|
PART III
Organized Crime
Introduction
We have now taken the reader through the production and wholesaling
phase of Dope, Incorporated. We have introduced the Far East
clearinghouse bank, the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank and he gold and
diamond houses that with HongShang feed the black market with
invisible forms of payment. In the following pages we will
concentrate on the distribution side of Dope, Incorporated's
business cycle.
We will first enter the Canadian board rooms where
the Keswicks, the Inchcapes and their representatives brush
shoulders with the wholesalers of the drug trade the Zionist
Hofjuden middlemen whose assigned task is to ensure swift and
secure delivery of that "most valuable source of revenue" to
Britain's retail distributors: the mob.
The Bronfman family of
Canada is our leading case, since they are the top middlemen for the
U.S. market which, in turn, is the richest in the world. Beneath the
respectable veneer of the Bronfmans' corporate financial empire we
will uncover Dope, Incorporated subsidiaries that control the
criminal underworld of North America. We will look closely at Meyer
Lansky, the Marcello family, and other
"Mafia" figures and discover that like China's Green Gang, the mob
is a secret army, a fifth column controlled by Britain against the
United States.
We will trace the drug money to the gambling casinos and other
"legitimate" enterprises that are the syndicate's indispensable
storefront cover for the drug trade. From these respectable
enterprises we will trace the drug money into the halls of the state
assemblies, city councils, congressional offices, and into the
pockets of America's contemporary Benedict Arnolds and Aaron Burrs,
among whom we will find Edward Kennedy, Jacob Javits, Henry "Scoop"
Jackson, and other leading lights of the Zionist Lobby. We will find
tainted heroin money being funneled into Zionist organizations and
from Zionist fronts back into political machines for the dual
purpose of buying protection for the drug trade and shaping U.S.
policy.
We will then take a grand tour through the Anglo-Dutch offshore
banking centers, watching money being laundered through Basel,
Liechtenstein, Tel Aviv, and the Bahamas; tracing it carefully as it
changes ownership from the mob, to the Bronfmans, to British banks,
to the Israeli Mossad finally ending up in dummy corporations to
finance international terrorism and a privately owned worldwide
assassination bureau.
By the time we finish, the reader will have a view of organized
crime that tears to shreds all the fairy tales of the drugstores
novels and Grade-B Hollywood productions. The image of gangsters and
thieves lurking in the dark underworld will dissipate before the
fact that we are dealing with the most highly integrated, top-down
political machinery in the world one that enjoys the logistical
support of a $200 billion per annum international cartel and the
"protection" of every political entity Britain has created through
these vast "invisible earnings."
The cutouts
The police investigator has a problem in trying to track down the
source of the drug trade: he invariably proceeds from the
bottom up and gets lost along the way long before he reaches the
level of command that counts. Every year, local police arrest
thousands of street corner and schoolyard pushers, yet it is a rare
occasion when any of these arrests leads to the arrest of higher up
syndicate figures who ply the street trade in the first place. And
these local syndicate warlords are themselves usually several steps
removed from the "Mr. Bigs."
As Part II of this report demonstrated, at the top, British banking
through HongShang controls the production and wholesaling side
of Dope, Incorporated. This "out-front" activity in the Far East is
protected by the legal technicality that the area is off-limits to
U.S. investigative agencies. (As one experienced
U.S. foreign service officer put it, "It would be easier for a white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant to penetrate the Politburo of the Chinese
Communist Party than it would be to gain access to the Hong Kong or
Swiss bank accounts of the drug traders.") At the retail,
distribution end, there is no parallel way of directly linking the
British oligarchy to the drug traffic at least not with the
ordinary tools of the police trade.
One of the ABCs of any covert operation is the time-tested practice
of securing middlemen or, to use the professional expression,
"cutouts" that effectively conceal the identities of the stage
managers who run the show from behind the lace and velvet curtains.
From the top all the way down to the street level, Dope,
Incorporated is run through layer upon layer of such cutouts.
Even in China, where the British Crown brazenly pursued its opium
policy, it operated through the corrupted Soong family which carried
out the day-to-day business operations for Jardine Matheson.
In the West, the prime cutout for Dope, Incorporated is the Zionist
Lobby. This cutout begins at the top with the cohesive grouping of
Hofjuden ("Court Jews") who serve the British monarchy as loyal,
wholly owned servants. These families, whom we will meet by name,
have a centuries-long tradition of attaching themselves to the
predominant noble houses of Europe, providing indispensable services
as tax-farmers and errand boys for the
types of missions that the aristocrats would prefer to plan but not
get caught in carrying out.
Many of these Hofjuden families migrated from Amsterdam to Britain
after the "Glorious Revolution" (1688), which brought the Dutch
House of Orange onto the British throne in alliance with the most
bucolic, feudalist landed gentry of the Isles. That Anglo-Dutch
merger of the late 17th century turned Britain into the most
powerful center of the European oligarchical faction a status it
has maintained for three centuries. For these Hofjuden families, the
relocation to Britain marked no shift in allegiance; they have
functioned as servants for the oligarchical system, not for specific
houses.
Several of the Hofjuden families who converged on London
during the 17th and 18th centuries had served the Genoese bankers in
their takeover of Holland, had participated in the Dutch East India
Company's first expeditions in opium trade, and had collaborated
over the centuries with the British Jesuits against European
humanist forces.
The Hofjuden should not be confused with the Jewish people. In much
the same way that one would not condemn an entire nation for the
crimes committed by its most deranged citizens, one cannot condemn
the entire Jewish people for the centuries of crime committed by the
Hofjuden. The only relationship the Hofjuden have had to Jewry is
that of persecutors and tormentors.
As the clandestine operations
bureau for the oligarchy, they quickly learned that they could
augment their capabilities tremendously by subjecting Jews to waves
of persecutions and then recruiting terrorized Jews into Zionist
organizations that had as their ostensible aim the "survival" of
Jewry! In street parlance, the Hofjuden have run a six-century-long
protection-extortion racket against the Jewish people to the
overall effect of building up a sizable "Zionist" network at the
disposal of British Secret Intelligence. This traditional
relationship to Jewry was carried to its lawful conclusion in the
20th century when the Rothschilds, Warburgs, Oppenheimers,
Schroeders, and other Hofjuden became the leading financial backers
of Adolf Hitler.
One of the greatest benefits that the Hofjuden gained by their
complicity in Hitler's genocide of the East European population
was that they could henceforth hide behind the memory of the
awesome fate of millions of Jews and conduct the filthiest sorts of
operations from drug-running to terrorism to genocide against Arab
and related populations without being exposed for these crimes
against humanity. Whenever any critic attempted to expose these
crimes, he was quickly assaulted as a "Nazi," a"fascist," or an
"anti-Semite."
It is neither unrelated nor coincidental that these
Zionist Hofjuden were delegated the role of cutouts between the
inner circles of the British nobility and the filthiest gutters of
organized crime. Even within the Hofjuden, we encounter two levels:
one is the centuries-old families (the Hofjuden "elite") who rub
shoulders with and are intermarried with the nobility; and the
second, the "initiates" "chosen" by the Hofjuden elite to be the
drug-runners, the bootleggers, the murderers, and extortionists
who themselves hope that by slavishly serving the British
oligarchy they will be placed among the ranks of the
Zionist "respectables." Within the first category, we find such
"respectable houses" as these:
The Montefiores trace their origin as "special operations"
experts for the European oligarchy to the 13th century in Spain,
when they ran errands as tax farmers and Inquisitors for their
masters, the Genoese. The Montefiores later moved to Holland to help
found the Dutch East India Company and the Bank of Holland. After
the Stuart Restoration of the mid-17th century, the Montefiores
moved to England where they helped establish the Bank of England and
the British East India Company. Under Sir Moses Montefiore, the
family collaborated with Lord Palmerston and Prime Minister Disraeli
in the founding of the present-day Zionist "movement."
The Goldsmids and Mocattas have been the leading bullion merchants
for the royal family of England since the Stuart Restoration,
predating the founding of the Bank of England. As we have seen, both
families conduct a significant portion of the black marketeering in
precious metals for the Hong Kong drug
traffic. The Oppenheimers control a large portion of the diamond and
gold mining in South Africa and are interlocked with the
HongShang Bank to provide yet another means of exchange for drug
transactions.
