The Twisted Business Ties of Mormon Leader Robert Gay
The Twisted Business Ties of Mormon Leader Robert Gay
Jesus chose his original disciples from the poor Galilean fishermen, but His allegedly restored church doesn’t work that way. Men hoping to join the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (Q12) or First Presidency (the governing body of the church that includes the prophet) have to climb the corporate ladder, proving their loyalty through decades of committed service. The goal, ultimately, is to become the Prophet of the church. First, you must serve as a bishop and then climb through higher roles — stake president, Area Seventy, Seventy, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Then, if you outlive your other Quorum members and get the timing just right, when the Mormon prophet dies you’ll be next. You are now the modern Moses.
Each governing body has fewer members, giving the Mormon org chart a wonderful pyramidal structure … scheme if you will. The Seventy is the last step before the big show. Few of the 70 members will make it to the Q12, and those who do have a long wait. Vacancies in the Q12 only come after the death of a current apostle. Your Mormon career gets made or broken during your time in the Seventy, but you’ll increase your chances of becoming a big dog if you manage to get into the Presidency of the Seventy. These few men are the leaders of the Seventy, kings of the middlemen. Most importantly, they are seen as heir apparent to the Q12. Of the current twelve apostles, eight served in the Presidency of the Seventy before getting called to the higher Quorum.
With General Conference right around the corner, let's dive into the past of Elder Robert C. Gay — a former member of the Presidency of the Quorum of the Seventy — specifically, his spooky connections to the world of intelligence operations and shady corporations. He’s been climbing the ladder for a while, would have probably become an apostle, and could have become a future Prophet of God… until he was fired in 2021.
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In 1970, Howard Hughes had a problem. The enigmatic playboy billionaire had spent four years holed up in the Desert Inn, increasingly losing touch with reality and the day-to-day operations of his business empire. Two executives entered the power vacuum: Robert Gay’s father Frank Willian “Bill” Gay and Robert Maheu. Each man was on a quest for power and they hated each other. In a series of underhanded business maneuvers, each tried to push the other out of the Hughes circle.
Robert Maheu entered the Hughes empire in the 50s when the billionaire hired Maheu’s detective firm to surveil Jean Peters, Hughes' fiance. He believed she had a potential second man and wanted proof of infidelity.
Robert Maheu’s detective firm had a history of working in the shadows of American politics. Staffed with CIA and FBI employees, the firm was used to carry out assassinations, kidnapping, and other dark deeds on American soil, the types of things you wouldn’t want directly connected to a government agency. The firm was, of course, involved in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, as was nearly everybody connected to the CIA in the 60s.
His most impactful innovation, however, was developing an early form of what later became known as “extraordinary rendition.” When a dictator had friendly relations with the United States he could call in favors with the CIA and its cutouts. If the dictator had an enemy, the CIA would kidnap said enemy. The victim was then handed over to the dictator’s security forces to do with as they pleased. In its modern incarnation, “enemy combatants” are routinely kidnapped and carted off to CIA black sites for torture and interrogation.
This is the fate that befell Jesús de Galíndez, a critic of Rafael Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic. When Galíndez wrote a dissertation criticizing the Dominican government Trujillo, incensed, called in a favor with the CIA, and had Galíndez kidnapped from his home in New York City.
What followed comes from The Devil’s Chessboard by David Talbot, and if you’re squeamish, maybe just skip this quote:
Grabbed by Maheu agents who were waiting for him in his apartment, Galíndez was drugged and carried into an ambulance, then driven to a small airport in Amityville, Long Island. There he was loaded into a twin-engined Beech airplane that was specially equipped to fly long distances and flown south, stopping for refueling after midnight in West Palm Beach, before continuing on to the Dominican Republic. After landing in Trujillo’s kingdom, Galíndez — still half conscious — was transported to Casa de Caoba, the dictator’s favorite hideaway. There Trujillo, dressed in a riding outfit, confronted the traitor with evidence of his betrayal — a copy of the dissertation, which his agents had stolen. “Eat it,” he commanded. The dazed Galíndez took the pile of papers but could not keep hold of them, letting them fall to the floor as his head slumped to his chest. “Pendejo!” screamed the dictator in his high-pitched squeal as he flayed Galíndez’s head with a riding crop. Galíndez was taken to a torture chamber in the capital city, where he was stripped, handcuffed, and hoisted on a pulley. Then he was slowly lowered into a tub of boiling water. What remained of him was thrown to the sharks, a favorite disposal method of the dictator.
Robert Maheu was a very, very bad man. Through Hughes’ paranoid contracting and connections with the John Roselli of the Chicago mob — an influential Las Vegas financier — Maheu found himself at the top of the Hughes organization.
Working alongside him was Bill Gay. The elder Gay was an active Mormon, born in Salt Lake City, and possibly the most powerful man in the Hughes organization.
