Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

Robert Vesco - Wikipedia

Among the charges that emerged during the 1970s, the SEC accused Vesco of embezzling $220 million from four different IOS funds. During 1973, Robert Vesco fled to Costa Rica. Shortly before his departure, hoping to end the SEC en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ve…

investigation into his activities, Vesco routed substantial contributions to Richard Nixon through Nixon's nephew Donald A. Nixon.

Donald Anthony Nixon (born December 12, 1946) is a businessman. He is the nephew of former President Richard Nixon and the son of Richard Nixon's

brother, Donald Nixon and Clara Jane Lemke.

In the early 1970s, Donald Nixon was encouraged by his family to undertake a position in finance with financier Robert Vesco in Europe. While he lived in Geneva, he proved himself and over time, he and Vesco, the chairman of a

substantial organization owning banks, mutual funds, real estate and various global entities, developed a relationship and Nixon became Vesco's live-in assistant; later conducting business globally with businesses and governments.

Francis Donald Nixon (November 23, 1914 –

June 27, 1987) was a younger brother of United States President Richard Nixon.

In January 1957 Howard Hughes lent Francis Nixon $205,000 to bail out his "Nixon's" drive-in restaurant in Whittier, California.
The restaurant went bankrupt less than a year later. Questions about

whether this was a political favor dogged Richard Nixon during his campaign for president and later when he sought the governorship of California.

One of the many speculated motives for the 1972 Watergate burglary that ultimately led to Richard Nixon's resignation was a desire

to find proof that the then-Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O'Brien was also secretly working for Hughes. John H. Meier, one of Hughes' former business advisors, in collaboration with former vice president Hubert Humphrey and others, was using Donald Nixon to feed

misinformation to his brother, the President.

Larry O’Brien served as Postmaster General in the cabinet of President Lyndon Johnson and chair of the Democratic National Committee. He also served as commissioner of the National Basketball Association from 1975 to 1984. The NBA

Championship Trophy is named after him.

In 1960, O’Brein was appointed by President-elect Kennedy to recruit staff for his administration and subsequently took on the job 1961 as the special assistant to the president for congressional relations and personnel. O'Brien also had

a major role in awarding patronage as one of President Kennedy's inner circle of trusted advisers (known in Washington as the "Irish Mafia".)

O'Brien accompanied President Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy on their trip to Texas in November 1963 and was riding in the motorcade in

Dallas. As such he was an eyewitness to the assassination of President Kennedy. After the president was declared dead, O'Brien accompanied the coffin and Jackie Kennedy back to Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas. While aboard Air Force One, President Johnson called for

O'Brien and Kenny O'Donnell, asking both of them to stay on and work with him in the new administration.

Then in 1968 after Johnson refused to seek the Democratic nomination again, O'Brien unsurprisingly reclaimed a position as Senator Robert F. Kennedy's campaign advisor. After

RFK was assassinated, Vice President Hubert Humphrey hired O'Brien to serve as his national presidential campaign director.

O'Brien was involved in a counter-intelligence type operation to confuse and traumatize Richard Nixon surrounding "business dealings" between the

president's brother, Donald, and Howard Hughes. Apparently John H. Meier, a former business advisor to Hughes, either was recruited or volunteered to collaborate with the Democratic National Committee to agitate Donald Nixon into feeding misinformation to the president.

Meier,

by most accounts, told Donald that he was sure the Democrats had the ace-card in the 1972 election since O'Brien and the committee had information on the Nixon's illicit dealings with Hughes.

John H. Meier (born September 28, 1933) is an American financier and business

consultant now living in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is noted for his involvement with Howard Hughes, his behind-the-scenes involvement in events that precipitated President Richard M. Nixon's resignation, and his work in the environment.

In 1959, Meier was hired in

the computer division at Hughes Aircraft and two years later transferred to Hughes Dynamics, a Los Angeles-based information management subsidiary of the Hughes Tool Company."

Meier was the first person to reveal everything from the Hughes Organization, and Robert Maheu's,

involvement with the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, to Thane Cesar's connection to Jack Hooper.

The Hughes Organization supplied the CIA with a "magic box", which is a "cover" organization used by a nation's spy apparatus which allows its inhabitants to hide anything they

possess or do, regardless of the importance of what is being done or hidden.

Richard Nixon's brother, Donald Nixon, in his sworn testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee, stated that John Meier was the #2 man in the Hughes Organization. This was at a time that Hughes was the

wealthiest man in the world.

