Friends in High Places: The Bechtel Story : The Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the Wo Laton Mccartney (surface ebook reader .TXT) 📖

York for $20,000, made out to “cash.” This was to be the first of three payments Bechtel promised to make, and Fallow delivered a manila envelope 140

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stuffed full of $100 bills to the mayor in his private office at a nearby shopping center.

Steve junior hadn’t known about the first payment, but several days before the second was to be made, he learned of it and exploded. In a rage, he summoned Waste to San Francisco and instructed him to secure from the pipeline managers a letter stating that they, not Bechtel, had authorized the payments, and a promise from the managers to reimburse Bechtel in full. Unless both were soon forthcoming, Bechtel said bluntly, Waste and Fallows would find themselves on the street.

Waste returned to New Jersey and did as ordered. He also arranged for the remaining two payments to be made to Zirpolo by a small local subcontractor called Gates Construction. The Bechtel Corporation, he assumed, was in the clear.

For a time, it seemed to be. Zirpolo delivered the permit, and the pipeline was built without further incident. Then, in May 1966, an FBI agent working on another New Jersey case stumbled across bank records stating that Bechtel had drawn a $20,000 check made out to cash. Large companies, the agent realized, did not use cash unless they had something to hide. He began probing further and eventually a federal grand jury was called. On February 24, 1967, it handed up a nine count indictment charging Zirpolo, the Bechtel Corporation, Gates Construction, the pipeline managers and several other firms that had become involved with two conspiracies to use interstate mails for the purposes of bribery. Each of the accused parties “passed a dirty job down to the next one because each knew what they were doing was unlawful,” the federal prosecutor said in summary. The jury concurred and convicted all the defendants except for Zirpolo, who was convicted later in a separate trial but then won a retrial.

Steve junior personally was not charged with anything. His penalty was merely severe embarrassment.

Though the pipeline episode had been a fiasco, just as the Broadway Tunnel had been thirty years before, Steve, like his father, had learned from it. He would be wary from now on of the company old guard and the traditional Bechtel way of doing things. Soon he would establish a mandatory retirement age in order to ease out his father’s old pal Bill Waste, whose operations, obviously, demanded closer scrutiny. He

The defendants were fined, but the trial judge, Reynier J. Wortendyke, Jr., did not impose prison sentences, on the ground that their crime had not been one of violence.

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would give them that scrutiny, and as he did, he would begin to put his mark on the company.

In 1965, with his father’s formal retirement and his own elevation to chairman and chief executive officer, Steve junior demonstrated just how independent he meant to be. He presented that year for his father’s inspection a plan for a new corporate headquarters, a twentytwo-story, aluminum-skinned monolith that would rise at the intersection of Mission and Beale Streets. As he described the project, explaining the need to consolidate Bechtel’s 10,000-member office force-now tied with Pacific Bell as the largest employers in the city -extolling the building’s Skidmore, Owings & Merrill design, detailing how it would be equipped with satellite receivers and the latest Univac mainframes, the old man sat in stony, disapproving silence. To the other Bechtel executives in the room, the tension was almost palpable. For the first time, Steve junior