NARCO-PHILANTHROPY

NARCO GLOSSARY (cont.)

“In 1832, David Sassoon (1792-1864) and his family arrived in Bombay (now Mumbai) after fleeing the persecutions of the ruler of Baghdad, Daud Pasha. The merchant, who founded a dynasty known as the “Rothschilds of the East”, was also named the Prince of the Exilarch. Sassoon established huge philanthropic funds for the beautification and development of the city of Bombay and Poona.”

NARCO-CHARITY
http://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13218-sassoon
http://globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/opium-wars-kingpins.htm
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1997/drug-trafficking-drug-lords-mexico-s-top-drug
http://articles.latimes.com/1997/oct/21/news/mn-44987
Drug Lords Buy Way Into Church’s Heart
by Mary Beth Sheridan / October 21, 1997

Bamopa, Mexico — “Abelino Ortiz needed a miracle. The farmer, a devout Catholic, had rallied the peasants in this mountain village to build a chapel, but the project was short of cash–until the local drug lord happened by, briefcase in hand. “He threw out 100,000 pesos,” then about $3,500, recalled Ortiz, sitting on his porch overlooking the tiny red-brick church he built 15 years ago. Because of Rafael Caro Quintero, a local boy who had become Mexico’s marijuana king, the people of Bamopa could now praise God. Caro Quintero is now in a Mexican prison, convicted of drug trafficking and the murder of Enrique Camarena, a U.S. drug agent. But in Bamopa, he enjoys a saintly status. “The good memories he left will not be erased,” Ortiz said. Such incidents are at the center of a national uproar over “narco-charity”–donations by drug traffickers to benefit the Roman Catholic Church. While the practice has existed quietly for years, it has burst into public view after a speech by a Catholic priest praising Mexican drug lords’ faith and charity. Church leaders fiercely deny condoning drug trafficking. But the scandal has focused attention on how some of Mexico’s most violent, ruthless men have gained public acceptance and protection–and how the Catholic Church may have contributed. “The church has been the same as the local society–it closes its eyes in front of those who give interesting contributions,” said Luis Astorga, a sociologist who has studied the social impact of drug trafficking.

The controversy began with a recent sermon at Mexico’s main Catholic shrine, the Basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico City. A priest, Father Jose Raul Soto Vazquez, said Catholics should be more generous, like the drug traffickers. “Such as Caro Quintero–we’d like to do the kind of charity he did,” Soto Vazquez reportedly told the startled congregation last month. “People like Amado Carrillo, who at times gave money to do great works, and people didn’t care if he was a drug trafficker. . . . If sinners do good things, how much more should we, who aren’t sinners!” The comments about Caro Quintero and Amado Carrillo Fuentes–considered Mexico’s top drug lord before he died in July after undergoing plastic surgery–provoked a furious reaction in this overwhelmingly Catholic country, in which the church is one of the most esteemed institutions. “The penetration of drug trafficking in politics, banks, the army and of course the police is nothing new,” the Mexico City daily Reforma said in an editorial. “To this list, will we have to add some members of the church?” The government quickly called on the church to investigate whether it had received drug money. In a chorus of protest, bishops around the country have denied accepting donations from traffickers–and said they were not about to police the collection plate. “The Catholic Church does not launder dollars. The only thing that it cleanses is sin,” declared Matamoros Bishop Francisco Chavolla. But here in the rugged, dirt-poor hills of Sinaloa state, the traditional home of Mexico’s drug lords, it is obvious that “narco-charity” has been an important weapon in winning hearts and minds, if not souls.

Just consider what traffickers have done for Babunica, a hamlet near Bamopa. They built the pink church, the French-style park with a bandstand and the imposing cemetery with two white towers on a hillside, local residents say. Nearby, in La Noria, Caro Quintero’s hometown, a small hill is topped by a pink-and-white church, reportedly built by the trafficker. The lovely building is an eye-catcher in a region where many houses are built of primitive concrete block. Ortiz, 80, an old friend of the Caro Quintero family, says there is much more. Drug traffickers paid for electricity to be brought to the area. Caro Quintero carved out the rutted dirt “highway”–and his family still maintains it, Ortiz says. The drug lord handed money to the sick, the poor, those who didn’t have running water. “He did the work of a government,” Ortiz says.

https://youtu.be/yX71LEpnE8s

No wonder people here speak of the trafficker–who was convicted of overseeing the brutal, 30-hour torture and death of the Drug Enforcement Administration agent in 1985–in almost reverential terms. “The drug traffickers act almost like Robin Hoods. With the money they make, they help their communities,” said Emilio Goicoechea, a senator from the conservative National Action Party who represents this region. But at the same time, he said, the traffickers buy the people’s loyalty, ensuring they won’t cooperate with authorities fighting drug trafficking. Have they bought the loyalty of the church too? Father Humberto Patron, 31, who spent two years ministering to these villages in the sierra, said no. But he acknowledged that he did not criticize or boycott churches built with drug money. They were already built when he arrived, he said, and served a good purpose.”

“In these towns, people don’t have the money to build a church. They don’t even have enough to eat,” he said with a shrug. “I condemn drug trafficking,” added Patron, who now works in the state capital, Culiacan. “But as a priest, if someone says, ‘Father, baptize my child,’ I can’t say: ‘You’re a killer, I’m not going to baptize your child.’ Everyone has the right to God.” Some priests appear to have gone beyond simply ministering to traffickers’ families. Father Benjamin Olivas, who conducted Carrillo’s funeral rites, cheerfully admits that the trafficker was a friend. The drug lord built the white church near his mother’s house in Guamuchilito, Sinaloa, Olivas said.

