War Is Big Business

Deep Politics of Freeport Sulphur

In the Vol. 3, No. 3, March-April, 1996 edition of Probe, noted JFK assassination researcher Lisa Pease wrote in her article entitled "David Atlee Phillips, Clay Shaw and Freeport Sulphur":

Freeport Sulphur was born in Texas in 1912. The company later moved the headquarters office to New York. Originally, the principal business was mining sulphur. By 1962, Freeport Sulphur was the nation's oldest and largest producer of sulphur. In 1962, the fertilizer industry used 40% of the sulphur produced in the world. Other business segments that use sulphur in the production process are chemical, papermaking, pigment, pharmaceutical, mining, oil-refining and fiber manufacturing industries. For most of this period, Freeport was headed by John Hay Whitney.

Jock makes the Time cover

In 1927, Payne Whitney, one of America's richest multimillionaires, died, leaving his only son and future Freeport president an estate valued at over $179 million. At the young age of 22, John Hay Whitney became one of the country's richest men. Nonetheless, "Jock," as the press later called him, took a job at Lee Higginson and Co. on a salary of $65 a month. There, he made a fateful friendship with another onetime Lee Higginson employee named Langbourne Williams. Langbourne's father had originally founded Freeport Texas, then lost control of the business. Langbourne enlisted Jock's boss at Lee Higginson--J. T. Claiborne--to help in a proxy fight for control of Freeport. Claiborne urged the young Jock to join their efforts. Jock did--to the tune of a half a million dollars. By 1930, the Claiborne-Williams-Whitney team had won control of Freeport.

Freeport, Texas, was actually a town--not a business. It became a deep-water port when a Swedish Texan named Swenson, coincidentally the widowed brother-in-law of fertilizer magnates from Maryland named Tilghman, decided to use the expiring Herman Frasch patent to develop a sulphur resource. Located within a salt dome located on a part of the historic Austin's Colony granted to Stephen F. Austin, the land was owned by the heirs of Austin's sister, Mrs. James F. Perry, whose Peach Point Plantation in Brazoria County--variously called Bryanmound (Bryan Mound) or Bryan Heights Salt Dome -- was first suspected to contain sulphur by stock speculator Bernard Baruch a few years prior to its actual development in 1912.

When Baruch was unable to obtain financing from J.P. Morgan for sulphur production at the Bryan/Perry property, he instead moved to adjacent Wharton County's Boling salt dome, which he (along with the Morgan bank and W. Boyce Thompson) purchased in 1914 from  the Gulf Sulphur Company. In 1918 the name changed to Texas Gulf Sulphur. Austin's original land grant included land all the way to Bastrop, but it is not known whether the mineral estate of Boling Dome was still by that time owned by the Perrys and Bryans.

Freeport Sulphur, early days

Sulphur, however, was in great demand during World War I, and Bernard Baruch of the War Industries Board in Woodrow Wilson's administration was sniffing it out. It should not be overlooked that Woodrow Wilson was a wholly owned subsidiary throughout his administration by the little man from Texas named "Colonel" Edward M. House, originally from Houston. 

House's father, Thomas W. House, had run the blockade during the war years and had been in Matamoros and Monterey with Charles Stillman, William Marsh Rice and other merchants from Texas. They knew how to profit from trading in war materiel. 

The New Regime at National City Bank

By 1915 sulphur output would double:


By this time, Erice Swenson was 65 years old, no doubt ready to retire. But, as an officer in the National City Bank in new York, and as head of Freeport Sulphur in the middle of the great war, that was not about to happen. James Jewett Stillman, who died in 1918, was for four years replaced by his son, James Alexander Stillman. 

An 1896 Harvard graduate, young James in 1901 married Anne Urquhart, the daughter of actress Cora Urquhart and James Brown Potter. As founder of high society's Tuxedo Set, Potter was the son of banker Howard Potter, who married Mary Louisa Brown, whose father, James Brown, was the senior partner of  Brown Brothers & Co, an investment bank founded by sons of Alexander Brown of Baltimore.

When Mrs. Stillman followed her mother onto the stage as "Fifi" Stillman in 1921, a long battle played out in news headlines across the nation, and when James' embarrassing personal life hit the front pages of all the newspapers, it was the elderly Eric Swenson who rose to the chairmanship of the National City Bank.

