The dealings have brought Joe unwelcome scrutiny and threaten to distract from his presidential bid. At this, the executive recalled, Beau Biden, who was then running for attorney general of Delaware, turned bright red. A spokesman for James and Hunter disputed several specific recollections of former Paradigm executives but did not address more general questions about their business dealings. “The Bidens threatened to use their alleged connections with a former United States Senator to retaliate against counsel for insisting that his bill be paid, claiming that the former senator was prepared to use his influence with a federal judge to disadvantage counsel in a proceeding then pending before that court.” James and Hunter denied those allegations. He got a year in prison. At the time, a spokesman for Paradigm told The Wall Street Journal that it had terminated its relationship with Stanford and offered to turn over the money it received from him to a court-appointed receiver. The club, Seasons Change, located in a shopping plaza near the Pennsylvania state line, would eventually fail, leaving behind it a trail of debt and a trickle of embarrassing revelations about its financing. On September 29, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 777 points, then the largest single-day drop in history. “Don’t worry about investors,” he said, according to the executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of retaliation. Patterson resigned as auditor in 1996 after pleading guilty to lying on official documents to avoid paying taxes on a car. James Biden isn’t a big name in the business of residential housing development, so what exactly qualifies him to work at a construction company and share in the winnings of a $1.5 billion project. The group also sought out associates in Switzerland, Argentina and Venezuela, according to a brochure for the prospective firm obtained by Wilkie. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! The charges were dropped. Before he published the book, Wilkie — who covered Joe Biden’s career on the New Castle County Council as a local Delaware reporter in the 1970s — said he reached out to the vice president’s office to offer him a briefing on its contents. While the house served for several years as a family getaway amid beautiful surroundings, it did not pay off as an investment. At one point after the Bidens purchased the fund, one of the executives recalled, groups of firefighters started trekking up in small groups to Paradigm’s offices and leaving him checks for a few thousand dollars each, about 10 in total over the course of a few days. We've received your submission. James Biden's father was Joseph Biden Sr. James Biden's mother was Jean Biden. During this time, Hunter Biden was busy making a living in his father’s wake. The fund of hedge funds represented a partnership with the firm run by Allen Stanford. The duo would go on to victory, in part by casting themselves as reliable stewards of an economy that was careening downward as a result of financial engineering gone awry. The day the Bidens took over Paradigm Global Advisors was a memorable one. Things quickly got messy. Another figure tied to Farmers Bank, the politically connected financier Norman Rales, extended James Biden an unsecured loan. Caroline agreed to anger management treatment and the case was dismissed. “Neither Mr. Heinz, nor any business in which he had an interest, was involved in Burisma or Bohai Harvest RST.”. He was a prominent opponent of the creation of an asbestos trust fund, a measure that would have curtailed lawsuits related to the cancer-causing fibers. | Politico Illustration; Getty Images; AP. In the 1990s, a group of Mississippi trial lawyers enlisted James to further its interests in Washington as it sought congressional support for a tobacco megasettlement. No conviction recorded. They planned to use the dinner as an opportunity to recruit Charles Stith, who had served as ambassador to Tanzania during the Clinton administration, to their firm in a bid to bolster the firm’s standing with potential clients in Africa, according to Wilkie’s book. A decade later, those Mississippi contacts supported Joe’s presidential bid — hosting a fundraiser for him and accepting an invitation to accompany Joe to a high-profile Washington dinner — while they simultaneously prepared to launch a lobbying firm with James and his wife, Sara. Another poor influence on Hunter was his low-rent lobbyist uncle, James Biden, who has been cashing in on his brother’s last name for years, according to … Sun Myung Moon, founder of the Unification Church. “We've got investors lined up in a line of 747s filled with cash ready to invest in this company,” the executive remembers James Biden saying. In 1995, famed Mississippi trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs set his sights on a gargantuan national settlement with Big Tobacco worth hundreds of billions of dollars. They also obtained $1 million in financing from SimmonsCooper, a St. Louis-area law firm with a thriving practice representing asbestos victims. Politico Illustration; NBCU Photo Bank; Getty Images. In 1975, the same year Farmers was having difficulty collecting on its original night club loan, James Biden and his partners went to a Philadelphia bank, First Pennsylvania, to get more money to expand their operation. He left to become a lobbyist in 2001, though he continued receiving consulting fees from the bank. During the tobacco fight, James Biden’s services had been recommended to Scruggs by former Mississippi State Auditor Steve Patterson. Ben Schreckinger is a reporter for Politico. In June 2011, the firm landed contracts worth an estimated $1.5 billion to build homes in Iraq. 106,942, This story has been shared 96,713 times. He and wife Sara have three children, James Brian Biden Jr., Caroline Nicole Biden and Nicholas Coleman Biden. By the time the club was going under, Joe had left his seat on the Banking Committee for one on the Judiciary Committee. There is no evidence Paradigm participated in the scheme. James attended the event and used it as an opportunity to talk business with his Southern associates, according to the book. “My only contact with First Pennsylvania was with a junior loan officer who wanted to see me about my brother’s loan. In August 2019, Caroline Biden, 33, a niece of former Vice President Biden, was busted in Lower Merion Township, Penn., for driving under the influence and without a license, public records show. Biden spent three days on nearby Keewaydin Island where his brother and sister-in-law, James Biden, Sr. and Sara Jones Biden, purchased a … James Biden's children: James Biden's son is Nicholas Biden James Biden's son is James Biden Jr. James Biden's daughter is Caroline Biden. In February 2009, less than a month after Joe Biden was sworn in as vice president and Hunter served as honorary co-chairman of the inaugural committee, Stanford was charged with a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, one of the largest in U.S. history. “We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden.”