“…“Scandal in contemporary U.S. life is an institutionalized sociological phenomenon. It is not due primarily to psychopathological variables, but it is due to the institutionalization of elite wrongdoing which has occurred since 1963. Many of the scandals that have occurred in the U.S. since 1963 are fundamentally interrelated: that is, the same people and institutions have been involved.”
—Prof. David Simon, Elite Deviance (6th edition)
(…)
Twenty years later journalist Danny Casolaro, shortly before his bled-out body with slashed wrists was found in a bathtub in West Virginia in 1991, had placed Meese at the center of a plot involving a secret operation dubbed “the Enterprise,” overseen by retired Air Force major general Richard Secord, who cut his teeth on covert operations in Laos in the ‘60s. Working for the CIA-owned Air America, Secord learned how to launder opium drug profits into private enterprise, as described in a variety of Iran-Contra documents that came out of Reagan’s time in offie.
Casolaro had taken his research a step beyond official reports by zeroing in on then-current activities of private individuals with connections to former Reagan officials still making money by supplying products secretly to George Bush’s Defense Department. Danny’s death occurred in the final days of Bush’s term, but the activities would continue with President Bill Clinton, who had been complicit with the Reagan and Bush administrations engaged in covert drug drops and money-laundering in Mena, Arkansas in the ‘80s. Clinton used the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority to launder the drug money proceeds after setting up a re-insurance company (Coral Reinsurance) in Barbados, according to the Staff of the Ozark Gazette’s research project called “Gray Money.” See Mark H. Gaffney’s book, Black 9/11 for the full story.
Casolaro had taken his research a step beyond official reports by zeroing in on then-current activities of private individuals with connections to former Reagan officials still making money by supplying products secretly to George Bush’s Defense Department. Danny’s death occurred in the final days of Bush’s term, but the activities would continue with President Bill Clinton, who had been complicit with the Reagan and Bush administrations engaged in covert drug drops and money-laundering in Mena, Arkansas in the ‘80s. Clinton used the Arkansas Development and Finance Authority to launder the drug money proceeds after setting up a re-insurance company (Coral Reinsurance) in Barbados, according to the Staff of the Ozark Gazette’s research project called “Gray Money.” See Mark H. Gaffney’s book, Black 9/11 for the full story.
Edwin Meese III was the third generation of his name to run political affairs in Alameda County, and he was a natural in overseeing Reagan’s political affairs in Sacramento after the new governor’s inauguration in early 1967, the same year, incidentally, that the Hopsicker family left Chicago Heights for their move to California.
During the 1970’s–while the primary author of Gangster Planet, was studying at UCLA–a ban was issued by California’s Air Resources Board (ARB) on sulphur dioxide emissions from industrial facilities. The ban was followed by a complaint for injunctive and declaratory relief filed by Daniel’s dad’s employer, Stauffer, joined in by other plaintiffs, including Chevron U.S.A., Inc., and Allied Chemical, as well as the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The fact that Harry’s company was “under attack” by California while he was paying his son’s California tuition may help explain the generational conflict that arose between father and son at the time.
Harry Hopsicker officially retired from the company in 1980, three years before Stauffer’s executives and accountants got in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a “multimillion-dollar fraudulent scheme to overstate its 1982 and 1983 earnings.” Stauffer entered into a consent decree—settling the case without admitting wrong-doing. By this time, of course, Harry and Rita were making plans to move from Stauffer’s headquarters in Westport, Connecticut to Venice, Florida.
Stauffer and Phosphorous Trichloride
Harry may not have known that Stauffer had sold the design for a phosphorous trichloride chemical plant it owned in Pennsylvania to a Swiss company, Krebs A.G. Sale documents acknowledged the design would be used by El Nasr Pharmaceutical Company of Egypt, a fact that alarmed even the Bush administration in 1989. Besides pesticides, phosphorous trichloride was also a key ingredient for “Sarin, a deadly nerve gas and is on the Western core list of precursor chemicals.”
Sarin gas was used during the Iran-Iraq war begun in 1980. This use resulted in a ceasefire and an agreement designed to prevent Egypt from manufacturing the gas in another plant. Consequently, Krebs was forced to sell out to Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) of the UK.
ICI’s interest in toxic chemicals first rose in 1948, according to a book by Dan Kaszeta (Toxic: A History of Nerve Agents, From Nazi Germany to Putin’s Russia. Oxford University Press 2021, p. 89), while doing research on pesticides. A long-winded article in the Harvard Business Review in 1995 analyzed why ICI had, in 1987, “demerged” its businesses. ICI kept the part of the company that made industrial polymers, paints, and explosives, but it sold the part that made drugs, pesticides, and specialty chemicals to Zeneca—now merged into AstraZeneca….”