Swenson must have known where lots of bodies were buried over the years, even having been one of the chief witnesses in the case prosecuted by the grandfather of James A. Baker III against the alleged murderer of William M. Rice, whose death opened up the huge endowment for Rice University.

By now most of the men who participated in setting up the sulphur facility at the new city of Freeport, Texas and the port that allowed for its distribution, were beginning to recede from the active management. These investors were named as the original underwriters of the stock at page 105 of a book by Gerald Kutney, Sulfur: History, Technology, Applications & Industry, as well as in a magazine article in The Chemical Engineer.

Original underwriters of $700,000 worth of stock in the company included the following:

• Frank A. Vanderlip, James Stillman, Samuel McRoberts--all officers of National City Bank, along with Eric P. Swenson, whose family bank, S. M. Swenson & Sons, also subscribed, as did Maud Tilghman Swenson's brothers, Frederick B. & Sidell Tilghman. Maud died in 1892, only three years after her marriage to Eric Swenson.
• John Langbourne Williams & Sons and Franklin Quimby Brown of Redmond bank (also involved in Knickerbocker Trust), who also subscribed as underwriters, were members of a fertilizer syndicate called Interstate Chemical Corporation with the Tilghmans. Their syndicate of investors in railroad securities often included C. Sidney Shepard (Yale, 1878) of New Haven, CT.
• Smaller investors: Edwin Hawley (tycoon in Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad), Williams & Peters (coal merchants), E. K. Knapp, E. M. Carter, Benjamin Andrews (a mining engineer who held several patents in connection with Union Sulphur Co.), James M. Edwards, Orne Wilson, W. B. Chisolm (part of a fertilizer syndicate), W. O. Wetherbee (a bank clerk who testified with Swenson in the Rice murder trial), John N. Steel, John Hays Hammond (associate of William Boyce Thompson), A. Chester Beatty, A. C. Swenson, F. A. Fearing, George C. Reiter, and S. M. Betts.

Many of those named above were also directors of the Interstate Chemical Corporation.
It was because of the initial investment by the J.L. Williams & Sons banking enterprise that Langbourne Meade Williams, Jr. ascended to a management position in 1930. His father (L.M. Sr.), died in 1931, and the Freeport Sulphur stock the family held gave him an opportunity to make a financial play, but it was another connection which gave him the power to do it. That came from the Rockefellers.

To be continued in a future post.

Citigroup's Texas Roots

From Wethersfield, CT - Puritan Stronghold

Charles Stillman, whose Texas-made fortune was used to set up the First National City Bank in New York City, was born in Wethersfield, Connecticut in 1810. His father, Francis Stillman, was a great-great-grandson of the man referred to by Stillman family genealogists as the "Settler" in America, George Stillman.

Wethersfield, CT

Francis Stillman stemmed from three Nathaniel Stillmans in a genealogical line that began in Hadley, MA in 1691. The first Nathaniel, who married a daughter of David and Honour Treat Deming in 1743, died in Wethersfield in 1770, six years before the Declaration of Independence. Francis' father was the third Nathaniel Stillman, born in 1752, who fought in the Revolutionary War, then died in Wethersfield in 1838, the same year his son Francis died--only two years after Texas had declared its independence against Mexico.

Francis was a ship-owning merchant who took his teenage son Charles to Durango, Mexico, as early as 1823, leaving him there to fend for himself within a trading network already established. "Don Carlos," as Charles was known in those parts, commandeered a profitable mercantile trade, which he would substantially increase during the Mexican War, which began when the new Republic of Texas was annexed as part of the United States in 1845. Upon his death many years later, Charles Stillman's family donated his papers from those years in Mexico and Texas to Harvard, an event which would give rise to research projects designed to establish a link between the New England money interests and Stillman's somewhat hidden Texas roots.

Dredging up the Past 

Chauncey D. Stillman

In 1939 one of these descendants, a cocky young Harvard graduate named Chauncey Devereaux Stillman, recruited some historians to pore through the papers, while he also tossed some family money around in Texas, most of it in the form of grants to memorialize his ancestor's eminent stature in the wilds of Texas. He even brought an entourage with him to Texas for ceremonial purposes, but according to one local resident named G.E. Dodd, more money was sought from the locals to memorialize their unsaintly ancestor than was passed down to them.