The Canadian de Hirsch family bankrolled much of the Jewish
migration from Eastern Europe to Canada and is still a bankroller
of Zionist organizations.
The Sassoons were the first Hofjuden family to concentrate their
resources primarily in opium production. Known as the "Rothschilds
of the East," they settled in India at the beginning of the 18th
century. The Sassoons relocated in 1949 to the Caribbean where
they established themselves on the ground floor of casino gambling
and unregulated offshore banking.
The Rothschilds began their fortune in Hesse-Cassel, Germany by
supplying Hessian mercenaries to the Hanoverian King George III of
Britain against the American colonies. They are
"johnny-come-latelys" to the Hofjuden circle, having only seriously
gained a place in the oligarchical court with the Treaty of Vienna
in 1815. From that point, however, the Rothschilds have expended
considerable resources toward the subversion of the American
republic; they maintain an "investment" presence in Dope,
Incorporated.
Immediately below the Hofjuden elite are those "initiate" families
selected and sponsored to run the criminal underworld and its
"legitimate" front organizations. Into this category falls the
powerful Bronfman family of Canada, the Hong Kong of North America.
By all accounts one of the richest families in the world, the
Bronfmans are a sterling example of a family handpicked and raised
out of the gutter to become some of the best paid crooks in the
world.
A Bronfman illegal loan of $350,000 to the Campaign to
Re-Elect Hugh Carey as Governor of New York recently caused a public
outcry, but as the story we now tell shows, the Bronfmans themselves
are owned and operated by the British banking elite of Dope,
Incorporated.
Back to Contents
The Bronfman Gang
The Bronfman family is best known to Americans through its ownership
of Seagram, the biggest liquor company in North America. The
family's holdings stretch from whiskey, banking, mining, real
estate, and although somewhat less publicized narcotics. Today
they are regarded as respectable and outstanding "philanthropists"
whose name is attached to everything important in Canada and
Israel be it government, business, or "cultural" affairs. This was
not always the public profile of the Bronfman family.
Less than 50
years ago, they were known to be the biggest boot-loggers in North
America and were referred to by the less prestigious title "the
Bronfman gang." The Bronfmans have always been beholden to the
Hofjuden elite. The first member of the family to come to North
America was Yechiel Bronfman, a grist mill owner from Bessarabia,
Romania, who later anglicized his name to Ekiel. Yechiel emigrated
to Canada in 1889 under the sponsorship of the Moses Montefiore
Jewish Colonialization Committee. (1)
This enterprise had been
initiated at an 1872 meeting between
Baron Maurice de Hirsch, Baron Alfred de Rothschild, and other
Zionists that established a Jewish Colonialization Association to
bring selected Russian and Eastern European Jews to agricultural
settlements ("kibbutzim") in the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and
Saskatchewan. (2)
The same period marked the transfer of the
Warburg, Kuhn, Loeb, and related Our Crowd migration from Germany
and Britain into lower Manhattan. In 1912 William Sebag Montefiore
himself arrived in Montreal where he spent the remainder of his life
(d. 1950). Lord Harold Sebag Montefiore, current head of the
Jerusalem Foundation (the Zionist wing of the Most Venerable Order
of St. John of Jerusalem) was sent to Canada for his early
education. In the same period, Baron de Hirsch established the De
Hirsch Foundation in Canada as the umbrella for all Canadian Jewish
"philanthropic" activities and the Montefiores created a club (named
after the family) to service the resident Zionist elites. The
Rothschilds, too, planted a branch of their family on Canadian soil.
Meanwhile, in Saskatchewan, the Bronfman family found little
interest in eking a living out of the plains of midwestern Canada.
The strenuously Orthodox Jewish family first turned to selling wood,
then to horse trading, and then most successfully to the hotel
business (and prostitution). (3)
In Yiddish Bronfman means "liquorman," and the hotel business put
the Bronfmans in a good position to take advantage of the 1915
advent of Canadian prohibition. Bronfman hotels became "boozeriums."
Prohibition enacted on orders from the Privy Council as the
prelude to the 1920s U.S. Prohibition and birth of organized crime
catapulted the Bronfmans into the multimillionaire bracket and a
status as the untouchable kingpins of crime in North America.
During Canada's four dry years from 1915 to 1919, the Bronfmans
established their contacts with U.S. criminal figures for illegally
importing liquor into Canada. In 1916, the Bronfmans established
their first link with the opium trade proper. Samuel and Abe
Bronfman, two of Ekiel's four sons, collaborated with the
Hudson's Bay Company in which the Keswick family of
Jardine Matheson had controlling interest to buy the Canadian
Pure Drug Company. In this way the Bronfmans rushed into the
loophole in the War Measures Act that permitted the distribution by
pharmacists of alcohol for "medicinal" purposes.
When prohibition in
Canada ended in 1919 and Prohibition in the United States began, the Bronfmans simply turned from whiskey importing to whiskey exporting.
After it was all over, in May 1936 the Bronfmans agreed to pay $1.5
million to settle their account with the U.S. Treasury; the sum
amounted to an admission that half the liquor that came into the
United States during Prohibition was from the "liquormans." (4)
The "Seagram Chickencock" the family poured across the border was
pure poison a mixture of pure alcohol, sulfuric acid, caramel,
water, and aged rye whiskey that paralyzed its victim. Between 1920
and 1930, 34,000 Americans died from alcohol poisoning. Their control
of liquor flow into Prohibition USA gave the Bronfmans literally
life-and-death control over American crime. Refusing to play ball
with the Bronfman gang usually spelled death, and independently
minded gang bosses were often known to be executed by their
lieutenants on the Bronfmans' behalf.
One of the buyers best liked
by the gang was New York City beer baron Arthur Flegenheimer, a.k.a.
Dutch Schultz, who succeeded in wiping out his competition including
the notorious killer Legs Diamond. Schultz himself was later rubbed
out when he took it into his head to murder the reforming New York
District Attorney Thomas Dewey. (We will meet up with Mr. Dewey
later in regard to the Mary Carter Paint Company.) (5) In the first
years of Prohibition, Ekiel's four boys ran all bootlegging from
the prairie states of Canada to major distribution sites south like
Chicago. To secure the shipment lines, Harry set up a dummy firm,
Transcanada Transport Company.
Transcanada was a protective cover
for the Canadian Pacific Railway owned by respectable gentlemen back
in London, which ran the whiskey across the border. (6) The
Bronfmans also bought up stretches of barren farmland along the
border and even built an underground pipeline to pump their
"chickencock" into the United States. During these early years, the
Bronfmans were scarcely under the protective wing of their Zionist
sponsors. Thus, for example,
in 1932 Bronfman brother-in-law Paul Matoff was executed
gangland-style by the Chicago mob in a dispute over profit
splitting. A scandal ensued, public hearings were convened, and the
Bronfman crimes came spilling out into the light of day. The
Bronfmans received a mild reprimand from the Canadian government and
relocated their operations to Montreal.
1922 also marks the year that the Bronfmans procured their own
distillery, hauled with workmen included from Kentucky to Montreal.
Since 1920 the Bronfmans had been importing British whiskey from the
Distillery Company of London (DCL), which controlled more than half
the world market in scotch whiskey. Owned by the higher echelons of
the British nobility including Field Marshal Haig, Lord Dewar, Lord
Woolavington, and others, the dispensation of distribution rights
was a decision made by HM the King.
In 1926, upon the request of
Samuel Bronfman, the DCL agreed to go 50-50 in the Bronfmans'
distillery and the Distillery Corporation Limited was formed as a
holding company with Bronfman and Seagram distilleries. Headquarters
were established at the Bronfmans' corporate castle in Montreal, but
it was the Distillery Company of London's William Ross who was
installed as president with Sam Bronfman as vice-president. The
British elite had made a decision to go with the Bronfman option.
Despite the massive infusion of capital and the newly gained
legitimacy the link-up with DCL afforded them, the smell of
Bronfman smuggling both into and out of Canada and their
wholesale bribery of Canadian customs a la Hong Kong had
gotten too strong. In 1928 the Royal Commission on Customs
recommended the immediate prosecution of Harry Bronfman on
charges of attempted bribery. Nothing happened, but shortly
thereafter the Bronfmans created the Atlas Shipping Company
and moved their smuggling operations to the French islands of
St. Pierre and Miquelon, 15 miles off the Newfoundland coast.
