The Family (53 page)
Despite the bankruptcies of AMIFS and Quantum Access, he continued to operate through Prescott Bush Resources Ltd., a company he had set up for real-estate and development consulting. With this enterprise, he sought to arrange lucrative partnerships with foreign corporations.
His first was with Mitsui, the third-largest exporter of U.S. goods to Japan. He drew up a plan for introducing Mitsui executives to Chinese and American business contacts and later submitted a sizable bill ($500,000) for his work. Mitsui rejected his plan and wanted to reject his bill, but worried about angering the brother of the U.S. Vice President, who looked more and more likely to become the next President.
Prescott also had signed a contract with Aoki Corporation to build an $18 million country club near Shanghai with a golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones for visiting businessmen. Aoki “gave” Prescott a one-third share ($6 million) at no cost. He put up no money for his portion of the investment. When asked about the $6 million gift, an Aoki executive said that Prescott had received the stake for “the good will expected from having him involved.” He was to introduce Japanese investors to the Chinese officials participating in the deal.
Soon after George’s presidency, Prescott helped start the U.S.-China Chamber of Commerce, whose goal was to promote trade between the two countries. As chairman of the board of directors for several years, Prescott collected fees for recruiting large corporations for membership: United Airlines, American Express, McDonald’s, Ford Motor Company, Arthur Andersen, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, and Archer Daniels Midland.
“From the beginning, Prescott Bush made his relationship to the former president a major part of the Chamber’s sales pitch,” reported the
Far Eastern Economic Review
in 2000. Prescott responded: “China has a special place in my heart. I have personally been involved in China for over 15 years. My brother George has been instrumental in the development of U.S. and China relations since 1974.”
Flying under the flag of “my brother George,” Prescott sailed into several more lucrative contracts, including an agreement in 1999 to be a “counselor” to Wanxiang Group, a large Chinese auto-parts company that exports to the United States. The chairman of Wanxiang Group said: “Inviting Prescott Bush to be the counselor will help expand Wanxiang’s operations overseas.” A company spokesman elaborated: “The company hired Mr. Bush because of his wide connections. He has many friends.” Prescott’s yearly retainer was reputed to be $350,000.
Despite the family’s discomfort with Prescott’s business dealings, there was no denying his vast wealth, and the accumulation of wealth was the first imperative for George Bush’s sons, all impatient to become millionaires like their father. “In our family, when you’re done in four, you’re out the door,” said Jeb Bush, meaning that the boys were on their own after their college graduations.
“I’d like to be very wealthy,” Jeb told the
Miami News
in 1983. “And I’ll be glad to let you know when I think I’ve reached my goal.” By 1998, Jeb had attained a net worth of $2.4 million. He maintained that his success—financial and political—had nothing to do with his family name. “I’ve always been independent,” he said. “I’m a self-made man.”
Jeb was ferociously driven to succeed, and he worked constantly, sleeping no more than five hours a night. He completed college at the University of Texas in two and a half years and, like his father, graduated Phi Beta Kappa. He was the first son to marry; the first to have children. He competed with his older brother, George W., but the two were never close; both measured themselves against their father, who had been the dominant, if distant, influence in their lives. At the time, Jeb was the family’s golden boy—smart, talented, articulate—the son in whom his parents invested their biggest dreams.
Shortly after his father was sworn in as Vice President, Jeb moved his family out of Houston because the prejudice against his Mexican wife had become too hurtful. “Miami is wide open. It’s a frontier town,” Jeb said. “It doesn’t have a lot of people with Roman numerals behind their names.” Columba also wanted to be closer to her mother and her sister, so George H.W. loaned his son twenty thousand dollars to buy a house in Miami, where Jeb had helped his father campaign in the anti-Castro Cuban communities during the Florida Republican presidential primary.
“That’s when I caught the bug,” Jeb said. “It was perhaps the most rewarding experience of my life . . . I think I grew as a human being. I learned how to deal with people. I learned how to overcome fear: fear of humiliation, fear of embarrassment, fear of not doing as well as you want to do.”
“Campaigning for Dad was hardly a paying job,” Stephen Pizzo wrote in
Mother Jones
, “but Jeb was about to learn that being one of George Bush’s sons means never having to circulate a résumé.”
