Mysterious Republican Money
By Robert Parry
September 7, 2004
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If
House Speaker Dennis Hastert were really concerned about drug profits
being laundered into the U.S. political process, he would not be sliming
billionaire financier George Soros with that suspicion. Hastert would be
looking at a principal conservative funder: South Korean theocrat Sun
Myung Moon.
While Hastert was unable to cite a shred of
evidence that the liberal Soros is funneling illicit money, there is a
substantial body of evidence that Moon has long commanded a criminal
enterprise with close ties to Asian and South American drug lords. The
evidence includes first-hand accounts of money laundering disclosed by
Moon confidantes and even family members. Besides those more recent
accounts, Moon was convicted of tax fraud based on evidence developed in
the late 1970s about his money-laundering activities.
Since serving his tax-evasion sentence in the early
1980s, however, Moon appears to have bought himself protection by
spreading hundreds of millions of dollars around conservative causes and
through generous speaking fee payments to Republican leaders, including
former President George H.W. Bush.
Moon himself has boasted that he spent $1 billion
on the right-wing Washington Times in its first decade alone. The
newspaper, which started in 1982, continues to lose Moon an estimated
$50 million a year but remains a valuable propaganda organ for the
Republican Party.
How Moon has managed to cover the vast losses of
his media empire and pay for lavish conservative conferences has been
one of the most enduring mysteries of Washington, but curiously one of
the least investigated – at least since the Reagan-Bush era.
Limited investigations of Moon’s organization have
revealed large sums of money flowing into the United States mostly from
untraceable accounts in Japan, where Moon had close ties to yakuza
gangster Ryoichi Sasakawa. Former Moon associates also have revealed
major money flows from shadowy sources in South America, where Moon
built relationships with right-wing elements associated with the cocaine
trade, including the so-called Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia in the
early 1980s.
But Hastert, an Illinois Republican, made news at
the Republican National Convention by suggesting that liberal funder
Soros may be fronting for foreign “drug groups.” In a Fox News
appearance, Hastert said, “You know, I don’t know
where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where – if it comes
overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from.…”
Soros demanded an apology for the smear.
“Your recent comments implying that I am receiving
funds from drug cartels are not only untrue, but also deeply offensive,”
Soros said in a letter. “You do a discredit to yourself and to the
dignity of your office by engaging in these dishonest smear tactics. You
should be ashamed.”
A Bush-Style Warning
Hastert and other Republicans
seem to have targeted Soros because he has helped finance liberal
activist groups that have engaged in voter registration drives and run
TV ads criticizing George W. Bush. Hastert and other Bush loyalists
could be laying down a marker that people who finance anti-Bush politics
can expect to have their reputations destroyed and possibly become
subjects of federal investigations.
Yet for Moon, despite his
criminal record and eyewitness accounts of his money-laundering
activities, opposite rules apply. Republicans – who now control the
Executive Branch, the Congress and the federal judiciary – protect Moon
and his money from any serious examination. (I detail Moon’s history of
money laundering and organized-crime associations in my forthcoming
book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to
Iraq.)
Moon’s criminal associations go
back to the early days of his Unification Church when South Korean
intelligence saw the church as a means to conduct covert operations.
Kim Jong-Pil, who founded South Korea's KCIA in 1961, became
closely associated with Moon’s church during a transitional phase as the
institution evolved from an obscure Korean sect into a powerful
international organization.
In the early 1960s, Kim
Jong-Pil also was in charge of talks to improve bilateral relations with
Japan, Korea’s historic enemy. Those talks put Kim Jong-Pil
in touch with two other important figures in
the Far East, Japanese rightists Yoshio Kodama and Ryoichi Sasakawa,
both of whom were jailed after World War II as war criminals but were
later released. The pair grew rich from
their association with the yakuza, an organized crime syndicate
that profited off drug smuggling, gambling and prostitution in Japan and
Korea. Behind the scenes, Kodama and Sasakawa became power-brokers in
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
Immediately after Kim
Jong-Pil opened the door to Kodama and Sasakawa
in late 1962, 50 leaders of an
ultra-nationalist Japanese Buddhist sect converted en masse to
the Unification Church. According to David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro in
their authoritative book, Yakuza, “Sasakawa became an adviser to
Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Japanese branch of the Unification Church” and collaborated with Moon in
building far-right anti-communist organizations in Asia.