With licenses in Bermuda, Saint John, New Brunswick, and Belize, British Honduras, the Atlas Shipping Company was one of the
first ties laid down in the dirty money-drug underground railway
between Canada and the Caribbean. (7)
A little ditty popular during the time indicates the amusement with
which the British viewed the entire operation:
Four and twenty Yanks Feeling very dry, Went across the border To get
a drink of rye. When the rye was opened, The Yanks began to
sing: "God bless America, But God save the King."
Organized crime comes of age
With Prohibition, crime became a bigtime business. It was no longer
based on small-scale prostitution, loan sharking, or petty
protection rackets. Now it was centralized around the marketing of
one precious and outlawed commodity whose supply was controlled from
London and from the British colony of Canada. Crime was reorganized
from top to bottom into an integrated wholesale and retail
distribution chain with well-defined marketing districts, quotas,
and uniform pricing. Crime became syndicated.
Hundreds of movies
spewed out of Hollywood about the "Roaring Twenties" have glamorized
the truth: with Prohibition, Britain through its Bronfman Gang
cutout had created a nationally syndicated crime cancer. Within a
decade of the Roaring Twenties, the Bronfman syndicate would be
peddling heroin, cocaine, and every other available poisonous drug
through the same wholesaling, transporting, and retailing system
that bootlegged booze.
Bronfman's counterpart in the United States
was one Arnold Rothstein. Just as Bronfman made it into the big-time
under the auspices of the Hofjuden elite, so Arnie Rothstein was
sponsored by Our Crowd Zionist investment bankers who arrived in New
York as the Montefiores were setting up business in Canada.
Arnold Rothstein the godfather of organized crime was the son of
a wealthy Our Crowd dry goods merchant.
At the turn of the century, the Russell Sage Foundation had issued a
well-publicized field study of loan sharking in New York City. (8)
The report's wide publicity resulted in the bankrupting, jailing, or
takeover of the petty gangsters by Rothstein, who emerged as a
powerful Tammany Hall figure with a fabled loan sharking business
estimated at several million dollars.
Region wide combines were formed up and down the East Coast for
smooth distribution. The Reinfeld Syndicate named after the
Newark, New Jersey bootlegger and accused murderer Joseph Reinfeld
functioned as the middleman between the British liquor distilleries
and the "Rum Rows" of Boston and New York. Its controlling
shareholders were the four Bronfman brothers, Allan, Sam, Edgar, and
Charles. The U.S. leg was handled by Reinfeld and Abner "Longie"
Zwillman, later the boss of Atlantic City, and Rothstein's gangs in
New York. (9)
In 1927, the Big Seven combine consolidated the entire East
Coast distribution system. Its organizer was John Torrio a
dapper little gentleman who without benefit of family, racket, or
turf had gained notoriety for eliminating any local crime bosses
who stood in the way of national syndication. Torrio was a
Bronfman man who had murdered his own uncle to prove it.
Brought into Chicago in 1910 by his uncle, racketeer "Big Jim"
Colosimo, Torrio smelled the wind on the eve of Prohibition and
demanded that his uncle start making the right contacts to get
into the lucrative business of bootlegging. When "Big Jim"
refused, Torrio had him murdered and took over the Chicago
mob as the distribution point for the Bronfman liquor. (10)
In 1925, Torrio suddenly left Chicago heading first for Havana
and then landing in Italy. Returning to the United States in 1927
after he miraculously "escaped" Mussolini's purges of the
Mafia, Torrio came back with one goal: to build a nationally)
organized crime syndicate.
While the mad killers and punks like Dutch Schultz, Legs
Diamond, and Al Capone made the headlines every day and
provided good material for gangster movies, John Torrio quietly
continued the work that Arnold Rothstein (assassinated in 1928)
had begun, now with the aid of Rothstein's successor Meyer Lansky.
Torrio could do what Lansky and the Bronfmans were prohibited from
doing for reasons of ethnicity: discipline the scores of family
local crime chieftains and "moustache petes" into one centralized
business that could penetrate every sector of the economy. Known as
the "assassin who never carries a gun," Torrio presented himself as
the elder statesman of organized crime and commanded respect from
the Mafia locals. "Cooperation is good for business" was his slogan.
The Big Seven had been Torrio's first step. The cooperative of East
Coast bootleggers controlled from the top down to the local levels
all prices, membership, centralized distribution points, corruption,
and protection.
By 1928 Torrio was able to call a Cleveland meeting to establish a
nationwide crime syndicate. (11) The gathering was unique in that it
had succeeded in bringing together into one room all the crime
bosses of every major organized city. There were three items on the
agenda. First, how to use the huge profits of Prohibition and invest
them in legitimate business that would permit a steadily
increasing take for the syndicate. Second, how to deal with the
Italian question. The ritual vendetta murders of the Mafioso
families were good for the newspapers, said Torrio, but bad for
business. Immediately after the meeting the Castellammarese gang
wars broke out in New York as the test case for Torrio's syndicate.
Under the auspices of Lansky and Torrio, Lucky Luciano succeeded in
wiping out all recalcitrant godfathers.
During the last night of
the war the infamous "Night of the Sicilian Vespers" over 40
people were gunned down. (12) With cartelization came the need for
more long-lasting regulation gangland style. In the early 1930s
Murder, Incorporated was formed as a regulatory commission of sorts
to police any
overzealous "free enterprise" advocates who might try to buck
the syndicate. A special assassination bureau was set up by
Meyer Lansky and Benjamin "Bugs" Siegel. The "Bugs and
Meyer Gang" had been distinguished by the fact that they owed
allegiance to no one (except maybe Arnold Rothstein); they had
originally been used to protect Bronfman liquor shipments
across the border against "freelance" hijackers. (13)
By 1932 Torrio was strong enough to pull together another meeting of
the syndicate, this time in Atlantic City, where a National
Commission the board of directors of organized crime was
officially formed. Aside from the leading Italian mafiosi who had
survived the transition, Meyer Lansky, now regarded as the financial
and enforcement wizard of the syndicate, and Atlantic City's
Zwillman were in attendance as honored guests.
Thus, for the British, Prohibition was a roaring success. What had
begun as a three-way contract between Britain (the supplier),
Bronfman (the cutout), and Rothstein (the distributor) had become
within the space of a decade a nationally organized crime syndicate
a private, secret army under British banking and political
control.
The Rothstein-Hong Kong connection
To pick up the story of the modern-day Dope, Incorporated, let us
return to Cleveland and John Torrio's first 1928 meeting of the
syndicate. The third item on the agenda was what to do after
Prohibition. The commodity, Torrio proposed, that would replace
liquor as the black-market, big-profit taker was narcotics.
When Prohibition began in 1920 Arnold Rothstein had personally gone to Great Britain to establish the liquor pipeline with the
British distilleries. Less known but more important is that at the
same time he had dispatched his underling Jacob "Yasha"
Katzenberg to Shanghai to begin negotiations for a dope pipeline
from the Far East into the East Coast of the United States. (14)
(The West Coast had been sewn up in the previous century with a
pipeline from Shanghai straight into the Pacific Chinese coolie
communities.)
It was projected that the same networks established to bootleg
liquor could just as easily smuggle and retail narcotics. By 1926,
U.S. narcotics agent-on-the-scene in the Far East, Ralph Oyler,
wrote back to his boss Levi Nutt, chief of the U.S. Narcotics
Division, that the opium market had expanded so tremendously that
Britain was "even taking shipments of crude opium from the
Near East to add to her gigantic supply of Asian opium" in order to
meet market demand. The traditional opium families of Kes-wick,
Sassoon, and Inchcape were preparing for the future. (15)
One year after Oyler's report, the 1927 Shanghai massacre put an end
to all challenges to the rule of opium. The Shanghai uprising had
been an attempt by the nationalist factions within the Kuomintang
and Communist Party to destroy the opium dealers, such as the Soong
family, who had seized control over the government and had carved up
China into drug-running "warlord" satrapies. The massacre was
carried out by the Green Gang Syndicate, acting on orders and
funding from the Extraterritorial International Settlements on
Shanghai headed by Lord William Johnston Keswick.
