In this excerpt, Roger Morris in Partners in Power, The Clintons and Their America [Henry Holt and Company, 1996] describes the destruction of Gary Hart's campaign for the presidency in 1988. Ronald Reagan was completing his second term and both the Republican and Democratic fields were weak. Hart had virtually perfected his Kennedy imitation and looked like the odds-on favorite to be the next president.
Page 431:
Yet other secrets, other plans turned out to be far more decisive. The shadowy destruction of Democratic front-runner Gary Hart in the Donna Rice affair was to influence not only the Clintons' fate and the presidential election in 1988 but also the campaign of 1992 and the presidency that followed.
Pages 432 - 434:
Clinton admitted, however, he would enter the race far from the obvious choice. The front-runner for the Democratic nomination was clearly Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, a former McGovern campaign manager and a nationally known, well-financed veteran of the 1984 race. He was receiving increasingly favorable publicity, had run well ahead of George Bush, the likely GOP nominee, in the polls, and already seemed to many an odds-on favorite to be the next president.
On March 27 Clinton went to Los Angeles for an exclusive dinner with television producer Norman Lear and other figures from the entertainment industry-"Hollyticking," as the process of currying and money seeking came to be known. By striking coincidence, however, among those dining with Clinton that evening was Don Henley, a former member of the Eagles rock band. The same night, across the continent in Miami, one of Henley's close friends, a young woman named Donna Rice, was boarding a yacht called the Monkey Business for a voyage that would change the course of American politics.
Within the next few weeks, the public would witness the swift destruction of Gary Hart's candidacy and potential presidency. Only days after his April 13 formal announcement for the White House, the senator was the object of media speculation about his alleged womanizing. Acting on what it claimed was an anonymous tip, the Miami Herald followed a woman to Washington, staked out a townhouse where she was visiting Hart, and on May 4, in the story that swept through the media nationwide, accused the front-runner of an illicit "relationship" with twenty-nine-year-old party girl Donna Rice of Miami. The next day it was confirmed that Hart has spent the weekend of March 27-29 aboard the Monkey Business, which his aide Billy Broadhurst had chartered for the candidate's relaxation after Hart attended a scheduled fund-raiser in South Miami. On Saturday the two men had taken an overnight trip to Bimini with Rice and her girl-friend.
In the wake of the later Herald story, compromising photos of the Bimini trip, including one showing Rice on the senator's lap, were sold to the tabloid press for six figures. And though Hart adamantly denied charges of adultery and seemed to be riding out the Herald story, which some reporters had begun to question, there was more. The Washington Post put the Hart campaign on notice that it had been given a private detective's report purporting to show the candidate's involvement with yet another woman in Washington. It was what many later saw as the paper's power play to force the candidate out of the race. Meanwhile, amid the blaring headlines and rumors, crucial sources of Hart campaign money and support were deserting him. On May 8, less than a month after the Monkey Business expose', Hart withdrew.
As elements of the Hart drama began to emerge afterward, it was clear that his personality and habits had driven his fate to some extent. Yet there had been more to the politician's destruction than vulnerable psychology. Whatever his other strengths or weaknesses, Hart was no ordinary candidate to those in the inner recesses of power.
As a freshman senator he had been a key member of the celebrated Church committee investigation of CIA abuses and specifically the agency's incessant links to organized crime. He had gone on to serve on the new Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee, where he continued to be known for advocating further investigation and exposure of the alliance between the mob and the US intelligence community. Hart would be a vocal critic of CIA covert operations in general. A leading opponent of the Nicaraguan Contra war, the senator had barely escaped what he and others believed to be an assassination plot in 1983 when he flew into Managua at the time of an extraordinary CIA-sponsored Contra air strike against the capital.
From 1984 to 1987 Hart was repeatedly on record voicing his skepticism about the official version of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and promising that if elected president in 1988 he would order the opening of all CIA and other government files in question, looking in particular at the possible role of organized crime figures Santo Trafficante, John Roselli, and Sam Gianciana in the Kennedy murder--the last two of whom had been killed during the Church committee inquiry. By the mid-1980s Hart was increasingly bold in exposing the "sleaze factor" in the Reagan administration, including the wider influence of the mob in Washington. According to someone familiar with the written record of the remark, Trafficante had said of Gary Hart, "We need to get rid of the son of a bitch."
