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At Trial, Hollywood Power Broker Says He Wanted Only Information
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER Published: April 10, 2008

LOS ANGELES — A reporter who wrote damaging articles about Michael S. Ovitz, the onetime Hollywood power broker, broke down repeatedly in court on Wednesday as she testified about what she said were threats on her life orchestrated by the private eye Anthony Pellicano on Mr. Ovitz’s behalf.

The reporter, Anita M. Busch, said two men in a dark Mercedes nearly ran her down outside her own home in August 2002. “I remember thinking I was going to die,” she said through tears. “I thought, ‘This is how it ends.’ ”

But Mr. Ovitz, once a top talent agent and later president of the Walt Disney Company, denied any role in threatening Ms. Busch. He acknowledged paying Mr. Pellicano $75,000 in cash to dig up information about her and another reporter who he said were hurting him, but he said he did not know Mr. Pellicano was doing anything illegal.

“I wanted to know when I was going to be ambushed, when the next shoe was going to drop,” said Mr. Ovitz, describing a period in 2002 when his attempt at a Hollywood comeback was collapsing — hastened, he believed, by Ms. Busch’s articles.

The back-to-back appearances by Mr. Ovitz, just before 9 a.m., and Ms. Busch, for three hours afterward — including her contentious cross-examination by Mr. Pellicano — made for a climactic day in the five-week-old trial.

Mr. Pellicano and four co-defendants are being tried in Federal District Court on federal wiretapping and racketeering charges. The prosecution is expected to rest Thursday. Mr. Pellicano, who is representing himself, has indicated he might take the stand at trial’s end.

Mr. Ovitz, a founder of the Creative Artists Agency and once considered one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, entered the courtroom with two lawyers. In his testimony, he detailed the embarrassing and public unraveling of the Artists Management Group, through which he was trying to regain his influence in the industry.

After a deal with AT&T fell through in 2001, he said, he began looking to sell the company and make a “graceful exit.” By May 2002 he was in escrow to sell it to a rival management company, called the Firm. But, he testified, a series of New York Times articles from March to May — written by Ms. Busch, a freelancer, and Bernard Weinraub, the newspaper’s Hollywood correspondent — had made it “more than difficult” to close the sale. “Particularly ones that were accusing us of stealing money from our partners,” he said.

Prosecutors played a recording of Mr. Ovitz calling Mr. Pellicano on April 11, 2002, the day of another Busch byline in The Times on an article that contained negative information about Mr. Ovitz, and asking for a 30-minute meeting to discuss “the most complex situation imaginable.”

On the stand, Mr. Ovitz said he “may have exaggerated a bit,” but said he “had no one feeding me information.” So he turned to Mr. Pellicano to get embarrassing or otherwise useful information about the New York Times journalists and their sources, who he believed included David Geffen, of DreamWorks, and Ron Meyer, the Universal Studios chief who was also a founder of Creative Artists.

“It was an extraordinarily difficult time for the companies and for me,” Mr. Ovitz said. “We were in a consistent state of negative press, filled with innuendo that we were in ruin, which wasn’t true. There were client problems — we lost one out of hundreds — but there was a perception issue. There were morale problems. There was tension among the partners. It was wildly embarrassing to me and my family.”

Mr. Ovitz’s lawyers in three civil cases hired Mr. Pellicano and paid him $25,000 for each case in May 2002. Mr. Ovitz said he had paid Mr. Pellicano an additional $75,000 in cash over the rest of that year, and received “information that was extraordinarily helpful to me.”

That included tips about an employee who was preparing to sue and about Mr. Meyer’s animosity toward Mr. Ovitz. He said he had told Mr. Pellicano he would “pay any amount of money” to effect a rapprochement with Mr. Meyer.

Mr. Pellicano gave “very good advice,” Mr. Ovitz said. “Frankly, when a lot of people abandoned the ship, he didn’t. He was always an open ear.” Mr. Ovitz said he knew nothing of wiretaps, threats or illegal activity by Mr. Pellicano, who gave Mr. Ovitz a code name: Gaspar. As for the cash, he said, Mr. Pellicano had told him only that he needed it “to run his business.”

