Robert H. Allen

Robert H. Allen, president of Gulf Resources and Chemical Co. and head of the Nixon campaign organization in Texas, appears in the investigation as a crucial intermediary in a reported system for moving campaign funds through Mexico. The evidence places him between Texas fund-raisers and Mexican lawyer Manuel Ogarrio Daguerre, who was said to convert checks and financial notes into dollars. Allen’s significance lies in that intermediary position: investigators followed his contacts and the money associated with him, while the account of the scheme came through other people rather than a public explanation from Allen himself.

Identity and Investigative Attention

In mid-August, as Bernstein called employees of the Texas Committee for the Re-election of the President, he learned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had interviewed the committee’s treasurer, Emmett Moore. The agents had asked about money allegedly transmitted to and from Mexico. Moore emphasized that their questions concerned Allen, the committee chairman, rather than Moore’s own conduct. They were particularly interested in Allen’s relationship with Ogarrio, a Mexico City lawyer who represented Gulf Resources’ interests in Mexico.

That detail connected Allen’s corporate position, his campaign role, and the investigators’ inquiry into cross-border transfers. It did not, by itself, establish what Allen knew about the purpose or full structure of those transfers. Moore said he did not know why money had been moved across the border, and the reporting at this stage presented the Mexican connection as a question to be pursued, not a settled explanation. Allen’s importance initially emerged through the questions asked about him and the professional relationship investigators were examining.

The Reported Mexican Money Route

Bernstein tried to reach Allen at both home and office, leaving messages that went unanswered. On the morning Maurice Stans summoned a General Accounting Office auditor to Miami, Bernstein called Allen’s Houston home at six o’clock in the morning—five o’clock in Texas. Allen, still sleepy, declined to discuss the matter because it was before the grand jury. His refusal offered no account of the transactions, but it made clear that the inquiry had reached a subject under grand-jury scrutiny.

The reporters’ understanding of the alleged operation came instead through Richard Haynes, the Texas lawyer representing Allen. Haynes described a money chain intended to make contributors’ identities difficult to trace. According to his account, shortly before April 7—the effective date of a new campaign-finance law and the last day anonymous contributions could legally be accepted—Stans made a final fund-raising trip through the Southwest. Contributions were reportedly to be carried into Mexico, deposited in Mexico City through an account established by a Mexican national with no known ties to the Nixon campaign, converted there, and sent on to Washington. Haynes said the arrangement could protect donors’ anonymity and allow the committee to receive funds from sources barred or made risky by campaign rules and government scrutiny.

Haynes confirmed the operation to Bernstein from Houston. In his description, Allen was the conduit for funds moving to Mexico, including the $89,000 that had gone into Bernard Barker’s bank account. Ogarrio, Haynes said, served as the money-changer: he converted checks and notes Allen gave him into American dollars, either in cash or in dollar drafts drawn on his account at Banco Internacional. This account gave the investigation a specific route to examine—Allen to Ogarrio, then the conversion and onward movement of funds—rather than merely an unexplained reference to Mexico.

Scale and Limits of the Account

Haynes estimated that $750,000 raised by Stans and his two principal fund-raisers in Texas had passed through Mexico during the final weeks before April 7. That estimate described the scale of the broader operation, not an amount shown to have been handled by Allen alone. Similarly, Haynes’s characterization of Allen as a conduit identifies his reported function in the chain; the available account does not supply Allen’s own description of his actions, establish that he designed the arrangement, or specify what he understood about every contributor or recipient.

The distinction matters because the story assembled the scheme from several layers of testimony. Moore relayed the FBI’s interest and distinguished Allen from himself; Haynes, as Allen’s lawyer, explained the route and Allen’s alleged role; and Allen declined to comment while the matter was before the grand jury. These accounts made Allen a central link in the reporters’ reconstruction without turning the unanswered questions about his knowledge into established facts. His place in the narrative is therefore both concrete and bounded: the reported movement of funds ran through him, but the evidence presented here does not give his own version of that involvement.

Significance in the Investigation

Allen’s role helped make the Mexico connection legible as a chain of people, accounts, and conversions. His campaign position connected Texas fund-raising to the committee; his relationship with Ogarrio connected the Texas organization to a lawyer representing Gulf Resources in Mexico; and the reported $89,000 transfer connected the route to money later found in Barker’s account. Each link sharpened the inquiry, while also showing why tracing the source of funds was difficult: the reported process depended on intermediaries and conversion into cash or dollar drafts.

The account also separated Allen’s function from the alleged design and broader scale of the operation. Haynes attributed the fund-raising initiative to Stans and described Allen as a channel, while assigning the currency conversion to Ogarrio. Allen’s refusal to speak left those descriptions untested by his own public account in the material presented. For the investigation, he was not merely a Texas campaign official whose name surfaced in an FBI inquiry; he was the reported passage point through which a concealed financial route could be followed, and a boundary beyond which the reporters still lacked a direct explanation.