so we all know about Epstein, but today I'd like to talk about some of the other monsters out there in the early days of the Caribbean, and the region's transition from overt colonial extraction to tax haven and criminal hideout

to start, the British holdings in the Caribbean were focused on trade, as well as brutal agricultural production using slaves to grow cash crops like sugar. roughly 3 million slaves were brought over

like we were talking about yesterday, when Britain's empire collapsed, they kept many territories - 14 in the Caribbean: Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands

all of these are now tax havens, lol. additionally, there are some 'Crown Dependencies' like Jersey and Guernsey, as well as the Isle of Man, Hong Kong is still close to the UK re banking, and a variety of ex-colonial oddities in the Pacific and elsewhere

these didn't start out as tax havens, but they became them. interestingly, a pretty famous guy pops up to help ensure they became tax havens

Meyer Lansky, who played on a much bigger chessboard than most of the stupid guineas, got serious about building an overseas financial network after they got Al Capone on tax evasion back in 1931

he was obsessed with getting mafia money out of the US, laundering it, and then bringing it back in clean. and he was great at it, as he beat every criminal charge he ever faced

in scope and scale, Lansky said "We're bigger than U.S. Steel", and that appears to be true. and that's pretty impressive, you know, cause US Steel whacked JFK ;)

Lansky, as far as we can tell, started sending money to Swiss banks in 1932, using the loan-back technique, which is fundamentally not that different from this scene in the Wolf of Wall Street

The loan-back technique "involved first moving money out of the United States—in suitcases stuffed with cash, diamonds, airline tickets, cashier’s checks, untraceable bearer shares, or whatever."

"Next, he would put the money in secret Swiss accounts, perhaps via a Liechtenstein anstalt (an anonymous company with a single secret shareholder)."

"The Swiss bank would loan the money back to a mobster in the United States, who could then deduct the loan interest repayments from his taxable business income there"

Lansky and the National Crime Syndicate used these funds to expand in Cuba. here's Lansky w/ Batista, lol

Jeffrey Robinson said Cuba at this time was the “anti-Disneyland . . . the most decadent spot on the planet.”
luckily, the glorious Cuban revolution swept the mafia elements out of the country, and where did they go?

they went with the gusanos to Miami. Lansky settled there, where he lived for the rest of his life. as a side note, guess who his neighbor and protege was?

Brett Ratner, known Hollywood rapist, just happened to be neighbors with Meyer Lansky. he got his start through Lansky and Alvin Malnik's connections. make of that what you will.

so anyway, after the gusanos and the CIA shit the bed at Playa Girón, the mafia looked for other Cubas, and for a while they were thinking maybe the Dominican Republic, but Lansky settled on the Bahamas, for reasons that will become clear

"The Bahamas was perfect. Formerly a staging post for British gun-running to the US slave states of the Confederacy, and loosely governed for years by laissez-faire members of British high society, the Bahamas were effectively run by an oligarchy of corrupt white merchants"

this did not go unnoticed by the British: "“We feel that this [lack of provision of an effective regulatory system] might be a grave omission, since it is notorious that this particular territory, in common with Bermuda..."

"attracts all sorts of financial wizards, some of whose activities we can well believe should be controlled in the public interest.”

check it out: the Bahamanian minister of finance, who literally looks like he's eating his salary, Stafford Sands. he was, of course, a racist, and he took a $1.8 million bribe from Meyer Lansky to pass a law making it a criminal offense to break secrecy laws in the Bahamas

"Sands had estimated that there was a billion dollars or more of dirty money to be tapped by reinforcing bank secrecy, and he was prepared to anger the US to get it. It was “a calculated risk.” London gave the go-ahead, and Lansky built his new criminal empire"

WHOOPS

let's back up a minute. the Bahamas was run by the United Bahamian Party, aka the Bay Street Boys, who were, as you might imagine, insanely racist British oligarchs who ran the Bahamas, of which Sands was a member

the Bay Street Boys bring over Hjalmar Schacht and Ilse Skorzeny to promote Bahamanian financial interests abroad

Hjalmar Schacht was the top Nazi economist and president of the Reichsbank, and became Minister of Economics for Nazi Germany

Otto "Scarface" Skorzeny married Countess Ilse Lüthje, the niece of Hjalmar Schacht, and it goes without saying that he has a long, long career of warcrimes and ran the Paladin Group, one of the first, dirtiest PMCs

so uh, what's up with the UBP inviting Schacht and Ilse Skorzeny to their islands?

