Sammlung von Newsfeeds

Whitney is joined by Catherine Austin Fitts to discuss the current financial situation and what to expect in the short term, why the US government is using the crisis to push for greater bank consolidation, the FedNow service and the role commercial banks are set to play after the rollout of CBDCs.

Originally published 04/18/23.

Links discussed:

Podcast available early for Unlimited Hangout members and Rokfin subscribers. After a few days, all episodes are free and available on all platforms.

Links Discussed:

• J.P. Morgan Joins the Biometric Palm & Face ID Race
• JPMorgan to let consumers pay with face instead of card | Fortune
• JPMorgan Taps Into Wish for Biometric Payments | PYMNTS.com
• John Titus – All the Plenary’s Men
• Crypto & the SVB Banking Crisis with Marty Bent & Michael Krieger
• Fed’s ‘Emergency rate cut’ by June to precede ‘controlled implosion’ of banking sector, only 6 banks left as CBDCs rolled out by 2025 – Edward Dowd | Kitco News
• Solari – I want to stop CBDCs What Can I Do?
• Why You Should Destroy Your Smart Phone Now – OffGuardian
• Mind Control Tactics Used on Young People and Children (and Everyone Else) – Solari Report
• The Economy of the Energy Body with Ulrike Granögger – Solari Report
• FedNow’s rollout might get complicated by misinformation | American Banker
• Home – Chapwood Index
• The role of commercial banks in CBDCs – The Global Treasurer

Links from Catherine
Solari – I want to stop CBDCs What Can I Do?
How to Find a Local Bank – Solari Report
Financial Rebellion Episode 31 Where to Stash Your Cash – Catherine Austin Fitts
Mind Control Tactics Used on Young People and Children (and Everyone Else) – Solari Report

Follow Catherine: Solari Report

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Chapters

00:02:23: SVB crisis & Government response
00:15:10: Regulatory efforts on Crypto
00:22:07: Policy push to get money into ‘Too Big To Fail’ banks
00:25:57: Bank consolidation timeline
00:29:42: How much damage will be done before the plan fails?
00:31:46: Surveillance through wearables and healthcare
00:34:25: I Want to Stop CBDCs – What Can I Do? – Solari Report
00:35:14: Article- “Why You Should Destroy Your Smart Phone Now”
00:38:48: Mind Control – Mind Control Tactics Used on Young People and Children (and Everyone Else) – Solari Report
00:40:45: Fear trap
00:43:58: Mental atrophy/ChatGPT
00:47:17: Federal Reserve short term outlook
00:50:32: FedNow
00:52:11: “FedNow’s rollout might get complicated by misinformation”
00:58:53: “The Red Button Story” – Solari
01:04:23: Shift from Dollar to Global Reserve currency
01:10:01: Chapwood Index
01:14:43: Commercial Banks & CBDCs
01:18:52: How to prepare financially

Consolidating Control with Catherine Austin Fitts.

Whitney joined The Jimmy Dore Show to discuss her new article on JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and his connections to the network behind Jeffrey Epstein.

The Jimmy Dore Show.

“Bluebonnet” was name given to fifteen Texas savings and loan institutions, bundled together and sold-off by federal regulators at the tail-end of the savings and loans crisis that rocked the United States in the late 1980s. For reasons that remain murky, Bluebonnet became the subject of intense interest by a number of intriguing individuals. As noted in Part 1 of this two-part article, this may have had something to do with the fact that the multiple thrifts that were consolidated into Bluebonnet had earlier been active in a sprawling “daisy chain” of bad loans, real estate transactions and money laundering. This hot money network was overseen and administered a very unusual coterie of conmen who had ties to powerful political figures in Texas and beyond, as well as to organized crime and the CIA.

When the fifteen S&Ls were on the auction block, among those who attempted to acquire them included figures linked to major nodes in this daisy chain—and they brought with them Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, at the time, was embarking on his effort to build an American business empire. Far from the curious appearance of a ruthless businessman hoping to capitalize on the crisis, Maxwell’s ill-fated attempt to purchase Bluebonnet was dependent on his deep ties to the state of Texas, ties that were intimately connected to the criminal and intelligence-linked underworld in which the controversial media mogul moved.

Maxwell’s departure from the Bluebonnet scene was by no means the end of the intrigue surrounding the thrift. Arriving soon after his exit was an insurance man with a history of fraud, and a revolving cast of suspect backers, all of whom had played supporting roles in a number of clandestine dealings that defined the corruption of the 1980s.

Bluebonnet, Round 2: A Widening Gyre

The man who ultimately secured ownership of Bluebonnet Savings, James M. Fail, got his start in the world of finance working in Alabama’s insurance industry. Among the various entities that he controlled included United Securities Holdings, the parent company of the Public National Life Insurance Company of Birmingham. Public National, in turn, managed numerous insurance concerns, running from life to industrial insurances. By 1971, it boasted over $72 million in assets.

Fail, it seems, was also familiar with fraud. In 1976, he transferred assets from Public National to a shell company, Modern Home Life Insurance. Along the way, he may have overstated the value of these assets to generate cash flow. That same year, Fail pleaded guilty in a securities fraud suit that targeted one of the officers of his companies.

By the late 1970s, Fail consolidated his various holdings together under the auspices of the Lifeshares Group, and began a march across the United States, accumulating along the way more and more companies to bundle under this umbrella. Subsidiaries of Lifeshares sprouted up in Nebraska, Texas, Arizona, Illinois and Maryland. Somewhere along the way, Fail relocated his base of operations to Phoenix, Arizona, and became acquainted with a man whose ties to powerful political forces generated a firestorm of controversy over Bluebonnet: lobbyist and Republican party insider Robert J. Thompson. “It is not clear,” notes the Congressional report on Bluebonnet, “how Fail and Thompson came together.”

Born in Oklahoma, Robert Thompson was the son of Victor Thompson, the longtime president of Utica National Bank. In 1982, Victor was accused by Congressional investigators of “knowingly concealing loan losses and deceiving investors” when it became known that Utica held a number of loans for Penn Square Bank. Penn Square, based in Oklahoma City, had declared bankruptcy that year, which had set off a domino-effect of bank losses across the country. Thompson’s deceptive practices mirrored those of Penn Square: various investment advisors charged that the bank had offered them assurances about the financial institution’s financial footing.

Other, darker things may have been afoot at Thompson’s Utica National Bank. One of the bank’s major borrowers was Global International Airways, a Missouri-based aviation company overseen by Farhad Azima. In 1984, journalists working for the Kansas City Star revealed that Global International had been involved in the transport of arms to conflict hotspots across the globe, presumably with CIA approval. They had also uncovered Global International’s relationship to EATSCO, a shadowy freight forwarding company that was a front utilized by former CIA officers Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines and Edwin Wilson. In the mid-1980s, another Azima company called Race Aviation popped up in the Iran-Contra affair.

A Global International Airways aircraft, Source

Reportedly, one of Global International’s pilots was Heinrich “Harry” Rupp, a confirmed arms broker who was convicted in 1988 for defrauding Colorado’s Aurora Bank (Rupp had been brought to Aurora by a relative of one of Adnan Khashoggi’s employees). Rupp might have also been tied into the Texas crowd discussed in Part 1. Documents drafted by Rebecca Sims, found in the Danny Casolaro papers, reference an allegation made by an unnamed source that Rupp and Robert Corson were hidden owners of a company called Roswell Imported Cars, Inc. Sims noted that one of Roswell’s directors was also the director of a Houston aviation company, Northwest Jet, that Corson was known to use.

Such connections immediately raise questions about potential ties between Robert Thompson and the world of intelligence, and, by extension, his relationship to James Fail’s successful Bluebonnet acquisition. What is certain is that Thompson was politically well-connected. In 1979, he served as chairman of the Tulsa County Republican Party, and for his efforts Thompson was made an aide to George H.W. Bush. Various press reports describe him as the Vice President’s Congressional liaison, and as a “special assistant” to President Ronald Reagan.

In the mid-1980s, Thompson left the White House to embark on a career as a lobbyist. The New York Times reported that “a central selling point of Thompson’s lobbying business was his relationship, including monthly get-togethers with the vice president.” Thompson was also a close friend of Daniel Wall, the nation’s top savings and loan regulator. The relationship between the two was so cozy that Thompson lobbied Wall directly over Fail’s attempts to purchase Bluebonnet, writing him letters beginning with “Dear Danny.”

The “Dear Danny” letter

Suspicions were soon raised that Thompson himself might have had an unseen financial interest in the Bluebonnet deal. As compensation for his efforts, Fail guaranteed a loan for Thompson from an Oklahoma bank, and in violation of Federal regulation, had the loan transferred from the bank to one of Fail’s insurance companies. Thompson used part of the money to invest in two ventures, one with California congressman Doug Bosco and the other with a former FDIC official in Oklahoma.

The ultimate deal that Thompson was able to craft for Fail was, quite frankly, ludicrous: he only put up $1,000 of his own money to buy the package of fifteen thrifts. Using his insurance companies as collateral, Fail secured $35 million in financing from Bankers Life, a subsidiary of I.C.H. Corp, an insurance giant headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. A secondary loan was made to Fail, for the purposes of recapitalizing Bluebonnet, by the Capital National Corporation (CNC). CNC and I.C.H. were interrelated institutions, both owned by businessman Robert Shaw. At the time, Shaw was chairman of I.C.H., and president of CNC.

While I.C.H. was located in Kentucky, its principal banker was located elsewhere, in Dallas, Texas. The 1988/1989 edition of Major Companies of the USA shows that this bank was none other than M Bank, the bank that was so close to Robert Corson.

A 1987 report by CNN Money provided some details about what it described as “I.C.H. Corp’s ascent from nowhere.” The report notes that from 1982 through 1987, Shaw’s Kentucky insurance combine had been catapulted along a dizzying growth trajectory, with its balance sheet ballooning from $800 million to $8 billion in just 5 years. Part and parcel of I.C.H.’s rapid climb were the alliances that Shaw had forged. One of these alliances was with First Executive, the insurance giant overseen by Fred Carr. Before its spectacular fall in 1990, First Executive had been the top buyer of junk bonds peddled by Michael Milken; by some accounts, the value of these purchases totaled somewhere in the $40 billion range.

According to CNN Money, I.C.H. had purchased 9.9% of First Executive in October, 1986. At the time, First Executive was doing business with Imperial Savings of San Diego, then owned by the Gouletas family. As discussed in Part 1, the deep ties of the Gouletas family ranged from companies involved with Robert Corson to Jeffrey Epstein to Allan Tessler, attorney for Earl Brian.

Another I.C.H. ally was disgraced stock trader Ivan Boesky. Shaw had invested $10 million with Boesky in the mid-1980s. Boesky—who claimed to have worked undercover for the CIA in Iran in the 1970s—was, like Fred Carr and First Executive, closely tied to Milken and his junk bond peddling apparatus. The SEC charges that during the 1980s, “Milken supplied Ivan Boesky with capital and information, which Boesky used to take advantage of takeover bids and manipulate stocks to the benefit of both men.”

Michael Milken (L) in 1978 and Ivan Boesky (R) in 1987, Source

I.C.H. provided James Fail with the lion’s share of the capital he needed to complete the takeover of Bluebonnet. In light of its deep history with figures involved with Michael Milken, this paints an intriguing picture. While the junk bond story and the S&L story are often treated as separate tales of the runaway greed of 1980s finance, they are really the same story. There were the aforementioned business dealings between the Gouletas and First Executive, and the close ties that existed between Milken and the arch-S&L fraudster Charles Keating. Another case was the real estate investment firm Southmark, which was lodged within a deal-making triangle involving Keating and Milken.

Incredibly, at the time that I.C.H. began backing Fail, Shaw’s company was joined (almost quite literally) at the hip with Southmark. It is here that figures intimately connected to the PROMIS affair begin to bubble back up to the surface.

Meet Southmark

In the beginning, Southmark was known as Citizens and Southern Realty Investors. It was a real estate investment vehicle organized in the early 1970s by Citizens & Southern Bank, one of Atlanta’s largest banking houses. Citizens & Southern was certainly familiar with the darker side of politics: the institution had helped bankroll Bert Lance, Carter’s controversial Office of Management and Budget chief who was forced to step down under a cloud of scandal in 1977. It was Lance, in league with Jackson Stephens, who had first helped the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) penetrate the American banking system, thereby setting up key nodes for a truly global money laundering operation.

Around the time it was setting up the future Southmark, Citizens & Southern may have helped provide start-up capital to its employee, the CIA-trained Cuban exile Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya, to form the World Finance Corporation (WFC). At the time of its collapse in the late 1970s, WFC was known to American law enforcement as a major player in illicit narcotics traffic and money laundering operations worldwide (Among those who availed themselves of the WFC’s services included Edward DeBartolo, the prominent shopping mall builder, reputed heir to Meyer Lansky’s criminal enterprise, and close business partner of Leslie Wexner). During this time, no major arrests or prosecutions were made against WFC principals. The reason? They were protected by the CIA.

Edward Debartolo Sr. (R) and his son Edward Debartolo Jr. (L), Source

In 1981, Southmark fell under the direction of Gene Phillips, who relocated its operations from Atlanta to Dallas, Texas. There, Phillips proceeded to build Southmark into what was known as a “vulture firm,” with a specialty in picking up the shattered pieces left in the wake of the S&L looting spree. Journalists Stephen Pizzo and Mary Fricker described these activities succinctly, stating: “Time and time again the company had turned up at the end of our investigation of a failed thrift… acquiring the troubled assets of those who had contributed to the failure of the institution.”

Feasting on the remains of economic failure isn’t always the most lucrative of gigs, and by the late 1980s, Southmark found itself in a perilous position. In dire need of cash flows, the company puzzled stock analysts when it announced a stock-swap plan with I.C.H. Corp. First proposed in 1987, the plan would effectively merge Southmark and I.C.H., which was – at the time – flush with capital thanks to its involvement with high-volume junk bond traders. This would have taken place on the eve of I.C.H.’s own forays into the world of dead S&Ls, through its bankrolling of the Bluebonnet purchase.

Besides I.C.H., other interesting figures could also be found in the gravitational pull of Southmark. One subsidiary of Southmark, Carlsberg Management, was run by developer (and prolific defaulter on S&L loans) G. Wayne Reeder. Among Reeder’s investments was a stake in a bingo parlor and casino on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California—the site of a weapons development project carried out in conjunction with the Wackenhut Corporation. It was at the Cabazon reservation where at least some of the modifications of the PROMIS software were carried out.

A California law enforcement surveillance report on a meeting that took place in late 1981 at Cabazon between Wackenhut, representatives of various weapon development companies, and members of the Contra rebels reported that Reeder had arrived in the company of Earl Brian. Michael Riconosciuto, the weapons specialist who helped modify PROMIS, later stated that Reeder’s role in the operation was to source “clean money.”

The presence of Reeder at a subsidiary of Southmark is alarming enough, but an examination of the company’s owners besides Gene Phillips raises even more questions.

Herman Beebe, Source

A 1985 Southmark annual report shows that 61.9% of its Series E Preferred Stock was held by AMI, Inc.—the Shreveport-based company owned by Herman Beebe and which had played such a central role in his S&L and insurance businesses. Indeed, Beebe and Southmark were a close-knit pair. His holdings in Southmark were leveraged to pay down debts he had to at least one S&L, though this was just the tip of the iceberg. Southmark was subsequently revealed to have done a staggering $90 million worth of business with Beebe, which included the purchase of various nursing homes owned by the fraudster.

The same annual report illustrates that another holder of Southmark’s Series E stock was the nursing home operator Beverly Enterprises, with 13.8% of the grand total. A major stakeholder in Beverly Enterprises, meanwhile, was Jackson Stephens’ Stephens, Inc. In turn, Stephens’ software company, Systematics, eventually contracted with Beverly Enterprises to service its data processing needs. This opens a potential linkage between Beverly Enterprises and the PROMIS affair—a possibility that was of great interest in the course of Bill Hamilton’s legal battle over the fate of Inslaw. As mentioned in Part 1 of this article, the modification of PROMIS held by Systematics was put to use in banks, for the dual purpose of tracking financial flows and facilitating money laundering.

A “memorandum for the record” drafted by Hamilton and his wife in connection with the case outlined the importance of Beverly Enterprises. They noted that principals of the company helped finance the 1974 Senate campaign of Earl Brian, and that by the early 1990s, Beverly Enterprises had become a user of a modified version of Inslaw’s PROMIS software.

Intriguingly, both Beverly Enterprises and Beebe’s AMI appear on the attorney client list of Vince Foster, President Bill Clinton’s deputy White House counsel who died under suspicious circumstances on July 20th, 1993. Foster had previously been a partner at Arkansas’ prestigious Rose Law firm, which had boasted particularly close ties to the Clinton family’s political fortunes (Hillary Clinton herself had worked for the firm), and to Jackson Stephens’ stable of companies. While the interconnections between Foster, the Clintons, and Stephens have been heavily scrutinized over the years, little is known regarding what sorts of interactions Foster might have had with Beebe and his unruly gang of spooks, mobsters, and financial fraudsters.

Beverly Enterprises and AMI, as found in Vince Foster’s attorney client list. The entire client list can be viewed here.

It is quite possible that this tracks back, once again, to the PROMIS scandal. Ex-Forbes journalist Jim Norman, in his groundbreaking article “Fostergate“, describes how multiple sources had informed him that beginning sometime in the late 1970s, Foster had “been a silent, behind-the-scenes overseer on behalf of the NSA for a small Little Rock, Ark. (sic) bank data processing company”—that is, Stephens’ Systematics, Inc. Norman added that “Systematics has had close ties to the NSA and CIA ever since its founding, sources say, as a money-shuffler for covert operations.” If Foster was involved with intelligence community “money-shuffling,” this might help explain the connection to AMI; after all, Beebe was involved in effective money laundering on a colossal scale.  

Towards the end of 1987, Southmark and I.C.H. Corp. abandoned their merger plans, citing “dissatisfaction… registered by the securities market” after concerns about regulatory roadblocks caused Southmark’s stock value to dip. Nonetheless, the two companies stated that they were committed to exploring “alternative methods of doing business together”. When Southmark finally went bust in 1989, I.C.H. was found to have “been listed as a $35 million creditor.” Southmark’s bankruptcy trustee stated that the “claim was bogus and should not be honored because Southmark and I.C.H. had engaged in a questionable stock swap to puff up their mutual balance sheets.”

Given the linkage between the Arkansas empire of Jackson Stephens and Southmark through Beverly Enterprises, it is possible that Stephens himself might have played some sort of role in this entire series of events. In 1987—the same year that Southmark and I.C.H. were exploring their merger—Stephens, Inc. raised $1.3 million for I.C.H., ostensibly for the purpose of enabling the company to acquire two life insurance companies. Several years later, in 1994, Stephens, Inc. announced that it was buying the controlling stake in I.C.H. held by Consolidated National Corporation—the same holding company owned by I.C.H.’s Robert Shaw that provided funds to James Fail to recapitalize Bluebonnet.

