Protecting the opium market
Even through the early decades of the present century, Britain retained an open diplomatic posture on behalf of unrestricted drug profiteering.
In 1911, an international conference on the narcotics problem was held at The Hague. The conference participants agreed to regulate the narcotics trade, with the goal in mind of eventual total suppression. The success of the Hague Convention, as it was called, depended on strict enforcement of the earlier Anglo- Chinese agreement of 1905. Under that agreement, the Chinese were to reduce domestic opium production, while the British were to reduce their exports to China from British India correspondingly.
The Chinese, who had subscribed enthusiastically to both the 1905 and 1911 protocols, soon discovered that the British were completely evading both by sending their opium to their extra- territorial bases, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Opium dens in the Shanghai International Settlement jumped from 87 licensed dens in 1911 at the time of the Hague Convention to 663 dens in 1914! (14) In addition to the trafficking internal to Shanghai, the Triads and related British sponsored organized crime networks within China redoubled smuggling operations — conveniently based out of the warehouses of Shanghai.
If anything, British profiteering from the opium trade jumped as the result of the reversion to a totally black-market production-distribution cycle. Ironically, the legalization of the opium trade into China forced upon the Emperor through the Opium Wars had cut into British profits on the drug. Legalization had brought with it the requirement that the British opium merchants pay import duties, an overhead they did not have to absorb when the drug trade was illegal.
In yet another act of contempt for the Hague Convention, Britain issued a major new loan to Persia in 1911. The collateral on that loan was Persia's opium revenues.
Even with the post-Versailles creation of the League of Nations, Britain flaunted its drug trafficking before the world community. During this period, Her Majesty's opium trafficking was so widely known that even the Anglophile U.S. newsweekly The Nation ran a series of documentary reports highly critical of the British role.
At the Fifth Session of the League of Nations Opium Committee, one delegate demanded that the British government account for the fact that there were vast discrepancies between the official figures on opium shipments into Japan released by the Japanese and British governments. The British claimed only negligible shipments, all earmarked for medical use, during the 1916-1920 period; while the Japanese figures showed a thriving British traffic. When confronted with this discrepancy as prima facie evidence of large-scale British black market smuggling of opium into Japan, the British delegate argued that such black marketeering merely proved the case for creating a government owned opium monopoly.
As late as 1927, official British statistics showed that government opium revenues — excluding the far more expansive black market figures — accounted for significant percentages of total revenue in all of the major Far East Crown colonies.
British North Borneo 23 percent
Federated Malay States 14 percent
Sarawak 18 percent
Straits Settlements 37 percent
Confederated Malay 28 percent
In India as well, official Crown policy centered on protection for the opium market. According to one recently published account, when Gandhi began agitating against opium in 1921
. . . his followers were arrested on charges of "undermining the revenue." So little concerned were the British about the views of the League of Nations that after a commission under Lord Inchcape had investigated India's finances in 1923, its report, while recognizing that it might be necessary to reduce opium production again if prices fell, went on to warn against diminishing the cultivated area, because of the need to safeguard "this most important source of revenue."
. . . while the British Government was professing to be taking measures to reduce consumption of opium and hemp drugs, its agents in India were in fact busy pushing sales in order to increase the colony's revenues. (18)
Lord Inchcape — who chaired the India Commission which endorsed continued opium production in British India — was a direct descendant of the Lord Inchcape who during the previous century founded the Peninsular & Orient Steamship Line and subsequently helped found HongShang as the clearinghouse bank for opium trade. Through to the present, a Lord Inchcape sits on the boards of P & 0 and the HongShang.
In 1923, the British-run opium black market represented such a seriously perceived international problem that Representative Stephen Porter, Chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced and passed a bill through Congress calling for country-by-country production and import quotas to be set on opium that would reduce consumption to approximately 10 percent of then-current levels. The 10 percent figure represented generally accepted levels of necessary medical consumption.
Porter's proposal was brought before the League of Nations Opium Committee — where it was publicly fought by the British representative. The British delegate drafted an amendment to Porter's plan which called for increased quotas to account for "legitimate opium consumption" beyond the medical usage. This referred to the massive addict population in British colonies and spheres of influence (predominantly in Asia) where no regulations restricted opium use.
The enraged U.S. and Chinese delegations led a walkout of the plenipotentiary session; the British rubberstamped the creation of a Central Narcotics Board designated with authority to gather information and nothing more; and the journalists stationed in Geneva henceforth referred to what remained of the Committee as the "Smugglers Reunion." (19)
A chest of opium in 1820 sold for $2,075 on arrival at the port of Canton. While this figure tended to drop marginally as the volume of traffic increased after 1830, any calculation of cash valuation of the opium trade into China establishes a figure that very nearly parallels "the present $100-200 billion (when appropriate calculations are made to account for differences in purchasing power of the dollar in ratio to total volume of world production) in annual "black" revenues.
2 - Palmerston's Fifth Column,USA
The assassination bureau
Narcotics traffic was the business of organized crime during the 19th century no less than in the 20th, and Britain's Opium War cabinet spun out a web of criminal connections that crisscrossed the globe. Prime Minister Palmerston conducted, the opium business behind a screen of respectability, in full public view.
What remained hidden — until the report of the Military Commission that heard evidence on the Lincoln Assassination — was the importance of Palmerston's secret life, as Patriarch of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.
It does not surprise the modern student that the perpetrators of the narcotics traffic show up in every element of the dirty side of 19th century politics, including presidential assassinations. But the extent of the web of criminal networks put in place by Palmerston could have come out of a Gothic horror story, American counterintelligence specialists of the time, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Morse (1), knew the problem well.
Palmerston's irregulars, employed in illegal dope trafficking, assassinations, and "Fifth Column" subversions against the United States in the period before and during the Civil War, are the linear ancestors of what is now called organized crime.
the Chinese "Triads," or Societies of Heaven;
the Order of Zion and its American spinoff, the B'nai B'rith;
"Young Italy," whose Sicilian law enforcement arm became known as the Mafia;
the Jesuit Order based in decaying Hapsburg Austria;
Mikhail Bakunin's bomb-throwing anarchist gangs;
nearly every other inhabitant of Britain's political netherworld...
