 SMITH'S REPORT America's Only Monthly Revisionist Newsletter - Number 38 - December 1996
Contents
and now... our front page! IHR Prevails against Willis Carto in Missing Millions Case; Carto and the Liberty Lobby Ordered to pay IHR $10 millionA judge in Vista, California has found that Willis Carto and one of his associates, Henry Fischer, as well as Carto's Washington, DC-based Liberty Lobby, owe the Institute for Historical Review (through its controlling corporation, the Legion for the Survival of Freedom), about $10 million. California Superior Court Judge Runston Maino ruled on November 13 that Carto acted wrongfully in withholding and concealing from the IHR $6.43 million of a $7.5 million bequest to the institute by Jean Farrel, a grandniece of Thomas Edison, and ordered Carto and the Liberty Lobby to return the money--with 10% percent interest computed since 1991, which adds up to some $10 million. In addition, the judge ordered Carto and his wife Elisabeth, Fischer, former LSF officers and directors Lewis and Lavonne Furr, and Vibet, evidently a corporation set up in Switzerland for the conversion of the Farrel estate assets to Carto's use, to account for an unspecified quantity of gold and gems missing from the IHR's share of the Farrel estate. In a separate letter issued a day before the ruling, Judge Maino stated that Carto had backdated corporate minutes, deceived lawful directors as to the Farrel estate, falsely told others that they were directors, and wrongfully acted as though the Farrel money left to the IHR in Switzerland in 1986 was his to do with as he wished. The judge characterized Willis Carto's testimony during the trial as follows: "I found that much of his testimony made no sense; much of his testimony in court was different from his previous testimony; much of his testimony was contradicted by other witnesses or by documents. By the end of the trial I was of the opinion that Mr. Carto lacked candor, lacked memory, and lacked the ability to be forthright about what he honestly did remember." On the last day of the trial, Carto submitted a torn, handwritten, barely legible sheet of paper bearing a scrawled accounting of the disbursement of the Farrel money. According to this document, which Judge Maino characterized as illustrative of Carto's "entire attitude: one of arrogance, deceit, evasiveness and convenient memory," Carto and his cronies and his "causes" have devoured all but a couple of hundred thousand of the Farrel millions. Thus, a potential war chest that could have made the Institute of Historical Review--which Carto helped found and on behalf of which he claimed to act--a true force on the national and international scene was squandered away, on Carto's sworn testimony, on such enterprises as Euro Disney ($54,000 lost, Carto reports) and something called Cal Futures ($500,000 lost). The judge found that $100,000 of the Farrel bequest actually reached the IHR (presumably this does not include the slightly larger amount that Carto caused to be loaned, out of money that belonged to it, at interest, to IHR). The staff at IHR is nonetheless hopeful that, despite Carto's testimony, a significant portion of the $7.5 million that Jean Farrel left to it on behalf of the revisionist cause ten years ago is still intact, and that it can be retrieved, with judicial prodding if necessary, from the remote caches in which Carto and Fischer have likely secreted what they haven't spent. Judge Maino's ruling, and his letter on the evidence, sustains the case of the IHR employees who overthrew Carto in 1993 after he had failed to respond to a number of their grievances, from the missing millions to his efforts to derail IHR's journal from its scholarly, revisionist track.
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