As Hughes’ mental state deteriorated, Gay created the “Mormon Mafia” to cement the Mormon hold on the empire. Handpicked by Gay, the six men in the Mafia were all Mormon and were the only people allowed to personally interact with Hughes. In 8-hour shifts, 24 hours a day, supported by a team of nurses, these six sat in that Desert Inn suite relaying orders to and from Hughes. It was impossible to tell whether the orders coming from the Desert Inn were Hughes's real decisions or Gay’s personal plans. Nobody else had access. The Mafia was the only connection between Hughes and the outside world and — according to Las Vegas historian Geoff Schumacher — the Mormons had been tweaking Hughes’ medication to keep him in a docile mood.
Not content with the king’s ear, Gay transformed the Hughes empire into a Mormon-run business. He only recruited church members and placed job ads on the church’s bulletin boards. Mormons took over the Hughes business headquarters in Los Angeles. Security was ramped up at the office, including background checks stricter than the CIA’s. Mormon employees transformed the office into a sophisticated electronic surveillance center, and young gun-toting Mormon men patrolled the parking lot.
Continuing to outplay Maheu, Gay placed himself in charge of Hughes’ subsidiary companies, even creating one of his own — the software company Hughes Dynamics. Without Hughes' knowledge or permission, Gay founded this company, looking to exploit the growing computer market. Seriously, what is up with Mormons getting into weird stuff when it comes to computers? We’ve seen this a few times before.
Gay, naturally, only wanted to hire Mormons for this company but did have an interesting non-Mormon employee named John H. Meier. Watergate-heads will recognize the name — he’s the guy who gave Nixon the idea to break into the hotel. Meier also has connections to the RFK assassination. The security guard that led Kennedy into that fateful pantry — Thane Eugene Cesar — was introduced to Meier by Maheu years before the assassination. Of course, both Cesar and Maheu deny this accusation.
Hughes Dynamics didn’t end up going anywhere, but Gay bagged a bigger prize when he became the CEO of Summa Corporation, the holding company for the whole Hughes empire. Among some things the Summa Corporation did under his leadership: developing the Summerlin master planned community in Northwest Las Vegas and building the Glomar Explorer, a CIA vessel used in an attempt to recover the Soviet submarine K-129 from the ocean floor.
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In hindsight, it was pretty obvious who was going to win the power struggle. This speaks to the power the Mormon church had amassed that they outmaneuvered a CIA contract assassin. By the end of 1970, Maheu was out. To quote the bastard: “I know who is driving the train, and it’s not Howard. It was Bill Gay and Chester Davis of the so-called Mormon mafia.”
Howard Hughes wasn’t long for the world, dying in 1976 and leaving behind a tangled web of business intrigues and confusion about his will. As you’ve probably expected, Bill Gay was involved in the Mormon Will fiasco. The document, claimed real by one Melvin Dummar, left a chunk of the Hughes wealth to the Mormon church, and another chunk to Dummar. Shockingly, Gay fought against the authenticity of the will, though I suspect he had more issues with Dummar getting the money than David O. McKay. Battles about the Mormon Will and the final disposition of Hughes's assets would tie Gay up in legal proceedings for the rest of his life.
The Mormon Will couldn’t give Gay as much control and wealth as the corporate positions he had maneuvered himself into. Alongside William Lummis, he transformed the Summa Corporation from a holding company into a massive Las Vegas real estate empire. The aforementioned Summerlin project was a highly detailed master development plan, comprising an expansive region of Northwest Las Vegas, and filled with all the amenities a Southwest suburbanite could hope for. He also chaired the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the second wealthiest philanthropic organization in the US, the second-biggest medical endowment in the world, and an organization widely considered to be a tax dodge.
Bill Gay made a name for himself, bringing power and wealth to the Mormon church. Both the Mormon church and the capitalists of this country reward good behavior, which leads us to Bill Gay’s son, Robert.
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Fast forward to the 80s, and we meet another weirdo businessman in the Gay saga: Willard “Mitt” Romney.
Romney comes from a long line of Mormon royalty, stretching back to the polygamy colonies in Colonia Juárez. His dad had an aborted run for US President (telling people you got brainwashed in Vietnam turns out to be a turn-off for voters). As his dad was getting clobbered in the Republican Primaries, the younger Romney started his career where the money was: venture capital.
At 25 years old, Romney was recruited to work at Boston Consulting Group by Kenneth Woolley, a Stanford grad, fellow Mormon, and the future CEO/Founder of Extra Space Storage. After a few years at Boston Consulting Group, working alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, Romney joined Bain & Company, consulting for such wonderful companies as Monsanto. In 1984, Romney and some coworkers spun off their own management company, Bain Capital.
Despite being new players on the VC scene, Bain quickly raised millions of dollars. A large chunk of this money came from shadowy Latin American financiers, some of these linked to the right-wing death squads terrorizing El Salvador. Naturally, these death squads were indirectly funded by the United States government. Blood-soaked money secured, Romney set course for his eventual presidential run.
Robert Gay also lived in Boston during this time. In fact, he was a high counselor in the stake run by a future Mormon historian-apologist, Richard L. Bushman. This was also Romney’s stake. And wouldn’t you know it, Robert Gay was hired as a managing director at Bain Capital.
