We continue with more from The Crimes of Patriots,A True Tale of Dope,Dirty Money & The CIA By Jonathan Kwitny. Dope and dirty money replacing Chevy and apple pie these days...

... Where did the Nugan Hand Bank get its money? After Nugan and Hand became famous as big-spending bankers in the late 1970s, a legend arose that they spent the years around 1970 building independent reputations in the financial community as astute speculators. That was when they were said to have accumulated the capital that would launch the Nugan Hand Bank. But the legend doesn't match the facts.

After arriving in Australia, Hand went to work selling development lots along the Australian coast five hundred miles north of Sydney. His prey was mostly his former fellow spooks and war heroes. He made many trips back to the war zone to see these men. But not many actually bought.

Over several years only a few dozen men are on record as having paid cash for the lots, and they paid only in the low- to mid-four figures. This would have provided a total gross under $200,000, leaving Hand with a commission share that wouldn't even have met his living and travel expenses. And there's still more mystery.

His employer in the real estate sales was a company backed by, of all people, Pat Boone, the blond, goody two-white-buckskin-shoes Christian revivalist singer with the toothpaste-ad smile. The money to develop real estate on Boone's good name was put up by someone who seemed almost equally out of place on the outback, D.K. Ludwig, the reclusive multi billionaire shipping magnate then reputed to be one of the two or three richest men alive, and certainly one of the two or three hardest to get to talk to.

Ludwig's operations in Australia were managed by a lawyer named Fred Millar. Millar was and is senior executive and general counsel for the shipping empire of Sir Peter Abeles—Rupert Murdoch's longtime business partner, and the knight whose small circle of friends also picked Bernie Houghton up off the street when he arrived in Australia and put him to work selling real estate.

Thus both Hand and Houghton, on arriving from overseas, quickly landed real estate sales jobs tied to the same multimillionaire crowd that was politically supportive of U.S. hard-line foreign policy.

There is, of course, nothing to prove that this wasn't just a coincidence. Fred Millar insists* he didn't know who Michael Hand was back in the 1960s, before the newspapers became full of Hand. Even after Hand was a celebrity, Millar says, he never met the man. All Millar says he remembers of the whole real estate deal is that Ludwig advanced money to "some American" whose name he doesn't remember, the company went bust, and Ludwig had to take over.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/10/part-3-crimes-of-patriotssleight-of.html