Charles Chauncey and sons, 1922

Charles Devereaux Stillman was the acknowledged author of a genealogy which began with the life of Don Carlos, who is said to have made his way on his father's schooner Albion from Mexico's interior near Durango in 1828 to Brazos de Santiago--the "salt water harbor for the town of Matamoros." There he came in contact with Francis Stillman's partner, Daniel Willard Smith, according to this book, Charles Stillman 1810-1875, published in a private printing for the author in 1956. 

Smith, who also hailed from Wethersfield, had been appointed American Consul to Mexico by President James Monroe. The consul's job was to resolve disputes that American citizens, then trading with Mexico (which at that time included what is now known as Texas), had with the government or other citizens of Mexico during an extremely tense time. Evidence of that tension was revealed in this article published in early 1837 recounting numerous reports recently received in the U.S. capital regarding incidents that had occurred in Mexico:

Zalmon Hull, father of Hezekiah Hull, Lydia Wells' father

Zalmon Hull's father was a resident of Fairfield, CT., 60 miles or so down the road from Wethersfield, passing by Middletown and New Haven. But Zalmon married a Redding girl named Betts and relocated further inland, even though he shipped out to engage in the Mexican trade. He was mentioned in the January 1914 edition of National Magazine, an article entitled "The Tragedy of Mexico," page 847 of which reads:

This "American consul" was Daniel W. Smith, who was already married by that time to the widow of Zalmon Hull's son, formerly Mrs. Hezekiah Belden Hull. That marriage made him the stepfather of her daughter Lydia Ann Hull, the mother of James B. Wells, Jr., for whom Jim Wells County in Texas was named. Lydia's husband, James Babbage Wells,

"was a privateer or mercenary during the Texas Revolution and commanded the Texas Navy yards at Galveston. In Aransas village, Wells was a cattle rancher who owned a schooner."

It was that fact which caused his name to be listed in an extremely rare book called The Sons of the Republic of Texas., which glorifies the lives of those who settled Texas when it still a part of Mexico prior to 1836, and before statehood in 1845.

When Charles Stillman arrived in Matamoros (often spelled Matamoras) in 1828, he naturally gravitated to fellow natives of Connecticut there, in addition to two of his brothers with whom he was involved in business partnerships until 1847, when the last of them, Frank D. Stillman, returned to Connecticut. Charles was then on his own but soon established a partnership with John J. Young on Rosales Street in Matamoros. Young died in 1859, but his descendants remained, and we will hear more about them later.

During this time, Charles realized the U.S. government would want to sell off part of the land on which Fort Brown was located and had almost 5,000 acres surveyed out of it. This was to become the city of Brownsville. We can only wonder if Frank had helped to make that happen once he returned to the northeast. A land boom quickly occurred, making Charles quite wealthy, but the population diminished from cholera epidemics. In 1849 Charles, at the ripe old age of 38, returned to Wethersfield for a wife.

Chauncey Devereux Stillman

Keep in mind that Charles Stillman's descendant, fresh from Harvard in 1929, had taken it upon himself to research and write the history of his family in Texas. In 1955 he traveled down to Brownsville to dedicate a house to the City of Brownsville, claiming it to have been the home that Charles Stillman bought for his bride Elizabeth Pamela Goodrich Stillman a century earlier.

Beginning in 1945, articles began to appear in the Southwestern Historical Quarterly on this subject, such as this one by Harbert Davenport, whose father was a law associate of Judge James B. Wells, Jr. Newspaper articles, like the one below, appeared under the byline of his wife:

Not everyone believed the story told by Jim Wells' law partner, Harbert Davenport, or by Mrs. Davenport in the above article. One witty, courageous long-time Brownsville resident, however, named George Emmet Dodd (son of Beeville, Texas attorney William W. Dodd), responded to the Mayor Stokeley's trumped up decision to grovel before the Stillman and Rockefeller families who came to Brownsville in 1955 to memorialize Charles Stillman with a little help from the city taxpayers. Dodd himself had a long and illustrious heritage in Texas, married to a granddaughter of Colonel James Eskridge Graham. 

It's unfortunate there aren't more people like G.E. Dodd in the world, who can tell fake historians and paid public relations "experts" to take a flying leap.

