by Eamon Javers
Allan Pinkerton and, 187–88
cost to client, 179, 192, 196
shorting a stock by using, 177, 195
telltale indicators, 175, 176, 181–85, 189–90, 196
training in, 184–85
Takriti, Barzan al-, 127–28
TD International (TDI), 254, 266–69, 282
CIA ties, 266, 268–69
“Project Voss,” 266–67
Technology
eavesdropping equipment, 63–74
journalism and, 36
n laser microphone, 227
microwave-transmission cameras, 236
mug shot invented, 36
privacy issues and, 283–84
rail travel and Pinkertons, 38
spy satellites, 207, 207n, 213
telegraph used by Pinkertons, 36–37
Telephone taps. See Audio surveillance, bugging, and wiretaps
Thatcher, Margaret, 16
Thiel, George H., 59
Thiel Detective Service Agency, 59
Thirty Years a Detective (Pinkerton), 39, 39n
Thomas, Bully Bill, 52
Threat Assessment Resources International, 250
Total Intelligence Solutions, 282–83
Trading Places (film), 209
Trans World Airlines, 65, 65n, 94
Trapline, 112–14, 112n
Trident Group, 255, 277–80, 282
Trifonov, Alexander, 280
Triple Canopy, 58
Trump, Donald, 111
Udall, Lee, 116
United Arab Emirates, 265, 268
U.S. Army, 74–76, 221, 223, 224, 225, 235
U.S. Congress
All-American Flag Lines Bill, 64–65
Anti-Pinkerton Act, 58
bugging of members, 64, 66
Land Remote Sensing Policy Act, 214
wiretapping concerns, 72–73
U.S. Department of Agriculture, 208–9, 209n, 210, 211
U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), 205–6
U.S. Department of Justice, 61–62
FBI formed, 62
Foreign Agents Registration Unit, 265–66
intelligence contractors and, 36, 61
Intertel founded by veterans of, 85
Mafia investigations, 86, 89–91
veterans in private-sector investigation, 85, 131
U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 138–39, 145–50, 153
USG Corporation, 246–47
US PIRG, 148, 152
U.S. Secret Service, 61
Beckett Brown International and, 142
Counter Assault Team, 156
National Threat Assessment Center, 250
veterans in private-sector investigation, x, 140, 143, 144, 155–56, 250
U.S. State Department, 15, 102, 255, 256, 258, 260
U.S. Supreme Court, bugging of, 63–64
U.S. Treasury, 128
UTStarcom, 173–79
Vanity Fair, 134
Van Praag, Lucas, 192
Vasilenko, Gennady, 274–77
Veracity Worldwide, 253–59, 260
CIA and, 253, 255–56, 258–59
Verbatim Advisory Group, 243–46
Verma, Shailu, 210, 211, 212
Vietnam War, 98
Vinogradov, Alexander, 280
Wal-Mart, 141, 168, 206, 212–13
Ward, Tim, 155–56, 161, 167
Warne, Kate, 41–42, 41n, 46
Washington, D.C., 281–82
Washington Analysis, 247, 248
Watergate break-in, 91n, 102, 109, 118, 151n
Webster, Timothy, 40, 45, 47–48, 48n
Webster, William, 4, 16
Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of, 25
Western Union, 35
Whetstone, Hank, 149, 163–66
Whetstone Candy, 145, 149, 162–66
White, John, 42
White and Case, 259
Wicher, Joseph, 55
William Burns International Detective Agency, 59
Williams, D. C., 36–38
Williams, Edward Bennett, 102
Willis Inspace, 204n
Woodward, Bob, 118, 189n
Woolston-Smith, James, 151n
Workplace shootings, 250–51
WorldView, Inc., 215
Wright, Laura, 188
Xinhua Finance, 248
Xinhua News Agency, 248
Yeltsin, Boris, 127–29, 276, 280
Yost, Benjamin, 52, 54
Yukos, 279–80
Zelmanowitz, Gerald (aka Paul Maris), 76–81
Ziff, William, Jr., 188
Ziff Brothers Investments, 188–91
About the Author
EAMON JAVERS is a correspondent for Politico, where he covers the Obama White House and the economy. Earlier in his career, he was a Washington correspondent for Business Week magazine and an on-air correspondent for CNBC. In 2006, he received an investigative reporting award from the Medill School of Journalism for a story exposing how convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff had secretly paid columnists to write favorable stories about his clients. Javers appears frequently on CNN, FOX News Channel, MSNBC, CNBC, and BBC. He is a graduate of Colgate University, and lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with his wife, Maureen, and two children.
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Credits
Jacket design by Christopher Tobias
Jacket photograph © Masterfile
Copyright
BROKER, TRADER, LAWYER, SPY. Copyright © 2010 by Eamon Javers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Javers, Eamon.
Broker, trader, lawyer, spy: the secret world of corporate espionage / Eamon Javers.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-06-169720-3
1. Business intelligence. 2. Espionage. I. Title.
HD38.7.J38 2010
364. 16'8—dc22 2009031010
EPub Edition © January 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-196938-6
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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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.
*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.
*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.
*The sons weren’t as liberal as their father in at least one respect: they discontinued the use of female detectives.
*Dash would go on to fame as the co–chief counsel of the Senate Watergate committee nearly two decades later.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*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.
*In the winter, the Peloquins spend time at their condo in Plantation, Florida, situated just off the Lago Mar Country Club. And Peloquin still goes to Paradise Island sometimes. “I know people there who can get me a reservation,” he says with a laugh.
*This story made for great Hollywood fare: in 2007 it became a movie, The Hoax, starring Richard Gere as Irving.