@ Steeph… Voor mij is een fruitautomaat ook een soort van pinmachine… De ene keer geeft ie wel en de andere keer weer niet. Meestal zo op het einde van de maand niet…
Maar zie daar verder geen gevaar in…
#6
HansR
@Steeph
Goed nieuws. Ben benieuwd
@RennieB
“Ik kan in het casino honderd meter verderop geld uit de automaat halen. Dat is apart. Tussen al die gokkende mensen – het was echt druk – gewoon geld trekken en onder de ogen van de vriendelijk groetende portiers de deur weer uitlopen. Nee heren, van mij krijgt u niets. Maar het is in dat dorp de enige geldautomaat en dus is het heel gewoon voor ze.
Citaat uit eigen werk. Echt gebeurd in Santenay bij Dezize-les-Maranges in de Bourgogne.
#7
HansR
Steeph, ik denk dat mijn comment in het zwarte gat terecht is gekomen.
#8
Steeph
@HansR: Vreemd. Geen foutmelding gehad?
#9
HansR
Nee
#10
RennieB
Fout!! Hahaha. Zo melig vandaag!
@ steeph… Ik heb een tijd terug eens een stuk gelezen over Diebold en nog een stemmachine maker…
Dat de stap onderwereld/gokken naar politiek/stemmen een logische was in het kader van de praktijken die veel voorkomen in Florida state. Jou iets van bekent? Ik ga zoeken…
#11
RennieB
New Word for a New World
Sequoia Pacific’s record is riddled with instances of criminal bribery and political corruption.
It began its modern life as Automatic Voting Machine, spun off to shareholders of Defense contractor Rockwell in the 1960s. The company’s founder, Lloyd A. Dixon Jr. resigned as president and CEO on Jan. 10, 1973, and later went to prison, after being indicted by a New York federal grand jury for bribing Buffalo election officials.
The company was fined nearly $50,000 for bribing Texas and Arkansas officials… not a particularly auspicious beginning.
Then things got worse.
Last week we briefly related the sordid tale of the next owner of Sequoia Pacific, financier and corporate raider Louis Wolfson. Wolfson was convicted of bribing the only Supreme Court Justice ever forced to resign in disgrace, “Dishonest Abe” Fortas.
Fortas got caught palming a lifetime yearly “retainer” from the wily Wolfson’s family foundation… Alas for “Dishonest Abe,” as he came to be called, the Law draws no distinction between “accepting a retainer” and “taking a bribe.”
Fortas cut himself a deal. He taped phone calls, at the FBI’s behest, with Wolfson, who was pleading with the Supreme Court Justice to dummy up. In the transcripts of these phone calls the word ‘cover-up’ enters the American lexicon for the first time.
Apparently Fortas coined it at the instant of need, when he said (probably for the tape recorder), “No I can’t do that! That would be a cover-up!”
The Modern Age had begun.
“Tacho Has Only One Question”
Dixon’s main competitor, Ransom Shoup, also got sent to the Big House, in 1979. The company which became E S & S, barely escaped a Justice Dept. investigation, but only after a change in Administrations in Washington.
“We had to get Ronald Reagan elected President to get this thing (the investigation) killed, “quipped E S & S’s President at the time.
In a November 29, 1985 Chicago Tribune article headlined “VOTE MACHINES CAN BE A DIFFICULT SELL” a company marketing director is quoted as saying that “Whether working in the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa or Latin American the first disquieting question of potential customers is always the same. ‘Can the things be rigged?’”
The election company exec, Ron Lawyer, spoke of meeting Shoup for the first time in Managua, Nicaragua, in the palace of then-Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, to whom Shoup was attempting to sell voting machines.
“Tacho (Somoza) had one question,” Lawyer told the Tribune. “Can I be guaranteed the election?”‘
We first learned of Sequoia Pacific’s penchant for greasing the palms of corrupt public officials from the well-publicized news accounts in the year 2000 about Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler, convicted of taking as much as ten million dollars over a period of a decade from Sequoia’s Southeast Representative, a man named Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci, from Marlton, New Jersey.
