Pete Brewton also spends a good deal of time on Carl Lindner. Mr. Lindner is a very interesting guy. In fact the more you manage to learn about Lindner the more you wonder why you have not heard more about him. Carl Lindner is one of the most prolific campaign contributors in American history. Anyone who has been elected to the U.S. Congress in the last forty years knows who he is and was likely glad to make his acquaintance. Carl Lindner was a big supporter of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the last election, switching to John McCain later. Business Week magazine took note of that in an article about the biggest donators and political power players. Of course, Business Week never mentioned anything at all about Carl Lindner's sordid history.
Carl Lindner's sordid history in addition to the Ocean Reef Club's being the landing site of planes from Columbia that were full of cocaine, was also the major benefactor of Charles Keating, the owner of Lincoln Savings. Charles Keating would end up in state prison doing hard time as the face of the Savings and Loan scandal of the 1980's, in which Pete Brewton was not the only author to note CIA connections. In fact, Carl Lindner himself was involved in this scandal as owner of Provident Bank and American Financial in Cincinnati, and paid some large fines for admitting to some of the same charges that sent Keating to prison. But Carl Lindner with his connections to the CIA, and hundreds of politicians in Washington and elsewhere, never got so much as a perp walk from the FBI.
In 1984 Carl Lindner would purchase Keating's Lincoln Savings using money from Drexel Burnham. And who at Drexel Burnham would give Lindner this money? Why junk bond king Michael Milken. This is the same Michael Milken who would a few years later go camping with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) at their Lompac, California facility. Milken was sentenced to ten years at the Lompac camp, but having got to keep over $600 million of his scammed loot (that we know of) he had access to the best lawyers and political connections -including his good friend Carl Lindner- and Milken was soon freed after just eighteen months of camping with the BOP.
Dope smuggling at the Ocean Reef Club, dirty dealing with Charles Keating in the Savings and Loan scandal, and very close financial ties with junk bond king Michael Milken; and Carl Lindner not only never got a perp walk, but he never gets any bad press -outside of a few books that only a half million people read parts of. Today Carl Lindner is only treated with respect. His sins were never spotlighted by the news media when committed and are never recalled by those outlets today.
In fact, Carl Linder in being a huge donor to John McCain's campaign did not provoke anyone in the major media to note that John McCain was once involved in a Senate scandal known as “The Keating Five”, as in Charles Keating, who went to prison as owner of Lincoln Savings, and who was a long time close business associate of Carl Lindner. John McCain was one of five senators who helped beat back regulation attempts over Lincoln Savings, and took huge donations from Charles Keating to do so. And there was McCain arm and arm with Carl Lindner as he ran for president and everyone in the “mainstream” media pretended not to notice.
So what else does Carl Lindner own? How about Chiquita banana. A company that was once known as “United Fruit” when the banana pickers in Guatemala thought they should be paid a decent wage. That was in 1954 and the president of Guatemala at the time thought it was OK for workers to unionize. Big mistake. United Fruit went to the CIA and “The Company” as the CIA are sometimes known, organized a coup d'état, which was a success from the CIA point of view.
Carl Lindner also had connections to Oliver North and his Central American operations against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. So far as is known this involved purchasing air strips in neighboring Honduras for the Contras to use. Cocaine was flown in from Colombia and out to America from those airstrips. Of course, the crack cocaine epidemic was started in this country by the CIA's importation of cocaine at an 80% discount from the then current street prices. This was detailed in a book called “Dark Alliance”, by Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Gary Webb, who had his career destroyed for doing so.
George Herbert Walker Bush, Vice President, President and also a previous Director of the CIA, was a friend of Carl Lindner; and there is a picture in “The Mafia, CIA and George Bush” from the Miami Herald of George Bush taking off for a second day of fishing in a boat from the dock of the Ocean Reef Club, accompanied by former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson. Carl Lindner was a big donor to George Bush's campaigns as well.
George H. W. Bush was a big baseball fan, played at Yale. His son the “War on Terror” President was owner of the Texas Rangers (MLB). George H. W. Bush has been a frequent guest of Houston Astros (MLB) owner Drayton McLane Jr., sitting in the owners box at some point almost every season. Carl Lindner shared a love of baseball as well apparently, as he was the then owner of the Cincinnati Reds (MLB).
Pete Brewton,
CIA,
The Mafia CIA and George Bush,
Carl Lindner,John McCain, Mitt Romney, Keating Five, Oliver North,Ocean Reef Club,FBI,Dark Alliance,
Gary Webb,George Bush,Drayton McLane Jr., Michael Milken,Charles Keating,Houston Astros,
Texas Rangers,
Cincinnati Reds, MLB
