- Editor's note: The following report on Vice President
Al Gore's alleged past drug use, as well as his deep connections with Soviet
operative Armand Hammer, was researched and written by native Tennessee
reporters Charles C. Thompson II and Tony Hays.
-
- Thompson is a long-time veteran of network news, having
been a founding producer of ABC's "20/20," as well as Mike Wallace's
producer at CBS's "60
-
- Minutes." His most recent book, "A Glimpse
of Hell: The Explosion on the U.S.S. Iowa and Its Cover-Up," was released
by W.W. Norton in Spring 1999. Hays is a veteran journalist who has written
extensively on political corruption in Tennessee. Recently his 20-part
series on narcotics trafficking received an award from the Tennessee Press
Association.
-
-
-
- By Charles Thompson and Tony Hays © 2000, WorldNetDaily.com,
Inc.
-
- According to a former high-ranking official in the CIA,
Russian intelligence agencies possess thick dossiers concerning Al Gore's
heavy usage of drugs three decades ago as well as his father's questionable
dealings with Armand Hammer, a dedicated Soviet operative for 70 years.
-
- The CIA source, speaking to WorldNetDaily on condition
of anonymity, has since the 1970s routinely advised American presidents,
including President Clinton, on Russian intelligence.
-
- There is credible evidence, says the source, that these
dossiers have already been employed to alter Gore's behavior on issues
affecting Russia. As an example, he cited Gore's acquiescence to the corruption
of former Russian Prime Minister
-
- Viktor Chernomyrdin, who co-chaired a commission with
Gore to encourage Americans to do business in Russia. Chernomyrdin accumulated
from one to five billion dollars in
-
- personal assets from the systematic looting of the Soviet
state treasury during the time he co-chaired the commission with Gore.
-
- Republican presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush
brought this exact point up during last
-
- week's second debate with Gore.
-
- "We went into Russia," said Bush. "We
said, 'Here's some IMF money,' and it ended up in Viktor Chernomyrdin's
pocket and others. And yet we played like there was reform."
-
- As WND has reported previously, American businessmen,
who were threatened with death by the Russian mafia and/or had their assets
expropriated by these gangsters, say their complaints were brushed aside
by Gore and his aides while the vice president chaired the committee meant
to help them.
-
- "Chernomyrdin didn't have to show Gore the incriminating
dossiers; Gore knew he had them. It's akin to blackmail and extortion,
but it's really using highly embarrassing information on
-
- a sustained basis," said the source, who has been
associated with America's foreign policy elite for three decades as a chief
adviser on intelligence matters.
-
- "The situation will get much worse if Gore's elected
president. Russian president Vladimir Putin [a former KGB colonel who has
mob connections] will tell Gore, in effect, 'I've got the files and this
is what we want you to do.' And Gore will do it," he added.
-
- Earlier this year, John C. Warnecke Jr., a former Tennessean
newspaper reporter in Nashville, told Newsweek reporter Bill Turque that
he and Al Gore had spent many a night together nearly 30 years ago imbibing
cognac and smoking opium-laced marijuana. Warnecke worked with Gore in
1971 and remained a good friend through 1976. Ken Jost, another former
reporter
-
- for the newspaper, backed up Warnecke's account after
Turque's biography, "Inventing Al
-
- Gore," was published.
-
- In years past, The Tennessean had treated Warnecke as
if he were royalty due to the fact that his father has close connections
to the Kennedy family, as did John Seigenthaler, the former editor and
publisher of the paper. Seigenthaler considered himself to be a king-maker
and recruited both Warnecke and Gore to join the paper's staff, largely
because of their respective fathers' political clout. Seigenthaler was
the one who first convinced Al
-
- Gore Jr. to run for Congress.
-
- Even so, after his revelations about Gore's alleged drug
use, the paper didn't waste any time training its editorial guns on the
53-year-old Warnecke.
-
- It was quick to bring up the fact that he had once suffered
from depression. Warnecke admitted he had been depressed 20 years ago,
but said he
-
- had obtained treatment then and was fine now. The paper
cited 31 former Tennessean staffers who had worked with Gore and Warnecke
in the early 1970s who said they had never seen Gore smoke marijuana. Three
others deferred comment.
-
- Gore called the story "old news" and said he
used marijuana "when I came back from Vietnam, but not to that extent."
