Richard Haynes

Richard Haynes, the Texas lawyer known in courthouses as Racehorse, became a key source for the Washington Post’s account of a hidden campaign-finance route through Mexico. Representing Robert Allen, a leader of Richard Nixon’s campaign organization in Texas, Haynes described a system that could disguise who supplied money and protect donors from scrutiny. His account expanded the scale of the story: the $89,000 associated with a Mexican transfer was, he estimated, part of a much larger operation that had moved $750,000 across the border.

Identity and Role

Haynes represented Allen, who headed the Nixon campaign organization in Texas and, according to Haynes, served as a conduit for money sent through Mexico. The book presents Haynes as an operator familiar with the rough-and-tumble of Texas politics and corporate affairs. His nickname, Racehorse, was known in courthouses from Dallas to Austin; his breezy, swashbuckling manner accompanied claims that were both specific and politically consequential.

Haynes entered the reporting through Martin Dardis, who was investigating the Mexican checks. Dardis told Carl Bernstein that Haynes had explained the laundering arrangement to him. Bernstein then obtained Haynes’s confirmation directly from Houston. The information thus passed from a lawyer representing a participant in the money flow, through an investigator, and into the newspaper’s account. Haynes was not presented as a neutral official describing a government finding: he was Allen’s lawyer, and the claims about the scheme were attributed to him.

The Mexican Funding Route

Haynes traced the arrangement to the weeks before April 7, the effective date of a new campaign-finance law and the final day anonymous contributions could legally be accepted. Maurice Stans, he said, made a last fund-raising swing through the Southwest. Donors who were reluctant to support a Republican presidential candidate could be assured that their identities would remain hidden by routing contributions through a Mexican middleman whose bank records could not be subpoenaed by American investigators.

The proposed route served more than one purpose. It could conceal the source of contributions and allow the Committee for the Re-election of the President to receive money from corporations, which campaign laws barred from contributing to political candidates. Haynes also described potential donors among business executives and labor leaders having difficulties with government regulators, special-interest groups, large Las Vegas gambling interests, and mob-dominated unions. These categories were part of his account of the operation’s reach, not a list of donors individually established in the passage.

Contributions could arrive as checks, security notes, or stock certificates. According to Haynes’s description, they would be taken across the border, converted into cash in Mexico City through an account opened by a Mexican national with no known connection to the Nixon campaign, and then sent on to Washington. Stans, Haynes said, kept the sole carefully guarded record in Washington so contributors would not be forgotten when they later sought assistance. The structure joined concealment with political access: the trail was obscured, while the record of the donor’s identity remained useful to those controlling it.

Haynes identified the participants’ functions within this route. Allen passed funds onward to Mexico, including the $89,000 that had entered Bernard Barker’s bank account. Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre acted as the money-changer, converting checks and notes supplied by Allen into American dollars, in cash and dollar drafts drawn on Ogarrio’s Banco Internacional account. Haynes estimated that Stans and two principal fund-raisers in Texas had moved $750,000 through Mexico during the final weeks before April 7. That figure transformed the story from an inquiry about a specific set of checks into an allegation of a much broader financing system.

Haynes’s Account of Fund-Raising

Haynes described Stans’s appeals as carefully calibrated. Stans would approach wealthy Democrats who had not previously supported a Republican, discussing their concerns about federal regulation and presenting the campaign as a possible point of access in Washington. Haynes characterized the appeal as stopping short of an explicit promise or threat, but said the implication was clear: contributors could give without their political opponents or business competitors finding out.

He also said Stans could accept company stock when a prospective donor claimed to be short of cash. Haynes described the requested contribution as roughly ten percent of a wealthy businessman’s income, framed as a price worth paying to keep Richard Nixon in office and preserve a channel of contact. In this telling, the arrangement depended not only on secret transfers but on a persuasive exchange: money in return for anonymity and anticipated access. Haynes’s account made the political meaning of the route legible without presenting its operation as merely a technical method of moving funds.

Haynes spoke of the system as longstanding, attributing its operation to Stans and Nixon over a period of years. He treated the practice as ordinary political giving, even while describing the concealment that made it possible. That contrast matters to the account: the route was represented by its defender as an accepted way to contribute, but its anonymity enabled sources of money that campaign law prohibited or that donors had reason to keep hidden.

Reporting Consequences and Significance

The timing gave Haynes’s claims particular force. On August 26, three days after Nixon had been renominated, the General Accounting Office report was released for the Sunday papers. It listed eleven apparent and possible violations of the new law, referred the matter to the United States Department of Justice for possible prosecution, and stated that Stans maintained at least $350,000 in cash in a secret fund in his office. The fund had at one time included money from Kenneth Dahlberg’s $25,000 check and the four Mexican checks totaling $89,000.

Carl Bernstein dictated an account of the Mexican route and Haynes’s $750,000 estimate from Miami, while Bob Woodward wrote the story based on the audit report. The two lines of reporting placed the documented checks and secret cash fund alongside Haynes’s larger account of how contributions had allegedly been raised and concealed. His estimate did not simply enlarge the reported sum; it supplied a proposed mechanism, participants, donor rationale, and route by which money could move beyond ordinary scrutiny.

Haynes’s role in the narrative is therefore that of a source whose access came through legal representation and whose account linked individual transfers to a wider political-finance operation. The book records his assertions and their value to the reporting, while leaving them attributed rather than converting every element into an independently established fact. Through his account, the Mexican checks became evidence not only of money crossing a border, but of a system in which secrecy, donor protection, and the prospect of political access were intertwined.