[SPEAKER_00]: In the last episode, we examined James Engelton's ties to Israel to say that Israel had an ally in James Engelton would be a massive understatement.
[SPEAKER_00]: For those who believe that Israel is behind the JFK assassination, the close relationship with Engelton establishes and Israeli connection to actions that only someone inside the CIA, like Engelton, could take.
[SPEAKER_00]: What other players are on the board and the Israel did it theory?
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, we'll look at two of them, Myorlanski and Permandex.
[SPEAKER_00]: Did Myorlanski have involvement in the JFK assassination through Israel?
[SPEAKER_00]: And was Permandex a permanent industrial exhibition or was it really an entity that raised funds for assassinations?
[SPEAKER_02]: In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired at President Kennedy's motorcade in downtown Dallas.
[SPEAKER_02]: The first reports say that President Kennedy has been seriously wounded by this shooting.
[SPEAKER_01]: and then they have formally charged the assassination question.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just a part of it as the man is the unclean.
[SPEAKER_01]: But also acting alone, and was he a member of experts?
[SPEAKER_01]: Mission answers, acting alone, alone, alone, alone.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm a rookie.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm a rookie.
[UNKNOWN]: I'm a rookie.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is solving JFK.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host, Matt Crumpton.
[SPEAKER_00]: We previously talked about Myer Lansky in episode 81 when we covered the Mafia.
[SPEAKER_00]: Although Lansky was Jewish, he was welcomed in to the Italian mob because of his relationship with Lucky Luciano and his know-how when it came to offshore banking.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that same episode, we covered how Lansky sought refuge in Israel from a U.S. tax evasion charge in 1970, but was denied by gold to my heir, even though he had previously given money to my heir for Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: For many people who think that Israel was involved in the JFK assassination, myor landscape looms large.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's take another look at landscape, this time in the context of his ties to Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to landscape's biographer, he first met Israeli agents in the summer of 1948 when his colonial and gambling house hosted a fundraiser for the Haginah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lansky gave a donation himself and reportedly told the Israeli agents, quote, I'm at your service.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shortly after that, according to Michael Collins Piper, who I should note, is alleged to be a holocaust denier by the anti-defamation league, Lansky also found out about an arms shipment leaving the New York Docks to go to Arabs who were fighting against Jews in Palestine.
[SPEAKER_00]: To help his Zionist friends, Lansky got the dock workers to toss the Arab-bound weapons into the water.
[SPEAKER_00]: On other occasions, arms that were intended for the Arabs were hijacked by Lansky and shipped to the Haganah instead.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, so Myer Lansky cares about the Zionist cause, especially on the heels of World War II.
[SPEAKER_00]: But aside from that, there are a few other points about Lansky that are potentially notable when it comes to whether he had involvement in the JFK assassination.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lansky traveled through France for his heroine smuggling operations and met high-ranking leaders in the Corsican Mafia, and it turns out that the CIA also had ties with the Corsicans.
[SPEAKER_00]: The agency supplied weapons and money to Corsican gangs to assault communist picket lines and harass important union officials.
[SPEAKER_00]: Partially as a result of being in business with Lansky and the CIA, the French connection heroin network thrived.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many JFK assassination researchers suspect that the Corsican Mafia may have been involved in procuring an assassin in Dallas.
[SPEAKER_00]: If so, Lansky would have a direct link
[SPEAKER_00]: We also can't forget that Myer Lansky's career, Jim Braden, was arrested in the Daltex building across the street from the schoolbook depository immediately after the assassination.
[SPEAKER_00]: Braden, who legally changed his name from Eugene Braden two months before the assassination, told police that he was in town on business and was just looking for a phone in the Daltex building.
[SPEAKER_00]: What makes Braden's presence in the Dal-Tex even more suspicious is that he had visited H.L.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hunt the day before the assassination, the same day that Jack Ruby also visited Hunt's office.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to Bernard Fensterwald, Jack Ruby visited the Cabana Motel where Braden was staying around midnight the night before the assassination.
