Covenant House

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Covenant House

Postby chiggerbit » Fri Oct 30, 2009 1:37 pm

Didn't want to derail the amnesiac girl thread, so thought I'd start a thread specific to Covenant House. It's kind of interesting that the notorious covenant House events happened near to the same time as the Franklin scandal began to unfold. By way of introduction, wiki tells us:

....Ritter arrived at Manhattan College to teach theology in 1963.[1]

In 1968, Ritter decided to leave the College and to begin a new ministry on the Lower East Side of New York City. He engaged a fellow Franciscan priest, James Fitzgibbon, to move to this troubled neighborhood and initiate what he described as a "ministry of availability" to the poor. The Archdiocese of New York assigned Ritter and Fitzgibbon to St. Bridget's Church in New York City, which had been designated as an experimental church that had been structured around a team ministry. The Franciscans lived in a tenement building on East 7th Street, and gradually accumulated a following of young volunteers who moved to the East Village, Manhattan and surrounding apartments in an effort to live in community and effect social and political change. Fitzgibbon soon left the ministry, but several other individuals, including Adrian Gately, Patricia Kennedy, and Paul Frazier, proved instrumental in defining the early years.

By the early 1970s, Ritter decided to focus his efforts on sheltering homeless youths, as the issue of "runaways" was receiving considerable national media attention and the Greenwich Village area appeared to be a magnet that attracted many homeless youths. He formally incorporated his ministry as Covenant House in 1972 and received his first grant from the New York City Addiction Services Agency to support his work. Ritter soon began acquiring other properties and opened a series of boys' and girls' group homes, primarily in the Greenwich Village and East Village neighborhoods. In 1976, he announced plans to open a multi-service center for youths near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in the Times Square area. He began to obtain considerable publicity by claiming that he was rescuing youths who had arrived in New York City and had been lured into the child pornography and prostitution trade.[2]

By the late 1980s, Covenant House had moved away from the small group home approach and opened large shelters with training programs in seven United States cities, as well as in Toronto and Latin America. Its budget approached US$90,000,000, and it spent three times what the federal government did on runaways. He called the teenagers in the Covenant House “my kids”, “nice kids”, and “gorgeous kids”. Ritter wrote two books, Covenant House: Lifeline to the Street (New York: Doubleday, 1987) and Sometimes God Has a Kid's Face, which detailed his experience in starting up Covenant House and provided his perspective on homeless teenagers.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan praised Covenant House in his State of the Union address for their efforts in aiding homeless and runaway youth. In 1985 Ritter served on US Attorney General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography.

In December 1989, Ritter was accused by Kevin Kite, a former male prostitute and pornographic actor, of having sexual relations after meeting him in New Orleans and flying him to New York to live at Ritter's expense. Several other men came forward with similar stories. Additional allegations surfaced concerning financial improprieties and administrative irregularities at the agency. Charles Sennott, a reporter for the New York Post broke the story and it became a tabloid sensation into the early months of 1990.[3] It also served as one of the earliest and most highly publicized cases in the clergy sexual abuse scandal that subsequently emerged within the American Catholic church. No charges were filed by the district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau or state attorney general Robert Abrams, but an internal investigation by Kroll and Associates and the law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore found evidence that Ritter did engage in at least questionable behavior and inapproprite activities with Kite and other employees. Despite mounting a vigorous public relations defense and denying any wrongdoing, Ritter was forced to resign from the organization in February 1990.[4]

Ritter eventually retired to the small town of Decatur, New York, where he died of cancer at the age of 72. While he had left the Franciscan order, he retained his priestly faculties by being incardinated in a diocese in India. He privately celebrated Mass in his home and attended retreats from 1990 until the end of his life.
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Postby chiggerbit » Fri Oct 30, 2009 1:39 pm

I wasn't able to figure out how to copy this passage, so I just transcribed it.

http://tinyurl.com/ydy5fbm

...Father Bruce Ritter received the first annual Charles Keating Award and $100,000 for establisning Covenant House for runaway boys in New york City. Father Ritter insisted that only missionary-style sex between hetosexual married couples is permissable. He condemned Dr. Ruth Westheimer for being a "pornographer," since she extolled organsms in pre-marital sex....
Last edited by chiggerbit on Fri Oct 30, 2009 3:02 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Postby chiggerbit » Fri Oct 30, 2009 2:20 pm

Trying to figure out who/what this website is here. Is it Larouchain, by any chance? Regardless, Covenant House is referred to. Also, deCamp is quoted, giving an explantation of the Iran/contra-Franklin-pedo network connections, which is why I'm posting the entire article. It's an interesting article, would like to hear any insights on it.


http://www.isgp.eu/dutroux_and_nebula/B ... Nebula.htm

Belgian "Nebuleuse" tied to child abuse networks, Iran Contra and the BCCI's "Black Network"
An expansion on ISGP's 'Beyond Dutroux': The craziest story on the internet just got a little crazier

"To comprehend this nebula, it is necessary to abandon traditional financial or political logic; this is not merely a question of nation, political party, or of ordinary economics... Our conclusion would be that at least over the last twenty years, the economic powers, some of which mafia types, have allied themselves with political forces and organized criminal structures, and reached the 4th stage of money laundering, namely, Absolute Power. It has been specified to us that at the present moment these characters control 50% of the world economy."
- Introduction of a Belgian gendarmerie report to a number of senior officials, District of Liege, November 21, 1994.

Contents Intro
Jean Violet's activities in Belgium
More child abuse accusations
"The Organization"
"The Nebula"
This is where people die
Concluding summary


Intro
After publishing the 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' article in July 2007 I was almost completely empty when it came to the information I had. Virtually everything I had learned in the previous 1,5 years went in that article. In the past six months people have sent me a number of new documents, making it possible to expand a bit on different groups which appear to be involved in a lot of the abuse.

Jean Violet's activities in Belgium
Eight months before 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair', ISGP - at the time called PEHI - had published an article on Le Cercle, a private, secretive, and rabidly anti-communist discussion group which for decades has brought together hard-right elements of Western and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. The Cercle had a particular focus on European integration and even though the British played an equally prominent role, the Cercle had been founded as a branch of what this site has been calling the "Vatican-Paneuropa network".

In 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' ISGP began to expand on the Belgian branch of both the Cercle and the Vatican-Paneuropa network. As expected, Jean Violet, the primary founder of the Pinay Cercle, was closely affiliated with the persons running Belgium's anti-communist stay-behind networks, or at the very least all its illegal offshoots.

First it turned out that in the late 1960s or early 1970s Violet had organized the Académie Européenne de Sciences Politiques in Brussels. As with the founding of Le Cercle, Violet acted as a frontman for Otto von Habsburg and his Vatican-Paneuropa network. Paul Vanden Boeynants was reportedly a board member of this hard-right think tank. This may or may not have been the case, but what we do know now is that Baron de Bonvoisin certainly was a (regular) member [1]. People who have read 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' will recall that Paul Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin were the twin pillars of the fascist underground in Belgium during the 1970s and 1980s, and that both have been accused of extremely sadistic child abuse.

While writing 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' it also turned out that Jean Violet was a member of Cercle des Nations, which we described as "a private, aristocratic club, which started out with about 80 members who generally were royalist, staunchly anti-communist, pro-Nato, pro-European integration and highly fascist." Besides Paul Vanden Boeynants and Baron de Bonvoisin, members included Paul Vankerkhoven, a side-kick of Otto van Habsburg who founded the Belgian branch of the World Anti-Communist League; and countless people who have been accused of sadistic child abuse: Jean-Paul Dumont, Count Herve d'Ursel, Roger Boas, Charly De Pauw, Guy Mathot, Ado Blaton, General Rene Bats, Philippe Cryns and the de Merode family. A lot of these men belonged to Opus Dei; Violet was no exception. Although these associations of Violet with Belgium's subversive and apparently child abusing elite are telling, it would be nice to have more details on the personal relationship
between the Pinay Cercle founder and persons like de Bonvoisin and Paul Vanden Boeynants. A "strictly confidential" report written by substitute magistrate Jean-Francois Godbille does just that. On pages 52 and 53 we read:

"Major BOUGEROL and de BONVOISIN, according to a confidential report of the gendarmerie of the Wavre district dated August 14, 1985 (photocopy in appendix), were extremely close the lawyer Jean VIOLET, a member of the secret services of France and the Vatican, and close to the SAC and the P2 Lodge. This is confirmed when reading parts
Photocopies of the Godbille Report.
of the dossier about A. de VILLEGAS ... and that of de BONVOISIN, in which it appears that at the request of BOUGEROL, VIOLET was introduced to BOUGEROL by de BONVOISIN (cfr file PDG)."


Godbille did far more here than confirm Violet's closeness to de Bonvoisin. First of all he repeated the previous claims that Violet was a senior agent of the Vatican. He also stated that Violet not only was involved in running Belgium's fascist underground, which was largely overseen by Bougerol, de Bonvoisin and Vanden Boeynants through their PIO intelligence group, but also that he was in contact with similar subversive elements in France (the Service d'Action Civique, or SAC) and Italy (P2). Of course, those who have read the article on Le Cercle will find no surprises here. PIO and its successor, the European Institute of Management, like Cercle des Nations, have been tied to extreme child abuse. EIM had additional ties to Wackenhut, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the rabidly anti-communist Moony cult.

Violet's Pinay Cercle actually appears to have been a continuation of the most reactionary pro-fascist forces in France and Great Britain who were active at the time of World War II. Two key French members of the Cercle, Jean Violet and Georges Albertini, were tied to the notorious "Synarchie" movement. Sir Peter Tennant from Britain, a banker who chaired a number of early meetings of the Cercle, had a close relative, Sir Ernest Tennant, who as a leading light in the Anglo-German Fellowship and a good friend of Hitler's ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, had tried to bring about an anti-communist Anglo-German alliance. Sir Frederik Bennett, a close associate of the British Cercle leadership, had a father who was a member of the secretive, subversive and highly anti-semitic Right Club. [2] More child abuse accusations
Baron de Bonvoisin was accused by two witnesses in the X-Dossiers of child abuse: X1 and X2. These actually are not the only accusations. [update: person wishes to remain

Photocopy of relevant document. Event written down in Dutch. anonymous], has been in the possession of four brief summaries of witness testimonies about child abuse. De Bonvoisin's name comes up in three of them. Here's a rather familiar sounding excerpt:

"Event: Witness her husband, who has passed away, received an invitation for a party at a castle in the neighborhood of ATH. Former minister DESCAMPS and Baron de BONVOISIN were present there. At a certain point children of approximately 10 years of age were brought in. These were then abused by the guests present. The husband of the witness
didn't know this would happen and left the place because he didn't want to participate … Date of the event: About 4 years ago."


"Descamps" is a reference to the liberal politician Pierre Descamps, whose political allies were questionable figures as Jean Gol (partouser at Les Atrebates, together with Nihoul; X2 stated she had attended a meeting at the Hilton between Madani Bouhouche's spouse (husband of an alleged abuser), Paul Vanden Boeynants (alleged abuser), Wilfried Martens (alleged abuser), Guy Delvoie (alleged abuser who partied with Lippens and Davignon), Nihoul (alleged abuser) and Jean Gol) and Jean Militis (special forces col.; CEPIC; PRL member of parliament; named as a coup plotter along with Vanden Boeynants), and reportedly also was a friend of the notorious gang leader Patrick Haemers. Descamps was born in ATH, a Belgian municipality located in the Walloon province of Hainaut, in the West of the country. He was appointed a honorary Minister of State in 1973.

The following excerpt of a similar summary brings up another familiar element in child abuse cases involving high-placed persons: intimidation of victim-witnesses and investigators.

"The witness points out several people implicated in various affairs. She informs us that she already shared what she knew with the PJ [Judicial Police] of NAMUR [Namen].. She says to us that she received threats on behalf of examining magistrate MAROTTE of the NAMUR District Attorney's office. She seems to know an enormous amount of things, but doesn't want the NAMUR District Attorney's office to handle the information. The PJ [Judicial Police] warned her over what she said. A gendarme of the BSR [Special Investigations Unit of the Gendarmerie] of NAMUR, Daniel PETIT, would have liked to help her but he feared for his family and his job. She gives us a series of names: ..." [3]

One of the names this witness mentioned was Philippe Cryns, owner of the aristocratic Mirano club. In the 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' article we discussed how child abuse parties would have taken place here in the 1980s involving Baron de Bonvoisin and other notables.