Worldwide Connections
Authors Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson wrote
in their 1986 book, Inside the League, that Sun Myung Moon was
one of five indispensable Asian leaders who made the World
Anti-Communist League possible. The five were Taiwan’s dictator Chiang
Kai-shek, South Korea’s dictator Park Chung Hee, yakuza gangsters
Sasakawa and Kodama, and Moon, “an evangelist who planned to take over
the world through the doctrine of ‘Heavenly Deception,’” the Andersons
wrote.
WACL became a well-financed worldwide organization
after a secret meeting between Sasakawa and Moon, along with two
Kodama representatives, on a lake in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan. The
purpose of the meeting was to create an anti-communist organization that
“would further Moon’s global crusade and lend the Japanese yakuza leaders
a respectable new façade,” the Andersons wrote.
Mixing organized crime
and political extremism, of course, has a long tradition throughout the
world. Violent political movements often have blended with criminal
operations as a way to arrange covert funding, move operatives or
acquire weapons. Drug smuggling has proven to be a particularly
effective way to fill the coffers of extremist movements, especially
those that find ways to insinuate themselves within more legitimate
operations of sympathetic governments or intelligence services.
Nazi Rat Lines
After World War II, some
Nazi leaders faced war-crimes tribunals, but others managed to make
their escapes along “rat lines” to Spain or South America or they
finagled intelligence relationships with the victorious powers,
especially the United States. Argentina became a natural haven given the
pre-war alliance that existed between the European fascists and
prominent Argentine military leaders, such as Juan Peron. The fleeing
Nazis also found a home with like-minded right-wing politicians and
military officers across Latin America who already used repression to
keep down the indigenous populations and the legions of the poor.
In the post-World War II
years, some Nazi war criminals chose reclusive lives, but others, such
as former SS officer Klaus Barbie, sold their intelligence skills to
less-sophisticated security services in countries like Bolivia or
Paraguay. Other Nazis on the lam trafficked in narcotics. Often the
lines crossed between intelligence operations and criminal conspiracies.
Auguste Ricord, a French war criminal who had collaborated with the
Gestapo, set up shop in Paraguay and opened up the French
Connection heroin channels to American Mafia drug kingpin Santo
Trafficante Jr., who controlled much of the heroin traffic into the
United States. Columns by Jack Anderson identified Ricord’s accomplices
as some of Paraguay’s highest-ranking military officers.
Another French Connection
mobster, Christian David, relied on protection of Argentine authorities.
While trafficking in heroin, David also “took on assignments for
Argentina’s terrorist organization, the Argentine Anti-Communist
Alliance,” Henrik Kruger wrote in
The Great Heroin Coup. During President Nixon’s “war on drugs,”
U.S. authorities smashed the famous French Connection and won
extraditions of Ricord and David in 1972 to face justice in the United
States.
By the time the French
Connection was severed, however,
powerful Mafia drug lords had forged strong ties to South America’s
military leaders. An infrastructure for the multi-billion-dollar drug
trade, servicing the insatiable U.S. market, was in place. Trafficante-connected
groups also recruited displaced anti-Castro Cubans, who had ended up in
Miami, needed work, and possessed some useful intelligence skills gained
from the CIA's training for the Bay of Pigs and other clandestine
operations. Heroin from the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia soon
filled the void left by the broken French Connection and its mostly
Middle Eastern heroin supply routes.
Moon's Arrival
During this time of
transition, Sun Myung Moon brought his evangelical message to South
America. His first visit to Argentina had occurred in 1965 when he
blessed a square behind the presidential Pink House in Buenos Aires. But
he returned a decade later to make more lasting friendships.
Moon first sank down roots in Uruguay during the 12-year reign of
right-wing military dictators who seized power in 1973. He also
cultivated close relations with military dictators in Argentina,
Paraguay and Chile, reportedly ingratiating himself with the juntas by
helping the military regimes arrange arms purchases and by channeling
money to allied right-wing organizations.
