WAS THERE A "COMPANY" BEFORE THERE WAS A C.I.A.?
Let's
go back to United Fruit Company for a moment. From 1899 until 1936
the
United Fruit Company was operating more or less as a partnership between
the
Boston interests represented by T.J. Coolidge, and the New York
interests,
represented by Minor Cooper Keith. Because of an extremely
boring book
researched and written about a land development company in West
Texas during
this same period of time, we have a clear picture of how the
investment
partnership worked. The Texas Land and Development
Company,
written by B.R. Brunson, discloses that one of the directors of
the land
company was F. Murray Forbes, a Boston lawyer who served from 1916
until
1919. Others included J. Lothrop Motley, a member of Old Colony
Trust
(1916-19), New York banker C. W. Fry (1916), United Fruit founder
Minor
Cooper Keith (1916-29) and his brother Henry M. Keith
(1919-26).
According to Brunson's short bio of Minor Keith, he became an
investor in
the land development company in the Plainview, Texas area through
Empire
Trust Company. Another director was Frederick Stark Pearson, who
was born
in Lowell, Mass. in 1861 and graduated from Tufts College and
M.I.T.
Pearson started the development project in 1912 after being a trustee
of
Tufts in Boston in 1900. His son, Ward Edgerly Pearson (1915-19),
who was
born in Boston and educated at Yale, was the treasurer of the Empire
Trust.
Brunson listed the original investors of the company in 1912 for
the Texas
Prairie Lands, Limited and its subsidiary trust. Among many
others, the
holders of securities in the company included the
following:
American Investment Trust Co.; Anglo-Austrian Bank; Bank of
Scotland; R.
Benson & Co.; British Investment Trust Ltd.; British Linen
Bank; M.J. and
R.C. Brown; H.B. Cabot, individually and as trustee; Cabot,
Lyman, Putnam &
Bradley, trustees; Norman W. Cabot; Empire Trust Co.;
First
Scottish-American Trust Co., Ltd.; Isabel C. Forbes; C.J. Hambro &
Son;
Minor Cooper Keith; Dominion Securities; Canadian Bank of Commerce;
Dunn,
Fisher & Co.; National Bank of Scotland; Lord Revelstoke (Baring
Bank); and
Seligman Brothers. The book gives a detailed account of how
the investment
capitalized the original company, as well as the numerous
permutations of
stock and bonds in reorganized companies. It shows how
real estate was held
in the names of nominees in the Plainview area who had
no ownership
interest, in order to avoid Texas laws against land ownership by
foreign
persons. Although not mentioned by name, it is clear from
reading a
biography of Lord Beaverbrook, that he was a friend and partner of
F.S.
Pearson in many American engineering projects similar to that studied
by
Brunson.
The role of the Empire Trust Co. is made doubly
interesting because of a
statement that appears in a footnote of a most
amazing book written by Dick
Russell about the Kennedy assassination.
He quotes Peter Dale Scott as
saying that the Empire Trust was "a firm whose
leading shareholders, the
inter-related families of Loeb, Lehman and
Bronfman," which, according to
Stephen Birmingham (author of The Rest of Us),
"maintained 'something very
like a PRIVATE CIA ... around the world' to
protect their other investments
such as in Cuba, in Guatemala, and in General
Dynamics."
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