which had been deposited before the war in the Chase National Bank [John J. McCloy would later be named its chairman] in the name of one of his corporations. These funds had been frozen as enemy assets during the war by John Pehle [pronounced Pa-ley] of the Treasury Department.
Normally, such funds are used for postwar compensation to American companies (such as Standard Oil) which had property confiscated by Rumania. However, John Pehle [see a photo in The American Jewish Weekly Chicago in March 30, 1944] had since returned to private practice [his resignation from War Relief Board was announced Jan. 27, 1945] and Malaxa shrewdly hired the law firm of Pehle and Loesser [sic] to argue his case. This time, Pehle and Malaxa won. [Pehle's partners were Lawrence S. Lesser, James H. Mann, Ansel F. Luxford, former general counsel of IRS, and Karl Riemer.]

Similarly, Ugo Carusi was United States Immigration commissioner when Malaxa first attempted to enter as a displaced person. When Carusi resigned his job, Malaxa hired him. Other former government officials and their associates were recruited – and compensated – to assist in Malaxa's legal suits:
  • Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell;
The briefs of these lawyers, though, were no match for the vivid eyewitness testimony detailing Iron Guard atrocities which were heard at every Immigration hearing. A victim of justice, Malaxa tried, instead, privilege. At Malaxa's urging, the junior senator from California, Richard Nixon, introduced a private bill in 1951 which would allow Malaxa to remain permanently in the United States. Congressman Emanuel Celler, head of the House Immigration Committee later said on television, "I saw something suspicious about the bill ... I held up the bill.”

The bill was never passed. The bill was defeated, but it was not the end of Nixon's involvement with Malaxa. The Rumanian (or one of his lawyers or advisors) now had a new scheme. In May 1951, at the height of the Korean War when all industry was under war-time control, Malaxa organized the Western Tube Corporation. The company, of which Malaxa was treasurer and sole stock owner – a thousand dollars worth – planned to manufacture seamless tubes for oil refining. Athough most similar manufacturing was done in the East, Malaxa's plan was to construct facilities on the West Coast, near the California oil fieIds. It had taken Malaxa five years in the United States to locate what he insisted was the perfect site for new industry – a small suburb east of Los Angeles, Whittier, California. And for Malaxa's purposes, the site was perfect. It was, coincidentally, the hometown of the then junior senator from California, Richard Nixon. This was, for Malaxa's purposes, just the first of many perfect coincidences.
Western Tube's California address was 607 Bank of America Building, Whittier. This was the same address as that of the law firm Bewley, Kroop & Nixon. Throughout his Senate career, Nixon's name remained part of the official firm title and Nixon used the office on his vacations in California.

Thomas Bewley, Nixon's long-time friend and law partner, was secretary of Western Tube.

Herman L. Perry, the vice president of Western Tube, was an old Nixon political supporter, the same "family friend" whom Pat Nixon credited as the man who "got Dick ... to oppose Congressman Jerry Voorhis."

On May 17,1951, the Western Tube Corporation filed for a "certificate of necessity" to give top war-time priority to its materials and personnel. Also, the company filed a petition seeking "first preference quota" for its treasurer, Nicolae Malaxa, on the grounds that he was indispensable to the operation of Western Tube. These two applications were personally promoted by Senator Nixon. Nixon telephoned the executive assistant to INS Commisioner James Hennessy to plead for Malaxa's permanent entry. And a letter sent by Nixon to the Defense Production Administrator marked "Urgent" insisted, "It is important strategically and economically, both for California and the entire United States, that a plant for the manufacturing of seamlees tubing for oil wells be erected … urge that every consideration it may merit be given to the pending application."

Both appeals were successful. The application for Western Tube was quickly approved and on September 26, 1953, Malaxa was admitted from Canada under a special first-preference petition as a permanent resident.

Yet, once Malaxa obtained permanent residence in the United States, nothing further was ever done to make Western Tube a reality. Neither Malaxa nor Nixon nor any of the corporation's other sponsors ever again concerned themselves with Western Tube. Congressman John Shelley of California was later to observe, "It is impossible to discover any reasons for creating Western Tube and seeking a certificate of necessity other than to give Malaxa a springboard for entry into the United States."