“Relationships nurtured with right-wing Latin
Americans in the [World Anti-Communist] League led to acceptance of the
[Unification] Church’s political and propaganda operations throughout
Latin America,” the Andersons wrote in Inside the League. “As an
international money laundry, … the Church tapped into the capital flight
havens of Latin America. Escaping the scrutiny of American and European
investigators, the Church could now funnel money into banks in Honduras,
Uruguay and Brazil, where official oversight was lax or nonexistent.”
Moon’s organization also funneled money to the
United States with the goal of helping friendly U.S. politicians and
hurting others who were considered unfriendly. In the late 1970s, a
congressional investigation into South Korea’s influence-buying
operations in Washington – the so-called Koreagate scandal – implicated
Moon and traced the church’s chief sources of money to bank accounts in
Japan, but could follow the cash no further.
Cocaine Coup
In 1980, Moon made more friends in South America
when Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup plotters seized power in a terrifying
alliance of fledgling cocaine cartels, international neo-Nazis and
right-wing Bolivian military officers. Before the coup, WACL associates,
such as Alfred Candia, allegedly had coordinated the arrival of some of
the paramilitary operatives who assisted in the violent coup.
Afterwards, one of the
first well-wishers arriving in La Paz to congratulate the new government
was Moon’s top lieutenant, Bo Hi Pak. The Moon
organization published a photo of Pak
meeting with the new strongman, General Garcia
Meza. After the visit to the mountainous capital, Pak declared, “I have
erected a throne for Father Moon in the
world’s highest city.”
According to later
Bolivian government and newspaper reports, a Moon representative
invested about $4 million in preparations for the coup. Bolivia’s WACL
representatives also played key roles, and
CAUSA, one of Moon’s anti-communist organizations, listed as members
nearly all the leading Bolivian coup-makers.
Soon, Colonel Luis
Arce-Gomez, a coup organizer and the cousin of cocaine kingpin Roberto
Suarez, went into partnership with big narco-traffickers,
including Trafficante’s Cuban-American smugglers. Nazi war criminal
Klaus Barbie and his young neo-fascist followers found new work
protecting Bolivia's major cocaine barons and transporting drugs to the
border. “The paramilitary units – conceived by Barbie as a new type of
SS – sold themselves to the cocaine barons,”
German journalist Kai Hermann wrote.
“The attraction of fast money in the cocaine trade was stronger than the
idea of a national socialist revolution in Latin America.”
A month after the coup, General Garcia
Meza participated in the Fourth Congress of the Latin American
Anti-Communist Confederation, an arm of the World Anti-Communist League.
Also attending that Fourth Congress was WACL president Woo Jae Sung, a
leading Moon disciple.
On May 31, 1981, Moon
representatives sponsored a CAUSA reception at the Sheraton Hotel’s Hall
of Freedom in La Paz. Moon’s lieutenant Bo Hi Pak
and Bolivian strongman Garcia Meza led a
prayer for President Reagan's recovery from an assassination attempt. In
his speech, Bo Hi Pak declared, “God had chosen the Bolivian people in
the heart of South America as the ones to conquer communism.”
According to a later Bolivian intelligence report, the Moon organization
sought to recruit an “armed church” of Bolivians, with about 7,000
Bolivians receiving some paramilitary training.
But by late 1981, the
cocaine taint of Bolivia’s military junta was so deep and the corruption
so staggering that U.S.-Bolivian relations were stretched to the
breaking point. “The Moon sect disappeared overnight from Bolivia as
clandestinely as they had arrived,” Hermann
reported.
The Cocaine Coup leaders
soon found themselves on the run, too. Interior Minister Arce-Gomez was
eventually extradited to Miami and was sentenced to 30 years in prison
for drug trafficking. Drug lord Roberto Suarez got a 15-year prison
term. General Garcia Meza became a fugitive from a 30-year sentence
imposed on him in Bolivia for abuse of power, corruption and murder.
Barbie was returned to France to face a life sentence for war crimes. He
died in 1992.
Untouchable
But Moon’s organization
suffered few negative repercussions from its association with the
Cocaine Coup. By the early 1980s, flushed with seemingly unlimited
funds, Moon had moved on to promoting himself with the new Republican
administration in Washington. An invited guest to the Reagan-Bush
Inauguration, Moon made his
organization useful to President Reagan, Vice President Bush and other
leading Republicans.