In an interview with the Culiacan newspaper Noroeste early this month, the priest said he had declined money from Carrillo. But the cleric recalled telling him of the church, “If you build it, I thank you very much, and God will also take it into account.” The drug lord, who shipped tons of cocaine and other drugs to the United States, was “very attached to God,” the priest said. Jorge Madrazo Cuellar, Mexico’s attorney general, recently told reporters that a priest from Guamuchilito was under investigation for accepting drug money but declined to identify him. The church was further embarrassed recently when newspapers published a startling photograph showing Carrillo–with a giant wooden cross on his shoulder–walking through Jerusalem several years ago accompanied by a Mexican priest, Father Ernesto Alvarez. Alvarez claims he didn’t recognize the infamous trafficker, who reportedly joined his mother and her Catholic tour group in Israel.

Catholic leaders say coziness between priests and traffickers is rare and that the church doesn’t turn a blind eye to the drug trade. As far back as 1988, they note, Mexico’s bishops issued a document condemning drug trafficking. A few priests and bishops have been outspoken in denouncing the practice. And analysts agree that the church hasn’t received huge sums from traffickers. “The social works [of traffickers] that are most spoken of are peanuts compared to the amount of money narcos handle,” says Astorga, the sociologist. But the latest controversies indicate that some priests may be as unfazed by drug trafficking as many other Mexicans. Even as trafficking has exploded in recent years, it rarely is named as one of Mexicans’ top concerns in public opinion polls.”

NARCO PUBLIC RELATIONS
http://newsweek.com/public-relations-narco-style-225872
https://nonprofitquarterly.org/philanthropy/23530-trends-in-narco-charity.html
by Rick Cohen / Jan 15, 2014

“Public relations has become meat and potatoes to big charitable givers, and so it seems to have evolved in Mexico with a unique charitable giver—the Gulf Cartel. One of the largest drug cartels in Mexico, the Gulf Cartel, has a video on YouTube showing its members visiting schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and neighborhoods in Tamaulipas state to give away cakes decorated in the colors of the Mexican flag.

The Gulf Cartel’s charitable message is, according to a caption embedded in the video, “We take care of our people and always help.” Newsweek describes the video as “narco public relations,” but to us, it is a variant: narco-charity. It represents a new approach by the cartel for winning the hearts and minds of the population, a sharp change from murders, public hangings, and decapitations. But it isn’t unique. Longtime Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was known for paying for street lighting and reforestation projects and for building public housing and soccer fields, making him quite beloved in parts of Colombia. In Mexico, Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cárdenas Guillén sent dolls, roller skates, and bicycles to Tamaulipas, with each toy tagged with a sticker advising the children, “Perseverance, discipline and effort are the basis for success. Keep studying to be a great example. Happy Children’s Day. With all my warmth for tomorrow’s triumphant one…your friend: Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.”

The idea of organized crime kingpins acting charitably is not new. In the U.S., some of the most infamous criminals in history used charitable giving much like the leaders of the Gulf Cartel or earlier like Colombia’s Escobar. Al Capone, for example, actually established some of the first soup kitchens in Chicago during the Great Depression. After World War II, Bugsy Siegel helped finance Holocaust survivors moving to the embryonic state of Israel. Across the Pacific, Yakuza criminal gangs sent dozens of trucks loaded with supplies to northeast Japan after the March 2011 earthquake.

For the Gulf Cartel leadership, what is new is the use of social media to promote their charitable activities. The distinctive factor in much of the charity of organized crime, whether by Capone and Siegel, the Yakuza, or the cartels, is that it tends to flourish when there is an absence of official government presence. Capone during the Great Depression and the Yakuza coming from Kobe and Tokyo to the earthquake zone where 27,000 people died are examples of criminally based charity operating where the authorities were under-resourced. The same goes for the Gulf Cartel in Mexico, providing charitable gifts and publicizing the activity with impunity because of the weakness of governmental forces where it operates.”

NARCO-ELITES
http://minormusings.com/search/label/opium
http://geni.com/projects/American-Opium-Merchants/6568
http://newyorksocialdiary.com/node/1907199/print
http://xxxciter.blogspot.com/2011/01/opium-trade-built-many-american.html
http://andrewgavinmarshall.com/2012/12/13/banking-on-criminality-drug-money-and-the-above-the-law-global-banking-cartel/
http://voxfux.com/features/scull_bones_opium.html

“In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell and Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and smuggling it to China. Russell and Company merged with the Perkins (Boston) syndicate in 1830 and became the primary American opium smuggler. One of Russell and Company’s Chief of Operations in Canton was Warren Delano, Jr., grandfather of Franklin Roosevelt. Other Russell partners included John Cleve Green (who financed Princeton), Abiel Low (who financed construction of Columbia), Joseph Coolidge and the Perkins, Sturgis and Forbes families. (Coolidge’s son organized the United Fruit company, and his grandson, Archibald C. Coolidge, was a co-founder of the Council on Foreign Relations.)”

