An American-registered drug plane has been plying the airspace over Central and South America carrying cargoes of cocaine for a good long while (authorities admit they’ve been “investigating” it since 2011) without apparent incident, until recently, when a newspaper in Costa Rica reported that the President of Costa Rica had been seen using it to fly to Hugo Chavez’s funeral, as well as the recent wedding of the son of Peru's Vice-President in Lima.

This was one of at least three seismic events recently which have shaken the drug trafficking industry. Most readers have probably only heard of one: the raid by Marines from the Mexican Navy last week near the US border in Nuevo Laredo that captured Los Zetas cartel kingpin Miguel Angel Trevino.

A predictably huge dose of back-patting and drug-war optimism ensued with his capture among U.S. and Mexican officials.  The second most powerful Mexican cartel—Los Zetas—had been dealt, they said, a potentially fatal blow.  

But, at a glance, Miguel Trevino doesn’t look like the kind of guy who is comfortable discussing laundering the billions of dollars his cartel makes with personal bankers at Wells Fargo or Deutche Bank. 

Instead, he resembles the kind of guy who hides his savings in his boots.

"Real drug lords don't get their names in the papers"

So to find a real drug kingpin, it would seem—a guy (or gal) charged with recycling the billions kicked out each and every year by the illegal drug trade—one needs to look further afield, or to events which don't receive much publicity in the US, perhaps because they don’t conform to the DEA’s narrative about the “war on drugs."

Simply stated the DEA's story (and they're sticking to it) is this: Operating from hide-outs in the mountains of Sinaloa and million-acre ranches in the Sonora desert, goes this narrative, with bandoliers loaded with spare ammunition strapped across their bare chests, Mexican drug lords direct the worldwide drug trade.

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In almost every country in which drugs are a factor, a corrupt elite in that country controls that country's drug trade.

(In Peru, for example, a reporters task force discovered that jets belonging to the Peruvian Air Force, and controlled by that country’s President Alberto Fujimori and intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesino, had for years been flying secret flight to Russia loaded with cocaine.)

Speaking of a “corrupt elite,” the recent troubles of the President of Costa Rica are instructive.

You mean, almost as soon as Obama left town?

Just six weeks ago, Laura Chinchilla was hosting visiting American President Barack Obama. "The stronger the economy and institutions, the weaker the drug trade," Obama told a joint new conference. “The war on drugs is the same everywhere.”

After a 22-hour stop, Obama trotted energetically across the tarmac to board Air Force One, waving good-bye from the top of the steps. Mission accomplished: greetings, photo ops, and a message left on the table.

Just a few days later, news broke that the President of Costa Rica—known to her faithful as Dona Laura—had flown to Venezuela for Hugo Chavez’s funeral, as well as to Peru for the wedding of the Peruvian Vice-President’s son, aboard a luxury jet belonging to Colombian drug traffickers.

The discovery was a big story all over Latin America. It was, in Wolf Blitzer's phrase, "happening now." And it set off a scandal which threatened to bring down Laura Chinchilla's government.

In the US, there was a UPI wire service story buried in the business section.

Chinchilla announced she was suspending all public appearances, and asked the press for "understanding" while she focused on taking "corrective actions."

It was a very, as it happens, popular plane

It bought her a day. But the facts were incontrovertible. The flights took place aboard an American-registered Citation 3 jet (tail number N93CW) which has flown at least 26 recent flights to Fort Lauderdale, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Colombia.

So, instead of challenging them, President Chinchilla claimed it had all been a big misunderstanding. She had been unaware that the plane she’d been flying aboard spent more time hauling loads of cocaine than it did flying government officials to weddings and funerals.

She had been—in a now time-honored phrase—victimized by unscrupulous employees. 

As if to prove her point, over the event-filled next few days she threw under the bus the nation’s intelligence chief, Mauricio Boraschim along with another member of her Cabinet, Minister of Communication Francisco Chacon( ironically, also Costa Rica’s drug czar), and even Chinchilla’s personal assistant.

All three were forced to resign. This seemed to quell, at least temporarily, the swelling calls for her resignation.

As it turns out, a number of Latin American politicians and celebrities have at one time or another flown on the plane. Topping the list of travelers would be Laura Acuna, a television presenter and one of Colombia’s top models.

Also aboard has been Andres Fernandez Acosta, Colombia’s former Minister of Agriculture; as well as Juan Pablo Ortiz Bravo who occupied the strategic position of Director of Customs under President Alvaro Uribe.

And Marilu Mendez, the former head of Colombia’s Directorate of Public Prosecutions (CTI), who just today (July 22) was charged with embezzlement, influence peddling and forgery of public documents.

One Bogotá columnist speculated, tongue firmly in cheek, about the reason so many celebrities and politicians were traveling on the plane of, and in the company of a controversial character and alleged drug trafficker.

There must be, he wrote, a lack of seats available on commercial airlines

"Complicated and complex situations from a criminal point of view"

The story has a big—and, predictably, largely unexamined—American component. But Latin American newspapers seemed less than eager to confront it.

Mauricio Boraschi, soon-to-be-the- ex-Costa Rican intelligence chief, offered a defense that, as an admission of guilt, could not be more revealing about the true nature of drug lords in Central, South, and North America.

The alleged drug trafficker, Morales, he explained, “has no convictions, or pending arrest warrants [but] has been linked to very complicated and complex situations from a criminal point of view.”

“Linked to very complicated and complex situations from a criminal point of view” turned out to mean that Morales had at some point offered to become an informant for the DEA.

But apparently nobody told the by-now professionally clueless Dona Laura.

The alleged drug trafficker, Gabriel Morales Fallon, told Latin American journalists that nothing untoward was going on, because the plane, which he admitted controlling, was actually owned and registered to a large American corporation, Cessna Finance.

The plane belongs to THX Energy, a company reporters learned was being controlled by Gabriel Morales Falan, who was a long-time lieutenant of one of South America’s leading drug traffickers. Colombian newspapers have for years linked Morales to Juan Carlos Ramirez, alias "Chupeta," until his arrest in Brazil.

And the Cessna Citation 3 Jet is indeed owned by Cessna Finance Corp of Wichita Kansas, and leased to an oil company, THX Energy, that is a subsidiary of a Canadian capital company called Birch Island Capital.

"A failed agricultural effort to export palm oil?"

The President and CEO of Birch is one Ron MacMicken, who is also a Director of Tolima Gold, Sintana Energy, and Santa Maria Petroleum (TSXV:SMQ), which bills itself as "a public junior oil and gas exploration company in Colombia."

MacMicken, his online bio says, is a former Managing Director of Investment Banking at Canaccord Genuity Corp, and claims to have been the “Lead financier and financial advisor of in aggregate over $1 billion of oil & gas transactions in the last three years.”

The problem— if there is one—is that the oil company he runs seem to observers to be a little… thin.

Currently it is trading at 04. a share.

Laura Chinchilla was alleged to have personal links to THX Energy, at least until sources revealed that in Costa Rica the company is involved—not in oil exploration—but a failed effort to export palm oil.

The parent company, Birch Island Capital, is itself owned by a US firm out of—of all places—Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It's  called Delavaco Capital, which is owned in turn by Andy DeFrancesco, who used to own night clubs in Toronto.

Today Andy sponsors a racing team and appears happy and prosperous.

Is everything kosher here? Who knows? A better question might be: Is it ever?

A key employee in Bogotá of the Canadian oil company owners of the drug plane flown by Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla was at the heart of the Contra Cocaine pipeline profiled by the late author Gary Webb in his 1996 best-seller “Dark Alliance.”

David Scott Weekly was both a CIA agent and drug trafficker, according to Webb’s book. His nickname was "Dr. Death." 

Today that same man is in Bogotá, reports Colombian newspaper “El Tiempo," lobbying the Colombian government for oil leases for an oil company exploring in the jungles of the Amazon Basin, with ties to drug trafficker Gabriel Morales, whose drug plane took Laura Chinchilla for a ride.

In Colombia today, there is a a brand new type of oil venture: the narco-energy play.  

El Tiempo reported, "Nobody has explained how a man with a past as singular ends litigation on behalf of a company whose promoters have ties to the oil Ricardo Morales, star of judicial scandals in Colombia."

“Why does a Vietnam veteran, an expert on weapons and the training of mercenaries, so frequently visit the offices of the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH) in Bogota?” asked El Tiempo..

The question may have been rhetorical. The answer is anything but.

A spy novel come to life

 The scandal embroiling Costa Rica’s President Laura Chinchilla for flying aboard an American-registered (N93CW) luxury Citation 3 jet continues with surprising new disclosures.

Costa Rica's President, sounding defensive and shrill, sacked three officials of her Aministration for what she conceded had been a "mistake." 

But many seem convinced the coziness they saw between major drug traffickers and their elected officials was evidence of far more than a lapse in judgment. And despite being Central America’s first elected woman leader, Dona Laura Chinchilla is not beloved by her people. 

Polls consistently show her to be the most unpopular President in modern Costa Rican history, perhaps because populations in third world countries have grown increasingly wary of the type of neo-liberal NGO’s (non-governmental organizations) based in Washington DC, for whom Chinchilla has worked for much of her career.

The Latin American press dubbed the aircraft in question the “Plane of Shame,”  and focused on identifying the powerful government officials who, like Laura Chinchilla, had availed themselves of its use, pointing out that the sheer number of senior Colombian and Costa Rican officials who had rubbed elbows on the plane with lieutenants for one of the worlds biggest drug lords was a measure of the corruption and hypocrisy of their ruling Latin American elites.

Its called a "burn run."

When the government of Costa Rica asked for assistance in disposing of a huge stash of cocaine and other drugs they’d accumulated during the past two years worth of drug trafficking busts—in airports, in airplanes, and on the high seas—the US was only too willing to help.

According to a spokeswoman for the DEA in Miami, it went off without a hitch. At least that's what the DEA says. If anyone actually saw the drugs destroyed, they're not talking.

A 24-ton no peek burn run

From Dover AFB, the Air Force sent crew of 12 aboard a C-17 Globemaster called the “Spirit of Delaware,” a huge military cargo plane half-a-football field long and almost as wide, that despite its size can land on short (3500 ft) runways even if they’re unpaved or unimproved.

The C-17 picked up the cocaine at San Jose’s International Airport. Pallets of cocaine from the OIJ evidence warehouse were loaded in two vans. The transfer was overseen by 200 Costa Rican military and law enforcement officers in tactical vehicles.

“I can confirm that we did assist Cost Rica in destroying 24 tons of cocaine. It took place at an undisclosed location outside Miami,” a DEA spokeswoman stated. “You’re the first person to ask.”

24 tons of cocaine is worth as much as three-quarters of a billion dollars. Yet the spokeswoman was unfazed.  Her tone was matter-of-fact. “We just took care of it,”  she said.

Except, if anyone saw Costa Rica’s cocaine go up in smoke, they have yet to come forward. 

So far, the explanations on offer are less than satisfactory.

Seldom-asked questions

It started with a question that hardly ever comes up. “How are we going to get rid of all this cocaine?” 

But law enforcement officials in Costa Rica were asking it several months ago. Or, at least, “allegedly" asking it. 

Because while no one is questioning that Costa Rica sent 24 tons of cocaine to the US to be incinerated, the operation has been received with what can be characterized as somewhere between skepticism and disbelief.

For one thing, the atmospherics are all wrong. Like the ritualized perp walk every notorious drug baron endures when caught, drug burnings are spectator events in Latin America, filled with ritual pomp. If he's there, El Presidente wears the sash of office. Generals in mirrored Raybans, decked out like beauty queens, medals shining like bling.

When Latin American drug agencies incinerate huge amounts of seized narcotics, which happens on a regular basis, there’s often a reviewing stand. Representatives from all the federal agencies involved in the bust stand around and smile.  They watch each other. They eye the drugs. There’s a couple of speeches. There's the traditional group picture in front of the piled-up dope.

Only then do they fire up the torches, and set fire to the bonfire. Spectators discreetly move downwind.

But not this time.

24 tons of cocaine, representing two years worth of interdiction by Costa Rica’s Coast Guard Service, the Justice Dept (OIJ), the Border Police, the Fuerza Publica (national police force) will meet a peculiarly low-key fate.

When the C-17 arrives in Miami, a Costa Rican judge is on the plane. At least, he's rumored to have been on the plane. The judge and the Costa Rican Consul in Miami are supposed to be on hand to confirm the delivery and destruction of the cocaine.

No such advisory has been forthcoming.

The biggest question: “Why?”

Most Latin American nations get rid of seized drugs by piling it up in a field and lighting a match. So why not Costa Rica?

“It had to do with new regulations from the Costa Rican EPA,” said the DEA’s spokeswoman. Cocaine, she insisted,  requires special incinerators that burn at 816 Celsius (1,500 Fahrenheit), with multiple chambers that filter out the hazardous fumes and leave nothing but carbon dioxide.

Pieced together from several Costa Rican newspapers, the story of how 24 tons of cocaine flew to Miami on a US Government plane goes like this:

Prior to the massive airlift of cocaine to Miami in late July, Costa Rica's Justice Dept (the OIJ) used to destroy seized drugs at a cement factory incinerator, until several unfortunate incidents resulted in the cancellation of the contract.

Bags holding 20 kilograms of pure cocaine began to go "missing."

Costa Rica went back to stockpiling their seized swag. Later, when employees began to complain they couldn’t walk around the drug warehouse because it was stuffed to the brim with cocaine, the cement factory agreed to donate a mini-incinerator, which burns up to 300 kilograms per hour of cocaine.

“By February of 2012 they’d burned so much coke that the incinerator began to malfunction. Fumes began escaping the incinerator’s chambers. Those involved—including judges supervising the destruction—began getting high.”

Math for Meth-heads

While DEA officials are understandably reluctant to look a 24-ton gift horse made of cocaine in the mouth, Costa Rica’s big donation raises a puzzling question:  Why doesn't the math add up?

Where exactly did Costa Rica get the 24 tons of cocaine they're turning over to the gringos?

"The cocaine had been seized over the course of the last two years during anti-drug operations in the country,” reported Costa Rica’s online newspaper CRHoy.com.

Two years. Two years worth of seizures would be June 2011 through June 2013.

In 2012 Costa Rican drug seizures totaled 15.5 tons. In 2011 they seized 7.4 tons. This year, when the US Air Force came calling, they were at about 5 tons.

Take half of the 2011 total (3.5), all of 2012 (15.5 tons) and year to date through July in 2013(5 tons.)

That’s roughly 24 tons, about the same amount they turned over to the DEA.

Except… remember that mini-incinerator the cement factory gave them that broke, but not before successfully incinerating what newspapers said was up to 300 kilograms per hour, for an unspecified length of time?

If the mini-incinerator worked for just one day before it broke down, Costa Rican officials would have shaved 7 tons of  cocaine off their total. The C-17 cargo flight to Miami would have had just 14 tons of cocaine aboard.

So—in addition to the cocaine seized by Costa Rica over two years—where did the additional 7 tons of cocaine the USAF flying to Miami come from?

50-yard line seats for the Army-Navy game?

After 24 tons of pure cocaine from Costa Rica fell into their laps, US officials were perhaps understandably smug. It was the first hopeful sign that the Mexican drug cartels’ vise-like grip on US cocaine supply may be easing. The 24-ton import allowed the DEA to cut Mexican cartels’ market share in the US by at least five percent. 

To convey the thanks of a grateful nation, Costa Rican officials should expect at least some 50-yard line seats at next year’s Army-Navy game. Especially if the coke is as pure as has been rumored.

"Costa Rica is today the closest the U.S. has to a protectorate in Central America," said Sam Logan, director of Southern Pulse, a risk-analysis firm focused on Latin America.

Perhaps because of the publicity, Costa Rica’s Dept. of Investigations (OIJ in Spanish) announced they will “no longer send” cocaine or other controlled substances to the United States. The way they phrased it suggests the 24 ton shipment was more than a one-time event.

Of course, in the drug trade, one never knows. Apparently, that’s the point.

Irregularities surrounded the flight.

Although it was a big story all over Central America, the massive coke haul to Miami didn’t make the papers in the States. One reason it played big in Costa Rica involves a curious circumstance peculiar to that country.

Because Costa Rica has no military, their constitution requires legislative permission for any foreign military forces to enter the country. And, in fact, a Commander Bradley Ripkey from the US Coast Guard sent a letter to Costa Rican officials requesting permission for the Air Force plane to land.

A brief investigation discovered that Bradley Ripkey is, as advertised, a US Coast Guard Commander. So, there's that.

But the Costa Rica Star revealed that no official permission had been given to allow the U.S. military flight into Costa Rican airspace. Nor were legislators informed about the massive transfer of narcotics into American hands.

"We are investigating the government for what happened,” said the leader of one of Costa Rica’s leftist parties.

“There is no law regulating the export of drugs. It's a unique situation to put them onto a U.S. military plane.”

A unique situation? Not hardly. The legislator was being too kind.  

A long history of unique situations

 Surely he remembered the Contras. Surely he remembered Oliver North?

Surely he remembered CIA pilot Barry Seal flying weapons down to the Contras on old C-123 military cargo planes, and then flying back with a cargo hold filled with tightly-wrapped packages of cocaine.

Surely he remembered CIA official John Hull, who used a landing strip on his ranch in Costa Rica to send planes north filled with drugs?

None of them are allowed into the tiny nation-state of Costa Rica today. They've been permanently barred for drug trafficking. 

It is comforting to know that DEA chief administrator Michelle Leonhart, who traipsed around Afghanistan a few years ago on the arm of American drug trafficker Oliver North, will someday face sanctions too, just maybe not in this life.

A major Colombian drug trafficker who willingly sought extradition to the United States—even offering a $40 million bribe to officials in Brazil to send him to the US—apparently knew what he was doing. After being extradited and convicted in Federal Court in New York of felony drug charges that could have put him in jail for life, he disappeared.

His name is Juan Carlos Ramirez-Abadia (nickname: Lollipop). He's a figure in the recent scandal over the President of Costa Rica’s use of a drug plane belonging to Gabriel Morales Fallon, who was identified as one of his former lieutenants.

Juan Carlos Abadia's extradition to the US from Brazil in 2008 received major media coverage.The DEA was calling him the biggest drug cartel boss since Pablo Escobar. They say he led the world’s biggest drug cartel, exporting more than 500 tons of cocaine—worth in excess of $10 billion—just to the United States alone.

His name was in the news again several months later, when he asked (citing claustrophobia) to be placed in a bigger detention cell while awaiting trial in New York.

But when he pled guilty in March of 2010 to felony counts of drug trafficking and racketeering, not one newspaper in America carried the story. His conviction went completely unreported. The DEA didn't didn’t even issue a press release.

It was as if, when Pablo Escobar was gunned down in Colombia, the story didn't make the news.

Where is "My Boy Lollipop?"

Court documents indicate Abadia was sentenced to 25 years in Federal prison. But a search of the prisoner locater at the Federal Bureau of Prisons website does not list his name as among those currently incarcerated.

The Assistant US Attorney in charge of the Abadia case, Carolyn Pokorny, declined to comment on his whereabouts.  

And that’s where the trail ends, at least for the moment.

Another anomaly: There is no record of his sentencing.  Among the official court documents available through PACER is a transcript of a hearing held before the court accepted Abadia’s guilty plea, to ensure he understood his rights, and was pleading guilty voluntarily. There is a binding 9-page forfeiture agreement. Abadia agreed to forfeit $10 billion (that’s billion with a ‘b’) in currency and property to the US Government.  There is also an order by District Judge Sandra Townes accepting his guilty plea.

But—more than two years later—there is no record of his being sentenced. Whether the discrepancy concerns missing documents, years-long deferred sentencing, or some other cause is unknown at this time.

"Almighty Latin Kings and Queens" Beware

The situation is more than puzzling. On what should have been a banner day for the DEA and the Department of Justice, Drug Kingpin Juan Carlos Ramirez-Abadia was well on his way to being erased from public memory. 

As an organization, the DEA has shown that it excels at only one thing: shamelessly flogging its own dubious achievements. That, and putting the best face possible on the long-ago lost drug war.

So why did they pass up the chance to announce they'd bagged & tagged the biggest drug lord to walk the earth since Pablo Escobar fell off a roof?  

A search of March 2010 press releases on the Department of Justice’s national website turned up . headlines announcing that a member of the “Almighty Latin King and Queens,” sentenced to 210 months for his role in a drug conspiracy; and a “Maryland Man,” convicted of sex trafficking, firearms and gun charges.

But nothing about Abadia's conviction.

One headline looked promising. It announced that a “Leader of Colombian Narco-Terrorist Organization” had been sentenced to more than 20 years for conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the U.S 

Alas, the DEA, as is well-known, plays favorites, and the narco-terrorist kingpin fixin' to do time had been a leader of the gritty and perennially out-of-favor-in-Washington FARC. Abadia, on the other hand,  had taken over the remnants of the "bandana-free" Cali Cartel, and turned it into the powerhouse North Valley Cartel.