One of the trio who refused to discuss Gore's drug usage was the top editor,
Frank Sutherland, who had allegedly partied with Gore and Warnecke.
-
- "If Al Gore wants to talk about his private life,
that's fine," Sutherland said. "But I'm not going to talk about
my private life. That's nobody's business." An ardent Gore supporter,
Sutherland went so far as to appear in a Gore campaign video.
-
- In early June, Sutherland couldn't find space in his
newspaper to report the story about the overflowing sewage in a ramshackle
house Gore rents on the edge of his 80-acre estate in Carthage, Tenn.,
to a disabled man, his wife and their five handicapped children. Even though
the story appeared on the Associated Press and on the front page of almost
every major newspaper in America, Sutherland said it didn't
-
- merit sending a reporter from Nashville to Carthage,
about 60 miles away.
-
- One of the tenants, Tracy Mayberry, said she had complained
repeatedly about clogged toilets, overflowing sinks and the odor of sewage
that permeated the house, but received no satisfaction from Gore. Even
after he was widely chided as a "slumlord," Gore apparently didn't
take the matter all that seriously, because the repairs were carried out
in a slipshod, grudging manner. Disgusted, Mayberry and her family vacated
the premises and moved to the Midwest, where she said she was going to
vote for George W. Bush.
-
- Whatever the Russians have in their dope dossiers regarding
Gore, the material can't match what's apparently in the Gore/Armand Hammer
files. The squalid Gore/Hammer relationship, according to one longtime
observer of Hammer, is much like a B-grade gothic movie, replete with spying,
murder, bribery, art forgery, jewelry theft and exploitation of workers
and the environment.
-
- 'Remarkable life' Until Armand Hammer's death on Dec.
7, 1990, at age 92, a story such as this could probably not be written.
During his lifetime, Hammer commissioned three vanity biographies, including
one entitled "The Remarkable Life of Dr. Armand Hammer," to camouflage
his dealings with Russia.
-
- His public relations staff doled these volumes out to
reporters, and over time fiction became accepted as fact. Any reporter
who dug too deeply into Hammer's background was threatened with a lawsuit.
Steve Weinberg, a well-respected journalist and University of Missouri
professor, was the only writer to produce an unauthorized biography about
Hammer. Published nearly two years before Hammer's death, the well-researched
book drew Hammer's ire. He had his attorneys file a lawsuit in England
alleging that 156 passages were defamatory.
-
- Weinberg did not have the same defenses against libel
in England that he would in the U.S. He had the burden of proving that
all 156 passages were true. If just one were proven false, Weinberg would
have lost the entire case. As it was, his publisher was forced to pay millions
of dollars in legal expenses. The case
-
- was dropped when Hammer died.
-
- Hammer's attorneys also threatened retired Marine Lt.
Col. Bill Corson for what he wrote about Armand and his father, Julius,
in Corson's 1985 book, "The New KGB." Corson, who died earlier
this year, was a legendary expert on intelligence who had served in combat
in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He told attorney Louis Nizer, who was
famous in his own right, to pound sand after Nizer threatened to bring
legal action. Nizer never followed up on his threat to sue.
-
- In the past 10 years, a glut of CIA and FBI documents
concerning Hammer's extensive dealings with Russia have been declassified.
In
-
- addition, a hard-hitting book, "Dossier: The Secret
History of Armand Hammer" by Edward Jay Epstein was published four
years ago. This material provides rich insight into Hammer's treasonous
activities on behalf of the Communist Party.
-
- Interestingly enough, only a trickle of documents have
been released concerning the Gore/Hammer relationship from the Russian
archives. This, despite the fact that millions of documents on other subjects
have been dislodged since the dissolution of the former Soviet Union 10
years ago.
-
- "The Russians don't want anybody chasing down that
rat hole, poking into those side corridors involving the Gores," the
CIA source said. "Al Gore Jr. is clearly still a valuable asset to
the Russians."
-
- Armand Hammer was born on May 21, 1898, in Manhattan.
His father, Julius Hammer, told friends that he named his son for the arm
and hammer emblem of one of the Communist Party predecessor organizations.
Julius, a dedicated revolutionary most of his life, was born in the
-
- Jewish ghetto of Odessa in 1874. He spent his youth in
Russia, and when he was 16 moved with his family to America.
