Contract Time: Allen Klein with Yoko Ono and a distracted John Lennon.
As part of my research for The Cash Box Murder, I bought a copy of Cash Box magazine from 1969 for its masthead. I had no idea that the magazine contained an ‘International’ news section which turned out to be very informative.
As you can imagine, the Great Britain section was dominated by Beatles news. I’m not a Beatles fan myself and the information contained in the column was new to me– it may also be new to some a.nolen readers, so I’m going to reproduce a few paragraphs in full:
David Platz of Essex Music has emerged as the new big wheel at The Beatles’ Apple Corps and the general supervising their operation to win the takeover battle with Associated TeleVision for Northern Songs. He has disclosed that he will be active in putting “the Apple shop in order,” and if the Beatle bid for Northern is successful, he will be the “expert in music publishing” who will join the reconstituted Northern board. In return for his services, Platz will receive 10% of the Northern and Apple annual turnover, estimated to be worth an additional GBP 500,000 income for the Essex group. Platz is one of the most astute executives in international publishing and has been in on the ground floor of every British pop trend [on] behalf of Essex over the past ten years. He handles the Rolling Stones‘ publishing interests amongst other perennial money-spinners. Platz has been conferring with The Beatles and other interested parties about the strategy for the Northern struggle and firming up the fortunes of the financially groggy but potentially prosperous Apple empire.
Beatle business manager Allen Klein revealed that he has pledged the 45,000 shares in Metro Goldwyn Mayer owned by his company ABKCO as collateral for the GBP 1.5 million cash loan which Ansbacher, the Beatle merchant bankers, made to underwrite the bit for Northern. Slater Walker Investments, financial advisers to institutional shareholders in Northern stock like Hambros, Howard and Wyndham, EBOR and Invan Unit Trust, has urged them not to accept the ATV offer worth 37 shillings and sixpence per share which was due to close May 2nd. Slater Walker made no comment on the Beatle counter offer worth 42 shillings and sixpence per share. The institutions it advises hold about 14% of Northern’s voting capital, and could mount an effective blocking operation in the takeover tussle.
That snippet associates a number of corporate entities with The Fab Four; some of these entities are better understood today than they were in 1969. Sit back, readers, as I explain how this unsavory lot connects The Beatles’ with a selection of ugly pursuits, from war propaganda to international arms dealing.
Let’s start with Northern Songs, which was a holding company that owned rights to The Beatles’ early songs. Northern was started in 1963 by Lennon and McCartney, along with their manager Brian Epstein and Epstein’s friend, ‘Dick James’ born Reginald Leon Isaac Vapnick. Although Epstein was supposed to be working in Lennon and McCartney’s interests, he and James gave themselves the majority of shares in Northern— it appears that the Beatles didn’t realize James controlled the company at the time of its creation.
Dick James was the son of Eastern European immigrants who had come to Great Britain in 1912 to escape an unfavorable political climate; in 1942 James joined the Army Medical Corps, where he was assigned to a band that toured Britain and the Middle East throughout WWII. After the war, he found himself with the right connections to launch his music career, which included representing money-spinners like Elton John. For information on how the US military uses music for propaganda purposes, please see my post on Cash Box.
Brian Epstein was equally colorful and also descended from Eastern European immigrants to the U.K. His family was in the furniture business just like Andrew Loog Oldham’s sponsor, mobster Alec Morris. The Epsteins later owned one of the largest music retail outlets in Northern Britain.
Brian Epstein
Brian Epstein served in the British Army as did Dick James, but during the mid-Fifties not during WWII. He was discharged after he was caught impersonating an officer at the Army and Navy Club in Piccadilly– Epstein appears to have done this regularly as a way to pick up homosexual flings. Readers interested in Addiction and Control should know that Epstein was hooked on prescription sleeping tablets and amphetamines. Readers interested in CIA psychologist John Gittinger’s system of control or Kim Philby’s views on homosexuality should know that Epstein was also promiscuous: he searched out “rough sex”, that is sado-masochistic sex, with random strangers and regularly patronized rent boys. These characteristics suggest that Epstein was vulnerable to manipulation from ‘cult leaders’, or intelligence handlers, as I’ve discussed in Elementals, Or Soul Hacking as well as Kim Philby on Homosexuality.
After Brian Epstein died of a drug overdose in 1967, the Beatles wanted to renegotiate their contract with James and realized that he controlled the majority stake in Northern Songs. They wanted their new holding company, Apple Corps, to own their early songs which gave rise to the “takeover battle” described in Cash Box. Apple Corps was founded in 1968, and according to Tom Hormby of lowendmac.com:
Apple Corps would finance a record label and other pet projects of the band members while also providing a “front” for their financial activities to reduce personal liability and taxes.