Everywhere one turns in the story of Bluebonnet, I.C.H., and Southmark, one bumps up against Jackson Stephens—and with him, the specter of PROMIS. Given the appearance of Robert Maxwell, the principal salesman of PROMIS abroad, in the Bluebonnet affair, it is clear that something very peculiar was happening with this package of beleaguered thrifts.

Dangling Threads: The Jersey Connection

There is circumstantial evidence that Robert Maxwell’s appearance in the Bluebonnet story wasn’t a one-off, momentary brush with the immense savings and loans swindle that took place across the United States. Incredibly, there are a number of overlaps between individuals operating in Maxwell’s extended network and figures involved in the pilfering of funds for ends that, many decades later, still remain murky.

Take the Florida land fraud, mentioned earlier, in which Robert Corson had played a key role. Central to that scam was a British attorney by the name of Keith Alan Cox, who had worked closely with the scam’s architect, Mike Adkinson. Adkinson was a Houston developer and builder close to the circles around Corson and Walter Mischer—and, reportedly, an “international arms dealer” who worked with a “group of Kuwaitis” to broker weapon sales to Iraq sometime in the early 1980s.

These arms dealings might hold the key to explaining how Adkinson became linked up with British attorney Keith Alan Cox. According to court filings drafted in connection with Adkinson’s land scam, Cox “represented a group of Kuwaitis who invested internationally through a multi-billion dollar company called Compendium Trust.” The filings also note that Compendium Trust had a “lending arm” called Sandsend Financial Consultants, Ltd. Sandsend, through Adkinson’s scheme, was able to spirit away large sums of money from Texas savings and loans, including funds from Corson’s Vision Banc.

Linda Minor notes that another player that bubbled up in the course of the scam was Southmark, though its involvement was ultimately blocked by regulators at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation. Press reports from the period also show that Adkinson was fueling his real estate company, Development Group, Inc., with loans from San Jacinto Savings, one of Southmark’s subsidiaries. The man described in court records as San Jacinto’s “commercial lending officer” was Joseph Grosz, formerly employed by the Gouletas family.

Given the proximity of the Gouletas to Middle Eastern arms deals via their ties to Jeffrey Epstein, and to PROMIS sales (copies of which ended up in countries like Iraq), via their attorney Allan Tessler, it is worth asking to what degree the Florida land affair was being used to generate funds for clandestine activities.

Further details of Adkinson and Cox’s connections to the Middle East were provided by Rebecca Sims in an article for Covert Action Information Bulletin. According to Sims, in the early 1980s, Adkinson had partnered up with the Ahmad Al-Babtain Group, described as a consortium of “wealthy Kuwaitis”. Confusingly, Ahmad Al-Babtain was in fact Saudi in origin, though the group had extensive holdings in Kuwait. It appears that this is the same group that Cox was representing through Compendium Trust and Sandsend Financial Consultants. Pete Brewton notes that Cox stated in court that, at the time of the Florida land scam, Al-Babtain was no longer involved with the Isle of Jersey companies. This raises an important question: who, then, was Cox representing during his involvement with the looting of savings and loans?

Cox did have rather high-profile clients. On May 14th, 1992, while the fallout from the Florida fraud was still being battled out in court, Cox was appointed as a director of the board of the Oxford United Football Club. Since the early 1980s, Oxford United had been owned by Robert Maxwell, with the publishing magnate taking a term as the club’s chairman in 1982. By 1984, Ghislaine Maxwell and her brother, Kevin Maxwell, had taken positions on Oxford United’s board. Ghislaine held her spot until June 19th, 1991, while Kevin maintained his until May 14th, 1992—the day that the Maxwell estate sold their holdings in the club and Cox joined up as a new director. This suggests that Cox represented the interests of the buyers of Maxwell’s stake.

Robert Maxwell holding the Milk Cup while being embraced by his daughter Ghislaine. Maxwell owned Oxford United when it won the trophy in 1986, Source.

On May 15th, 1992, journalist Dan Atkinson ran an article in The Guardian titled “Jardine Matheson is buyer of Oxford football club.” In the article, Atkinson notes that the purchase of the Maxwell stake involved a convoluted nest of companies. The direct buyer was a British entity called Biomass Recycling Ltd., which in turn was controlled by an investment company called Energy Holdings Ltd. Energy Holdings, meanwhile, was “owned by a trust of which Jardine [Matheson]—an international group registered in the tax haven of the Bahamas—is the trustee.” Cox, then, could very likely have been acting on behalf of Jardine Matheson.

Jardine Matheson, which was once one of the great opium houses of British-controlled Hong Kong, has been the longtime haunt of the Keswick family, a prolific clan of merchants, bankers, and spies deeply embedded in the ruling classes in London and in Hong Kong (e.g., prominent members of the Keswick family populated the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine service organization operational during the Second World War). Recently, Unlimited Hangout reported that Jardine, which has long been accused of complicity in money laundering, may have been involved with Washington’s Farmington State Bank, an important node in the still-unfolding FTX imbroglio.

Robert Maxwell had his own ties to the Isle of Jersey, the small island and tax haven where savings and loan money vanished into the Cox-linked Compendium Trust and Sandsend Financial Consultants. The one-time chairman of his Pergamon Press was banker Sir Henry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, formerly the head of the Anglo Israel Bank (a London affiliate of Israel’s Bank Leumi). Sir Henry had also acted as the chairman of the International Investment Trust Company of Jersey. This entity was slanted towards the interests of the Rothschild family: fixtures on the board included Jacob Rothschild, representing N.M. Rothschild of London, and George Karlweiss, an investment strategist in the employ of Edmond de Rothschild.

Then there is John Dick. Born to a Mennonite family in Canada, Dick’s climb to the top began in Colorado and he later set out for the Isle of Jersey sometime in the 1970s, where he resided in St. John’s Manor— “the finest house in Jersey,” as one journalist described it. His ascendancy was facilitated by deep inroads made into the British establishment, culminating in the 1980s with dealings with the powerful Peninsular & Steam Oriental Navigation Company (P&O). Together with his partner, William Pauls, Dick took control of European Ferries, a shipping company with global interests, and merged it into P&O, gaining along the way spots on the reformed company’s board. Dick and Pauls then tapped this capital to invest heavily in American real estate, with a trail of acquisitions that included the attempted acquisition of two of Colorado’s biggest ski resorts, Vail and Beaver Creek.

John Dick’s Jersey estate, St. John’s Manor

P&O, meanwhile, was closely tied to Keith Alan Cox’s likely employer, Jardine Matheson. During the 1970s, P&O and Jardine belonged to a corporate syndicate that controlled Southern Pacific Properties, a Hong Kong-based development company that specialized in hotels throughout Asia and the Pacific. Southern Pacific’s founder, Canadian businessman Peter Munk, had been backed early on by the powerful Keswick clans, the controlling force behind Jardine. Sometime during his world travels on behalf of Southern Pacific, Munk made contact with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi; later, the pair would launch the fantastically wealthy—and politically-connected—Barrick gold mining company.

There were rumors that Dick himself was no stranger to the world of Saudi arms dealers. According to Richard Rossmiller (a serial S&L fraudster and participant in Mike Adkinson’s Florida land scam), Dick had “sold weapons to Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s”. Whatever the truth of the matter, Dick had certainly cultivated contacts in a world of powerful players, many of them in direct proximity to high-level arms dealing—and much more.

Press reports tell stories of Dick and William Pauls, strolling the streets of London “dressed in mink overcoats and black suits instead of the proper pinstripe suits”; the nickname granted to the pair was the “dark duo.” Some of Dick’s dark dealings apparently included helping himself to the open coffers of America’s savings and loans. Pete Brewton recounts that Dick had some manner of contact with Herman Beebe, though details of their business together remain murky.

What is clear is that Dick was particularly close to the circles around Silverado, the doomed Denver thrift where Neil Bush, son of George H.W. Bush, served on the board. During a divorce proceeding, Dick’s ex-wife told the court that Dick had aided Bill Walters—the man most responsible for Silverado’s free-fall collapse, and a close business partner of Neil Bush—in stashing some $20 million in funds in a Jersey bank.

This bank was likely Compendium Trust, the same bank tied to Keith Alan Cox and the Florida land fraud. A 2020 article in The Guardian notes that, over the course of Dick’s lengthy divorce battle, it was revealed that Compendium managed a private trust for Dick.  

Further dealings of Dick’s were revealed by the 2015 leak of a trove of documents detailing the inner workings of La Hougue, a sprawling, long-running shadow financial apparatus controlled by Dick from his St. John Manor on the Isle of Jersey. Through Dick’s secretive machine, “wealthy clients in the U.S., U.K., and Europe engaged in elaborate schemes to minimize their taxes through legal loopholes, avoidance measures, dummy accounts, ginned-up debt, bogus client names, and painstakingly crafted document forgeries—an apparent specialty of La Hougue’s.”

The clients of Dick’s transnational laundromat included figures such as Igor Vishnevskiy, formerly the head of the Moscow offices for Marc Rich’s Glencore. More recently, Vishnevskiy has been involved in gold mining operations in Rwanda (Dick himself has acted as Rwanda’s ambassador-at-large, and travels with a Rwanda diplomatic passport). Another was Alexander Zhukov, the Russian-born and London-based investor and industrialist. Zhukov was accused of participating in an arms smuggling ring operating in Ukraine in the mid-1990s, leading to his arrest in Italy in 2001. He was subsequently acquitted on a technicality.

Other clients of Dick’s Jersey operation were members of the Maxwell family. To date, known involvement with La Hougue by the Maxwells dates to the mid-1990s, and many of the interactions concerned Telemonde, a media and telecommunications company founded by Kevin Maxwell. Before its inglorious decline in the wake of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, Telemonde—headquartered in the British Virgin Islands—had seemed like the makings of a giant, with a string of subsidiaries maintained from Bermuda to Oman. At its peak, Telemonde had a market capitalization of $500 million—but since the La Hougue revelations, this can now be understood as a clear-cut case of financial manipulation.

Entry for Malcolm Grumbrige in Epstein’s contact book, listed as “solicitor”

Through La Hougue, the Maxwells bought and swapped stock of Telemonde through a number of proxies, thus manipulating the company’s overall stock price. These transactions were negotiated with La Hougue by British attorney Malcolm Grumbridge. Described as the man acting “at the heart of the Maxwell’s opaque finances”, Grumbridge had been retained by Robert Maxwell in 1976, and had worked for him until his death. His name also appears in Jeffrey Epstein’s black book of contacts.

The stock price manipulation that Dick facilitated for Telemonde took place against the backdrop of Kevin Maxwell’s ambitious plan to become his “dad reincorporated”. Like his father, he clearly had a penchant for dubious financial schemes—and just as the older Maxwell had one shortly before his demise, Kevin went to work for shadow outfits operating in Eastern Europe and Russia. Among the eighty-plus companies he was affiliated with during the same time frame of the Telemonde affair was Nordex, a former KGB money laundering and capital-flight apparatus that Robert Maxwell himself had allegedly played a hand in setting up.

When the machinations of Nordex began to trickle out into the media during the 1990s, it was reported in the European press that the company had worked closely with Marc Rich and helped facilitate the commodity trader’s acquisition of newly-privatized assets in the former Soviet Union. As mentioned above, key figures in the Rich organization would emerge as clients of John Dick’s Jersey money laundromat.

Further research is required to determine if the relationship between the Maxwell clan and Dick’s operations on the Isle of Jersey preceded the mid-1990s. If such a relationship did exist, then perhaps more light could be shed on the mysterious appearance of Robert Maxwell in the American savings and loans crisis, when strange actors with even stranger motives descended on small lenders across the country, drained their assets, and left the American taxpayer holding the bag.

Robert Maxwell Goes to Texas: The Story of Bluebonnet, Part 2.

Whitney joined Rare Candy to discuss the real unsolved issues regarding Jeffrey Epstein, CBDC/Digital Currency, the “Collapse” narrative, and more. Available in podcast apps and Rumble. Clips on Podverse.

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Whitney joined Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell to discuss CBDCs, WEF & Internet Privacy, CEO Jamie Dimon.

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Read “The Rise of Jamie Dimon“

Coin Stories with Natalie Brunell.

When Robert Maxwell’s body plunged into the cold waters of the Atlantic on November 5th, 1991, he left in his wake a seemingly endless parade of unanswered questions about the many lives he had led. In his outward facing persona, he was a giant in the world of media, controlling everything from major publishing houses to newspapers. Towards the end, this facade had crumbled under the weight of revelations that he had systematically looted the pension funds of his employees. This points towards Maxwell’s other life: that of a serial criminal, whose crimes escalated from theft to involvement with a worldwide network of organized crime outfits— with the Russian mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, and Chinese Triads just being some key examples.

There was the life of Robert Maxwell the arms merchant, thanks to the globe-trotting activities of his close business partner, Nick Davies. This life was overshadowed by that of Robert Maxwell the spy, with an espionage career stretching back to jaunts with British intelligence during the Second World War. Work for MI6 seems to have been long-running for Maxwell, but he tirelessly collected fellow—and rival—intelligence agency contacts throughout the years. The most important of these was his connections to the Israeli intelligence apparatus, though he also nurtured ties to American intelligence, and to the Soviet KGB.

This impressive range of contacts saw Maxwell embroiled in the infamous PROMIS affair, a joint CIA-Mossad operation that involved a case management database software, developed by Bill Hamilton and his company Inslaw, which had been stolen by a joint effort involving Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan and President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department. One of the versions of PROMIS that was fitted with a “trap door” was weaponized by Systematics, a bank data processing firm owned by Arkansas financier Jackson Stephens, and by figures operating at a weapons development facility located on the Cabazon Indian Reservation in Indio, California. This trap door allowed intelligence agencies to peer into users of PROMIS, and so the software was sold to enemy and ally alike. Maxwell was selected as one of the ‘salesmen’ to peddle PROMIS abroad.

The entire operation advanced along several parallel tracks. Maxwell, working for the Israelis, marketed PROMIS to intelligence agencies and national security installations around the world and within the US, including to Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories. The version of PROMIS marketed by Systematics, meanwhile, was sold to large banking institutions, particularly those in Switzerland. This appears have to be been part of the CIA’s “follow the money” program, which tracked and monitored the financial flows of rival nations.

Against this backdrop there are lesser known, but by no means unimportant, activities that Maxwell engaged in. One of these was his attempted purchase in 1988 of a Texas savings and loan (S&L) institution that became known as Bluebonnet. Since his involvement with the company was brief, sputtering out at about four months of negotiations, it would be tempting to write it off as a footnote in the broader Maxwell story—except for the fact that effectively every person involved in the story of Bluebonnet and its sale was connected, in one way or another, to serious financial crime, arms dealing, and the theft and distribution of the PROMIS software.

Understanding Bluebonnet requires unpacking a tangled and diffuse web of fraudsters, intelligence assets, bankers and real estate developers who together rampaged across Texas and surrounding states during the mid-1980s, bilking and crashing a near-limitless number of thrifts and related lending institutions in a then-unprecedented spree of brazen financial crime. Much of this was exactly what the mainstream narrative of the S&L crisis said it was: runaway greed enabled by deregulatory fever, which allowed crooks to spirit away untold sums. Yet, this isn’t the full picture. In many instances, it seems that money was siphoned off into offshore accounts, where it was then used to help finance covert intelligence operations—support for the Contras of Nicaragua, and for the transfer of arms and sensitive technology to the Middle East.

It also requires understanding Maxwell’s unique relationship to Texas. The state and its long history of political corruption rumbles quietly below the story of Maxwell and many of his most notorious affiliates. Take Jeffrey Epstein, for example. His involvement with the Maxwells likely began with his introduction into the world of arms dealing, forged in large part by his alliance with British arms dealer Douglas Leese. According to Leese’s son, Julian Leese, Epstein reportedly first connected with Leese after meeting him at a party that was hosted by a person described as “a well-known oil baron down in Texas.” Per this account, Epstein had first met Leese’s other son, Nicholas, who then brokered the subsequent introduction between Epstein and his father.

The identity of this “oil baron” remains unknown, but ties made in Texas proved enduring for Epstein. In 1982, Epstein placed—and subsequently stole—hundreds of thousands of dollars from Chicago businessman Michael Stroll, which had been for the ostensible purpose of investing in Texas oil producers. As for his Texas-born relationship with Douglas Leese, arms trafficking wasn’t the only door opened for Epstein. Leese reportedly introduced Epstein to Steven Hoffenberg, who then brought him to work for his company, Towers Financial. In 1993, Towers Financial was unveiled as the operator of a massive Ponzi scheme—though the late Hoffenberg has more recently alleged that Epstein was using the company to wash profits from the lucrative arms trade.

Mark Thatcher, son of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, was another associate of Robert Maxwell who arrived in Texas in this same period. He began visiting the state in 1983, and relocated his operations there three years later. Former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe has charged that during his time in Texas, Thatcher was involved in the clandestine shipment of arms to Iraq—an allegation that spawned a spirited debate in the halls of British Parliament. Perhaps more importantly, Thatcher did have dealings with arms dealer Ian Smalley (also known by the pseudonym “Doctor Doom”), a known provider of weapon systems to both Iran and Iraq. Smalley, at the time, lived on a cattle ranch not far from Dallas, Texas.

Mark Thatcher and his mother Margaret Thatcher in 1974; Source: Tatler

Thatcher enjoyed the protection of powerful Texan political figures during his time in the Lone Star state. In 1986, he was facing eviction from his Dallas condominium due to “security requirements” put in place because of his fear of “terrorism.” The eviction was continuing apace until former Senator John Tower intervened, and apparently arranged for Thatcher to receive Federal protection.

It was notably John Tower himself who was Maxwell’s most important Texas contact. Tower had been brought to Maxwell’s attention by none other than Henry Kissinger, who had suggested that the former senator would be the person most suited to open doors necessary for Maxwell’s sale of PROMIS to specific state-run facilities in the United States. Kissinger reportedly made this suggestion to Maxwell sometime in early 1984, while Tower was still in office and serving as head of the Senate Armed Service Committee. Tower would act as Maxwell’s agent until 1986 when, having left office, he joined the board of Pergamon, Maxwell’s scientific publishing press. Throughout the period of his involvement with Maxwell, Tower was reportedly on Mossad’s payroll.

Tower’s impressive roster of contacts connected Maxwell to the commanding heights of the Reagan administration and the prevailing conservative establishment. He also placed the media mogul and spook into the direct proximity of a powerful network in Texas, one with deep complicity in both savings and loans fraud and shadowy covert operations.