...followed a chain of command that led through the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry directly to Lord Palmerston and his successors.
The model for the Scottish Rite operation is the ethnic secret society — Jewish, Italian, or Chinese. Closest to hand among Palmerston's agencies was the Order of Zion, a highly specialized dirty tricks operation founded by London-based Hofjuden ("Court Jew") families, whose close ties to the British oligarchy traced back to the founding of the Bank of England, and before that to an alliance with the piratical financiers of post-Renaissance Genoa.
The names of these families will appear and re-appear throughout this report, including the Mocattas and Goldsmids, gold dealers in London before even the Bank of England was there, now the operators of one of the world's most sophisticated money-laundering devices; the Montefiores, now central figures in the modern Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem; and the de Hirsch family, whose tightly controlled colonization program for Jews in Canada brought the present leaders of organized crime to the New World.
Control over the Order of Zion rested in the British Board of Deputies, founded in 1763 and still in action. One of the board's earliest presidents was Sir Moses Montefiore, described in contemporary accounts as "Queen Victoria's favorite Jew." (2)
When Montefiore took command of the board in 1835, its dirty tricks division, the Order of Zion, was on the verge of launching the covert campaign that would lead to both the Lincoln assassination, and the founding of organized crime, so-called, in the United States. Through the efforts of Montefiore, later Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (the Earl of Beaconsfield), and the then nouveau riche Rothschilds, the Order of Zion nursed into being the leadership of the Confederacy.
Their starting point was the 1843 founding of the B'nai B'rith, also called the Constitutional Grand Lodge of the Order of the Sons of the Covenant, as a recognized branch of the Scottish Rite for American Jews. B'nai B'rith's first headquarters were at 450 Grand Street in Manhattan, at the house of Joseph Seligman, the wealthy "dry goods" merchant. (3) Seligman, whose name survives on Wall Street along with such of his contemporaries as August Belmont, Loeb, Schiff, and Lazard, was allied to the cotton-trading British oligarchy.
B'nai B'rith was a straightforward covert intelligence front for the Montefiores and Rothschilds. Its American house organ, the Menorah, could not disguise its relationship to the Rothschilds. It chose to flaunt it:
"The name Rothschild, in all countries is a synonym for honor and generosity, and no name in Europe has a popularity so great and so well merited. The Rothschilds in France occupy a social position even higher than that of the English branch of the family." (4)
The Menorah was also frank on the subject of the B'nai B'rith's relationship to the Scottish Rite Freemasons:
"Their reunions were frequent and several of them being members of then existing secret benevolent societies and especially of the Order of the Free Masons, and Odd Fellows, they finally concluded that a somewhat similar organization, but based upon the Jewish idea, would best obtain their object." (5)
Once in operation, the B'nai B'rith effectively merged its operations with another branch of the Scottish Rite, based in the Midwest and South — the Knights of the Golden Circle, the fore-runner of the Ku Klux Klan, the training ground for the entire Confederate military and political leadership. (6) Its most important American operative was Judah P. Benjamin, a British subject and leader of the B'nai B'rith, whose amazing career included a brief term as Confederate Secretary of War and then Secretary of State, during the closing phases of the Civil War. (7)
Another British subversive agent later worked together with Benjamin to found the Ku Klux Klan. He was Dr. Kuttner Baruch, B'nai B'rith leader and grandfather of Bernard Baruch, a leading Wall Street Anglophile. (8) Their colleagues in that venture included Confederate General Albert Pike, a Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite, and a Jesuit priest. (9) The same group carried out the Lincoln assassination — which raises questions concerning the Defense Department's refusal to release secret files concerning that assassination. Are they afraid to embarrass the now politically powerful B'nai B'rith?
The B'nai B'rith and its Confederate opposite numbers, the Knights of the Golden Circle and the Ku Klux Klan, were only three of the many parallel operations that Palmerston brought to life during the 1860s. In Britain, future Prime Minister Disraeli, the man who evaded debtors' prison through the help of the House of Rothschild, launched the "Young Englanders." (10)
In Italy, the local leader of the Scottish Rite, Mazzini, organized and commanded "Young Italy." (11) Scottish Rite member and Rothschild agent Alexander Herzen initiated a similar group covertly, avoiding the watchful eyes of the Czarist secret police; his best-known protégé took the name Bakunin. (12) In China, as of the second Opium War, the long-established "Triad" secret societies had already taken the retail distribution franchise for the distribution of British opium imported from India, and had become an uncontrollable, paramilitary arm of British "free trade."
What Palmerston and his colleagues had at their disposal was an International Assassination Bureau, capable of eliminating any chief of state who resisted British policy objectives. Not much different from the Red Brigades of Italy or the Baader-Meinhof terrorists of Germany today, the Scottish Rite's rainbow gathering of secret societies took money from the narcotics traffic and orders from Lord Palmerston.
What must be judged, in the long run, as the most deadly of these organizations was organized on an international footing at the same time that B'nai B'rith appeared in the United States.
Disraeli, Moses Montefiore, and other leading British Hofjuden founded a new masonic-style order called, in the original French, the "Alliance Universelle Israelite." It became known — and feared — under the name of its elite secret arm, the Order of Zion. (13) Most of the Order of Zion's funding was provided through the London and Paris banking houses of Rothschild, Montefiore, and de Hirsch. In crucial respects, the Order of Zion and Palmerston's Scottish Rite of Freemasonry were indistinguishable. In France, for example, the head of both organizations was the same individual, Adolphe Isaac Cremieux. (14)
Order of Zion leader Judah P. Benjamin was the individual who gave the order for Lincoln's assassination, according to the one authoritative historical document in the public domain, the report of the Judge Advocate assigned to investigate the assassination and report to the Military Commission responsible. (15) The report cites the orders of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin. According to this document, Confederate secret intelligence had raised a dirty tricks slush fund of $649,000 through the sale of Confederate bonds in Liverpool.
