Gerald Harp <[EMAIL PROTECTED] responded: > >In a message dated 1/1/99 9:44:44 PM Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] >writes: > >> Other persons with offices there, according to the >> 1956 Dallas City Directory, included George DeMohrenschildt, Suite 1639-40; > >Linda, is this the guy who turned out to be a sort of facilitator for Lee >Harvey Oswald? +++++++++++++ DeMohrenschildt, who was a petroleum geologist, was well acquainted with a number of people involved in the oil industry, including George Bush. I will attach a brief excerpt of some of his involvements. Linda
DALLAS OIL MEN AND BANKERS Zapata Petroleum was first formed in 1953. By his own account, George Bush moved to Houston at a point in 1959 when Zapata Petroleum spun off its subsidiary, Zapata Off-Shore [ZOS], each corporation buying out the other's interest. The initial investors in the parent corporation were procured by Brown Brothers, Harriman (whom George represented) and by Gulf Oil (whose agents were Bill and Hugh Liedtke). The Liedtkes' father was the Oklahoma general counsel to the Mellons' Gulf Oil Corp. As a member of Houston's petroleum community, Bush made contact with other members of the same "investment" class of businessmen, including: (1) W.S. Farish-an heir to a fortune in Standard Oil of New Jersey and Sears Roebuck stock-invested through his family's investment banks-as well as connected by marriage to Houston's famous Rice family, Howard Hughes, and the Neuhaus family who controlled the investments of multi-millionaire oilman Hugh Cullen; (2) James A. Baker III-whose family of lawyer/bankers had created and controlled the Rice University endowment, and set up the law firm of Baker & Botts; Baker became a partner at the firm of Andrews, Kurth, which was set up by attorney Frank Andrews-long-time lawyer for the railroads which consolidated to form the Atkinson, Topeka and Santa Fe. Andrews had been the family attorney for Howard Hughes, Sr. And also advised Howard Jr. in the making of his will at age 19 when he married the niece of W.S. Farish's wife. Hughes' mother's sister married Dr. Fred Lummis, whose mother was a sister of Farish's wife. Zapata Offshore set up its headquarters in the Houston Club Building, the building which also housed the offices of investor W.S. Farish III of Underwood Neuhaus & Co. After the split from the Liedtkes' company, Bush entered into a joint venture with Jorge Diaz Serrano in a Mexican drilling company called Permargo, which received lucrative contracts from Pemex. Permargo had been founded by Edwin Pauley, whom FDR had named to be Secretary of the Navy, but whose appointment was blocked by the Senate.1 Instead, Pauley went to Mexico City, where he worked with George Bush and other associates during the years preceding the Bay of Pigs operation (the code name of which was "Operation Zapata"). Serrano left Permargo to become head of Pemex in 1975, but in 1983 was convicted of defrauding the Mexican government.2 Jonathan Kwitny, the investigative reporter checking into the story, discovered that Zapata's corporate records from 1960 to 1966, stored at the SEC, had been "inadvertently destroyed" shortly after Bush became U.S. Vice-President.3 1. Dresser Industries In 1961 Zapata Offshore joined a consortium with Dresser Industries4 and General Dynamics to bid on the Mohole Project, which was awarded to Brown & Root.5 In 1950 Dresser Industries had relocated its headquarters to Dallas with a large branch office in Houston-the center of the oil and gas industry. Before the 1961 bid Dresser had rejected the opportunity to acquire Brown & Root, whose chairman, Herman Brown, was the organizer of Houston's own political action committee; Herman's brother George R. Brown, was for many years head of the Rice Institute board of governors and was Lyndon Johnson's biggest contributor and fund-raiser. The Rice board controlled the assets and companies of Howard Hughes, not the least important of which was the patent for the three-cone rolling cutter rock bit. According to the history of Dresser, written by Darwin Payne: A lawyer and inventor named Howard R. Hughes, father of an even more famous son who by now had expanded the family enterprises into the motion picture and aircraft industries, had invented this unique bit, with three revolving cutting elements, before World War I. It was one of the most important contributions of the century to the art of drilling. The company he formed, Hughes Tool Company, now controlled some 80 percent of the bit business. Dresser inquired into the possibility of acquiring the company, sought persistently but in vain to win an audience with the younger Hughes, and finally realized that the firm was not available under any circumstances. Neither was the second most important company in the field, Reed Roller Bit, although a deal had seemed imminent until its principal owner balked at the last moment.6 2. W.S. Farish III So Dresser had to settle for the third company, a small one in Whittier, California. Reed Roller Bit, incidentally, was also controlled by the same group in control of the Hughes empire-the Rice and Farish families in Houston, whose lawyers were the Bakers. The patent for the Reed bit was filed in 1913, and the company which manufactured it was begun four years later by Niels Esperson and one other stockholder. All the stock was purchased in 1925 by a syndicate formed by Stephen Farish, brother of W.S. Farish.7 Prior to the investment in Reed Roller Bit, Steve Farish had formed Navarro Oil Co., which was sold in 1945 to Continental Oil Co. Steve Farish was married to Lottie Baldwin Rice, sister of Kate Rice Neuhaus and cousin of Libbie Rice Farish. With Zapata Offshore as a cover, Bush could easily have been working as a covert intelligence operative during the 1960s. One declassified document which evidences that is a November 29, 1963 memorandum from J. Edgar Hoover to the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the U.S. State Department for the purpose of relaying information regarding the reaction of the anti-Casto Cuban community in Florida to the John Kennedy assassination. The memo states as follows: An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that these individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination. The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W. T. Forsyth of this Bureau.8 3. United Fruit Company Bush soon made contacts with Houston politicos, and, even though he says he was invited by George Brown to run as a Democrat for U.S. Senate in 1964, his picture was printed in the Houston Chronicle on March 21, 1963 as "County G.O.P. Leader." He ran as a Republican against Democratic Senator Ralph Yarborough that November.9 Defeated, he resigned in February 1966 as chairman and CEO of Zapata to run for Congress full-time. At the end of 1976 Zapata Off-Shore was still an independently owned subsidiary of Zapata Corporation, but apparently there were plans in the works to merge back into the parent during 1977.10 The Liedtke brothers had by then bought Pennzoil, which was still separate from Zapata Offshore.11 It is impossible to tell from reading the SEC reports whether Bush retained his stock in Zapata and, if so, how much he had. It is clear from newspaper articles, however, in what direction Zapata was moving by 1968. According to a January 20, 196912 Houston Chronicle article by Albert T. Collins, Zapata Norness, Inc. (formerly Zapata Off-Shore) had been seeking to acquire United Fruit Co. stock by offering to exchange one share of convertible stock for every share of United Fruit stock tendered to it. A competing offer to purchase stock had been made by AMK Corp., which was recommended by officers of the fruit company. The following week, after Zapata had already received almost 31,000 shares, AMK Corp.'s chairman, E.M. Black, and Zapata Norness reached an agreement whereby AMK would pay Zapata $3.8 million to withdraw from competition for United Fruit. AMK would buy all United Fruit stock which Zapata had purchased, in cash up to $3 million and would execute a promissory note for any amount in excess of the $3 million, payable at 6-7/8% interest in 10 equal annual installments. To understand the significance of this purchase it