Within weeks of his move, Jeb contacted Armando Codina, a Cuban American developer and a big Bush political supporter who owned a commercial-real-estate development company. Codina was reported to be worth $75 million. He hired Jeb as an agent to lease office space for his development company in Miami, although Jeb had absolutely no real-estate experience. “I learned the business the hard way,” Jeb said. “On the job.” Codina also offered Jeb a 40 percent share of his company’s profits—and Jeb did not have to put one cent of his own money into the firm. Opportunities were also offered to invest in other ventures on the side. Jeb accepted, and the company was renamed Codina-Bush, which gave Codina an instant relationship with the Vice President of the United States.
Within two years Jeb launched himself politically. As his father had done twenty-one years earlier, Jeb sought the top office of his county’s Republican Party and he was elected chairman of the Dade County GOP. As someone who played country-club tennis and spoke fluent Spanish, he was uniquely situated to bridge the chasm between Anglos and Cubans within the party. The Anglos were genteel people, much like Jeb’s paternal grandparents, who had fled the cold winters up north. The hot-tempered Cubans were brash entrepreneurs who had fled the repressive Castro regime. Each group viewed the other with veiled contempt but revered Ronald Reagan—so the thirty-year-old son of Reagan’s Vice President was well and favorably received. This made Jeb a valuable asset to Armando Codina.
Sometimes Codina-Bush clients wanted Jeb to do more than find them office space. They wanted his influence in Washington. Jeb always complied, frequently interceding for thugs and knaves whose blatant criminality defied exaggeration. In every case, the con men who hustled Jeb made contributions to his Dade County coffers before requesting his help. In case after case, Jeb responded as if each were a prince of the realm. As Jefferson Morley of
The Washington Post
wrote: “Political entrepreneurs like Jeb Bush sell access.”
In one case Jeb peddled his influence for Miguel Recarey Jr., an international fugitive whose hobby was extortion. Recarey, who boasted of Mafia ties to Santos Trafficante, pulled off one of the biggest Medicare frauds in American history, skimming untold millions from taxpayers. According to law-enforcement officials, he increased his personal net worth from $1 million to $100 million in six years. By the time Recarey met Jeb Bush, the Cuban immigrant had been forced to repay $13 million in improper Medicare payments. He had also been convicted of tax evasion, served time in prison, and was being investigated for hospital embezzlement in connection with his health maintenance organization, International Medical Centers.
In 1984, Recarey made a two-thousand-dollar contribution to Jeb’s Dade County coffers. Jeb then acted as a conduit to his father and Oliver North to arrange for IMC to provide free medical treatment for the contras. Afterward, Recarey hired Jeb’s personal company, Bush Realty Management, for $250,000 to find IMC an office building. During their conversations, Recarey mentioned that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was tightening Medicare rules, which threatened IMC profits. Recarey asked Jeb to call HHS on his behalf. Jeb agreed and made two telephone calls, which he would later deny, asking that Recarey be granted a waiver of the new HHS regulations.
Jeb went right to the top. He called the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Margaret Heckler, and spoke to her chief of staff, C. McClain Haddow. Jeb told Haddow to “discount rumors that were floating around concerning Mr. Recarey . . . He’s a good community citizen and a good supporter of the Republican party.”
These calls from the son of the Vice President commanded not just attention but action. When Congress later investigated Recarey’s Medicare fraud, Haddow testified that Jeb’s calls for Recarey had helped IMC receive its waiver, enabling IMC to have more than half its clientele be Medicare recipients. Secretary Heckler’s approval of this waiver overruled the decision of a local HHS administrator. Jeb’s intervention basically guaranteed that Recarey could continue bilking millions from Medicare, which is exactly what he did for three more years. Recarey paid Jeb seventy-five thousand dollars, which both men claimed was a realty fee, although Jeb never found Recarey any office space. In 1985 and 1986, Recarey also gave more than twenty-five thousand dollars to George Bush’s political action committees.
In 1987, when IMC was shut down because of insolvency, more than $200 million in Medicare money was missing. Recarey was indicted for embezzlement, labor racketeering, bribery, obstruction of justice, and wiretapping. He fled to Venezuela, and then to Spain, where he now lives in luxury. To this day he remains on the FBI’s list of international fugitives.