. Her arrest, which was never made public, was at least the ninth among Joe Biden’s close family, and followed incidents involving his brother Frank, his son Hunter and his daughter Ashley. The Biden family are of English, French and Irish descent. Biden spent three days on nearby Keewaydin Island where his brother and sister-in-law, James Biden, Sr. and Sara Jones Biden, purchased a … Lotito claimed in his complaint that Hunter had entered into an employment agreement with Paradigm that entitled Hunter to draw an annual salary of $1.2 million. “I thought we had a good chance during a downturn in that market to become a player and I was wrong, so we closed it down,” Richter told the magazine Arabian Business in 2014. The Bidens told the News Journal that the senator placed the call only because the bank was telling James that a default would be embarrassing for Joe. Separately, the Justice Department began investigating whether Rales had defrauded the bank in his unrelated dealings with it. He did not respond to request for comment, but has said previously that he has been “sober for a long time.”. He wanted me to use my influence with my brother. In 2017, Joe Biden told a Vanity Fair writer that he sometimes wished that one of his children had gotten rich in order to provide for him in his old age. By the mid-1990s, he was working with a crew of corrupt Mississippi operators, as detailed in journalist Curtis Wilkie’s 2010 book, The Fall of the House of Zeus. To make such a settlement work, Congress would have to bless it by immunizing the tobacco companies against future legal claims. The pattern of dubious associations and possible conflicts of interest would continue later with Hunter’s foreign dealings, which led him to a lucrative appointment to the board of a Ukrainian oil company and to deals with firms connected to the Chinese state. Ho was convicted on seven counts in December. A year later, the man who took it over from him, Salvatore Cardile, was fighting First Pennsylvania in court, claiming the bank had set him up to take the failing club off of James Biden’s hands. While declining to discuss specifics, Owens told the News Journal that from a “philosophical” perspective there would be nothing wrong with such a recommendation. Neither James nor Lion Hall appear in federal lobbying disclosures. “Listen, his name helps him get in the door, but it doesn’t help him get business,” Hill International’s founder, Irvin Richter, told Fox Business Network of James. Located on Keewaydin Island, a barrier island off the coast of Naples that is accessible only by boat, the house is owned by James Biden, Sr. and his wife Sara. Six months later, the firm announced a contract to build 100,000 homes. In November 2017, federal agents in New York arrested Ho on suspicion of bribing government officials in Chad and Uganda. Painter said Biden should pledge that if he were elected president, he would ask his relatives to refrain from business practices that could pose ethical quandaries, such as taking foreign sources of financing. In 1999, Biden was a passenger in a car involved in a fatal drunk-driving accident. Wilkie said he never heard back. James Biden, known socially as Jimmy, is seven years younger than Joe and a dead ringer for his famous older brother. In September 2008, with the financial system melting, an executive at Paradigm registered “Paradigm Stanford Capital Management Core Alternative Fund” with the SEC. In the late summer of 2006 Joe Biden’s son Hunter and Joe’s younger brother, James, purchased the firm. The crisis spurred several investigations into the bank’s lending practices and political connections. | Politico Illustration; AP. Firefighters unions have been among Joe Biden’s closest political allies since the start of his political career. Biden’s son Hunter’s long history of drug abuse began in 1988 with an arrest for drug possession — at around the same time his father was intensifying his War on Drugs bonafides and pushing for stiffer sentences for drug users. In 2012, Fox Business pegged James Biden’s net worth at $7 million. The same year Hunter was arrested, Sen. Biden voted for the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which specifically targeted the use of crack cocaine, making it the only narcotic with a mandatory penalty for possession. A former executive at HillStone and a person involved in negotiating TRAC’s deal with the Iraqi government both told POLITICO that James Biden played no role in the deal, but the founder of HillStone’s parent company has said the Biden name was an asset. In the Bidens' first months at the helm, Paradigm reached an arrangement with Longship Capital Management, a New York investment firm, in which Longship would serve as an investment adviser to Paradigm, according to an Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Those plans were heating up around August 2007, when Patterson, Balducci and Scruggs co-hosted a high-dollar fundraiser for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in Oxford, Mississippi. Despite a lack of experience in the construction industry, he was named an executive vice president at HillStone International, a subsidiary of New Jersey-based construction firm Hill International, in November 2010. As Joe Biden runs for the Democratic presidential nomination on the argument he can strongly appeal to the party’s dwindling base of blue-collar supporters, the candidate has often made the point that he hasn’t gotten rich from his decades in politics.