Even after pleading guilty to suborning democracy in the state of Louisiana for more than a decade, Ricci remained something of a mystery figure, we learned to our surprise.
When L.J. Hymel, the silver-maned and somewhat elaborately-coiffed US Attorney for Louisiana gave a press conference on the steps of the US Courthouse in Baton Rouge after Fowler’s sentencing, an out-of-state reported posed a question to him…
“Was Pasquale Rocco Ricci of Marlton New Jersey—the man convicted of bribing Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections for over a decade—a member of Organized Crime?”
“I don’t know,” replied Hymel. Apparently the question had not crossed his mind, or was of little concern. “I don’t know,” he repeated again, a little more forcefully this time.
The reporter persisted. “You’re the US Attorney, and you don’t know if the man who bribed the state Commissioner of Elections is a member of Organized Crime?”
From the shocked silence among the assembled members of what passes for a free press in the benighted state of Louisiana, it was clear that the question was akin to asking the U.S. Attorney whether he enjoyed having sex with small furry animals. It was a faux pas.
The reporter had violated a taboo.
Whether the man who fixed elections for Sequoia Pacific in Louisiana for over a decade was a member of organized crime was not considered a fit topic for discussion on the steps of the US District Courthouse.
And, indeed, the closer you look into the election services industry, the more the whole topic appears to have been placed off-limits. Had it not been, we would have already heard a lot more about Sequoia Pacific.
“Pressing Bernacker and getting Gambalucca”
“Long-time Louisiana Governor Earl Long once claimed that with the right elections commissioners he could make the voting machines play “Home Sweet Home.” Commissioner of Elections and former pro football player Jerry Fowler would have been his kind of public official.
Fowler got himself in big gambling trouble at Harrah’s casino in Atlantic City in the mid-’90’s, which helped explained his taking bribes. It was at this same time when allegations of voting irregularity became commonplace in Louisiana.
Curiously, gambling was the burning issue on the ballot in state elections at the same exact time.
One proposition concerned Harrah’s proposal to build a casino in downtown New Orleans. From one of five losing candidates that alleged vote fraud in a suit at this time, we learned of the strange death of the Supervisor of Elections in New Orleans just two weeks before voters went to the polls.
Tony Giambelluca, who held the keys to the warehouse where the election machines were kept, turned up an apparent suicide. He had chosen to take his life behind a garbage dumpster, which seems an odd decision. Given the choice, we figure most people would choose to end their existence in a slightly more scenic locale.
“Given the choice.”
The discovery that the election scandal had already consumed lives certainly quickened our interest. The sad fact is that nothing becomes a true scandal in America anymore until after the bodies begin to pile up.
Voting machine tests performed and videotaped by a suspicious local candidate immediately after this election demonstrated that votes Susan Barnecker cast for herself during the test were electronically recorded for her opponent.
The test was repeated several times with the same result. (The astonishing video footage is in our documentary The Big Fix, 2000. You can see the trailer here.)
Manhattan Commissioner of Elections Douglas Kellner investigated Barnecker claims, then questioned the reliability of Sequoia Pacific machines. The issue quickly became a focal point among people who distrust electronic voting.
So? Rocco Ricci counts your vote. You got a problem with that?
But it was the efforts of another unsuccessful candidate, Woody Jenkins, the Republican Senate candidate in Louisiana in 1996, who lost the contested 1996 US Senate race by a hairsbreadth margin to Democrat Mary Landrieu, that led to prosecutions.
Allegations of voting irregularities by Republican Jenkins led to a year-long investigation. The probe quickly came across evidence of massive bribery, which became the focus of the investigation that followed, leading to charges that Elections Commissioner Fowler had squandered $8.6 million in state money on worthless election equipment, and taken kickbacks from voting machine contractors working for Sequoia Pacific, all in a scheme engineered by that company’s executives.
Fowler was eventually sentenced to five years in prison.