A year after becoming a permanent resident, Malaxa visited with Juan Peron in Argentina. Malaxa also met in Buenos Aires, according to the CIA, with Otto Skorzeny, the Nazi parachutist who had rescued Mussolini in 1943. Skorzeny, now settled in Madrid, remained a close associate of other Rumanian exiles, including Horia Sima, the head of the Iron Guard.

When, ten months later, Malaxa attempted to re-enter the United States, he was challenged once more by the INS. In 1958, after two years in the courtroom, Hearing Officer Arnold Martin ruled against Malaxa and ordered him deported. Malaxa appealed the decision and won. Another Nixon friend, U.S. Attorney General William Rogers, affirmed the Immigration Appeals Board's ruling. "How interesting," Congressman Shelley noted with judicious understatement, "that this man ... found sanctuary in the United States thanks to the special favors accorded him by Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rogers. This was at a time when thousands of deserving displaced persons, victims of Mr. Malaxa's Nazis, Iron Guardists, and Communists, were unable to obtain admission. Maybe they would have done better if they transported plunder and been friendly enough with Richard Nixon to obtain his personal intervention in their behalf."
The Lawyers Take the Case

In attempting to document the information about Malaxa's court case, this editor (QJ) happened upon the case of UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Chaja KASEL DE PAGLIERA, Petitioner, v. Joseph SAVORETTI, District Director, United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, District No. 6, Miami, Florida, Respondent. UNITED STATES of America ex rel. Nicolae MALAXA, Petitioner, v. Joseph SAVORETTI, District Director, United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, Respondent. Civ. Nos. 6705-M, 6728-M, which is reported as UNITED STATES v. SAVORETTI, 139 F. Supp. 143 (S.D. Fla. 1956) - Decided Feb. 15, 1956.

David W. Walters, Miami, Fla., and Jack Wasserman, Washington, D.C., were the attorneys of record for petitioner, Nicolae Malaxa. Walters was the finance chairman for Florida Congressman Fascell's campaign and Drew Pearson named him also as "the attorney for ex-dictator Perez Jiminez of Venezuela". Pearson also disclosed in 1963 that immigration attorney Wasserman represented Carlos Marcello.
Malaxa's writ of habeas corpus case, pooled with the others, was designated Civ. No. 6728-M, and the court made the following findings of fact pertaining to him:
1. Petitioner, a 71-year-old stateless native of Roumania, was issued an immigration visa for permanent residence on or about September 26, 1953, and was admitted to the United States for permanent residence by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at Rouses Point, New York.
2. Petitioner was admitted for permanent residence after the Attorney General had certified that his services were urgently needed in the United States, and that they would be beneficial to our national interests.
3. Petitioner was admitted to the United States for permanent residence after his case had been investigated and approved by the Department of State and the Department of Justice.
4. The petitioner applied for and received a reentry permit from agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, valid until December 17, 1955.
5. The petitioner proceeded with the aforesaid reentry permit to Argentina and on October 12, 1955, while he was in Argentina, the Immigration and Naturalization Service revoked the said reentry permit without a hearing. This revocation was declared null and void *148 by the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on December 7, 1955, and no appeal has been taken from such decision.
6. On December 16, 1955, the petitioner arrived at Miami, Florida, in possession of valid travel documents, including a valid reentry permit, which he presented to the immigration authorities.
7. Without notifying petitioner of any charges and without assigning any reasons, the respondent has refused to permit petitioner to reenter the United States and has confined him on parole, with limited exceptions, to the State of Florida. Petitioner has been denied permission to visit his family in New York or to conduct business activities there or to visit counsel in Washington, D.C. He has been denied permission to travel in the United States, except that he may be present in cities where his immigration case will be heard.
8. Respondent has not advised petitioner or the Court of the charges against petitioner, nor have any reasons been advanced as to why it is necessary to restrict petitioner's liberty of movement in the United States.
9. Petitioner's immigration hearing began on January 26, 1956, and it appears that considerable time will elapse before a final administrative decision is reached.
10. The restriction and interference with the petitioner's liberty pending final administrative decision in his case will cause him irreparable injury.
The court then ordered Malaxa's release from confined and required the U.S. Government to furnish a hearing for him before denial of re-entry into the U.S. Listen to Mae Brussell on Malaxa and Operation Paperclip below, or read transcript: beginning at 16:40 on the tape, where she talks briefly about Howard Blum’s book mentioned above: Wanted! Search for Nazis in America. After discussing Nixon's political birth in 1946, after his stint in the Navy and at the Bureau of Aeronautics at 50 Church Street in New York City, she mentions here her 1972 Realist article about Nixon's role with Allen and John Foster Dulles with Operation Paperclip, before resuming with Blum's book at 24:30.



