FOIA on Martin Luther King

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

National Bank in Miami, the bank through which Bernard Barker channeled funds for the Watergate crime.

## The Teamsters Again

A recent visitor to La Costa was Frank Fitzsimmons, a key to Nixon's new-found support in organized labor. Fitzsimmons is president of the Teamsters Union. This summer he stopped in La Costa on his way to see Nixon at San Clemente. Fitzsimmons had just come from dinner in Detroit with a local Mafia figure and soon after his Detroit-La Costa-San Clemente excursion, Fitzsimmons announced his support for Nixon. One wonders whether the Teamster decision to stay on the Pay Board and to support Nixon is somehow related to what the Detroit Free Press has been hinting strongly as of late: that the administration has stopped prosecution of Frank's son Richard Fitzsimmons — the business partner of a Detroit mobster — on charges of missing union funds, in exchange for Teamster support of the Republican President.

Whatever deals Nixon and Fitzsimmons did make, the Teamsters have a long working relationship with organized crime. Their marriage goes back over twenty years, where Jimmy Hoffa was introduced to the Detroit underworld by Paul Dorfman, in exchange for some multi-million dollar insurance business. Dorfman's son, Paul, has residences at both Sky Lakes and La Costa and was recently convicted of taking kickbacks on a Teamster loan.

The Teamster tradition of labor racketeering and corruption made for a ready alliance with the mob. Early government investigations of the Teamsters, such as the Bobby Kennedy-led McClellan Permanent Committee on Investigations, centered on labor racketeering. As Attorney General, Kennedy continued his pursuit of the Teamsters and their boss, Jimmy Hoffa. At one point Kennedy had twenty-nine grand juries simultaneously investigating Hoffa's activity one of which led to a conviction for mail fraud and jury tampering.

.In 1969, two Oakland Tribune reporters concluded a six-month investigation with the charge that "the $628,000,000 Teamsters Central States, Southeast and Southwest Pension Fund headquartered in Chicago, has become a bankroll for some of America's most sinister underground figure".

Nowhere does the relationship between this fund and the mob surface more dramatically than in Las Vegas, where Teamster trustees have approved loans between $50 and $70,000,000, some shakily secured by second mortgages and subordinated notes. A high-ranking Federal official has commented that "the Teamster fund is a sort of open bank to people well-connected in Las Vegas and well-connected to organized crime".

It was Hoffa's desire "to have [his] own bank in every city" that brought on the Teamster takeover of the Miami National Bank. The Bank in turn is just one of a long list of ventures, such as Ceasar's Palace, Sky Lakes, La Costa, Worldwide Realty, International Airport Hotel Systems, Truesdale Estates, in which Teamster money amounting to over $60,000,000 figures prominently alongside the social and business partners of Richard M. Nixon a line of investments that leads from Nixon's three White Houses to a Federal clemency for Jimmy Hoffa and back to organized crime.

The current head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division saw enough evidence in 1967 to say

that he "knew for a moral certainty [that] in the upper echelons there is an amalgamation between the Cosa Nostra and the Teamsters Union". In 1971, when a Federal Grand Jury probing the activities of Meyer Lansky questioned Jimmy Hoffa, many wondered whether the links between the two giants were more direct than the numerous transactions between mutual friends.

A few months after his testimony, Hoffa was granted clemency after serving less than five years of his thirteen-year sentence. The freeing of Hoffa and three co-defendents of the 1963 wire fraud pension case is the latest and most crucial event in Nixon's longstanding friendship, a friendship with some clear public benefits for both. Jack Anderson documents, for example, that as early as 1960, then Vice-President Nixon and Attorney General Rogers intervened to halt an indictment against Hoffa in exchange for Hoffa's support in the 1960 election.

## ANICO - More of the Same in Texas

In recent years the Teamster fund has been superseded by a giant Texas insurance company as a major source of finance for Las Vegas.casinos tied to the mob. The company is the American National Insurance Company (ANICO) of Galveston, Texas. ANICO is close to the heart and pocketbook of the two ranking Texans in the Nixon administration former Treasury Secretary John Connally and former Assistant Attorney General Will Wilson.

As well as floating more than $40,000,000 to Las Vegas casinos and $13,000,000 to premier mob attorney Morris Shanker, ANICO has made loans to two Florida companies close to Richard Nixon $1,750,000 in 1966 to the Mary Carter Paint Company, and $3,000,000 in 1970 to a subsidiary of Worldwide Realty.

That year a group of disenchanted stockholders filed a multi-million-dollar suit, charging ANICO officials with having taken control of the company and using it as a private preserve as well as a source of funds for the mob.

The defendants in the suit hired Nixon's New York firm to handle the case. Connally's Houston law firm has also been used by ANICO. The First National Bank of Houston, of which Connally was a director and in which some of his law partners were officers, has provided an interest-free account of more than $1,000,000 for ANICO. Connally was also a director of a savings association which was purchased recently by ANICO.

Will Wilson was "general" of the Justice Department's "war" on crime from 1969-1971. He was head of the Criminal Division until October 1971, when his resignation was forced by disclosures tying him to the scandal-rocked financial empire of Texas wheeler-dealer Frank Sharp. Wilson has been charged by dissident ANICO stockholders of helping to drag ANICO into the twilight zones of finance with such deals as the 1963 absorption of a defaulted $450,000 mortgage held by Sharp. Sharp's attorney and "financial advisor" on the deal was Will Wilson.

While Attorney General of Texas, Wilson sued the foundation which controlled ANICO to bring three new trustees onto the foundation's board of directors. Wilson has no visible ties to the new trustees, whose votes were instrumental in shaping the company's new financial course. But dissident stockholders have charged that the "negotiations" that