Mr. Ovitz said he had assumed Mr. Pellicano would get information from people like Mr. Meyer and Mr. Geffen.
“He was someone that moved around in the community at the highest levels,” Mr. Ovitz said. “He talked to the same people that were sourcing the press.” How did Mr. Ovitz know this? “I don’t know how to articulate that,” he said. “I just know.”

Mr. Ovitz said he had referred to Hollywood as “the campus,” calling the entertainment business “much like high school.” But if so, in Ms. Busch’s retelling it was more like “Scream” than “Saved by the Bell.”

She related the June 2002 threat that prompted the Pellicano investigation: a fish and a rose left on her car, next to a note saying “Stop” and a bulletlike hole in her windshield. She told of phone trouble beginning that month, of learning that her D.S.L. service had been canceled without her knowledge and that large chunks of e-mail had been stolen, and of finding a virus on her computer.

On an August morning, she testified, two men in a Mercedes nearly ran her down. One put a finger to his lips, as if warning her to keep quiet, and then motioned with two fingers as if saying goodbye, before the driver sped off.

That November, she finally got the phone company to check her phones, and learned there had been a wiretap on her lines since June. “I was stunned,” she said.


A lawyer for one of Mr. Pellicano’s co-defendants pressed Ms. Busch about a memoir she said she had begun with two other writers, Dan Moldea and John Connolly. She said at first she had thought it could be a way “to survive financially.” But she said she had concluded that she was being used and abandoned it. “There will never be a book,” she said.

In his cross-examination, Mr. Pellicano grilled Ms. Busch at a glacial pace over her account of the August threat, often waiting as she wept and struggled to regain her composure.

But Ms. Busch rallied. “Mr. Pellicano, I was scared for my life, 24-7,” she said angrily at one point. Later, she told of her sources deserting her and her career falling apart.

“I saw everything slipping away,” she said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. There were a number of incidents, one after another. It was a relentless attack, Mr. Pellicano — as you know.”
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It was therefore in Ovitz's and Pelicano's power to create the second false molestation accusations against Michael that resulted in the 2005 trial.

Could these allegations have been retribution, a means of trying to regain control of Michael and if not successful than an attempt to destroy him completely?

Are these the people Michael was afraid of?

Is this part of the conspiracy the family is talking about?

Is Pelicano the fall guy for them all?
Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Guest
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Serenitys_Dream

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What Michael Ovitz knows about managing the news.
Columbia Journalism Review • Nov-Dec, 1995 • Walt Disney Company president Michael Ovitz

The National Mercantile Bancorp of Los Angeles is another case Ovitz would rather forget. And, for the most part, the press has accommodated him. It is an embarrassing tale of apparently poor business judgment. In February 1990, CAA -- then majority-owned by Ovitz -- bought just under 10 percent of National Mercantile, barely short of the legal definition of a controlling interest. which carries with it government-mandated disclosure requirements. At the same time. a group associated with Hollywood business manager, Gerald Breslauer, who had close ties to CAA, also bought just under 10 percent of the bank, making the two group Mercantile's largest shareholders. According to Forbes report, Breslauer -- "Hollywood's most powerful money manager" -- and Robert Goldman. CAA's c.f.o., "decided to pool their talents and some of their respective capital and get into the banking business.
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This Starry New Hollywood Bank Is No Hit So Far
Entertainment: Gerald Breslauer's plans for a showbiz financial institution find the rich and famous wary. Besides, they already have a bank.
November 11, 1990|MICHAEL CIEPLY and JAMES BATES, TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Gerald Breslauer, business manager to such stars as Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg, long dreamed that he would close the circle of celebrity wealth by creating a manager's bank. He and his clients, and his friends and their clients, would own the bank. They would keep an eye on their own deposits, enjoy the profits and, perhaps, fatten the bank up for eventual sale.
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In a rough approximation of that vision, associates of Hollywood's Breslauer, Jacobson, Rutman & Sherman management firm in February joined the star-packed Creative Artists Agency to pay a total of $6 million for stakes of nearly 10% each in National Mercantile Bancorp. The company owns Mercantile National Bank, a small business bank with offices in Century City and Irvine.

