Alliance "might garner a healthy share of additional monies to manage as initially $5 to $6 billion in monthly payroll-tax revenues stream into private accounts," Gabriel noted on July 4, 2000.

Less than three weeks earlier, David Williams, the chairman of Alliance, had given $100,000 to the Republican National Committee. Together with his wife Reba, who is a director at the firm, Williams owns 1.4 percent of the company. Alliance manages $454 billion, much of it in pension funds for employees at 43 major companies and for public workers in 41 states. Between 1997 and 1999, Williams received $13 million in bonuses.

Williams is a former president of the New York Society of Securities Analysts and a former director of the Financial Analysts Federation, both influential trade associations. He is also chairman of the Foreign Policy Association, a nonpartisan think tank, which has held recent forums on missile defense programs, the U.S. embargo of Cuba, and the Asian financial crisis.

Reba Williams, once a fundraiser for Rudolph Giuliani, broke with the New York mayor in 1998 in a public dispute over the shape of the city's flagpoles. Giuliani's parks commissioner had bypassed the arts commission, which she chaired, and decided to raise poles with horizontal crossbars resembling ship masts. Williams resigned her post and sued the city, though the case was later dropped.

"I was so proud of being part of the Giuliani administration," she told the New York Times. "I honestly thought that Giuliani was using the law to make life better for everybody. The one time I had a brush with it, though, I found out that it's not true."