Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy (34 page)

About the Publisher

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

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Canada

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca

New Zealand

HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand

http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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London, W6 8JB, UK

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

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New York, NY 10022

http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com

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In fact, there may have been at least one murder related to the battle between Alfa and IPOC. In early 2008, the Russian-American businessman Leonid Rozhetskin vanished under mysterious circumstances. Rozhetskin, whose attempt to sell his shares in MegaFon had triggered the corporate battle in the first place, was visiting his seaside villa in Latvia at the time of his disappearance. He has not been seen alive since. Authorities later found blood on the floor of the beach house, and discovered Rozhetskin’s abandoned car. It was not clear if Rozhetskin had been killed or had faked his own death to escape the clash of the Russian oligarchs. Six months later, his wife—the model Natalya Belova—and their three-year-old son Maximillian disappeared from their London home. Rozhetskin also left behind his business partner, the Hollywood producer Eric Eisner, the son of Michael Eisner, legendary former CEO of the Walt Disney Company.

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The IPOC saga involved a convoluted global web of companies and lawsuits. But by 2007, the government of the British Virgin Islands (BVI) concluded in a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice that “Reiman has a private beneficial interest in IPOC and its group entities.” In other words, the BVI investigation concluded that Diligence had been right about IPOC’s ownership all along. A Bermuda court ordered that IPOC be liquidated in 2007.

*
That seems like a fine point, but it is a distinction with a difference. “Lobbying” expenses are required by law to be disclosed publicly. “Consulting” fees can remain private. There are many in Washington’s lobbying community who argue that as much as 50 percent of all influence-peddling fees are hidden from public disclosure through the use of this loophole. If so, that would make Washington’s lobbying business a nearly $6 billion industry.

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His tale is expertly told in James Mackay,
Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye
(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1996). Mackay’s account is the most comprehensive of the many biographies of Pinkerton, and it is relied on extensively here.

*
A little more than a decade earlier, the new town of Chicago had elected its first trustees at a meeting held in the same hotel.

*
The seeds of the FBI would be sown in 1908, when President Theodore Roosevelt authorized the creation of a small corps of special agents, under the auspices of the attorney general. The new agency was named the Bureau of Investigation.

*
Journalists, too, were seduced by the temptation to cheat via telegraph. In his book
The Eavesdroppers
(1959), Sam Dash wrote that reporters at the
San Francisco Call
in 1899 alleged that rivals at the
San Francisco Examiner
were tapping telephone lines to steal scoops.

*
Pinkerton wrote more than fifteen books, including memoirs of his own exploits and pulp-style detective novels. He is said to have employed a squad of ghostwriters to churn out these books, which also served as publicity for the Pinkerton image. In his books, detectives were typically heroic, criminals nefarious, and clients innocent victims. They had titles like
Strikers, Communists, Tramps, and Detectives
(1878),
The Spy of the Rebellion
(1884), and
Cornered at Last: A Detective Story
(1892).

†
The author Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton agent from 1915 to 1921, and he relied on his experiences in the agency to create the legendary fictional private detective Sam Spade in the novel
The Maltese Falcon
. Spade became the ultimate celluloid detective when he was played by Humphrey Bogart in the famous film version of
The Maltese Falcon
, but the character had his roots in genuine Pinkerton exploits. Hammett didn’t stay with the Pinkertons long. He grew disillusioned with what he saw as the Pinkertons’ antilabor strikebreaking efforts and quit the agency.

*
Rumors have long circulated that Warne—an attractive widow—and Pinkerton were romantically involved. There seems to be no proof of this except that Warne was the first female detective Pinkerton hired, and she traveled the country with him for years while his wife and children stayed home in Chicago. Pinkerton praised her as one of his best detectives, saying, “Mrs. Warne never let me down.” When she died, Pinkerton buried her in his family plot. His own grave is close by.

*
The security contract for Lincoln was not to last long. The Pinkertons were not on duty the night he was assassinated.

*
After the war, Allan Pinkerton had Webster’s body removed from its grave in Richmond and reburied in northern soil. He also erected a monument to Webster in his own family cemetery.

*
Frick’s partnership with Carnegie, though severed after the Homestead strike, was lucrative. The union-breaking industrialist built an enormous mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York City, which is now the home of the Frick Collection, a museum dedicated to old masters including Rembrandt, Goya, and Titian.

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The sons weren’t as liberal as their father in at least one respect: they discontinued the use of female detectives.

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Dash would go on to fame as the co–chief counsel of the Senate Watergate committee nearly two decades later.

