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	   Allegations Regarding Vince Foster, the NSA, and
		Banking Transactions Spying, Part XXXI
			  
			  by J. Orlin Grabbe

	There is something about the explosive smell of money in Little 
Rock's Ozark air that turns a young man's thoughts to suicide.  

	But one might have believed John Markle, a PhD economist and son of 
the actress Mercedes McCambridge, was sitting on top of the world in 1987.  
He had left Salomon Brothers eight years earlier to become the one-man 
futures trading operation for Stephens Inc. on East Capitol Street.

	Markle had a lot of money to play with.  He had no position limits, 
at least none that he knew about.  "They're at least $800 million, because I 
once had that much at risk and nobody stopped me," he told *Forbes* on March 
31, 1987.

	He traded exclusively for the house account--essentially for the
personal profit of the two brothers Wilton R. "Witt" and Jackson T. "Jack" 
Stephens, the only stockholders in Stephens Group, which controlled an
empire that included the investment bank Stephens Inc., the multibank 
holding company Worthen Banking Corp., the Capital Hotel of Little Rock, the
software firm Systematics, the nursing home operator Beverly Enterprises, 
the insurance holding company ICH Corp., and (the crown jewel) the natural 
gas company Stephens Production Co.

	Witt Stephens, a former Bible saleman, had long controlled Arkansas
politics through a simple mechanism:  those local candidates he didn't 
support saw all their funding cut off.  Naturally no local candidate could
afford to be seen taking out-of-state money, assuming it was available.  

	But like many of the super-rich, the Stephens brothers were neither
Republican nor Democrat.  Jackson Stephens, who was a major fund-raiser for  
Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, would also become one of George Bush's "Team 
100" through $100,000 political donations in 1988 and 1992.  The latter was 
the year that a Stephens-controlled bank would supply a $3.5 million line of 
credit to the campaign of Bill Clinton.  

	No, these boys weren't hard-core Democratics. It was Witt Stephens 
who started the rumor that Geraldine Ferraro was Benito Mussolini's 
grandniece, a stunt he found so entertaining that he repeated it four years 
later with a story that Michael Dukakis was Aristotle Onassis' nephew. 

	Such international wit was curious for a man who retired weekends to
the family homestead in Prattsville, and boasted that he had left the state 
of Arkansas only once in fifteen years.  Witt's brother Jack, on the other 
hand, could more likely be found on the 6,000-acre plantation that Jack owned 
in Chittlin Switch, Georgia, where he might be joined for a weekend of 
hunting by Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton, Oklahoma Govenor Henry Bellmon, or 
Joseph Williams, the chairman of Williams Cos., of pipeline and 
telecommunications fame.

	Markle, perched in front of his data screens trading futures, 
probably didn't know about the monetary flows generated by Operation Black 
Eagle and siphoned through the Stephens' financial institutions. He just knew 
that the different parts of the Stephens empire--legally administered by the 
Rose Law Firm trio of Webster Hubbell, Vince Foster, and Hillary Rodham 
Clinton--generated a lot of cash. ("They have so much money it scares you," 
a Merrill Lynch vice president would tell *Time* magazine a few years later.)

	First, there was Beverly Enterprises, the nation's largest nursing
home operator.  As explained by Stephens' executive Jon Jacoby, "In 1968  
the Great Society started the nursing home business, and all you had to do
was open the doors and they filled up." That same year Jack bought into a 
chain of nursing homes called Leisure Lodges, and took them over in 1975.
Then, after helping Beverly Enterprises avoid a takeover they didn't want,
he sold Leisure Lodges to Beverly in 1978.

	The Stephens brothers then acquired control of Beverly and turned it
into a cash cow.  In 1980 the Stephens sold most of their Beverly stock at a 
handsome profit, but retained the real estate from  Leisure Lodges, which was 
rented to Beverly, and also contracted to provide data processing services to 
Beverly through Jack's software firm Systematics. The Stephens also remained 
one of Beverly's primary bankers.  

	The Stephens brothers were thus nicely positioned to make out like a 
bandit if they could convince some politician to push through a system of 
National Health Care, which would provide a built-in government demand for 
both health and software services.  The Stephens brothers had always favored 
the notion of private enterprise supplemented by government subsidies.