Though it came too late to affect his fate, there would be still more evidence that Hart's fall was not what it seemed at the time. According to US Customs sources, one part of the setting of the episode had long been suspected of a role in drug running. Some of those involved in Hart's Miami-Bimini weekend turned out to have links to organized crime and cocaine trafficking and, in spiraling circles beyond, to crime bosses of the Jewish and Italian syndicates, who in turn possessed ties to the US intelligence community dating back to the Bay of Pigs and earlier.
Discrepancies were plain in the Miami Herald's role in the affair as well. In the supposedly spontaneous call of the paper's public-spirited tipster there had been highly implausible detail about Hart's movements and phone records over the preceding period, intimate knowledge that should have prompted journalistic suspicion but that the paper apparently never questioned. In fact, as a subsequent independent investigation would show, Hart had been under surveillance by unknown parties for days and perhaps weeks before the weekend of March 27-29.
There were also reports of sensational videotapes of the Money Business, part of a professional surveillance of the vessel. Despite unexplained money, incriminating phone calls, and even evidence of a contract murder, most of the media had simply repeated the first trumpeted charges and reprinted the supplied photos, joined the clamor that forced the candidate from the race, and then moved on to the next story. There was no doubt that Hart inhabited the edge, but there was compelling evidence, too, that he had been pushed over it. And both self-inflicted and arranged, the ruin of Gary Hart would have historic impact on the Clintons.
Note that Morris speaks of Hart's advocacy of "further investigation and exposure of the alliance between the mob and the US intelligence community." For the latest on that subject and the destruction of other American political leaders see Richard D. Mahoney, Sons & Brothers, The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy [Arcade Publishing, 1999]
David Martin
April 2, 2000
http//Enough Monkey Business is Enough
http//Enough is Enough
Additional information and later developments reinforce Morris' thesis that Gary Hart's political destruction was a covert operation. The following excerpt is from a July 9, 2008, LACityBeat article entitled "Miss Narco America," about a woman the author, Ron Garmon, calls "Cissie," who was a major drug courier for a Colombian cartel:
What happened to Waldo? “Yeah, well, I found 21 kilos in his house. He was the one I originally held the kilos for myself when I first went into business out here. We were friends and competed who could sell the most after Danny set me up. His wife was a chick named Lynn [Armandt], who was the other woman in the Donna Rice scandal with Gary Hart. She was on the Monkey Business with Donna and told her story to Barbara Walters [and sold to the National Enquirer for $25,000 the infamous picture with the luckless senator’s arm around Ms. Rice]...
“Lynn was friends already with the girls in Florida and all these Pittsburgh ladies who were my girlfriends, like normal chicks,” she adds. “These I took into the business. Another family extension. Lynn later went on Barbara Walters. She was pretty hot. She had a bathing suit place at Turnberry, which was a hub for drugs. I used to see James Caan there all the time. Like that’s a big surprise!”
The article generated the following comment by a reader:
"Cissie," unbeknownst to her, was most likely working on behalf of the CIA and their War With Drugs. Her associate Lynn Armandt was a procurer of hot babes at the Turnberry resort in Miami, which was awash in VIPs, spooks, and coke traffickers in the 80's. Regulars at the club included Meyer Lansky associate Don Aronow, who designed the cigarette boats preferred by drug smugglers. Aronow was a close friend of George H. W. Bush. Aronow was rubbed out in 1987 at the peak of Bush's transparently fraudulent War on Drugs (the day before he was to receive a subpoena). The case file was inexplicably sealed until 2020. Nothing suspicious about any of that, I suppose.
Cissie, like many others, was likely allowed to operate with impunity by the CIA (which always trumps the DEA) to generate vast laundered liquid capital with which the CIA could use as it pleased without a pesky Congress asking a bunch of troublesome questions. In a nutshell she was probably an unwitting Iran/Contra operative.
