Edgar Bronfman, the president of the World Jewish Congress, the honorary vice chairman of the Anti-Defamation League and the chairman of th ADL’s key fundraising arm, the Northeast Appeal, was a major beneficiary of the Skadden Arps law firm’s expertise in corporate takeovers.
In the mid-1980s, Irving Hapiro, the chairman of the board of the DuPont Company, one of America’s oldest and largest industrial concerns, retired from his corporate post to become a partner in Skadden Arps.
Shortly after his arrival at the law firm, Edgar Bronfman’s Seagrams Corporation began buying up stock in the DuPont Company, eventually taking over a controlling interest.
Shapiro, who worked closely with Bronfman during his tenure as president of the Business Roundtable, was reportedly a key inside player in the Bronfman takeover of DuPont.
After his move from DuPont to Skadden Arps, Irving Shapiro helped recruit his son Isaac to the firm. Isaac brought with him the lion’s share of Japanese real estate investors in the United States, who had been his clients at his previous firm, the blueblood-run Milbank, Hadley, Tweed and McCoy.
Armed with a string of prestigious titles as a leading Zionist philanthropist and corporate billionaire, Edgar Bronfman launched a systematic effort in the mid-1980s to implement Meyer Lansky’s second dream the syndicate takeover of Israel.
If there was a single official of the ADL equipped to convince the Soviet government to open the floodgates of Jewish emigration and to ensure that the Russian Jews landed in Israel, it was Edgar Bronfman.
Through his Seagrams distributorships, Edgar and his brother Charles had cultivated a cozy relationship with some of the most powerful and brutal figures in the Communist world, beginning with East German Communist Party chief Erich Honecker.
Through the West German branch of Seagrams, the Bronfmans had arranged to supply the East German Communist Party with unlimited quantities of Seagrams alcohol, which was provided free of charge to the most senior ranking members of the party.
By 1986, a Bronfman emmisary in East Berlin had established close ties with the East German minister of religious affairs and Gregor Gysi the father of Honnecker’s successor as head of the the Communist Party (SED). The Gysis are Jewish.
In 1988, Edgar Bronfman travelled to East Berlin to meet with Honecker and East German Communist Party official Herman Axen. During the visit, Bronfman pledged to arrange a state visit for Honecker to Washington, D.C.
A year later, on the eve of Honecker’s ousting and the overthrow of the communist dictatorship in East Germany, Bronfman received the highest civilian award given by the state, the “Peoples Friendship Medal in Gold.”
Even as the Berlin Wall was on the verge of collapsing, Bronfman began an ambitious diplomatic drive on Moscow, paralleling his successful courting of the East Germans.
On Jan. 23, 1989, according to a report published by syndicated columnists Evans and Novak, Edgar Bronfman held a secret meeting at his New York City penthouse to plan out the Soviet Jewish exodus.
In attendance at the session was Dwayne Andreas, the chainnan of the grain cartel Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), who was identified in the Wall Street Journal as Gorbachov’s “closest pal ” in the West.
Bronfman’s plan was simple: in return for assurances that the United States would supply urgently needed grain shipments to the Soviet Union, Moscow would allow Soviet Jews to move to Israel.
To assure that the Soviet Jews who arrived in the West would have no alternative other than immediate migration to Israel, Bronfman’s World Jewish Congress had already launched a vicious slander campaign against Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, branding him as a wartime Nazi collaborator who had participated in the extermination of the Jews of Eastern Europe.
Bronfman campaign was aided by forged documents allegedly provided by the Soviet KGB and other Soviet bloc secret police agencies.
The scandal led to a serious rift in American-Austrian relations. As a result, Austria, which had previously been the major transit point for Soviet Jews fleeing to the West, was shut off to Soviet Jewish emigres. Alternative routes were established through Hungary and Poland-with the caveat that the Soviet Jews would only be allowed to emigrate to Israel.
Evans and Novak denounced the Bronfman scheme as a cynical effort to trade “Jews for rain.” The harsh words did not bother Bronfman in the least. As the heir to the “Bronfman Gang, ” his family had been called worse. Besides, the ADL man realized that he was personally repaying a longstanding family debt to Meyer Lansky-and was fulfilling the second grand dream of the crime czar: the takeover of Israel.
caltonjock 