[SPEAKER_00]: Additionally, in the weeks before the assassination,
[SPEAKER_00]: Braden worked out of an office suite in room 1701 of the Marquette building in New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_00]: During the same time, David Ferry, who worked with the Cuban exiles Carlos Marcelo and Guy Bannister, was working in the same building as Braden on the same floor in room 1707.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of the things that are suspicious about Braden being in Dealy Plaza are vicariously tied back to Myer Lansky, the man who Braden was working for as a courier.
[SPEAKER_00]: Further, according to Michael Collins Piper, Myer Lansky's close associate and Las Vegas Casino operator Morris Dalits hired Robert Blakey.
[SPEAKER_00]: a former Justice Department prosecutor to be one of his lawyers when he was a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit in 1976.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next year, Blakey oversaw the investigation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations as Chief Counsel.
[SPEAKER_00]: And remember, Myor Lansky's name is not mentioned by the HSEA's Organized Crime Report.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what to make of this fact, and Piper didn't have a footnote for it, but I file it under the category of Notable If True.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll come back to Lansky's alleged role in a bit, but first, let's turn our attention to the bank where Lansky laundered most of his cash on behalf of American Organized Crime.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Banquet, Decreddit, International, or BCI,
[SPEAKER_00]: The bank was founded in 1959 by T. Bohr Rosenbaum, who had previously served as director of logistics and supply for the Mossad.
[SPEAKER_00]: BCI's board members included two very close associates of Myolansky, John Pullman, Lansky's International Finance Man, and Ed Levinson, the Mafioso who helped finance Bobby Baker's
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that two guys with an organized crime background and questionable board credentials were appointed to the BCI board speaks volumes about Lansky's influence and about BCI's willingness to do business with a known criminal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another significant depositor of the bank was the state of Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ernest Jeffet, who was the president of the largest bank in Israel, Bank Leumi, was also on the board of BCI.
[SPEAKER_00]: At one point, as much as 90% of the Israeli Defense Ministries external budget flowed through BCI.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, ECI Bank was extremely close to Israel and its leadership, but perhaps most importantly, BCI was, according to Piper, one of the primary shareholders of Permandex, a company that also did its banking with BCI.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what exactly was Permandex?
[SPEAKER_00]: Ostensibly, it was an organization with the goal of fostering international trade by creating a new world trade center.
[SPEAKER_00]: The name Permandex was an acronym for Permanent Industrial Exposition.
[SPEAKER_00]: Depending on who you ask, Permandex was either a poorly thought-out international trade venture or a front company for covert operations, including assassinations.
[SPEAKER_00]: The company was formed as Centro-Mondiel-Comercial in Basel, Switzerland by George Mantello.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mantello was a Romanian textile manufacturer who escaped to Switzerland and lead up to World War II, where he went to work for the consulate of El Salvador in Geneva.
[SPEAKER_00]: While working at the Salvadorian consulate, he issued thousands of travel documents to Jewish refugees, a courageous and
[SPEAKER_00]: A CIA memo about Mantello from 1959 says that two well-placed sources said that he quote was closely connected with the Israeli intelligence services.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because Mantello helped many Jewish refugees escape, it's not necessarily nefarious that he would have connections with the Israeli intelligence service.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, the objective of creating a World Trade Center in Basel, Switzerland, was changed to creating one in Rome.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason for that move is a little cloudy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The official account is that Mantello and his backers were simply not successful in raising the money in Switzerland and then decided to move the project to Rome.
[SPEAKER_00]: The unofficial account comes from what New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison told Playboy Magazine's editors off the record in 1967.
