Billionaires who get too big for their boots

Adnan Khashoggi
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Adnan Khashoggi (or Kashoggi) (Arabic:عدنان خاشقجي)(born 25 July 1935) is a billionaire Saudi arms-dealer and businessman, and was involved in the Iran-Contra Affair.
Contents
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* 1 History
* 2 Trivia
* 3 See also
* 4 External links

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History

Kashoggi is the son of Muhammad Khashoggi a medical doctor, and was educated in Victoria College in Alexandria in Egypt, California State University, Chico, and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA. He is Turkish by descent.

It is said that Kashoggi quit his studies in order to seek his fortune in business. Khashoggi headed a company called Triad Holding Company, which amongst other things built the Triad Centre in Salt Lake City, Utah, which later went bankrupt. He was famed as an arms dealer, brokering deals between US firms and the Saudi Government, most actively in the 1960s and 1970s. Among his overseas clients were defense contractors Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin Corporation), Raytheon, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation and Northrop Corporation (which have now merged into Northrop Grumman). A shrewd businessman, he covered his financial tracks by establishing front companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein to handle his commissions (bribes) as well as developing contacts with notables such as CIA agents James H. Critchfield and Kim Roosevelt and US businessman Bebe Rebozo, a close associate of former US President Richard Nixon.

Among Kashoggi's activities reported in the news was a reported $1 billion 1980 divorce settlement paid to his ex-wife Soraya. He was also implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair as a key middleman in the arms-for-hostages exchange along with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar, and in a complex series of events, was found to have borrowed money for these arms purchases from the near-infamous and now-bankrupt financial institution the Bank of Credit and Commerce International with Saudi and US backing. In 1988, Kashoggi was arrested in Switzerland, accused of concealing funds, and held for three months and then extradited to the United States where he was released on bail and subsequently acquitted. Since then he has kept a low profile, last resurfacing in 1992 to mediate for Col. Ghaddafi of Libya his investment in the United Kingdom Metropole Hotels.
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Trivia

* Khashoggi was well known for leading an extravagant and wild lifestyle that was legendary in its time. This was commemorated on rock band Queen's album The Miracle, on which the second song is titled Khashoggi's Ship. The song mentions his super yacht "Nabila" built by Benetti

* Army of lovers band featured Khashoggi in its song La Plage De Saint Tropez with the following line: "We met Khashoggi with a gun".

* Harold Robbins´novel The Pirate (1974) is supposed to be inspired by the life and lifestyle of Khashoggi.

* Khashoggi's sister, Samira Khashoggi Fayed was the mother of Dodi Al-Fayed, friend of the late Princess Diana

* In his 50th birthday party, held in Marbella in Spain in 1985, said to have cost millions of dollars, he entertained celebrity guests such as Sean Connery, Shirley Bassey, Brooke Shields and George Hamilton IV.

* American University used to have a prominent building named the Khashoggi Center but after defaulting on his donation obligation, the school removed his name from the building.

* One of "his" daughters with ex-wife Soraya Khashoggi, turned out, on DNA testing at age 18, to be the daughter of UK Tory Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken, soon to be disgraced for his role in accepting a gift from another arms dealer, Mohammed Said Ayas, a Lebanese and a close associate of Prince Muhammad bin Fahd of Saudi Arabia. In his libel suit against the Guardian newspaper, Aitken perjured himself over this gift of accommodation at the Paris Ritz and went to jail.

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See also

* Ghaith Pharoan
* Ahmed Zaki Yamani
* Ramy El-Batrawi

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External links

* TIME Magazine Cover: Adnan Khashoggi Jan. 19, 1987
* Notes on The Richest Man In The World by Ronald Kessler ISBN 0446513393
* Profile at NNDB
* Death of a Princess
* Chapter Servants of the Crown from Saïd K. Aburish's The House of Saud ISBN 0747578745
* Did Adnan Khashoggi Throw the Election to Dubya?
* More "Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi"
* TSX member Deutsche Bank in major penny stock scandal article by Brent Mudry
* Banking units embroiled in lawsuit copy of a Globe and Mail article by Karen Howlett
* Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi? The New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, March 2003.

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Khashoggi"

Categories: 1935 births | American political scandals | Arms traders | Living people | Saudi Arabian businesspeople


Taken from: Adnan Kashoggi - Wikipedia









Malcolm Forbes
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Malcolm Stevenson Forbes (August 19, 1919 – February 24, 1990) was publisher of Forbes magazine, founded by his father B.C. Forbes and today run by his son Steve Forbes. He is a graduate of the Lawrenceville School and Princeton University.
Contents
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* 1 Career
* 2 Fabergé
* 3 Trivia
* 4 See also

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Career

After dabbling in politics, including a term in the state legislature and candidacy for Governor of New Jersey, he committed to the magazine full time by 1957, three years after his father's death, and after the death of elder brother Bruce Charles Forbes in 1964 acquired sole control of the company.

