Daniel Ellsberg: “They are reversing freedoms we’ve had since the Magna Carta.”

[Octafish]

14. Reagan, MCA, and the Mob

From Dan Moldea:

    President Ronald Reagan's professional life--his acting career, his personal financial fortune, and his rise in politics--has been interwoven with and propelled by a powerful, Hollywood-based entertainment conglomerate named MCA.  For nearly fifty years, Reagan has benefited both personally and financially from his association with this sixty-two-year-old company--formerly known as the Music Corporation of America--as well as from his close association with the firm's top executives:  Jules Stein, Lew Wasserman, and Taft Schreiber.

     Everyone involved has greatly profited from this relationship.  MCA helped to make its client, actor Ronald Reagan, a multimillionaire; and the favors that were returned by Reagan, the former president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the former governor of California, have helped to transform MCA into a billion-dollar empire and the most powerful force in the entertainment world today.

     Reagan and his closest friends have portrayed and defended the president's business transactions with MCA, which date back to 1940, as being totally above suspicion.  But there remain numerous unanswered questions and allegations about the relationship between Reagan and MCA.  These doubts raise delicate issues that involve possible personal and political payoffs--as well as links to major Mafia figures, particularly Beverly Hills attorney Sidney Korshak, who has been described by federal investigators as the principal link between the legitimate business world and organized crime.

     In 1962, the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice tried to resolve some of these questions, but their secret investigation was settled out of court before the evidence could be presented.  The results of the probe were never made public, and no one close to MCA was ever indicted.  However, through the Freedom of Information Act, many of these documents have been recovered and are excerpted in this book.

     These records show that Reagan, the president of SAG and an FBI informant against Hollywood communists, was the subject of a federal grand jury investigation whose focus was Reagan's possible role in a suspected conspiracy between MCA and the actors' union.  According to Justice Department documents, government prosecutors had concluded that decisions made by SAG while under Reagan's leadership became "the central fact of MCA's whole rise to power."

CONTINUED...

http://www.moldea.com/MCA.html