In another document (see document 2 at note 2 under 'sources') a witness spoke about "pink ballets" - normally a reference to parties where children are abused - at which de Bonvoisin, Frans Reyniers, and Guy Spitaels were present. Reyniers was a controversial Brussels police commissioner who in the early 1980s was a "partouzer" at Les Atrebates, together with Michel Nihoul. He also went to the Jonathan, a club loaded with members of the fascist underground. Reyniers has been a close associate of police commissioner Georges Marnette and police officer Yves Zimmer. The trio Reyniers-Marnette-Zimmer, centrally located in Brussels, has been accused of aiding numerous cover ups, from the Gang of Nijvel, to Group G, and the X-Dossiers. Both Marnette and Zimmer have been accused of child abuse (actually, Zimmer has only been seen at the wrong places with the wrong people). Interestingly, Zimmer was head of the sexual abuse department of the Brussels police from 1982 to 1987. Guy Spitaels was a socialist politician and vice prime minister under Wilfried Martens (accused of child abuse) from 1979 to 1981. In the late 1980s his nickname was "God" because of his dominant influence in government. His political career came to an abrupt end in the early 1990s after accusations that he was involved in the Agusta scandal. He would later be convicted of "passive corruption" in this affair. From 1977 to 1997 Spitaels was the mayor of ATH.

"The Organization"
Among the documents received by ISGP also was a police report about the Haemers Gang, which was involved in a number of high profile robberies throughout the 1980s, starting in 1981. Leaders of the gang were Patrick Haemers and his father Achiel.

It was only in January 1989 that the Haemers Gang really received national and international notoriety when it kidnapped former prime minister Paul Vanden Boeynants. At first it was reported that Vanden Boeynants had been kidnapped by the "Socialist Revolutionary Brigade", which no one had ever heard of, and the equally peculiar "Fighting Communist Cells" [4]. Only in the weeks and months after the kidnapping it turned out that the Haemers Gang was behind the affair. Michel Vander Elst, the gang's lawyer after their arrest, later was convicted for having provided false alibis for the gang members and even for having been the coordinator of the kidnapping. [5] Looking back at Vanden Boeynants's long involvement in all kinds of illegal anti-communist and anti-socialist intelligence operations, including false flag terrorism and gangsterism, this

Partial photocopy of the Haemers document. The original language is Dutch, by this author considered a welcome deviation of the usual French. can be considered a highly curious kidnapping; also because Vanden Boeynants knew his captors [6] and was under almost continuous investigation for forgery, tax evasion, corruption, and what not. Over the years many have suspected that the kidnapping was some sort of staged event, but the exact details have never come out. This new police report, based on information from an informant close to the Haemers Gang, adds a very important detail: namely that there was some kind of "organization" with "dangerous political ideas" behind the kidnapping and used the Haemers Gang to carry it out. According to this informant, the lawyer Michel Vander Elst, the alleged mastermind behind the kidnapping, actually
was only an intermediary between the Haemers Gang and this unknown organization. The police report:


"Between mid January '89 and February (before 14 February '89) there has been contact between the HAEMERS family (Achiel, Lilis and Bobonne) and Patrick HAEMERS, Denise TYACK and Kevin. This happened somewhere at a chateau, outside Paris (probably QARTRES). ... During the conversation with his father Patrick told him that he was behind the VDB case. ... Patrick would have told Achiel that he worked for an "organization" and that he was well compensated for his services. The "organization" would pay the rent of the apartments and they needn't worry about anything. The organization would consist of influential people and has their own doctor and lawyers. They would have dangerous political ideas and Patrick described them as "the dangerous mad men". ... The contact between the "organization" and the gang around HAEMERS is a lawyer, a certain VANDER ELST... In any case Patrick feels he's super-protected by this organization. - According to the informant, VDB would also have ties to this organization and his kidnapping has possibly been staged. In any case VDB is well acquainted with his kidnappers. ... Eric HAEMERS would know more about the organization, but would be afraid to speak about it."

The name Michel Vander Elst may sound familiar to those who have read 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair'. This is the person who provided Michel Nihoul, Dutroux's (alleged) associate in the kidnapping of children, with an alibi; an alibi which later on turned out to be incorrect. Vander Elst is also among the persons pointed out by X1 who, along with Nihoul, is said to have abused, tortured and murdered a number of children. Vander Elst's law office was located in the same building as the apartment of Vanden Boeynants [7], a person with similar accusations against his person.

"The Nebula"
Vander Elst's name also popped up in an internal confidential report of BSR (Special Investigations Unit of the Gendarmerie) investigators to Belgium's top magistrates and gendarmerie officers. The report, dated November 21, 1994, was part of the ATLAS Dossier, a case opened in the summer of 1994 after the collapse of a company named Commerciale et Minière d'Uele (Comuele).

The immediate history of the Comuele affair goes back to 1990 when two members of the Russian mafia, Boris Nayfeld and Riccardo Fanchini, set up the "import-export" firm M&S International in Antwerp. Nayfeld, a top figure in the Russian mafia in New York, had just fled to Belgium because the American authorities were closing in on his illegal operations. Riccardo Fanchini was a gangster originally from Poland. He would soon become a top Russian mafia boss with close ties to President Boris Jeltsin. The Ukrainian gangster Rachmiel "Mike" Brandwain, who had a wealth of experience in arms, gold and diamond smuggling, became the managing director of M&S.

In 1992, the real estate firm Comuele, headed by Bruno Goldberger and Arthur Fogel (not the tour producer of Madonna and U2), took a controlling interest in M&S International. According to the ATLAS Dossier, Comuele at this point was controlled by a shady group of Russian and Israeli financiers, who had been brought in by Bruno Goldberger with the help of Maurice Tempelsman, a Belgian-American diamond merchant who had a long relationship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Despite the injection of capital from the east, Comuele began to collapse in the summer of 1994, leading to the exposure of the Comuele-M&S ties to the Russian mafia.

The ATLAS document is specifically focused on a person with the name Felix Przedborski and the network he controls. According to the authors of the ATLAS document, Przedborski is a mafia boss with a double nationality, Belgian and Costa Rican. His group, allegedly controlling some 7 billion dollars in assets in the early 1990s, would be involved in the trafficking of diamonds, arms, narcotics, and nuclear material, and would have considerable influence over a number of politicians in Belgium and the European Union. Przedborski's group would literally control a number of multinationals through which it launders large amounts of funds. General Electric, Alcatel, the Schneider Group, and Lyonnaise des Eaux are among the multinationals named in the document. The authors specifically wondered why Przedborski, whom they stated had been caught trafficking nuclear materials with the Chinese in 1956 (and was released after Konrad Adenauer intervened), by the 1990s was Costa Rica's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

The ATLAS document clearly indicates that elements in the Israeli government and intelligence are involved in what is described as Przedborski's "Nebula". We cite:

"Around 1983, PRZEDBORSKI would have hired a MOSSAD Colonel for his own safety and that of his group. ... "Later, this Colonel would have accepted the proposal to leave the MOSSAD and put his entire team at the service of PRZEDBORSKI.

The Mossad played a key role in both Iran Contra and in Felix Przedborski's "Nebula".
"This Colonel would have ... trained members of the CONTRAS as well as those of the CALI CARTEL...

"It is said that some weapons of IRANGATE would have been transferred to the CONTRAS of NICARAGUA by this network. (It appears that on this matter PRZEDBORSKI would have called an American president by his first name)."

The Iran-Contra affair, or Irangate, was the result of decades-long U.S. support for the Shah of Iran. When the Shah's regime collapsed in 1979, David Rockefeller and associates
convinced Carter to allow the Shah refuge in the United States [8], leading to an acute and strong anti-American feeling in Iran, not only with the Ayatollah but also with the general population. Iranian radicals seized the American embassy while the Iranian leadership began to sponsor and train Hezbollah, an Islamic paramilitary organization in Lebanon which soon also began to take American hostages.

After the first hostages had been taken, members of the U.S. government - often through
Israel - began to negotiate arms shipments to supposedly pro-Western factions in Iran and the Iranian government. The idea was that these factions would negotiate the release of hostages. These "arms-for-hostages" deals proved unsuccessful, however, as new hostages would be taken as soon as a previous group had been released. Eventually these secret arms shipments were exposed, leading to the Iran aspect of the Iran-Contra affair.

The Contras came in when Oliver North and his associates at the National Security Council decided to use the proceeds of the Iranian arms sales to supply the Contras of Nicaragua with weapons. Clandestine U.S. involvement in aiding the contras had been forbidden by the Boland Acts of of 1982-1984, so when the arms to Iran scandal broke in 1986 this automatically evolved into the Iran-Contra affair.

Iran-Contra was much more complex and sinister than illegally supplying arms to both Iran and the Contras. First of all, U.S. officials labeling the Contras as "freedom fighters" or even as "anti-communists" is misleading, as their daily operations consisted of terrorizing the population by brutally torturing and murdering villagers at random, including women and young children. Although the Sandinista opposition may not have been a whole lot better, the fact that the United States, in cooperation with the Israelis, were actively arming and training these Contras shows the inhumane nature of the members of this cabal. The group's involvement in drug trafficking should not be surprising then. The CIA and its allies allowed the Contras to ship huge amounts of cocaine into the United States and sell it to mafia families in New York, Los Angeles, Texas, Miami, and a number of other places. The proceeds of these sales allowed the
Anastasio Somoza, whose family almost continually ruled Nicaragua from 1936 to 1980. His brutal dictatorship was supported by anti-communist reactionaries in the United States. When Carter withdrew support for Somoza, the Israelis - again - were used to keep Somoza's dictatorship afloat - an effort which failed. Somoza lost to the far-left Sandinista forces. The Contra terrorist units, trained and funded by the Israelis and the forces behind Reagan, were largely composed of former Somoza supporters. According to John DeCamp, among Somoza's business partners was Roberto Alejos Arzu, who is said to have been involved in procuring of children for pedophile networks. [35] Arzu's biography certainly fits this accusation. Arzu was an extreme right CIA asset, a Knight of Malta, involved with the Knights of Malta-run Americares and Covenant House (tied to a major abuse scandal), involved in the Guatemalan death squad killings (including the murder of Covenant House employees who tried to clean up the institution, together with a number of children), and reportedly sent the children of the plantation workers he killed to "local charities". His plantation at one point was used by the CIA to train Cubans for the Bay of Pigs invasion. [36]
Contras to buy (third-rate) arms and other supplies from the United States. The CIA recruited Manuel Noriega in Panama as an intermediary in a lot of the drug trafficking. [9]

The Israelis played a major role in the whole Iran-Contra affair. They were used as an intermediary to sell the arms to Iran. They also supported the United States in training the Contras, and apparently also in shipping the drugs and assassinating those who tried to expose these schemes. The accusations in the ATLAS document that the Mossad was

Costa Rica's central location in Central America. training the Contras and members of the Cali Cartel while protecting friendly drug dealers as Felix Przedborski do not stand on their own then. In fact, the ATLAS document appears to lay bare the seldom discussed Belgian-Costa Rican aspect of the whole Contra affair.

Costa Rica sits right in between Nicaragua in the north, where the Contras were fighting the Sandinista government, and Panama in the South, where General Noriega was supporting the United States in shipping the drugs from South and Central America to the United States. It is already known that Israeli special forces as
Colonel Leo Gleser were operating out of Honduras, to the north of Nicaragua (in cooperation with the "Secret Team" or "the Enterprise" from the United States), and that General Noriega's right hand man in running the drugs and arms was the Israeli Mossad officer (and former assassin) Mike Harari. [10] Costa Rica has largely been ignored, but it is known that this country was used by the United States as a staging ground for anti-Contra special operations. It is also known that drugs coming from Columbia in some cases went through Costa Rica before ending up in the United States. President of Costa Rica throughout the Contra operations was Luis Alberto Monge, who in the ATLAS document is described as a friend of Felix Przedborski. The ATLAS document further alleges that Przedborski's group imported weapons from Belgium and, once again, had the Contras pay for them with drugs - heroin in this case. These weapons apparently would have come from Fabrique National [11] and ASCO, two very interesting companies.

In January 1986 the Belgian fascist Juan Mendez was shot dead, apparently by a member of the fascist-pedophile underground earlier described in 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair'.
Mendez was a sales director at Fabrique National (FJ). His Peruvian predecessor, a person with the name Carlos Davilla del Pielago, had fled Belgium after it had been found out that he worked for the CIA and was involved in illegal arms and drug trafficking. In the weeks before his death, Mendez himself had been interrogated about his connection to Douglas Stowell, a rich American businessman who apparently was working for or with the CIA in the Iran-Contra operation. [12] Mendez had been groomed by Madani Bouhouche - the person who apparently murdered him - as a member of a group that some day was to conduct a terror-extortion campaign against warehouses as part of an effort to destabilize the Belgian state. Just as interesting, according to his friends and family, some time before his death Mendez had informed them that he had been invited to join some kind of clandestine group that was gathering data on political adversaries to be used during and after a coup. [13] In other words, the claim that Fabrique National was part of Przedborski's network is not at all far-fetched.