[SPEAKER_00]: Garrison said, quote, Permandex was dissolved by the Swiss government in 1961 on the grounds that it was a conduit for funds to the OAS.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Neo-Fascist secret army then struggling to keep Algeria French and overthrow
[SPEAKER_00]: At the height of the OAS's activities, French government officials, such as Andre Malru, charged the group was secretly supported by the CIA, which wished to see De Gaulle deposed.
[SPEAKER_00]: In support of Garrison's claim, a February 1, 1957 State Department dispatch from the American
[SPEAKER_00]: expelled from Switzerland by the Swiss authorities.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the other hand, a later state department dispatch from Basel, on April 9, 1958, mentioned the same allegations against Mantello and said QUOTE.
[SPEAKER_00]: As far as the consulate is concerned, none of these charges have been proved.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a follow-up dispatch on May 21st that said Mantello, quote, was once threatened with expulsion from Switzerland for illegal dealings in gold.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next week, the State Department in Basel, who was apparently very interested in Permandex, reflected on the failure of Permandex.
[SPEAKER_00]: which was never able to get off the ground in Switzerland, saying quote, Permandeck's collapsed principally for one reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: It had no real money to start with and all efforts to raise some failed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Early in the game, backers of the scheme let word be spread that there was substantial American capital in the venture.
[SPEAKER_00]: They politely declined to disclose names or the amount of holdings.
[SPEAKER_00]: The consulate was assured reliably that there was never American money worth mentioning in the scheme.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so was Permandex kicked out of Switzerland?
[SPEAKER_00]: The answer is no, if you're looking strictly at the available primary documents.
[SPEAKER_00]: The answer is yes, if you take Jim Garrison's word for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: My question for which I couldn't find a great answer is why did George Mantello want to start Permandex in the first place?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not like he had a background in international trade.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would a bona fide World War II hero like Mantello cares so much about an international trade exhibit?
[SPEAKER_00]: In particular, why would Mantello continue to care about its success in Rome after the project never even got off the ground in Basil?
[SPEAKER_00]: As we discussed in episode 81, Myor Landsky helped fight the Germans in World War II by working with the Office of Naval Intelligence to watch out for Nazi infiltrators at loading docks that Landsky controlled.
[SPEAKER_00]: This plan to secure the eastern seaboard against Nazi sabotage with Mafia help
[SPEAKER_00]: which became known as Operation Underworld, was led by British Colonel William Stevenson.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stevenson's top aide for Operation Underworld was Canadian Lewis Bloomfield, who also served as the attorney for the Canadian Bootlegging Bronfman family, who were associated with mob activities during the prohibition era.
[SPEAKER_00]: an entity that provided weapons and money to the Hagenah.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the Sarnaborn Institute, Bloomfield coordinated the smuggling of guns, bombs, and ammo to the Hagenah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bloomfield was also the director of the Israeli Canadian Maritime League and the chair of the
[SPEAKER_00]: Zooming out, the big picture here is that Lansky put his money in the bank at BCI and had influence over BCI through his two directors, Pullman and Levinson.
[SPEAKER_00]: BCI, according to Michael Collins Piper, was one of the largest shareholders of Permandex.
[SPEAKER_00]: You may be asking yourself, who cares?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why does this matter?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, where it gets really interesting is when we look at the list of the board members of Permandex, we find the name Clay Shaw.
[SPEAKER_00]: On March 1, 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison arrested and charged businessmen and CIA said Clay Shaw with conspiring to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three days later, Italian newspaper Paises Sarah published a story alleging that Clay Shaw was linked to the CIA through his involvement as a board member of Central Mundial Commercial, or CMC, the company that owned Permandex.
[SPEAKER_00]: We learned an episode 52 that Clay Shaw was an asset of the CIA who was regularly in touch with the agency.
[SPEAKER_00]: The declassified documents that we're aware of about Shaw's relationship with the CIA show that he was focused on gathering intelligence about what he saw during his international travels.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shaw provided information to the CIA on 33 different occasions.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, what exactly did the PASA Sara newspaper say?
