Blood and Politics (77 page)

Both sides decided to forgo a jury trial. The facts of the case were too complicated, all the lawyers agreed. The unstated corollary: neither Carto’s dictatorial style nor the staff’s revolt was likely to appear particularly sympathetic to a jury, even if the average Californian could forget that both plaintiff and defendant shared a common belief that the Holocaust was a hoax. As Judge Maino sat alone in judgment, he restrained emotionally charged rhetoric by the attorneys and sorted fiduciary truth from ideological fancy. He allowed greater latitude to elderly witnesses,
who had traveled long distances to testify, and he repeatedly heard stories irrelevant to the decision at hand. If the nine-hundred-page transcript is any indicator, he also remained remarkably good-humored throughout the proceedings.
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The plaintiff’s assertions were straightforward: after Jean Farrel died in Switzerland, her will had been contested. The legion-IHR’s board of directors had appointed Willis Carto its “limited agent” to secure the legacy, and in 1990 Carto finally succeeded at winning 45 percent of the estate for the legion. Instead of directing the funds into legion accounts, however, Carto and codefendant Henri Fischer, an experienced international trafficker, had placed the assets in a separate corporation known as Vibet, Inc. With the funds outside the corporate control of the legion, Carto and Fischer had then distributed money, as they personally wished, to various “good causes,” including to Liberty Lobby and its connected projects. Eventually discovering that Carto was treating the Farrel funds as his personal property, a new (and legitimate) board of directors terminated Carto’s “agency” in 1993. Now the legion was trying to collect the entirety of the Farrel assets, a sum in excess of seven million dollars.
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Willis Carto’s defense, by contrast, stretched and twisted around self-contradictory claims. On one hand, he contended that he still “owned” the Legion for the Survival of Freedom by virtue of his supposed status as its “substitute incorporator” in 1966. According to this argument, he legally controlled the legion and could dispose of its assets, including the Farrel millions, as he pleased. On the other hand, Carto also claimed that the legion’s board of directors had formally met in March 1991 and officially decided to forfeit its ownership of millions of dollars and then had given the funds to him personally. In either case, Carto’s defense contended the money was his.
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Paradoxically, Carto’s testimony before Judge Maino, although clouded and unbelievable at points, projected critical moments of unadorned truth. For three decades Willis Alison Carto had avoided the truth about his various political and publishing projects. He had usually shunned long interviews with reporters. He kept his name off the masthead of
The Spotlight
, despite his actual role in setting its editorial direction. And he had hidden his relationship to the Institute for Historical Review under a blanket of pettifoggery. Nevertheless, Carto had produced a remarkable public record in the half dozen lawsuits he had pursued over the decades, volumes of courtroom testimony and evidentiary depositions more revealing than any two dozen media interviews.

This extensive court record must be read with care. In one and the same trial Carto could both unaffectedly tell a truth and hide a lie. He
could claim in one deposition that he never wrote articles under another name and in another hearing rattle off a list of pseudonyms dating back to his first years as editor of
Right
magazine. He could claim he was not anti-Semitic and then testify endlessly about the nefarious ways of the Jews.

In one particularly revealing case from the 1970s and 1980s, Liberty Lobby had sued William Buckley’s
National Review
magazine for libel. During this proceeding the magazine’s attorney read a couple of paragraphs from
Imperium
into the record and questioned Carto about Francis Parker Yockey. “The soul of the Negro remains primitive and childlike in comparison with the nervous and complicated soul of western man” was one gem. “Primitive violence is natural to the Negro and the sense of social disgrace is lacking in him” was another. Did the witness consider this passage racist? the lawyer asked. “No, I don’t consider it racist at all,” Carto responded.
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The answer told reams about the Liberty Lobby chief’s actual worldview, and in all good common sense he must have known it undermined his claims for tort.