At the time, the headquarters of this outfit, called the Secret Cabinet, were housed in St. Lawrence Hall in Montreal — in the same building occupied by the Commander in Chief of British forces in Canada, General Sir Fenwick Williams. (16) The report names George N. Sandis as the group's money mover; Sandis was an American citizen, formerly an advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Stephen Douglas, and Consul of the United States in Liverpool under the Pierce Administration.
Eight days before Lincoln's death, the chief of the Secret Cabinet — former Interior Secretary in the Buchanan Administration, Jacob Thompson — withdrew $180,000 from the group's account at the Bank of Montreal in Montreal, to set the murder plot in motion. (17) His courier was one John Harrison Suratt, a British agent trained at Jesuit Georgetown College. Neither Thompson nor Benjamin was ever apprehended; both fled to England and remained there under the Crown's protection. (18) This evidence, heard on June 25 and June 26, 1865, ran up against a cover-up effort under the direction of Secretary of War Edward Stanton that compares in audacity with the work of the 1963 Warren Commission.
The relevant raw documentary is not available to researchers. The documents relating to the Lincoln assassination are still locked up in the archives of the Defense Department. Jefferson Davis, who lived comfortably in Montreal after the collapse of the Confederacy, kept his papers in the Bank of Montreal, the same bank that conduited the funds for the assassination itself. If they are still in the vaults of the Bank of Montreal, the bank has not acknowledged this. (19)
These facts concerning the death of President Lincoln are more than a useful case history, illustrating the power of the dope trade's criminal networks. If the leads developed in New Orleans District Attorney Garrison's investigation of the Kennedy assassination were accurate, the two murders were the work of the same operation. All that is necessary is to cross out the names "Secret Cabinet" and "Judah Benjamin," and write in: Permindex and Major Louis Bloomfield (see Part III, Section 3).
From what remains of the official record, there is no question that the death of Abraham Lincoln was traced to British-controlled and British-funded networks by American military intelligence. It must be underscored that much more than the central figure of Lord Palmerston brought these networks into the mainline of the narcotics traffic. Southern cotton, for which the British verged on invading the United States during the Civil War (20), was not merely a facet of the same trading operation that produced the dope trade; for all purposes, it was the dope trade. Opium was the final stage in the demand cycle for British-financed and slave-produced cotton. British firms brought cotton to Liverpool.
From there, it was spun and worked up into cloth in mills in the north of England, employing unskilled child and female labor at extremely low wages. The finished cotton goods were then exported to India, in a process that destroyed the existing cloth industry, causing widespread privation. India paid for its imported cloth (and railway cars to carry the cloth, and other British goods) with the proceeds of Bengali opium exports to China. Without the "final demand" of Chinese opium sales, the entire world structure of British trade would have collapsed.
Palmerston's above-cited remark concerning the future of British trade in opium-consuming China and other parts of the East was, in fact, a matter of hard contingency.
Britain's new instrument of subversion in the United States was controlled elements of Italian and Chinese immigration, combined with the Order of Zion entity that had been in place since 1843. By the turn of the century, the different ethnic networks became so intertwined that, for generic purposes, the name "organized crime" applies to all of them.
The implantation of the ethnic secret societies into the United States is a complex story, but may be centered accurately in a few case histories. One is the way that the family of Sam Bronfman — the man who shipped enough liquor to the United States to double the size of Lake Erie, in the testimony of Lucky Luciano — got to North America. Bronfman's story begins, in fact, in Romania, where the Order of Zion secret organization achieved its first major victory, a coup d'etat that brought King Charles of Romania to the throne in 1887.
In the years following the Civil War, the Order of Zion merged with the much older Cult of Mizraem, a centuries-old covert organization that dated back to the days of Genoese and Hapsburg intrigue and assassination. (21) From the British side, Sir Moses Montefiore, and on the Romanian front itself, American Consul Benjamin Peixotto, aided the local secret society in installing a new monarch. (22) Peixotto held a leadership position in the American B'nai B'rith and was a member of the Order of Zion.
The Elders of Zion
Romania became, in consequence, a nesting place for the most lurid form of Central European covert operations until the Second World War. The character of the political machine the Order of Zion installed in that country is perhaps best illustrated by the strong support Order of Zion elements gave to the Romanian Green Shirt Nazis, who seized power in Hitler's wake during the 1930s. (23) Romanian Jews show up prominently in American organized crime, as well as in the terrorist activities of the Israeli secret service, the Mossad.
The Order of Zion was simply the Jewish division of the Most Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the London-centered chivalric order and secret society, whose members swear — and act on — a blood oath. A secret meeting in Paris in 1884 yielded the famous minutes of the Order, published under the title, Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The minutes were intercepted and published by the Russian counterintelligence service, the Okhrana. (24)
Probably, the decision to publish the captured minutes involved retaliation against the Order of Zion's role in fomenting a sweeping destabilization against the government of Russian Prime Minister Count Witte, whose government fell during the so-called 1905 Revolution. Witte had sought an alliance with Germany and France against Britain on a program that included the industrial development of Russia.
The question of the authenticity of the Protocols has been a matter of fierce, even hysterical dispute. The question may be settled with dispatch by a textual comparison between the oaths of the Order of Zion printed in the Protocols, and the blood-curdling oaths sworn by initiates into the fourth Grade of the Knights of Columbus of Mexico, which maintains close ties to the Jesuits and to the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, which reads in part as follows: (25)
I, ________ , in the presence of all-powerful God, the blessed Virgin Mary, the blessed St. John the Baptist . . . by the belly of the Virgin Mary, the womb of God and staff of Jesus Christ, I declare and swear that his holiness the Pope is vice regent of Christ and sole and true head of the universal Catholic Church on earth, and in virtue of the keys to do and undo given to your holiness by my savior Jesus Christ, (you) have the power to depose kings and heretics, princes, states, communities and governments and dismiss them from office without risk. . . .
