“If I had a machine gun I’d shoot every one of them white sons of bitches.”
Henry Makarka was talking about the executives who came to him and his tribe 40 years ago to purchase their land at Valdez.
They were from the companies now known as Exxon and BP. The Tatitlek were paid the handsome price of $1 for Valdez, which the companies knew was worth billions.
How does BP get away with it? The same way the Godfather got away with it:
BP’s CEO of Alaskan operations hired a former CIA expert to break into the home of a whistleblower, Chuck Hamel, who had complained of conditions at the pipe’s tanker facility. BP tapped his phone calls with a US congressman and ran a surveillance and smear campaign against him.
When caught, a US federal judge said BP’s acts were “reminiscent of Nazi Germany.”