A search of contemporaneous press releases on the US Attorney’s own website in Brooklyn showed they hadn’t even issued the standard boilerplate press release, thanking the DEA and the hard-working men and women of law enforcement etc., while trumpeting the significance of Ramirez-Abadia's conviction. 

A check of that month’s press releases at the national Department of Justice's Eastern District of New York site turned up Bloods gang members indicted on murder and racketeering. There was a headline touting a “leader of violent drug crew” getting life in prison, while another, “leader of violent drug crew,” unconnected and slightly luckier than the first, was being dished out  27 years.

But not one word about the (local!) conviction of a man who’d just admitted to shipping 500 tons of cocaine to the US.

A lot of money changing hands

Authorities estimated that Abadia’s North Valley Cartel employed hundreds of people, and controlled 60 percent of the drugs leaving Colombia for the United States and Europe each year, a significantly higher percentage than the Medellin bad boys– who always lagged the Cali Cartel, never mind the DEA–controlled in its heyday. 

His employees weren’t stringing up narco-banners over highways, or sharpening their machetes, cutting up corpses into pieces small enough to fit into 55-gallon drums or strapping bandoliers across their chests.  They were international businessmen and women, manufacturing and transporting multi-ton loads of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, destined for the US market for Abadia’s Drug Division; or counting and then launderering money, or couriering it for the Money Laundering Division.

They doled out bribes to police, politicians and military officials in the cartel’s Corruption Division; or carried out murder, torture, kidnapping and violent drug debt collections for the "Office of the Sicarios."

Law enforcement officials have confiscated more than 24 tons of cocaine from Abadia’s cartel associates, seized hundreds of properties; and dozens of legitimate corporations: pharmaceutical distribution companies, major currency exchanges, even thoroughbred horse breeding farms.

The Silence of those on the lam

Excessive government secrecy has long been common in cases involving national security. Less understandably, it is also common—suspiciously common—in cases involving drug trafficking.

The level of secrecy in the Abadia case is reminiscent of what was recently reported here involving a key figure in the biggest drug seizure on an airplane in Mexican history, the 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC-9 from St. Petersburg, Florida. 

Tracing the money from that massive drug bust led directly to the forced sale in 2008 of Wachovia, then America's 4th largest bank.

When a key figure in that case pled guilty to unrelated drug charges two years ago in a Federal Court in Miami, it was a secret to journalists, as well as to probation officials preparing his Pre-Sentence Report (PSI). It was even a secret to the Federal judge. Court transcripts reveal she was unaware the man she was sentencing had been a key figure in a case that brought down America's 4th largest bank.

Another "only in Miami" moment? Or something more?

The temptation was to write the "oversight" off as one of those “only in Miami moments,” which are encountered regularly by observers of judicial proceedings in South Florida.

(Another is upcoming in two weeks, when men associated with the Gambino Family go on trail for the murder of Gus Boulis, more than seven years after their arrest in 2006.)

But now its happened in Brooklyn, too.

Are there similarities between events in Miami and Brooklyn?

One stands out: the Asst. US Attorney's in each case specializes in major drug traffickers. In Miami, Asst US Attorney Hoffman handles everything involving Colombians.  When asked to comment on the false identity under which she prosecuted a key figure in the 5.5 ton DC-9 story, she declined.

In Brooklyn, Asst US Attorney Carolyn Pokorny  handles "all the big Colombian cases." Regarding the current whereabouts of the man she two years ago helped send to Federal prison for 25 years, she offered to put us in touch with the Court's Public Information Specialist.  

Might the reason both appear so tight-lipped be that they’ve been “read into” a sensitive and highly classified US operation involving drug trafficking which has been ongoing for decades now, and whose survival demands that the rest of America remain ignorant? 

Are these two well-placed Asst US Attorneys privy to information which indicates that US drug policy differentiates between drug traffickers who smuggle drugs for US interests… and everybody else?

Why is the debate over air strikes on Syria like America’s decades-long Drug War?

Because, if you’re one of those Americans unlucky enough to have left your security clearance in your other pair of pants, questions about either receive essentially the same answer:

“You’re not cleared for that information.”

An informed citizenry is the basis for democracy, say the civics books. But whether the subject is the coming punitive attack on Syria, or the latest developments in the drug war, an informed citizenry is less popular than a 4 am car alarm with Administration officials. It's less welcome than French kissing at a family picnic.

The evidence of Wednesday's televised House hearing on Syria—which featured Secretary of State Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff presumably too powerful for anyone to have told him that his comb-over looks ridiculous—was clear and unequivocal:

Walter Cronkite’s famous phrase “the public’s right to know,” has been officially replaced in the American lexicon with two deadly words designed to stop discussion in its tracks: “It’s classified!”

The botched intelligence about Iraq still casts a long shadow over decisions about waging war in the Middle East. But both Kerry and Hagel's explanations why the US needs to strike Syria were so vague as to be insulting.

Watching the two men act like Iraq never happened was stupefying. It was surreal.

You had to go back a long way to find someone who knew how to explain it, to New York Yankees great Yogi Berra…

Yogi said, "It's like deja vu all over again."

What happened to hope and change?

Florida Congressman Alan Grayson's questioning of Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel showed just how irritated officials become when they're taken to task for deliberate and arrogant vagueness.

GRAYSON: There’s been a report in the media that the administrations has mischaracterized post-attack Syrian military communications and that these communications actually express surprise about the attack. This is a very serious charge. Can you please release the original transcripts so that the American people can make their own judgment about that important issue? 

HAGEL: What transcripts are you referring to?

GRAYSON: The transcripts that were reported to take place after the attack in which the government suggested that they confirm the existence of an attack but actually its been reported that Syrian commanders are expressing surprise about the attack have taken place, NOT confirmed it.

HAGEL: Well, that’s probably classified. Congressman I’d have to go back and review what you’re referring to.

GRAYSON: You will agree that its important the Administration not mislead the public in any way about these reports won’t you?

HAGEL: Well of course, but I’m not aware that the Administration is not misleading the public about this or any other issue.

Yogi said, "Even Napoleon had his Watergate."

"Most likely, its classified.”

For anyone who yearned for something better after the Bush years, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

Sec. of Defense Chuck Hagel's attitude was as dismissive as an Exxon executive in a meeting with Greenpeace.

Still, Grayson, almost heroically, persisted. Someday in the future he may be credited for making it possible to utter the words "Florida" and "Congressman" together in a sentence without sneering.

GRAYSON: Will you agree the only way to put the matter to rest is to release the original reports in some redacted form?

HAGEL: Well, I’m not going to agree to anything until I see it, and see what it is. But, most likely, its classified.

GRAYSON: I understand that. I’m asking will you declassify it for this purpose.

HAGEL: I just gave you my answer. I have no idea what exactly you’re talking about.  I’d have to go back and look at it, I’d have to confer with others in our intelligence community. That’s all I can tell you now. Thank you.

And, with that, Hagel indicated just how done he was with Grayson. He reached forward and peremptorily turned off his microphone.

Yankee great Yogi Berra was ahead of his time. He said, "The future ain't what it used to be."

The Two John Kerry’s

Kerry accused Syrian government forces of killing 1,429 people in the chemical weapons attack, an absurdly specific number which showed him offering up statements incapable of standing up to the simplest tests of verisimilitude.

"Secretary Kerry seems to have been sandbagged into using an absurdly over-precise number," said Anthony Cordesman, former director of intelligence assessment at the U.S. Defense Department.

An intelligence analyst was quoted saying, 'There’s no way in hell the U.S. can back up an estimate of the death toll this exact."

It wasn’t a yellow cake moment by any means. But it was palpably untrue. .

When an anti-war protester interrupted the Senate hearing on Syria to yell, “We don’t want another war,” Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged the irony that he first appeared before the same Senate panel 42 years ago as an anti-war activist.

“When I was 27 years old, I had feelings very similar to that protester. And I would just say that is exactly why it is so important that we are all here having this debate, talking about these things before the country, and that the Congress itself will act representing the American people,” Kerry told the Foreign Relations Committee.

Huh?  It was a non-answer; it said nothing about how Vietnam Veterans Against the War protester John Kerry would view his current incarnation as a salesman advocating an attack on Syria. We’re left wondering: What happened to John Kerry?

“It’s the arc of a man’s life,” said Bill Delahunt, a former Democratic congressman from Massachusetts who has known Kerry since the two were young prosecutors. “His history gives him credibility. He speaks with such moral authority now — just as he spoke with moral authority when he entered the national stage.”

Sounds good. Too bad its not true. Then or now—a bad war is a bad war.

One of the most insidious things about American society today is officials feel they’re doing the public a favor by lying to us. We’re feckless morons incapable of critical thought. We can’t handle the truth.

Kerry didn’t used to feel that way. Clearly, his views have changed.

"He hits from both sides of the plate," Yogi Berra said. "He's amphibious."

If the Bush Administration lied to justify waging a war against Iraq, what truths still lie buried beneath the official explanation for what happened on September 11 2001?

Before discussion about 9/11 was squeezed—in a pincer movement worthy of Hitler’s Panzer divisions—between the so-called “official story” and the subsequent campaign of disinformation that gave conspiracy a bad name, there were some promising avenues of investigation where definitive answers might still be possible.

Here are a few that remain at the top of my list. There are many others. 

The FBI took a powder

On the 12th anniversary of the Sept 11 attack there has still been no official investigation into the murders of almost 3000 people that day. The Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee investigation, which met in secret, delivered a report famously containing 28 blank pages.

And anyone looking to the 9/11 Commission for answers had already been disillusioned, even before they issued “findings,“ because they were charged only with identifying what might have been done differently to prevent a future attack.

The FBI’s ballyhooed 4000-man “largest investigation in history” lasted just a little more than three weeks, until someone—we still don’t know who—mailed letters sprinkled with anthrax, changing the focus of the FBI investigation.

Days later, in an order describing the investigation of the terrorist hijackings as "the most exhaustive in its history," FBI Agents were ordered to curtail their investigation of the Sept. 11 attack. Officials said Robert Mueller, newly-sworn in head of the FBI, believed that his agents had a broad understanding of the events of Sept. 11.

"The investigative staff has to be made to understand that we're not trying to solve a crime now," said one law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It was now time to move on."

The order was said to have met with resistance from FBI agents who believed that continued surveillance of suspects might turn up critical evidence to prove who orchestrated the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Before all the breathless talk about missiles and holograms and termites in the World Trade Center took center stage, there had still been a few promising avenues of investigation where definitive answers might be possible without resorting to stadium-sized white noise generators.

Mohamed Atta at Maxwell Air Force Base

According to a flurry of stories between Sept 15 and 17 in the Washington Post, Newsweek, and Knight Ridder newspapers, as many as six of the terrorists, including ringleader Mohammed Atta, received training at U.S. military facilities.

"U.S. military sources have given the FBI information that suggests five of the alleged hijackers of the planes used in Tuesday's terror attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations in the 1990’s," Newsweek reported. Newsweek also reported that three of the hijackers received training at the Pensacola Naval Station in Florida.

"We always, always, always trained other countries' pilots,” a former Navy pilot told Newsweek about his years on the base. “When I was there two decades ago, it was Iranians. The Shah was in power. Whoever the country du jour is, that's whose pilots we train."

"In the wake of those reports we asked about the Pensacola Naval Air Station but we never got a definitive answer from the Justice Department," said a spokesman for Sen. Nelson. "We asked the FBI for an answer ‘if and when’ they could provide us one. Their response to date has been that they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult."

The Senator had received no reply to his request. "Speaking for Senator Nelson," concluded the spokesman, "we still do not know if three of the terrorists trained at one time in Pensacola or not."

"Discrepancies in biological data"

Knight Ridder newspapers reported that Mohamed Atta attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala.  Another terrorist, Abdulaziz Alomari, attended Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force base in Texas. And Saeed Alghamdi had been to the Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California.

Official denial was swift, but strangely worded. "Some of the FBI suspects had names similar to those used by foreign alumni of U.S. military courses," said the Air Force in a statement. "However, discrepancies in their biographical data, such as birth dates 20 years off, indicate we are probably not talking about the same people."

"Probably not talking about the same people" does not quite strike the note of certitude we should expect in an investigation into the murder of 3000 more-or-less vaporized human beings. But it was enough for Newsweek, the Washington Post and Knight Ridder to all drop the story. 

I didn’t drop the story. I'm funny that way. And several weeks later I reached a Major in the Air Force's Public Affairs Office. She was familiar with the question, she said, because she had read the initial Air Force denial to the media.

"Biographically, they're not the same people," she explained. "Some of the ages are twenty year off."

I told the Major I was only interested in Atta. Was she saying that the age of the Mohamed Atta who attended the Air Force's International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base was different than the reported age of the terrorist Mohamed Atta?

Um, er, no, the Major admitted. Still, she persisted. "Mohamed is a very common name."

I offered that if the Registrar of the International Officer's School provided the name and address of the Mohamed Atta who had attended there, I would call and confirm that he was still alive, just to relieve the Air Force of that burden.

"I don't think you're going to get that information," the Major replied.

She was right. I didn’t.

Still, I pressed her again, probably to the point of rudeness,
to provide a few specifics. And I was rewarded when she  told me, in exasperation: “I do not have the authority to tell you who (which terrorists) attended which schools.”

It is hard to read this as anything but a back-handed confirmation that somewhere in the Defense Dept,  even though she didn’t have the authority to release it, there exists a list with names of Sept. 11 terrorists who received training at U.S. military bases.

"Extremely well-connected, check. Friendly Arab government? The friendliest!"

Gaining admittance to the International Officer’s School at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery would have required Atta to be
extremely well-connected with a friendly Arab government.

I learned just how well-connected after finding the resume of an International Officer’s School graduate from the United Arab Emirates, Colonel and Staff Pilot Mohammed Ahmed Hamel Al Qubaisi, (shown in photo in recent posting as UAE Ambassador to Singapore) posted on the Internet.

Currently, his resume stated, he was a Defense Military Naval & Air Attaché at the United Arab Emirates embassy in Washington, after serving stints in his country’s Embassy & Security Division as Chief of Intelligence, and in the UAE’s Security Division/Air Force Intelligence & Security Directorate as Security Officer.

It’s safe to say that Mr. Al Qubaisi is pretty dialed-in in the UAE, and the furthermost thing from a terrorist. He’s a member of the Arab elite. It even looks like he’s a spook.

And so was Mohamed Atta.

Later I heard from the former wife of a CIA pilot who had worked on Maxwell Air Force Base. “I have a girlfriend who recognized Mohamed Atta when she saw his picture after the attack," she told us.

"She met him at a party at the Officer’s Club. And the reason she swears it was him here is because she didn’t just meet him and say hello. After she met him she went around and introduced him to the people with her. She knows it was him.”

She also said that Saudis were a highly visible presence at Mawell Air Force Base. “There were a lot of them living in an upscale complex in Montgomery. They were all gone the day after the attack.They had to get all of them out of here.”

The Venice "Magic Dutch Boys"

I called them the “Magic Dutch Boys.” Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof, two Dutch nationals, purchased the two flight schools that trained three of the four terrorist pilots to fly at the tiny Venice Airport, which has an extensive history of CIA involvement,.

When Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cell left Hamburg and moved to Florida, Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard were in the middle of an aggressive European ‘marketing’ campaign, reported the local Venice Gondolier.

"The world is my working place," Dekkers boasted to the paper. His plans were so successful the makeup of the flight school had soon changed, and foreign nationals came to account for over 80 per cent of the students.

Yet Dekkers repeatedly stated Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi—the pilots who brought down the Word Trade Center—just "walked in" off the street into his school.

Dekker’s and Wally Hilliard’s flight schools (they had another 100 miles south in Naples, FL) were annually training four hundred foreign nationals, many if not most from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

My investigation uncovered numerous connections between Huffman Aviation and the CIA. 

Here's a rhetorical question: Does the CIA use foreign contractors to establish plausible deniability in covert operations?

But The New York Times never mentioned anything about it.

Follow the money

Prior to the Sept 11 attack press accounts of Dekkers’ business dealings revealed him to be a fast-talking con man. Afterwards, the hometown Venice Gondolier ran a headline saying he was no stranger to headlines.

"Huffman Aviation Inc. has had problems in the last few months with the city of Venice, Sarasota County and the state of Florida, but the school keeps flying," the paper reported.

Dekkers’ wasn’t paying his rent out at the airport.

"When Huffman Aviation paid three months of overdue rent last Friday, May 12th, company president Rudi Dekkers said the rent wouldn't be late again. "No, we won't have this any more," he said during an interview last Friday."
A month later a headline read: “Huffman rent is late again.”

"Huffman Aviation Inc. is again on notice from the city to catch up on its rent payments or face eviction from the airport," the paper wrote on June 9th.

Nothing had changed by mid-July. "For the sixth straight month, Huffman Aviation Inc. has failed to pay its rent to the city on time."

Then, less than one month before 9/ 11, almost miraculously, Dekkers paid the rent.  

"Ties to an organized network"

While they received humiliating newspaper coverage for being deadbeats, Hilliard and Dekkers were launching a commuter airline. Planes and pilots for the venture, known as Florida Air, came from Richard Boehlke, a Gig Harbor, Washington man.

Boehlke was at the same time involved in the massive Mob bust-out in Portland, Oregon of Capital Consultants, a pension fund management company that lost $320 million dollars, much of it from the pension fund of the Laborers Union, called the biggest Mob-run union in America.

"Boehlke would do anything for money, he was so desperate," said an aviation executive who had witnessed Boehlke's descent. "I’m surprised he hasn’t skipped the country by now, what with all the trouble he’s gotten himself into farting around with those Mafia boys down in Portland."

A major recipient of the largesse of the busted-out Capital Consultants was Alvin Malnick, whom Readers Digest once called "Meyer Lansky’s heir as head of Organized Crime."

In “Welcome to TerrorLand” I dubbed him “Alvin of Arabia, because he moved to Saudi Arabia and converted to Islam while doing some business with the King.

There is also the little matter of the bust of Wally Hilliard's Lear jet with 43 lns of heroin in Orlando in late July of 2000, just a few weeks after Atta arrived to attend his flight school. The DEA Agents on the scene later went before a Federal Judge to make sure Hilliard didn't get his Learjet back by pleading he was an "innocent owner."

If you’re looking for connections between the 9/11 hijackers, drug traffickers, and international organized crime, you need look no further than Huffman Aviation. 

Yet The New York Times never mentioned anything about it.

Six years ago this week an American-registered luxury jet, a Gulfstream II—later dubbed “Cocaine 2”—crashed just before dawn in the middle of the jungle in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying four tons of cocaine. The event, and its aftermath, changed forever an official narrative of the war on drugs which has for years been pushing the notion that there is no significant American involvement in the global drug trade, and no American Drug Lords.  

When the Gulfstream's fuselage split into pieces on impact, spilling cocaine across an area the length of three football fields, a chain of events was set in motion that would prove that nothing could be further from the truth.  

Several hundred miles away, and more than a year earlier, in May 2006, the Gulfstream’s ‘sister ship,’ a DC-9 which became known as “Cocaine1" because it was painted to impersonate an official US Government plane, had been caught carrying more than 5.5 tons of cocaine.

The two planes shared too many identifying characteristics, including interlocking owners and a shared base in the sleepy retirement Mecca of St Petersburg FL  on Florida’s Gulf Coast, to be coincidence. 

The twin events represented the biggest sea change in the global drug trade since the death of Pablo Escobar in 1992, or the assassination of Barry Seal in 1986. Today, despite the intervening years, new details continue to emerge about the case. 

What could YOU buy with $378 billion in laundered drug money?

Almost every news story that day, September 25, 2007, played bigger than the downed drug plane: The dozen people who died in a suicide bombing in Baqubaa Iraq. The report that 829,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana possession the previous year. And the Forbes magazine story announcing that there were so many billionaires in the world that 82 of them weren't rich enough to make the Forbes 400 List.

But none would have the eventual impact that the story of the Gulfstream crashing in the jungle did. During the course of the investigation which followed it became clear that the money used to purchase both planes—the Gulfstream and the DC-9—was laundered and funnelled through Wachovia Bank, and more importantly, that it represented just a tiny sliver of the more than $380 billion of drug money that had been laundered during the past six years through what was then America’s 4th largest bank. 

Wachovia was fined a record $165 million. The sullied bank was forced to sell itself to Wells Fargo Bank in Salt Lake City.

Some observers found it ironic that America’s first full-service narco-bank was headquartered—not in New York or San Francisco—but in the conservative bastion of paleo-Republican Jesse Helms's North Carolina. 

The true meaning of "cartel du jour."

At about three a.m. the normal quiet of the town of Tixkobob  (pop. 17000), located an hour outside of the Yucatan capital of Merida, was disturbed by the deafening noise of a low-flying twin-engine jet circling overhead, and the whine and buzzing of several military helicopters in pursuit. 