I promise and declare that I will, when the opportunity presents itself to me, wage war without quarter, secretly or openly, against all the heretics, Protestant and Mason, such as I may be ordered to do, in order to extirpate them from the face of earth, and I will not take into account either age, sex or station, and I will hang, burn, strangle and bury alive those infamous heretics: I will cut open the stomachs and wombs of their women and smash the heads of the babies against the rocks and walls, in order to annihilate the execrable race; that when this cannot be done openly, I will secretly employ the poison cut, strangulation, the sword, dagger or bullet, without consideration for the honor, rank, dignity or authority of the persons, whatever their status in public or private life may be, such as I may be ordered at any time. . . .
If I manifest falsity or weakness in my determination, I consent that my brothers and comrade soldiers in the army of the Pope may cut off my hands, my feet and slit my throat from ear to ear. . . .
I promise to execute and fulfill this oath, in testimony whereof, I take this sacred sacrament of the Eucharist and affirm it even with my name written with the point of this dagger, drenched in my own blood and sealed in the presence of this holy sacrament. Amen. (26)
Romania's Order of Zion stronghold produced, among other criminal elements, one Yechiel Bronfman, who emigrated to Canada in 1889. The circumstances of Bronfman's emigration are noteworthy. His passage was paid by the de Hirsch family fund for settlements in Canada — which conferred benefits with strings attached. De Hirsch political screening of new immigrants was so precise that a significant number of new arrivals were sent back without funds, for unreliability. (27).
The important features of the arrival of the Italian "Mafia" in the United States are inseparable from the story of the Order of Zion. Mazzini, the sponsor of the Mafia in Italy, reported directly to the most prominent of Britain's Hofjuden, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and received funding from the leading British Hofjuden bankers, Rothschild and Montefiore. (28)
Correspondingly, when Mazzini sent his lieutenants into the United States, the veterans of the "Young Italy" movement moved into channels already carved out by the likes of ex-General Pike and B'nai B'rith. The combination of Hofjuden-controlled crime networks and the Mafia provided the framework for organized crime on a big-business scale.
The first arrivals of the Italian-speaking mob followed the tracks of the original "dry goods" merchants who figured so prominently in the B'nai B'rith, the grandfathers and fathers of the Our Crowd banking group in New York City. New Orleans, the first base of the Lehmans and Lazards in the United States, also became the receiving station for the Mazzini networks. Most important, the first recorded evidence of organized Mafioso activity in the United States identifies the Mazzini networks with General Pike's guerrilla war against the "Reconstruction'' South.
Nothing depicts this arrangement better than the stories of the first New Orleans godfathers, Joseph Macheca and Charles Matrenga. Protégés of Mazzini, they took over the New Orleans franchise on behalf of the Palermo mob, which reported to Mazzini and thence to Disraeli. The chain of command was so well known that the joke made the rounds that the word "mafia" was really an acronym for "Mazzini autorizza furti, incendi, e attentati" — "Mazzini authorizes theft, arson, and kidnapping." (29)
The first of the Mazzini networks drifted in before and during the Civil War.
"The Mafias in New Orleans, New York, and Palermo were separate societies," wrote one leading historian of the period, "but they cooperated closely. A member who was properly sponsored could be transferred from one city to another, from one family to another." (30)
By the close of the Civil War, Disraeli's Mafia was in the hands of one Joseph Macheca. By contemporary accounts, the activities of the Macheca gang were indistinguishable from those of the Klan. In 1868, Macheca organized the New Orleans side of Democratic candidate Seymour's campaign against Ulysses S. Grant. Seymour's funding and political direction came from August Belmont, the Rothschilds' official business agent in the United States.
The campaign, such as it was, was described as follows in the New Orleans Picayune:
This popular and pleasant-mannered gentleman (Macheca) organized and commanded a company of Sicilians, 150 strong, known as the Innocents. Their uniform was a white cape bearing a Maltese Cross (the insignia of the British Royal Family's Order of St. John of Jerusalem — ed.) on the left shoulder. They wore sidearms and when they marched the streets they shot at every Negro that came in sight. They left a trail of a dozen dead Negroes behind them. General James E. Steadman, managing the (Seymour) campaign, forbade them from making further parades and they were disbanded. (31)
One historian of the Mafia notes,
"This matter-of-fact account is the first report of a formal Sicilian organization in New Orleans, and it is likely that from the ranks of these armed Innocents came the nucleus of Macheca's Mafia." (32)
Belmont's presidential candidate ran on a program drafted at the Seligman and associated Our Crowd banking houses in New York: the repeal of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The same cousins of the British Hofjuden controlled General Pike and his hooded goons, the Ku Klux Klan, whom Macheca's gangsters took such great pains to imitate — along with the conceit of the Maltese Cross. Pike, Macheca, and their paramilitary irregulars unleashed a wave of violence across the South that buried Lincoln's Reconstruction policy not many years after the President himself.
The historical record shows that Macheca's group in New Orleans, which started out by shooting blacks for the copperhead Our Crowd banks in New York, had proved its mettle by the early 1870s. It became the jumping-off point for the organization of the mob throughout the United States. Macheca provided a base for Mazzini's syndicate organizer of the first years of the Mafia, Giuseppe Esposito. A close Mazzini associate, Esposito fled Sicily in the early 1870s, arriving in New Orleans to make contact with Macheca.
Esposito traveled through the United States, pulling together Italian-speaking secret societies and establishing inter-city communications where none had existed before. From Esposito's tour onwards, the Sicilian-speaking secret societies became crime syndicates. Mazzini's representative on the scene had absolute authority over the local godfathers, even over the leader of the New Orleans base organization. Macheca's "Mafia leadership was eclipsed briefly," according to one historian, "from 1879 to 1881, when he temporarily deferred to Giuseppi Esposito." (33)
Macheca died at the hands of a New Orleans mob, which dragged him from a prison cell and lynched him, after he had been arrested for the murder of a policeman. (34) His old lieutenant Matrenga took over the reins. Macheca's death left a deep impression on the syndicates; possibly this is the point where the mob decided to "go legit," its strategy ever since. In order to do so, the Matrenga gang turned back to the Hofjuden.
The vehicle for the New Orleans mob's conversion to "legitimate business" in 1900 was another Romanian Jew, an immigrant from the Romanian province of Bessarabia, whence Yechiel Bronfman had migrated to Canada some ten years earlier. The new immigrant, one Samuel Zemurray, obtained financing from a group of Boston and New York Our Crowd banks, and bought out a portion of the Macheca gang's shipping interests.