SOPHISTS AND OTHER SCOUNDRELS

Part Two

© 2005 by Linda Minor

Part 2 - Scooter Libby’s Client

Marc Rich

Marc Rich

Amid rumors that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is close to indicting White House officials in the Plame leak case are reports that Scooter Libby was Judith Miller’s source of information. Part One of this series explored Libby’s “handler,” Leonard Garment, a Brooklyn attorney who ushered Libby into three different law firms. 

As an attorney in one of those firms, Libby represented his wealthiest and most mysterious client—Marc Rich. Only one of a myriad of Rich’s attorneys, Libby, nevertheless, worked for the metal and oil trader for a period of eighteen years. Understanding Marc Rich is essential in understanding Scooter Libby and the financial network which invaded Iraq.

Strategic Metals

Craig Copetas, Marc Rich’s biographer, who lumped his subject, Rich, into the category of the “Metal Men,” [1] attempted to trace Marc Rich’s mysterious background. Marc’s father, David Rich, a descendant of the Belgian Reich family who fled Europe during World War II, assisted by a Jewish placement agency, changed his family's surname to Rich. 

David Rich  engaged in an assortment of secretive businesses

1. Jewelry distribution in Kansas City, Missouri; 
2. Importation of burlap at Melrose Bag in the Bronx, New York; 
3. Expansion into Sidec Overseas, S.A., a diversified agricultural import company which traded with Bolivian merchants; and 
4. Setting up of the American Bolivian Bank in La Paz. 

All of this industry centered around the metal trade--Bolivia being a prime source of silver, zinc, antimony, lead, cadmium, tungsten, gold, and tin since the sixteenth century. In 1976 Bolivia added lithium, a necessary ingredient in nuclear weapons, to its stock of strategic minerals.

While his father was busy trading, young Marc was quietly attending school and going to summer camp. He graduated from the private “Rhodes School” in mid-town Manhattan in 1952, just ten years before a future commerce secretary, Ron Brown, would receive his diploma there.[2] 

An advertisement for the school in 1917 (above) sported photographs of selected members of its illustrious faculty, which included former Harvard and Columbia professor Adolphe Cohn; Alexis Irene du Pont Coleman, a scion of the gunpowder and chemicals family that owned Dupont; and Dr. Jose F. de Fernandez, recruited from New York’s Jesuit St. Francis Xavier College. Those years at Rhodes constitute the sum total of Marc Rich’s formal education, apart from a year or so of study at New York University. He dropped out of college in 1954 to begin his trading career at Hamburg-based Philipp Brothers.  

Philipp’s London office first opened in 1908. A New York branch appeared in 1927, just nine years before Rich’s boss, Ludwig Jesselson, arrived there from Germany. Philipps Brothers also had close connections to Spain and to Bolivia. David Rich—allegedly in connection with his burlap bag business—traveled frequently to La Paz and even set up a bank there, where the physical commodities business tends to be based, along with Brazil, Colombia and the Ivory Coast.[3] It is impossible to trade physical commodities without arranging for their transportation from one place to another at a time certain. 

Marc’s twenty years at Philipp Brothers was spent 

“buccaneering between North and South America, Africa and Europe…Copper was king at the time, and Rich was one of the metal’s crown princes…He went on to learn tungsten under the direction of Henry Rothschild and Steven Dale, a former British commando who was the tungsten expert….” [4] 

Rich’s reward was a posting to the Philipp Brothers office in Madrid as manager in 1967.  He used this outpost as a base through West Africa and the Middle East, and he gained contacts through his seat on the European management committee in Zug, Switzerland. 

Goldfinger

Andre Meyer

In 1960 Jesselson, assisted by his friend Andre Meyer of Lazard Freres, merged the firm with Minerals & Chemicals (Minorco).  A second major change occurred in 1967—about the time Rich was arriving in Madrid—when Andre Meyer convinced Jesselson to merge with Engelhard Industries, owned by “Meyer’s friend and sometime business partner Charles Engelhard, the legendary inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger.” [5] 

Engelhard (sometimes called “The Platinum King”) also fabricated gold and other precious metals and lived in northwestern New Jersey’s aristocratic hunt country. His neighbors included Treasury Secretaries Douglas Dillon and Nicholas Brady—two partners in the Dillon, Read investment bank. Both Dillon, Read and Lazard Freres--as well as being favored investment arms of Rockefeller corporations and banks-- were also heavily involved in investments in the State of Texas, whose favorite son (Lyndon Johnson) had been in control of the Presidency since November 22, 1963.