“Some Moonie-watchers
even believe that some of the business enterprises are actually covers
for drug trafficking,” wrote Scott and
Jon Lee Anderson. “Others feel that, despite the disclosures of
Koreagate, the Church has simply
continued to do the Korean government’s international bidding and is
receiving official funds to do so.”
While Moon’s
representatives have refused to detail how they’ve sustained their
far-flung activities – including many businesses that insiders say lose
money – Moon’s spokesmen have denied recurring allegations about
profiteering off illegal trafficking in weapons and drugs. In a typical
response to a gun-running question by the Argentine newspaper, Clarin,
Moon’s representative Ricardo DeSena responded, “I deny categorically
these accusations and also the barbarities that are said about drugs and
brainwashing. Our movement responds to the harmony of the races, nations
and religions and proclaims that the family is the school of love.”
Without doubt, however,
Moon’s organization has had a long record of association with organized
crime figures, including ones implicated in the drug trade. Besides
collaborating with Sasakawa and other leaders of the Japanese yakuza and
the Cocaine Coup government of Bolivia,
Moon’s organization developed close ties with the Honduran military and
with Nicaraguan contra units tied to drug smuggling. Moon’s organization
also used its political clout in Washington to intimidate or discredit
government officials and journalists who tried to investigate those
criminal activities.
In the mid-1980s, for
instance, when journalists and congressional investigators began probing
the evidence of contra-connected drug trafficking, they came under
attacks from Moon’s Washington Times. An Associated Press story
that I co-wrote with Brian Barger about a Miami-based federal probe into
gun- and drug-running by the contras was denigrated in a front-page
Washington Times article with the headline: “Story on
[contra] drug smuggling denounced as political ploy.”
Kerry's Probe
When Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts conducted
a Senate probe and uncovered additional evidence of contra drug
trafficking, The Washington Times denounced him, too. The
newspaper first published articles depicting Kerry’s probe as a wasteful
political witch hunt. “Kerry’s anti-contra efforts extensive, expensive,
in vain,” announced the headline of one Times article.
But when Kerry exposed more contra wrongdoing,
The Washington Times shifted tactics. In 1987 in front-page
articles, it began accusing Kerry’s staff of obstructing justice because
their investigation was supposedly interfering with Reagan-Bush
administration efforts to get at the truth. “Kerry staffers damaged FBI
probe,” said one Times article that opened with the assertion:
“Congressional investigators for Sen. John Kerry severely damaged a
federal drug investigation last summer by interfering with a witness
while pursuing allegations of drug smuggling by the Nicaraguan
resistance, federal law enforcement officials said.”
Despite the attacks from The Washington Times
and pressure from the Reagan-Bush administration to back off,
Kerry’s contra-drug investigation eventually concluded that a number of
contra units – both in Costa Rica and Honduras – were implicated in the
cocaine trade.
“It is clear that
individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug
trafficking, the supply network of the contras was used by drug
trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves
knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug
traffickers,” Kerry’s investigation stated in a report issued April 13,
1989. “In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had
information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or
immediately thereafter.”
Kerry’s probe also found
that Honduras had become an important way station for cocaine shipments
heading north during the contra war. “Elements of the Honduran military
were involved ... in the protection of drug traffickers from 1980 on,”
the report said. “These activities were reported to appropriate U.S.
government officials throughout the period. Instead of moving decisively
to close down the drug trafficking by stepping up the DEA presence in
the country and using the foreign assistance the United States was
extending to the Hondurans as a lever, the United States closed the DEA
office in Tegucigalpa and appears to have ignored the issue.”
Drug Evidence
The available evidence now shows that there was
much more to the contra drug issue than either the Reagan-Bush
administration or Moon’s organization wanted the American people to know
in the 1980s. The evidence – assembled over the years by inspectors
general at the CIA, the Justice Department and other federal agencies –
indicates that Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup government was only the first in a
line of drug enterprises that tried to squeeze under the protective
umbrella of Ronald Reagan’s favorite covert operation, the contra war.
