Final_Judgment

152 Israel’s Godfather [91]
The ADL connection here is interesting in that it further backtracks to
Lansky's BCI-Rosenbaum linkage. Klutznick, who had been associated with
the Lansky-linked Sonneborn Institute gunrunning operations coordinated by
Louis M. Bloomfield (mentioned earlier), had become chairman of the board
of the American Bank and Trust Company.
American Bank and Trust was a subsidiary of the Swiss-Israel Trade
Bank, a Mossad financial operation of which Rosenbaum and his long-time
associate, Shaul Eisenberg, had been directors. By coincidence—maybe
not—Swiss-Israel Trade Bank assumed management of American Bank and
Trust on a very memorable day: November 22, 1963. 249
Installed as one of the new directors of the company was New York
businessman Abe Feinberg. It was Feinberg, whom we first met in Chapter
4, who was instrumental in arranging highly critical American Jewish
financial support for the 1960 presidential campaign of then-Senator John F.
Kennedy.
American Bank and Trust had an unhappy ending. The company was
looted in 1975-76 by financier David Gravier who subsequently was
supposed to have died in an airplane crash in Mexico. Tibor Rosenbaum's
BCI also, incidentally, had a similarly unhappy ending. The bank collapsed
in 1974 resulting in a scandal that shook Israel to its core. In his book,
Jews and Money: The Myths and the Reality, author Gerald Krefetz details
the collapse of the Lansky-Mossad banking operation.
THE ADL BANKS
The Bank of Miami Beach and the City National Bank of Miami were
Lansky's chief money laundering banks in the United States and both
included several Lansky associates, most notably one Max Orovitz, as
directors. In 1963, in fact Lansky began planning the installation of his
gambling casinos in the Bahamas in Orovitz' office. Finally, when Lansky
himself ultimately settled in Israel, he initially took up residence in the Dan
Hotel in Tel Aviv, owned by Lansky's Miami banker friend, Orovitz.
Lansky's Miami banks were central to Lansky's gambling operations in
the Caribbean. According to former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow, the
Bank of Miami Beach "was originally set up to service Cuban casinos
operated by organized crime and continued to perform laundering services
through the 1960s—and was still considered mob-connected. It was
considered a sister bank of the Miami National Bank in the 1960s, sharing
many of the same directors and performing many of the same services." 250
These Miami banks, additionally, have close ties to the Anti-
Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, Israel's intelligence and propaganda arm
in this country. For example, Leonard Abess was chairman and founder of
City National Bank of Miami. His bank managed ADL Foundation funds
and Abess himself served as ADL national vice chairman. 251
City National's chairman, beginning in 1982, was Donald Beazley,
who was a former director of the mysterious Australian Nugan Hand
Bank. 252 The Nugan Hand Bank, the subject of an interesting study by