https://youtu.be/MFzGu5bxnOc

NARCO-HISTORY as WRITTEN
https://alexandreafonso.wordpress.com/2013/how-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang/
http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/academia-is-not-a-meritocracy/
http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2015
http://aeon.co/magazine/science/how-did-science-come-to-speak-only-english/
http://scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0202/S00030.htm
http://minormusings.com/Page/Aristocracy.html
http://minormusings.com/Drugs/Harvard.html

“Harvard is one of the oldest of America’s universities and is among the most prestigious. But what is “prestige”? The word is defined by Merriam-Webster as follows: “standing or estimation in the eyes of people; weight or credit in general opinion; commanding position in people’s minds.” “Prestige” is not unlike the word “history” when you consider that what we call history has been written by people on the winning side, who reveal only that part of what happened that they want us to know. If what really happened would not afford them that air of standing or estimation in people’s minds to which they aspire, then they’re not averse to making up a cover story which would bestow on them that degree of craved respectability. So prestigious has Harvard’s “image” become that you may have trouble, for example, believing that the board members, administrators, and faculty of Harvard–that most noble of institutions–would allow the men and women entrusted with its endowment to operate in a manner that Catherine Austin Fitts has suggested. What do you really know about Harvard? There is a side of history that has been glossed over in the telling-that has been covered up.

Who wrote the history you were taught?
Since the American Revolution Harvard College has been run by the successors of a board that in the period after the Revolution, was entirely under the control of a group of men from Essex County, Massachusetts, located north of Boston. These men were mentioned in 1808 in correspondence between then-Senator John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson as being involved in a plot to secede from the United States because they felt its nationalistic policies designed to protect the trade of the United States were detrimental to their own business interests. All the plotters except Reeve had been born in Essex County, Massachusetts.

These men, called the “Essex Junto” were identified by Adams as:
(1) Massachusetts Senator George Cabot,
(2) Judge John Lowell and his son, also named John Lowell (sometimes called “The Rebel”),
(3) former Secretary of State Timothy Pickering,
(4) merchant Stephen Higginson,
(5) Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Theophilus Parsons, and
(6) Aaron Burr’s brother-in-law, Judge Tapping Reeve from Connecticut.

https://youtu.be/_MCWf_dle3I

Researcher Anton Chaitkin, who is one of the authors of the much lauded Unauthorized Biography of George Bush, spent months delving into the archived correspondence among those individuals, and unearthed admissions of their treasonous intentions against the United States. The plot was hatched in large part by the secret intelligence operations of their trading partner, the British East India Company, in collaboration with powerful financier families in Europe. Alexander Hamilton’s support of Thomas Jefferson for president against Aaron Burr prevented the clique from electing Burr, but Hamilton’s action also targeted him for destruction; he was eventually murdered in a duel allegedly set up by Aaron Burr.

Harvard Endowment Established with Drug Profits
After Judge John Lowell was selected to Harvard’s Board, he continued to pour money into that school’s coffers, and was rewarded in return. From then until 1943, there was only one decade in which a Lowell was not among the half-dozen or so board members. His son, John Lowell, attended his first meeting of the Harvard board April 17, 1810, at the home of the board chairman, Theophilus Parsons. [Source: Greenslet, Ferris, The Lowells and their Seven Worlds, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, (1946), pp. 75-76.] Judge Parsons was aptly characterized by a faculty member: “Our college …. is under the absolute direction of the Essex Junto, at the head of which stands Chief Justice Parsons,…. a man as cunning as Lucifer and about half as good. This man is at the head of the Corporation.” [Source: Quoted in Zechariah Chafee, Jr., “Theophilus Parsons,” Dictionary of American Biography.] The Cabot name has been almost as closely associated with control of the Harvard Corporation as the Lowells. The Cabot family, who were involved in the shipping trade, established their fortunes during the war years of 1776-1783 as eminently successful privateers. One author stated: “The Cabots provided America with more privateers than any other family.” [Source: Leon Harris, Only to God: The Extraordinary Life of Godfrey Lowell Cabot (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 6]

Keeping Family Value in the Family
The Cabot fleet, sanctioned by various state legislatures, attacked and captured British, Spanish, Portuguese, and other ships, selling the spoils of legalized piracy as booty. George Cabot’s brother, Andrew, purchased the estate confiscated from the Royal Governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, a cousin of both the Cabots and Higginsons. He later became the governor of Nova Scotia. George Cabot’s uncle Francis married the sister of Richard Clarke, of Clarke and Sons–the British East India Company agents whose tea was dumped in Boston harbor. [Source: Briggs, Vernon L., History and Genealogy of the Cabot Family, 1475-1927, privately printed, Boston, 1927, Vol. I, p. 196.]. George Cabot’s wife was also his double-first-cousin, Elizabeth Higginson, while Stephen Higginson’s daughter, Sarah, was the wife of Judge John Lowell. Samuel Cabot became the friend and personal agent of his English cousin, Richard Clarke, and was placed in charge of the management and disposal of the Clarke’s property in the United States. He also directed the Clarke family’s venture capital into new investments. The bond was made even closer when he married Richard Clarke’s granddaughter. The bulk of the Cabot family’s fortune was acquired several years later by Samuel Cabot’s son (Richard Clarke’s great-grandson) through an alliance with Thomas Handasyd Perkins in the West Indies slave-trade.