Savings and Loans and “Off-the-shelf Operations”

John Tower’s political career long enjoyed the backing of one of Texas’ great political king-makers: construction magnate, land developer and banker Walter Mischer. Though it’s not exactly clear how Tower and Mischer first connected, Mischer headed up the Democrats for Tower, a Democratic Party outreach arm of Texans for Tower, in 1978. Mischer and Tower also moved in the same social circles. For example, mutual associates of each included Robert F. Stewart III, a prominent Texas businessman, and Eddie Chiles, the owner of a large petroleum industry services concern.

Senator John Tower and his wife Joza Lou in 1966; Source: UNT Libraries

Besides Tower himself, Mischer had his own ties to the business circles around Robert Maxwell. One partner of Mischer’s in a major land development project in west Texas was a man named Robert O. Anderson, the figure behind the powerful Atlantic Richfield oil company. Anderson, in turn, was a frequent business partner of Tiny Rowland, a British businessman who counted Maxwell among his circle of closest friends (there are rumors that Rowland helped broker the sale of PROMIS to African countries where his company, Lonrho, had considerable sway). Among the ventures where Anderson and Rowland could be found together was at the British media company The Observer. In 1984, Rowland initiated talks with Maxwell to sell The Observer, though their negotiations bore little fruit.

Mischer’s flagship corporation was Allied Bank, a consolidated banking combine that had been set up in the 1970s and subsequently grew to be Houston’s fourth largest bank by the 1980s. It is through Allied that one can see a fuller picture of Mischer’s ties to the S&L crisis: one of the bank’s prominent customers was Herman K. Beebe, a Louisiana-bred businessman and mob insider who controlled a sprawling empire of banks, insurance companies, nursing homes, and hotel franchises through his Shreveport-based AMI, Inc. AMI borrowed heavily from Allied, and Beebe guaranteed loans from the bank to various fraud-ridden thrifts.

Since around 1976, Beebe became closely linked to former Texas lieutenant governor (and notorious S&L looter) Ben Barnes—himself an intimate crony of Walter Mischer. Despite the 1987 collapse of the multi-million dollar real estate empire that he controlled in partnership with former Texas governor John Connally, Barnes was listed as a director of Steven Hoffenberg’s Towers Financial in 1990, the same period that Epstein was affiliated with the company. Hoffenberg must have been impressed with Barnes’ financial track record, as the former politician was placed on his company’s audit committee.

From Left to Right: Walter Mischer Sr., John Conally and Jim Stewart break ground for the Stewart & Stevenson building in Houston, TX; Source: Houston Business Journal

Recent reporting by the New York Times illustrates how close Barnes himself was to intelligence circles. According to Barnes, in 1980, he participated in a “mission to the Middle East” spearheaded by Connally, the purpose of which was to “sabotage the re-election campaign” of President Jimmy Carter. The pair’s Middle Eastern tour entail meetings with various leaders, where Connally delivered a message intended to be passed to Iran, advising them not to release hostages prior to the election. A report on this trip was then provided to Reagan’s campaign manager and future CIA director William Casey.

Barnes also states, conveniently, that he was unaware of the intention of his trip when he agreed to accompany Connally. At any rate, Barnes’ story is just one example of several overlaps between the “October Surprise” plot against Jimmy Carter and the subsequent S&L crisis. William Casey’s alleged pilot during his meeting with Iranian representatives in Paris was Heinrich “Harry” Rupp, who was also involved in S&L-linked bank fraud in the mid-1980s (details of this fraud will be discussed in part 2 of this article). These sorts of murky ties to the underworld of covert operations also orbit a close associate of Barnes and Connally, Herman Beebe.

A 1985 Comptroller of the Currency report details well over a hundred banks and S&Ls where Beebe exerted hidden control. The report states that Beebe’s “influence and control flows through an extensive web of corporate enterprises and nominees.” Through this vast machine, Beebe became the ultimate wheeler-and-dealer, participating in the looting of countless S&Ls in a manner that confounded law enforcement and federal regulators alike. As journalists Stephen Pizzo and Mary Fricker recount, Beebe “could shift fraudulent deals not only from institution to institution and district to district but from regulatory system to regulatory system—which would make him almost impossible to stop.”

The 1985 Comptroller of the Currency report names Palmer National Bank of Washington, D.C. as one of the banks where Beebe held sway (he had, in fact, helped provide start-up capital for the institution). Palmer’s first chairman was Stefan Halper, the son-in-law of longtime CIA official—and ardent Cold Warrior—Ray S. Cline. During the course of the investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal, Palmer was revealed to have been utilized as a mechanism for moving covert funds destined for the Contras in Nicaragua.

George H.W. Bush as CIA Director, Source: George Bush Presidential Library

Like his friend Beebe, the aforementioned Walter Mischer was also plugged into the intelligence apparatus, though the full details of his activities in that context remain obscure. Former Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton, in his book The Mafia, the CIA, and George Bush, recounts how multiple law enforcement and political sources informed him that Mischer had been recruited into something of a private intelligence apparatus that was organized by George H.W. Bush after Jimmy Carter became president and began his controversial reforms of the CIA. By the 1980s, under Reagan’s CIA director William Casey, it seems that Mischer continued to work within the orbit of the Agency.

According to Brewton’s sources, Mischer and Bush decided to use Mischer’s former son-in-law, Robert Corson, as a “cut-out” for their intelligence activities. Corson became known to law enforcement as a money launderer who was active in moving money around domestic banks and savings and loans and even ferrying money in and out of the country. The CIA might not have been the only intelligence service that Corson dealt with. “A Texas law enforcement official”, writes Brewton, “…confirmed Corson’s work for the CIA. This officer said that Corson also did work for the Israelis, but may not have known it because there were several layers of cutouts between Corson and the Israelis.”

Could this Israeli connection have come through Mischer’s friendship with Maxwell’s agent, John Tower? It is likely that this question will never be answered. However, it is interesting to note that one business associate of Mischer and Corson, Joe Russo, ended up partnered with Earl Brian – an architect of the PROMIS theft – in the late 1980s in the ownership of the media outlet UPI.

Additional information about Corson can be found in the surviving papers of Danny Casolaro, particularly in the documents provided to him by former undercover Customs investigator Robert Bickel. One document found in these papers is an investigative summary written by Rebecca Sims, a former employee of Corson’s who became a freelance sleuth investigating covert CIA financial activity as well as an expert in S&L fraud. There, Sims recounts that CIA-linked arms dealer and controversial Iran-Contra whistle-blower Richard Brenneke informed her that “Corson had been involved with Norman Callahan… and Allsource Air concerning gun shipments to Iran.”

Sims eventually determined that “Allsource Air” was in fact Air Source Express, an aviation company headquartered in Bridgeton, Missouri, with offices in Houston. Missouri Secretary of State records show that the proprietor of Air Source was Richard Baum, who had established the company in April 1982. Baum’s wife, Judy Baum, ran the company’s subsidiary, Plan Freight, Inc. In 1987, she became an administrator for the American Society for Technion—with Technion being Israel’s technology-oriented public research university.

Other documents provided by Bickel to Casolaro identify Norman Callahan as an “associate” of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and supervisor for “the Demavand project from its inception.” While it is not well known, Demavand was the code name for a large-scale, clandestine flow of weapons to Iran that took place prior to the arm sales of the Iran-Contra affair. Among those implicated in this shadowy operation was “Mr. Boyle”, the code-name for a National Security Agent officer; French arms dealers John Delaroque and Claude Lang; and Michael Austin, the owner of a Manhattan-based defense firm called Austin Aerospace.

The New York Times reported that Austin Aerospace’s board of directors included Major General John K. Singlaub, a long-standing intelligence operative who was also implicated as a participant in the Iran-Contra affair. At the time that Demavand was up and running, Singlaub was a principal in an arms trafficking outfit called GeoMiliTech (GMT). GMT, which had offices in the US and in Israel, was revealed to have brokered arms transactions with Nicholas Davies, the foreign editor of Maxwell’s Daily Mirror. Like his boss, Davies was an active Israel intelligence asset at that time.  

“Demavand” does not appear anywhere in the thousands of pages of Iran-Contra testimony. Norman Callahan appears one time, in the deposition of former high-ranking CIA officer Ted Shackley. When asked if he knew a “Norm Callahan”, Shackley responded that he “didn’t recognize Norman Callahan.” There was more to his answer, however, but the details still remain redacted from the public record.

Richard Brenneke denied that this particular deal involving Corson was part of Demavand, but other documents provided to Casolaro by Bickel show that Sims believed Brenneke was lying, and that the deal was indeed part of this covert operation. Whatever the answer to this mystery may be, what is certain is that, within a few years of this deal, Corson launched himself into notoriety through his involvement in a series of massive, complicated savings and loan frauds that bear the classic hallmarks of money laundering.

Among the dubious S&L ventures that Corson found himself embroiled in was a 1985 joint venture with Bellamah, a large home building company based in New Mexico. The details of the venture are immediately suspicious: Bellamah and Corson purchased nearly three-hundred acres of land in Houston marked for development, but as Brewton points out, “Bellamah put up the entire $4.4 million purchase price.” An additional $11 million in loans were added onto the project courtesy of the easy-lending of Houston’s MBank, a bank with long-standing ties to Corson. In the end, Bellamah bought out Corson’s “stake” in the venture—netting Corson $33,000 despite the fact that he had never put money into the project—and subsequently defaulted on the MBank loan.

In the aforementioned investigative summary drafted by Rebecca Sims, it is alleged that Corson and Bellamah were involved with another entity called Meadows Resources. A source, Sims reported, told her that Meadows “was a company used to fund money for covert, off-the-shelf operations.” While this cannot be confirmed, Bellamah did indeed have a long-running partnership with Meadows Resources, an investment and land development subsidiary of the Public Service Company of New Mexico.

Importantly, Bellamah had previously been owned by the Gouletas family, a high-wheeling crew of condominium syndicators and land developers out of Chicago. The Gouletas had, on paper, owned Bellamah from 1977 through 1982, when it was sold to a group that included Douglas Crocker II—a high-ranking officer in American Invesco, the Gouletas’ primary corporate umbrella. This raises the question of whether or not the Gouletas had actually disposed of their holdings in Bellamah, or had merely shuffled the holdings around in an effort to raise capital for their other ventures.

Evangeline Gouletas-Carey, who shared office space with Jeffrey Epstein for several years, with Hillary Rodham Clinton in an undated photo; Source: Evangeline Gouletas

As discussed in the second volume of One Nation Under Blackmail, the Gouletas family had significant ties to both Jeffrey Epstein and to figures involved in the PROMIS scandal. Evangeline Gouletas-Carey, part owner of American Invesco and wife of former New York governor Hugh Carey, shared office space with Epstein in the Villard Houses, a historic building located in New York City’s Midtown Manhattan neighborhood. While little is known about the exact nature of the joint endeavors that the Gouletas and Epstein engaged in, it is worth noting that Epstein for a time was presented in the media as a real estate developer, and a paper trail does exist showing his involvement in the buying and selling of several New York City properties—including some marked for condominium development.

It would be none other than Steven Hoffenberg of Towers Financial who claimed to have set Epstein up in the Villard Houses offices, which suggests that there might have been some sort of coordination happening between the respective financial frauds of the Gouletas and Towers Financial. The mutual connections of each to the same intelligence-linked circles in Texas warrants further scrutiny.  

At this same time, the Gouletas had retained the legal services of Allen Tessler, an attorney from the powerful law firm of Shea & Gould. Among Tessler’s duties for the Gouletas was managing Imperial Savings, a thrift in California that the Gouletas had purchased from Saul Steinberg. Yet, the Gouletas were far from Tessler’s only notable client—he was also the close friend of and attorney for Earl Brian, and had served on the board of numerous Brian-controlled companies. Tessler appears in one of Epstein’s leaked contact books, with a number listed for Data Broadcasting Corp.—one of Brian’s companies.

SEC filings show that Tessler also spent a decade, from 1977 through 1987, on the board of The Limited, the clothing company owned by Epstein’s close associate Leslie Wexner. During this time, he served as a member of The Limited’s finance committee, and was one of two members of the board’s Nominating Committee (which selects nominees for board membership). The other member was Wexner himself.

Epstein black book contact for Allan Tessler

A year after he entered into the ill-fated partnership with Bellamah, Robert Corson called upon the resources of MBank to take control of Kleberg County Savings Association, a small thrift in Kingsville, Texas. Corson promptly rechristened Kleberg as Vision Banc, and proceeded to loot the savings and loan dry, driving it into bankruptcy within two years. Inflicting a particularly grievous injury to Vision Banc’s finances was its involvement in a sweeping, multi-state $200 million land fraud in Florida, which led to millions being siphoned away into a network of offshore banks on the Isle of Jersey. The ties of these same banks to the Maxwells will be discussed in the final section of this article.

The ringleader of this elaborate scam was Mike Adkinson, a Texas land developer and rumored arms dealer who was suspected of working for the CIA (when asked under deposition whether or not he worked for the Agency, Adkinson responded that he “was not at liberty to disclose that information”). Also implicated was Lawrence Freeman, a Florida attorney who had previously been the law partner of Paul Helliwell, a veteran of American intelligence services whose infamous Castle Bank & Trust, located in the Bahamas, had moved money for both the mob and the CIA. When it came to the looting of America’s savings and loans, it seems that presence of operators from the clandestine world of intelligence was a pattern that reoccurred with alarming consistency.

Bluebonnet, Round 1: The Maxwell Bid

Thanks in no small part to operators like Robert Corson, Mike Adkinson and Herman Beebe, the late 1980s was marked by a domino-effect of S&L failures. Hotspots for this slow-moving financial crisis included California, Illinois, Arizona, and, perhaps most notably, Texas. In order to try and stem the steady stream of collapses, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation set in motion various emergency schemes. More often than not, this entailed rolling shattered thrifts into consolidated packages and selling them off to stable financial institutions. Frequently, the ultimate beneficiaries of these deals were large Wall Street banks and investment houses, allowing them even greater control over the nation’s lending industry.

One such emergency response was the Southwest Plan. With billions in Federal funding, the Southwest Plan consolidated a number of thrifts across Texas and surrounding states. Bluebonnet (originally labeled “Rose/Pard”) was the name given to one particular consolidation involving fifteen thrifts that was carried out in 1988 under the Southwest Plan. At least two of the S&Ls bundled into Bluebonnet, Sentry Savings of Slaton and Hi-Plains of Hereford, can be found in hand-drawn diagrams made by Arthur Leiser, then the senior examiner for the Texas Savings and Loans Department. Leiser’s diagrams detail the inner-workings of a sprawling “daisy chain” of bad loan-making and money laundering through countless thrift institutions, as well as interlocking webs of ownership structures.

It was Leiser who pursued Herman Beebe as far as he could go, tracking his presence all across this particular “daisy chain.” Beebe and his company, AMI, can be found in various diagrams, as can Mischer’s Allied Bank. Leiser showed that one of the Bluebonnet S&Ls, Sentry Savings, was doing business with Texas banker Sam Spikes, who appears in the 1985 Comptroller report as a figure involved in Beebe’s network.

When Bluebonnet was placed on the market, the first prospective buyer was Weston Edwards. Up until just a few months prior to his bid for Bluebonnet, Edwards was the senior executive vice president of Houston’s large mortgage lender, Lomas & Nettleton, which was controlled by the prominent Democratic Party fundraiser Jess Hay. Pete Brewton notes that “Lomas & Nettleton was very close to MBank”—the Texas bank that worked frequently with Robert Corson—with the two institutions sharing several directors. He adds that another customer of Lomas & Nettleton was the international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a key player in Iran-Contra whose personal contacts included Jeffrey Epstein and Robert Maxwell.

Memorandum concerning fraudulent real estate dealings between Corson, his partner William Chester, and General Homes. Copy in author’s possession

The close proximity of Lomas and MBank are further confirmed by their mutual participation in a revolving line of credit to the General Homes Corporation, a Houston-based real estate company that frequently did business with Corson. Between 1978 and 1982, General Homes was controlled by Cadillac Fairview, a real estate investment vehicle owned by the Bronfman family. Control passed from the Bronfmans to the American Savings and Loan Association of Florida, where one could find Marvin Warner, the corrupt financier and Democratic Party insider involved in the high-profile collapse of Home State S&L of Ohio. Warner was a banking partner of Bruce Rappaport, a close friend of CIA director William Casey and himself no stranger to financial fraud and intelligence operations alike.

American Savings participated in the credit lines to General Homes alongside Lomas and MBank, as did Valley National Bank of Phoenix, Arizona. Former Mossad operative Ari Ben-Menashe has alleged that accounts at Valley National were utilized by Earl Brian and by Carlos Cardoen, a Chilean arms dealer who sold weapons—and the PROMIS software—to Iraq. As Whitney Webb noted in a recent Unlimited Hangout report, both Valley National and MCorp (the parent company for MBank) were both subsequently acquired by Ohio-based Banc One. This bank, which was extremely close to the circles around Leslie Wexner, was identified as a conduit for washing money connected to covert arms deals.

The Rise of Jamie Dimon As JPMorgan’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein are being scrutinized in court, Whitney Webb reveals how the same powerful players who brought Epstein to prominence were largely responsible for the rise of JPMorgan CEO, Jamie Dimon.

Documents made public during an examination of the efforts to sell Bluebonnet show that Weston Edwards was in active communication with Jess Hay, who agreed to make Lomas a partner in the acquisition. Lomas also agreed to provide $5 million in financing to Edwards. Curiously, Hay wrote to Edwards that they had learned that “this transaction, if it is consummated, is likely to close in October [1988] or expire if it is not accomplished by Election Day”—a reference to the upcoming electoral battle between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis. This will not be the last time that Bush appears in the Bluebonnet story.

At the time that Hay committed the resources of Lomas to Bluebonnet, Edwards had already found his primary backer: Robert Maxwell. The entry point of Maxwell into the plan had come through John Tower. The congressional examination of Bluebonnet described Edwards’ “affiliation and association with former Senator John Tower”, and noted that Tower was “very much a presence” in the ongoing negotiations. Perhaps importantly, these deals were taking place more or less simultaneously with Tower’s failed bid to take over Texas’ First Republic Bank, which at the time was contemplating a purchase of MCorp—the holding company for MBank.

Given that Tower was attempting to gain control of Bluebonnet for Maxwell, in league with the former executive vice president of MBank’s affiliate, Lomas & Nettleton, it is worth asking if the attempted acquisition of First Republic was some sort of related maneuver.

These moves took place alongside a broader effort by Maxwell to extend his financial empire. In the same month that he began striving to take control of Bluebonnet, he launched his takeover of publishing house Macmillan, Inc. (guiding Maxwell’s hand in this endeavor was Robert Pirie, representing Rothschild family interests that had been “yearn[ing] for a prominent foothold in Wall Street”). 1988 was also the year that Maxwell truly began to consolidate—and systematically loot—a number of pension funds, allowing him to rapidly expand his economic war chest.

