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Tuesday July 3, 2001; 11:27 a.m. EDT

Rogergate Witness Details Clinton Company's China Swindle

A California businessman who helped a company owned by former first brother Roger Clinton import building materials and other products from China said Sunday that Clinton's business partners swindled him and another businessman out of hundreds of thousands of dollars on different import deals.

Davey Crockett, a distant relation to the fabled frontiersman and one-time candidate for Congress, has been a successful importer of Chinese-made apparel for years.

But more recently he's become a valuable witness to government investigators who are trying to determine the extent of Roger Clinton's contact with

Chinese business interests as well as the source of a mysterious 1999 deposit in Clinton's personal bank account: $250,000 in travelers checks drawn on banks in Taiwan and Venuzuela.

Roger has refused to talk to a federal grand jury in New York as well as a House committee currently examining allegations that he took cash in exchange for promises of presidential pardons.

Crockett, on the other hand, confirmed over the weekend that he has been talking to government investigators about a 1999 trip he made to China with Clinton's business partners, Dickey Morton and George Locke -- who have both refused to testify citing their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.

In his first broadcast interview anywhere, the international businessman told WABC Radio's John Batchelor and Paul Alexander that Roger Clinton's company, CLM LLC, was a corrupt operation that used his influence to gain access to China trade then defrauded those who bankrolled the deals.

While staying with Roger's business partners in Shanghai, Crockett said he was privy to phone conversations made to Clinton in California.

ALEXANDER: What was the nature of the phone calls between Locke and Morton and Roger Clinton? What would they talk about?

CROCKETT: They cited the contracts, the amount of money that was going to be made on the contract or the order and, you know, to have Roger come over there. And Roger -- since Bill Clinton was really, really well received and well liked in China -- they felt that his brother Roger would be the same way.

BATCHELOR: And you had every reason to believe that what they were telling you about Roger Clinton was true; that he had access to his brother, that there were going to be many contracts come your way because of that access.

CROCKETT: Correct.

The government witness also revealed that Shanghai officials were preparing a gala reception celebrating the former first brother's arrival.

CROCKETT: Yeah, I mean we even went as far as to -- there's several mayors in Shanghai -- there's just not one. And we even had a reception that was going to be planned through Shanghai, which, as you know, is a very, very large city, to welcome Roger....

BATCHELOR: Your understanding was that you were going to bring (Morton and Locke) into China and that Roger was going to come later. Is that correct?

CROCKETT: Right, right.

Ultimately, the Clinton brother declined to make the trip for reasons that are still unclear to Crockett.

The California businessman said his relationship with Clinton's company came unraveled when he learned that Morton had conned him out of $30,000 in a plan to import cement from China.

BATCHELOR: You also discovered that Locke and Morton and CLM were up to registering shadow companies that were looking to profit on your work in China.

CROCKETT: Yeah, we did a Nevada corporation cause of the tax loophole that we could have gotten out of Nevada.

BATCHELOR: This is for American Gypsum?

CROCKETT: Right, instead of a California corporation. So we filed it, Nevada Corp. The next thing I know Dickey Morton had filed a same name, same everything, American Gypsum -- but he did it in Arkansas. So I confronted him on it and that's when everything blew up.

BATCHELOR: That's when you realized you were dealing with swindlers, not businessmen.

CROCKETT: Yeah, it was just -- yeah, absolutely.

BATCHELOR: Did you lose more than that $30,000?

CROCKETT: Yeah, I lost the next order that came in which was a potential of about a half-million dollar commission, which we should have split.

Crockett described another CLM swindle that involved the importation of Chinese sheet rock.

CROCKETT: There was a successful period of time with this commodity (sheet rock), you'd bring it in and there was tremendously large profits being made on this one commodity. So this is why we jumped into sheet rock.... So (CLM) got this guy and got him to put the money up. The goods arrived late. They didn't even have enough money to even unload the ship when it got into Georgia....

ALEXANDER: There's a person who puts up this money, it gets over here -- and then how does he get swindled?

CROCKETT: Well, he got swindled for two reasons. Number one; he put the money up and was promised the goods in December -- November or December. The goods arrived in January. So right then all of his customers were late. Number two; the market had just collapsed then. The price of sheet rock was just going straight down.

ALEXANDER: And so how much had he paid for sheet rock to get it over here?

CROCKETT: Oh, he paid over a million-and-a-half.... In fact, the sheet rock is still sitting in the warehouse.

BATHELOR: How much did the CLM crowd take from this shipment that they...

CROCKETT: Well, they got their commission. They got their commission of about a-half-million dollars.

BATCHELOR: This is a deal that happened late 1999 into 2000?

CROCKETT: Correct.

BATCHELOR: And you believe that they took a half-a-million dollar payment?

CROCKETT: Four to five hundred thousand dollars

BATCHELOR: Four to five hundred thousand dollars in China?

CROCKETT: Correct....

The experienced China trader said Roger Clinton was slated to get a cut of the swindled cash.

BATCHELOR: American Gypsum Cement Products, which you organized with them, that was your understanding that in that group was going to be Clinton, Locke and Morton with you.

CROCKETT: Well, yeah, Roger was always going to receive money for helping.

Crockett said that when the FBI asked about the former first brother's

involvement in the company's suspect dealings, he told them, "There's just no way that Roger wouldn't know about CLM."

-- Anonymous, July 04, 2001