One could delve further, but one might risk the fate of Gary Webb, who committed "suicide" by shooting himself in the head. Twice.
More provocative information on Armandt, Rice, and their Miami milieu is provided by Webster G. Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin in George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography:
Gary Hart talked about being the candidate with new ideas, but he had an immense vulnerability. He was a habitué of Turnberry Isle, a 234 acre earthly paradise located north of Miami. Part of the complex was a 29 story condominium. Turnberry was frequented by celebrities of the sports and entertainment world, by politicians and by Mafiosi like Joey Ippolito, a convicted marijuana kingpin. The developer and manager of Turnberry was Don Soffer, who was also the owner of a yacht named the Monkey Business. (After the February, 1987 murder of Don Aronow, Soffer received a telephone call, from a person who told him, "You're next." Soffer hired extra bodyguards and went for a one-week Atlantic cruise on the Monkey Business.) Soffer was a friend of Don Aronow. Ben Kramer was also a frequent visitor to Turnberry Isle. The establishment employed a staff of hostesses who were termed "Donnie's girls" or "the party girls". According to some, these hostesses doubled as luxury prostitutes for the Turnberry clientele of wealthy male patrons.
Among the employees of Turnberry was the sometime model Donna Rice. Another woman, Lynn Armandt, was in charge of the staff of party girls, and also had retail space for a bikini boutique in an upscale and remunerative Turnberry shopping complex. Lynn Armandt was the widow of a reputed Ben Kramer associate, a Miami drug dealer and underworld figure who had disappeared and never been found. The car of Armandt's husband was eventually found, riddled with machine-gun slugs and stained with blood. In the glove compartment, investigators found the telephone number of Ben Kramer.
When federal agents raided Ben Kramer's Fort Apache Marina on August 28, 1987, they examined the contents of Kramer's safe and found the original manuscripts of early primary stump speeches by Gary Hart.
Speaking of covert operations, if official censorship comes to the Internet, the rationale for it is likely to be the protection of impressionable young people from pornography and other objectionable things. Among the other bad things is "hate speech," as defined by the would-be censors. It's already being done by private Web-blocking services. You can see what one service blocks as "intolerance and hate" by going to Surf Control's test-a-site and typing in, say, www.crescentandcross.com or www.savethemales.ca.
So where does Donna Rice land? As the top dog at the non-profit, public-service organization, Enough is Enough. She's even had a book published, Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace. And how did that come about. Check out this exchange in an interview article in Salon:
How did you come to write "Kids Online"?
I was approached by the publisher.
That's flattering.
Flattering? Try unbelievable.
David Martin, January 17, 2009
The book is Blue Thunder: How the Mafia Owned and Finally Murdered Cigarette Boat King Donald Aronow by Thomas Burdick and Charlene Mitchell (Simon and Schuster, 1990). It is a hidden treasure.
Don Aronow was the ruggedly handsome, larger than life, offshore powerboat racing champion who was also famous for designing the industry-leading Cigarette, Donzi, and Magnum speedboats, crafts that are favored not just by racing competitors but by drug smugglers and the customs agents who pursue them. On February 3, 1987, as he was leaving his place of business in Miami in his Mercedes, he was gunned down by the driver of a Lincoln Town Car, who pumped several bullets into his body with a .45 automatic at point-blank range.
Anyone reading this gripping, extraordinarily educational book must conclude that the better, more descriptive noun for what happened to Aronow is “assassination.” It was an assassination in the same sense that the violent deaths of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Forrestal, Frank Olson, and Vincent Foster were assassinations. Donald Aronow was an important person whose killing had a political dimension, and the actual truth about what happened is very different from what our corrupt authorities concluded.
