Author: muckety

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This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.

This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.

This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.

This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.

This post was archived from createpositivechange.org/. View the original on the Wayback Machine.

Talk about a firm for all seasons.

We’ve already shown that investment bank Goldman Sachs is a power in politics and in finance, sending its executives off to presidential cabinets and elective offices and to lead other companies.

And now there’s proof that Goldman can hit home runs in baseball as well.

Word is out that two of Goldman’s managing directors, John Mallory and Gerald J. Cardinale, helped bring the New York Yankees and superstar Alex “A Rod” Rodriguez back into contract talks.

It would seem they did what Scott Boras, Rodriguez’s agent and one of the most powerful and vilified men in sports, couldn’t do. Though, reports say he is still involved.

Rodriguez and Boras had earlier opted out of the last three years of his contract, passing up $91 million and apparently severing his ties with the Yankees.

The new deal with the Yankees is said to be a 10-year, $270 million pact, tops for a U.S. athlete. With incentives, it could reach $300 million.

(Though the Yankees don’t want to use the word “incentives.” Rather, they’re calling them “historic achievements.”)

The Goldman connection to the Rodriguez negotiations began, it seems, with a friend doing a friend a favor.

Rodriguez reached out to Mallory, who had been his neighbor in Miami, and asked him if there was some way he could get back to the Yankees.

Mallory contacted Cardinale, his colleague at Goldman who is a board member of the extraordinarily lucrative YES Network.

Goldman has a partial ownership in YES, which broadcasts Yankees games.

According to the Times, the network’s revenues exceed $300 million and the network’s value may be two or three times the value of the team itself.

What’s good for the Yankees is good for the YES network and Goldman, so it’s no surprise that Cardinale joined the effort to bring back the team’s star third baseman.

Cardinale told Randy Levine, the Yankees president that Rodriguez wanted to reopen talks.

Rodriguez and his wife Cynthia then met with the Hal and Hank Steinbrenner, the Yankees’ senior vice presidents, and the talks got started.

Significantly, Boras was not said to have been part of these conversations.

The agent’s vast influence in baseball has been documented here. He represents 65 Major League players and nearly that many minor league players.

He also negotiated Rodriguez’s first mammoth contract, getting the Texas Rangers to come up with $252 million for 10 years in 2000.

Sports columnists and many fans love to hate Boras, despising his hard-nosed style.

But even though Goldman’s guys stole some of his thunder, Boras hasn’t gone away.

The agent is involved in hammering out the final details of the Rodriguez contract, reports say.

Typically, his company gets five percent of an athlete’s salary. So it stands to make $13.5 million on the deal over 10 years and more, too, if Rodriguez hits a lot of home runs.

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The appointment of John Thain to head troubled Merrill Lynch demonstrates, yet again, the long reach of Goldman Sachs.

Thain, currently CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, began his career as an investment banker at Goldman. He went on to become co-president and co-chief operating officer.

As the New York Times reports, Thain was chosen not only for his success at the exchange, but also for his background at Goldman.

The idea that Merrill would seek a leader from a rival rankled some. “It’s shocking [they picked] someone from a Goldman Sachs background,” former Merrill CEO Dan Tully told the Wall Street Journal, observing that Thain didn’t seem to be a “people person” who would fit easily into Merrill’s culture. “I understand he’s very cerebral,” Tully said.

Yet the Merrill culture is one of the factors that has led the company into so much trouble. Former CEO Stanley O’Neal was forced to resign two weeks ago after he approached Wachovia CEO G. Kennedy Thompson to discuss a possible merger. The move had followed announcement of a $8.4 billion writedown, largely due to subprime mortgage losses.

Goldman, on the other hand, has been able to avoid many of the ills faced by Merrill and other firms. It’s also a frequent source of talent for both government and industry. Henry M. Paulson Jr. and former Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, now chairman of Citigroup. Former Goldman co-chairman John Whitehead has served as deputy secretary of state and head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. New Jersey Gov. Jon S. Corzine was a Goldman chairman & CEO.