Other cocaine smugglers soon followed, cozying up
to the contras and sharing some of the profits as a way to minimize
investigative interest by the Reagan-Bush law enforcement agencies. The
contra-connected smugglers included the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian
government of Manuel Noriega, the Honduran military, the
Honduran-Mexican smuggling ring of Ramon Matta Ballesteros, and the
Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans with their connections to Mafia
operations throughout the United States.
As Moon continued to
expand his influence in American politics, some Republicans began to
raise red flags. In 1983, the GOP’s moderate Ripon Society
charged that the New Right had entered “an
alliance of expediency” with Moon’s church. Ripon’s chairman,
Representative Jim Leach of Iowa, released a study which alleged that
the College Republican National Committee “solicited and received” money
from Moon’s Unification Church in 1981. The study also accused
Reed Irvine’s Accuracy in Media of
benefiting from low-cost or volunteer workers supplied by Moon.
Leach said the
Unification Church
has “infiltrated the New Right and the party
it wants to control, the Republican Party, and infiltrated the media as
well.” Leach’s news conference was disrupted when then-college GOP
leader Grover Norquist accused Leach of lying. (Norquist is now a
prominent conservative leader in Washington with close ties to the
highest levels of George W. Bush’s administration.) The Washington
Times dismissed Leach’s charges as “flummeries” and mocked the Ripon
Society as a “discredited and insignificant left-wing offshoot of the
Republican Party.”
Despite periodic fretting over Moon’s
influence, conservatives continued to accept his deep-pocket assistance.
When White House aide Oliver North was scratching for support for the
Nicaraguan contras, for instance, The Washington Times
established a contra fund-raising operation.
By the mid-1980s, Moon’s Unification Church had carved out a niche as an
acceptable part of the American Right. In one speech to his followers,
Moon boasted that “without knowing it,
even President Reagan is being guided by Father [Moon].”
George H.W. Bush's Praise
By the late 1980s and
early 1990s, The Washington Times was the daily billboard where
conservatives placed their messages to each other and to the outside
world.
In 1991, when conservative commentator Wesley
Pruden was named the new editor of The Washington Times,
President George H.W. Bush invited Pruden to a private White House
lunch. The purpose, Bush explained, was “just to tell you how valuable
the Times has become in Washington, where we read it every day.”
While the Moon
organization was promoting the interests of the Reagan-Bush team, the
administration was shielding Moon's operations from federal probes into
its finances and possible intelligence role, U.S. government documents
show. According to Justice Department documents released under the
Freedom of Information Act, administration officials were rebuffing
hundreds of requests – many from common U.S. citizens – for examination
of Moon’s foreign ties and money sources.
Typical of the responses
was a May 18, 1989, letter from Assistant Attorney General Carol T.
Crawford rejecting the possibility that Moon’s organization be required
to divulge its foreign-funded propaganda under the Foreign Agent
Registration Act (FARA). “With respect
to FARA, the Department is faced with First Amendment considerations
involving the free exercise of religion,” Crawford said. “As you know,
the First Amendment’s protection of religious freedom is not limited to
the traditional, well-established religions.”
A 1992 PBS documentary
about Moon’s political empire and its free-spending habits started
another flurry of citizen demands for an investigation, according to
Justice Department files. One letter from a private citizen to the
Justice Department stated, “I write in consternation and disgust at the
apparent support, or at least the sheltering, of the Reverend Sun Myung
Moon, a foreign agent ... who has subverted the American political
system for the past 20 years. ... Did Reagan and/or Bush receive
financial support from Moon or his agents during any of their election
campaigns in violation of federal law?”
However, all these U.S.
citizen complaints were rebuffed.
South American Money
In the mid-1990s, more
evidence surfaced about Moon’s alleged South American money laundry.
In 1996, the Uruguayan bank employees union blew
the whistle on one scheme in which some 4,200 female Japanese followers
of Moon allegedly walked into the Moon-controlled Banco de Credito in
Montevideo and deposited as much as $25,000 each. By the time the parade
of women ended, the total had swelled to about $80 million. Authorities
did not push the money-laundering investigation, apparently out of
deference to Moon’s political influence and fear of disrupting Uruguay’s
secretive banking industry.