“If you came away from reading ‘Blue Thunder’ with the idea that all of south Florida is controlled by the mob, it would be understandable,” begins The Washington Post in its disparaging, don’t-read-this-book review by Jerry Bledsoe, demonstrating in the process that the control, at least of the justice system and the press, reaches well beyond south Florida. As I followed Burdick and Mitchell’s unraveling of the Aronow mystery, from his meteoric success in the mob-infested construction industry in New Jersey, his precipitate “retirement” and relocation to south Florida after a brief Caribbean detour, his equally meteoric rise in the boat-building industry, his violent end, and then the obvious cover-up of the murder, I was unable to get the lines from my take on the well-known Edwin Arlington Robinson poem, “Richard Cory,” out of my head:
Confession
You know what bothers me most of all
Is those guys that never learn how to play ball.
I've known some real losers, but I think that the worst
Was that bum with the plant up on Fifty-First,
Good looking fellow, all polished and slim,
The jerk believed nothing could happen to him,
He thought all his money was enough to protect him,
His stupid self-confidence finally wrecked him.
What he didn't know was our guy was on top,
We had every pol and we had every cop.
The suckers don't know that we nailed him yet;
We had every hack at the News and Gazette.
We hired a good hit man, and the boss didn't know it,
But I even sprung for a slick-writing poet.
As soon as the boss seen how good that it went
He called it the very best dime that we spent.
Now youse have all heard my gospel-truth story.
Too bad what we done to that slick Richard Cory.
No, they didn’t stage a “suicide” for Aronow and the mobsters don’t “have” all of those people, but they have enough. Here, on page 298, Burdick and Mitchell explain how it works:
When local detectives…wander into…sensitive avenues, someone from the brass is on hand to “advise” them to focus their efforts on some other “more productive” aspects of the case. “They tell them not to waste their time, that it’s a dead end, some bullshit like that,” says [probation officer Rory] McMahon. “You know how that shit is, when the big boss makes a quote suggestion. It’s all very subtle.”
It’s even easier at a newspaper. The reporter’s story gets rewritten, or it doesn’t make it into the paper at all. The consequent personnel weeding-out process that takes place validates the poem narrator’s low opinion of the surviving inky-wretch set, of course.
The narrator’s bad English also might have been appropriate for Richard Cory’s day, but Burdick and Mitchell suggest that day is past:
The popular stereotype of organized crime is outdated…
The ill-fitting black suits have been cast off for Savile Row styles. The dingy neighborhood bars have lost out to four-star gourmet eateries. The Brooklyn accents have given way to Ivy League tones. Street smarts are being enhanced by law degrees and MBAs. This is today’s mob. At its disposal is a sophisticated network of lawyers, bankers, businessmen, and officials who help them manage global operations that are woven into the fabric of legitimate society…
Meyer Lansky had once said about the mob: “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” At the time, U.S. Steel was the largest corporation in the world. Since then, the steel company has gotten smaller. The mob is bigger and more powerful than ever…
The underground empire has become the invisible empire. And no amount of armed security at the gates of government is going to keep it out. (pp. 313-315)
Unlike our revisionist version of Richard Cory, Don Aronow certainly did learn “how to play ball.” His early mastery of the game accounted for much of his material success. But two things seemed to have confused the rules for him, leading to his murder. They were the death of his main patron and protector in the mob, Meyer Lansky, and his own close friendship with then vice president George H. W. Bush. You’ll have to read the book to see how these two factors, according to the authors’ theory, came into play.
Generally, the mob would rather not have to kill people, especially people who are not known mobsters and with whom they have developed a profitable relationship. They prefer their old stock in trade, extortion, or a sub-category of extortion, blackmail. When the target is a prominent politician, an even more light-handed tactic can be just as effective, public humiliation. That’s where a little vignette from Blue Thunder meets the title of this article.
Blue Thunder on the Monkey Business Caper
Chapter 20 begins this way:
A titillating piece of information had come my way while looking into the Aronow story. Although apparently unrelated to the murder, it reinforced the omnipresence of the mob and its infiltration into all aspects of society. When the feds busted Ben Kramer, they discovered originals of Gary Hart’s stump speeches in Ben’s Ft. Apache safe. Somehow a Lansky, Inc. drug kingpin had gotten possession of a presidential contender’s papers.