Not surprisingly, Thain’s successor at the New York Stock Exchange will be another Goldman Sachs alumnus. Duncan Niederauer, a former Goldman managing director and most recently president and co-COO of the exchange, will become CEO.

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Activating maps

Muckety maps are interactive. After performing a search and choosing from the search results, you’ll get a map that shows connections between people and organizations.

To view descriptions of the relations, click anywhere on the map to activate it. When you pass your mouse over connecting lines, you’ll see a popup box describing the connections. Solid lines represent current relationships; dotted lines show former relationships.

View large map | View static map | Embed this map | License Muckety technology

Rearranging maps

Clicking on a box in the map will expand the connections to the person or organization.

You can also re-center a map around one or more players by clicking on the map background and dragging the mouse to draw a temporary box around them. The chosen boxes will be highlighted in pink.

You can then perform one of several functions to redraw your map:

Choose Menu: Edit -> Center to recenter the map around the selected boxes.

Choose Menu: Edit -> Expand to additional relationships of the selected boxes.

Choose Menu: Edit -> Group to place multiple actors in a single grouped box. You’ll be asked to name the box.

Choose Menu: Edit -> Delete to remove the selected boxes from the map.

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It was a story of connections. But were they real?

“Hillary’s Mystery Money Men,” first appeared on the website the Real News Project on Oct. 18.

The story was then reprinted in the Nov. 5 issue of The Nation and it has circulated widely on the Internet.

It either opens a window on a significant shift of a controversial Republican money man to the Democratic camp, or it overstates the actions of a hedge-fund savvy financier who may have been hedging his bets by contributing to several candidates.

The piece by Russ Baker and Adam Federman argues that “notorious financier Alan Quasha” was a secret force behind the presidential campaign of New York’s Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Quasha’s involvement would be significant because he was the head of Harken Energy in 1986 when it bailed out Spectrum 7 Energy Corp., a failing oil company headed by George W. Bush. Harken is now known as HKN Inc.

The rescue of the company gave Bush some needed money and set the stage for his lucrative time as a managing partner of the Texas Rangers. After that, he became governor of Texas before becoming president.

Consequently, it would seem that a man who made the Bush presidency a Republican reality is now backing Clinton, a Democrat, for president.

As proof, Baker and Federman note that Quasha has contributed to Clinton.

Beyond that another one of Quasha’s companies, Carret Asset Management, hired Terry McAuliffe after he stepped down as Democratic chairman in 2005. McAuliffe left that company after becoming national chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The authors suggest that Quasha could prove to be a problem for the Clinton campaign, the second coming of Norman Hsu. That “financier” raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Clinton before he was revealed to be a fugitive from the law.

“The very premise of your article is wrong,” Quasha wrote in response to the story. “Not only am I not a secret force behind the Clinton campaign, I am not even supporting Hillary Clinton for president. … I am openly backing Mitt Romney for president.”

(Federal campaign contribution records show that Quasha has given $5,200 to Romney. He has contributed to $4,600 to Clinton, $2,300 to former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, a Republican, and $2,300 apiece to Democratic senators Barack Obama and Christopher Dodd. His wife, Ilona Nemeth Quasha, has given to Clinton.)

In his response to the story, Quasha wrote that his contributions to the Clinton campaign were made at the request of Hassan Nemazee, his business partner and a key Democratic contributor.

Nemazee also invested in Harken and he is a co-chair of Carret.

Quasha also said he gave to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee because Nemazee is the finance chairman of that group.

And Quasha also stated that it was Nemazee who hired McAuliffe.

In his response after the story appeared, McAuliffe takes the authors to task on several points. He alleges he did not receive $18 million by selling his interest in Global Crossing, an interest that had cost $100,000.

And he states that he had not “intentionally” omitted his connection to Carret in his memoir. Rather, he states, the memoir stopped before he got to his hiring at Carret.

