[#212] CONTRA VIII, Part Three: The Triumph of the Deal and the Fall of the USSR

Dimitri and Khalid continue wading through the Caribbean shell companies and Swiss bank accounts of Bruce Rappaport in Alan Block’s “All Is Clouded By Desire”, specifically his network’s activities in and around the late Soviet Union/new Russian economy starting in the late 1980s. Topics include:

The Iran-Contra “Brunei money” that Rappaport stole with the help of neocon superstars Elliot Abrams, Richard Secord, Oliver North, Albert Hakim, and Michael Ledeen, Lake Resources Inc., Rappaport’s “odd reputation” among lawyers in the late 80s and penchant for “deals” where he’d screw his partners, his involvement in a dispute over MINE Liberia and bauxite mining projects on the Guinea-Liberia border…

The Bank of New York (now BNY-Mellon) and Rappaport’s Inter-Maritime Bank together at last, the LITCO-Bill Casey assist, Western Holdings Limited, BONY chairman J. Carter Bacot’s hostile takeover of Irving Trust in 1985 and their Micro-Ca$h Register securities processing software, Burt Kanter putting together the Deal…

BONY and Rappaport using Irving Trust’s long-established correspondent accounts with eastern bloc banks to penetrate Warsaw Pact economies, establishing joint ventures in the Soviet Union, Rappaport meeting personally with Gorbachev in August 1990 about the Soviet cruise/shipping industries, the ill-fated Sudopromimpex, Soviet Inter-Ship Builders, and Global Sovcruise, speculating about why China survived its capitalist turn and the USSR didn’t…

Burt Kanter & Co. marketing the MoneyFacts magazine in the USSR to facilitate capital flight, the rise of the spetsbank or “zero bank”, the function of American Depository Receipts (ADRs) in international money laundering, Rappaport’s “literary man” Matthew Stevenson, BCCI/Keating associate Alfred Hartman, Riggs National Bank, Valmet-Riggs and Menatep Bank, Mikhail Khodorkhovsky’s meteoric rise from Komsomol computer nerd to Russian mega-oligarch, WACL libertarian Christian Michel and the cult of Friedrich von Hayek in the New Russia, Alton G. Keel, and more…