The other company, ASCO, featured quite prominently in the testimonies of X1. Let's recap a portion of 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair':

"The factory" X1 regularly spoke about (see above) was a location, where besides regular abuse, snuff movies were shot. Vanden Boeynants' private driver Henri Bil, Baron de Bonvoisin, Annie Bouty, Michel Nihoul, Tony,
Just amazing: the person who provided Nihoul with an alibi (later proven false) for the day he was named as an aide in the kidnapping of one of Dutroux's victims, not only had been involved in the kidnapping of former prime minister Paul Vanden Boeynants, but according to the ATLAS document, had a father who was the lawyer of "Nebula" leader Felix Przedborski (not to mention the lawyer of the Grand Orient Lodge and a personal counselor to King Albert II). Vander Elst, Jr. was pointed out as a child abuser by X1 two years after the ATLAS dossier was written (she also put him at ASCO). Another report had previously mentioned Vander Elst, Jr. as an intermediary between the Haemers gang and an unknown but very influential political group consisting of "dangerous madmen".
the controversial lawyer Michel Vander Elst, former prime minister Wilfried Martens, examining magistrate Melchior Wathelet and lawyer Jean-Paul Dumont apparently all went to the ASCO factory to torture and abuse children. (270). In November 1996, X1 took the investigators to the location she had described. On arrival, it turned out that the witness had been talking about the ASCO factory, located just outside Brussels. The description she had given matched, and coincidentally, ASCO was (and is) owned by the Boas family, which used to be close friends and business partners of the late Paul Vanden Boeynants (271). X1 mentioned having seen a "Roger" (272) at the factory, apparently the head of the Boas family who used to be a member CEPIC and Cercle des Nations."


Isn't it just amazing how a lot of the same names keep coming up? According to the ATLAS document, the following persons were involved in illegally shipping weapons to Iran and Central America:

"a) Andre COOLS
- Assassinated former Belgian minister
b) Roger BOAS (ASCO company)
c) Abraham SHAVIT
- Right hand of Roger BOAS
- Personal friend of Israeli minister BEGIN
- It is known that Andre Cools stayed at Shavit's when he went to ISRAEL
d) Guy MATHOT
- Former Belgian minister
e) Paul VANDENBOEYNANTS
- Former Belgian minister and prime minister
f) Fernand BEAURIR
- Former Gendarmerie commandant of Belgium"

Back in 2006 and 2007 when 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' was written, ISGP had already stumbled across reports that Israeli general Efraim Poran, a businessman and military liaison officer for prime ministers Menachem Begin (PM 1977-1983) and Yitzchak Rabin (PM 1974-1977 and 1992-1995), used to be a board member of ASCO. Nothing was done with these reports because they were not particularly authorative and because there appeared to be no real Israeli connection to the things described in 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair'. Next to Poran, there was however one other hint to the possible involvement of the Israelis in this network. This was escort madam Fortunato Israel, a mistress of Roger Boas who ran a prostitution network for the rich, including Belgian royals, Arab princes, and men working for international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. But again the connection to Israel was weak. She had occasionally been mentioned as someone closely tied to interests in Israel, but these connections appear not to have been investigated in any detail. The ATLAS document now mentions Abraham Shavit, and again it is ASCO that supplies the Israeli link. Shavit was a manager of ASCO at the time of Iran Contra. Besides his ties

Oliver North, apparently never far away in this type of business. to the Israeli government and Belgian minister Andre Cools, Shavit has been described as a friend and associate of Portuguese arms dealer Manuel J. Pires. [14] This Pires, who "handled secret CIA arms transfers to Angola, and later to both Iran and Iraq", [15] worked with the infamous Lt. Col. Oliver North during the Iran Contra scheme. [16]

Incredibly, not only have the Belgians that were involved in Iran Contra been accused of child abuse (Boas, Mathot, Vanden Boeynants and Beaurir), but North and his employer, vice president and later president George Bush, were uncomfortably close to the Franklin child abuse affair in the United States. Both were mentioned by witnesses as having attended the parties of alleged
child abuser, Satanist, Contra supporter, money launderer and drug dealer Lawrence E. "Larry" King. [17] Another Contra supporter and alleged child abuser, Robert Keith Gray, was also close to Bush, North and King. [18]

The ATLAS document also reported that both the "Przedborski Group" and the Belgian arms traffickers tied to the ASCO factory - Paul Vanden Boeynants, Roger Boas and
Abraham Shavit - used the Republic National Bank, and its owner Edmond Safra in particular, to launder some of their funds. The Mossad would have used the same conduit. [19]

Safra, a member of Syrian-Jewish banking family, certainly had impeccable connections to the Zionist intelligence network, a network going back to the days of the Haganah and its Sonneborn "institute" in the United States. A number of sources have referred to Safra's controversial banking associates and have named him as a major money launderer for Russian and Eastern European mafias. [20] Back in 1989, newspapers reported that, "massive money-laundering investigations spanning four continents have intersected through a single account at Republic National Bank of New York. That account appears to link Colombian cocaine money, Mideast heroin profits and a criminal enterprise run by the Bulgarian secret service." [21] Safra's reputation survived these investigations, but during the late 1990s he reportedly became so worried about the FBI closing in on his illegal activities that he allowed the bureau to monitor some of the funds moving through his bank. [22] The banker died under suspicious circumstances in December 1999, amidst claims that he had been murdered for giving evidence to the FBI and Swiss prosecutors concerning the diversion of a $4.8 billion IMF
The somewhat controversial banker Edmond Safra. A member of the Board of Overseers of B'nai B'rith International in the 1980s, together with Edgar M. Bronfman (chair) and Max Fisher (highest level connections in the US and Israeli governments), he was a prominent Zionist. Like his friend Robert Maxwell he had close connections to both the Russian and Eastern European mafias and Israeli intelligence. The ATLAS document's allegation that his bank was used by the Mossad and Israeli Iran-Contra traffickers is not a big surprise then.
loan to stabilize Russia's economy. [23] Interestingly, Safra had a fall-out with the notorious Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky just weeks before his death. The meeting apparently had shaken Safra to such an extent that he fled in panic to his heavily fortified Monte Carlo residence [24], where he would soon be killed in a fire. Safra was a member of the 1001 Club of Prince Bernhard and Prince Philip. [25] And in February 2004 the London Evening Standard reported that, "it was the super-well-connected Jacob Rothschild who helped introduce the billionaire widow of banker Edward Safra, Lily, to Prince Charles, and helped establish her in London." [26]


This is where people die
In 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' ISGP created a separate list of Belgiums tied to controversial affairs who have died under suspicious circumstances. There are no less than 48 people on the list, and includes the earlier-discussed gang leader Patrick Haemers who hung himself in prison in 1993. Even Jean Denis Lejeune, father of one of the girls Dutroux murdered, stated:

"As if by coincidence people die. There is no explanation for their deaths. For instance, they are victims of a deadly traffic accident just when they are under way to testify. Or one finds their charred bodies. Our judiciary apparently doesn't have sleepless nights over this." [27]

Going through the ATLAS document you realize the same thing: a lot of people die under suspicious circumstances in these circles. Examples are the politician Andre Cools, who was murdered; mafia businessman Mike Brandwain - assassinated; former French vice-prime minister Pierre Beregovoy - suicide; Edmond Safra - died in a fire. There also was the report of an unnamed person who, "would have committed suicide by jumping off the 47th floor of a New York building". The ATLAS document elaborates that it would actually have been wealthy diamond trader Joseph Kaszyrer who would have given the order for this assassination.

It is possible to see the same pattern of suspicious deaths in other countries where really big, criminal interests are threatened. Names that come to mind at this moment are Frank Nugan (murdered), Salem Bin Laden (plane crash), Senator John Tower (plane crash), Danny Casolaro (suicide), Robert Maxwell (drowning accident), Maxwell's associates Sasho Danchev and Peter Boychev (suicide), John O'Neill (died on 9/11; chief investigator of anti-terrorist and mafia networks, including those of Safra and Bin Laden), and Daniel Pearl (murdered; investigated ISI ties to 9/11). Senator John DeCamp noted, "From late 1988, when the Franklin case first broke into public view, until mid-1991, at least 15 people associated with the case as investigators, alleged perpetrators, or potential witnesses, died sudden deaths, many of them violent." [28] His friend, the former CIA director William Colby, warned him to get off the case or risk being killed too. [29] DeCamp followed his friend's advice, and it actually was Colby who died under mysterious circumstances in April 1996. These strange deaths could also be seen in the 1975-1976 period at the time of the Church Committee hearings when half a dozen mafia bosses and associates suspected of involvement in the Kennedy murder all died one after another. [30] Another notorious case is the "Clinton deaths". Although the idea of Clinton's involvement in these 40-some deaths, including Vince Foster and the teenagers Kevin Ives and Don Henry, has been promoted by America's ultraconservative right-wing and are likely not true, the fact remains that many of these deaths were extremely suspicious. They surrounded big interests as illegal drug imports and the Promis affair.

One particularly interesting case in relation to this article is the one of Colonel Edward P. Cutolo, a special forces officer who wrote an affidavit claiming he was part of a team that secured drug trafficking operations from Columbia to Noriega's Panama, from where these drugs were shipped to the United States. Cutolo claimed these operations were overseen by Edwin Wilson, Wilson's superior Thomas Clines (representing "the Enterprise", or the U.S. side of Contra operations'; Clines in turn was a deputy to Ted Shackley, head of the Secret Team and a highest level player in the CIA drug trade), and Mossad agents David Kimche and Mike Harari. The latter was Noriega's right hand. In his affidavit Cutolo claimed that one of his associates, Colonel Robert Bayard, had been assassinated by Kimche and Harari (the latter a known assassin). He announced to investigate these two Israeli officials in more detail. Cutolo wrote the affidavit in March 1980; in May 1980 he died in a car crash in England. About half a dozen people who came into the possession of the affidavit also died under strange circumstances. [31]

Concluding summary
Iran-Contra, which is what the ATLAS document largely comes down to, is just one of many scandals tied to the same international network of conspirators, consisting of anti-communist military and intelligence men, pro-Zionist neoconservatives, arms dealers, bankers, businessmen, mafia organizations, diplomats, etc. Examples of scandals tied to this network are the collapse of the Nugan Hand Bank in 1980, the October Surprise in 1981, Iran Contra in 1986, the collapse of the Franklin Credit Union in 1988, the Craig Spence affair in 1989, Iraqgate in 1990, and the BCCI scandal in 1991.

It was during the BCCI scandal that senior executives of the bank actually gave a name to this network. They referred to it as the "black network", and made sure not to elaborate too much on it. The influence of this "black network" turned out to be so pervasive that even the official investigators of the scandal suspected they had been put under surveillance by this network, which was described as a "a global intelligence operation [with] a Mafia-like enforcement squad". [32] Only a handful of reporters ever reported on this black network. Among the exceptions was Jack R. Payton, editor of the St. Petersburg Times, who in October 1992 wrote:

"Well I've just finished slogging through a 794-page government report on the scandal, and believe me it's even worse than I thought. Much worse...

"Consider, for a moment, what it might mean to have an organization around that could pull off the following: Manipulate the Central Intelligence Agency and the spy agencies of Britain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, China, Syria, Israel and who knows how many others all at the same time...; Help Pakistan buy nuclear technology on the international black market...; Launder drug money for the Medellin cocaine cartel in Colombia; Bankroll Abu Nidal, the most notorious terrorist in the world; Handle Manuel Noriega's finances in Panama; Procure prostitutes, some of them children, for traveling Middle Eastern potentates; Rig international commodity markets so that a few insiders could make hundreds of millions of dollars in a single day; Intimidate potential opponents to the point that they feared for their lives. There's a lot more, but you get the idea...

"This is scary enough as it is. The reason we may never know is that as thorough as the Senate investigation may have been, it didn't have access to reams of information that could shed more light on BCCI. The CIA has several hundred reports on BCCI but allowed the subcommittee to look at only three of them. British authorities also have a stockpile of information on BCCI they won't make available because it was classified by British intelligence, MI-5...

"But despite the years of investigation, the arrests and confiscations, even the Senate subcommittee had to admit that we may never know the full extent of BCCI's crimes, how many top politicians it bribed or if it really had a so-called "black network'' of assassins who would eliminate anyone who got in its way.

