Republic of Money: Mellon-Scaife

[Hannah Bell]

Richard Mellon Scaife (born July 3, 1932) is an American newspaper publisher and billionaire...Scaife owns and publishes the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.



Scaife is also known for his financial support of conservative and right-wing public policy organizations over the past two decades. He has provided support for conservative and libertarian causes in the U.S., mostly through the private, nonprofit foundations he controls... Scaife also helped fund the Arkansas Project, which ultimately led to the impeachment proceedings of President Bill Clinton.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mellon_Scaife

Scaife has a lot of money, 200 years worth, inherited from both sides of his family.

Scaife family

The Scaifes are an old Pennsylvania family. Great-great-great grandfather Jeffrey Scaife & his father-in-law founded the family business in 1803 -- an iron & tinworks, the "most important of its kind" as an account of the time had it.

It became WB Scaife & Sons in the next generation, then The Scaife Company, and continued in operation until 1952. The Scaife Company's operations changed as the times did; WB Scaife manufactured steamboat components while his son Marvin manufactured one of the most popular cooking stoves of the Victorian era. And weapons & ordnance.



The Scaife men married highly eligible women, also from old Pennsylvania families; the Verners (brewing, real estate, railroads, iron); the Magees (patriarch James was a founder and original director of the Pennsylvania Railroad); the Frisbees (patriarch Ephraim founded the first boatyard in Pittsburgh).

Alan Magee Scaife, Richard's father, was a trustee of the University of Pittsburgh, a fellow of the Yale Corporation, Chairman of the Scaife Co., and a Vice-president of Mellon & Sons, the banking concern.



http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=c438a87edb8602ed&q=alan%20magee%20scaife&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dalan%2Bmagee%2Bscaife%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26biw%3D1003%26bih%3D567%26tbs%3Disch:1

1920 Yale News Board magazine edit staff: front row - Francis Thayer Hobson, managing editor Henry R. Luce, chairman Briton Hadden, C. Stuart Heminway, assignment editor William D. Whitney. Back row P. I Prentice, Calvin Trowbridge, Alan Magee Scaife, Donald Rentert, Louis Sheridan.


He was also in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, one of several OSS agents in RM Scaife's extended family.

Alan married into the Mellon family.

Mellon family

The Mellons arrived in Pennsylvania after the Scaifes. Archibald Mellon came to the States in 1816, and his children followed a bit later. But Thomas (b. 1813) became a judge and founded a bank (T. Mellon & Sons) just in time to loan money to Frick & Carnegie for the enterprise that would become Carnegie Steel, & then US Steel.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_BumWKhci_e4/Spx7MUaSDuI/AAAAAAAAAMo/T-WpjOlCuDM/s400/Thomas+Mellon.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_BumWKhci_e4/SpxyDJeXcrI/AAAAAAAAALY/EA3PtdOEbt4/s400/First+Acquaintance+with+Thomas+Mellon.jpg

The Mellons also married well. Thomas married the daughter of the rich Negley family he'd idolized as as a young immigrant. His son Richard married a daughter of the King glass manufacturing concern. Son Andrew married a McMullen, of the (UK) Guiness brewing family. Son James married a Rachel Larimer, daughter of the founder of Denver, Colorado, and namesake of Larimer Street -- eventually to become the skid row of bars & cheap hotels where Neal Cassady would spend his childhood.




and the descendants of Thomas did well....

Thomas's Son Andrew W Mellon became Secretary of the Treasury. Mellon's tax cuts for the rich helped bring on the Great Depression (top rate from 77% after WW1 down to 24% by 1929).

Mellon is the person who, when the Depression hit, advised Hoover to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people."



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_W._Mellon

As a banker in his father's business, he financed the nascent aluminun, silicon carbide, coke & steel industries. He was the third-richest taxpayer in the US in the 20s, after Ford & Rockefeller.

He was a member of the South Fork Hunting club, along with his kinsman Marvin Scaife and other notables. When the club's earthen dam broke, it caused the Johnstown Flood, which killed 2,200 people:



http://profilesintime.blogspot.com/2007/03/marvin-f-scaife.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood


Andrew's daughter Ailsa married David KE Bruce, diplomat, financier, & London station chief in the OSS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_K_E_Bruce

David KE Bruce was at Princeton with F. Scott Fitzgerald, like Tommy Hitchcock, another Mellon by marriage, & Fitzgerald's model for Tom Buchanan. These were the big shots that small fish Fitzgerald (son of a failed Procter & Gamble exec) was intimidated by, the rich who "were very different from you & I".

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…”




Andrew's son Paul was a major in the OSS. He married two heiresses in succession, the second to the Gilette Razor/Listerine/Warner-Lambert pharmaceutical fortunes.




Paul's daughter Catherine was the first wife of Senator John Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee. His son Tim heads the company that's heir to the Pan Am name. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Systems


Judge Thomas's son James Ross was a coal magnate.

James' son William Larimer Mellon founded Gulf Oil.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Larimer_Mellon


William Larimer Jr was in OSS Secret Intelligence Branches in Spain & Switzerland, then became a doctor & opened the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Haiti, where he died.