Ultimately, Apple Records was the only successful and long lived division of Apple Corps. The label released all Beatles records after 1968 and was also home to other artists including Ravi Shankar.
Less successful divisions included Apple Electronics, Apple Movies, and the Apple Boutique, the most ostentatious of Apple Corps’ businesses. Paul McCartney described the Apple Boutique as a “beautiful place where you can buy beautiful things – a controlled weirdness – a kind of Western communism.” (Uncontrolled Weirdness)
In 1969 Dick James sold his Northern Songs stake surreptitiously, he told neither the Beatles nor anybody at Apple Corps about the sale, to a company called Associated Television– the “ATV” from above– which was controlled by the shadowy Lew Grade.
Lew Grade, thanks to the ATV website.
Lew Grade, who eventually became Lord Grade of Elstree, was born Lovat Winogradsky and came from the same immigrant community as James and Epstein. Grade will be familiar to American readers as a producer of Jim Henson’s The Muppet Show. His life’s work was low-quality television programming; he’s often described as the British Samuel Goldwyn. During the course of Grade’s forty-year t.v. career he patronized famous names that will be familiar to a.nolen readers:
International acclaim came with the casting of Burt Lancaster in Moses The Lawgiver and the casting of everyone from Olivier to Peter Ustinov in Jesus Of Nazareth, for which Lew had an audience with the Pope. ‘He’s got great charisma,’ said Lew of John Paul II. ‘I’d like to sign him up.’
Grade got his start in show business in 1926 when he won a dance competition judged by mob-groupie Fred Astaire, after which Grade made a living as an international cabaret dancer.
Lew Grade as a portly professional dancer in 1933.
If the mafioso-groupie=> dancehall-darling=> media-mogul combination sounds familiar to a.nolen readers, it’s because Rolling Stone manager Andrew Loog Oldham’s sugar-daddy Alec Morris broke into the world of showbiz the same way, just replace ‘Fred Astaire’ with ‘George Raft’. Loog Oldham would not have got his position with The Stones where it not for his mother’s lover’s assistance; Morris himself had ties to Meyer Lanksy and by extension the CIA. Loog Oldham’s fantastic music career dried up when Lansky/Raft’s U.K. gambling operations were shut down by British authorities in the late Sixties.
Grade joined the British Army during WWII and was involved in sourcing entertainment for the troops. According to the Daily Mail:
On his first and last day in uniform, he rode a motorcycle into a tree, which caused his knees to swell up ‘to a frightening size’.
He was better placed negotiating performance contracts for the comedians emerging from the Services – Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers and Tony Hancock were his clients. He also represented the Dagenham Girl Pipers and enticed Bob Hope, Louis Armstrong and Edith Piaf to appear on the British stage.
WWII was very good to Grade and allowed him to groom American connections like Bob Hope, who I recently mentioned with regard to Marjorie Cameron’s sexual services and his association with USO Shows. By the 1960s Lew Grade had established himself as a heavyweight in British media– music and television programming– through his firm ATV. According to The Independent:
Grade’s biggest break came almost by accident. At the start of commercial television he was rather casually involved in the formation of Associated Television, an uneasy alliance which included the Pye group, Lord Renwick, a leading stockbroker, and Norman Collins, the novelist and former BBC executive who was the true father of ATV.
ATV was not in an “alliance” with Pye group, ATV owned a “substantial interest” in Pye Records. Of course, Pye Records were the UK distributors of Chess and Checkers Records, including works by super-star Muddy Waters, who was active in Europe during the CIA’s Jazz ‘cultural offensive’. (Pye also distributed Chess Records in South Africa in the 1960s, when Jazz was considered subversive. ) You can read more about the exploitative Phil and Leonard Chess here, Leonard’s son Marshall Chess went on to become distributor for The Rolling Stones in 1969.
ATV logo in the 1970s.
I think I’ve presented enough information to show that Brian Epstein and Dick James were ultimately loyal to people at ATV, people like Norman Collins, who was a high-ranking propagandist at the BBC during WWII and beyond, as well as Lord Renwick, who served as Controller of Communications at the Air Ministry; Controller of Communications Equipment at the Ministry of Aircraft Production and as Chairman of the Airborne Forces Committee during WWII. Readers will remember how important Royal Air Force contracts were to Brian Jones’ home town of Cheltenham, Gloucester.