The noise went on for an incredible two hours until, out of fuel, the jet crashed three miles outside town on a plantation, Rancho San Francisco, identified by Mexican journalists as belonging to an American named Martin Wood.

Although remote, the crash site quickly drew a crowd. Slightly after dawn a Mexican Army unit from the Tenth Military Region deployed to the site, secured it, and then guarded it over the next 36 hours, repelling intrusions from other Mexican law enforcement agencies, as well as from the DEA, which flew six agents to the scene from Mexico City to reconnoiter, only to see them turned away from the site.

The history of the flight.

Days earlier, the Gulfstream jet had begun its journey at Fort Lauderdale’s notorious Executive Airport, flying southwest across the Gulf of Mexico to Cancun. There the pilot made arrangements with the airport’s general manager that they would be able to land without incident at the airport on their return from Colombia laden with cocaine. 

The next day, negotiations being successfully concluded, the Gulfstream  took off for Colombia. Nothing unusual was noticed. The plane was on a well-worn path. The airport in Cancun was the busiest drug port in Mexico.

After loading its cargo of cocaine the following day, the Gulfstream took off from the international airport just outside Medellin, in Rio Negro Colombia, bound once more for the exclusive Mexican Caribbean resort of Cancun, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo.

Among the mysteries surrounding the flight, the one which looms largest is this: Why did authorities at the Cancun airport change their minds, renege on their promise, and refuse the plane permission to land? 

At a press conference a year earlier after the crash of the DC-9, Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said officials from Federal security agencies in the Yucatan were known to be in collusion with drug traffickers. Curiously, with his next breath he mentioned Kamel Nacif, 69, a Lebanese businessman in Cancun who was in the news for alleged links to an international network of pedophiles.

On the off-chance the Mexican Attorney General was dropping hints, and not just free-associating, I did a quick search on Nacif, who I was surpised to learn is (or was) the biggest high-stakes gambler  in Las Vegas, a “whale” who won and lost millions of dollars at a time. 

In a Nevada Gaming Commission staff report questioning the association of Ted Binion, chairman and CEO of the Horseshoe Casino, with what the report called “certain individuals,” the report cited Kamel Nacif by name,  chiding Binion for putting up $2 million to bail Nacif out of jail. 

Nacif, the Commission staff reported, was associated with  “narcotics, firearms sales, and money laundering.” 

Unsung heroes of the drug trade: The Americans

During that time the plane was “parked” or “sheepdipped” in the hands of a motley crew of politically well-connected ‘straw’ owners.  

With that in mind, I paid a visit (along with a pilot friend pictured, above)  to the address, 4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 in Coconut Beach FL. that “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” listed on FAA documents as well as with the Florida Dept. of Corporations.

What I found was an empty office suite with a blank sign out front, and no visible sign of any entity called Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc.

What there was, however, oddly enough, were a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite.  

Today documents from the FAA cast new suspicion on the story told by two Brazilian businessmen in Boca Raton who had—just weeks earlier—purchased the Gulfstream II, according to the FAA, through a dummy company they owned called Donna Blue Aircraft (DBA,"doing business as," get it?).

Joao Malago and Eduardo Dias Guimaraes both stated repeatedly that they were no longer responsible for the plane when it went down, having sold it to two pilots from Fort Lauderdale, the week before it scattered cocaine litter across the jungle floor. 

They may not have been telling the truth.  

Two very very lucky Brazilians 

"We are not the owners of the plane," said Guimaraes, reached in Goiania in central Brazil.

He deferred most questions to his partner, Malago, who said from Sao Paulo that Donna Blue purchased the aircraft in July from a company that had owned it for 10 years. Then they quickly flipped it, reselling it to two Florida pilots who they said paid for it in full.

Malago, who said he'd been a pilot for 25 years and had bought and sold planes throughout Latin America, said he learned of the crash only after after receiving a phone call from an insurance company, had been unable to reach the new owner by phone and feared he was dead.

He stated that he knew nothing of the plane's history or what use it had been put to previously. "Generally, (when you buy a plane) you don't know the history of the plane," he said.

That was a red flag. Anyone with even limited knowledge of general aviation knows this statement to be untrue. Scrutinizing an airplane’s logbooks,which  contain its flight and repair history, is one of the first things checked out by potential buyers.  

Raising further suspicion was the company's website, which seemed a clumsy and half-hearted attempt to construct a plausible “legend,” or cover, for what was clearly a dummy front company. The company’s bogus phone number (415.555-5555) contributed to the effect. And when the site featured a quote from a supposedly satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer, it gave his name as “John Doe.” 

The FAA "weighs in"

“As you know,” my note began, “when a plane is sold, the owner is required to report the sale to the FAA. Yet when it was deregistered in February, 2008, five months after crashing, the FAA still listed the plane's owner as Donna Blue Aircraft.

“The Brazilian owners of Donna Blue Aircraft said they'd sold the plane a week before its last flight South for $2 million to two pilots from Fort Lauderdale, Clyde O'Connor and Greg Smith. Smith wrote them a check for $2 million to purchase the plane, the Brazilians claimed. 

“Yet within the aviation community in Fort Lauderdale Greg Smith is known to be so penurious that charter flight operators make sure to give him extra cash to take when he flies a charter for them, because he never has any money, and if the plane needs to refuel, they're stuck.

This will someday be remembered as the year when shocking new discoveries about the National Security Agency became an almost daily occurrence. But amid the steady drumbeat of revelations, the one I’ve been waiting for hasn’t yet surfaced:

The NSA’s involvement in the global drug trade.

Surprised? So was I, at first. But the NSA does a lot more than just signals intelligence. More than a decade ago, long before the current brouhaha,  I heard credible allegations about an NSA role in the cocaine trade in Bolivia, from someone who was there. What I know of the NSA’s links to drug trafficking requires a brief excursion back to the year 2000. More on that in a moment.

Today the NSA is mapping American’s social networks, using cell-phone geo-location to track their movements , cracking the encryption guarding their bank accounts, medical records, e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls.

Just this week we learned that the NSA spied on everyone from Mohammed Ali to Martin Luther King to Republican Senator Howard Baker during the Vietnam War. 

The NSA’s new Utah Data Center is already up and running, and they didn’t even announce it. No big "Grand Opening" sign outside, no balloons, no parade, no open house… and no sense of humor. 

Art Buchwald, Enemy of the State. 

Here's two horrific facts about the NSA: The Surveillance State is menacing our basic political liberties. Equally important: they have no sense of humor.  

The most revealing single nugget of information about the NSA which has come to light, to me, is the recent discovery that they even spied on humorist Art Buchwald. Many won’t remember him–Buchwald is dead, and from another era—but  he was utterly harmless. Even his humor was gentle.

So how did he became a ‘person of interest’ to the NSA? 

The answer tells you everything you need to know about why the NSA today represents a clear and present danger to the Republic.  At the time (1967) someone had figured out that the Vietnam War was costing the Pentagon $300,000 per enemy combatant killed. 

Buchwald wrote a column suggesting the US should offer any Viet Cong who defect to our side a new house in the US, a new car, a color television set and a paid-up country-club membership. We’d still be saving money, he figured, not to mention creating jobs right here in the US.  

Running Bolivia for the NSA

“Spying is spying. You have to make up your mind that you are going to have an intelligence agency, protect it as such, and shut your eyes and take what is coming.” Senator John Stennis, Democrat from Mississippi.

It’s the year 2000. In the middle of a mild winter in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, home to the John C. Stennis Space Center, a NASA rocket testing facility, on the banks of the Pearl River that forms the boundary between Mississippi and Louisiana, fifty miles east along the Gulf Coast from New Orleans. I’m there doing research for my book, “Barry & the Boys.” 

At the invitation of a retired US Customs Agent, I’m At Dan B’s, a popular local bar and restaurant on a waterfront crowded with yachts and shipbuilders, to meet a man who knew and worked for more than a decade in Central and South America with life-long CIA pilot and famous American drug smuggler Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal. 

With a touch of awe in his voice, the Customs Agent told me the man I’m there to meet was such a “big dog” during the ‘80’s  that the US Customs Service had a 17-man squad (he was on it) assigned to do nothing but track every movement he made, both inside and outside of the U.S. 

He had been running Bolivia for the NSA, the Customs Agent said, while Barry Seal was flying round-trips to South America on military cargo planes loaded with weapons and cocaine. American intelligence is a competitive world. So, of course, U.S. Customs was intrigued. 

A visitor and a warning

From across the room I see a man slip into the restaurant almost  unnoticed, heading this way. My NSA informant turns out to be a steely blue-eyed middle-aged man  dressed in a tight-fitting olive drab t-shirt. 

He moves across the room with a quiet sense of power that belies his smallish frame. He has the kind of erect former military bearing that becomes increasingly recognizable as you approach Mobile, Alabama, where they seem to congregate in the winter. 

When we met, he requested anonymity. It was, he said,  ‘mission critical.’ 

One reason for his reluctance to use his real name became clear with the first words out of his mouth.  “The day after we first met, something happened,” he said with obvious annoyance.

 “I got a visit from a well-known man I haven’t seen for a half-dozen years. He warned me against talking with you. Then he asked me if I had everything I need. 

“‘Got enough money, Russ? Need anything?’" He shrugged. 

So in “Barry & ‘the boys’” I called him “Gus.” But a few years ago he passed away. So there’s no harm now in using his real name.  

His name was Russ Eakin.

In the here and now

"We are here," said muckraking American  journalist H. L. Mencken,  "and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.” 

While this story is not about Russ Eakin, a sense of who he was may be important in understanding what comes next. Also, he was such a picture-perfect example of the type of American, for better and worse, who strode the continents of Earth during the American Century. 

Russ Eakin was born in Bay St Louis in 1944 and raised in the small town of Bunkie, Louisiana (pop 5000), which bills itself, perhaps over-enthusiastically, as the “Best Spot Topside on God’s Green Earth!”

My first question to him was how had he become a spook.

“I was asked if I was interested in taking a trip to Honduras in the summer of 1964,” he replied. “I learned Spanish quickly, in two weeks, and loved the culture. And I ended up living in Central and South America and working for two different factions of the U.S. Government: Customs and NSA.”

Two weeks seems an incredibly short time to learn a language. Then I learned of his family’s record of achievement. His mother, one of Louisiana’s most celebrated historians, edited a scholarly edition of “Twelve Years a Slave,” the autobiographical memoir of a free black man who was kidnapped into slavery in  1841, working on plantations in Louisiana for 12 years before his release. 

The book, considered  “the best firsthand account of slave life in existence,” was turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt, and is being released this month.  

His father, according to his obituary in the Feb 8, 1995 Alexandria Daily Town Talk, was a newspaper publisher who graduated magna cum laude from Louisiana State University. Among the children he left behind was  “Russell  Eakin of Mexico City, Mexico and Mandeville, LA.” 

A job is a job is a job

“If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” Thomas Pynchon

“I first met Barry Seal in the lobby of the Hotel Maya in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, back in the mid-70’s,” he told me. “Barry was good friends with the owners of the hotel, which was the center of intrigue in Central America back then.”

“And just by looking at each other, we both knew what the other was doing, although neither of us stated it openly. It was just…understood. Besides, what we were doing wasn't as important as the fun we were having doing it. We were—both of us—making more money than we knew what to do with, and having a great old time.” 

“What did you do down there?” I asked.

 “My job was to corrupt the governments of Central America,” he stated crisply. “And I was so good at it I didn’t come back for 17 years.” 

“I was working for NSA. I owned two arms manufacturing plants in Bolivia. They were set up through the Catholic Church. I worked out daily with (Bolivian) President Bandar. We built SM-90 machine guns.”

“We manufactured 5000 machine guns a day, using  computer-driven lathes from Rockwell International. Each one cost us 35 bucks. And we’d sell ‘em for $1200 apiece.”

“We field-tested them against the Israelis, who had designs on the biz but could never get their foot in the door, because they were so mistrusted. Row after row of Bolivian Generals in tents, our weapons against the Israelis, and we won.”

The Great Cocaine Coup

Eakin was in Bolivia during the Cocaine Coup in 1980.

“Garcia-Meza brought in the neo-fascist paramilitary squads with the swastika armbands. They called themselves the ‘Fiancées of death.’ He put the Interior Ministry under the nephew of Roberto Suarez, the self-styled King of Cocaine.”

“I knew Roberto Suarez very well,” Eakin said quietly. “I was married to one of the Suarez’s.” 

Eakin also knew Sonia Atala, the other well-known drug figure in Bolivia at the time. Known as the “queen of the cocaine business," she may be the most important figure of the Iran Contra era to avoid wide exposure.

“Sonia ran the cocaine biz in Bolivia,” said Eakin. “And that was where the business was run from. The guys you heard about—the Ochoa’s and the Escobar’s and the Lehder's—they were just Vice Presidents fronting for the company.”

“And Barry Seal worked directly for Sonia.”

Things take a turn for the worse

It was right about then that I pissed off Russ Eakin. I’d had a drink or two by then, and must have wanted to impress him with my knowledge of the drug business, a ridiculous thought, because peeking in through the window from outside is no substitute for being there. 

Plus by that point in my investigation I’d lost interest in romantic tales of drug pilot daring do. Skimming ten feet over the surging waves of the Gulf of Mexico on a 'dangerous' drug run. Looking over your shoulder all the way.  

But tracing the money back up the line–now there was an endeavor promising real adventure. 

I tried to make my voice as casual as possible. “So, ah, Russ, what can you tell me about Bernardo Dominguez?” 

I was unprepared for the vehemence of his response. There was instant silence. Then a glare. 

“How do you know about Bernardo Dominguez?” he demanded. He didn’t bother to wait for a reply.

 “Listen,” he told me. “I agreed to talk to you about Barry Seal, who died 20 years ago. And now you’re asking about Bernardo Dominguez. I don’t know if I can talk to you anymore.”

“I was only asking a question,” I said lamely. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“Don’t you know what you’re doing? Just by asking? You’re threatening to compromise current operations. And that can get you in real trouble.”

"Threatening to compromise current operations'

We’ll come back to Russ Eakin. He didn’t stay mad long. But he never said a word about Bernardo Dominguez, or even mentioned him, and neither did I. There were plenty of other topics I wanted to know about. 

And we'll return to Bernardo Dominguez, and explain his links to Barry Seal, andhis links to, incredibly, the crew running the Venice Airport today, and how he  represents the corporatization of drug trafficking.

You’ve got to look closely at the information they’re giving out. And then look even closer at what they’re leaving out. 

Here's an example: A control tower employee in Ciudad del Carmen, the airport where the DSC-9 landed, causing something of a fuss, told authorities at a crucial juncture in what was an extremely tense situation, as the American-registered DC-9 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine circled and requested permission to land, she was approached inside the airport terminal by an American she'd never seen before.  

She described him as being 40 years old, with blond hair and a deep tan, and he was wearing a green polo shirt. The American, she said, hadn’t just wanted officials in the airport to let the plane land. He wanted the tower to certify the flight, meaning the DC-9 could then continue its journey, as a domestic flight, which would not need to clear Mexican Customs. 

Its in. Passed ‘go.’ Pop the champagne.

Make sure everybody brought cash. 

Said green polo shirt-wearing American remains unidentified. He just disappeared from narratives of the event… except for one respected journalist at Mexican newspaper Proceso, who wisely picked up on this detail, followed up, and then reported that among the contingent of drug traffickers awaiting the arrival of the plane on the ground with as much nonchalance as they could muster…the American had been in charge. 

It’s not outlaws who run the drug trafficking industry. It’s the parasitic rich. The deviant elite. The bankers. There’s even a link in our story to Goldman Sachs.  

In every country in the world in which drugs are present, and illegal, control of the drug trade is the most important tool in perpetuating that country’s oligarchy, more important than a police force with a billion Billy clubs. 

Profits from the drug business can purchase a billion Billy clubs and have enough change left over to meet the needs of venture capital (cf: the British Empire).

The guys chopping off heads in Mexico while wearing bandoliers strapped across their bare chests are barely into middle management. 

And the guys whose names you read in newspapers, where they're identified as bosses, jefes, and kingpins... 

They’re not the guys that get the best girls. 

Mexican-style South of the Border Justice has arrived in America with a vengeance, and is on display in a courtroom in Miami where three members of New York’s  Gambino Family, Anthony "Big Tony" Moscatiello, Anthony "Little Tony" Ferrari, and  James "Pudgy" Fiorello, are on trial for the murder of Suncruz Casino tycoon Gus Boulis.

The Boulis trial confirms the appearance on these shores of the kind of blatant immunity from prosecution that Mexican gangsters, politicians, drug cartel bosses and Generals—many of whom wear more than one hat—have long taken for granted in our neighbor to the South.  Given the continuing devolution of the formerly-great superpower, this should not be considered an especially surprising development.

Yet it is still a shock to realize how much justice in today’s Miami resembles that in, say, Tijuana, fabled home of risque sex acts and now “stewmasters” making “Mexican meat soup” by dissolving bodies in 55-gallon industrial drums in auto repair shops placed strategically across the dusty landscape.

Tijuana is located in a semi-failed state that you could call a banana republic, if that weren’t a slur on nutritious fruit.

Guess what? So is Miami. 

Inconvenient men 

Maybe Miami and Tijuana should be sister cities. Because Gus Boulis' murder trial is almost too spookily similiar for words to a trial which took place in Tijuana twenty years ago. 

Gus Boulis was a casino cruise operator who had recently sold his 11-ship operation to Jack Abramoff, the big-time Republican lobbyist who was at the time one of America’s most powerful men. After Abramoff and Kidan “forgot” to pay Boulis for the purchase of his casino cruise line, his continued existence almost instantly became inconvenient.

Héctor Félix Miranda was a well-known journalist in Tijuana. When he wrote something unflattering about one of Mexico’s most powerful men, his continued existence also became inconvenient.

Both suffered the same fate, in the same way.  Also, the aftermath of the murders played out almost identically.

Hector Felix Miranda was ready to go to work. On a rainy morning in April, 1988, he left his house and climbed behind the wheel of his Crown Victoria LTD to drive to his job as co-editor of ZETA, a widely-read muckraking newspaper. 

Across the street from Hector that morning sat a man watching from a black Pontiac TransAm with its engine running. Victor Medina was a burly former state policeman, an expert marksman, and a professional bodyguard to Jorge Hank Rhon, the son of Carlos Hank González, the most powerful man in Mexico at the time. 

Parked facing Hector, maybe 150 feet away, was a brown Toyota pickup truck with two men aboard. One wore Levis and work boots,  while the other, the shooter, Antonio Vera Palestrina, who had been Carlos Hank González’ personal  bodyguard when Hank was Mexico City’s mayor, was decked out in cowboy boots, cowboy hat, an expensive suit, and a belt with a gold belt buckle.

The black TransAm pulled out in front of Hector, then suddenly stopped. Coming up behind him was the brown Toyota pickup, which pulled up beside Hector.  

"A dog-watching, food-fetching, car-washing wanna-be Mobster"

Gus Boulis was ready to go home. Finished with a later meeting that lasted until 9:15 p.m. on a cool breezy night in February 2001, he walked outside to his BMW, and pulled out of the parking lot and turned south, towards home. 

Watching Boulis drive away, according to his testimony at the trial, was James “Pudgy” Fiorillo, described as a "dog-walking, food-fetching, car-washing, and baby-sitting wanna-be Mobster from New Jersey.”  Pudgy got his nickname back in high school, where he stood 5’6” while weighing 260 pounds.  

Prosecutors used to think Pudgy had been the gunman who killed Boulis. But they accused him only of spying on Boulis and reporting his movements to “Little Tony” Ferrari  on the night of the murder. Two years ago, he pled guilty to murder and conspiracy charges, and got a light sentence in return for testifying for the prosecution.

Boulis had only driven a few blocks before  a car pulled in front of his BMW, forcing him to slow down, and then stop. The car in front of him  didn't budge. Boulis slammed on the brakes to avoid a collision. Just then, witnesses told police, a second car, a black Mustang drove up and pulled alongside him in the oncoming lane.

The Mustang's driver opened his window. Boulis turned to look, and made a grim discovery. The man in the Mustang was pointing a gun right at him. Boulis raised his hand as if to shield himself, but it wasn’t enough to stop three hollow-tip bullets from burrowing deep inside his chest when the driver opened fire, shooting Boulis at least three times with a semi-automatic weapon.

As the black Mustang front of him sped away, Boulis screamed, a loud blood-curdling animal sound that eyewitnesses said they will never forget. Bleeding and barely conscious, Boulis pressed the accelerator, headed south a few blocks, then turned a corner and blacked out, spinning across a median into oncoming traffic and crashing into a tree next to a Burger King.

