Our governments have long had a relationship to Organized Crime (generally called the Mafia.) The story of the American Intelligence services using "Lucky" Luciano during World War II is well documented. [See particularly the section on World War II, freedom, and deportation.] Similarly well documented is the creation of the gambling center in Las Vegas by the Mafia, as is the fact that Fulgeencio Batista, dictator of Cuba, depended heavily on the Mafiosa Meyer Lansky and numerous organized crime leaders from South Florida to maintain himself in power. In return they had control of the gambling, drug smuggling and other crime in Cuba, subject to Batista's 30% take from the Lansky casinos (the Hotel Nacional, the Montmartre Club and others.) Lansky was also providing a cut to Lucky Luciano until after the Castro-led Revolution succeeded.INTRODUCTION: The Mafia, CIA and George Bush
Crime/Corruption Extended News News Keywords: SAVINGS AND LOANS, MAFIA, CIA, GEORGE BUSH, CIA, MAFIA
Source: New York: S.P.I. Books
Published: 1992 Author: Pete Brewton
Posted on 02/04/2000 16:08:55 PST by Wallaby
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
INTRODUCTION
The Mafia, CIA and George Bush
Pete Brewton
(New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992)
Something very significant happened during our country's savings-and-loan crisis, the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression. It happened quietly, secretly, without any fanfare and attention. It happened before our very eyes, yet we knew it not.
What we all missed was the massive transfer of wealth from the American taxpayers to a select group of extremely rich, powerful people. What these people had in common -- unknown to the American public -- were their symbiotic relationships to the Mafia and the CIA, and to the two most prominent, powerful politicians from Texas, President George Bush and Senator Lloyd Bentsen.
This small cabal of businessmen realized that the S&Ls were going the way of the dinosaurs. They recognized that S&Ls couldn't survive under rapid inflation and high interest rates. So they decided to exploit the situation for their own purposes, with help from, and rewards for, the Mafia, the CIA and their favorite politicians. They probably figured that the insulation and protection these powerful institutions and individuals conferred upon them, in addition to all the endemic protections with the financial, judicial, political and journalistic systems, made them invulnerable. They were probably right.
For unlike Watergate and Iran-Contra, this was a bipartisan scandal. There was no opposition party to push for an independent investigation. In fact, the same group of wealthy, powerful businessmen, centered in Houston, that encircle Republicans like George Bush and James A. Baker III, also encircle Democrats like Jim Wright and Lloyd Bentsen.
This information enables one to view the 1988 elections, in which not one cross word was ever spoken about the savings-and-loan debacle, in a whole new perspective. It was not merely a fortuitous coincidence that both Bush, the Republican nominee for President, and Bentsen, the Democratic nominee for Vice President, were part of, and beholden to, the same group of Houston businessmen. Even if the Democrats lost that presidential election, as they did, Bentsen could still win re-election to his Senate seat under the so-called "LBJ rule." The Houston boys, as usual, had their bets covered.
(If the Democrats had won in 1988, this book would be entitled "The Mafia, the CIA and Lloyd Bentsen," for Bentsen and Bush are two interchangeable peas in a pod. They have many friends, business associates and campaign donors in common. The story of the most important one they share begins this book.)
But Bush won in 1988, and one of the reasons he did was his ability to keep the S&L scandal out of the political debate. He was assisted in this by none other than Bentsen, as we shall see. They both had much to hid, Bush in particular. Not only were many of the President-to-be's friends involved -- along with two of his sons -- but Bush himself, as Vice President, had personally intervened in the federal regulation of a dirty Florida savings and loan that was being looted by people with connections to the Mafia and the CIA. This S&L ultimately failed, costing taxpayers nearly $700 million.
The S&L scandal is the vehicle for telling the story about these leading American politicians and businessmen. But the relationships between these individuals and how they control and manipulate public and private institutions is the bigger story. Unless we know who these people are and understand how they operate, we can all look forward to more S&L-type debacles to come.
The S&L scandal was almost the perfect crime. The layers of protection and insulation between what the public discovered was going on at the savings and loans and what actually happened with the money were so many and so thick that the crimes and theft would never be completely figured out. And even if the truth were ultimately unearthed, there were additional layers between that revelation and the bringing of those responsible to the bar of justice and recovering the money.
The first and foremost layer of protection is the difficulty in tracking the money from the savings and loans to its ultimate destination. That is why almost no FBI agent, federal prosecutor, S&L regulator, congressional committee or journalist has been able to track the money. Yet where the money went is really the only thing that matters. The rest of the "facts" that, typically, got investigated, prosecuted and written about were mostly smoke and mirrors, set up to shield who really got the hundreds of billions of dollars that taxpayers must pay back and to hide what the money was used for.[1]
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[1]--A notable exception is the book Inside Job, by Stephen Pizzo, Mary Fricker and Paul Muolo, which nailed down the fact that the savings-and-loan debacle was caused primarily by fraud.
