Allen and Company

Allen and Company is the New York City investment bank of the Allen family. In September 1983 Dominic Laiti, chairman of Hadron, the company controlled by Earl Brian, and Paul Wormeli, vice president of its public-safety software subsidiary Simeon, went to New York to raise capital for Simeon and met at the bank's offices with the executive Mark Kesselman and "a young man whose last name was Allen." Kesselman later visited Simeon's Northern Virginia offices; he told the investigators of the special counsel Nicholas J. Bua that he had been asked by Charles Allen to assist Allen's nephew Nathaniel Kramer in the analysis, and that he left the firm in February 1984. Bill Hamilton of INSLAW held that the trip's purpose was the acquisition of INSLAW and its PROMIS software; Bua's investigators concluded the thesis was "incorrect."¹

About 1985 or 1986 the bank bought 7.8 percent of the stock of Systems and Computer Technology on behalf of an unnamed third party. INSLAW cited the purchase, in its rebuttal to Bua's report, as evidence that Brian was secretly behind SCT's attempted hostile purchase of INSLAW in 1986. The Justice Department's 1994 review rejected the inference as unsupported and noted that on INSLAW's own theory Brian by then already controlled the enhanced PROMIS and was selling it abroad, leaving him no motive to buy the company. Neither the Bua report nor the House Judiciary Committee's report connects the bank to the financing of Brian's later Infotechnology, Financial News Network and United Press International ventures, which collapsed in 1991.¹²