Bass, Rainwater, GTech Lottery & Miers

[sandnsea]

I’m not saying Harriet Miers has taken a penny from GTECH, Guy Snowden or anybody else. Let me make that clear. But she, and the whole cabal from Texas, absolutely reek from the GTech Lottery flow of money.

Ms. Miers’ time on the Texas Lottery Commission has been well reported, usually with Ms. Miers as the driving force who rooted out corruption and helped the Texas Lottery turn over a new leaf. “In other circles, the Texas Lottery Commission is known as the incident that permanently sealed Bush’s Texas Air National Guard records. As I earlier reported, “Miers was also Chairwoman of the Texas Lottery Commission and responsible for a chain of events involving GTech, which ran the Texas Lottery, former Lt. Governor Ben Barnes, and accusations of kick-backs and illegal contracts. Yes, that Ben Barnes, who says he helped George Bush get into the National Guard. His original deposition on that subject was given in 1999, during this Texas Lottery Commission investigation, and has been permanently sealed.”

Littwin has claimed that GTECH paid Ben Barnes for his silence as the basis for his wrongful dismissal lawsuit against the Commission. But “control of the Texas Lottery Commission” as stated in the lawsuit seems to me to hit the mark more closely, “interference by GTECH with Mr. Littwin's employment relationship with the Texas Lottery Commission which caused him to be removed as the Executive Director; alleged conspiracy with unspecified third parties to maintain control of the Texas Lottery Commission and the Texas lottery; and various alleged civil violations by GTECH of the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization Act (18 Sections 1961(4) and 1962(b), (c) and (d)) ('RICO').”

GTech was founded in 1981 and backed by the Texas Bass brothers and none other than Richard Rainwater. I think one could literally start writing now and not stop for twenty years and still not touch on everything the Bass Brothers and Richard Rainwater have been involved in. In fact, Rainwater was the Bass Brothers money manager for many years and had put up the money to buy out Bush’s Spectrum 7 oil and for Harken Energy to drill in Bahrain. And, of course, Richard Rainwater also stepped up to the plate, literally, and put up a good portion of the $86 million to purchase the Texas Rangers. Bush bought in by borrowing $500,000 from a bank he had once directed, and a millionaire was born.

By 1995, allegations of GTECH’s underhanded practices were beginning to surface. In 1993, Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Records, accused Guy Snowden of GTech of bribery. He later sued Snowden for libel, a case which he won in 1998. In 1994 GTech's national sales manager resigned amid charges that he received kickbacks, although the charges against Ben Barnes in that matter were subsequently dropped. In addition, GTech is part owner of the Retama race track in San Antonio, race track owners having contributed some $3.1 million to Texas politicians, along with the $4.1 million of slot money. This is the same Retama race track where instant game tickets went missing in 1996, followed by :more than 180 files regarding bingo and lottery security investigations.” And the same Retama race track that is also partially owned by Red McCombs, former Vikings owner and Bush Ranger.

It is amid this bedlam that Harriet Miers came to chair the Texas Lottery Commission in 1995. She was joined by John L. Hill, appointed by Bush in 1997. Perhaps these two are the kinds of Democrats Bush always claimed to have unity with, Democrats who campaign for and donate to Republicans. In any event, this former Texas Attorney General, Secretary of State and Supreme Court Justice went to serve on the Texas Lottery Commission. Two years later, in December 1998, he resigned to avoid any appearance of impropriety when his law firm and Harriet’s law firm merged to become Locke, Liddell & Sapp.

In the meantime, for all the talk of cleaning up the Texas Lottery and rebidding the GTech contract, the new Lottery director, Linda Cloud, signed a contract with GTech in 1998. She said, “the commission may change its bid requirements and try again to find a new operator or may try to renegotiate Gtech's current contract, which expires in 2002.” If you’re wondering, no, that didn’t happen. Gtech has the Texas Lottery contract today.

In fact, GTech runs “all five of the country's biggest state lottery systems - New York, Texas, Georgia, California and Florida. Altogether, GTech will operate 26 of the 36 state lottery systems, plus the Washington, D.C., system.” The campaign contributions have flowed with $30,000 given to Republicans in Florida during Jeb Bush’s campaign and a recent $50,000 to the Democratic Governor’s Association. Its shady dealings don’t appear to be history either, as “the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened a formal investigation after Brazilian prosecutors recommended bribery charges against two GTECH employees -- one of whom is still with the company.”

