McCain fortune traced to organized crime

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ELECTION 2008
McCain fortune traced to organized crime
Mob figures later implicated in Arizona savings and loan scandal

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Posted: February 26, 2008
9:29 pm Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

John McCain's personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona, through his father-in-law, according to a report published by a multi-news agency team called Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc.

IRE reporters Amy Silverman and John Doherty, writing in the Phoenix New Times, note that the father of McCain's wife, James Hensley, was convicted by a federal jury in U.S. District Court of Arizona in March 1948 on seven counts of filing false liquor records. Hensley also was charged with conspiracy to hide from federal authorities the names of persons involved in a liquor industry racket with two companies he managed, United Sales Company in Phoenix and United Distributors in Tucson.

The umbrella company, United Liquor, at that time held a  monopoly in Arizona, organized and managed by Kemper Marley, who was accused of mob ties by a reporter who was murdered in 1977.

Arizona crime connections again surfaced in the 1980s when McCain was implicated as one of the five U.S. senators named in the "Keating Five" scandal.

Charles Keating Jr. and his associates paid McCain some $112,000 in political campaign contributions between 1982 and 1987, while Keating was organizing a massive real estate fraud in the then FDIC federally insured Lincoln Savings and Loan Association.

In April 1986, McCain's wife and father-in-law also invested $359,000 in a Keating shopping center, before the savings and loan scandal broke.

Keating was sent to prison under civil racketeering and fraud charges for the $1.1 billion loss the investment scheme cost the public, although McCain and the other U.S. senators involved managed to avoid charges in the Senate, with McCain receiving only an Ethics Committee rebuke for exercising "poor judgment."

Even today, McCain's 2008 presidential campaign staff includes several prominent lobbyists, despite the senator's claim to be a campaign reform crusader whose goal is to take money out of politics.

WND previously reported McCain's 2000 and 2008 campaign manager Rick Davis took a six-figure salary as president of the Soros-funded Reform Institute in the intervening years and managed his own lobby firm of Davis, Manafort & Freeman in Alexandria, Va., operating at the same building in a suite down the hall from the Reform Institute.

In 2003 and 2004, Davis apparently solicited CSC Holdings, a subsidiary of the Cablevision Systems Corporation, headed by Charles F. Dolan, to make two separate $100,000 contributions to the Reform Institute.

In between the two separate $100,000 contributions Cablevision made to the Reform Institute, McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, wrote a letter to the Federal Communications Commission supporting Cablevision's desire to continue packaging customer TV programming in a manner more profitable to Cablevision.