-Caveat Lector-
http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3004megabucks.html
This article appears in the January 31, 2003 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Are `Mega' Bucks Helping Sharon
Steal Israeli Elections?
by Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg A small group of American and Canadian mega-billionaires, tied to organized crime and right-wing Zionist causes, has joined in the effort to steal the Jan. 28 Israeli elections, on behalf of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who is committed to drowning any Israel-Palestine peace process in a sea of blood. The Mega Group, founded in 1991 by Charles and Edgar Bronfman, Michael Steinhardt, Max Fisher, and several dozen other multi-billionaires, meets secretly twice a year, and, since its founding, has sought to impose its top-down control over the "alphabet soup" of pro-Israel political action committees, self-styled civil rights organizations, and tax-exempt charities. Among the Mega Group's institutional power bases are the World Jewish Congress, the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish American Organizations, and the United Jewish Fundâa recent merger of the major American and Canadian Jewish charities, disbursing annual gross contributions of nearly $3 billion.
According to one Israeli source, the group has expanded in recent years, and now is made up of over 50 American and Canadian super-rich Zionist activists. The dominant figures in the groupâthe Bronfman brothers, Steinhardt, and Fisherâall have longstanding personal and family organized-crime pedigrees, tracing back to the Meyer Lansky National Crime Syndicate. The Canada-based Bronfman gang, headed by Edgar and Charles' father Sam, and by Max Fisher, got their start as bootleggers during Prohibition. Fisher was a leader of the Detroit-based Purple Gang, which, in collusion with Moe Dalitz's Cleveland-centered "Jewish Navy," smuggled Bronfman's illegal booze across the Great Lakes from Canada into the Midwest. The Bronfman family motto, which applies to most of the Mega Group, is: "From rags, to rackets, to riches, to respectability."
Michael Steinhardt, like Edgar and Charles Bronfman, is the son of a Meyer Lansky lieutenant, "Red" Steinhardt, who was the National Crime Syndicate's number-one jewel fence. "Red" Steinhardt was also a partner with Lansky in the Havana casinos prior to Castro's takeover, and was also affiliated with the Genovese organized-crime family. According to Michael Steinhardt's autobiography, it was his father's ill-gotten gains that put him through the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business; and it was syndicate loot that started him on a successful career as a Wall Street speculator and hedge-fund manager.
For the past 15 years, Steinhardt has been one of Presidential wanna-be Sen. Joseph Lieberman's (D-Conn.) biggest boosters, having founded the neo-conservative Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), and promoted Lieberman as the group's poster boy.
Steinhardt grabbed headlines in January 2001, when he played a pivotal role in conning President Bill Clinton into granting a Presidential pardon to Russian Mafiya "Godfather" Marc Rich, one of Steinhardt's longtime business partners. Rich was a fugitive from U.S. Justice Department indictments for tax evasion and trading with the enemy (Iran). As EIR reported on Jan. 10, Rich is another source of dirty money flows into the Sharon camp, through his secret Russian Mafiya partner, Grigori Loutchansky, among others.
Mafiya Damage ControlIn a Jan. 15 interview with a Washington, D.C.-based journalist, Steinhardt boasted about his recent intervention to sabotage the electoral campaign of Israeli Labor Party Chairman Amram Mitzna, which was also intended to control the damage being done by the spreading scandal over the Likud party's ties to organized crime, into which Steinhardt and the whole Mega Group could be swept.
On Jan. 12, Steinhardt said, he had had a private dinner with Ariel Sharon. While claiming that he does not support either major party in Israel, Steinhardt did insist, that the Jan. 28 elections must produce another "national unity government," along the lines of the coalition that Sharon formed in 2001, in which Labor Party leaders Shimon Peres and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer held the Foreign and Defense portfolios. Their participation with serial war-criminal Sharon, gave him and and his right-wing thug allies, 20 months in which they could tear apart the entire Oslo peace process, brutally exterminate much of the Palestinian Authority, and achieve Sharon's ultimate goal: the "ethnic cleansing" to remove all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza.
Mitzna has repeatedly stated that he will not join a national unity government with the mobbed-up murderers of Likud, and will press for Israeli authorities to get to the bottom of the Sharon-Likud-Mafiya election theft scandals. Whatever the outcome on Jan. 28, it is widely acknowledged inside Israel, that the scandals have denied Sharon the