On a street in Tijuana in a light rain

Professional bodyguard Antonio Vera Palestrina rolled down his window and pulled out a powerful  shotgun and shot Hector twice.
The impact of the first shot threw Hector off his seat to the other side of the car, where his head bounced off  the door as a second shot pierced his ribs, ripped his arm and almost tore it away.  His body was left slumped under the dashboard, his gray “Members Only” jacket shredded, smelling of gunpowder, and soaked in blood and flesh. 

In Tijuana, there were daily demonstrations. The public and independent newspapers across Mexico expressed skepticism of the investigation into Hector’s murder, and called for justice. “Unless politics or publicity interferes, money can buy innocence and freedom,” explained a journalist in Mexico City. 

Authorities in Mexico soon arrested the two Jorge Hank Rhon bodyguards, Medina from the TransAm, and Vera from the Toyota pick-up truck, who they also identified as the shooter.

Despite persuasive evidence to the contrary, prosecutors theorized Vera’s motive for murdering the journalist was rage over something Hector had written about him.  This mystified Hector’s co-workers at the newspaper, who could find no evidence that Hector had ever even  mentioned him in his column. 

Jorge Hank Rhon was known to have been incensed about Hector’s last columns, in which Hector had ridiculed him as a spoiled rich kid. Yet the relationship between Hector and Rhon went unexplored.  The bodyguards' boss, Jorge Hank Rhon, was never even questioned. 

And, most tellingly, on the day of the murder Vera—who was Jorge Hank Rhon’s head of security as well as his personal bodyguard—had cashed a $10,000 check from Rhon at Rhon’s Aqua Caliente racetrack. 

Despite these major loose ends,  authorities began to act as if the crime had been solved. There was an inexplicably long delay before the trial began, during which it was continually postponed. Slowly, the story began to disappear from newspapers. People no longer demonstrated. Journalists stopped showing up at noon every day outside the prosecutors office demanding justice. 

When the trial finally commenced, witnesses had become considerably less certain of their facts than before. 

Something wicked–and highly irregular–this way comes

After Greek tycoon Gus Boulis was gunned down in his BMW, Fort Lauderdale police immediately began scrutinizing SunCruz Casinos. Suspicion focused on the recent sale of his casino fleet, for a very good reason:  Boulis, Jack Abramoff, and Adam Kidan had been carrying on a very public feud.

“We certainly aren't lacking in suspects,” said a Fort Lauderdale homicide detective with admirable understatement.  

Later, detectives said they had basically solved the crime within 48 hours. However, they offered no explanation for why it took four years before three men who they had believed were involved in the murder since the day after the crime were finally arrested and charged. 

Nor have prosecutors, since the trial began two weeks ago, taken the jury into their confidence about why—after taking an impossibly slow four years to bring charges—they took an additional eight years to bring the case to trial. Safe to say, something highly irregular was clearly going on. 

Adam Kidan, a defrocked attorney who had gone bankrupt in both a bagel shop and a mattress store, became Jack Abramoff's partner in what prosecutors say was a totally fraudulent purchase of Fort Lauderdale-based SunCruz casinos from Boulis.

Kidan and Jack Abramoff partnered to buy SunCruz from Boulis for $147.5 million, then reneged on paying as soon as the deal was final. Instead of paying Boulis, Kidan and Abramoff used $300,000 of SunCruz money for a luxury skybox at FedEx Field in Washington, D.C., where Abramoff entertained politicians and GOP fat cats.

Abramoff and Kidan also helped themselves to $500,000 salaries, as well as lots of expensive perks. But the best part of the deal was that the two men took control of the casino line without ever putting down a dime of their own money. 

No wonder Boulis was suing to regain control of the business when he was killed.

A really cheesy way to work off a beef

Both men were later jailed after pleading guilty to defrauding lenders in the deal.  As part of his plea agreement, Kidan pledged to cooperate with federal prosecutors. 

“Mr. Boulis, who owned the casino boat fleet, was shot and killed in 2001,” reported the New York Times. “Mr. Kidan may be able to help state prosecutors who are investigating the slaying of Konstantinos Boulis.” 

“Mr. Kidan may be able to help prosecutors investigating the Boulis hit” is like authorities asking  O.J. Simpson for help figuring out who murdered Nicole. It's almost too droll for words. And far too ironic for the NY Times.  

Now that the government shutdown is over, if you’re looking for a fresh source of outrage to bring a healthy flush to your face, try this: By stepping forward and bravely pointing an accusing finger at Gus Boulis’ "real" killer, who turned out, alas, and all too conveniently, to be already dead, Adam Kidan got his federal prison sentence cut… in half. 

Despite having a string of well-documented character defects that mark him as a prime candidate for an invitation to Michael Milken's Sociopaths Ball, somebody in our government clearly wanted Adam Kidan to really really like him.

Eleven unregulated casinos trump "lucrative bodyguard contracts."

In an opening statement lasting over an hour, prosecutor Gregg Rossman described a scenario right out of a Hollywood movie — shady financial deals, powerful Washington D.C. interests, mob figures, convicted felons…All he left out was the real reason for the terrifying end of one of South Florida's most prominent businessmen.

Prosecutors said they "didn't believe" Kidan or Abramoff played any role in the murder of Boulis.

Because I found the statement so amazingly unbelievable, I collected examples of how various national newspapers had phrased it. 

“Abramoff had nothing to do with Boulis' death,” said prosecutor Brian Cavanaugh, in a straighforward, if unconvincing,  explanation. He went on to say he can understand why defense lawyers would want to look into it. "They have a right to investigate their case," Cavanaugh said. "They perceive things differently than we do."

"Prosecutors said they believe Moscatiello, Ferrari and Fiorillo had Boulis killed without Kidan's knowledge," read another, "then pressured the lad to continue paying protection money."

Elsewhere, prosecutors theory of the case suggested the Goombah Gambinos had killed Boulis to "encourage" Kidan to keep paying protection money.

“According to prosecutors, “Big Tony” Moscatiello saw Kidan and SunCruz as a continuous income stream. Boulis was a threat to that income. Boulis’ attempt to regain control over SunCruz, threatened  lucrative contracts they had with the new owners.”

The prosecutor’s reasoning made no sense. Compared to the real stakes involved in controlling SunCruz, the Gambino torpedoes bodyguard contracts were strictly penny ante. Also, since Kidan was ostensibly paying for their bodyguard services because he was worried about being “rubbed out’ by Boulis, wouldn't eliminating the threat posed by Boulis also eliminate the need for the "lucrative" bodyguard contract? 

Recall for a moment Tijuana prosecutors claim that Jorge Rhon's bodyguard killed journalist Hector Felix over something the journalist hadn't written about him. Jack Abramoff and Jorge Hank Rhon must have something powerfully compelling in common.  

Determined to shield jurors from realizing that the people responsible for ordering the murder of Gus Boulis are not sitting in the dock—and never will be—prosecutors since the trial began have engaged in tortured reasoning that would be right at home in courtrooms  in Tijuana.  

They believe the gunman who shot Boulis to death was a man named John Gurino, who was killed in a dispute with a Boca Raton delicatessen owner two years later.

Murder trumps fraud…but blackmail trumps murder

Eight years ago, some believed the Florida State’s Attorney’s Office was about to charge Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan, then on trial for fraud for stealing the SunCruz line through blatant financial fraud, in the murder of Gus Boulis. 

Wrote one optimistic pundit, “Murder trumps fraud in the prosecutorial world.” But neither Abramoff or Adam Kidan was ever named as a suspect. The answer to “why not Kidan?” is easy. 

No one would be able to convince a jury that the buck stopped with him. (Kidan was the man, after all, who wrote checks(totaling $200,000) to pay for the hit.) That meant charging Abramoff. 

The kid glove treatment both men received illustrated how little reason there was for ever believing that the result of the Abramoff Scandal would be a big broom sweeping everything clean. 

The Abramoff Scandal, like the Jorge Rhon murder scandal in Tijuana, and like Iran Contra and every other recent American scandal,is deemed too big to ever be allowed to break. 

Moscatiello told detectives that Kidan had ordered the hit. Prosecutors apparently don't believe him. Anyone doubting his assertion should perform a simple thought experiment: 

“You’ve just bought a life insurance policy for $10 million on your spouse, who is then shot three times at close range with hollow point rounds by people authorities identify as Gambino hit men who recently cashed big checks from you. 

Is writing a quarter million dollars worth of checks (for no discernible purpose) to Mafia hit men later charged with the murder of the check-writer’s biggest enemy just another in the long line of "freak coincidences" for which Florida is justly famous?

We are apparently about to find out. 

Skyway Global LLC, the St. Petersburg, FL company that owned the DC-9 airline busted in Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, made its headquarters in a 79,000 sq ft building owned by Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT), a foreign tele-communications company with a contract to wiretap the U.S. for the NSA through the communication lines of Verizon, which handles  almost half of all landline and cell phone calls in the U.S.

Verint’s founder and CEO, Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, is a former Israeli intelligence officer who is today a fugitive from justice living in Namibia, where he has for several years been fighting extradition to the U.S.

On Verint’s Board of Directors is Lieutenant General Kenneth A. Minihan, former director of the NSA, which has led to speculation that the company today is a joint NSA-Mossad operation.

James Bamford’s 2008 expose of the NSA, “The Shadow Factory, The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America,” unearthed disturbing facts about how America’s two major telecom companies, AT & T and Verizon, had outsourced the bugging of their entire networks to what Bamford called “two mysterious companies with very troubling foreign connections.”

Verint is one of those two “mysterious companies.”

Definition of "making a start": Two recent convictions

In  “The NSA, Drug Trafficking, & the Crash of Cocaine2,” I reported that I first learned of that Agency’s involvement in drug trafficking in 2000, more than a decade before the super-secret NSA became a household name. The source for that story, Russ Eakin, had been the NSA’s “man on the ground” in Bolivia during the Cocaine Coup in the early 1980’s.

The discovery of previously-undisclosed ties between SkyWay and the NSA came in a review of documents after two men implicated in the drug trafficking network were recently convicted.

Recently Douglas McClain Jr, was sentenced to 14 years for money laundering in Federal Court in San Diego. McClain was the president of Argyll Equities, the dodgy private bank in Texas which purchased the drug-running DC-9 for SkyWay.

Joining McClain in the Big House is  Jonathon Curshen, who got twenty years for fraud and money laundering.  Curshen, an American con man from Sarasota Florida,  controlled a company in Costa Rica called Red Sea Management, which (at least on paper) generously provided— in return for 28,000,000 shares of common stock in SkyWay—the 1966 McDonald Douglas DC9 aircraft that shortly thereafter began carrying cargo which came to include 5.6 tons of cocaine worth several hundred million dollars.

SkyWay put out a press release announcing the deal:  "The DuPont Investment Fund 57289, Inc. Satisfies $7 Million Funding Agreement with SkyWay Communications Holding Corp."

"Some guy in Costa Rica"

“They wrote it up in a press release, touting how they’d just received a big investment from the DuPont Foundation," explained a former SkyWay executive. "It turned out to be bogus. It was just some guy (Curshen) at a desk in Costa Rica.”

SkyWay’s only other overt act of capitalism was its participation in the ownership of a plane hauling 5.5 tons of cocaine worth several hundred million dollars.

But what is known about SkyWay may also illustrate just how much we still don’t know about the NSA.

Musical chairs and the "known unknowns"

It has always struck some observers as odd that a fledgling start-up like SkyWay—with at the time just a few dozen employees—moved in to a huge 79,000 square foot facility in January of 2003, the recently-vacated American headquarters of Tadiran Tele-Communications, which had moved its U.S. operations to New York.

So I took a closer look at the Israeli telecom company which passed on its U.S. headquarters to a tiny start-up with no prospects and little money. According to a press release, Tadiran Tele-com (TTN) moved its U.S. headquarters to the newly-constructed facility in Clearwater in early 1997.

When I first learned of Tadiran, the company didn’t set off any alarm bells.

Now a little probing indicated that the Israeli entity housing itself in Clearwater Florida didn’t call itself “Tadiran” for long. In early 1999, Tadiran’s global surveillance division, housed in Clearwater, was sold to another Israeli telecom, ECI-Telecommunications (Nasdaq: ECTX).

Tadiran also funded an electronics school for the Guatemalan army. At the same time Israel was setting up a factory to manufacture ammunition and replacement parts for Guatemala’s Israeli-made rifles, and advising the Guatemalan military by providing military, counterinsurgency, and intelligence advisers for what human rights groups called a genocidal war which included forced resettlement schemes in the rural highlands against a largely Mayan Indian population.

Carlos Slim jumps the shark

The DC9 (N900SA) was the first of two drug planes with apparent ties to the U.S. Government caught carrying multi-ton loads of cocaine in Mexico over an 18-month period.  The second, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA), was cited by European authorities for flying extraordinary renditions missions for the CIA.

In 2006, during the same year SkyWay’s drug plane was seized, the Bush Administration chose SkyWay landlord-partner-co-conspirator Verint to install a $3 million telephone and Internet wiretapping center in Mexico, allowing authorities there to eavesdrop on every landline and cell phone call made in the country.

“In 2006 the Bush Administration entered into a quiet agreement with the Mexican Government to fund and build an enormous $3 million telephone and Internet eavesdropping vendor that would reach into every town and village in the country,” reported James Bamford.

In fact, a press release suggests the program in Mexico probably began three years earlier. The headline read: “Comverse (which became Verint) Selected by Telefonos de Mexico to Implement a Widespread Expansion of Voicemail Services.”

Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) is owned by Mexico’s richest man, Carlos Slim Helú, whose own links to the drug trade have been the subject of rumors for years. And with some reason:

When Amado Carrillo Fuentes, known in Mexico as “Lord of the Skies" for his vast armada of planes, died in 1997 while undergoing plastic surgery, he was worth $25 billion, according to the AP.

If you do the math, that means that Drug Lord Amado Fuentes managed to salt away no more than $10 or $15 billion a decade… And HE was in the cocaine business, where counting your money can be a bigger problem than making it.

At that same time Carlos Slim was worth $6 billion, according to numerous published reports. For example, the May 7, 1999, Mexico City newspaper La Jornada fixed Slim's fortune at “something like $6 billion.” Latin Trade magazine pegged Slim as being worth $7.2 billon. After working hard for more than 40 years, Carlos Slim was worth a hefty $6 billion.

Yet, according to news reports in 2009, when Slim made a big investment in the New York Times, Slim was now worth between $57 billion and $60 billion dollars. Has anyone in history ever made $50 billion in just ten years?  Did Carlos Slim?  Not by doing anything legal, he didn’t. 

Do the math. Mexico's richest man is dirty.

Did data mining lead to body dumping? 

Bamford discovered a State Department document used to solicit vendors for the system, in which the U. S. was promising to provide Mexico ‘with the capability to intercept, analyze, and use intercepted information from all kinds of communications systems operating in Mexico.”

The communications intercept system, which the U.S. was paying for,  included all necessary hardware, software, and equipment to provide a complete system to intercept, process analyze and store email, internet, chat, landline and cellular, including location and tracking, with the capability to scan millions of telephone calls with voice prints of their targets, to analyze calls and automatically generate links between them to bring under surveillance ever-widening circles of people.

The system the Bush Administration chose for Mexico was similar to the warrantless eavesdropping operation in the U.S. And it used one of the two “mysterious companies with very troubling foreign connections” that Bamford was warning about.

Calderon argued he needed the system and the freedom from court scrutiny to fight drugs and organized crime, many in Mexico, like former Mexico City prosecutor Renato Sales, weren’t buying it. “Suddenly anyone suspected of organized crime is presumed guilty and treated as someone without any constitutional rights. And who will determine who is an organized crime suspect? The State will.”

Define "unfair competitive advantage"

The vendor for the job, founded by veterans of Israel’s version of the NSA, the hyper-secret Unit 9200, was Verint, the same company that had somehow ended up owning the gleaming facility in Clearwater Florida that the drug traffickers at SkyWay Global called “home.”

Having your own countrywide bugging system to listen in on phone calls made by your indiscreet drug trafficking competitors is probably the very definition of an “unfair competitive advantage. “

Few think that sort of consideration slowed down anyone in this gang.

Data scraped through internet search queries, emails, Smartphone chatter and text messages may be intrusive; but the result may be nothing more serious than a few targeted ads in your browser.

But when the data mining is being done by bent officials from a major NSA contractor with a contract to wiretap and eavesdrop on both the U.S. and across the entire country of Mexico, the results can probably be measured, not in annoying pop-up ads, but in piles of corpses on one side of the road, and piles of heads on the other.

It was in the sun-drenched Albuquerque study of one of America's most prominent historians—a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Book Award winner—that I first heard what I later came to think of as "The Question."

Enroute from Los Angeles to New Orleans, where I would spend the next two years researching and writing a book about renowned CIA pilot-turned-infamous drug smuggler Barry Seal, I stopped to visit Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton, the writers who first brought serious national attention to the CIA operation in Mena, Arkansas led by Oliver North, and Barry Seal.

We were drinking cokes in the warm sun and exchanging tidbits of information each of us had gleaned about our common subject, when at one point Morris leaned forward.

“What have you heard,” he asked, “about Barry Seal having flown a get-away plane out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination?”  

I stared at him blankly. I replied that I didn’t know there had even been a get-away plane. And that was the end of it. The conversation quickly moved on.  But the moment changed my life. In the two years of research which followed, I never forgot the question.

Months later, while collecting old news clippings in Barry’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I struck up a conversation about Seal with the morgue librarian at the Baton Rouge Advocate. She had a kind of smoky whiskey voice you generally don't associate with librarians.

"Its another world, New Orleans"

"Hell, she said, “a good 20 years. I've been remarried for ten."

Later, after I heard a story  about Barry Seal from John Odom, a friend and classmate of Seal’s in high school, I began to realize that the rumor might be something more than that.  While it wasn’t common knowledge, in certain circles in Louisiana it is what is known as an “open secret.”

Big shout out to Oliver Stone

Even if  you’re not a JFK assassination researcher—and I wasn’t—you know who Ferrie was. Everyone’s seen Joe Pesci’s brilliant portrayal of Ferrie in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Many recall that Ferrie – just forty-eight hours after Kennedy died—was brought in for questioning on suspicion that he had been involved in the assassination.

Odom watched them confer, he said, and saw Ferrie point to the 50-or-so wooden crates staged next to the tarmac.

On the way back to Baton Rouge, Barry Seal told him that he was working for Ferrie, who he said was "CIA.”  (Ferrie's CIA link was confirmed by Victor Marchetti, former Deputy Assistant to Richard Helms, who testified that Helms disclosed, in executive discussions during the Garrison investigation, that Ferrie had in fact been employed by the CIA.)

“Seal said he making $400 a week flying "runs" of crates of weapons and ordinance for Ferrie,” said Odom. He asked me, How'd you like to make that kind of money?”

Odom said he told Barry, 'I'll think about it.'  But they never discussed it again. Decades later, the incident remains puzzling to Odom. "Our dad made about $400 a month back then, and we weren't poor, but I was stunned and didn't know what to say.”

Translated into today's money, Barry Seal was making $2500 weekly…on the weekends.

A piece of real history slipped through the cracks

Then a fortuitous happenstance brought me a photograph that spoke volumes about Barry Seal's career, and the people involved in the JFK assassination.

Seal left it to his wife, Debbie, now his widow. And despite the 7-man "clean-up crew" from the State Department that came down from Washington to her home and combed through all of Barry's records in early 1995, it is still in her possession. The photo, which she considered a keepsake, remained untouched in her safe.

The photo was in a cardboard frame of the kind used by nightclubs and tourist attractions, with the date it was taken, January 22,1963, stamped on the back. It was taken in the nightclub of the Aristos Hotel in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa.

At the time the photo was taken, the CIA's covert action chief in Mexico City was David Atlee Phillips. Philips, AKA Maurice Bishop, reportedly met with Oswald in Dallas before the assassination.

The photo shows a group of ten men, wearing black suits and skinny ties, drinking around a table. They appear to be a mixed group of Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military intelligence types.

Identifying the men in the photo took months. And when I had, I realized that it is the only extant photograph of the members of  the CIA’s super-secret assassination squad known as “Operation Forty."

A young (24-year old) Barry Seal is seated third from left.  Seated to Seal’s right is former CIA chief Porter Goss. Front left, beside Goss, is the notorious Cuban "freedom fighter" Felix Rodriguez.  Rodriguez, a vice cop under the corrupt Mob-run Batista regime in Cuba, later became an Iran Contra operative and a confidant of the first George Bush.

Felix Rodriguez has long been known to be one of the CIA's most vicious assassins. According to law enforcement authorities, he keeps Che Guevara's hands in a jar atop his dresser. 

On the other side of the table, the only celebrant displaying any regard for tradecraft is  covering his face with his sport coat. However, his swept-back “Big Wave in Hawaii” pompadour made him fairly easily identifiable as Frank Sturgis. Sturgis has often been mentioned in connection with the JFK assassination.

