The Insiders

New York Times article about the death of Congressman Louis T. McFadden in 1936. Wilson sat down on the floor and began to read. Congressman McFadden was a Republican from Pennsylvania. He served as chairman of the Banking and Currency Committee of the United States House of Representatives from 1920 to 1931. According to hand-written notes on some of the press clippings and documents, McFadden had also been a close personal friend and associate of Wilson’s great-grandfather, Harry Wilson Fielder.

On May 23, 1933, Congressman McFadden brought formal charges against the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Secretary of the United States Treasury for numerous criminal acts, including, but not limited to, conspiracy, fraud, unlawful conversion, and treason. From the floor of the House of Representatives, Congressman McFadden accused international bankers of orchestrating the stock market crash of 1929 and creating the nation’s Great Depression. He called the bankers a “dark crew of financial pirates who would cut a man’s throat to get a dollar out of his pocket… They prey upon the people of these United States.”

Congressman McFadden and Wilson’s great-grandfather had worked together with author William Tate Boyles to expose the hidden tyranny of the Federal Reserve and international bankers who controlled the world’s credit and money supply, until lives were threatened. Boyles’ New York publisher was threatened with the death of his family if he printed Capitalism’s Flaw and McFadden barely escaped an assassination attempt near the Capitol Building. Wilson’s great-grandfather argued vehemently against further attempts to expose the corruption and severely reprimanded McFadden for his increasingly anti-Semitic views. Boyles agreed, but McFadden disregarded the warnings and continued fighting until his untimely death in 1936.

Wilson scanned the news clippings from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other major newspapers about Congressman McFadden’s speeches between 1932 and 1934. Congressman McFadden accused the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks of being “the most corrupt institutions in the world.” He claimed they had impoverished and ruined the people of the United States and almost bankrupted the government. On the floor of the House of Representatives in 1933, Congressman McFadden called the Federal Reserve and its power-over-money supply the greatest conspiracy of modern times. Wilson was captivated by the speech:

Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies that prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory moneylenders… These twelve private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this country by the bankers who came here from Europe, and repaid us our hospitality by undermining our American institutions. Those bankers took money out of this country to finance Japan in a war against Russia. They created a reign of terror in Russia with our money, in order to help that war along. They instigated the separate peace between Germany and Russia, and thus drove a wedge between the allies… In 1912, the National Monetary Association, under the chairmanship of the late Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, made a report and presented a vicious bill called the National Reserve Association Bill. This bill is usually spoken of as the Aldrich Bill. Senator Aldrich did not write the Aldrich Bill. He was the tool, if not the accomplice, of the European bankers who for nearly twenty years had been scheming to set up a central bank in this country and who in 1912 had spent and were continuing to spend vast sums of money to accomplish their purpose… We were opposed to the Aldrich plan for a central bank. The men who rule the Democratic Party then promised the people that if they were returned to power there would be no central bank established here while they held the reigns of government. Thirteen months later that promise was broken and the Wilson administration, under the tutelage of those sinister Wall Street figures who stood behind Colonel House, established here in our free country the worm-eaten monarchical institution of the “King’s Bank” to control us from the top downward, and from the cradle to the grave. It fastened down upon the country the very tyranny from which the framers of the Constitution sought to save us… These men and those who replaced them are still in power and control every aspect of your life. They will not give up a slave just because the slave no longer wishes to be a slave.

After Wilson had finished reading McFadden’s other speeches, he found more firsthand accounts and press reports on the assassination attempts against the congressman. In early 1934, two ambush shots were fired at the congressman as he was getting out of a taxi near the Capitol Building. A few months later he became violently ill after dining at a political banquet in Washington D.C. and would have died if not for his friend and physician who was on site to administer an emergency stomach pump. Finally, on October 3, 1936 at age sixty, McFadden died of sudden heart failure after an usual bout with intestinal flu. His associates were convinced he’d been poisoned, but investigations into his death were squelched. Wilson’s great-grandfather and William Boyles continued to distance themselves even further from their earlier quest. They vowed to live within the system without being destroyed or corrupted by it, until 1952, when both Boyles and his great-grandfather died.

What Wilson read next from an obscure collection of copied journal pages grabbed him by the throat like a hangman’s noose. He literally could not breathe. Just as he was beginning to lose consciousness, he gasped for air. With his heart racing, he read the words again:

Harry Wilson Fielder was killed on November 11, 1952, one week after Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president, in a hit-and-run accident outside his Back Bay office. William Tate Boyles was poisoned two days later and died of a heart attack after being rushed to the hospital. Both men were murdered in order to keep them quiet.

Wilson’s body was still shaking as he read the words again in utter disbelief. He now knew why his father had never told him the truth about his great-grandfather’s death. It would have magnified his natural rebellion a hundredfold. He never would have made it to age thirty-one. Now I might not see thirty-two.

As Wilson regained his composure, his shock turning to sadness, he continued to read everything he could find on his great-grandfather. According to a set of journal pages written by Harry’s son, Wilson’s grandfather, both Harry Wilson Fielder and William Tate Boyles had long feared for their lives. As they grew older, they had been secretly preparing to simultaneously publish their memoirs as witnesses to a hidden tyranny. Extensive notes from Harry’s son confirmed that they had indeed been murdered. Investigations into their deaths were taken over by federal authorities and then shelved. Wilson’s grandfather never pursued the matter out of fear for his family and in heed to his father’s warning.

When Wilson finished reading the journal notes, he sat in the corner of the closet and cried-mourning the death of a murdered great-grandfather he’d never known, but who had shaped his life. It all made such tragic sense. His father had been preparing him all along, without telling him the ugly details. It was like finally uncovering the cause of an ancestral curse-or blessing. Only time would determine which was the case.

He finally left Fielder amp; Company a little after midnight, resolved to confront his mother first thing in the morning. A new mantra had taken hold of him: revenge and redress are now mine to pursue.

16

Tate — New York City, NY

Looking out at the East River and Governor’s Island from his downtown Manhattan office, Wayland Tate mulled over the Musselman stock-manipulation plan he’d received from Jules Kamin. After convincing Musselman’s Board of Directors that Wilson Fielder was unstable and incompetent, the twelve directors agreed that the Kresge consulting project had been mismanaged from the beginning. A unanimous vote terminated the project. Now the stage was set to begin manipulating Musselman’s stock, but the plan needed tweaking.

Jules Kamin, and John Malouf from Fielder amp; Company, who’d also worked on the plan, were recommending six successive events designed to maximize the peaks and valleys in Musselman’s stock price over the next several weeks. The first event called for a leak to the business press that Kresge amp; Company had been fired because it concluded that the J. B. Musselman Company had no viable future as presently constituted. The second event to follow two weeks later would come in the form of an announcement that Musselman was hiring the number two man at Costco or Sam’s Club to launch a new discount retailing strategy. Four weeks after that, a third event would create a scathing criticism of the America’s Warehouse campaign, quickly followed by a spectacular