[SPEAKER_00]: For starters, it said that CMC was, quote, a creature of the CIA, set up as a cover for the transfer to Italy of CIA FBI funds for illegal political espionage activities.
[SPEAKER_00]: When the CIA became aware of these claims after they were published in Proveda, the Soviet State Paper, an internal memo was drafted, which said, quote, it appears that all of the Proveda charges are untrue, except that there was a CIA relationship with Shah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Critics of Paisesera have noted that it was a left-wing Italian paper that had reported disinformation about the United States and the past, and that same story was echoed by Soviet outlets like Proveda, the state-sponsored newspaper.
[SPEAKER_00]: The argument that, if they're communist, then everything negative that they say about the US must be a lie is not typically one that would convince me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Enemies can tell the truth about each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes enemies are the only ones who do tell the truth, but more important than the political leanings of Paisesera is the sourcing of the claims in the article.
[SPEAKER_00]: My biggest concern is that I don't know where the newspaper got its information from.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the information in the paper was probably wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, Lewis Bloomfield was the attorney for Permandex who had no ownership of it, not a banker who owned 50% of the company as Paises Sarah reported.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what documentary evidence exists to help our understanding of Clay Shaw and Permandex?
[SPEAKER_00]: We have a copy of the letter from the CMC Board of Directors to Shaw from July 26, 1958, notifying him that he had been unanimously elected to the board.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few months earlier, George Mantello and his son Enrico had met with Shaw and New Orleans to see the international trademark in person.
[SPEAKER_00]: The president of Permanentax was Farrink Nagy, who had been the president of Hungary and moved to the US in 1947 when Soviet-backed communist held his son hostage and forced him to resign.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1959, after Clay Shaw was already on the CMC board, Nagy contacted the CIA to let them know that he would be willing to place an American businessman on the board of Permandex or to place a CIA agent on the staff of Permandex.
[SPEAKER_00]: He also invited the CIA to buy equity in the company, which is another way of saying that he was asking the CIA for money.
[SPEAKER_00]: The November 1959 internal CIA memo discussing Nagi's offers noted that the exhibit holes of Permandex had just opened in Rome and were expected to be in full operation by the spring of 1960.
[SPEAKER_00]: The memo came from Cored Meier, who was then the chief of the CIA's International Organizations Division, also known as IOD.
[SPEAKER_00]: Notably, Meier described Frank Nagy as a, quote, covert associate of IOD.
[SPEAKER_00]: The commercial staff of the CIA then passed on the Permandex opportunity, primarily because the Trade Center in Rome had no planned relationships with Soviet-block countries, which made putting a CIA official on the staff much less helpful to the agency.
[SPEAKER_00]: A later 1967 CIA memo, which analyzes the earlier back and forth about Nagi and Permandex, inject some uncertainty into the issue, saying QUOTE.
[SPEAKER_00]: The documents did not indicate whether or not CIA decided to use Permandex.
[SPEAKER_00]: In April of 1959, Clay Shaw's friend, New York Times reporter, and Karnahan, wrote him to ask for details about Permandex because she had been approached by Permandex to do some public relations work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shaw responded, quote, although I am a member of the Board of Directors,
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm afraid I don't know too much about them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Shaw didn't answer Karnahan's questions in his letter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead, he noted that he would be in New York to visit her soon and could answer more questions then in person.
[SPEAKER_00]: In an October 1960 letter, responding to someone who had offered to help recruit tenants for the World Trade Center, Shaw said QUOTE.
[SPEAKER_00]: As for Permandex, my relation with them is a rather specialized one.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are anxious for the international trademark here and the Trade Center in Rome to work together.
[SPEAKER_00]: To that end, invited me to join their board of directors, which I have done.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, I am not too familiar with their day-to-day operations.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1962, the Permindex World Trade Center in Rome was forced to close, because it couldn't secure enough tenants.