is necessary to take a closer look at Dresser Industries. The Harriman crew had installed Yale Skull and Bones colleague, Neil Mallon, as president of Dresser, when he "coincidentally" appeared in town for a visit after spending six months skiing in the "European Alps." (He was more likely taking lessons from Swiss banking experts.) Mallon's grandfather had been a Cincinnati judge, his father a lawyer with connections to President Taft. Mallon himself had an abiding interest in world cooperation-active in Cleveland's Council on World Affairs while Dresser was headquartered there, and then establishing a branch in Dallas as soon as the company relocated to Texas in 1950. The Council was his "chief outside interest."13 In connection with this interest, Mallon hired a man named Hans Bernd Gisevius to work on a worldwide economic development program called the "Institute on Technical Cooperation."14 Gisevius, an Abwehr (German Intelligence) member stationed at the German consulate in Zurich, was a friend of Allen Dulles, who served as head of U.S. intelligence in Switzerland from December 1942 until the war ended.15 Gisevius, in fact, "owed his life to the helping hand of Allen Dulles."16 While in Switzerland Dulles began a long-lasting love affair with a woman named Mary Bancroft, whom he asked in 1943 to translate a book Gisevius had written. Gisevius and some of his Abwehr associates had been scheming for years to kill Hitler and instigated the July 20, 1944 plot, hoping to form an alliance with Britain and the U.S. against Russia. His group, like Dulles, was anti-Nazi and anti-Communist, "but not necessarily anti-fascist."17 Dulles' mistress, Mary Bancroft, had previously been married to a man named Sherwin Badger, a Harvard graduate whose first job had been in the head office of United Fruit in Cuba. After a year in Cuba he became a journalist in Boston, later moving to the Wall Street Journal and Barron's in New York, both of which were published by Mary's stepfather, Clarence Walker Barron.18 Mary also had a long friendship with George Lyman Paine and Ruth Forbes Paine, whose son Michael Paine and his wife Ruth befriended Marina Oswald the year prior to John Kennedy's assassination. The Paines were from Boston and both had family trees tying them to the United Fruit Co.-through Michael's mother (a niece of W. Cameron Forbes) and his father (a descendant of Thomas Dudley Cabot, a former president of United Fruit). Michael's uncle, Eric Schroeder, was a friend and investment associate of geologist Everette DeGolyer and a cousin of Alexander "Sandy" Forbes, former director of United Fruit who "belonged to the elite Tryall Golf Club retreat in Jamaica with former DeGolyer associate Paul Raigorodsky..."19 The head of United Fruit in 1969 was Eli Black, successor of Samuel Zemurray, a Romanian from the same province as Edgar Bronfman's grandfather. United Fruit was traditionally financed by New York and Boston banks, which installed their bankers in top management positions of the company. Allen Dulles was a Wall Street lawyer who represented such banks. After the 1954 Guatemalan coup in which the CIA was heavily involved, Walter Bedell Smith, head of the CIA, became a United Fruit director and Allen Dulles, who had been president of United Fruit, replaced Smith at the CIA. At that time the DuPont family also had a large investment in United Fruit.20 DuPont's significance will become more apparent in connection with the following section on the Bronfman interests in Conoco. 4. Everette DeGolyer Everett DeGolyer, the famous geologist, who spent his entire career working for the Pearson oil companies21-and thus had close ties to Lazard Brothers-was also a director of Dresser Industries. He had begun his career employed by Mexican Eagle Oil Co., owned by Sir Weetman Pearson, who called him to London in 1918 to sell Mexican Eagle to Royal Dutch Shell. The proceeds from the sale were invested by Pearson in the creation of a new oil company founded and operated by De Golyer in 1919 called Amerada (some years later merged into Amerada Hess).22 After he retired from the oil business to become an owner of Saturday Review, DeGolyer still maintained an office in Houston and was well-known in the Houston and Dallas petroleum clubs frequented by Bush and Liedtke. One of DeGolyer's daughters married George C. McGhee, a U.S. State Department official, who was present in May 1954 at the first Bilderberg meeting with George Ball, David Rockefeller, Prince Bernhard of Holland and Dr. Joseph Retinger.23 McGhee later served as a trustee of the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, established by the Anglo-American establishment to shape the "limits to growth" agenda.24 Researcher Bruce Campbell Adamson of Santa Cruz, California, discovered a copy of George DeMohrenschildt's mid-1950s address book and set out to trace what connections the people listed there had with the mysterious friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. One portion of his work covers George McGhee, graduate of Southern Methodist University, who was a 1938 Rhodes Scholar. In 1936, according to Adamson, "McGhee attended a dinner with forty other German Rhodes Scholars, and those in attendance included: Hitler's finance minister, Count Schwerin von Krosigk; and Hitler's ambassador to London and foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop." Twenty-five years later McGhee would become Ambassador to Germany after his appointment by JFK in 1963. Between those years, McGhee served in the Navy as liaison officer to General Curtis LeMay, then worked as an assistant to Houstonian Will Clayton who was responsible for implementing the Marshall Plan in Europe.25 During World War II McGhee had been on the War Production Board and Combined War Materials Board, later becoming coordinator for aid to Greece and Turkey under Robert A. Lovett of the U.S. State Dept. He was appointed Ambassador to Turkey in 1952. It was during his tenure that problems arose over whether Aramco was entitled to tax concessions. McGhee negotiated with Mossadegh in 1951 but was was unsuccessful in resolving the problem. By the time he became Ambassador to Germany in March 1963, McGhee was the "number three man" in the State Department, according to Adamson, and was "known to be running the show in the Congo."26 While in Dallas, in 1958 McGhee became president of the Dallas Council on World Affairs which Neil Mallon had founded in 1951. McGhee was a director, however, as early as 1955-serving with his father-in-law, Judge Sarah T. Hughes, Robert Gerald Storey, and others.27 In 1959 he headed Lyndon Johnson's presidential campaign committee in Dallas.28 Once Johnson became Kennedy's vice-president, McGhee was one man Johnson insisted on having appointed to a high position in the State Department. Robert Kennedy called McGhee a "real zero...one of the problems with the State Department..."29 Kennedy was even more incensed that a good ambassador was fired in order to put McGhee in that post in Germany. Although Bruce Adamson's manuscript is very poorly written, and not well documented, it is possible to glean a few interesting tidbits of information from it. In Vol. II, about George McGhee, Adamson states that McGhee was a partner of Jack Crichton in some oil leases in Lincoln Parish, Louisiana in 1954; in a March 12, 1954 letter to Crichton, McGhee disclosed that he "had been talking to Jack Dougherty30 the vice-president of Empire Trust Company Oil and Natural Gas Department of New York City." McGhee's geologist, C.N. Valerius, estimated the oil and gas production to be worth over $3 million at that time. Other parties who had an interest in the lease included Crescent Production Co., Inc., attorney Harold F. Thompson (Thompson & Knight in Dallas),31 Valerius himself, Southwest Natural Production Co., Atlantic Refining Co., Lion Oil Co., and the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Co.32 According to documents filed in the Harris County deed and mortgage records, in November 1963 Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc., a company whose largest shareholders-the Bronfmans-also had a significant block of stock of Empire Trust, had purchased certain oil and gas properties from Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company, and had assigned a percentage of the production payments it would receive to Glanville Minerals Corp. [File No. B782604].33 Glanville Minerals is connected to a Texan named James Glanville, who resigned from Lehman Brothers after numerous battles with Pete Peterson. He then went to work for Lazard Freres and eventually ended up as advisor to Hugh Liedtke of Pennzoil in the takeover of Texaco. Glanville also went in the land development business with engineer E.J. Hudson, a close friend of the H.L. Hunt family and former husband of a Blaffer heir. R.L. Blaffer was a founder of Humble Oil, and prior to that was W.S. Farish's first partner in the oil business at Spindletop. After leaving the State Department McGhee became a director of Mobil Oil, the company which absorbed Magnolia Oil Company,34 which played a very strategic part in the Kennedy assassination, as will be shown in the next few pages. 