Yet the results have been anything but dreamy so far. Mercantile National profits have plunged since the investment, and the parent company's stock has lost half its value in a weak market. The bank quickly found itself in a war for deposits with a rival, Beverly Hills' City National Bank, where most of Breslauer's clients kept accounts. It also has become the focus of heated debate among Hollywood's agents, lawyers and managers--many of whom were Mercantile National customers when the investments were made--as to the wisdom of banking with an institution partially controlled by potential business rivals.

The fortunes of Mercantile National during the past year provide a behind-the-scenes view of a part of Hollywood business few outsiders see. The attempt to create a glamorous celebrity bank may prove that the normally cool, detached business of banking does not mix with the heated currents of star finance. It also shows that Hollywood executives, usually wide open to creative business arrangements, may be uncomfortable when it comes to something as sacred as the personal or corporate bank account.
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Hollywood Group May Sell Bank Stake
December 07, 1990|JAMES BATES, TIMES STAFF WRITER

A group of Hollywood insiders--including stars Richard Dreyfuss, Demi Moore and Jane Fonda--that invested some $6 million in a Century City bank struggling to become a major force in the entertainment business has registered its shares for possible future sale, Securities and Exchange Commission documents show.

The 548,945 shares--a stake of nearly 20%--in National Mercantile Bancorp, the parent of Mercantile National Bank, were originally bought in a private placement of stock last year. The purchase was made by two groups: a partnership affiliated with the powerful Creative Artists Agency and by associates of Hollywood's Breslauer, Jacobson, Rutman & Sherman business management firm. The two groups each own nearly 10%.

The celebrity investors, who were with the Breslauer group, have not been identified previously by the bank. They include such music industry figures as musician Glenn Frey, singer Tina Turner and record executive Irving Azoff. Others include author Sidney Sheldon, director Tim Burton, singer Olivia Newton-John, actresses Susan St. James, Sally Field and Stockard Channing and actors Richard Chamberlain and Robert Duvall.

Fonda, Dreyfuss and Duvall are listed as owning 4,100 shares each. Sheldon and Azoff own 12,300 shares and 8,200 shares, respectively.

Registering privately placed stock for possible future sale is common. It does not mean that the shares will be sold soon but gives investors that option. A lawyer for the bank said the step was agreed to when investors bought the stock last February.

The investment in the bank was spearheaded by Gerald Breslauer, who heads what is generally regarded as Hollywood's top business management firm. So far, the investment has not worked as well as planned, in part because Mercantile National found itself in a war for business with rival City National Bank in Beverly Hills, where most of Breslauer's clients kept their accounts.
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Bernard Madoff
Bernard Lawrence "Bernie" Madoff is an incarcerated former American stock broker, investment adviser, non-executive chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, and the admitted operator of what has been described as the largest Ponzi scheme in history.

In March 2009, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 federal crimes and admitted to turning his wealth management business into a massive Ponzi scheme that defrauded thousands of investors of billions of dollars. Madoff said he began the Ponzi scheme in the early 1990s. However, federal investigators believe the fraud began as early as the 1980s, and that the investment operation may never have been legitimate. The amount missing from client accounts, including fabricated gains, was almost $65 billion. The court-appointed trustee estimated actual losses to investors of $18 billion. On June 29, 2009, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum allowed.

Madoff founded the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960, and was its chairman until his arrest on December 11, 2008. The firm was one of the top market maker businesses on Wall Street, which bypassed "specialist" firms by directly executing orders over the counter from retail brokers.

On December 10, 2008, Madoff's sons told authorities that their father had just confessed to them that the asset management arm of his firm was a massive Ponzi scheme, and quoting him as saying it was "one big lie." The following day, FBI agents arrested Madoff and charged him with one count of securities fraud. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had previously conducted investigations into Madoff's business practices, but did not uncover the massive fraud; critics contend that these investigations were very incompetently handled
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Madoff's Hollywood Connection
By Amy Wallace   |   April 16, 2009

...There's a saying in Hollywood: Publicists and agents come and go, but business managers are forever. Steven Spielberg, for instance, has been a client of Gerald Breslauer's for more than three decades. According to the Los Angeles Times, they first met in the early 1970s. After seeing Amblin'-a 24-minute film Spielberg had made while interning with Universal Pictures' editing department-at the home of Ray Stark, the legendary movie producer, Breslauer sought out the then-unknown director and offered his services. Soon, Spielberg was serving as Breslauer's conduit to young Hollywood.