Mae brings up Nixon's meeting with Herman Perry's group at 28:00, reminding us that all this was occurring six months after Malaxa was allowed to come into the U.S. on September 29, 1945, to receive $2,460,000 in reparations to his business, which had to be deposited in Chase National Bank. All the funds had been maintained for him, she says, by John W. Pehle of the Treasury Department, throughout the war. After coming initially to New York, he settled in Whittier, California (30:00), where he opened a "dummy front" company called Western Tube Corporation. He claimed he made tubes for oil refining with the address of 607 Bank of America Building in Whittier. Coincidentally, that was also the address of the law office of Richard Nixon at Wingert & Bewley until Wingert's death in 1943. Thomas William Bewley lived until 1986. When Nixon joined the firm it became Kroop, Bewley & Nixon, although nothing appears online indicating the full name of Kroop.

Then Along Came Oswald

Brussell makes a fascinating case about Nixon's working with Tom Bewley and Herman Perry in setting up Western Tube Corp. for Malaxa, who she said stayed in New York long enough to accept the millions of dollars provided him by the U.S. Government (the Dulles brothers), then went to Whittier and on to Argentina, at the same time as another family, Alexandr Romanovich Ziger, a Polish Jew, who lived in Argentina between 1938 and 1956. In another location Brussell stated about this Nazi family, whom she referred to as Lee Harvey Oswald's only connection to Nazis:
The Argentine Connections: Isaac Don Levine and the Ziger Family
    The Warren Report wasn't published until September, 1964. Testimony of witnesses and exhibits were being collected up to the day of printing. Yet as early as June 2, 1964, Isaac Don Levine, another arch-enemy of Communists and a so-called expert on the Soviet mind, was arranging with the Warren Commission staff to bring the daughters of Oswald's boss, Alexander Ziger, from the Minsk Radio factory to Argentina. He suggested using CIA assistance.
    What was that about?
    "When the Oswalds left Russia they smuggled out a message to one of the relatives of the Zigers living in the U.S. They wanted help to get the Zigers’ daughters out of Russia. The daughters, having been born in Argentina, could claim Argentine citizenship. Levine suggested some confidential source in the American Government such as the CIA should contact the Argentine Government to set machinery in motion. (Memorandum from W. David Slawson: Conference with Mr. Isaac Don Levine, May 23, 1964).
    January 21, 1964, John J. McCloy told Commission members, before any witness was yet called, "this fellow Levine is a contact with Marina to break the story up in a little more graphic manner and tie it into a Russian business, and it is with the thought and background of Russian connections, conspiracy concept."
    If there was a Russian conspiracy to kill President John Kennedy, John McCloy, Isaac Don Levine, Allen Dulles, and J. Edgar Hoover, not to speak of Nixon and others, would squeeze that out.
    Remember Gary Powers strongly hinted at Oswald's role in downing the U-2, breaking up the Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting while Lee was employed at the Minsk Radio factory?
    Nicolae Malaxa, Otto Skorzeny, and international CIA-DIA agents were thick in both Minsk and Argentina. It was Alexander Ziger and his family who introduced Lee to Marina Oswald. That same evening they were at the home of an unidentified woman just returned from the U.S.
    The President of the U.S. had been murdered in 1963.
    Six months later the CIA is supposed to assist the Ziger daughters?
    One more connection to Richard Nixon.
    When poor Whittaker Chambers almost collapsed from the strain of having to testify against Alger Hiss, it was Isaac Don Levine who took "Chambers by the arm, a reluctant Chambers, and arranged the meetings where he would begin to smear Hiss." (Friendship and Fratricide, Meyer Zelig).
    When Levine was searching for a Soviet connection to Kennedy's death, he was also doing business with Marina's new manager, James Martin. It was Martin who was selling the photo of Oswald posing with Communist literature and a rifle, the same evidence pulled from the Paine's garage. Notice the similarity to the Whittaker Chambers pumpkin papers years earlier that launched Nixon's political career and convicted Alger Hiss.
    If the evidence didn't fit the conclusions of the investigators, the one picture would sell the Oswald assassin story.