5. Republic National Bank of Dallas and the CIA Copies of correspondence indicates that in 1956 McGhee Production Company had an office at 2420 Republic Bank Building in Dallas. According to an article in the Houston Chronicle in February 1967, the Republic National Bank in Dallas was acting as trustee for an unnamed trust which was a conduit for CIA funds. The Chronicle article failed to reveal that the bank was trustee for the Estates of Esther and Karl Hoblitzelle, who died in 1943 and 1962, respectively. The original trust was set up in 1942. Interestingly, in her will she listed the names of those trustees: Sarah T. Hughes (then only a young attorney), Umphrey Lee, Fred Florence (president of the bank), and the Hoblitzelles. Karl Hoblitzelle, formerly of Kentucky, had an office in Dallas in the Majestic Theatre Building. He also owned three movie theatres in Houston, including the Majestic at Rusk and Travis, which was sold after his death to Jimmy Lyon, River Oaks banker and Contra supporter.35 The theatre was torn down to build the General Crude Building, now owned by Wells Fargo. The Hoblitzelle Foundation was named by Wright Patman's subcommittee which investigated tax-exempt foundations in 1964. According to E.W. Kenworthy in a February 19, 1967 article printed in the New York Times, between 1959 and 1965, the foundation received contributions of $505,700, $250,000 of which was listed on its form 990-A filed with IRS as coming from "anonymous" sources and the rest from foundations identified by Patman's House Select Committee on Small Business as "front foundations." Hoblitzelle then donated $75,000 to the International Cooperative Development Fund and $430,700 to the Congress for Cultural Freedom or its French affiliate. Kenworthy also exposed the M.D. Anderson Foundation of Houston as being a similar "pass-through" foundation for funds coming from the CIA to be distributed for propaganda purposes domestically and abroad. The national news was filled with reports during February and March 1967, brought on by the expose in Ramparts about the CIA's funneling of funds into the National Student Association. This relationship went on for about 15 years, with the CIA providing $200,000 per year to the NSA as grants funneled through private foundations.36 Many of the grants were made for students' travel abroad, with the students expected to file reports about their observations.37 Some student reports were allegedly used by the CIA in preparing intelligence evaluations of the revolution in the Dominican Republic in 1965.38 Another Houston foundation mentioned in the disclosures during 1967 was the Hobby Foundation. William P. Hobby, Jr. not only admitted that it had been a conduit for the transfer of CIA funds, but declared he was "glad to have done it and proud to have been of service to the Federal Government."39 The IRS forms filed by Hobby indicated that about half the funds went to Berliner Verein zur Forderung der Publizistik in den Entwicklunslandern, one-fourth to the American Friends of the Middle East and another one-fourth to the Fund for International Social and Economic Education. Surprisingly, Robert Kennedy also admitted that the funneling of the funds had occurred with his knowledge and that of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. But Bobby made clear that the presidents did not direct the policy, leading one to conclude that the decisions were made by the National Security Council.40 Besides the Hoblitzelle estate, Republic National Bank in Dallas also acted as trustee for the estates of Everette DeGolyer and the Nieman and Marcus families. The bank was heavily involved in loans and investments for those estates. The bank's attorneys were the firm of Locke, Purnell which had offices in the bank building. This firm specializes in tax shelters and international finance transactions, many of which involve transfers from Canadian, Swiss and Caribbean banks. Through its partner Eugene Locke, who served as John Connally's campaign chairman during his first gubernatorial election, the law firm also controlled the Lomas & Nettleton mortgage company, whose main client was the commercial construction company operated by Trammell Crow, who was related to the Blaffer family by marriage. The Houston Chronicle mentioned other CIA conduits, including the San Jacinto Fund, "one of the many dummy foundations set up by the CIA to conceal the source of the funds it was distributing."41 The San Jacinto Fund was organized by John Mecom and used the address of a CPA42 in the San Jacinto Building at 911 Walker-the same location of the Brown Foundation for many years. This building was in the same block as Hoblitzelle's Majestic Theatre. Neil Sheehan in a New York Times story named the San Jacinto Foundation as one of three foundations used as a conduit for funds to the National Student Association (NSA) and the International Student Conference.43 According to Sheehan, Harry H. Lunn, secretary of the Foundation for Youth and Student Affairs in 1967 had been present of the NSA in 1954-55, then served as a research analyst for the Defense Department, then moved to the political section of the American embassy in Paris and later worked for the Agency for International Development (AID). 6. Paravicini Bank and Permindex In the same year that Zapata and Pennzoil were moving toward hostile takeovers, a new Swiss bank opened in Houston with J. Hugh Liedtke and George Bush's securities adviser, W.S. Farish III, among the directors. Called "Bank for Investment and Credit Berne" (BICB), its stock was owned by Capital National Bank and Paravicini Bank, but investors included Seagrams, Boeing, Minute Maid in Zurich, the London subsidiary of Brown and Root and the Schlesinger Organization of London and Johannesburg.44 These investors are more than interesting in light of the fact that Paravicini is a descendant of the Venetian Pallavicini family, whose attorney in Rome, Carlo d'Amelio, was the general counsel to Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), the Italian arm of Permindex. CMC was incorporated in Berne Switzerland, and D'Amelio sat on the board of directors during the time that Seagrams' attorney, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of Montreal, was chairman of Permindex.45 When the role of CMC in the attempted assassination of President DeGaulle of France was discovered, it fled Europe and re-emerged in Johannesburg, South Africa. However, the parent company, Permindex, continued to be managed from Montreal by Bloomfield. Clay Shaw, the man prosecuted in New Orleans by Jim Garrison for his role in the Kennedy assassination, was also a board member of CMC, with which his International Trade Mart had connections. According to a 1970 report called "The Torbitt Document," a compilation of information gathered by a Texas attorney from "court-approved and documented evidence" from sources in the U.S. Customs Department and the Narcotics Bureau, from the Warren Commission and the Garrison investigations, Bloomfield's Permindex Corp. supervised five subsidiary groups: (1) "White Russian" organization called the Solidarists--members Ferenc Nagy of Dallas (former Hungarian premier) and Jean De Menil of Houston (head of Schlumberger); (2) American Council of Churches--H.L. Hunt organization; (3) Free