So now the Supreme Court of the United States is going to be seated with someone who chose not to bring down one of the sleaziest outfits ever to be set loose to prey upon the American people. Sadly, too many politicians have been sullied by GTech money as well. But a Supreme Court Justice, above all others, should have a proven record of being above the influence political money buys. Harriet Miers had 5 years on the Texas Lottery Commission to prove that her character was, indeed, above such influence. She clearly failed.

LINKS:
http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/?view=plink&id=1397

PREVIOUS Miers/Gonzales link:
http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/?view=plink&id=306

[sandnsea]

1. Anybody home?

Yesterday's Village Voice link to the Miers/Gonzales article,
http://villagevoice.com/news/0540,webmondo2,68426,2.html

[seemslikeadream]

2. The Bass Brothers

from starroute

The Bass Brothers
"Lee, Ed, Sid, and Robert Bass have been fortunate from early on. It has been estimated that their uncle Sid Richardson, who UT has an auditorium in his name, was worth around $800 million. Following in their father's footsteps, each of the four attended Yale University; Ed and George W. Bush were classmates and friends there. . . .

"Based out of Fort Worth, they know others from the Metroplex. Tom Hicks proposed in 1998 that UTIMCO invest $20 million in the Bass Brothers Enterprises through the limited partnership of Prime Enterprises II. . . .

"The Bass brothers pumped $210,000 into Bush's gubernatorial campaigns, via their PAC's (Political Action Committees) and their personal donations of roughly $273,000. The billionaire Bass family is Bush's number 5 career patron. As Governor, Bush appointed Lee Bass as Chairman of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD). Amazingly, Bush later received $202,000 from the organization. TPWD made news when it was found to be passing out brochures at park entrances that contained tobacco and alcohol advertisements. TPWD also granted permits for their land that allowed hunters to make money from killing wild deer on Texas lands.

<snip>

"In 1990, when George W. Bush was on the board of directors at Harken, he was told that the company was going under. He sold over 200,000 shares of Harken stock weeks before the value plummeted. The overall gain was $848,560; roughly $600,000 of this went towards buying a piece of the Texas Rangers. So, who doled out $850k for a company that could potentially go under at any point directly after the sale? A search of company memos returned only one name, and they can't be sure to whom or what it refers, naturally, the name is 'Lee.' "

http://www.utwatch.org/utimco/bass.html


"Which brings us to one of the interesting conundrums encountered in Bush finances. The contract with Bahrain would have been impossible to carry out by Harken alone; it needed big, big bucks. These were supplied by the Bass family of Fort Worth, a clan of billionaires. Was this a quid pro quo or just a happy coincidence? Of course, the Basses may have simply wanted to take a gamble, as they often did. On the other hand, they may have felt some obligation to help George W.’s company as a kind of payback; after all, his father’s administration had given $2 billion in tax-exempt subsidies to a group of “vultures” (to use Newsweek’s generic term) headed by Robert Bass, to help pick the carcass of the $16.3 billion American Savings and Loan, the biggest insolvent S&L in the country, but still very fleshy.

Robert Bass’ good fortune on that occasion may have had something to do with the fact that he was a member of Vice President Bush’s 'Team 100,' a knot of rich men, each of whom contributed $100,000 or more to Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign. On the other hand, so much money, so many favors have been passed back and forth over the years between the Bushes and their incredibly wealthy backers, it is probably foolish to try to figure out all the quid pro quos that tie their daisy chain together."

http://www.bushfiles.com/bushfiles/fertilize_bushes.html



The Bass Brothers and Mickey Mouse and Pug Winokur
Edited on Sat Dec-13-03 10:47 AM by seemslikeadream

Strangely enough, Arvida remained a part of Penn Central and was managed by it until 1983 - at least three years after Pug Winokur went to work for Victor Palmieri, who headed Penn Central and its subsidiaries. According to John Taylor in Storming the Magic Kingdom: Wall Street, the Raiders and the Battle for Disney (Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), Penn Central emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1978 "with what to many seemed an excessively bureaucratic management." One of Arvida's executives, Chuck Cobb, joined with Richard Rainwater in a leveraged buyout on behalf of the Bass Brothers. With an investment totaling $20 million, they arranged financing of $183.6 million, secured by Arvida's assets. Six months later they marketed the company to Disney, a corporation which already owned 17,000 acres of land in Florida. The eventual deal with Disney would result in giving Bass Brothers a big block of Disney stock. The land package which Disney had bought in around Orlando, Florida, in the 1950's had been put together for him by Paul Helliwell, former OSS chief of the Far East Division, who was recommended to Disney by William J. Donovan. Disney's investment banker for many years was J.P. Morgan, a firm which worked with Donovan. Helliwell also set up the Castle Bank in the Bahamas to launder money flowing from the sale of drugs from Burma and Thailand used to finance Chennault's airline. Castle Bank would eventually he connected to Billy Melon Hitcock's profits from selling LSD to California college students.