Sunday, June 1, 2014

The A-B-C's of Nixon's Rise


A Loose End from Chapter 16

While editing Chapter 16 of The Great Heroin Coup, I happened upon a fascinating connection with previous Quixotic Joust posts related to Florida's land boom during the 1920's, in particular with Maude Cody Fowler, alleged niece of the late Buffalo Bill Cody, whose son had worked with Paul Helliwell in 1934 in a company set up to distribute liquor as soon as prohibition was repealed. As we shall see below, that same year Meyer Lansky went to Cuba, seeking ingredients for his now legitimate liquor business, acquired when it was illegal and, therefore, much more profitable. 

Lansky's plans had been developed five years earlier, in the spring of 1929, as he took his bride honeymooning in Atlantic City. Of course all the boys were there as well, attending the first ever, loosely organized, "secret four-day convention" of organized crime in America. As Al Capone later disclosed to an historian who interviewed him:

On the Boardwalk in Atlantic City

I told them there was business enough to make us all rich and it was time to stop all the killings and look on our business as other men look on theirs, as something to work at and forge when we go home at night. It wasn't an easy matter for men who had been fighting for years to agree on a peaceful business program. But we finally decided to forget the past and begin all over again - and we drew up a written agreement and each man signed on the dotted line.

The mobsters were looking to their future as liquor was about to go legit, as speakeasies and bootleg whiskey would soon become a thing of the past. Once it was again legal, most had no difficulty switching over to the smuggling of other illegal substances. It was the black market in tires during a period of war rationing which Henrik Kruger described in chapter 16--the manner in which he indicated his belief that President Nixon had made a connection with the mafia in Miami during WWII, while employed by the Office of Price Administration

It was through that job, Kruger says, Nixon met Bebe Rebozo and George Smathers, who were working together in a business selling retread (recapped) tires. Nixon was assigned to OPA's statutory interpretations section, which gave opinions on how the rationing provisions of the law would be applied on a case by case basis. 


By the time Nixon arrived at the job, the local boards had been organized and given quotas of how tire certificates would be issued. That year Miami's directory shows future Senator George Smathers was working with his brother, Benjamin Franklin (Frank) Smathers, Jr. at the law firm of Smathers, Thompson and Maxwell in the A.I. duPont Building, 149 E. Flagler. It's entirely possible, even if so far undocumented, that Smathers could have contacted the OPA office in Washington, D.C. on behalf of his high school classmate, Bebe Rebozo.

Smathers Family History

Before moving forward, let's go back a few years in order to learn a little more about the Smathers family background.

The Smathers brothers, while they were still in grade school, had moved with their attorney father, Frank Smathers, Sr.,  to Miami from Atlantic City, New Jersey. Frank, who had entered the practice of law in North Carolina in 1903, soon relocated to New Jersey and worked for a law firm established in 1898 by Judge Joseph Thompson and Clarence L. Cole. Judge Thompson was an expert in banking law, representing and serving as either an officer or director for several institutions in the city.