Although Robert Maheu, a known Hughes confidante, who admitted he himself had never actually met Hughes, Meier was associated with Howard Hughes for 15 years and was one of the few in the reclusive Hughes's inner circle to have met with him

regularly.

Meier alleged that Hughes was behind some of the controversy in a complex scheme he hatched in order to convince Moe Dalitz to sell the Stardust Casino.

Robert Aime Maheu (October 30, 1917 – August 4, 2008) was an American businessman and lawyer, who worked for the

FBI and CIA, and as the chief executive of Nevada operations for the industrialist Howard Hughes.

In 1941, during his law studies at Georgetown, Maheu was hired by the FBI and worked as a counter-intelligence officer in Europe during World War II. He left the FBI in 1947 and

opened Robert A. Maheu and Associates, a private detective firm in Washington, DC.

Maheu's contract with the Hughes company started in 1955, after Howard Hughes hired him to investigate an alleged suitor of his fiancé Jean Peters.

Jean Peters went to college at the

University of Michigan and later Ohio State University, where she studied to become a teacher and majored in literature.

Before its release, she was cast in Viva Zapata! (1952) opposite Marlon Brando.

Also in 1951, Peters had her first collaboration with Marilyn Monroe, when

they had secondary roles in As Young as You Feel.

The decorated soldier and actor, Audie Murphy, met Peters when both were students at the Actors Lab. They had a very warm affair in 1946, before she met Howard Hughes. In 1954, Peters married Texas oilman Stuart Cramer.

In 1957,

after her divorce from Cramer, Peters married Howard Hughes. Soon after that, he retreated from public view and, reportedly, started becoming an eccentric recluse.

Although Maheu was for years a close confidant of Howard Hughes, he never met Hughes face-to-face, as they worked

via memo and telephone. He was dismissed in 1970. As part of the power struggle with Frank William Gay, Hughes “Mormon Mafia” chief, to get rid of Maheu, Hughes wrote a manuscript letter to Chester Davis and Bill Gay which was published in facsimile by Life in January 1971; this

publication provided Clifford Irving with a sample of Hughes' handwriting which he later used to attempt to forge Hughes' autobiography.

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Bill Gay was a student at University of California, Los Angeles when he was hired by Hughes. He was responsible

for the creation of Hughes Dynamics, a short-lived computer services subsidiary of Hughes Tool in the early 1960s. A member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Gay put together the so-called "Mormon Mafia" that comprised Hughes's inner circle in his later life.

Appointed by the Delaware Court of Chancery, Gay served as trustee of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 1984 until his retirement in 2006.

His son is Robert C. Gay, a co-founder and CEO of Huntsman Gay Global Capital, and before that managing director of Bain Capital for

sixteen years.

HGGC was originally co-founded as H&G Capital Partners by Messrs. Benson, Lawson and Young alongside Jon M. Huntsman and Robert C. Gay. Prior to co-founding H&G Capital Partners, Huntsman founded Huntsman Chemical Corporation, the largest manufacturer of

polystyrene in the United States. Gay was a long-time Bain Capital managing director, who gained additional prominence due to his connection to former Bain Capital alumnus and presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

In 1961, Jon Huntsman Sr. was employed by Olson Brothers, Inc., an

egg-producing company in Los Angeles.

His leadership was key in developing the first plastic egg carton. In 1965 he established contact with the polystyrene operations of the Dow Chemical Company. In 1967 he became president of a joint venture between Olson Brothers, Inc., and

Dow Chemical, the Dolco Packaging Corporation.

Seeing an opportunity to create packaging for the emerging fast-food industry, Huntsman left Dolco in 1970 to form the Huntsman Container Corporation with his brother, Alonzo Blaine Jr. (1936–2012), and others in Fullerton,

California.

In 1974, Huntsman Container Corporation created the "clamshell" container for McDonald's Big Mac.

Through his father, Huntsman Sr. is the great-great-grandson of early LDS Church leader Parley P. Pratt.

While young Jon Huntsman Jr. was visiting the White House in

1971 during his father's service as special assistant to President Nixon, Henry Kissinger confided to the 11-year-old that he was secretly traveling to China.

Task Force 157 is the U.S. military's only network of undercover agents and spies operating abroad using commercial and

business "cover" for their espionage.

