by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR & ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Jackson Stephens of Worthen National Bank on left PHOTO/Walton College
Hassan Abedi of Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) PHOTO/Google
The political rise of the Clintons has been monetarily fueled by a man linked to one of the biggest banking scandals in the nation’s history. Arkansas financier and political king-maker Jackson Stephens, with his son Warren, helped raise more than $100,000 for Clinton. More important, Stephens’ Worthen National Bank extended Bill Clinton a $2 million line of credit in January 1992, when the campaign was reeling under multiple allegations of adultery.
It was Jackson Stephens who brokered the arrival of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)–the bank later identified as an institution of preference for global criminals and drug peddlers–into this country in 1977. He steered the bank’s founder, Hassan Abedi, toward Jimmy Carter’s budget director, Bert Lance, whose bank an Abedi front man took over. Stephens then helped clear the ground, according to SEC documents, for Abedi’s secret takeover of First American Bankshares. In the wake of BCCI’s downfall, these institutions are gravely weakened; other U.S. banks secretly taken over by BCCI–including CenTrust, the biggest S&L in Florida, and Independence Bank of Encino–collapsed, leaving taxpayers holding the multi-billion dollar bag.
Just as the BCCI trail heads back toward Arkansas and a prime cash register for the Clintons, so too does another long-running and explosive scandal within the state, involving money-laundering, drug-running and support for right-wing insurgents backed by the CIA.
By the mid-1980s, Arkansas was a crucial link in the contra war against Nicaragua being masterminded from Washington. One scheme for maintaining a cover-up for Oliver North’s network was, it appears, played out in the Governor’s mansion occupied by Bill Clinton.
Among the occupants of that same mansion was Buddy Young, a man then, in charge of Clinton’s security, who later became a regional director for FEMA. According to court documents filed by Terry Reed, a former C.l.A. asset involved in North’s contra supply effort, Young was a pivotal figure in a case designed to land Reed in prison not long after Reed had walked out of an arms-for-drugs operation in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he had been working with C.I.A. man Felix Rodriguez.
Arkansas’s role in the contra war and in an arms-for-drugs supply network goes back to the early 1980s and the airport at Mena, Arkansas. A federal investigation aided by the Arkansas State Police established that Barry Seal, a drug dealer working for the Medellin cartel as well as with the C.I.A. and the D.E.A., had his planes retrofitted at Mena for drug drops, trained pilots there and laundered his profits partly through financial institutions in Arkansas. Seal, at this time was in close contact with North, who acknowledged the relationship in his memoir. These were the years in which North was constructing his covert supply lines for the contras.
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