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Amin has been a fond Page customer since 1973. That year a Page vice president sold Amin a Gulfstream after giving him a lift from Uganda to a meeting of Third World leaders in Algiers. Page subsequently sold Amin a Lockheed cargo plane and furnished crews for it. When Amin wanted to buy medical supplies and seed wheat, Page executives rounded them up from U.S. suppliers. Amin gave Wilmorite the contract to build Uganda's new $5 million U.N. mission in Manhattan. Only after Congress began investigating U.S. suppliers selling equipment to Uganda about a year ago did Page break its aircraft service contract with Amin.
Wilmot insists that the SEC charges are without merit and dismisses criticism about dealing with Amin. Says he: "You don't have to believe in a man's political philosophy to do business with him."
Jim Wilmot, reports TIME New York Correspondent Robert Parker, has always known how to mix business and politics. Son of an Irish immigrant tailor, Wilmot left high school to help support his family and, by 21, was deeply involved in Rochester's Democratic politics. Through political connections, he got a job as assistant manager of the city's airport. He took flying lessons from Elmer Page, a local instructor, and in 1939 joined him and three other men to form Page Airways, which operated a flying school and charter service. It began with two Piper Cubs, a Waco biplane and a desk borrowed from a Democratic ward office.
As he prospered, Wilmot became an important Democratic Party fund raiser. He has entertained New York Governor Hugh Carey and Robert Kennedy in his Rochester home. After his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1968, Hubert Humphrey relaxed at Wilmot's 400-acre hunting reserve at Mendon, N.Y. Wilmot, his friends and associates contributed large sums to the 1974 reelection campaign of Senator Daniel Inouye, member of the Senate Aviation Subcommittee, and in 1976 to a fund set up by House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill, then majority leader, for the campaigns of Democratic Congressmen.
Wilmot helped organize Democratic fundraising dinners in the mid-1970s, when Robert Strauss headed the Democratic National Committee and funneled legal work on his aviation and real estate interests to Strauss's Dallas law firm. When Strauss left the board of Columbia Pictures to join the Carter Administration last year, Wilmot took Strauss's seat.
Although it could be many months before the SEC's charges come to trial, Wilmot's days as a highflyer in international aviation seem over. Last month Grumman sold its Gulfstream-manufacturing subsidiary to American Jet Industries, of Van Nuys, Calif. Its president, Allen Paulson, says flatly that Page will not be asked to help sell any more Gulfstreams.