The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  Shortly after his father was sworn in as Vice President, Jeb moved his family out of Houston because the prejudice against his Mexican wife had become too hurtful. “Miami is wide open. It’s a frontier town,” Jeb said. “It doesn’t have a lot of people with Roman numerals behind their names.” Columba also wanted to be closer to her mother and her sister, so George H.W. loaned his son twenty thousand dollars to buy a house in Miami, where Jeb had helped his father campaign in the anti-Castro Cuban communities during the Florida Republican presidential primary.

  “That’s when I caught the bug,” Jeb said. “It was perhaps the most rewarding experience of my life . . . I think I grew as a human being. I learned how to deal with people. I learned how to overcome fear: fear of humiliation, fear of embarrassment, fear of not doing as well as you want to do.”

  “Campaigning for Dad was hardly a paying job,” Stephen Pizzo wrote in Mother Jones, “but Jeb was about to learn that being one of George Bush’s sons means never having to circulate a résumé.”

  Within weeks of his move, Jeb contacted Armando Codina, a Cuban American developer and a big Bush political supporter who owned a commercial-real-estate development company. Codina was reported to be worth $75 million. He hired Jeb as an agent to lease office space for his development company in Miami, although Jeb had absolutely no real-estate experience. “I learned the business the hard way,” Jeb said. “On the job.” Codina also offered Jeb a 40 percent share of his company’s profits—and Jeb did not have to put one cent of his own money into the firm. Opportunities were also offered to invest in other ventures on the side. Jeb accepted, and the company was renamed Codina-Bush, which gave Codina an instant relationship with the Vice President of the United States.

  Within two years Jeb launched himself politically. As his father had done twenty-one years earlier, Jeb sought the top office of his county’s Republican Party and he was elected chairman of the Dade County GOP. As someone who played country-club tennis and spoke fluent Spanish, he was uniquely situated to bridge the chasm between Anglos and Cubans within the party. The Anglos were genteel people, much like Jeb’s paternal grandparents, who had fled the cold winters up north. The hot-tempered Cubans were brash entrepreneurs who had fled the repressive Castro regime. Each group viewed the other with veiled contempt but revered Ronald Reagan—so the thirty-year-old son of Reagan’s Vice President was well and favorably received. This made Jeb a valuable asset to Armando Codina.

  Sometimes Codina-Bush clients wanted Jeb to do more than find them office space. They wanted his influence in Washington. Jeb always complied, frequently interceding for thugs and knaves whose blatant criminality defied exaggeration. In every case, the con men who hustled Jeb made contributions to his Dade County coffers before requesting his help. In case after case, Jeb responded as if each were a prince of the realm. As Jefferson Morley of The Washington Post wrote: “Political entrepreneurs like Jeb Bush sell access.”

  In one case Jeb peddled his influence for Miguel Recarey Jr., an international fugitive whose hobby was extortion. Recarey, who boasted of Mafia ties to Santos Trafficante, pulled off one of the biggest Medicare frauds in American history, skimming untold millions from taxpayers. According to law-enforcement officials, he increased his personal net worth from $1 million to $100 million in six years. By the time Recarey met Jeb Bush, the Cuban immigrant had been forced to repay $13 million in improper Medicare payments. He had also been convicted of tax evasion, served time in prison, and was being investigated for hospital embezzlement in connection with his health maintenance organization, International Medical Centers.

  In 1984, Recarey made a two-thousand-dollar contribution to Jeb’s Dade County coffers. Jeb then acted as a conduit to his father and Oliver North to arrange for IMC to provide free medical treatment for the contras. Afterward, Recarey hired Jeb’s personal company, Bush Realty Management, for $250,000 to find IMC an office building. During their conversations, Recarey mentioned that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was tightening Medicare rules, which threatened IMC profits. Recarey asked Jeb to call HHS on his behalf. Jeb agreed and made two telephone calls, which he would later deny, asking that Recarey be granted a waiver of the new HHS regulations.

  Jeb went right to the top. He called the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, and spoke to her chief of staff, C. McClain Haddow. Jeb told Haddow to “discount rumors that were floating around concerning Mr. Recarey . . . He’s a good community citizen and a good supporter of the Republican party.”