Baker and Federman fire back, saying they had made all sorts of good-faith efforts to contact Quasha and McAuliffe. And they state that statements from other sources in the story were accurate.

There have been no new salvos from either side.

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It’s a billion-dollar family feud straight out of central casting.

The first great-grandchild of legendary Dallas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt is suing his father and other family members for alleged mismanagement of two trust funds with up to $4 billion in assets.

In a Texas state court filing that often reads like a Hollywood script, Albert G. Hill III claims that his father, Albert G. Hill Jr., and two aunts “were motivated by their avarice. . .so they could ‘get their money sooner rather than later.’”

The complaint calls Tom Hunt, a nephew of H.L. and trustee of the two trusts, “the ’spider’ in a web of conflicting interests” and “the most conflicted man in Dallas.”

Specific claims involve an $800,000 luxury skybox at Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, a $20 million penthouse condo in Vail, Co., allegations of inappropriate transfers of millions in oil and gas assets, and payments of more than $100 million for Albert Jr.’s legal and tax bills.

The real issue, however, may be that some of H.L.’s progeny simply live too long. What triggered the lawsuit was a decision by family elders to break up a trust established for one of H.L.’s daughters, now deceased.

The suit, filed Nov. 8, was first reported by The Dallas Morning News.

In 1935, H.L. and his first wife, Lyda, established trusts for each of their six surviving children: Margaret, Hassie, Caroline, Nelson Bunker, William Herbert and Lamar.

The trusts named in the suit were established for H.L.’s first two children, Margaret and Hassie, also named Haroldson Lafayette, like his father.

Hassie, born in 1917, was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man, and died in 2005.

Margaret, who married Albert Hill Sr., died in June at age 91. Albert Sr. and Hassie were best friends, according to Margaret’s book about her life, and he was an initial trustee of Hassie’s trust.

H.L., who amassed one of the largest fortunes in history, died in 1974 at age 85.

It’s clear, attorneys for Albert Hill III argue, that H.L. intended “the trusts would remain intact for the benefit of his grandchildren and their descendants.”

One exhibit included with the suit is labeled “Hypothetical Model” of the flow of trust assets following Margaret’s death.

The two-page analysis was distributed to family members at a meeting in Colorado Springs six weeks before she died.

After distributions to cousins ($500 million), taxes ($500 million) and payments to Hunt Petroleum ($300 million), it shows $1.4 billion remaining in Margaret’s trust.

Albert Jr.’s share of Margaret’s trust is re-divided into four equal parts among Albert Jr. and his children, Albert III, Heather and Elisa.

Were she still alive, the suit claims, Margaret never would have allowed the breakup of her trust. At the meeting, she reportedly told family members, “The Hill family stays together.”

According to the suit, Tom Hunt is 84, Albert Jr. is 62, Lyda 65, Alinda 59 and Albert III 37.

In the suit, Albert III says that his father “disclaimed” most of his share in Margaret’s trust in exchange for nearly $100 million from the trust being used to pay his gift taxes and legal fees.

Albert III, like many Hunt heirs, is active in Dallas affairs. He sits on the boards of Baylor Health Care System Foundation and the Dallas Zoo. He is an officer of the family’s AG Hill Partners.

H.L. had 15 children with three women, in often overlapping households. Margaret and Hassie were from the first family, along with brothers Nelson and William, who famously tried to corner the world silver market in 1979-80.

Lamar, who died last December, co-founded the American Football League and owned the Kansas City Chiefs of the NFL. Caroline owns and operates some of the top luxury hotels in the world. Nelson and William are also billionaire Dallas oil men.

Ray Hunt, whose Hunt Oil recently signed a controversial exploration deal in Iraq, is from H.L.’s third family. Ray has kept himself and his business interests separate from the other branches of the Hunt tree.

It’s hard to predict how the suit will play out. All parties certainly can afford the best legal talent Dallas has to offer.

One thing for sure, when the Hill branch of the Hunt dynasty sits down for Thanksgiving dinner next week, it’s going to be very quiet — or very loud.

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