Bankruptcy and “Good Causes”

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.

Last month Willis Carto and his wife Elisabeth declared their intent to file for personal bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Carlo's Liberty Lobby filed for bankruptcy in Washington, DC These steps came nearly a year and a half after a San Diego County, California judge, Runston Maino, determined that the Cartos and their “populist institution” owed the Institute for Historical Review $11 million that Carto had received for the IHR as its agent.

In the five years that have ensued since the staff at IHR ousted Carto from his full-authority, zero-responsibility role at the Institute and took steps to gain control of the fortune that an IHR benefactor had left the Institute, Carto has enmeshed the IHR and its principals in a web of lawsuits. He has also unleashed a tidal wave of sludge and slander at the men who run the IHR, Greg Raven and Mark Weber; its corporate directors; its attorneys; and revisionists, such as David Irving, Robert Faurisson, and Ernst Zuendel, who have refused to play Carto's game.

Now it looks as if the legal options and maneuvers to which Carto has had endless recourse, and on which he must have spent vast sums of money (despite his claims in The Spotlight that every court decision in the case so far has been made by order of the CIA, the Mossad, the ADL, the Church of Scientology, Burmese drug lords, and like entities), begin to run out. Judge Maino, disdaining Carto's attempts to invoke Constitutional privilege against selfincrimination, has ordered the Fifth Amendment capitalist to account for the missing millions on Monday, June 8—or go to jail. It is anybody's guess what exactly may transpire, but very soon Carto must either cough up the money, or (perhaps not without personal legal risk) explain what happened to it—or head for the hills.

Carto's achievements on behalf of revisionism over the years are undeniable. His desire for control and his dishonesty and his endless capacity for rancor have long since put him beyond the pale, however (the issue of The Spotlight in which Liberty Lobby's bankruptcy was announced featured a “wanted” poster for Mark Weber, including the name of his wife, which was virtually an incitement for some wacko to take a potshot at Weber).

Back in 1993, before Willis Carto had an inkling that a rebellion was brewing at the Institute, Carto told then IHR director Tom Marcellus that the money left IHR by Jean Farrel wouldn't be coming to the Institute. Carto had put it to “good causes,” he told Marcellus. For a long time, the definition of chutzpah was the kid who had killed both his parents, and then thrown himself on the mercy of the court because he was an orphan. For revisionists, the new embodiment of chutzpah may be a man who founded and controlled a non-profit, educational institute, devoted to truth and freedom on some of the most important and most vexed questions of the age, and then siphoned off millions of dollars from that institute—for supposed “good causes” that to this day, despite court order after court order, remain unnamed and unspecified.