Task Force 157 was involved in some of the most sensitive intelligence missions of the 1970s. The unit's top secret communications channel, for example, was used to set up Henry A. Kissinger's secret 1971 visit to China.

The cover for the

task force is the Naval Administrative Services Command and Pierce Morgan Associates Inc., which operates as an international maritime consulting firm.

One contract employee for Task Force 157 from 1971-76 was Edwin P. Wilson, an ex-CIA agent. Wilson is currently under

investigation by the Justice Department for allegedly selling explosive devices and related material to the Libyan government. In addition, federal authorities are trying to determine if detonating devices made for Wilson were used in last year's bombing murder of former Chilean

Ambassador Oriando Letelier.

In 1975 Wilson approached the Director of Naval Intelligence, then Rear Adm. Bob by R. Inman, with an offer to set up a counterpart to Task Force 157.
In the words of one Pentagon official, Wilson "wanted a bag of money to set up another Task Force

157 that would do the things" that have been criticized by congressional investigators of the intelligence community.

Inman then began an inquiry into Task Force 157 operations.

At this time, Wilson set up another front company—World Marine, Inc.—to assist with his logistics

work.

Wilson continued to run the businesses he had built under the guidance of the CIA, the largest of which was Consultants International.

In 1974, President Gerald Ford appointed George H.W. Bush as the Chief of the Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China, and in

1976 Bush became the Director of Central Intelligence.

n the 1970s, Edwin P. Wilson became involved in dealings with Libya. Wilson claims that a high-ranking CIA official Theodore "Blond Ghost" Shackley asked him to go to Libya to keep an eye on Carlos the Jackal.

Wilson recruited a group of retired Green Berets—decorated Vietnam veteran Billy Waugh among them —to go to Libya and train its military and intelligence officers.

The most dramatic deal, and the one that brought Wilson to the attention of the U.S. government, was for some

twenty tons of military-grade C-4 plastic explosives. This was a massive quantity that was equal to the entire U.S. domestic stockpile.

A partner with Edwin P. Wilson in this company was another former CIA officer, Thomas G. Clines. Wilson also maintained that Major General

Richard V. Secord was also a "silent partner" in this company, though Secord denied this allegation. Nonetheless, Wilson, Clines and Theodore Shackley (another former CIA officer) were all working together with Secord in the summer of 1984 when Oliver North approached Secord to

ask for help in buying arms for the Contras, a group of armed rebels then trying to overturn the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

The original Safari Club charter was signed in 1976 by leaders and intelligence directors from the five

countries:
•France – Alexandre de Marenches, Director of the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), the external intelligence agency
•Saudi Arabia – Kamal Adham, Director of Intelligence Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah
•Egypt – General Kamal

Hassan Ali, Director of the Intelligence Mukhabarat
•Morocco – General Ahmed Dlimi, Director of Intelligence and commander of the Royal Moroccan Army
•Iran – General Nematollah Nassiri of SAVAK (Iranian Intelligence)

The Safari Club takes its name (reportedly de

Marenches' idea) after the exclusive resort in Kenya where the group first met in 1976. The club was operated by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi—also a friend of Adham's.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Khashoggi helped bring together Western companies and the Saudi Arabian

government, to satisfy its infrastructure and defense needs. Between 1970 and 1975, Lockheed paid Khashoggi $106 million in commissions. His commissions started at 2.5% and eventually rose to as much as 15%. Khashoggi "became for all practical purposes a marketing arm of

Lockheed.

A commercial pioneer, Adnan Khashogghi established companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein to handle his commissions as well as developing contacts with notables such as CIA officers James H. Critchfield and Kim Roosevelt and United States businessman Bebe Rebozo,

a close associate of U.S. President Richard Nixon.

Rebozo first met then-U.S. Representative Nixon in 1950 through Florida Representative George Smathers. Smathers had recommended Key Biscayne as a vacation destination to Nixon, who eventually established a residence there

which was later nicknamed the "Winter White House" by journalists. While Nixon was vacationing in Key Biscayne, Smathers had Rebozo take Nixon deep sea fishing. Rebozo and Nixon then started a friendship that endured 44 years.

According to Rebozo, the two men were swimming

together at Rebozo's home in June 1972 when Nixon was first informed of the Watergate Hotel break-in.

The Florida White House (or Winter White House) was an informal name for a compound in Key Biscayne, Florida, used by U.S. President Richard Nixon.

