The hotel room was on an upper floor in Manhattan. It was January 31, 1970, late enough in the evening that the call would have woken someone up. Terence Robertson, a Canadian writer who had been commissioned to produce the official history of the Bronfman family, picked up the phone and dialed the Toronto Daily Star. He reached Roderick Goodman in the editorial department and told him he had “found out things they don’t want me to write about.”
Robertson made a second call. Another Star editor, Graham Murray Caney, would later testify under oath that Robertson told him his life “had been threatened.” Caney kept Robertson talking while he had the call traced and alerted the New York Police Department. Officers arrived at the hotel room. They were minutes too late. Robertson was dying of barbiturate poisoning.
The book was never published. Robertson’s publisher, McClelland and Stewart, had taken out a $100,000 life insurance policy on him. In 1977, the firm sued Mutual Life Assurance Co. to collect. It was during that trial, seven years after the phone calls, that Goodman and Caney gave their testimony under oath, and the details of Robertson’s last night became part of the public record.
The family hired another writer, John Scott, to try again. That manuscript was also never published. It took until the early 1990s for the Bronfmans to get a biography they could live with: Michael Marrus, a historian at the University of Toronto, produced the authorized version with full access to corporate archives and the family’s cooperation. The book Samuel Bronfman wanted the world to read arrived two decades after his death and one dead biographer later.
The question Robertson’s phone call raises has never been answered: what did he find in those records, and why did he die before he could write it down?
One Nation Under Blackmail documents what the Bronfman records would have contained. And it starts where most dynasties pretend their history doesn’t: with the crime that made the money.
The Bootlegger
Samuel Bronfman made his fortune during Prohibition. Between 1920 and 1933, while the United States government banned the sale of alcohol, Bronfman ran liquor across the Canadian border into the United States on an industrial scale. This wasn’t a man with a few cases in the trunk of his car. This was a transcontinental supply chain built in coordination with Meyer Lansky’s criminal networks. Lansky provided protection for the shipments. Lucky Luciano, Lansky’s lifelong partner and co-founder of the National Crime Syndicate, was part of the same ecosystem. Frank Costello, another founding member of the syndicate, controlled the political machines that kept police and prosecutors looking the other way. The bootlegging pipeline that kept America drinking during Prohibition ran through organized crime, and the Bronfman family was at the center of the supply side.
Consider the scale of the partnership. Lansky was the intellectual architect of multi-ethnic organized crime cooperation and the pioneer of offshore money laundering. He built a financial empire connecting Caribbean casinos, Geneva banks, and real estate across the American Sunbelt. His wife later claimed her husband “fixed that sonofabitch” J. Edgar Hoover, a reference to compromising photographs Lansky obtained of the FBI director, images later confirmed as authentic by CIA officials. Those photographs neutralized the FBI’s ability to pursue organized crime for decades. This is the man who was protecting Bronfman’s shipments, and the man whose criminal infrastructure would outlast Prohibition by half a century.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, most bootleggers went broke or went to prison. Bronfman did neither. He had something the street-level operators didn’t: the infrastructure to go legitimate. The same distilling capacity, the same distribution networks, the same relationships with Lansky’s organization. Seagram’s became one of the largest liquor companies in the world. The money that started as bootlegging revenue became corporate revenue, and the criminal enterprise became a corporate dynasty while the family’s history got rewritten along the way. Meanwhile, Lansky’s networks transitioned the same infrastructure, the same smuggling routes, and the same corrupt officials into large-scale heroin trafficking. The French Connection, as it came to be known, operated with the knowledge and involvement of U.S. intelligence, and its proceeds were laundered through the same Middle Eastern banking networks that serviced the arms trafficking operations documented in Volume 1.
The Arms Pipeline
In the 1940s, the Bronfman family’s connections to Lansky served a new purpose. During the lead-up to Israeli independence, Lansky coordinated illegal arms trafficking to support the Haganah, the paramilitary force that would become the Israel Defense Forces. The Bronfman family provided financial backing and logistical support for these operations. This wasn’t quiet philanthropy. This was smuggling weapons in violation of international law, coordinated through the same networks that had been moving contraband across borders for two decades. Jewish organized crime figures internationally were leveraged by Israeli intelligence to support these operational objectives, and the Bronfman family’s wealth and North American distribution networks made them a natural partner.
Lansky, a career criminal who ran casinos and laundered money through Tibor Rosenbaum’s International Credit Bank in Geneva, was now coordinating arms shipments for what would become a sovereign nation. The Bronfmans, who had partnered with him during Prohibition, were backing him again. Rosenbaum’s International Credit Bank would go on to become Lansky’s primary money laundering vehicle, handling casino skim from Las Vegas and the Caribbean while simultaneously servicing Israeli intelligence operations. The same bank handled both. The bootlegging networks had become arms trafficking networks, and the arms trafficking networks were becoming intelligence coordination networks, with the money flowing through the same channels and the same families sitting at the table across every transition.
The Heir
Edgar Bronfman Sr. was Samuel’s son, and the family’s most successful project. He took the Seagram’s fortune and turned it into something the bootlegging money was never supposed to buy: legitimacy at the highest levels of international power. In 1981, he became president of the World Jewish Congress, one of the most influential international Jewish organizations, a position he would hold for nearly three decades. Under his leadership, the WJC became a political force that negotiated directly with heads of state. Bronfman personally met with world leaders to recover Holocaust-era assets from Swiss banks, pressured the Soviet Union on Jewish emigration, and shaped policy on three continents. He was no longer a corporate heir. He was a statesman, and the bootlegger’s son now had access to any room on earth.
