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Dan Lasater: a friend of Bill's - Bill Clinton - Cover Story
Insight on the News, Nov 6, 1995 by Jamie Dettmer
Evidence is mounting that Bill Clinton had a much closer personal friendship with Little Rock bond daddy and convicted cocaine distributor Dan Lasater while governor of Arkansas than either man has been willing to acknowledge publicly in recent years. Lasater was a regular visitor at the governor's mansion in the 1980s and was considered a member of Clinton's "kitchen circle." Clinton often dropped by the wheeler-dealer's downtown Little Rock office, Insight can now reveal.
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Recent biographers of Clinton have tended to mention Lasater only briefly, and normally just in the context of his having loaned $8,000 to Clinton's half brother, Roger, to pay a narcotics debt. But Arkansas state troopers who served on the governor's security unit have told Insight that the high-rolling bond and securities broker who was notorious in Arkansas for the wild (and at times semipublic) drug parties he allegedly held, appeared to play a prominent role in Clinton's Little Rock life. The troopers maintain that Lasater and Clinton were close friends - a relationship which Clinton's wife apparently disapproved - and that the bond dealer's access to the mansion was as unhindered as that of Clinton's family and senior aides.
The troopers' claims about the frequency of meetings between the bond broker and the governor throws a new and potentially intriguing light on the lucrative business relationship Lasater was able to forge with the Arkansas state government, the $1.6 million profits he made from state bond issues and the apparent leniency with which his drug activities were treated by the Arkansas State Police. The closeness between Clinton and Lasater as attested by former gubernatorial bodyguards also prompts questions about the pardon Clinton granted Lasater in November 1990.
In the few, brief public comments Clinton has made about Lasater since 1992, the president has maintained that he never really knew the bond dealer. The White House line is that they only met a couple of times. During a March 1994 press conference, the president did agree Lasater had been "an active supporter of mine," but immediately put this in the context of a Lasater habit of contributing to local Democratic politics generally by adding that the bond dealer and former restaurateur "gave money and raised money for Senator Dale Bumpers, for Senator David Pryor, for me and for other Democrats."
At the same press conference, the president dismissed in a few sentences his extension of a state pardon to Lasater, who had received a 30-month sentence after pleading guilty in late 1986 to distributing cocaine. "The parole board recommended him, and it would have been highly unusual for me not to do it," said Clinton, though he said he had qualms about issuing the pardon because, "I thought somebody might some day try to make something of this."
Even before Clinton was elected president, Lasater appeared to downplay his relationship with the then-governor, despite the fact that he employed Roger Clinton as a sometimes limousine driver. In a deposition Lasater gave to the FBI and Arkansas State Police in October 1986 as part of a plea-bargain made with US. Attorney George Proctor, the bond dealer reduced the number of times he had met Clinton to three. Lasater "advised that Bill Clinton had been at his house on one occasion for a Christmas party and was there only 30 minutes. He also attended a Christmas party at the Little Rock Country Club and was there approximately 30 minutes. He was present for the opening of Pulleybone's, a local restaurant, and was there approximately 30 minutes also," the deposition reads.
Lasater was not pushed hard in the interview about his Clinton links or his befriending of local law-enforcement officers (See "A State of Corruption," Oct. 30), something that irks Julius "Doc" Delaughter, the state police investigator who conducted the successful drug investigation of the bond broker but who then was blocked on the instructions of his superiors from being one of Lasater's interrogators.
Was the Lasater connection really just a 90-minute collection of bump and runs? No, according to Arkansas state troopers who served in Clinton's gubernatorial security detail. In an interview with Insight, Trooper L.D. Brown, who was a Clinton bodyguard from 1983 to 1985, claims Lasater visited Clinton "at least four times" to his knowledge when he was on guard duty. He also says he went with Clinton "a few times to Lasater's house" in the Heights district of Little Rock, again "about three or four" times. "We went to Lasater's office a bunch of times, just stopping by How often? I couldn't say. At least a dozen times. It's just absurd that Clinton is now trying to distance himself from Lasater. We used to go use his box at the races at Hot Springs." Clinton aides have maintained in the past that Brown is not to be trusted - they allege he is a "pathological liar."
But Brown's memory conforms with what a rather reluctant Trooper Barry Spivey recently told attorneys in a lawsuit involving Buddy Young, the former head of Clinton's Arkansas security unit. Spivey, who was subpoenaed for his information and is no friend of Brown (he accuses his former colleague of being a "publicity-hound"), says in an Aug. 9 deposition of which Insight has obtained a copy that Clinton and Lasater often were in each other's company, and he mentions a 1983 jaunt to the Kentucky Derby that Bill, Hillary and Roger Clinton took with Lasater on board the wheeler-dealer's jet. Although Spivey himself never again flew with the governor on Lasater's private aircraft, there were "other times to the best of my recollection that Gov. Clinton took flights with Dan personally." Spivey, who worked on the security unit until 198-4, also detailed visits to the mansion by Lasater and even more frequent Clinton drop-bys at Lasater's office in downtown Little Rock.