  These calls from the son of the Vice President commanded not just attention but action. When Congress later investigated Recarey’s Medicare fraud, Haddow testified that Jeb’s calls for Recarey had helped IMC receive its waiver, enabling IMC to have more than half its clientele be Medicare recipients. Secretary Heckler’s approval of this waiver overruled the decision of a local HHS administrator. Jeb’s intervention basically guaranteed that Recarey could continue bilking millions from Medicare, which is exactly what he did for three more years. Recarey paid Jeb seventy-five thousand dollars, which both men claimed was a realty fee, although Jeb never found Recarey any office space. In 1985 and 1986, Recarey also gave more than twenty-five thousand dollars to George Bush’s political action committees.

  In 1987, when IMC was shut down because of insolvency, more than $200 million in Medicare money was missing. Recarey was indicted for embezzlement, labor racketeering, bribery, obstruction of justice, and wiretapping. He fled to Venezuela, and then to Spain, where he now lives in luxury. To this day he remains on the FBI’s list of international fugitives.

  In 1985, the year after Jeb intervened with HHS for Recarey, he wrote a letter to the Department of Housing and Urban Development on behalf of another unscrupulous character. Hiram Martinez Jr. had applied for federal loan insurance for an apartment development. The application was stalled because of questions about the value of the land. After Jeb wrote to HUD, Martinez got the loan, but HUD later discovered that Martinez had indeed inflated the value of the land and the cost of the project. He was convicted and served six years in prison for fraud. Jeb said he did not remember writing the letter, but HUD released a copy.

  Jeb had interceded for Martinez because he had been hired by Martinez’s contractor, Camilo Padreda, another anti-Castro Cuban, who was finance chairman of the Dade County GOP when Jeb was chairman. In 1982, Padreda had been indicted for embezzling $500,000 from the Jefferson Savings and Loan in McAllen, Texas. But the case never went to trial, because the CIA intervened on behalf of Padreda’s associate, who was indicted with him. His associate had worked for the CIA during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Padreda later pleaded guilty to defrauding the Department of Housing and Urban Development of millions, including the Martinez fraud, but Padreda never went to jail. Instead, he was placed under house arrest and given probation in exchange for cooperating with authorities investigating Dade County corruption.

  Jeb, who has claimed that he never lobbied his father’s government, petitioned the Justice Department in 1990 in behalf of Orlando Bosch, who was in prison for having entered the United States illegally. The anti-Castro terrorist, who was implicated in the car-bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier, was notorious for having masterminded the bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight in October 1976, which killed all seventy-three on board, including a group of Cuban athletes returning from the Pan Am Games in Caracas, Venezuela. At that time George Herbert Walker Bush was CIA director. The United States sanctioned terrorism against Cuba and routinely trained commandos to infiltrate the island. Jeb, who planned to run for governor of Florida, represented a rabid anti-Castro constituency, a voting bloc that held his father’s anti-Castro actions at the CIA in the highest esteem. Jeb’s public support for paroling Bosch further enhanced his standing in the Cuban community, which considered Bosch a patriot in exile and honored him for his murderous bombings around the globe. At his son’s behest, George Bush intervened to obtain the release of the Cu
ban terrorist from prison and later granted Bosch U.S. residency.

  By this time Jeb had woven an intricate web of murky business deals with spidery ties to the CIA. He repeatedly profited financially and politically by exploiting his father’s high office for personal gain. One of his most egregious deals occurred when he and his business partner, Armando Codina, obtained a loan of $4.56 million from Broward Federal Savings and Loan through a third party, J. Edward Houston. Codina-Bush used the money to buy an office building. When Broward Federal Savings and Loan failed, federal regulators found that the loan to Houston, which had been secured by Codina-Bush, was in default. Rather than force the Vice President’s son and his partner to sell the office building to pay off the loan, federal regulators negotiated a settlement in which Jeb and his partner repaid $505,000, retained control of the office building, and passed on to taxpayers the $4.1 million loss. Both men expressed surprise to The New York Times that the settlement could be interpreted as the use of taxpayers’ money to make good a loan whose proceeds went for their building: “Asked if they were aware that the funds for the repayment of the loan came from the taxpayers, both men said no.” Three years later, Jeb and his partner sold the building for $8 million, which Jeb claimed, with a straight face, was just enough to cover their costs and legal fees. “This little episode,” observed Christopher Hitchens in The Nation, “provides a handy insight into the mental and moral world of people who make money rather than earn it.”