Maxwell’s expansionary phase, combined with his increasing interest in American business, took place as his involvement in the shadowy underworld of intelligence and organized crime deepened. Author Gordon Thomas alleges that, in 1988, Maxwell helped introduce Semion Mogilevich, the notorious and powerful Ukranian-Russian mafiosi, to the “western financial world”, and reportedly aided him in securing an Israeli passport. Within a year, Mogilevich was living in Israel and was able to use his Israeli passport to penetrate the financial networks of Israel and many other countries, including the United States.

Left to Right: Steve Ross (CEO TimeWarner), Donald Trump, John Tower, Mike Wallace (journalist for CBS, 60 Minutes), Robert Maxwell. Photo taken on the Lady Ghislaine, May 1989.

In the course of the congressional inquiry into Bluebonnet, it was stated that Maxwell had backed out of the acquisition bid on November 7th, 1988. The timing was auspicious. Three days prior, on November 4th, Macmillan’s board of directors committed themselves to Maxwell’s takeover of the publishing giant, determining that Maxwell’s bid was “in the best interest of all shareholders.” Simultaneously, a competing interest in the takeover, a group led by billionaire Robert M. Bass, agreed to sell their shares to Maxwell.

By coincidence or not, Bass—an inheritor of one of Texas’ storied oil fortunes—had his own ties to the world of savings and loans. Concurrent with his attempt for control of Macmillan, Bass began to pursue the purchase of American Savings & Loan of California (not to be confused with the American Savings & Loan Association of Florida, which was mentioned above). A deal was consummated with the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in December 1988, a month after Bass sold his Macmillan shares to Maxwell. In acquiring American Savings, Bass committed an initial payment of $350 million—and the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance made available nearly $2 billion in subsidies to ensure the transaction.

There was also Richard Rainwater, a longtime financial advisor and strategist for the Bass family. A powerful figure in Texas business in his own right, Rainwater’s associates included George Aubin, a fixture in the S&L raider circles around Robert Corson and a known business partner of Herman Beebe. By the time that Bass was chasing Macmillan and American Savings, Rainwater had struck out on his own, dipping his toes into a mad-cap chase for beleaguered Texas financial institutions. He also appeared to have been acting as something of an unofficial financial manager for his close friend, George W. Bush.

As for Weston Edwards, efforts to acquire Bluebonnet continued despite Maxwell’s departure. His first post-Maxwell backer was the Lodestar Group, a boutique Wall Street investment firm founded by Merrill Lynch’s Ken Miller. Although Lodestar’s commitment was only brief, it soon ended up with another entity within this particular network. In 1989, Miller’s company purchased the daycare operator Kinder-Care. During the 1970s, Kinder-Care had been owned by the aforementioned Marvin Warner, whose American Savings in Florida had purchased the Bronfman’s stake in the company that did considerable business with Corson, General Homes. It’s telling, then, that during the late 1970s, Corson built daycares—using loans from Mischer’s Allied Bank—which he leased to Kinder-Care.

At the time that Lodestar was buying Kinder-Care, the daycare company owned a controlling chunk of American Saving of Florida, where Warner had held sway (he had departed the company, however, by the time of Kinder-Care’s acquisition). This was the same American Savings that partnered with Lomas & Nettleton, MBank, and Valley National Bank to provide a revolving line of credit to General Homes.

After Lodestar’s brief appearance, a third party appeared in the orbit of Bluebonnet. A letter from Edwards to Angelo Vigna of the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, dated December 5th, 1988, contrasts the “Bob Maxwell proposal” to a more favorable proposal offered by the Deerpath Group, a merchant bank operating from a suburb of Illinois. Deerpath, in turn, had enticed a variety of partner companies, including real estate and utility concerns from Indiana and a shopping mall builder from Mississippi.

And with that, Edwards was out. On December 7th, two days after submitting the Deerpath proposal, Edwards was informed that he was no longer in the running for Bluebonnet. The Feds instead opted to offload the consolidated thrift onto an insurance businessman name James Fail—but the acquisition rapidly blossomed into something of a scandal. Widely circulated accusations charged that Fail had obtained Bluebonnet due to political cronyism and ties to the heights of political power in the United States. It was also alleged that pressure coming from those quarters—perhaps even from George H.W. Bush himself—had prevented Weston Edwards from completing his purchase.

This scandal may very well have been a well-crafted misdirection. As we will see, the backers of Fail did indeed have ties to Bush, and also to the same network of institutions that orbited Edwards’ troubled efforts. Even stranger is the fact that a number of institutions involved loopback to the PROMIS affair in which Robert Maxwell had played such a central part.

Robert Maxwell Goes to Texas: The Story of Bluebonnet, Part 1.

In this episode, Whitney is joined by Maddie Bannon to discuss FDA Commissioner Robert Califf and his role in removing regulatory obstacles for the “healthcare” related wearable, implantable devices and other emerging technologies seen as crucial to the advance of the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Originally published 04/03/23.

Podcast available early for Unlimited Hangout members and Rokfin subscribers. After a few days, all episodes are free and available on all platforms.

Links discussed:

• A Look At How The Revolving Door Spins From FDA To Industry : Shots – Health News : NPR
• About Our Team of Experts – Google Health
• Google hires former FDA digital health leader – The Verge
• Breakthrough Devices Program | FDA
• Sooma | Sooma Receives FDA Breakthrough Device Designation
• Otsuka and Click Therapeutics Initiate First-of-its-Kind Fully Remote Clinical Trial Using Digital Therapeutics as Adjunctive Therapy in Adults With Major Depressive Disorder | Otsuka US
• Galvani Bioelectronics Reaches Major Milestone in RA Neuromodulation Therapy with First Patient Implantation | Verily Life Sciences
• Project Baseline | Verily Life Sciences
• Verily, Colgate-Palmolive to conduct study on link between oral health and diabetes, cardiovascular disease | MobiHealthNews
• FDA Makes Real-World Data Available on Google Cloud Platform
• Google, other companies get your data if you use Verily’s coronavirus site – CNET
• Verily seeks to establish new COVID-19 ‘Baseline’ with coronavirus antibody research project | Fierce Biotech
• New U.S. FDA chief says he will prioritize fighting misinformation | Reuters
• Biden’s FDA Chief Urges Crackdown On Health ‘Misinformation’
• The FDA Commissioner’s Embarrassing Lecture on ‘Misinformation’ – Ethics & Public Policy Center

• Neurolutions | The Latest Breakthrough in Stroke Recovery
• Forging the Future | Duke Health
• Real-World Evidence Generation and Evaluation of Therapeutics: Proceedings of a Workshop
• Investigational New Drug Applications (INDs) for CBER-Regulated Products | FDA
• Human Gene Therapy Products Incorporating Human Genome Editing; Draft Guidance for Industry
• Synchron’s Stentrode Brain-Computer Interface Receives Breakthrough Device Designation from FDA | Business Wire
• Elon Musk’s Neuralink Shares More About Its Implantable Brain Stimulator | Medgadget
• Blackrock Neurotech’s MoveAgain Brain-Computer Interface System Receives Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA
• Stroke-recovery device using brain-computer interface receives FDA market authorization – Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
• Galvani Bioelectronics Reaches Major Milestone in RA Neuromodulation Therapy with First Patient Implantation | Verily Life Sciences
• Harris Remarks at FY24 Budget Hearing for the Food and Drug Administration (As Prepared) | House Committee on Appropriations – Republicans

See Whitney’s previous work:
A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction
Episode 41 – Biden and the Bioeconomy with Derrick Broze
Episode 31 – Neurorights and Neuromarkets
Who Is A “Terrorist” In Biden’s America?
Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon
This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”
CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US

Maddie’s Robert Califf article:
The Covid Collaborators | Brave New Real-World Data

Follow Maddie: TLAVagabond Substack, Manufacturing Reality, @llspacejellyll

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Robert Califf’s FDA with Maddie Bannon.

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Question about Charges?.

Whitney joined Redacted to discuss JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Redacted.

Earlier this month, a judge ruled that two different lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase over the bank’s ties to deceased “financier” and pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, would be allowed to advance in U.S. Courts. One of these cases, brought against the bank by the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), has been a particular focus of independent media since the new year began, in part because the Attorney General of the USVI, Denise George, was fired from her post just days after she filed that case.

In a hearing in the USVI case against JPMorgan earlier this month, a USVI lawyer argued that the CEO of JPMorgan – Jamie Dimon – “knew in 2008 that his billionaire client [Jeffrey Epstein] was a sex trafficker.” The lawyer, Mimi Liu, also stated that former JPMorgan Jes Staley also knew this about Epstein at the time, but noted: “This case was not just Jes Staley … there will be numerous documents that go far beyond his office to the executive suite.” Liu also asserted that “Staley knew, Dimon knew, JPMorgan Chase knew” about Epstein’s criminal activities against minors.

While the bank has disputed that Dimon knew anything about Epstein’s accounts at the bank or what he was really up to at the time, this Unlimited Hangout investigation – a multi-part series – will reveal that Dimon’s rise to the top post at JPMorgan was intimately linked to the very same group of people who enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities as well as his extensive financial crimes.

In this article, we will examine how Dimon’s rise to become one of the most powerful men on Wall Street was largely reliant on top executives and directors of Bank One, which boasts incredibly close ties to The Limited’s Leslie Wexner and his right-hand man for many decades, Columbus-area real estate developer John W. Kessler. Kessler and other individuals tied to Wexner were the dominant forces that saw Dimon installed as Bank One’s CEO in 2000. Bank One was acquired by JPMorgan in 2003 and, shortly thereafter, Dimon became CEO of the combined entity. That acquisition, as well as the role of the Crown family in Chicago in Dimon’s selection as Bank One’s CEO, will be discussed in the second part of this series.

Yet, Dimon’s ties to the same networks as Wexner, particularly those characterized by their connections to organized crime and intelligence, preceded his time as Bank One’s CEO by many years. As this article will show, Dimon’s construction of what is now Citigroup, alongside his mentor Sandy Weill, began with their takeover of a company called Commercial Credit Corporation. That company, as well as its parent company, Control Data Corporation, had a troubling history of ties to intelligence networks that were extensively involved in criminal activity – including the so-called “private CIA” formed by CIA veteran Ted Shackley in the 1970s as well as individuals crucial to the Epstein story like Robert Maxwell.

Given these connections, JPMorgan’s claims that Dimon never knew what Jeffrey Epstein was up to during his time with the bank becomes much harder to believe. Furthermore, as future installments of this series will show, the players discussed here – Dimon and Epstein among them – were instrumental in the creation of what would manifest as the 2008 economic crisis. Not unlike some of the events that sparked today’s banking crisis, figures like Jeffrey Epstein, Dimon’s mentor Sandy Weill and the former Treasury Secretaries with close associations with both men, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, appeared to have engaged in actions that would intentionally provoke the collapse of certain banks to further consolidate the banking sector for their benefit. The goal, both then and now, seems to have been a move towards the logical conclusion of the “too big to fail” banking model — the eventual creation of a centralized cartel of mega-banks that dominate, not only commercial banking, but also central banking.

A Brief History of Control Data Corporation

Created by a group of Naval engineers in 1956, at the dawn of the American military-industrial complex, Engineering Research Associates (ERA) was a military contractor with a focus on cryptography and code-breaking. Shortly after its creation, part of the core ERA team split off and formed Control Data Corporation (CDC) a year later in 1957.

CDC quickly became a defense contractor in its own right and became a major purveyor of super-computers to sensitive U.S. research facilities. These included Sandia National Laboratories and Oak Ridge Laboratories, both of which worked on the U.S. nuclear program. At the same time, CDC also had an odd relationship with the Soviet Union’s own sensitive nuclear facilities, which eventually led to congressional scrutiny. Congressional hearings from the mid-1970s revealed that:

In 1968, a second-generation Control Data Corporation 1604 system was installed at the Dubna Soviet Nuclear Facility near Moscow. In 1972 [CDC] sold the Soviet Union a third-generation CDC 6200 system computer. For these systems, [CDC’s] operating statement had improved by about $3 million dollars in the past three years. And the Soviet Union has gained 15 years in computer technology

The Control Data 6600 Console; Source

The hearings also noted that CDC planned to sell Soviet-controlled Poland computer systems so sensitive that they were only used domestically at the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Atomic Energy Commission. CDC claimed that Poland planned to use the equipment at a Polish “high school.” At the time, no American high school or educational institution of any type possessed this particular system, and there were only 10 in the entire country. As reflected by these and other examples in the hearings’ transcripts, Congress’ concerns were based around the perception that CDC’s business in the USSR involved technology transfers that undermined U.S. national security during the height of the Cold War.  Those concerns would only grow with time.

After these hearings in 1974, CDC made an apparent move at increasing its role in technology transfers, despite political concerns. By the late 1970s, they had established a new subsidiary called Worldtech, described in the press as “a division of Control Data Corp that does research and consulting on, and brokering of, technology transfers.”

Once Worldtech was established by CDC, it entered into a joint venture in 1979 with Greek publisher George Bobolas that was called Worldtech Hellas Ltd. 70% was owned by Bobolas and 20% was owned by CDC. The owner of the remaining 10% was not disclosed in reports at the time.

A 1979 letter from one of Bobolas’ companies to A. Afonin, identified as a “representative of the State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations of the USSR Council of Ministers,” proposed the creation of a “joint development company using Worldtech for ‘world-wide technology transfer’” and stressed that “Worldtech Hellas Ltd. will give a lot of help’ to ‘technology transfer on an international base.’” After journalist Paul Anastasi published information about Bobolas and called him a “KGB agent of influence,” one of his companies, Bobtrade, asserted that “no improper transfer of high technology was involved.” CDC moved to dissolve their partnership, likely due to bad publicity.

Around the time that Worldtech was created, CDC’s then-executive vice president, Robert D. Schmidt, was part of the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations (ACUSR, previously the American Committee on East-West Accord). Other members at the time, specifically in 1977, included Robert Maxwell’s lawyer and confidant, Samuel Pisar (stepfather to current U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken), as well as Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, who would become the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1979. Another member was Paul Ziffren, a major figure in the organized crime networks that ran through Chicago and Hollywood described in Gus Russo’s acclaimed work Supermob. Another key figure in the “Supermob” network was Henry Crown. Crown, along with his son and grandson – Lester and James, will be discussed in greater detail later in this series due to their pivotal role in the rise of Jamie Dimon.

Notably, in the early 1970s, Samuel Pisar told Congress that the world was moving “toward a single, unified world economy, in disregard of national frontiers, and even ideological boundaries.” He stated that “all conventional tools of national policy, it seems to me, are rapidly becoming anachronistic [as] the State itself, even a strong one, [..] is no longer a defendable economic entity.” Pisar also claimed that the main drivers of this shift included “the multinational corporation” and “the dissemination of technology.” He later frames technology transfers by major multinational corporations as giving rise to the “trans-ideological corporation” where “capital private enterprises” and “Communist state enterprises” freely intermingled and formed joint ventures. When asked if these “trans-ideological corporations” were forces for good or for evil, Pisar responded that “I believe that on balance, they are a force for good,” but qualified that as depending on how governments and corporate management act “to make certain that they become forces for good.”

Samuel Pisar in 1991 with his wife, Judith, the mother of current U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken via her previous marriage; Source

By the mid-1980s, Occidental Petroleum executives Armand Hammer and William McSweeney had also joined the ACUSR. Samuel Pisar also represented Hammer’s business interests. Hammer notably served as a back channel between the Americans and the Soviets and had once sought to acquire the American bank First General Bancshares (FGB) for the purpose of “financially blackmailing” US politicians, specifically members of Congress who had open accounts at the bank. It is also worth mentioning that Hammer’s father, Julius Hammer, had once served as a Soviet spy.

Another member of the ACUSR was Joseph Filner, president of Noblemet International (later renamed the Newmet Corporation). Filner was extensively involved in USSR-U.S. tech transfers. Filner’s Noblemet created a joint venture for the purpose of tech transfers, which was called Multi-Arc. By 1984, CDC’s Worldtech had become “a worldwide marketing representative for Multi-Arc.”

CDC would later recruit Minnesota governor Rudy Perpich after Perpich lost his re-election campaign in 1979. Perpich, a dentist by training, would specifically work for CDC overseas as “vice president and executive consultant to Control Data Worldtech Inc.”The New York Times, reporting on his hire by CDC in January 1979, stated that Perpich was expected to be based in Yugoslavia, but he said he could find himself in Hungary, Bulgaria or Rumania [sic].” Robert Maxwell was also intimately involved with tech transfers in Eastern Europe, specifically in Bulgaria, through the Bulgarian intelligence-linked Neva program that specifically targeted and pirated Western-developed technologies. Perpich, after working for Worldtech, went on to win another term as Minnesota’s governor in 1983.

CDC, by that time, had also recruited another influential politician, Walter Mondale. Mondale was hired by CDC right after he left office as Jimmy Carter’s vice president. CDC hired Mondale as a legal consultant and retained his services for $2,000 per month (about $6,537 in 2023 dollars).

Simultaneously, Mondale was also a consultant to Allen & Co, the company of the organized crime-linked brothers Charles and Herbert Allen. Mondale was not only a consultant to, but also a close friend of the Allen brothers. The Allen brothers also worked closely with organized crime interests as well as Leslie Wexner’s “mentors” Max Fisher and Alfred Taubman and he also had “a close business association with Earl Brian and had financed one of his attempts to buy out Bill Hamilton’s Inslaw.” Brian, along with Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan, was the architect of the theft of the PROMIS software originally created by Hamilton’s company, Inslaw Inc. Brian’s lawyer, Allan Tessler, also served on the board of Les Wexner’s company The Limited and had a close business relationship with another organized crime-linked family, the Gouletas. The Gouletas family notably shared office space with Jeffrey Epstein while Epstein was working as Wexner’s financial advisor in the late 1980s.

CDC was itself tied up with the PROMIS theft and the resulting scandal. The PROMIS software, after its theft, was bugged by both Israel intelligence and a separate group that involved the CIA, the “Supermob”-linked company MCA, and Latin American drug cartels. This latter group’s version was used to spy mostly on financial institutions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, investigative journalist Danny Casolaro was writing a book that covered, among other things, this group’s repurposing of PROMIS for financial espionage and money laundering. Shortly before his untimely death in 1991, those close to the journalist had seen documents obtained by Casolaro that detailed money transfers from the World Bank to Earl Brian as well as Saudi arms dealer and Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi. Notably, throughout the 1980s, Khashoggi had retained the financial services of Jeffrey Epstein.

