Dillon Read & Co. Inc. & The Aristocracy of Stock Profits (Part 3 - Final: Chapters XIV -XVIII)
By Catherine Austin Fitts
This post contains chapters XIV - XVIII, the final chapters. Please find Part 1: Chapters I-VII here and Part 2: Chapters IX - XIII.
Total Chapters: XVIII. Originally published 2005.
XIV. Enforcement Terrorism — 1997
By the time Bill Clinton and Al Gore were sworn in for their second term in January 1997, the first wave of investigation and smear campaign had failed to do anything other than affirm that The Hamilton Securities Group was doing a great job for the government and the government team at FHA was doing a great job for citizens. Consequently, 1997 settled into the first of eight grinding years of enforcement terrorism — the inexhaustible resources and often invisible weaponry that the “Sheriff of Nottingham” uses to exhaust the target’s resources and to turn over investigation personnel, judges and false witnesses who failed to frame the target while throwing more “mud” up on the judicial, whisper campaign and media “wall” looking for anything that might stick.
To get a sense of the level of professionalism involved, the HUD OIG started to interview all of Hamilton’s employees and HUD staff, with many interviews starting off with questions regarding my personal sexual habits. This is a technique used to start false rumors and destroy businesses when the absence of evidence gives enforcement teams nothing to go on. As described by one member of the HUD OIG staff, when there is no evidence of any wrongdoing, the intimation of certain sex practices can still get an indictment from a Washington, DC grand jury. My feedback indicated that the Hamilton employees overwhelmed them with facts and did not fall prey to the smear tactics.
The turnover started at the top. Secretary of HUD Henry Cisneros left HUD to face charges tried before Judge Stanley Sporkin that he had lied to the FBI regarding how much money he had given his mistress. I had worked at HUD when the allegations regarding pedophilia at the White House and the so-called “Franklin Cover Up” had exploded onto the front page of the Washington Times. One of my deputies had taken me aside when I was being pressured by Kemp to do illegal funding awards to warn me that Kemp was involved in sexual activities this scandalous.[65] The notion of Cisneros facing criminal charges for legal financial transactions between consenting adults while Kemp had been chosen by the Republicans to run for Vice President seemed a bit upside down. When you considered that Hamilton was being run out for ensuring that the government got fair market value for its assets, poor people had an opportunity to earn money legally without government subsidies or engaging in narcotics trafficking and street crime and communities had access to government financial information, things made more sense.
If anything, the wave of investigatory assaults on Hamilton and the team at FHA seemed to be a pretext for Cuomo to take over the agency and convert it to the service of enforcement, gentrification and housing bubbles. Cuomo had many ties to the enforcement community. His father had been Governor of New York, his ex-wife Kerry (they were separated in 2003 and subsequently divorced) was a Kennedy, whose father Bobby Kennedy had been Attorney General and whose uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts, home of Harvard University, was a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
If Cuomo was going to rise to higher political office and help his close ally Al Gore become President, he needed to get credit for being a leader in re-engineering government. He needed to do it in a way that attracted the support of $500 billion–$1 trillion of annual money laundering flowing through the U.S. financial system. If the Bush sons as Governors could be expected to have Texas and Florida sewn up, that meant Al Gore, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats would need to win the money and votes in California and New York during the 2000 campaign. It turns out, this meant getting rid of the people who were leading authentic re-engineering. In April 1997, Hamilton received notice that our ongoing contract would be rebid — a process expected to take some time. In the meantime, Cuomo was competing with the HUD OIG to see who could integrate more revenue generating enforcement goals, War on Drug activities and DOJ partnerships into HUD programs and budgets faster.
Jamie Gorelick left the Department of Justice in January and then moved to Fannie Mae as a Vice Chair — a title held by Franklin Raines who had joined the Administration as head of the Office of Management & Budget (OMB) in the fall of 1996. Gorelick at Fannie Mae and Raines at OMB (later to return to Fannie Mae as Chairman) were to play leading roles with former Goldman Sachs partner Robert Rubin, Larry Summers and former (and subsequent) Arnold & Porter partner Jerry Hawke (whose son, Dan Hawke, was Ervin’s attorney) at the U.S. Treasury, Alan Greenspan at the Federal Reserve, and Andrew Cuomo at HUD in engineering the largest housing and mortgage bubble in history. They shared a mutual silence as $4 trillion went missing from HUD, DOD and other government accounts for which the U.S. Treasury and New York Federal Reserve Bank and its member banks — as depository for the U.S. Treasury — were responsible. [84] Gorelick would later leave Fannie Mae to become a partner of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, then led by Lloyd Cutler who had served as White House Counsel in the Clinton Administration after the death of Vince Foster. Cutler had been a board member of NHP, Harvard’s HUD property management company.
Given the efforts underway with numerous legislation and treaties designed to intentionally shift American jobs abroad, the simultaneous effort by the same governmental and financial system leadership to encourage Americans to take on increasing amounts of debt without warning them that their income was likely to fall brought new meaning to the old expressions “fraudulent inducement” and “predatory lending.” As a result, Americans lived beyond their means. With many using their home equity to maintain their standards of living, equity slowly and invisibly drained out of moderate and middle income communities into private hands through Fannie Mae and other large financial institutions that led the explosion in the mortgage and mortgage securities markets.
In October 1996, Jeffrey H. Smith rejoined Arnold and Porter after serving as General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency from May 1995 to September 1996. Director of the CIA John Deutch resigned in December 1996 after his embarrassing confrontation regarding CIA drug dealing in the now infamous town hall meeting in Los Angeles.[66] At the meeting, Deutch committed publicly to an investigation by the CIA’s Inspector General, Frederick Hitz, of the “Dark Alliance” allegations regarding CIA complicity in narcotics trafficking. The publication of this report in two volumes was to have an impact on the course of events in 1998.[67]For her service to the U.S. intelligence community, Jamie Gorelick received a Director of Central Intelligence Award from the CIA in 1997.[68]
The most significant turnover impacting The Hamilton Securities Group was behind closed doors. It was the transfer of the qui tam lawsuit (still filed in secret and unknown to us) from Judge Charles Richey who had warned that he was reluctant to give DOJ extensions of the seal (which kept the lawsuit secret) without evidence of wrongdoing. According to press reports, Judge Richey contracted a fast-acting cancer and died. Ervin’s qui tam was turned over in early 1997 to Judge Stanley Sporkin, the former General Counsel of the CIA when the Memorandum of Understanding between DOJ and CIA had been crafted.[69]
The dirty tricks employed by Judge Sporkin, DOJ, HUD OIG and Ervin’s attorneys throughout the qui tam have been described in more details in other articles. [70]
Highlights include:
Sporkin insisted that he had never received filings by The Hamilton Securities Group, even though my attorneys reported to me that they had a receipt of delivery signed by his office.
The allegations in the qui tam lawsuit tracked allegations made in a separate filing by Ervin against HUD that was filed before another judge in Federal District Court. In sealed hearings in the qui tam, DOJ attorneys for years argued that there was real merit to the allegations, which justified more time for them to investigate. In open court in the other action, DOJ attorneys took the position that the allegations were baseless. Hence, DOJ attorneys took opposite positions in the two courts — one open and one in secret — and Sporkin supported these actions. The transcripts show the DOJ attorneys reminded him that they could not consolidate the case under one judge because that would prevent them from taking opposite positions in the two cases.
The public document was used by HUD OIG and private parties to lobby Congress and the media to smear Hamilton. One reporter from the Washington Post told me that the HUD Inspector General had personally assured them that Hamilton was guilty of criminal violations and that John Ervin had mailed documents to them that could fill up half an office, floor to ceiling. She said that she believed that the Washington Post was only one of many publications and she only one of many, many reporters who had been the target of such a mailing campaign. She reported that in late 1997, Ervin had a staff of 17 people at Ervin & Associates working full time on the litigation.
Despite no evidence of any wrongdoing brought forward by Ervin as well as after multiple investigations and full access to all the parties and documents needed for years by the government, Sporkin nonetheless extended the seal (by law a qui tam authorizes only a 60 day investigation) into a four-year fishing expedition. This ended only when my colleagues and I launched a website in 2000 with the story of what was happening and made hundreds of supporting documents accessible through the Internet. When, after five years, transcripts of Sporkin’s hearings were unsealed, critical transcripts were mysteriously missing.