By the mid-'80s, Breslauer and the partners in his firm, then known as Breslauer Jacobson Rutman, had formed alliances with Barry Hirsch, an entertainment attorney, and Michael Ovitz, one of the biggest agents in town. As Ovitz built Creative Artists Agency into the reigning talent mill for the film and television industries, Breslauer's practice grew too. His firm's clients included superstars Barbra Streisand and Prince; movie producers Jon Peters, Peter Guber, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Don Simpson; Fox Inc. chairman Barry Diller; and music executive Irving Azoff, among many others.

David Geffen, who was a Breslauer client for years, referred Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and other performers to the firm, which at one point reportedly controlled an estimated $750 million in assets. It was often described as Hollywood's premier management company. "Gerry Breslauer was the king," says a person who was close to clients who invested with him in the '80s and '90s. "His was the club everyone wanted to be in."

Precisely when and how Breslauer hooked up with Madoff is unknown. (Breslauer refused requests for an interview.)
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Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Guest
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Serenitys_Dream

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MEDIATION IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS
by Jeswald W. Salacuse

Deal-Making Mediation in Hollywood
The acquisition in 1991 by Matsushita Electric Industrial Company of Japan, one of the world's largest electronics manufacturers, of MCA, one of the United States' biggest entertainment companies, for over $6 billion illustrates the use of mediators in the deal-making process. (See Bruci, 1991) Matsushita had determined that its future growth was dependent upon obtaining a source of films, television programs, and music,-- what it termed "software",-- to complement its consumer electronic "hardware " products. Matsushita knew that it could find such a source of software within the U.S. entertainment industry, but it also recognized that it was virtually ignorant of that industry and its practices. "For Matsushita executives, embarking on their Hollywood expedition may have felt almost interplanetary. They were setting out for a place that was ... foreign to their temperament, culture, and business experience..."(Bruci, 1991, pp.39-40). They therefore engaged Michael Ovitz, the founder and head of Creative Artists Agency, one of the most powerful talent agencies in Hollywood, to guide them on their journey.

After forming a team to assist in the task, Ovitz, a man who was fascinated Asian cultures and who had been a consultant to Sony when it had purchased Columbia Pictures, first extensively briefed the Japanese over several months, sometimes in secret meetings in Hawaii, on the nature of the U.S. entertainment industry, and he then proceeded to propose three possible candidates for acquisition, one of which was MCA. Ultimately, Matsushita chose MCA, but it was Ovitz, not Matsushita executives, who initiated conversations with the MCA leadership, men whom Ovitz knew well. Indeed, Ovitz assumed the task of actually conducting the negotiations for Matsushita. At one point in the discussions, he moved constantly between the Japanese team of executives in one suite of offices in New York City and the MCA team in another building, a process which one observer described as "shuttle diplomacy," a clear reference to the mediating efforts of Henry Kissinger in the disengagement talks between the Israelis and the Arabs following the 1973 October War. Although Matsushita may have considered Ovitz to be their agent in the talks, Ovitz seems to have considered himself to be both a representative of Matsushita and a mediator between the two sides.

Because of the vast cultural and temperamental differences between the Japanese and American companies, Ovitz's strategy was to limit the actual interactions of the two parties to a bare minimum. During the first six weeks of negotiations, the Japanese and Americans met only once in a face-to-face meeting. All other interactions took place through Ovitz. He felt that to bring the parties together too soon would create obstacles that would inevitably derail the deal. He was not only concerned by the vast differences in culture between the two companies but also by the greatly differing personalities in their top managements. The Japanese executives, reserved and somewhat self-effacing, placed a high value on the appearance if not the reality of modesty, while MCA 's president was an extremely assertive and volatile personality. Like any mediator, Ovitz's own interests may also have influenced his choice of strategy. His status in the entertainment industry would only be heightened by making a giant new entrant into Hollywood dependent on him and by the public image that he had been the key to arranging one of the biggest deals in the industry's history. It should also be noted that Ovitz's primary interest was in making the deal happen, and only secondarily in creating a foundation that would result in a profitable long term acquisition for Matsushita.