  By then, Jeb felt he had made enough money to seriously launch his political career. He told his father he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate in 1986, but his father persuaded him to wait. The Vice President said he could not afford “another Pressy deal” just as he was gearing up for his own presidential run. Jeb knew the reference was to his father’s brother Prescott’s embarrassing candidacy in 1982 for the U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut. Now, George told his son that he needed him in Florida. Jeb, who idolized his father, knew that this was George’s last and best chance to become President. No matter whom the Democrats put up, the Vice President to the beloved Ronald Reagan would have an edge. Jeb said he would do anything to help his father get elected.

  As chairman of the Dade County GOP, Jeb frequently called his father for political favors, and in 1986 he asked George to come to Florida to campaign for Bob Martinez, the Republican candidate for governor. “The kids were always calling the Vice President’s office with requests,” said Bush’s deputy chief of staff, “but Jeb’s calls usually got the old man’s best attention . . . I think he trusted Jeb’s political instincts.”

  Jeb’s hard-right politics—“I’m a hang-’em-by-the-neck conservative”—and his vociferous support of the contras appealed to his father and boosted Jeb’s popularity in the conservative, anti-Communist Hispanic community of Dade County. Jeb’s access to fabulously wealthy Cubans made him invaluable to his father’s political staff as they prepared their 1988 run for a Bush presidency. Jeb’s request for his father to campaign for Martinez was immediately put on the Vice President’s schedule, and George made several trips to Florida. When Martinez won, he appointed Jeb to be Florida’s secretary of commerce, a job Jeb held for twenty months. It enabled him to travel abroad on trade missions to Latin America and Asia, pursuing further business opportunities for himself and his state. After George was elected President in 1988, he appointed Martinez—who had been defeated in his bid for reelection—“drug czar.”

  As Florida’s secretary of commerce, Jeb awarded a $160,000 state contract to Richard Lawless, a former CIA agent, to promote Florida in the Far East. After Jeb quit his state job, Lawless paid him $528,000 for various real-estate services. Lawless also donated $35,000 to the Republican Party and $5,000 to Jeb’s first gubernatorial campaign.

  Jeb started a second company with Hank Klein, Bush-Klein Realty, to sell real estate. His new partner wondered if politics would get in the way of business.

  “I asked him, ‘What does your dad think of your going into business with a liberal Democrat?’” Klein said. “Jeb told me that his father thought about it a minute, then said, ‘It’s okay—as long as you make money together.’

  “I said, ‘Spoken like a true Republican.’”

  After his father became President, Jeb phoned with more requests—autographed photos, presidential cuff links, and presidential endorsements. When he managed the 1989 congressional campaign of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen in a race against ten other candidates for the congressional seat once held by Representative Claude Pepper, Jeb asked his father to endorse the prominent Cuban American. George agreed and flew to Florida on Air Force One to appear with her during her campaign in Miami. He declared, “I am certain in my heart I will be the first American president to set foot on the soil of a free and independent Cuba.”

  Ros-Lehtinen won the seat and became the first Cuban-born American and the first Hispanic female to sit in Congress, which further enhanced Jeb and his father in the eyes of the anti-Castro community. Heading an economic mission to Japan a few months later, Jeb attended a seminar at which pamphlets were distributed describing him as “political heir” to the President and as having “the strongest connections to the White House among the members of the Bush family.”

  Jeb accumulated a great deal of his net worth during his father’s presidency. After working in the 1988 presidential campaign, Jeb formed a private partnership, Bush-El, with David Eller of M&W Pump. The two men, who met through the Dade County GOP, sought to sell giant water pumps to poor countries, including Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, Panama, Taiwan, and Thailand. Perhaps their most lucrative deal occurred in Nigeria, where they pursued a $74 million loan from the Export-Import Bank to finance the sale of pumps for irrigation and flood control.