Under the qui tam statute, if the party accused of wrongdoing is subpoenaed, they are required to be informed that they are a target of a qui tam, even though the complaint is still under seal. In our case, DOJ and Sporkin took the position that DOJ could circumvent this disclosure provision by delegating the subpoena issuance to HUD OIG.
My favorite Sporkin quote was his retort from the bench when one of our attorneys pointed out that the law and a recent Supreme Court case clearly indicated that a filing we had made in Superior Court could not be moved over to Sporkin’s court and control in Federal District Court — that Sporkin had no legal right or basis to do what he was doing. Sporkin said something to the effect of “I disagree with the law and if you have a problem with that, take it up with Congress.”
When it comes to describing the treatment of The Hamilton Securities Group and myself by Judge Sporkin and DOJ and HUD attorneys, it is essential to underscore how lucky I have been. I had the knowledge and control to ensure that Hamilton was run according to very high standards. Hamilton had been blessed with a very strong team — starting with an outstanding Chief Financial Officer and excellent contract leadership for our work at HUD. I had an excellent reputation in the marketplace. I had personal wealth and family support to ensure that I had attorneys, food, clothing and shelter. With the presence of a strong legal team and resources over a long period, many private and public witnesses and honest officials in government and the judicial system were able to help — often at great risk to themselves. I had a wonderful church and tremendous spiritual support. And over time I connected with thousands of people around the world trying to illuminate corruption and build community. So I am alive, I am fully intact and I am not alone. That is more than I can say about the millions of children and innocent adults worldwide who have been destroyed, killed and incarcerated by the drug running, weapons trading and cover ups made possible with the help of the same type of extraordinary legal and harassment skills I faced. Among them was Gary Webb, who died in December 2004 from gunshot wounds to the head — ruled a suicide.
With Jamie Gorelick gone from DOJ, much of the work at DOJ continued under the jurisdiction of Frank Hunger, Al Gore’s brother-in-law, who was head of the civil division, and the new Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder. Holder had come over from the Washington, D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office which was the lead office with the day-to-day lead responsibility for DOJ on Ervin’s qui tam. Holder continued the policies of support for Operation Safe Home, the War on Drugs and prison privatization and helped arrange Marc Rich’s pardon at the end of the Clinton Administration before joining Covington & Burling. Frank Hunger was also to join Covington & Burling after helping run Al Gore’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2000.
Al Gore’s former chief of staff Jack Quinn resigned as White House Counsel at the end of 1996 and returned to his old law firm, Arnold & Porter. He was replaced by former (and later) Covington & Burling partner Charles Ruff in early 1997. (Quinn was later to return to visibility when he assisted the Gore campaign in 2000 and helped to engineer Arnold & Porter client Marc Rich’s White House pardon.) [71] Ruff, a former Watergate prosecutor and top Justice Department official was the Washington D.C. Corporation Counsel who had critical background to help the Clinton Administration engineer the federal takeover of many aspects of the Washington, D.C. government, including the local courts and prison system. The former Assistant U.S. Attorney, Judith Hetherton, who was leading the Hamilton investigation as HUD OIG General Counsel had worked for Ruff. Ruff, like Gorelick, had served as President of the D.C. Bar Association. After her efforts to frame The Hamilton Securities Group failed, Heatherton became staff to the Ethics Committee at the D.C. Bar Association.
The federal takeover of the District of Columbia began in August 1997 with the Balanced Budget Act and the National Capital Revitalization and Self Government Improvement Act of 1997. This was the beginning of a wave of gentrification in the District, with easy mortgage finance encouraging people to move back in from the suburbs or young people and immigrants to buy new homes. The law also provided for private prison capacity that would result in, among other things, a request for proposal by the Federal Bureau of Prisons in February 1998 that Cornell would win in 1999 for 1,000 people for ten years, or a total award of $342 million. In a significant leadership position was Senator Lauch Faircloth, a Republican retired hog farmer from RJR’s home base of North Carolina, who as chair of the DC appropriations subcommittee had taken a significant interest in demanding investigations of Hamilton Securities and the HUD loan sales. The Federal takeover was a pork fest for HUD real estate developers under Andrew Cuomo’s leadership. The flood of developers cashing in on HUD Hope VI projects, with Scott Nordheimer in a leading position was well underway.[72]
While the HUD Operation Safe Home swat team round ups continued to create the need for private prison capacity at taxpayer expense,[73] and government officials and Wall Street board members played musical chairs, inventing new ways of handing out contracts and financing the housing bubble, private companies were cashing in on their resulting good fortune:
Cornell Corrections increased their revenues and capacity thanks to DOJ’s Federal Bureau of Prison and several state governments.[74]
Dillon Read exercised their options to purchase additional shares in Cornell Corrections.
In the summer of 1997, Dillon Read’s partners and investors, led by John Birkelund, sold Dillon Read to the Swiss Bank Corporation, which merged the following year with UBS, the largest Swiss bank.
With HUD policies reversed by Cuomo to those in favor of traditional private and not-for-profit real estate constituencies, Harvard Endowment and Pug Winokur’s Capricorn Investment sold NHP, the large HUD property manager to AIMCO, a large Denver HUD property manager.
Pug Winokur’s firm Capricorn Holdings, an investor with Harvard in NHP, a leading HUD property management company, sold a significant portion of their controlling position in DynCorp, an important HUD and DOJ contractor, with Pug stepping down from Chairman of the Board of DynCorp to remain a member of the board and Chairman of the Compensation Committee, the board committee that recommends compensation for senior management as well as compensation policies for the corporation.[75]
Dyncorp
A few words are appropriate to describe DynCorp and its former Chairman and lead investor, Herbert S. “Pug” Winokur. Pug and his investment operation Capricorn Holdings were later to come under scrutiny when Pug resigned from the Harvard Corporation board at a time of controversy regarding his role as board member and chairman of the Finance Committee of Enron. Pug was serving on the board when Enron went bankrupt, after a period in which Harvard Endowment (where Pug was also on the board) was aggressively and profitably selling the stock. This raised questions as to whether the Endowment had the benefit of “insider information.” Read on
In the meantime, Gary Webb had problems of his own. After extraordinary efforts by the corporate media to try to discredit his story,[77] he was demoted by the San Jose Mercury News in the summer of 1997 and then left the paper in December 1997 to work on his book, Dark Alliance, which was published the following year.
The fall of 1997 was an intense time in Washington, D.C. given fundraising and Whitewater investigations that would continue to distract from Mena and South Central LA narcotics trafficking allegations and use sex between consenting adults in the Oval Office to blossom the following year into the Clinton impeachment proceedings. On September 18th, Cornell Corrections announced its next public offering with Dillon Read (renamed SBC Warburg Dillon Read since its purchase by the Swiss Bank Corporation) as the lead senior manager. The offering proceeded on October 10th, raising $57.3 million at a price of $19 5/8 per share, a 64% increase from the first offering in October 1996, a year before. This implied a value of $25,962 per person in Cornell’s jails and facilities — a significant portion derived from the Federal Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals, both at DOJ.
On October 14th, then-HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo fired Hamilton with no notice, seized monies owed to The Hamilton Securities Group for work already performed and launched a concerted smear campaign. At the same time, a variety of dirty tricks, including through Hamilton’s bank, auditor and insurance companies, drained our resources. In November, an amount equivalent to our remaining contract authority — approximately $10 million — was awarded to HUD OIG’s Operation Safe Home by special appropriation by the Senate HUD appropriation subcommittee. Legal action to try to stop HUD’s seizure of Hamilton’s monies and illegal investigatory leaks ended up in Stanley Sporkin’s court — giving the former general counsel of the CIA another chance to use his skills to protect criminal enterprise. As a result, all of Hamilton’s efforts to support responsible management of HUD’s programs or to create tools and jobs for communities came to an end.
I had to smile when we ended up with new attorneys the following year. One assured me that Sporkin would love what we were doing for community transparency and job creation. They had heard him in the meetings of attorneys speaking about the inner city. They insisted he very much cared about young people in the inner city. By then I had learned to just smile and not try to explain about how it was that despite everyone caring so much in conversation about the Popsicle Index going up, for some mysterious and inexplicable reason it just kept going down.
