Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Comcast - Wikipedia

In 1963, Ralph J. Roberts in conjunction with his two business partners, Daniel Aaron and Julian A. Brodsky, purchased American Cable Systems as a corporate spin-off from its parent, Jerrold Electronics, for U.S. $500,000. At the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast

time, American Cable was a small cable operator in Tupelo, Mississippi, with five channels and 12,000 customers.

The company was re-incorporated in Pennsylvania in 1969, under the new name Comcast Corporation.

Ralph Roberts was born on March 13, 1920, in New York City. His

parents Robert Max Roberts (also known as Bob Roberts) and Sara Wahl were both Russian-Jewish immigrants who became wealthy in America through ownership of a number of pharmacies, the most notable of which was in the Biltmore Hotel.

The New York Biltmore Hotel was a luxury

hotel in New York City that opened in 1913. It was one of three palatial hotels built as part of the Terminal City development around Grand Central Terminal in Midtown Manhattan. The others were the Commodore Hotel (currently Grand Hyatt New York), and the Roosevelt Hotel.

The New York Biltmore was founded by Gustav Baumann, who purchased the lease from the New York State Realty and Terminal Company, a division of the New York Central Railroad.

The hotel had its own arrival station within the terminal, nicknamed "The Kissing Room," with elevator

access to the lobby. A private elevator served only the Presidential Suite. The Tea Room (a.k.a. Palm Court) echoed the design of the Main Concourse at the Terminal. On the 22nd floor of the hotel was the grand ballroom, called the Cascades; Bert Lown was the conductor in the

hotel's early years. Between the north and south towers was the Italian Garden, which overlooked Vanderbilt Avenue and Grand Central Terminal. In the winter months the garden was transformed into an ice skating rink. Henry Ford tried to broker a truce agreement to halt World War

I while headquartered at The Biltmore, 1915.

The New York Biltmore Hotel ceased operation when the building was gutted in 1981 by its then owners Paul Milstein and Seymour Milstein.

Eli M. Black (April 9, 1921 – February 3, 1975) was an American businessman. He controlled the

United Brands Company. His son Leon Black is a founding member of private equity firm Apollo Management.

After Black's death, Seymour Milstein and Paul Milstein bought into United Fruit.

Black was married to artist Shirley Lubell (sister of Oklahoma oil executive Benedict I.

Lubell and art dealer Grace Borgenicht Brandt).

In 1965, the family sold Bell Oil and Lubell formed a new oil production company, the Lubell Oil Company.

Allied Chemical Corporation sued Mid-Tex Development Company, Apollo Oil Company, Lubell Company, a partnership, and Bell

Oil Gas Company, to recover damages measured by the total of certain unpaid invoices on open account sales of gasoline and other peroleum products to Mid-Tex and Apollo. Prior to trial Lubell Company was voluntarily dismissed.

Allied Chemical Company and its Union of Texas

Petroleum Division; that Bell Oil Gas Company paid 70% Of the salary of Mr. Harry Jenkins who was an employee of Bell Oil Gas Company at the time he was also an officer of Mid-Tex Development Company; that Mr. Herbert Rothstein
did represent to Mr. J. W. Love in the May, 1962

long distance telephone conversation, Mr. Love then being Credit Manager for Texas Gas Corporation, that Bell Oil Gas Company would protect Texas Gas Corporation in return for its extending credit to Mid-Tex Development Company and thereby induced Texas Gas Corporation to

extend continued credit.

During World War I, Imperial Germany controlled much of the world's chemical production. This resulted in critical shortages of certain dyes, drugs and especially ammonia, a vital compound used to make fertilizers and explosives.

In 1920, publisher

Eugene Meyer and noted chemist William Ripley Nichols founded Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation in order to address this shortcoming in American industrial production. Allied was an amalgamation of five existing companies with a total capitalization of $175,000,000, including

Barrett Chemical Company (est. 1858), General Chemical Company (est. 1899), National Aniline & Chemical Company (est. 1917), Semet-Solvay Company (est. 1895), and the Solvay Process Company (est. 1881).. All manufacturing was consolidated in Buffalo, and much attention was given

to improving the processes hastily introduced during World War I.

In 1962, Allied bought Union Texas Natural Gas. Allied initially regarded Union as a vertical integration supplier of raw materials for its chemical products. However, CEO John T. Connor, secretary of commerce

under president Lyndon Johnson, sold many of Allied's unprofitable businesses in the 1970s and invested more heavily in oil and gas exploration. By 1979, Union Texas was generating 80% of Allied's revenue.

The Union Texas stake was acquired by an investor group comprised of the

New York investment firm Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company (KKR) and Union Texas's top management.

Raymond F. Kravis, was an Oklahoma oil man, philanthropist and father of Wall Street financier Henry R. Kravis.

Raymond rose to prominence and wealth as a business analyst and

broker who specialized in oil and natural gas.
Raymond Kravis and Associates opened in 1935 and counted Joseph P. Kennedy and Prescott Bush among its clients.

After working at various jobs in New York City's financial sector, Henry Kravis and his first cousin, George R. Roberts,

joined the staff of Bear Stearns. There, they worked under the corporate finance manager, Jerome Kohlberg, Jr.. They both became partners at Bear Stearns at very young ages, 30 and 31.

