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Followed a link to this excellent article:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/From_Bagdad_to_Chicago:_Rezko_and_the_Auchi_empire

From Baghdad to Chicago: Rezko and the Auchi empire
by JOHN A. SHAW (Opinion: former senior official of US Defense, State, and Commerce departments)
October 10, 2008

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As the Wall Street Journal showed several weeks ago, Obama has been anything but forthcoming about his real relationship with Rezko and Auchi. And the public has no idea how extensive and how corrupt the network that Auchi has developed across the world is. Let me count the ways: Like organized crime, the network shows no public profile beyond legitimate business activities, and has a small army of lawyers threatening any critics with libel actions in Britain, Auchi’s adopted residence where there is no First Amendment protection.

Billionaires can buy anonymity at the same time they buy influence and politicians. In 2000, although Nadhmi Auchi had spent two decades as Saddam Hussein’s broker in the international oil and armament worlds, he was seen from the United States as essentially a European go-between, who worked the highest levels of the Italian and particularly the French and British governments. He had bought an aura of respectability by buying senior politicians and favorable press, and threatening any critics, a pattern he had begun to introduce in the United States with British assistance a decade earlier. I first began to fathom the extent of Nadhmi Auchi’s reach and corrupting influence when I was given responsibility for monitoring illegal transfers of technology and munitions to Iraq as well as overseeing all coalition transportation and communications reconstruction in Iraq.
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His seemingly innocent investments with Rezko in the Middle West, however, went hand in hand with Rezko’s extensive scheme to trade off campaign donations to Illinois politicians for jobs and multimillion dollar state and city contracts. That strategy appears to have tied in as well to Joseph A. Cari, Jr., a Clinton administration official who served as Democratic National Committee Finance Chairman in 1993-94, and who, like Rezko, was found guilty of extortion of Illinois officials in 2006, and similarly is awaiting sentencing. Cari was Clinton’s national finance chairman when Rezko and Auchi made their White House visits. Cari is now managing director of a Middle East trade and investment fund in New York. How many of Rezko’s donations and US investments originated with and were dependent on Auchi? Is there any evidence that Rezko had any other major source of funding? How long had the Auchi network been in place in Chicago? And what were Auchi’s connections to the Iraqi spy ring about to go to trial in Detroit, who in late 2002 paid two Democratic congressmen to go to Iraq and oppose the war, and which flourished on UN Oil for Food vouchers?

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But his underwriting of the purchase of Obama’s multimillion dollar Chicago mansion may have been the step too far which finally brought down Auchi’s grand scheme of empire and intrigue. It was, however, cheap at the price to buy a putative United States Senator. Nothing boneheaded about that decision at all. What is a candidate worth? This was Chicago, after all. On the other hand, however, if Barack Obama becomes President of the United States, the sky may be the limit for Nadhmi Auchi.