In 1911 New Jersey's Governor Woodrow Wilson appointed Cole to be a judge.  At that point, just as Judge Thompson was set to replace his partner Cole with Frank Smathers, the latter, like Cole, was also appointed to a bench by the governor. Frank Smathers then served as a judge for nearly ten years. When he grew ill and sought a warmer climate, he resigned and was replaced by his brother,William Howell Smathers, who had finished his legal studies in North Carolina in 1912 and followed Frank to New Jersey, working for the firm Endicott and Endicott. William served as judge from 1922 until he became a pro-New Deal U.S. Senator in 1937, supporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt 100% of the time. Defeated in 1942 for reelection by Albert W. Hawks, Smathers returned to his law practice until he ultimately retired to his hometown in North Carolina before his death in 1955.

In 1930, before becoming Senator,  Uncle William Smathers' home was at 5903 Ventnor Avenue, just outside Atlantic City. If you google that address today, you may be surprised to find that, in addition to being a good location to place a hotel if you happen to be playing Parker Brothers' Monopoly board game, Ventnor Avenue now merges into Atlantic Avenue northeast of U.S. Business 40, and if you follow Atlantic a few miles you might just stumble upon seven or eight gambling casinos. But hey, all that occurred long after the games was patented in 1932. A mere coincidence, right?


Carl Oglesby's Karmic Wheel


Oglesby with SDS, 1968
The source of the Smathers-Nixon rumor was elaborated upon by author Carl Oglesby, who posted the following at the Education Forum October 18, 2006, about three months before his death:

Nixon is commonly supposed to have been introduced to Bebe Rebozo by Richard Danner, the courier and connecter who left the FBI to become city manager of Miami Beach at a time when it was under the all-but-open control of the Mob.

Danner first met Nixon at a party thrown in Washington in 1947 by another newly elected congressman, George Smathers. Smathers was by that time already an intimate friend and business partner of Rebozo and a friend of Batista. When Nixon vacationed in Havana after his 1952 election to the vice-presidency, Syndicate-wise Danner used his clout with Lansky's man Norman "Roughhouse" Rothman to get gambling credit at the Sans Souci for Nixon's traveling companion, Dana Smith. We recall Dana Smith as the manager of the secret slush fund set up to finance Pat Nixon's cloth coats, the exposure of which led to the famous Checkers TV speech during the 1952 campaign. Smith dropped a bundle at the Sans Souci and left Cuba--without paying it back. Safe in the States, he repudiated the debt. That infuriated Rothman. Nixon was forced to ask the State Department to intervene in Smith's behalf.

It is poetically satisfying to imagine Nixon and Rebozo meeting through Danner. When Danner reenters in the next-to-last act of Watergate with the $100,000 from Hughes, which only he seems to have been able to deliver, we may sense a wheel coming full circle.

But there is the possibility also that Rebozo and Nixon actually connected in Miami in 1942, and it is almost certain that they knew of each other then, as will emerge.

Here are the fragments with which we reconstruct Rebozo:
(1) he is associated with the anti-Castro Cuban exile community in Florida;
(2) an all-Cuban shopping center in Miami is constructed for him by Polizzi Construction Co., headed by Cleveland Mafioso Al "The Owl" Polizzi, listed by the McClellan crime committee as one of "the most influential members of the underworld in the United States";
(3) his Key Biscayne Bank was involved in the E. F. Hutton stock theft, in which the Mafia fenced stolen securities through his bank. [The links involved court cases in which Rebozo's bank foreclosed a loan made to Charles L. Lewis of Atlanta, in which stock was held as collateral.]

Rebozo's will to power appears to have developed during the war, when he made it big in the "used-tire" and "retread'' business. Used-tire distributors all over the country, of course, were willingly and unwillingly turned into fences of Mafia black market tires during the war. Rebozo could have been used and still not have known it.