Engelhard’s wife Jane was the daughter of a Brazilian diplomat, and her daughter, Annette Mannheimer, from a previous marriage (whom Engelhard adopted) married Samuel Pryor Reed, grandson of armaments tycoon Samuel F. Pryor. As Percy Rockefeller’s agent at Remington Arms in 1914, Pryor had a key position in mobilizing American industry, supervised by the War Industries Board, to manufacture and sell weapons to the Allies in World War I.

In “Who ‘Created’ Condi Rice?”—Linda Minor explored how Eugene Meyer, Jr. and Bernard Baruch used the War Finance Corporation and the War Industries Board “to administer minerals and materiel into a massive war machine.”  It was this war profiteering endeavor which first brought Samuel Bush (George H.W. Bush’s grandfather) into government operations—as discussed in “Money and Gunpowder, Part Two—A Place for Cannons”. [6]

Liquefying the Metals Trade

The metals Marc Rich brokered prior to 1973, from the aspect of national defense, were very strategic ones. Originally, such trading had to be done in the field, as it necessarily involved physical delivery of the metal at a specific location and time. Eventually, however, futures contracts were devised for most metals, allowing financial trading to take place at the commodities exchange. Before 1973, oil had never been traded on the futures markets, but things began to change in March of that year when President Nixon imposed price controls on oil. As reported in Time Magazine on March 19:

Inflation seems once again to be getting out of hand, despite repeated assurances from the President and Treasury Secretary George Shultz that Washington retains ample authority to crack down on price boosters. There was even more concern last week after the Government reported that in February the unadjusted wholesale price index jumped 1.9%, the biggest monthly rise in 22 years. With that, in an obvious attempt to regain its credibility, the Administration reached for its vaunted ‘stick in the closet’ and re-imposed direct controls on the nation's 23 biggest oil companies.”

Shah Pahlavi of Iran

Little mention was made of the price controls on oil, however, as food prices continued to soar through the summer. Marc Rich, however, knew that Middle Eastern oil producers were fuming because the dollar devaluation in 1971, combined with the price controls, had resulted in a net loss of income to them. At that point, through trading contacts with the royal Pahlavi family of Iran, Rich began to ship Iranian oil to Spanish refineries. He bought $150 million worth of crude oil at $5 above spot, only to be forced to sell by his bosses in New York, who panicked before the embargo set in. [7]

Harry Oppenheimer

Virtually all the trading done at Phibro (as Philipp Brothers was called after the Minorco merger) was extremely secretive.  Minorco, S.A. (Luxembourg) was then the international trading and investment arm of the Oppenheimer mining interests—trading in diamonds, gold and other precious materials. Engelhard and Harry Oppenheimer were bosom buddies, who first met in South Africa. Just as Engelhard played a vitally strategic role in maintaining a predictable level of necessary metals for the United States’ needs for coinage and national defense purposes, the Oppenheimer family had long performed the same functions for the British Empire.

Diamonds are Forever

Prior to the diamond discoveries in South Africa in the 1860’s, the supply of that precious gem was feared to be in danger of depletion.  Author Edward Jay Epstein relates:

Rough diamond

According to the records of the British East India Company, Jewish traders controlled virtually the entire world diamond traffic by the end of the eighteenth century. The Brazilian fields, however, were becoming rapidly depleted of diamonds, and no more diamonds were coming out of India.  Just as it appeared that the world might run out of diamonds, the South African mines were discovered in the eighteen-sixties. The ten leading Jewish merchants in London, fearing that the market would be flooded with South African diamonds, quickly formed a syndicate to buy up all of the production from these new mines. A number of the merchants in this syndicate had also acquired large stock holdings in the De Beers monopoly itself. One of the merchants who took the lead in arranging the deal with Cecil Rhodes was Dunkelsbuhler. Dunkelsbuhler brought into his London company a sixteen year old apprentice from Friedberg, Germany. [8] 

Ernest Oppenheimer, son of a cigar merchant, was that young boy sent to South Africa as a buyer for Anton Dunkelsbuhler in 1901. “German by birth, British by naturalization, Jewish by religion, and South African by residence," he became the “prototype of the multinational businessman.” [9]

Oppenheimer created Consolidated Diamond Mines (CDM) of South West Africa in 1917 by first setting up Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa in London with some assistance from his brothers and the House of Morgan. He offered to give each major German investor shares in Anglo-American in exchange for their holdings in the “forbidden zone” in Namibia, which he held in a South African corporation. With this leverage he convinced De Beers to trade him a share of stock and a seat on the board in exchange for an interest in his properties. By 1929, he and his cousins had become a powerful force in the diamond monopoly. With support from Lord Rothschild, whose bank still owned a large block of stock in De Beers, he was named chairman and added De Beers to his Anglo-American Company.

