From KALLISTE@delphi.comThu Oct 10 20:49:28 1996
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 1996 19:09:41 -0500 (EST)
From: KALLISTE@delphi.com
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Subject: Tenacious Tentacles

		Tenacious Tentacles

		by J. Orlin Grabbe

	Both the Wall Street Journal and William Safire 
are getting to the nitty-gritty of paid political influence in 
the Clinton administration.  Both have been inquiring into 
the political fund-raising activities of Mochtar Riady's 
Lippo Group.

	Mochtar Riady is the Indonesian billionaire who 
was a joint investor with Little Rock billionaire Jackson 
Stephens in Worthen Bank, which bailed out the 1992 
Presidential campaign of Bill Clinton with a three million 
dollar loan at a crucial juncture.

	Safire has been wondering about the propriety of 
former Lippo employee--and current finance vice 
chairman of the Democratic National Committee--John 
Huang's conducting of $25,000-a-plate Presidential 
dinners at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from 
the White House.  The Wall Street Journal similarly 
wonders how the millions of dollars poured into the re-
election efforts of Bill Clinton by the Lippo Group have 
influenced U.S. commercial policy in Asia.

	The Lippo Group is still represented in Arkansas 
by Joseph Giroir, a former Rose Law-Firm managing 
partner, who, on one of Ron Brown's "trade" trips to 
China, secured a $1 billion deal between Entergy and 
Lippo to build a power plant in China.  Giroir works out 
of the firm he set up to do deals like this, Arkansas 
International Development Company.

	The same set of characters has been parading in 
and out of the continuing Little Rock saga for quite a long 
time.  

	Recall that it all started when an investor group 
that included Jackson Stephens took over First American 
Bank in Washington, D.C.  This bank was headquartered 
near the White House, and had many government 
employees as account holders--the perfect vehicle for 
gathering political intelligence.  To take advantage of this 
fact, Jackson Stephens proposed that his software firm 
Systematics handle all the accounting for the bank. But 
the investor group refused to go along.

	So Stephens, with the help of Bert Lance and 
others, brought in BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce 
International) to wrest control of the bank from that 
group, and to put it into the hands of friendlier partners.  
There were lawsuits, and Stephens' software firm 
Systematics was represented by Joseph Giroir, Hillary 
Rodham Clinton, and Vince Foster of the Rose Law Firm.

	Hillary Clinton is now the First Lady of the U.S.  
Vince Foster is now dead, and the mysterious 
circumstances of his death are being investigated by the 
Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr.  Joe Giroir now does 
paid favors for the Lippo Group.

	The software firm Systematics was to become the 
nation's biggest supplier of back-office banking software, 
and would eventually work closely with the National 
Security Agency to facilitate intelligence monitoring of  
banking transactions.  Vince Foster would be assigned by 
Stephens to an oversight role on this project.

	Jackson Stephens, meanwhile, proposed, 
developed, and financed a plant for hazardous waste 
facilities, called Waste Technology Inc., beginning in 
1979.  This project became a bottomless pit for the 
consumption of funds, and at one point, the financially-
strapped Stephens made a Faustian pact with Indonesian 
Mochtar Riady to set up a money-laundering operation in 
Arkansas.  Stephens and Riady had previously formed 
Stephens Finance Ltd. in Hong Kong in 1976.

	Stephens bought 9.3 percent of Little Rock's 
Worthen bank from the John H. Hendrix Corp. of 
Midland, Texas, while Lippo purchased 9.4 percent.  
Lippo paid about $16 million for its share, and installed 
James Riady as a bank director in 1984.  Stephens-Lippo 
continued to increase their share of Worthen stock, up to 
36.7 percent.  

	This propitious union came about just as the 
Mena, Arkansas, drug-and-arms trade was creating a vast 
local demand for money-laundering services. At the Asian 
end, with Mochtar Riady, Stephens purchased Seng Heng 
Bank in Macao, the "Oriental Las Vegas", where 
gambling is the primary source of government revenue.  
Stephens' Systematics supplied software to the Banco 
Nacional Ultramarino, the cashier and treasury bank of 
the Macao government and the bank that issues the local 
currency.  (Macao is located less than 40 miles from Hong 
Kong, the center for heroin trade.)

	The cozy relationships continued.  Hillary Clinton 
became the intellectual property lawyer for Systematics, 
and obtained access to important materials from 
Systematics clients, such as the operating system for a 
new national security computer at E-Systems of Dallas, 
Texas, which the CIA determined ended up in the hands 
of the Israelis after a month's time.