Nixon purchased the first of

his three waterfront homes, 500 Bay Lane, during 1969 from his former Senate colleague George Smathers of Florida. Nixon visited it at least 50 times while in office as President from 1969 to 1974.
Nixon's compound was close to the home of Charles "Bebe" Rebozo who resided at

490 Bay Lane and of industrialist Robert Abplanalp (inventor of the modern aerosol spray can valve). Bebe Rebozo, president/owner of the Key Biscayne Bank, was indicted for money-laundering a $100,000 donation from Howard Hughes to the Nixon election campaign.

Nixon and Rebozo

got bargain real estate prices from Donald Berg, a Mafia-associated Rebozo business partner. The Secret Service eventually advised Nixon to stop associating with Berg. The lender for one of Nixon's properties was Arthur Desser, who consorted with both Teamsters President

Jimmy Hoffa and mobster Meyer Lansky. Nixon and Rebozo were friends of James V. Crosby, the chairman of Resorts International, repeatedly associated with major mobsters, and Rebozo's Key Biscayne Bank was a suspected pipeline for Mafia money from Crosby's casino in The Bahamas.

Resorts International (RI) evolved from a CIA front--the Mary Carter Paint Company--set up in the 1950s by then-CIA director Allen Dulles and his close associate, New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, a leader of the "Rockefeller wing" of the GOP. While the company did in fact operate

a national paint store chain, its real purpose was to function as a covert CIA money-laundering operation.

Allen Dulles was simultaneously working for Harry Truman and Dewey during 1948 election.

While the company did in fact operate a national paint store chain, its real

purpose was to function as a covert CIA money-laundering operation and “paint houses”.

In 1958 and 1959 Dewey and several associates used CIA funds to buy a controlling interest in the Crosby-Miller Corporation (headed by Dewey friend James Crosby), which was then merged with

Mary Carter. The new concern laundered CIA money for the arming of the anti-Castro Cuban exiles and also launched lucrative gambling enterprises in the Caribbean where the CIA was active, having engaged the Meyer Lansky crime syndicate in plots to topple Fidel Castro.

JM WAVE was the Central Intelligence Agency station in Florida. Located south of Miami in a heavily wooded 1,571-acre tract. The numerous buildings were said to belong to Zenith Technological Enterprises.
After the Bay of Pigs disaster President John F. Kennedy created a

committee (SGA) charged with overthrowing Castro's government. The SGA, chaired by Robert F. Kennedy (Attorney General), included John McCone (CIA Director), McGeorge Bundy (National Security Adviser), Alexis Johnson (State Department), Roswell Gilpatric (Defence Department),

General Lyman Lemnitzer (Joint Chiefs of Staff) and General Maxwell Taylor. Although not officially members, Dean Rusk (Secretary of State) and Robert S. McNamara (Secretary of Defence) also attending meetings.

At a meeting of this committee at the White House on 4th November,

1961, it was decided to call this covert action program for sabotage and subversion against Cuba, Operation Mongoose. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also decided that General Edward Lansdale (Staff Member of the President's Committee on Military Assistance) should be placed

in charge of the operation.
The CIA JM WAVE station in Miami served as operational headquarters for Operation Mongoose. The head of the station was Ted Shackley and over the next few months became very involved in the attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. One of Lansdale's first

decisions was to appoint William Harvey as head of Task Force W.

Operation 40 was the code name for a Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored counterintelligence group composed of Cuban exiles. The group was formed to seize control of the Cuban government after the Bay of Pigs

Invasion. Operation 40 continued to operate unofficially until disbanded in 1970 due to allegations that an aircraft that was carrying cocaine and heroin in support of the group crashed in California.

Operation 40 was approved by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in March 1960,

after the January 1959 Cuban Revolution.

The group was presided over by then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon and included Admiral Arleigh Burke, Livingston Merchant of the State Department, National Security Adviser Gordon Gray, and Allen Dulles.

In October 1960, they realize

that this project has failed, and that is when Brigade 2506" was created, a CIA-sponsored group made up of 1,511 Cuban exiles who fought in the April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion.

In the 1960 presidential election, JFK narrowly defeated Republican opponent Richard Nixon, who was

the incumbent vice president.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born outside Boston in Brookline, Massachusetts on May 29, 1917, at 83 Beals Street, to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a businessman and politician, and Rose Kennedy (née Fitzgerald).

Joe Kennedy formed alliances with several

other Irish-Catholic investors, including Charles E. Mitchell, Michael J. Meehan, and Bernard Smith. He helped establish a "stock pool" to control trading in the stock of glassmaker Libbey-Owens-Ford.

The company's heritage dates back to 1818 with the founding of New England

Glass Company of East Cambridge, Massachusetts, which relocated to Toledo, Ohio, and in 1892 changed its name to Libbey Glass Company under the direction of Edward Drummond Libbey. In parallel, Michael Owens and associates completed work in 1902 on the first fully functioning

automatic bottle-blowing machine.

In 1928, Libbey-Owens was the first company to produce automotive laminated safety glass and won a contract to supply the Ford Motor Company with windshields for the Model A.

During the Great Depression, Joe Kennedy vastly increased his fortune

by investing most of his money in real estate. In 1929, Kennedy's fortune was estimated to be $4 million. By 1935, his wealth had increased to $180 million.

Kennedy made huge profits from reorganizing and refinancing several Hollywood film studios. Film production in the U.S.

was much more decentralized than it is today, with many different movie studios producing film product.

In October 1928, Kennedy formally merged his film companies FBO and KAO to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO).

Kennedy tried to buy the Pantages Theatre chain, which had 63

profitable theaters, Kennedy made an offer of $8 million. It was declined. He then stopped distributing his movies to Pantages. Still, Alexander Pantages declined to sell. However, when Pantages was later charged and tried for rape, his reputation took a battering, and he

accepted Kennedy's revised offer of $3.5 million. Pantages, who claimed that Kennedy had "set him up", was later found not guilty at a second trial. The girl who had accused Pantages of rape, Eunice Pringle, confessed on her deathbed that Kennedy was the mastermind of the plot

to frame Pantages.

Newspaper coverage of the trial, particularly by William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner, was antagonistic towards the Greek-accented Pantages, while portraying Pringle as the innocent victim.

In countless stories in the Examiner from the moment the

case broke in the newspaper on Saturday, August 10, 1929, until the end of the trial, Pantages was portrayed as variously alone, aloof, cold, emotionless, effete, and European, while the American-born Pringle was portrayed as "the sweetest 17 since Clara Bow".

Alexander Pantages
used to call himself "King Greek", perhaps in emulation of Louis B. Mayer's "Super Jew".

King Greek left San Francisco in 1897, and made his way to Canada's Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush, ending up in the mining boom-town of Dawson City.
In

his time in the bitter cold of Dawson City, he worked as a waiter and janitor, but always restless and allergic to manual labor, he became business partner (and lover) to the saloon dancer and brothel-keeper 'Kitty' Rockwell, operating a small, but successful vaudeville and

burlesque theatre, the Orpheum.

The intense love affair between Pantages and Rockwell became the stuff of legend in the Yukon, although streaks of jealousy ensured that they found more stability in their professional lives than in their personal ones. They were not above

swindling unsuspecting miners, and this dubious quality eventually infected their own relationship.

In 1902, Pantages left Dawson City and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he opened the Crystal Theater, a short-form vaudeville and motion picture house of his own.

'Kitty' Rockwell filed a breach-of-promise-to-marry lawsuit against him as 'Klondike Kate' that was settled out of court; she later wrote that he had stolen from her the money with which he purchased the Crystal.

Around 1920, Pantages entered into partnership with the motion

picture distributor Famous Players, a subsidiary of film producer Paramount Pictures, and further expanded his "combo" houses, designed to exhibit films as well as staging live vaudeville, to new sites in the western U.S.

The Famous Players Film Company was a film company

founded in 1912 by Adolph Zukor in partnership with the Frohman brothers, powerful New York City theatre impresarios.

Adolph Zukor (January 7, 1873 – June 10, 1976) was a Hungarian-American film producer best known as one of the three founders of Paramount Pictures.

Born to a Jewish family from Sandusky, Ohio, the Frohman brothers developed a system of touring theatrical companies that would perform in various parts of the United States.

Charles Frohman became the representative partner in the Theatrical Syndicate which created a monopoly

in 1896 that controlled almost every aspect of theatre contracts and bookings for the next twenty years.

In 1915 the brothers created Frohman Amusement Corp to be used primarily as a vehicle to make motion pictures from theatrical plays on which they held the rights. A few

months after the film company was set up, Charles Frohman died in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.

William L. Sherill was a producer in the early film industry of the United States. He served as president of the Frohman Amusement Company. A 1918 issue of Theatre Magazine

reported he was the single most important figure among independent producers of motion pictures.

Sherrill was involved in film industry discussions about hiring extras directly rather than via agents. He was also at meetings of the National Association of the Motion Pictures

Industry seeking to have presidential candidates address censorship issues.

At the start of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in March 1933, Joe Kennedy and future Congressman James Roosevelt II founded Somerset Importers, an entity that acted as the exclusive American agent

for Haig & Haig Scotch, Gordon's Dry Gin and Dewar's Scotch.

Kennedy invested his profits from alcohol into residential and commercial real estate in New York, the Le Pavillon restaurant, and the Hialeah Park Race Track in Hialeah, Florida. In addition, Kennedy purchased

spirits-importation rights from Schenley Industries, a firm in Canada. His most important purchase was the largest privately owned building in the country, Chicago's Merchandise Mart.

Schenley Products Company was organized in the 1920s by Lewis Rosenstiel. The company bought

numerous distillers, including one in Schenley, Pennsylvania, and acquired a license to produce medicinal whisky.

Lewis "Lew" Solon Rosenstiel (July 21, 1891 – January 21, 1976) was the founder of Schenley Industries, an American liquor company, and a philanthropist. The

Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award is named after him and the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami is named after him and his wife.

In 1963, Gar Wood sold to a Fisher Island development group that included local Key Biscayne millionaire

Bebe Rebozo, Miami native and United States Senator George Smathers and then former U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, who had promised to leave politics.

The Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) of the University of Miami maintained the Comparative

Sedimentology Laboratory on Fisher Island from 1972 to 1990 under the leadership of Robert Ginsburg.

Meyer Lansky is credited with having "controlled" compromising pictures of a sexual nature featuring former FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover with his longtime aide, Clyde Tolson. In

his book, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, biographer Anthony Summers cites multiple primary sources regarding Lansky's use of blackmail to gain influence with politicians, policemen and judges. One such stage for the acquisition of blackmail

materials were orgies held by late attorney and Lansky protégé, Roy Cohn, and liquor magnate, Lewis Rosenstiel, who had lasting ties with the Mafia from his bootleg operations during Prohibition.

In 1967 and 1968 Mary Carter changed its name to Resorts International and

expanded. Several principal investors provided the assets:

* Meyer Lansky, the "chairman of the board" of the Jewish crime syndicate;

* David Rockefeller, who provided his family's clout with the CIA and in global banking to assist;

* The Investors Overseas Service, then

the world's largest "flight-capital" conglomerate, headed by notorious Bernard Cornfeld who was no more than a frontman for two behind-the-scenes principals:

* Tibor Rosenbaum, the Mossad's Swiss-based arms procurer, who headed the Banque De Credit Internationale of Geneva,

the Lansky syndicate's chief European money launderer;

* Baron Edmond de Rothschild of the infamous banking family and a personal business partner of Rosenbaum in many Mossad-related ventures; and

* William Mellon Hitchcock, an heir to the Mellon dynasty--one of America's

largest family fortunes which has collaborated closely with the CIA for years. In 1970 the mob moved to expand legalized gambling on U.S. soil. Mob chief Lansky called a high-level syndicate conference where the fading resort of Atlantic City was pinpointed as their new target.

Prior to this, Lansky-controlled Nevada was the only outpost of legal gambling in the United States. RI's resources were used to finance the lobbying campaign that brought legalized gambling to Atlantic City and RI quickly moved in.

In 1987 upon the death of RI's nominal

head--CIA frontman James Crosby--up-and-coming New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump stepped in and bought Crosby's RI holdings.

Lewis Rosenstiel was married five times: to Dorothy Heller, Leonore Cohn (niece of Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures), Louise Rosenstiel,

Susan Kaufman and Blanka Wdowiak.

Schenley became one of the largest liquor companies in the United States. It was one of the "Big Four", which dominated liquor sales, and included Seagram, National Distillers, and Hiram Walker. Rosenstiel retired from Schenley in 1968 and it

was acquired by Israeli financier Meshulam Riklis. The company was sold to Guinness in 1987.

Rosenstiel was a friend of attorney Roy Cohn, and together they formed the organization American Jewish League Against Communism. Cohn was eventually disbarred based on his attempt to

fraudulently name himself co-executor of Rosenstiel's will by forcing a dying, semicomatose Rosenstiel to sign a codicil that Cohn falsely claimed was related to Rosenstiel's divorce. The incident happened in 1975, and Cohn was disbarred shortly before his death in 1986.

Rosenstiel was also friends with Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, and was the primary contributor to the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation.

Gene Pope II attended Horace Mann, an exclusive boys' school in the Bronx where his best friends were Roy Cohn, the

lawyer who rose to prominence as a handmaiden to Senator Joe McCarthy during the 1950s and S.I. Newhouse, the scion of Conde Nast Magazines. 

Generoso Pope Sr acted as a mentor to Cohn who admired his 'magnetic personality.' In fact Cohn credits Pope Sr for his very first foray

into the politics of 'quid pro quo' favor trading. 'I learned an awful lot about practical politics,' he said on the tape. 

Frank Costello and Generoso Sr. met as teenagers shortly after Generoso immigrated to the United States when he was 15. Costello was the boss of the

Luciano crime family’s vast illicit empire that brought him enormous wealth.

Frank Costello, another famous Mafioso leader and Prohibition-era New York gangster, got in on the run running act, too. Born Francesco Catiglia in Calabria, Italy, Costello joined Bill Dwyer's

West Side smuggling syndicate in the early 1920s. When Dwyer was convicted and jailed in the mid-1920s, Costello and Joseph Reinfeld (the latter operating a bootleg gang out of Northern New Jersey with Abner “Longy” Zwillman), took over the operation.

Abner "Longie" Zwillman (July 27, 1904 – February 26, 1959) was a Jewish-American mobster who was based primarily in North Jersey. He was a long time friend and associate of mobsters Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. Zwillman's criminal organization was a part of the National

Crime Syndicate.

Zwillman dated actress Jean Harlow at one time and got her a two-picture deal at Columbia Pictures by giving a huge cash loan to studio head Harry Cohn.

Harry Cohn had a long-standing friendship with Chicago mobster John Roselli, and New Jersey mob boss Abner

Zwillman was the source of the loan that allowed Cohn to buy out his partner Brandt.

Cohn’s brothers all worked at Columbia. As well as co-founder Jack, the eldest brother Maxwell was a shorts subject producer and Nathan was the New York division manager. Cohn's nephew, Ralph,

one of Jack Cohn's three sons, founded Screen Gems. Another of Jack's sons, Robert, was also a Columbia executive. Maxwell's daughter was Leonore "Lee" Cohn Annenberg, the wife of billionaire publishing magnate Walter Annenberg of Philadelphia.

In 1946, Leonore married Lewis Rosenstiel, the multimillionaire founder of the Schenley liquor distillery, and they had a daughter named Elizabeth; that marriage, too, ended in divorce.

She and Walter Annenberg, then editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, met in 1950 at a party

in Florida and the two were married the following year.

Walter Annenberg died on October 1, 2002, aged 94. Lee Annenberg succeeded her husband as chairman and president of the Annenberg Foundation.

Some of the Foundation's core initiatives are the Annenberg/Corporation for

Public Broadcasting (CPB) project (now Annenberg Learner), which funds many educational television shows broadcast on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) public television in the United States.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created on November 7, 1967, when U.S.

president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The new organization initially collaborated with the National Educational Television network—which would be replaced by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Jack Joseph Valenti (September 5, 1921 – April

26, 2007) was an American political advisor and lobbyist who served as a Special Assistant to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson. He was also the longtime president of the Motion Picture Association of America. During his 38-year tenure in the MPAA, he created the MPAA film rating

system, and was generally regarded as one of the most influential pro-copyright lobbyists in the world.

After earning an M.B.A. from Harvard University in 1948, Valenti went to work for Humble Oil in its advertising department.

In 1966, Valenti, at the insistence of Universal

Studios chief Lew Wasserman and with Johnson's consent, resigned his White House commission and became president of the Motion Picture Association of America. With Valenti's arrival in Hollywood, the pair were lifelong allies, and together orchestrated and controlled how

Hollywood would conduct business for the next several decades.

In 1998, Valenti lobbied for the controversial Digital Millennium Copyright Act, arguing that copyright infringement via the Internet would severely damage the record and movie industries.

By 1947, just after

Al Capone died, and still with the help of his alliance with the underworld, Wasserman was instrumental in helping Reagan to become president of the Screen Actors Guild, which kicked-off Reagan's rise to power. Reagan allowed MCA to work both as a producer as well as an agent,

which enabled the Mafia to earn a huge income.