Sturgis will later become famous as one of the Watergate burglars.Beside him, front right, is a man well-known among Kennedy assassination researchers.  William Seymour was the New Orleans representative of the Double-Chek Corporation, a CIA front used to recruit pilots (like Seal).  Researchers identify Seymour as the man said to have impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald, while Oswald was out of the country.

It is certainly a well-connected group. Just the fact that the man who will become the biggest drug smuggler in American history had been  consorting back in 1963 with a man whose job was recruiting pilots for the CIA makes allegations of CIA involvement in the drug trade far more than just another conspiracy theory.

So, if there had been a get-away plane flown out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination—and assuming there had been an authentic investigation into the assassination, which there was not—Barry Seal would have been high on the list when authorities told the police to call in the “usual suspects.”

But that puts the cart somewhat in front of the horse. Is there evidence that there was a get-away plane?  The answer is yes.

Three men in suits at Redbird Airport

At about 1:00 P.M. that same afternoon, half an hour after the president was shot, neighbors who lived along the road that runs by the Redbird Airport, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Dallas, began calling the police.  A small private plane, they reported, was behaving very strangely.  

For an hour it had been revving its engines, not on the runway, as per usual, but parked at the end of the airstrip on a grassy area next to the fence. The noise was so loud it prevented nearby residents, glued to their TVs for the news about the terrible event downtown, from hearing.

The police, perhaps understandably, were too busy to check it out. The question became moot when shortly thereafter  the plane took off. 

An FBI file of March 10, 1967, describes statements made by Louis Gaudin, the government's air traffic control specialist at Redbird airport, who recalled observing three men in business suits board a Comanche-type aircraft at about 2:00 P.M.

Thirty-seven years later, I  tracked down Louis Gaudin in retirement in the tiny town of Long Branch, Texas. “I filed that report in ’67 for only one reason,” Gaudin told me. “Sometime in 1967 I received a visit from an Assistant District Attorney in (New Orleans District Attorney) Jim Garrison’s office.”

“He showed me pictures of four possible pilots involved in the incident that day. One was a weird-looking character with a funny-looking wig. Then, shortly thereafter I saw on the news that David Ferrie had committed suicide, said Gaudin.

“That’s when I smelled a rat.”

Redbird Airport (today Dallas Executive Airport) is  a  small airfield between Dallas  and  Fort Worth. But it wasn’t just any old airport.

“The  FAA  had  its  general  aviation  headquarters there, said Gaudin.  “Howard Hughes had a huge old WWII hanger there, with heavy security. People from Wackenhut all over the place. And there were the Porter planes from General Harry Byrd’s outfit.”

General D. Harry Byrd’s links to the Kennedy assassination begin with the fact that he owned the building, the Texas School Book Depository, from which Kennedy was supposedly gunned down.

Then, too, he founded an aircraft company that became one of the largest U.S. defense contractors during the Vietnam War, Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), which also—and perhaps not coincidentally?—tested missiles at the Venice Airport in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

“What had happened was this,” he continued. “I was an air traffic controller working in the tower at Redbird that day. When I came on shift at 2 PM,  we received a bulletin to report any suspicious activity immediately to an FAA Security number. And we kept calling that number all afternoon, but got nothing but a busy signal. And then, after we heard they had caught the ‘lone gunman,’ I guess they called it, we stopped calling, and let the matter drop.”

From his perch atop the control tower, Mr. Gaudin, between handling twenty or thirty flights into and out of the airport an hour, had noticed something suspicious about three well-dressed men  in business suits standing, along with several suitcase,  beside a Comanche painted green-and-white.

So suspicious was he, Mr. Gaudin related, that when the plane took off on runway 17, he asked the pilot if he needed any assistance. The pilot said no. Gaudin asked which way the plane was heading. The pilot stated south.

Gaudin watched as the plane flew south for two miles, then made a hard left, and then flew north to Love Field.

The pilot had lied.

Suspicions aroused, Gaudin went over to the control tower’s receiver and listened as the plane made an approach and landed at Love Field, eight miles north of Redbird.

An hour later, the plane was back at Redbird. This time only two people were aboard. The third passenger—let’s call him the shooter–had been left at Love Field.

James Garrison, American hero

And that’s where the matter rested until Garrison’s investigator’s came calling. 

Then, after Gaudin became alarmed at the death of a man whose picture he had just recently been shown, he called the FBI, and filed the report which, he said, became something of a burden to him for the rest of his life.

“There was no Freedom of Information Act back then,” he says today. “That’s what’s  created some problems for me.”

This would be just a ‘suspicious sighting’ except for something that happened later, which clearly indicated to Gaudin that he was a witness to something he had no business seeing.

From the control tower, he says, he was too far away to be able to identify anyone who boarded the plane. But there was one person who could: Merrit Goble, who ran the fixed-wing operation, TexAir, at Redbird Field.

“Merrit and I were friends,” Gaudin relates. “So one day, after filing the FBI report, I went down to see if the FBI had been by to visit him as well. They hadn’t, he told me. So I asked him if he had anything, any gas receipts, any record of the fueling of the plane in question. And Merit acted very strangely. He told me, in effect, that it was none of my business. He said, ‘I will only answer questions from a bonafide law enforcement authority.’”

“I always thought that was strange: ‘I will only answer questions from a bonafide law enforcement authority.’ Because like I said, we were friends.”

Merrit Goble died last year, taking any secrets he possessed about the suspicious plane to his grave.

Means, Motive, Opportunity

 Was Barry Seal at the controls of the plane that took off from Redbird Airport on November 22 1963? We’ll never know for sure. But lacking an eyewitness willing to come forward and enough of a survivalist to live to tell his tale, we base a “yes” answer on his association with—and proximity to—the major players whose names get bandied about in connection with the assassination.

The central thesis of most writers on the  assassination is that the Kennedy assassination was the work of the Mafia, elements of the CIA, and right-wing Cuban exiles aligned with Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie, all of whom were CIA-connected. Not to mention Lee Oswald, who had formed an alliance with the U.S. intelligence community as a young man in the Civil Air Patrol with David Ferrie.

Barry Seal knew them all.

He was a known associate of the ‘usual suspects’: David Ferrie, Carlos Marcello, Guy Banister, and Grady Partin. He was a gunrunner to Cuba, and a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. And his participation in Operation 40, the CIA’s assassination squad, the blackest of black ops, as attested by the photo taken in Mexico in January 1963.

About one longtime associate of Banister and Ferrie (Murray Kessler)  who was busted with Barry in 1972, one DEA agent said, “He (Kessler) had a lot of familiarity with that group of ‘yahoos’ in New Orleans; that’s how I figure he met Barry, who was known to have been involved with Guy Banister and Ferrie back then too.” 

Moreover, Barry Seal was a spectacular pilot, one of the best alive.

I believe Seal flew that ‘getaway’ plane out of Dallas; and that during his often-acrimonious dealings with his superiors, his participation in the JFK hit remained his ‘ace in the hole’ for the rest of his life.

But where did the shooters come from? I’ll take that up tomorrow, in “The Camp in Lacombe.” As far as I know, I’m the only investigator in recent times who was able to locate—and visit—the site of the CIA’s secret camp for assassins in Lacombe, Louisiana.

What do the 9/11 attack and the Kennedy assassination cover-ups have in common?

Mis-direction. On 9/11, New York City was where most of the killing took place. It took maybe an hour. In Venice, Florida, where the key conspirators got together, they spent more than a year.  Yet there’s been endless talk—leading absolutely nowhere—about thermite, about holograms, about Building 7. And its all hooey, or, to use the technical term, disinformation.

Why I’m so sure is because I was the only investigative reporter at the biggest 9/11 crime scene—Venice—that wasn’t reduced to rubble. And I was continually made aware that I didn’t belong—and wasn’t wanted—there.

The Kennedy assassination set the pattern. Debating the minutiae of Dallas—the ‘magic bullet theory,’ the changing parade route, the standing down of military intelligence, and dozens of other unexplained anomalies—has proven only that a conspiracy had indeed taken place.

But it was never going to put anyone in jail. Because the conspiracy was elsewhere. In New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, on No Name Key, and. most especially, in Lacombe, Louisiana, where the CIA kept a secret camp which trained  assassins.

Moreover the conspirators were pros. The Kennedy assassination was their calling card.  Unlike the “big find” about the identity of the second shooter which one prominent author is currently using to flog his book—who was told by a friend of a friend of a guy who had it on good authority that so-and-so, who’s now, regrettably, dead, was in on the hit— they didn’t disappear from history after November 23, 1963.

 For the next several decades, the people who killed JFK made history. In Laos, and Cambodia, at the Watergate complex, and in the drug trafficking scandal that was mis-named Iran Contra.

They were people like Barry Seal.  

It’s July 1, 1972. The TV series Bewitched is airing its final episode, Attorney General John N. Mitchell is resigning as chairman of President Nixon's re-election  committee, and Sammy Davis JR’s aptly-titled single “Candy Man” is moving smartly up the charts.

(This is the second of two parts. Read the first part here.)

And its also the date of Barry Seal’s arrest in New Orleans for conspiracy to export enough C4 plastic explosive to blow the island of Cuba half-way toward the Florida Keys, which will eventually result in confirmation that rumors he flew a get-away plane out of Dallas are true.

His arrest—though no one suspects it yet— is part of the Watergate Scandal. When Customs Agents slap the cuffs on Seal in New Orleans, he says, angrily, “All I need is a bunch of Cubans after me.”

"All our secrets are the same."

It was in the sun-drenched Albuquerque study of two of America's most prominent writers —one a Guggenheim Fellow, National Book Award winner, and former member of the National Security Council, the other a celebrated investigative reporter whose first book took on  the entire power structure in Kentucky —that I first heard what I later came to think of as  "The Question."

Answering that question, to my satisfaction and hopefully tours, is where this story will end. In between are a few carefully chosen  fragments, shards from the broken mirror that I have—that we all have—been attempting to piece back together for the past 50 years.

To understand what follows, here are a few insights that seem to have particular relevance to this story from a few of Barry Seal’s contemporaries kind enough to share with me some of their accumulated wisdom.

An active and still-living(and thus necessarily anonymous) participant in American “clandestine operations,” for example, who once told me something that upon reflection seems obvious on  its face.

He said, “All our scandals are the same scandal. All our secrets are the same.”

What he meant, I believe, is that serious American scandals almost always arise from the fertile soil of this nation’s chief post-WWII money-making propositions: selling weapons and/or running drugs.

These are often said to be the No. 1 and No. 2 industries in the world, in terms of foreign trade, and it matters not which is ranked first, and which second, because they are two sides of the same coin. Many people to whom you would like to sell weapons can only pay you back with an equivalent quantity of illicit drugs.

Then there's something a famous Southern lawman named Rex Armistead told me, which helps me keep from getting my hopes up too much when there's an announcement that there will be a full FBI investigation of whatever the latest outrage happens to be: "The three most over-rated things in this world,” he told me, “are home cooking, home loving…and the FBI."

Finally there's what a retired US Customs Agent who had spent much of his career investigating Barry Seal said when he learned how shocked I'd been at the solicitousness of so many Americans towards Fidel Castro back in the 50’s, when he was just another bandito in the hills. These Americans had all shown their concern for Fidel by running weapons to him to defend his guerrilla band against the cruel Cuban tyrant Batista.

Their number included CIA guys, Mafia guys, and even a few characters from what they call the “Dixie Mob,' including Barry Seal, David Ferrie, and even Jack Ruby, who I was shocked to discover all knew each other!

“What did you expect?”asked my Customs informant with a bemused smile. "Of course they all know each other. There aren't that many ‘players’ out there."

Most of what follows drives home one or another of these points.

Welcome to Connected-land! 

Our story begins during the summer of 1972, a more innocent time where few suspected that the breaking Watergate scandal will contain links to narcotics trafficking and arms smuggling.

During the CIA’s shut-down of what Watergate investigators will later call “The Mexican Connection,” the arrest of Barry Seal will merely be “collateral damage” 

But it is what happened after Seal’s arrest that today provides persuasive evidence that Barry Seal was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and viewed it as his "ace in the hole" during his often-acrimonious dealings with his superiors. 

On July 3 The New York Times reports a DC-4 has been seized at the Shreveport Regional Airport, loaded with enough explosives to fuel a coup in a good-sized Latin American country. There’s almost seven tons of C-4 explosives, there’s 7,000 feet of  primer cord, 2,600 electric blasting caps and 25 electrical  detonators.

Authorities say the explosives are destined for Cuban exiles in Mexico, who plan to use them to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Federal officials say seven men in Texas and Louisiana have been arrested on charges of conspiring to smuggle munitions to Mexico. 

They include Richmond Harper, a millionaire rancher and bank director from Eagle Pass, Texas, a former Inspector with the INS, a New York Gambino-connected Mobster named Murray Kessler, and pilot Barry Seal.

Kessler, a  frequent house guest at the Harper ranch, has a record of six felony convictions on charges of interstate theft, transporting stolen property, bookmaking and conspiracy to possess heroin. 

A surveillance report written after he landed at the San Antonio airport  describes him as “50-ish and Jewish-looking, wearing a open-collar gray shirt with a gray sports suit, accompanied by a “bleached blond in white slacks and a red polka-dotted jacket.” 

More important than the bleached blond wearing polka dots, to our story, at least, is that Murray Kessler according to former DEA agent Dick Gustafson, who knew him, is “an anti-Castro guy, which was like a mantra he carried around with him.”

Stirring the pot a little thicker, Kessler was also a known associate of Guy Banister and David Ferrie in the 1960’s. 

“He had a lot of familiarity with that group of ‘yahoos’ in New Orleans,” Gustafson says. “That’s how I figure he met Barry, who was involved with Guy Banister and Ferrie back then too.”

The Shut-down of the Mexican Connection

It will come out at their trial that the men were busted by a US Customs undercover agent with CIA connections with whom Kennedy assassination aficionados are familiar named Cesario Diosdado, a participant in one of the stranger episodes occurring on November 22, 1963.

In Miami, Cuban Alpha 66 head  Antonio Veciana reported that several hours after the assassination Caesar Diosdado mysteriously showed up at his home unannounced.

“You don’t know anything about Kennedy, do you?” Diosdado asked.

When Veciana replied “no,” Diosdado seemed satisfied. Veciana felt he was being tested, so didn't tell Diosdado that he had seen Oswald in Dallas a month earlier, he later testified, because “he didn't want to get involved.”

JFK assassination investigator Gaeton Fonzi reported: "Veciana said as soon as Diosdado walked in the door he told him, ‘hey, don't worry about a thing, I don't even know why I'm doing this, they just told me to do it, interview some Cubans.’”

What’s been busted up, later court testimony reveals, is a weapons for heroin deal, masterminded by “rancher-banker” Richmond Harper, who is  described as a “tall lean guy wearing a string tie and cowboy boots  and a cowboy shirt with monogrammed initials “RCH.” 

It’s a description which fits him, Seal widow Debbie agrees, having seen him when she flew in to the airport in Eagle Pass with her pilot husband, so the two men could confer while awaiting trial.

Any friend of Zapata's a friend of mine

Time to stir the pot a little thicker: It was through Richmond Harper's’ Eagle Pass Texas ranch that Oswald’s friend in Dallas, oilman and CIA asset George DeMohrenschilt had entered Mexico en route on “a walking tour” of Central America that led him to be in Guatemala for the launch of “The Bay of Pigs invasion.

After DeMohrenschildt's sudden death by shotgun on the eve of his testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations—which his wife strenuously said was not a suicide—his personal address book was located, containing an entry reading: "Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio see also Zapata Petroleum Midland."

Richmond Harper is also an associate of the man known as Carlos Marcello's front man, Herman Beebe. And, according to a statement Barry Seal issued later, he had "very deep ties right into the (Nixon) White House."

Those ties were to the head of US Customs, Myles Ambrose, who was also a  Special Consultant to the President on Narcotics, and who was there at the birth, in 1973, of Nixon’s demon spawn, the DEA.

Myles Ambrose, according to former Customs officials who were disgusted at having had to work under him, would visit Harper and go hunting with him on his ranch on the border. He was a guest at what must have been the wedding of the year down in Eagle Pass, the nuptials of Richmond Harper’s daughter, an event her proud Danny commemorated with the slaughtering of 600 steers. 

"We tried to warn him [Ambrose],” stated one Customs official at the time. “Tell him that this guy [Harper] is bad. He wouldn't listen."

When we finally reached Myles Ambrose for his version of events, and his recollections of Barry Seal, he was perhaps understandably defensive.

“Frank is dead now. We can talk.”

Ambrose said he had no recollection of the warning.  It was only after his visits that he discovered that Harper had been the defendant in a civil suit involving the mislabeling of dog food–food not intended for humans—that was then shipped over the border from Mexico to the United States.

At any rate, he had only ever visited the Harper ranch once, he said emphatically.

He had been the guy, he told me, changing the subject, who had shepherded the establishment of the DEA through Congress. “I got to Tip O’Neill,” he told us. “And that kept the partisan stuff out.”

During my  interview with him, I felt Ambrose’s displeasure at some of my questions, which, in fairness, may have sounded slightly more suspicious than someone who had been a Special Consultant on Narcotics to President Nixon is used to fielding.

But whatever the reason, Ambrose became a bit over-eager to share his thoughts on the involvement in the drug trade by folks on the other side of the aisle.

“I was with Treasury back in the late Fifties, when Bobby Kennedy was running the Kefauver Committee Hearings on Organized Crime,” Ambrose said. “I know for a fact that there was a yellow sheet (investigative report) on a meeting in Havana where Meyer Lansky gave two kilos of heroin to Frank Sinatra to bring back to the States so he (Sinatra) would have a little ‘walking-around’ money.”

“But because Sinatra was helping Kennedy get elected, his brother removed all reference to this from the Committee’s report.”

Ambrose left office shortly after his friendship with Harper was revealed. Years later, Nixon aide Chuck Colson told Senator Lowell Weicker two pieces of information on Myles Ambrose that should never go together. 

1.  "Ambrose set up the CIA in the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

2.   Ambrose had cordial relations with certain Mafia figures.”

Even the DC-4 Barry Seal was piloting loaded with 7 tons of C4 plastique had some heavy connections.  It was owned by a man, James Boy of Fort Lauderdale, with whom Seal will be arrested in Miami in 983 as part of the DEA’s Operation Screamer.

As a result of that arrest, Barry Seal will “get with the program” and move his smuggling activities up to Mena Arkansas. And the rest, of course, is history.

“The trial of the C4 Seven”

One clue to Seal’s status is that, after having been caught illegally exporting 7 tons of C4 explosives, no one was in any hurry to bring him to trial.

But when they did, an extraordinary document surfaced, which clearly shows that Barry Seal viewed his participation in the Kennedy assassination as a bargaining chip, a laminated "get out of jail" card to be for the rest of his life. 

 Both the prosecutor and the judge received an anonymous (though the envelope bearing the letter is clearly in Barry Seal’s handwriting) letter threatening that unless the charges were dismissed, the sender would blow the cover off matters pertaining to “national security.”

The heading reads “CJ Simpson de Cuba.”

“Due to personal initiative and desire to see justice done this letter is mailed to you and your associates,” the letter reads.

“The United States two-count indictment against seven men on charges of conspiracy to ship “implements of war” out of the United States, without having approval of the government, has no chance to succeed.”

“I worked for the CJ Simpson de Cuba Drilling Company, which had three rotary drilling rigs operating in Cuba. Whether you or any of your associates are aware of the number of “implements of war” shipped by that company out of the United States as components of drilling equipment, I have no idea. But I advise you to find out!

These shipments of “implements of war” by the CIA had no known open approval of the United States Government. Yet I am sure that your attitude towards it would be that as long as it is done by a federal agency, it is correct. If this is your assumption, then you are dead wrong.

I can name names of agents involved in these shipments. The whole sorry mess of the CIA putting Fidel Castro into a position to overthrow the government of Juan Batista has never been told to the public.”

The letter, on its surface, is puzzling. While it might still have been embarrassing if the size of the assistance the CIA provided Fidel Castro became known, any resulting scandal would clearly have not risen to a level of seriousness where it might threaten to compromise current operations.

Vietnam and Cambodia were on the front burner in 72. Castro and Cuba was old news.

"That Bay of Pigs Thing"

The letter couldn’t be taken literally. But was it making some sort of oblique reference only understood by insiders? The way Nixon did while trying to get the FBI to call off the Watergate investigation?

"Look, the problem is that this tracks back to the Bay of Pigs, the whole problem is that this will open the whole— the whole Bay of Pigs thing—and the President just feels that ah, without going into the details–don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is a comedy of errors, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again and, ah…they should call the FBI in and (unintelligible) don't go any further into this case period!”

H.R. Haldeman later testified that Nixon's references to Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs was Nixon’s way of making an oblique allusion to the Kennedy assassination.

