Robert Booth Nichols

Robert Booth Nichols was born in the United States on March 3, 1943.⁵ He was a principal source for the journalist Danny Casolaro in the investigation Casolaro called The Octopus, and the subject of a FBI organized-crime investigation from 1987.²³

Meridian and the FBI

In September 1987 the FBI's Los Angeles division opened an investigation of Nichols, who, "acting through Meridian, was suspected of being involved in organized crime"; it was led by Special Agent Thomas Gates, who learned that Nichols "had potential illegal contacts with individuals in both Japan and Australia" and pursued them through the FBI's legal attachés there. On June 16, 1989, Nichols's company, Meridian International Logistics, sued Gates in California state court for eleven million dollars for libel, slander and interference with contracts, alleging that he had told the Australian Federal Police and others that Meridian was involved in organized crime and fraud; the former FBI agent Ted Gunderson filed a declaration that such foreign contacts "would never, under FBI policies, be initiated by an agent assigned to the Los Angeles field office." The government substituted itself for Gates, and on July 19, 1991, the Ninth Circuit reversed the dismissal of the suit.²

According to Cheri Seymour, the FBI investigated Meridian as "a source of funding for the purchasing of narcotics/controlled substances"; Eugene Giaquinto, president of the home entertainment division of MCA, sat on its board, and FBI wiretaps on MCA recorded his calls with Nichols.¹ Gates swore in a 72-page affidavit to a federal court on an FBI wiretap of figures in the entertainment industry suspected of organized-crime ties; the House Judiciary Committee, which heard from Gates that the threads of Casolaro's inquiry led to "a single individual, Robert Booth Nichols," took "no position on any of Gates' assertions or suppositions vis-a-vis Nichols, except to note again that they were duly sworn statements."³

Allegations

Seymour's book, largely on the word of Michael Riconosciuto, describes Nichols as a director, senior vice president and chairman of the investment committee of the First Intercontinental Development Corporation, a company alleged to have served the National Security Council in Lebanon; as chief executive of R.B.N. Companies, International; as a contract operative for the NSC; as the man who helped Ignacio Paz of the Philippine government move money through Swiss accounts; and as a participant in a heroin operation run through Euramae Trading in Nicosia, Cyprus. In the same account he laundered money and gold for Gilberto Rodríguez and José Santacruz Londoño of the Cali Drug Cartel, was linked to the Gambino Crime Family, the Bufalino Crime Family and the Yakuza, was called the "godson" of Harold Okimoto of Hawaii, and was the subject of investigations that the Department of Justice shut down.¹ Neither the House report nor the special counsel Nicholas J. Bua mentions the First Intercontinental Development Corporation.³⁴

Riconosciuto swore to the House committee that Earl Brian and Peter Videnieks had delivered PROMIS to the Cabazon Indian Reservation for "refitting," and Seymour describes Nichols's company Meridian Arms as a partner of Riconosciuto in the proposed weapons work of the Wackenhut Corporation joint venture there. The committee called the material linking Nichols, Meridian Arms and Riconosciuto to the Cabazon-Wackenhut venture "speculative reports and fragmentary records," and the "continuing intersection" of those names "certainly intriguing and curious associations but without the requisite degree of causation and factual convergence necessary to draw conclusions."¹³ Bua found Riconosciuto "totally unreliable."⁴

Nichols testified in 1993, in his suit against the Los Angeles Police Department, that he had been a member of the American intelligence community for many years. The Justice Department's review of 1994 reported that "No evidence supports that claim. In fact, the CIA informed us that it does not have, nor has it ever had, any employment relationship, contractual relationship or any other association with Mr. Booth Nichols," and that documents showed Howard Hughes's Summa Corporation had rejected the bid for its assets that Nichols testified he had been "instructed" to make in the late 1970s.⁴

Casolaro

Telephone records show that Casolaro and Nichols "spoke regularly and at length" in the last months of Casolaro's life, and the two had dinner at a restaurant in Virginia in the early summer of 1991. Nichols told committee investigators he had been "a sounding board" for Casolaro and would not give a sworn statement.³ On September 30, 1991, he told Detective Sergeant Swartwood of the Martinsburg police that he thought Casolaro had been murdered and that Riconosciuto "was probably involved in some way." The review noted a January 1993 Spy article suggesting that Nichols had Casolaro killed for fear of being exposed as a would-be FBI informant against the Mafia, and found "no evidence that he had anything to do with Mr. Casolaro's death. Furthermore, he was in London on the day that Mr. Casolaro died."⁴ According to Seymour, Nichols had warned Casolaro to drop the investigation and went to Martinsburg to press him in person, Casolaro had confronted him shortly before his death about Michael Abbell and the Cali cartel, and Nichols later wrote a manuscript, "Danny Casolaro's Octopus."¹

The Bayou Fee

In the spring of 2004 Nichols offered Samuel Israel III, manager of the Bayou hedge funds, access to what British investigators later described as programs with "all of the hallmarks of fraudulent prime bank note programs." After more than 150 million dollars of Bayou money passed through a London account of the "Humanitarian Coalition Aid Foundation" and back in April 2004, Nichols and Israel signed a "Financial and Security Consultancy Agreement" on July 11, 2004, and on July 19 Israel wired ten million dollars to accounts in Germany, Liechtenstein, Singapore and the United Kingdom in the name of or controlled by Nichols, about eight million of which ended in a London account in the names of Nichols and his wife, Ellen. The Bayou funds' liquidating entity sued the couple in 2008 to recover the fee as a fraudulent transfer; they answered that he had received it "for value, in good faith and without knowledge of the alleged voidability of the transfer." Nichols was deposed on video at the U.S. Attorney's office in Manhattan on December 16, 2008, and the case was closed on April 28, 2010.⁵⁶ At the time his address was in Honolulu.⁵