Intertel

International Intelligence, Inc., called Intertel, was a private investigative company owned by Resorts International, formerly the Mary Carter Paint Company, the operator of the casino on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.¹

Paradise Island

James Crosby's Mary Carter Paint bought three quarters of Paradise Island from Huntington Hartford for 3.5 million dollars and with it "the legal services of Sir Stafford Sands," the Bahamian minister and lawyer, who advised that the casino be run by the group of Wallace Groves at Freeport. Crosby gave a Groves company four ninths of the casino. Robert Peloquin, a lawyer in the Justice Department's organized crime section who worked with the revenue service's Operation Tradewinds, wrote in a January memorandum that "the atmosphere looks right for a Lansky skim." A royal commission sat in 1967 under Sir Ranulph Bacon, formerly of Scotland Yard and later a director of Intertel, with Peloquin as "an 'unofficial,' but influential, observer." It exposed Meyer Lansky's interest in the Lucayan Beach casino and the fees Sands had taken, and Sands "retired to his castle in Spain." It did not examine Crosby's company, whose casino had not yet opened.¹

The Firm

Peloquin left the government in 1967 with William Hundley, and within weeks the two were vice presidents of the Resorts subsidiary responsible for the new casino. "Many of those involved in Tradewinds," among them the IRS intelligence chief William Kolar, "would all find jobs with Intertel." Hundley later defended Tongsun Park, John Mitchell, and Richard Kleindienst. A few weeks before the casino opened on January 1, 1968, Crosby wrote 34 checks to campaign committees of Richard Nixon, all but one for 3,000 dollars, and raised another hundred thousand from friends. Nixon, Bebe Rebozo, and Robert Abplanalp attended the opening. The casino's manager was Eddie Cellini, brother of Lansky's associate Dino Cellini. Crosby later ordered Peloquin to dismiss him.¹

One of Tradewinds's informants, the former Wackenhut detective Norman Casper, later obtained the depositor list of the Castle Bank and Trust, one of whose customers, Billy Mellon Hitchcock, an early financier of the Paradise Island development, was then suing the bank over its voting of his Resorts stock.¹