At the time that Hart was blown out of the presidential waters, he had been the Democratic front-runner. The rest of the Democratic contenders seemed to have little chance of knocking Hart off the winning path. On the Republican side was George Bush, the heir apparent to the Reagan era. Bush was considered a weak candidate; even Reagan had expressed doubts about his loyal veep’s presidential fortitude. It looked as if the Democrats might capture the White House for the first time in eight years.
Suddenly, “Snow White,” as Hart was dubbed by the press, was devastatingly and humiliatingly knocked out of contention. With Democrats’ strong front-runner gone, the party was divided among the “Seven Dwarfs,” the remaining Democratic candidates. The precarious unity was gone, and a fractious campaign ensued with no one able to amass the strength that Hart once commanded.
Despite Gail Sheehy’s famous “psycho-political” article in Vanity Fair about Hart, there may be more behind the story than simply the tale of a man whose rigid religious upbringing forced him to punish himself by self-destructing. A closer look at the Hart debacle reveals an interesting panorama played out behind the highly publicized story.
Lynn Armandt, the woman who brought Gary Hart down, had worked for a long time at Turnberry Isle before the infamous Monkey Business trip in May 1987. Don Soffer, the developer and manager of the resort, had made her the head of “Donny’s party girls”–which some cynics likened to high-priced call girls. He also provided her with free floor space to sell bikinis. (Turnberry’s shops are considered some of the most expensive retail space in Miami.) In all, an extremely lucrative position for a woman of her background.
She and Donna Rice, another of Donny’s girls, were very good friends. The two women lived in upscale, neighboring condominiums not far from Turnberry and Thunderboat Alley. As Donny’s girls, Armandt and Rice made money, “dated” wealthy and famous men, and had entrée to Miami’s high-flying lifestyle.
After the incident, Rice supposedly ended her association with Armandt, angered over the “betrayal.” Or so she told Barbara Walters in a 20/20 piece. But people at Turnberry and Rice’s Miami condominium saw the two women together often after the Hart affair. A maintenance man at Rice’s condo saw them sunbathing at the pool frequently both before and after the 20/20 piece. “They were laughing and joking and were the best of girlfriends,” he had said. “Nothing changed.”
As the scrutiny of the scandal continued unabated, Armandt moved to New York and then went underground. She was castigated as a money-hungry woman who sold out her friend and brought down a presidential contender for a handful of dollars. But if she had been so inclined, why not blow the cover on some of the other celebrities who cavorted at the resort over the years? The resort’s client roster included a long list of powerful and celebrated men. Some whose often compromising activities there would have been ideal fodder for the gossip rags.
A street-smart woman such as Armandt knew she would become a pariah among Turnberry’s clientele and her relationship with her boss and benefactor would be severed if she publicized the secret life of any patron. Armandt also knew that some of the Turnberry boys could play a rough game. If it ever slipped her mind, she only had to remember what happened to her drug-smuggling husband. The last trace of him was a bloody bullet-riddled car and a piece of paper containing the telephone number of Turnberry patron Ben Kramer.
Gary Hart had already been to Turnberry before the Monkey Business incident, despite his denials. When he returned in May 1987, a “setup” may have been arranged with Armandt being directed at every step of the way.
One fed who has investigated Turnberry (he alleges that the twenty-nine-story condominium is “mobbed-up from the twenty-ninth floor down”) agrees with the notion that the Hart affair was masterminded by OC (organized crime, ed.) interests. He points out that Armandt went to the Miami Herald with her story, where she had no prospect of making any money but the greatest chance of destroying Hart quickly. The key question is, who stands to benefit from destroying Gary Hart? “One thing to always remember is [the mob] they’re big business,” he reminds me, “As goes the economy, so goes big business. Meyer Lansky was a staunchly conservative Republican, you know.”