XV. Dillon Read — Cashing Out on Cornell
When Cornell Corrections listed its shareholders with investments of greater than 5% in its proxy statement filed with the SEC in March 1998, Dillon Read was no longer listed. Making the assumption that Dillon Read and its various funds and officers and directors cashed out at or between the second Cornell offering in October 1997 and early 1998 when this proxy was filed, we can pause in the telling of our story to estimate the total profits to Dillon and their investors. We should first note that it appears that Dillon sold their shares at a historical high for Cornell’s stock price.
Cornell Historical Stock Prices
While Dillon was not required to disclose their total investment banking revenues and investment profits on Cornell Corrections between 1991 and 1998, I estimate Dillon’s total profits for their stock investment in Cornell to have been $6.7 million for Dillon employees who invested and $19.4 million for the investors in Dillon’s funds, which also included Dillon officers and directors. This represented an annual return on investment of approximately 35-45%. These are the kind of profits you get when you buy stock for a price of $3.8 million and several years later sell that stock for $29.9 million — or an almost 800% increase on your investment. In addition, I estimate that Dillon also generated at least $6 million in fees for investment banking and investment advisor services. This results in an estimated total of $32.1 million in profits for Dillon, its leaders and its investors over a seven-year period.
Profits on Cornell
Dillon Read’s Profits on Cornell Corrections: An Example of How To Estimate “Prison Pop”
PROFIT #1: Estimate of Dillon Read Profits on Stock Investments: $26.1 Million
EXPLANATION: Cornell’s October 1996 Prospectus describe Dillon and its funds having a stock position of 1,359,863 shares. Dillon’s April 1997 Cornell 13-D filing describes shareholdings of 1,191,864 shares and an original cost of $3,359,736. Read on …
I remember reading some of the Carlyle Group’s marketing material about their success in leveraged buyouts of companies that did lots of contracts and business with the federal government. They claimed to have achieved annual investment returns of 35%, in the range of the returns that I estimate Dillon to have made on Cornell Corrections. If you understand the story of Cornell Corrections, you will get a good understanding of the type of investment that achieves 35% investment returns for private investors on the stocks of companies that enjoy growth in government contracts and the fruits of “privatization.”
It is imperative in understanding investments like these to look not just at the companies involved, but to look through to the individuals who make the critical decisions. In Dillon Read’s case, the key leaders were also personal investors. We do not know if, as sometimes happens in cases like this, the firm financed or arranged financing for their purchases in an arrangement where, in essence, they can buy for “no money down.” An estimate of their personal profits is as follows:
Estimated Personal Profits of Seven Largest Dillon Direct Investors * $22 Est. Sales Price **
To generate these profits for Dillon and the Dillon leadership at a stock market valuation of $25,962 (the value “per bed” at the time of the October 1997 offering) when Dillon had invested when Cornell had no prisons and prisoners, the following table estimates how many people had to go to prison for an extended period:
Estimated Number of People Incarcerated for Extended Period to Generate Dillon Stock Profits
Another useful calculation is to look at the how many taxpayers will have to work their entire lives to pay the taxes for this many people to be imprisoned. Let’s assume that the average taxpayer pays $150,000 of federal taxes in an entire lifetime. Based on the General Accounting Office’s (now the General Accountability Office, the Congressional Auditor) study in 1996 that indicated the total annual federal, state and local system expenditures per prisoner were approximately $154,000. That means that ten taxpayers would have to work their whole lives to pay for one prisoner with a mandatory sentence of ten years. On this basis, the following table estimates how many people would have to work their whole lives to pay the taxes to fund the incarcerations necessary to generate Dillon’s profits on Cornell Corrections.
Estimated Number of People Working Their Entire Lives to Pay Taxes to Fund Prisoners Incarcerated for Extended Period to Generate Dillon Stock Profits
Cornell’s March 1998 proxy filed with the SEC inspires some additional questions regarding the source of funds that bought Dillon Read out at a price that generated tens of millions of profit on their venture investment. There are several new large shareholders listed:
When Cornell Corrections filed its 1999 proxy the following year, AMVESCAP and Alliance were each up to 9% of the outstanding shares.
Based on the foregoing filings, it is fair to assume one way or another these investors were helpful in making it possible for Dillon Read to cash out at or near a market high in Cornell’s stock price.
John Haskell, the second largest personal investor among the Dillon officers and directors was a board member of Equitable. Alliance Capital was soon to become much more visible as a result of its role in using Florida pension funds to buy Enron stock when one of its executives and Lockheed Martin board members, Frank Savage, was also on Enron’s board and member of its finance committee.[81]
However, in the category of “it’s a small world” was the relationship of Cornell’s largest European shareholder AMVESCAP to RJR. In 1999, AD Frazier, President and CEO of INVESCO joined the board of R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Holdings. The press release describes Frazier as a member of the Board of Directors of INVESCO’s parent AMVESCAP.
RJR’s 2003 Proxy, filed after the European Union lawsuits were filed list INVESCO as the third largest shareholder with 5.6% of outstanding shares. RJR’s 2004 Proxy lists INVESCO in London as having 11% and INVESCO North American Holdings as owning 11%. RJR’s 2005 Proxy lists INVESCO in London with 6.3% and AMVESCAP in London with 6.32%.
Which means that when one of RJR Nabisco’s former lead investment bankers, Dillon Read, and its investors made in the range of $30 million cashing out of a private prison company, they were cashed out directly or indirectly by one of RJR Nabisco lead investors.
I wonder what the ghost of Barry Seal would say about what that might all have to do with the alleged $5 billion of drugs he pumped through a little airport in Arkansas, and who was responsible to reinvest that money. I wonder what Lou Gerstner, Henry Kravis and George Roberts as CEO and lead investors in RJR would say if given truth serum about who may be responsible for reinvesting the dirty money allegedly laundered with RJR cigarette sales.
Brown University: Cashing Out on Cornell Corrections
In Cornell’s prospectus when Dillon Read led its second stock offering on October 10, 1997, Brown University’s Third Century Fund was listed as a shareholder with 88,818 shares, of which 28,818 shares were to be sold through the offering. John Birkelund, Chairman and CEO of Dillon Read, was a long time trustee of Brown University. The price on the 1997 offering was $19 5/8 per share. If Brown’s average profit was the difference between the 1997 price and the 1996 offering price of $12 per share, it would have generated a profit in a year’s time of $677,237. Brown’s return on investment under these assumptions would have been a smashing 63.5%. If it had sold when the stock peaked after the offering at or around the time that Dillon appears to have sold out, it would have been higher.
The number of people who needed to be imprisoned for many years to generate such investment profits based on the foregoing assumptions was 67 people. An estimate of the number of men and women in the U.S. who would have to work their whole life to pay the taxes to imprison those 67 people would be 670 people.
Brown University also benefited from John Birkelund’s success at Dillon Read — including from Cornell Corrections — presumably through his donations and fundraising for the school — a primary function of a trustee. Typically, funding a “chair” at a university requires a donation greater than a million dollars — even several million. According to Brown’s website, there is a John P. Birkelund Professor of History at Brown, Omer Bartov.
Professor Bartov is an expert in genocide. His publications listed on Brown’s website include:
In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, edited volume with P. Mack (Berghahn Books, 2001).
Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford UP, 2000)
The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, edited volume (Routledge, 2000)
Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (Oxford UP, 1996)
For the Fall 2005 semester Professor Bartov taught a course called “Modern Genocide and Other Crimes against Humanity.” The course description is as follows:
“The emergence, evolution, varieties, and underlying causes of and confrontations with genocide and other crimes against humanity in the 20th century: genocide in colonial empires, Ottoman Turkey, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda; killing of the handicapped, wartime massacres, mass crimes of Communism, and ‘ethnic cleansing’; the role of racism in and moral arguments about crimes against humanity; and policies of retribution and restitution.”