In 1983, Edgar sat on the board of the B’nai B’rith Banking and Finance Lodge when it held a dinner honoring Roy Cohn, the sexual blackmail operator documented in Brief #001. The same year, the Wexner Foundation was created with Rabbi Maurice Corson, who had been recruited from B’nai B’rith, where he had served as director of development during the years that Bronfman, Max Fisher, and Edmond Safra sat on its board of overseers. By the time Edgar’s brother Charles co-founded the Mega Group with Wexner eight years later, the Bronfman name wasn’t just money. It was institutional access across organized crime, intelligence, and political power stretching back to Prohibition, now wrapped in the credibility of a man who had dined with prime ministers and recovered stolen fortunes.
The Pattern
Here is what the Bronfman line looks like when you lay it out:
1920s: Samuel Bronfman builds a bootlegging empire in partnership with Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s criminal networks, running liquor across the Canadian border on an industrial scale.
1933: Prohibition ends. Bronfman converts the operation into Seagram’s, one of the largest legitimate liquor companies in the world. Lansky’s networks transition the same smuggling routes into heroin trafficking through the French Connection pipeline.
1940s: The Bronfman family provides financial and logistical support for Haganah arms procurement, coordinated by the same Meyer Lansky who protected their bootlegging shipments, using the same smuggling infrastructure.
1970: Terence Robertson, commissioned to write the Bronfman biography, calls a journalist from a New York hotel room to say he’s found disturbing information. He dies of barbiturate poisoning before the book is published.
1981: Edgar Bronfman Sr. becomes president of the World Jewish Congress, transforming the bootlegger’s son into a statesman who negotiated with heads of state. Two years later, he sits on the board of a B’nai B’rith lodge that honors Roy Cohn, the sexual blackmail operator documented in Brief #001.
1991: Edgar’s brother Charles co-founds the Mega Group with Les Wexner, the man who bankrolled Jeffrey Epstein. Twenty billionaires. No press coverage for seven years. A journalist described its ambition as creating a “Mafia” of Jewish philanthropy.
Two bloodlines converge in that room: Wexner, whose connection to Epstein was documented in Brief #002, and Bronfman, whose family history runs from Prohibition-era organized crime through wartime arms trafficking to the highest levels of international diplomacy. They are not the only ones.
What Comes Next
The $30,000 annual dues were a formality for men worth billions. The value was the room itself, and the coordination it made possible. Within six years of the group’s founding, the National Security Agency intercepted a phone call from the Israeli embassy in Washington in which a Mossad officer, seeking a classified State Department letter, told his supervisor he would need to “go to Mega.” The FBI investigated. The investigation went nowhere.
Next: Who was in that room, and what the name Mega meant to people on both sides of the Atlantic.
Forward this to someone who thinks billionaire philanthropy groups are about charity.
HOW WE VERIFIED THIS
Bronfman bootlegging operations and Lansky partnership: Webb, Whitney, One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume 1, Chapter 2 (2022), documenting Prohibition-era organized crime foundations and Bronfman-Lansky coordination of international distribution channels.
Haganah arms procurement and Bronfman involvement: Webb, Whitney, One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume 1, Chapter 3 (2022), documenting organized crime figures’ coordination of illegal arms trafficking for Israeli independence, including Bronfman financial and logistical support.
Terence Robertson biography and death: Newman, Peter C., King of the Castle: The Making of a Dynasty (Atheneum, 1979), Author’s Note, page ix. Originally published in Canada as Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World (1978). Newman documents sworn testimony from Roderick Goodman and Graham Murray Caney of the Toronto Daily Star’s editorial department, given during the 1977 trial of McClelland and Stewart Ltd. v. Mutual Life Assurance Co. to collect on Robertson’s $100,000 life insurance policy.
B’nai B’rith dinner honoring Roy Cohn and Wexner Foundation origins: Webb, Whitney, One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume 1, Chapter 10 (2022), documenting the 1983 B’nai B’rith Banking and Finance Lodge dinner with board members including Edmond Safra and Edgar Bronfman. Volume 2, Chapter 14 (2022), documenting Rabbi Maurice Corson’s recruitment from B’nai B’rith to co-found the Wexner Foundation, and the overlap of B’nai B’rith board of overseers (Bronfman, Fisher, Safra) with Wexner’s emerging philanthropic network.
Mega Group formation and NSA intercept: Webb, Whitney, One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume 2, Chapter 14 (2022), documenting founding by Wexner and Charles Bronfman, $30,000 annual dues, and seven years without press coverage. Wall Street Journal reporting on the group’s formation. NSA intercept citing the Washington Post (May 1997) on the February 16, 1997 phone call from the Israeli embassy referencing “Mega” in the context of obtaining a classified Christopher-Arafat letter.
Meyer Lansky as organized crime-intelligence bridge: Webb, Whitney, One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume 1, Chapters 1-3 (2022), documenting Lansky’s role in Operation Underworld, Haganah arms procurement, and financial networks through Tibor Rosenbaum’s International Credit Bank.
Note on sources: All claims about the Bronfman family, their business relationships, and their institutional connections are drawn from Whitney Webb’s documented research in One Nation Under Blackmail and from public records including court testimony and news reporting. PRCDNT presents these as the documented record, not as proven conclusions.
THE PRCDNT BRIEF investigates the three-layer system of control: Operations (blackmail, trafficking, financial crimes), Control Systems (media, education, psychological manipulation), and Institutions (intelligence agencies, elite networks, corporate empires). Every week, we verify our investigation showing how the layers connect.
All claims sourced from declassified documents, on-the-record intelligence histories, and investigative journalism. No speculation. No anonymous sources. Just the documented record.
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