Thomas H. Perkins and his brother worked tirelessly, trading with China and sending cargoes to the West Indies and to Europe. By the end of 1792 they owned sizable shares in seven vessels, but were losing interest in the slave trade because of a vicious slave uprising in Santo Domingo at that time. They much preferred the China trade, and by the 1830s, Perkins was said to control as much as half of the entire U.S. trade with Canton. [Source: Russell B Adams Jr., The Boston Money Tree ©1977]. Their nephew, John Perkins Cushing, in 1804 was chosen as an assistant to the manager of the Canton outpost, who died within a few months. Cushing, not yet twenty, became a principal in the firm, newly named Perkins & Company.

Waltham Mill – Forerunner to HUD Money Laundering
John Perkins Cushing remained in Canton tending the affairs of Perkins & Company while his more “respectable” relations like Francis Cabot Lowell were marveling at the success of their Waltham mill and laying the foundations of the great manufacturing city of Lowell, Massachusetts, which was financed with the profits brought in from China. Thomas Handasyd Perkins remained first and foremost a merchant, far and away the leader of Boston’s mercantile community even though he did build a short-lived cotton mill of his own along the Charles River in Newton, just west of Boston, and later made some fairly substantial investments in the Lowell mills. He was even, for a time, president of the Appleton Company. By the 1820s Cushing was known as the most influential of all the foreigners in Canton. Cushing had struck up a close business and personal relationship with the hong merchant Houqua, who at his death in 1843 was said to be the richest man in the world. During the War of 1812, they loaned their money out–at 18 percent interest–to other merchants in Canton. But the fur trade paled and when hard cash grew harder to come by, a search began for a substitute for the furs and specie that had been foundations of Boston’s China trade. Opium seemed the ideal commodity to fill the gap.

During much of the 1820s, opium was virtually the only profitable commodity in the China trade. The British, with their monopoly in opium-rich India, were far and away the heaviest dealers, but the Perkins interests, sparked first by Cushing and later by the brothers Robert Bennet Forbes and John Murray Forbes, ran a worthy second. The first Perkins cargo of Turkish opium, on board the brigantine Monkey, arrived in China in 1816; when the transaction proved profitable, the firm dispatched an agent to Leghorn, Italy, to set up an opium-buying operation. It was the beginning of a thriving, if illicit, commerce for the house of Perkins and for the future of a number of other Boston fortunes. Thomas Handasyd Perkins welcomed Chinese moves to halt the opium traffic, figuring that if China made things hot enough for drug dealers, the less venturesome traders would be scared out of the business, leaving a bigger share for the Perkins firm. It was a shrewd guess: rival merchants John Jacob Astor and Stephen Girard dropped the opium trade. For years, along with the Boston firm of Bryant & Sturgis, the Perkins interests had a virtual monopoly on Turkish opium imports to China.

The Perkins firm and Bryant & Sturgis were frequently called “the Boston Concern,” and William Sturgis, scion of an old Cape Code seafaring family, was a Perkins nephew and employee. Cushing announced, on October 26, 1818, that the commission business of Perkins & Company would thereafter be handled by a newly organized firm, James P. Sturgis & Company, whose head was William Sturgis’s first cousin. On paper, this took Cushing out of direct involvement in the drug trade, since opium shipments from the Boston Concern would go through the Sturgis firm rather than Perkins & Company. In fact, Cushing had by no means washed his hands of the opium traffic; not only was he related to the principals of James P. Sturgis & Company, but he was still a partner of the drug-dealing Perkins brothers, who also were Sturgis kinsmen. And even after he retired from active business and returned to Boston, he continued to invest in opium ventures.

Russell & Company was founded in 1824 with Cushing’s encouragement. Later, Perkins & Company would be merged with the Russell firm, further consolidating the Boston Concern’s interests in China. Like John Perkins Cushing, John Bennet Forbes was a Perkins nephew. His father, Ralph Bennet Forbes, had married Margaret Perkins in 1799, young Bennet was taken under the generous Perkins wing, as were his brothers Thomas Tunno Forbes and John Murray Forbes. The Forbes boys grew up in Milton, just south of Boston, where they were enrolled at Milton Academy. In 1816, at the age of twelve years, John Bennet became the first apprentice in a new firm formed by Thomas H. Perkins, Jr. and James Perkins along with Samuel Cabot, their brother-in-law.

“Aside from opium, accounts of which are largely swept under the rug, Forbes is also remembered as the philanthropic captain of a famous 1847 voyage of the USS Jamestown, laden with 800 tons of donated food for famine-wracked Ireland.”

By 1818, Robert Bennet Forbes had been stationed in China to assist his cousin John Perkins Cushing. In 1828 Cushing returned to Boston from Canton, where he had spent nearly half his life, leaving Perkins & Company’s affairs in the able hands of Robert Bennet’s brother, Thomas Forbes. He rejected a proposal of partnership with Samuel Cabot (a Perkins son-in-law) and Thomas Perkins, Jr. and also turned aside an offer as head of the Perkins firm, which since the death of James Perkins in 1822 had been run by Samuel Cabot and Thomas Handasyd Perkins.

https://youtu.be/5M1KD7Dnq4s

Thomas Forbes, who understood that John Bennet preferred his life on the sea to running the Canton office, died in 1828, leaving instructions that Russell & Company should take over the Boston Concern’s affairs. Samuel Russell agreed, and in the spring of 1832, Bennet Forbes sold a half share in the business to Russell & Company. With a tidy fortune, he sailed home to Boston, where he set up in the offices of China merchant Daniel C. Bacon to handle consignments from Russell & Company. Through the influence of younger brother, John Murray Forbes in Canton–who managed transactions for Houqua as well as for the Boston Concern–the goods readily came his way.