-
- One of the founders of the Communist Party in America,
Julius Hammer raised huge sums of money for radicals both before and after
the Russian Revolution, sometimes by theft. A graduate of Columbia College's
medical school program, Julius was primarily an abortionist. He also controlled
eight drugstores from which he siphoned off assets for the benefit of the
Bolsheviks.
-
- Armand followed in his father's footsteps to Columbia
College and was a second-year medical student in 1919, working afternoons
in his father's clinic, when tragedy struck. Julius Hammer was charged
with manslaughter after a 33-year-old woman underwent an abortion in the
clinic located in the Hammer home and later
-
- bled to death. Although Julius admitted performing the
abortion, he claimed it was medically justified. However, author Edward
Jay Epstein asserts that it was Armand, not Julius, who actually performed
the abortion on Marie Oganesoff, the wife of a Russian diplomat
-
- who had come to America for the czarist regime during
World War I. Not long after his father was arrested, Armand dropped out
of medical school. Despite this, he referred to himself as
-
- "Doctor Hammer" for the rest of his life.
-
- Julius's trial dragged on for almost a year. It was interrupted
by a charge that William Cope, a public relations man retained by him,
had attempted to bribe a juror. The jury finally found Julius guilty and
sentenced him to three-and-one-half years of hard labor at Sing Sing State
Prison.
-
- Julius's imprisonment left the Hammer family in
-
- a quandary. At that time, there seemed to be a good chance
that the worldwide embargo of Russia would be loosened, allowing foreign
entrepreneurs to make a financial killing in that impoverished country.
Julius had been planning on returning to Russia to take advantage of the
situation, but now Armand was designated to go. A callow youth with no
business experience, he couldn't even speak Russian. Nevertheless, he was
shrewd and could capitalize on his family's sterling relations with Lenin,
Leon Trotsky and other communist luminaries. Armand was later joined in
Russia by his brothers, Viktor and Harry, and by his father after he was
released from prison.
-
- In 1921, Armand drew the attention of J. Edgar Hoover,
then a 26-year-old lawyer at the U.S. Department of Justice spearheading
the "red round-ups." The future FBI director heard from an informant
that Hammer was a courier for the newly organized Communist International,
or Comintern. Hoover alerted British authorities, and Hammer was searched
when his ship reached Southampton, England. A propaganda film was found
in his possession. Scotland Yard
-
- detained him on the ship for two days and then allowed
him to go his own way. Although Hoover kept close tabs on Hammer for another
half century, he never arrested him, possibly because Hammer's Russian
spymasters had amassed so much dirt on the FBI chief.
-
- After a meeting with Lenin in the Kremlin in 1921, Armand
later recorded in his dairy: "If Lenin told me to jump out that window,
I probably would have done it." He said he was "captivated"
by Lenin and agreed to do anything he asked. Lenin granted Hammer the first
U.S. concession in Russia, a run-down asbestos mine. Josef Stalin, Lenin's
brutish successor who murdered millions of his countrymen, later granted
Hammer a concession to manufacture pencils in Russia.
-
- In addition to these ventures, Hammer spent much of the
1920s serving as a courier and paymaster to a multitude of active spies
salted
-
- away in 20 countries. It was a miserable existence for
Hammer, one-night stays at down-at-the-heel hotels, constantly dodging
counter-intelligence agents who pursued him.
-
- In 1922, embittered by the atrocious working conditions
and miserly pay at the asbestos mine, the workers revolted. Hammer quickly
got in touch with Felix Dzerzhinski, head of the Cheka, the dreaded Soviet
secret police for help. The Cheka brutally suppressed the strike. Hammer
wrote glowingly about Dzerzhinski's tactics. He said he had been with the
police chief in the Urals, and when a train was late, Dzerzhinski became
enraged. He ordered a detachment of Cheka troops to take the chief train
administrator and his assistant to a courtyard and shot as a "lesson"
for the other workers. Hammer was impressed by Dzerzhinski's brutal methods,
telling colleagues that he had witnessed an example of the ends justifying
the means.
-
- After Armand's return to New York in late 1931,
-
- he separated from his Russian-born wife, Olga, a former
cabaret singer, and his young son, Julian. He later divorced Olga and was
reconciled with Julian. The divorce was part of
-
- his attempt to obscure his dealings with the Soviet Union.