"Even so, what we do know about BCCI is mind-boggling. It's also incredibly complicated - as the Senate subcommittee itself admits, almost beyond comprehension." [33]

A few years after the reports on this black network, the Comuele scandal in Belgian broke out. After an elaborate investigation, gendarmerie investigators working on the ATLAS dossier, wrote:

"To comprehend this nebula, it is necessary to abandon traditional financial or political logic; this is not merely a question of nation, political party, or of ordinary economics.

"Our conclusion would be that at least over the last twenty years, the economic powers, some of which mafia types, have allied themselves with political forces and organized criminal structures, and reached the 4th stage of money laundering, namely, Absolute Power.

"It has been specified to us that at the present moment these characters control 50% of the world economy. ...

"One should not lose sight of the fact that this nebula would control the majority of the financial traffic, as well as the highest political leaders, worldwide.

"This same structure could, if it wanted, put pressure on the most important cities of this world, controlling in each one almost everything (energy, communications, provisioning of water, environment....) ... in order to impose itself, its strategy has been to use corruption, and has done so for many years."

Powerful words. Both the BCCI and the ATLAS report talk about very powerful international networks involved in drug trafficking, the procuring of child prostitutes (indirectly in the case of ATLAS), the use of terrorists [34], the smuggling of nuclear materials, and massive money laundering. Both reports also concluded that these networks are extremely complex, very hard to understand, and just as hard to fight. We all heard the rumors, the "conspiracy theories"; but now it slowly begins to seem as if important police and judicial reports that can confirm the existence of above-government, criminal networks are locked away in national security archives around the world. We definitely need to find ways to get these files out.
Last edited by chiggerbit on Fri Oct 30, 2009 3:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
chiggerbit
 
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Postby chiggerbit » Fri Oct 30, 2009 3:01 pm

http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php ... 96.20;wap2

....THOUSAND POINTS OF LIGHT?

Perhaps you have seen the recent commercials by former CIA President Bush promoting his charity as honorary chairman. Few people remember that he gave his original Thousand Points of Light at Covenant House in NYC on June 22, 1989.

Ironcally, only one week later the Wahington Times headline about Craig Spence read : " Homosexual Prostitution Inquiry Ensnares VIPS with Reagan,
Bush "(June 29,1989).

The founding director of this New York-based charity for homeless children, Father Bruce Ritter, was a favorite of the Reagan administrtion. Reagan even gave him an award in the White House. Eventually he resigned in disgrace for paying a male teenage prostitute for sex out of the funds contributred to his $100 million charity for homeless children.

Ironically, Sister Mary McGready attended this recent White House ceremony to publicize te President's concern for abused and neglected children. She succeeded Ritter and worked hard to remove the moral stain he left on Covenant House whose Board of Directors were strongly linked to te CIA and the Knights of Malta. These directors included WR Grace who ran Project Paperclip for the CIA. He was a Knght of Malta, and as was William Simon, the Nixon Republican.

All these facts are relevant to the child sex ring organized by Covenant House in Guatamala with the help of the Connecticut based Americares whose Board of Directors included Barbara Bush and Prescott Bush, the brother.

I am saving the best part for last to demonstrate that there are many reasonable leads to follow to connect the dots and identify this national pedophile network.

THE FRIENDS OF FATHER RITTER

The story of Father Ritter's rise and fall is told in Broken Covenant (1992) by Charles Sennott, who is now to the best of my knowledge a London-based reporter for the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times. Ritter tried to set up a Covenant House in the Combat Zone of Boston with the support of then Cardinal Medeiros. However, eventually he was thwarted by a combination of factors, including Sister Barbara Whelan who wanted to know why her kids in crisis program was underfunded.

The only Boston reporter willing to suggest that the Boston pedophile priest story had wider implications was Boston Herald columnist, Howie Carr. He called
loudly for Cardinal Law to resign while slamming the way church authorities allowed Shanley to continue molesting children. He noted that Shanley was chosen to succeed Dr. Frank Pilecki as director of the Leo House, a Catholic youth hostel in NYC- in Manhattan where Covenant House was based.

Another source reported that they had met at McLean Hospital in Boston area where Shanley was the chaplain and Pilecki, then President of Westfield State University, was a patient recovering from allegations of molesting two male college students.

Mr. Carr also mentioned that Dr. Pilecki was a good friend of Father Ritter. The question reporters in Boston and across the country should be asking and investigating is: Did Shanley and Ritter know each other?

Unfortunately, the acerbic Mr. Carr did not go far enough, because as reported by Charles Sennott, another good friend of Ritter was Robert Macauley, the founding director of Americares. This fact is significant because Macauley was the roommate of former CIA President George Bush at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and his classmate at Yale. Do you think they were good friends?

Ritter was a frequent guest at Mcauley's estate in Connecticut, a state that is, in my experience, very friendly to pedophiles. I know for a fact that the best friend of an accused pedophile linked to this network
is a physics professor at Amherst College, not far from
Westfield in western Massachusetts.

Macauley was also on Board of Directors of Covenant
House which was organized as Casa Alianza in Guatamala to house the orphans whose parents were killed by the CIA linked right wing death squads. The new director at Casa Alianza, Bruce Harris, has waged
a brave battle to remove the pedophiles who had gatered like vultures.

Whatever award Father Ritter was given by President Reagan is much more richly deserved by Bruce Harris.
Will President Bush acknowledge him?

CURRENT STATUS OF OMAHA BASED PEDOPHILE RING?

Not likely. Instead President Bush has greeted Father Val Peter at the White House to promote his 'faith-based initiative', the idea embodied by the sex pervert, Father Ritter. Val Peter, as head of Boystown and head of its Board of Directors facilitated Larry King's access to its finances and his children. He did this with the help of Wall street billionaire, Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway is based in Omaha.

Buffett was also good friends with Larry King- hosting a party to celebrate his 10th wedding anniversary. Another good friend of Buffett recently appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine.

911/FRANKLIN COVERUP

You should read this July 2002 issue and try to grasp how the political forces promoting a pedophile agenda
are the very same who launched the high tech company of L-3 Communications which built the computer communications system for GLOBAL HAWK, the remote control technology that more and mre people believe was responsible for directing the 911 attack.

The man on the Fortune cover, Walter Scott, Jr., was,
until recently, a longtime member of the Creighton University Board of Directors. Did he know Dr. Cassem
or his family?

OFFUTT AFB

Creighton University also has a working relationship with the nearby Offutt Air Force Base only 15 miles from Omaha. Paul Bonacci has testified that he was
abused at Offutt AFB where the satanist Lt Col Michael Aquino has been accused by others of carrying out brutal torture and mind control experiments.

Why wasn't Mr. Bonacci invited to the White House
to talk about missing and exploited children? It may be the greatest of ironies that President Bush was flown to Offutt AFB for safe keeping on 911. That is our SAC command center. I do not imagine that Paul woul feel safe there or at the White House....

If you are distubed by these facts and allegations, as I am, please, do what you can to investigate them further. How else can we save our children?
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Re: Covenant House

Postby conniption » Tue Jun 18, 2013 6:10 am

from a different thread:
MinM » Mon May 27, 2013 11:44 am wrote:

Monday, May 27, 2013
CIA'S 'CHRISTIAN' FACTION; AMERICARES, PEDOPHILE RINGS, WOOLWICH, BIN LADEN
Image
AmeriCares has been linked to child abuse rings and death squads.

Reportedly, Christian Charities are often fronts for:

CIA child abuse rings,

CIA terrorist activities

And CIA attempts to keep the rich elite in power...

http://aangirfan.blogspot.com/2013/05/c ... cares.html


*


Russ Baker

A Thousand Points of Blight (January 8, 1991)

THE VILLAGE VOICE

January 8, 1991

A Thousand Points of Blight

ArmeriCares, George Bush’s Favorite Charity, Dispenses Bitter

Medicine Around the World

By Russ W. Baker


Three days after Thanksgiving, when planes from AmeriCares, the private Connecticut-based relief organization, landed in Moscow, the American networks were there to gush as crates of medical supplies and food were unloaded. Each box bore the words, “To the Soviet people from the people of the United States-with love,” a slogan even the Soviet television cameras lingered over, as the crates were lowered onto the tarmac by Russian soldiers and students. It was another media triumph for Robert Macauley’s fast-growing charity empire.

This was not AmeriCares’s first venture in the Soviet Union. In 1988, when the devastating earthquake struck Soviet Armenia, burying thousands under a sea of rubble, the USSR, for the first time ever, accepted significant amounts of foreign relief assistance. First on hand with aid was a Southern Air Transport plane, whose cargo bays opened to reveal the prominent red, white, and blue AmeriCares logo. On Christmas Eve, after flying in three large shipments of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, AmeriCares played Santa Claus, bringing in 100,000 pounds of medicines, toys, blankets, and other items designated specifically for children. That time, each package was labeled, in Armenian: “From the kids of the United States to the kids of Armenia, with love.” The airlift into the region-the scene of considerable anti-Soviet unrest-was accompanied by Jeb Bush, the president’s son, and grandson George P. Bush. For his efforts in Armenia, AmeriCares founder and chairman Robert Macauley was named ABC News’s “Person of the Week.”

Unhindered by red tape, and with U.S. military and corporate largesse at its disposal, AmeriCares gets to earthquake scenes almost before the plates stop rattling. Time and again, American television makes Robert Macauley the star of the moment, a balding, preppy Mother Teresa. And, wherever AmeriCares goes, there’s often a Bush on board, whether it’s George, or one of his sons or grandsons. When AmeriCares sent 250,000 pounds of food and medicines to provinces in rebellion against the Marxist Ethiopian government in 1985, the then vice-president was in Khartoum with Macauley to meet the plane. Bush and Macauley turned up together again at a 1987 airport ceremony in Ecuador to recognize AmeriCares’s relief efforts following an earthquake there. Even the president’s personal physician, Burton J. Lee III, sits on the group’s medical advisory committee. (Macauley and President Bush are old, old friends, and their relationship dates as far back as kindergarten in Connecticut.)

A tidal wave of acclaim has made AmeriCares and Robert Macauley famous. People magazine raved that ” ‘Saint’ Bob Macauley applies the vision of an industrial magnate and the nerves of a corporate raider to helping the world’s poor” and photographed him with Mother Teresa. Reader’s Digest lovingly limned his devotion: Macauley, returning from a trip to Africa, “was sick from intestinal parasites,” the magazine said. “His doctor advised him to stay put. But workers in Honduras had sent him a needs list. So Macauley hopped on a plane and flew down. By the time he came home, he had malaria and pneumonia.” Time, The Atlantic, and a multitude of other publications joined the chorus. Not one of them bothered to take a deeper look at AmeriCares.

If they had, they might have noticed the disturbing way in which AmeriCares resembles a private foreign-policy operation of the U.S. government, and an agent abroad for some of America’s most powerful corporations. A six-month Voice investigation of the places AmeriCares goes, the type of aid it provides, and the players involved has raised questions as to the group’s ultimate agenda. Its founder, advisory committee, and benefactors are an unlikely bunch to be running a charity: They are almost exclusively powerful right-wingers with close ties to the intelligence community, president and ex-CIA director George Bush, and the most conservative elements of the Catholic church. They have been variously associated with coups, covert actions, military counterinsurgency operations, and groups dedicated to fighting reformist and progressive movements throughout the world.

The New Canaan, Connecticut, group’s proclaimed mission is to deliver medical supplies to needy people. But sometimes, it seems more interested in the needs of its corporate donors, many of whom give the charity unpopular or soon-to-expire medicines for which they get hefty tax write-offs. In one case, AmeriCares shipped more than one million doses of vaccine for haemophilus influenza-B to the Philippines on a U.S. Air Force plane. The vaccine’s distributor had first offered it to another relief organization, which turned it down after consulting with the Centers for Disease Control. (CDC officials said the drug wasn’t worth shipping-it had been designed for children 2 years and up, although haemophilus influenza-B, a fairly rare disease anyway, is most common in infants.) But Macauley’s charity was happy to dispose of it.

In the Philippines, though, the vaccine was angrily rejected. “We concluded it would not be good for our children,” says Dr. Linda Milan, chief of the Philippine health ministry’s Foreign Assistance Service. But AmeriCares insisted it be accepted. After much bickering, the charity was eventually forced to take the vaccine back to the States, where it was passed on to another relief group, SHARE, which has many board members in common with AmeriCares. SHARE shipped the vaccine to Mexico, where it was no more useful than it was in the Philippines. One aid official says that country accepted it because “the controls weren’t there.”

