How about a little truth to go along with the McCain’s stories. Cindy is so offended, poor thing, that Barack Obama would attack her wealth and her husband’s failing memory or confusion that she left out telling the story about how her daddy worked in the whiskey business right after WWII ended. She didn’t explain how 50 cases of whiskey went missing from a warehouse and how her father’s handwriting appeared on invoices for these missing cases of whiskey. Oh, and she forgot to tell us that the required government serial numbers for these missing cases of whiskey were found in the trash. Cindy must be just as confused as her hubby.
Back in 2000, the Phoenix New Times had an interesting story that they wrote after investigating the Hensley’s fortune.
“‘Well,’ Gene Hensley says, ‘It is five o’clock, why don’t you go home? It is time to close,'” Ratliff told Assistant United States Attorney E.R. Thurman in sworn testimony in March 1948.
Ratliff went home.
Upon his return to the warehouse the next morning, Ratliff found a disturbing sight.
“When the warehouse man came down and opened the warehouse, I started out through the warehouse to go to the men’s room, and I noticed there was two rows of whiskey there the night before that wasn’t on the floor that morning. So I went back to the office. I thought we had been robbed.”
In his office, Ratliff found another surprise.
“There was a bunch of invoices in my desk that had been made out after I had left the office, apparently,” Ratliff testified.
The invoices appeared to be related to the whiskey — about 50 cases — that had disappeared from the warehouse overnight.
Ratliff went outside to empty some trash and noticed “a pile of empty whiskey cases out there.” Tangled up in the pile of boxes were federal tax serial labels that were supposed to remain with the liquor when sold to a retailer.
Ratliff recognized the handwriting on the invoices as belonging to then-25-year-old James Hensley, who had become general manager of the Tucson operation in June 1945 after a three-year stint in the military. James Hensley had served as a bombardier on a B-17 and was shot down over the English Channel on his 13th mission.
Ratliff wasn’t sure what was going on until later that day, when James Hensley returned to his office.
“He came in and paid me for those invoices,” Ratliff testified. “Cash sales.”
Ratliff dutifully marked the invoices as paid.
Did the Federal Government ever collect the Federal taxes on these 50 cases of whiskey? The invoices that Hensley created indicated several different locations that received this whiskey. But the invoices were deceptive.
In fact, none of the liquor went to the retailers named in the invoices prepared by James Hensley. Nobody but James Hensley knows where it really went, and he never told authorities. He declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story.
Just recently, Cindy is telling the press that her parents sold everything so that they would have the money to start their beer distributorship. Hum…. that must be the official family story. She doesn’t mention that her father was convicted of “seven counts of filing false liquor records and conspiracy” and that he spent time in jail as a convicted felon. Instead, Cindy wants us to believe that daddy and mommy were dirt poor.
This jail time had little impact on Hensley’s ability to create his multi-million dollar business. If you are known by the company you keep, then here’s what there is know about Hensley.
James Hensley profited handsomely from his association with liquor magnate Kemper Marley, a man police suspect ordered the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who had written about Marley’s business and political dealings. The man convicted of placing a bomb beneath Bolles’ car testified that Marley also wanted former Arizona governor and then-attorney general Bruce Babbitt murdered because Babbitt had filed an antitrust lawsuit against the liquor industry in 1975. (Marley, who died in 1990, was never charged in the Bolles case. Babbitt is now U.S. Secretary of the Interior.)
By 1955, James Hensley had launched a Budweiser distributorship in Phoenix, a franchise reportedly bestowed upon him by Marley, who was never indicted in the 1948 federal liquor-law-violation case — or a subsequent one — despite his controlling financial role in the liquor distribution businesses.
James Hensley’s conviction didn’t deter the State of Arizona from granting him a wholesale liquor license in the mid-1950s. The Arizona Department of Liquor Licenses and Control turned a blind eye to repeated liquor-law violations at the company. State liquor regulators did nothing when James Hensley failed to disclose his federal felony conviction on a sworn 1988 disclosure statement to the department and the City of Phoenix.
And you may have thought that Chicago politics was crooked. How ethical is the politics in Arizona?
John McCain would NEVER have afforded a political career if it wasn’t for Cindy’s father’s money. Just how did James Hensley benefit from having John McCain elected? Surely there had to be a pay back from McCain. Someone as rich as Hensley doesn’t just throw his money around unless he benefits.
In a rare 1988 interview, James Hensley gave a glimpse of his political savvy.
“The neo-prohibitionists are real active about trying to dry us up all the time,” he told the Phoenix Business Journal. “They’re a constant battle. They’re going after us in different ways now than they did in those days, trying to ban advertising, things like that…. We’re legislatively involved very heavily…. It’s a way of life to protect our industry.”
John McCain’s reputation as a “Maverick” also extends to his philandering ways with women. Even though John McCain likes his women young, he stays with Cindy because of a pre-nuptial agreement. He divorces Cindy and he loses her money. And Cindy has no self-esteem otherwise she would left her angry husband a long, long, time ago.
A centerpiece in McCain’s remarkable and sudden rise to national prominence is his promise of campaign-finance reform.
Yet McCain has relied heavily on the financial contributions from big corporate donors — with the liquor and beer industry near the top of the list. McCain won — one could say bought — his first election to the House of Representatives in 1982 with lavish sums of Hensley beer money.
But back to the original premise of how James Hensley really got his start. You see, the Hensley brothers profited heavily from the whiskey that they lifted from the warehouse back in the 1940’s. This whiskey help build the nightlife of some the most exclusive clubs of that time.
There is so much more to read…. you really don’t want to miss reading this whole article.
Note: This article was originally written in 2000 when John McCain was making his first attempt at the presidency. We all know he lost to George W Bush who has since become John McCain best friend. Hey, McCain cannot divorce himself from the fact that he has voted in Bush’s favor 95% of the time.
It sounds like Cindy copes with her self-centered life by living in this world of untruths. So does her husband. Guess birds of a feather really do flock together.
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Organizing for Change 