In October 1947, the members of a list of suspected communists working in the Hollywood film industry were summoned to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), which was investigating Communist influence

in the Hollywood labor unions. Ten of those summoned, dubbed the "Hollywood Ten", refused to cooperate, and were charged with contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison.

The president of SAG – future United States President Ronald Reagan – also known to the FBI as

Confidential Informant "T-10", testified before the committee but never publicly named names.

During the height of what is now referred to as McCarthyism, the Screen Writers Guild gave the studios the right to omit from the screen the name of any individual who had failed to

clear his name before Congress.

At this time, J. Edgar Hoover formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO actions included planting forged documents to create the suspicion that a key person was an FBI informer, spreading rumors through

anonymous letters, leaking information to the press, calling for IRS audits, and the like. The COINTELPRO program remained in operation until 1971.

In March 1950, McCarthy had initiated a series of investigations into potential infiltration of the Central Intelligence Agency

(CIA) by communist/paperclippers agents and came up with a list of security risks that matched one previously compiled by the Agency itself. At the request of CIA director Allen Dulles, President Eisenhower demanded that McCarthy discontinue issuing subpoenas against the CIA.

McCarthy headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1953 and 1954, and during that time, used it for a number of his communist-hunting investigations. McCarthy first examined allegations of communist influence in the Voice of America, and then turned to the

overseas library program of the State Department.

Blinken Open Society Archives (abbreviated as Blinken OSA) was founded by George Soros in 1995, and opened in 1996 as a department of the at the Central European University. Originally called simply Open Society Archives (OSA),

in 2015 it was renamed Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives.

The original core of Blinken OSA’s holdings is the former archives of the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, previously based in Munich and New York.

Radio Free Europe was created and grew in

its early years through the efforts of the National Committee for a Free Europe (NCFE), an anti-communist CIA front organization that was formed by Allen Dulles in New York City in 1949.

The Office of War Information, when organized in the middle of 1942, officially took over

Voice Of America’s operations.

VOA reached an agreement with the British Broadcasting Corporation to share medium-wave transmitters in Britain, and expanded into Tunis in North Africa and Palermo and Bari, Italy, as the Allies captured these territories.

Congress feared an

American propaganda machine that could resemble Joseph Goebbels’ operation in Nazi Germany. Third, previous attempts at propaganda under the Committee on Public Information/Creel Committee during WWI were viewed as a failure.

But in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the

need for coordinated and properly disseminated wartime information from the military/administration to the public outweighed the fears associated with American propaganda. President Roosevelt entrusted the OWI to journalist and CBS newsman Elmer Davis, with the mission to take

“an active part in winning the war and in laying the foundations for a better postwar world”.

Davis was born in Aurora, Indiana, the son of a cashier for the First National Bank of Aurora. One of his first professional writing jobs was with the Indianapolis Star, a position he

held while attending Franklin College. A brilliant student, Davis received a Rhodes Scholarship to Queen's College, Oxford in 1910. His stay in England was cut short when his father fell ill and eventually died. Davis met his wife, Florence MacMillen, in England.

In August 1939,

Paul White, the news chief at CBS, asked Davis to fill in as a news analyst for H. V. Kaltenborn, who was off in Europe reporting on the increasingly hostile events. Davis became an instant success. Edward R. Murrow later commented that one reason he believed that Davis was

likeable was his Hoosier accent, which reminded people of a friendly neighbor.

Davis was a longstanding member of The Baker Street Irregulars, the literary society dedicated to keeping green the memory of Sherlock Holmes.

Few people were aware of SOE's existence. Those who

were part of it or liaised with it were sometimes referred to as the "Baker Street Irregulars", after the location of its London headquarters. It was also known as "Churchill's Secret Army" or the "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare". Its various branches, and sometimes the

organisation as a whole, were concealed for security purposes behind names such as the "Joint Technical Board" or the "Inter-Service Research Bureau", or fictitious branches of the Air Ministry, Admiralty or War Office.

New York City also had a branch office, formally titled

British Security Coordination, and headed by the Canadian businessman Sir William Stephenson. This office, located at Room 3603, 630 Fifth Avenue, Rockefeller Center, coordinated the work of SOE, SIS and MI5 with the American FBI and Office of Strategic Services.

Allen Dulles

was recruited to run the New York City office. His address was Room 3603, 630 Fifth Avenue. The address of British Security Coordination was Room 3603, 630 Fifth Avenue.