For the next decade, Hammer devoted much of his time to promoting and running
Hammer Galleries in New York. These galleries were a Soviet front used
to peddle fake Romanoff jewelry and counterfeit art. Russia was strapped
for money, and this was a desperate attempt to raise hard currency. The
shipments that arrived from Russia included everything from costume jewelry
to Torah scrolls stolen from synagogues and icons ripped
-
- from the walls of orthodox churches.
-
- Almost none of it had been owned by the czars. Faberge
Easter eggs were also faked. Hammer was allowed to keep very little of
the profits. A master of disinformation, at one time when Hammer had only
$2,000 in his banking account, he was widely touted in the press as being
a multi-millionaire.
-
- In 1940, even though he had signed a non-aggression pact
with Adolph Hitler, Stalin was mistrustful of his German allies and enlisted
Hammer to influence President Franklin Roosevelt to help Russia if she
were invaded. Roosevelt was well aware of Hammer's background from J. Edgar
Hoover and from British intelligence. Roosevelt met once with Hammer, for
just five minutes. Hammer's mission was a failure. The Roosevelt administration
was well aware of who Hammer's real masters were and shunned him.
-
- Hammer was nervous during the 1950s as the Korean War
was being fought and anti-Soviet sentiment grew throughout America. He
saw himself being jailed as his father had been. Somehow, that never happened,
although others were imprisoned or deported for much lesser offenses.
-
- Enter Al Gore Sr. During this same time, Hammer brazenly
petitioned the U.S. government for a license to
-
- export synthetic nitrogen-based and ammonia fertilizer
to Russia. This fertilizer could also be used to make military explosives
and munitions. Most of the fertilizer would be manufactured at a $75 million
West Virginia plant owned by the U.S. Army. Hammer submitted the highest
bid for a 15-year lease on the plant. Denied access to the Truman administration,
he enlisted key members of Congress, most notably Albert Gore Sr., to lobby
in his behalf. He put Gore on his payroll.
-
- Hammer cut Gore in on a sweetheart deal when Occidental
purchased Hooker Chemical Company in 1969. According to author Bob Zelnick,
who was then an ABC News correspondent, the Tennessee senator was allowed
to purchase a thousand Hooker shares at $150, far less than the stock was
worth. Gore was also made a partner in Hammer's cattle-breeding business,
from which the Tennessee senator earned tidy profits. Gore reciprocated
by doing favors for Hammer, such as cutting through Justice Department
opposition to make an FBI agent available to testify for Hammer in a civil
suit.
-
- Zelnick lost his job at ABC News after he refused to
honor the network's demands that he break his contract with Regnery Publishing,
Inc. to write his book, "Gore: A Political Life." He
-
- now teaches graduate courses in journalism at Boston
University.
-
- The House Armed Services Committee looked into Hammer's
fertilizer deal and grilled him about his dealings with Russia. The Army
refused to do business with him. The FBI was also hostile, and the Hammer
deal ultimately went down in flames.
-
- About that same time, Hammer's 26-year-old-son, Julian,
was charged with first-degree manslaughter after he shot an old Army drinking
buddy, Bruce Whitlock, twice in the chest in Julian's Los Angeles apartment.
Julian told police that he and Whitlock had quarreled about a $400 gambling
debt. Armand Hammer spread bribe money around, and employed Rep. James
Roosevelt as an intermediary. The eldest son of President Franklin Roosevelt,
James Roosevelt had been eased out of the White House staff by his father,
because he frequently intervened in politically
-
- sensitive cases and offered his influence to financial
backers of the Democratic Party.
-
- James Roosevelt informed Hammer that he was in deep financial
trouble, requiring $2,500 for
-
- alimony payments and debts. He also asked and received
$10,000 from Hammer for a partnership in a failing business he owned. Through
Roosevelt's intervention, Hammer's bribes, reportedly amounting to $50,000,
and the slick manipulations of his attorneys, the charges were dismissed
against Julian.
-
- Hammer was the guest of Sen. Albert Gore Sr. at
-
- the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on Jan.
19, 1961. That evening, Hammer and Gore hoped to talk with the new president
about Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev's proposal for "coexistence"
with the West. However, the meeting never took place. Hammer had recently
become chairman of Occidental Petroleum, then a financially strapped venture,
and he allegedly skimmed millions from his third wife's substantial settlement
from her former husband to keep Occidental afloat. After Kennedy and his
White House aides rebuffed Hammer's bid to represent the U.S. at a meeting
with Khrushchev
-
- in Moscow, Albert Gore Sr. approached Secretary of Commerce
Luther Hodges and persuaded Hodges to allow Hammer travel to Russia under
the Commerce Department's auspices.
