Jackson Stephens Sr. is a big-money man from Arkansas. A top donor to the Reagan and George H.W. Bush campaigns, he suddenly switched to Clinton in 1990. He brought BCCI to US shores in 1979 and helped to launder cocaine profits from CIA drug smuggling in Mena, Arkansas and elsewhere.
Mochtar Riady is the Indonesian billionaire who was a joint investor with Little Rock billionaire Jackson Stephens in Worthen Bank when an investor group that included Jackson Stephens took over First American Bank in Washington, D.C.
Stephens, with the help of Bert Lance and others, brought in BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International) to wrest control of the bank from that group, and to put it into the hands of friendlier partners.
The Stephens’ software firm Systematics was to become the nation’s biggest supplier of back-office banking software, and would eventually work closely with the National Security Agency to facilitate intelligence monitoring of banking transactions.
Jackson Stephens, meanwhile, proposed, developed, and financed a plant for hazardous waste facilities, called Waste Technology Inc., beginning in 1979. This project became a bottomless pit for the consumption of funds, and at one point, the financially- strapped Stephens made a Faustian pact with Indonesian Mochtar Riady to set up a money-laundering operation in Arkansas. Stephens and Riady had previously formed Stephens Finance Ltd. in Hong Kong in 1976.
Stephens bought 9.3 percent of Little Rock’s Worthen bank from the John H. Hendrix Corp. of Midland, Texas, while Lippo purchased 9.4 percent. Lippo paid about $16 million for its share, and installed James Riady as a bank director in 1984. Stephens-Lippo continued to increase their share of Worthen stock, up to 36.7 percent.
Over in Indonesia, the Riady family has stirred up consternation among the minority shareholders in the Lippo Group by a planned restructuring that would enable the family to extract cash to invest elsewhere. The deputy chairman of Lippo Group is James Riady, a former director of Worthen Bank.
This propitious union came about just as the Mena, Arkansas, drug-and-arms trade was creating a vast local demand for money-laundering services. At the Asian end, with Mochtar Riady, Stephens purchased Seng Heng Bank in Macao, the “Oriental Las Vegas”, where gambling is the primary source of government revenue. Stephens’ Systematics supplied software to the Banco Nacional Ultramarino, the cashier and treasury bank of the Macao government and the bank that issues the local currency. (Macao is located less than 40 miles from Hong Kong, the center for heroin trade.)