But for Jenkins tenacious efforts the world might never have learned of Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci. And although Fowler’s conviction was big news in the state’s two major newspapers, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Baton Rouge Advocate, neither mentioned the name of the company on whose behalf he was being bribed… Sequoia Pacific, which was successful at keeping the company’s name completely out of local newspaper and television coverage.
So although the defendants signed admissions stating that the entire scheme was carried out on behalf of the Sequoia Pacific Corp., the firm garnered zero negative publicity. No ‘bad pub’ at all.
That’s clout.
More dummy front companies
Study of this case revealed some interesting details about the way the ‘election services’ industry works…
First, the scheme showed that there was collusion, rather than competition, between the two major election services firms, Sequoia Pacific and E S & S. Court documents revealed the two sold voting machines back and forth to each other until they had arrived at the figure they wanted the client, the state of Louisiana, to pay.
Nor was this an isolated case. The bribery conviction of Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, for example, revealed that E S &S’s predecessor company, Business Records Corp. of Dallas, arranged for contracts which led to Smurfit Packaging Corp. and its subsidiary, Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment Inc.
More collusion.
Another discovery was that, like the CIA, Sequoia Pacific operates through a number of dummy front companies. For example, two Florida election execs, Glenn Boord and Ralph Escudero, pled guilty to conspiracy to compound a felony (public bribery), who had owned a paper voting-machine company called Uni-lect, which was just a front for Sequoia Pacific.
Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci’s company, International Voting Machines, was also really Sequoia Pacific. So too was Harold Webb’s Garden State Elections. (And also Herb Webb’s Elec-tec.)
Webb, a New Jersey elections equipment executive who participated in the bribery and kickback scheme that resulted in the conviction of Fowler, also played a key role in the infamous Martin County, Florida drama over Republican absentee ballots in the 2000 election.
New Jersey election services companies controlled by Webb were key suppliers to Martin County, Florida, which calls into question the version of events surrounding the tampering with absentee ballot applications testified to by Republican Party operatives in court in 2000.
In counties where their name never surfaced, Sequoia supplied both computer and punch card systems, and used tabulating machines from Sequoia Pacific disguised as being from other vendors, and used the same (doctored) machines as Louisiana, supplied by the same ‘shadowy’ sources.
When a reporter for the Fresno Bee interviewed Sequoia’s chief executive, the reporter told us later he had been “taken aback by his secretive nature.” In truth, Sequoia’s chief executive has a lot to be secretive about…
As we will see next week, the company has decades-long ties to the Rockefeller Family, as well as to a very private organization, the bete noire of “conspiracy theorists” everywhere, the Bilderberger Group. During the endless cable news coverage of the Presidential Election, any of these stories would make an interesting and colorful item.
Funny how no one in the major media let slip a word. But not ‘funny’ ha-ha.
Sorry voor de overlast.
Te technisch om dit uit te leggen.
#17
HansR
Ha, dank!
Nou kan je al die meta comments weggooien :)
#18
RennieB
Dus… Sorry Steeph… Maar ging b.t.w. niet over Diebold maar over een andere fabrikant.. Maar toch weer leuk leesvoer…
#19
RennieB
Addendum @ # 5. Ahum Ik gok nooit. Dus voor mij is een pinmachine ook een soort van fruitautomaat…
@ HansR. Heb je nog meer eigen werk?
Maar het is dus voor de locale burger aldaar nagenoeg onmogelijk om de vers gepinde pecunia niet op de machines en roulette tafels te vergokken… Gokverslaving zal toch wel erg hoog zijn dan, denk ik…
#20
RennieB
Hmmm, comments op onderwerp geeft aan 19. Feitelijke reacties 18… Hmmm, toch het filtert denk ik Steeph… Of,…..
Reacties (22)
Zijn er ook al ergens geluiden te vernemen dat al die indicaties van fraude ergens consequenties gaan hebben?
Nee HansR… Ik vraag me dan ook af of we ooit nog legitieme verkiezingen zullen zien…
Trouwens, die Diebold, van oorsprong toch een fruitmachine maker uit Florida?
