by JOHN RAINFORD
Over a five year period, Nugan Hand was responsible for arranging the financial transactions of at least 26 known drug dealers.
In early February 1978, on the strength of a claimed turnover of $1 billion, the Australian Financial Review reported that “at this sort of growth rate Nugan Hand will soon be bigger than BHP.”
Two years later, on January 27, 1980, one of the two founders of the Nugan Hand Bank, Frank Nugan, was found dead near Lithgow in New South Wales from a gunshot wound to the head, apparently self-administered. While this was taking place, the other founder of the bank, Michael Hand, was busy shredding “sensitive” documents. By June 1980, Nugan Hand Ltd was in liquidation. It owed about $15 million to creditors. Hand had fled to the United States, never to be seen or heard from again.
As some of the activities of Nugan Hand came to light following the appointment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry, the print media in Australia and the US were running stories about the connection between the bank and the CIA, alongside allegations that the bank was involved in drugs and arms trafficking.
Nugan and Hand were not bankers, and they employed a number of prominent former US military and intelligence personnel who also lacked banking experience.
The bank’s president was Admiral Earl Preston Yates, who was deputy chief of staff at US Pacific Command during the final US withdrawal from Vietnam. General Edwin Fahey Black, the bank’s representative in Hawaii, commanded US troops in Thailand during the Vietnam War, having previously served with the National Security Council and the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA. Lieutenant-General Leroy Joseph Manor, who worked for the bank in the Philippines, was also a Vietnam veteran, and had previously been chief of staff of the Pacific Command. General Erle Cocke, a World War II veteran and former Brigadier-General of the Georgia National Guard, worked as a consultant for the bank in Washington.
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