Jamaican newspaperman H.G. Helps will always remember the day Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford fired him from the Antigua Sun in 1999.
“Everybody was called to that staff meeting,” said Helps, 48, now an editor-at-large for the Jamaica Observer. “He made his general remarks about his vision for the paper. And the last comments, he reserved for me”.
“He looked at me straight and said, ‘I want you to examine your heart and your mind, and determine whether you want to continue working for the company.”
Stanford, who owned the newspaper, had earlier promised Helps that he wouldn’t interfere with its operations. Yet he put Helps on paid leave in front of the entire staff.
“He kept emphasizing, ‘I will pay you. I will pay you.’ And the first thing that came to my mind was, ‘Why is this man paying me to go and sit down?'”
Until last week, the brash and burly CEO of Stanford Financial Group was apparently using other peoples’ money in a bid to become some kind of Caribbean king.
He’d gotten as far as knighthood, an honor that the Antiguan government bestowed in 2006. But last week, a civil complaint from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused Stanford of running an $8 billion investment fraud.
The move not only froze his investors’ accounts, but put an abrupt end to Stanford’s royal fantasies.
Where does a jet-setting financier from Houston find the time to play mind games with the underpaid staff of a 6,000-circulation newspaper on a tiny island in the Caribbean?
“As soon as he stopped addressing me, he just walked away,” Helps said in a telephone interview from Kingston, Jamaica. “He didn’t say goodbye, or anything. He just left everybody dumbfounded.”
During his paid leave, Helps received a hand-delivered letter saying he was fired.
His offense: Covering an election rally by the opposition United Progressive Party which was vying against the Antigua Labour Party, and Stanford’s prime ally, then-Prime Minister Lester Bird.
Anyone who wants be king has to control the media.
“He wanted to project himself as much as possible in the newspaper,” Helps said. “Photographic coverage in particular.”
The charade was unimpressive, though. Helps recalls that when he first came to the island from Jamaica in 1998, he quickly learned the Stanford name was taboo.
One of his sources explained: “Stanford go on like a he own Antigua. He want everything and the Antiguan people no fi get nutten.”
When Stanford was knighted in 2006, he did something few nobles throughout history have tried: He put out a press release.
“My love for the Caribbean, its people and future has been clearly displayed by my commitment to the region over the past two decades,’ he pontificated.
Stanford often boasted that one of his relatives had founded Stanford University, a claim the esteemed school has gone to great lengths to debunk. The school even has a pending lawsuit against Stanford for using marketing materials with typefaces and colors that are strikingly similar to the university’s logo.
Also in his bid to be king, Stanford struck a five-year, $100 million deal with the England & Wales Cricket Board to fund 2-0/20 Cricket — a faster, more aggressive variation of the gentleman’s game.
“At the cricket matches he sponsored, he was all over the television and he deliberately set it up that way,” Helps said. “The television camera was always zooming in on him.”
Last fall, cameras zoomed in on him with the wife of one English cricket player on his lap, and others in his arms. It was a spectacle so flamboyant that even the royal Sir Stanford had to apologize for the headline it generated: “The Stanford Wives.”
“He essentially bought a knighthood,” said Helps. “He was giving the (Antiguan) government a lot of gifts. It was really an exchange situation.”
“A man who receives a knighthood is somebody who is supposed to be revered by the people, and he’s not,” Helps said. “If you do a poll in Antigua, you will find that 80 percent really don’t like the man at all, and don’t see him as their hero.”
Helps said that while he was suspicious of Stanford, he never dreamed Stanford would be accused of misdirecting billions of his investors’ funds.
Now, it all makes sense to Helps as Stanford takes his place beside alleged Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff in the headlines.
“That’s the bottom line, really,” Helps said. “That was what he was gaming for — people to trust him so that they could invest as much as possible with him.”
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com
