Also involved were New York banks, some members of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and at least one important official at the Federal Reserve. On the Arkansas front, Hayes was quite open in telling me he was going to nail Jim Guy Tucker to the wall, and over the following year I watched him do just that. One might assume from such a statement that Hayes was a Republican, out to get Democrats. But in fact Hayes' father had been a local Democrat party official, and Hayes had been a friend and admirer of John Kennedy. Hayes was not political in that sense, any more than I was.
Some people have a strange habit of trying to interpret everything in political terms.
I refused to bite. But my interest was not partisan, and never has been. Gasior was politically a liberal Democrat, and when she was pursuing a case against Kennametal, which had done business with Iraq during the Gulf War, she received some support from Democrat politicians, because the issue was embarrassing to Republican interests. To the average political hack, partisanship always takes precedence over the search for truth. Hayes had come up with financial records showing that fifty to seventy million dollars a day of drug-related money was being laundered through the institutions he was looking at.