A historian comments, "Joe Macheca's shipping line merged with four others to form the great United Fruit Company, which remains one of the largest of all U.S. firms." (35) United Fruit — re-chartered recently as United Brands Company — traditionally brought in Our Crowd bankers for its top management. Nonetheless, the Sicilian mob was remembered with nostalgia. When Charles Matrenga died in 1943, the entire board of United Fruit turned out for the funeral. (36)
From these most prominent among the Jewish and Italian ethnic crime stories of the formative years of the American syndicates, the roots of the narcotics traffic and associated evils are already evident. The Bronfmans, we will document later, founded and bankrolled the modern-day Murder Incorporated, Permindex, the firm that police agencies in the United States and Europe have suspected of organizing the murders of John F. Kennedy, Italian oil magnate Enrico Mattei, and former Italian premier Aldo Moro, as well as the many attempts on the life of Charles de Gaulle. It was in New Orleans that District Attorney Garrison linked the remnants of the old Macheca mob to the events in Dallas in November 1963.
As old Charles Matrenga withdrew into a "legitimate" back-ground, the day-to-day operations of the New Orleans mob fell into the hands of Sylvestro Carolla, who, in turn, passed the godfather's mantel onto Carlos Marcello in the early 1950s. What had begun as a small secret cult, receiving direction from the London center of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and Prime Minister Disraeli's Order of Zion, had spread across the American South, the Caribbean, and Central America. It maintained close ties with Meyer Lansky and the British installations in the West Indies.
And, according to sources in the Drug Enforcement Administration, 20 percent of cocaine smuggled into the United States arrives on the ships of United Brands.
The Chinese entry
Opium and morphine, in the early days of the mob, were not illegal drugs; heroin only came into circulation at the turn of the century and was not made illegal as a prescription drug until 1924. But the British dope-runners had a direct hand in the infiltration of narcotics into the United States, through the third wave of crime-tainted immigration, from China.
Not coincidentally, the first large-scale importing of opium into the United States commenced with the "coolie trade," referred to by its British Hong Kong and Shanghai sponsors as the "pig trade." Even before the Civil War, the same British trading companies behind the slave trade into the South were running a fantastic market in Chinese indentured servants into the West Coast. In 1846 alone, 117,000 coolies were brought into the country, feeding an opium trade estimated at nearly 230,000 pounds of gum opium and over 53,000 pounds of prepared (smoking) opium. (37)
Although Lincoln outlawed the coolie trade in 1862, the black marketeering in Chinese (the term "Shanghaied" referred to the merchant company kidnapping — through the Triad Society — of impoverished and often opium-addicted Chinese) continued at an escalating rate through to the end of the century. Often these Chinese "indentureds" would put their entire earnings toward bringing their families over to the U.S. This traffic in Chinese immigrants represented one of the earliest channels of opium into the country, and laid the foundations for the later mass-scale drug trade out of the Chinatowns developed in San Francisco, Vancouver, and other West Coast cities during this period.
The amount of opium coming into the United States during the last quarter of the 19th century is measured by the fact that in 1875, official government statistics estimated that 120,000 Americans — over and above the Chinese immigrant population — were addicted to opium! (38)
Adding to the opium addiction was the fact that British pharmaceutical houses had begun commercial production of morphine in the years leading up to the Civil War and made large quantities available to both armies. The British firms misrepresented the morphine as a "non-addictive" pain killer and even had the audacity to push it as a cure for opium addiction.
The British Brahmins in the U.S.
The nature of the London-centered cycle of international trade from cotton to opium further cultivated a group of British financial allies in the United States. Some of these allies are comprador trading families whose activities span the entire period from the inception of the opium traffic through to the Second World War.
Most important among these groups is the Astor family dynasty, whose founder, John Jacob Astor (1763-1848) made his fortune in Chinese opium sales. One of his biographers reports,
"We see that quicksilver and lead from Gibraltar and opium from Smyrna, as well as some iron and steel from the North of Europe, began in 1816 to take a conspicuous place in the list of Astor's imports into China... Since according to Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette, quicksilver and opium did not become regular articles of import into China by Americans till about 1816, Astor must have been one of the pioneers of their introduction." (39)
Leveraged into investments in Manhattan real estate, John Jacob Astor's opium earnings formed the basis of one of America's largest family fortunes. Participation in the China opium trade, a de facto monopoly of the East India Company at the time Astor took part in the traffic, was a privilege extended only to Americans the East India Company thought deserving.
Other American firms active in the Canton trade did not touch opium. (40) Possibly, Astor's trading privileges were a British pecuniary reward for services as a British intelligence operative in the United States. Astor provided funds for the escape of his attorney Aaron Burr after Burr murdered Alexander Hamilton; at the time, Burr was a British intelligence agent. Burr's control, and the man to whom he fled after the murder of Hamilton, was East India Company employee Jeremy Bentham. (41)
Apart from the Astor group in New York City, the East India Company developed similar networks in Philadelphia and Boston, among other American cities. The leading British merchant bank Baring Brothers, which remodeled the old East India Company as an instrument for the opium traffic after William Pitt's installation as British Prime Minister in 1783, acquired a group of business partners (and brothers-in-law) in Quaker Philadelphia.
The family the Barings married into was William Bingham's, reportedly the richest in the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century. Barings were prominent throughout the first years of the China traffic, founded the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in 1864, and retained their family seat on its directing "London Committee" as of the HongShang's 1977 annual report.
One historian describes how closely the Bingham group aped the British oligarchy:
Bingham was a most enthusiastic admirer of the British financial system which he desired to see copied in America. . . . Immense wealth enabled the Binghams to import fashions, and copy the Duke of Manchester's residence in Philadelphia. . . they gave the first masquerade ball in the city, encouraging what soon became a mania among the American rich — a passion for dressing up as aristocrats.