-
- That same year, Hammer also attempted to reinstate a
variation of the fertilizer deal with Russia that had been shot down a
decade before. This scheme was avidly supported by Rep. Roosevelt and Sen.
Gore. The FBI learned about the deal from wiretaps on key Soviet agents.
-
- This information was brought to the attention of William
Sullivan, then the number-three man at the FBI. W.A. Brannigyn, special-agent-in-charge
of the FBI's New York office, wrote Sullivan on
-
- Feb. 23, 1961, "Hammer has been described by a business
associate as a loyal American but (is)
-
- unscrupulous and a type 'who would do business with devil
if there was a profit in it.'" Brannigyn also wrote that because of
the "political overtones" of Hammer's proposed deal, the U.S.
should avoid any dealings with him.
-
- Hammer's wholesale bribing of Libyan officials in the
1960s to obtain drilling and exportation
-
- rights for Occidental was credited by knowledgeable sources
as having caused the overthrow of King Idris by Muammar Gaddafi, then only
a 27-year-old sub-lieutenant in the Libyan army, in 1969. The year before
that happened, Hammer and his third wife, Frances, and Gore Sr. had attended
an extravagant affair
-
- in Libya staged by Hammer to honor the King Idris and
his court. Occidental didn't fare all that well with Gaddafi.
-
- Not long after Richard Nixon became president in 1969,
Hammer began petitioning administration figures to normalize U.S./Soviet
-
- relations. According to a CIA memo, Hammer worked through
an experienced KGB officer, Mikhail Bruk, to smooth the way for him to
return to Moscow. Hammer announced at a press conference that he had concluded
"a wide-ranging agreement" with the Soviets for his company.
Occidental's stock value shot up 19 points before analysts determined that
most of it was pie-in-the-sky. The CIA labeled the deal a stock swindle.
CIA director Richard Helms sent Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security
adviser, a memo on Aug. 1, 1972, which
-
- included excerpts from the agency's voluminous files
on Hammer and Russia in order to blackball Hammer's most recent Russian
proposal.
-
- "The financial community is skeptical about the
-
- worth of this agreement," Helms wrote.
-
- Hammer donated $54,000 in laundered $100 bills to President
Richard Nixon's reelection campaign during the spring of 1972. Watergate
special prosecutors moved against him, and his attorney, Edward Bennett
Williams, persuaded Hammer to plead guilty in 1975 to misdemeanor charges
of making illegal campaign contributions. He was fined a mere $3,000 and
put on probation, but not sent to prison. He immediately launched a crusade
to have his guilty pleas set aside.
-
- For the remaining years of his life, Hammer commuted
back and forth to Moscow, failed several times in his attempt to wangle
a Nobel Peace Prize and battled to keep his life as Soviet agent secret.
He also continued to do business with Albert Gore Sr. -- and began an alliance
with Gore's son, Al Jr.
-
- By 1990 when Hammer died, Gore Sr. had been a full-time
Hammer employee for 20 years after having lost his 1970 senatorial reelection
bid.
-
- After Gore's defeat, Hammer put him on the Occidental
board of directors and subsequently made him chairman of an Occidental
subsidiary, Island Creek Coal Co., the third largest coal producer in America.
-
- 'Money in the bank' Of all the deals and financial schemes
that Sen. Albert Gore Sr., the father of the current presidential candidate,
was involved in with Soviet agent and business mogul Armand Hammer, none
was more tawdry than their bull-and-heifer breeding venture.
-
- In 1950, with Hammer's encouragement and financial support,
Gore began buying and breeding prize Aberdeen-Angus cattle in a big way
for his farm outside Carthage, Tenn., which
-
- he was turning into a baronial estate. Gore's hometown
paper, The Carthage Courier, contains stories during the 1950s and '60s
of important politicians, lobbyists, sports figures, defense contractors
and government vendors flocking to Tennessee to attend a Gore cattle auction.
A former Gore senatorial office staffer, who spoke on the condition of
anonymity, said that many of the buyers never bothered to pick up their
livestock after plunking down thousands of dollars for the animals.
-
- Was this a bribe?
-
- "Not in the strictest sense of the word," the
former staffer said. "It was sleazy, something you would expect from
Gene Talmadge (a flamboyant Depression-era political boss from Georgia).
