Bill Liedtke was racing against time. His deadline was a little more than a day away. He’d prepared everything—suitcase stuffed with cash, jet fueled up, pilot standing by. Everything but the Mexican money. Bill was George H. W. Bush’s oil company partner when Bush’s little firm Zapata was aquired by Penn Oil — the “Z” is the remnant of Zapata.
The date was April 5, 1972. Warm afternoon light bathed the windows at Pennzoil Company headquarters in downtown Houston. Liedtke, a former Texas wildcatter who’d risen to be Pennzoil’s president, and Roy Winchester, the firm’s PR man, waited anxiously for $100,000 due to be hand-delivered by a Mexican businessman, an Operation 40 alumni named José Díaz de León.
When the money arrived, Liedtke (pronounced LIT-key) would stuff it into the suitcase with the rest of the cash and checks, bringing the total to $700,000. The Nixon campaign wanted the money before Friday, when a new law kicked in requiring that federal campaigns disclose their donors. Maurice Stans, finance chair of the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, or CREEP, had told fundraisers they needed to beat that deadline. Liedtke said he’d deliver.
Díaz de León finally arrived later that afternoon, emptying a large pouch containing $89,000 in checks and $11,000 in cash onto Liedtke’s desk. The donation was from Robert Allen, president of Gulf Resources and Chemical Company. Allen—fearing his shareholders would discover that he’d given six figures to Nixon—had funneled it through a Mexico City bank to Díaz de León, head of Gulf Resources’ Mexican subsidiary, who carried the loot over the border.
Winchester and another Pennzoil man rushed the suitcase to the Houston airport, where a company jet was waiting on the tarmac. The two men climbed aboard, bound for Washington. They touched down in DC hours later and sped directly to CREEP’s office at 1701 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, across the street from the White House. They arrived at 10 p.m.
It was the last gasp of a two-month fund-raising blitz during which CREEP raked in some $20 million before the new disclosure law took effect. A handful of wealthy donors accounted for nearly half of that haul; insurance tycoon W. Clement Stone alone gave $2.1 million, or $11.4 million in today’s dollars. Hugh Sloan, CREEP’s treasurer, later described an “avalanche” of cash pouring into the group’s coffers—all of it secret.
Later, when the hush money finally gets paid to the arrested Cubans, it comes in the form of Mexican checks, turned over first to Maurice Stans of the CREEP, who transferred them in turn to Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy. Liddy then passed them on to Bernard Barker, one of the Miami station Cubans arrested on the night of the final Watergate break- in. Barker was actually carrying some of this “Mexican” cash left over from these checks when he was apprehended.
[The money for the Plumbers had come from one of George Bush’s intimates, and at the request of Bush, a member of the Nixon Cabinet from February, 1971 on. Just two days before a new law was scheduled to begin making anonymous donations illegal, $700,000 in cash, checks, and securities had been loaded into a briefcase at Pennzoil headquarters and picked up by a company vice president, who boarded a Washington- bound Pennzoil jet and delivered the funds to the Committee to Re-Elect the President at ten o’clock that night.]