Earlier this month, a judge ruled
that two different lawsuits against JPMorgan Chase over the bank’s ties
to deceased “financier” and pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, would be
allowed to advance in U.S. Courts. One of these cases, brought against
the bank by the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), has been a particular focus
of independent media since the new year began, in part because the
Attorney General of the USVI, Denise George, was fired from her post just days after she filed that case.
In a hearing in the USVI case against JPMorgan earlier this month, a USVI lawyer argued that
the CEO of JPMorgan – Jamie Dimon – “knew in 2008 that his billionaire
client [Jeffrey Epstein] was a sex trafficker.” The lawyer, Mimi Liu, also stated
that former JPMorgan Jes Staley also knew this about Epstein at the
time, but noted: “This case was not just Jes Staley … there will be
numerous documents that go far beyond his office to the executive
suite.” Liu also asserted that “Staley knew, Dimon knew, JPMorgan Chase
knew” about Epstein’s criminal activities against minors.
While the bank has disputed that Dimon knew anything about Epstein’s
accounts at the bank or what he was really up to at the time, this Unlimited Hangout
investigation – a multi-part series – will reveal that Dimon’s rise to
the top post at JPMorgan was intimately linked to the very same group of
people who enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking activities as well
as his extensive financial crimes.
In this article, we will examine how Dimon’s rise to become one of
the most powerful men on Wall Street was largely reliant on top
executives and directors of Bank One, which boasts incredibly close ties
to The Limited’s Leslie Wexner and his right-hand man for many decades,
Columbus-area real estate developer John W. Kessler. Kessler and other
individuals tied to Wexner were the dominant forces that saw Dimon
installed as Bank One’s CEO in 2000. Bank One was acquired by JPMorgan
in 2003 and, shortly thereafter, Dimon became CEO of the combined
entity. That acquisition, as well as the role of the Crown family in
Chicago in Dimon’s selection as Bank One’s CEO, will be discussed in the
second part of this series.
Yet, Dimon’s ties to the same networks as Wexner, particularly those
characterized by their connections to organized crime and intelligence,
preceded his time as Bank One’s CEO by many years. As this article will
show, Dimon’s construction of what is now Citigroup, alongside his
mentor Sandy Weill, began with their takeover of a company called
Commercial Credit Corporation. That company, as well as its parent
company, Control Data Corporation, had a troubling history of ties to
intelligence networks that were extensively involved in criminal
activity – including the so-called “private CIA” formed by CIA veteran
Ted Shackley in the 1970s as well as individuals crucial to the Epstein
story like Robert Maxwell.
Given these connections, JPMorgan’s claims that Dimon never knew what
Jeffrey Epstein was up to during his time with the bank becomes much
harder to believe. Furthermore, as future installments of this series
will show, the players discussed here – Dimon and Epstein among them –
were instrumental in the creation of what would manifest as the 2008
economic crisis. Not unlike some of the events that sparked today’s
banking crisis, figures like Jeffrey Epstein, Dimon’s mentor Sandy Weill
and the former Treasury Secretaries with close associations with both
men, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, appeared to have engaged in actions
that would intentionally provoke the collapse of certain banks to
further consolidate the banking sector for their benefit. The goal, both
then and now, seems to have been a move towards the logical conclusion
of the “too big to fail” banking model — the eventual creation of a
centralized cartel of mega-banks that dominate, not only commercial
banking, but also central banking.
A Brief History of Control Data Corporation
Created by a group of Naval engineers in 1956, at the dawn of the
American military-industrial complex, Engineering Research Associates
(ERA) was a military contractor with a focus on cryptography and
code-breaking. Shortly after its creation, part of the core ERA team
split off and formed Control Data Corporation (CDC) a year later in
1957.