In order to maintain the monopoly, even though demand for diamonds during the depression was nil, Oppenheimer closed his mines but continued to buy from whatever source was presented to the company. By 1937 De Beers had stockpiled some 40 million carats, about a 20-years supply. Threatened with bankruptcy, he decided to create a market himself. 

He first found industrial applications for poor-quality diamonds in manufacturing--diamond grinding wheel—which became an indispensable tool for mass production. Oppenheimer sent his son Harry to New York City to work with Madison Avenue strategists on a campaign touting the four “C’s” of diamond perfection—cut, color, clarity, carat—helping sales to increase more than 50 percent in two years. A new custom was declared—diamond engagement rings—with the slogan “a diamond is forever,” a slogan adapted by Ian Fleming for one of his James Bond novels.

The Gold Fix

London first became the world gold center in 1671 when Moses Mocatta arrived from Amsterdam. His bank, called Mocatta & Goldsmid, would begin operation in 1684, a mere ten years before the Bank of England was established. Mocatta would act as broker for buying and selling foreign gold that arrived at the Bank of England. Great Britain first adopted a formal gold standard in 1816. Nathan Mayer Rothschild had his first bullion dealings with the Bank of England in 1824; then Pixley & Abel began operating in 1852, followed the next year by Samuel Montagu & Company. Germany and the U.S. adopted the gold standard early in the 1870’s. Most countries, however, suspended gold payments once World War I commenced, and the gold standard collapsed. At war’s end in 1919 London became the center for “fixing” the price of gold twice a day in a formal meeting at the Rothschild offices in New Court, St. Swithins Lane in London.

Britain, devastated by economic depression, abandoned the gold standard in 1931, though the United States kept the price of gold fixed at $20.67 per ounce until 1933, when America prohibited gold exports, ended convertibility of dollars into gold, and mandated that all gold held by citizens be exchanged for dollars. In January 1934 the price of gold was devalued to $35 per ounce, and the gold standard resumed. London continued its fixings until the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, when they were suspended for almost fifteen years. 

The task of keeping the sterling price of gold at $35 per ounce became increasingly more difficult as the market grew. As early as 1961 the Bank of England had to occasionally sell from its reserves on the fix to hold the $35 per ounce. This led to the creation of the gold pool—an alliance between central banks—to maintain the $35 level. The pool worked well until 1965, when private buying of gold began to exceed mine supply, forcing central banks to sell reserves into the market to hold the price steady.

A run on gold in March 1968 resulted in suspension of gold selling in London for two weeks—reopening with prices thereafter fixed in dollars rather than sterling. The gold price, free to float, was set twice a day, morning and afternoon. London’s action was followed two years later by President Nixon, who in August 1971 repudiated the United States’ obligation to redeem its dollars in gold. By the end of 1974, gold had soared from $35 to $195 per ounce.

Gold is a stabilizing influence in global trade, useful in maintaining a level of confidence in the government’s ability to ensure the value of investments both at home and abroad. The author previously mentioned the importance of gold in an article called “Taking the Golden Eggs.” The strategic value of other metals was discussed in “Who “Created” Condi Rice?”  These two articles are part of an ongoing project by this author to describe the historical trail that has been taking America and the rest of the world into a new world order—a centralized order where local control no longer exists. Implicit in this new world order is the recognition of one absolute truism:  Power comes from controlling vital and strategic commodities. The countries which are the sources of those commodities must, therefore, be dominated and not allowed to exercise any form of independence or nationalism.