For the two Forbeses, Houqua’s business offered a double-barreled return: John picked up a percentage of the hong merchant’s business in Canton, and Bennet got a commission on his shipments sold in Boston. At the same time, Bennet began to build an expensive house on a hill in Milton; it is now the Museum of the American China Trade, under the curatorship of his great- grandson, Dr. H. A. Crosby Forbes, an expert on Chinese porcelain. (This house is a short distance from where his parents lived when George Herbert Walker Bush was born less than a century later.)

https://youtu.be/RLmE3RY_2qM

John Murray Forbes, his health broken from his labors, returned to Boston on doctor’s orders in the summer of 1833. When he recovered and returned to China the following year, Forbes found the firm still deeply involved in the opium trade. When he returned to Boston in the spring of 1837, he brought with him a sizable fortune–including a half-million dollars of Houqua’s own money which the hong merchant gave him to invest in American enterprise as he saw fit–and an agreement to get a three-sixteenths share of the firm’s profits for three years, in exchange for looking after its interests in the United States. The Panic of 1837 resulted in John Bennet’s insolvency, and he again returned to China, with John’s power of attorney, entitling him to act in his stead as a partner in Russell & Company. It was a well-placed trust: Bennet Forbes was made chief of the firm on January 1, 1840, and man[a]ged to merge the competing house of Russell, Sturgis & Company into the older Russell concern.”

How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang

NARCO-ENDOWMENTS
http://dailyprincetonian.com/news/2008/11/the-buildings-that-opium-built/
http://academia.edu/354845/Inquiring_Into_Empire_Princeton_Seminarys_Society_of_Inquiry_on_Missions_the_Opium_Trade_and_the_British_Empire_ca._1830-1850
http://academia.edu/1444383/The_role_of_Opium_in_the_Expansion_of_the_British_Empire_from_1764_to_1825
http://minormusings.com/Drugs/Mask.html
http://minormusings.com/Drugs/Delanos.html

“As we saw in Part I, certain families from Essex County near Boston, whose wealth came primarily from trading in slaves and opium in the 18th and early 19th centuries, tried to hide the taint of dirty money by donating huge sums of it to Harvard College. So grateful was the college that it elected the donors to the board of trustees beginning soon after the conclusion of the War of 1812. The charter of the Harvard Corporation also gave these board members the authority to choose successors to replace members of the board who died or resigned, so that their long-practiced habit of laundering drug money through the university system survives until the present day.

Interestingly, it was some of these same families who were also involved in setting up an endowment at Yale College. Elihu Yale, who was born near Boston, educated in London, and served with the British East India Company, eventually became governor of Fort Saint George, Madras, in 1687. He amassed a great fortune from the trade and returned from India to England in 1699. Yale became known as quite a philanthropist; upon receiving a request for a donation from the Collegiate School in Connecticut, he sent only a gift of books, but after receiving subsequent bequests from him to the college, Cotton Mather suggested the school be named Yale College, in 1718.

In 1823, Samuel Russell established Russell & Company for the purpose of acquiring opium in Turkey and selling it to China. Forced out of the lucrative African slave trade by U.S. law and Caribbean slave revolts, leaders of the Cabot, Lowell, Higginson, Forbes, Cushing and Sturgis families had married Perkins siblings and children. The Perkins opium syndicate made the fortune and established the power of these families. By the 1830s, the Russells had bought out the Perkins syndicate and made Connecticut the primary center of the U.S. opium business. Massachusetts families (Coolidge, Sturgis, Forbes and Delano) joined Connecticut (Alsop) and New York (Low) smuggler-millionaires under the Russell auspices.

https://youtu.be/19Yx6XV_QTo

There is a long list of names of the great American and European fortunes which were built on the “China”(opium) trade:
-Augustine Heard (1785-1868): ship captain and pioneer U.S. opium smuggler.
-John Cleve Green (1800-75): married to Sarah Griswold; gave a fortune in opium profits to Princeton University, financing three Prince-ton buildings and four professorships; trustee of the Princeton Theological Seminary for 25 years.
-Abiel Abbott Low (1811-93): his opium fortune financed the construction of the Columbia University New York City campus; father of Columbia’s president Seth Low.

-John Murray Forbes (1813-98): his opium millions financed the career of author Ralph Waldo Emerson, who married Forbes’s daughter, and bankrolled the establishment of the Bell Telephone Company, whose first president was William Hathaway Forbes, father of Ruth Forbes Paine.
-Joseph Coolidge: his Augustine Heard agency got $10 million yearly as surrogates for the Scottish dope-runners, Jardine Matheson during the fighting in China; his son organized the United Fruit Company; his grandson, Archibald Cary Coolidge, was the founding executive officer of the Anglo-Americans’ Council on Foreign Relations.
-Warren Delano, Jr.: chief of Russell and Co. in Canton; grandfather of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
-Russell Sturgis: his grandson by the same name was chairman of the Barings Bank in England, financiers of the Far East opium trade.

