The Bahamas: Consultant’s Paradise Lost

THE BAHAMAS

Despite the air-conditioned comfort of the pine-paneled hearing room in Nassau’s Supreme Court building, the rotund witness mopped repeatedly at his ample jowls and bald dome. His sweat was understandable. Sir Stafford Lofthouse Sands, 54, until eight months ago the most powerful political figure in the Bahama Islands, was trying to explain just why he had been paid $1,800,000 by the operators of two lavish and controversial casinos. The money, charged a royal investigating commission, had changed hands both before and after the casino owners were exempted from the Bahamas’ law against gambling, by the government in which Sands was Minister of Finance and Tourism.

Only Coincidence. In the easygoing Bahamas, where for 350 years men have reaped fortunes from piracy, intentional shipwrecking, Civil-War blockade breaking and Prohibition-era rumrunning, the payments were not likely to be considered a crime or much of an offense against hardened public sensibilities. Still, Sir Stafford was embarrassed.

“One million, eight hundred thousand?”

he asked disingenuously. “I didn’t think it was quite that much.” He admitted that he had received at least $1,000,000 in consulting and attorney’s fees from companies controlled by Promoter Wallace Groves, an ex-Virginian whose political clout in the sun-drenched Bahamas has enabled him to turn his giant holdings on Grand Bahama Island into a lucrative industrial park and high-priced playground just 26 minutes by jet from Miami.

Groves, who served part of a two-year prison term for mail fraud in the U.S. in the early ’40s, was described by Sir Stafford as a “splendid man.”

But on the ground that it “might incriminate me,” the former Minister refused to say what he did with the money that Groves gave him. It was “mere coincidence,” Sir Stafford insisted, that Groves and his associates also agreed to contribute $10,000 a month to Sir Stafford’s United Bahamian Party while the casino applications were under consideration in 1963.

Though Sir Stafford was the chief beneficiary, the royal commission’s inquiry showed last week that well-paying consultancies were handsomely distributed among the rest of the U.B.P.’s ruling executive council—the body through which the islands’ fate was firmly controlled for years by the white businessmen-politicians who are known as “the Bay Street boys.” Sir Roland Symonette, the first Prime Minister of the Bahamas, signed on as a $20,000-a-year consultant to Grand Bahama’s real estate developers. His son, Robert, an internationally famed yachtsman, also had a five-year consulting contract, at $15,000 annually. “I earned my fees,” he testified last week, “advising on marine design, yacht purchases and bunkering facilities.” Dr. Raymond Sawyer, a dentist and U.B.P. executive-council member, held a $12,000-a-year consultancy on health problems. “Of course,” intoned Sir Stafford with a straight face, “these consultancies were not softeners or bribes.”

Double Trouble. Whatever they were, the consulting paradise ended, at least temporarily, when the Negro-dominated Progressive Liberal Party won control of the Bahamian House of Assembly last January. As one of his first acts, Negro Premier Lynden Pindling asked Queen Elizabeth to appoint a royal commission to delve into his campaign charge that government leaders had accepted questionable fees and that U.S. crime-syndicate members were taking over the casinos. Soon after, Pindling announced that three fugitive Americans, wanted on tax evasion and bookmaking indictments, who were forced out as managers of one of Groves’s Grand Bahama casinos, will be expelled from the islands when their residence permits expire at year’s end.

Pindling has also doubled the islands’ casino tax to $1,000,000 a year, and as a result, Groves last month abruptly closed the gold-papered Monte Carlo gaming room at his luxurious Lucayan Beach Hotel. That leaves Grand Bahama with only the Moorish-style El Casino in operation. In Nassau, the wheels still spin at the sedate Bahamian Club, now run by Eddie Cellini, who along with his brother Dino once ran the casino at Havana’s Hotel Nacional for the big-time gambler and Mafia henchman, Meyer Lansky.

Bigger than Beaches. Sir Stafford himself pulled up stakes in Nassau last spring and moved to self-imposed exile in Spain, although he says he still plans to spend a few winter months each year at Waterloo, his home on East

Bay Street in Nassau. There is little doubt that Sir Stafford, who returned voluntarily to face the commission, will be able to hang on to his money, and no assurance at all that the islands have seen the last of his political cronies. Last week, in a special election to fill the spot Sir Stafford gave up in the General Assembly, his United Bahamian Party hung on to his seat by the simple expedient of running a Negro. Clearly, the party, if not the man, still has considerable power. “The Bahamians need us,” said a smug Bahamian Club croupier. “Tourism couldn’t survive without us. Why, the beaches ain’t as big as these crap tables.”