	Systematics also came to be represented by Beryl 
Anthony, a partner at the Washington law office of 
Winston and Strawn, former chairman of the Democratic 
Congressional Campaign Committee, and husband of 
Vince Foster's sister Sheila Foster Anthony.  It was Sheila 
Anthony who, while assistant attorney general for 
legislative affairs at the Justice Department, effected a 
$286,000 transfer to Vince Foster from a Democratic 
National Committee account held at Mellon Bank, just 
four days before Vince Foster met his death.  Upon 
Foster's death, Hillary Clinton hopped on the phone and 
directed the removal of files from Foster's office.

	Worthen Banking Corp. was sold to Boatmen's 
Bancshares Inc. of St. Louis in 1995 for $535 million.  
Members of the Stephens family owned 22 percent of 
Worthen at the time of the sale, and acquired shares in 
Boatmen's.  In addition, the investment bank Stephens 
Inc. retained the right to handle the trades (and to collect 
commissions) for Worthen Investments, which was folded 
into Boatman's Investment Services, Boatman's securities 
subsidiary. (All other securities trades at Boatman's 
Investment Services are handled by Pershing Inc. of New 
Jersey.)  

	Currently, Boatman's Bancshares Inc. is being 
acquired for around $9 billion by NationsBank Corp. of 
Charlotte, N.C. This merger will make NationsBank the 
fourth largest U.S. banking franchise. The investment 
bank Stephens Inc. was brought in to give a "fairness 
opinion" on behalf of NationsBank Corp. shareholders, 
even though the Stephens family, through their Boatmen's 
stock holdings, stand to make more than $200 million on 
the acquisition.  Also standing to gain on stock holdings is 
Curt Bradbury, the chief operating officer at Stephens 
Inc., and also the former chief executive of Worthen 
Bank. Stephens Inc. represented NationsBank in the 
merger negotiations, while Goldman Sachs represented 
Boatmen's.

	NationsBank has its own discount brokerage 
service, NationsBank Discount Brokerage Inc., which 
clears its trades through Stephens Inc.  Stephens Inc. is 
trying to acquire all of NationsBank's brokerage business 
after the merger of Boatmen's and NationsBank is 
complete.  If so, that would make Stephens Inc. the largest 
clearing firm for banks in the U.S.  It clears the brokerage 
trades for around 200 banks--banks like Wells Fargo and 
First Interstate Bancorp, which recently merged in 
California.  

	Meanwhile, over in Indonesia, the Riady family 
has stirred up consternation among the minority 
shareholders in the Lippo Group by a planned 
restructuring that would enable the family to extract cash 
to invest elsewhere.  The new primary ownership vehicle 
is intended to be a "financial supermarket" named Lippo 
Securities.  Under the plan, the Riady family would 
increase their ownership of Lippo Securities from 19 
percent to 50 percent.  Lippo Securities would in turn be 
the major owner of the insurance company Lippo Life, 
increasing its ownership share from 4.9 percent to 32 
percent.  Lippo Life would then buy a 40 percent stake in 
Lippo Bank.  The Riady family would sell their interest in 
the latter institution.  The deputy chairman of  Lippo 
Group is James Riady, a former director of Worthen 
Bank.   

	After the Fifth Column began looking into the 
financial affairs of Jackson Stephens, Stephens hired an 
international assassin, Pablo Vitale Rodriquez, to kill the 
Angel of Death.  When Pablo failed to do the job, 
Stephens then teamed up with Don Tyson and Richard 
Mellon Scaife to purchase a $100,000 contract on the 
Angel of Death from the New Orleans mafia.  The New 
Orleans mafia gave the contract to two ex-CIA wet boys.  
Unfortunately, these two men showed up one morning, 
wrapped in barbed wire and very dead, on Jackson 
Stephens' lawn.  Stephens had the bodies removed, but 
one of them was subsequently recovered, having been 
stuffed down a capped oil well in Louisiana.  The corpse 
is rumored to be abiding its time, waiting to show up in 
Stephens' refrigerator, or served up to him as a roasted 
dinner entree. 

	A couple of details need to be cleared up.

	". . . Lippo was also generous with Webster 
Hubbell, paying him for unspecified legal work on his trip 
from the Justice Department to federal prison.  The 
amount was never revealed in Mr. Hubbell's depositions, 
but was reported by Mr. Safire as $250,000" ("Who is 
Mochtar Riady--II", Wall Street Journal, Oct. 9, 1996).  
Well, the amount wasn't $250,000.  As I reported back in 
March, the correct figure is $500,000.  And "unspecified 
legal work" is a short-hand way of saying "a bribe to keep 
his mouth shut".

	Safire himself, meanwhile, has joined the chorus 
of indictment nay-sayers, referring to "the Independent 
Counsel, a part-time prosecutor who won't bring 
indictments until after the election" ("Absence of 
Outrage," The New York Times, October 10, 1996).  
Sorry, Mr. Safire.  You'll now have to go stand in the 
corner with all the other morons of the media.

October 10, 1996
Web Page:  http://www.aci.net/kalliste/