The British
enclave harbored the Green Gang criminals at the time of the
massacre, and the British-dominated Municipal Council (headed again
by Lord Keswick) turned over trade union leaders and others to Green
Gang criminals who executed them. (16) Had the Shanghai massacre
occurred during the previous century, it would have been known as
the Third Opium War; the consequence of the slaughter was yet
another dramatic increase in British opium control over China.
The two principal Green Gang leaders involved in the massacre were
Tu Yueh-sheng, "whose factories flooded the American market with
narcotics" after the coup, and Huang Chin-jung, who was Arnold
Rothstein's contact man. British-dominated post-1927 Shanghai was to
become for the next 14 years the premier drug depot for the world.
This shift East in the production of the opium cycle has been
documented by Jonathan Marshall in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian
Scholars:
By the late 1920s, China was a net exporter of opium, and within a
few years it replaced the Near East as the world's opium smuggling
capital. By 1931, China produced seven-eighths of the world's
narcotics. Chinese opium flooded the world markets through Hong
Kong, Shanghai and Macao. ... By the mid-1980s, Chinese heroin
dominated the American market.
As documented by Marshall, Lord Keswick and the other controllers of
the opium trade imposed the Green Gang dope merchants in power in
China, making the production and distribution of opium the backbone
of the Chinese economy. The consequences were predictable:
unparalleled genocide against the Chinese population.
In early July, 1932, T.V. Soong, who had resigned (as Finance
Minister ed.) the month before after failing to raise enough money
for the communist suppression campaign, hinted that he would
return to office if a new source of revenue such as opium could
be found. He picked up the support of the influential H.G.W.
Woodhead, who, probably reflecting the sentiment of the British
business community (i.e., Keswick, the HongShang, and Standard and
Chartered ed.) argued that only such a monopoly could solve
China's financial crisis. An opium monopoly was a small price to pay
to protect the stability of China's business climate...
(Due to the forced cultivation of opium ed.) millions of acres of
land were taken out of food production. In food-short China, this
reduced the margin of peasant survival... the most notorious case
of famine brought on by over cultivation of opium occurred in
Shaanxl province between 1928 and 1933. It took as many as six
million lives in four provinces, wiping out perhaps a third of the
entire population of Shaanxl province. (17)
Let us now stand back and review in light of this history the
jigsaw puzzle pieces that fall into place with Yasha Katzenberg's
trip to Shanghai and the sealing of an opium pact.
First, Arnold Rothstein, Yasha Katzenberg's employer, was a product
of the Rothschild "dry goods" empire that included the Seligman,
Wannamaker, and Gimbel families. During Prohibition, according to
the Bronfmans' own testimony, Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky
Luciano were the Bronfmans' main distributors. As Prohibition came
to a close Bronfman associates traveled to Shanghai and Hong Kong to
streamline and
expand the drug trade into the United States, negotiating with the
foremost Chinese drug-runners who were not only encouraged but
pressured by the British "business community" to pull together an
opium cartel.
The man dictating the opium policy to China in this
period, the man who sired the T.V. Soong opium monopoly, was Sir
William Johnston Keswick of Jardine Matheson and the Hong Kong and
Shanghai Bank. From the period of the Shanghai massacre to 1942 when
he was interned by the Japanese, Keswick directed the international
Settlements of Shanghai the period of gross expansion of Shanghai
heroin into the United States. The same Sie William Keswick was
until very recently the director of the Hudson's Bay Company of
Canada, the same company, it will be recalled, that collaborated
with Sam and Abe in 1916 to found the Pure Drug Company for illegal
distribution of whiskey into Canada.
Working for Hudson's Bay along
with Keswick is Sir Eric Drake, who not only sits on the board of
several Bronfman-run banks and companies, but is also an employee of
the Inchcape family and presently the deputy chairman of the Inchcapes' Peninsular & Orient Steamship Company. The current
chairman of the board is the son of the Lord Inchcape who in 1923
called for the expansion of "that most valuable source of revenue"
the opium trade.
Sir Eric Drake is also a member of the board of
Canadian Pacific, which plays a most vital role in the transshipment
of drugs through Canada into the United States, just as they did
with alcohol during the Prohibition. Along with Lord Trevelyan, who
heads up the HongShang's "gold-for-dope" exchange from his position
at the British Bank of the Middle East, and Lord Inchcape, Sir Eric
Drake sits on the board of British Petroleum, as does Sir William
Johnston Keswick. Sitting on the board of the Bank of Montreal along
with Charles Bronfman and two Seagram directors are J. Bartlett
Morgan, William Arbuckle, and F.S. Burbridge, who in turn sit on the
boards of Hudson's Bay, Canadian Pacific, and a host of other banks
and corporations in which the drug families of the HonkShang nexus
play a policy-making role.
We are not charging "guilt by association" but rather making note of
the fact that the series of "legitimate" enterprises the Bronfmans
moved into toward the close of Prohibition are indistinguishable
from and intermeshed with companies controlled by Keswick, Inchcape,
and other leading opium traders. During the same period, these
gentlemen openly supervised the drug trade into the United States.
This association not only continues to this day but is the mainstay
of the Bronfman empire.
Going legit ain't necessarily kosher
With the repeal of Prohibition and with the Shanghai opium deal in
operation, the Bronfmans, like so many of their partners across the
border, "went legit." Organized crime sunk its millions in
legitimate businesses that both acted as cover for illegal
activities and set up the laundry networks for dirty money. The new
phase of respectability signaled that the most successful big-time
whiskey bootleggers were switching to big-time narcotics.
In the early days, the Bronfmans had to run all the risks of the
smuggler's profession. They had to dodge the law, stay one step
ahead of the desperadoes on the other side of the border, and
whenever things went wrong, face the humiliation of public expo
sure and scandal. As a result, the family acquired a considerable
reputation.
Looking expectantly toward the fast increase in drug trade in
America, the British could not afford to leave their leading cutout
in such an exposed and precarious position. Nor could they simply
dispose of the Bronfmans after Prohibition. The family had become
irreplaceable due to its in-depth control over the syndicate. Yet,
they would be a liability if they continued to work as openly with
their distributors in narcotics trafficking as they did running
Prohibition.
The problem was resolved by bringing the Bronfmans into the
lower rungs of the Hofjuden caste. Almost overnight, the Rothschilds, Montefiores, de Hirsches, et al. took "Mr. Sam," the
crime czar of North America, and transformed him into a rising
star of the Canadian Zionist movement.
-
In 1934, Mr. Sam was given his first "respectable post" as chairman
of the National Jewish People's Relief Committee (Canada).
-
By 1939 he had been appointed head of Baron de Hirsch's Jewish
Colonization Association, the same Association that had brought
Yechiel to Canada.
-
In the same year, the Canadian Pacific Corporation invited Mr. Sam
to establish a new refugee organization for Eastern European Jews.
-
Within five years, the prince of crime was transformed by the good
grace of His Majesty's oligarchists into a Zionist "philan
thropist."
One post followed after another. He became head of the
Canadian Jewish Committee, replacing Lyon Cohen, the son of Lazarus
Cohen, the founder of the Jewish Colonialization Association and
the official agent of the de Hirsch family interests. After World
War II, Mr. Sam established the National Conference of Israeli and
Jewish Rehabilitation, using his considerable smuggling skills to
run guns to the Haganah. Similar posts were awarded to the other
Bronfmans.
Allan Bronfman was named president of the Zionist
Organization of Canada, a member of the board of trustees of the
Federation of Jewish Philanthropists and of the national council of
the Canadian Jewish Congress. Abe Bronfman was posted to the Joint
Distribution Committee and also to the national council of the
Canadian Jewish Congress. _ Finally, in 1969 the Bronfmans were
given the highest reward issued by Her Majesty. Sam was made a
Knight of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem
Her Majesty's official chivalric order.
His brother Allan and his
son Charles were appointed to the highest rank, Knight of Justice of
the Order. These appointments are emphatically not ceremonial, but
are only bestowed on those who have carried out the most dangerous
and fruitful missions for the British Crown. The Bronfmans' time had
truly come. Sam's children were welcomed into the Hofjuden elite
by intermarriage.