@RennieB: Diebold levert nu de geldautomaten van Fortis in NL……
Goed nieuws, mensen lijken wakker te worden:
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060921/020114.shtml
@ Steeph… Voor mij is een fruitautomaat ook een soort van pinmachine… De ene keer geeft ie wel en de andere keer weer niet. Meestal zo op het einde van de maand niet…
Maar zie daar verder geen gevaar in…
@Steeph
Goed nieuws. Ben benieuwd
@RennieB
“Ik kan in het casino honderd meter verderop geld uit de automaat halen. Dat is apart. Tussen al die gokkende mensen – het was echt druk – gewoon geld trekken en onder de ogen van de vriendelijk groetende portiers de deur weer uitlopen. Nee heren, van mij krijgt u niets. Maar het is in dat dorp de enige geldautomaat en dus is het heel gewoon voor ze.
Citaat uit eigen werk. Echt gebeurd in Santenay bij Dezize-les-Maranges in de Bourgogne.
Steeph, ik denk dat mijn comment in het zwarte gat terecht is gekomen.
@HansR: Vreemd. Geen foutmelding gehad?
Nee
Fout!! Hahaha. Zo melig vandaag!
@ steeph… Ik heb een tijd terug eens een stuk gelezen over Diebold en nog een stemmachine maker…
Dat de stap onderwereld/gokken naar politiek/stemmen een logische was in het kader van de praktijken die veel voorkomen in Florida state. Jou iets van bekent? Ik ga zoeken…
New Word for a New World
Sequoia Pacific’s record is riddled with instances of criminal bribery and political corruption.
It began its modern life as Automatic Voting Machine, spun off to shareholders of Defense contractor Rockwell in the 1960s. The company’s founder, Lloyd A. Dixon Jr. resigned as president and CEO on Jan. 10, 1973, and later went to prison, after being indicted by a New York federal grand jury for bribing Buffalo election officials.
The company was fined nearly $50,000 for bribing Texas and Arkansas officials… not a particularly auspicious beginning.
Then things got worse.
Last week we briefly related the sordid tale of the next owner of Sequoia Pacific, financier and corporate raider Louis Wolfson. Wolfson was convicted of bribing the only Supreme Court Justice ever forced to resign in disgrace, “Dishonest Abe” Fortas.
Fortas got caught palming a lifetime yearly “retainer” from the wily Wolfson’s family foundation… Alas for “Dishonest Abe,” as he came to be called, the Law draws no distinction between “accepting a retainer” and “taking a bribe.”
Fortas cut himself a deal. He taped phone calls, at the FBI’s behest, with Wolfson, who was pleading with the Supreme Court Justice to dummy up. In the transcripts of these phone calls the word ‘cover-up’ enters the American lexicon for the first time.
Apparently Fortas coined it at the instant of need, when he said (probably for the tape recorder), “No I can’t do that! That would be a cover-up!”
The Modern Age had begun.
“Tacho Has Only One Question”
Dixon’s main competitor, Ransom Shoup, also got sent to the Big House, in 1979. The company which became E S & S, barely escaped a Justice Dept. investigation, but only after a change in Administrations in Washington.
“We had to get Ronald Reagan elected President to get this thing (the investigation) killed, “quipped E S & S’s President at the time.
In a November 29, 1985 Chicago Tribune article headlined “VOTE MACHINES CAN BE A DIFFICULT SELL” a company marketing director is quoted as saying that “Whether working in the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa or Latin American the first disquieting question of potential customers is always the same. ‘Can the things be rigged?’”
The election company exec, Ron Lawyer, spoke of meeting Shoup for the first time in Managua, Nicaragua, in the palace of then-Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, to whom Shoup was attempting to sell voting machines.
“Tacho (Somoza) had one question,” Lawyer told the Tribune. “Can I be guaranteed the election?”‘
We first learned of Sequoia Pacific’s penchant for greasing the palms of corrupt public officials from the well-publicized news accounts in the year 2000 about Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections Jerry Fowler, convicted of taking as much as ten million dollars over a period of a decade from Sequoia’s Southeast Representative, a man named Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci, from Marlton, New Jersey.