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/lm4,30,02,harvardtoenronpt4.htm

[sandnsea]

3. Thank you

I would have thought the Bass Brothers and Rainwater connection to GTech connection to the Texas Lottery connection to really dirty politics connection to Miers would have been more interesting to people around here.

[seemslikeadream]

4. Richard E. Rainwater

Richard E. Rainwater

"One may also fairly conclude that the Bushes are blessed and protected beyond reason by those portions of the public’s brain that have turned to mush. What other explanation but public stupidity explains the denouement of the Texas Rangers deal? As everyone knows, George W. used $600,000 from the Harken stock sale to buy a tiny slice of the Texas Rangers; and when the Rangers were sold last year for $250 million, the second-largest amount ever paid for a baseball team, George W. emerged with more than $14.9 million. What had made the ball club so valuable was a gift from the public — a $200 million stadium mostly paid for by a sales tax that the citizens of Arlington, Texas, had overwhelmingly voted to assume.

"Incredible. Ordinary folks — most of whom probably have a hard time meeting their mortgage payments — dug into their pockets to make George W. a rich man. But wait. It’s worse than that. Forget George W. for a moment. His reward was penny-ante compared to what some of his fellow owners got — men like Richard E. Rainwater, the mastermind of it all, the guy who allowed George W. to buy into the Rangers in the first place. Rainwater, rated by Fortune magazine as one of the 400 richest men in America, is the sorcerer who devised the investment strategy that elevated the Bass family from millionaires in the 1970s to billionaires in the 1990s. He probably owns the U.S. Treasury. And yet Texans are paying a sales tax to make him richer? Unbelievable."

http://www.bushfiles.com/bushfiles/fertilize_bushes.html


Columbia/HCA is a partnership of financier Richard Rainwater of Ft.Worth and lawyer Richard Scott. Scott was recently terminated by Darla Moore, the wife of Richard Rainwater, according to Fortune Magazine.

The new CEO in place of Richard Scott is Thomas Frist, the former head of Hospital Corporation of America.

Rainwater also owns a large stake in Magellan Health Care which controls Charter Medical. Magellan, run by Darla Moore, is the largest network of psychiatric hospitals in the country. They are becoming more and more involved in obtaining government money for services formerly not covered as health care.

http://www.angelfire.com/de/jehudi/hospital.html

[hootinholler]

5. This is the stuff we need...

The bottomless Quagmire of the boosh.

-Hoot

[sandnsea]

6. *sigh*

I thought so. Handing Bush a memo that we already know about, which was her job, doesn't seem to be very interesting to me. But GTech Lottery with its fingers in politics all across the country, getting one of its cronies on the Supreme Court, that seems pretty big to me.

[Horse with no Name]

7. Excellent work

most most excellent. I have to leave for a bit, but will be back to share a couple things I have found out.
:thumbsup:
Nominated and am sending link to crispini. She is working tirelessly on this as well.

[never cry wolf]

8. No time to read this now in depth.

but I can kick it because it deserves the light of day

[MelissaB]

9. I'm still reading

and kicking. :)

[hootinholler]

10. WTF people!

This doesn't get 5 recs?

I'm betting that GTech ties into Abramoff and DeLay, we just need to dig a little deeper.

Sorry Sand, I rec'd and kicked it earlier.

-Hoot

[Horse with no Name]

11. Okay these are the things I am working on in a nutshell

Still chasing down information.
My thoughts are that Miers was brought to the Dallas City Council by Mary Poss (http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_detail.php?city=DALLAS&st=TX&last=poss&first=mary) solely for the purpose of "assisting" in the redistricting fight. In question was the 14-1 vs. 10-4-1.
This had to do with minority voting rights and redistricting.
I need to get some more facts on the two issues, but of particular interest is that one of councilman that was for the 10-4-1, abruptly "changed" his mind during the voting.
His name was Tandy.
Proponents for 14-1 were Al Lipscomb, Miers, Diane Ragsdale, and Jim Buerger.
One question that I would like to find the answer for is was the redistricting of Dallas during the early 90's used as case law when Delay gerrymandered Texas?
If it was, was Miers SOLE purpose on the Dallas City Council merely to set precedent law for that upcoming fight?

Anyway...that is where I am.
Nice work.