Daughter Margaret married Tommy Hitchcock, whose sons (rumored to have CIA connections) let Tim Leary rent their estate in Millbrook & experiment with LSD. You can read about that in a previous installment here:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Hannah%20Bell/148

Great-grandson Christopher was Staff Director for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, among other DC positions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Mellon


Judge Thomas's Son Richard Beatty Mellon became President of Alcoa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_B._Mellon

Richard Beatty's son Richard King Mellon was a financier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_King_Mellon


Richard Beatty's daughter Sarah Cordelia married OSS officer Alan Magee Scaife.

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[Hannah Bell]

3. Mellon Financial Corporation

was one of the world's largest money management firms. Based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it was in the business of institutional and high-net-worth-individual asset management, including the Dreyfus family of mutual funds; business banking; and shareholder and investor services.

On December 4, 2006 it announced a merger agreement with Bank of New York, to form The Bank of New York Mellon. After regulatory and shareholder approval, the banks completed the merger on July 2, 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellon_Financial

[Hannah Bell]

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[Hannah Bell]

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[Hannah Bell]

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[Hannah Bell]

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[Hannah Bell]

19. k

[billlll]

2. pronunciation?

Sciafe

[Divernan]

4. Spelled Scaife, not sciafe. Rhymes with "safe"

[pnorman]

5. K & R !

n/t

[blue neen]

6. Richard Mellon Scrooge.

He's a mean and bitter man old man. Scaife owns practically all of the newspapers in western Pennsylvania, and people can't understand why this area votes Republican now. He has managed to brainwash the public with daily attacks and diatribes on Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Ed Rendell, on and on and on. Many are thinly veiled sexism and racism.

The newspapers lose money every year, but he doesn't care--as long as he's influencing public opinion to be as biased and bigoted as he is.

Scaife financed Ken Starr, the attacks on the Clintons in the 80's. At the same time, his wife was divorcing him because of his own affairs with women. Typical Republican hypocrite.

Scaife was very influential in getting Pat Toomey elected to the Senate here in PA. The people who voted Toomey in know not what they have wrought.

Thanks for posting. People in this country need to know what a horrible person he is.

[blue neen]

7. Here's a typical excerpt from today's paper:

"Lance: To municipal inertia. Municipalities throughout Southwestern Pennsylvania are moving forward regarding the enactment of ordinances to place commonsense restrictions on Marcellus gas drilling -- allowing it in nonresidential neighborhoods, limiting operational hours, etc. But most in the Alle-Kiski Valley are dragging their feet. We've learned government regulation lags behind new technology -- often to the detriment of residents. Our municipalities have models from others to use for their regulations. Drilling is here; it's time to get moving."

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/valleynewsdispatch/s_710889.html

Local governments are trying to take their time making decisions about the Marcellus Shale drilling, because we will have to live with their decisions forever. The impact on the environment will be devastating...in our area there are wells on the property of Beaver Run Reservoir, the water supply for MILLIONS of people.

Scaife doesn't care--he would only see the corporate side of things, and of course belittle those who are trying to be intelligent about the issue.

The citizens of Pennsylvania don't realize that Marcellus Shale drilling companies contributed almost all of their donations in 2010 to Republican Tom Corbett, our governor-elect. Those companies are almost all from Texas.

So, now the people of PA will have Texas oilmen running our state.

[Divernan]

8. Latest Scaife divorce called tawdry & surpassingly vicious spectacle by WP

If this link doesn't work, google Scaife & "Low Road to Splitsville"

The WP article, titled "Low Road To Splitsville", Oct. 22, 2007
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR207102101643.html

"Remember him? The cantankerous, reclusive 75-year-old billionaire who's spent a sizable chunk of his inherited fortune bankrolling conservative causes and trying to kneecap Democrats? He's best known for funding efforts to smear then-President Bill Clinton, but more quietly he's given in excess of $300 million to right-leaning activists, watchdogs and think tanks. Atop his list of favorite donees: the family-values-focused Heritage Foundation, which has published papers with titles such as "Restoring a Culture of Marriage."

The culture of his own marriage is apparently past restoring. . . . the story of Scaife v. Scaife already included a dog-snatching, an assault, a night in jail and that divorce court perennial, allegations of adultery. Oh, and there's the money. Three words, people. No. Pre. Nup.

Unfathomable but true, when Scaife (rhymes with safe) married his second wife, Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife, in 1991, he neglected to wall off a fortune that Forbes recently valued at $1.3 billion. This, to understate matters, is likely going to cost him, big time. As part of a temporary settlement, 60-year-old Ritchie Scaife is currently cashing an alimony check that at first glance will look like a typo: $725,000 a month. Or about $24,000 a day, seven days a week. As Richard Scaife's exasperated lawyers put it in a filing, "The temporary order produces an amount so large that just the income from it, invested at 5 percent, is greater each year than the salary of the President of the United States."

