by Greg Palast
There's an easy way to find oil.� Go to some remote and gorgeous natural sanctuary, say Alaska or the Amazon, find some Indians, then drill down under them.�
If the indigenous folk complain, well, just shoo-them away.� Shoo-ing methods include:� bulldozers, bullets, crooked politicians and fake land sales.
But be aware.� Lately the Natives are shoo-ing back.� Last week, indigenous Peruvians seized an oil pumping station, grabbed the nine policemen guarding it and, say reports, executed them.� This followed the government's murder of more than a dozen rainforest residents who had protested the seizure of their property for oil drilling.
Again and again I see it in my line of work of investigating fraud.� Here are a few pit-stops on the oily trail of tears:
In the 1980s, Charles Koch was found to have pilfered about $3 worth of crude from Stanlee Ann Mattingly's oil tank in Oklahoma.� Here's the weird part.� Koch was (and remains) the 14th richest man on the planet, worth about $14 billion. Stanlee Ann was a dirt-poor Osage Indian.�
Stanlee Ann wasn't Koch's only victim.� According to secret tape recordings of a former top executive of his company, Koch Industries, the billionaire demanded that oil tanker drivers secretly siphon a few bucks worth of oil from every tank attached to a stripper well on the Osage Reservation
where Koch had a contract to retrieve crude.�
Koch, according to the tape, would, "giggle" with joy over the records of the theft.� Koch's own younger brother Bill ratted him out, complaining that, in effect, brothers Charles and David cheated him out of his fair share of the looting which totaled over three-quarters of a billion dollars from the Native lands.�
The FBI filmed the siphoning with hidden cameras, but criminal charges were quashed after quiet objections from Republican senators.��
