Word: vesco
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...brown briefcase loosely packed with $200,000 in $100 bills. The cash was turned over to Stans in his office at the Nixon committee, and he placed it in his safe (the same safe from which $235,000 was later disbursed to G. Gordon Liddy, a convicted Watergate wiretapper). Vesco also gave $50,000 by check, which was publicly reported. Later that very day, Mitchell arranged a meeting for Sears with Casey and G. Bradford Cook, who was then SEC general counsel and recently succeeded Casey as the commission's chairman. The express purpose was to discuss the commission...
Indeed the indictments charge that Stans took great pains to cover up the contribution. In the course of its investigations of Vesco the SEC began looking into why he had made the big withdrawal from the Bahamian bank. Stans went to Cook and persuaded him to delete from the draft of the SEC complaint against Vesco any reference to the money-and how it was used to help the Republican election campaign...
Then, according to the indictments, Mitchell got Presidential Counsel John W. Dean III to ask Casey to postpone subpoenaing employees of International Controls Corp. "to prevent or delay disclosure by them of facts relating to the secret Vesco contribution." Despite denials of wrongdoing by Cook and Casey, who is now Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, there is a chance that they too will face legal charges for the cozy manner in which they handled the case...
...indictments say that by October, as the presidential election neared, Vesco was threatening that he would disclose the secret payment unless stiffer action was taken to delay or halt the SEC inquiry. Sears phoned Mitchell to pass on the threat. In November, presumably just before the election, Vesco sent a memorandum to Donald Nixon, the President's brother.* In the memo, Vesco again warned that he would reveal the details of the contribution unless all the SEC charges were dropped...
Finally, on Jan. 31, almost three months after Nixon's victory and two months after the SEC issued its fraud charges against Vesco, the re-election committee returned the money. Perhaps by coincidence, the Washington Star-News reported five days before that the Government had begun an investigation into the donation. The probe began when an unidentified witness came forward in Manhattan earlier in January and volunteered to U.S. Attorney Whitney North Seymour Jr. that he would tell about the transaction...