Continuing with The Crimes of Patriots,A True Tale of Dope,Dirty Money & The CIA By Jonathan Kwitny....

... A month after arriving in Bangkok, on March 30, 1977, John Owen sent Jerry Gilder a list of twenty expatriate executives he said were considering a deposit with Nugan Hand. The list ranged from managing director of a TRW, Inc., subsidiary to the commercial attache of the Israeli Embassy in Bangkok.

Owen's whole correspondence file—which was somehow rescued by fate from the shredder—makes interesting reading. He was enthusiastic about working with General Black, but alarmed that Black's lack of financial wile might cause trouble.

"He certainly knows a lot of people who are important in this country, both in political and business circles," Owen said in a letter. But Owen reported that Black had caused general embarrassment— "a horrified silence"—when he talked openly at a dinner in Thailand about Nugan Hand as a deposit-taking institution. Someone had to publicly point out for the record that "he could not take deposits here because it was illegal," Owen reported. Gilder, in reply, passed it off as a joke.

Despite the illegality, Owen seems to have been consumed with attracting deposits, as he told Gilder about this or that prospect in his letters. "This man rang us and asked specifically about deposits," he enthused, underlining as he went. Other prospects, he said, urged Nugan Hand "to set up a central finance and trade reinvoicing system for the whole of Southeast Asia including Australia and New Zealand." (Reinvoicing, as explained earlier in the case of the Australian pharmacists, is a method of creating phony tax deductions and currency transfers by importing goods through a front company in another country, which jacks up the price before the goods are brought into your own country.)

"We have a number of small deposits starting to flow in now," Owen wrote on November 4, noting that a depositor code-named "our cerebral friend" had just handed over $12,000. That account was to grow considerably before the "cerebral friend" suffered a financial lobotomy when the bank folded.

But Owen's first successes at attracting deposits were overshadowed by his unique achievement in October 1977: he produced the one big, proven trade bonanza in Nugan Hand history. Owen brokered the sale of a Thai cement plant by Kaiser Cement & Gypsum Company, Oakland, California, to some local Thai shareholders. Kaiser received $650,000, and paid Nugan Hand a 10 percent commission—$65,000—for, as Owen wrote Gilder, "arranging, cajoling and generally jumping up and down trying to keep the thing more or less on the rails."
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