Could the dynamite the letter-writing hoped to be flinging in the judge’s face have something to do with the company involved?

As it turns out, it could… It's corporate name CJ Simpson de Cuba occurs in the most amazing context imaginable: A U.S. Secret Service agent in Chicago reported that a CJ Simpson de Cuba employee named Homer Echevarria had foreknowledge of the Kennedy assassination.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations Report cited one incident they found particularly troubling, which had come to the attention of the Secret Service within days after John Kennedy's death. 

An informant had "reported that he had knowledge of a group of Chicago Cubans, allegedly anti-Castro, who were bitterly opposed to President Kennedy.”  The informant had been attempting to negotiate a sale of machine guns to  Homer Echevarria. The day before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Echevarria told the informant that 'we now have plenty of money…as soon as 'we' take care of Kennedy.'”

Homer Echevarria, the man making threats against the President, worked for the CJ Simpson Oil Drilling Company in Cuba, and then later in Dallas.

It prompted an agent in charge of the Chicago field office of the Secret Service to write a memorandum about "a group in the Chicago area who may have a connection with the JFK assassination."

Three days after the JFK assassination, a Secret Service Agent in Chicago  reported that Cuban exile Homer Echevarria, who investigation showed was connected with the DRE and the 30th of November Movement, learned from Paulino Sierra— prior to November 22, 1963—that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated.

Cuba, the guns, New Orleans, everything"

The HSCA found that the 30th of November group was backed financially by a Chicago-based organization run by Paulino Sierra that backed Alpha 66 and the DRE  with  financial support from organized crime.

Paulino Sierra's provisional government operated with money obtained from "hoodlum elements," who were "not restricted to Chicago." Sierra was linked to the Lake Pontchartrain camp and the Mafia and the Castro assassination plots.

The two exile Cuban groups with which Echevarria was associated, the DRE and the 30th of November Movement, were the groups using what is often referred to as the CIA’s rogue, renegade, or black training camp in Lacombe.

New  Orleans sits  alongside not just the Mississippi, but a large freshwater lake, Lake Pontchartrain.  For well over twenty years assassination researchers and government investigators have suspected that a shooter team for the Kennedy assassination came from the anti-Castro guerrilla training camp on the north shore of Lake Pontchatrain, in the tiny town of Lacombe.

New Orleans DA Jim Garrison suspected that brothers Mike and Bill McLaney were providing Cuban exiles with a renegade off the books training site and arms cache, curtsey the CIA.

 He asserted there had been two anti-Castro groups training north of Lake Pontchatrain, one "overt," the other "covert."

The covert group, according to Garrison, was led by David Ferrie, who drilled five-man commando teams in guerrilla warfare practice and infiltration techniques on a site adjacent to the McLaney cottage. According to the New Orleans States-Item. "Immediately after the Lacombe raid, the so-called 'overt' Cuban group disappeared."

When we asked the engaging but slippery "CIA's man in '60's New Orleans" Gordon Novel if he had known the McLaney brothers,  his answer was interesting.  "I knew Mike McLaney by name, a CIA guy, supposedly. Dead now."

"But," he continued, "here's the problem of dealing with intelligence: its a beehive. Each cubicle is like this. McLaney over here and me over here, see? We're in separate cubicles, and our operations never overlapped. Just because he did this and I did that and we were both in New Orleans doesn't mean  we ever came in contact."

"Everybody know everybody in New Orleans"

While doing research in Louisiana in 2000, I identified and visited Mike McLaney’s Lacombe property. It is peopled with ghosts, none of whom would go on the record. So, for what follows, I’ve relied on the apparently most reliable JFK researched to cover the subject.

In July of ‘63 a group of Cuban exiles from Miami arrived and joined the anti-Castro guerrilla training camp at Lacombe.

Not long after the Miami exiles arrived, Lee Oswald offered his services to the exiles. Whether Oswald is patsy or conspirator or emissary from the Spiders From Mars, he was there, in the company of men like Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and CIA agent David Atlee Philips.

Mike McLaney sent the CIA a detailed plan for knocking out three Havana refineries, but instead of getting his plan approved, he got an urgent phone call warning him “not to attempt such a thing under any circumstances.”

According to an FBI informant, Marcello associate Sam Benton had almost 2,500 pounds of dynamite hidden there, and was negotiating to obtain a B-24 aircraft to bomb Castro’s oil refineries. The raid was set for August ’63, with two aircraft to take off from an airstrip near the Lacombe camp on a flight to bomb Havana’s oil refineries.

Apparently, fervent  anti-communism is all well and good, but Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corporation retained a fondness for their seized refineries in Havana, and a reluctance to return at some future date to discover bomb craters where a refinery had once been.

Prodded by Bobby Kennedy, the FBI raided the house in Lacombe storing the dynamite, and the training camp nearby.

The FBI’s Lacombe raid assumed a prominent role in Jim Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination. He believed that the exiles training there—for an assassination attempt on Castro—had been ‘spun off’ into the successful attempt on Kennedy.

So just who were Mike and Bill McLaney?  Mike was a casino owner in Havana, where one of his employees, Lewis McWillie, was  Jack Ruby's best friend. When Fidel Castro took power, Mike McLaney was arrested for three months, then freed, and continued to operate under Fidel Castro in hopes of becoming gambling czar of Cuba, hopes nursed by having paid out $102,000 to Fidel Castro's Ministry of Gambling, Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis.

When the Casino Nacional was nationalized in 1960 he lost $7 million. McLaney's brother, Bill, owned the Carousel Club in Las Vegas. It is presumably "just a coincidence" that Jack Ruby's club in Dallas is also called the Carousel Club.

Life Magazine once printed a story linking McLaney with Meyer Lansky, and he responds by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. When the magazine produced newspaper clippings that confirmed that no casino operated in Havana without the consent of Meyer Lansky, his suit was thrown out.

The Internal Revenue Service then rubbed a little salt in Mike's wound by filing income tax evasion charges him. He was convicted of evading $118,000 in taxes and sentenced to three months in Federal prison.

A personal friend of J Edgar Hoover

Because of the Life brouhaha, the Miami Police began an investigation of McLaney. "In the course of the conversation Mr. McLaney named some of his close friends," their report said. "Those named included  J. Edgar Hoover, John S. Knight, publisher of the Miami Herald and Rocky Pomerantz, Chief of the Miami Beach Police Department. He (McLaney) stated that he could use these people as references, along with the Chief of Police and Mayor of New Orleans."

We have the feeling he could have quit after mentioning Hoover, but you know how Mob guys  like to boast.

Garrison charged that David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, and Lee Oswald were all involved in training two paramilitary groups of Cuban exiles and American "neo-Nazis"

The covert group,  he  said, was  led  by  David Ferrie, who  drilled  five-man  commando  teams  in  guerrilla  warfare  practice.

There are eyewitness accounts of Dave Ferrie, Lee Oswald, and  numerous Cubans dressed in military fatigues and carrying automatic rifles involved in extensive military training maneuvers on the site.

Several people, including a CIA asset named Colonel William Bishop, shortly before his death  in  1990,  who told  author Dick Russell that he’d seen Oswald and Ferrie in a have seen a training film shot at the site.

So too, did HSCA lawyer and later Beverly Hills Mayor Robert Tenenbaum, who claims that after the House assassination investigation got hold of a copy of the training film shot at the Lacombe camp, it was stolen.

“MIKE MCLANEY WAS a good friend of mine, a wonderful athlete, a national tennis champion, and  a  splendid  golf  hustler,”  said venerable old New  Orleans  antiques  dealer  Dave  Dixon, who “just happened” to have been Barry Seal’s CIA handler.

But  none  of  these  attributes  which  Dixon  ascribed  to  his  friend made McLaney important enough to burglarize the US House of Representatives.

“What was there about the McLaney's training camp on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain that made it important enough to risk burglarizing the US House of Representatives?”

The answer is simple. What else?

Finally, we return to where we began: in the sun-dappled study of Roger Morris and Sally Denton, whose question had sent me on my quest. One question I wished I’d asked them was where they first heard the rumor.

Later, I learned from Sally Denton that her father, a prominent attorney in Las Vegas, had been Mike McLaney’s lawyer.

They combed through the trash. They searched dozens of planes. And while TV cameras from all the Miami TV network affiliates looked on, they loaded box after box filled with aviation records into government SUV’s parked in plain sight on the tarmac in front of the office.

But today— more than two weeks after more than 100 Federal agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security descended on the headquarters of the infamous and notorious World Jet Inc. at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport—if you want to know why they were there or what they were looking for, you’re two weeks too late.

That’s because the detailed 35-page affidavit supporting the request for a search warrant of Don and Bill Whittington’s air charter company filed at the United States District Court in Grand Junction Colorado has been sealed.

But not, thankfully, before it was discovered and leaked onto the Internet in an exclusive story by reporter Joe Hamel from The Durango Herald in Durango Colorado.  

“I found a search warrant and one affidavit during a regular trip down to the Federal Courthouse to check on what’s new,” reporter Hamel said in an interview. “But when I went back a week later to check for new filings, it was gone. The whole case has been sealed.”

"The whole case has been sealed." 

Alone among major crimes, drug trafficking is often treated as a matter of “grave” national security. No one will say why. But there's a lot of money involved…

This penchant for secrecy is especially clear in the case of the two American-registered drug planes from St Petersburg Florida busted in the Yucatan, whose seizure revealed that Wachovia, then America's 4th-largest bank, had laundered $378 billion for Mexican drug cartels. 

For example, “Raul Jimenez Alfaro,” who investigators identified the man in charge of bringing the DC-9  busted in the Yucatan carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine north to the U.S.,  pled guilty under an alias to drug charges in a Federal Court in Miami, keeping his role in the massive 5.5 ton drug move secret.  

Another recent example is Juan Carlos Abadia. The DEA called him the biggest drug cartel boss since Pablo Escobar, the leader of the world’s biggest drug cartel, and the man responsible for exporting more than 500 tons of cocaine—worth in excess of $10 billion to the United States.

Yet when Abadia pled guilty to drug trafficking and racketeering in a US Federal Court in 2011, not one newspaper in America covered his conviction. It went completely unreported. The DEA didn't didn’t even issue a press release.

Compounding this "anomaly"is another strange fact: Although Abadia was sentenced to 25 years in Federal prison,  a search of the prisoner locater at the Federal Bureau of Prisons website does not list his name as among those currently incarcerated. Phone calls asking about his whereabouts to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons were met with a terse "no comment."

"Gaming the system" is "Call of Duty" for elite deviants

The DEA affidavit details a year-long investigation of aircraft dealer Reginald “Don” Whittington, 67. 

The Whittington’s, the affidavit states, are suspected of illegally leasing aircraft from Florida to cocaine cartels and laundering drug-related profits through a hot springs resort hotel and a ranch in Colorado.

 It contains startling information about the ease with which Mexican and Colombian drug cartels are able to purchase US aircraft—as well as a certain amount of protection— from brokers like Whittington, or the unmentioned Larry Peters of Skyway Aircraft in St Petersburg, who has also sold numerous drug planes to Mexican cartels with apparent impunity.

The scheme works like this: the Whittington’s company would sell airplanes at inflated prices to drug traffickers, but maintain the title and American registration number in the name of World Jet or a designated nominee.  Then, after the smugglers were done with the planes, World Jet would “repossess” them, at a tidy profit. 

The clear virtue of this strategy is it provides “plausible deniability.” And even if the airplane is caught, by claiming to be an "innocent owner," there's a good chance the participants will get back the plane.  

Donna Blue, Donna Blue, wherefore art you?

The affidavit confirms reporting published here which called into question the very existence of Donna Blue Aircraft, the Florida company which the FAA listed as the owner of a Gulfstream II which went down in the Yucatan on September 24 2007 carrying four tons of cocaine.

Suspicions about the two plane's "unusual" chain of ownership turned out to beright on the money.

The affidavit sates, “On September 24, 2007, a 1975 Gulfstream II turbo jet bearing tail number N987SA crashed in the Yucatan Peninsula while carrying 3723 kilograms of cocaine, which was recovered by the Mexican Government, as documented by DEA Mexico City.”

“N987SA was owned by Donna Blue Aircraft Inc, which was subsequently identified as a front company for a Tampa Florida-based ICE undercover operation named Operation Mayan Jaguar.” (emphasis mine.)

The “Tampa-based ICE undercover operation” likely provided “cover” for a CIA operation, which “sheep-dipped”  an already-owned CIA plane, the Gulfstream II, to a dummy front company, Donna Blue Aircraft.

As I reported five years ago, the registration history of the Gulfstream II (N987SA) indicated the plane had been “parked” or “sheep-dipped” in and out of the hands of a motley crew of politically well-connected ‘straw’ owners, whose ranks included a secretive Midwestern media magnate who bought more than a million dollars of billboard advertising for Presidential candidate George W Bush in 2000; a lieutenant to Saudi “fixer’ and long-time CIA asset Adnan Khashoggi; and most recently individuals in New York with strong connections to the Russian Mafiya.

"Hail hail, the gang's all here!"

Several days after the crash of the Gulfstream II in the Yucatan, I paid a visit to the address—4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 in Coconut Beach FL—that “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” listed as its home address on FAA documents.

What I found was an empty office suite, with a blank sign out front. There was no visible sign of any entity called Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc.

What there was, however, were a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite. 

Donna Blue Aircraft (d-b-a- doing business as, get it?) was a dummy front company cut from the same cloth as decades-worth of CIA dummy front companies.

Moreover the brief description of Donna Blue on its Internet page  was such a clumsy half-hearted effort that it defeated its purpose of constructing a plausible “legend,” or cover.

The website featured a quote from a satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer whose name, unfortunately is “John Doe.”  The company’s listed  phone number was right out of a movie: 415.555-5555.  

Here is where the affidavit reveals perhaps more than was intended.

 “Earlier in 2007 this aircraft was sold from a Delaware-based company SA Holdings LLC of Donna Blue Aircraft, which in turn produced bill of sale for the aircraft to Clyde O’Conner and Greg Smith.”

“Clyde O’Conner and Greg Smith had long been targets of DEA investigations for the trafficking of cocaine from South America to Central America and Mexico. As well, Gregory Smith currently works as a contract pilot for World Jet. Don Whittington and World Jet were implicated in brokering the sale of N987SA from SA Holdings LLC to the undercover company Donna Blue Aircraft.”

A "pilot of interest" flying loads all over

A little later, the affidavit states that Federal agents had Don Whittington under surveillance on a flight from Fort Lauderdale to their resort in  Pagosa Springs New Mexico in mid-April of last year.

The flight was piloted by “Gregory Dean Smith.”

“Gregory Smith has been identified in other DEA investigations as a pilot of interest due to intelligence that indicated he was a contract pilot who had flown loads of cocaine from South and Central America to points in the US and Mexico.”

Brazilian Joao Malaga of Donna Blue Aircraft—now known to have been fronting for an ICE operation— explained to authorities that pilots Greg Smith and Clyde O’Conner paid him $2 million in cash to purchase the Gulfstream.

Malago’s statement was greeted with derision by insiders at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport who know both men, I reported.

Neither man is anywhere near wealthy. One, Smith, is anything but.

“Greg Smith’s a good pilot, and dependable, and I never thought twice about hiring him to fly a charter for me,” a charter aviation manager told me.

 “Except I always had to be sure to always front him money for expenses, or I’d get phone calls from the backside of nowhere telling me they didn’t have enough money to gas up the plane to fly home.”

"Operation Mayan Jaguar"

Bill Conroy of NarcoNews had reported that the now-mangled drug plane had been used for at least a decade by the CIA to fly "extraordinary renditions “to the US base in Guantanamo and to ferry extradited drug traffickers from Colombia to the USA.

At least on the surface, the DEA affidavit appears to indicate otherwise.

On the other hand, there is the possibility that the DEA was looking at pilots O’Conner and Smith as “persons of interest” in drug trafficking investigations at the same time the CIA was employing them as pilots?

Anyone who remembers Barry Seal would seem to have no trouble answering, at least tentatively,  “yes.”

Another place we got it right: The DEA affidavit called the Tampa-based ICE operation  “Operation Mayan Jaguar.” Bill Conroy called it “Operation Mayan Express.”  

Especially when dealing with a government which jealously guards information on drug trafficking  that they themselves aren’t sponsoring as a matter of (usually ‘grave’)national security, that’s close enough for television. Or government work.

So far, so good. Kudos to Bill Conroy of NarcoNews, the only other reporter following the story, and to (immodestly) me as well.

ICE running amok?

This is a case of ICE running amok,” a DEA source told Conroy. “If this [operation] was being run by the book, they would not be doing it unilaterally” – without the participation of DEA – “and without the knowledge of the Mexican government.”

For my part, I’d interviewed the No 2 DEA official in Miami, who insisted on anonymity for reasons which will soon become obvious.

In my whiniest citizen-journalist voice, I asked him plaintively, “How come you guys aren’t investigating the planes out of St Petersburg busted with 10 tons of cocaine?”

He calmly replied that one Federal Agency does not, as a matter of course, investigate the operations of another Federal Agency.

What had been exposed by the Dc-9 and Gulfstream II seizures, he said,  was a rogue U.S. Customs operation (ICE is part of Customs, which in turn is part of Homeland Security).

For further answers, he pointed my to the Homeland Security’s Office of Professional Responsibility, charged with investigating internal misconduct.

Five years later, I’m still waiting to hear back from them.

Disneyland for Spooks

The Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport looms so large in recent American history that it may one day get national landmark status. It’s the hub of one of Florida’s biggest and most  lucrative industries. A playground for elite deviants from both North and South America.

It’s Disneyland for Spooks. An otherwise unprepossessing local airfield that’s just a hop skip and a jump from almost anywhere—the Bahamas, the Caymans, Turks & Caicos, Puerto Rico—that anyone in the drug trafficking/money laundering industry needs to go.

The Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport is the Little Airfield That Could.

Yet local state and federal authorities have been unable to summon the will to plug what is by now a glaringly visible national security loophole, perhaps because the enormously lucrative traffic in money, weapons, drugs, diamonds, and even terrorists that takes place using business jets cruising at up to 40,000 feet and available only to a select few among the international elite.

In the coming days, I will begin to detail some of the truly shocking revelations contained in the DEA affidavit that somehow has wiggled its way into the public domain.

But it strains credulity to think there is much there that the DEA didn’t know five or ten or even twenty years ago.

Now that the notorious Whittington brothers are— once again—the target of a major DEA investigation, the real question is: Why now? 

They combed through the trash. They searched dozens of planes. And while TV cameras from all the Miami TV network affiliates looked on, they loaded box after box filled with aviation records into government SUV’s parked in plain sight on the tarmac in front of the office.

But today— more than two weeks after more than 100 Federal agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security descended on the headquarters of the infamous and notorious World Jet Inc. at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport—if you want to know why they were there or what they were looking for, you’re two weeks too late.

That’s because the detailed 35-page affidavit supporting the request for a search warrant of Don and Bill Whittington’s air charter company filed at the United States District Court in Grand Junction Colorado has been sealed.

But not, thankfully, before it was discovered and leaked onto the Internet in an exclusive story by reporter Joe Hamel from The Durango Herald in Durango Colorado.  

“I found a search warrant and one affidavit during a regular trip down to the Federal Courthouse to check on what’s new,” reporter Hamel said in an interview. “But when I went back a week later to check for new filings, it was gone. The whole case has been sealed.”

"The whole case has been sealed." 

Alone among major crimes, drug trafficking is often treated as a matter of “grave” national security. No one will say why. But there's a lot of money involved…

This penchant for secrecy is especially clear in the case of the two American-registered drug planes from St Petersburg Florida busted in the Yucatan, whose seizure revealed that Wachovia, then America's 4th-largest bank, had laundered $378 billion for Mexican drug cartels. 

For example, “Raul Jimenez Alfaro,” who investigators identified the man in charge of bringing the DC-9  busted in the Yucatan carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine north to the U.S.,  pled guilty under an alias to drug charges in a Federal Court in Miami, keeping his role in the massive 5.5 ton drug move secret.  

Another recent example is Juan Carlos Abadia. The DEA called him the biggest drug cartel boss since Pablo Escobar, the leader of the world’s biggest drug cartel, and the man responsible for exporting more than 500 tons of cocaine—worth in excess of $10 billion to the United States.

Yet when Abadia pled guilty to drug trafficking and racketeering in a US Federal Court in 2011, not one newspaper in America covered his conviction. It went completely unreported. The DEA didn't didn’t even issue a press release.

Compounding this "anomaly"is another strange fact: Although Abadia was sentenced to 25 years in Federal prison,  a search of the prisoner locater at the Federal Bureau of Prisons website does not list his name as among those currently incarcerated. Phone calls asking about his whereabouts to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons were met with a terse "no comment."

"Gaming the system" is "Call of Duty" for elite deviants

The DEA affidavit details a year-long investigation of aircraft dealer Reginald “Don” Whittington, 67. 

