FOIA on Martin Luther King

In 1969 Lums purchased the Ceasar's Palace Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas for $60,000,000. A month later the Nevada state gambling authorities were looking into the hotels' "catering to twelve underworld figures from Kansas City".

A few months after the purchase the SEC filed suit charging Lums and Ceasar's Palace with "false and misleading" statements. The SEC wondered how Ceasar's managed to lose $1,000,000 in five months when the previous year (before Lums bought in) there was a $2,200,000 profit for a comparable time period.

The SEC also questioned Lums concerning the $3,500,000 Lums paid one Jerome Zarowitz, a convicted professional sports fixer who wasn't even listed as an owner of the casino. Top officials in both Ceasar's and Lums have been under investigation by IRS intelligence in Miami and by Nevada gaming authorities in cases involving organized crime ever since Rogers' firm took on the Lums account.

There is also the question of the 1971 Lums acquisition of a North Miami housing resort development called Sky Lakes. Both Sky Lakes and Ceasar's Palace have received large sums of money from the Teamsters - $12,000,000 for the Miami project and more than $16,000,000 for Ceasar's Palace.

With things going slowly, Lums announced plans for a new $22,000,000 casino next door to Ceasar's Palace. In December of 1971 the company decided that the whole restaurant idea was no longer worth the trouble. In a classic climax to a classic American success they changed their name to Ceasar's World Inc. and sold their hot dog stands.

Meanwhile the Secretary of State's old law firm reaped a bundle with their new-found involvement in the Las Vegas underworld. With such stunning successes at home, one wonders what a firm with a link to the Secretary of State could do abroad, in places like the Bahamas or Vietnam, for example.

Nor do the underworld implications of big names surrounding Nixon end with the Secretary of State. Murray Chotiner, a long-time Nixon aide and architect of his early smear campaigns, has past links to the underworld. In 1962 Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson wrote that "Chotiner ... besides representing the top gangster of Philadelphia, Marco Reginelli, represented a long and amazing list of hoods, concession peddlers, income tax violators and others needing influence in high places ..." It was Chotiner who brought Frank Vitale, "once involved in the biggest bootlegging conspiracy on the West Coast," onto Nixon's special plane to Moscow in 1959.

Nixon's recent appointment of Walter Annenberg as Ambassador to England also echoes the themes of underworld involvement. Annenberg and his father were indicted in 1939 for "aiding and abetting" in connection with their wire service operation in Chicago, an operation run with the protection of Al Capone, for which the Annenbergs paid $1,000,000. The Annenberg family was also a major contributor to Nixon's 1968 election campaign.

Further back in the Nixon saga, and closer to his southern California birthplace, lies San Diego financier, C. Arnholdt Smith and his bookmaker partner John Alessio. In 1946 Alessio and Smith introduced Nixon to another bookmaker named Lew Lipinsky. Lipinsky, who was convicted for bookmaking in 1938, served for three decades as a go-between for the Smith/Alessio interests to their syndicate connections.

Some of the dealings of the Smith/Alessio combine were brought to national prominence by a recent LIFE magazine article which accused Attorney General Richard Kleindienst of "tampering with justice" in a case involving Alessio. According to the Wall Street Journal, Smith raised $1,000,000 for Nixon's 1968 campaign. He and his wife took the first position on the receiving line behind the President at the White House inauguration.

## More of the Same in California

Nixon's other favorite resting place besides Key Biscayne is the area near his birthplace in southern California. Here the underworld pattern of his Florida involvements repeats itself in a strikingly similar pattern.

One story there involves Nixon's multi-millionaire backer, C. Arnholdt Smith, and the Del Charro Hotel in La Jolla, just north of San Diego.

The Del Charro was a favorite stopover for Nixon in the Fifties. Owned by the Murchison brothers, who also owned the nearby Del Mar race track, the hotel played host to numerous Detroit and Las Vegas gangsters. Alan Witwer, a former manager of the hotel, has alleged in statements to this reporter and others that the hotel served as a secret meeting place for politicians and assorted business interests, some of them from the underworld. Witwer specifically cited a 1954 meeting attended by Nixon and chaired by a leading member of ITT. He also claimed that there was a bookmaking operation at the hotel, but has offered no documented proof.

Mrs. C. Arnholdt Smith is a permanent resident of the Del Charro, and the hotel's visitors have included John Connally, Barry Goldwater, and J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover's $15,000-a-year bills were picked up by the stockholders of the Murchison interests.

The fact that certain of Hoover's good friends rubbed elbows, rather warmly, with Meyer Lansky, and the fact that the nation's leading crime fighting agency the FBI has come up almost blank in its fight against organized crime may not prove anything about Hoover. On the other hand, these facts don't make it any easier to dismiss questions which might arise about the influence of organized crime at the highest levels of government.

North of the Del Charro and thirty miles south of the San Clemente White House, lies the mammoth La Costa land resort development. The development is tied to both Smith (his daughter is a director) and to the Teamsters.

LaCosta was originally developed by Cleveland syndicate reliables Allard Roen and Moe Dalitz. The development was reorganized in 1968 to bring Teamster control more in line with their investments, which already exceeded $18,000,000. Like Sky Lakes, its Florida counterpart, La Costa attracts a whole range of figures from organized crime. La Costa visitors have included Willie "Ice Pick" Alderman, a St. Louis mob cohort Morris Shenker, and Wallace Groves and Lou Chesler of Bahamas fame.

According to eyewitnesses, when Groves' helicopter sets down, the red carpet is rolled out. It may be because Groves bought a home in La Costa, but more likely it's because, as government agents put it, "where Groves appears, Meyer Lansky will not be far behind".

Another mob frequenter of the La Costa development is Jake Arvey, an organizer of the Republic