Cuba Committee--Carlos Prio Soccaras (Cuban ex-president); (4) "The Syndicate"--Clifford Jones and Bobby Baker working with Joe Bonanno Mafia family; (5) NASA's Security Division--Werner Von Braun, headquarters in Redstone Arsenal in Muscle Shoals, Alabama and on East Broad Street in Columbus, Ohio. The Kennedy assassination was planned and carried out by Division Five of the FBI, which acted in conjunction with the Defense Intelligence Agency under the control of the Joint Chiefs. These divisions had a highly secret police agency called the Defense Industrial Security Command, which also worked with NASA, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), USIA and weapons and ammunition supply corporations (munitions makers) which contract with those agencies. The police force originated in the 1930's to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, then expanded to the AEC, tying it in with army intelligence. Agents of this force included Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and others, and was headed up by Bloomfield. According to this report: The principal financiers of Permindex were a number of U.S. oil companies, H.L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, John De Menil, Solidarist director of Houston, John Connally, as executor of Sid Richardson estate, Haliburton [sic] Oil Co., Sen. Robert Kerr of Okla., Troy Post of Dallas, Lloyd Cobb of New Orleans, Dr. Oechner of New Orleans, George and Herman Brown of Brown & Root, Attorney Roy M. Cohn, Chairman of the Board for Lionel Corp., New York City, Schenley Industries of New York City, Walter Dornberger, ex-Nazi general and his company, Bell Aerospace, Pan American World Airways and its subsidiary, Intercontinental Hotel Corp., Paul Raigorodsky of Claiborne Oil of New Orleans, Credit Suisse of Canada, and Heineken's Brewery of Canada and a host of other munitions makers and NASA contractors directed by the Defense Industrial Security Command. 7. Permindex and Seagrams Roy Cohn was a very close friend of Lewis Rosenstiel, who was in turn a friend of Sam Bronfman. Bloomfield was also president of Heineken of Canada. What these companies seem to have in common is their shareholders, directors and financiers. They are the same persons who invested in Bush-Overbey, Zapata and Dresser Industries through the investment trusts they controlled. The 1992 edition of Dope, Inc. has this to say about the banks involved: Both Seagram's (and its old Prohibition rum-running partner, Hudson's Bay) are interlocked through a maze of contacts with all five of the big Canadian chartered banks: the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia, the Toronto Dominion Bank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Thus, the dirty money gleaned from the drug trade is conduited through these banks to points further south: The banks' offshore centers in the Caribbean, and from there the money makes its whirlpool round of worldwide laundering.46 The chairman of this Houston-based international investment bank, BICB, whose investors included Seagrams and the Schlesinger mining interests in South Africa, was Johan F. (Fred) Paravicini.47 Vice-chairman was L.F. McCollum, Sr.-a long-time Humble Oil employee, who headed Conoco and founded Capital National Bank of Houston in 1965. The bank's president was Baker Lovett, cousin of James A. Baker III, and grandson of the first president of Rice University, Odell Lovett, a friend of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton. In an interview with the Houston Post, Baker stated that his experience of 15 years in banking indicated that Houston had a relatively short supply of money, and that venture capital had to come from New England-from "more mature economies."48 He believed a bank "should dedicate a portion of its resources to relatively risky situations because it's those which sometimes really pay off." As the 1980s showed, however, it was also that type of investment that resulted in the bailout of the savings and loan industry. In addition to its investment in the BICB set up by Conoco's chairman, Seagrams also owned a great deal of stock in Conoco and caused a major eruption with DuPont in 1981 over who would control the company. Seagrams was interested in Conoco because it owned a 53% interest in Hudson's Bay Oil and Gas Co. in Canada. Since it had recently received $2.3 billion cash profit from the sale of Sunoco stock, with which it had tried and failed to purchase control of DuPont's St. Joe Minerals, the Scottish-financed liquor barons at Seagrams saw another chance to grab something prized by the New Englanders-control of Conoco. In 1969 W.S. Farish III was 31 years old and was a partner in the investment companies of Underwood Neuhaus and W.S. Farish & Co., through which he handled millions of dollars of his family's wealth in addition to George Bush's blind trust. Farish was also serving as president of a company called Fluorex, an international mineral and exploration company, and in 1973 also became a director of Houston Natural Gas.49 He was the only grandson of one of the founders of Humble Oil, W.S. Farish, Sr., who had been chairman of Standard Oil of New Jersey prior to World War II. W.A. Harriman & Co. helped Jersey Standard finance a merger with I.G. Farben, the German chemical corporation which manufactured the gas used to exterminate so many Jews. Lehman Brothers, which had an office in Capital National Bank's building at 1300 Main-on the same floor, incidentally, as George Bush's friend (and later, Commerce Secretary, Robert Mosbacher), was represented on the board of the Capital National and its international investment branch. One director was Lehman Brothers partner, John B. Carter, Jr., and another was director I.H. "Denny" Kempner III, heir to the Imperial Sugar fortune, whose brother was a Lehman representative in Houston.50 The Kempner brothers' mother was Mary Carroll Kempner, a granddaughter of W.T. Carter and sister of W.T. Carter, Jr., whose wife was Lillie Neuhaus, making them first cousins of Victor J. Carter. 51 Lillie was a niece of C.L. Neuhaus and W. Oscar Neuhaus, the founders of Neuhaus & Co. (later Underwood Neuhaus). Oscar's son, Hugo, married Kate Rice, Libbie Farish's cousin, and after W.S. and Libbie's son died in 1943, their daughter-in-law, Mary Wood Farish, married Kate Neuhaus' son. The Oscar Neuhaus who became trustee for the wealthy Cullen family and secretary of a joint venture between Dresser and Cullen interests, was a key member of the Neuhaus/Farish banking interests-which thus had control of Cullen/Dresser real estate matters in downtown Houston.52 This relationship resulted in the construction of a complex of office buildings in the southwest part of downtown leased to Dresser, Cullen/Frost Bank, Enron, Oppenheimer & Co. and assorted other interesting companies. The Carter family also were investment bankers in Houston. Still another director of Capital Bank was Bill Barziza, a descendant of Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, founder of Houston Land & Trust, which has since merged into First International Bank. This ancestor was the son of a Venetian count and French-Canadian mother, born in Williamsburg, Virginia, who, during the Civil War, had been captured at Gettysburg and smuggled through the Confederate underground to Canada where he was returned to Houston via the blockade route through Bermuda.53 The decision to form a partnership with Paravicini may have also been influenced by another Lehman representative-William Mellon Hitchcock--grandson of William Larimer Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, and nephew of banker Andrew Mellon. Bush's partners in Zapata were the sons of William Liedtke, Sr.