The Beatles never wrested control of their early work from ATV. David Platz, who the Beatles hired to put their financial house in order, never delivered on the Northern bid– which won’t be surprising once I explain his business background. According to The Independent:
Platz was born in Hanover of Jewish stock. His parents, aware of the political climate in pre-war Germany, sent their two children to Britain for safe keeping, and so, at the outset of the Second World War, he and his sister, Gina, arrived in Neasden, Middlesex.
No formal musical training, not even a great love of music, led him to his first job. It was obtained by chance. His guardian thought a school-leaver would be suitably placed in the publishing world. David was impressed with the suggestion, thinking it would be literary, and disappointed to find it was music. Aged 14, he found himself as an office boy with Southern Music in the then shrine of music publishers, Denmark Street, London. His early business awareness soon took him through the copyright department, then to the Latin-American music division, as manager.
Some few years later a new managing director of Southern Music was required but Platz, at 28, was considered too young for the post and turned down. The opportunity arose for him to leave Southern Music and front a new company, Essex Music…
Essex Music was a success story from its outset, and due solely to the personality of the man that ran it… The Rolling Stones were early conquests and then the clients poured in.
Platz’s first job was for Southern Records in 1943. Southern Records, now ‘peermusic’, was set up by Ralph Sylvester Peer, a veteran talent scout for Columbia, Okeh and Victor records, who “was the prominent early businessman in country music” according to The Country Music Hall of Fame. I wrote about Nashville’s weird connection to the US military here.
Ralph Sylvester Peer. He always had that expression.
Country music wasn’t Peer’s only business interest according to the peermusic website:
Peer recognized the potential for growth in the Latin market after a trip to Mexico City in 1928 when he met composer Agustin Lara. He brought this rich musical culture to the world when RCA-Victor sought to increase its presence in Latin America by signing such Latin luminaries as Lara, “the Musical Poet,” and Perez Prado, “the Mambo King.” These composers created some of peermusic’s signature Latin music hits, including “Granada,” “Sólamente Una Vez” and “Mambo #5.” The tradition continued to create many legends including Rafael Hernández, Benny Moré and Tito Puente and songs such as “Perfidia,” “Besame Mucho,” “Brasil,” and “Mas Que Nada..”
While the 1930s saw peermusic extending its presence in Latin America, the company was also opening offices throughout Europe. By the end of World War II, with the help of peermusic’s London executive Tom Ward, the once-fledgling company had truly become a worldwide force, acquiring and developing local repertoire throughout Europe that have since become classics by artists such as Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Yves Montand, Henri Salvador, and Fred Bongusto.
…by the 1950s peermusic was as vested in U.S. artists and their music as ever. At this point they were determined not to merely remain current, but to look forward. With this thought in mind, at the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll, peermusic signed none other than rock legend Buddy Holly. Before long, a new wave of rock and pop artists, including The Rolling Stones and Donovan, started their careers at peermusic’s London studios.
Southern scored a coup in the 1930s-40s by promoting South American music at the same time as the Rockefeller family’s foray into ‘Inter-American Affairs‘, during which the banking clan collaborated with William Stephenson’s ‘British Security Coordination’ to use spookish means to undermine Latin American democracies in favor of FDR, just like they were doing back home in the USA. Music has always served as an important military propaganda tool.
BrainPickings.org: “In 1941, Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, asked Walt Disney to make a goodwill tour across South America, hoping the universal popularity of his characters would help diffuse anti-Axis sentiments in the region.” See the FDR/KGB connection with Disney’s forced tour at Walt and El Grupo.
The Beatles had made another stupid, and spooky, hiring decision when they put Platz in charge of Apple Corps. Platz had a close working relationship with Beatles manager Allen Klein, which extended beyond their business with the Fab Four. According to this 1984 The Times article provided by fans of musical group Procol Harum, Mr Justice Walton, the judge presiding over a breach of contract case involving Rolling Stones copyrights and Westminster Music, said that Platz and Klein were “thick as thieves”.
Readers will remember that Allen Klein, from NYC not London, took over Andrew Loog Oldham’s job after a highly suspicious drug bust in 1967: a mysterious man from California with multiple passports gave the Stones illegal drugs just before a police raid on the band. William Colby’s ‘Family Jewels’ leaks suggest that the CIA had trouble keeping track of their fake passport collection over the period of the raids.
Cash Box tells us that acquiring Northern Songs was important to Klein, as he was willing to pledge 45,000 Metro Goldwyn Meyer shares toward the deal, shares that were owned by his company, ABKCO. ABKCO is an acronym for “Allen & Betty Klein and Company”. Several months after this Cash Box article was printed The Beatles signed a contract with ABKCO which the band would later regret and spend over a decade trying to extricate themselves from through multiple lawsuits and many millions of dollars.