Although Ovitz launched the deal-making process and moved it a significant distance, he was not able to bring it to completion alone. Eventually the talks stalled over the issue of price, and meetings between the two sides ceased. At this point, a second deal-making mediator entered the scene to make a crucial contribution. At the start of the negotiation, Matsushita and Sony together had engaged Robert Strauss, a politically powerful Washington lawyer who had been at various times U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and U.S. Trade Representative, as "counsellor to the transaction." Strauss, a member of the MCA board of directors and a close friend of its chairman, was also friendly with the Matsushita leadership and did legal and lobbying work in Washington for the Japanese company. In effect, his strong personal and business relationships with the two sides led them to appoint him to represent them both. Although his letter of appointment merely stated that Strauss was to "co-ordinate certain government relations matters," and even excluded his participation in the negotiations themselves, it appears that both MCA and Matsushita felt that he might be useful in other, unspecified ways.

When the talks stalled on the question of price, Strauss' close relationship to the two sides allowed him to act as a trusted conduit of communication who facilitated a meeting between the top MCA and Matsushita executives that ultimately resulted in an agreement on what Masushita would have to pay to acquire the American company. In arranging that meeting over some fifteen hours, he apparently gained an understanding of the pricing parameters acceptable to each side and then communicated them to the other party. The Japanese, at that point, apparently had greater trust in Strauss, particularly because of his former role as high U.S. government official, concerning the delicate issue of price than they did in Ovitz, who they sensed had a dominant interest in simply getting the deal done, regardless of the price the Japanese would have to pay for it.( Bruci, 1991, p. 66) In the end, as a result of that meeting, the two sides reached an agreement by which Matsushita acquired MCA.

The Matsushita-MCA case shows clearly how two mediators facilitated the deal making process, a deal that the parties probably would not have achieved by themselves. The factors that allowed Ovitz and Strauss to play successful roles were their knowledge of the two parties and their industries, their personal relationships with the leadership of the two sides, their respective reputations, the trust that they engendered, and their skills and experience as negotiators. On the other hand, although Matsushita did succeed in purchasing MCA, the acquisition proved to be troubling and ultimately a disastrous financial loss for the Japanese company. One may ask whether Ovitz' strategy of keeping the two sides apart during negotiations so that they did not come to know one another contributed to this unfortunate result. It prevented the two sides from truly understanding the vast gulf which separated them and therefore from realizing the enormity -- and perhaps impossibility -- of the task of merging two such different organizations into a single coordinated and profitable enterprise.
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When Michael Ovitz’s National Mercantile Bancorp (a saving & loan) began getting into the quicksand of several lawsuits & scandals, attorney Robert Strauss represented him

Robert Schwarz Strauss
Robert Schwarz Strauss is a figure in American politics and diplomacy. A Texas political figure, Strauss’s political service dates back to future president Lyndon Johnson’s first congressional campaign in 1937. By the 1950s, he was associated in Texas politics with the conservative faction of the Democratic Party led by Johnson and John Connally. He served as the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee between 1972 and 1977 and served under President Jimmy Carter as the U.S. Trade Representative and special envoy to the Middle East. Strauss was selected by President George H. W. Bush to be the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union  in 1991 and after the USSR's collapse, he served as the U.S. ambassador to Russia from 1991 until 1993. Strauss has advised and represented U.S. presidents over three administrations and for both major U.S. political parties.

An accomplished lawyer, Strauss founded the law firm now known as Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in 1945, which has grown to be one of the largest in the world with offices in 15 cities and employing over 900 lawyers and professionals worldwide. His business activities included serving on the Texas Banking Commission and as Chairman of the U.S.-Russia Business Council. Strauss was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 2003 and was recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award, on January 16, 1981. He is a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and The Forum for International Policy, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.