Minda married Baron Alain de Gunzberg, himself an
extension of the Rothschild family tree. De Gunzberg sits on the
board of Seagram, is managing director of the Banque Louis Dreyfuss,
and controls the Seligman-Louis Hirsch investment house which has close Rothschild ties.
Edgar Bronfman's first marriage was to Ann Loeb, bringing him
instantly into a command position within the Wall Street house of
Loeb, Rhoades, and Co. While taking over the Seagram main branch in
New York, Edgar's marriage clinched the tie to Our Crowd that had
begun during Prohibition. His second marriage, to Lady Caroline
Townshend, as we have seen, was unsuccessful. Phyllis Bronfman
married Jean Lambert of the Belgian banking and mining interests.
Yet, despite their mountains of wealth, despite their hard-won entry
into the realms of good breeding, it would be a mistake to think the
Bronfmans were a power in their own right. When it comes to the
question of control, they are treated as if the money were not their
own.
Take, for example, the case of "Trizec," the holding company through
which the Bronfman brothers ostensibly run their various
corporations, including Seagram. Since it was formed in 1960, the
Bronfmans have never held a majority position within Trizec! Trizec
is run by Eagle Star Ltd. of London, a holding company whose
directors have been described by one author as "the most notable of
the British aristocrats." (18)
Evelyn de Rothschild, the earls and
dukes who control Lloyds of London and other banking and insurance
firms, and leading lights of British intelligence such as Sir
Kenneth Strong and Sir Kenneth Keith all converge on the board of
Eagle Star. (See Part II, Section 8.) This extraordinary company in
turn owns English Property Corp. Ltd.
whose principal individual shareholder Laurie Marsh has gained
notoriety in Britain as the "Prince of Pornography" for his ownership
of the majority of pornographic movie theaters, massage parlors, and
"red light district" real estate in London.
(19) English Property Corp. Ltd. owns majority holdings in Trizec.
Neither are the brains behind the Bronfman empire situated between
the ears of members of the Bronfman family. The source lies
elsewhere in the family's law firm of Phillips, Bloomfield,
Vineberg, and Goodman (now Phillips and Vineberg).
The personage of family arbiter and attorney Lazarus Phillips,
in particular, was a constant sore to Mr. Sam. Born into the upper
crust of the Zionist elite, Lazarus Phillips succeeded in gaining
all the yeckus publicly recognized respect that Mr. Sam could
never seem to win. Phillips was a holder of the Order of the British
Empire, a senator in the Canadian Congress, a member of the board of
directors of the Royal Bank of Canada, invited into the exclusive
Mount Royal Club as a member, and was a powerbroker for the
Liberal Party.
But without Phillips the Bronfman family empire could
not survive. It is likely that through him the Bronfmans received
the input of cash that allowed them to proceed steadily from boot
legging to the legitimate big-time. Certainly it was Phillips who
unfroze enough funds under export control from the grip of the Bank
of Canada to finance Seagram's wartime expansion into the United
States. As the final judge in all family matters legal and
otherwise Phillips has sat on the board of Seagram since 1940 and
on every other company and philanthropic front nominally run by Mr.
Sam.
He is still the co-director of Trizec and the other major
Bronfman holding company Edper (named after Edgar and Peter
Bronfman). Phillips is also the expert who managed to get the
Bronfmans off every legal hook they ever got caught on. (20)
Philip
F. Vineberg is part of the Vineberg family of Abraham Moses
Vineberg, chairman of the Moses Vineberg Investments firm and the de
Hirsch Institute. Cochairman of all the Bronfman holding companies,
Vineberg runs the Canadian Israeli Bond Drives and the Canadian
Council of Christians and Jews. He is also a member of the Hofjuden
elite's Montefiore Club. Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, also of
the firm Phillips, Vineberg, and Bloomfield, is however, without a
doubt the most
colorful of the Bronfman brains-behind-the-scenes and this may
explain why his name was left out of Peter Newman's 1978 book The
Bronfman Dynasty (rumored to have been commissioned by the Bronfmans
themselves).
In addition to his position up to the late 1960s as a
Bronfman family lawyer, Bloomfield remains a close banking
associate. The Major's Zionist activities are numerous: he is
involved in a nest of corporations including the Israeli Continental
Company, he is chairman of the Canadian
Histadrut Campaign, and a former president of the Israeli Maritime
League. He also holds the post of Consul-General in Liberia, under
whose flag vast quantities of opium and narcotics are shipped. He is
a high-ranking member of the Most Venerable Order of St. John of
Jerusalem and runs its subsidiary Canadian Red Cross Ambulance
Corporation.
Major Bloomfield also runs Britain's International Assassination
Bureau, an entity we will soon examine in detail.
Are they really clean?
The answer, of course, is no. Since the days they sent their
"chickencock" across the border to their claim as the world's finest
whiskey blenders, the Bronfmans' ties to North America's crime
syndicate have never been broken but merely undergone corporate
reorganization. In Section 3 on the Bronfman company of Permindex,
we will analyze their criminal activities in length At this point a
few examples will suffice.
Take the case of Bronfman family intimate Murray Koffler. A leader
of the Jerusalem Foundation in Canada, Koffler was the subject of a
major scandal in 1976 when his business associates, Starkman stores,
were busted by Canadian police after its pharmacists were caught
manufacturing illegal amphetamines and funneling them into the black
market. (21)
Charles Bronfman's sister Phyllis Lambert was the subject of a
simultaneous scandal for her involvement in Heritage Canada, a
government funded "social service" program that got caught
conduiting drugs onto Canadian college campuses. (22)
In 1975 the Bronfmans again made the front pages when Edgar
Bronfman's eldest son, Samuel II, was reported kidnapped. The case
revealed the kidnapper to be Sam II's homosexual lover. When the
police found them, Sam's kidnappers pleaded that the Bronfman youth
had blackmailed them into the hoax as a way of extorting money from
his father. The jury agreed; the two abductors were declared
innocent of kidnapping, but found guilty of the lesser charge of
extortion. The press also aired the kidnappers' pleas that their lives were now in danger for having sung
about Sam II.
Since he took over the reins of Seagram's New York branch in the
1950s, Sam II's father, Edgar, has built the Seagram distilleries
network into a multinational global empire. The
Bronfmans, for example, have entered into a most profitable business
partnership with the Cuban rum Bacardi family. After Fidel Castro
took over the island in 1959, the Bacardis switched their base of
operations to Puerto Rico and Miami, taking along with them a small
army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles.
The Bacardis, headed by Manuel
Cutilla Bacardi, have been pinpointed by law enforcement agencies
as the funders and political controllers of entire networks of Cuban
exiles. The "gusanos," as they are called, are not only involved in
terrorism (Orlando Bosch's September 1976 bombing of a Cubana
airlines plane killed over 70 people). Drug runners in the
Bacardi-Cuban exile networks, Jose Medardo Alvero-Cruz and Antonio
Cruz Vasquez, have been recently arrested for drug trafficking in
the Caribbean and Mexico. (23)
Seagram has also staked a
conglomerate empire in Mexico. Bronfman's contact is former Mexican
President Miguel Aleman, who owns and operates Acapulco. Today
Aleman is demanding the revival of casino gambling in Mexico; in the
1930s nationalist President Lazaro Cardenas threw the casinos, and
with them Meyer Lansky, out of the country.
In short, wherever Seagram branches appear on the map, they are
thoroughly intermeshed with narcotics runners, gambling, and crime.
One the public record, the Bronfmans' gutter connections are most
visible in the case of Mitchell Bronfman. The son of Knight of
Justice Allan Bronfman, Mitchell is reportedly never without the
automatic strapped to his shoulder and his stiletto strapped on his
left calf. He is on record with the Montreal Police, the Quabec
Provincial Justice Ministry, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
as a kingpin of organized crime in Montreal. (24)
A 1972 report by
the Montreal Crime Commission names one Willie Obront as the head of
the syndicate in the area and
describes the relationship between Obront and Mitchell Bronfman as
"almost a brotherly relationship." (25)
This relationship extends into illegal activities in which they have
mutually or jointly indulged... the special kinds of favors they
did for each other and the resulting
advantages of each in the fields of loan gambling, illegal betting,
securities, tax evasionruption. (26)
Everything was on a strictly "friendly basis," claims Mitchell.
