Vultures' Picnic Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1 - Goldfinger

  CHAPTER 2 - Lady Baba-Land: The Islamic Repulic of BP

  CHAPTER 3 - Pig in the Pipeline

  CHAPTER 4 - The Coon-Ass Riviera

  CHAPTER 5 - The Cheese Smelled Funny So We Threw It in the Jungle

  CHAPTER 6 - The Wizard of Ooze

  CHAPTER 7 - My Home Is Now a Strange Place

  CHAPTER 8 - We Figured Out Who Murdered Jake

  CHAPTER 9 - The Sorcerer’s Stone

  CHAPTER 10 - Fukushima, Texas

  CHAPTER 11 - Mr. Fairness

  CHAPTER 12 - The Generalissimo of Globalization

  CHAPTER 13 - Vultures’ Picnic

  CHAPTER 14 - Lots of Fish

  CONTACT THE PALAST INVESTIGATIVE TEAM

  READ, LISTEN, INTERACT . . .

  WATCH THIS . . .

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY GREG PALAST

  In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores

  ALSO BY GREG PALAST

  The Best Democracy Money Can Buy

  Armed Madhouse

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,

  England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd);

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, November 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Greg Palast

  Art care of Matt Pascarella

  Photos on pages 232, 242, 247 by James Macalpine

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Palast, Greg.

  Vultures’ picnic : in pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates, and high-finance carnivores / by Greg Palast.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55862-1

  1. Petroleum industry and trade—Corrupt practices. 2. BP (Firm)—Moral and ethical aspects.

  3. Banks and banking, International—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. International finance—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title

  HD9560.5.P236 2011

  338.7’6655—dc23 2011032687

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication maybe reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  “A cross between SEYMOUR HERSH and JACK KEROUAC.”

  —BuzzFlash.com

  “THE REAL SAM SPADE.”

  —JIM HIGHTOWER, THE NATION

  “Book of the Year: Greg Palast’s Armed Madhouse, incendiary . . . virtuosic . . . had me cheering on my feet.”

  —New Statesman

  “GREAT FUN. PALAST, DETECTIVE STYLE,

  PROVIDES . . . PIECES OF THE SECRET PUZZLE.”

  —THE NEW YORKER

  “The last true investigative reporter in America....

  The story is like a spy thriller.”

  —Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

  “WE HATE THAT SONOVABITCH.”

  —White House spokesman

  Based on the reports for BBC Television Newsnight, for Channel 4 Dispatches, for ARTE, and for Democracy Now!

  Portions of this story have appeared in SuicideGirls.com, Hustler, Harper’s Magazine, BuzzFlash.com, New Statesman, Rolling Stone, Dazed and Confused, Radar, Truthout.com, The Raw Story, AlterNet, The Guardian, The Shadow, Red Pepper, In These Times, Top Shelf Comix, The Observer (London), and one story, forgive me, in The New York Times.

  There’s always an excuse to be a prick.

  —C. Bukowski

  There’s a man by my side walkin’.

  There’s a voice within me talkin’.

  There are words that need a-sayin’.

  For Frank Rosen

  United Electrical and Machine Workers’ Union

  Carry it on.

  © Pete Seeger, with his permission

  Everything that happens here, happened.

  CHAPTER 1

  Goldfinger

  ROLLING HILLS, OUTSIDE NEW YORK CITY

  It’s all my fault, because I’m such a cheap bastard. I was told to rent a white van, something nondescript that painters or a handyman might use and wouldn’t be noticed parked at dawn on a road where only BMWs and Carrera 95s play.

  But I was afraid BBC wouldn’t pay for the van rental (I was right about that) and so here I was in the Red Menace, my fourteen-year-old busted-up Honda with the brakes idiot light on.

  Anyway, I won’t move. I can wait you out.

  Well, maybe I can. It’s freezing insane cold and the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee is cold, and I have to urinate out the last three cups I killed waiting on The Vulture to drive through his estate’s electronic gate to his “work” so I can somehow tail him unseen in my ridiculous red car.

  And now God is snowing on me. Thick, nasty, wet, heavy predawn snow, so everything turns white except my red beater. I might as well stick a flashing sign on the hood: I AM ON A STAKEOUT. I AM LOOKING FOR YOU.

  We started at four A.M. It looks really glamorous on-screen when we broadcast these stories: the dramatic long-lens footage, then the jump and the confrontation. But after four horridly cold hours, there is nothing glamorous, just my bladder screaming at me.

