The Arrogance of Power (43 page)

During the presidency Nixon would personally escort Crosby through the White House. The casino boss, meanwhile, announced that James Golden, who had served Nixon as special assistant and security chief, had joined his staff. Company insiders came to know Golden as “Nixon's man.” Ehrlichman recalled “a lot of back and forth” in the Oval Office about helping Crosby's company out, with Rebozo acting as go-between.

Rebozo and White House aides visited Paradise Island during the presidency, but Nixon apparently did not, on the advice of the Secret Service. “Presidents of the United States,” as
Barron's
magazine tartly put it, “did not hang out at gambling spots.” Instead Nixon met with Crosby on another Bahamian island.
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In 1968, at the gala opening of the Paradise casino, Nixon remarked that the island “could be one of the most significant pieces of American investment abroad.” It may also have proved a lucrative source of income for him.

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“Nixon was a charming man, who—along with Jim Crosby—ended up giving me the shaft.” So claimed Huntington Hartford, who wound up years later suing Crosby for depriving him of his slice of Paradise. He sued, in particular, over the profits from the toll bridge linking the island to the mainland, and thereby hangs a mystery.

At $2 a crossing—an exorbitant charge at the time—the bridge was producing significant revenue. It paid for itself by 1969 and from then on brought in $1 million to $1.5 million a year. If one takes the lower figure it was generating, at today's values—nearly $5 million.
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It later emerged that 80 percent of the shares in the bridge were held by a group made up of Crosby himself, a colleague linked to the Florida-based company Benguet Consolidated, and an Anglo-Canadian banking concern. The remaining 20 percent was owned by “a number of individuals,” represented by a Swiss bank.

Huntington Hartford said early on that he had “reason to believe” that one of those individuals was “a close friend of President Nixon.” Privately, he claimed knowledge of massive deposits Nixon had made in a Swiss bank. Crosby, for his part, denied that Nixon or Rebozo were hidden investors in the bridge but refused to identify the unnamed shareholders. Information now available suggests that Hartford's claim was more than the wild allegation of a millionaire who believed he had been bilked.

Former FBI agent Frank Smith, who tied Nixon and Rebozo to the planning of the Paradise Casino, said they were also party to the negotiations over
the bridge. As former special assistant to the president of Benguet, Smith was well placed to have such knowledge.

So was Allan Butler, founder of Butler's Bank in Nassau and for some time a partner of rogue financier Robert Vesco. Vesco had reason to be familiar with the affairs of Paradise Island: He tried to buy it. One of the banks that owned the bridge, Butler said, was acting as nominee for Nixon, Rebozo, and a third party. Oral questions to the Nixon White House about these assertions met with flat denials, and a written inquiry went unanswered.
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An interviewer had better luck in 1987 with former Attorney General John Mitchell, who had been one of the former president's closest associates. Asked if he knew of offshore holdings owned by Nixon, Mitchell said he was aware of only “whatever he received from his interest in the Paradise Island Bridge.” The astonished interviewer asked if he was joking, but Mitchell shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “Nixon had the bridge.”

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The Nixon story is permeated with rumors of ill-gotten gains. Those who probed Watergate were bombarded with them. “We're not talking about twenty a week,” recalled Carl Feldbaum, a Watergate Special Prosecution Force attorney. “We're talking about twenty a day.” Even working around the clock, there was not enough time or money to follow up on everything. One such lead, a serious financial allegation, remained unresolved even though, as Feldbaum reported to his boss, it seemed to form “a sound basis for investigation.” Fresh research today has uncovered an extraordinary story.

It began on a balmy day in Florida, just weeks after Nixon's 1969 inauguration, when the new president was cruising Biscayne Bay on Rebozo's boat
Cocolobo.
Rebozo had told yacht club members he feared “someone would snap a picture while Nixon was aboard,” and the fear proved justified:
Life
photographer George Silk was hidden belowdecks on one of the boats in the harbor, his camera hidden in a sail bag.