well, we don't know, because the meeting was secret

supposedly, it was to broker a German tourism deal. but I think if we use my patented ANGLETON MINDSET ™ approach, we might could discern what was really going on

first off, we know the German tourism thing was bunk, because they flatly got like literally one tourist out of it, not a major influx like they were saying

second, if you wanted to make a tourism deal, you wouldn't bring literally Hitler's top banking genius, right? so ofc something was going on. but what?

basically, the Bahamanians knew they were setting up a tax haven, which is a fundamentally transnational criminal enterprise. in fact, Shaxson found a letter from the Bank of England marked SECRET that shows what they were thinking

1. Britain knew that these territories were vulnerable to 'shady actors': “The smaller, less sophisticated and remote islands are receiving almost constant attention and blandishments from expatriate operators who aspire to turn them into their own private empires,”

“We need to be quite sure that the possible proliferation of trust companies, banks, etc., which in most cases would be no more than brass plates manipulating assets outside the Islands, does not get out of hand.”
oh yeah, dude, absolutely

so yeah, to return to the ANGLETON MINDSET ™, I think you can view the Bahamanians meeting with Schacht and Skorzeny as cutting them in on their budding transnational crimes, because there literally is no other explanation
(Skorzeny with Perón lol)

so, to try to wrap this up, there's a few more freaks I wanna touch on briefly, like Bernie Cornfeld, who ran a mutual fund ponzi scheme, Investors Overseas Services (IOS)

IOS sold mutual funds door-to-door, and Cornfeld called it "the people's capitalism", (which ought to Pavlovianly trigger you to check for your wallet). it preyed mainly on expat businessmen and GIs

I love ponzi schemes, and they can tell you a lot about how the world really works: IOS's "board of directors included a former governor of California, Pat Brown, and FDR’s son James Roosevelt, and many of his advisers came from the Bank of England"

pic unrelated

IOS was incorporated in Panama and banked with the same Swiss bank that Lansky used to launder the Vegas casino skim. he found an even better sucker than American GI's, however: hot money

IOS joked about renaming themselves “Capital Flight Airlines", and started sucking up hot money from "traders in Hong Kong, settlers in Kenya, French rubber-planters in Laos and Vietnam, Belgian miners in Congo, the Lebanese in West Africa, the overseas Chinese, and so on"

you know, the hotspots for all the worst shit.
anyway, Cornfeld was tight with Lansky, Alvin Malnik (himself close to Brett Ratner), Tibor Rosenbaum, and Resorts International................................
(also, is this not Epstein-like, or what?)

I am -not- gonna get into Resorts International today, but let's just say, there's a lot going on there

IOS was doing courier runs with the Lansky org, and IOS also bought shares in Resorts International. but yeah, IOS inevitably collapsed, as it was, among other things, a Ponzi scheme, and that's where Robert Vesco swoops in, buying into and taking over IOS

without recounting his long, fascinating career, let's just say he tried to buy Antigua, donated to CREEP, was called "the undisputed king of the fugitive financiers", and fled to Cuba, spending 13 years there in jail

finally, there was Norman's Cay, basically run by Carlos Lehder, the German-Colombian Medellín Cartel leader, also later the site of the Fyre Festival

Shaxson describes Norman's Cay as the "ultimate male libertarian fantasy. One former Medellin cartel pilot remembers being picked up by naked women at the airport. “It was a Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said. “Drugs, sex, no police . . . you made the rules.”"

“Lehder started to develop kind of like a neo-Nazi group there, that would protect the planeloads of coke and intimidate the people that lived there", said a chief of the DEA

“He spent untold hours plotting a political career, aiming at the Colombian presidency. As his goals expanded, so did his fascination with Nazism; after all, Hitler’s goal was to take over the world, and it was the same with Lehder,” said journalist Tamara Inscoe-Johnson

Lehder "formed a neo-Nazi Party called the National Latin Movement, which apart from wanting to set up a neo-Nazi government in Colombia, took aim at Colombia’s extradition treaty. He publicly championed Hitler"

so anyway, this is why the Bermuda Triangle exists: all the drug traffickers, Epsteins, Nazis, evil Brits, bankers, spooks and spies, lol

in conclusion, the Caribbean and the British West Indies are all tax havens designed to foster crime, they're in bed with the Mafia, Nazis, and drug traffickers, and they set it up that way on purpose

stay paranoid, god bless