He was born in 1912 in Florida to a family of poor Cuban immigrants, was ambitious, and by 1935 had his first gas station. By the time the war was over, his lucrative retread business had turned him into a capitalist, and he was buying up Florida land. Before long he was buying vast amounts of it in partnership with Smathers and spreading thence into the small-loans business, sometimes called loan-sharking. From lending he went to insuring. He and Smathers insured each other's business operations. His successes soon carried him to the sphere of principalities and powers the likes of W. Clement Stone of Chicago and the aerosol king Robert Abplanalp, both of whom met Nixon through him. Also during the war, Rebozo was navigator in a part-time Military Air Transport Command crew that flew military transports to Europe full and back empty, which some find a Minderbinderesque detail [see Joseph Heller's Catch-22].

During the first year of the war, before going into the Navy, Nixon worked in the interpretations unit of the legal section of the tire-rationing branch of the Office of Price Administration. Investigator Jeff Gerth has discovered that three weeks after Nixon began this job, his close friend-to-be, George Smathers, came to federal court for the defendant in this case, United States vs. Standard Oil of Kansas. U.S. Customs had confiscated a load of American-made tires reentering the country through Cuba in an "attempt to circumvent national tire rationing," i.e., bootleg tires. Smathers wanted to speed up the case for his client, and so wrote to the OPA for a ruling. His letter must have come to Nixon, who, OPA records show, was responsible for all correspondence on tire rationing questions. It was therefore Nixon's business to answer Smathers. Especially since this was the first knock on the door, it would be nice to know what Nixon said and how the matter was disposed of.

"Unfortunately," reports Gerth, "most OPA records were destroyed after the war. The court file for this case is supposed to be in the Atlanta Records Center, but a written request submitted to the clerk of the civil court on July 6, 1972, has not been honored, despite the usual one week response time. Written questions submitted to President Nixon and Bebe Robozo have also gone unanswered. Among the relevant questions is whether Miami was one of the regional offices Nixon set up.

Was this the bending of the twig? And if Rebozo and Nixon actually did meet then, even if only through bureaucratic transactions around the flow of tires, then they met within the sphere of intense Syndicate activity at a time when Roosevelt's Operation Underworld had conferred immense prestige and freedom of movement on Syndicate activities. Could the Nixon-Rebozo relationship escape being affected by FDR's truce between law arid crime?

Let us spell out this theory of Nixon's beginnings in A-B-C simplicity.

Prohibition: Organized crime takes over the distilleries industry.

Repeal: Bootlegging goes legit, the Syndicate thereby expanding into the sphere of "legal" operations. This is the first big foothold of organized crime in the operations of the state.

Cuba/Batista: Lansky goes to Cuba in 1934 in search of a molasses source, meets and courts the newly ascendant strongman Batista, stays three weeks and lays plans for developing Havana into the major off-shore freezone of State-side organized crime, Cuba playing the role in the Caribbean of Sicily and Corsica in the Mediterranean.

World War II: In despair of otherwise securing the physical security of the docks against sabotage which may or may not have been Fascist-inspired, Roosevelt accepts a secret arrangement with organized crime. He comforts Luciano in prison and agrees to release him to exile at the end of the war. He generates an atmosphere of coalition with crime for the duration. In that atmosphere, Syndicate projects prosper. But one of the smugglers, Kansas Standard, gets too brazen and is caught, perhaps, by naive customs officials. Smathers takes the case for the defendant and thus comes into contact with Nixon.

Noting Gerth's discovery that the records of this case have inexplicably disappeared from the files, noting Rebozo's involvement in the tire business and his rapid enrichment during World War II, and noting Smathers's well-known affection for Cuban associations, we generalize to the straight-forward hypothesis that Nixon may have been fused to the Syndicate already in 1942. Was his 1944 stint in the Navy a sheep-dipping? Look at this rise: 1946: Nixon for Congress; 1948: Nixon for Congress (II); 1950: Nixon for Senate; 1952: a heartbeat away.

Yankees beget monster?
So it is another Dr. Frankenstein story. The Yankees beget in sheer expediency and offhandedness the forces that will later grow strong enough to challenge them for leadership. Operation Underworld was the supreme pioneering joint effort of crime and the state, the first major direct step taken toward their ultimate covert integration in the Dallas-Watergate decade.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Links Between Assassins, Green Berets and French Connection?