ABKCO logo.
ABKCO is litigious in its own right. In 1997 it was ABKCO which brought the lawsuit against The Verve for using a few extra notes from The Stones’ “The Last Time” than was specified in their sampling contract; in 1999 Andrew Loog Oldham got in on the lawsuit and profited from it too.
Metro Goldwyn Mayer was, of course, one of the most viciously pro-war movie studios in the run up to WWII, which you can read about in Stephen Vaughn’s Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics or in my post Cleopatra!, which explains how FDR and William Stephenson used Hollywood contacts to push their war/ imperialist agenda. I find it interesting that the Beatles’ manager would put his own money in a pro-war, pro-establishment outfit like MGM.
MGM Stars promoting the war effort, thank you SilverScreenBlog.
Klein worked with an investment bank to broker the proposed Northern Songs takeover, that bank was Ansbacher, which Cash Box describes as “the Beatle merchant Bankers”.
Ansbacher was not a warm, fuzzy institution. In 2007 it was revealed that the bank was the lynch-pin in a nasty arms dealing scandal, according to The Guardian:
The arms company BAE Systems used a secret payments system to transfer more than £13m to a company linked to David Hart, the controversial former Conservative defence adviser, according to legal sources.
He has acted as a lobbyist both for Britain’s biggest arms company and also for the giant military manufacturer Boeing in the US.
Mr Hart, an Old Etonian who lives in a Suffolk mansion, became notorious in the 1980s for helping the then prime minster Margaret Thatcher break the miners’ strike in an operation he ran from a luxury suite at Claridges hotel, in London.
BAE is alleged to have paid the money into a previously unknown offshore company linked to Mr Hart called Defence Consultancy Ltd (DCL).
The company was registered anonymously in 1997 in the British Virgin Islands, with a bank account in the Channel Islands tax haven of Guernsey, at the Henry Ansbacher merchant bank. Mr Hart’s late father, Louis “Boy” Hart, was the bank’s chairman.
This is the latest allegation to emerge from corruption investigations into BAE, being conducted by prosecutors from three countries – Switzerland, Sweden, and the Serious Fraud Office in the UK.
Ansbacher hit troubled waters in 1993, when the Apartheid-era South African spin-off of the British Barclays National Bank, First National, bought the bank. (This British-derived concern seems to have done well in the fall-out from the 1994 regime change.) During negotiations it emerged that Swiss firm Pargesa Holdings owned 62% of Ansbacher. Pargesa is a very prominent multinational specializing in fossil fuel investments, with huge stakes in Total S.A. and Suez S.A., amongst other energy and mining firms. The Guardian goes on to state:
Ansbacher has at times been tinged by scandal: Lord Spens, a former director, was involved in the Guinness affair, and its current chairman advised Robert Maxwell on a deal now being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office. The merchant bank made a pre-tax loss for 1991, but a small pre-tax profit in first half of 1992.
The Guinness Affair involved artificially raising the price of Guinness stock in anticipation of buying out another distillery; the scandal epitomized rampant corruption in London’s financial sector. Robert Maxwell, born Ján Ludvík Hyman Binyamin Hoch, was yet another British subject to escape Nazi persecution. Maxwell was also a disgraced publishing magnet and embezzler, whose daughter recently made the news for being a procuress of underage girls for Jeffrey Epstein.
In 2002, Ansbacher made the Irish press for all the wrong reasons:
At the centre of the scandal is Ansbacher, an international group of “boutique” banks specialising in “wealth preservation” for the super-rich. In Ireland Ansbacher and its predecessors ran an illegal banking operation that helped a select group of the well heeled and politically connected, the so-called “golden circles”, to dodge tax over the course of two decades.
The Beatles chose some pretty ugly people to manage their affairs; hardly people who fit in with the band’s ‘love & peace’ image. Unsurprisingly, the investment bank advising Northern Songs shareholders, Slater Walker, was no better. The bank collapsed in 1975 after its founder Jim Slater misused millions of GBP manipulating share deals, Slater was replaced by the equally corrupt playboy and Anglo-French billionaire financier Jimmy Goldsmith after a Bank of England bailout. (Jimmy’s daughter Jemima is famous for her strange, failed marriage to Pakistani politician Imran Khan.)
The cover of a James Goldsmith biography.
But which companies hired Slater Walker? Which companies did Brian Epstein and Dick James allow to benefit from Beatles intellectual property in the first place, prior to ATV? Cash Box tells us: “Hambros, Howard and Wyndham, EBOR and Invan Unit Trust”.