The Whittington’s, the affidavit states, are suspected of illegally leasing aircraft from Florida to cocaine cartels and laundering drug-related profits through a hot springs resort hotel and a ranch in Colorado.

 It contains startling information about the ease with which Mexican and Colombian drug cartels are able to purchase US aircraft—as well as a certain amount of protection— from brokers like Whittington, or the unmentioned Larry Peters of Skyway Aircraft in St Petersburg, who has also sold numerous drug planes to Mexican cartels with apparent impunity.

The scheme works like this: the Whittington’s company would sell airplanes at inflated prices to drug traffickers, but maintain the title and American registration number in the name of World Jet or a designated nominee.  Then, after the smugglers were done with the planes, World Jet would “repossess” them, at a tidy profit. 

The clear virtue of this strategy is it provides “plausible deniability.” And even if the airplane is caught, by claiming to be an "innocent owner," there's a good chance the participants will get back the plane.  

Donna Blue, Donna Blue, wherefore art you?

The affidavit confirms reporting published here which called into question the very existence of Donna Blue Aircraft, the Florida company which the FAA listed as the owner of a Gulfstream II which went down in the Yucatan on September 24 2007 carrying four tons of cocaine.

Suspicions about the two plane's "unusual" chain of ownership turned out to be right on the money.

The affidavit states, “On September 24, 2007, a 1975 Gulfstream II turbo jet bearing tail number N987SA crashed in the Yucatan Peninsula while carrying 3723 kilograms of cocaine, which was recovered by the Mexican Government, as documented by DEA Mexico City.”

“N987SA was owned by Donna Blue Aircraft Inc, which was subsequently identified as a front company for a Tampa Florida-based ICE undercover operation named Operation Mayan Jaguar.” (emphasis mine.)

The “Tampa-based ICE undercover operation” likely provided “cover” for a CIA operation, which “sheep-dipped”  an already-owned CIA plane, the Gulfstream II, to a dummy front company, Donna Blue Aircraft.

As I reported five years ago, the registration history of the Gulfstream II (N987SA) indicated the plane had been “parked” or “sheep-dipped” in and out of the hands of a motley crew of politically well-connected ‘straw’ owners, whose ranks included a secretive Midwestern media magnate who bought more than a million dollars of billboard advertising for Presidential candidate George W Bush in 2000; a lieutenant to Saudi “fixer’ and long-time CIA asset Adnan Khashoggi; and most recently individuals in New York with strong connections to the Russian Mafiya.

"Hail hail, the gang's all here!"

Several days after the crash of the Gulfstream II in the Yucatan, I paid a visit to the address—4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 in Coconut Beach FL—that “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” listed as its home address on FAA documents.

What I found was an empty office suite, with a blank sign out front. There was no visible sign of any entity called Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc.

What there was, however, were a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite. 

Donna Blue Aircraft (d-b-a- doing business as, get it?) was a dummy front company cut from the same cloth as decades-worth of CIA dummy front companies.

Moreover the brief description of Donna Blue on its Internet page  was such a clumsy half-hearted effort that it defeated its purpose of constructing a plausible “legend,” or cover.

The website featured a quote from a satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer whose name, unfortunately is “John Doe.”  The company’s listed  phone number was right out of a movie: 415.555-5555.  

A "pilot of interest" flying loads all over

Here is where the affidavit reveals perhaps more than was intended.

 “Earlier in 2007 this aircraft was sold from a Delaware-based company SA Holdings LLC of Donna Blue Aircraft, which in turn produced bill of sale for the aircraft to Clyde O’Conner and Greg Smith.”

A little later, the affidavit states that Federal agents had Don Whittington under surveillance on a flight from Fort Lauderdale to their resort in  Pagosa Springs New Mexico in mid-April of last year.

The flight was piloted by “Gregory Dean Smith.”

“Gregory Smith has been identified in other DEA investigations as a pilot of interest due to intelligence that indicated he was a contract pilot who had flown loads of cocaine from South and Central America to points in the US and Mexico.”

Brazilian Joao Malaga of Donna Blue Aircraft—now known to have been fronting for an ICE operation— explained to authorities that pilots Greg Smith and Clyde O’Conner paid him $2 million in cash to purchase the Gulfstream.

Malago’s statement was greeted with derision by insiders at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport who know both men, I reported. Neither man is anywhere near wealthy. One, Smith, is anything but. 

“Greg Smith’s a good pilot, and dependable, and I never thought twice about hiring him to fly a charter for me,” a charter aviation manager told me.  “Except I always had to be sure to always front him money for expenses, or I’d get phone calls from the backside of nowhere telling me they didn’t have enough money to gas up the plane to fly home.”

"Operation Mayan Jaguar"

Bill Conroy of NarcoNews had reported that the now-mangled drug plane had been used for at least a decade by the CIA to fly "extraordinary renditions “to the US base in Guantanamo and to ferry extradited drug traffickers from Colombia to the USA.

The DEA affidavit, which states that the two pilots had been under investigation for drug trafficking, would seem to indicate otherwise.

“Clyde O’Conner and Greg Smith had long been targets of DEA investigations for the trafficking of cocaine from South America to Central America and Mexico," states the affidavit.

"As well, Gregory Smith currently works as a contract pilot for World Jet. Don Whittington and World Jet were implicated in brokering the sale of N987SA from SA Holdings LLC to the undercover company Donna Blue Aircraft.”

On the other hand, is it possible the DEA was looking at pilots O’Conner and Smith as “persons of interest” in drug trafficking investigations at the same time the CIA was employing them as pilots?

Anyone who remembers Barry Seal would seem to have no trouble answering, at least tentatively,  “yes.”

The DEA affidavit called the Tampa-based ICE operation  “Operation Mayan Jaguar.” Bill Conroy called it “Operation Mayan Express.”  

Especially when dealing with a government which jealously guards information on drug trafficking  that they themselves aren’t sponsoring as a matter of (usually ‘grave’)national security, that’s close enough for television. Or government work.

So far, so good. Kudos to Bill Conroy of NarcoNews, the only other reporter following the story, and to (immodestly) me as well.

ICE running amok?

This is a case of ICE running amok,” a DEA source told Conroy. “If this [operation] was being run by the book, they would not be doing it unilaterally” – without the participation of DEA – “and without the knowledge of the Mexican government.”

For my part, I’d interviewed the No 2 DEA official in Miami, who insisted on anonymity for reasons which will soon become obvious.

In my whiniest citizen-journalist voice, I asked him plaintively, “How come you guys aren’t investigating the planes out of St Petersburg busted with 10 tons of cocaine?”

He calmly replied that one Federal Agency does not, as a matter of course, investigate the operations of another Federal Agency.

What had been exposed by the Dc-9 and Gulfstream II seizures, he said,  was a rogue U.S. Customs operation (ICE is part of Customs, which in turn is part of Homeland Security).

For further answers, he pointed my to the Homeland Security’s Office of Professional Responsibility, charged with investigating internal misconduct.

Five years later, I’m still waiting to hear back from them.

Disneyland for Spooks

The Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport looms so large in recent American history that it may one day get national landmark status. It’s the hub of one of Florida’s biggest and most  lucrative industries. A playground for elite deviants from both North and South America.

It’s Disneyland for Spooks. An otherwise unprepossessing local airfield that’s just a hop skip and a jump from almost anywhere—the Bahamas, the Caymans, Turks & Caicos, Puerto Rico—that anyone in the drug trafficking/money laundering industry needs to go.

The Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport is the Little Airfield That Could.

Yet local state and federal authorities have been unable to summon the will to plug what is by now a glaringly visible national security loophole, perhaps because the enormously lucrative traffic in money, weapons, drugs, diamonds, and even terrorists that takes place using business jets cruising at up to 40,000 feet and available only to a select few among the international elite.

In the coming days, I will begin to detail some of the truly shocking revelations contained in the DEA affidavit that somehow has wiggled its way into the public domain.

But it strains credulity to think there is much there that the DEA didn’t know five or ten or even twenty years ago.

Now that the notorious Whittington brothers are— once again—the target of a major DEA investigation, the real question is: Why now? 

A major Colombian drug trafficker who willingly sought extradition to the United States—even offering a $40 million bribe to officials in Brazil to send him to the US—apparently knew what he was doing. After being extradited and convicted in Federal Court in New York of felony drug charges that could have put him in jail for life, he disappeared.

His name is Juan Carlos Ramirez-Abadia (nickname: Lollipop). He's a figure in the recent scandal over the President of Costa Rica’s use of a drug plane belonging to Gabriel Morales Fallon, who was identified as one of his former lieutenants.

Juan Carlos Abadia's extradition to the US from Brazil in 2008 received major media coverage.The DEA was calling him the biggest drug cartel boss since Pablo Escobar. They say he led the world’s biggest drug cartel, exporting more than 500 tons of cocaine—worth in excess of $10 billion—just to the United States alone.

His name was in the news again several months later, when he asked (citing claustrophobia) to be placed in a bigger detention cell while awaiting trial in New York.

But when he pled guilty in March of 2010 to felony counts of drug trafficking and racketeering, not one newspaper in America carried the story. His conviction went completely unreported. The DEA didn't didn’t even issue a press release.

It was as if, when Pablo Escobar was gunned down in Colombia, the story didn't make the news.

Where is "My Boy Lollipop?"

Court documents indicate Abadia was sentenced to 25 years in Federal prison. But a search of the prisoner locater at the Federal Bureau of Prisons website does not list his name as among those currently incarcerated.

The Assistant US Attorney in charge of the Abadia case, Carolyn Pokorny, declined to comment on his whereabouts.  

And that’s where the trail ends, at least for the moment.

Another anomaly: There is no record of his sentencing.  Among the official court documents available through PACER is a transcript of a hearing held before the court accepted Abadia’s guilty plea, to ensure he understood his rights, and was pleading guilty voluntarily. There is a binding 9-page forfeiture agreement. Abadia agreed to forfeit $10 billion (that’s billion with a ‘b’) in currency and property to the US Government.  There is also an order by District Judge Sandra Townes accepting his guilty plea.

But—more than two years later—there is no record of his being sentenced. Whether the discrepancy concerns missing documents, years-long deferred sentencing, or some other cause is unknown at this time.

"Almighty Latin Kings and Queens" Beware

The situation is more than puzzling. On what should have been a banner day for the DEA and the Department of Justice, Drug Kingpin Juan Carlos Ramirez-Abadia was well on his way to being erased from public memory. 

As an organization, the DEA has shown that it excels at only one thing: shamelessly flogging its own dubious achievements. That, and putting the best face possible on the long-ago lost drug war.

So why did they pass up the chance to announce they'd bagged & tagged the biggest drug lord to walk the earth since Pablo Escobar fell off a roof?  

A search of March 2010 press releases on the Department of Justice’s national website turned up . headlines announcing that a member of the “Almighty Latin King and Queens,” sentenced to 210 months for his role in a drug conspiracy; and a “Maryland Man,” convicted of sex trafficking, firearms and gun charges.

But nothing about Abadia's conviction.

One headline looked promising. It announced that a “Leader of Colombian Narco-Terrorist Organization” had been sentenced to more than 20 years for conspiring to import tons of cocaine into the U.S 

Alas, the DEA, as is well-known, plays favorites, and the narco-terrorist kingpin fixin' to do time had been a leader of the gritty and perennially out-of-favor-in-Washington FARC. Abadia, on the other hand,  had taken over the remnants of the "bandana-free" Cali Cartel, and turned it into the powerhouse North Valley Cartel.

A search of contemporaneous press releases on the US Attorney’s own website in Brooklyn showed they hadn’t even issued the standard boilerplate press release, thanking the DEA and the hard-working men and women of law enforcement etc., while trumpeting the significance of Ramirez-Abadia's conviction. 

A check of that month’s press releases at the national Department of Justice's Eastern District of New York site turned up Bloods gang members indicted on murder and racketeering. There was a headline touting a “leader of violent drug crew” getting life in prison, while another, “leader of violent drug crew,” unconnected and slightly luckier than the first, was being dished out  27 years.

But not one word about the (local!) conviction of a man who’d just admitted to shipping 500 tons of cocaine to the US.

A lot of money changing hands

Authorities estimated that Abadia’s North Valley Cartel employed hundreds of people, and controlled 60 percent of the drugs leaving Colombia for the United States and Europe each year, a significantly higher percentage than the Medellin bad boys– who always lagged the Cali Cartel, never mind the DEA–controlled in its heyday. 

His employees weren’t stringing up narco-banners over highways, or sharpening their machetes, cutting up corpses into pieces small enough to fit into 55-gallon drums or strapping bandoliers across their chests.  They were international businessmen and women, manufacturing and transporting multi-ton loads of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico, destined for the US market for Abadia’s Drug Division; or counting and then launderering money, or couriering it for the Money Laundering Division.

They doled out bribes to police, politicians and military officials in the cartel’s Corruption Division; or carried out murder, torture, kidnapping and violent drug debt collections for the "Office of the Sicarios."

Law enforcement officials have confiscated more than 24 tons of cocaine from Abadia’s cartel associates, seized hundreds of properties; and dozens of legitimate corporations: pharmaceutical distribution companies, major currency exchanges, even thoroughbred horse breeding farms.

The Silence of those on the lam

Excessive government secrecy has long been common in cases involving national security. Less understandably, it is also common—suspiciously common—in cases involving drug trafficking.

The level of secrecy in the Abadia case is reminiscent of what was recently reported here involving a key figure in the biggest drug seizure on an airplane in Mexican history, the 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC-9 from St. Petersburg, Florida. 

Tracing the money from that massive drug bust led directly to the forced sale in 2008 of Wachovia, then America's 4th largest bank.

When a key figure in that case pled guilty to unrelated drug charges two years ago in a Federal Court in Miami, it was a secret to journalists, as well as to probation officials preparing his Pre-Sentence Report (PSI). It was even a secret to the Federal judge. Court transcripts reveal she was unaware the man she was sentencing had been a key figure in a case that brought down America's 4th largest bank.

Another "only in Miami" moment? Or something more?

The temptation was to write the "oversight" off as one of those “only in Miami moments,” which are encountered regularly by observers of judicial proceedings in South Florida.

(Another is upcoming in two weeks, when men associated with the Gambino Family go on trail for the murder of Gus Boulis, more than seven years after their arrest in 2006.)

But now its happened in Brooklyn, too.

Are there similarities between events in Miami and Brooklyn?

One stands out: the Asst. US Attorney's in each case specializes in major drug traffickers. In Miami, Asst US Attorney Hoffman handles everything involving Colombians.  When asked to comment on the false identity under which she prosecuted a key figure in the 5.5 ton DC-9 story, she declined.

In Brooklyn, Asst US Attorney Carolyn Pokorny  handles "all the big Colombian cases." Regarding the current whereabouts of the man she two years ago helped send to Federal prison for 25 years, she offered to put us in touch with the Court's Public Information Specialist.  

Might the reason both appear so tight-lipped be that they’ve been “read into” a sensitive and highly classified US operation involving drug trafficking which has been ongoing for decades now, and whose survival demands that the rest of America remain ignorant? 

Are these two well-placed Asst US Attorneys privy to information which indicates that US drug policy differentiates between drug traffickers who smuggle drugs for US interests… and everybody else?

News that a DEA affidavit implicated Fort Lauderdale aviation impresario Don Whittington for brokering the now-famous Gulfstream II jet that crashed with 4 tons of cocaine in the Yucatan to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) black operation in Tampa came as a complete surprise, even to those closely following the case. 

But in hindsight it makes a certain sense.  The Whittington's have long been among South Florida's most storied 'pirates.' 

And the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport is to American general aviation what Sodom and Gomorrah were to the Bible. 

The new information in the DEA affidavit was the first movement in the case in six years , almost since the moment the American-registered plane from St Petersburg FL burst open on impact,  spilling four tons of cocaine across an area the size of three football fields. 

Don Whittington brokered the sale of the Gulfstream (N987SA) jet to the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in Tampa, the DEA document disclosed,  as part of an operation called Operation Mayan Jaguar.

It was a controversial operation. A top DEA official in Miami called it  a "rogue operation." On the evidence of recent court filings in Miami in a related case (profiled in an upcoming story), the U.S. Asst Attorney in Miami who is charged with handling all major drug trafficking cases in South Florida appears to concur.  

An inter-Agency tug-of-war is underway; the kind of imbroglio during which some truth may slip out. 

Do not ask for whom the cell phone rings.

The case of the Gulfstream has sat dead in the water— with no Americans ever charged, even though it was an American-registered plane—for more than six years.

In Mexico, however, it was a whole different story:

Three tortured bodies associated with the case were found lying across a road near the Merida airport. A dozen Federal agents in Cancun went to prison. Four airport policemen served time. One pilot committed suicide while serving his sentence.

And the Director of Civil Aviation in the Yucatan, Jose Luis Soladana Ortiz, was assassinated. Soladana had been in direct radio contact with the pilots on the Gulfstream as it approached Cancun Airport, where local observers stated it had landed without incident on numerous occasions. 

This time, however, Soladana denied the plane permission to land. The  Gulfstream flew on into the night. Hours later when it ran out of fuel the plane made an emergency crash-landing in the jungle near Tixkobob, a hamlet 50 miles from Merida. 

Soladana Ortiz paid for his decision with his life. His body was found on the side of the road, face down, holding his cell phone with both hands in front of his chest. As authorities examined it his  phone began ringing, eerily, repeatedly. His killers, still nearby, were mocking  investigators.

Hapless pilots with empty pockets set up to take the heat

That the Gulfstream hadn’t belonged to a hastily set-up company called Donna Blue Associates, owned by two Brazilians, became obvious when, less than two weeks after the crash, I paid a visit to the address in Coconut Beach FL. that “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” listed as its place of business on FAA documents. 

What I found was an empty office suite with a blank sign out front. There was no sign of Donna Blue Aircraft. However, there were a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite.  

Nor was it owned by the two hapless pilots in Fort Lauderdale who were set up as patsy’s by the Brazilians, who swore they’d sold the Gulfstream to them for $2 million in cash a week before it went down. It was clear in interviews with aviation executives that—unless the back end of a Brinks truck suddenly fell open in front of them—neither pilot could have raised enough to pay for more than one beer with lunch 

It already seemed clear (“Sloppy Tradecraft Exposes CIA Drug Plane”) that the plane had been owned by an Agency of the U.S. Government. During the course of reporting on drug trafficking for more than a decade I had become familiar with how the CIA hides or sheep-dips the ownership of its fleet of planes. 

Gaming the System 101

During the following months I identified a motley crew of politically well-connected ‘straw’ owners in whose hands the plane had been temporarily  “parked” or “sheep-dipped” during the previous decade. These stories will become highly relevant when Tampa ICE is forced to admit, as it will be, that the Agency was also behind the operation of the DC-9 (N900SA)  from St Petersburg that was seized carrying  5.5 tons of cocaine eighteen months before the crash of the Gulfstream II.

Bill and Don Whittington’s World Jet in Fort Lauderdale allegedly ran a scheme designed to shield drug planes from official suspicion by providing planes with American registration to drug cartels, according to the DEA affidavit.

“They negotiate a contract with the representative of a DTO (drug trafficking organization) to lease an aircraft to the DTO requiring a large amount of money down, often more than the plane is worth. In return, Whittington maintains the aircraft and the American registration number. 

“After an unspecified amount of time the plane is repossessed. If its seized in a bust, both parties deny responsibility and world jet can reclaim the plane because it holds the financial lien.”

Meaning even if the drug plane was caught, World Jet could obfuscate its true ownership, and often be able to keep  it from being seized by the government.  In short, the “boys” at World Jet— like Wall Street’s parasitic elite before the 2008 crash of the global economy—had been gaming the system. 

The CIA has used the same scheme for years.

The history of a single plane tells us a story

Citing seven different confidential informants, the 35-page DEA affidavit accused the Whittington’s of running a scheme that sold at least 12 planes to  drug traffickers from Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, and even Africa. 

The story of just one of those planes—a Hawker 700 (N49RJ)—which the DEA affidavit alleges that World Jet eventually sold to drug traffickers, offers  an inside look at 30 years of drug trafficking in South Florida. 

There are astonishing disclosures and eye-popping revelations to make even a jaded observer shudder to be found on virtually every page in the DEA document.

While owned by the Whittington’s, the Hawker 700 luxury business jet carrying tail number N49RJ had a colorful history. One particular highlight(or lowlight) occurred in 2005.

A terrorist, sure. But our terrorist.

At the same time World Jet’s planes were flying suspected terrorists to prisons around the world, a man who had been convicted of terrorism— Cuban exile Juan Posada Carriles, convicted of the murder of 78 innocent passengers killed on a Cuban airliner in 1976—was flying on N49RJ under more genteel circumstances.

