Johns, Michael

In the Labash piece, Stone is chauffeured around by A-Mill, a “23-year-old driver/computer whiz/all-around Boy Friday.” As usual, with Stone, we get the color that keep bringing reporters back to him: A-Mill looks like he’d fight as a featherweight, but Stone says looks can be deceiving. One late night, when they were walking across a strip-club parking lot together, two large gentlemen tried to mug them. A-Mill reached into his boot, pulled out a blade, and slashed one of them across the face, causing both assailants to run. ‘Watch this guy,’ says Stone. ‘He’s a killer.’” A-Mill is most likely Andrew Miller, Dianne Thorne’s stepson, who would work as Kristin Davis’s campaign manager, for free, while he was also paid $17,000 by the Paladino campaign, for “advance work and logistics.” Also with Paladino was Dianne Thorne’s husband, Tim Suereth, who had also worked on a number of Stone projects. There was Michael Johns, a speechwriter for Paladino who also had worked at the Heritage Institute praising Jonas Savimbi and criticizing Nelson Mandela as a communist. The incident involving BMS&K client Savimbi, where chemical weapons were supposedly discovered in Angola, has already been mentioned. It was Johns who brought Andries Holst, the film-maker who’d supposedly filmed evidence of chemical weapons use, to Washington to meet various officials such as Jesse Helms<a name="bkfrftnote134" style="text-decoration-line: underline; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote134" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: large; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">134</a>.<div>...<div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" text-align="text-align" center="center" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Paladino’s campaign manager wasn’t Stone, but Michael Caputo, Stone’s former driver and another all-round occasional Stone associate. It was Caputo who handled the press for Stone when the National Enquirer swinger story broke. Stone was second only to Caputo’s father on his speed dial. Caputo was a military veteran who’d been a speechwriter for Jack Kemp, and the Communications Director for the Council for Inter-American Security in Washington, which meant that he was involved in civic and military public affairs programs in Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in support of Reagan foreign policy initiatives, which was either sinister or nebulous, depending on how you read it. <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=qnVC8yS4N_AC&lpg=PP1&rview=1&pg=PA52#v=onepage&q&f=false" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">“Publicists of the Damned”</a> which detailed BMS&K’s work for Savimbi, Mobutu, Ferdinand Marcos, and others, would also describe the difficulties of one lobbyist trying to refurbish the image of El Salvador’s Alfredo Cristiani (<a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=qnVC8yS4N_AC&lpg=PP1&rview=1&pg=PA58#v=onepage&q&f=false" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">specific page 58</a>). “All we heard over and over was that he was a puppet of the death squads, a creature of millionaire coffee growers,” the lobbyist complains. The article mentions why Cristiani carried this around: “That unfortunate reputation is due in part to the fact that Cristiani was the candidate of the right-wing ARENA party, which was founded by death-squad mastermind Roberto D’Aubisson and supported by millionaire coffee growers.” Caputo would help to run the 1989 campaign for Cristiani to give him the semblance of an actual election. Three journalists were killed during this election, one of them when a military helicopter strafed a car clearly marked with a PRESS sign. After the election, there was an incident where six Jesuit priests, suspected of collusion with the country’s rebels, were killed. High level members of the military were blamed by Cristiani for the killings. Twenty years later, two human rights organizations, The Association for Human Rights in Spain (APDHE) and the Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA), would file suit, charging Cristiani with responsibility for the murders<a name="bkfrftnote135" style="text-decoration-line: underline; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;" /><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote135" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">135</a>.Caputo would also work in Russia in 1996 for the election of Boris Yeltsin. He would show up in The Exile, the infamous Russian paper co-founded by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, under <a href="http://exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7414&IBLOCK_ID=35" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">“Who Tolls The Bell?”</a>, a list of journalists the paper especially despised. “Any way you look at it,” wrote “Field Marshal von Paulus” (I have no idea who’s behind the pseudonym) about the 1996 Russian election, “the campaign was totally illegal and anti-democratic, and Caputo played a huge role in it.” The heart of the animus is Caputo’s involvement in this political race: “This guy was the spin doctor behind Yeltsin’s reelection campaign in 96. As if subjecting Russia to the horror of that post-quadruple bypass pig shaking it with a Rostov pop band wasn’t bad enough, greaseball Caputo gets to brag at Beltway cocktail parties that Jeff Goldblum played him in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324619/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">Spinning Boris</a>.” But Goldblum didn’t play him in Boris, Caputo isn’t even a character in the movie, Goldblum plays Caputo’s boss, a go for the jugular political consultant named George Gorton.Like Roger Stone, Gorton was a veteran of CREEP, who would go on to work as a top consultant, helping Pete Wilson, governor of California, win re-election by pushing Proposition 187, the ballot initiative that prohibited illegal aliens from using education, health and social services in the state. Stone had paid for Sedan Chair II to infiltrate various Democratic campaigns, and Stone had recommended that CREEP hire Theodore Brill to spy on various student groups. Gorton oversaw Brill, and paid him from his own pocket, so that his compensation wouldn’t come from campaign expenses. When Watergate broke, the revelation of student spying came out as well. “GW Student Spied for GOP,” was the Woodward-Bernstein headline (I cannot find this piece on-line; however, the excerpt from All the President’s Men, <a href="http://www.prop1.org/history/1776plus/74allpm.htm" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">“The Quaker Plot”</a> focuses on Brill). “Spying is a funny way to describe” what Brill did, Gorton said at the time. What exactly was it Brill was paid for, then? “It was a part of my job to know what all of youth was thinking,” Gorton explained. Gorton’s fellow CREEP staffers would hand him pages that were folded in half that he would give his signature to. Because they were folded in half, he couldn’t see what he was signing off on, and thereby could admit to no knowledge in court or elsewhere of what he’d just authorized. After a short exile after Watergate, Gorton would become a very successful political consultant<a name="bkfrftnote136" style="text-decoration-line: underline; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;" /><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote136" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">136</a>. Time magazine would put Gorton and others on the cover for their work in Yeltsin’s election (<a href="http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19960715,00.html" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">“Yanks to the Rescue”</a> is the cover,<a href="http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984833,00.html" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">“Rescuing Boris”</a> by Michael Kramer is the story inside), but perhaps the Time writer was being spun more than the Russians. Yeltsin’s Russian consultants ridiculed the way that American consultants, who they felt had played a marginal role, placed themselves at the center of everything <a name="bkfrftnote137" style="text-decoration-line: underline; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;" /><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote137" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">137</a>. “Russia needs democracy…. I would be remiss in my duty to mankind if I didn’t use every political consulting trick I could think of to keep what I felt was a great evil from returning to mankind,” Gorton would say at the time to the Sacramento Bee. His hindsight view was more brutally realistic. “My guy was drunk, corrupt. It was bad vs. evil,” he’d say<a name="bkfrftnote138" style="text-decoration-line: underline; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;" /><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote138" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">138</a>. “von Paulus” also has Michael Caputo’s company reaping a fortune in the millions through a deal with GazProm media in 2001. This is either very wrong, or he blew through the money quickly. A piece run during the Paladino campaign has him grateful for Roger Stone giving him some work and a place to sleep after a nasty divorce and a financial meltdown in 2003<a name="bkfrftnote139" style="text-decoration-line: underline; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;" /><a href="http://italkyoubored.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/roger-stone-pretty-reckless-is-going-straight-to-hell-part-six/#ftnote139" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">139</a>. So, in 2010, Michael Caputo was Carl Paladino’s campaign manager.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">...</div></div></div>