The Binghams finally achieved their ambitions by uniting two daughters to foreign aristocrats: one to Count de Tilly, and the other to a member of the London banking house of the Barings, who later became Lord Ashburton. (42)
Another Philadelphia family that united itself with Baring Brothers was that of millionaire Stephen Girard, (43) whose interests survived under the family name, in Philadelphia's multibillion dollar Girard Bank and Trust.
Several of the old "Boston Brahmin" families, however, made it into the mainstream of the 19th century opium traffic, alongside the well-remembered British names of Jardine, Matheson, Sassoon, Japhet, and Dent. The Perkins and Forbes families achieved notoriety in the traffic after the East India Company's monopoly expired in 1832, and after the Astors had ceased to be an important factor. William Hathaway Forbes became so prominent an associate of the British trading companies that he joined the board of directors of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in 1866, two years after its founding.
Hathaways, Perkins, and Forbes operated through a joint outlet, Russell and Company, formed around the Perkins family shipping empire, a "business reaching from Rio to Canton." (44) The fortunes of these families, as with the Philadelphia group, began with the slave trade — handed to them when the British dropped the slave trade as unprofitable in 1833. The China clippers of Russell and Company made not only Perkins's fortune, but most of the city of Boston's.
A biographer reports,
"By merging and creating. Russell and Company, he was responsible to a large degree in the establishing of all of Boston's merchant families — Cabots, Lodges, Forbes, Cunninghams, Appletons, Bacons, Russells, Coolidges, Parkmans, Shaws, Codmans, Boystons and Runnewells." (45)
Baring Brothers, the premier merchant bank of the opium traffic from 1783 to the present day, also maintained close contact with the Boston families. John Murray Forbes (1813-98) was U.S. agent for Barings, a post occupied earlier by Philadelphia's Stephen Girard; he was the father of the first American on the HongShang board.
The group's leading banker became, at the close of the nineteenth century, the House of Morgan — which also took its cut in the Eastern opium traffic. Thomas Nelson Perkins, a descendant of the opium-and-slaves shipping magnate who founded Russell and Company, became the Morgan Bank's chief Boston agent, through Perkins's First National Bank of Boston. Morgan and Perkins, among other things, provided the major endowments for Harvard University. (46) Morgan's Far Eastern operations were the officially conducted British opium traffic.
Exemplary is the case of Morgan partner Willard Straight, who spent the years 1901-12 in China as assistant to the notorious Sir Robert Hart, chief of the Imperial Chinese Customs Service, and hence the leading British official in charge of conducting opium traffic. Afterwards he became head of Morgan bank's Far Eastern operations. (47)
The above facts are necessary to round out the historical back- ground to the opium traffic today. What makes them especially interesting is the intricate trail that leads investigators of present-day drug financing back to the same American families and American banks. In Part III, we will blow the cover of Philadelphia's old "Main Line" Quaker families, whose present generation controls not only the leading supply of illicit amphetamines in the United States, but funds a whole array of street-level drug- trafficking operations as well.
Morgan's case deserves special scrutiny from American police and regulatory agencies, for the intimate associations of Morgan Guaranty Trust with the identified leadership of the British dope banks (see Part II, Section 7). Jardine Matheson's current chairman David Newbigging, the most powerful man today in Hong Kong, is a member of Morgan's international advisory board. The chairman of Morgan et Cie., the bank's international division, sits on the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. The chairman of Morgan Grenfell, in which Morgan Guaranty Trust has a 40 percent stake,- Lord Catto of Cairncatto, sits on the "London Committee" of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
But perhaps the most devastating example of continuity among the corrupted American families involves the descendants of old John Jacob Astor. American citizen Waldorf Astor, his direct descendant, was chairman of the Council of the Royal Institute of International Affairs during the Second World War, while Harvard-trained American citizens of the Institute for Pacific Relations smoothed the transition to People's Republic of China opium production (see Part II, Section 7).
The old Boston families who made their fortunes on the narcotics traffic were the ones whom old Joseph Kennedy strove to imitate when he obtained his British liquor delivery contacts during Prohibition, and the same ones who staffed his son's Administration.
3 - Britain's "Noble Experiment"
In the years 1919 and 1920, two events of critical strategic importance for Britain's opium war against the United States occurred. First, the Royal Institute of International Affairs was founded.
The purpose of this institution had been set forth over 40 years before in the last will and testament of empire-builder Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes had called for the formation of a "secret society" that would oversee the reestablishment of a British empire that would incorporate most of the developing world and recapture the United States (see Part II, Section 7). Toward this objective, Rhodes's circle, including Rudyard Kipling, Lord Milner, and a group of Oxford College graduates known as "Milner's Kindergarten," constituted the Round Table at the turn of the 20th century. In 1919, the same grouping founded the Royal Institute of International Affairs as the central planning and recruitment agency for Britain's "one world empire."
On January 6 of the next year, Britain declared its opium war against the United States. Americans knew it as Prohibition. Prohibition brought the narcotics traffic, the narcotics traffickers, and large-scale organized crime into the United States. Illegal alcohol and illegal narcotics made up two different product lines of the same multinational firm. The British, through their distilleries in Scotland and Canada, and the British, from their opium refineries in Shanghai and Hong Kong, were the suppliers. The British, through their banks in Canada and the Caribbean, were the financiers. Through their political conduits in the United States, the British created the set of political conditions under which the United States might be won back by means other than the failed Balkanization plan of the Civil War period.
Two tracks led to the drug epidemic in the United States, one in the Far East, and the other in the United States and Canada. Against the outcry of the League of Nations and virtually all the civilized world, the British stubbornly fought to maintain opium production in the Far East, expanding the illegal supply of heroin, just as the drug went out of legal circulation in America in 1924. In North America, Canada — which had had its own period of Prohibition — went "wet" one month before the United States went dry.
In interviews with the authors, Drug Enforcement Administration officials have emphasized the similarity of the alcohol and narcotics modus operandi. When the agents of Arnold Rothstein and Meyer Lansky made their first trips to the Far East in the 1920s, they purchased heroin from the British with full legality. What the American gangsters did with the drug was their own business; the British opium merchants were merely engaging in "free enterprise."