Yet during that same
National Review
trial he revealed much less when questioned about Liberty Lobby’s relationship to the legion-IHR. In response to the question “Did Liberty Lobby ever have a connection with an organization called the Institute for Historical Review?,” Carto replied with one word: “Never.”
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That question had been asked time and again. Carto routinely insisted that Liberty Lobby was organizationally and ideologically separate from all his various enterprises on the West Coast; including Noontide Press and
Western Destiny
magazine in the 1960s and the Legion for the Survival of Freedom and Institute for Historical Review in the years after. Liberty Lobby was simply a patriots’ lobby working the halls of Congress, providing testimony and educating the public, he claimed. Holocaust revisionism was not part of its platform. Neither was white supremacy or anti-Semitism, although he didn’t mind telling everyone Liberty Lobby was “anti-Zionist.” He was its “founder” and “treasurer” after all. At the same time, he claimed he was just a friendly volunteer when working on behalf of Noontide and the legion. When one opposing attorney, who had already discovered Carto’s past membership on the Legion for the Survival of Freedom’s board,
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asked him why he had resigned from that post in 1969, Carto replied that he simply could not spend any more time on the project.
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When the same matter came before Judge Maino in the case at hand, Carto and his legal team completely reversed these previous claims. As the IHR staff noted in its own report on the trial, “time and again he impeached his previous testimony on virtually every substantive issue.”
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Far from asserting that Liberty Lobby and the legion had never had a relationship of one to the other, for example, Carto’s attorney most emphatically described them as one virtually seamless enterprise. “The evidence will show that all of the organizations work together for a common scheme to promote revisionism, among other topics, to the common public, to discuss constitutional issues,” he averred in opening remarks. “And they were all in the same ball park, as the evidence will show, with respect to their editorials that included Liberty Lobby, who put out the
The Spotlight.
”
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When asked in this trial about his resignation from the legion board, Carto quickly admitted that the resignation had been an attempt to conceal his real relationship to both Liberty Lobby and the legion. It was for show purposes only. Not being able to devote more time had nothing to do with it. “It was obvious that should I become public in my association with the Institute other than just giving it my personal approval, which I did . . . why this would be definitely contrary to the interests of Liberty Lobby as well as to the Institute,” Carto testified under oath.
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His exact words need to be recorded here because Willis Carto was rarely as forthright as he was that day before Judge Maino. When the legion’s attorney asked if his testimony before Judge Maino contradicted previous testimony in other cases, Carto’s memory once again seemed to develop multiple problems. But with a little reminder he was able to remember.

Asked if had had ever made any statements under oath about having no position of authority with the legion, Carto replied that he didn’t “think so.” But the plaintiffs repeatedly produced documentary evidence of such statements. In a June 1989 letter, apparently written at a time when Carto was trying to court former California Republican Congressman Paul McCloskey, Carto had claimed that he had “no official position” with the legion-IHR.
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When asked about a similar claim he had made in a 1993 letter to William Hulsey, then legion-IHR’s lawyer, Carto once again told Judge Maino he could not remember such a letter . . . until it was produced to the court.
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As had happened for over three decades, when questions hit too close to home, Willis Carto simply could not remember the facts. His problem in this court was that the plaintiffs did, in fact, remember. And they had the documents to prove it.

