IHR Scores Bi-coastal Legal Triumph in Carto Fight

Again, as repeatedly stated in previous issues of SR, we know that we should let sleeping dogs lie and not open up old wounds. If I had a chance, I wouldn't publish the following article. But we are in the business of posting the contents of all issues of Smith's Report for historical and archival reasons—all of its contents. So we won't hide this article either. –Webmaster, Oct. 28, 2015.

The Institute for Historical Review chalked up two more court victories in its now nearly six-year long struggle to regain its assets and to survive the long legal war of attrition that its one-time chief. Willis Carto. has waged against the revisionist research and publishing group.

On April 13, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., Henry H. Kennedy. Jr.. dismissed, with prejudice, Carto and his Liberty Lobby's RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) suit against IHR and LSF's officers, directors, and former officers and directors. Carto and Liberty Lobby's complaint ran to a mammoth 148 pages. He sought $160 million in damages against the defendants based on his claim that they had conspired to commit robbery, bribery, and extortion against Carto and his underlings at the Liberty Lobby and the Barnes Review.

Carto’s suit is a prime example of the burgeoning misuse of this type of suit, which was devised to fight crime and is now often used as a bludgeon in ordinary civil disputes. Aside from the inability of Carto. and his counsel, Mark Lane, to substantiate any of the alleged offenses, the elephantine complaint that ran on for 769 paragraphs, many of them rehashing irrelevant personal grievances of Carto’s against each of the numerous defendants, must have left Judge Kennedy feeling like somebody cornered at a party by a tedious, longwinded bore.

In his ruling, the judge said as much, characterizing the Carto complaint as: “…outrageously long-winded and redundant, and hid[ing] the substance of the claims within its prolixity,” as well as “…rambling and expansive.” Judge Kennedy also found that Carlo’s suit was “suffused with factual allegations that have previously been litigated and adjudged in California State courts.”

Meanwhile, across the continent, Judge John J. Hargrove, a bankruptcy court judge in San Diego, ruled on April 28 that the bankruptcy Carto had filed after Judge Runston Maino (see SR 38, December 1996) found him personally liable to the IHR for over six million dollars, was fraudulent. IHR was able to present evidence showing that Carto, who now poses as a pauper, with no investments and less than $500 cash on hand, had been trading in million dollar ($1,000,000!) gold stocks—before the Maino decision. (Who is there left who would be surprised to learn that this supposed populist silver stalwart is—a secret gold bug?) And since the decision he has written himself thousands of dollars worth of Liberty Lobby checks made out to “cash”

Now that Willis Carto's bankruptcy has fallen through, at the very least IHR can move aggressively to recover its assets from Carto and from the Liberty Lobby, which owes IHR several more million dollars of the missing assets. The dismissal of the nuisance-making RICO suit, in which Carto had evidently laid great store, will, we hope, speed IHR's victory in what has been a long and wearing battle, but one which has concerned, as well as the disposition of IHR’s assets, the very integrity of revisionism in America.