Some Uruguayan politicians did protest, however.
“The first thing we ought to do is clarify to the people [of Uruguay]
that Moon’s sect is a type of modern pirate that came to the country to
perform obscure money operations, such as money laundering,” said Jorge
Zabalza, a leader of the Movimiento de Participacion Popular, part of
Montevideo’s ruling left-of-center political coalition. “This sect is a
kind of religious mob that is trying to get public support to pursue its
business.”
Back in the United States, some of Moon’s
confidantes supplied more evidence of money laundering. When Moon’s
daughter-in-law Nansook Moon fled from abuse at the hands of one of
Moon’s sons, Hyo Jin, she described her personal participation in
money-laundering schemes. In a sworn affidavit
– and a later book – Nansook said the price for her life of luxury was
being part of what she regarded as a criminal enterprise.
To finance his personal
and business activities, Hyo Jin received hundreds of thousands of
dollars in unaccounted cash, Nansook said. “On one occasion, I saw Hyo
Jin bring home a box about 24 inches
wide, 12 inches tall and six inches deep,” she wrote in her affidavit.
“He stated that he had received it from his father. He opened it. ...
“It was filled with $100
bills stacked in bunches of $10,000 each for a total of $1 million in
cash! He took this money and gave $600,000 to the Manhattan Center, a
church recording studio that he ostensibly runs. He kept the remaining
$400,000 for himself. ... Within six months he had spent it all on
himself, buying cocaine and alcohol, entertaining his friends every
night, and giving expensive gifts to other women.” Another time, a
Filipino church member gave Hyo Jin $270,000 in cash, according to
Nansook.
Nansook’s lawyers secured
corroborating testimony from a former Manhattan Center official and
Unification Church
member, Madelene Pretorious. At a court
hearing, Pretorious testified that in December of 1993 or January of
1994, Hyo Jin Moon
returned from a trip to Korea “with $600,000
in cash which he had received from his father. ... Myself along with
three or four other members that worked at Manhattan Center saw the cash
in bags, shopping bags.”
Front Companies
As the Nansook’s divorce
case played out, I met with Pretorious at a suburban Boston restaurant.
A law school graduate from South Africa, the 34-year-old full-faced
brunette said she was recruited by the Unification Church
through a student front group, the Collegiate
Association for the Research of Principles (CARP), in San Francisco in
1986-1987. In 1992, Pretorious went to work at the Manhattan Center and
grew concerned about the way cash, brought to the United States by Asian
members, would circulate through the Moon
business empire as a way to launder it.
The money would then go
to support the Moon family’s lavish
life style or be diverted to other church projects. At the center of the
financial operation, Pretorious said, was One-Up Corporation, a
Delaware-registered holding company that owned Manhattan Center and
other Moon enterprises including New
World Communications, the parent company of The Washington Times.
“Once that cash is at the
Manhattan Center, it has to be accounted for,” Pretorious said. “The way
that’s done is to launder the cash. Manhattan Center gives cash to a
business called Happy World which owns restaurants. ... Happy World
needs to pay illegal aliens. ... Happy World pays some back to the
Manhattan Center for ‘services rendered.’ The rest goes to One-Up and
then comes back to Manhattan Center as an investment.”
Hyo Jin Moon did not
respond to interview requests sent through his divorce lawyer and the
church. Church officials also were unwilling to discuss Hyo Jin’s case.
But Hyo Jin was forced to produce documents and discuss his financial
predicament in a related bankruptcy proceeding.
In a bankruptcy
deposition on November 15, 1996, Hyo Jin
sounded alternately confused and petulant.
“All I like was guns and music,” he volunteered at one point. “I’m a
boring person.” But Hyo Jin confirmed that he had received hundreds of
thousands of dollars in cash at the Manhattan Center that was not
reported as taxable income.
“[In] 1993, I received
some cash, yes,” he said. “At that time around 300, 500 Japanese members
were touring America and they stopped by to see the progress that was
happening at Manhattan Center, because it was well known within the
inner ... church community that I was doing a project, a cultural
project. And they came and I presented a slide show, and they were
inspired by that prospect and actual achievement at that time, so they
gave donations. ... It was given to me. It was a donation to me.”