People weren't bribing Sen. Gore for any specific favor. They were putting
money in the bank for the time when they needed a favor from him."
-
- He added, "This was not the King Ranch. Gore wasn't
even an especially good cattle farmer. These people (the buyers) wanted
something for their money. The cattle trading wouldn't pass any kind of
smell test."
-
- He said that what happened on Gore's farm with the cattle
was well known, but was a carefully guarded secret by the staff. What about
Armand Hammer?
-
- "He was a really sinister character, a gangster,
and supposedly a Soviet agent," the former aide
-
- said.
-
- Former Tennessee Gov. Ned McWherter, a close ally of
the Gore family, told author Zelnick, "I've sold some Angus in my
time too, but I never got
-
- the kind of prices for my cattle that the Gores
-
- got for theirs." For example, a 1963 sale grossed
$85,675. Cattle and the sale of bull semen quickly surpassed the family's
profits from growing tobacco. Al Gore Jr. first participated in one of
his father's cattle auctions when he was
-
- 10 years old, selling a cow his father had given him
to raise to a Virginia businessman for $751.
-
- Gore Sr. and his family were embittered by his humiliating
defeat by Rep. William Brock in 1970. The senior Gore, his son and their
supporters would, from then on, solemnly swear that the senator had been
beaten by the forces of darkness due to his championing of racial equality
and his opposition to the war in Vietnam.
-
- Actually, Gore had a spotty record at best on race relations,
having voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964. According to
-
- Washington author Joe Goulden, whose 1969 book, "Truth
Is The First Casualty," is still required reading for students of
the Vietnam war, Gore was a Johnny-come-lately to the peace
-
- movement.
-
- "Gore was allowed to vote in absentia for the Tonkin
Gulf Resolution while he was on the road campaigning for reelection. This
resolution was used by President Lyndon Johnson as a basis for widely escalating
the war. Gore didn't come out against the war until it became unpopular
with the American people," Goulden said.
-
- Many Tennesseans recall Al Gore Jr. in 1970 as being
a vain man who had lost touch with his constituents. And to make matters
even worse in that election, Gore appeared in a campaign commercial shortly
before election day dressed as a country squire sitting astride a prancing
white horse. To many voters, this was the height of arrogance in a state
renowned for its folksy
-
- ways and populist heritage.
-
- Shortly after his defeat, Gore was on an airliner flying
between Nashville and Washington. Larry Bates, then a member of the Tennessee
General Assembly, sat beside him.
-
- "Sen. Gore was a very bitter man, who told me, 'I've
served on the committees which handle taxes, and I know every loophole
by heart. Since the voters don't want me anymore, I'm going to take my
expertise and make some serious money for myself, my good friend Armand
Hammer and Occidental Petroleum,'" Bates said. Bates is now a nationally
syndicated radio talk show host based in Memphis.
-
- Gore continued to serve as a buffer between Hammer and
J. Edgar Hoover during the last two years of the FBI director's life. One
of the first chores Gore undertook for Occidental was getting the long-term
fuel contracts one of its
-
- subsidiaries, Island Creek Coal Co., had with the Tennessee
Valley Authority, set aside and renegotiated for a higher price. Gore was
just the man for the job, having treated the system that generates electrical
power at often-inflated rates to seven southern states like a fiefdom since
shortly after its inception in 1933.
-
- Gore Sr., and later Gore Jr., routinely named appointees
to TVA's board, influenced lucrative
-
- contracts and smoothed the way for campaign contributors
who wanted permits for such things as building boat docks and homes along
the Tennessee River, its tributaries and man-made waterways controlled
by the massive utility and flood control agency. Hammer was so pleased
by Gore's work on this project that he named him executive vice president
and director of Island Creek Coal Co. in 1972. Island Creek remains TVA's
top supplier of coal to this day.
-
- Al Gore Sr. also was instrumental in papering over some
of Island Creek's outstanding federal
-
- pollution complaints. Al Gore Jr. prospered through his
father's camaraderie with Armand Hammer when the senior Gore purchased
an 88-acre mineral-rich farm located just across the Caney Fork River from
the Gore estate for $80,000. The former senator paid another $80,000 for
the mineral rights and then resold everything at no profit to his son.
Occidental then leased back the mineral rights for zinc, shelling out more
than $450,000 in zinc royalty
-
|