In one segment of the Great Heroin Coup we viewed the plan to create a "war on drugs" as a plan to change the location point from which illegal drugs would be transported into the United States. We called it "changing the middleman." When did this plan originate? Who was coordinating it?

Gearing up for war on French narcotics, propaganda.
There was a drug bust in New York City in 1961 that nobody heard of until a book came out in 1969, which was developed into "The French Connection," the movie which swept the Academy Awards in April 1972. Brahman-bred author Robin Moore dug this story out of the archives just in time for Nixon to begin his war against French heroin refiners. Was that just a fluke, or could Moore, with contacts in Special Forces since the days it was still part of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), have known that this story was about to become big news?

Who Was Robin Moore?
Robin Moore, author
 
Robert Lowell "Robin" Moore, Jr., born in Boston in 1925, but grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, the heart of transcendentalism. His mother, Eleanor Turner Moore, was a devoted volunteer at the Thoreau Society, while raising four children--Robin, his sister Marcia, and brothers William and  John. Robert L. Moore Sr.'s mother was Mrs. James Lowell Moore, a member of the Newell family. Her father, Rev. Dr. William Newell, had been pastor of the First Parish in Cambridge 1830-68, and her historical tale delivered in 1939 about her family connections to Harvard's literary Lowell family is intriguing, to say the least.

Their neighbors in Concord included local physician, Edward Waldo Emerson, son of Thoreau's best friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Dr. Emerson's sister, Mrs. William Hathaway Forbes, had named one son, Edward Waldo Forbes, for her brother. Another son, Ralph Emerson Forbes married Elise Cabot, and their daughter Ruth Forbes grew up to be the mother of Michael Paine. 
 
It was Michael's wife, Ruth Hyde Paine, who befriended Marina Oswald in Dallas, possibly at the request of Michael's employer, Bell Helicopter, which manufactured and sold the invention patented by Michael's stepfather, Arthur M. Young

Another son, William Cameron Forbes, "worked as a partner in his grandfather's firm, J.M. Forbes and Co., after 1899 and was appointed by President Roosevelt in 1904 to the Philippine Commission, where he held several administrative posts and then served as governor-general of the islands, 1909-1913. He also served as the ambassador to Japan in 1931-1932 and led an economic mission to East Asia in 1935." In 1927 his name was tossed around briefly as a potential  Republican candidate for President, most likely by those at Harvard who would have liked to have one of their own in a position of power.

Robin Moore enlisted in 1944 and served in the Army Air Corps as a nose-gunner on a B-17 bomber during WWII. After the war he went to Harvard, graduating in 1949. Only eight years out of college, in 1957, he was able to purchase a 2,000-acre estate at the eastern end of Jamaica, a large chunk of which he donated to the government for a public beach. Near Port Antonio, his Blue Lagoon estate was almost 100 kilometers east of where British spy Ian Fleming was writing his tales of James Bond.

Jack Youngblood
Moore's first book (The Devil To Pay - The True Story of an American Soldier of Fortune in Castro's Revolution), was co-authored with mercenary Walter A. "Jack" Youngblood, and came out in 1961, at least four years after Moore bought his tropical island retreat. Thus the money did not come from book sales, nor from inheritance from his parents who were both still living at the time. 
 
Dick Russell wrote in the Village Voice in 1976 that the same  Youngblood whose story Moore told in 1959 was believed by James Earl Ray's attorney, Robert I. Livingston, to have been a contract assassin who worked with a man James Earl Ray claimed had set him up -- "a Latino gunrunner he'd known only as 'Raoul'," who looked very much like a man called "Frenchy," one of the tramps arrested in Dealy Plaza in 1963. Frenchy is believed by many researchers to have been a Texan named Charles Rogers from Houston, who was a first cousin of Charles Harrelson. (See The Man on the Grassy Knoll by John R. Craig and Philip A. Rogers for more on their family backgrounds and possible relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald.)
 