“Did you report that gift
to the taxing authorities?” a lawyer asked.
“It was [a] gift,” Hyo
Jin responded. “I asked [Rob Schwartz, the center’s treasurer] whether I
should. He said I didn’t have to. You have to ask him.” When pressed for
clarification about this tax advice, his lawyer counseled Hyo Jin not to
answer. “I’m taking that advice,” Hyo Jin announced. “My lawyer’s advice
not to answer it.”
John Stacey, a former
CARP leader in the Pacific Northwest, was another Unification Church
member who described Moon’s organization as
dependent on money arriving from overseas. Stacey told me that the
fund-raising operations inside the United States barely covered the
costs of local offices, with little or nothing going to the big-ticket
items, such as The Washington Times. Stacey
added that the church-connected U.S.
businesses are mostly money losers.
“These failing businesses
create the image of making money ... to cover his back,” Stacey said of
Reverend Moon. “I think the majority of the money is coming from an
outside source.”
Another member who quit a
senior position in the church confirmed that virtually none of Moon’s
American operations makes money. Instead, this source, who declined to
be identified by name, said hundreds of thousands of dollars are carried
into the United States by visiting church members. The cash is then
laundered through domestic businesses.
Another close church
associate, who also requested anonymity out of fear of reprisals, said
cash arriving from Japan was used in one major construction project to
pay “illegal” laborers from Asia and South America. “They [the church
leaders] were always waiting for our money to come in from Japan,” this
source said. “When the economy in Japan crashed, a lot of our money came
from South America, mainly Brazil.”
First-Hand Account
In Nansook Moon’s 1998 memoirs, In the Shadow
of the Moons, Moon’s ex-daughter-in-law – writing under her maiden
name Nansook Hong – alleged that Moon’s organization had engaged in a
long-running conspiracy to smuggle cash into the United States and to
deceive U.S. Customs agents.
“The Unification Church was a cash operation,”
Nansook Hong wrote. “I watched Japanese church leaders arrive at regular
intervals at East Garden [the Moon compound north of New York City] with
paper bags full of money, which the Reverend Moon would either pocket or
distribute to the heads of various church-owned business enterprises at
his breakfast table.
“The Japanese had no trouble bringing the cash into
the United States; they would tell Customs agents that they were in
America to gamble at Atlantic City. In addition, many businesses run by
the church were cash operations, including several Japanese restaurants
in New York City. I saw deliveries of cash from church headquarters that
went directly into the wall safe in Mrs. Moon’s closet.”
Mrs. Moon pressed her daughter-in-law into one
cash-smuggling incident after a trip to Japan in 1992, Nansook Hong
wrote. Mrs. Moon had received “stacks of money” and divvied it up among
her entourage for the return trip through Seattle, Nansook Hong wrote.
“I was given $20,000 in two packs of crisp new bills,” she recalled. “I
hid them beneath the tray in my makeup case. ... I knew that smuggling
was illegal, but I believed the followers of Sun Myung Moon answered to
higher laws.”
U.S. currency laws require that cash amounts above
$10,000 be declared at Customs when the money enters or leaves the
country. It is also illegal to conspire with couriers to bring in lesser
amounts when the total exceeds the $10,000 figure, a process called “smurfing.”
In the Shadow of the Moons raised anew the
question of whether Moon’s money laundering – from mysterious sources in
both Asia and South America – has made him a conduit for illicit foreign
money influencing the U.S. government and American politics. Moon’s
spokesmen have denied that he launders drug money or moves money from
other criminal enterprises. They attribute his wealth to donations and
business profits, but have refused to open Moon’s records for public
inspection.
Given Moon’s influence over the Republican Party –
and The Washington Times' impact on U.S. national politics –
House Speaker Hastert might want to investigate where Moon’s money
originates, assuming that Hastert is truly concerned about illicit
foreign money entering the U.S. political process. It may be more
likely, however, that Hastert simply wants to smear a liberal adversary.
This story was adapted from Robert Parry's book,
Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq. A 27-year veteran of Washington journalism, Parry
broke many of the Iran-Contra scandal stories in the 1980s for the
Associated Press and Newsweek.
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