Word: cliffords
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...Clark Clifford...
Those words must have long haunted the former Defense Secretary, but never more so than when he resigned under pressure last week as chairman of First American Bankshares, Washington's largest bank holding company. A decade ago regulators, relying on Clifford, permitted a group of Middle Eastern investors to acquire First American. Those purchasers, however, turned out to be alleged fronts for the notorious Bank of Credit & Commerce International, the criminal enterprise that collapsed in July with an estimated $10 billion in losses. First American's secret ownership demonstrated B.C.C.I.'s knack for infiltrating power elites even as it served...
Just as Pharaon came to CenTrust's aid, so members of Washington's power elite have frequently gone to bat for B.C.C.I. Jack Blum, the former chief investigator for Kerry's subcommittee, stunned the hearing last week by declaring that Altman and Clifford advised Amjad Awan, a B.C.C.I. official who had run the bank's Panama office, to flee the U.S. for Paris in 1988 to avoid a congressional subpoena. Altman, a fast-rising star in Washington legal and social circles, then reportedly arranged for B.C.C.I. to transfer Awan to Paris. But Carl Rauh, an attorney for Clifford and Altman...
...Raab charged that the Bush Administration had taken a "lackadaisical" approach to prosecuting B.C.C.I. in part because the bank used Beltway insiders such as Clifford and Altman to lobby federal regulators. "If you were to look at the Rolodexes at B.C.C.I.," he said, they would show "the blue chips of Washington influence peddlers." As a result, he said, "senior U.S. policy-level officials were constantly under the impression that B.C.C.I. was probably not that bad because these good guys who they play golf with all the time were representing them...
Whatever the reason, regulators around the world certainly allowed B.C.C.I. to flourish far too long. The alliance with Altman and Clifford's First American Bankshares was clearly -- and apparently successfully -- designed to win respectability in the American power establishment. The link with Paul's CenTrust S&L was a pipeline to the fast-buck financial arrivistes of the '80s -- a joining of hands by what history may well describe as the two great scandals of the century...