In previous trials he had claimed that he held no official position with the legion-IHR either because he did not want Liberty Lobby to be known for its support of Holocaust revisionism or because he was trying to keep litigation involving one organization from spilling over into another. In this case, he swore that he had always called the shots at the legion as its permanent “substitute incorporator,” and as such the Farrel
legacy was properly his to distribute to various “good causes,” the largest of which was Liberty Lobby. And to prove that Liberty Lobby was a good cause, Carto’s attorney avowed, in this instance, that the Lobby and IHR were ideologically inseparable.
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The legion’s attorney, on the other hand, wanted to discredit these current claims. Thus he questioned Carto about past disavowals of a “position” with the IHR, demonstrating that Carto would testify to whatever was immediately expedient.
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In addition to establishing the legion’s claim to the Farrel money, its attorneys tried to use this trial to discover where Carto had stashed the funds. Weber’s crew began this court session with the facts they already knew. During the period when Carto still controlled the legion, for example, several of the staff’s paychecks were drawn on Swiss bank accounts for a corporation called Vibet, Inc. They had learned that Vibet, Inc. was a Bahamian corporation, initially established to hold the Farrel funds offshore. In addition, when Vibet’s Swiss funds were wired into IHR accounts, the bookkeeper had recorded them as loans rather than as assets. This convoluted manner of accounting supposedly protected the legion-IHR from adverse court judgments during the period before the coup. After the coup, this system helped stymie the legion’s new directors, as they searched for the Farrel funds.
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The legion’s difficulties had been compounded, apparently, because of the ingenuity of Henri Fischer, named as a defendant along with Vibet. Fischer’s reputation for international intrigue and double-dealing far exceeded any of Carto’s own. Apparently born of French parents and raised in French Indochina, Fischer lived alternatively in Australia and California in the 1960s and 1970s. He also traveled internationally, including to destinations in the Arab Middle East and North Korea, and was rumored to be “connected” to one intelligence agency or the other, most probably the Central Intelligence Agency. According to Australian press reports, during the 1960s Fischer was part of an ultraright clique in that country’s Liberal Party and published an internationally distributed anti-Semitic journal. The Australian Labor Party apparently deputized him in 1975 as its bagman in a deal with Iraq’s Baathist Party. Laden with postelection debt, the Labor Party arranged for a five-hundred-thousand-dollar “contribution” from Iraq to be picked up in Japan by Fischer and brought to Australia. Fischer apparently did travel to Japan with two Iraqi officials and received five hundred thousand U.S. dollars, but he never delivered the money to the Labor Party. Instead, he absconded
with the funds, losing a pair of “bodyguards” at a Singapore hotel in the process. His ex-wife contended several years later that he used the money to buy a home in San Diego County, where he subsequently settled.
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Fischer’s home was actually a five-acre estate in Escondido, complete with a full guesthouse and tennis court, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Willis and Elisabeth Carto were rumored to have lived on this estate for more than two years, at the same time as a man named Michael Brown, who had once been a bodyguard for George Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party führer assassinated by one of his own men in 1967. When the Cartos needed their own home, they acquired a multiacre estate of their own, also in Escondido. And when Carto needed assistance securing and then disposing of the Farrel funds, according to the legion’s lawsuit, he turned to Fischer, who then helped set up Vibet, Inc., and made other arrangements for a tidy sum of two hundred or three hundred thousand dollars. On the witness stand Carto could not remember how much his friend had been paid.
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Eight months after the legion filed suit, but before the hearing in Judge Maino’s court, the Costa Mesa, California, Police Department concluded that Fischer’s estate on Pine Heights Way and the Carto home on Quailridge Drive probably housed “bank records, correspondence, journals, ledgers and other documents showing the location and amounts of LSF [legion] assets under their control.” According to a search warrant,
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these assets had been “stolen” from the legion and were subject to seizure. On March 22, 1995—three plus weeks before the Oklahoma City bombing—police squads raided both residences and carted off documents by the caseload. Liberty Lobby’s
Spotlight
was enraged at the raid on Carto’s home, and Carto wrote personally of the indignities his wife, Elisabeth, endured during the raid, having her home searched by a squad of police. But
The Spotlight
did not report on the raid on Fischer’s estate. Apparently, it would have been difficult to accuse Weber of being party to one conspiracy, while at the same moment revealing that the object of that conspiracy was one Henri Fischer, an alleged bagman.
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Weber’s attorney questioned Carto about the expenses incurred in securing the Farrel legacy. Lawyers had to be hired, and a host of details handled in Switzerland. A huge sum, eight hundred thousand dollars, was paid to a man Carto described as an “expeditor,” Mr. François Genoud. The legion’s attorney began spelling the name for the record. “I
don’t believe I gave the name,” Carto interrupted, but the attorney continued. Despite prodding from both attorney and judge, Carto didn’t want to discuss Genoud in open court, but he was forced to.
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