- Hambros was a UK-based bank that specialized in flogging British Government debt to various Scandinavian countries and financing the ugly diamond trade— you need high-level connections to set up a concern like Hambros, which is now part of Société Générale.
- Howard and Wyndham was a huge British media concern, specializing in theaters which featured live plays– an important propaganda vehicle in the U.K.
- EBOR Unit Trust was a British life assurance concern— a sort of mutual fund rolled up with an insurance company. The British insurance industry is not very transparent and is dominated by Lloyds of London, an insurance market that is a quasi-governmental organization in its own right and has always been at the heart of British power circles.
- INVAN Unit Trust was set up by Slater Walker to elbow in on the life assurance business, presumably they paid Slater Walker for investment advice too.
None of these firms held the philosophy that “all you need is love”, but they were all clued into a smart investment that even John Lennon didn’t fully understand. Apple Corps would never gain control of the rights to early Beatles songs, these rights would eventually pass to the late Michael Jackson and his partnership with Sony Music.
Readers will have noticed that ’67-’69 was a tumultuous time for Britain’s two most socially influential bands, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, whose management switched from British to American hands. Also in 1969, The Rolling Stones got entangled with Kenneth Anger’s Crowley-inspired cult, while the The Beatles got mixed up in Hare Krishna. Money changes hands; talent joins cults.
I’m going to end this post by stepping away from the Cash Box article and talking about Steve Jobs’ Apple Computer. As readers no doubt already know, Apple Computer was involved in a drawn-out legal battle with Apple Corps, because– let’s be honest– Steve Jobs stole Apple Corps’ name in 1976.
Thank you, TechCrunch.
Jobs certainly knew about the Beatles’ corporation when he chose “Apple” and American trademark law was well established by that time, so the name was a very odd choice for Jobs. What is even more odd is that Apple Computer Inc. has won every trademark battle brought by Apple Corps in defense of its name– there have been three separate series of litigation over the decades. By ‘won’ I mean each case was settled in Apple Computer’s favor, often with only paltry sums being paid to the Beatles’ firm despite obvious trademark and other infringements. All in all, Apple Corps received about $29 million from Apple Computer Inc. over the span of 30 years.
Considering that Jobs actually stole a trademark from one of the most popular music groups in history, $29 million is quite paltry. However, it’s $29 million that Apple Computer didn’t need to lose– why not ‘Banana Computer’, or ‘Grapefruit Inc.’?
For a long time, Jobs refused to give an answer. Then, after the third settlement, he revealed that he chose ‘Apple’ because he was on a freakish, all-apple diet at the time of the company’s founding. Needless to say, that excuse is lame.
I don’t think that Jobs was a stupid man; I think his lawyers would have advised him against naming his company after the Beatles’ firm in any ordinary situation. I don’t think that the founding of Apple Inc., one of the NSA’s corporate spying buddies, was an ordinary situation for reasons I’ve just detailed in this post. The Beatles were financially connected to companies with close ties to Anglo-American military and propaganda concerns– spooky concerns. After striking it rich, the Beatles were probably casting around for music-related investments through Allen Klein and Ansbacher with its Boeing connections. Somebody probably tipped The Four off to a smart technology investment, which was fronted by the kid of a Las Vegas casino operator and political science professor Abdulfattah John Jandali. (For more on Las Vegas, Meyer Lanksy and the CIA, please see The Rolling Stones and Meyer Lansky?)
Jindali, Jobs’ biological father who had a habit of deserting his children, is an interesting character according to The Las Vegas Sun:
Jandali, who was born in Syria and educated in Beirut, has lived in Reno for decades, including working as a political-science professor at UNR in the late 1960s… Jandali’s time in Nevada is somewhat unclear. In addition to teaching at UNR in the late ’60s, he has managed several Reno restaurants and worked in Las Vegas for a time.
(Readers interested in American and British intelligence’s investment in Beirut, and particularly in education and publishing concerns there, will like my post Kim Philby and Saddam Hussein.)
When Jobs found out that one of his favorite bands wanted to invest in his firm, he probably saw a great marketing opportunity, and there were probably informal talks about sharing the ‘Apple’ name– talks at the ‘Klein’ level, not the ‘Lennon’ or ‘McCartney’ level.
I dare say that cooler British ‘intelligence community’ heads prevailed and quashed the proposed linkage for reasons that Reddit would have been wise to ponder before supporting the Tor Project. Jobs, and his American handlers, were probably ticked and decided to give two fingers to their special friends across the pond.
We have a saying in the Midwest: When you lie with dogs, you rise with fleas.