There could be a deeper motive behind the Hart fiasco than simple partisan preferences. Contemporary organized crime depends on a protective shield of middle-level governmental and law enforcement officials. These are the people who possess valuable information and make decisions that directly affect the mob—selecting which cases to investigate and which to ignore, which drug smugglers to go after, which wiseguy convicts to parole. It’s the mob’s real muscle and it comes from owning not the president but the appointed politicians and law enforcement management.
After eight years of productive, well-oiled relationships at all levels of the federal government, it’s unlikely the mob would look favorably on a completely new administration. With a Democratic win, these relationships would be lost as officials and appointees made way for a new administration. The protective shield would falter—temporarily—as OC bagmen had to start anew finding people willing to take envelopes stuffed with cash in return for favors.
Keeping the same party in power and simply changing the head ensures that the machinery continues to run smoothly. From organized crime’s perspective, the “right” people retain their jobs: those not-so-really-new faces who would be expected from the not-so-really-new President Bush.
It is widely acknowledged that the Republicans didn’t win the 1988 election so much as the Democrats lost it. Perhaps there was an unseen hand making some adjustments in the direction of the election by strengthening the Republican chances of winning.
The mob had influenced presidential campaigns in the past. It’s common knowledge that Lansky, along with the mob boss Sam Giancana, had tipped the scales in Jack Kennedy’s favor when he delivered the state of Illinois. And if the mob could influence an election, manipulation of a local murder would be a small endeavor. It was all just a matter of “taking care of business” for the world’s largest and most powerful “corporation.”
The authors, it is clear, are much better at explaining what really happened in the elimination of Gary Hart as a presidential contender, and how it was done, than in explaining why it was done. It was not a case of mob preference for one party over the other or of preference for the incumbents over the party that was out of power. It had much more to do with blocking the aspirations of one particular Democrat, Gary Hart, than those of the party as a whole. We can say this with the advantage of hindsight that they did not have. Former member of the national security council, Roger Morris, explained in his book, Partners in Power, the Clintons and Their America, published six years later, that Hart as a senator had been a particular thorn in the side of the mob and had shown a strong inclination toward exposing the close ties between organized crime and the government’s own intelligence community. Burdick and Mitchell did not know that after only one term, the Republican George H. W. Bush would be replaced as president by a relatively obscure Democratic Arkansas governor with his own mob connections through his influential uncle Raymond Clinton. Furthermore, this man, Bill Clinton, was already known to have womanizing habits that were much worse than anything Hart was accused of. They also did not know that Bill Clinton would appoint as his Attorney General the Dade County State Attorney, Janet Reno, who, to the authors’ dismay, would end up pinning the Aronow murder on a man who by that time was already serving a life sentence for other offenses.
Falling off the Journalistic Ladder
In Blue Thunder, Burdick and Mitchell tell us of one law enforcement official after another being taken off the Aronow case just when they are beginning to make some progress, with at least one being demoted and his effectiveness essentially ended. Their work on this case seems to have been a career killer for the authors, as well. The authors are described on the dust jacket of the book as follows: “Thomas Burdick and co-writer Charlene Mitchell jointly write a nationally syndicated column, The Winning Edge. Burdick has been published in The Washington Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, the Ottawa Citizen, and a variety of national magazines.”
We know that Burdick, at least, was relatively young when he wrote Blue Thunder because at one point he describes a man who was in his mid-fifties as being old enough to be his father. As a work of investigative journalism, Blue Thunder is nothing less than a tour de force. These are the kind of people that we desperately need in the journalism profession, we keep telling ourselves as we turn page after revealing page. So what else have they written? A Google search of their names turns up only Blue Thunder.
And what has happened to the vast organization of Meyer Lansky, now that that powerhouse is dead? Several times in the book, Miami lawyer, restaurateur, and philanthropist, Alvin Malnik, is described as Lansky’s heir apparent. Blue Thunder has a very detailed 11-page index. Curiously, Malnik’s name is not listed there. We might be inclined to dismiss this omission as an inadvertence, but we have seen this technique used very tellingly recently. In that instance, the corrupt pre-appointment actions of federal judges John Bates and Brett Kavanaugh had been described in the text, but both names were missing from the index.
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