Obront first came to the attention of the authorities after two of
his Quebec nightclubs used as hangouts for Montreal's underworld
were raided. It was revealed that Mitchell's friend was one of
Montreal's top movers of dirty money from narcotics, prostitution,
and loan sharking.
Together with Willie, Mitchell Bronfman is a minority partner in the
Pagoda North, a Miami restaurant that has been identified by U.S.
and Canadian law enforcement agencies as the headquarters for a
continent wide illegal bookmaking syndicate run by Vito Genovese.
Willie Obront was convicted in 1976 of "tax evasion" and put behind
bars. Mitchell Bronfman narrowly averted the same fate.
Another one of Mitchell Bronfman's business partners is Sidney
Rosen, who was also arrested and convicted in 1975 for looting 35
Canadian and American companies of $7 million through an
asset-stripping clearinghouse called Value Trend Holding Company.
Value Trend in turn laundered these stolen assets, along with
other dirty revenues from illegal gambling, extortion and
narcotics, through Corporate Bank and Trust Company of Freeport,
Grand Bahamas and Flendon Ltd., of the same address. Both companies
are jointly owned by Rosen and Mitchell Bronfman through another
holding company called the "Milton Group." When Rosen went off to
jail (again leaving Mitchell Bronfman scot free), the $7 million
passed unscathed into offshore accounts in Barclays Bank in
Freeport. (27)
But the two major corporations that Mitchell operates out of are the
mysterious "Securex" and "Execaire Aviation." The former was
disbanded in 1977 by Ouebec Provincial Justice Minister Delard.
While the Official Secrets Act has kept the reasons behind this
hidden, it can be stated with reasonable certainty that Mitchell
Bronfman and the company were discovered to be up to their necks
in the wave of FLQ (Front pour la Liberation du Quebec) terrorism
that had plagued the province since 1970 not to mention the
narcotics trade.
The two directors of Securex at the time of its banning were Donald
McCleary and Gilles Brunet, formerly RCMP sergeants in charge of the
G-4 (Secret Service Division) of the Mounties. Both were fired from
the Service in 1972 when it was discovered that they were close
associates of Mitchell Bronfman. (28) McCleary and Brunet were in
charge of the counter terror efforts in 1970 when the FLQ kidnapped a
provincial official and a British government officer, an affair
which led to the declaration of a state of emergency. The emergency
period was used as a pretext to go after the French Canadian
networks that had been built up by de Gaulle in conjunction with the
Vatican to liberate Quebec from British colonial status.
In point of fact, the FLQ was itself funded by Bronfman family
networks as an extension of earlier efforts to assassinate French
President de Gaulle (the story will be told below). The Bronfmans'
FLQ option was the North American version of the British Special Air
Service's control over both the Provisional Wing of the Irish
Republican Army and the British Army's counter terror efforts.
Securex advertises itself as a security "consulting firm
specializing in anti-terrorism, anti-kidnapping, and guerrilla
warfare training." (29) All things considered, it would have to be
regarded as both a semi-official covert branch of British intelligence in Canada and as a bridge to the criminal underworld. Its
affiliated Execaire Aviation emerges as yet another scarcely
concealed front for crime.
Execaire is the largest private charter
airline service in Canada specializing in jet
service for business executives... and narcotics. Is Mitchell
Bronfman just the black sheep in the Bronfman family? It is
unlikely. Cemp, the Bronfman family trust, signed a
guarantee for part of Execaire's line of credit at the Bank of
Montreal.
Nevertheless, the high publicity the Bronfmans have received over
the years for such exploits as Mitchell's has prevented the family
from receiving that degree of respectability they have always
coveted. In the 1950s Mr. Sam looked across the fence at the status
of his friend Senator Jacob Javits and decided that he would buy the
ultimate title to confer respectability to his name: he sought to
become a Senator of the Canadian Congress. All told, he spent $1.2
million in bribes. The Liberals took his money but wouldn't give him
a seat. The Bronfman name was still too dirty to be permitted in the
ranks of Canadian politics.
In this regard, the Kennedy family fared much better.
Back to Contents
The Kennedys - Organized Crime in the Government
There are some facts in the mind of the American public that hint at
the reality behind the "Kennedy look": Ted's Chappaquiddick
disaster, Judith Exner Campbell's revelations that Chicago mobster
Sam Giancana had given her to Jack, and the well-known stories of
Papa Joe's bootlegging days. The suspicions are there but Americans
aren't really sure what the Kennedys are; after all, if they're so
dirty, how do they stay so clean?
Dope, Incorporated supplies the
answer.
The Kennedys are clean because, beginning with Papa Joe,
they were flea-dipped, scrubbed, and polished by the British to be
the respectable front for organized crime. Whether or not a Kennedy
crosses the British Crown in terms of policy as Jack Kennedy did
in 1963 does not alter the fundamental content of the political
machine that gives the Kennedy dynasty its power. The Kennedy
machine is organized crime in government. If Ted Kennedy becomes
President in 1980, whom will he owe debts to? The same people who
pay for him now. At the top of the list of contributors to Kennedy's
1976 senatorial campaign released by the Federal Elections
Commission is one Joseph Linsey. (1)
A Massachusetts bootlegger who
maintains connections to Meyer Lansky from the 1930s, Linsey sits on the board of
International Airport Hotel Systems Inc., a Miami-based company
whose board also includes Lansky. Hotel Systems is also connected to
Resorts International, a firm we will soon hear more of. FBI
wiretaps showed recently that Linsey also has dealings with Raymond
Patriarcha, the titular godfather of New England narcotics
trafficking. (2)
Patriarcha is a partner of the Jacobs family (whom
we will also encounter later) in several business ventures,
including a multimillion dollar a year slot machine company in St.
Louis. Although sentenced to jail for murder, Patriarcha was
released over four years ago when doctors "discovered he was
suffering from a case of terminal cancer" from which he presumably
still suffers.
Among the business enterprises of Kennedy financier Joseph Linsey
are two liquor distributing firms, Crown and Whitehall, and a
dogracing track in Tauton, Massachusetts. Whitehall's chief
"salesman" Mike Rocco was described by the McClellan Committee
hearings on organized crime, in which both John and Robert Kennedy
participated, as a "collection man for the mob." (3) Linsey's chief
political lobbyist, Hirsch Freed, is a senior partner in the law
firm of Brown, Rudnick, Freed, Gesmar and sits on the board of the
Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Boston. Freed and all of his law
partners are generous donors to the Kennedy campaign fund. (4)
It is the character of Kennedy's friends rather than his own low
personal standard of morality that explains why as a leader of
the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee he has come forward
as the leading sponsor of federal legalization of marijuana and
why he has given his approval to decriminalization of heroin "for
experimental purposes." The job of the Kennedy dynasty is to
usher in British dope and the criminals who distribute it
through the front door.
The rise to power
Papa Joe Kennedy did not have to struggle like the Bronfmans did to
make their name and money in the world of crime he
was born into it. Joe's father P. J. Kennedy was one of the shanty
town mobsters of late 19th century Boston.
P. J. began his rise to fortune as a tavern keeper who bought his
way into the corrupt Democratic Party machine (a machine that, like
the Jacob Astor-Aaron Burr power system in New York, had its roots
in opium trafficking). Once he had obtained a seat on the ward's
Democratic Committee at the age of 26, P. J. gave up his tavern and
went into the more lucrative wholesale liquor business. Two years
later in 1886 he began the first of five consecutive terms in the
Massachusetts State Legislature. By 1896, he was part of the
triumvirate of Kennedy-Donovan-Corbett, known as the Board of
Strategy, which controlled the Democratic organization in Boston.
But it was common knowledge that the secret to P. J. Kennedy's
political success was his control of the local crime ring, the
"McGuire Gang." (5)
Joe Kennedy's mother sadly recognized that with her husband, her
social pretensions could never be realized for herself. Kennedy's
public image was so filthy that he could not even Qualify for entry
into the "High Irish" social circles of Boston, let along the
Brahmin elite centered around the opium smuggling Perkins family.
