PRESCOTT BUSH. Prescott Bush, Jr., President George Herbert Bush’s older brother, served on the advisory board of Americares in the early 1980s. The Americares was a United States-based relief organization with ties to prominent right-wing Republicans, the intelligence community, and the Contras in Central America. A portion of $680,000 in Americares aid to Honduras was funneled to Nicaraguan Miskito Indian guerrillas which had close ties to the Contras.

The Boland Amendment cut off aid to the Contras in 1985. Subsequently, Americares donated more than $100,000 worth of newsprint to the pro-Contra newspaper La Prensa in Managua. Americares supplied $291,383 in food and medicine and $5,750 in cash to Mario Calero, an arms purchaser for the Contras, and to the brother of Contra leader Adolfo Calero.

In the late 1980s, Prescott developed Prescott Bush Resources Ltd., a real estate and development consulting company. In 1989, he initiated a joint partnership in China with Akoi Corporation, a Japanese firm. Prescott’s company had a 30 percent stake in the development of an $18 million golf course and resort near Shanghai.

In September 1989, Prescott became consultant for Management International Financing & Settlement Ltd., a Wall Street investment firm in bankruptcy proceedings. Prescott received a consulting fee of $250,000 for helping to develop an internal communications network in China. He also was paid by Asset Management to reach a contract with the Chinese government.

However, President Bush had imposed sanctions that suspended $300 million worth of Hughes Aircraft satellites, a key component of Asset Management’s joint venture with the Chinese government. The satellites allowed television programming to broadcasters in China and provided telecommunications links to China’s provinces.

In November 1989, Congress passed additional sanctions specifically barring the export of U.S. satellites to China unless the president found the sale “in the national interest.” However, Prescott got a big boost, when President Bush lifted sanctions on the satellite contract on December 19, 1989. (Jack Colhoun, The Family Preys Together)

JEB BUSH. George W. Bush’s oldest brother, John Ellis or Jeb, also had Contra connections. In 1984, Jeb set up a meeting between Oliver North and Mario Castejon, a right-wing Guatemalan politician. Castejon later met with North in the White House. On another occasion, Castejon met with members of North’s covert Contra support network that included General John Singlaub and Contra leader Adolfo Calero.

Jeb was contacted in February 1985 by a friend of Castejon, who gave him a letter from Castejon to be passed on to then Vice President Bush, asking for funds for medical aid for the Contras. Congress eventually appropriated $27 million in “humanitarian” aid to the Contras in 1985.

Jeb also had ties to another Contra sympathizer, Miguel Recarey, Jr., who headed the International Medical Centers (IMC) in Miami. IMC was one of the largest health maintenance organizations in the United States, receiving $30 million a month for its Medicare patients and clearing $1 billion in federal monies from 1981 to 1987.

In 1985 and 1986, Recarey and his associates at IMC gave more than $25,000 in contributions to political action committees controlled by then Vice President Bush. In 1986, Recarey hired Jeb, a real estate developer, to find a new headquarters for IMC. Jeb was paid a $75,000 fee, even though he never located a new building.

In September 1984, two months after IMC’s $2,000 contribution to the Dade County Republican Party, which was headed by Jeb, the vice president's son contacted several top Department of Health and Human (HHS) officials on behalf of IMC. Jeb helped secure an HHS waiver of a rule so that IMC could receive more than 50 percent of its income from Medicare. However, an audit of IMC in 1986 determined that IMC used Medicare funds to treat wounded Contras at its hospital. The transaction was arranged by IMC official José Basulto, a right-wing Cuban trained by the CIA.

Jeb was also linked to Leonel Martinez, a Miami-based right-wing Cuban-American drug trafficker. Martinez attempted to smuggle more than 3,000 pounds of cocaine into Miami in 1985 and 1986. He was arrested in 1989 and later convicted for bringing 300 kilos of cocaine into the United States. Federal prosecutors in Miami had a photograph of Jeb and Martinez shaking hands. Whether Jeb was aware of Martinez’s drug trafficking activities is not known.

Jeb also had ties to BCCI, notorious for money laundering during the Contra war. In 1988, Jeb was mentioned in a deposition taken by a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee which was investigating drug money laundering operations in the United States. BCCI officials stated that Jeb had met with them in Miami in the 1980s.

In 1988, Jeb and his business partner Armando Codina profited after President Bush bailed out Broward Federal Savings and Loan in Sunrise, Florida. The FDIC absorbed $285 million in bad loans, including a $4.6 million loan by the Bush-Codina partnership. The two partners wrote a check for $505,000 to the FDIC, and the government paid off the remaining $4.1 million of the loan for an office building on which Jeb and Codina defaulted.

Anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch was a leader of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), which was responsible for more than 50 anti-Castro bombings in Cuba and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Bosch was jailed in 1988 for jumping bail on a 1968 conviction for shooting a bazooka at a Polish freighter in the Miami harbor. He also the mastermind of the explosion of a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados on October 5, 1976, in which 73 passengers were killed. Bosch was paroled in 1990 after Jeb lobbied his father’s administration for his release from prison in Miami. (Jack Colhoun, The Family Preys Together)

NEIL BUSH. Neil Bush personally profited from questionable Silverado loans to his business partners, Ken Good and Bill Walters. Good and Walters later defaulted on $132 million in loans to Silverado, leaving the taxpayers to pick up the tab. Bush reportedly failed to disclose his business connections to Good and Walters when he voted to approve a $900,000 line of credit to Good International, Inc. Bush got Silverado to write a letter of recommendation to authorities in Argentina, where Good International, in partnership with Bush’s JNB Exploration Company, was exploring for gas and oil. Good also gave Bush a $100,000 loan to invest in the commodities market, which Bush was never required to repay.

Bush failed to inform Silverado that Walters had contributed $150,000 to JNB Exploration. Neither did Bush disclose that Walters’ Cherry Creek National Bank in Denver extended a $1.5 million line of credit to JNB Exploration. Bush contributed only $100 when he founded JNB Exploration, but over the next five years was paid $550,000 in salary drawn from the Cherry Creek National Bank line of credit.

In 1985, Good received an $86 million loan from the Dallas Western Savings Association, which was tied to Robert Corson, a Texas developer and reputed CIA operative, and Herman Beebe, Sr., a convicted Mafia associate of Louisiana mob boss Carlos Marcello. Bush profited from the Western Savings loan to Good, because the loan helped Good buy Gulfstream Land and Development, a Florida real estate company. Good made Bush a board member of one of Gulfstream’s subsidiaries in 1988. Bush was paid $100,000 a year to attend occasional Gulfstream board meetings before it went out of business in 1990. (Jack Colhoun, The Family Preys Together)

In 2002 -- while his brother was president -- Neil Bush signed a contract with Shanghai, China’s Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (GSMC) on August 15, 2002. Neil received a $2 million contract over five years and an annual retainer of $400,000 in stock. The deal was made while the Bush administration was negotiating sensitive trade, human rights, and anti-proliferation policy with China. (Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2003; Business Week, December 2003)

Bush provided business advice to a Chinese computer chip manufacturer at the time that President George W. Bush was helping American corporations compete more effectively against China. Neil Bush agreed to “provide GSMC from time to time with business strategies and policies; latest information and trends of the related industry, and other expertized advices.” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 2003; Business Week, December 2003)