Presidency 1980 - FTP Directory Listing

dollar. It is the correspondentbank for every expatriate Chineseor Thai banker in the region, includingthose detected by the DrugEnforcement Administration asdope financiers. It was created in1864 for the explicit purpose offinancing narcotics traffic and admitssuch activity up through theend of World War II. The onlything that changed since then,Dope, Inc. documented, is thatHongShang employs expendableCh'ao Chou Chinese frontmen(among others) to handle the dirtiersides of the business. Its empireof transport, shipping, airline,warehousing and chemical companies—thefull list of which is stillHugh Carey: a New York governor onthe Bronfmans' stringsecret—is thje physical infrastructureof the opium and herointrade.denounced his own banking supervisor'sobjections to the merger as"invalid" at a May 15, 1979 pressconference. He let the press knowthat if Siebert did not approve thetakeover, he would fire her andfind a superintendent who would.But New York State legislatorsalready had outraged constituentsat their backs. Tens of thousandsof copies of Dope, Inc. were inprint, and the facts were too glaringto ignore. Hong Kong is a barrenisland, first settled in 1837 byBritish opium traders as a supplydepot for the Chinese opium trade.In 1978, its money supply was only$5 billion, yet its banks processedmore than $10 billion of illegalopium and heroin revenues. Its policeforce is the most corrupt in theworld, accepting—in the official estimateof the Independent CommissionAgainst Corruption—$1billion in bribes every year! EveryAmerican Congressional investigationon the dope trade has pointedto that British Crown Colony asthe center of the financing anddistribution of the world's heroinsupply.On top of this sits the Hong-Shang, with half of the island'sbanking deposits, traditionallycontrolling the local government.HongShang officially prints the island'scurrency, the Hong KongSiebert backedAt stormy hearings held appropriatelyat the New York StateOffice Building in Harlem, theBanking Committee of the NewYork State Legislature backed upthe beleaguered Superintendent.The same day, the IndependentBankers Association of New YorkState demanded, "The continuedproliferation of takeovers of U.S.banks and banking holding companiesby foreign banks or otherforeign interests should bebrought to an immediate halt."Backers fearful that they would benext to be taken over by the Britishfinancial octopus, including thebillion-dollar Long Island Trust,lobbied behind the scenes in Siebert'sbehalf. The New York Stateruling stood:! no balance sheet, noapproval of the application.That was in June 1979. But afterJuly 1979, America's politicalstructure had been drastically altered.The Federal AmergencyManagement Agency slitheredinto existence that month, immediatelytaking control over the socalleddisaster at the Three MileIsland nuclear plant. FEMA beganto run the emergency functions ofthe Treasury and Federal Reserve,a government within a government.HongShang lawyer SteuertW. Michael Blumenthal: an old cronyof HongShang's lawyer in the cabinetPittman, the godfather of the newentity, then pulled a trick that anyother administration would havelaughed out of court.Tore up its own rulesIn July, Marine Midland, underthe new chairmanship of LehmanBrothers partner John Petty, appliedto change its charter fromstate to national status. Under itsstate charter, Marine Midland'smerger with the HongShang wassubject to approval by New YorkState. However, if it changed to anational charter, it could bypassNew York State entirely.What makes Pittman's eventuallysuccessful gambit so extraordinaryis that the rules of theTreasury office which decides onnational charters, the Comptrollerof the Currency, state specificallythat a bank may not change itscharter merely to "circumventstate regulation." Yet that is preciselywhat Marine Midland andHongShang proposed to do, as MarineMidland's counsel Frank J.Laski told Oct. 22 hearings:"By June of 1979, it became clearthat the Superintendent probablywould not approve the transaction. .. the Board of Directors of MarineMidland then concluded thattheir duties . . . gave them no otheralternative than to pursue all26 War on Drugs / July 1980