Web sources:
-With reference to the allegations of Catherine Austin Fitts: See “Harvard Endowment Prefers ‘Gaming’ to Market Competition”.
–The Boston Money Tree by Russell B Adams Jr. ©1977 Thomas Y. Crowell Company New York ISBN 0-690-01209-8 324 pps.
–Bonds of Enterprise by John Lauritz Larson President and Fellows of Harvard College 1984 Harvard University press ISBN 0-87584-155-4257 pages – First Edition – McGraw-Hill Companies ISBN: 0071032797
-Kris Millegan, “Inside the Order of Skull and Bones”
–George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography – by Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin Chapter VII – Skull and Bones: The Racist Nightmare at Yale

-Randy Roberts, “FDR in the House of Mirrors,” A review of Geoffrey C. Ward ‘s Before The Trumpet 1985 Harper & Row ISBN 0-06-015451-9390pps
–Harvard Charter of 1650
–Roosevelts at Harvard: A Family Matter
-Delano genealogy–FDR’s maternal ancestors
–Jonathan Goldstein’s review of Jacques M. Downs’ The Golden Ghetto: The American Community at Canton and the Shaping of American China Policy, 1784-1844. See pages 126-128 for the early involvement of Russell & Co. in the opium trade.
–Treason in America by Anton Chaitkin (download free)”

NARCO-REGIMES, NARCOPRESIDENTS
http://narconews.com/Issue67/article4621.html
http://huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/20/eric-holder-banks-lanny-breuer_n_1218452.html
http://darkgovernment.com/news/americas-secret-deal-with-mexican-drug-cartels/
http://dailykos.com/story/2009/11/02/799595/-BREAKING-Karzai-Brothers-Narco-Regime-Triumphs-Run-off-Election-Cancelled
http://virginiavallejo.com/biography.html

“In 2009, Pablo Escobar’s terrorist acts were reclassified as Crimes against Humanity by the International Criminal Court. The Attorney General Mendoza-Diago determined that, before their referral to the ICC, the complaints of victims and families had to been filed individually in Colombia. To prevent the reparation of dozens of thousands of victims through a class action lawsuit, Pablo Escobar’s son and siblings engaged in an impressive worldwide public relations campaign with the narcopresidents and their media moguls, coordinated by Publicaciones Semana: the Organización Ardila-Lülle; Beatrice, Alejandro and Andres Santo Domingo of New York; Haim Saban’s Univision and Carlos Slim’s Telmex, that hired Christian Amanpour for an apology of Escobar and his family.”

“the ONLY LIQUID INVESTMENT CAPITAL”
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/banks-are-where-money-drug-war
http://narconews.com/narcodollars1.html
http://projects.icij.org/swiss-leaks/countries/
http://theguardian.com/news/series/hsbc-files
http://indianexpress.com/topic/swiss-leaks/
http://dailykos.com/story/2010/Wherever-Can-The-Mystery-Money-Be-Coming-From
http://washingtonpost.com/justice-department-hsbc-transactions-with-drug-traffickers/
http://dailykos.com/story/2009/Opium-wealth-and-war-8211-the-story-of-Bagram
http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1845&context=edissertations
http://thelocal.ch/20150209/billionaire-safra-key-to-hsbc-private-bank-origins
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/2013/oct/10/un_drug_chief_warns_afghanistan
http://theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims
Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor
by Rajeev Syal / December 2009

“Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer. Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result. This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations.

Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said. “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.” Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered. “That was the moment [last year] when the system was basically paralysed because of the unwillingness of banks to lend money to one another. The progressive liquidisation to the system and the progressive improvement by some banks of their share values [has meant that] the problem [of illegal money] has become much less serious than it was,” he said. The IMF estimated that large US and European banks lost more than $1tn on toxic assets and from bad loans from January 2007 to September 2009 and more than 200 mortgage lenders went bankrupt. Many major institutions either failed, were acquired under duress, or were subject to government takeover.

Gangs are now believed to make most of their profits from the drugs trade and are estimated to be worth £352bn, the UN says. They have traditionally kept proceeds in cash or moved it offshore to hide it from the authorities. It is understood that evidence that drug money has flowed into banks came from officials in Britain, Switzerland, Italy and the US. British bankers would want to see any evidence that Costa has to back his claims. A British Bankers’ Association spokesman said: “We have not been party to any regulatory dialogue that would support a theory of this kind. There was clearly a lack of liquidity in the system and to a large degree this was filled by the intervention of central banks.”

https://youtu.be/KiK9ht9HwdA

NARCOBANKS
http://npr.org/awash-in-cash-drug-cartels-rely-on-big-banks-to-launder-profits
http://guardian.co.uk/drug-cartels-banks-hsbc-money-laundering
http://bloomberg.com/hsbc-mexican-branches-said-to-be-traffickers-favorites
http://qz.com/hsbcs-private-swiss-bank-everyone-alleged-arms-dealers-to-pop-stars
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/02/09/hsbc-belgium-moneylaundering
http://zerohedge.com/article/inside-global-banking-intelligence-complex-bcci-operations
http://greatgameindia.com/2611-the-black-money-trail/
http://greatgameindia.com/hsbc-bank-secret-origins-to-2611-mumbai-attacks/
http://bloomberg.com/banks-financing-mexico-drug-cartels-admitted-in-wells-fargo
http://zerohedge.com/hsbc-bank-secret-origins-laundering-worlds-drug-money
HSBC Bank: Secret Origins To Laundering The World’s Drug Money
by Tyler Durden / 02/16/2015
by the Drug Trafficking & Narco-Terror Dept of GreatGameIndia