	The Systematics contracts were overseen by Vince Foster and Hillary 
Rodham Clinton of the Rose Law Firm.  Systematics provided data processing
services and software to track the flows of money through banks, and the
flows of people and money through the nursing home industry.  Vince and  
Hillary represented Systematics in the Jackson Stephens-Bert Lance-BCCI 
attempted takeover of First American Bank in 1978.  Hillary also became 
self-taught in intellectual property law, important for a software company. 
Stephens had even picked up some neat software from Earl "Cash" Brian who 
had once been influential at Beverly Enterprises at its Pasadena, California,
headquarters.

	Jack Stephens had purchased 49 percent of Systematics for $400,000 in 
1968, and it had since become one of the largest suppliers of retail banking
software. Banking customers could purchase Systematics software to do their 
back office data processing (i.e. to transfer money between accounts and 
between banks), or they could contract with Systematics to do all their data 
processing for them (this was called "outsourcing")--either on the premises, 
or at remote locations using telecommunication links.

	The investment bank Stephens Inc. had, with White Weld (now part of 
Morgan Stanley) underwritten the initial public offering of Wal-Mart in 1970.  
Other public offerings included Tyson Foods (which made about one-half 
McDonald's Chicken McNuggets), Beverly Enterprises, and Systematics.  Jack 
Stephens had joined the firm in 1946, and was now its Chairman, while his son 
Warren was President.

	In 1983 the Stephens brothers had acquired controlling interest in 
Arkansas' largest bank holding company, Worthen Banking Corp.  Another major 
shareholder in Worthen would be Mochtar Riady, an Indonesian banker closely 
connected to President Suharto.  Jackson Stephens met Riady in 1976, when
Riady wanted to buy into an American bank.  Two years later Riady and 
Stephens Inc. set up a joint venture, Stephens Finance Ltd., in Hong Kong to 
write letters of credit.  Later, in 1983, Stephens and Riady bought Seng Heng 
Bank in Macao, and in 1984 they bought the Hong Kong Chinese Bank. Riady also  
controlled the Bank of Trade in San Francisco.

	Hong Kong was then the banking center for the heroin trade, just as 
Panama was the banking center for the cocaine trade.

	Stephens Link, a customized computer network designed for commercial
banks, was launched in 1986.  It tied together bank branches to Stephens Inc. 
trading and clearing operations.  There were computer terminals in eight 
states and Panama.  The good citizens of Panama, the home of the Stephens' 
friends Gabriel Lewis and Manuel Noriega, could purchase a variety of 
Stephens financial services and products without ever having to leave home.  

	Finally, there was Stephens Production Co., based in Ft. Smith,
which owned perhaps a trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Arkoma Basin.  
The property, purchased in 1953 for $5.4 million, was now worth at least
a billion dollars.  But the Stephens brothers valued the property at cost,
which led to an understatement of their ranking among the world's wealthiest
individuals.

	And Markle, the futures trader, could put much of this wealth at  
risk, could bet it on the rolls of the market dice.  Markle liked to think he 
could predict the future.  He would quote from Michael Talbot's *Beyond the 
Quantum*: "The human biological organism possesses the ability to leap into 
the future, to actively tap into information about future events and process 
that information in the present."

	Luckily, as is often the case, he was spared the vision of his own
demise. He was fired on Friday the 13th (Nov. 1987).  He had been asked, they 
said, about an unidentified, out-of-state brokerage account he controlled,
and its relationship to a Stephens corporate account.  Rumors would circulate 
saying maybe he was putting profitable trades in the secret account, and 
sticking Stephens with the unprofitable ones.  But that's all they were, 
rumors.  For Markle himself wasn't talking.

	Three days after Markle was fired, there was a furious thunderstorm
in Little Rock, during which, it is said, John Markle killed his wife, his 
two young daughters, and then himself.  And to do the job, he used three 
different handguns.  That's what they said.

	Curious deaths, those.  But this was Stephens country, and no one
wanted to ask very many questions.  They found it much safer to talk about 
the violent weather.

			[to be continued]

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