-one of the "highest ranking lawyers in Gulf Oil Corp."54 Billy Mellon Hitchcock worked from 1961 to 1967 for "his father's mentor," Bobby Lehman of Lehman Brothers in Manhattan.55 Fred Paravicini began an illegal trading relationship with Billy in 1965, for which they were not indicted until 1973-Hitchcock in February and Paravicini in June. Hitchcock pled guilty in April.56 He then appears to have disappeared from sight. What Hitchcock shows us is a classic Venetian fondi member, educated at Harvard, trained at Lazard Brothers during Lord Cowdray's tenure, who while vacationing in Venice, is recruited to work for CIA-connected investment bank with connections to the Bronfman family by a member of his father's polo team! How did he manage to get caught? These people never get caught. But what was never followed up on was how Hitchcock and Paravicini were connected to Conoco, Seagrams, Standard Oil, Brown & Root and the Schlesinger mines in Johannesburg. These connections lead straight to Permindex, the Bronfmans and to the Dallas oil men funding the JFK assassination. They also lead to George Bush through W.S. Farish-investor of his blind trust. Another interesting connection with the Capital National Bank involves a man named S. Mort Zimmerman of Dallas, who in 1962 formed the Capital Exchange Corporation for seven investors. In Houston, Capital Exchange bought the former Federal Reserve Bank Building at Caroline and Texas, which was later sold to companies involved in metal fabrication (possibly for weapons manufacturing). Control was retained, however, through a lien held by a company with an office in the 1300 Main Building. The Capital Exchange was connected with Zimmerman's Dallas bank-the Mercantile National Bank-as was the Capital National of Houston.57 Zimmerman began his career, not as a banker, but as an electrical engineer, working for James T. Ling in a company which became Ling-Temco-Vought. After six years as president of Electron Corporation, an LTV subsidiary, Zimmerman formed Capital Exchange and began buying banks in Florida. At the same time he created one corporation after another, manipulating funds and stock among the various entities in a classic ponzi scheme. Zimmerman owned Intercontinental Industries, a subsidiary of which--Intercontinental Manufacturing Company-produced bomb bodies and missile motor cases in Garland, Texas. In 1967 this company had $30 million in sales, with a $1.5 million profit. In 1968 Zimmerman sold the subsidiary, valued at $11 million to Robert Vesco's International Controls Corporation in exchange for 275,000 shares of ICC stock.58 8. The Pearson Group and Texas oil men Although it has never been proven that Farish, Liedtke or George Bush had any background in intelligence operations before Bush was appointed director of the CIA by Gerald Ford in 1976, an inference can be made just by reviewing the associations that existed in the Texas oil community in the 1960s. Billy's training as an investment banker had taken place at the English branch of Lazard Freres, which has been shown to be closely tied to one of George Bush's original investors, Eugene Meyer, and to Everett DeGolyer, a Dresser director who had spent most of his career working for Sir Weetman Pearson (Viscount Cowdray). DeGolyer left his job at Amerada Petroleum in New York and moved to Dallas where he established a geological consulting firm called DeGolyer and MacNaughton and served from 1954 until his death in 1956 on the board of Dresser Industries in Dallas. He was replaced on the board by his partner, Lewis W. MacNaughton, who remained until 1969. 59 Lewis MacNaughton was also a director of Empire Trust, a company whose largest single holding of stock was comprised of Loeb-Lehman, Bache and Bronfman holdings, in which Edgar Bronfman became a director in 1963. Edgar Bronfman, Sr. married the daughter of John L. Loeb (Loeb, Rhoades), who was himself married to a Lehman.60 A vice-president of Empire Trust in Dallas was Jack Crichton (also president of Nafco Oil & Gas, Inc.) who was connected with Army Reserve Intelligence.61 In a 1995 book written by Fabian Escalante, the chief of a Cuban counterintelligence unit during the late 1950s and early 1960s, he describes that as soon as intelligence was received from agents in Cuba that Fidel Castro had "converted to communism," a plan called "Operation 40" was put into effect by the National Security Council, presided over by Vice-President Richard Nixon. Escalante indicates that Nixon: was the Cuban "case officer" who had assembled an important group of businessmen headed by George Bush and Jack Crichton, both Texas oilmen, to gather the necessary funds for the operation. Nixon was a protégé of Bush's father Preston [sic] who in 1946 had supported Nixon's bid for Congress. In fact, Preston Bush was the campaign strategist that brought Eisenhower and Nixon to the presidency of the United States. With such patrons, [Tracy] Barnes was certain that failure was impossible.62 According to Peter Dale Scott, Crichton arranged for Marina Oswald to have Ilya Mamantov as her interpreter when she was questioned after Oswald's arrest.63 Mamantov also taught scientific Russian classes at Magnolia Oil Co. Lee and Marina Oswald first met the Paines at a party at the home of Richard Pierce and Everett Glover where practically all the guests worked for Magnolia Oil. The guests included a German named Volkmar Schmidt who came to Dallas in 1961 to do geological research at Magnolia's laboratories in nearby Duncanville.64 MacNaughton's personal accountant was George Bouhe, who also worked at the Tolstoy Foundation with Paul Raigorodsky-a man involved with the National Alliance of Solidarists. Bouhe was closely tied to George DeMohrenschildt, who later became famous as the White Russian assigned to "handle" Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas. It was DeMohrenschildt who had taken the Oswalds to a party where they met Volkmar Schmidt, and then a later party at the same house where they met Michael Paine. DeMohrenschildt was also the one in charge of getting Marina a place to stay at Ruth Paine's home, and it was Ruth Paine who found Oswald the job at the book depository office in the building owned by Jack Crichton's friend. DeMohrenschildt also was involved with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia in Dallas which received subsidies from the Baird Foundation, which was determined to be a CIA conduit by the Patman House Select Committee hearings [cf. New York Times, March 5, 1967, p. 36].65 DeMohrenschildt immigrated to the U.S. in 1938, having been involved in espionage with the OSS and probably with the Nazis.66 He had a doctorate in commerce from the University of Liege, Belgium, when he came to the United States at age 27 where his brother Dmitry was a professor at Dartmouth, having degrees from Columbia and Yale.67 While visiting his brother and American sister-in-law at Bellport, near East Hampton, on the eastern, ocean tip of Long Island, DeMohrenschildt met many influential people, including stockbroker Jack and Janet Bouvier (Jackie's parents). He was also a friend of Margaret Clark Williams, whose family had vast land holdings in Louisiana, who gave him a letter of introduction to Humble Oil.68 DeMohrenschildt came to Texas by bus "where he got a job with Humble Oil Company in Houston, thanks to family connections," and, "[d]espite being friends with the chairman of the board of Humble," he worked as a roughneck in the Louisiana oil fields.69 DeMohrenschildt came to Texas in 1944 and got a master's degree in petroleum geology at the University of Texas at Austin. For a time he worked overseas for the Murchisons' Three States Oil and Gas70 and for Pantipec, an oil company owned by William F. Buckley, Jr.'s father operated in Mexico at the same time Sir Weetman Pearson (later Viscount Cowdray) and DeGolyer were there running the Mexican Eagle. In fact, Buckley and his brother were the attorneys for the Mexican oil companies after their properties were taxed illegally by the Mexican government.71 According to William Engdahl, Pearson worked for British Secret Intelligence, "as did all other major British oil groups."72 They had financed and put in power the regime of General Victoriano Huerta, subsequently overthrown by President Woodrow Wilson, who was supporting the objectives of Standard Oil in attempting to take from Britain at least a portion of its concessions for half of Mexico's oil. The U.S. under Rockefeller cover sent money and arms to Carranza.73 NOTES: 1 Pauley had been treasurer of the Democratic National Committee while he was a stockholder in Petrol Corporation and ran into trouble during the confirmation hearings by being accused of lobbying to promote his personal financial interests in submerged federal lands. See Bruce Adamson manuscript, Vol. VII, p. 71. 