AmeriCares’s seeming indifference to the donation’s unsuitability characterizes many of its operations. Such an attitude wastes valuable resources and time in poverty-stricken countries, agree knowledgeable relief coordinators and U.S. officials. “They’ve sent some stuff that wasn’t acceptable,” says Bryant George, of the U.S. embassy’s relief office in Manila. “All they need to do is consult locally.”

AmeriCares president Stephen Johnson admits the Philippine minister of health raised questions about the vaccine. “We assumed he was disappointed it wasn’t consigned to him,” explains Johnson, noting that the Catholic lay order the Knights of Malta was the actual consignee.

AmeriCares’s worldwide mission is to deliver aid regardless of “race, religion, or political persuasion.” But the group often effectively contributes to armed conflicts that worsen the plight of the needy, takes sides in those clashes, and ships the vast majority of its goods into prime ideological battlefields. Much of the charity’s aid goes to Central America, but a sizeable portion is directed toward flashpoints in the decaying Soviet empire, including Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Armenia, and Poland. Meanwhile, many of the places that most critically need medical supplies but are not deemed of “strategic interest” to the U.S., especially in sub-Saharan Africa, have been virtually ignored by AmeriCares. In fiscal 1990, AmeriCares gave $17.8 million to newly emergent Poland but a scant $59,000 to Uganda, which, with its AIDS crisis, is experiencing one of the world’s worst medical emergencies.

Though AmeriCares gets most of its media mileage from high-profile disaster relief, 80 per cent of its supplies go to long-term “established health care programs,” according to Stephen Johnson. Much of the aid is channeled into war zones in Central America, an area of great interest to the White House.

Throughout the relief community, the politics of aid are much debated. Explaining why his group stayed out of Romania and Panama, two countries where AmeriCares helped bolster U.S. “interests,” Richard Walden of Operation California wrote in a relief publication that “both crises are intimately interlinked with current U.S. foreign policy objectives (in one case, a historical fantasy come true, the collapse of a Stalinist regime; in the other, a U.S.-as-cowboy shootout’s after-effects); both are media-genic tragedies beginning their recovery appeals; and both will countenance wholesale waste of supplies….” AmeriCares had no such qualms.

As a result, the whole AmeriCares agenda is questioned by many longtime relief workers and by a host of specialists who track groups with links to the U.S. intelligence apparatus. They view it as a classic example of how Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light,” like many of the right’s “answers” to grave social ills, is being used not so much to benefit the sick and needy, but the powerful few.

The most obvious of many things wrong with AmeriCares’s claim to offer “humanitarian” aid is the charity’s one-sided distribution of help-which hardly meets Geneva Convention standards. These require that aid be given impartially to all sides in a conflict and state that assistance to military forces cannot be considered “humanitarian.” (Stephen Johnson says he’s not sure the Geneva accords have any applicability in humanitarian-aid situations.) Certainly, some other aid organizations are guilty of bias-on the left as well as the right. But AmeriCares is way off the chart. In 1988, for example, it failed to provide assistance to Sandinista Nicaragua, which had just suffered a devastating hurricane. “Our information from the press was they did not want aid from the U.S.,” says Johnson. “We’re only going where we’re welcome.” But other American aid groups, including the Red Cross, did deliver substantial amounts of relief to Nicaragua. At the same time, AmeriCares shipped many millions worth of medicines and supplies to other Central American nations with more pliant governments.

And AmeriCares couldn’t get the planes in fast enough once U.S.-backed Violeta Barrios de Chamorro defeated the Sandinistas. On February 28, 1990, just three days after the election, the charity’s first flight brought in 23 tons of medical supplies. “From the people of the United States to the people of Nicaragua-with love,” each box read, sending the familiar message that seems to be the very essence of AmeriCares: doing what the U.S. says has its rewards.

“Why didn’t they give aid to Nicaragua before Chamorro took over?” asks Lonnie Turnipseed of the Church World Service and Witness, an arm of the National Council of Churches. “The people were suffering just as much.”

When AmeriCares decided Nicaragua had earned assistance, rightist Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo went to the airport to receive the first shipment, and the well-connected Knights of Malta distributed it. President Bush’s son Marvin was aboard the next AmeriCares flight, which arrived just days after Chamorro’s inauguration. He was met by a Knights of Malta ambassador by the name of Roberto Alejos Arzu, who, beyond his recent role as an avuncular dispenser of charity, has a long history of association with some of Central America’s most reactionary elements.

The Knights, AmeriCares’s “partner” throughout most of the world, has the unusual status of being a recognized sovereign state without territory, which means it enjoys full diplomatic rights in many countries and can speed items across borders via “diplomatic pouch,” bypassing customs inspectors. The 900-year-old organization, formally called the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St. John, of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta, is modeled after an order of soldier-monks who fought in the Crusades. With more than 10,000 members in 42 countries, the Knights is a powerful Vatican order with extensive and close links to intelligence organizations in the U.S. and Western Europe.

In 1986, AmeriCares’s worldwide collaboration with the Knights culminated in Robert Macauley’s becoming the first non-Catholic to receive the coveted Cross of the Commander of the Order of Malta. According to Thomas L. Sheer, the executive director of the American Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the award “was based on his participating in meritorious acts along the lines of what we do-help the sick and poor.” Ronald Reagan was also honored by the Knights, receiving, in 1988, their Grand Cross of Merit, Special Class, the highest decoration for a non-Knight. Reagan’s spokesperson said the Knights wished to honor Reagan for his “devotion to Christian principles, his defense of the rights of the unborn, and his commitment to the dignity of the individual, and the importance of family values.”

The American branch of the Knights, with 1700 Catholic members, is a group with strong ties to the intelligence and military communities and to conservative politics. Members have included former CIA directors William Casey and John McCone (who helped direct the 1973 military coup in Chile); former CIA chief of counterintelligence James Buckley; Alexander Haig; and former Nixon-Ford treasury secretary, financier, and key right-wing ideologue William Simon. Reagan’s ambassador to the Vatican, William Wilson, was himself a Knight. Another Knight, former U.S. senator Jeremiah Denton (Republican, Alabama), authored the bill that made it possible for air force jets to use their “surplus capacity” to move supplies for organizations like AmeriCares.

As might be expected, for AmeriCares ideology often seems to outweigh altruism. In Iran, where it sent aid after last year’s earthquake, the group was criticized for taunting the still-hostile Iranians with a risky, pro-U.S. message. “They draped the stuff with American flags,” says an official of another relief agency. “We didn’t think it was necessary to rub people’s noses in ideological stuff when we’re trying to help disaster victims.” In a not-very-subtle 1985 brochure describing the charity’s work in Afghanistan, AmeriCares brayed that it “is committed to assisting the people of Afghanistan in their resistance to the persistent and methodical efforts at genocide perpetrated on that country by the USSR.”

Although the U.S. public-and Congress-clearly wished to stay out of Afghanistan, AmeriCares began pumping millions of dollars in supplies into that country in August 1983. Much of the impetus came from AmeriCares’s honorary chairman, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who as Carter’s national security adviser had used his supervisory role over the CIA to support a covert network against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

In one bizarre 1984 episode, AmeriCares shed any vestige of neutrality, evacuating wounded mujahideen soldiers to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. The group also revealed that it had been smuggling medicine and doctors into rebel-held areas of Afghanistan, servicing 57 clinics inside the country. AmeriCares’s conduit in Afghanistan was Ralph Magnus, who also served on the board of the Federation for American Afghan Action, a pro-intervention group, which discussed “sending planes into Afghanistan to land and deposit arms,” according to the publication Afghan Update. A former employee of the U.S. Information Service in Kabul, Magnus later taught in the national security affairs department of the Naval Postgraduate School in Pacific Grove, California.

AmeriCares’s mission statement is full of double entendres. It says the group aims to provide “an immediate and effective response to emergency medical needs, wherever and whenever intervention is deemed appropriate.” Often, Macauley’s interventions immediately follow those of his friend George Bush: AmeriCares was in Panama with medical supplies exactly one week after 24,000 American troops invaded. “Those supplies are badly needed here,” army captain William Beverley told the Stamford Advocate. The AmeriCares transport was coordinated with top U.S. officials, including General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Once again, the plane was met by local members of the Knights of Malta. Panama got no AmeriCares funds from January to June of 1989, but received $2.5 million in the next twelve months, beginning immediately after the American invasion.

(Deciding what’s “appropriate” in an imperious manner is an AmeriCares trademark. In a letter to this reporter, Macauley declined a request for an interview at any time and any place, citing a busy schedule. Macauley did say that he was willing to consider written questions, but only “if the questions are considered pertinent and the information is not confidential.” After repeated requests over many months the Voice was finally able to meet with AmeriCares president Stephen Johnson, who has been with the group since 1987.)

AmeriCares, which receives government money via the Agency for International Development (AID), does more than wave the flag-sometimes it helps Washington plant it on foreign soil. The incestuousness is sometimes truly remarkable, as in a joint government/AmeriCares effort to aid the Philippine army in 1986. As the Associated Press reported on September 19 of that year, “the Reagan administration and a private relief agency today gave Philippine President Corazon Aquino a $20 million sendoff from her four-day trip to Washington: a planeload of medical supplies for soldiers fighting communist guerrillas … [they were] purchased with a $10 million U.S. government grant and an equal sum from the relief group AmeriCares.”

Not everyone has been so lucky with Washington. “The Air Force certainly doesn’t donate planes to us,” says Louise Simone, president of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, which played a major role in Armenian quake assistance. “We’ve been told the Air Force can’t loan their planes to anybody.” In most cases, AmeriCares doesn’t get its planes directly from the government either. It most frequently charters them from Southern Air Transport, a company associated with the CIA as far back as 1970.

But the fact that AmeriCares is no Red Cross is best underscored by its leadership. In addition to honorary chairman Brzezinski, there is a seven-member advisory board that includes J. Peter Grace, chairman of W. R. Grace and Company and head of the American Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta; William Simon; Prescott Bush, the president’s brother; and retired general Richard Stilwell, Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon intelligence czar.

Stilwell’s interest in winning the hearts and minds of the masses dates back to the Vietnam war, when he was a key proponent of the Strategic Hamlet Program, in which millions of villagers were forced from their homes into camps where their contact with guerrillas could be limited (the plan was later applied in Guatemala).

In 1983, as deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, Stilwell was involved in the formation of a super-secret Army spy unit, the Intelligence Support Activity, which operated in El Salvador, Nicaragua, and parts of Africa before being disbanded. The unit existed without the knowledge of the CIA, the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, or Congress-although William Casey appears to have known about it.

About the same time, Stilwell was trying to expand the Defense Department’s involvement in humanitarian assistance. The idea was to improve the image of the U.S. and its armed forces, while giving military personnel an excuse to check out strategic locales. In 1984, a Pentagon panel recommended expanding such aid to Central America and Ethiopia; it also proposed distributing “surplus property” as disaster relief. The program was run by Stilwell’s special assistant. AID-which has its own image problems-was unhappy with the operation because it felt that all American relief would be tainted by association, and so the Pentagon decided Stilwell’s group would keep its distance from AID.

In 1987, Stilwell, out of government, paid a private visit to the Philippines sponsored, according to the Associated Press, by a “private health-relief organization.” While there, he criticized President Corazon Aquino’s weak efforts against communist rebels and met with members of the Philippine military. Shortly after he left, there was an abortive coup; Stilwell denied Philippine media reports charging him with involvement. By 1988, Stilwell had launched a group called the Gray Eagles, made up of former military people, to train friendly Third World armies. Thousands of ex-soldiers volunteered, and according to a Stilwell aide, numerous Latin American, African, and Far Eastern countries had expressed interest in learning U.S. techniques. “Everybody in the security assistance business thought it was a good idea,” Herbert Y. Chandler, a retired colonel and Stilwell’s right-hand man in the Gray Eagles, told The New York Times.

AmeriCares contributes to a broad problem with disaster relief.. Along with genuinely useful aid, much of what’s sent is either poorly labeled, improperly packaged, or doesn’t match local needs-a result of aid organizations’s elevation of media splash above relief quality. AmeriCares’s compulsion to be first on the scene-and thus earn publicity, which its workers, and Stephen Johnson, have nicknamed “baloney” -can conflict with its ability to meet real needs. Describing AmeriCares’s methods, a project coordinator once told a reporter, “We don’t hold a lot of meetings, write a lot of reports or send a lot of fact-finding missions. We just get the stuff out there.”

That’s not necessarily good. “What’s definitely wrong is this methodology of ‘being the first,’ ” says Dr. Claude De Ville, head of disaster relief for the Pan American Health Organization. “You need to be the best. Most of these people arriving first, they do so for reasons at home, not because they care.”

