In his autobiography, No Bull, son Michael describes the bundles of cash his mobster father brought him for investment, and how he multiplied the mob seed money by furious speculations.
"Red" Steinhardt was arrested in 1958 for his role as the mob "fence" (receiver and seller of stolen property -- i.e., laundering robbery proceeds). At that time the Cuban casinos run by Meyer Lansky, Lansky's partner Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Also, and his buddy Red Steinhardt, were in full swing in pre-Castro Cuba.
Red was tried in early 1959 and sent to prison. According to New York State appellate court records, the elder Steinhardt was convicted of receiving jewelry robbed from a store, the loot passing through several hands before it got to him as the fence.
Son Michael hired attorney O. John Rogge to appeal the conviction. Rogge was notorious from the earlier Rosenberg spy case, in which he was the lawyer for Ethel Rosenberg's brother and co-defendant, David Greenglass. Working with the judge and the prosecutors (including Roy Cohn), Rogge got his client Greenglass to testify against the Rosenbergs, making the case to fry them and fuel the McCarthyite hysteria of the period.
In the Steinhardt case in 1959, New York District Attorney Frank Hogan excoriated the lawyers for Red Steinhardt with epithets suggestive of their status with the mob. Rogge used that incorrect behavior to get Red's sentence reduced to the two years he served in Sing Sing and in Dannemora (maximum security).
After he came out of prison, the mob money poured into the partnership with his son -- the man who sponsored Joe Lieberman's rise in the Democratic Party.
Red's partner Vincent Alo, described by Michael Steinhardt as "grandfatherly," was originally the hitman assigned by the Genovese crime family to guard Meyer Lansky. He was Lansky's partner from the mid-1930s, and took care of Lansky's son after Meyer died. Alo died March 10, 2001, at age 96. [ahc]
July 18 (EIRNS)--BESIDES WILLIAM BUCKLEY, THE RIGHT-WING CUBAN EXILES IN MIAMI ALSO BANKROLLED LIEBERMAN'S FILTHY 1998 CAMPAIGN AGAINST LOWELL WEICKER, a highly-authoritative source told EIR today. During the last week of his campaign to unseat the incumbent Republican Senator, Lowell Weicker of Connecticut, Lieberman had totally run out of money. He made a dirty deal with the most extreme right-wing Cuban exile groups in Miami around Jorge Mas Canosa, people who had connections into the Iran-Contra operations, and suddenly his campaign was flooded with the money to saturate the state of Connecticut with negative radio and TV ads against Weicker in the last days of the campaign. Lieberman still maintains his connections to these groups, the source said.
It is also reported that when Bill Bradley was campaigning in the last election, he told people that the origin of the kind of dirty campaign operations which were being used by the Gore forces against him, was the Lieberman operations against Weicker, and that during that 1988 campaign, no other Democrats were willing to back up Lieberman in that kind of filthy campaigning.
He said that Lieberman is an opportunist who always goes to the extreme right-wing when he is in need. (NCO) [source: New Republic, 9/25/00; Miami Herald, 2/1/00]
Referring to the long-time head of the CANF, Lieberman declared, "Jorge Mas Canosa and I really just struck it off." Mas Canosa and others provided contributions to Lieberman's campaign. Lieberman continued to champion the anti-Castro Cubans, and was a member of Mas Canosa's "Blue Ribbon Commission for the Economic Reconstruction of Cuba" which was planning to sail a cruise ship full of investment bankers and money into Havana when Fidel Castro fell.
A spokesman for the CANF told the Miami Herald that their relationship with Lieberman went back to the 1988 campaign against Weicker. "We established a very close relationship with Sen. Lieberman, who understood the plight of the Cuban people. Jorge Mas Canosa and he became very close friends over the years.... In the case of Elian [Gonzalez], he was one of the first individuals who wanted to help with us. He's going to be a co-sponsor of the bill to grant him citizenship." (The latter comments refer to the case of young Elian Gonzalez, in which both Lieberman and Al Gore publicly opposed the actions of the Clinton Administration in returning Elian to his parents in Cuba.)
During the 2000 campaign cycle, the "Free Cuba PAC" (linked to the CANF) gave at least $10,000 to Lieberman, and Mas family members gave him more. [ews] [source: The Progressive, July 1993]
AIPAC SET UP MAS CANOSA'S POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE. Jorge Mas Canosa, the founder of the CNAF, arrived from Cuba in 1960, and quickly became a member of Brigade 2506, trained by the CIA for the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961. He was involved with E. Howard Hunt (of Watergate fame) in broadcasting propaganda into Cuba, and he boasted of running "commando operations" against Cuba throughout the 1960s.
When the Reagan-Bush Administration came into office in January 1981, National Security Advisor Richard Allen was instrumental in creating the CANF, as a useful instrument for what later became known as the "Contra" operations.
With the assistance of Bernard Barnett of AIPAC, CANF set up its own PAC, "Free Cuba," and also the Cuban American Foundation. [ews] [source: Shadow Warrior, by Felix Rodriguez and John Weisman, 1989]
"MY LONGTIME FRIEND JORGE MAS" is how Jorge Mas Canosa was described by Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban exile and one-time CIA operative, who went on to become a top figure in George Bush's Contra drug-running operation in the 1980s. [ews] [Source: National Review, "Weicker Watch" columns fall, 1988, EIR Files]
WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY RAISED THE RED FLAG OF THE CUBA ISSUE, AND HAS EXTENSIVE TIES TO CUBAN EXILE GUSANOS. Throughout the "Weicker Watch" series of campaign counterintelligence conducted by BuckPac's "Horse's Ass Committee," there was a constant drumbeat of a McCarthyite witchhunt against incumbent Sen. Lowell Weicker, because he favored normalization of relations with Cuba. He was said to be "soft on Castro" both in the pages of National Review, the NR-linked United Press Syndicate, and BuckPac-funded attack ads.
This is particularly striking, because U.S. intelligence sources told EIRNS that in the late-1970s, it had been former deep cover CIA officer Bill Buckley, who initiated an act of terrorism by having Old Nazis work with Gusanos to blow up an Air Cubana airline killing everyone on board. Also, Buckley had ties with Gusanos through his prominent role in the period of the 1970s-1980s in the World Anti-Communist League, that was grown out of the Asian Pacific Anti-Communist League with assistance from the CIA, KCIA, Taiwan, and the Moonies.
Even more directly, Buckley was a very close friend of E. Howard Hunt, who had worked with George DeMohrenschildt on the sheep-dipping of Lee Harvey Oswald, and as later Hunt was part of the Kissinger-initiated CREEP operation to re-elect President Richard Nixon, where he employed Gusanos.
As EIRNS had previously reported, DeMohrenschildt, after leaving the Pantepec Buckley family oil firm, joined the oligarchic Schlumberger Co., that had played a crucial role in the aborted Bay of Pigs operation that blew up in President John F. Kennedy's face and whose previous "case officer" had been then-Vice President Richard Nixon.
Moreover, it was Hunt and DeMohrenschildt who are believed to have introduced Lee Harvey Oswald on his return from the U.S.S.R. to Permindex and FBI Division Five member Guy Bannister. Out of the same office, Bannister ran both the "pro-Castro" Fair Play for Cuba Committee and "anti-Castro" Gusano operations, that frequently engaged in gang-countergang fist fights for, among other reasons, further sheep-dipping Oswald as a "leftist."
Certainly, the Buckley family had had longstanding ties with Cuban-exile Gusanos, who was driven to rage by Buckley's anti-Sen. Weicker attack ads on the Cuba issue. [smt]