The numbers are just one of many we-kid-you-not dimensions to this tale. In late 2005, Ritchie Scaife peered through a window at one of her husband's many homes and saw him with one Tammy Sue Vasco, a woman whose colorful criminal history includes an arrest for prostitution. And this tryst was no one-afternoon stand. Ritchie Scaife describes Vasco in court filings as her husband's "mistress."

See also, Vanity Fair's Feb. 2008 expose of Scaife: " A Vast Right Wing Hypocrisy"
(IN WHICH MARRIED, 75 YEAR OLD DICK SCAIFE SHACKS UP WITH A CONVICTED PROSTITUTE IN A NO TELL MOTEL RENTING OUT FOR $49 A NIGHT OR $31 FOR THREE HOURS!)

Richard Mellon Scaife, billionaire bankroller of conservative crusades, spent heavily to expose Bill Clinton’s “Troopergate” misbehavior. Now Scaife’s divorce from his second wife, Ritchie, is providing another unsavory saga—adultery! addiction! assault! dognapping!?!—as both parties let loose to V.F.
by Michael Joseph Gross February 2008

Over many years, in the five households the couple shared, the wife hired scores of servants to help take care of her rich husband. Then, in 2005, she hired someone to tail him. Margaret Ritchie Rhea Battle Scaife (whose friends call her Ritchie) suspected Richard Mellon Scaife (whose friends call him Dick) of committing adultery, so she enlisted the services of an investigator. It was a private act that would have very public consequences. Richard Mellon Scaife is the best-known living member of Pittsburgh’s storied Mellon clan, whose eponymous bank made the family a 19th-century fortune, which grew steadily with diversified investments, including major coal, steel, and real-estate interests, and Gulf Oil Corporation. Scaife, who owns several newspapers, is a major backer of conservative causes; his political donations fueled the rise of the New Right and its moral crusade against Bill Clinton, making Scaife the central figure in Hillary Clinton’s “vast right-wing conspiracy.” In the 1990s, his gift of $1.8 million to The American Spectator funded investigations into Whitewater and Bill Clinton’s personal life, including David Brock’s notorious “Troopergate” exposé, which led to Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment suit against the president.


Ritchie and Richard Mellon Scaife’s 2005 Christmas card. Even as the holiday greetings went out, a private detective was confirming Ritchie’s suspicions.
In December of 2005, the private detective proved Ritchie’s fears to have been well founded: he took pictures showing the reclusive 75-year-old billionaire with a woman named Tammy Vasco, a tall, blonde 43-year-old whose criminal history includes two arrests for prostitution. The pair was photographed at Doug’s Motel, a roadside establishment near Pittsburgh, where rooms rent for $49 a night, or $31 for three hours.

[blue neen]

9. Excellent, excellent article...loved this part:

"Dickie, as he's known to his handful of friends, acquired a mean streak at an early age, according to his now-deceased sister, Cordelia Scaife. (She once told The Washington Post that she and her brother hadn't spoken for 25 years.) His trouble with alcohol started when he was at prep school, and he later was tossed out of Yale when he rolled a keg of beer down a flight of stairs and broke the legs of a fellow student. His father, a below-average businessman, died a year after Richard graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. His mother was "just a gutter drunk," as Cordelia put it."

[ljm2002]

11. Thanks for posting, very interesting. K&R n/t

[blue neen]

13. Money doesn't make you a classy guy, Dickie:

"At some point in late 2005, Ritchie started having suspicions about her husband and hired a private investigator named Keith Scannell, a specialist in high-end surveillance for insurance companies. In December of that year, Scannell followed Richard Scaife to nearby North Huntingdon, home of Doug's Motel, a place where the TVs are bolted to the furniture and rooms can be rented in three-hour increments, for $28. (It's now under new management and renamed the Huntingdon Inn. Head east on Route 8, then east on Route 30.) There, according to Scannell, Scaife spent a few hours with Tammy Sue Vasco."

"Why a billionaire would shack up at Doug's Motel, of all places, is a mystery. Ditto his choice of companions. Vasco is a tall, blond 43-year-old mother who in 1993 was busted in a sting operation after showing up at a Sheraton hotel and offering to have sex with an undercover cop for $225, the Post-Gazette reported."

"Social Register material she is not, but Vasco and Scaife seemed to have a relationship that went beyond the purely professional. The two usually met each other twice a week, for months, at the motel, says an employee of the motel. Scaife would show up in a chauffeured car, dressed in a suit, wearing cuff links, always bearing flowers. Vasco would be waiting in same room every time, Room 5 on the ground floor, facing the parking lot, said the employee. Mr. Dick, as he was known at the motel, would stay for two hours or so, then get back in the car, which had been waiting, and leave."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/21/AR2007102101643.html

[PA Democrat]

17. LOL. Doug's Motel is known for cheap sexual liaisons.

It's a shame that Dick didn't pick up a nasty case of bed bugs at Doug's Motel.

[blue neen]

18. That would be proper justice!

:evilgrin:

[Toucano]

15. Fascinating! Thanks. n/t

[Greyhound]

20. Portrait of a parasite. n/t

[ConsAreLiars]

21. Excellent! A bit more and more links at:

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Mellon_Scaife