Even after pleading guilty to suborning democracy in the state of Louisiana for more than a decade, Ricci remained something of a mystery figure, we learned to our surprise.
When L.J. Hymel, the silver-maned and somewhat elaborately-coiffed US Attorney for Louisiana gave a press conference on the steps of the US Courthouse in Baton Rouge after Fowler’s sentencing, an out-of-state reported posed a question to him…
“Was Pasquale Rocco Ricci of Marlton New Jersey—the man convicted of bribing Louisiana’s Commissioner of Elections for over a decade—a member of Organized Crime?”
“I don’t know,” replied Hymel. Apparently the question had not crossed his mind, or was of little concern. “I don’t know,” he repeated again, a little more forcefully this time.
The reporter persisted. “You’re the US Attorney, and you don’t know if the man who bribed the state Commissioner of Elections is a member of Organized Crime?”
From the shocked silence among the assembled members of what passes for a free press in the benighted state of Louisiana, it was clear that the question was akin to asking the U.S. Attorney whether he enjoyed having sex with small furry animals. It was a faux pas.
The reporter had violated a taboo.
Whether the man who fixed elections for Sequoia Pacific in Louisiana for over a decade was a member of organized crime was not considered a fit topic for discussion on the steps of the US District Courthouse.
And, indeed, the closer you look into the election services industry, the more the whole topic appears to have been placed off-limits. Had it not been, we would have already heard a lot more about Sequoia Pacific.
“Pressing Bernacker and getting Gambalucca”
“Long-time Louisiana Governor Earl Long once claimed that with the right elections commissioners he could make the voting machines play “Home Sweet Home.” Commissioner of Elections and former pro football player Jerry Fowler would have been his kind of public official.
Fowler got himself in big gambling trouble at Harrah’s casino in Atlantic City in the mid-’90’s, which helped explained his taking bribes. It was at this same time when allegations of voting irregularity became commonplace in Louisiana.
Curiously, gambling was the burning issue on the ballot in state elections at the same exact time.
One proposition concerned Harrah’s proposal to build a casino in downtown New Orleans. From one of five losing candidates that alleged vote fraud in a suit at this time, we learned of the strange death of the Supervisor of Elections in New Orleans just two weeks before voters went to the polls.
Tony Giambelluca, who held the keys to the warehouse where the election machines were kept, turned up an apparent suicide. He had chosen to take his life behind a garbage dumpster, which seems an odd decision. Given the choice, we figure most people would choose to end their existence in a slightly more scenic locale.
“Given the choice.”
The discovery that the election scandal had already consumed lives certainly quickened our interest. The sad fact is that nothing becomes a true scandal in America anymore until after the bodies begin to pile up.
Voting machine tests performed and videotaped by a suspicious local candidate immediately after this election demonstrated that votes Susan Barnecker cast for herself during the test were electronically recorded for her opponent.
The test was repeated several times with the same result. (The astonishing video footage is in our documentary The Big Fix, 2000. You can see the trailer here.)
Manhattan Commissioner of Elections Douglas Kellner investigated Barnecker claims, then questioned the reliability of Sequoia Pacific machines. The issue quickly became a focal point among people who distrust electronic voting.
So? Rocco Ricci counts your vote. You got a problem with that?
But it was the efforts of another unsuccessful candidate, Woody Jenkins, the Republican Senate candidate in Louisiana in 1996, who lost the contested 1996 US Senate race by a hairsbreadth margin to Democrat Mary Landrieu, that led to prosecutions.
Allegations of voting irregularities by Republican Jenkins led to a year-long investigation. The probe quickly came across evidence of massive bribery, which became the focus of the investigation that followed, leading to charges that Elections Commissioner Fowler had squandered $8.6 million in state money on worthless election equipment, and taken kickbacks from voting machine contractors working for Sequoia Pacific, all in a scheme engineered by that company’s executives.
Fowler was eventually sentenced to five years in prison.