The magazine grew steadily under his leadership, and he diversified into real estate sales and other ventures. One of his last projects was the magazine Egg, which chronicled New York's nightlife. (The title had nothing to do with Forbes's famous Fabergé egg collection.)

Malcolm Forbes was legendary for his lavish lifestyle, his private Capitalist Tool jet, ever larger Highlander yachts, huge art collection, substantial collection of Harley-Davidson motorbikes, his French Chateau (in Balleroy, Normandy), collection of special shape Hot air balloons and opulent birthday parties.

He chose the Palais du Mendoub (which he had acquired from the Moroccan government in 1970) in the northwestern city of Tangier, Morocco to host his 70th birthday party. Spending an estimated $2.5 million, he chartered a Boeing 747, a DC-8 and a Concorde to fly in eight hundred of the world's rich and famous from New York and London. The guests include his friend Elizabeth Taylor (who acted as a co-host), Gianni Agnelli, Robert Maxwell, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, half a dozen US state governors, the CEOs of scores of multinational corporations likely to advertise in his magazine. The party entertainment was on a grand scale, including 600 drummers, acrobats and dancers and a fantasia - a cavalry charge which ends with the firing of muskets into the air - by 300 Berber horsemen.

Forbes was outed as a gay man in the late 1980s by the gay political group, ACT-UP. He died suddenly in 1990. The exact nature of his death is unsure.
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Fabergé

The nine Fabergé eggs he acquired were scheduled to be auctioned in April 2004 by Sotheby's, with a pre-sale estimate that they would sell for an average of US$10 million apiece. However, Russian oil magnate and art collector Victor Vekselberg made a deal in February to buy the entire collection for $100 million.
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Trivia

* Malcolm Forbes became a motorcyclist late in life. He rode with a motorcycle club called the Capitalist Tools. His estate in New Jersey was a regular meeting place for tours that he organized for fellow New Jersey and New York motorcyclists. He had a stable of motorcycles but was partial to Harley Davidson machines. He was known for his gift of Purple Passion, a Harley-Davidson, to actress Elizabeth Taylor. He was also instrumental in getting legislation passed to allow motorcycles on the cars-only Garden State Parkway in New Jersey.

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See also

* Forbes family (publishers)


Taken from: Malcolm Forbes - wikipedia

The Bush Family

The Project for the New American Century is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; and that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle.

The Project for the New American Century intends, through issue briefs, research papers, advocacy journalism, conferences, and seminars, to explain what American world leadership entails. It will also strive to rally support for a vigorous and principled policy of American international involvement and to stimulate useful public debate on foreign and defense policy and America's role in the world.

William Kristol, Chairman

Project For The New American Century


Supported by none other than Jeb Bush and a large number of George Bush's cabinet (new and ex members)


Prescott Bush - Investor in Nazi Germany



Prescott Bush
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Prescott Sheldon Bush
Prescott Sheldon Bush
Senator (Class 2,)
Connecticut
Term of office:
November 4, 1953—
January 2, 1963
Political party:
Republican
Preceded by: William A. Purtell
Succeeded by: Abraham A. Ribicoff
Born: May 15, 1895
Columbus, Ohio
Died: October 8, 1972
New York City
Spouse: Dorothy Walker Bush

Prescott Sheldon Bush (May 15, 1895 — October 8, 1972) was a United States Senator from Connecticut and a Wall Street executive banker with Brown Brothers Harriman. He is the father of former president George H.W. Bush and the grandfather of current President George W. Bush.
Contents
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* 1 Early life
o 1.1 Military service
* 2 Business career
* 3 Political career
* 4 War seizures controversy
* 5 Writings
* 6 Further reading
* 7 External links

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Early life

Bush was born in Columbus, Ohio to Flora Sheldon and Samuel Prescott Bush, a railroad executive, and later, steel company president and during World War I, a federal government official in charge of coordination and assistance to major weapons contractors.

Bush attended the Douglas School in Columbus and then St. George's School in Newport, Rhode Island from 1908 to 1913. In 1913, he enrolled at Yale University, starting a family tradition of higher education, as his son, George H.W. Bush, his grandson, George W. Bush, as well as his great-granddaughter Barbara are all Yale alumni. Prescott Bush was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity while at Yale, though two of his sons and grandson would opt for Delta Kappa Epsilon. All four Bushes, however, would be members of the Skull and Bones secret society (along with several Walkers), and Bush has long been implicated in the society's alleged theft of the skull of Native American leader Geronimo, when three Bonesmen were stationed at Fort Sill.[1] Some historians, and Cecil Adams, regard this claim as false.

Prescott Bush played varsity golf, football, and baseball, and was president of the Yale Glee Club, and, in fact, was regarded as the best close-harmony man in the class of 1917. His strong devotion to singing at Yale became another of his passions, as evidenced by his founding of the Yale Glee Club Associates, an alumni group, in 1937.