  Two months after his father’s inauguration, Jeb walked into the office of Nigerian President Ibrahim Babangida in Lagos and presented him with an autographed copy of President Bush’s inaugural address. Jeb and his business partner were visiting Nigeria with their wives for five days, ostensibly for the dedication of a $3.6 million M&W manufacturing plant.

  In advance of the trip the President’s son had informed the State Department that he was traveling on business and “did not want any special treatment”—shades of his Uncle Prescott. And despite the President’s cable to foreign embassies not to accord preferential treatment to his family, Jeb was red-carpeted every step of the way. He told reporters that the meeting with the Nigerian President was a “brief courtesy call” for the President to thank M&W for its investment in Nigeria. The Ambassador’s report to the State Department described a longer meeting, which covered human rights in Cuba, the value of close U.S.-Nigeria ties, and President Babangida’s desire to visit the United States. After Jeb passed on the Nigerian President’s request, a White House state visit was scheduled, although it was postponed at the last minute because of unrest among Nigeria’s Muslims.

  After Jeb’s trip, President Bush sent a handwritten message to the Nigerian President by diplomatic pouch: “I want to thank you for receiving Jeb and Columba Bush and for the hospitality they were shown at all their events in Nigeria. They came back singing the praises of your country and very grateful to you.”

  On Jeb’s second trip to Nigeria, he was accompanied by M&W’s Nigerian agent, Al-Haji Mohammed Indimi, who carried a suitcase full of Nigerian cash, which he used to bribe Nigerian officials. Jeb later told the press he knew nothing about the bribes. After Jeb’s visit, the Export-Import Bank approved eight direct loans of $74.3 million on Nigeria’s pending purchase of pumps from M&W. The U.S. government later accused David Eller of inflating his prices and using the loan money to pay for the bribes and a large commission to Indimi. The business partner of the President’s son was not charged with criminal fraud. By the time of the government’s investigation, Jeb had departed. Having made $196,000 in commissions from Bush-El, Jeb sold his share of the company to Eller for $452,000. He had worked there for six years.

  While the Vice Presiden
t was discouraging his second son’s political ambitions, his third son, known in the family as “Mr. Perfect,” was about to bring the Bushes their most public humiliation. His parents had always described Neil Bush as “the ideal child” because in his eagerness to please them he did the unpleasant chores no one else wanted to do. “Neil brings us nothing but happiness,” George wrote shortly after his son’s birth. He was saying the same thing thirty years later.

  “He drove us all crazy, growing up, because he made us look just horrible,” Marvin, son number four, told a reporter. Neil said it was his way of making up for his poor grades, which were attributable to his dyslexia. “I always found ways to compensate,” he said. “I was nicer. I volunteered to rake the yard when the others were bailing out.”

  John Claiborne Davis, the former assistant headmaster at St. Albans, said he had the unenviable duty of getting Neil into a good college. “He was a perfectly charming guy,” recalled Davis, “but not a spectacular student. Still, I managed to get him into Tulane because of who his father was. Thank God, Barbara Bush didn’t press me to get him into Yale. I think she was quite happy that I swung Tulane for him . . . Neil earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations and then a master’s degree in business . . . How he ever got into graduate school—and finished—I’ll never know. At St. Albans we gave out three types of diplomas: one was a diploma with merit, which was for someone at the top of his class. Then there was a diploma with commendation for the B+ students, and, finally, there was a certificate of graduation with no distinction whatsoever . . . That’s the certificate that Neil got.

  “He had applied to Rice first because he said he wanted to be in Texas, but Rice is a good school with high academic standards, and they turned him down. So I suggested he apply to Tulane in New Orleans . . . I had placed several of our boys there, and I thought I could get him in . . . I remember visiting during the first semester to see how our students were doing. I took Neil and two black boys from St. Albans out to dinner at Commander’s Palace. We all ordered lobster, but poor Neil didn’t know what to do with his fish fork. When the waitress came, he said, ‘How do I eat this thing?’ She put the napkin around his neck like a bib on a baby. She cracked the shell of the fish for him, put his fork in, and spoon-fed him his first bite. ‘That’s how you do it, sonny,’ she said. The other boys and I winked at each other; we couldn’t believe that Neil had never had lobster before, especially after all those summers at Kennebunkport . . . I guess I had just assumed there was a minimum level of sophistication in the Bush household.”