It appears that this version of PROMIS and its use at the World Bank involved CDC in some capacity. By 1983, CDC was providing its services to the World Bank’s computer center and, that same year, the PROMIS software was found to be in use at that specific facility to keep track of wire transfers of money. This comes from a sworn statement that Inslaw Inc. obtained from David McCallum in 1995. In 1983, McCallum was working for CDC at the World Bank.

In my correspondence with Inslaw’s Bill Hamilton, he stated the following:

According to an article in the International Banking Regulator dated January 17, 1994, U.S. Justice Department officials delivered the VAX version of PROMIS to the World Bank in 1983. The World Bank, as an international institution, is outside the reach of discovery of the U.S. courts. For its part, the World Bank declares that it has been unable to find any evidence that it ever possessed the VAX version of PROMIS.

Hamilton also relayed that he had once been informed of a connection between CDC and PROMIS that involved the Deputy Attorney General under Ed Meese, D. Lowell Jensen. However, he could no longer remember the specifics of that connection.

Also significant is the role CDC played during the 1990 visit of Mikhail Gorbachev, the then-leader of the Soviet Union, to the United States. During that trip, Gorbachev visited CDC headquarters alongside Rudy Perpich, as well as Robert Maxwell. The Gorbachevs arrived in Minnesota immediately after a summit meeting in Washington with then-President George H.W. Bush.

According to a report from the Minnesota Historical Society:

Gorbachev most likely agreed to the visit [Minnesota] because several Minnesota-based corporations – especially the computer firm, Control Data Corporation – had long done business in the Soviet Union. When the corporation’s officials learned that Gorbachev was interested in a post-summit tour, they passed the word to Perpich, who had worked for Control Data between his two terms as governor. Albert Eisele, who had been a consultant for Control Data and, earlier, was Vice President Walter Mondale’s press secretary, drafted the governor’s letter inviting the Gorbachevs. Former Control Data CEO Robert Price personally delivered the letter to the Soviet embassy on February 26, 1990.

During the visit, Gorbachev attended a lunch at the governor’s mansion, where Robert Maxwell and Rudy Perpich joined groups of Soviet and American officials. One of the American officials present was Condoleezza Rice, the future Secretary of State who was then a National Security Council staff member. Afterwards, there was a press conference where Robert Maxwell, in characteristic bombastic fashion, “announced that he would donate $50 million to help create a private research institution to be called the Gorbachev-Maxwell Institute of Technology.” Maxwell said that the donation was “contingent on Perpich raising matching funds.” However, the institute was never launched.

The-Governor Rudy Perpich greets Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on the lawn of the governor’s residence in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1990; Source: Minnesota Historical Society

After visiting Minnesota, Gorbachev next visited Silicon Valley, where he spent the week “trying to perfect the art of winning acceptance and investment from the captains of capitalism.” A Washington Post article on his visit quoted John Sculley, then-head of Apple Computers as saying, “I think Gorbachev got to us… We’ll all be thinking about business with the Soviet Union in a way we wouldn’t have if he hadn’t come.”

Notably, Apple’s Steve Jobs was advised by Samuel Pisar. Jobs later stated that his 1985 trip to the USSR had been “facilitated by an international lawyer based in Paris” and that Jobs had a “feeling” that this attorney “worked for the CIA or the KGB.” That lawyer was almost certainly Pisar.

Commercial Credit Corporation and the “private CIA”

In 1968, CDC acquired the Commercial Credit Corporation (CCC) to “help its computer customers finance leases of company hardware and stabilize erratic earnings” that then characterized much of the early computer industry. A few years after the acquisition, both CDC and CCC would find themselves intertwined with the “private CIA” network developed mainly by Ted Shackley, the Agency’s infamous “Blond Ghost,” in the late 1970s and which later allied itself with George H.W. Bush. This is highly significant as this particular network was intimately involved with the illicit transfers of both weapons and technology, including during the Iran-Contra scandal, the related PROMIS scandal, and the subsequent “Chinagate” scandal of the mid-1990s.

Edwin Wilson; Source

For example, around 1976, CDC hired the “rogue” CIA agent Edwin Wilson as a consultant. Wilson, who later was sent to prison when he was caught illegally selling weapons to Libya, has been described as “part spy, part tycoon” and used a web of corporations he controlled to benefit his benefactors in the CIA and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Wilson had long worked closely with Ted Shackley. He was also allegedly involved in sexual blackmail operations involving both the American CIA and the South Korean CIA at Washington DC’s Georgetown Club. CDC purportedly hired Wilson so he could help the company “unload some outdated computers on Third World countries.”

Yet, CDC leveraged Wilson’s extensive contacts and abilities for much more, going so far as to have Wilson bug the U.S. Army’s Materiel Command on behalf of the company. The company was apparently seeking “inside information … on bidding and procurement plans” of the military. Given CDC’s role in illicit technology transfer, its ties to organized crime and intelligence-linked networks and its explicit espionage activity targeting the U.S. military, it seems fair to say that CDC was much more than just a technology company.

CCC, for its part, also had odd connections to the networks around Shackley. For instance, one of the key components of this “private CIA” was a company created by Shackley and another CIA operative and long-time associate of Shackley’s named Thomas Clines. That company was known as the Egyptian-American Air Transport and Services Corporation, or EATSCO. It seems that EATSCO functioned as a middleman in arms sales made by the Pentagon to Egypt and, later, other countries.

EATSCO’s primary support apparatus in this regard was an airline called Global International Airways, which was based in Kansas and founded in the late 1970s by Farhad Azima. Azima was reportedly tied to Iran’s pre-revolutionary intelligence apparatus, SAVAK, and – according to author Joseph Trento – was a frontman for the “private CIA.” Trento further alleges in his book Prelude to Terror that Global International had actually been designed by James Cunningham, who had previously worked under Shackley as the manager of the CIA’s Air America. Air America, later renamed Southern Air Transport, would relocate to Columbus, Ohio in the mid-1990s as part of a deal negotiated by Leslie Wexner’s The Limited and, according to local reporters in the Columbus area, his then-money manager, Jeffrey Epstein.

Source

What is particularly notable for the purposes of this article is how Global International was initially financed. It turns out that Azima was only able to launch the airline after he was given, for reasons that remain unclear, a “multi-million dollar loan from the Commercial Credit Corporation.”

A few years after it was acquired CDC, both Commercial Credit Corporation and its parent company were floundering. In 1985, two men would arrive, take over CCC, and turn the troubled, intelligence-linked financial services company into what is now the massive megabank Citigroup. Those men were Sanford “Sandy” Weill and his young apprentice, Jamie Dimon.

The Beginning of “Too Big to Fail”

Sandy Weill began his Wall Street career at Bear Stearns in 1955. There, he was a colleague of Alan “Ace” Greenberg, who would later head Bear Stearns and hire controversial figures such as Jimmy Cayne and Jeffrey Epstein. Greenberg would later say of Weill that, during his brief time at Bear Stearns, “it was easy to see he was a winner.”

By 1960, Weill had left Bear Stearns and teamed up with four friends to create their own brokerage firm, which was first named Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill. After the departure of Arthur Carter and Peter Potoma, the firm later became known as CBWL when Marshall Cogan, who previously had worked at CBS and the investment firm Orvis & Co., and Arthur Levitt, the future chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) during the Clinton administration and later adviser to the intelligence-linked Carlyle Group, joined the firm.

A decade later, in 1970, Weill organized what would be the first of many takeovers. His target was Hayden Stone and his company then became CBWL-Hayden Stone. In 1974, Weill again went on the offensive and acquired Shearson Hammill, creating Shearson Hayden Stone. After several more acquisitions, Loeb, Rhoades was also acquired and the combined firm became Shearson Loeb Rhoades. It is during this period that Weill would first encounter a young Jamie Dimon.

Jamie Dimon’s father and grandfather had both been top stockbrokers at Shearson and a young Dimon briefly worked for the firm one summer while on break from Tufts University. Dimon’s parents had befriended Sandy Weill and, one day, gave Weill an economics term paper Jamie had written about CBWL-Hayden Stone’s acquisition of Shearson. Weill was impressed with the paper and Dimon asked Weill for a summer job.

Dimon, after graduating from Tufts, attended Harvard Business School and worked over the summer, not at Shearson but at Goldman Sachs. Around this time, Weill sold Shearson Loeb Rhoades to American Express in 1981 for $1 billion. As part of the deal, Weill became American Express’ president. In 1982, as Dimon was about to graduate, Weill approached Dimon and asked him to work for him at American Express as his executive assistant. For nearly two decades, Dimon would continue to serve as Weill’s apprentice.

Sandy Weill, left, and Jamie Dimon, then with American Express, at a conference in California in 1983, Source: NY Magazine

About three years later, in 1985, Weill was forced out of American Express. Weill urged Dimon to stay at the company, but Dimon chose the somewhat riskier option of continuing to work for Weill despite the uncertainty of the path ahead. They went on the hunt for a financial services company in need of a drastic turnaround and eventually settled on Commercial Credit Corporation in 1986. According to an academic study of Dimon’s early career from Harvard Business School, it was Weill and Dimon who identified CCC and then convinced Control Data Corporation to spin off their troubled consumer-lending subsidiary. However, a different account in Fortune magazine claims that Weill were approached by two financial officers at CCC who, “without a breathing a word to their CEO,” came to Weill “to urge that he buy the company from its owner, Control Data.” Regardless of which account is more accurate, the company tied to illicit tech transfers to the USSR and the “private CIA” would, within a decade or so, grow into a Wall Street titan.

Weill took control of the company in September 1986, becoming its President and CEO and taking the company public. Dimon served as the company’s Chief Financial Officer and an Executive Vice President, later becoming its President. An old bio of Dimon’s describes him as “a key member of the team that launched and defined the strategy for Commercial Credit Company in October 1986.” About a year after the acquisition, Weill’s CCC bought back Control Data’s remaining stake in the company.

In August 1988, CCC acquired Primerica Corporation, the parent company of brokerage firm Smith Barney. Despite being the buying company, Weill and Dimon decided to shed the CCC name. A year later, the new Primerica acquired 16 Drexel, Burnham & Co. branches and also acquired the branch offices and loan portfolio of Barclays American Financial, an American subsidiary of Barclays Bank PLC. In 1992, Primerica bought a 27% stake in the insurance giant Travelers and went on to buy the remainder of Travelers later the following year. In this same period, Weill and Dimon purchased Shearson back from American Express, which – per Weill – “changed everything.” At the end of 1993, Weill was CEO of the new entity, Travelers Group, and Dimon was President and its Chief Operating Officer. A few years later, Travelers Group would acquire Salomon Brothers, merging it with Smith Barney. Dimon became the CEO and Chairman of the new Salomon Smith Barney.

1993 was also an important year for a friend of Weill’s, former Goldman Sach’s head Robert Rubin. Rubin had just become the director of President Clinton’s National Economic Council and was the person who signed off on Jeffrey Epstein’s first visit to the Clinton White House in February 1993. Epstein would make 17 visits to the White House in total between February 1993 and January 1995, many of them tied to Clinton-era fundraising scandals. During this time, Epstein’s name was mysteriously dropped from the case regarding the Towers Financial Ponzi Scheme, despite him being labeled the “mastermind” of the scheme in grand jury testimony. Shortly after Clinton left office, Epstein would play a pivotal role in creating the Clinton Foundation, which critics have derided as a Clinton family “slush fund.”

Robert Rubin became Treasury Secretary in 1995 and, in that capacity, would later work with Weill to consecrate the marriage between Weill’s Travelers Group and Citicorp in the late 1990s, creating Citigroup and one of the biggest “too big to fail” banks of today. This merger necessitated, among other things, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Rubin would later be rewarded by Weill with a lucrative position at Citigroup. The role of Weill, Rubin and Rubin’s deputy, Larry Summers, in the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the 2008 economic crisis will be discussed in another installment of this series. Notably, Larry Summers, whose close relationship with Epstein is a matter of record, began his friendship with the deceased pedophile while he was Rubin’s deputy (if not earlier).

Left to right: Deryck Maughan, CEO of Salomon Brothers, Sandy Weill, CEO of Travelers Group, Robert Denham, CEO of Salomon Inc., and Jamie Dimon, CEO of Smith Barney, in 1997; Source

The partnership between Weill and Dimon would fall apart shortly after the creation of Citigroup. According to some who were close to Weill and Dimon around this time, the tensions between the two were palpable in 1998. At the time, a Citigroup spokesperson told the New York Times that a restructuring of the bank’s leadership hierarchy, which “would have offered Mr. Dimon less authority at Citigroup than he wanted and that ultimately led to his departure.” Several years later, in 2010, Weill told the New York Times that Dimon had pushed to be Citi’s CEO at a time when Weill wasn’t ready to retire. In the years that followed, Weill softened his account of their parting even more, lamenting in 2014 that the two hadn’t “been able to work out [their] issues” and continue their partnership.

Like Weill had been after his ouster from American Express in 1985, Dimon’s future after Citigroup was uncertain. He was offered jobs from a variety of companies, including Amazon, but turned them all down as he waited for the right “financial services” opportunity to come along. That opportunity would come in the year 2000, as Bank One hunted for a new CEO.

Bank One – The bank behind Leslie Wexner and The Limited Left, John G. McCoy and, right, his son John B. McCoy; Source: Columbus Monthly

Bank One was founded in Columbus, Ohio in 1870 as City National Bank (CNB) and – for much of the 20th century – was run by the McCoy family. John G. McCoy took over the firm from his father, John H. McCoy, in 1958 and, very early on, sought to identify ways that technology could improve convenience for customers. As a result, CNB was an early adopter of the credit card and the forerunner of the automated teller machine (ATM) in the late 1960s. Over the next several decades, CNB ballooned in size, acquiring 22 small Ohio banks within a holding company that would later become Banc One. Banc One (perhaps confusingly) later became Bank One after a merger in the mid-90s and up until its acquisition by JPMorgan. To avoid confusion, the remainder of this article will refer to the bank as Bank One.

Sometime before his retirement in 1984, John G. McCoy was a banker for many Columbus area businesses, including Leslie Wexner’s The Limited. Little information is available regarding the specifics of the relationship between Wexner’s business interests and Bank One prior to the mid-1980s.

However, Wexner’s right hand man throughout the 1980s, 1990s and beyond – John “Jack” Kessler – was very close to John G. McCoy. Kessler, who became friends with Wexner when they both attended Ohio State University, later claimed that John G. McCoy had been his “biggest mentor” and “like a second father.” He also went on to note that he had been put on Bank One’s board by John G. McCoy when Kessler “was a very young man.” When Kessler was asked about what “lasting lessons” he learned from John G. McCoy, he responded:

How you conduct yourself in business. Ethics and your reputation. He always gave us talks – he did the same with Les [Wexner], who was also very close to him – making sure you give back to your community.

Records of Bank One reported on by Harvard Business School faculty list Kessler’s Date of Hire (DOH) to the bank’s board as 1986, when Kessler was 50 years old and when John G. McCoy’s son – John B. McCoy – had already taken the reigns at the bank. Regardless of whether Kessler’s connection to the bank preceded 1986 or not, both Kessler and Wexner were close to John G. McCoy and Kessler would continue to have a very close connection with the bank well after it was acquired by JPMorgan in the early 2000s.

From Left to Right: John W. Kessler, Leslie Wexner, and John G. McCoy in an undated photo (likely the early 1980s), Source: Columbus CEO

Wexner for his part, was also on Bank One’s board of directors during the 1990s (and potentially earlier) and, as will be noted again later, Wexner’s The Limited even held “unclaimed funds” belonging to the bank, suggesting very close ties between Wexner’s businesses and the bank. In 1996, Wexner stated of McCoy that “John has been a mentor, both to me and The Limited, for many years.” As we will see, it is very possible that Wexner’s less than legal financial activities, which would later include his patronage of and association with Jeffrey Epstein, may have been learnt from John G. McCoy, as Bank One under his tenure reportedly became involved in – among other things – money laundering on behalf of Israel intelligence.

John G. McCoy retired as the head of the bank in 1984, with his son – John B. McCoy – taking over. Around this same time, state banking laws were altered to allow bank holding companies to acquire banks in different states. This led Bank One to begin rapidly acquiring banks throughout the country, including in Indiana, Kentucky, Texas, Arizona, Wisconsin and Louisiana. The dramatic growth of Bank One via numerous acquisitions eventually earned John B. McCoy a spot on Forbes’ list of the six bankers who built up the main “too big to fail banks” of today. One of the other six, unsurprisingly, is Sandy Weill.

The mid-1980s were a time of great change for Bank One and it was also a time of great change for Leslie Wexner, his businesses and his business associates. Some of the changes for Wexner during this period, which would see Jeffrey Epstein enter his inner circle, were spurred by a grisly murder. In 1985, the tax attorney for The Limited, Arthur Shapiro, was shot in the face in a murder that, still today, remains unsolved. Shapiro was murdered just a day before he was due to testify to the IRS in a case related to his filing of fraudulent tax returns.

As Unlimited Hangout previously reported on the case:

As an unindicted co-conspirator, Shapiro would not have been indicted himself, but he could have provided damaging information regarding those who had been indicted, giving considerable motive to [Berry] Kessler and the other co-conspirators—unnamed in the [Columbus] Dispatch or other media reports at the time—to see that Shapiro did not testify. What is odd about this court case, beyond the significant fact that a key witness had been shot in what police referred to as a “mob style murder” or “mafia hit,” is that Kessler and his co-conspirators were only sentenced to probation and did not serve prison time for the crime of helping Shapiro file false tax returns in 1971 and 1976.

This raises several questions: Why was Shapiro an unindicted co-conspirator if he was the one who filed the fraudulent tax returns, while those charged were convicted of aiding Shapiro file the false returns? Does that mean Shapiro had planned to testify about other individuals involved in a bigger scheme, who were not part of this particular case, in exchange for avoiding tax-fraud charges against himself? Also, why were those convicted given such lenient sentences despite Shapiro’s planned testimony being the most likely motive for his high-profile murder?

It is fair to say that none of these questions have ever been answered properly by Ohio authorities. However, a few years after Shapiro was killed, Elizabeth Leupp – an analyst with Columbus Police’s Organized Crime Bureau, sent a report to her superior Curtis Marcum. It soon made its way to the then-Columbus Police Chief James Jackson, who quickly suppressed the document and ordered it destroyed. It was accidentally released to local Ohio journalist Bob Fitrakis in response to a Freedom of Information Act request he had filed about a different matter. The censored document discusses in detail how Shapiro’s murder was seen by police as a mob-style murder and it extensively detailed the organized crime connections of two of Ohio’s wealthiest men – Leslie Wexner and a business partner of Wexner’s, Edward DeBartolo Sr.

