Jury Convicts LaRouche of Fraud Charges

Political extremist Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. was found guilty Friday of tax evasion and cheating lenders who financed his presidential campaigns, controversial causes and luxurious life style.

After two days of deliberation, a federal court jury convicted LaRouche and six associates of conspiracy and mail fraud in an alleged plot to bilk numerous supporters, including a 75-year-old grandmother who testified that she lost her life savings of $112,800.

Prosecutors charged that the defendants raised more than $30 million by promising high interest rates on loans that they never intended to repay.

No Income Tax Returns

LaRouche also was convicted of failing to file federal income tax returns since 1979. His lawyers contended that he had no taxable income because his housing, food, clothing and other expenses were gifts or were purchased by others.

The four-time independent candidate for President stood jut-jawed and stared impassively at the jury of eight women and four men as the verdict was read, convicting him and his associates on all counts.

LaRouche, 66, who faces a maximum sentence of 65 years in prison and $3.25 million in fines, declared on his way out of the courthouse amid a phalanx of bodyguards: “Well, it’s a runaway jury, that’s obvious.”

At a news conference later, he said his conviction was “a wrong, gross, disgusting, obscene miscarriage of justice” that was the result of a long “campaign of hate” by the news media and friends of the Soviet Union within the federal government.

“The way the jury voted, I’m dead,” LaRouche said, adding that he expects to be killed in prison if his conviction is upheld on appeal. But he said he would leave behind an international “anti-Bolshevik resistance” that his followers were willing to fight and die for.

Concluding a 3 1/2-week trial, prosecutor John Markham told the jury Wednesday that the government’s case had nothing to do with LaRouche’s political beliefs but focused on allegedly deceptive fund-raising practices.

“The ends, however noble they may be, do not justify lying to people to get their money,” he declared.

Lenders ‘Given Rosy Picture’

Condemning “the callousness” of the fund-raisers, Markham said lenders such as Elizabeth Sexton, 75, who lost everything, were “given a false, rosy picture with assurances the money was safe.”

But even as the loans were going unpaid, much was being spent on LaRouche’s heavily guarded estate near Leesburg, Va.: $97,000 for a pond, $19,000 for a swimming pool, $33,000 for landscaping, $67,000 for a road, $15,000 for a guest house, $4,600 for a riding track.

To defense contentions that LaRouche’s residence had to be made secure to ward off death threats, Markham commented acidly: “No bogyman is going to be scared off by well-landscaped property or a riding ring.”

William Wertz, LaRouche’s chief fund-raiser and another defendant in the case, set fund-raising quotas, harangued fund-raisers and humiliated them when they failed to meet goals, telling them that “Lyn wanted it done,” Markham said.

Defense lawyers maintained that LaRouche was brought to trial simply because of his extremist beliefs. Witnesses said LaRouche was often the target of death threats because he insisted that Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II was involved in international drug trafficking and that the International Monetary Fund was responsible for the spread of AIDS.

LaRouche’s attorney, Odin Anderson of Boston, charged that the government case was based on “voodoo conspiracy” charges that were vague and unfounded.

“They don’t want you to decide straightforward facts,” he told the jury. “They want you to decide garbage.”

Reflecting his client’s own penchant for pungent rhetoric, Anderson said the “bad smell” that sometimes wafted through the courtroom “came from the rotting carcass of the government’s case.”

Defense lawyer Brian Gettings asserted that the defendants had simply borrowed too much money and were unable to repay loans because of government harassment and media attacks that shrank their revenues.

LaRouche did not testify in his own defense.

The other defendants were LaRouche’s chief legal officer Edward Spannaus and fund-raisers Michael Billington, Paul Greenberg, Joyce Rubinstein and Dennis Small.

U.S. District Judge Albert V. Bryan Jr. released the defendants on bail and set sentencing for Jan. 27. Prosecutors, clearly concerned that LaRouche might attempt to flee to residences abroad, asked that the defendants’ passports be surrendered and that travel be restricted to northern Virginia.

Bryan denied the request, saying: “I am not concerned with flight.”