Lieberman Backer Michael Steinhardt
The
same motto could apply, equally, to another of Joe Lieberman's leading
mob-tainted patrons, Michael
Steinhardt. Steinhardt ran one of the filthiest hedge funds on Wall Street
during the 1980s and 1990s, Steinhardt Management. In
conjunction with another large Wall Street hedge fund, Caxton Corp., Michael
Steinhardt ran a thoroughly illegal conspiracy to corner the market on an
April 1991 two-year U.S. Treasury bond issuance. Steinhardt and his chief
partner-in-crime, Caxton founder Bruce Kovner, made
an instant killing, netting between $200-600 million (by Steinhardt's own
account in his recent autobiography, No
Bull). But several years later, the Department of Justice and the
Securities and Exchange Commission landed on Steinhardt, Kovner
and Salomon Brothers, which ran a parallel, and apparently coordinated
cornering operation on a later Treasury auction.
On
Dec. 16, 1994, the SEC and DOJ issued a joint press release, announcing that
"Two of the country's leading investment fund managers,
Steinhardt Management
Company, Inc. and Caxton Corporation, have agreed to pay $76 million to
settle antitrust and securities charges," which had been filed in
Federal Court in the Southern District of New York.
The
government complaint had noted that "The conspiracy had a dangerous
probability of damaging the Treasury of the United
States.... Above all,
this represented an attempt to disrupt and render ineffective a part of the
market of the sovereign debt of the United
States."
Remarkably—or
not so remarkably—Steinhardt avoided jail, and did not even face felony
prosecution for the scam. Perhaps Steinhardt's intimate ties to both
Lieberman and then-Vice President Al Gore had something to do with
Steinhardt's good fortune. At the time of the Treasury market conspiracy,
Steinhardt was the Chairman of the Democratic Leadership
Council, the "Third
Way" caucus in the Democratic
Party that he had bankrolled from the mid-1980s, when it was launched out of
Pamela Harriman's "Democrats for the 80s" group. When Steinhardt quit
as DLC chairman in 1995, over his personal hatred for President Bill Clinton,
the vacancy was filled by Steinhardt's favorit pol, Joe Lieberman.
In
his autobiography, Steinhardt candidly admitted that he was a Barry Goldwater
Republican, and a Buckleyite National Review booster. Steinhardt,
Lieberman and Gore would go on to play a pivotal role in the attempted coup
d'état of Sept. 1998, when they tried to convince President Clinton to resign
over the Monica Lewinsky affair.
At
issue at the time was President Clinton's and Treasury Secretary Robert
Rubin's threat to crack down on the speculative activities of Wall Street
hedge funds, as part of their effort to establish a "new global
financial architecture," an effort bearing some similarity to Lyndon LaRouche's well-known call, at the time, for the
convening of a New Bretton Woods conference to
place the global financial system through bankruptcy reorganization, modeled
on FDR's 1944 action.
Red, Meyer and Jimmy Blue Eyes
Steinhardt
had been well-schooled in crime. His father, Sol "Red" Steinhardt,
was the leading jewel fence for the Meyer Lansky syndicate. "Red"
Steinhardt's most intimate mob ally was Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo, a Genovese family hit-man, who happened also to be Lansky's
partner in casinos in Havana, Cuba and
southern Florida.
"Red"
Steinhardt was arrested in 1958 on jewelry theft charges, and was jailed a
year later. Son Michael, who was
put through the Wharton School by his
father's ill-gotten gains, organized the appeal, and hired attorney O. John
Rogge, who had earned a reputation by working with Roy Cohn in the
prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, on charges they passed U.S. nuclear
weapons secrets to Moscow. Rogge
represented David Greenglass, Ethel Rosenberg's brother and the key witness
against the couple. "Red" got out of jail after only two years,
served in Sing Sing and the maximum security Danamora prison, and immediately began
pouring his mobbed-up money into his son's brokerage business.
Michael Steinhardt is
not only Joe Lieberman's most prominent public booster. Since shutting down
his hedge fund in the wake of the Treasury scandal, Steinhardt has emerged as
a major player in the Bronfman-founded Mega Group, a secretive collection of
50 or so Zionist billionaires, who have provided the financial and propaganda
backing to Ariel Sharon's Jabotinskyite fascist
government, since February 2001.
Steinhardt is now the chairman of
Martin Peretz's The
New Republic, and a director, along with the Hollinger Corporation's
Conrad Black, Bruce Kovner, and Alliance Capital
boss Roger Hertog, of the newly launched New York Sun. This is an unabashed Mega
propaganda sheet, boosting the McCain-Lieberman assault on the Presidency.
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