  Badpenny calls from our Toyota, staked out in front of Vulture’s office building. Same issue—she and Jacquie have to pee. So now they could blow the whole story because God forbid they should just squat behind a tree and make some yellow snow. The women insist on porcelain and have to leave their post. All right, damn it, find a gas station but don’t let them see you.

  Ricardo is cuddling his camera. His baby. Ricardo is calm. Ricardo is always calm. He’s just back from Iraq, where calm kept him alive. Ricardo is never hungry; Ricardo is never cold and never needs to
urinate. Whatever drug he’s on, I want it.

  I tell Ricardo, “We stay.” Why? If God doesn’t give a rat’s ass about The Vulture and what he does for a living, what he’s done to Africa, why should I? Well, fuck God.

  If I were a psychologist, I’d say I’m here because my father worked in a furniture store in the barrio in Los Angeles, selling pure crap on layaway to Mexicans; then later on, he sold fancier crap to fancier people in Beverly Hills and he hated furniture, and I hated the undeserving pricks and their trophy wives who bought it. I could smell their cash and the smell of the corpses they stole it from. They were all vultures, and the rest of us were just food.

  So there you have it. My story, my motivation: resentment, envy, revolutionary fervor, whatever.

  But I’m not a psychologist. I’m a reporter. And apparently one with a tiny, if fervent, international reputation: Just this morning I got a request from another young man, this one from Poland, who wants to join our investigative team. But instead of the usual résumé, Lukasz the wannabe journalist writes from Krakow that he walked away with my BBC press pass, my notebook, and my laptop, which he’d found at London’s Heathrow Airport. Rather than money, he wants the job. It wasn’t ransom: If I said no to the job, he’d return the pass and notebook anyway. But he’d already junked the computer after cracking my security codes.

  I could use a guy like that.

  But I don’t ask why I’m here. I know why I’m here. It’s because of what our Insider said on the tape about Vulture:

  Eric’s gone over to the Dark Side.

  LAS VEGAS

  The two-grand-a-night call girls are wandering lonely and disconsolate through the Wynn casino, victims of the recession. Badpenny, dressed full-on Bond Girl, is losing nickels in the slots and humming Elvis tunes.

  Badpenny’s assigned job here is to look good and get information. She’s good at her job. A tipsy plaintiff’s lawyer is telling her, “A woman as beautiful as you should be told she’s beautiful every five minutes.” His nose dips slowly toward her cleavage. I didn’t know there were guys who still talked like that. Well, good. Take notes, Penny.

  My own assignment is to hook up with Daniel Becnel. Becnel is just about the best trial lawyer in the United States. He doesn’t have an office in Vegas or New York. He puts out his shingle at the ass end of Louisiana, at the far end of the bayous, where he defends Cajuns like himself, and that includes the wildcatters out on the Gulf Coast oil rigs.

  I have just come back from the Amazon jungle, where I was tracking Chevron’s operations. Chevron Petroleum monopolizes deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Maybe Becnel and I could trade information. It’s April 20, 2010. Hitler’s birthday and my ex-wife’s.

  I found Becnel—far from the gaming tables and looking unpleasantly sober.

  There was an explosion back home. A rig blew out and was burning. The Coast Guard called him. They want his permission to open an emergency safety capsule they’d found floating in the Gulf. The Guard assumed maybe a dozen of his clients who had been working on the Deepwater Horizon platform were inside, cooked alive.

  The sound on the TV above the bar is off. The high, black rolls of smoke rising out of the BP oil rig remind me of my own office when it burned.

  Something is very wrong in this picture. All I can see are a couple of fire-boats pointlessly shpritzing the methane-petroleum blaze with water. What the hell? Where are the Vikoma Ocean Packs and the RO-Boom? Where is the Sea Devil?

  Because of my screwy career path, I happen to know a lot about oil spill containment. And I know a lot about bullshit. This isn’t spill containment, this is bullshit.

  Here is a skyscraper on fire, and the firemen show up with two bottles of seltzer.

  How could they do this? How could British Petroleum, the oil company with the green gas stations, with the solar panels on the cover of their annual report, that kissed environmental groups full on the mouth by breaking ranks with Exxon to decry global warming . . . how could Green BP savage and slime our precious Gulf Coast?

  The answer: BP had lots of practice.

  By the next day, CNN’s Anderson Cooper and an entire flock of reporters ran down to the Gulf to take close-ups of greased birds and to interview that mush-mouthed fraud, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal.

  But I know something the other reporters don’t know: The real story about the BP blowout is in the opposite direction, eight thousand miles north.