“#SwissLeaks as the media has termed it is a trove of secret documents from HSBC’s Swiss private banking arm that reveals names of account holders and their balances for the year 2006-07. They come from over 200 countries, the total balance over $100 billion. But nowhere has the HSBC Swiss list touched off a more raging political debate than in India. That’s why to obtain and investigate the Indian names, The Indian Express partnered in a three-month-long global project with the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and the Paris-based Le Monde newspaper. The investigation revealed 1,195 Indian HSBC clients, roughly double the 628 names that French authorities gave to the Government in 2011. The new revelation— published as part of a global agreement — is expected to significantly widen the scale and scope of the ongoing probe by the Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by the Supreme Court. For years, when banks have been caught laundering drug money, they have claimed that they did not know, that they were but victims of sneaky drug dealers and a few corrupt employees. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“These included the David Sassoon Mechanics’ Institute (1847), which evolved into the David Sassoon Library and Reading Room (1938), the David Sassoon Industrial and Reformatory Institution, David Sassoon Elderly and Destitute Persons Home or the David Sassoon Infirm Asylum (1863) in Poona (today the Nivara Old Age Home)…”

The truth is that a considerable portion of the global banking system is explicitly dedicated to handling the enormous volume of cash produced daily by dope traffickers. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not “demand” from the world’s population which creates the mind destroying drug trade. Rather, it is the world financial oligarchy, looking for massive profits and the destruction of the minds of the population it is determined to dominate, which organized the drug trade. The case of HSBC underscores that point. Serving as the central bank of this global apparatus, is HSBC.

2009 CIA Map of Drug Trade Routes

East India Company Origins
The opium trade began in the early 1700s as an official monopoly of the British East India Company, which conquered India, and ran it on behalf of the British Crown and the financiers operating through the City of London. Indian-grown opium became a key component in the trade for tea and silk in China. The East India Company had a thriving business selling British textiles and other manufactured products in India, and selling Chinese silk and tea in Britain. But the Company ran into problems with the opium end of the trade. The influx of opium caused major problems for China, and led the Emperor to issue an edict in 1729 prohibiting opium consumption. Then, in 1757, the Emperor restricted all foreigners and foreign vessels to a trading area in the port city of Canton. A stronger edict in 1799 prohibited the importation and use of opium under penalty of death.

None of this stopped the British from continuing to flood China with opium, creating millions of addicts, but it did cause the East India Company to protect its tea and silk trade by shifting its Chinese opium operations to nominally independent drug runners who bought opium legally from the East India Company in Calcutta, and smuggled it into China. The most prominent of these drug-running firms was Jardine Matheson & Co. It was founded in 1832 by two Scotsmen, William Jardine and James Matheson. Jardine had been a ship’s surgeon with the East India Company, while Matheson was the son of a Scottish baronet. The firm today is controlled by the Keswick family. In 1839, the Chinese Emperor launched an anti-opium offensive, which included the confiscation of all opium stocks in the hands of Chinese and foreign merchants. The merchants put up a fight, but were ultimately forced to concede, turning in their opium stocks after being indemnified against losses by British officials. In response, however, the British launched a propaganda campaign against China, accusing it of violating Britain’s right to “free trade.”

Britain sent its fleet to China, to force the Chinese to capitulate to the opium trade. The action, known as the First Opium War, resulted in the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, under which China not only capitulated to the opium trade, but also agreed to pay reparations to the opium runners and gave the British control of the island of Hong Kong. However, the treaty did not specifically legalize opium, so the British launched a second Opium War, which resulted in the 1856 Treaty of Tientsin, which legitimized the opium trade and opened China up to foreigners even more. As the opium and other trade with China expanded, Britain’s new territory of Hong Kong became a major imperial commercial center. The opium dealers gathered together to form a bank, the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, as the financial flagship of the British opium trade. Over time, the bank—now known as HSBC—would extend its reach into the drug fields of the Middle East and Ibero-America, as befitting its role as the financial kingpin of Dope, Inc.

Role of Secret Societies
In 1783 Lord Shelbourne launched the Chinese opium trade with Scottish merchants from the East India Company and members of the House of Windsor-allied Knights of St. John Jerusalem. Shelbourne’s chief propagandist was Adam Smith who worked for East India Company, which emerged from the slave-trading Levant Company and later became known as Chatham House, home to the powerful Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA). In 1776 the high seas pirate Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, which became the bible of international capitalism. In the Far East the British organized the Chinese Triad Society, also known as the Society of Heaven and Earth, to smuggle their opium. Beginning in 1788 the Freemason Grand Lodge of England established lodges in China, one of which was the Triad Society. Another was known as the Order of the Swastika. In 1839 William Jardine- a Canton-based opium trafficker- steered Britain into the first Opium War after Chinese officials confiscated his stash. The second Opium War lasted from 1858-1860. Lord Palmerston commanded both expeditions for the Brits. He was also the High Priest of Scottish Rite Freemasonry in the British Empire.

https://youtu.be/WMbEhP2irDM

Throughout the 19th century the British families of Matheson, Keswick, Swire, Dent, Inchcape, Baring and Rothschild controlled the Chinese heroin traffic. The Inchcape’s and Baring’s Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company (PONC) transported the dope around the world. To the US West Coast, the families brought Chinese coolies to build JP Morgan’s railroads, slave laborers who were kidnapped (shanghaied) by the Triads. The Triads came along too, setting up opium dens in San Francisco and Vancouver and using a network of Chinatowns as a channel for heroin. This network exists today. To the US East Coast the families brought African slaves and cotton. These same families built plantations and became kings of southern cotton on the backs of shanghaied Africans.