Professor Bartov also serves on the Brown University Slavery and Justice Committee whose mission is described on the University’s website as follows:
“Welcome to the website of Brown University’s Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. The committee was appointed in 2003 by President Ruth Simmons and charged ‘to organize academic events and activities that might help the nation and the Brown community think deeply, seriously, and rigorously about the questions raised’ by the national debate over slavery and reparations. As an institution whose early benefactors included both slave traders and pioneering abolitionists, Brown has an intimate relationship to the history of American slavery. This history gives us, in the president’s words, ‘a special opportunity and a special obligation’ to contribute to this ongoing debate.” [82]
A 2003 press release regarding one of Professor Bartov’s articles describes his work as follows:
“Throughout the last century, the scholarly community played a prominent role in providing the rationale and supplying the know-how and personnel for the perpetration of state-directed mass violence, according to new research by a Brown University historian. Omer Bartov, the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History, cited incidents of ethnic cleansing, genocide and terrorism which were legitimized and supported by academics in his paper “Extreme Violence and the Scholarly Community,” published in the current issue of the International Social Science Journal. “We must recall that scholars and intellectuals have not infrequently found themselves at the forefront of support for mass crimes and inhumanity and have often distinguished themselves by their extraordinary political blindness and moral callousness,” Bartov wrote. “We ignore its implications at our peril.”
From a survey of Professor Bartov’s research online there is no indication of what his thoughts are regarding Brown’s quick profits on Cornell Corrections or possible sources of funds to support a John P. Birkelund Professorship in European History and the facts and circumstances of John Birkelund’s fortune — including fees and profits from RJR Nabisco and Cornell Corrections.
Professor Bartov was contacted by e-mail at Omer_Bartov@brown.edu for comment in late November 2005 and has not yet replied.
XVI. Financial Coup d’Etat — 1998
The Hamilton Securities Group had a subsidiary charged with taking our data as it developed on individual transactions and portfolio strategy assignments and using it to develop a new approach to investment. We sought to help investors understand the impact of their investments on people and places and on a wider society as a strategy to identify opportunities to lower risks and enhance investment returns.[83]This included understanding how to reduce the dependencies of municipalities and small business and farming on debt and increase their ability to finance with equity. Indeed, easy, subsidized access to equity financing is one of the reasons that large companies have grown so powerful and taken over so much market share from small businesses. Access to equity investment for small business and farms would result in a much healthier economy and much more broad-based support for democratic institutions.
We were blessed with an advisory board of very capable and committed pension fund leaders. In April 1997, we had an advisory board meeting at Safeguard Scientifics where the board chair led a venture capital effort. I gave a presentation on the extraordinary waste in the federal budget. As an example, we demonstrated why we estimated that the prior year’s federal investment in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area had a negative return on investment. It was, however, possible to finance places with private equity and then reengineer the government investment to a positive return and, as a result, generate significant capital gains. Hence, it was possible to use U.S. pension funds to increase retirees’ retirement security significantly by investing in American communities, small business and farms — all in a manner that would reduce debt and improve skills and job creation. This was important as one of the chief financial concerns in America at that time was ensuring that our retirement plans performed financially to a standard that would meet the needs of beneficiaries and retirees. It was also critical to reduce debt and create new jobs as we continued to move manufacturing and other employment abroad. If not, we would be using our workforce’s retirement savings to finance moving their jobs and their children’s jobs abroad.
The response from the pension fund investors was quite positive until the President of the CalPers pension fund — the largest in the country — said, “You don’t understand. It’s too late. They have given up on the country. They are moving all the money out in the fall (of 1997). They are moving it to Asia.” He did not say who “they” were but did indicate that it was urgent that I see Nick Brady — as if our data that indicated that there was hope for the country might make a difference. I thought at the time that he meant that the pension funds and other institutional investors would be shifting a much higher portion of their investment portfolios to emerging markets. I was naive. He was referring to something much more significant.
The federal fiscal year starts on October 1st of each year. Typically the appropriation committees in the House and Senate vote out their recommendations during the summer. When they return from vacation after Labor Day, the various committees reconcile and a final bill is passed in September. Reconciling all the various issues is a bit like pushing a pig through a snake. Finalizing the budget each fall can make for a tense time. When the new bill goes into effect, new policies start to emerge as the money to back them starts to flow. October 1st is always a time of new shifts and beginnings. In October 1997, the federal fiscal year started. It was the beginning of at least $4 trillion going missing from federal government agency accounts between October 1997 and September 2001. The lion’s share of the missing money disappeared from the Department of Defense accounts. HUD also had significant amounts missing. According to HUD OIG reports, HUD had “undocumentable adjustments” of $17 billion in fiscal year 1998, and $59 billion in 1999. The HUD OIG refused to finalize audited financial statements in fiscal year 1999, refused to find out the basis of the undocumentable adjustments or to get the money back and refused to disclose the amount of undocumentable adjustments in subsequent fiscal years.[84] The HUD OIG continued to invest significant resources in persecuting Hamilton during this time.
The contractor who was blamed for the missing money at HUD was a financial software company named AMS. My old partner, Steve Fenster, the Dillon Read banker who led the firms effort in the Campeau leveraged buyout of the Federated Department Stores which had gone bankrupt (See my description expressing my concerns to Steve regarding this deal in “A Parting of the Ways” earlier in this story), had been a board member of AMS until his death in 1995, when he was replaced by Walker Lewis, a board member affiliated with Dillon Read and now, as Chairman of Devon Value Advisors, a consulting partner to Pug Winokur and Capricorn Holdings. With $17 billion and $59 billion missing from HUD, Secretary Cuomo never fired AMS or seized their money. Indeed the AMS Chairman Charles Rossotti was appointed IRS Commissioner and given a special waiver to keep his AMS stock. As a result, he profited personally when HUD kept AMS on its contractor payroll and new task orders were awarded to AMS by the IRS. As IRS Commissioner, he oversaw the responsibilities of the IRS criminal investigation division that plays a special role with respect to money laundering enforcement during the period when $4 trillion went missing from the Federal government. When Rossotti left government service, he joined Lou Gerstner at The Carlyle Group.
If we assume that the $17 billion went missing at HUD during 1998 on an even basis — that is, $1.4 billion a month, $63.6 million per week day, $7.9 million per working hour — by the summer of 1998, approximately $14 billion would have been missing from HUD alone, not counting other agencies. Where did it go? Was it financed with securities fraud using Ginnie Mae or other mortgage securities fraud or fraudulently issued U.S. Treasury securities? These are important questions. Interestingly, this was also a period in which some of the most powerful firms in Washington, D.C. or with Washington ties were having remarkably good luck raising capital. Indeed, the period of missing money coincided, not surprisingly with a “pump and dump” of the U.S. stock market and a significant flow of money into private investors hands.
Pump and Dump
Adapted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The financial fraud known as “pump and dump” involves artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price. This practice is illegal under securities law, yet it is particularly common.
Let’s look at some examples. Cornell Corrections was far from the only company to raise funds during this period and Dillon Read far from the only investor to cash out. Indeed, in the scheme of things, Dillon Read’s investment in Cornell Corrections can be described as a financially modest in size — albeit highly successful in percentage terms — venture investment. For example, Dillon’s investment and profits look tiny when compared to the billions that KKR was investing in RJR. Whether large or small, I would argue that both investments are highly informative regarding the real corporate business model prevailing in the US and globally.
In the summer of 1998, Carlyle Group announced that it had closed its European Fund with $1.1 billion. By the end of the decade Carlyle had more than a dozen funds with close to $10 billion under management. In the meantime Enron, transacting with Wall Street, was enjoying a rush of good luck with offshore partnerships and growing revenues from “the new economy.” Enron’s leaders included a “Who’s Who” of government contracting. Pug Winokur was the chairman of the Enron finance committee. Pug was also an investor and board member in DynCorp, who was running critical and highly sensitive information systems for DOJ, HUD, HUD OIG and the SEC. Arthur Anderson, Enron & DynCorp’s auditor, (also Cornell Correction’s auditor) was a major contractor at HUD. Frank Savage, a board member of Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor that at the time was paid more than $150 million a year to run the HUD information systems, was also on Enron’s board and finance committee. Enron and HUD shared all the same big banks — Citibank, JP Morgan-Chase — and Wall Street firms. Winokur was on the board and invested with the Harvard endowment, a large investor in Enron. The attorney representing his firm on SEC documents, O’Melveny and Myers, a prominent Los Angeles firm, was reported to be the lead firm helping Al Gore during the 2000 election. Harvard University was a HUD contractor and major source of HUD, Treasury and White House officials. The Harvard Endowment was a major investor in HUD real estate and mortgage operations along with Pug Winokur and his investment company. Harvard employees were one of the largest groups of lifetime contributors to Bill Clinton. Harvard was also a source of appointees for OMB, DOJ, SEC, DOD and other agencies throughout the government.[85] During the Clinton Administration the Harvard Endowment rose from approximately $4 billion to almost $20 billion, an astounding performance.
