FOIA on Martin Luther King

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

brought on the shift of control in the foundations were handled by a Galveston law firm linked to the mob. The stockholders also claim that John Connally played a role in these negotiations, albeit a "backstage" role. The ANICO case is part of a long history of Wilson's involvement with the Galveston underworld.

When he came to the Justice Department in Washington, Wilson discovered the organized crime division looking into the affairs of ANICO. Since then there have been no indictments in the case and there are reports that Wilson had the ANICO files locked safely in his personal office. One source of those reports is Stewart Hopps, a former Justice Department investigator.

Some serious conflict-of-interest charges concerning ANICO remain:

The officers of ANICO who were later represented by Nixon's law firm, made a loan to a company whose top officers are long-time friends of Nixon.

- The criminal division of the Justice Department has been headed by a man with direct links in a company the division is supposedly investigating.

- The company also has clear ties to Nixon's former Treasury Secretary, a man mentioned for the Vice-Presidency, the national chairman of Democrats for Nixon, and a key figure in the President's re-election scheme.

## Whose Justice Department?

The ANICO case takes us to a fitting endpoint to the story of Richard Nixon's involvement with the underworld - the Department of Justice. It is an old saw that criminal and criminal-chaser eventually become involved in the same business, but in Richard Nixon that old saw has become more of a reality than perhaps ever before in American history. For Richard Nixon is a man whose name has been synonymous with "law and order" in America for three decades.

Yet the four-year "war" on organized crime by the Nixon administration bears more resemblance to the "peace" in Vietnam than a sincere effort to get at the mob.

In a recent interview in U.S. News and World Report (September 11, 1972), Attorney General Richard Kleindienst hailed "about 1600" indictments of underworld figures brought by the Nixon administration in the past three and half years. The Justice Department claims that many of these indictments involve top mobsters.

Those outside the Nixon administration, however, have charged that the government's prosecution has been both partisan and selective, aimed exclusively at mobsters linked to big-city Democrats such as in Newark, and at the "little fish" who are always in abundance and who make little difference in conducting mob business. Time has reported that quotas have been established (i.e. one hundred hoodlums a month for New York City) and that arrests are "being delayed so that future quotas can be filled". The New York Times has editorialized about the ease with which petty gamblers can and have been rounded up, and wondered aloud if the Justice Department isn't conducting more a publicity war than one on organized crime. A Times report this year found the government was building up a backlog of gambling indictments, saving them for a crucial time during the election campaign.

Indeed, while the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell team has used the spectre of "CRIME" to keep the fear level high and to guarantee large budgets and expanded powers for their Justice Department, the actual "attempts" of the Nixon administration to cope with organized crime have resembled a somewhat sinister update of the Keystone Cops.

For example, up to 1,000 of Kleindienst's vaunted 1600 indictees in gambling and organized crime may have their cases thrown out for somewhat dubious "improper procedures" technicalities. A Miami attorney named James Hogan has "discovered" irregularities on signatures required for electronic surveillance authorizations. Court-approved wiretaps require written authorization by the Attorney General of a designated representative, in this case Will Wilson. Instead of being signed by John Mitchell or by Wilson, the authorizations in question were signed by aides, thus rendering thousands of wiretap authorizations and the indictments based on them useless.

Hogan himself is a long-time syndicate attorney and a partner of Ben Cohen, a former political boss of Miami Beach who figures prominently in the Forties' takeover of Miami by organized crime. The case in which Hogan made his discovery involved the busting of the largest heroin/cocaine ring in Miami, many of whose members were Cuban refugees. Inspection of various court papers, including wiretap authorizations, confirmed "irregularities" in the signature - Will Wilson's signature. While resembling his actual handwriting, the signatures appeared as "Wil" instead of "Will".

While it may seem strange for an aide to misspell his boss' name, it seems even stranger that Hogan took the case. His normal fees start in five figures but he has been working on behalf of his court-declared indigent client for more than two years with minimal compensation. While Hogan is known as a "very thorough" attorney, it would be interesting to find out more about the circumstances in which he discovered the "irregularities".

Even more interesting, perhaps, are the circumstances under which Richard Kleindienst was offered a bribe of $100,000 to quash several mob indictments In sworn testimony in November 1971, Kleindienst admitted to being offered the $100,000 bribe (which would be paid in the form of a contribution to Nixon's 1972 campaign) in exchange for stopping prosecution against several underworld figures caught in a stock fraud case. The bribe was offered by an aide of Senator Hiram Fong, a Republican from Hawaii. The aide had worked previously with Kleindienst through Fong's position on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Kleindienst said he refused the offer but he also said he did not realize it was a bribe for an entire week!

In cross examination, the prosecutor asked Kleindienst, "If you had regarded the conversation as something regarding a bribe offer you would have immediately report it, would you not?"

"Yes sir," replied Kleindienst, "I would have."

Kleindienst admitted he reported the bribe a full week later, upon learning from J. Edgar Hoover that Federal agents were investigating the case.

One would expect the Attorney General of the United States to be more alert. But what is more troubling are reports aired in the Washington Post