Shapiro-Murder-File-complete1_text

The document also extensively mentioned John Kessler. It states that the investigation into Shapiro’s death became “more complex” after “unusual interactive relationship between the following business organizations” were revealed. These organizations are listed in order as: The Major Chord Jazz Club, tied to former Columbus City Council President Jeremy Hammond; Wexner’s The Limited and its investment interests; Walsh Trucking Company, operated by Frank Walsh who had known connections to the Genovese crime family; Arthur Shapiro’s law firm, which dropped Shapiro’s name from the firm hours after his death; The Edward DeBartolo Corporation, which also had documented organized crime connections detailed in the report; and John W. Kessler, who is referred to in the report as a “local developer.”

Regarding Walsh Trucking, it is worth noting that – when New York law enforcement attempted to subpoena Walsh’s bank records in investigating his organized crime ties, his address was listed as The Limited’s corporate headquarters. In addition, the DeBartolo family’s ties to organized crime are actually much more extensive than Leupp noted in her report and those details can be found in a previous Unlimited Hangout investigation on the topic as well as the book One Nation Under Blackmail, Vol. 2.

Regarding Kessler, one of the suspect businesses detailed in the report is referred to as the W & K Partnership, which Leupp believed to be the Wexner & Kessler partnership and a forerunner to the New Albany project that the two men eventually co-founded. The partnership, Leupp notes, had invested a significant amount of money in Hammond’s Jazz Club. As the report later states, the financial tie of this partnership to Hammond was apparently used to essentially bribe Hammond so he would support controversial legal changes in Franklin County to benefit the Wexner-Kessler New Albany project, which had lobbied extensively for those changes despite public opposition.

Notably, Kessler, as well as Hammond, were later investigated by Columbus police in connection with some of the activity detailed in Leupp’s report as well as corruption involving public contracts. Yet, by the time of the grand jury in 1995, Leupp’s report had already been taken out of circulation by the Columbus Police Chief. Kessler and Hammond were ultimately not charged due to “insufficient evidence.” Oddly, the prosecutors involved in the case declined to call either Kessler or Hammond to testify when both had agreed to do so, suggesting that the prosecutors pursued the claims against both men half-heartedly.

John W. Kessler, Source. New Albany Community Foundation

In Leupp’s report, Kessler’s firm – the John W. Kessler company – is also listed as sharing office space with the New Albany Company and firm called PFI Leasing, where Wexner’s money manager before Jeffrey Epstein, Harold Levin, was listed as Vice President. Epstein, after he rose to the top of Wexner’s inner circle, had taken over that position at PFI Leasing from Levin by 1990. It is noted in the report that a lawyer from Arthur Shapiro’s firm had been caught speeding in a vehicle registered to PFI Leasing, suggesting that this company was used to offer “perks”, such as lent vehicles, to people operating within Wexner’s network.

Another company in this same location was originally named Lewex, but was later renamed Parkview Financial. Levin was listed as Vice President of Parkview until 1990, when that position also became Epstein’s. Parkview Financial then became a major vehicle for both Wexner’s and Epstein’s activities in the New York City real estate market, several of which tie into properties linked to his sex trafficking activities and Ossa Properties, the real estate company run by Epstein’s brother – Mark Epstein – and former employees of Epstein’s J. Epstein & Co.

In the report – and elsewhere – Kessler is portrayed as one of Wexner’s closest associates and, as previously mentioned, co-founded the New Albany project with Wexner. An article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, cited by Fitrakis, said the following of the genesis of the project: “Wexner and Kessler formed the New Albany Co. and spun off a bunch of paper corporations to cover their footprints. Then their minions knocked on doors and made the proverbial offers you couldn’t refuse.”

Jeffrey Epstein got involved in the New Albany project around 1988, shortly after becoming a financial advisor to Wexner. He was eventually a general partner in the real-estate holding company, New Albany Property. This, of course, means that Epstein would have known Kessler quite well. Bob Fitrakis, quoted in Vicky Ward’s 2003 piece on Epstein in Vanity Fair, stated of the relationship that “Before Epstein came along in 1988, the financial preparations and groundwork for the New Albany development were a total mess […] Epstein cleaned everything up.” Ward notes the oddity of Epstein having a general partnership in New Albany Property “despite putting only a few million dollars of capital into the project.” Epstein was also given a luxury home in the development by Wexner, which he later sold.

At the same time Epstein was advising Wexner and becoming a partner in New Albany alongside Kessler, he was also helping to orchestrate one of the largest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history with Steven Hoffenberg via Hoffenberg’s company Towers Financial. Epstein had previously described his work after he left Bear Stearns in 1981 as that of a “financial bounty hunter” and that he had helped “hide and find looted money” for powerful people, including Iran-Contra figures like Adnan Khashoggi. Given that New Albany and its apparent predecessor, the W & K partnership, were intimately involved in the web of companies tied to Arthur Shapiro’s murder and considering Epstein’s prior work history, it seems possible that what Epstein helped to “clean up” at New Albany may have involved activities that were less than legal.

Wexner, Kessler and Epstein were not the only noteworthy residents of New Albany as far as this article is concerned. One of the first wealthy elites of Columbus that bought property in the luxury development was none other than John G. McCoy, Bank One’s head from 1958 to 1984 and “mentor” to both Kessler and Wexner. Today, the New Albany Community Foundation has an award named in honor John G. McCoy and both Kessler and Wexner are past recipients.

The Bank One Laundromat

Bank One, in the early 1990s, had an apparent relationship with a controversial data processing and bank software firm tied to the aforementioned PROMIS scandal and financial espionage. That company, Systematics, was controlled by the intelligence-linked Arkansas businessman and political kingmaker Jackson Stephens. Stephens, who played a major role in the rise of the Clinton family, tapped Little Rock’s Rose law firm, where Hillary Clinton worked, to represent Systematics. Systematics has long been of interest to researchers of the PROMIS scandal, with the late journalist Michael Ruppert referring to the company as “a primary developer of PROMIS for financial intelligence use.”

Arkansas businessman Jackson Stephens; Source

Systematics had very close ties to American intelligence, including the NSA and CIA, and was alleged to be a “money-shuffler for covert operations.” Systematics also had a relationship with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and was a contractor to BCCI’s American subsidiary First American. BCCI, as noted in One Nation Under Blackmail, was essentially a private intelligence apparatus masquerading as a bank and – in addition to money laundering for intelligence agencies and organized crimes – was directly involved in the sex trafficking of minors in order to curry favor with bank “VIPs” and the ruling elite of countries like the United Arab Emirates.

Systematics also had connections to Israeli intelligence. It had a subsidiary in Boston as well as Israel that employed undercover Mossad agents and focused on the sale of software to banks. Systematics also entered into a joint venture with Israel intelligence operative and media mogul Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, who was also Israel’s most successful salesman of the bugged PROMIS software, teamed up with Systematics to sell PROMIS to five banks, most of which were Swiss.

Bank One’s ties to Systematics came through its acquisition of Team Bancshares Inc., which had already entered into a multi-year data processing contract with Systematics at the time of the merger. Bank One eventually cancelled that contract in favor of a competitor. At the time of these events, Systematics had recently become a subsidiary of Alltel, where Jackson Stephens also had a major stake. In fact, Jackson Stephens, after the merger, became Alltel’s single largest shareholder and Stephens’ son Warren Stephens was placed on the Alltel board.

An unspecified “major” stake in Alltel was notably held by Lester Crown, the son of “Supermob” associate Henry Crown. Lester Crown was a founding member of the Leslie Wexner-created “Mega Group” and his son, James S. Crown, would play a major role in the activities of Bank One after 1995, including the hire of Jamie Dimon to lead the bank. The Crowns are discussed in-depth in the next installment of this series.

Per reports, the time that Bank One had a contract with Systematics after it merged with Team Bancshares was relatively brief. However, Bank One – for many years prior – had also been involved with much of the covert activity that Systematics had helped enable, particularly money laundering for intelligence agencies.

Former Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe mentions Bank One’s role in laundering funds for Israeli intelligence-brokered arms deals, deals in which Ben Menashe had been personally involved. In his book, Profits of War, he states the following about how Israeli intelligence received money from its arms sales to Iran with the involvement of banks like Bank One as well as U.S. intelligence:

A letter of credit from the Iranian government would be issued to an Israeli “front” company by a European-based Iranian company through the London or Paris branch of Iran’s Bank Melli. It would be endorsed by the National Westminster Bank in England, and we would then ask for it to be transferred to an American Bank. Favorites were the Chicago-Tokyo Bank in Chicago, the Chemical Bank in New York, Bank One in Ohio, and the Valley National Bank of Arizona. Then the banks would have to explain these letters of credit, in U.S. dollars, to the U.S. Treasury if they were to accept them. According to U.S. Treasury regulations, letters of credit for sums in excess of $10,000 had to be approved by the Treasury.

Since the sales were a U.S.-sanctioned operation, the CIA would have to ensure that Treasury issued an acceptance. Once the letter of credit was approved, it was moved back again to Europe. Except for the John Street operations in 1981-1982, this was to be the way almost all American-supplied arms sales to Iran were handled from late 1981 until late 1987.

In other words, from 1981-1987, Bank One was a “favorite” bank of Israel intelligence for the laundering of arms dealing profits. Notably, all but the first of these four “favorite” banks are now part of JPMorgan.

A Valley National Bank billboard; Source

What’s particularly interesting about this passage from Profits of War is that one of the other banks mentioned, Valley National Bank, was later acquired by Bank One in 1992, shortly after Bank One acquired Team Bancshares. This is notable for a few reasons as Valley National Bank appears in a separate part of Ben Menashe’s book, where Ben Menashe states that he deposited $4 million on behalf of Israeli intelligence into a Valley National Bank account owned by PROMIS scandal architect Earl Brian. That money, per Menashe, was likely to have originated from Latin American drug sales. Valley National Bank was also known to provide multi-million dollar loans to Charles Keating’s American Continental Corporation (ACC). In addition, Cindy McCain, wife of late Senator John McCain, wrote checks to Keating’s ACC from her personal Valley National account. John McCain was one of the “Keating Five” and was accused of corrupt dealings involving Keating, a white collar criminal who played a major role in the S & L crisis of the 1980s and who was also a figure in the banking circles surrounding BCCI. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the head of Valley National, Richard Lehmann, remained in charge of the bank after its acquisition by Bank One, at which point it became Bank One Arizona. Just three years after the acquisition, in 1995, Lehmann became president and chief operating officer of the entire Bank One Corporation, where he worked directly with John B. McCoy.

In addition, another of Bank One’s acquisitions, which took place a few years before it acquired Valley National, saw them absorb another bank with unsettling connections. In 1989, 20 banks owned by Mcorp failed and were taken over by the FDIC in what was, at the time, the second most expensive bank rescue in U.S. history. The FDIC awarded all those banks to Bank One. Mcorp had been the result of a merger between the Mercantile Texas Corporation and Bank of the Southwest, which took place in 1984. The latter bank had a close relationship with a Houston-based foundation that moved CIA money called the San Jacinto fund. The person who ran that fund, Ernest Cockrell Jr., was also a board member of Bank of the Southwest. In addition, the Bank of the Southwest had a close relationship with the M.D. Foundation, which had funnelled CIA money to an international lawyer group at the Agency’s request.

Bank One’s connections to these networks brings up an obvious question: Did such networks also intersect with Leslie Wexner and his businesses? As I noted in One Nation Under Blackmail, former investment banker and government official Catherine Austin Fitts, who has extensively investigated the intersection of organized crime, Wall Street and the government in the U.S. economy, was told by an ex-CIA official that Wexner was one of five key managers of organized crime cash flows in the U.S. As previously mentioned, Wexner had organized crime connections, including through his business partner, Edward DeBartolo Sr., and the man who was managed much of The Limited’s logistical business domestically, Frank Walsh.

In addition, from 1992 to 1995, Wexner’s The Limited played a major role in courting two different CIA-connected airlines to relocate to Rickenbacker airfield in Columbus, Ohio to ostensibly run “cargo” for The Limited. They ultimately settled on Southern Air Transport, formerly the CIA’s Air America and one of the main airlines implicated in illicit activities in the Iran-Contra scandal. The relocation of Southern Air to Ohio was also notably secured with the help of Alan Fiers Jr., the former chief of the CIA Central American Task Force, and Richard Secord, the former head of Air America’s covert action in Laos in the late 1960s. Secord was also the air logistics coordinator for Oliver North during Iran-Contra, while Fiers had also been intimately involved in the scandal.

Bob Fitrakis has claimed that Epstein, who was involved in logistics planning for The Limited at the time, was also part of this deal. Epstein had his own connections to Iran-Contra era arms deals through his former client Adnan Khashoggi and one of his mentors, British arms dealer Douglas Leese. The relocation of Southern Air Transport to Ohio and the beginning of the airline’s partnership with The Limited notably occurred in 1995, when Wexner was also on the board of Bank One.

If Bank One’s leadership, during the 1980s, participated in money laundering for Iran-Contra era arms deals and the bank’s leadership – John G. McCoy and his son – were so close to Wexner, the possibility of such a connection is high. There is also the following to consider – The Limited was apparently holding onto “unclaimed funds” belonging to Bank One in the 1990s, when Wexner and Kessler were both on the bank’s board. Yet, reports quizzically claimed that neither state officials nor The Limited could “find” the bank to return the money.

As the Columbus Dispatch reported in 1995:

Banc One has branch offices all over Ohio and its headquarters are across the street from the Statehouse, but apparently state officials can’t find the multibillion-dollar banking operation. The name of the nation’s eighth-largest bank holding company shows up on the state’s list of owners of unclaimed funds.

But Ohio is not alone. The Limited, which is holding the funds, couldn’t find the banking company either, even though Leslie H. Wexner, the specialty retailer’s chairman, sits on Banc One’s board of directors.

The claim that state officials and the business of a bank’s board member “couldn’t find” Bank One to return their “unclaimed funds” to them is odd on its own. Even crazier is the idea that Bank One’s “unclaimed funds” would be held by The Limited, nominally a retail business, and not another bank or a state institution.

Dimon Rising

Though Wexner was no longer on Bank One’s board at the time Jamie Dimon was hired, John Kessler was. Kessler, who has acknowledged his role in selecting Dimon as the bank’s CEO, has sung Dimon’s praises for many years. Yet, also crucial to Dimon’s hire as well as John B. McCoy’s abrupt departure from the bank was James S. Crown and a top executive at the Sara Lee Corporation, a Crown-controlled company. Both men were directors of the First Chicago NBD bank, which merged with Bank One in 1995.

James Crown’s father, Lester Crown, was close to Wexner, having been a member of the “Mega Group”, which Wexner co-founded with Charles Bronfman in 1991. His grandfather, Henry Crown, was a major figure in the aforementioned “Supermob” network as well as a major figure in the American defense industry through his control of defense contractor General Dynamics. The next installment of this series will examine the Crown family in detail as well as their dominant role at First Chicago NBD and how they spurred McCoy’s ouster from Bank One and the hunt for a new CEO. Dimon’s arrival to Bank One and his time there up until he became CEO of JPMorgan will also be discussed.

Acknowledgements: Ed Berger contributed research to this report.

This investigative series is sponsored by the Solari Report.

The Rise of Jamie Dimon.

How far back can we trace gain-of-function research? Co-hosting today’s ‘Good Morning CHD’ are Whitney Webb and Johnny Vedmore. Both investigative journalists, they have a wealth of knowledge on bioweapons to share with viewers. From the 19th century to the present day, to what extent has vaccination development as a means of profiting emotionally and physically harmed the global population? And what do the evil actors, behind this agenda, have planned for the future? Available on Rumble or CHD.

Good Morning CHD.

Whitney joined the TLAV Livestream. Other guests include Derrick Broze, Taylor Hudak, Robert Inlakesh and Matthew Ehret.

TLAV Fundraiser.

In this episode, Whitney is joined by Marty Bent and Mike Krieger to unpack the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the financial instability that has ensued and interrogate the flimsy narratives used to justify, among other things, the SVB bail-out and the shutdown of Signature Bank.

Podcast available early for Unlimited Hangout members and Rokfin subscribers. After a few days, all episodes are free and available on all platforms.

Originally published 03/16/23.

Links Discussed:

• Bank Consolidation graphic
• FTX and the Curious History of Farmington State Bank
• Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon
• Elon Musk Is ‘Open’ to Buying SVB, Tesla Investor Says ‘No Thanks’
• SVB collapse: Peter Thiel’s role scrutinized as spark of bank run
• Fed Will Keep Boosting Interest Rates After SVB Failure, BlackRock Says – Bloomberg
• Moody’s Puts First Republic, Five US Banks on Downgrade Watch – Bloomberg
• Why Bank Bail-Ins Will Be the New Bailouts
• New Fed Bank Backstop Has Scope to Inject as Much as $2 Trillion – Bloomberg
• Credit Suisse delays annual report after ‘late call’ from the SEC | CNN Business
• Credit Suisse breach spills info of high-net-worth clients
• Silvergate Bankrupt!! What it Means For Crypto! – YouTube
• The Banks Are FAILING!! SVB Collapse & Everything It Means!! – YouTube
• gabrielShapir0 on Twitter: “”Any buyer of Signature must agree to give up all the crypto business at the bank, the two sources added.”
• Exclusive: U.S. regulator eyes Friday bids for SVB, Signature Bank -sources | Reuters
• “Shocking interview with Barney Frank — pushes back at DFS’ assertion that Signature wasn’t closed due to an anti-crypto animus…” | Twitter
• Goldman Sachs Eyes a Big Payout From Silicon Valley Bank Deal – The New York Times
• What collapse of crypto banks may mean for stablecoins | Fortune Crypto
• Fintech Brex got billions of dollars in Silicon Valley Bank deposits Thursday
• Fintech Firm Brex Brings New Tools To Finance Teams With OpenAI | Crowdfund Insider
• About Us | Brex

Follow Marty
@Martybent
TFTC
TFTC – YouTube
Rabbit Hole Recap – BitcoinTV.com
Bitcoin resources

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@libertyblitz
Liberty Blitzkrieg

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Crypto & the SVB Banking Crisis with Marty Bent & Michael Krieger.

In this video, Whitney delves deep into the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime and how its efforts are aimed at eliminating financial and online privacy to pave the way for CBDCs and complete online surveillance.

Published 03/14/23.

Video available free on Rokfin.

Links discussed:

Main article discussed
Ending Anonymity: Why the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens the Future of Privacy (Part 2 of series)

A Catastrophic Mutating Event Will Strike the World in 2 Years, Report Says

Former Biden adviser says a digital dollar could “crowd out” private cryptos and improve national security | Kitco News

Ending Anonymity: Why the WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens the Future of Privacy (Part 2 of series)

WEF Warns of Cyber Attack Leading to Systemic Collapse of the Global Financial System (Part 1 of series)

Board of Directors

2020 Carnegie – International Strategy to Better Protect the Financial SystemAgainst Cyber Threats

Partnership against Cybercrime | World Economic Forum

Chainalysis for Crypto Investigations – Chainalysis

About Us – Chainalysis

Tal Goldstein – Agenda Contributor | World Economic Forum

Global Cyber Alliance | World Economic Forum

CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US

From “Event 201” to “Cyber Polygon”: The WEF’s Simulation of a Coming “Cyber Pandemic”

Who Is A “Terrorist” In Biden’s America?