2 Warren Hinkle and William Turner, Deadly Secrets: The CIA-Mafia War Against Castro and the Assassination of J.F.K. (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1981), p. xxxix. 3 Hinkle and Turner, citing Kwitny article "The Mexican Connection: A Look at an Old George Bush Venture," Barron's, September 19, 1988. 4 Dresser Manufacturing Co. began in Bradford, Pennsylvania as a family corporation to make and sell couplings and sleeves for oil and gas pipelines, based on a patent issued to S.R. Dresser. In 1928 Dresser's son-in-law, who had operated the company since Dresser's death in 1911, retired and the sons-one a 32nd degree Mason, another a Princeton graduate-contacted W.A. Harriman & Company, Inc. to find a buyer. Harriman bought all the stock, supposedly with the intention of reselling, but apart from subsequent stock flotations, the investment bank (now Brown Brothers, Harriman) still has control of what became Dresser Industries, Inc. in 1944. The initial stock issue in 1928 was underwritten by Roland (Bunny) Harriman and Prescott Bush while G.H. Walker was president of the W.A. Harriman firm. Prescott Bush served on the board of directors continuously until he went to the U.S. Senate in 1953. Other directors from Brown Brothers, Harriman were Hamilton Pell (1928-30) and William T. Smith (1929-31). Bankers on the board have been George C. Scott of First National City Bank, now Citibank (1967 to at least 1979); A. Bruce Bowden of the Mellon National Bank in Pittsburgh [possibly a relative of John Bowden Connally?] (beginning in 1967); Rawles Fulgham of First International Bancshares in Dallas (beginning 1975). The representative law firm has been Squire, Sanders & Dempsey of Cleveland, formerly Squire, Sanders & Dempsey and McAfee, Hanning, Newcomer, Hazlett & Wheeler. 5Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc. 1880-1978 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 270. 6 Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy, p. 194. 7 The only other member of the syndicate named in the February 19, 1950 Houston newspaper article was M.W. Mattison, a man whose named has often been found in conjunction with the Masonic Lodge in Houston. 8 Robert D. Morrow, First Hand Knowledge: How I Participated in the CIA-Mafia Murder of President Kennedy (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992), p. 378. 9 George Bush, Looking Forward, p. 83. 10 In 1972 the chairman and CEO of Zapata Corporation, William H. Flynn, also became chairman and CEO of ZOS. The 1976 SEC report shows a man named Paul E. Baria at ZOS as general manager for Europe and Africa from 1972 to date, having come to ZOS from the London office of Clinton International Corporation; prior to that he was acting as London resident manager of International Resources Limited. In 1973 Clinton International Corp. was 79% owned by Clinton Oil Co. and 19% owned by Robert B. Anderson, Eisenhower's Secretary of the Treasury. (Wall Street Journal, April 3, 1973, p. 44) The article states that Anderson, since leaving the government, had "helped put together an international consortium that owns concessions in copper-rich Zaire, the former Congo republic." The article also says that Anderson "even got involved at one time with Bernard Cornfeld, then the head of the faltering I.O.S. Ltd....Barred from selling mutual-fund shares in Portugal and Iran, Mr. Cornfeld asked Mr. Anderson to use his influence with Portugal's late premier Antonio Salazar and the Shah of Iran to get the ban lifted." After Clinton Oil entered into a consent agreement about insider stock bolstering with the SEC, the old management team was replaced. It therefore appears that Paul Baria may have been part of that illegal activity. The 1979 SEC report for Zapata lists attorney B. John Mackin of Baker & Botts, a director since 1966, as chairman and CEO since March 1979. The 1979 report also lists Grossi Brothers, 208 S. LaSalle in Chicago as owner of 12,000 shares of $2 preferred stock (29.3%), perhaps indicating they were still holding stock exchanged with United Fruit. International Mining Corporation of 200 Park Avenue in New York was the largest shareholder of common stock (10%). On the same day the agreement was announced, the Chronicle contained another article about a tender offer made by Hugh Liedtke of Pennzoil to acquire American Smelting and Refining Co. through an exchange. An injunction had been issued in favor of the target company which challenged a merger under the Clayton Act. What is not clear is whether Bush or Liedtke retained any stock in their old companies. If not, how did they dispose of the stock and to whom? It is interesting to note that the Pennzoil Buildings (there are two separate towers) were designed by Philip C. Johnson, the architect, for Gerald Hines, the contractor. Johnson's office is in New York in the Seagrams Building at 375 Park Ave. Johnson wrote to Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in 1964, thanking him for his help and faith in his career. He mentions "our beloved museum" and the "beginning of Art Incorporated, back when we were both too young to know what we were doing. It has been a wonderful life ever since." This letter is reproduced in Bruce Adamson's manuscript, Vol. VII at p. 19. Other buildings designed by Johnson include the Transco Tower in Houston and Republic National Bank in Dallas. The museum referred to was the Modern Art Museum in New York in 1939. He served on the Board of the Museum with Rockefeller, William S. Paley and Henry Luce. According to the diary of William Shirer, who wrote about Adolph Hitler, he once shared a hotel room om Berlin with Johnson, "an American fascist who says he represents Father Coughlin's Social Justice. None of us can stand the fellow and suspect he is spying on us for the Nazis." 12 The dates of the offer coincide with Nixon's election in November and his inauguration the following January. 13 Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy, pp. 248-49. 14 Richard Bartholomew, Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used in the JFK Conspiracy (the Nash Rambler)--unpublished manuscript, p. 48. Bartholomew cites this information to Bruce Campbell Adamson with Steve Perez, Oswald's Closest Friend: The George DeMohrenschildt Story (unpublished manuscript, 1993)-Bush chapter, p. 31. Adamson apparently accused Mallon of using Dresser as a cover for CIA activities. It is also interesting to note that in 1957 Zapata Off-Shore was drilling on the Cay Sal Bank on islands leased the previous year to Howard Hughes, Jr., which were later used as a base for CIA raids on Cuba. See article entitled "Zapata Petroleum Corp." in Fortune, April 1958, p. 248. 15Richard Bartholomew, Possible Discovery, p 31. 16 Harold C. Deutsch, The Conspiracy Against Hitler in the Twilight War (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1968), p. 360. 17 Mary Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy (New York: William Morrow, 1983), pp. 187-88. 18 According to Bruce Adamson, Bancroft was having an affair with Henry Luce at the same time she was "dating" Allen Dulles. Adamson manuscript, Vol. IV on Dimitri von Mohrenschildt, at p. 52. 19 Richard Bartholomew, Possible Discovery, p. 38. See also Mary Bancroft, Autobiography of a Spy (New York: William Morrow, 1983). 20 Gerard Colby, DuPont Dynasty (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, Inc.), p. 421. 21 DeGolyer had handled the negotiations of the sale of Pearson's former oil company, the Mexican Eagle, to Royal Dutch Shell and used the profits to set up Amerada, 10% of which was said to be owned by the British Government. The sale of the Mexican Eagle to Deterding occurred at approximately the same time that Deterding was "secretly financing a White Russian counter-revolution beginning in 1918, in concert with Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill,...[when he then] went to France and bought up the pre-Revolutionary oil leases for the Russian Baku..." F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Dr. Bottiger Verlags-GmbH, 1992-1st English printing in 1993, distributed by Paul & Company Publishers Consortium, Inc. in Concord, Mass.), p. 78. 