CDC quickly became a defense contractor in its own right and became a
major purveyor of super-computers to sensitive U.S. research
facilities. These included Sandia National Laboratories and Oak Ridge
Laboratories, both of which worked on the U.S. nuclear program. At the
same time, CDC also had an odd relationship with the Soviet Union’s own
sensitive nuclear facilities, which eventually led to congressional
scrutiny. Congressional hearings from the mid-1970s revealed that:
In 1968, a second-generation Control Data Corporation 1604 system was
installed at the Dubna Soviet Nuclear Facility near Moscow. In 1972
[CDC] sold the Soviet Union a third-generation CDC 6200 system computer.
For these systems, [CDC’s] operating statement had improved by about $3
million dollars in the past three years. And the Soviet Union has
gained 15 years in computer technology
The hearings also noted
that CDC planned to sell Soviet-controlled Poland computer systems so
sensitive that they were only used domestically at the National Security
Agency (NSA) and the Atomic Energy Commission. CDC claimed that Poland
planned to use the equipment at a Polish “high school.” At the time, no
American high school or educational institution of any type possessed
this particular system, and there were only 10 in the entire country. As
reflected by these and other examples in the hearings’ transcripts,
Congress’ concerns were based around the perception that CDC’s business
in the USSR involved technology transfers that undermined U.S. national
security during the height of the Cold War. Those concerns would only
grow with time.
After these hearings in 1974, CDC made an apparent move at increasing
its role in technology transfers, despite political concerns. By the
late 1970s, they had established a new subsidiary called Worldtech, described in the press as “a division of Control Data Corp that does research and consulting on, and brokering of, technology transfers.”
Once Worldtech was established by CDC, it entered into a joint
venture in 1979 with Greek publisher George Bobolas that was called
Worldtech Hellas Ltd. 70% was owned by Bobolas and 20% was owned by CDC.
The owner of the remaining 10% was not disclosed in reports at the
time.
A 1979 letter
from one of Bobolas’ companies to A. Afonin, identified as a
“representative of the State Committee for Foreign Economic Relations of
the USSR Council of Ministers,” proposed the creation of a “joint
development company using Worldtech for ‘world-wide technology
transfer’” and stressed that “Worldtech Hellas Ltd. will give a lot of
help’ to ‘technology transfer on an international base.’” After
journalist Paul Anastasi published information about Bobolas and called
him a “KGB agent of influence,” one of his companies, Bobtrade, asserted
that “no improper transfer of high technology was involved.” CDC moved
to dissolve their partnership, likely due to bad publicity.
Around the time
that Worldtech was created, CDC’s then-executive vice president, Robert
D. Schmidt, was part of the American Committee on U.S.-Soviet Relations
(ACUSR, previously the American Committee on East-West Accord). Other
members at the time, specifically in 1977, included Robert Maxwell’s
lawyer and confidant, Samuel Pisar (stepfather to current U.S. Secretary
of State Anthony Blinken), as well as Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM, who
would become the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union in 1979. Another
member was Paul Ziffren, a major figure in the organized crime networks
that ran through Chicago and Hollywood described in Gus Russo’s acclaimed work Supermob.
Another key figure in the “Supermob” network was Henry Crown. Crown,
along with his son and grandson – Lester and James, will be discussed in
greater detail later in this series due to their pivotal role in the
rise of Jamie Dimon.
Notably, in the early 1970s, Samuel Pisar
told Congress that the world was moving “toward a single, unified world
economy, in disregard of national frontiers, and even ideological
boundaries.” He stated that “all conventional tools of national policy,
it seems to me, are rapidly becoming anachronistic [as] the State
itself, even a strong one, [..] is no longer a defendable economic
entity.” Pisar also claimed that the main drivers of this shift included
“the multinational corporation” and “the dissemination of technology.”
He later frames technology transfers by major multinational corporations
as giving rise to the “trans-ideological corporation” where “capital
private enterprises” and “Communist state enterprises” freely
intermingled and formed joint ventures. When asked if these
“trans-ideological corporations” were forces for good or for evil, Pisar
responded that “I believe that on balance, they are a force for good,”
but qualified that as depending on how governments and corporate
management act “to make certain that they become forces for good.”....
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