To repeat a critical point made earlier in our initial discussion of the leveraged buyout business that has engineered a takeover of America’s economy — money is like the Pillsbury Doughboy. When you squeeze down on one part — it pops up someplace else. While we do not yet know the truth of who now has $4 trillion (or some other very large actual amount of cash and/or fraudulently issued securities) of undocumentable transactions indicating extraordinary amounts missing from the U.S. government or trillions more that disappeared out of pension funds and retail investors stock holdings during this period, we do know who has growing financial resources. We also know the extent to which extraordinary enforcement resources were used to target many of the honest people.
On December 18, 1997, the CIA Inspector General delivered Volume I of their report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding charges that the CIA was complicit in narcotics trafficking in South Central Los Angeles. Washington, D.C. ’s response was compatible with attracting the continued flow of an estimated $500 billion–$1 trillion a year of money laundering into the U.S. financial system. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in January 1998 visited Los Angeles with Congresswoman Maxine Waters — who had been a vocal critic of the government’s involvement in narcotics trafficking — with news reports that he had pledged billions to come to her district. In February Al Gore announced that Water’s district in Los Angeles had been awarded Empowerment Zone status by HUD (under Secretary Cuomo’s leadership) and made eligible for $300 million in federal grants and tax benefits. At the same time, the existence of Hamilton’s software tools and databases would have posed a significant risk if my team and I had become aware of the “Dark Alliance” story. The fastest way to connect the dots would have been for me and my teammates to have looked at the maps of high HUD single family defaults contiguous to areas of significant narcotics trafficking that we had posted on the Internet and then use the Hamilton Securities software tools and databases to dig deeply into government financial flows in the same areas, including patterns of potential mortgage and mortgage securities fraud.
The destruction, suppression and theft of our software tools, databases and computer system was arranged by a series of events between late 1997 and early 1998 that was so orchestrated throughout government, media and members of the Council of Foreign Relations that I would never have believed it if I had not lived through it.[86] The Washington Post mysteriously killed a story about what was happening to The Hamilton Securities Group at the last minute — just as they had done with the Mena story in 1995. Our errors and omission insurance carrier suddenly refused to pay our attorneys, who withdrew from representation of The Hamilton Securities Group.
I sold my interest in our family farmland to my uncle to try to get new attorneys to manage the assault of legal and investigatory workflow coming our way. The HUD OIG then called my uncle, apparently trying to persuade him that I was a criminal, and sent four HUD OIG and FBI agents to his home in New Hampshire at night with a subpoena. Their pretext was that they needed to review the family financial records for the farm to see if I had been entertaining government employees at this “vacation resort.” In time they would come to understand that no government officials had ever joined me at the farm and that the farm did not have electricity and depended on an outhouse for “basic” functions.
Judge Sporkin ruled against us in our efforts to get HUD to pay us immediately monies owed for work performed and then, for no legitimate reason, authorized our digital records and papers to be seized. On March 8, 1998, a court representative with a team of HUD OIG and FBI investigators landed in our offices and took them over. All copies of all documents whether in our office or in our homes and personal possessions were turned over. We were not allowed to keep copies of anything. We had been ordered by HUD to wipe all HUD databases from our server — most of which were available to the public by law — and certify that they had been wiped clean. We were told we could get copies or excess items of what had been turned over back quickly. In fact, with the exception of one server and a few computers, it took many years to recover any of our files. By the time our most critical files were returned to our control, our most valuable software tools had “disappeared” while under court control.
We were later to discover that DOJ was using CACI as a litigation support contractor on our case. CACI was the leading supplier of Geographic Information Systems software and services to the U.S. government who later was in the headlines as a result of their connections to the prison at Abu Grahbi in Iraq. This begs the question whether DOJ was paying our competitor to help themselves to our proprietary software and databases. Some time after our entire digital infrastructure was taken over, DOJ came out with a geographic information systems mapping tool to help support increased community policing and enforcement product. You had to wonder if this was the “Sheriff of Nottingham’s” answer to Community Wizard — rather than using software to allow citizens to understand what government was doing, why not use software to provide increased surveillance of citizens by government.
While in possession of our offices, the HUD OIG investigators took empty shredding bins, filled them up with trash and then — from a separate floor — found and added corporate accounting files and then staged photo-taking by the HUD IG General Counsel, Judith Hetherton, who then sent us a letter alleging obstruction of justice as evidenced by our “throwing out” corporate accounting records. We were saved by a property manager who witnessed this charade and decided to help us out after he saw the intentional — and very disgusting — trashing of the The Hamilton Securities Group offices and was touched by our efforts to clean it up. The property manager had come to the U.S. from Latin America—presumably to find freedom from lawless government. One of our attorneys went into the office when the federal investigators were there and came out shaking. He said to me, “My parents left Germany to get away from these people. Now they are here. Where do I go?”
Meanwhile, as soon as The Hamilton Securities Group’s digital and paper records and tools were under court control, computers auctioned off and websites taken down, Congress held surprise hearings on March 16, 1998 on Volume I of the CIA Inspector General’s Report on Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance” allegations about government involvement in cocaine trafficking. The CIA Inspector General during these hearings disclosed the existence of the Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and DOJ that had been created in 1982. Sporkin, the judge who had just engineered the destruction of Community Wizard and our digital infrastructure and had the carcass under his control, was the CIA General Counsel when that MOU was engineered.
There was one small glitch. When we were next allowed in our offices one evening in mid-March, we took the main server and brought it back to my home. The next day, a HUD auditor was stunned to see it gone — he assumed that everything would be wiped clean and sold. He asked where the server was and one of my partners said, “we took it last night.” At which point the HUD auditor said, “You can’t do that. My instructions are you are not allowed to have any of the knowledge.” He then could not come up with a rational reason or lawful basis as to why that was so and why The Hamilton Securities Group was to be denied access to its own property.
While the private prison companies were booking more contracts and billions of dollars were going missing from HUD, I spent the next months slugging through hundred-hour work weeks managing some eighteen audits, investigations and inquiries and twelve different tracks of litigation while struggling under the drain of significant physical harassment and surveillance and an ongoing smear campaign.
Information was dribbling out which ultimately would provide relief. Congresswoman Waters read the Memorandum of Understanding between the CIA and DOJ into the Congressional Record in May. Then in June, Gary Webb published his book Dark Alliance. I saw a brief piece pooh-poohing it in a corporate magazine and realized that somehow this might help explain the insanity that I was dealing with and could not understand.
After reading Dark Alliance, I started to study the extraordinary moneymaking business that DOJ and agencies like HUD had built in enforcement that really only made sense if in fact the government was entirely complicit in narcotics trafficking and related mortgage and mortgage securities fraud. I started to realize the extent to which private information systems and accounting software companies like DynCorp and AMS were taking control of government agencies behind the scenes — thus creating the conditions for billions of dollars to disappear from government accounts. Then I started to research private prison companies when a banker from our bank — whose colleagues’ behavior had been egregious and I believe criminal towards us—told me how much money they were making in Washington D.C. gentrification and private prisons. This was a theme that kept repeating itself during this period. Private prisons were the next “big thing” and were going to be “real money makers.” It was not just Scott Nordheimer who had tried to persuade us of this. When I had met with several senior partners of Coopers & Lybrand in late 1994, they assured me that I should shift my focus from communities to prisons — that the future was in enforcement and prisons.
In September, I discovered that DOJ owned a prison business company, the Federal Prison Industries, marketed by the name of UniCor. It markets federal prison labor to federal agencies. It turns out that Edgewood Technology Services, a Hamilton Securities Group brainchild and investment, was a potential competitor with DOJ’s own prison company for federal data servicing contracts. UniCor’s website indicated that they had a growing data servicing business with a focus on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software products — the same as Edgewood Technology Services. It made me wonder if Scott Nordheimer had given DOJ and its Federal Bureau of Prisons our business plan despite my insistence that we were not interested in prison opportunities. I called the head of the data-servicing group in UniCor, who was amazed to hear the story I told him. He said something to the effect of: “That makes no sense. Most people end up in prison because they cannot get good jobs. It is much more expensive to have them working in prison than not come here in the first place.” He was eager to meet with me, as he was interested in helping good data servicing workers find jobs when they left prison. I told him to check with his superiors and that I would love to meet with him. He never called me back.