“1999: Encounter between New York Stock Exchange President Richard Grasso and Raul Reyes, Commander of Colombia’s FARC / El entonces presidente de la Bolsa de Nueva York, Richard Grasso, y el comandante de las FARC, Raúl Reyes se abrazan durante un encuentro en junio de 1999”

The American families Perkins, Astor and Forbes made millions off the opium trade. The Perkins’ founded Bank of Boston, which is today known as Credit Suisse First Boston. The Perkins and Morgan families endowed Harvard University. William Hathaway Forbes was a director at Hong Kong Shanghai Bank shortly after it was founded in 1866. John Murray Forbes was the US agent for the Barings banking family, which financed most of the early drug trade. The Forbes family heirs later launched Forbes magazine. Steve Forbes ran for President in 1996. John Jacob Astor invested his opium proceeds in Manhattan real estate and worked for British intelligence. The Astor family home in London sits opposite Chatham House. These families launched the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank Corporation (HSBC) after the second Opium War as a repository for their opium proceeds.

HSBC, a subsidiary of the London-based HSBC Holdings, today prints 75% of Hong Kong’s currency, while the British Cecil Rhodes-founded Standard Chartered Bank prints the rest. HSBC’s Hong Kong headquarters sits next to a massive Masonic Temple. Wealth derived from selling this Chinese opium during British colonial rule, helped build many landmarks on India’s west coast. The Mahim Causeway, The Sir JJ School of Art, David Sassoon Library and Flora Fountain, landmarks in modern Mumbai, were built by prominent Parsi and Jewish traders from profits made by a flourishing opium and later cotton trade with China. Prominent families from Mumbai’s past, names that adorn today’s famous institutions such as the Wadia’s, Tata’s, Jejeebhoy’s, Readymoney’s, Cama’s and Sassoon’s sold opium to China through the British.

By the end of the nineteenth century, when the opium trade went bust, cotton from India’s western state of Gujarat, which had already developed strong trade links with Canton profited. The Paris’s ploughed profits from the trade with the Chinese back into India, setting up several schools, hospitals and banks. Historical records prove that some of India’s prominent Parsi traders at the time, were founders of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) founded in 1865. [For a detailed report read about the colonization of India.]

It is this deadly opium empire that Gandhiji was very much conscious about and spoke out against for which he was jailed in 1921 by India’s British rulers for “undermining the revenue”. Having seen generations of Chinese youths rendered docile and passive Gandhijis was concerned over opium and its deadly effects on India which is clear from his letters. These opium production activities ran until 1924 in India and were stopped with the heroic efforts of Mahatma Gandhi who first agitated to remove opium production from India and destruction of China using Indian soil. Finally the British transferred the entire production to Afghanistan in 1924 handing the production to southern Afghani tribals which after 90 years became the golden crescent of opium production. Though the production is in the hands of Afghan tribals the distribution finance market control is still exercised by the same old British business houses or their proxies.

“How Many Islamic Terrorists Marry into Skull & Bones Families?”

Afghan Opium for Bankers and Terrorists
There is a general impression that Afghanistan has always been the center of opium production. In fact, it has not. Prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, opium production in Afghanistan was less than 1,000 tons; that grew to 8,200 tons (based on conservative UN Office on Drugs and Crime/UNODC figures) in 2008. Throughout this period, Afghanistan was in a state of war. Following the Soviet invasion, the anti-Soviet powers, particularly, the US, UK, and Saudi Arabia, began generating larger amounts of drug money to finance much of the war to defeat the Soviets. Since 1989, after the Soviet withdrawal, there has been an all-out civil war in Afghanistan, as the US-UK-Saudi-created mujahideen dipped further into the opium/heroin money. What was happening in Afghanistan during this period that caused opium production to soar to those levels?

https://youtu.be/U-e3Lx1MTqI

History shows that the US invasion in 2001 came close to wiping out the Taliban forces; the Afghan people, at least at that point in time, because of the Pakistani-Saudi links to the Taliban and the oppressive nature of the Wahhabi-indoctrinated regime, supported the invading American and NATO forces. That began to change in 2005. The year 2005 is important in this context, since one of the most damning parts of the US Senate report details HSBC’s relationship with the Saudi-based Al Rajhi Bank, a member of Osama bin Laden’s “Golden Chain” of important al-Qaeda financiers. The HSBC-Al Rajhi relationship has spanned decades; perhaps that is why, even when HSBC’s own internal compliance offices asked that it be terminated in 2005, and even when the US government discovered hard evidence of Al Rajhi’s relationship with terrorism, HSBC continued to do business with the bank until 2010. In fact, the report said, Al Rajhi’s links to terrorism were confirmed in 2002, when US agents searched the offices of a Saudi non-profit US-designated terrorist organization, Benevolence International Foundation. In that raid, agents uncovered a CD-ROM listing the names of financiers in bin Laden’s Golden Chain. One of those names was Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi, a founder of Al Rajhi bank.

“German Customs authorities confiscated paperwork from the now closed Cayman branch of Coutts Bank. Recently an operation by German Customs officials allegedly revealed that the British Queen in some way financed Osama Bin Laden. German officials in an operation raided two containers passing through Hamburg Port and seized 14,000 documents establishing that Osama bin Laden was funded by UK Queen’s bank Coutts, part of the Royal Bank of Scotland …..“

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