Strauss has occupied academic chairs and lecture positions, including one as the Lloyd Bentsen Chair at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The University of Texas. He is also the namesake of The Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at The University of Texas. Additionally, Strauss has an interest in biomedical issues and has endowed two chairs at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas: the Helen and Robert S. Strauss Professorship in Pediatric Neurology and the Helen and Robert S. Strauss Professorship in Urology.

Strauss was hired as a special agent by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and served in the FBI throughout World War II. At the end of the war, he settled in Dallas, where he and a fellow FBI agent, Richard A. Gump, founded their own law firm. This firm, originally known as Gump and Strauss, would eventually grow into the international law firm Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld.
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Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Guest
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Serenitys_Dream

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Here is an interesting connection...

Robert Strauss Biography
In law school at the University of Texas, he met another student who would have a large impact on his career
John B. Connally.

By the 1950s, Strauss's law school friend, John Connally, was serving on the staff of Lyndon Johnson, who soon became Senate Majority Leader. Connally had hitched his wagon to Lyndon Johnson's star, and Strauss hitched his to Connally's.

When John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were elected President and Vice President of the United States in 1960, Connally, a former naval officer, was appointed Secretary of the Navy. Within a year, at Strauss's urging, Connally returned to Texas to run for governor. At the time, the Republican Party had no significant presence in Texas, but Connally faced stiff opposition in the Democratic primary. Strauss's skill as a campaign adviser and fund-raiser was a crucial factor in Connally's narrow victory. Having secured the Democratic nomination, Connally easily won the general election. Connally's election finally brought Strauss the access to the Dallas business establishment he had long sought. Governor Connally appointed Strauss to the Texas Banking Commission, and Strauss's law firm grew and prospered.

The world of Texas politics was turned upside down, along with the rest of the country, by the events of November 1963. Governor Connally and his wife Nellie were riding in the limousine with President Kennedy in Dallas when the President was fatally shot. Governor Connally was severely wounded by the assassin's bullets, but soon recovered. Connally and Strauss's mentor and patron, Lyndon Johnson, was now President of the United States. Although Strauss did not regard himself as part of the President's inner circle of political advisers, Connally certainly was, and Robert Strauss's connection to Connally brought him closer to the President.
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John Connally
John Bowden Connally, Jr. (February 27, 1917 – June 15, 1993) was an influential American politician, serving as the 39th Governor of Texas, Secretary of the Navy under President John F. Kennedy, and as Secretary of the Treasury under President Richard M. Nixon. While he was Governor in 1963, Connally was a passenger in the car in which President Kennedy was assassinated.
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Bilderberg Attendees
Robert Schwarz Strauss (1982, 1989, 1990, 1992), former Chairman of the Democratic National Committee
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WHAT I DID AT SUMMER CAMP
A reporter gets inside Herb Allen’s C.E.O. retreat.

The New Yorker - July 26, 1999 BY KEN AULETTA

For a media mogul, the five-day Sun Valley, Idaho, camp conducted for the past seventeen years by the investment firm Allen & Company offers similar advantages. There is a head counselor and there are activity directors; each day has a morning activity period, canteen, then playtime and evening programs. The session culminates in an awards ceremony. This year, for the first time, an outsider, a reporter, was permitted to attend. This is my diary.

To read the guest list is to savor the class list in “Lolita” but then to recognize the cast in the pages of Forbes. Among the C.E.O.-ish men and women arriving are Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, and now of Vulcan Ventures; C. Michael Armstrong, of A.T. & T.; Jeffrey Berg, of International Creative Management; Jeffrey P. Bezos, of Amazon.com; Michael R. Bloomberg, of Bloomberg L.P.; Warren E. Buffett, of Berkshire Hathaway; Stephen M. Case, of America Online; Michael Dell, of Dell Computer Corporation; Barry Diller, of USA Networks; William T. Esrey, of Sprint; William H. Gates III, of Microsoft; Donald and Katharine Graham, of the Washington Post Company; Andrew S. Grove, of Intel; Christie Hefner, of Playboy Enterprises; John S. Hendricks, of Discovery Communications; Nobuyuki Idei, of Sony; Steven P. Jobs, of Pixar Animation Studios and Apple Computer; Robert L. Johnson, of BET Holdings; Mel Karmazin, of CBS; Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of three DreamWorks SKG partners; Geraldine B. Laybourne, of Oxygen Media; John C. Malone, of the Liberty Media Group; Thomas Middelhoff, of Bertelsmann AG; Jorma J. Ollila, of Nokia; Sumner M. Redstone, of Viacom; Oprah Winfrey, of the Harpo Entertainment Group; Robert Wright, of NBC; and Jerry Yang, of Yahoo!