Federal Prison Industries
The Department of Justice’s profits from prison labor grew along with the growth of federal prisoners — the vast majority of whom were non-violent offenders. An April 12, 2004 story in Government Executive magazine, Prison labor program under fire by lawmakers, private industry, by K. Daniel Glover shows the rise of DOJ’s prison sales and labor force as more arrests and incarcerations are good for business.
Federal Prison Industries’ Growth
A report from The Center for Public Integrity in September 2004 reported that the Federal Prison Industries was the 72nd largest defense contractor with $1.4 billion of contracts between 1998-03, describing it as follows:
“Federal Prison Industries, also known as UNICOR, uses federal prisoners to manufacture a wide variety of products including furniture, clothes and electronic equipment. It also provides administrative services such as data entry and bulk mailing. A government-owned corporation, it operates as a part of the Federal Bureau of Prisons and is the Defense Department’s number one supplier of clothing, furniture, and household furnishings.”
Then on October 8th, an hour after the House of Representatives voted to move forward with the Clinton impeachment hearings, the CIA quietly posted Volume II of the CIA Inspector General report on the “Dark Alliance” allegations on their website. Volume II included a copy of the Memorandum of Understanding between DOJ and CIA. The message from President Clinton to the Republicans was simple and clear. “You take me down and I will take everyone down.” Literally the next day, October 9th, Secretary Andrew Cuomo issued a series of sole source contracts through Ginnie Mae, the mortgage securities operation at HUD, to John Ervin’s company (the same company leading the qui tam lawsuit against Hamilton) and to Touchstone Financial Group, a firm apparently started by a former Hamilton Securities Group employee who brought on a series of former Hamilton people to do some of the Hamilton work for HUD. One can only make a list of more unanswered questions of the political deals that may have been happening behind the scenes. After all, October 1, 1998 was the beginning of the fiscal year in which HUD was missing $59 billion from its accounts — for which the HUD OIG was to refuse to provide an audit as required by law. This amount of money translates into $4.9 billion per month, $1.2 billion per work week or $30.7 million per work hour. This was somebody’s payback time.
Disgusted with events in Washington during this period, I headed to New York to try to get a sense of what this meant on Wall Street. I went down to Wall Street to have lunch with Bart Friedman, one of the partners at Cahill Gordon, Dillon Read’s lead law firm. Bart was someone I had immense respect for and who had helped Hamilton with our legal work. As we were having lunch at a private club near Cahill, Bart’s senior partner, Ike Kohn, walked by. When I was at Dillon Read, Nick Brady would introduce Ike as our most trusted attorney. Bart said something to the effect of, “Ike, you remember Austin Fitts.” Ike looked at me and sneered with hostility and walked away abruptly in a manner that was shocking to me. At least it was shocking until I saw the SEC filings for Cornell Corrections. Bart Friedman had handled all of Dillon’s investment and underwriting files for Cornell Corrections. While Ike may have been scared that I might connect the dots at lunch, I did not. I plowed through the SEC documents for Wackenhut Corrections and Corrections Corporation of America. I did not look at Cornell until years later. To this day I wonder what Ike knew about what happened to The Hamilton Securities Group.
I then headed to a birthday party for a member of the family of a Dillon Read partner being held at the Colony Club, an elegant private club on Park Avenue. A rush of friends wanted to know what I thought of prison company stocks. They were all in them, the brokers were pushing them, they were the “new hot thing” and they were anticipating delicious profits. I said get out, the pricings assumed incorrectly that piling people into prisons — the innocent and guilty alike — was like warehousing people in HUD housing. Sure enough, the stocks were to later plummet. But not until the Wall Street Journal ran a story about decorators using prison equipment to do bathrooms and kitchens on Park Avenue and Esquire ran a fashion layout in front of a series of jail cells. To this day, I wonder how many of the people I spoke to that evening had bought Cornell Corrections stock from Dillon Read.
I came back to Washington, D.C. feeling that the world had indeed gone mad. Everywhere I turned I saw people who seemed quite happy to make money doing things that drained and liquidated our permanent infrastructure and productivity as a people and a nation. Our financial system had become a complex mechanism that allowed us to profitably disassociate from the sources of our cash and concrete reality.
After several conversations with my attorneys, I realized that the efforts to frame us had failed and now those involved had been left with a bit of a mess as we were turning in the court affidavits that documented intentional falsification and suppression of evidence. My assessment was that DOJ would be willing to drop everything if we simply let them keep all of The Hamilton Securities Group’s money. Whatever the urgent thrust had been, it was over. Was it because Dillon had now cashed out all of their money? Was it because all of the software tools and databases were effectively suppressed and would not lead millions of Americans to connect mortgage fraud with the Dark Alliance story? Was it because the covert cash spigot had been turned on and $59 billion was pouring out of HUD to feed the hungry beast the appetizer followed by a main course of $3.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon? Was it because, with honest people forced out and the bureaucracy properly terrorized, the housing bubble was now being fueled with explosive federal credit from FHA, Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Or was it a combination? More than anything, there had been a very intense and personal desire to see me in prison. It had failed. I made a decision that I was not going to simply walk away. I was going to get to the bottom of what happened.
What communities in America and worldwide most need is the truth. We need the ability to know whom we can trust and who we cannot trust. We need to know how to build a life, a family, a small company, and retirement savings and be able to protect them from corruption. We need to generate an income that builds up our wealth and equity, rather than a subsidy that keeps us going while our equity slowly drains out of our savings and our communities. Any successful explorer will tell you that all the resources in the world are of little use if you have a bad map and as a result end up naked to the elements.
The first step was to understand organized crime — a topic that I had never been interested in. I called an organization that sold tapes by researchers on government corruption and narcotics trafficking and bought the tapes he recommended. So began a journey of reading and watching thousands of books and videos and networking with researchers globally.
Later that year, I published an article about the potential connection between the Dark Alliance allegations and the efforts to suppress our transparency tools and what that may imply regarding the possible use of HUD mortgages and mortgage fraud by these same networks. Right after the article was published on May 22, 1999 with copies delivered to the Intelligence Committee subscribers, Congress suddenly held closed hearings on Volume II of the CIA Inspector General’s reports, taking testimony in secret from DOJ Inspector General Michael Bromwich and CIA Inspector General Britt Snider.[87]
It was clear where things were going by that summer. In June of 1999, Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York stock exchange, went to Colombia to visit a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) Commander to encourage him to reinvest in the U.S. financial system. At the time of his visit, the General Accounting Office reported on FARC’s growing influence in the Colombian cocaine market.[88]
As I learned more about the black budget and covert cash flows at work in our economy, I also learned more about their history. I began to connect more of the dots to my personal history and that of my family, friends and neighbors. I realized that the viciousness of the current attack could relate not just to my work at Hamilton but to problems that my family had dealing with similar, if not the same, people long ago. [88.5] It only served to reinforce the wisdom of my decision to pursue the litigation and get to the bottom of what was happening and why. In the famous words of George Santayana, “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” I was to spend many years resolving the litigation and building new networks that I needed to found and grow my investment advisory company — helping to preserve and grow family wealth in a world increasingly defined by financial and political corruption.
XVII. Private Banking & the Profitable Liquidation of Every Place
In December of 1998, during the period when Dillon Read cashed out of Cornell Corrections and $59 billion went missing from HUD, Time Magazine published an article, “Just Hide Me the Money” by S.C. Gwynne with reporting by Adam Zagorin about the October 1998 Citicorp and Travelers merger and the world of offshore banking:
“Citibank’s private-banking unit holds more than $100 billion, which makes it about the same size as the entire bank was in 1982. These funds are in turn part of a $17 trillion global pool of money belonging to what bankers euphemistically call ‘high- net-worth-individuals’ — a pool that generates more than $150 billion a year in banking revenue. The numbers are impressive when you consider that except at a few sleepy British and Swiss institutions, the private-banking industry didn’t exist until the 1980s. Citibank predicted early this year that it would reach $1 trillion — that’s trillion with a T — in private-banking assets by the year 2010. And it faces some 4,000 competitors, from global dreadnoughts like Switzerland’s UBS [AUTHOR’S NOTE: the bank that bought Swiss Bank Corporation after Swiss Bank Corporation bought Dillon Read] to secretive banks in the tiny principality of Andorra to brokerages in Miami and accountancy firms in the Channel Islands.”