GCA Partners. Become a Partner. Global Cyber Alliance

With Grenell Appointment, the Israel Lobby’s Foothold on US Intelligence Grows Even Stronger

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Are You Ready for a Driver’s License for the Internet?

Christopher Painter

Christopher Painter – Center for Internet Security

Chris Painter – Cybersecurity Expert – Stern Strategy Group

Online ID Verification Plan Carries Risks – The New York Times

Chris Painter – The Aspen Institute

Israel Blurs the Line Between Defense Apparatus and Local Cybersecurity Hub – CTech

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The WEF & The End of Online Privacy.

Whitney joined TLAV to discuss her newest article “CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US.” Show notes here. Available on Odysee.

TLAV.

Whitney joined Tin Foil Hat to discuss One Nation Under Blackmail and what the digital future might look like.

Audio only version available in podcast apps. Video available here.

Tin Foil Hat with Sam Tripoli.

Launched in 2016 in response to a Tel Aviv shooting and the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, Gabriel offers a suite of surveillance products for “security and safety” incidents at “so-called soft targets and communal spaces, including schools, community centers, synagogues and churches.” The company makes the lofty promise that its products “stop mass shootings.” According to a 2018 report on Gabriel published in the Jerusalem Post, there were an estimated 475,000 such “soft targets” across the U.S., meaning that “the potential market for Gabriel is huge.”

Gabriel, since its founding, has been backed by “an impressive group of leaders,” mainly “former leaders of Mossad, Shin Bet [Israel’s domestic intelligence agency], FBI and CIA.” In recent years, even more former leaders of Israeli and American intelligence agencies have found their way onto Gabriel’s advisory board and have promoted the company’s products.

While the adoption of its surveillance technology was slower than expected in the United States, that dramatically changed last year, when an “anonymous philanthropist” gave the company $1 million to begin installing its products throughout schools, houses of worship and community centers throughout the country. That same “philanthropist” has promised to recruit others to match his donation, with the ultimate goal of installing Gabriel’s system in “every single synagogue, school and campus community in the country.”

With this CIA, FBI and Mossad-backed system now being installed throughout the United States for “free,” it is worth taking a critical look at Gabriel and its products, particularly the company’s future vision for its surveillance system. Perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the company’s future vision coincides with the vision of the intelligence agencies backing it – pre-crime, robotic policing and biometric surveillance.

“Safety” Through Invasive Surveillance Gabriel Network, LinkedIn

Gabriel’s product suite is built around its “smart shield” panic button. The panic button can be activated both manually and remotely and offers two-way communication, a live video feed, instant altering and gunshot detection by acoustic means. However, the panic button is meant to be used in tandem with company’s “threat detection” suite, which includes “smart cameras” that use AI, facial recognition and related technologies to detect not just weapons, but also “fights” and “abnormal behavior” of people in a particular area. Gabriel’s cameras and panic buttons throughout a facility are meant to act as “activation triggers.” The triggering is largely automated and managed by AI. When an “activation trigger” is set off, the Gabriel system then enters any one of its alert modes, which include emergency, panic, silent panic and yellow (which is the alert mode for minor incidents).

As noted elsewhere on the company’s website, Gabriel is looking to expand far beyond schools and houses of worship to retail stores, warehouses, data centers and banks. At these other facilities, it specifically promotes its “abnormal behavior” detection capabilities. One example, given in reference to how its products might be used in the banking sector, states the following as an “abnormal behavior detection example”:

A group of people are loitering in the ATM lobby. Gabriel is activated in silent panic mode and sends alerts with live video to the security operations center and on-site security team. Audio talk warnings begin to broadcast in the lobby. Security arrives to clear the scene.

Another example, this time for the retail sector, notes how Gabriel surveillance cameras would activate alerts when they detect “unusual movements.” Yet another example for warehouses and distribution centers notes how facial recognition functionality could be used to activate “silent panic mode” when a terminated employee is detected on the premises.

https://www.gabrielprotects.com/solutions

One of the hallmarks of the Gabriel system versus other systems, per the company, is its heavy reliance on AI and machine learning. As noted on their website, “we are disrupting the security industry by replacing legacy security systems dependent on human interaction with automated systems that reduce response time, chaos and cost.” That “disruption” is predicated in part on Gabriel’s commitment to “innovation,” which has prompted them to integrate what they call “preventative capabilities” into its platform. The company also notes that they have “already begun integrating [the Gabriel system] with cutting edge technologies such as weapons detection, security drones, robotics and smart cameras.”

There is little further information available about the company’s efforts to integrate their system with security drones and robotics. Many security drones are currently on the market for use in homes, industrial sites and other types of locations, as are security robots, such as the robot “dogs” created by the Hyundai-owned company Boston Dynamics that are currently used by some U.S. law enforcement agencies. This, of course, means that Gabriel’s ambitions in this regard are likely to become reality sooner rather than later. What is worth noting, however, is that drones and robots alike can easily be “upgraded” to wield deadly weapons. With Gabriel’s technology in mind, the Orwellian possibility of having an entirely automated response to various types of incidents, including those arising from the detection of “abnormal behavior,” that could include the use of deadly force no longer seem as futuristic or far-fetched as they once did.

Also important to note is the company’s intended goal of offering predictive policing (i.e., pre-crime) functionalities. They state that: “In the future, we see a security platform [i.e., a future iteration of Gabriel’s products] that can anticipate a mass causality [sic] events based on human behavior, identify mass casualty threats prior to the first action taken, and automate alerting to inform potential victims before any harm is done.” Predictive policing has been a major goal of companies deeply tied to the CIA, as well as Israeli intelligence for a number of years, with the most well-known of these being Palantir.

Gabriel’s systems, once installed, offer complete yet invasive surveillance of civilian areas. While the schools and community centers that Gabriel most often courts have been sporadically targeted by shooters over the past few decades, these are often places that are traditionally uninterested in implementing AI-driven surveillance solutions on their premises. Yet, such places must become “connected” if the future paradigm of complete connectivity between all people and places (e.g., the internet of things, the internet of places, the internet of bodies) is to come to pass. Indeed, this paradigm is necessary to further the connections between the digital and physical worlds that are seen as necessary to usher in the so-called 4th industrial revolution, or 4IR (which itself has been described as the “fusion” of the physical and digital realms).

Notably, Gabriel’s products are meant to form a network equivalent to “the internet of places,” which is a “specialization of the internet of things” that allows buildings to be “instrumentally empowered through sensors, data sharing, and computation.” Gabriel openly touts the “network effect” of its products when they are installed in multiple buildings in the same area, creating a “safe and connected community.” While Gabriel casts this “network effect” as helping to keep entire communities safe, it also benefits the implementation of the “smart city” model, which utilizes the internet of things and ubiquitous sensors and cameras to harvest massive troves of data that are then used to “manage service delivery,” with those services including the deployment of law enforcement.

https://www.gabrielprotects.com/product

The main drivers (and builders) of the “smart city” and “internet of things” paradigms are, of course, Big Tech. It is worth noting that, despite marketing itself as a company aimed at thwarting mass shootings when and before they occur, Gabriel has also been actively courting the “Big 5” tech behemoths of Silicon Valley – Google, Amazon, Meta (formerly Facebook), Apple and Microsoft. Speaking to the Times of Israel last year, Gabriel’s co-founder Yoni Sherizen stated that:

Our product is now being adopted by the banking and financial services sector and we have some pilots with some of the biggest technology companies, the Big 5. So, we’re looking at data centers, corporate offices or campuses, manufacturing facilities for pharmaceuticals and other essential goods… [we’re] protecting a whole variety of different types of spaces.

The Wind Beneath Gabriel’s Wings

While mass casualty events in the United States are dreadful and could likely be mitigated to some extent by technologies like those offered by Gabriel, the company’s deep connections to Israeli and American intelligence agencies, which have been seeking to utilize such technologies for ulterior ends, are a cause for concern.

When I first wrote about Gabriel in 2019, their board of advisors included four individuals. They included Ram Ben-Barak, former deputy director of Mossad and former director-general of Israel’s intelligence ministry; Yohanan Danino, former chief of police for the state of Israel; Kobi Mor, former director of overseas mission for the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet; and Ryan Petty, the father of a Parkland shooting victim and friend of former Florida governor (and current Florida senator) Rick Scott. At the time, Petty was the only American on the board.

Since then, Gabriel has been courting American schools, business and other institutions much more aggressively and have added more Americans to its advisory board. These include Bob Pocica, former FBI Special Agent, former Senior Director for Global Security at Pfizer and Senior Advisor to the Chertoff Group (as in former head of the Department of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff), and Don Hepburn, former CIA executive for 26 years as well as a former FBI Deputy Assistant Director. Also added was Menachem Pakman, who worked as a senior executive for Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office for over 30 years and is an expert in “intelligence, security and counterterrorism.”

https://www.gabrielprotects.com/company

While it is certainly possible that these numerous former officials from American and Israeli intelligence may have no ulterior motive in advising Gabriel, it is important to note that the leaders of Israeli military intelligence and Mossad don’t see it that way. As I’ve detailed in several previous reports, Israel’s Calcalist Tech published a report in 2019 which noted that “since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose.” It later states that:

In some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies which then took over the [military and/or intelligence] project.

It’s not exactly clear why Israel’s military intelligence and other intelligence agencies decided to begin outsourcing its operations in 2012, though Calcalist Tech suggests the reasoning was related to the difference in wages between the private sector and the public sector, with pay being much higher in the former. However, 2012 was also the year that American hedge fund manager Paul Singer — together with Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-time economic adviser and former chair of the Israeli National Economic Council, Eugene Kandel — decided to create Start-Up Nation Central (SUNC).

As I previously reported for MintPress News, SUNC was founded as part of a deliberate Israeli government effort to counter the nonviolent Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement and to make Israel the dominant global “cyber power.” This policy is aimed at increasing Israel’s diplomatic power and specifically undermining BDS as well as any national or international efforts to hold Israel’s government accountable for war crimes and violations of international law in relation to the Palestinians. The goal is to have other countries become so dependent on Israeli companies, and more specifically technology companies, that they are unable to effectively challenge Israeli domestic or foreign policy.

In 2018, Netanyahu was asked by Fox News host Mark Levin whether the large growth seen in recent years in Israel’s technology sector, specifically tech start-ups, was part of Netanyahu’s plan. Netanyahu responded, “That’s very much my plan … It’s a very deliberate policy.” He later added that “Israel had technology because the military, especially military intelligence, produced a lot of capabilities. These incredibly gifted young men and women who come out of the military or the Mossad, they want to start their start-ups.”

Netanyahu again outlined this policy a year later at the 2019 Cybertech Conference in Tel Aviv, where he stated that Israel’s emergence as one of the top five “cyber powers” had “required allowing this combination of military intelligence, academia and industry to converge in one place” and that this further required allowing “our graduates of our military and intelligence units to merge into companies with local partners and foreign partners.”

This merging of “military intelligence, academia and industry” has also been openly acknowledged by former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo, who stated in 2017 that “everyone” in the Israeli cybertechnology sector is an “alumni” of either Israeli intelligence, like the Mossad, or Israeli military intelligence, like Unit 8200 (Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, or NSA). Pardo even went as far as to say that the Mossad itself is “like a start-up.”

Pardo would know. After leaving his post as Mossad director in 2016, he dove straight into the world of Israeli tech start-ups, becoming chairman of Sepio Systems, whose two CEOs are former Unit 8200 officers. Sepio Systems’ advisory board includes the former chief information security officer of the CIA, Robert Bigman, and former head of the Israel National Cyber Bureau and veteran of Israeli military intelligence, Rami Efrati. Sepio Systems’ cybersecurity software has been adopted by several banks, telecom and insurance companies, including in the U.S. and Brazil.

Now that we’ve established that numerous Israeli tech-focused companies are known to be operating as fronts for intelligence, the question arises of whether Gabriel is one such company. While it is difficult to know for sure, several companies that have been outed as fronts, such as the Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barak-connected Carbyne, have been involved in creating and implementing the necessary structure for a “pre-crime” approach to law enforcement in the United States. Gabriel’s vision for a fully automated system that can use predictive analytics of human behavior to stop crimes before they happen is eerily similar to the same vision espoused by Carbyne before their ties to Epstein and Israeli intelligence were outed very publicly in 2019.

The use of “pre-crime”, as detailed in sci-fi epics like Phillip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, has deeply unsettling implications for society, civil liberties and the future of policing. As noted by the British Journal of Criminology, “pre-crime links coercive state actions to suspicion without the need for charge, prosecution or conviction” and is part of a larger trend “towards integrating national security [e.g., intelligence agencies] into criminal justice.” Indeed, as I have noted in my work for many years now, American and Israeli intelligence agencies, particularly their most nefarious components, have covertly been the drivers of “pre-crime” protocols meant to eliminate public dissent since the 1980s, if not even earlier.

How the CIA, Mossad and “the Epstein Network” are Exploiting Mass Shootings to Create an Orwellian Nightmare Israel’s Mossad and infamous Unit 8200 are partnering with the CIA and US tech firms to create an Orwellian pre-crime nightmare.

These early “pre-crime” systems, like those in the works today, have long been dependent on technology as well as mass surveillance as a means of profiling would-be dissidents. The software key to these early iterations was the PROMIS software, which was stolen by Israeli intelligence operatives in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Justice and used to profile and track people as well as cash flows in the U.S. and beyond. U.S. national security officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal used PROMIS to create the “Main Core” database, still in use today, which lists those Americans deemed “dangerous” in the event of a vaguely defined “national emergency” that could threaten “continuity of government.” As I’ve previously noted, Israeli intelligence played an integral role in the development of Main Core.

Today, pre-crime is already here, though it is currently reserved for special cases as opposed to the main approach of U.S. law enforcement. In 2019, then-Attorney General William Barr formally adopted pre-crime as Department of Justice policy via a program called DEEP (Disruption and Early Engagement Program). Since then, the Biden administration’s War on Domestic Terror framework is largely predicated on pre-crime and aims to pick up where Barr left off. In order to have an effective pre-crime system, one needs the necessary infrastructure. That infrastructure is currently being provided by several companies with overt ties to intelligence, such as Mark43, Carbyne and Gabriel.

Who Is A “Terrorist” In Biden’s America? Far from being a war against “white supremacy,” the Biden administration’s new “domestic terror” strategy clearly targets primarily those who oppose US government overreach and those who oppose capitalism and/or globalization.

Yet, while Mark43 and Carbyne target law enforcement and emergency services, respectively, Gabriel is installing the infrastructure necessary for pre-crime directly into places of business, leisure, learning and worship. Its focus – schools, houses of worship and community centers – are places that would normally not purchase such invasive technology. Yet, Gabriel’s fear-driven marketing focusing on mass shootings (which notably mirrors Carbyne’s own marketing efforts) have prompted some to buy in.

Enter the “anonymous philanthropist” mentioned at the beginning of this article. Per reports, that “anonymous philanthropist” is providing the money needed to place Gabriel’s products in schools, houses of worship and campuses throughout the United States “for free.” As noted by the Israeli outlet No Camels, Sherizen shared that “[the philanthropist’s] vision is to actually cover every single school and synagogue and get everyone on the same platform.”What a boon for Gabriel’s “network effect” and broader pre-crime ambitions.

The anonymity of this “philanthropist” is notable as the term “philanthropist” has been used to launder the reputations of notoriously corrupt and cutthroat businessmen for generations. If one remembers back to the Jeffrey Epstein case, the intelligence-linked pedophile was widely hailed as a “philanthropist” before his covert and illicit activities became more widely known. It also begs the question – what kind of “philanthropist” would want pre-crime surveillance infrastructure in every school in the country? The story supplied by Gabriel’s co-founder could easily be cover for the same intelligence agencies backing Gabriel and related companies and we would do well to better scrutinize the technology being used to study and surveil our children and our communities.

CIA and Mossad-linked Surveillance System Quietly Being Installed Throughout the US.

Whitney joined Redacted to discuss the news about the death of Dana Hyde. Segment starts at 1:26:16.

Redacted.

Available on Rokfin.

AM Wake Up.

There was once a wealthy billionaire philanthropist who owned houses in Palm Beach, New York, and France, as well as a Caribbean Island paradise where he hosted young girls for elite sex parties, far away from prying eyes. Like the infamous paedophile people trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, this Harvard graduate sent his employees into the streets to recruit young girls for him to coerce and molest. One such employee, Stephen Ward, a man who played a central role in the downfall of the British government in the early 60s, reportedly recruited girls from the streets of London for this wealthy man, and even drew him a sketch of a young girl being pleasured by machines in peculiar ways. Also, like Epstein, this wealthy paedophile had significant intelligence ties which ensured he was protected from prosecution. The person I speak of was richer than Epstein and had more properties than Epstein; yet, unlike Epstein he was never caught, charged or prosecuted for any of his crimes, eventually dying of old age in his late nineties.

This is the story of George Huntington Hartford II, a friend of Hod Dibben and Stephen Ward, and a billionaire who was closely related to the intelligence-linked propaganda creators who were behind the invention of James Bond.  

George Huntington Hartford II – The Original Jeffrey Epstein Annigoni and Steele’s forgeries of Huntington Hartford’s signature from the night at Esmeralda Gullan’s Montrose Club – Evening Standard – 18 December 1954

Sitting at a table at Esmeralda Gullan’s Montrose Club one evening in the mid-1950s was a young actress who went by the name Marjorie Steele. She wasn’t just an actress, she was also a master forger who, on the night in question, was reportedly competing with the artist Pietro Annigoni to see who could best reproduce her husband’s signature. Steele was her stage name, with her married name being Huntington Hartford. Marjorie had married into a very wealthy family: her husband was George Huntington Hartford II, who was born on 18 April 1911 in New York City and had inherited his vast wealth from his grandfather, George Huntington Hartford I. When Huntington Hartford was just 6 years old he began receiving an annual income of $1.5 million. His grandfather had created the concept of chain grocery stores after taking over the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P) and had amassed a great fortune. Huntington Hartford II’s father, Edward, was not as interested as his brothers in the creation of excessive wealth and slowly distanced himself from the wider family, once declaring that at least “one Hartford ought to be a gentleman.” George’s mother, Henrietta, was also unlike the rest of the family and this led to a persisting rift. Edward’s brothers had refused to help their sibling financially, and eventually Edward went so far as to break off contact with them. Edward would also do the same with his own children before his death in 1922. Josephine Bryce, George’s sister, said before her death in 1992, “I don’t think Hunt ever saw him at all.” If the absence of his father wasn’t bad enough for George, his mother also negatively impacted his psychological development.