As Nixon stepped ashore with several companions, Silk stood up and began taking pictures. Seconds later Secret Service agents came running with guns drawn. It was a frightening moment, the photographer recalled in 1997, but the result was a rare picture of Nixon in casual clothes—and perhaps something much more interesting, something Silk could not have guessed at.

Four years later, in June 1973, a
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
reporter named Michael Buckley received a phone tip about a precious metals dealer, David Silberman, whom the caller alleged to be “involved in large gold transactions with officials of the Committee to Re-elect the President and the White House.” Among Silberman's papers, the caller claimed was “a
Life
magazine of February 21, 1969, that included several photographs . . . one of these showed Nixon, Rebozo and Silberman walking along a dock.”

Buckley investigated for months. Silberman, he learned, was a known
smuggler moving gold and silver across the Canadian border. When tracked down, Silberman admitted having worked for politicians of both parties but denied knowing the president or Rebozo. Confronted with the
Life
photograph, he excused himself and went to the telephone. On his return Silberman said he had never seen the photograph in his life.

Then in his midthirties, Silberman was a commodities dealer by profession with his own company, American Metals Inc. Intimates knew that he lived on the fringe and delighted in taking risks, breaking the rules. Silberman's wife would remember how he once laid a pile of gold bars out in the form of a pyramid on the kitchen table. His secretary was aware of her boss's trips to Swiss banks, trips Silberman would not discuss in detail. His daughter later found a list of twenty-five Swiss bank account numbers among his things.

A number of Silberman's associates, some with their own questionable backgrounds and hence reluctant to speak on the record, have spoken of his links to Las Vegas casinos and mobsters and to a Florida bank tied to Meyer Lansky.

Silberman's wife, Elsie, meanwhile, believed her husband had “a code of integrity of his own.” “He was an enigma,” said secretary Dee Anne Hill. “Extremely intelligent, secretive, devious, yet possessing a social charisma and a gentle caring for people. Yet, naïve as I was, I felt I should always watch my back.” Seven years after Watergate, Silberman would be sent to prison for life, convicted of killing the female companion of a former local Republican official who claimed he had cheated him over a gold deal.

Silberman was himself a Republican, who decades later still spoke of Nixon with admiration. One associate, who counts a close relative of the former president as a friend, told the FBI that “Silberman was given a large amount of cash by [Nixon attorney and fund-raiser] Herbert Kalmbach, for conversion into gold certificates. . . .” Another said he learned, though not from Silberman directly, that Silberman had a “business relationship with Rebozo.”

Those once close to Silberman recall that he displayed two framed pictures. One, a signed photograph, showed him with Nixon at some unknown function. The other, which he put up behind the bar at his home with other collectibles, was a copy of the photograph taken at Key Biscayne in 1969 and published in
Life.
It clearly shows Nixon, wearing a windbreaker, with Rebozo at his side in black, walking along the dock. Behind them are three men, two in white polo shirts, one in an open-neck white shirt and dark blazer (see photograph number 37).

Two of Silberman's friends, interviewed for this book, remembered his pointing out the photograph and saying casually that it had been taken at Key Biscayne and that he was one of the men behind Nixon. He did not elaborate, and one of the friends was not especially surprised. “He was open about some things,” said Jack Cassinetto, a former colleague, “and very secretive about others.”

Elsie Silberman remembered him getting the picture framed. She and their daughter, Kathy, thought it looked like him, and Silberman's own mother believed it was her son. His secretary too saw the likeness. Assuming correctly that two of the men at the rear of the photo were part of the Secret Service escort, the author contacted former Secret Service agent Art Godfrey, who had been head of the detail. Godfrey knew about the photograph, for he too had it framed on his wall.

Godfrey said that he was the man to the left rear of Nixon, that the man in the white to his right was fellow agent Bob Jameson, and—flatly—that the man in dark glasses and blazer was a third agent, Earl Moore. Reached at his home in Florida, Moore insisted that he was indeed the fellow in the blazer.