She set her hopes on her children. It was Joe Kennedy's marriage
into the Fitzgerald family (over the vehement protests of his
father-in-law, Boston's High Irish Mayor "Honey" Fitzgerald) that
launched the Kennedy family into high society.
Nevertheless, when Joe Kennedy went to Harvard he was snubbed and
ridiculed by his Brahmin classmates, who never missed a chance to
remind him of his family's seedy history. Joseph bitterly referred
time and again to his rejection by the
exclusive "final clubs," Harvard's most desired status
symbol. (6) After World War I, Kennedy was employed by Galen Stone,
a partner in the prestigious Hayden, Stone and Co., a Boston Hat
street investment house with ties to the Rothschilds.
While there,
he made his first contacts with the British aristocracy. Kennedy got
wind that one of Hayden, Stone's clients, the British company of
Robertson-Cole Pictures, was in the throes of a credit squeeze. The
ambitious Irishman went to London to seek the purchase of
the company's U.S. distribution affiliate, the Film Booking Company.
He was turned down flat. Within a month, however, Lord Inverforth
arrived in Boston to take Kennedy up on the offer.
Through a
subsequent merger With Ideal Films Ltd. Kennedy founded what was
described at the time as the "first genuinely reciprocal exchange of
production and distribution facilities between British and American
companies." (7) Kennedy's joint ventures with the British soon
produced RKO studios, ushering in British financial and cultural
domination of Hollywood.
Kennedy's film ventures were also noteworthy for another reason.
Lord Inverforth later showed up during World War II working closely
with British Secret Intelligence Services chief William Stephenson
("Intrepid"). (8) The Robertson-Cole deal was Kennedy's first
contact with Britain's aristocratic high command.
In 1929, Kennedy joined with Blair and Co., a firm operated by
Elisha Walker, later of Kuhn, Loeb, and Jacques Monnet, to bid
for control of A. P. Giannini's Transamerican Co., the controlling
company for the Bank of America. The attempt failed, but
Kennedy gained another invaluable contact. Jacques Monnet had
come to North America to represent his family's liquor business,
Monnet et Cie., in dealings with the Hudson's Bay Company.
In the
period that Kennedy was working with Blair and Co., Monnet was
traveling to Shanghai on a financial mission for the League of
Nations. Since the delegation came on the invitation of notorious
opium dealer T.V. Soong, and given Monnet's associations with
the Hudson's Bay, it is likely that more was on the agenda than
the financing of Chinese railroads.
Papa Joe also had business liaisons with the seamier side of the
illegal distribution market. During his own bootlegging days in
Prohibition, Kennedy entered into a coalition with Newark's
Reinfeld Syndicate, which it will be recalled was 50 percent
owned by the Bronfman gang. Joe retained his business dealings
with the syndicate thugs all the way until 1946. At that time, in
preparation for the launching of his sons' political careers, Joe
sold his liquor company, Somerset Importers Ltd., for $8 million
to the "Renfield Importers" a revised version of the Reinfeld
Syndicate. (9)
As the end of Prohibition approached, Kennedy again turned to London
where Winston Churchill personally approved the grant to Joe of the
British distillers' franchise for the American market. Through
Kennedy's Somerset Importers Ltd. and Renfield Importers, Kennedy
marketed Dewar's scotch, Gordon's gin, Ron Rico rum, and Haig and
Haig. (10)
But as Papa Joe made clear early in the game, he was not in it for
the money. His goal was to build a political dynasty, and his wife
produced nine children in succession to get it going. Churchill's
nod of approval and the cash flow accompanying it signaled that the
British were ready to take advantage of Joe Kennedy's political
ambitions.
Kennedy acknowledged the deal by placing his accumulated fortune in
the hands of one of the inner circle of London finance: Lazard
Brothers Ltd. Andre Meyer, head of the U.S. branch of that house,
became the manager of the Kennedy Estates. Lazard Brothers Ltd. is
owned by Viscount Cowdray (Weetman John Churchill Pearson), cousin
of Winston Churchill.
In 1933, Kennedy was appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt to
head the new Securities Exchange Commission. Kennedy's earlier
association with the London banking circles had put him in the
inside track to conduct a flurry of stock speculation on the eve of
the 1929 stock market crash and walk away from it all with a pocket
full of cash. When the SEC was
created to regulate the market, Roosevelt returned Kennedy's 1932
favor of swinging the Boston Democratic machine behind the FDR
candidacy at the 1932 nominating convention.
In 1936, FDR appointed Kennedy U.S. ambassador to Great Britain, a
post Kennedy wanted more than life itself. As Joe's official
biographer explained, "The old American aristocracy, with its
Anglophilic leaningsthe aristocrats that had rejected Kennedy at
Harvardregarded the post as the nation's highest social office."
(11) Kennedy had at last succeeded in giving the Boston Brahmins a
kick in the teeth. Once in London, the Royal Family further obliged
the funny Irishman by posing with his family in full regalia for the
newspapers.
Kennedy quickly attached himself to the most pro-Nazi British
aristocrats centered around Lady Astor's Cliveden Set where Round
Table figures such as Lazard Brothers' Lord Robert Brand, the
Marquess of Lothian, Fabian George Bernard Shaw, and the
opium-trading Sassoon family congregated to dictate Britain's
appeasement policy for the British Foreign Office.
Kennedy's antics in Britain soon got back to President Roosevelt
who, by the outbreak of World War II, had developed a fairly
accurate view of Britain's imperial designs. Kennedy's notoriety as
a Nazi supporter like his father's earlier underworld career
could not be covered over by even the most sympathetic biographer.
Thus, David E. Koskoff in his commissioned biography of Joe Kennedy
reported the following:
Kennedy had become intensely Anglophilic: "Indeed there are
unfortunate signs that Kennedy is going by way of Page." They
reported that he was one of the prime exhibits of Cliveden . . .
that he was a partisan of England and should be watched carefully. .
. . .
From the beginning of the Ambassador's career to the end, the
spectre of Walter Hines Page haunted Joseph Kennedy. From his
position as Ambassador to England, Anglophile Page had literally
conspired with the British to bring America into World War I. . . .
Kennedy always resented the fact that his name was always linked
with Page. . . . Even Roosevelt said before the outbreak of war,
"He's more British than Walter Hines Page." (12)
Kennedy's unswerving loyalty to the British monarchy was rewarded;
his daughter, Kathleen Kennedy, the sister of John, Robert, and
Edward, married William Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington.
Hartington was the son and heir to the 10th Duke of Devonshire and
his wife, Lady Mary Alice Cecil (daughter of the 4th Marquess of
Salisbury), the Dutchess of Devonshire.
In the hierarchy of the British nobility, the dukes are the highest
rank of royalty, taking second place only to the monarchy itself.
The Duke of Devonshire is at the center of the interlocking families
of the Cecils, Salisburys, and Macmillans who have run British
politics since the Glorious Revolution.
Joseph Kennedy repeated the theme many times: "If Kathleen and her
husband were living, I'd be the father of the Duchess of Devonshire
(first Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen) and the father in-law of the
head of all the Masons in the world." (13) Later, his son John would
marry Jacqueline Bouvier, whose sister Lee Radziwill married Prince
Stanislaus Radziwill, a member of the Polish nobility who traces his
titles back over 500 years.
The Radziwill family, which resides in
England, established the Order of St. John of Jerusalem in Poland in
1610 and was instrumental in transplanting the Order into the
United States in the early 20th century. While serving as ambassador
in Britain, Joseph Kennedy was made an initiate in His Majesty's
Most Venrable Order of St. John of Jerusalem.
Despite Joseph
Kennedy's eventual unceremonious recall from the Court of St. James
at the beginning of World War II, the elder Kennedy had succeeded
brilliantly in restoring his tarnished reputation. During his
sojourn in Britain, he turned over his sons to the British Round
Table for a "proper" education. Joseph Kennedy, Jr. and John F.
Kennedy were trained at the London School of Economics, an
institution founded by the Fabian Society dedicated to training and
recruiting foreign cadre as future British agents within government,
business, media, and educational posts in their respective
countries.