The camp is referred to, without irony, as “a family gathering,” but the family has got quite big.
Robert Strauss, the former Democratic National Chairman, has been a friend of Herbert Allen, the patriarch of the investment bank that bears his name, for thirty-five years. “I’ve been to every one of these,” he tells me. “The first one was the best: thirty-five people and one speaker—me!” Strauss, who is eighty, loves coming here, and not just because his Washington law firm can garner clients here. “There’s a bunch of people here I know are not the nicest people in the world,” he says. “But here they’re nice.” Here is the Sun Valley Lodge, which is just outside the town of Ketchum, six thousand feet above sea level. The lodge was built in the thirties by Averell Harriman and his Union Pacific Railroad’s millions. One begins to imagine this sort of gathering at the turn of the last century. Did Rockefeller go rafting with Carnegie?

There are other leadership retreats: the Bilderberg conference; the World Economic Forum, in Davos; Bohemian Grove; investor conferences. Allen & Co.’s retreat, though, is longer than most. It is also confined mainly to a single industry—communications. And, most distinct of all, it includes families. There’s one other difference, as Sumner Redstone points out: “This conference has a host in Herbert Allen”—a single figure who dominates, even as he shies away from the stage.

Many C.E.O.s have been attending the camp for most of its seventeen years, and, in addition, Allen has a large extended family. He has sons and nieces and nephews of his own and sons and daughters of close friends who work for Allen & Co. There are people he always invites because they’re old friends: Bob Strauss and his law partner, Vernon Jordan, of Akin, Gump; former Vice-President Walter Mondale; former Senator Bill Bradley, who is running for President; Meredith and Tom Brokaw; Diane Sawyer; the producer Ray Stark, who first introduced Allen to Sun Valley; the actress Candice Bergen; the director Sydney Pollack. Then, he has people who always came when they headed powerful organizations, and he makes sure they keep coming, even though they’re no longer in charge, such as James Robinson, the former C.E.O. of American Express, and Frank Biondi, the former C.E.O. of both Viacom and Universal. Allen gets upset at those who misbehave. A couple of years ago, Ronald Perelman both brought his own security detail and hired locals to protect him. No other C.E.O. comes with an aide, not to mention a security army, and Allen was mightily offended.

Allen, fifty-nine, is an unusual head counsellor. Unlike most investment bankers, he is a billionaire, yet in a business of salesmen he acts like a buyer. Day and night, he wears a cap pulled down to his ears. During the morning presentations, he sits off to the side near the front of the stage; he invites junior bankers to introduce all the speakers. One of the morning’s presenters is an unshaven, black-turtlenecked Steve Jobs. Jobs talks about the importance of stories, of marrying technology and storytelling skills. Most computer geeks, he says, don’t get it. “Silicon Valley thinks ‘creative’ is a bunch of guys sitting in a condo thinking up dirty jokes.”But Hollywood, he says, doesn’t get it, either: “Hollywood thinks technology is something you buy.”
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Oh yes as Joe says this "Conspiracy" goes to the highest levels...
Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Guest
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Serenitys_Dream

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Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
By: Alan DeutschmanJuly 1, 2005
Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices.

One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn't the Harvard Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon Valley's venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland. The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But he's renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.

On that August day in 2002, Hare gave a talk on psychopathy to about 150 police and law-enforcement officials. He was a legendary figure to that crowd. The FBI and the British justice system have long relied on his advice. He created the P-Scan, a test widely used by police departments to screen new recruits for psychopathy, and his ideas have inspired the testing of firefighters, teachers, and operators of nuclear power plants.