 

A Citizen of the World

Marc Rich fits snugly into this new world order. Jack Quinn, Rich’s lead attorney in charge of obtaining a pardon from President Clinton, explained the crime for which Rich was convicted on CNN’s Larry King program:

This case arose out of a complicated series of oil transactions that occurred during the time when we had price controls on oil. And, in essence, what happened was that Marc Rich and major United States oil companies, including Arco, had linked domestic transactions to foreign transactions in an effort, admittedly, to circumvent those price controls. I think they were trying to do so lawfully. But what they tried to do was to find a way to get the real value out of a price of oil. [10]

For years Howard Safir, working for Rudy Giuliani as his New York City police commissioner and later as chief of operations for the U.S. Marshals Service, had been tracking Rich down from one country to another. Safir told Larry King:

He was hard to get because he had a great deal of influence in a lot of countries, and we were pretty much restricted to just a few countries where we could apprehend him. He had a Bolivian passport, he had a Spanish passport. The Israelis were very clear they weren't going to help us apprehend him. So it was very difficult to get him, plus he had a lot of money….You know, Marc Rich is one of those people who considers himself a citizen of the world, inconvenienced by the petty laws of nations. And the message that this sends is outrageous. [11]

Such “world citizenship” makes perfect sense, of course, to those persons who make their livelihood from global trade—what can best be termed the merchant adventurer class which brought us slavery, tobacco, rum, spices, and last but not least, opium.

NOTES:

[1] A. Craig Copetas, Metal Men:  How Marc Rich Defrauded the Country, Evaded the Law, and Became the World’s Most Sought-After Corporate Criminal (New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 2001).

[2]  Steven A. Holmes, Ron Brown: An Uncommon Life (New York:  John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000).  According to Holmes, the school was a favorite preparatory academy for sons of middle-class black families.

[3]  The Wall Street Journal, May 24, 1984.

[4]  Copetas, Metal Men, 80.

[5]  Judith Ramsey Ehrlich and Barry J. Rehfeld, The New Crowd:  The Changing of the Jewish Guard on Wall Street (New York:  Little, Brown and Company, 1989), 197. 

[6]  This series will be continued as time permits. Interested readers are encouraged to read George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography—by  Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin—for more detail about the Pryor family’s link to the Bush network, which revolves around the Brown Brothers Harriman investment bank, Rockefeller banking and oil interests, and investments of the Payne and Whitney families.

[7]  Mark Honigsbaum, The Observer, May 13, 2001.

[8]  Edward Jay Epstein in The Rise and Fall of Diamonds: The Shattering of a Brilliant Illusion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).  (This book appears online at Epstein’s website.)  Epstein adds: "Until the early part of the eighteenth century, the entire world's supply of diamonds came from India. The caravans that brought them across Arabia traded these rare stones to Jewish traders in Aden and Cairo for gold and silver. The traders then resold them to Jewish merchants in Venice, Lithuania, and Frankfurt. It was a natural enterprise for the Jews scattered throughout central Europe: Since they were moneylenders, they had to concern themselves with assessing, repairing, and selling gems that had been offered to them as collateral for loans. They also had close connections with the Jewish trading centers in the Ottoman Empire through which all the Indian diamonds passed…. When the Jewish diamond merchants and workers were forced by the Inquisition to flee from Lisbon and Antwerp, they resettled in Amsterdam. Since cutting factories required no equipment except for hand tools, which were portable, the Jews instantly transformed Amsterdam into the diamond center of Europe. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Jewish diamond merchants helped finance the Dutch East India Company, which organized its own trade route to India. So Amsterdam then replaced Lisbon as the port of entry in Europe for India's diamonds.  Just as the fields in India began to cease yielding diamonds, more were discovered in 1725 in Brazil. The Dutch maneuvered to gain control of this traffic, but now they had to contend with the rise of British sea power. By the mid eighteenth century, the British had almost completely taken over the trade in diamonds, both from India and Brazil. As the trading center for uncut diamonds shifted from Amsterdam to London, so did the Jewish diamond merchants…. The Jewish traders sent the diamonds to cutting factories that had been re-established in Antwerp, and from there, the jewels were sold to all the royal courts of Europe. To select and evaluate these diamonds, the courts chose Jewish gem experts, who became known as ‘Court Jews’ "

[9]  Ibid.

[10]  Transcript of "Larry King," February 8, 2001 broadcast at CNN website. 

[11]  Safir indicated as well that in 1986 Rich “had a lawyer from East Germany offer $225 million for him and Pinky Green if the prosecutions were wiped out.”