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Political Figure |
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Bahamian minister and lawyer who arranged casino exemptions for clients tied to Meyer Lansky, was disgraced by a 1967 royal commission, and was kept as a client by Wackenhut during its Florida war on crime. | Nassau, Bahamas | 2026-09-21 | 2026-10-09 |
Sir Stafford Sands was a lawyer and minister in the government of the Bahamas before 1967. He acted for Wallace Groves at Freeport, and when James Crosby's Mary Carter Paint Company bought Paradise Island it acquired "the legal services of Sir Stafford Sands." Crosby called him "a very impressive intellectual." In the middle of 1965 Sands "arranged permission for the construction of the desired bridge connecting Paradise to Nassau, and obtained transfer of the Bahamian Club's certificate of exemption" from the gambling laws to the new casino.1
After the election of Lynden Pindling's government in 1967 a royal commission under Sir Ranulph Bacon examined the casinos. "Sir Stafford Sands, disgraced by revelations of the millions that he'd made drafting legislation for Mob-connected entrepreneurs, retired to his castle in Spain."1
The commission also took testimony on Lansky's approaches to Sands. Sands later acknowledged to the commission that Meyer Lansky had offered him a payment in 1960 to permit gambling on Grand Bahama, and that he turned the offer down.2
In February 1967 the crime reporter Hank Messick resigned from the Wackenhut Corporation, which Governor Claude Kirk had hired to fight organized crime in Florida, because the company kept Sands as a private client while it was supposed to be pursuing Meyer Lansky. "I quit the Wackenhut Corp. because I have reluctantly concluded a cruel hoax is being perpetrated upon the people of Florida," he said.3
Footnotes
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Hougan, Jim. Spooks: The Haunting of America: The Private Use of Secret Agents. William Morrow, 1978, pp. 381-382, 392-393. ↩︎
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FBI file 92-2831 (Meyer Lansky, Miami office), Section 16, undated newspaper article on the Lucayan Beach casino and the Groves companies, including Sands's acknowledgment to the commission. https://archive.org/details/MeyerLansky ↩︎
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"Wackenhut Aide Quits; 'Cruel Hoax,'" The Tampa Tribune, February 17, 1967, and St. Petersburg Times clipping, in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Tampa file on the Wackenhut Corporation. https://archive.org/details/WackenhutCorporation ↩︎