In 1985, the year after Jeb intervened with HHS for Recarey, he wrote a letter to the Department of Housing and Urban Development on behalf of another unscrupulous character. Hiram Martinez Jr. had applied for federal loan insurance for an apartment development. The application was stalled because of questions about the value of the land. After Jeb wrote to HUD, Martinez got the loan, but HUD later discovered that Martinez had indeed inflated the value of the land and the cost of the project. He was convicted and served six years in prison for fraud. Jeb said he did not remember writing the letter, but HUD released a copy.
Jeb had interceded for Martinez because he had been hired by Martinez’s contractor, Camilo Padreda, another anti-Castro Cuban, who was finance chairman of the Dade County GOP when Jeb was chairman. In 1982, Padreda had been indicted for embezzling $500,000 from the Jefferson Savings and Loan in McAllen, Texas. But the case never went to trial, because the CIA intervened on behalf of Padreda’s associate, who was indicted with him. His associate had worked for the CIA during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Padreda later pleaded guilty to defrauding the Department of Housing and Urban Development of millions, including the Martinez fraud, but Padreda never went to jail. Instead, he was placed under house arrest and given probation in exchange for cooperating with authorities investigating Dade County corruption.
Jeb, who has claimed that he never lobbied his father’s government, petitioned the Justice Department in 1990 in behalf of Orlando Bosch, who was in prison for having entered the United States illegally. The anti-Castro terrorist, who was implicated in the car-bombing assassination of Orlando Letelier, was notorious for having masterminded the bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight in October 1976, which killed all seventy-three on board, including a group of Cuban athletes returning from the Pan Am Games in Caracas, Venezuela. At that time George Herbert Walker Bush was CIA director. The United States sanctioned terrorism against Cuba and routinely trained commandos to infiltrate the island. Jeb, who planned to run for governor of Florida, represented a rabid anti-Castro constituency, a voting bloc that held his father’s anti-Castro actions at the CIA in the highest esteem. Jeb’s public support for paroling Bosch further enhanced his standing in the Cuban community, which considered Bosch a patriot in exile and honored him for his murderous bombings around the globe. At his son’s behest, George Bush intervened to obtain the release of the Cuban terrorist from prison and later granted Bosch U.S. residency.
By this time Jeb had woven an intricate web of murky business deals with spidery ties to the CIA. He repeatedly profited financially and politically by exploiting his father’s high office for personal gain. One of his most egregious deals occurred when he and his business partner, Armando Codina, obtained a loan of $4.56 million from Broward Federal Savings and Loan through a third party, J. Edward Houston. Codina-Bush used the money to buy an office building. When Broward Federal Savings and Loan failed, federal regulators found that the loan to Houston, which had been secured by Codina-Bush, was in default. Rather than force the Vice President’s son and his partner to sell the office building to pay off the loan, federal regulators negotiated a settlement in which Jeb and his partner repaid $505,000, retained control of the office building, and passed on to taxpayers the $4.1 million loss. Both men expressed surprise to
The New York Times
that the settlement could be interpreted as the use of taxpayers’ money to make good a loan whose proceeds went for their building: “Asked if they were aware that the funds for the repayment of the loan came from the taxpayers, both men said no.” Three years later, Jeb and his partner sold the building for $8 million, which Jeb claimed, with a straight face, was just enough to cover their costs and legal fees. “This little episode,” observed Christopher Hitchens in
The Nation
, “provides a handy insight into the mental and moral world of people who make money rather than earn it.”
By then, Jeb felt he had made enough money to seriously launch his political career. He told his father he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate in 1986, but his father persuaded him to wait. The Vice President said he could not afford “another Pressy deal” just as he was gearing up for his own presidential run. Jeb knew the reference was to his father’s brother Prescott’s embarrassing candidacy in 1982 for the U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut. Now, George told his son that he needed him in Florida. Jeb, who idolized his father, knew that this was George’s last and best chance to become President. No matter whom the Democrats put up, the Vice President to the beloved Ronald Reagan would have an edge. Jeb said he would do anything to help his father get elected.