According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters who rescued the moment from obscurity, Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.

"These are callous, cold-blooded individuals," Hare said.

"They don't care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse." He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life's savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said.

Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. "Why wouldn't we want to screen them?" he asked. "We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?"

It's Hare's latest contribution to the public awareness of "corporate psychopathy." He appeared in the 2003 documentary The Corporation, giving authority to the film's premise that corporations are "sociopathic" (a synonym for "psychopathic") because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish interests -- "shareholder value" -- without regard for the harms they cause to others, such as environmental damage.

Is Hare right? Are corporations fundamentally psychopathic organizations that attract similarly disposed people? It's a compelling idea, especially given the recent evidence. Such scandals as Enron and WorldCom aren't just aberrations; they represent what can happen when some basic currents in our business culture turn malignant. We're worshipful of top executives who seem charismatic, visionary, and tough. So long as they're lifting profits and stock prices, we're willing to overlook that they can also be callous, conning, manipulative, deceitful, verbally and psychologically abusive, remorseless, exploitative, self-delusional, irresponsible, and megalomaniacal. So we collude in the elevation of leaders who are sadly insensitive to hurting others and society at large.

But wait, you say: Don't bona fide psychopaths become serial killers or other kinds of violent criminals, rather than the guys in the next cubicle or the corner office? That was the conventional wisdom. Indeed, Hare began his work by studying men in prison. Granted, that's still an unusually good place to look for the conscience-impaired. The average Psychopathy Checklist score for incarcerated male offenders in North America is 23.3, out of a possible 40. A score of around 20 qualifies as "moderately psychopathic." Only 1% of the general population would score 30 or above, which is "highly psychopathic," the range for the most violent offenders. Hare has said that the typical citizen would score a 3 or 4, while anything below that is "sliding into sainthood."
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It’s true, your boss is a psychopath
Surprising insights from the social sciences

By Kevin Lewis June 20, 2010

Watching the news some days, you’d think a lot of companies were run by psychopaths. And, according to a recent study, some might well be. One of the authors of the study was hired by companies to evaluate managers — mostly middle-aged, college-educated, white males — for a management development program. It turns out that these managers scored higher on measures of psychopathy than the overall population, and some who had very high scores were candidates for, or held, senior positions. In general, managers with higher scores were seen as better communicators, better strategic thinkers, and more creative. However, they were also seen as having poor management style, not being team players, and delivering poor performance. But, apparently, this didn’t prevent some of them from being seen as having leadership potential. The authors conclude that “the very skills that make the psychopath so unpleasant (and sometimes abusive) in society can facilitate a career in business even in the face of negative performance ratings.”

Babiak, P. et al., “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk,” Behavioral Sciences & the Law (March/April 2010).
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Behav Sci Law. 2010 Mar;28(2):174-93.
Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk.
Babiak P, Neumann CS, Hare RD.

Abstract
There is a very large literature on the important role of psychopathy in the criminal justice system. We know much less about corporate psychopathy and its implications, in large part because of the difficulty in obtaining the active cooperation of business organizations. This has left us with only a few small-sample studies, anecdotes, and speculation. In this study, we had a unique opportunity to examine psychopathy and its correlates in a sample of 203 corporate professionals selected by their companies to participate in management development programs. The correlates included demographic and status variables, as well as in-house 360 degrees assessments and performance ratings. The prevalence of psychopathic traits-as measured by the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) and a Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL: SV) "equivalent"-was higher than that found in community samples. The results of confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM) indicated that the underlying latent structure of psychopathy in our corporate sample was consistent with that model found in community and offender studies. Psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma/presentation style (creativity, good strategic thinking and communication skills) but negatively associated with ratings of responsibility/performance (being a team player, management skills, and overall accomplishments).

PMID: 20422644 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
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It has been estimated that at least 1-10 executives are psychopaths. Psychopathy is about power and control whether that is achieved through murder or other means makes no difference....it is all power and control.
Last Edit: December 31, 1969, 06:00:00 PM by Guest
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