According to the Hal Boyle column (see clipping to left, above), Robin Moore told him he "ran a bar call 'The Teahouse of the Blue Lagoon'." If true, judging from an old postcard by that title showing a photo of an isolated bar, Moore would not have made much money at it unless.... Perhaps the "teahouse" was a code word for something else? Possibly a warehouse for weapons sales, approachable by boat.

The CIA once checked into using the bar and other parts of Moore's property as a staging area, based on a report from Jack Reed, who went to Jamaica in 1964 and spoke at length with Moore. Whether or not they worked out a deal is unknown, but their meeting occurred at approximately the same time Paul Davis tells us Robin "went back to school,"  according to his article in Military History:
At age 37 Moore graduated from the U.S. Army’s airborne school and the Special Warfare Center – the first and only writer to do so. He arrived in Vietnam on January 6, 1964 and spent six months with the Green Berets.
At the end of that Special Forces training mission, Moore returned to Blue Lagoon and wrote The Green Berets: The Amazing Story of the U. S. Army's Elite Special Forces Unit. It even had a catchy, nauseating tune to go along with it--Balad of the Green Beret.

Bahamian Tax Evaders
In 1973 Robin Moore, with two failed marriages already under his belt, married Mary Olga Troshkin, whom he met at a party given by his friend, G. Huntington Hartford II--the grocery heir who developed Paradise Island and its casino in the Bahamas. Hartford acquired the island in 1960 from the notorious Swedish Nazi, Axel Wenner- Gren, in 1962 entertained a defeated Richard Nixon there, and sold it to Resorts International in 1966. The following year Nixon attended the casino's gala opening in December. 

Wealthy Americans were being encouraged to set up secret bank accounts in these islands then being developed as tourist meccas, where money dropped in the casinos could be siphoned off by organized criminals, all in the guise of jet-setters' fun in the sun. Mitchell WerBell III, for example, was helping promote a group calling itself "Friends of Abaco," with help from John Patrick Muldoon, Michael "Moses Olitsky" Oliver, and Walter Josef "Walt" Mackem. Abaco was a Bahamian island that wanted to stay under the wing of the British monarchy. 

These tax evaders and gamblers not surprisingly had numerous connections to Mafia gunrunners, such as Jack Ruby, and all were in some way linked to ongoing intelligence operations previously mentioned with reference to Mitchell WerBell and the B.R. Fox company, allegedly created by Jimmy Hoffa's favorite wiretapper, Bernard Spindel. We will return to this scene in the future.

Sheraton Hotels and ITT
While Robin was whiling his time away with assassins and tax evaders, his father had been working with his partner Ernest Flagg Henderson II in negotiating a sale of their Sheraton Hotel Corporation to ITT, finally consummated in 1968. The elder Moore and Henderson had been roommates at Harvard before graduation in 1918. Moore then trained as a pilot in the Army Air Corps, while Henderson joined up as a pilot in the Navy. Upon release in 1920, both returned to study at MIT before entering business together. When Robin's father died in 1986, the following tribute was paid to him by the Associated Press:
Moore, who served as an ambulance driver and aviator in World War I, turned down a commission in the Army Air Force for World War II, telling the government he could be of more help working with William [Powell] Lear in development of the wire audio recorder - a predecessor to the tape recorder - and Radio Direction Finder, a navigational device. The RDF conceived and manufactured by Moore and Lear soon became standard equipment on all U.S. military aircraft. 

In 1944, having resumed his relationship with Henderson [through Atlantic Securities and Standard Investing Corporation], the two bought Boston's Copley Plaza hotel, made it their flagship, and continued building the Sheraton chain. In 1948, they merged with U.S. Realty and Improvement Corp., and the companies became Sheraton Corp. of America. In 1967, Moore and Henderson began negotiations with International Telephone and Telegraph Corp., which bought Sheraton in 1968. Henderson died during the negotiation period.
But ITT rose again to create another scandal during the Republican convention in San Diego in 1972. Jack Anderson printed a memo allegedly written by ITT's lobbyist Dita Beard.