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Merger talks between the two airlines would continue in one form or another for decades, resuming again in 1962 and 1990. Pan Am eventually collapsed in 1991.

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The moment of high drama became the climactic scene in a 2004 movie called
The Aviator
, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes and Alan Alda as Senator Brewster.

*
Shimon continued his decades-long career as a wiretapper. In 1962, he bugged yet another attorney’s room at the Mayflower Hotel, and was indicted and convicted on charges resulting from the incident, although the conviction was reversed on appeal. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges, according to
The Intruders
, a book written by Senator Edward V. Long in 1967, following his Senate investigation into illegal wiretapping.

†
The address of the New York Telephone Company office was 228 East Fifty-Sixth Street. There is a Verizon telecommunications facility in the same building today.

*
At the subsequent trial, Broady’s lawyers insisted that the real figure behind the wiretapping scheme was a private detective named Charles Gris.

†
Broady also tapped other phones, including those of the St. Joseph Lead Company, the Knoedler art gallery, the chairman of the board of Pepsi-Cola, a prominent lawyer, and a publishing company, according to
The Intruders
.

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Corio had a long career on Broadway and as a B-movie actress, appearing in films such as
Swamp Woman
(1941). Neither she nor the critics took her films seriously. “I was the Queen of the Quickies,” she once said. “Those pictures weren’t released, they escaped.”

*
Things didn’t turn out as well for Senator Long. Many believe that his years-long investigation of bugging and wiretapping annoyed the FBI’s powerful director J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted its use of such technology to remain a closely guarded secret. Whether Hoover leaked the material or not is unclear, but soon two media outlets ran allegations that Long had received tens of thousands of dollars in payments from a lawyer connected to the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, who was then in prison.
Life
magazine alleged in 1967 that Long had run the hearings on bugging mainly as a way to find evidence to clear Hoffa of his conviction, in 1964, for jury tampering. Long was defeated in a primary and resigned from the Senate on December 27, 1967.

*
Murphy later refused to tell a reporter for the
New York Times
whether or not he’d misled his own client. He would say only this: “If the government had decided that they were going to keep someone secure, I don’t think that I would be the one to blow him out of the water.”

*
My father, Ron Javers, was a reporter with the
San Francisco Chronicle
traveling with the murdered congressman, Leo Ryan. He was wounded during the shoot-out in Guyana and later was the coauthor of a book on the Peoples Temple,
The Suicide Cult: The Inside Story of the Peoples Temple Sect and the Massacre in Guyana
.

*
Hundley went on to an illustrious career in legal defense. When he died in 2006, his obituary in the
New York Times
noted that he’d represented President Richard Nixon; Attorney General John N. Mitchell, at Mitchell’s Watergate trial; Tongsun Park, a South Korean accused of bribing congressmen; and Vernon Jordan.

*
It was a small world: Chester Davis had been referred to Peloquin by a personal friend of President Nixon, the Florida banker Charles G. “Bebe” Rebozo. In later years, Rebozo would come under congressional scrutiny for allegedly passing along a $100,000 contribution from Howard Hughes to the Nixon campaign.

*
Peloquin recalls that one of his duties at Intertel was to deliver a monthly check for hundreds of dollars—a significant amount of money in those days—to William Durkin, the marine sergeant who had pulled Hughes from the burning wreckage. Peloquin’s account of a generous lifetime reward contradicts the account of Durkin’s family, who maintained that he never took money from Hughes. Durkin died in 2006.

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Roselli was killed in a Mafia hit in Miami in 1976. He had just testified about the plot against Castro before a Senate committee, and reportedly had not asked permission of the mob bosses beforehand. He was seventy years old. “They got him aboard a yacht and a hit man appeared out of nowhere, plugging his nose and mouth,” Maheu wrote in his autobiography. “He was pretty weak, so it didn’t take long for him to suffocate. Then, they decided to cut him into pieces. They stuck his foot in his mouth, wrapped his legs around his head, and then sank him in a steel drum.” Sam Giancana had been killed a year earlier, just before he could testify before the Senate on the attempted assassination of Castro.

†
But he remained an active participant in other CIA operations. Over the years, Maheu told Senate investigators, he allowed his firm to serve as cover employment for CIA officers on missions around the world. Maheu paid out salaries and expenses, sometimes for men he’d never met. “I mean, all they had to do was carry the credit cards and credentials and claim that they worked for Robert A. Maheu and Associates,” he said. The CIA reimbursed Maheu for the cost of the cover agents.