22 The Hess Oil Co. was founded by the husband of Leota Meyer Hess, a member of the Joseph Meyer banking family, which controlled Houston National Bank, which eventually became RepublicBank, and is now a branch of Nations Bank. It was this family which developed Meyerland Plaza and formed First General Realty, which later became General Homes. 23 F. William Engdahl, A Century of War, p. 149. 24 Engdahl, p. 160. 25 Bruce Campbell Adamson, Oswald's Closest Friend: The George de Mohrenschildt Story (self-printed manuscript, copyrighted 1993 and 1995), p. 5. 26 Adamson, Vol. II, p. 26. 27 Storey later became an attorney on the Warren Commission staff. 28 Adamson says he found much of the information on McGhee and Mallon in the Dallas Public Library in a folder on DCWA and at Southern Methodist University, which houses the papers of Mallon, Everette DeGolyer and Earle Cabell. 29 Robert Kennedy, In His Own Words, edited by Edwin O. Guthman and Jeffrey Shulman (Robert Kennedy Memorial: 1988), pp. 9-10, as quoted in Adamson manuscript, Vol. II, p. 29. 30 Possibly related to one of Humble Oil's attorneys, who owned a ranch in Beeville adjacent to the ranch of W.S. Farish III, where George Bush traditionally went hunting every year. 31 Bush was also connected to the Thompson & Knight law firm through Patrick S. Holloway, an attorney who represented Bush in 1965 in a political campaign appeal against the State of Texas. It would be interesting to trace the ownership of Crescent Production Co. to see if it is connected to Crescent Real Estate Equity REIT with which Texas Governor George W. Bush has ties. 32 Adamsom, Vol. II, p. 5. 33 In 1945 Humble Oil had bought all bulk stations, owned and leased service stations and delivery equipment from Texas Pacific Coal & Oil Company, which went out of retail marketing. Henrietta M. Larson and Kenneth W. Porter, History of Humble Oil (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 627. Glanville Minerals borrowed $130 million from First National City Bank (now Citibank in NY) and additional sums from New York Life, The Mutual Life Insurance Company of NY, First National City Bank as Trustee for various pension trusts, Connecticut General Life, Aetna Life, and Teachers Insurance totaling $86 million.33 Two years later there appears a conveyance from Cantexas Royalty Co. to Titan Gas Corp. [C265017]. The address for Cantexas was 375 Park Avenue in New York--the Seagrams Building, located between 52nd and 53rd Streets.33 This instrument is followed in the deed records by a conveyance from PIA Investment and Petrovest Corp. in New Jersey, and by a deed of trust from Domino Corp. to Empire Trust, whose address was 7 West 51st Street, NY. Apparently Titan had assigned an interest in the oil properties to Domino and to Southwestern Public Service Co. 34 In 1926 the trustees of the Walter Browne Botts Estate-one of the founding attorneys of Baker & Botts-most of whom were bankers in Galveston, conveyed to Magnolia Petroleum Co., an unincorporated joint stock association with offices in Galveston, a tract of land in downtown Houston which eventually became the site of the First City National Bank. 35 According to Pete Brewton, Lyon was mentioned by name in Oliver North's diaries at least four times. The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush, p. 256. Lyon acquired the theatre lease from the Esperson family who had at one time owned the rights to Reed Roller Bit. 36 Steven V. Roberts, New York Times, February 17, 1967. 37 John Herbers, New York Times, February 25, 1967. 38 Ibid. 39 E.W. Kenworthy, New York Times, February 21, 1967. 40 Marjorie Hunter, New York Times, February 22, 1967. 41 Richard Harwood, Houston Chronicle, February 26, 1967, p. 2. 42 The fund's secretary-treasurer in 1967 was Francis G. O'Connor of 6520 Buffalo Speedway, who refused to speak to the Chronicle reporter. 43 New York Times, February 16, 1967. 44 Pete Brewton, The Mafia, the CIA and George Bush, p. 137. Brewton's information came from two articles in the Houston Post-dated April 25, 1969 and January 11, 1970. The earlier article, naming the corporate investors in the new bank, had no by-line. 45 Dope, Inc. (1992), p. 459. 46 Dope , Inc., p. 256. The Royal Bank of Canada is said by the EIR writers of Dope, Inc. to be the dirtiest bank, followed closely by the Bank of Nova Scotia, of which Bronfman aide and Zionist, R.D. Wolfe, is a director. This bank is also involved in the financing of business in Jamaica tied to the arms trade, as well as being tied to the Canadian gold markets through an interlock with Noranda Mines. The gold exchange also serves as a means of payment for the illegal weapons trade. 47 The Paravicinis are the descendants, most likely, of Sir Horatio Pallavacino, who filled the post of Venetian ambassador to England-which had been vacant for 50 years or so-- in 1603 when James VI of Scotland became James I of Great Britain. Pallavicino was the head of an intelligence service which "was at the disposal of Cecil, as, presumably, was his money." See David Cherry, The Found of Englands Civil Warres Discover'd, as cited in Al and Rachel Douglas's manuscript on Venice. 48 The "more mature economies" he referred to in New England were those which began with the first life insurance company established in America in 1762 by the Presbyterian Ministers Fund. The managers brought in to oversee this fund were members of British banking families such as the Bevans of Barclays Bank-which was later to assimilate most of the country and colonial banks into its London bank. Through these family and social contacts, connections arose between the Canadian banks, Scottish banks, the Far East, South Africa, the Caribbean and New England. These same families also had strong ties to the Carolinas which was originally settled by a great number of Scottish emigrants who retained strong ties to the mother country. 49 Another chapter will detail fondi control of this and other companies founded by John Henry Kirby-railroads, lumber, oil and banking interests financed by Brown Brothers of Baltimore and the Maryland Trust. 50 This representative was James Carroll Kempner . See Harold M. Hyman, Oleander Odyssey, p. 217. It had been the tradition in the Kempner family for the sons to attend Harvard, then spend a year in Paris before coming back to Texas to help with the family business. 51 Mary later married Lawrence Reed. Mary's aunt was Frankie Carter Randolph, who became the famous liberal Democrat who mentored Billie Carr in liberal Texas politics. 52 Julius V. Neuhaus (Lillie Neuhaus Carter's brother) married Laura Boettcher, whose family brokerage company also came into the company in 1985 when Larry Johnson and Tom Masterson came into the company. Connections can be shown between Larry Johnson, General Homes and Walter Mischer-a close friend and fund-raiser for George Bush-through an assortment of complicated corporate relationships. 53 He was the founder of Houston Land & Trust Company, the first trust institution in the State of Texas. Marie Phelps McAshan, On the Corner of Main and Texas: A Houston Legacy (Houston: Gulf Publishing Co., 1985), p. 130; Marguerite Johnston, Houston, the Unknown City, 1836-1946 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), pp. 75 and 404fn. The name "Barziza" is similar in sound to "Barozzi," which was the name of one of the case vecchie that existed in Venice [Allen and Rachel Douglas, manuscript entitled "Venice: The Fondi...and related matters", p. 12] 54 Thomas Petzinger, Jr., Oil & Honor: The Texaco-Pennzoil Wars (G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York), p. 36. Incidentally, Allen Dulles, before becoming director of the CIA, had been legal counsel to Gulf Oil for Latin American operations, as well as counsel to Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman. Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (EIR: Washington, D.C., 1992), pp. 148-49). John McCloy also represented Gulf in 1975 when the scandal involving bribery and payoffs of elected officials occurred. 