Mexican Checks

The Mexican Checks were four payments that passed through a Mexican intermediary to obscure the source of campaign contributions. Their significance emerged when Carl Bernstein found them alongside a separate $25,000 cashier’s check: together, the deposits connected a cross-border laundering mechanism to money later associated with a secret campaign fund and the Watergate espionage operation. The checks made a hidden financial chain legible, but the reporting also shows why tracing money did not, by itself, settle every question about who knew what or authorized its use.

Appearance and Initial Discovery

The four checks matched the description previously published by The New York Times. Each had been drawn on a different American bank. On the reverse, an illegible signature appeared above the same typed notation, identifying Manuel Ogarrio D. and an account number. Their common endorsement suggested a shared point in the chain, even though the signatures themselves did not reveal who had handled them.

A fifth check in the records was distinct from the four Mexican Checks. Dated April 10, it was a cashier’s check for $25,000 drawn on First Bank and Trust Co. of Boca Raton, Florida, check No. 131138, payable to Kenneth H. Dahlberg. Bernstein copied it by hand as if making a facsimile. The four Mexican Checks and the Dahlberg check were deposited together on April 20, for a combined $114,000. Four days later, Bernard Barker withdrew $25,000; the other $89,000 was withdrawn separately. The records thus placed the four checks within a larger, precisely timed movement of money without making them identical to the Dahlberg instrument.

The Laundering Route

Martin Dardis explained the proposed mechanism to Bernstein after speaking with Richard Haynes, a Texas lawyer representing Robert Allen. In Dardis’s account of Haynes’s information, Maurice Stans had devised the arrangement to prevent investigators from tracing where contributions originated. Haynes described the Mexican intermediary as a way to make a money chain difficult to follow, not as a claim that the checks had been issued by Mexican banks: they began at different American banks and were routed through Mexico.

Haynes identified Allen, head of the Nixon campaign organization in Texas, as a conduit for funds sent to Mexico, including the $89,000 that had gone into Barker’s bank account. He described Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre as the money-changer who converted checks and notes from Allen into American dollars, either in cash or in dollar drafts drawn on his account at Banco Internacional. The endorsed notation on the checks gave the reporters a concrete detail to compare with this account of the route.

The timing mattered. Haynes said Stans had made a final fundraising trip through the Southwest shortly before April 7, the effective date of the new campaign-finance law and the last day anonymous contributions could legally be accepted. According to Haynes, the promise of anonymity was offered to contributors reluctant to support a Republican presidential candidate. Routing funds through a Mexican intermediary, he said, was intended to shield their source from U.S. investigators because the intermediary’s bank records were not subject to U.S. subpoenas. He also said the arrangement could permit contributions from corporations, which campaign laws forbade from giving to political candidates, as well as from other contributors concerned about disclosure.

From Checks to a Secret Fund

When Haynes confirmed his account to Bernstein from Houston, he estimated that Stans and two principal Texas fund-raisers had moved $750,000 through Mexico in the final weeks before April 7. That figure was an estimate of the larger operation, not the amount represented by the four checks. The checks’ identifiable contribution to the trail was narrower: they accounted for $89,000, while the separate Dahlberg cashier’s check supplied the additional $25,000 in the $114,000 deposit.

On August 26, three days after Richard Nixon had been renominated, the General Accounting Office report became available for publication. It listed 11 apparent and possible violations of the new law, referred the matter to the United States Department of Justice for possible prosecution, and reported that Stans maintained a secret cash fund in his office of at least $350,000. At one time, that fund included money from the Dahlberg check and the four Mexican Checks. This linked the checks to a larger pool of concealed campaign cash, while distinguishing the known $89,000 in the four checks from the fund’s minimum reported total.

The checks also belonged to a broader investigative problem: how money for sensitive political activity had been controlled and disbursed. A Washington Post report said a special account at the Committee for the Re-election of the President held more than $300,000 earmarked for sensitive political projects, with G. Gordon Liddy among its recipients. Later, former treasurer Hugh Sloan told Bernstein and Bob Woodward that John Mitchell had authorized campaign-fund expenditures by telephone, beginning in 1971, and that others, including Jeb Magruder, later received authority to approve payments. These accounts helped reporters investigate the organization around the funds; they do not establish that each Mexican Check paid for a particular operation or that the checks alone proved who authorized the Watergate break-in.

Reporting and Evidentiary Limits

Bernstein dictated an account of the Mexican laundering route for publication alongside Woodward’s report on the General Accounting Office findings. The reporters had also heard Haynes describe other fundraising tactics, but they chose not to publish those allegations at that stage. They were wary of his language and filed the claims for further investigation; a General Accounting Office investigator confirmed the substance of the Mexican laundering operation to Woodward. That distinction kept the reported mechanism separate from claims they could not yet adequately substantiate.

The checks’ investigative force lay in what could be followed: different American banks, a repeated endorsement notation, a shared Mexican intermediary, a combined deposit, and subsequent withdrawals. Their trail supported an account of concealment and connected particular money to a reported secret fund. It did not turn every broader allegation about contributors, political pressure, or operational authorization into a proven fact. In the reporting, the checks were both evidence and a threshold: enough to expose a route across borders, but not enough on their own to complete the chain of responsibility.