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.......TO GET A SENSE OF HOW DEEP RICH'S TENTACLES MAY reach into the U.S. government, it's necessary to recap the rise of an obscure New York University dropout whose genius catapulted him to the top of Philipp Brothers, the most powerful commodities trading company in the world, where he single-handedly created what's now called the spot oil market. After he left Philipp Brothers (now Phibro-Salomon), Rich founded an oil company and engineered its growth into a multibillion-dollar trading firm. Then he molded his holdings into an international financial conglomerate that gave him access to capital from the four corners of the earth. He bought real estate, refineries, film companies, movie studios, mines, oil wells, politicians, tanker fleets, Picassos, grain silos, weapons, and, perhaps to satisfy his thirst, a Coca-Cola distributor.
Rich mastered the arcane game of buying and selling the earth's crust. The business gave him deep - hell, bottomless - pockets, but information was his true currency, and with it he bought power. Real power. No one but Rich has ever fully harnessed and directed the energy that's created when money and power collide.
And then, in 1981, a young federal prosecutor named Sandy Weinberg caught Rich ripping off the American public in the biggest oil scam in American history. Rich fled to Switzerland to avoid arrest and paid a total of $150 million to settle a federal case against his U.S. operation. In a sense, it was his first grain deal: chicken feed in exchange for the right to do business in America.
"I'm not gonna tell you what I said when we made a deal for money instead of Rich and Green," Weinberg said in the fall of 1984, when his office was piled with 200,000 pages of records that could've put Rich and Green behind bars for 325 years. "I wanted those boys in jail, but they can never come back into the United States as free men - never. Those indictments are outstanding - no statute of limitations. But Marc and Pinky will try to come back. Bet on it."
As it turns out, you could have. Rich, the 55-year-old power behind Marc Rich & Company Trading AG, a Swiss firm, had been accused of breaking federal oil-price regulations between 1980 and 1981 and of siphoning his plunder to Switzerland to evade U.S. taxes. But he takes pride in his ability to trade for anything - even the right to return to America as a free man. And sure enough, in 1987 he expressed a desire to return home - as long as he had written assurance from the Justice Department that he wouldn't have to spend any time in the slammer. Prosecutors laughed at his proposal and sent the U.S. Marshals Service out to bushwhack him.
These days Rich can't wander far from the safety of his golden cages, Switzerland's mountains and his $9.5 million coastal estate in Marbella, Spain, without running the risk of being nabbed by the marshals (or, even more frightening, the bounty hunters who'd happily turn him over for the $750,000 reward that's been offered for his head by the Internal Revenue Service). But glorious exile is the only alternative to the cell that awaits him in America. To be sure, he has powerful allies: oil man Marvin Davis, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, lawyer Leonard Garment, Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, public relations gurus Harold Burson, Robert Gray, and Frank Mankiewicz, opera superstar Placido Domingo, and a boxcar full of European princes, American politicians, OPEC sheiks, and Fortune 500 bosses. But they can't lift the criminal counts that are suspended over his head.
As long as Rich remains cloistered in Zug, he and his businesses are safer than Heidi's goats; Switzerland won't permit the owner of its third-largest corporation and its number-one philanthropist to be extradited for tax evasion, fraud, racketeering, and trading with Iran during the hostage crisis. Rich is what his name says - estimates of his net worth exceed the billion-dollar mark - and his firm trades some $15 billion worth of oil, metal, and grain a year, second only to Cargill among the world's commodities giants.
The deal to keep Rich's business alive in the United States - the largest settlement for criminal tax evasion in U.S. history - went down on October 11, 1984 in the federal courthouse at Foley Square. "It was like an E.F. Hutton commercial," recalls Martin Auerbach, a former federal prosecutor. "Twenty lawyers in a room. Marvin Davis's lawyer handed Rich's lawyer a $116 million check for 20th Century-Fox; Rich's lawyer handed Chase Manhattan's lawyer a $130 million check for the money he owned the banks; and Chase Manhattan's lawyer handed Sandy Weinberg a check for $133,081,306.76.
"It was real dramatic and very quiet. All anyone could do was gawk when the checks were signed over."