By 1976, tensions had built up between Bear Stearns and the trio of Kohlberg, Kravis and

Roberts leading to their departure and the formation of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts in that year.
Jeff Epstein joined Bear Stearns in 1976 as a low-level junior assistant to a floor trader. He swiftly moved up to become an options trader, working in the special products division,

and then advised the bank's wealthiest clients, such as Seagram president Edgar Bronfman, on tax mitigation strategies.

During this period, one of Epstein's clients was the Saudi Arabian businessman Adnan Khashoggi, who was the middleman in transferring American weapons

from Israel to Iran, as part of the Iran–Contra affair in the 1980s.
Leon Black stepped down as CEO and chairman of Apollo in 2021 after revelations that he paid the disgraced businessperson and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein $158 million for family office tax-related advice over

the period from 2012 to 2017.

In 1975, his father committed suicide by jumping out of the 44th floor of the Pan Am Building in New York City. It was later made public that, at the time, federal regulators were investigating allegations that United Fruit Co was bribing Honduran

government officials.

In February 1975, United Brands (UB) Chairman of the Board Eli Black walked out of a window on the 44th floor of th'e Pan-American building in New York City. Within two months of his mysterious death, Max Fisher was appointed acting chairman of the company,

and subsequently became its new Chairman of the Board. By 1975, Fisher and two his close associates, Carl Lindner of Cincinnati and Seymour Milstein of New York City, held a total of 48 percent of the stock of UB and its subsidiary companies.
Fisher's appointment was sponsored

by two individuals: Sol Linowitz and Donald R. Gant, a Goldman, Sachs partner and Henry Kissinger associate. The Car­ter adlministration's special envoy for Panama Canal treaty negotiations, Linowitz is an international policy adviser to Maritime Fruit Company, the Israeli

counter part to United Brands, and sits on the board of Marine Midrland Bank, which in 1979 merged with the Hong­ Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, long the central clearinghouse bank for the Golden Triangle Far Eastern heroin trade.
One of Fisher's first actions as board

chairman was to appoint Bert C. Reiss as Vice-President in charge of transportation. Reiss came from National Bulk Carriers Cmporation (NBC), a firm involved in shipping and construction throughout Latin America. NBC is owned by Daniel K. Ludwig, an associate of Meyer Lansky who,

was responsible for the harbor-dredging project that l ed to the building o f the scandal-ridden Paradise Island.

An equal share was simultaneously purchased by the Swiss-Israel Trade Bank, whose man­ aging director was Julius Klein. Closely linked to Swiss­ Israel Trade Bank

was the Banque de Credit Interna­tionale (BCI), implicated in the early-1960s Permindex assassination attempts against Charles de Gaulle as well as the murder of President John Kennedy. BCl Chair­man Tibor Rosenbaum was the Mossad's first Minister of Finance and Supply, and

BCl's manager Sylvain Ferdman, a Swiss national, was reported by Life maga­zine in 1967 to be a prominent bagman for Meyer Lansky. Permindex itself was overseen by Major Louis M. Bloomfield of Montreal, with whom Max Fisher worked directly in smuggling arms to the Haganah in

Palestine.

Fisher's early career was shaped by his association with such Detroit Purple Gang figures as Jack Rothberg, who helped him get started in the oil refinery business. In the late 1930s, Fisher was introduced to Julius Klein, a Chicago-based career military man and

unofficial liaison between the Purple Gang and the Jewish underground in Palestine, and later a consultant on the formation of the regular Israeli armed forces and the Mossad secret service.
Julius Klein was mentored by William Wiseman.

Sir William George Eden Wiseman, 10th

Baronet CB (1 February 1885 – 17 June 1962) was a British intelligence agent and banker. He was a general partner at American investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. from 1929 till 1960.

As a businessman, before the outbreak of the First World War he was Chairman in London of

Hendens Trust. From 1914, he served as a lieutenant colonel with the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry but, following injury, transferred to military intelligence. He was sent by Secret Intelligence Service director, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, to establish the agency's office in

New York, 'Section V'. As the head of the British intelligence mission in the United States, Wiseman was extensively involved in the counter-intelligence

Wiseman acted as a liaison between Woodrow Wilson and the British government. He and his associate General Julius Klein

were closely associated with Special Advisor to Wilson Colonel Edward M. House. He met with Wilson on a regular basis and on one notable occasion in August 1918 spent a week's vacation with the President and House. Wiseman was also a mentor to spy chief William Stephenson.

Sir

William Samuel Stephenson CC MC DFC, (23 January 1897 – 31 January 1989) was a Canadian soldier, airman, businessman, inventor, spymaster, and the senior representative of British Security Coordination (BSC) for the entire western hemisphere during World War II. He is best known

by his wartime intelligence codename Intrepid.

As head of the British Security Coordination, Stephenson handed over British scientific secrets to Franklin D. Roosevelt and relayed American secrets to Winston Churchill.

The BSC was registered by the State Department as a foreign

entity. It operated out of Room 3603 at Rockefeller Center and was officially known as the British Passport Control Office from which it had expanded. BSC acted as the administrative headquarters more than the operational one for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and the

Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was a channel for communications and liaison between US and British security and intelligence organisations.

Stephenson was soon a close adviser to Roosevelt, and suggested that he put Stephenson's good friend William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan

in charge of all U.S. intelligence services. Donovan founded the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which in 1947 would become the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).