Newsweek Magazine Covers Up McCain’s Mob Ties
One of the biggest stories of modern political history is consistently being suppressed by the controlled media
By Michael Collins Piper — AFP
Newsweek—one of the big three “news” magazines—has demonstrated beyond question that the American media is determined to cover up the organized crime origins of the fortune that set John McCain’s political career in motion and made him one of the richest men in Congress.
On June 30, Newsweek published a glowing cover story about McCain’s second (and current) wife, the former Cindy Hensley, featuring a glamorous cover photo of Mrs. McCain, followed by eight full pages of friendly reportage, including another glamour photo of the attractive woman draped across two pages. Mrs. McCain, so it seems, may be a candidate for sainthood.
Although Newsweek said Mrs. McCain’s family “is deeply rooted in Arizona,” and that her late father, Jim Hensley, “was one of the most prominent men in the state,” who was “a World War II bombardier . . . shot down over the English channel,”—in other words, a war hero just like McCain—Newsweek did not even hint of the racketeering and corruption (and murder) associated with Hensley and his patrons in his rise to power.
Newsweek said Hensley “borrowed $10,000 to start a liquor business” which became one of the largest Anheuser-Busch distributorships in the country and pointed out that the vast Hensley influence and fortune (worth $200 million) “got [McCain] access to money and connections” after he divorced his ailing first wife and married his then-mistress, Cindy Hensley, and settled in Arizona where he first ran for office in 1982. What Newsweek chose not to mention is what AFP previously reported:
McCain’s father-in-law got his start as the top henchman for Kemper Marley, who, for 40 years until his death in 1990, was the undisputed political boss of Arizona, acting as the behind-the-scenes power over both the Republican and Democratic parties. But Marley was more than a politician. He was the Meyer Lansky crime syndicate’s chief Arizona operative, front man for the Bronfman family—key players in the Lansky syndicate.
During Prohibition, the Canadian-based Bronfman family supplied and thus controlled the “spigot” of liquor funneled to local Lansky syndicate functionaries in the United States, including Al Capone in Chicago.
After Prohibition, Lansky-Bronfman associates such as Marley got control of a substantial portion of liquor (and beer) distribution across the country. In fact, Marley’s longtime public relations man, Al Lizanitz, revealed it was the Bronfman family that set Marley up in the alcohol business.
However, in 1948, 52 of Marley’s employees (including Jim Hensley, the manager of Marley’s company) were prosecuted for federal liquor violations. Hensley got a six-month suspended sentence and his brother Eugene went to prison for a year.
In 1953, Hensley and (this time) Marley were prosecuted by federal prosecutors for falsifying liquor records. But a young attorney,William Rehnquist, acted as their “mouthpiece” (as mob attorneys are known) and the two got off scot-free. Rehnquist later became chief justice of the Supreme Court and presided over the “fix” that made George W. Bush president in a rightly disputed election.
The story in Arizona is that Hensley took the fall for Marley in 1948 and Marley paid back Hensley by setting him up in his own beer distribution business. Today, Newsweek implies Hensley’s company was a “mom and pop” operation that became a big success, but the real story goes to the heart of the history of organized crime.
Hensley’s sponsor, Marley, was also a major player in gambling, a protégé of Lansky lieutenant Gus Greenbaum who, in 1941, set up a national wire for bookmakers. After Lansky ordered a hit on his own longtime partner, “Bugsy” Siegel, who was stealing money from the Flamingo Casino in Las Vegas—which was financed in part by loans from an Arizona bank chaired by Marley—Greenbaum turned day-to-day operations of the wire over to Marley while Greenbaum took Siegel’s place in tending to Lansky’s interests in Las Vegas.
In 1948 Greenbaum was murdered in a mob “hit” that set off a series of gang wars in Phoenix, but Marley survived and prospered as did his protégé, Jim Hensley, whose fortune sponsored McCain’s rise to power.
McCain’s father-in-law also dabbled in dog racing and expanded his fortune by selling his track to an individual connected to the Buffalo-based Jacobs family, key Prohibition-era cogs in the Lansky network as distributors for Bronfman liquor.
Expanding over the years, buying up racetracks and developing food and drink concessions at sports stadiums, Jacobs enterprises were described as “probably the biggest quasi-legitimate cover for organized crime’s money-laundering in the United States.”
In 1976, Hensley’s mentor—Marley (at the height of his power)—was the key suspect behind the contract murder of journalist Don Bolles who was investigating the mob in Arizona, but Marley was never prosecuted.
All of this is well known in Arizona, but Newsweek is working to keep the story contained.
In 2000, when McCain first ran for president, The Spotlight brought the facts to a national audience for the first time. AFP has since reported on this and many Internet outlets have picked the story up, but do not mention AFP as the source. McCain’s mob ties were also outlined in the book, The New Jerusalem (available from AFP for $20) which has had considerable distribution here and abroad.
Since McCain’s career was sponsored by the Lansky-Bronfman syndicate, it is no coincidence McCain recently traveled to London where Lord Jacob Rothschild of the international banking empire raised money among American expatriates on McCain’s behalf. Rothschild has long been allied with the Bronfman family as major patrons of Israel.
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