The tremendous quantities hastily shipped into disaster zones by relief organizations frequently tie up personnel and resources desperately needed for more useful work, and anger and frustrate local relief officials racing against the clock. In Armenia, where AmeriCares was both the first private relief agency in and one of the largest suppliers of drugs, the British medical journal the Lancet has been harshly critical of the overall relief efforts.

“Most drugs arrived in Armenia unaccompanied,” noted the Lancet. “Often, aircraft simply dropped the boxes on the airstrip and left.” The journal went on to note the sloppiness of the operation, saying that 80 per cent of the drugs arriving in the early days were “unsorted,” inconveniently packed, and “difficult to identify.” In the most heavily affected area, “pharmacists wasted about two-thirds of their time merely looking for and identifying useful drugs.” The quantity of drugs wildly exceeded needs. For example, although Armenia needed about 250,000 tablets of the antibiotic doxycycline (one of the drugs AmeriCares rushed in), 7 million tablets were received, 95 per cent of which expired before they could be used. The quantities dumped in Armenia were so ridiculously vast that in took 50 people six months merely to gain a clear picture of what was present.

Stephen Johnson defended AmeriCares’s record in Armenia. “We knew from experience what was most needed,” he said. Though he conceded AmeriCares sent drugs due to expire to Armenia, he said they were actually good beyond their off-shelf date, and that letters were sent along certifying them. Johnson also admitted all the medicines were labeled in English, but said that two pharmacists went along to identify them (altogether there were five warehouses full of supplies in Armenia, each the size of a football field). Among what AmeriCares shipped were so-called “charity boxes,” usually packages of unsorted mixed pharmaceuticals, which “do waste time in sorting” according to an official of another relief group. His organization refuses to ship charity boxes until they’ve been repackaged, something AmeriCares doesn’t have the time to do. (One supplier contends that it sent only sorted pharmaceuticals through AmeriCares.)

In 1984, 18 months after AmeriCares began flying relief missions, President Reagan gave the organization his Voluntary Action Award. That same year, in addition to its Afghan activities, AmeriCares shipped $14 million in aid to Central America. In Honduras it went to contra-controlled refugee camps; in Guatemala to military authorities who distributed it while involved in brutal counterinsurgency programs that have left tens of thousands dead or missing.

Throughout Central America, AmeriCares hands its shipments over to the local Knights of Malta for distribution, following a “partnership” the two groups announced in 1983. In El Salvador the effort has been coordinated by local head Knight Gerald Coughlan, a retired FBI agent and executive of International Harvester, which has donated its warehouses to store the supplies. The Knights’ Salvadoran cochair, Miguel Salaverria, a manager of a large coffee export firm, described the U.S. embassy as “very helpful” in arranging transport, and said that the Salvadoran armed forces has helped move AmeriCares medical supplies.

“I’m AmeriCares around here,” Roberto Alejos Arzu once told a reporter. Driving a van emblazoned with “Knights of Malta/AmeriCares” the group’s Central American coordinator “will go around to small towns and villages” says Stephen Johnson. But Alejos says he couldn’t possibly handle all the aid himself. Instead, he turns shipments over to other organizations, including the Reverend Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and, in the past, the youth charity Covenant House. Another aid conduit has been the Air Commandos, a group of retired American military pilots, who have close connections with counterinsurgency operations and with the Reagan-Bush effort to aid the contras (the group’s leader, retired general Harry Aderholt served under general John Singlaub in Indochina and is Soldier of Fortune’s unconventional warfare editor.) “There are many U.S. organizations that come around here,” Alejos told the Voice in a phone interview. “They come with recommendations from the States. We try to service them.”

Alejos typifies the 2.2 per cent of Guatemalans who, according to UNICEF own two-thirds of the arable land and live in opulence while 90 per cent of their country-people live in abject poverty, and three-quarters of all children under five are malnourished. Through the Knights, landed gentry like Alejos have an opportunity to give a little to the poor, without sacrificing their own wealth and power. But “charitable” is not the sort of word usually used to describe Roberto Alejos. “He’s a thug in a business suit,” says Jean-Marie Simon, author of Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny.

Time and again Alejos, a wealthy plantation owner, has been implicated in kidnappings, coups, and death squad actions. According to the North American Council on Latin America, “as with most of the Guatemalan elite, there is circumstantial evidence linking Alejos to La Mano Blanca,” one of the most virulent of the death squads, which specialized in the disappearance of political opponents, routine torture, and machine-gun executions. Victims included students, priests, labor leaders, journalists, teachers, peasant activists, and members and leaders of moderate opposition parties-all perceived to be “communists” because of their calls for social and economic reform. A number of workers on Alejos’s sugar plantations who had tried to strike or organize were killed, according to researcher Allan Nairn, formerly of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs. On several occasions, Alejos refused to pay his workers, saying he was out of money and unable to come up with their wages of 50 cents to $2 a day.

Alejos denies any association with La Mano Blanca. “That’s a lie,” he says. “I don’t get involved in that-I’m a practicing Catholic, I don’t go into anything violent.” As for the deaths of workers on his plantation, El Salto, Alejos says, “in the two cases where labor leaders of El Salto were assassinated, they were no longer workers at El Salto. I can’t tell you why they were assassinated.” He says he never told his workers that he was unable to pay them. But, he says, “there might have been delays in the transfers of funds.”

Alejos’s plantation served as a CIA training ground for the Bay of Pigs invasion (although the actual invasion was launched from Nicaragua with the help of his old friend, dictator Anastasio Somoza). In the ’60s, he was exiled by the Guatemalan regime, and tried several times to overthrow it. He was later arrested for planning the kidnapping of the cardinal of Guatemala, Mario Casariego, but was never charged. He vehemently denies being involved. “I was a very close friend of the cardinal,” says Alejos. “I proved 100 per cent I was never involved in anything.” Stephen Johnson says he sees nothing wrong with using Alejos as AmeriCares’s Central American coordinator.

Alejos’s links to the Reagan-Bush administrations go back to1979, when he hosted a delegation from the private military lobby, the American Security Council (ASC). The group, led by generals Singlaub (later of Iran-contra fame) and Daniel Graham, met with the president of Guatemala and took helicopter tours of rural counterinsurgency operations. Alejos later came to California and met with Reagan. “Mr. Reagan was in favor of human rights as much as we were,” Alejos said at the time. “I have personal respect and great admiration for Mr. Reagan. I think your country needs him.”

Using tactics developed in Vietnam-and promoted there by AmeriCares advisory board member general Stilwell-the Guatemalan army has pursued a brutal scorched-earth policy, bombing and forcing the abandonment of whole villages. In 1983, more than a quarter of the 4 million Indians living in the highlands were pushed from their land, according to the Guatemalan Council of Bishops. Many tens of thousands have died, and the number of orphans is estimated in the hundreds of thousands.

Although many nongovernmental aid groups operating in Guatemala have faced harassment, banishment, and even the deaths of members because of their perceived “leftist” slant, certain groups have been welcomed with open arms. Among them is AmeriCares, whose aid, as confirmed by Alejos, is distributed in the so-called “model villages” -camps to which peasants are forced by the army in order to cut their contact with guerrillas-including those surrounding the highland town of Nebaj. The town often takes on the look of an old spooks’s convention, as legions of far-right activists, Evangelicals, and American former military types troop in and out, administering “humanitarian aid.” Meanwhile, the residents need army permission to leave, and the men have a choice of forced conscription in the government’s civil patrols or homelessness.

Further south in Nicaragua, Sandinista officials have long accused AmeriCares of being a CIA front. Whether or not that’s true, it did attempt to fly a planeload of newsprint to the anti-Sandinista La Prensa, with then vice-president Bush’s office calling the Nicaraguan embassy to get approval for the AmeriCares plane to land. Bush’s people pointed out that the plane had pharmaceuticals on board as well, but the Sandinistas refused to assist “either Mr. Bush’s presidential aspirations or AmeriCares’ pro-contra activities.”

AmeriCares’s aid to Nicaraguans during the Sandinista era was strictly to contras. Shipments from the charity arrived at contra-controlled camps just inside Honduras, where refugees were subject to constant harassment and abuse by contra troops, and heavily pressured to join their ranks. In contrast other aid groups, such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, provided relief only to Nicaraguan refugee camps further in the Honduran interior and out of contra control.

AmeriCares’s aid to the contras included an Ollie North-controlled effort to supply them with medical supplies, thereby freeing them to spend their own money on arms. It was run through a front group called the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund (NFF), which was headed by AmeriCares’s William Simon. Simon, a key advocate of counterinsurgency in the Third World, put his theory into practice in Nicaragua. North and National Security adviser Robert MacFarlane got funding for the effort through the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. The supplies purchased by NFF were then flown into Nicaragua on an AmeriCares plane. A May 21, 1985, memo to Oliver North about the Fund said that “Macauley” (he was so well-known to North that no first name was required) “has put a hold on it [the plane] and will turn it over to the Fund; he just awaits the word.” Simon was ready “to announce that the first plane load of medical supplies [is] on its way from Florida.”

Asked by The Washington Post where the $350,000 in supplies was going, Macauley replied, “My feeling is that none of the aid goes to the contra forces, but I couldn’t say that absolutely none of it does.” But contra spokesperson Bosco Matamoros told the Post the NFF’s contributions would free up funds that the group could use “for other supplies.” And Roberto Alejos confirmed that other AmeriCares shipments went to Miskito Indians, who had been linked to the rebels. Macauley’s vagueness about whether AmeriCares was aiding the contras is strangely out of synch with the image he likes to project. According to a magazine profile, “If he can’t personally confirm that the aid will reach the right people, then none will be sent.”

Robert Macauley’s “charity empire” began in Vietnam, when he helped U.S. GI John Wetterer expand a rescue mission for homeless children in Saigon into the Shoeshine Boys Foundation, which enabled orphans to make money cleaning GIs’ shoes. In 1975, according to a Reader’s Digest hagiography, Macauley used a check-kiting scheme to finance a $251,000 airlift of U.S.-associated orphans who’d been injured in the crash of an earlier evacuation flight. “Macauley didn’t have the money, but he knew a check needs three days to clear. If I move today, he thought, and get the kids safely into the United States, I can worry about finances next week…. Not surprisingly, the check bounced.”

Out of this Vietnam experience Macauley and his wife formed a charity called Friends of Children. Wetterer had since moved on to Guatemala, where he was running Mi Casa, a program for homeless youths. Friends of Children soon became one of his major funders. (In 1988 Wetterer was accused by 60 Minutes of molesting a number of boys, and Friends of Children withdrew its funding. Though Guatemalan officials cleared Wetterer, he was indicted for fraudulently soliciting money to support his sexual abuse of children by the U.S. Attorney’s office last September. Wetterer continues to deny the charges.)

AmeriCares, incorporated in 1979, was to remain little more than a personal philanthropy until 1981, when Macauley and his friend Father Bruce Ritter of Covenant House flew to Rome (sources believe it was in the plane of Knight Peter Grace, who regularly ferried the two around) for a private audience with the conservative Pope John Paul II.

Macauley has long had an interest in things Catholic. Though raised an Episcopalian like President Bush, “I’ve done everything but take sacraments,” he once said. Macauley is fond of recounting his Vatican meeting for friends. “The Pope’s a regular guy,” Macauley tells associates, drawing a picture of a cigar-smoking type who enjoys political discussions with other powerful men. The story of AmeriCares’s papal inspiration has become so enshrined in the charity’s mythology that it even appears in its brochures: John Paul II-the first non-Italian Pope since the 16th century and a Pole-urged Macauley to send medicine to Poland, where unrest was growing and martial law had just been imposed. “It was the Pope’s request,” one pamphlet says, “to which Macauley answered, ‘Certainly, Your Holiness,’ that started AmeriCares on the road to delivering millions of dollars in aid to the needy at home and all over the world.”

Macauley got into Poland by helping to underwrite the flights of established relief groups. In 1982, on behalf of one private aid organization, Macauley telephoned the Pope’s office, asking if the Holy Father could help expedite an airlift of medical supplies. In March the planes landed and, as promised, the church had smoothed the way. (Macauley continued to boost the noncommunist opposition in Poland. In 1988, while Solidarity was still officially an underground group, Lech Walesa’s son Slawak stayed with the Macauleys in New Canaan and then toured the country for 10 weeks courtesy of AmeriCares.)