He maintained homes in Long Island, New York and Greenwich, Connecticut; the family compound at Kennebunkport, Maine; a 10,000 acre (40 km²) plantation in South Carolina; and an island retreat in Florida.
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Military service

After graduation, Prescott Bush served as a field artillery captain with the American Expeditionary Forces (1917-1919) during World War I. He received intelligence training at Verdun, France, and was briefly assigned to a staff of French officers. Alternating between intelligence and artillery, Captain Bush came under fire in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Controversially, Prescott Bush wrote home about receiving medals for heroic exploits. His letters were later published in Columbus newspapers, but were retracted a few weeks later when it was revealed that he, in fact, had not received such medals. The retraction was made in a cable in which Prescott Bush stated that his earlier letter had been written "in a spirit of fun" and was not intended for publication.
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Business career

After his discharge in 1919, Prescott Bush went to work for the Simmons Hardware Company in St. Louis, Missouri.

On August 6, 1921, in Kennebunkport, Maine, he wed Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker (who would be the namesake of Prescott Bush's second son, George Herbert Walker Bush). They would have four other children: Prescott Bush, Jr., Jonathan Bush, William H.T. Bush, and Nancy Bush.

Among those attending the wedding ceremony were Isabel Stillman Rockefeller (daughter of Percy Rockefeller), Hope Lincoln, Mary Keck, Elizabeth Trotter, Martha Pittman, Ruth Lionberger, Nancy Walker, George Herbert Walker, Knight Wooley, Frank Shephard, John Shepley, Richard Bentley, Henry Isham, William Potter Wear, and Henry Fenimore Cooper.

The Bushes moved to Columbus, Ohio, in 1923, where Prescott Bush went to work for the Hupp Products Company, where his business efforts generally failed. He left in November, 1923 to become president of sales for the Stedman Products company of South Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1925, he joined the United States Rubber Company of New York City as manager of the foreign division, and moved to Greenwich, Connecticut.

From 1944 to 1956, Bush was a member of the Yale Corporation, the principal governing body of Yale University. Bush was on the board of directors of CBS, having been introduced to chairman William Paley around 1932 by his close friend and colleague Averell Harriman, who became a major Democratic party power-broker.
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Political career

Bush was a typical New England Republican of his time; as a former banker, he was pro-business, but held many positions today considered socially liberal. He was often asocciated with moderate and liberal Republicans. Later he would be identified with the "Rockefeller Republicans" (1), although this was inaccurate since Bush was a moderate conservative who supported Goldwater and opposed Rockefeller. Extreme right-wing elements of the party distrusted and at times openly opposed him, a pattern that has continued with his son and grandson.

Bush was involved with the American Birth Control League as early as 1942, and served as the treasurer of the first national capital campaign of Planned Parenthood in 1947. Bush was also an early supporter of the United Negro College Fund, serving as chairman of the Connecticut branch in 1951.

From 1947 to 1950 he served as Connecticut Republican finance chairman, and was the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1950. The ties with Planned Parenthood hurt him in heavily Catholic Connecticut, and were the basis of a last-minute smear campaign in churches by Bush's opponents; the family vigorously denied the connection, but Bush lost to Democrat William Benton by only 1,000 votes.

In 1952 he was elected to the United States Senate, defeating Abraham Ribicoff for the vacant seat which was caused by the death of James O'Brien McMahon. A staunch supporter of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (another golf aficionado), Prescott Bush served until January, 1963.

Bush's moderate politics became more complicated in time. He disliked Nelson Rockefeller despite the close relationship his father Samuel P. Bush had with the Rockefeller family and his own friendship with Nelson's cousin Percy, and when Nelson divorced his first wife and remarried to a woman about twenty years his junior with whom he had been having an adulterous relationship while married to his first wife, causing an infidelity scandal that hurt his campaign for the 1964 Republican nomination for President, Bush denounced Rockefeller for his behavior[1]. Bush enthusiastically supported ultra-conservative Senator Barry M. Goldwater against Rockefeller and during the general election campaign. He liked Goldwater's book the The Conscience of a Conservative and recommended it to his son.
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War seizures controversy

Harriman Bank was the main Wall Street connection for German companies and the varied U.S. financial interests of Fritz Thyssen, who had been an early financial backer of the Nazi party until 1938, but who by 1939 had fled Germany and was bitterly denouncing Hitler. Dealing with Nazi Germany wasn't illegal when Hitler declared war on the US, but, six days after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed the Trading With the Enemy Act. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City.