When Britain's leading distilling companies sold bulk quantities of liquor to Arnold Rothstein and Joseph Kennedy — for delivery either to the Bahamas or to the three-mile territorial limit of the United States coastal waters — they had no responsibility for what happened to the liquor once it reached American shores. (The identical explanation was offered by an official of the British Bank of the Middle East, which now services the Far East drug traffic through a smugglers' market in gold bullion in Dubai, on the Persian Gulf. "We only sell the gold, old boy," the banker said. "What those fellows do with it once they get it is up to them.")
Which of the American syndicates obtained this month's franchise for drug or liquor distribution was immaterial to the British traffickers. The greater the extent of intergang blood-shed, the less obvious their role would be. In fact, the British distillers could provoke such events at will by withholding needed inventory of bootleg alcohol.
The "Noble Experiment" was aimed at degrading the American people through popular "violation of the law" and association with the crime syndicate controlled by the Our Crowd banks of Wall Street — the Zionist Lobby of its day (see Part III). New York's Our Crowd is an extension of the London Rothschild banking network and British Secret Intelligence into the United States. For example, Sir William Wiseman was the official head of British Secret Intelligence in the United States throughout the World War I period. He became a senior partner in the investment house of Kuhn Loeb immediately on demobilization. Wiseman was a personal protégé of Canadian Round Table founder Lord Beaverbrook and one of the most prominent public figures in the Zionist movement. (1)
With this lower Manhattan-Canada-centered grouping acting as the political control, the Prohibition project was launched during the early 1910s under the shadow of the United States' entry into World War I. It should shock no one that the creation and rapid growth of an organized crime syndicate in the United States was the filthy business of the Our Crowd banks — employing the cults of Lord Palmerston and Disraeli that conducted the unsuccessful assault against the American republic during the Civil War.
It is a fraud of the highest order that Prohibition represented a mass social protest against the "evils" of alcohol. Like the environmentalist movement and other present day anti-progress cults, the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and its Anti-Saloon League offshoots were a small, well-financed and highly organized circle that enjoyed the financial backing of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, the Warburgs, and the Rockefellers. (2)
Then as now, the funding conduits were principally the tax-exempt foundations — specifically the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. John D. Rockefeller I was hood- winked by Lord Beaverbrook colleague and former Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King into not only bankrolling the WCTU, but providing it with the services of the foundation's entire staff of private investigators. (3)
Who made up the Temperance Movement? It was run by Jane Addams, who studied the Fabian Society's London settlement house Toynbee Hall experiment and came to the United States to launch a parallel project which later produced the University of Chicago. (4) The "cadre" were drawn almost exclusively from three pools:
1) the settlement house and suffragette networks run by Addams and the Russell Sage Foundation
2) the pro-terrorist synthetic religious cults operated out of Oberlin College in Ohio
3) the Ku Klux Klan in the South
Oberlin College was founded by British "Christian missionaries" in the decades leading up to the Civil War. Like the ancient anti-Christian Manichean cult, Oberlin was organized around the principle that the material world was wholly evil; all students (i.e. initiates) were required to become vegetarians. From Oberlin's student body some of the most violent radical abolitionist terrorists were recruited, trained and deployed and safe housed during the Civil War. (5)
Like its predecessor radical abolitionist movement, the Temperance Movement was founded at Oberlin in the post-Civil War period as a violent cult (known at the time as "Organized Motherlove"). At the height of the Prohibition drive during the 1910s, bands of ax-wielding lesbians — the Susan Saxes and Bernadine Dohrns of their day — received banner headlines for their assaults against saloons throughout the Ohio Valley. Many of these women were drawn from the Manichean cult at Oberlin.
Once launched as a nationwide movement, WCTU founded a national headquarters in Evanston, 111. Nearby Wilmette, 111. (along with London and Tel Aviv) subsequently became the North American headquarters of the British Intelligence- organized Ba'hai terrorist cult. (6)
In the South, parallel "fundamentalist Christian" cultists had been drawn together from the turn of the century under the direction of the Ku Klux Klan.
These three British cults agitated nationally for Prohibition. While the WCTU and Anti-Saloon League staged well-publicized and frequently violent raids against saloons, the more sophisticated Fabian Settlement House social workers of Jane Addams used the unique conjuncture of the recently passed Seventeenth Amendment certifying women's voting rights in national elections and the concentration of much of the adult male population on the war effort to vote up the Eighteenth Amendment making Prohibition the law of the land. The Amendment was fully ratified by 1917; however, the Volstead Act that defined the federal enforcement procedures was not scheduled for implementation until January 6,1920.
The three-year lead time was critical for the establishment of a tightly organized crime syndicate, which was being organized out of Canada and Our Crowd banking circles in New York:
In Canada, a brief Prohibition period (1915-1919) was principally enacted by order of Her Majesty's Privy Council to create the financial reserves and bootlegging circuit for the U.S. Prohibition. In this period Canada's Hofjuden Bronfman family established the local mob contacts in the U.S. and consolidated contractual agreements with the Royal Liquor Commission in London.
Primarily out of Brooklyn, New York, teams of field agents of the Russell Sage Foundation conducted a reorganization and recruitment drive among local hoodlum networks — already loosely organized through Tammany Hall's New York City Democratic Party machine. "Legitimate" business fronts were established, replacing neighborhood nickel-and-dime loan sharking operations, and specially selected individuals — largely drawn from the Mazzini "Mafia" transplanted to the U.S. during the late 1800s Italian migrations — were sent out of Brooklyn into such major Midwest cities as Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis in the 12 months leading up to the Volstead enforcement. One such Brooklyn recruit was Al Capone.
The British oligarchy did much more than supply the gutter elements of the crime syndicates with their stock in trade. To a surprising extent, the Anglophile portion of America's upper crust joined the fun. The case of Joseph Kennedy, who owed his British contracts for liquor wholesaling to the Duke of Devonshire, and later married his daughter into the family, is notorious (see Part III).