55 Billy's father, Tommy Hitchcock, a Harvard graduate, had become a Lehman Brothers partner in 1937 but within two years became an air attache in the U.S. Embassy and then a pilot in Carl Spaatz' Ninth Air Support Command, where he was chief of tactical research. His plane went down in 1944, when his twin sons, Billy and Tommy were only five. He had learned to fly during the First World War when he had served in the Lafayette Escadrille as a seventeen-year-old and had been caught behind German lines, escaped from a prison train and hobbled a hundred miles into Switzerland. The Hitchcocks were "gentry, a clan whose way of living 'depicted the English country life,'" in Aiken, South Carolina, where Billy spent his visits fox hunting and playing polo. According to Billy, his grandfather had gone to Oxford, and his great-grandfather had been financial editor of the New York Sun, married to a descendant of William Corcoran, an "eminent Georgetown financier." Billy and his brother attended boarding school in South Carolina, a place run like an English public school. In the mid-50s he got a job as a tool dresser on oil rigs in Pecos, Texas (which is a short distance from Midland where George Bush was living and working for a Dresser subsidiary), then at a refinery near Vienna, Austria. Billy had been at Harvard before Harvard professor Timothy Leary took his first LSD trip in 1960, but he met Leary in 1964 after Leary had returned from Mexico where he had been doing psychedelic research with Aldous Huxley. In fact, Billy rented his family country estate in New York to Leary to continue his drug experiments. 56 New York Times, June 8, 1973. 57 It was Mercantile National Bank at Dallas which made a $4 million loan to Houston Bank & Trust (and its successor, First International Bank) to build a new bank building in 1965 at 1801 Main. First International Bank in Houston First International Bank in Houston had started out in the early days of Houston as Houston Land & Trust at 119 Main before becoming Houston Bank & Trust and relocating directly opposite the Capital Exchange Corporation on Texas. In 1978 (one year after George Bush moved back to Houston and went to work for First International Bancshares, Inc.), First International Bank in Houston, got a $7 million loan from the holding company. 58 Michael Dorman, Vesco: The Infernal Money Making Machine (Berkley Publishing Corp.), p. 36. 59 Darwin Payne, Initiative in Energy: Dresser Industries, Inc. 1880-1978 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), pp. 232 and 388. DeGolyer's death was reported in a December 15, 1956 Houston Post article, which stated that he "shot himself to death Friday in his Dallas office....His death was ruled a suicide....No immediate reason for DeGolyer's act could be determined. However, DeGolyer's son, E.L. DeGolyer, Jr. said his father had been in ill health for seven years and for the last two years suffered from aplastic anemia, a disease similar to leukemia. He said his father required frequent blood transfusions, having had the most recent one about four weeks ago. DeGolyer had other difficulties, his son said, including an operation for a detached retina in 1949, which was not successful and left him without the sight of one eye." None of those facts answers the question of why, at that particular time, he chose to kill himself. He had endured all those trials for years and survived optimistically. In the year before DeGolyer died, two men began buying land in the area of town which is now the location of the Galleria Shopping Center. One was the son of Grover J. Geiselman, an independent oil man who officed at Suite 849 of the Houston Club Building, where both Farish and Bush were located during this time. Eventually Geiselman conveyed his half interest to the other buyer, J.S. Michael, who in 1961 deeded to the estate of E.L. DeGolyer for a nominal sum, indicating they may have been holding title for him all along. Further indication of this is the deed in 1969 to Stephen T. Cochran, Trustee, executed by both Geiselman, Jr. and J.S. Michael, as well as Nell DeGolyer and First National Bank in Dallas, Trustees for the estate, as well as the three daughters and their husbands. All were joint payees on one promissory note. This land ended up having frontage on either side of the West Loop, which was constructed through the tracts, which were purchased for a pittance from Italians who had owned the land for decades. DeGolyer's death is reminiscent of the death of Howard R. Hughes, Sr., which was reported in a Houston Post January 15, 1949 "Post Yesteryears 15 Years Ago" column. The article stated: "Howard R. Hughes, 54, millionaire Houston manufacturer, and a brother of Rupert Hughes, the novelist, died suddenly in his office at the Humble building yesterday. Born in Lancaster, Mo., Mr. Hughes graduated from Harvard university in 1897....As a young Harvard graduate, Mr. Hughes entered the oil industry in the Old Sour Lake field and almost immediately began inventing oil well tools. Oil men said that he, more than any other man in America, was responsible for revolutionizing the oil industry. In association with W.B. Sharp of Houston, the Sharp-Hughes Tool company was launched by Mr. Hughes, and on Mr. Sharp's retirement, the concern became the Hughes Tool company which is known wherever drillers operate." 60 Stephen Birmingham, "Our Crowd": The Great Jewish Families of New York (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1967), pp. 444-445. 61 Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers/Richard Gallen, 1992), p. 615 and pp. 792-93 fn. 14. Crichton was also director of Dorchester Gas Producing Co. with D.H. Byrd, founder of the Temco Co. (later LTV), who owned the building to which the Texas School Book Depository had moved several months before Kennedy was killed. 62 Fabian Escalante, translated by Maxine Shaw, edited by Mirta Muniz, The Secret War: CIA Covert Operations against Cuba 1959-62 (Melbourne, Victoria, Australia: Ocean Press, 1995), p. 42. 63 See Scott, The Dallas Conspiracy, chapter III, p. 37 (quoted in Bartholomew, p. 71). 64 In Germany Schmidt had lived with Dr. Wilhelm Kuetemeyer, a professor of psychosomatic medicine at the University of Heidelberg. Kuetemeyer conducted experiments on schizophrenics. His work was interrupted when he became involved in the July 20 plot to kill Adolph Hitler. See Edward J. Epstein, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978), pp. 203-05. Schmidt shared a room in the house with the Magnolia employees who gave the party at Schmidt's request where Oswald met Michael Paine. Schmidt was also studying Russian at Magnolia with Mamantov, who worked as a geologist for Sun Oil Co. Mamantov was acquainted also with George Bush, who wrote to Mamantov's wife after his death stating, "We did it!" See Dick Russell, The Man who Knew Too Much. 65 See Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-Up, p. 66. 66 Marrs, Crossfire, p. 278-9. Gaeton Fonzi, The Last Investigation (New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1993), p. 190. 67 Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Marina and Lee (Harper & Row, 1976), p. 216. 68 Ibid., p. 219. 69 Ibid. The quoted passage does not identify which of the Humble Oil founders was DeMohrenschildt's friend, but it is known that his UT roommate, Hines Baker did later become chairman of Humble Oil. McMillan revealed that DeMohrenschildt was also friendly with H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, John Mecom, Robert Kerr and Jean De Menil of Schlumberger. According to Jim Marrs' interviews with Jeanne DeMohrenschildt after her husband's death, George was making regular trips to Houston from Dallas during 1962-63 on oil business with Mecom and De Menil. George's Russian friends in the Tolstoy Foundation told Marrs that he was going to Houston to see George and Herman Brown (Crossfire, p. 282.) 70 Peter Dale Scott, Crime and Cover-up, p. 34 71Buckley Sr., a Texan, as an undergraduate lived in the same upperclass dorm at the University of Texas at Austin where DeMohrenschildt, brothers Rex G. Baker and Hines Baker (who W.S. Farish, Sr. later hired as attorneys and top management for Humble Oil) lived when they were at UT. See Richard Bartholomew, Possible Discovery of an Automobile Used in the JFK Conspiracy (the Nash Rambler)--unpublished manuscript, pp. 63, 88-89. 72 Engdahl, p. 72. 73 Engdahl, p. 72.