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The five years that went into this book represent my efforts to peel back all the layers of insulation and protection to get to the real culprits. I have organized this book with that process in mind, to help the reader understand a complicated and confusing subject.
In general, the bulk of the money lost in the S&L crisis that American citizens must now pay for went to the owners of the property and assets that the more notorious borrowers purchased with money from S&Ls run by equally infamous owners. This seems to be obvious, yet it somehow got lost in all the hype and hysteria. While Congress, the Justice Department and the press concentrated on the flamboyant borrowers and managers of the S&Ls, the big recipients of the money -- the wealthy, powerful landowners and property owners -- crept off quietly with their profits.
In the second half of this book, a number of examples will be detailed to show how this happened, and who got the money. For example, one later chapter deals with a $200 million, 21,000-acre land transaction in Florida in which much of the borrowed S&L money went to a paper company owned by the Du Pont empire, one of the oldest, richest, most powerful bastions of wealth in this country.
We know this because many of the lending documents were pursued by a lone, shrewd, tenacious federal regulator named Kenneth Cureton. However, the unraveling of this transaction was a rare and exceptional event. But even it could not be called a complete victory. The Department of Justice's International Division, the government body through which subpoenas to offshore banks must pass, inexplicably became a brick wall for Cureton's efforts to obtain records on the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel, where a big chunk of the money went -- possibly to buy weapons for Iraq.
Since so many of the crucial documents in this scandal are not available, we are left with the second-best avenue of investigation: finding out who the original property owners were and everything we can about them, and then doing the same thing for the S&L proprietors and borrowers. The bulk of this book consists of that enterprise.
The evidence uncovered is clear, convincing, and compelling: Members and associates of the Mafia and the United States Central Intelligence Agency were key participants in our nation's savings-and-loan debacle, and some of the richest, most powerful people in the country did business with these participants and profited from the S&L crisis.
That members of the Mafia and the CIA, two organizations that operate in secrecy and whose members take sacred oaths -- one supposedly dedicated to national security, the other simply to their organizations' security -- may have been working together is not unprecedented in this country. But that fact doesn't make their cooperation any less outrageous.
It is well known that members of the Mafia and the CIA conspired to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. There are other, less substantiated, although credible, allegations regarding the two groups' involvement together in drug smuggling and money laundering in Southeast Asia, Australia and the Caribbean.[2]
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[2]--The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred W. McCoy (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); The Crimes of Patriots, by Jonathan Kwimy (New York: Norton, 1987); and In Banks We Trust, by Penny Lernoux (Penguin Books, 1986).
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There are also some curious, ominous connections between members of these groups and JFK-assassination figures Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby.
Drawing a straight, direct line from the CIA operatives discussed in this book to the top officials of the CIA and on to the President is extremely difficult because of the way the CIA works. Most of the characters in this book are not the card-carrying bureaucrats and bean counters at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. They are what are called CIA "assets," who can be someone who turns over an occasional piece of information to the CIA, without even knowing it is for the CIA, all the way up to someone who is continually working for the CIA in covert operations.
A similar and, likewise, important cog in CIA operations is what is known as a cutout. A cutout is a front man or middle man set up to protect the identities of the primary participants. Like an asset, a cutout may or may not know for whom he is working and the actual purpose of his work. (The Mafia also makes use of such cutouts, except they call them "mustaches" or "beards.")
The CIA uses assets and cutouts to maintain one of its prime directives: plausible deniability, or, in other words, "Don't get caught embarrassing the President." (The CIA is the intelligence-gathering and covert-action arm of the President. Perhaps that is the definition journalists should always refer to, rather than just throwing the general term "CIA" around as if it were some sort of independently run mythical loose cannon.) So . . . if an asset or cutout is caught breaking the law, the CIA can deny that its operative was working for it at that particular time.
This leads to one difference between the Mafia and the CIA, particularly in this story. Once it is established that members and associates of the Mafia are involved in a failed savings and loan, that is usually enough to establish, prima facie, the involvement of the Mafia. Members and associates of the Mafia don't do such things without the knowledge, permission and the sharing of the spoils, with their superiors.
The destruction of the savings and loan industry in Texas, and in some other parts of the country, worked basically like an organized-crime bustout or burnout. This is a mob scam in which a failing company is taken over, built up on credit, then drained of all its assets and purposely put into bankruptcy, leaving the creditors holding the bag.