The Harriman business interests seized under the act in October and November 1942 included:

* Union Banking Corporation (UBC) (for Thyssen and Brown Brothers Harriman)
* Holland-American Trading Corporation (with Harriman)
* the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation (with Harriman)
* Silesian-American Corporation (this company was partially owned by German entity; during the war the Germans tried to take the full control of Silesian-American. In response to that, American government seized German owned minority shares in the company, leaving the U.S. partners to carry on the business.)

The assets were held by the government for the duration of the war, then returned afterward. UBC was dissolved in 1951. Bush's interest in UBC consisted of one share. For it, he was reimbursed $1,500,000. These assets were later used to launch Bush family investments in the Texas energy industry. This presupposes that Union Banking Corporation was worth $4 billion, of which almost all would have been paid to the Harrimans. http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030214.html by Cecil Adams addresses this claim with some skepticism.

Toby Rogers has claimed that Bush's connections to Silesian businesses (with Thyssen and Flick) make him complicit with the mining operations in Poland which used slave labor out of Oswiecim, where the Auschwitz concentration camp was later constructed. Allegations that Prescott Bush profited from slave labor or the Auschwitz concentration camp remain unsubstantiated.

There are unsubstantiated rumors concerning Prescott Bush's associations with the Nazi party. The Anti-Defamation League has stated, "Rumors about the alleged Nazi 'ties' of the late Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, have circulated widely through the Internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated." [2] The rumors began with extreme right-wing attacks on George H.W. Bush during his 1980 presidential run and were renewed during his 1988 run.

The New York Herald-Tribune referred to the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, as "Hitler's Angel" and mentioned Bush only as an employee of the investment banking firm Thyssen used in the USA. The label was ironic, since by the time the Tribune article appeared, Hitler had turned on Thyssen and imprisoned him. Reportedly, however, there has been a determined effort by Canadian bloggers, apparently connected with Lyndon LaRouche, to circulate reports that Bush himself was known as "Hitler's Angel".
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Writings

Bush's articles include:

* "Timely Monetary Policy," Banking, June 1954 and July 1954
* "To Preserve Peace Let's Show the Russians How Strong We Are!" Reader's Digest, July 1959
* "Politics Is Your Business," Chamber of Commerce, State of New York, Bulletin, May 1960.

==References==^

References ^ 1.Michael Tackett. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-0408310265aug31,1,5159931.story?coll=chi-newsspecials-hed|"Echoes of long-vanquished 'Rockefeller Republicans'"]], Chicago Tribune, August 31, 2004. Retrieved on 2006-07-25.
^ 2.Stephen Mansfield (2004). The Faith of George W. Bush. Tarcher. Retrieved on 2006-07-25.

Taken from: Prescott Bush (Wikipedia)




Operation PaperClip - The Transfer of Nazi Scientists to The US after the 2nd World War

Operation Paperclip
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For other uses of "Paperclip", see Paperclip (disambiguation).

Operation Paperclip scientists pose together.
Enlarge
Operation Paperclip scientists pose together.

Operation Paperclip was the codename under which the US intelligence and military services extricated scientists from Germany, during and after the final stages of World War II. The project was originally called Operation Overcast, and is sometimes also known as Project Paperclip. [1]

Of particular interest were scientists specialising in aerodynamics and rocketry (such as those involved in the V-1 and V-2 projects), chemical weapons, chemical reaction technology and medicine. These scientists and their families were secretly brought to the United States, without State Department review and approval; their service for Hitler's Third Reich, NSDAP and SS memberships as well as the classification of many as war criminals or security threats would have disqualified them from officially obtaining visas. An aim of the operation was capturing equipment before the Soviets came in. The US Army destroyed some of the German equipment to prevent it from being captured by the advancing Soviet Army.

The majority of the scientists, numbering almost 500, were deployed at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, Fort Bliss, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama to work on guided missile and ballistic missile technology. This in turn led to the foundation of NASA and the US ICBM program.

Much of the information surrounding Operation Paperclip is still classified.

Separate from Paperclip was an even more secret effort to capture German nuclear secrets, equipment and personnel (Operation Alsos). Another American project (TICOM) gathered German experts in cryptography.

The United States Bureau of Mines employed seven German synthetic fuel scientists in a Fischer-Tropsch chemical plant in Louisiana, Missouri in 1946. [2]
Contents
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* 1 Key figures
* 2 Key locations
* 3 See also
* 4 External links

[edit]

Key figures

* Wernher von Braun
* Bernhard Tessmann
* Arthur Rudolph
* Kurt Blome
* Walter Schreiber
* Reinhard Gehlen
* Allen Dulles (Op architect)
* Alexander Lippisch
* Hans von Ohain
* Kurt Lehovec (one of the physicists responsible for the invention of the integrated circuit)
* Hubertus Strughold (Father of US space Medicine)

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Key locations

* Nordhausen
* Mittelwerk/Dora Concentration Camp
* Peenemünde
* White Sands Missile Range
* Nieves

Taken from: Operation Paperclip (Wikipedia)