We didn't have a choice: Oil company chiefs had told our clients -- Natives who were out of cash, isolated and desperate -- that they wouldn't get a dime unless we agreed not to use the "f-word": fraud. Exxon would withhold payment for 20 years.
We buried the fraud charges -- yet Exxon still didn't pay for 22 years. By that time, a third of the Natives and fishermen in the lawsuit were dead.
And BP? Who said crime doesn't pay? BP walked away with a nominal payment to Alaska's Natives, fishermen and towns of $125 million -- 100 percent of it covered by insurance.
And that's what led, years later, to the incineration of 11 men on the Deepwater Horizon and 600 miles of Gulf coastline still poisoned today.
BP and other oil companies have a clear motive for these safety games: skimmer barges, crews, equipment and operations cost billions of dollars a year worldwide to man and maintain. It's cheaper to lie, cover up and buy the favor of politicians and regulators.
In London, BP executives told me on camera of their systematic bribery of presidents and their minions in the new Caspian Sea oil states. (Bribery charges against one bagman were dropped when in 2010 the National Security Agency acknowledged that it had authorized the bribes.)
But it's not just "over there" that BP spreads its largesse. BP's original sweetheart oil leases in the Gulf and the light hand of regulators were doubtless the result of favors -- monetary and sexual -- that the company lavished on U.S. regulatory agents at the Minerals Management Service, an agency that President Obama shuttered in response to the Deepwater Horizon blowout.
There's also the monetary and political love laid upon America's powerful. Although a foreign company, BP's chief in Alaska, Bob Malone, became a co-chairman and fundraiser for George W. Bush's election campaign.
Polluted Shores, Polluted Politics
In 2010 for the U.K.'s Channel 4 Television, I returned to Alaska with filmmaker Richard Rowley. In the quiet rivulets of the islands within Prince William Sound, we picked up gobs of oil with the telltale chemical markers of the Exxon Valdez. Then we flew to the Gulf Coast with Alaskan oil spill biologist Rick Steiner -- and found miles and miles of BP's oil oozing under beaches the company and the Obama administration had already declared clean.
Yet just last week, BP was awarded more tracts to drill in the Gulf even as its onetime vice president for Gulf exploration, David Rainey, stands trial on felony charges of obstruction of Congress.
It is clear that neither BP, its partners nor this administration can be trusted to safely punch more miles-deep holes in the Gulf of Mexico. As long as oil companies can pad their bottom line by scoffing at the law, as long as they can cheaply pollute the political process, the next disaster is not a matter of if, but when.
Palast's investigation of BP opens his latest film, "Vultures and Vote Rustlers." Prerelease editions are available on DVD and download for a donation to Palast's foundation for investigative reporting.
And read the complete untold story of the Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon disasters in Palast's "Vultures' Picnic," BBC Newsnight's Culture Program's Book of the Year.
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