  I have in my files a highly confidential four-volume investigation on the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Alaska, written two decades ago. The report concluded,“Despite the name ‘Exxon’ on the ship, the real culprit in destroying the coastline of Alaska is British Petroleum.”

  I have a copy because I wrote it.

  That was my last job. The job that defeated me: after years as a detective-economist, investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering, this was the case that ruined the game for me.

  The important thing, the hidden story calling me north, is that the Deepwater Horizon disaster was born right there on the Alaska tanker route. Here’s why: BP did the crime but didn’t do the time. Exxon got away pretty cheap, sure, but BP walked away stone free, not one dime from its treasury, not one drop of oil blotting its green reputation. So I quit.

  But for now, from the casino, Badpenny is booking me a flight on Alaska Airlines and calling around for a Cessna Apache to charter to the Tatitlek Village on Bligh Island. The network would have to trust me on this. I know that the key to exposing the cause of the Gulf spill is there in the Tatitlek Native Village. I need to speak with Chief Kompkoff.

  SOMEWHERE OFF THE COAST OF AZERBAIJAN

  Just after leaving Las Vegas, Badpenny received an e-mail marked “Re: Your Palast Donation,” coming from, weirdly, a ship floating in the Caspian Sea near BP’s Central Azeri oil drilling platform, that is, somewhere off the coast of Azerbaijan in Central Asia. It read,

  We replied, “Understood,” and waited.

  When the Deepwater Horizon well blew out in the Gulf, BP acted shocked. Just six months before the Gulf explosion, a BP vice president testified to Congress that the company had drilled offshore for fifty years without a major blowout. When the big well did blow in the Gulf, the company said that nothing like this had ever happened before. That is, nothing they reported.

  Weeks after we received the first message from the ship in the Caspian Sea, we located our terrified source in a port town in Central Asia; and he told us BP’s claim to Congress was a load of crap. He himself had witnessed another deepwater platform blowout. He seemed really nervous. And for good reason.

  I didn’t know where the hell I’d get the budget to get to Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, but Badpenny booked it without asking. “I know you’re going, so let’s not discuss it.”

  ROLLING HILLS, NEW YORK

  Cold coffee in a snowstorm wasn’t what I had in mind. The original plan was not so screwed up. I’d enlisted that crazy bastard John McEnroe (really) to help us get consent to get onto The Vulture’s property.

  From satellite photos of Vulture’s estate, we could pick out a tennis court not a hundred yards from his entranceway. To get cameras onto his property, we would show up in tennis whites with our smiling crew from the new reality show So You Think You Can Play Tennis! Starring John McEnroe! Would Vulture like to swing a racket with the champ?

  But our timing went to hell. Tennis balls in a blizzard? Forget it.

  Now London is calling on Ricardo’s cell. BBC Television Centre. Trouble. Some flunky working for Dr. Eric Hermann aka The Vulture seems to have spotted a red car at the end of his driveway and called Dr. Hermann’s PR firm in England, where it’s already late morning. The Vulture’s flak squawked at the BBC news desk, “Is Palast on a ‘vulture hunt?’ ” Jones, my producer, says he told The Doctor’s PR, damn right.

  Jones adds, “A farkin red car!?” Forgive him, he’s Welsh.

  Cold, and now a bad, bad thought: He’s slipped us. That’s easy to
do from a house bigger than the Vatican—twenty thousand square feet with nine bathrooms (we checked the tax records). Worse, the aerial photo revealed acres of woods on the blind side, which leads right to the back of the Doctor’s office tower. And the profile said Dr. Hermann was a serious marathoner. This guy could merrily lope right across his private forest to his office, chuckling at the schmuck in the red car. Or maybe he could apparate there like a Harry Potter wizard.

  Badpenny and Jacquie swore over the cell that they hadn’t spotted one face from their photo sheet going into the building, but that could have been due to their inexcusable porcelain pit stop.

  I drove the Red Menace too fast on the ice around the back roads to Hermann’s office.

  We already had the layout. Badpenny had done the recon a week earlier. She deliberately misaddressed an envelope, made a “delivery” to their office, acting like a confused ditz while mentally mapping the place. Now, as we’re huddled against the snow, she tells Ricardo that if we could get by the distractible security guy with some BS, we could walk right into the fourth-floor office suites of The Vulture’s company, FH International.

  Inside the building—the security desk was oddly empty—Ricardo hopped the elevator, pulled his ultra-small digicam out of the sports bag and clicked on the microphone. A well-dressed woman riding up with us asked, “Surprise for someone?”