Henrietta Huntington Hartford was a domineering mother and George was her favourite child. He became the focus of most of her attention, and his sister later described her mother as smothering him in “a cocoon of mother [sic] love.” In a lengthy article published in Vanity Fair on the life of George Huntington Hartford entitled “Hostage to Fortune” on 12 June 2010, it was said that Henrietta would still lean across the dinner table when George was a teenager to cut his meat for him. That article, which contained quotes from a dishevelled 93-year-old George Huntington Hartford, also notes that he “scowled” at the memory of his mother, telling the reporter, “She was domineering, very domineering.” She sent Hartford away to school at St. Paul’s in New Hampshire where George was reportedly bullied constantly by the other students for being from “new money.” He stated, “I was very innocent, 12 years old, and I was sent to a very horrible place. My mother should never had done it.” While making the latter statement, Huntington Hartford is also noted as having raised his voice in distress at the memory. It was very clear from the early life of George Huntington Hartford II that his development had been stunted in many ways by the absence of his father and the overbearing nature of his mother. It is also very clear from his later life that he had kept much of that hatred and anger for his family hidden inside.

George Huntington Hartford II and Marjorie Steele, pictured 3 days after their 1949 wedding. Fort Worth Star Telegram – Sunday 18 Dec 1960

In 1931 Huntington Hartford eloped with his first wife, Mary Lee Epling, the daughter of a dentist from West Virginia, a decision which apparently caused his mother to throw herself onto the floor and weep. The pair were regularly found mingling with other members of American high society, but the marriage came to an early end in 1939 after his wife left him for the actor, Douglas Fairbank Jr. This was mainly due to Huntington Hartford chasing skirt, but also because he had impregnated a 23-year-old chorus girl named Mary Barton. Unfortunately for Mary Lee Epling, Douglas Fairbank Jr. himself was a notorious rascal and would become a future attendee of Horace Dibben’s elite sex parties. Huntington Hartford had reportedly “floated the idea” of his mother adopting Mary Lee Epling so that he “might keep her as a sister after their divorce.”

George Huntington Hartford II pictured alongside his first wife Mary Lee Epling – July 1986 – Vanity Fair

Huntington Hartford graduated from Harvard University in 1934, where he studied English literature. Only a couple of years after graduation he bought a sailing ship named The Joseph Conrad, a rare square-rigger sailboat that he had purchased from famed writer and adventurer Alan Villiers. Huntington Hartford soon became an avid sailor, taking part in ocean races such as the one reported on 28 August 1937, an event where he and Walter S. Gubelmann raced from Newport, Rhode Island, to the Bahamas.

After graduating from Harvard, Huntington Hartford went to work for his uncles at A&P’s company headquarters. However, his uncles were apparently keen to make George’s entry into the family business difficult. They put him in the statistical department of the company where he oversaw the tracking of the sale of bread and pound cake. Quickly becoming disenchanted with the experience, George took a day off to attend the Harvard/Yale football game. His alma matter lost and George Huntington Hartford also lost his position within the family firm. By 1942, Huntington Hartford was investing in property in Santa Monica, purchasing a house built by an opera singer in Runyon Canyon during the war in 1942. In 1948, Hartford also launched a modelling agency in Los Angeles and New York so that he could “be with girls” and it is here where his employees began picking up young girls off the street for him to sleep with. Lisa Rebecca Gubernick, who wrote a biography of George Huntington Hartford II entitled “Squandered Fortune,” stated, “Hartford believed that if he bought enough and built enough, he could convert those boldfaced mentions in the society columns to lasting fame,” positing that the A&P heir hoped to build a cultural empire. Indeed, throughout the 1940s and 50s, Huntington Hartford attempted to make a name for himself in the art scene, but the incoherence of his vision meant that all his grand projects eventually failed.

By this time he was becoming known as a patron to the arts, which continued to be the case when Hartford had met his second wife, the young Marjorie Sue Steele, who was recorded in the New York Times as being a “former night club cigarette girl.” He had met Marjorie while she was selling cigarettes at Ciro’s night club in Los Angeles, and he had enticed her into a relationship by purchasing her merchandise. His ruse worked and by all accounts she became the favourite of his four wives he had during his lifetime. At the time that Huntington Hartford began wooing Marjorie Steele, she was already engaged to Charlie Chaplin’s son, with the legend of silent movies himself being the one to advise her to leave his own son and marry the wealthy Huntington Hartford instead.

George Huntington Hartford II pictured with Marjorie Steele – Courtesy of the July 1986 edition of Vanity Fair

In the 1950s, Huntington Hartford began purchasing properties in New York City, Palm Beach, and New Jersey. He also purchased the famous Hollywood estate known as “The Pines”, a London town house, a property in France, as well as buying a house on Hog Island in the Bahamas. He later purchased Hog Island entirely in 1959 and renamed it Paradise Island, soon attempting to turn it into a haven for illicit elite sex parties involving underage girls. He even gave Paradise Island its own flag which was shaped like a “P,” a symbol he also wanted to put on the moon as a symbol for “world peace.”

The decade of the 1950s were seen as the most productive years of his life. Bolstered by Marjorie’s ambitions as an actress and a painter, he began investing in the movie industry, produced one of his wife’s more successful movies in 1951, opened a theatre in Hollywood, and founded what was described as an “artists colony.” During these busy years, he found time to write an adaptation of Jane Eyre for Marjorie, which had a short run on Broadway and eventually flopped after Marjorie pulled out of the project because “she just decided it would hurt her reputation as an actress.” To that, Huntington Hartford had stated, “I think she was right.” Hartford began investing in all manner of grand projects during this era, all of which were to be failures under his leadership. This was also to be the fate of his marriage to Marjorie, which was heading for divorce by the end of the 1950s.

Huntington Hartford, Ivar Bryce and James Bond

By 1960, Huntington Hartford’s marriage to Marjorie was coming to an end, and he was celebrating by organising elite sex parties, as well as becoming a regular at Hod Dibben’s sordid London-based events. At the famous, sometimes satanic themed, sex parties held by Hod Dibben and Mariella Capes, aka Mariella Novotny, George Huntington Hartford mingled with the elites of London, gangsters such as the Kray twins, as well as many of the main characters involved in the Profumo Affair, an event which saw the downfall of the British government. One of the people who sometimes attended these gatherings was Stephen Ward, who was to become the main patsy in the Profumo scandal, resulting in his death by overdose while in custody during one of the most high profile court cases Britain had ever seen. Douglas Thompson mentions Huntington Hartford’s relationship with Stephen Ward and Horace Dibben in his book, “Stephen Ward: Scapegoat,” stating:

Throughout the 1950s, employees would approach young women on the street on his [Hartford’s] behalf. In London, Stephen Ward, sketchpad in hand, did that for him. He also sketched a drawing of a girl being pleasured ’round the world’ by a machine for Huntington Hartford, who gave it to a friend of Kim Waterfield. The billionaire American liked girls in the flesh. As did the producer Harry Alan Towers, who was invited to a London party thrown by Huntington Hartford. There, with Stephen Ward and Hod Dibben, was Mariella [Novotny].

Commenting on Marjorie Steele, Thompson also states:

The first of his four wives was Marjorie Steele, an aspiring actress. When they married in 1949, she was a teenager (Huntington Hartford liked prime).

The latter statement was partly false, as Marjorie Steele was actually the second of Huntington Hartford’s wives, however, he was well known for liking “prime”, with Thompson going on to say:

As it was, George Huntington Hartford, one of the world’s richest men and a fan of Hod Dibben’s sex parties, found 18-year-old Mariella a little on the old side.

In fact, Stephen Ward’s attempt to entice Huntington Hartford into Mariella Novotny’s bed chamber opened-up a very dangerous can of worms, which eventually contributed to Ward’s untimely death, something we’ll explore more later in this series.

One of the most interesting associates of Huntington Hartford was his brother-in-law, a man named Ivar Bryce. Born John Felix Charles Bryce in 1906, Ivar’s father had made his fortune dealing in guano while his mother had worked as a painter with a side job writing detective novels. During World War I, to escape potential Zeppelin attacks, an eleven-year-old Bryce was sent to Cornwall. There, on a Cornish beach, Bryce met a young Ian Fleming and the two boys formed an enduring friendship. Fleming and Bryce attended Eton College together and later went on to co-publish a magazine called The Wyvern, where Bryce’s mother used her connections to persuade famous artists such as Welsh painter Augustus John to contribute drawings. The magazine was also used as a far-right propaganda tool, and at one point they even published an article praising the British Fascist Party.

Ivar Bryce, the only foreign national who served in the American OSS.

During World War II, Bryce began working for William Stephenson, who was the head of the British Security Coordination (BSC) operating out of New York. The BSC was an offshoot of MI6, which was setup by Winston Churchill to investigate enemy activities, prevent sabotage of any British interests in the Americas, and to positively influence American sentiment towards the British. They used many underhand methods to achieve their goals and Bryce was charged with stirring up trouble between the United States of America and their various Latin American neighbours, initially by using the threat of Nazi infiltration to force specific American policy actions. In Thomas Mahl’s book published in 1998, entitled, “Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939-44,” it states:

Bryce worked in the Latin American affairs section of the BSC, which was run by Dickie Coit (known in the office as Coitis Interruptus). Because there was little evidence of the German plot to take over Latin America, Ivar found it difficult to excite Americans about the threat.

To remedy American disinterest in the potential Nazi infiltration of Latin America, Bryce created fake propaganda, which successfully helped to sour relations between the US and Cuba. In his biography, You Only Live Once, Bryce writes about an early operation to undermine the Cuban-American relationship via the creation of a map, which was intended to be given to US Congress as evidence that Cuba was helping the Nazis set up secret bases in their country. Bryce writes:

Sketching out trial maps of the possible changes, on my blotter, I came up with one showing the probable reallocation of territories that would appeal to Berlin. It was very convincing: the more I studied it the more sense it made… were a genuine German map of this kind to be discovered and publicised among… the American Firsters, what a commotion would be caused.

In this instance, the ruse was carried out successfully and became a catalyst for Congress’ decision to dismantle what remained of their neutrality legislation which went on to pave the way for a more acrimonious relationship between the US and their Cuban neighbours. During World War II, Ivar Bryce built a property in Jamaica and his friend, Ian Fleming, who was then the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence, Admiral John Godfrey, had decided that he would also live in Jamaica and write full time after the war. In 1945, Bryce helped Fleming find some land and a house outside Oracabessa, with Fleming calling his newly found retreat “Goldeneye” – the name of one of his projects during the war.

In 1950, Ivar Bryce married into the Huntington Hartford family and wed Josephine Huntington Hartford. Like George Huntington Hartford II, his sister, Josephine Bryce, had inherited wealth from their grandfather. Yet, unlike George, she invested it well, concentrating on owning racehorses and becoming very successful in her own right. During the late-1950s, Ivar Bryce, Ian Fleming, and George Huntington Hartford also began producing films together. In April 1953, Fleming had published a novel entitled Casino Royale, which introduced his readers to a British secret agent, serving Queen and country, who went by the name James Bond. The book was successful and soon Fleming began working with Ernest Cuneo to develop scripts for James Bond’s cinematic debut. Cuneo had been an important, if not vital, figure in the operations of the aforementioned BSC during World War II. He also admitted to passing information about American decision-making onto British spies, during a time where the Brits were intent on manipulating US actions. Cuneo stated:

Given the time, the situation, and the mood, it is not surprising however, that BSC also went beyond the legal, the ethical, and the proper. Throughout the neutral Americas, and especially in the U.S., it ran espionage agents, tampered with the mails, tapped telephone, smuggled propaganda into the country, disrupted public gatherings, covertly subsidized newspapers, radios, and organizations, perpetrated forgeries—even palming one off on the President of the United States—violated the aliens registration act [sic], shanghaied sailors numerous times, and possibly murdered one or more persons in this country.

Xanadu or Bust

In April 1959, the film journal Kinematograph Weekly reported that:

Producer Kevin McClory and financier Ivar Bryce, who head Xanadu Productions, are planning to build their own studio in the Bahamas. 

The Bahamian government was keen to see a film production company establish itself on one of their 3000 islands. They were quick to offer the company tax cuts and other incentives under their Encouragement of Industry Act to entice Bryce and McClory to invest in the Bahamas. Kevin O’Donovan McClory had originally met Ivar and Josephine Bryce during a visit to their villa on Providence Island in the Bahamas—the villa itself is called Xanadu—to discuss collaborating on a film called “The Boy and the Bridge.” The Sunday Mirror reported on the match in September 1959, stating that:

The upshot was that Bryce went into partnership with Kevin–Bryce’s money and Kevin’s know-how–to make a film.

Also in April 1959, Ian Fleming wrote a letter to McClory concerning potential James Bond movie ideas, with that letter also being used in a 1963 court case between Bryce and McClory after their business relationship eventually broke down. However, in August 1959, McClory and Bryce were still on agreeable terms and were reportedly about to start work on their new studio in the Bahamas.

Basing the production company and much of the development of the James Bond franchise in the Bahamas made sense for many reasons. The Huntington Hartford children had both purchased homes in the Bahamas, with George’s “Paradise Island” being located very close to Ivar and Josephine Bryce’s Xanadu villa. But the main reason for Bond being based in the Bahamas was McClory himself, who claimed that he was responsible for a large part of Ian Flemings novel, Thunderball, being set in the Bahamas. McClory claimed in the previously mentioned 1963 court case that Bryce and Fleming had tried to oust him as the producer of the proposed Bond film. Eventually, like the relationship between McClory and Bryce, the plans to build a studio in the Bahamas began to unravel.

George Huntington Hartford had promised that his redevelopment of Hog Island into “Paradise Island” was to see the creation of a “dignified vacation resort.” In 1960, the New York Times reported that the island at Nassau in the Bahamas was to be a place for “artists and writers, socialites, and diplomats, teachers and scientists, sportsmen and students” in an atmosphere of “cultural enjoyment.” But Huntington Hartford was going to have to work hard to make his Paradise Island vision a reality, especially if he was to attract the right crowd. In November 1962, the project was described as:

The most elaborate resort primping for its first full winter of operation is the $23,000,000 Paradise Island project of Huntington Hartford. Just 15 minutes across Nassau Harbour by special boat, this holiday complex encompasses a French restaurant, a 52-room hotel, lavish tropical gardens, a swimming pool and superb tennis courts.

When the island’s Ocean Club finally opened in 1962, elites jetted in from all over the globe, with over a thousand people reported to have attended Paradise Island’s official launch party. But by March 1964, Huntington Hartford’s island resort was experiencing problems with crime after gunmen held up a group of tourists who were visiting Nassau and on their way to the Paradise Island resort. Four men were reported to have stopped the taxi after ramming it with their vehicle and were said to have stolen the belongings of the taxi’s occupants. At the time, the tourists were travelling back from a night at the Bahamian Club, Nassau’s only gambling casino at the time. The taxi driver also told the police that the bandits all “sounded like Americans.” Even though the robbers managed to get away with only around $1,000 in cash, their haul contained some extremely pricey jewellery—including a diamond ring worth $250,000—and their heist saw them net items totalling in excess of $750,000, which was equivalent to over $7 million in today’s money.

As it was with every other endeavour which Huntington Hartford undertook, he soon became disinterested in his Paradise Island project. By October 1964, his resort was up for sale. The press reported statements by Huntington Hartford’s broker, a man named Johnny Maschio, admitting that the island had never been profitable, blaming the 52-room hotel for limiting the venture’s profitability, saying:

You can’t pay for men like Pancho Gonzales, the island tennis pro, and Gary Player, the golf pro, with 52 paying guests.

The 700-acre property, which Huntington Hartford had originally purchased from a Swedish Industrialist named Dr. Axel Wenner-Gren in 1959, was finally reported to have been sold seven years later. Huntington Hartford didn’t get the $32 million which he originally wanted, with the resort eventually selling for around $14 million instead.

A Man About London Town

Many wealthy elites, such as George Huntington Hartford, had significant and close ties to various members of different national intelligence agencies during this period. Many of these agencies were still evolving in terms of the scope, scale, and style of their operations throughout the 1950s and 1960s. American and British intelligence agencies were not fighting their Soviet foe publicly and, instead of taking certain actions themselves, they were often found utilising front organisations such as the BSC to coerce their allies into making certain decisions.

George Huntington Hartford II – From July 1986 edition of Vanity Fair

Central to the ideological war between East and West during this era was the battleground of London. The Cold War was rarely fought in the open, and in major capital cities such as London, spies representing all sides were conducting deals in the shadows. This put the night clubs of London on the front lines of an information war, which had the power to sour international relations, or potentially spark wide-reaching international incidents. This era of spy-games was made much more dangerous by the dawning of the nuclear-age, with everyone involved believing in the risk of nuclear warfare, mutually assured destruction, and the potential extinction of life on Earth.

To gain access to sexual encounters with young women and girls, men like Huntington Hartford attended these secretive elite sex parties based in London and exposed themselves in more ways than one. While his vast inherited wealth and his many significant and powerful connections afforded Huntington Hartford some protection, the only benefit that these not-so-private events had for the wealthy billionaire was that they offered him the opportunity to fulfil his carnal desires. However, for the intelligence agents and their associates, these sordid events became a prime place to gather compromising information on powerful people, which could then be used against them later. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that organisers of elite sex parties such as Horace Dibben and George Huntington Hartford II, were useful allies for compromise operations run by the various intelligence agencies, whether they knew it or not. Like Horace Dibben, Huntington Hartford himself gave his companions access to a real underworld of hidden sexual subversion, which many people still think is fantasy.

However, this particular era of sexual compromise operations was coming to an end. The people involved were naive to believe that they could control such a complex blackmail operation indefinitely. Soon, a group of much more serious and sinister predators were slowly surrounding the people who thought they occupied the top of the intelligence food chain. There was a new wave of spies coming to prominence who were active among the melting pots of both London and Washington DC; people such as Tom Corbally were skulking around the American and English capitals and soon would begin to enact the scandal of the decade and bring about the downfall of the British government. Yet, it wasn’t only the British government which these intelligence agents intended to coup—they were also looking over the Atlantic, towards America, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

George Huntington Hartford II – From July 1986 edition of Vanity Fair

Soon, this investigation will go deep into the actual Profumo Affair and the intelligence linked characters who made it happen. As for George Huntington Hartford, he became a drug addict and lost nearly all his fortune. He spent the last years of his life lamenting his many negative childhood experiences, bed bound and disgruntled. He eventually died in the Bahamas at the age of 97.

The Original Jeffrey Epstein.