Originally, Bain Capital specialized in venture capital, creating new companies from seed money. This is how they created Staples. But by the late 80s, Bain Capital was pivoting to a new business strategy. Instead of creating new companies, Bain began taking over existing companies with huge sums of borrowed money and transforming these companies into money-making machines by any means necessary. I’m not as well versed on VC nonsense as I should be, so here’s Rolling Stone magazine:
Here’s how Romney would go about “liberating” a company: A private equity firm like Bain typically seeks out floundering businesses with good cash flows. It then puts down a relatively small amount of its own money and runs to a big bank like Goldman Sachs or Citigroup for the rest of the financing. (Most leveraged buyouts are financed with 60 to 90 percent borrowed cash.) The takeover firm then uses that borrowed money to buy a controlling stake in the target company, either with or without its consent. When an LBO is done without the consent of the target, it’s called a hostile takeover; such thrilling acts of corporate piracy were made legend in the Eighties, most notably the 1988 attack by notorious corporate raiders Kohlberg Kravis Roberts against RJR Nabisco, a deal memorialized in the book Barbarians at the Gate.
Romney and Bain avoided the hostile approach, preferring to secure the cooperation of their takeover targets by buying off a company’s management with lucrative bonuses. Once management is on board, the rest is just math. So if the target company is worth $500 million, Bain might put down $20 million of its own cash, then borrow $350 million from an investment bank to take over a controlling stake.
But here’s the catch. When Bain borrows all of that money from the bank, it’s the target company that ends up on the hook for all of the debt.
As a managing director, Robert Gay was a key player in these transactions. During his time at Bain, the company played this game with the Sealy Corporation, Domino’s Pizza, Dade International, DIC Entertainment Company (a Disney subsidiary), KB Toys, Houghton Mifflin, Burger King, Warner Music Group, Toys ‘R’ Us, the Hospital Corporation of America, Burlington Coat Factory, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Baskin-Robbins among others. Bain worked closely with The Carlyle Group in the early 2000s, a shadowy financial group with close connections to the bin Laden family, even making Shafiq bin Laden the guest-of-honor at an investor conference held on September 11, 2001.
In 2001, Bain proposed purchasing a stake in the Mormon-run Huntsman Corporation, but the deal never went through. A few years later, Robert Gay left Bain Capital to found Huntsman Gay Global Capital alongside the Hunstmans and Steve Young.
HGGC went about building investment funds, and are still in operation. Most recently, they partnered with the above-mentioned Carlyle Group to invest in PCF Insurance Services, an insurance brokerage firm based out of Lehi, Utah.
As an aside, I’m not sure that HGGC has good opinions about Romney. During Romney’s 2012 campaign, fellow Mormon Harry Reid revealed that Romney had paid no income tax in a decade. The Atlantic speculated that HGGC was Harry Reid’s source, although Huntsman himself denied the acquisition. Who knows?
In 2012 Robert Gay was called into the Quorum of the Seventy, beginning his ascension through the Mormon ranks. Within a few months he was put in charge of the Perpetual Education Fund. This is the church’s official student loan servicing organization, extending small loans to church members in underdeveloped countries. The average student loan is around $1,000. Deseret News bragged that the program had enrolled 83,260 students as of 2016, and that many of these students end up serving in local leadership positions. It does make one wonder why a church with $100+ billion doesn’t just spend the $100,000 or so to give their members a free education grant, but there’s always a dollar to be made in Mormonism.
The PEF wasn’t the first time Gay was involved in micro-lending. He is a co-founder of Unitus Labs, a micro-credit company that specializes in similar student loans as the PEF. It mainly targets India. Gay also co-founded BYU’s Melvin J. Ballard Center for Economic Self-Reliance. This outfit publishes material designed to help people financially support themselves, but curiously makes sure to mention paying tithing to the Mormon church as the first step for self-reliance.
Gay’s public facing church service was unremarkable, only giving one General Conference talk and going on a trip to India with apostle M. Russell Ballard. Was he checking on his investment, perhaps?
Internally, Gay seemed to pull the right strings, making it to the Presidency of the Quorum of the Seventy, the last stop before entering the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and getting a 1 in 15 shot at becoming the prophet of the Lord. The only problem? The Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency use Klingon promotions. Vacancies only open up on death. As life expectancy creeps up, vacancies are occurring with less regularity.
Callings to the Seventy used to be lifetime appointments until the late 70s when the church decided to start retiring older members of the Seventy that hadn’t made it to the Quorum of the Twelve. Members of the Seventy are given emeritus status when they turn 70. They are still General Authorities, sort of, but their path to the top is over.
In 2021, within arm’s reach of a lifetime appointment, Gay turned 70 and was released. Because even when you’re near the top of a cult, if you aren’t the leader, you can still get fucked.
Books
The Devil’s Chessboard - David Talbot
Sun, Sin, and Suburbia - Geoff Schumacher
Howard Hughes: Power, Paranoia, & Palace Intrigue - Geoff Schumacher