AS HE GAZED OUT OF THE JET'S WINDOW OVER BRITAIN'S brightly lit countryside in
November 1987, the deputy U.S. marshal who'd been assigned to the Oxford
Project - the code name for the operation to snare Rich - commented about how
odd it was to find London so mild and sunny. It was an idle comment about the
weather, the kind that thousands of travelers make every day. But before long,
the weather would come to haunt the marshal......
Excellent find.
Thanks...this deal has a bi-partisan stink to it!
Excellent find. Could you provide a link to the full article? Regardies Magazine is no longer in business.
More dirt on both Marc Rich and "the gold digger"
One for the files...
It was no mistake when the writer included politicians among things Rich bought. Money is a powerful corrosive.
We might want to link this thread to yours...
And Rich doesn't think twice about throwing it around. As I opined on another thread..there's a lot more to this pardon than meets the eye IMHO...
More evidence...
FYI
There is far more than meets the eye. We'll know more in time. Bet on it.
HOW"S THIS FOR A RETRO LOOK AT ANOTHER PARDON - - THIS ONE BY THE GOP!
In 1970 Murray Chotiner became NIXON'S Special Counsel; and in 1971, as a private attorney, he helped Teamster Union boss James Hoffa secure a Presidential pardon. Murray Chotiner was contacted by his friend, I. Irving Davidson, regarding this matter. [FBI FOIA Req. #72,182 approx. 500 pp.; HSCA OCR 11.2.78 Brady]
Chotiner. That is a name that I have not heard in a long time. Hoffa, on the other hand, hasn't been heard from in a long time.
If your point is that all presidents pardon felons, you are right on target. One of many differences between Hoffa and Rich seems to be that Rich has never been tried, convicted, or sentenced.
Belle, you have been working OT on this case. Mucho Kudos once again. Additional links to Kissinger and Eagleburger. They failed to mention Soros, but the links are there.
If I were Bush, I would attempt to find a means to block the pardon (it will tarnish the reputation of the U.S. and the Presidency), and I would put the heat on Switzerland and Spain BIGTIME!
It seems as if Switzerland is a crook's Haven with a very very thin veneer of respectability. The current administration should start to "pick away" at that "thin veneer". I would show Switzerland for what it really is.....a cesspoll of nefarious deeds, and unscrupulous financiers.
Where is Bill O'Reilly when you need him? < chuckle >
Vince Foster racked up the frequent flyer miles on quick trips to Switzerland, didn't he?
In fact he had only just returned from another quick one just before he was 'discharged'
.
the bounty hunters who'd happily turn him over for the $750,000 reward that's been offered for his head by the Internal Revenue Service).
What's this? I thought the liberal pundits on the talk shows have been saying the IRS thing has been settled long ago (trying to negate Rush's assertion on his show last week that Rich owes the government millions in back taxes, penalty and interest). Of course, they offered no documentation to back it up. I guess if you start a lie and repeat it the public will belive it.
Let's see if anyone else can hear the black helicopters:
.
If your point is that all presidents pardon felons, you are right on target. One of many differences between Hoffa and Rich seems to be that Rich has never been tried, convicted, or sentenced.
Right. If they weren't felons they wouldn't need pardons.
Rich was a wanted fugitive on the lamb so to speak..
And obviously a democrat..
"They failed to mention Soros, but the links are there.""
Schechter: Just what was the value of the meeting in Davos in your view. It's been called the Summit of Summits -- what's your sense of it?
Soros: Well, the Switzerland meeting is an enormous sort-of cocktail party -- lot of contacts -- people meet and so on -- a lot of things are discussed-- it's actually very convenient because you can meet a lot of people who you want to meet in a confined period of time. And it's also a media event.
"He [Soros] is portrayed as someone ... who can be offended if a leader of a country where he is involved philanthropically is insufficiently subservient; who will consort with an autocratic regime in order to see his programs carried out; and who is intent on imposing his influence generally on an ever-expanding area of the world."| He [Soros] confirmed what
someone had told me — that his family name had long ago been changed
from Schwartz.
(Connie Bruck, The World According to Soros, The New Yorker, 23Jan95, p. 58) |
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