[SPEAKER_00]: Michael Collins Piper and other authors alleged that when Permandex wasn't failing at operating a trade center, it was involved in numerous assassination attempts against French President Charles De Gaulle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Several articles mentioned a report from the French Intelligent Service, S-D-E-E-C-E, which says that Permandex laundered money into the OAS accounts to help finance the assassination attempts on to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many authors also claimed that Guy Bannister's office in New Orleans served as the American headquarters for French OAS mercenaries, which wouldn't be a huge surprise given that all of the munitions from the Shlumber J.
[SPEAKER_00]: Raid were stored at Bannister's office as we discussed in episode 47.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem with this OAS claim is that no one's ever been able to find the underlying SDEC reports or any proof that they existed.
[SPEAKER_00]: This does not mean that it's categorically untrue that Herman Dex had involvement with the OAS.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's just not much documentary evidence to support it.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, Herman Dex's president for Rank Nagy was a friend of Jacques Sustel, who had been the governor of Algeria under Charles De Gaulle.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sustel split with De Gaulle over Algerian independence and became a backer of the OAS.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1960s, Sustel traveled to Washington to meet with CIA officers.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to Andrew Tully in his book, CIA, the inside story, Sustel was successful in obtaining assistance from the CIA in his attempt to assassinate Charles De Gaulle, president Kennedy's ally.
[SPEAKER_00]: The CIA backing the OAS was also reinforced by the findings of the Church Committee.
[SPEAKER_00]: On top of the alleged Permindex ties to the French OAS, the company also had at least one connection to Propaganda Duay.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Italian right-wing anti-communist organization and secret society that exerted significant influence on Italian public life and had ties to the American CIA.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to Italian author Michelle Metta, Permandex met in the same office building as
[SPEAKER_00]: So what are we to make of Permandex?
[SPEAKER_00]: Was it a failed business venture that happened to have some CIA affiliated jet setters involved or was it a sinister money laundering scheme for covert operations?
[SPEAKER_00]: Putting all of this together, the theory advanced by Michael Collins Piper is one based largely on associations and implications.
[SPEAKER_00]: It goes like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Myor Lansky was aligned with Israel on its geopolitical policies.
[SPEAKER_00]: He put most of his money in the BCI bank where he had two board members, and which was also used by Israel, and was started by T-Boar Rosenbaum, who had been a massade officer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two CIA assets, Clay Shaw and Farringk Nagi were on the board of Permandex, which used the BCI bank and BCI, according to Piper, had an ownership interest in Permandex.
[SPEAKER_00]: The lawyer for Permandex, Lewis Bloomfield, was also very involved in causes related to the state of Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we throw the PIC's Sarah story on top of those connections, the implication is that Permandex may have been used as a vehicle to kill President Kennedy just like it was allegedly used to try to kill Charles De Gaulle.
[SPEAKER_00]: The challenge is that many of the worst allegations against Permandex don't seem to have any documentary support.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, we have the PIEC Sara newspaper, but they don't disclose their sources, and they're a communist leaning paper in the context of the Cold War, which further complicates matters.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not saying that the Permindex allegations have been debunked, but they're certainly not proven by any means.
[SPEAKER_00]: With something like the assassination of a president through an international cutout, we wouldn't expect to find a smoking gun document anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the lack of documentary evidence doesn't mean that the thing didn't happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just means it's much harder to prove it if it did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Next time on Solving JFK, we wrap up our study of Israel's alleged involvement in the JFK assassination by looking at the Mossad, Mickey Cohen, and one of the men behind the financing of Oliver Stone's JFK are non-milchan.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you heard anything that you believe is out of context or if you have additional information to offer, you can let us know at solving JFK podcast at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Please provide citations to the record for any fact that you're relying on.
[SPEAKER_00]: For transcripts, sources, and official podcast merchandise, visit solvingjfkpodcast.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thanks for listening.
[SPEAKER_00]: Visit solvingjfkpodcast.com for more information.