Crooks always have a swanky address. 

Guess this was too truthworthy for the Globe to include.....

Developers, Mayor Menino and others gush about  Brown  Brothers Harriman's projected Financial District move (" Brown  Brothers moving to Post Office Square," Business, Jan. 8). The article, which lauds the company as "the oldest privately held financial institution in the country," describes their work as providing "investment management, corporate banking, and advisory services."

With all due respect to the financial needs of Boston's business community, a bit of research confirms that the company performed far more than innocuous financial consulting during its long history of operation.

Brown  Brothers was among defendants in the 2007 Supreme Court reparation case Farmer-Paellmann v.  Brown & Williamson brought by a descendant of slaves, and in fact, was long involved in slave cotton trading. According to a Feb. 21, 2002 story in USA Today, James and William  Brown initially created their merchant bank through extending loans to Southern plantation owners, as well as "brokering slave-grown cotton shipments from Southern ports to mills in New England and Britain." Louisiana court records, states the article, depict "the fullest picture of the  Browns as slaveholders...affirming  Brown's claim to three Concordia Parish cotton plantations totaling 4,614 acres, and the plantations' 346 slaves, each named in court records."

Yes, that was 1861, and this is now, but this malevolent activity was nonetheless the basis from which the company began its ascent into becoming the Globe's "oldest privately held financial institution in the country."

But an even more sinister operation by the company was to occur nearly a century later. Upon the company's merge with two other firms to become  Brown  Brothers Harriman in 1931,  Prescott Bush (W's grandfather), became an employee. According to a September, 2004 article in The Guardian ("How Bush's grandfather helped Hitler's rise to power"), newly-accessible National Archives files have revealed that BBH aided in no less than Hitler's war machine. "[t]he documents reveal that the firm he worked for,  Brown  Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade," the article states. This is further corroborated in a New York Times' New York Magazine study of the Bush family's New York roots that cites a 1942 New York Herald Tribune article that ties Prescott Bush to "a Dutch bank with ties to the Nazi Party." New York Magazine alludes to this providing fodder for future conspiracy theorist blogs; nonetheless, the theorizing is grounded in fact.

"Fritz Thyssen (and indirectly, the Nazi party) had obtained their early financing from  Brown  Brothers Harrinan, and its affilate, the Union Banking Corporation...the Bush family's holding company....," states former U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor and President of the Florida Holocaust Museum John Loftus in his treatise "How the Bush family made its fortune from the Nazis: The Dutch connection."

Many companies have past dirty dealings, but my research points to those of  Brown  Brothers as particularly insidious. Given the nature of these dealings, I believe that it would have been prudent for the Globe to include references to this information in its overwhelmingly glowing tribute to this company. Or do financial benefits outweigh a reasoned and comprehensive examination of a local office of an industry giant?