One of the offshore Dillon funds that invested in Cornell Corrections was Concord Partners Japan Limited. Its officers and directors, as listed in Exhibit D to Dillon’s April l997 13-D filing with the SEC, include an impressive array of Japanese business leaders and a non-person, Amerex, S.A, which lists a Coutts private bank address in the Bahamas as its address. This Dillon fund provides a link between the privatization of prisons, offshore funds and arguably the most prestigious private bank in the world. With the anticipation of profits as prisons stocks increased in value and went public, an all-too-familiar impersonal financial mechanism was now in place that created yet another incentive system with global reach, to drive the financial returns of investors up by driving down the Popsicle Index of faceless people and communities, far removed.
According to Wikipedia online encyclopedia:
“Coutts has its headquarters at 440 Strand, London, with branches throughout the UK and the rest of the world. It is a private bank, which means its clients are by invitation only and have liquid assets in excess of £500,000 (AUTHOR’S NOTE: ap3; The bank is most famously known in the UK as the banker of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. A Coutts Automated Teller Machine is installed in the basement of Buckingham Palace for use by the Royal Family… Coutts is known as the “Queen’s Bank” to many by virtue of it being reputed to be the bankers to the British Royal Family. Within the UK it is the largest Private Bank… Historically Coutts was an upper crust clearing bank to the landed gentry, but today they are seen as wealth managers willing to accept a wider class of clientele, including top sportsmen, lottery winners, football stars, businessmen, chief executives, and pop singers. You don’t have to be “Posh” to get in, but if you are, it helps.
“As well as being the Queen’s banker, Coutts is also known as a bank for the rich and famous of British society. In 1999 it became known that Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother had a £6 million [AUTHOR’S NOTE: approximately $10 million U.S. dollars] overdraft with the bank. Sarah, Duchess of York also had a large overdraft with the bank worth around £8 million [AUTHOR’S NOTE: approximately $13.8 million U.S. dollars], which was subsequently paid off.”
So, let’s say I am a customer of a private bank such as Coutts. Let’s say through Coutts I have an interest in an offshore fund with private prison investments. The more people who are rounded up and put into prison, the more valuable my investment becomes. If laws are passed for mandatory sentences, the more valuable my investment becomes. If politicians and political appointees push through more prison contracts for private companies, the more valuable my investments become. The more enforcement staff and arrests, the more valuable my investments become yet again.
I can of course borrow on the increased value of my portfolio without ever having to sell my investment, so I can watch my investment grow, receive distributions based on profitability and still enjoy the liquidity it provides. In fact, given the wonders of modern banking, I can turn my investment into ready cash with my ATM card, just as the personal staff for the British Royal Family presumably can through the Coutts ATM machine in the basement of Buckingham palace. Indeed, the transatlantic slave trade never dreamed of financial leverage, engineering and liquidity this pervasive, instantaneous or socially respectable.
But perhaps this should all make us pause for a moment and think. If the housing bubble turned our homes into ATM machines and in turn induced many of us to take on debt beyond our means, will the privatization of our prison system provide incentives for those profiting from such investments to support policies that make us even more of a target in the future?
Catherine’s letter to the NY Times about the perverse incentive systems and “tapeworm” economics of prison stocks before she knew that Dillon had banked and cashed out of Cornell:
“Thank you for Tim Egan’s article on prisons. It was an excellent summary of the growth in the US prison population over the last two decades. A welcome follow up might be an exploration on how the money works on prisons…” [89]
Recently, I called the Washington, D.C. criminal attorney who represented The Hamilton Securities Group with respect to the criminal investigation until 1998. I asked him if DOJ had managed to frame me, where would it have sent me to prison? He said the order would have gone from the court to the Federal Bureau of Prisons at DOJ, and that it would have had the discretion to send me to the prison of its choice. Hence, it was possible that I would have been incarcerated in a Cornell Corrections prison. How ironic would that have been? I now have the satisfaction of knowing that at the cost to me of millions in litigation and investigation expenses over a ten year period, I may have denied my old partners and colleagues at Dillon Read and their domestic and offshore investors another $11,000 in stock profit — approximately 44% (Dillon’s percent ownership) of the increased value in Cornell Corrections stock from another “bed” being occupied by yours truly.
XVIII. Through the Via Dolorosa
The Via Dolorosa is the street in the Old City of Jerusalem which Jesus is said to have walked on the way to his crucifixion. It means “the way of grief.”
I believe if Dillon’s Chairman John Birkelund and I were free to speak openly about his investment in Cornell Corrections, he would say that decisions had been made to significantly grow narcotics trafficking, War on Drugs arrests and incarcerations and to privatize many aspects of government, including prisons. He was simply investing based on the directions that things were going to go. On the other hand, Hamilton’s investments in communities were “fighting the tape.” The expression “never fight the tape.” is a Wall Street saying. It means never try to oppose the market — always go with the market’s trend and direction.
John and I would not discuss the reality of what would happen if there were an application of criminal law to the officers and directors of Dillon Read of the kind that was applied to me and to all the young people regularly rounded up by Operation Safe Home during that time. I worked at Dillon Read for over a decade. I remember the department head that tried to persuade me to help engineer an insider-trading scheme. I remember the trader coming up in the elevator just after having gone outside to snort cocaine. I remember the gossip about drug use in certain parties in the Hamptons. I remember my office mate complaining that Moet & Chandon had given John Haskell cases of champagne to give the associates who worked on Moet’s private placement and that Haskell had kept them for himself. I remember the head trading partner confiding to me that Dillon’s capital had been below our required National Association of Securities Dealers capital requirements, but that Nick had insisted that we not report honestly.
Did I think of these as alleged felonies at the time? Of course not. I thought of them as humans muddling through equally difficult or unpleasant options, of people making mistakes — most of which got fixed. The trader got fired, our capital was increased, and my office mate had a nice life on a nice salary without free champagne. The reality is, however, that in my personal experience, the personal “lawfulness” of the people at Dillon Read was no more or less than the young people being rounded up by HUD and DOJ on Operation Safe Home and the War on Drugs. Indeed, I have generally found the poor to be more careful in their legal transgressions than the well-to-do or rich.
Then, of course, there is the question of what Dillon Read’s liabilities would have been in an evenhanded application of the law for its investment banking services to RJR. In the case of money laundering, saying you don’t know may not be enough to get you off the hook. And if you did know, that’s supposed to be serious jail time and disgorgement of profits, not to mention the physical takeover of your premises as was done to Hamilton Securities. Last but not least are the many unanswered questions I have about what role, if any, Dillon and former Dillon partners and their investment partners and network played in AMS, the HUD accounting software contractor. This includes questions about the $59 billion plus that went missing from HUD, billions lost through HUD mortgage fraud and how those cash and financing flows related to the money that bought Dillon’s Cornell Correction stock and other private prisons stocks and bonds.
John Birkelund and I would not discuss all of this because we would both understand that enforcement has nothing to do with law as described in civics classes. Enforcement is a game — a deadly game meant to maximize insider’s organized crime profits and operations worldwide, and to organize and implement class privilege and ensure that the insiders win in the game of “winner-takes-all” economic warfare. If I did bring it up, John would most likely get frustrated with me the way he used to in the old days. Because John does not have the power to change the rules of the game, just to play within them. John knows how hard it is to make money even when you do your very best to go with the flow. That is why the safe thing to do is to rig cash flow through government laws, regulations and contracts and to arrange for government to get rid of your enemies. This is one of the reasons why the blur of people cycling between high-level Wall Street and Washington positions at some point helps us to understand the extent to which there is no longer any sovereign government.