The Kennedy brothers were trained by Fabian Society
Executive member Harold Laski. At Harvard, on the Kennedys' return
to the United States, further tutoring for son John was secured from
Sir John Wheeler
Bennett, the founder and head of the research division of the Royal
Institute of International Affairs. Wheeler-Bennett denies that he
was the writer of Kennedy's Harvard master's thesis, later published
in book form as Why England Slept an apologia for the Cliveden
Set's and his father's sympathies for Hitler. (14) There is little
doubt that Wheeler-Bennett was aware that he had been entrusted with
the training of Britain's future political kingpins in the United
States. As he recalls:
I was invited one evening to dine informally at the American
embassy. We were a small party, not more than
ten, as I recall, and the three eldest Kennedy sons sat in a row on
the far side of the table to myself... "I'll tell you about
these boys," said the Ambassador to me in his rasping nasal voice,
as if they weren't there at all. "There's young Joe, he's going to
be President of the United States. And there's Jack, he's going to
be a university president; and there's Bobby (tapping his nose in
a cunning manner), he's the lawyer." (15)
Why the British killed Kennedy
When John F. Kennedy became President of the United States in 1960,
it is reported that Andre Meyer of Lazard Brothers Ltd. went around
Europe introducing himself as "the real President." Whether the
story is true or not, it is the case that the Court of St. James had
at least temporarily seized control of the Oval Office. So had
organized crime. The Kennedy machine moved into the Justice
Department, specifically Robert Kennedy's Organized Crime Strike
Force.
The Organized Crime Drive, as it was called. was a highly
irregular unit, even according to its nominal chief, Ed Silberling.
The section was in fact run by non-lawyer Walter Sheridan, a former
FBI man who had worked as Chief of the Counterintelligence Section,
Special Operations Division, Office of Security, and the National
Security Agency. It was Sheridan who had the ear of Robert Kennedy,
often as much as three times a day. (16)
According to Victor Navasky's Kennedy Justice, the Sheridan crew,
"had free access to the files of the McClellan Committee. It was in
touch with grand juries throughout the country. It had an undercover
air of mystery about it. Its modus operandi was cloak and dagger... Its relations with the FBI were highly irregular in that it
received little or no cooperation from the top, yet Sheridan, an
ex-FBI man, had a degree of line cooperation in the field that was,
in some respects, unparalleled. He actually coordinated FBI agents
with his own men told them where to go when, and they went.
"Unlike every other unit of the Justice Department, which is
organized around subject areas of responsibility," reports Navasky,
"the Sheridan unit's raison d'etre seemed to be not a subject area
but a target: Jimmy Hoffa." (17)
If Kennedy himself was obsessed
with getting Hoffa, the machine behind him found the campaign a
convenient ruse for three reasons. First, it badly damaged the
biggest and strongest trade union in the country, which had
consistently used its power to press for industrial growth. Second,
the publicity it engendered was a good diversion. And third, it was
a good cover for going after local Mafiosi who might object to a
tightened drug syndicate and the rise of the new black mafia to
service the cities. The fanfare around the Valachi revelations
served the same
purpose.
A look at the ensuing careers of the Kennedy crime fighters
underlines
the point.
-
Henry Peterson of the Organized Crime and Racketeering
Division joined Max Jacobs's Emprise Corporation, a money-laundering
outfit examined in Section 4.
-
His boss William Hundley and Robert Peloquin of the Criminal Division left Justice, formed their own law
firm, and now sit on the board of International Intelligence
(Intertel), Meyer Lansky's crime clearinghouse (see Section 3).
-
Stanley Mills, head of the Kennedy Anti-Trust Division, became
general counsel for Max Jacobs's Sportsystems.
-
William O. Bittman,
prosecutor for the Justice Department
against Hoffa, joined the board of Sportsystems.
-
Daniel Holloman and
Thomas Kennedy of the Organized Crime Division joined the same
board.
-
Horace Webb of the department's Public Informational
Services Division is the public relations man for Sportsystems.
-
Thomas J. Mekeon, member of the Organized Crime Strike Force in
Detroit, is assistant general counsel and vice-president of
Intertel.
While Sheridan's "Terrible Twenty" burned the small fry,
Meyer Lansky and Max Jacobs went untouched. Lansky's biographer,
Hank Messick, could even report that,
"Lansky could deplore the loss
of Newport and Hot Springs, but the attack on LaCosa Nostra caused
him no loss of sleep. Instead, from 1960 to1965, he succeeded in keeping his name completely out of the
newspapers. That five-year period was for Lansky one of the most
active, and profitable, eras he had known." (18)
DOUBLE-CROSS
Meanwhile, in the White House John Kennedy was being advised by the
higher echelons of the same network that had invaded the Justice
Department. Almost simultaneously with Kennedy's inauguration,
Harold Macmillan moved into 10 Downing Street. Macmillan was himself
part of the extended Devonshire family into which Kennedy's sister
Kathleen had married. His Canada-based pulp and paper company,
MacMillan Bloedel, as noted, was a component of the British Columbia
drug-smuggling apparat. (19)
Macmillan's newly appointed ambassador to the United States, David Ormsby-Gore (later Lord Harlech), was also a distant inlaw of the
President through the Cecil family. Ormsby-Gore had been a close
friend of JFK's since their days together at the London School of
Economics. The British ambassador had daily access to the President.
He was the fourth member of Kennedy's inner policy-making core,
"ExComm," along with Robert Kennedy and the Anglophile National
Security advisor McGeorge Bundy (also a Harvard protιgι of the Round
Table's William Yandell Elliott). During the Cuban Missile Crisis,
documents show that Ormsby-Gore and Macmillan made most of the
minute-to-minute decisions at the point that the United States was
on the brink of nuclear war.
Best estimates have it that up through the winter of 1962-63,
British directives to the White House, transmitted through
Ormsby-Gore, were carried out with only minor points of difference.
That special relationship began to show signs of deterioration
during early 1963. Policy differences between the Kennedy and the
Macmillan governments began to surface, as the U.S. President took a
series of initiatives toward detente with the Soviet Union and Cuba.
(20)
The diaries of Macmillan testify that Kennedy had to be intensely
arm twisted at the famous Nassau summit in spring 1963 before he
would agree to turn over the Polaris missile program
to the British. (21) That move precipitated French President Charles
de Gaulle's vehement denunciation of the Anglo-American violation of
the Atlantic Charter, followed by France's withdrawal from NATO.
A
combination of factors was operating on Kennedy. Foremost among them
was Papa Joe. Individuals, interviewed by the authors, who knew Joe
Kennedy intimately during the 1920s report that he cherished a deep
hatred for the British and the Anglophile society of Boston that had
humiliated him; however, the same individuals report, Kennedy had
made a decision that if he was going to make it, he would have to
prove his usefulness to the British. With John Kennedy's accession
to the Presidency, Joe Kennedy's dream of using the British to build
a sufficient power base for himself was a reality.
No astute
political observer during the 1960s could ignore the possibility of
a "Kennedy dynasty" installed in the White House for several
uninterrupted decades. During the spring and summer months of 1963,
JFK began reversing previous policies. Plans were being prepared to
devolve U.S. presence in Southeast Asia. Detente discussions were
opened up with the Soviet Union; in the weeks prior to his
assassination, Kennedy even sent a secret emissary to Havana to open
up talks with Fidel Castro. The Kennedys were showing signs of
bucking the machine that had put them in power.
The British had him
killed.
To use the language of a Grade-B movie, "Kennedy tried to
double-cross the syndicate and he got iced." It is reported by
Kennedy biographer Koskoff that upon JFK's death, Lord Beaverbrook
(whom we shall encounter in regard to the International
Assassination Bureau) sent a scarcely veiled warning to Joe Kennedy:
Perhaps he (Joe Kennedyed.) was a little comforted by the kind note
that his dear friend Lord Beaverbrook sent to Rose: "May Joe find
solace. . . in the assurance that Bobby will repeat Jack's career."
(22)
When Robert Kennedy refused to back off from the track of his
brother's assassins and began to prepare his own campaign for
the Presidency, he too was assassinated on British orders.
Playing by the rules of the game is Ted Kennedy's insurance
policy.
That's what makes him the foremost proponent of dope
decriminalization; that's what makes him today's frontrunner
for organized crime; that's what makes him the collaborator of
the assassins of his brothers.
Back to Contents
|