Shortly after his Poland debut, Macauley expanded his operation. In June 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, he again funded another relief organization’s airlift, this time offering to cover the entire transport cost, generosity made possible because AID had agreed to reimburse him for the price of the plane from New York to Cyprus. Macauley’s airlift partner initially balked, pointing out that it didn’t take government money. (Neither do many other respected groups, because, “Once one takes government money, particularly AID money, it does color where you work,” says Oxfam America’s executive director, John Hammond.) But Macauley persuaded the group to go along, and then said AID wanted to send a Public Health Service staffer to speak at a press conference announcing the airlift. When airlift personnel, accompanied by a Los Angeles Times reporter, arrived at the airport, they found the cargo had been completely covered with U.S. government stickers declaring it “A Gift From the People of the United States and the United States Government.” Staffers tore off most of the stickers, which angered Macauley, who offered to pay for an AID staffer to fly to Cyprus with more labels.

According to an associate, Macauley soon tired of working with established aid groups, and was particularly upset by what he saw as their “leftist” bias. He said he intended to do the same thing they did, but bigger and better, and with different politics.

Most of what AmeriCares distributes are pharmaceuticals and medical supplies donated by more than 200 U.S. pharmaceutical companies. AmeriCares shipped $70 million worth of such supplies in fiscal 1990, according to its own figures. Macauley proclaims that he is aiming to ship a billion dollars worth by 1993.

As in all corporate charity, the donor companies look gracious indeed, but there is a big-buck payoff. AmeriCares’s operation earns America’s pharmaceutical companies lucrative tax write-offs, of up to two times cost, for donating unpopular or soon-to-expire drugs that they would otherwise have to destroy at considerable expense. It is a kind of alchemy written into the tax laws.

Macauley has said in interviews that after getting small donations from pharmacies in New Canaan he quickly realized there was a better way. He says he ordered the annual reports of the 50 largest U.S. pharmaceutical companies and called in his big guns. “I have these two great friends you might have heard of-Peter Grace and Bill Simon,” Macauley told a reporter in a 1987 interview. He says he got in touch with Grace and Simon and found that between the three of them they had contacts on the board of 47 of the 50 companies. They were on their way.

Within a short time, AmeriCares was calling itself “the humanitarian arm of corporate America.” It was blunt about its appeal to drug companies: “These pharmaceutical companies often have surpluses and they have to dispose of them in a way that they can’t be recovered,” AmeriCares executive vice-president Charles Chandler told a reporter in 1990. “They can’t dump it in a landfill, because someone can get at it. They would have to pay people to dispose of it. So we provide them with a good, useful way to get rid of anything they don’t use.”

According to AmeriCares, all 40 of the biggest pharmaceutical firms contribute. Many have more at stake than taxes; they maintain operations in the same Third World countries where AmeriCares is active in supplying counterinsurgency programs and share an ideological bond with the group. Some, including Richardson-Vicks, GD Searle & Co., Eli Lilly, Sterling Drug, and Merck & Co., have affiliated philanthropies that have made large donations to other right-wing foundations active in covert-type operations, including the contra supply effort. And some companies are particularly close to the White House: on leaving the CIA in 1977, George Bush spent a year on the Eli Lilly board.

Although Robert Macauley says his goal is to spread love throughout the world, the study of his Connecticut home is filled with books about war and military affairs, according to visitors. His study of power began in Fairfield County, where he and the young George Bush became friends and schoolmates, going from kindergarten to Phillips Andover and, eventually, to Yale. After graduation, Bob Macauley joined his father’s paper brokerage, where he was a salesman. And a good one. “He could charm the Virgin Mary out of her drawers,” says one of his former customers. Another ex-client describes Macauley as “smooth, a charmer … a bullshit artist.”

Macauley, according to those who know him well, has alternately charmed and exaggerated his way to the top. He wooed his clients at New York hot spots, where he told wild tales. “Everybody in the world he knew, or said he knew,” recalls one. “He couldn’t stop talking about the Kennedys-this one and that one.” Macauley told customers about meeting Pablo Picasso in postwar Paris. Picasso, he said, excused himself and went off to make love to some young women, then came back to continue their chat. According to one source, Macauley also claimed that he’d served in the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA, during the Second World War (a statement Macauley now denies making). In Paris, Macauley met Peter Grace when, according to Stephen Johnson, the mogul wandered into “either a cathouse or a saloon where Bob was playing the piano. They’re both cut from the same cloth. They’re both very aggressive, very bang-gang, do-it-now kind of guys.”

Macauley eventually launched his own paper mill, which today helps fund AmeriCares. When he formed the Virginia Fibre Corporation in 1973, Macauley put up just $1 million of the $50 million total. He has managed to retain 93 per cent of the capital stock. “I can do pretty much what I want,” he told Forbes in 1985. Virginia Fibre has made Macauley a wealthy man: annual sales are about $100 million, and net profits climbed rapidly from $3 million in 1986 to a formidable $20 million last year. Nine per cent of the company’s pretax profits go directly to AmeriCares, $1.835 million last year.

To ensure tight control of AmeriCares and Virginia Fibre, Macauley places his best players on both teams. The officers of the mill and charity are nearly identical, and Virginia Fibre executives frequently go on AmeriCares missions. President Charles Chandler is also an executive vice-president of AmeriCares; Virginia Fibre VP Clark Johnson is also a VP of the charity. AmeriCares board member Bert Schwarz is a Virginia Fibre board member, as was Father Bruce Ritter, who was also on the AmeriCares board until the Covenant House scandal forced him to resign (see “The Ritter Connection,”)

The charity is also funded by Macauley’s 17 per cent share of the voting stock in Greif Brothers Corp., a closely held Delaware, Ohio, packaging manufacturer. Greif, a considerably larger firm, has made heavy loans to Virginia Fibre, and owns convertible nonvoting stock in the company that gives it the right to take Virginia Fibre over. Both Macauley and Charles Chandler sit on Greif’s board. The company has sales exceeding $400 million and has 102 plants scattered throughout the U.S. and Canada. Macauley has told people his Greif stock is worth several hundred million. He is also a favorite of Greif chairman John Dempsey and is rumored to be in line to succeed him. According to one major shareholder, Greif corporate meetings are frequently dominated by Macauley, who spends most of his time talking about AmeriCares. (Macauley also put Father Ritter into Greif. The biggest portion of a secret Covenant House trust fund set up to benefit Ritter was, according to The New York Times, made up of Greif Brothers stock Ritter purchased in 1982 on Macauley’s advice. By 1990, it was valued at $627,000.)

Greif is distinguished in part by its meshing of religion with business. Every year the back cover of its annual report features a photo of a conference table with a portrait of Jesus centered above it. The caption: “Beneath this portrait and at this conference table for the past 42 years have been made the major decisions of the corporation.”

In addition to Greif, AmeriCares’s most devout supporters include the Reverend Pat Robertson, the fundamentalist former presidential candidate. Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network runs Operation Blessing, which distributes tens of millions each year to relief groups, including AmeriCares and the Knights of Malta. Robertson has sometimes been AmeriCares single largest contributor, especially during the years in backed the contras. (There’s another odd wrinkle to the tale: Robertson was also once employed by Peter Grace’s company in Latin America. Grace and Robertson later served together on various political committees, including the one that planned the April 15, 1985, Nicaragua Refugee Fund dinner at which President Reagan began a new campaign to restore official funding to the contras.)

Although AmeriCares is Robert Macauley, nobody better illustrates its ideology than advisory committee chairman Peter Grace, whose $7 billion-dollar conglomerate is involved in chemical production, cocoa processing, oil and gas exploration, and other businesses in 44 countries. He’s also the president of the Knights of Malta in the U.S.

Grace has packed his company’s board with people involved in various ways with rightist political activity. (At least eight Grace directors have been Knights of Malta.) In addition to Macauley, the Grace board is stocked with the likes of Roger Milliken, chairman of Milliken & Company and a large contributor to right-wing groups (including the John Birch Society and Western Goals, a private intelligence-gathering agency that kept data on U.S. activists and supplied it to police departments, which are barred from keeping such files; the group honored Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D’Aubuisson at a 1984 dinner).

Grace has an unfortunate attraction for those with Nazi roots. In one case, in 1958, he petitioned the U.S. ambassador in Germany to allow the emigration of Dr. Otto Ambros, a brilliant scientist who’d worked during the war for I.G. Farben, the firm that developed the Zyklon-B gas used in the extermination camps. Ambros had been convicted by the Nuremberg Tribunal of mass murder and practicing slavery for his role in providing Farben with 200,000 laborers from Auschwitz. In his petition, Grace said that he admired Ambros “not only for his ability but-more important-for his character.” Grace hired him as a technical adviser for the company.

AmeriCares favorite region, Latin America, has been a Grace family playground since the mid-1800s. There, it has presided over a multibillion-dollar empire encompassing textiles, printing, shipping-materials production, and chemical manufacturing. Business and government have dovetailed nicely for Grace: highly placed members of the government-including the police-have worked for W. R. Grace.

Although a tireless anti-union crusader in his own U.S. plants, Grace trickily cofounded an organization dedicated to creating Latin American labor unions, albeit ones that would be subservient to U.S. companies. The American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), founded in 1961 and funded primarily by AID, called for “cooperation between labor and management and an end to class struggle.” The group took public pride in the role of its trainees in overthrowing reformist governments, including the Goulart administration in Brazil in 1964. A Senate Foreign Relations committee staff report once described AIFLD as having “the appearance of being little more than an instrument of the cold war.”

Grace embodied the corporate agenda of the right, and when Ronald Reagan took office, he immediately sought Grace’s guidance. Grace more or less appointed himself head of the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Controls. It was to recommend strategies for eliminating wasteful government spending. The panel ended up largely blaming the deficit on federal employees-rather than immense government subsidies of business, bailouts of failing corporations and banks, or the cleanup costs connected with corporate toxic and nuclear waste, some of which W. R. Grace is directly responsible for -and called for slashing the benefits and pensions of government workers. During this period, the “Latin Americanist” Grace was criticized for saying that Puerto Ricans “are all on welfare.”

As Grace was advancing the right-wing agenda at home, Robert Macauley was furthering administration interests overseas. As communist influence has waned around the world, AmeriCares has been there to welcome the dominoes into the American box, dispensing a sizeable dollop of Catholic orthodoxy in the process.

On January 7, 1990, a contingent of 25 AmeriCares workers and German and Hungarian Knights of Malta, arrived in Romania with 86,000 pounds of supplies, valued at $1.4 million-”the first privately organized, large-scale relief effort following the revolution,” according to AmeriCares. Accompanying them: White House physician Dr. Burton Lee III. Ironically, the group visited doctors at a hospital in Lipova, who told them that dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had been responsible for the deaths of many women because of his “virulent anti-abortion policy,” according to the Stamford Advocate. The paper, added, “Ceausescu’s policy for population growth called for prison terms for women who had abortions unless they had already borne five children.” (The Romanian doctors could not have known about the medal the Knights gave Reagan for his efforts to “protect the unborn” by making abortions more difficult to obtain.)

Asked once whether AmeriCares transports arms, Macauley answered that it did not. However, he hastened to add, he would do so at the request of the U.S. government. “As a citizen, it is incumbent on me to carry out the orders of the commander-in-chief.”

The White House has long had an interest in charity. Back in 1970, in a memo to Richard Nixon, aide Patrick Buchanan outlined ways to sidetrack “liberal” nonprofit group (see “Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner). Today, the right’s favorite humanitarian group dominates a growing share of pharmaceutical donations. One group recently received a letter from G. D. Searle & Co. saying that from now on only AmeriCares would get its donations. Said an official of the other charity, “This is not a commercial thing, there isn’t competition, there’s no reason for that.” He says a staffer at another firm, Johnson & Johnson, told him the White House had called there asking that the drug company give aid to victims of the Iranian earthquake only through AmeriCares. Johnson & Johnson spoke person Bob Andrews denies the company ever got such a call.

The humanitarian aid community is almost unanimously wary of AmeriCares, but officials of other nonprofit organizations are reluctant to speak publicly about Macauley, saying he can make life difficult for them. Those who will speak for the record are cautious. “[AmeriCares's] approach is not the same as other groups’,” says Doug Siglin, public policy director of InterAction, a coalition of most private, nonprofit humanitarian organizations, which AmeriCares joined last year. Indeed, other relief groups complain AmeriCares refuses to coordinate with them to avoid duplication of efforts. And unlike CARE, the Church World Service, and other groups that lobby Congress through InterAction to make aid responsive more to human need than to military and political objectives, AmeriCares usually doesn’t get involved in urging a moral component to government relief.

Siglin says that in spite of its size, “I know virtually nothing about AmeriCares. Frankly, I don’t think anybody knows too much about their operations. Private operations are private.” There’s a certain irony to that, since the charity has done everything it can to keep its operations in the eye of the camera.

