http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=4965934The Bass Brothers
Posted by seemslikeadream on Tue Oct-04-05 11:46 AM
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
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