Corruption

April 30, 2012

Fidel Castro and Richard Nixon

A “Top Secret” CIA report accuses then Vice President Nixon of shaping U.S. foreign policy to benefit a wealthy campaign contributor, a right-wing zealot who championed the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

by Don Fulsom

One of Richard Nixon’s vice presidential secrets surfaced only in recent years.  And it’s a doozy: a “Top Secret” CIA report accuses Nixon of shaping U.S. foreign policy to benefit a wealthy campaign contributor, a right-wing zealot who championed the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. This CIA document—completed in 1983—is known as “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Volume III: Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951- January 1961.”  (The CIA declassified only Volume III of the five-volume history in 1998.  It was discovered in the National Archives by Villanova professor David Barrett in 2005, and first posted on his university’s Web site. This volume is now posted on the Web site of the National Security Archive, which is suing the CIA for the release of the other volumes.)

Of course, it would not be the first nor the last time that Nixon—one of the stickiest fingered politicians in modern times—would be caught doling out favors to fat cats. 

Yet this declassified document exposes something even seamier than Nixon’s run-of-the-mill pay-for-play illegalities. Seamier, for example, than soliciting congressional campaign funds from L.A.’s top gangster; or keeping a secret senatorial slush fund rounded up by rich businessmen; or widespread presidential financial corruption – including the sale of ambassadorships; soliciting bribes from billionaires; or a go-easy attitude toward the ultra-generous Mafia godfathers and their thuggish Teamster allies.

These fresh revelations involve war and peace, life and death.  They lie buried among 295 pages of a CIA critique of the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles.  Written by a CIA historian, this document provides rich new details on Richard Nixon’s central role in plotting the invasion of a foreign country, Cuba, and the attempted assassination of its leader, Fidel Castro. It faults Nixon for taking risky anti-Castro actions, in large part, to satisfy a well-connected Castro-loathing U.S. plutocrat, William Pawley.

Historian David Kaiser, in his book The Road to Dallas, notes that Pawley worked closely with the CIA “on building anti-Castro organizations both inside and outside of Cuba.  He was, in effect, an informal (CIA) case officer.”  As such, it is almost certain that Pawley was aware of the recommendation, in early January of 1960, by CIA heavyweight J. C. King for Castro’s “elimination.”

Dec. 28, 2011

Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa, the leaders of the Omaha chapter of the Black Panther Party in the early 1970s, were framed for the murder of Omaha Police Officer Larry Minard as part of J. Edgar Hoover’s clandestine, illegal counterintelligence operation known as COINTELPRO that targeted Black Panther Party leaders all over the United States. Although neither man had any connection to the murder of the young officer, both remain imprisoned for life. 

by Michael Richardson

The murder of Omaha, Nebraska policeman Larry Minard over 40 years ago and the COINTELPRO-inspired investigation that followed landed two Black Panther leaders – Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa – in prison for life.  The scapegoats came to be known as the “Omaha Two.”  In order to pin the police officer’s murder on the two leaders of Omaha’s Black Panther Party, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover gave a secret order to withhold a crime laboratory report on the identity of the anonymous caller that lured the 29-year-old policeman to his death.

Hoover directed the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 1924 to his death in 1972.  He also directed a secret, illegal, counterintelligence operation within the FBI from 1956 to 1971, codenamed COINTELPRO that targeted radical groups such as the Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, and the American Indian Movement. COINTELPRO’s stated aim was to destabilize these groups by either murdering their leaders or getting them convicted of felonies. (COINTELPRO is an acronym for Counterintelligence Program.)

Oct. 10, 2011 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from Scott Bartz’s recently published book, The Tylenol Mafia: Marketing, Murder, and Johnson & Johnson, available at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com.

Introduction

On September 29, 1982, seven people in Chicago died after taking Extra Strength Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. Authorities immediately blamed the poisonings on an anonymous madman who had supposedly put the poisoned capsules into Tylenol bottles in several local retail stores. The evidence, however, refutes this madman-in-the-retail-stores hypothesis, and points instead to a culprit who planted the lethal capsules at a warehouse in the Tylenol distribution system - a system the police did not understand and the media did not investigate.