Yet Moore behaved oddly. Having first agreed to forward a photograph of himself taken during the same period, he abruptly changed his mind. Contacted again, he refused once more and hung up on the interviewer. Godfrey, for his part, had been unusually close to both Nixon and Rebozo. After retiring in 1974, he had visited the disgraced president at San Clemente and watched the Grand Prix with him at Long Beach. Rebozo even asked Godfrey to work for him. As late as 1994 Godfrey was a member of the February Group, an association of diehard Nixon loyalists.

The escutcheon of the Secret Service, rightly admired for its members' courage and efficiency in the physical protection of presidents, was not uncontroversial during the Nixon presidency. Its best-known hero, Rufus Youngblood, decorated for valor during the Kennedy assassination, departed angrily accusing Nixon's close aides of bending the service to their will “like Disneyland.” The service allowed itself to be used for political and private purposes, such as spying on Nixon rivals like Edward Kennedy and George McGovern, or surveilling his own brother Donald.

The
New York Times
would write of Nixon's “perversion of the Secret Service” and of “troubling signs that the agency has come to put service to his person ahead of any tradition of public service.” Former White House deputy counsel Edward Morgan has claimed that Nixon tried to convert the Secret Service into his personal “secret police.” “I was concerned about it,” John Ehrlichman recalled. “The Secret Service turned the President down very seldom. They were very willing to please.”

The service's loyalty to presidents can persist long after they are gone and in areas remote from its official function. As late as 1992, shown a press picture of himself with President Kennedy in Chicago, a former senior agent suggested ludicrously that the photograph might be a fabrication, in which his head had been pasted onto another person's body. The context, in that interview, was a question about Kennedy's activity with one of his mistresses.
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Within this context, one need not unquestioningly accept the assertions of former Secret Service agents about the photograph that allegedly shows Nixon with gold smuggler David Silberman—particularly when a document in the FBI file on the case states flatly that Silberman is indeed the man in the picture.

In 1997 the author was able to interview him, by now a frail, stooped figure looking far older than his fifty-eight years, at the California prison where he was serving out his life sentence.
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Silberman had at first been reluctant to speak at all, insisting that he was not “into digging up dirt.” A woman friend remembered that he had resisted talking to reporters who pressed him in the past, because he had not wanted to hurt Nixon. Also, he seemed nervous about discussing Rebozo. Yet there was a story to be told, he said, one “more interesting than you could ever dream of.”

At last, seated in the prison visitors' room, Silberman did talk. He had indeed been on the Florida dock with Nixon when the
Life
photograph was taken, he said, and he explained how the meeting had come about. Silberman had traveled to Florida at the request of Alfred Selix, a wealthy San Franciscan he knew through his father. They had flown to Miami and gone on to Key Biscayne for a luncheon meeting with Nixon and Rebozo. He recalled how, after Selix had introduced him as Mr. David Silberman, he had said nervously, “You can call me Dave.” Nixon replied with a straight face, “And you can call me Mr. President.” Everyone laughed.

After lunch, alone with Silberman for a while, Rebozo brought the conversation around to money. “I hear you're in banking,” he said, making quotation marks in the air around the word “banking.” Rebozo evidently knew Silberman laundered money and indicated knowledge of a specific deal in which Silberman was involved. That aside, though, he said nothing further to explain why he or Nixon might be interested in their visitor.

Soon after, accompanied by Secret Service agents, the pair rejoined Nixon for a trip on Rebozo's boat. Silberman remembered the photographer appearing as they came ashore and that his presence caused brief alarm. One of the agents passed him a pair of sunglasses to wear, apparently to make him less recognizable. Then the visit was over.

Nothing compromising had been said that day, and a puzzled Silberman returned to San Francisco. Selix said later that Nixon and Rebozo had been “impressed” with him and he would hear from them.