In some respects more revealing is the strange case of Robert Maynard Hutchins, the President of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1950. Hutchins had American citizen- ship, but was so close to the British aristocracy that he became a Knight Commander of Her Majesty's Venerable Order of St. John of Jerusalem, swearing an oath of chivalric fealty to the head of the order, the British monarch.
Under the guise of "social studies research," several well-known University of Chicago postgraduate students received their apprenticeships in the service of the Capone gang:
In 1930, University of Chicago graduate student Saul Alinsky, the godfather of the "New Left," entered the Capone Mob in Chicago. Alinsky for several years was the accountant for the gang — at the height of the Prohibition profiteering. Alinsky went on to be one of the most important British Fabian-modeled social engineers in the United States for the next 30 years, specializing in the creation of synthetic dionysian cults among the nation's youth and ghetto victims.
Alinsky, in fact, used the organizational model of the Capone Mob to build up a criminal youth gang infrastructure in Chicago during the early 1960s that assumed street-level control over drug trafficking and related criminal operations run 30 years earlier through the Capone gang. When the Our Crowd sponsors of Capone's initial deployment to Chicago determined at the close of Prohibition that a more "civilized" cutout was desired, Alinsky was the channel for bringing Frank Nitti into the Mob.
In the late 1940s, University of Chicago professor Milton Friedman was installed as President of the Gold Seal Liquor Company — the original Capone enterprise. Friedman soon also assumed the presidency of the Illinois Wholesale Liquor Dealers Association — a position from which he no doubt carried out his first experiments in "free market economics."
As late as the 1960s, retired University of Chicago President Hutchins himself was under investigation for his involvement with drug trafficking and other black market enterprises. Through the late 1960s his Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions was financed principally through Bernie Cornfeld's Investments Overseas Service (IOS) — an international pyramid swindle and drug money laundering enterprise (see Part III, Section 3). Furthermore, Hutchins was simultaneously the president of a little-known Nevada foundation called the Albert Parvin Foundation which several congressional committees investigating organized crime cited as a front for Las Vegas gambling receipts.
Mounting the drug invasion
The United States' fourteen-year experiment in Prohibition accomplished precisely what its British framers had intended. Ralph Salerno, an internationally recognized authority and historian on organized crime, a law enforcement consultant and former member of the New York City Police Department's intelligence division, succinctly summarized the effect of Britain's Prohibition gameplan in his book, The Crime Confederation:
The most crucial event in the history of the confederation (organized crime — ed.) was a legal assist called Prohibition. . . . Prohibition helped foster organized crime in several ways. It was the first source of real big money. Until that time, prostitution, gambling, extortion and other activities had not generated much capital even on their largest scale. But illegal liquor was a multibillion dollar industry. It furnished the money that the organization later used to expand into other illegal activities and to penetrate legitimate business.
Prohibition also opened the way to corruption of politicians and policemen on a large scale. It began the syndicate connection with politics and it demoralized some law enforcement groups to the point where they have never really recovered. . . . The manufacture and distribution of illegal liquor here and the importation of foreign-made liquor gave the men who were organizing crime experience in the administration and control of multibillion dollar world businesses with thousands of employees and long payrolls.
Men who had never before managed anything bigger than a family farm or a local gang got on-the-job training that turned them into leaders developing executive qualities. . . . Mass evasion of the Volstead Act also put the average citizen in touch with criminals, resulting in tolerance and eventually admiration and even romantic approval of them. It permanently undermined respect for the law and for the people enforcing it. Ever since Prohibition the man in the street has accepted the idea that cops can be bought.
The combined revenues of the illicit whiskey and drug trade during Prohibition had constituted a multibillion dollar black market booty. While families like the Kennedys and Bronfmans "made out like bandits" in the early 1930s transition to "legitimate" liquor trade, the overall financial structure for maintaining an organized crime infrastructure demanded diversification into other areas of black market activity only marginally developed previously. The market for illicit drugs in the United States — though significantly expanded as the result of the Prohibition experience — was not to become the foundation of a multibillion dollar traffic for several decades.
In the interim, the Our Crowd-British crime syndicate turned to casino gambling and associated enterprises as the immediate area for expansion. The Lansky syndicate took the opportunity of Nevada's 1933 passage of specific regulations legalizing casino operations to turn that no-man's-land into a desert resort to house all the West Coast criminal operations that had previously been run on pleasure boats 12 miles off the coast of Hollywood. Lansky also moved into the Caribbean, preparing the way for the British offshore complex of unregulated banking.
Through the investment of the phenomenal profits derived from the Prohibition into gambling casinos, professional sports stadiums and racetracks, organized crime established the foundations during the 1930s and 1940s for the drug trafficking that would begin in the mid-1950s — once a cultural climate had been created that was conducive to fostering drug addiction.
Nixon's war on drugs
It is not widely known that President Nixon was a casualty in the war against Britain's drug invasion of the United States. Had Nixon not taken up the most basic interests of the nation in launching a wholesale effort to shut down the drug trafficking — from the top down — it is likely that he would not have been unceremoniously forced out of office by Henry Kissinger, Ted Kennedy, and their British masters.
By 1970 Nixon became profoundly aware that the proliferation of drug abuse among the nation's youth had become a problem of such monumental significance that all his efforts to institute a long-range program of peace-through-development would be meaningless unless combined with a ruthless crackdown on the poison that threatened to wreck the nation's future leadership and its productive sector. Documents are available in the public domain from the Drug Enforcement Administration and other executive agencies showing that Nixon's "War on Drugs" was directed at the top — at the banking institutions, the transportation grids, and only then at the distribution channels delivering the volumes of drugs onto the streets of the country.
At the same time that Nixon generically understood the top-down nature of the problem, he and his assistants scarcely understood that by going after the drug infrastructure they were taking on the entire British oligarchy and the entire underpinnings of the Eurodollar market and the People's Republic of China. Had Nixon understood the drug problem as a London-Peking problem, he would have perhaps been better prepared to deal with the "inside-outside" attack against his Presidency.
In Part II of this report, we will reveal the inner workings of the London-Peking Drug Empire the Nixon Administration ran up against when it declared its War on Drugs. SOURCE:http://whale.to/b/dopeinc.html
TO BE CONTINUED...