As an officially sanctioned Point of Light, AmeriCares typifies the glitzy self-serving response of the very establishment responsible for many of the problems that plague the Third World: debt, hunger, militarization, and dictatorships. Meanwhile, dozens of other aid groups work quietly to transform the lives of the world’s impoverished without making the nightly news. Groups like World Neighbors, Oxfam America, TechnoServe, and the American Friends Committee supply more than Band-Aid solutions to endemic problems. They teach basic skills, build infrastructure, and enable people to help themselves. That sure beats retired spooks making foreign policy while dumping surplus pharmaceuticals on the tarmac.

Picture 1: Would ‘Saint’ Bob Macauley ship arms? Yes, if the White House asked nicely. “As a citizen it is incumbent on me to carry out the orders of the commander-in-chief.”

Picture 2: Fathers know best? Pope John Paul II, Macauley, and Ritter met in 1981. Here they look at pictures of Ronald Reagan and Mother Teresa.

The Cast of Characters


Roberto Alejos Arzu: On the heels of an easy life on his plantations and a career full of paramilitary affiliations (troops trained for the Bay of Pigs invasion on his land), he became interested in helping the poor through Covenant House, AmeriCares, and the Knights of Malta.

George Bush (and family): His childhood chum Macauley is one of his brightest points of light, and George and the rest of the Bush clan back him to the hilt. The president’s children and even George’s personal physician, Burton J. Lee III, escort AmeriCares shipments into recipient countries. But AmeriCares is no kinder or gentler than might be expected from a charity founded by a close associate of an ex-CIA director.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: AmeriCares’s honorary chairman certainly knows his way around the world. As national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, he oversaw an extensive covert operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In 1984, AmeriCares evacuated wounded mujahideen soldiers from Afghanistan and transported them for care to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Jeremiah Denton: A Knight of Malta and former Republican senator from Alabama, Denton gave AmeriCares a boost when he sponsored a bill allowing the United States Air Force to use its “surplus capacity” to ship goods for groups like AmeriCares-although other charities say no such help is available to them.

“Amazing” J. Peter Grace: With a direct line to the Vatican and history of playing Latin America like a board game (he has been associated with CIA-assisted coups and is known for his desire to derail progressive labor movements around the world), Grace loved groups like Covenant House, the Knights of Malta, and AmeriCares.

The Knights of Langley: The Knights of Malta, which use AmeriCares to further their international goals, has more spooks than a Halloween party. Among them: former CIA deputy director James Jesus Angleton and former CIA directors John McCone and the late William Casey.

“Saint” Robert Macauley: He grew with George Bush, then met Peter Grace in a postwar Parisian saloon, but it was not until the early ’80s that he got his own piece of the power scene. He funded Mother Teresa’s efforts, then, through AmeriCares and with the help of the press became a “saint” himself.

Ollie North: It just wouldn’t be intrigue without the colonel, who through AmeriCares shipped $350,000 worth of medicine to the contras so the contras could better use their cash-on arms. A 1985 memo to North that mentions Macauley by last name suggests just how tight the connections were.

The Reverend Sun Myung Moon: At the request of North and AmeriCares’s William Simon, Moon paid for that contra shipment through the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund.

Ronald Reagan: In 1984, Reagan gave AmeriCares the presidential Voluntary Action Award; four years later, the Knights of Malta gave him its Grand Cross of Merit, Special Class-the highest honor the group gives a non-Knight. Reagan was awarded, in part, for his “devotion to Christian principles.”

Father Bruce Ritter: Letting Macauley into his humble charity may have been his first misstep. Then came Grace and Simon, expansion and fame, and finally, ignominy.

Pat Robertson: Out of law school, he worked for Peter Grace in Latin America. Then he found his calling and became the world’s number one fundamentalist television preacher. But religious differences didn’t stand in the way of alliances with Catholics with shared agendas-including Peter Grace and the Knights of Malta.

William Simon: A king of mergers and acquisitions, he collected corporations while building a comparable empire of private, political organizations dedicated to fostering the corporate political agenda. He advocated supporting “nonegalitarian” scholars; he loved the AmeriCares brand of charity.

Retired General Richard Stilwell: An architect of counterinsurgency tactics in the Philippines and Vietnam, he was delighted to see them further refined in Latin America. AmeriCares was one of the vehicles that has helped insure that old soldiers need not fade away.

Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner

A Blueprint for AmeriCares?


In spite of the direct participation of Bush family members in AmeriCares, the White House sometimes winkingly denies involvement. William Simon told the Washington Post he talked with then White House communications director Patrick J. Buchanan about NFF/AmeriCares 1985 shipments to the contras, and that Buchanan said “they appreciated our efforts and thought what we were doing was very constructive.” But according to Buchanan, his comment did not reflect official administration position on the Nicaraguan fund. “I haven’t talked to anybody about it,” he told the Post. “Bill Simon is an old friend, and I just picked up the phone to say congratulations.”

Buchanan had an early interest in right-wing “charities” like AmeriCares. Back in 1970, he authored the following lengthy memo at Richard Nixon’s request, laying out the notion of conservative “philanthropic” groups that might derail nonprofit groups perceived as “leftist”:

March 3, 1970

The President directed several of us to give thought to how to combat the institutionalized power of the left concentrated in the foundations that succor the Democratic Party.

Following are recommendations both of an offensive and defensive nature-the major one being the creation of a countervailing power outside the Federal government.

The President should direct an in-house group of people preferably outside the Administration to quietly undertake a study of the top 25 foundations in this country; to identify both their leadership and power structure; and to indicate which are friendly, which are potentially friendly; which can be co-opted to support projects the President supports …

Buchanan suggested the White House put together a group that “would be charged with reporting to the President specific options on how we could either influence, take over or create a major institution to accomplish Administration objectives.

“The Administration should begin … to initiate a policy of favoritism in all future Federal grants to those institutions friendly to us … and we should direct future funds away from the hostile foundations, like Brookings….”


Buchanan proposed several ways to fund the operation: “The money men who are behind the Administration could provide the seed money” to get it rolling. In addition, he suggested that it be “pointed out to all Big Contributors to other Institutions, and all the Big Contractors who get Federal money” and to “all the high rollers we know” that it was in their interest to support the new institute, “one of the President’s favorites.”

“The Big Supporters would find themselves on White House Guest Lists, while the friends of Brookings would stay in outer darkness,” he warned.

Buchanan realized that “some of the essential objectives of the Institute would have to be blurred, even buried, in all sorts of other activity” and that “we would have to have people there who knew what was up and agreed to it….” He went on to caution that “if we get the wrong people on the board, or the wrong individuals running it, we would be pouring money down a sewer….”

To run the new institute, the administration was looking for someone who “knew this business and its purposes intimately. Wrong fellow here, a softliner or a hustler, and forget the whole thing.” In the White House, he would have to work closely with “two individuals at the top level-who had the ear of the President at all times…”

Buchanan warned that if, at any time, the conservatives lost control of the White House, “the new incumbent would put a sword to this operation…. Those involved in the operation would have to carry heavy political insurance. At any time there might be a sudden distribution of assets to stockholders.”

-R.W.B.


The Ritter connection


Robert Macauley’s name is associated with AmeriCares, but he has a lengthy history with another powerful institution, Covenant House. Although Macauley rarely made it into news accounts during the turbulent winter and spring of discontent at Father Bruce Ritter’s youth shelter, he was the power behind the throne-the man who transformed it from a nearly bankrupt, obscure outfit into one of the largest, fastest-growing charities in America.

AmeriCares and Covenant were flip sides of the same coin: AmeriCares, the Reagan-Bush vision of private international charity; Covenant House, the domestic version.

In 1977, Macauley (who’d read about the fledgling charity in the Daily News) called Ritter to offer his help in expanding the operation. To associates, Ritter expressed doubts about Macauley, his grandiose promises, and intentions. But after badgering the dubious Ritter, Macauley eventually succeeded in becoming one of the priest’s closest allies and advisers.

Ritter, a frequent guest at Macauley’s Delray Beach, Florida, home, soon started loaning members of Covenant House’s volunteer Faith Community to Macauley. Twice a year Covenant volunteers ferried Macauley’s cars between his Connecticut and Florida house (after dropping Macauley at the airport, of course). Macauley, through a spokesperson, admitted using Covenant volunteers to drive his cars, but says they were reimbursed for any expenses and given plane tickets home.

Macauley, who was soon calling Ritter his “best friend,” brought Peter Grace and William Simon onto the Covenant board, of which he became chairman. It was these three wise men “who made Bruce go big time,” as a board member told the L.A. Times. In 1978, Grace, who helped Covenant House get its main Times Square area shelter, and Ritter went to Rome, where Ritter addressed an international meeting of the Knights of Malta. At the same time, progressive Pope John Paul I asked the order to return to its hospice roots. (In 1981, Ritter and Macauley met with his successor, the conservative John Paul II.)

According to a source, Macauley told people he was the one who persuaded a reluctant Ritter to raise money by writing monthly anecdotal letters about his “kids.” (Macauley denies any involvement with the letters.) The result: Covenant House received 95 per cent of its fast-growing budget from individual donations, most of them from direct mail. Letters hyped the plight of blond, blue-eyed runaways from Kansas who ended up selling their bodies on the mean streets of New York. However, the vast majority of Covenant’s clients were inner-city minority youth suffering from the loss of social services under Reagan.

Meanwhile, Ritter was being shown other ways to expand. In 1981, Ritter told staffers that the group would open in Phoenix, Arizona, thanks to banker Charles Keating-chief of the failed Lincoln Savings and now indicted for banking fraud-a devout Catholic who flew Mother Teresa around in his plane, as did Grace and Macauley. Keating later loaned Covenant House more than $40 million to finance its real estate acquisitions, which included the Times Square Hotel, a welfare hotel that became a moral hot potato and big money-loser for Ritter. Ritter became involved in Keating’s antipornography group, as well as the Meese Commission on porn, yet another of the White House gang’s favorite distractions from pressing social ills.

Covenant was a single-city operation until one winter day in the early ’80s, when the empire-builders struck. Grace flew Ritter and Macauley on his plane from Florida to Westchester, and Ritter returned to headquarters excited, telling staffers that Grace was ready to put big bucks into making Covenant House grow. “Peter Grace says we can be a $40 million charity one day,” he said. Pushed by Macauley, Grace, and Simon, Ritter was hell-bent on going global. In his office, maps with little flags showed current shelters and proposed new sites.

The first foreign expansion was to be into Latin America. Grace flew Ritter to Rio and other cities, to look for prospective Covenant House sites. In most places, they visited local members of Grace’s group, the Knights of Malta. They eventually settled on Guatemala. Father Jim Joyce, a Jesuit priest now at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, New Jersey, who was a Covenant House child-care worker from 1978 to 1981, objected to the shelter’s expansion there, arguing that Covenant House was playing into the Guatemalan government’s efforts to harass the activist church and promote controllable charitable activities. His complaints were brushed aside by Ritter.

In Guatemala, one of the people instrumental in setting up and running the Covenant operation was Roberto Alejos. The Guatemala shelter, which opened in 1982, was run by a man named John Boyle until he was forced out; Boyle told associates it was because he’d alienated Alejos. To replace Boyle, headquarters sent down 22-year-old Pat Atkinson, a former child-care worker. Last year’s in-house investigation of Covenant House looked into Atkinson’s alleged sexual activities with boys under the shelter’s care. No findings have been made public; nor have charges been brought.

Macauley and William Simon were active in promoting Covenant House’s domestic expansion as well. When plans were announced in late 1988 to open a 100-bed shelter in Hollywood, it was Simon who made the announcement at a Los Angeles area Chamber of Commerce luncheon. However, officials of private L.A. social service agencies had urged Ritter not to open there, saying there were already enough beds in the area, that the shelter was too large, and that it would draw children into the seamy area. Although he had solicited their advice, Ritter now ignored it. The boys were going Hollywood.

Following allegations that Ritter had slept with young male Covenant House residents, it was revealed that he had secreted some of the young men in question at “safe houses,” saying they were on the run from organized crime. According to a source, Macauley’s upstate New York farm was one of the safe houses. Macauley says only that many people from Covenant House were guests at the farm.

Through all of their friendship, and in spite of Macauley’s considerable charm, Ritter felt there was something a bit scary about the AmeriCares founder. “I wouldn’t want to be on Bob Macauley’s wrong side,” Ritter once told a staffer. “The people he knows…”

-R.W.B.

categories RussBaker.com news | Russ Baker | datetime May 21, 2010 10:34 pm
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