But for Jenkins tenacious efforts the world might never have learned of Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci. And although Fowler’s conviction was big news in the state’s two major newspapers, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Baton Rouge Advocate, neither mentioned the name of the company on whose behalf he was being bribed… Sequoia Pacific, which was successful at keeping the company’s name completely out of local newspaper and television coverage.
So although the defendants signed admissions stating that the entire scheme was carried out on behalf of the Sequoia Pacific Corp., the firm garnered zero negative publicity. No ‘bad pub’ at all.
That’s clout.
More dummy front companies
Study of this case revealed some interesting details about the way the ‘election services’ industry works…
First, the scheme showed that there was collusion, rather than competition, between the two major election services firms, Sequoia Pacific and E S & S. Court documents revealed the two sold voting machines back and forth to each other until they had arrived at the figure they wanted the client, the state of Louisiana, to pay.
Nor was this an isolated case. The bribery conviction of Arkansas Secretary of State Bill McCuen, for example, revealed that E S &S’s predecessor company, Business Records Corp. of Dallas, arranged for contracts which led to Smurfit Packaging Corp. and its subsidiary, Sequoia Pacific Voting Equipment Inc.
More collusion.
Another discovery was that, like the CIA, Sequoia Pacific operates through a number of dummy front companies. For example, two Florida election execs, Glenn Boord and Ralph Escudero, pled guilty to conspiracy to compound a felony (public bribery), who had owned a paper voting-machine company called Uni-lect, which was just a front for Sequoia Pacific.
Pasquale “Rocco” Ricci’s company, International Voting Machines, was also really Sequoia Pacific. So too was Harold Webb’s Garden State Elections. (And also Herb Webb’s Elec-tec.)
Webb, a New Jersey elections equipment executive who participated in the bribery and kickback scheme that resulted in the conviction of Fowler, also played a key role in the infamous Martin County, Florida drama over Republican absentee ballots in the 2000 election.
New Jersey election services companies controlled by Webb were key suppliers to Martin County, Florida, which calls into question the version of events surrounding the tampering with absentee ballot applications testified to by Republican Party operatives in court in 2000.
In counties where their name never surfaced, Sequoia supplied both computer and punch card systems, and used tabulating machines from Sequoia Pacific disguised as being from other vendors, and used the same (doctored) machines as Louisiana, supplied by the same ‘shadowy’ sources.
When a reporter for the Fresno Bee interviewed Sequoia’s chief executive, the reporter told us later he had been “taken aback by his secretive nature.” In truth, Sequoia’s chief executive has a lot to be secretive about…
As we will see next week, the company has decades-long ties to the Rockefeller Family, as well as to a very private organization, the bete noire of “conspiracy theorists” everywhere, the Bilderberger Group. During the endless cable news coverage of the Presidential Election, any of these stories would make an interesting and colorful item.
Funny how no one in the major media let slip a word. But not ‘funny’ ha-ha.
Funny strange.
2004
2004II
Florida
Help, redactie… In het spamfilter… Zoveel maffia-connecties in een reactie is wat te veel voor het Spammert-filter… : )
Er staat geen spamfilter aan…..
Nu wel.
??? Waar is mijn reactie dan ???
Gevonden!
Sorry voor de overlast.
Te technisch om dit uit te leggen.
Ha, dank!
Nou kan je al die meta comments weggooien :)
Dus… Sorry Steeph… Maar ging b.t.w. niet over Diebold maar over een andere fabrikant.. Maar toch weer leuk leesvoer…
Addendum @ # 5. Ahum Ik gok nooit. Dus voor mij is een pinmachine ook een soort van fruitautomaat…
@ HansR. Heb je nog meer eigen werk?
Maar het is dus voor de locale burger aldaar nagenoeg onmogelijk om de vers gepinde pecunia niet op de machines en roulette tafels te vergokken… Gokverslaving zal toch wel erg hoog zijn dan, denk ik…
Hmmm, comments op onderwerp geeft aan 19. Feitelijke reacties 18… Hmmm, toch het filtert denk ik Steeph… Of,…..
@RennieB: Ja, het gaat nog niet helemaal goed. Maar ik vis alles er snel uit als ik het zie hangen.
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