If I were to sit down with Al Gore, Elaine Kamarck, Jamie Gorelick and Chris Edley, I would expect their explanations would involve more obfuscating policy discussions but it would ultimately come down to a similar notion of going with the flow. As would the hundreds of thousands of highly credentialed, well-paid Americans who have actively lead the day-to-day implementation of policies that — when we pierce the veil — are really dictated by powerful private interests outside of the law as most believe it to be. All these policies and actions add up to genocide — of our families and communities and of all living things, both throughout America and around the world.
Toward the end of the Clinton Administration, I sat down with a piece of paper and made a list of all the people who I believed had died as a result of actions by the U.S. banks, corporations, government and our allies — including economic warfare in Russia and Latin America, narcotics trafficking and War on Drugs both in the U.S. and abroad as well as limited military engagements. I estimated that in a decade, we were intentionally responsible for the death of many millions of people throughout the world. For example, note this interview from May 1996 about the death of
children in Iraq:
Lesley Stahl, 60 MINUTES: “We have heard that a half million children have died [because of sanctions against Iraq]. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima and, you know, is the price worth it?
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price…we think the price is worth it.”
I have not repeated this exercise for the current Bush Administration. I expect, if I did, that it would show that the killing machine is steadily growing hungrier — as it has for every Administration for a long time. And with $4 trillion missing from the U.S. government and more missing from a “pump and dump” of U.S. stock and other markets, I suspect that the private offshore deposits have continued to rise with the falling of the Popsicle Index.
The story of Cornell Corrections is not a story of powerful evil men doing racist and sexist things. I have known truly evil men. My former partners at Dillon Read are not among them. With rare exception, they were people that I liked and respected when I worked with them. Like the senior appointees in the Clinton Administration, they are well-to-do and well educated people who embrace “the way things are.” Conversion to a war economy and migration from democracy to authoritarianism are “the way things are.” There are big bucks and jobs at Harvard and universities like it for people like Elaine Kamarck who will give this force a socially respectable face with complex partisan distractions which help obfuscate how the Harvard Endowment continues to profit from something far deeper and far more malevolent than most of us — most likely including Elaine — are willing to face.
The power of the killing machine rests in part in the broad based popular support it receives through the investment system and the financial markets. How are we to plead ignorance if the profits and growth in our 401(k) plans and investment portfolios have been enriched from prison stocks and the securities of the banks, homebuilders, property managers, mortgage bankers and other groups who managed this process of ethnic and economic cleansing and the gentrification it made possible? What can our “socially responsible” investment managers say when they invest in the stocks of banks, like Citibank and JP Morgan-Chase, and government contractors, like IBM and AT&T, who are running critical parts of government as these manipulations occur — including the disappearance of $4 trillion from government bank accounts and the manipulation of the gold markets and inventory in a silent financial coup d’etat? What can all those who benefited financially in the stock market, or from cheap mortgage and consumer loans or reduced ATM and checking fees say? We disassociated the source of our financial benefits from what we saw happening around us that we knew was wrong.
In the summer of 2000, I asked a group of 100 people at a conference of spiritually committed people who would push a red button if it would immediately stop all narcotics trafficking in their neighborhood, city, state and country. Out of 100 people, 99 said they would not push such red button. When surveyed, they said they did not want their mutual funds to go down if the U.S. financial system suddenly stopped attracting an estimated $500 billion-$1 trillion a year in global money laundering. They did not want their government checks jeopardized or their taxes raised because of resulting problems financing the federal government deficit. Our financial profiteering and complicity is not limited to aristocrats and the elites who do their bidding. Our financial dependency on unsustainable economics is broad, ingrained and deep.
Are minorities, women and children being impacted disproportionately? Yes, but that is merely because those with little or no power are easiest to steal from or kill. However, the survival of a parasite dictates that it must keep on eating when the easy pickings are done. After the U.S. Government’s intentional decision to provide no relief in New Orleans in the early days after Katrina, a faster way to set the stage for urban gentrification then the War on Drugs and private prisons, the first female African-American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice went shopping for $200 shoes while men and women of all ages and backgrounds — black, brown and white — lost businesses, homes, families and lives together in the floods. This is the true face of the New World Order.
As South Drowns, Rice Soaks in N.Y.
Did New Yorkers chase Condoleezza Rice back to Washington yesterday?
Like President Bush, the Secretary of State has been on vacation during the Hurricane Katrina crisis, with Rice enjoying her downtime in New York Wednesday and yesterday. The cabinet member’s responsibilities are usually international, but her timing contributed to the “fiddling while Rome burns” impression given by her boss during the disaster, which may have claimed thousands of lives.
On Wednesday night, Secretary Rice was booed by some audience members at “Spamalot!,” the Monty Python musical at the Shubert, when the lights went up after the performance.
Yesterday, Rice went shopping at Ferragamo on Fifth Ave. According to the Web site www.Gawker.com, the 50-year-old bought “several thousand dollars’ worth of shoes” at the pricey leather-goods boutique.
A fellow shopper shouted, “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” – presumably referring to Louisiana and Mississippi.
The woman expressing her First Amendment rights was promptly removed from the store. A Ferragamo store manager confirmed to us that Rice did shop there yesterday, but refused to answer questions about whether the protester was removed, and whether by his own security or the Secret Service.
At the State Department’s daily briefing yesterday morning, before the New York incident, spokesman Sean McCormack responded to a journalist who asked whether Rice was involved with hurricane relief efforts by saying, “She’s in contact with the department as appropriate.” He made no mention that his boss had any plans to leave New York.
But yesterday afternoon, Rice had done just that. Department spokeswoman Joanne Moore told us: “The secretary is back in Washington, and she is being briefed on the situation.” Moore did not know whether Condi had planned a longer stay here.
Source: New York Daily News
(Link no longer available)
When Hamilton’s offices were seized, I found myself before a battery of new attorneys brought in by our insurance company. At one point, one of them suggested that we shift the responsibility for an action to a corporate subcontractor in a manner that would abrogate our verbal contract with them. When I made clear I would not do that, they said I had no choice. If I did not do what they said, the insurance carrier would pull their representation and with no attorneys — like the young people being rounded up by Operation Safe Home — I would go to jail. And so I decided it was time to lay down a few ground rules that would help newcomers understand what was involved with working with me. I said:
“Gentlemen, I am obedient to the laws of God and there is nothing that you can say or do that will cause me to violate them. If that means that I am going to jail, then I am going to jail, if only to organize the last group of entrepreneurs I need to run the country when the government collapses. Because if people like me are going to prison, then it is only a matter of time until this government fails.”
Interestingly enough, the lawyer who threatened me, told me many months later that this was the moment in which he realized that we were going to win.
Here is my prediction for the New World Order. I don’t know when. I don’t know where. I don’t know how many satellite systems, electromagnetic weapons, subliminal programming broadcasters, computer hackers, bio weapons labs, cocaine plantations and how much environmental destruction they will enlist along the way. I don’t know how many patents on fundamental life process that Monsanto will claim sufficient to not let me cough without paying them a fee. I don’t know how many people the New World Order will reduce to poverty, assassinate and torture before they fail. I just know that they will fail. Because ultimately large complex systems cannot be held together by greed, technology and fear alone. Suspicion, lawlessness and smallness of mind ultimately cause implosion from within.
Seeing the New World Order as they are accelerates their failure, particularly as it inspires withdrawing our resources from their control and shifting investment to alternatives to govern our global resources on a responsible, wealth creating basis. That is why we gather power for life as we withdraw from people, organizations and efforts that are not authentic and shift our social affirmation, our time and attention, our currency and deposits, and our investments and our donations to authentic people, enterprises and decentralizing solutions.
There was a time in my life when I believed that I was part of a culture of people — call us the English speaking people — who were excellent. The way of grief was the path through which I learned that we have not yet achieved this standard. Long ago, I made a promise that I would never act against the best interests or the excellence of my own people — that I would do my best to ensure that we were worthy of the stewardship of our world and that we did our best to leave a better world for generations yet to come. To make and keep such a promise is to understand that money and position are tools, not goals, and that death is not the worst thing that can happen. John Birkelund would probably accuse me of “fighting the tape” and not being “good at the game.” I would tell John that now is not the time in the history of our people for a failure of imagination.
Final paragraph is fantastic
Hmmm... this may explain some of trump's hatred of Harvard, cartels, etc. Not that there will be a sudden change in anything but it does shine light on warring factions within.