In the case of savings and loans, the credit was federally insured deposits injected by money brokers, like mob associate Mario Renda, and the creditors are the taxpayers. The front men, the cutouts and the "mustaches," like Don Dixon, Tyrell Barker, Ed McBirney, Jarrett Woods, Roy Dailey, Mike Adkinson and Robert Corson, are left to take the blame. But don't feel sorry for them, for they have usually skimmed enough off to offshore bank accounts to make it well worth a couple of years in jail, keeping their mouths shut.
However, because of the CIA's doctrine of plausible deniability, the involvement of a CIA asset in a failed savings and loan does not make a prima facie case for the involvement of the CIA. In fact, I know of no independent test a journalist can conduct to determine whether the involvement of a CIA asset means the CIA has sanctioned it or whether the asset is just freelancing for his own gain. Both possibilities would look the same to an outside observer.
The only way to tell would be if the CIA admitted its involvement or if there were unassailable, documented evidence sh owing S&L money going from an asset to a CIA operation. This is attainable only by subpoena, if at all. Even in such a case the CIA might deny that it knew the asset was pumping money into the operation or that it knew money came from an S&L. But if the CIA admitted that, it would be admitting that it is both incompetent and stupid.
In the case of the failed S&Ls, the CIA has categorically denied its involvement. The CIA did admit to a congressional committee that it had a relationship to five individuals connected to failed savings and loans, and that it had also done business with four savings and loans that later failed. But the spy agency claimed that its business with these S&Ls was legitimate. however, there are several cases in which there are clear indications that S&L money went directly to operations that the CIA took part in, even if it didn't overtly control them -- for example, the cases of Iran-Contra and of weapons shipments to the Middle East.
but one thing we can say, categorically: The CIA either knew or didn't know what its operatives were doing at S&Ls. If it knew, why didn't it stop them or alert the proper authorities? If it didn't know, how effective an intelligence agency could it really be?
Finally, a word about the circumstantial evidence in this book. Circumstantial evidence must necessarily be used because of the secretive nature of the CIA and the unavailability of S&L documents. The evidence appears many times in this way: A failed S&L was owned and controlled by people who have done business with Mafia associates and CIA operatives; many of the borrowers were Mafia and CIA associates; many of the original property owners have done business with Mafia and CIA operatives and some of the money disappears in foreign accounts controlled by Mafia and CIA associates.
What does such evidence prove? Based on my research and knowledge of the CIA, I believe it makes it more likely than not that someone in the CIA hierarchy knew about and approved, if not instigated, the S&L actions of its operatives. In any event, journalists are not in the proof business, we are in the information business. Proof is for mathematicians and courts of law, and even in those arenas, there are great disputes about what constitutes proof. The readers of this book, and the American public, can evaluate the evidence and information in this book for themselves and decide whether it should be acted upon or ignored.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with circumstantial evidence. In our country's courts of law, fortunes and lives can be won or lost, fairly and squarely, on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Juries, as well as readers of this book, may infer facts and conclusions from circumstantial evidence. I have attempted to set out all the facts and circumstantial evidence that I know. In some cases the meanings are clear and conclusions can be drawn. In other places the going gets a little tough, because there is not enough data and evidence to draw meanings and reach conclusions. For this I apologize; i wish I had found more information.
In all, I have tried to follow the injunction of our forefathers, who in proclaiming their thesis in the Declaration of Independence, stated: ". . . let facts be submitted to a candid world."
Admittedly, it is easy to be cynical and discouraged about the situation presented in the following chapters. One question I am constantly asked is: "What can we, the American people, do about this?" There are no quick-and-easy solutions or panaceas. However, like our founding fathers, we should have faith in the liberating power of knowledge and information. If we know how and why something happened, and who benefitted by it, then we will know the right thing to do.
Reposted from a covert spot on the thread of this post:
Our federal government approved Batista's dictatorship together with the gambling there run by the Mafia because Batista provided stability in Cuba, and the Mafia were a major element in keeping him in power. The organized crime families in South Florida that then ran the gambling and hotels in Cuba today make up a lot of the leading families in today's Anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Southern Florida who have had such a close connection to the Republican Party. Castro's revolt messed this up badly and then he couldn't be bought, for which the Republicans in the U.S. government have yet to forgive him.
Another major indicator of the relationship between the U.S. government and the Mafia is the way in which J. Edgar Hoover refused to even admit that the Mafia even existed and refused to permit investigations of the Mafia until the early 60's.
For some support for Brewton's book that is a bit more recent, try this article Organized Crime, The CIA and the Savings and Loan Scandal. Then there are these hits for a google search>on Houston Organized Crime.
This is only a quick summary of some of the documented connections between our government and the American Mafia. Anyone who thinks that organized crime doesn't own a number of politicians should really ask themselves if they are being realistic. [Did Jeb Bush really get elected Governor of Florida without some assistance from the Mafia? Just wondering.]
Keep all that in mind before you dismiss the assertions that Pete Brewton have made.
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