Posada led an operation which planted a bomb on a Cubana airliner. When it reached an altitude of 18,000 feet, two bombs exploded simultaneously. As the plane went down, the pilots tried to return to the airport. They radioed the control tower: "We have an explosion aboard, we are descending immediately! … We have fire on board! We are requesting immediate landing! We have a total emergency!"

Realizing a successful landing was no longer possible, the pilot turned away from the beach and towards the Caribbean Sea, saving the lives of many tourists. At the time it was the deadliest terrorist airline attack in the Western Hemisphere. All 78 people on board were killed. 

Moreover it was just one in a number of bomb attacks that were part of a violent terrorist campaign waged against Caribbean countries which had begun to establish links with Cuba, a campaign that included the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. later that year.

No shackles.No hoodie. No anal suppository.

Posada Carriles flew an airline charter on World  Jet’s luxury Hawker 700, N49RJ between Fort Lauderdale and El Paso where he was on trial in U.S. Court for perjury, as the US Government attempted to deport him from the U.S.

Yet unlike the suspected terrorists flown on World Jet’s extraordinary renditions for the CIA—who had as yet been convicted of nothing—Posada, who had, was not made to wear a hood and shackles. Nor is there any record of his having had a suppository thrust up his anus for the duration of the flight.

What explains the difference in treatment? Posada Carriles lack of shackles may have been because of his age—he was approaching 80 at the time—but was also almost certainly affected by his status as a  paid CIA operative since before the Kennedy assassination.

In court document, Posada Carriles lawyers said Alberto "Al" Herreros, the plane's owner, was paying for the charter. 

Alberto Herreros, the man reportedly paying for Luis Posada Carriles' charter flight to El Paso, is the former president of Vortex/Universal, cited in the "Kerry Report" on Iran Contra as one of six companies "owned and operated by convicted or suspected drug traffickers that were linked to the Contras."

Herreros'  vice president was Michael Palmer, a drug pilot who emerged into the glare of Congressional hearings along with his partner Frank Moss, at the Charlotte County Airport. Both men were listed in the diary of Rob Owen, Oliver North's aide. 

The CIA Inspector General's report on Iran contra later confirmed the allegation. It was totally clear, to anyone bothering to look, that the contras had close dealings with drug smugglers, who operated out of remote airfields where they knew that U.S. authorities were intentionally looking the other way. 

How the CIA sheep-dips its fleet of planes

In the FAA records of the Hawker 700, something unusual is visible almost immediately.

The plane’s registration changes hands four times between 2000 and 2009,. Yet  it remains at all times under the control of Don Whittington.  

The plane’s FAA registration shows that World Jet sold it to Mountain Aviation LLC of Cheyenne Wyoming in August 2000. 

Mountain Aviation then sold it back to World Jet on the 22nd of May 2002.

Then R.D. (Don) Whittington, as an individual,  apparently not bothering to change the plane’s registration from his company’s name to his own first, sold it to Hawker Jet 400, of Wilmington, in October 2007.

Hawker Jet 400 of Wilmington Delaware is another Whittington-controlled company, as can be seen in a registration form signed by its chief executive ( R.D. (Don) Whittington) when it is sold back to Mountain Aviation in Cheyenne in February of 2009.

Three corporate entities swapped the plane back and forth. It went from World Jet in Fort Lauderdale to Mountain Aviation in Cheyenne Wyoming, to  Hawker Jet 400 in Wilmington Delaware, and then back to Mountain Aviation in Cheyenne. 
Yet all three were controlled by Don Whittington.

The change of registration to Mountain Aviation is signed by Mountain Aviation executive Steven J Halmos, whose name will become significant shortly. But both the DEA affidavit, which asserts Mountain Aviation is controlled by Whittington, and a 2009 filing by Mountain Aviation to the FAA on the plane, signed by Tammy Whitmier, Whittington’s long-time assistant and bookkeeper, make it clear that Mountain Aviation is a Whittington-controlled company.  

The  point of all the changes is to game the FAA’s antiquated registration system to introduce uncertainty. The benefits of this strategy became immediately clear when the American-registered Gulfstream went down in the Yucatan. 

Investigating the covert activities of U.S. spy agencies—and many of the actions of the Whittington Brothers at World Jet fall within any reasonable definition of “U.S. covert activities”—leads into thickets which are overrun with the names of dummy front companies—called Donna Blue Aircraft, Southern Air Transport, or Hawker 400—whose true purpose is to sow confusion and hide the identities of those involved.

Beyond Human Ken

The result of these efforts —absent persistent and skeptical inquiry in the major media, which is always utterly lacking—is to make it appear as if Mankind’s knowledge of the ownership of luxury jets that "just happen" to get busted carrying multi-ton loads of cocaine is governed—like our understanding of the movement of subatomic quarks—by the equivalent of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.

The more influential the listed owner of a busted American-registered drug plane, the more uncertain the identification. The Associated Press headline about the Gulfstream,  “How the U.S.-registered Gulfstream ended up in the hands of suspected drug traffickers remains a mystery,” clearly suggests answers may lie beyond human ken.

The Associated Press' lack of any follow-up clearing up the mystery speaks volumes.

The answers are blowing  (like tumbleweeds) in the wind

The answers don't lie beyond human ken. They lie in the Arizona desert, 90 miles southeast of Phoenix, at a remote former CIA airbase that shimmers in the heat amid an otherwise unbroken vista of cactus and tumbleweed. 

The CIA's "former" airbase at Marana, Arizona holds the key to the mystery of how the Agency hides, or “sheep-dips,” its planes. When the base was privatized, top CIA aviation officers, including the Agency’s legendary George Doole, went to work there for Evergreen International.

Doole created and ran the worlds’ largest airline. They called it  “Spook Air.” 

He was so adept at the sleight of hand necessary to shuffle the ‘paper’ ownership of the CIA’s fleet of planes back and forth between a bewildering number of proprietary airlines that the true size of the CIA’s airline—then and now—will never be known.

When Richard Nixon appointed Richard Helms CIA Director in the early 70’s, Helms tasked a staffer with adding up and accounting for all the planes in Doole's domain. After three months on the project the staffer gave up in exasperation.

The subsequent privatization of government assets into private hands had  the same result as it did in Russia 15 years later. The aviation wing of crony capitalism was born.

They should have called it "Comrade Air."

Soon retired Generals, like Richard Secord, became instant corporate CEO’s, running aircraft charter and aviation companies that continued doing the CIA’s bidding.  

Today the tradition continues, with companies like World Jet and Donna Blue Aircraft replacing more familiar names like Air America, Southern Air, and Evergreen Airlines.  

According to FAA registration records, this is where the Gulfstream’s sister airplane,  SkyWay’s DC-9 (N900SA)— busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine in the Yucatan—came from. The plane was brought out of mothballs in 2002 to be put to work in the war on terror.

It  was also from here, in the late 80’s—while SkyWay Chairman Glenn Kovar still worked for the U.S. Forest Service—that that innocuous Federal Agency—the home of Smokey the Bear!— was “gifted” with dozens of  “surplus” military cargo airplanes.

All the really successful con men are politically connected.  Some of them cut out the middle man and run for President.”

Douglas Aaron McClain Sr., 62, whose Argyll Equities was a shady and now-bankrupt “investment bank” in Boerne Texas which provided services to at least three drug smuggling operations, including supplying a DC-9 to a very-possibly criminal Tampa-based ICE-HSI drug operation, is awaiting trial on charges of defrauding a 74-year-old neuro-psychiatrist paralyzed in a motorcycle accident several years ago.

An investigation into McClain’s past has uncovered overwhelming evidence that he is a career financial criminal, who has sometimes rubbed elbows in fraudulent operations with famous and near-famous names, including Jimmy Carter Administration official Bert Lance, and, more surprisingly, Chip Carter.  

Moreover, during the 1970’s and 1980’s, McClain was one of the leaders of a bizarre Christian cult which grew to more than 10,000 members living on farms and ranches in wilderness areas on three separate continents, including remote corners of Colombia, Peru, and Guatemala.

According to an account in the New York Times, the cult—in which McClain was active for a decade and maintained cordial relations afterwards— also owned its own fleet of planes. 

Enormous changes at the last moment                                                                                               

McClain's recent arrest in San Antonio Texas indicates that there is movement against individuals involved with the DC-9 (N900SA) that was the operation's first drug plane to fall afoul of the law. (The Gulfstream  was the second. )

  “Law enforcement always follows the drugs, because that leads to drug thugs no one cares about,” according to one former Federal official familiar with the case. “Following the money, which is much more effective, is discouraged,  because it leads to the suits—bankers, politicians, law enforcement types—people with social and political clout.”

Douglas McClain Sr, charged with financial fraud against the elderly after allegedly swindling $200,000 from an 74-year old paraplegic, befriending his victim by acting as if he were a Christian minister, instead of a sociopathic con man, showed up in court for the first time Tuesday in San Antonio for a pre-trial hearing, appearing unsettled and uncertain, according to a source close to the case.

But even as news trickled out from the courtroom in San Antonio, where the case was postponed for a month, an even more startling development was transpiring elsewhere.

The Vanishing of Bowens Mill Christian Center Airport.

An investigation into Doug McClain Sr’s tenure as a leader of a Christian cult called “The Move,” led to links between the cult’s airport in Georgia and a CIA-connected aviation charter company. 

Presidential Airways flew extraordinary renditions, one of which changed European attitudes about the way the U.S. was conducting the war on terror. While pursing links between the cult and the CIA-connected aviation charter company, our probe hit an unexpected snag: the airport disappeared from view three days ago.

A profile of the Bowen Mill Christian Center Airport in Fitzgerald, Georgia, that was visible just a few days ago, including nearby weather, a satellite photo of the airport’s runway, and pictures of nine planes belonging to Presidential Aviation that called the airport home, is gone.

Someone connected with the Christian cult removed the web links to its private airport. Taking its place, along with the Bowens Mill Christian Center Airport’s   FAA airport code, 74GA, is an airport located 180 miles away, Johnson Airport in Lutherville, Georgia.

The memory of the airport website lingers on, however, in Google’s cache, complete with its newsworthy features intact.

This is probably not what whoever hastily “disappeared” the airport’s web presence had in mind. Cooler heads would have informed that the removal would be seen to be a desperate move designed to forestall further investigation. Instead, the move has advertised the fact the someone at the airport has something to hide. This, of course, invites added scrutiny.  

Moreover the move may also have created a potentially dangerous situation in the air.  Pilots scanning the ground below for landmarks to guide them into an airfield with the FAA airport code 74GA  could very well find themselves examining scenery that’s 80 miles south of their true destination. 

A pilot struggling with a map in his lap, unable to find any familiar nearby landmark—of a conga line of Christian cultists, say, flagellating themselves while weaving around outdoor speakers booming Christian rock—could be excused for throwing up his hands in despair and landing on the highway.

Okay. It’s gone. Here’s why…

When something as large as an airport dematerializes overnight, my first response is to wonder, “Was it something I said?”

Perhaps it was.  Days earlier I’d interviewed Darryl Cobb, the airport manager until its recent and unfortunate demise. He’s also the son of co-founder and long-time Move cult headman Carrell C.E. (Buddy) Cobb.

Why would nine planes owned by Presidential Aviation Inc., an aviation charter company numerous published sources called “CIA-connected,” list his tiny airport—with no tower, no amenities, and a dirt and grass runway—as home?

“Your reporting was totally bogus,” Cobb asserted. “There’s no way anything like that ever happened here, all those planes landing here.”

The allegation was absurd, Cobb said. The airports’ only use was by “a bunch of ministers that had their own airplanes.” It was a grass field, completely unsuitable for Presidential Aviation’s high-end Gulfstream III’s and IV’s, known as “heavy iron.”

“I never reported the planes landed at your airport,” I replied.

“Well then what are you saying?” he challenged.

I replied, “I’m saying a CIA-connected aviation charter company called Presidential Aviation listed your airport as  home base for nine very expensive airplanes, and you can’t, or won’t, tell me why.”

You can’t miss him. Green sweater. Metal shackles

The heightened scrutiny of Doug McClain’s cultic past has unearthed evidence suggesting a link between two significant but seemingly-unconnected aviation incidents that occurred almost a decade ago.

The first, which lasted only 37 minutes, will haunt public opinion in Europe, and eventually destroy popular support for the way the George W. Bush Administration was conducting the war on terrorism.

On a warm October evening in the skies over Rome, an executive jet radioed ahead that it would be landing shortly at Ciampino Airport, a small military field near Italy’s ancient Via Appia.

The plane, a Gulfstream III (N829MG), was owned by Presidential Aviation, which had begun flying “extraordinary renditions,” both a phrase and concept not yet widely-known.  

On board are five CIA agents, two pilots… and Maher Arar, a tall, Canadian man wearing a green sweater, a pair of jeans, and metal shackles. 

How do you blind a duck?

Bowens Mill Christian Center Airport is owned by ”The Move,” Doug McClain’s former cult. It  adjoins the cult’s headquarters, run by the cult’s leader, Carrell C.E. (Buddy) Cobb, and managed by the cult leader’s son, Darryl Cobb.

There is no tower, no fixed-base-of-operations (FBO) and take-offs and landings take place on a dirt and grass runway. The airport could hardly be more inconspicuous.

So why did a CIA-connected aviation charter company advertise its presence at a tiny airport run by a secretive Christian cult? At first glance, there seems several ways to answer that question. One would be to call the Presidential Airways phone number listed on the site. It’s no longer in service. Calling Presidential’s headquarters at the notorious Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport was another option. But phoning in a question prompted general laughter in the flight room, and not much else.

A second approach would be to set up a duck blind in tall grass—assuming there is any— surrounding the rural airport, much like the admirable men and women from the world-renowned planespotters, and settle in to record take-offs and landings.

A third is to delve deeper into Doug McClain’s criminal career, both in and out of the cult, to see if that illuminates the puzzling questions swirling around the cult, and its contributions, if any, to the sizable role played by general aviation in massive, decades-long, and often state-sponsored organized crime.

The end of the world as we know it.

Once over the initial hurdles, my conversation with Darryl Cobb moved on smartly.  I asked him, “How did the group acquire so many airplanes?”

“The church never owned any planes,” Cobb replied.  “Local churches registered the planes. It was like a network, but there was no official organization.”

Each minister owned his own plane, he asserted. There was no central authority, or corporation, involved.

“We don’t have any membership. Every group is autonomous,” he continued. “They’re only affiliated through like beliefs, and through their understanding of the Word. They are all independent ministries.”

Right, I thought. And John Gotti and his buddies at the Ravenite Social Club in New York just got together to play cards. I didn’t say anything. But I felt slightly embarrassed, as if I had. So I asked a dumb and very obvious question. “So, um, in the early ‘80’s, how did your group  end up with colonies in Colombia, Peru, and Guatemala?”

Cobb matched my stammer with one of his own. “That was due, to, ah, the fact that we had a minister who felt the world economic system wasn’t in such great shape,” he replied, without much conviction. 

“Sam Fife had an understanding that there could be a possible collapse of the economic system of the world,” he continued, recovering quickly. “Same as what everyone’s taking about today, you know? He said we had only five years. And for him, he did have five years… till he crashed a plane down in Guatemala.”

I reminded him that people have been saying “the end is near”since well before Jesus walked the earth. Cobb merely grunted.

It seemed to go without saying that its been a cheap way to make a buck ever since.

Taking a ride on a plane to hell

After touching down on European soil just long enough to refuel— 37 minutes—the Gulfstream III took off for Amman, Jordan, where Maher Arar was carried off the plane, beaten, and loaded into a van headed to Damascus.

Arar, a computer programmer with no relationship with terrorism,  endured 10 months of torture based on completely false evidence.

The investigations and recriminations which followed provoked a deep sense of alarm across Europe. The use of Italian airports to transport Arar led to the collapse of Italy’s government.

A European Union report spoke uneasily of similar cases beginning to emerge. Relations between the U.S. and European allies soured, as the allies began facing outrage from their own people.

In Canada, Maher Arar’s case led to the resignation of the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, an apology from the Canadian Prime Minister, payment of $11.5-million in damages, and a remarkable level of tension between ideological bedfellows, the Republican Administration in the U.S. and the Conservative Party in Canada.

Gracious living in the Peachtree State

Today, a search on the web for the airport with the FAA airport code 74GA  produces sharp differences of opinion on websites which list FAA airport codes, about which of two contenders has the more legitimate claim. 

How had the Bowens Mill Christian Center Airport lost its FAA airport code? Had it been tied to a windsock on the field, and then come loose in a rainstorm? Wafted north all the way to Lutherville (Lex Lutherville?) on a strong spring breeze?

We were struggling with questions only an FAA spokesman could confidently address.  Increasing concern even more,  numerous calls to FAA officials—including one public information officer who was actually boots-on-the-frigging-ground in Georgia itself—had not been returned by press time.

We’re used to being snubbed by FAA officials. So our response was completely altruistic. We were concerned. Had our phone calls caused the official in Georgia to assume a duck and cover position under her desk? If so, would she know when it was once again safe to come out? 

Pass the toilet paper

There is heightened sensitivity, its safe to say, around the “issue” of Doug McClain. Now in the spotlight for his arrest for elder abuse, Doug McClain’s past seems to have finally caught up with him.

Because McClain is an important figure in the operation which lost two American-registered planes when they were caught smuggling a total of almost ten tons of cocaine,  his long career as an unpunished financial criminal is of more than passing interest.

His swindles, scams, rackets, cons, and career as a grifter, during which he stole millions from innocent shareholders and unwary investors, will shortly be detailed in this space.

But currently its McClain’s more distant past receiving close scrutiny. McClain was a leader in the “traveling ministry” of a Christian cult called “The Move” which grew to as many as 25,000 members  living on farms and ranches on four continents during the 1970’s  while simultaneously maintaining a nearly non-existent public profile.

“The Move” was a Christian cult that boasted at one time 25,000 members but remained assiduously unpublicized for almost its entire existence.

Lisa Kendall grew up in the cult. After she left, she became an academic cult expert helping people who have survived childhoods in extreme religious environments face the challenges of everyday living.

According to Kendall, the International Cultic Studies Association in Bonita Springs Florida, maintains a list of more than 3000 cults (known as high-demand groups).  While most are well-known to cultic experts,  the Move, somehow, was not on anyone’s radar until 2012.

“They would boast about flying to exotic locations in expensive private jets,” according to Kendall, “while members were often so poor they couldn’t afford toilet paper, healthy food, education, medical care, running water, electricity, or central heating in their rustic Alaskan cabins.”

That sounds like our boy.

The missing ingredient

The NEW YORK TIMES had once reported that the cult owned “a fleet of planes.”

“There is something you’re missing here,” another former cult member told me.

“The farms’ weren’t generating any money. When I lived there we were shooting moose illegally just so we’d have food. Yet the cult owned at least a dozen airplanes at any one time. When you have a group that’s got no money, where’s the money coming from?”

He stared at me, awaiting a response. I stared back blankly.

“The thing that’s always really sparked my curiosity,” he continued, “is that they didn’t really have any farms or believers in Peru or Colombia or Guatemala in the 70′s.

“And yet they spent an incredible amount of time spent going back and forth to South America. But on really short trips. If they came to Canton Ohio, for example, where they had a big revival, they’d stay for a week.”

“But when they would go down to Guatemala, or go down to Colombia, or go down to Peru, or Nicaragua, on trips we would hear about, they would always just go there and be back like the next day.”

“And after I grew up and began doing some research, I began to wonder, what is going on down there? Why was Sam down there? In a place where The Move had no business?”

Zombies in Georgia: Urban legend? 

We struggled for answers to the mystery of how FAA airport code 74GA had made its way from a Christian cult into the hip pocket of someone or other in Lutherville Georgia.  Was something going on in Georgia these days?  The one thing that came to mind, beside snow removal blues in Atlanta, was the name of Georgia’s biggest export: The Walking Dead. 

Consider: If the Christians of Bowens Mill had been wiped out en masse, there’d no longer be any need for an airport. Zombies don’t fly. Do they?

We contacted FAA headquarters in Oklahoma City, located at what appears to be a concrete bunker zombie-proof structure called the Mike Mulroney Aeronautical Center. 

How often do airport codes change? How does one airport end up with the airport code that was assigned to another?

“Re-assigning an airport code number is unusual,” stated a brusque but polite public relations officer. “But more information will need to wait on a response from  your local FAA public information officer in Georgia.”

So she wasn’t dead from a zombie attack, or on the run in some dust Bowl state. She’d had the moxie to contact her boss in Oklahoma before it all became too much. And obviously I felt enormous relief. No one likes to think they’re the cause of a public official crouching underneath her desk, day after day.

Walk this way

“Doug was one of the most popular leaders in the traveling ministry,” explained Lisa Kendall.  “He was very respected. Even after he left, supposedly because of ‘doctrinal differences,’ McClain retained associations with the leaders, and continued preaching and collecting tithes in the churches.” 

McClain could be very charming, she said. “But I know lots of people, personally, who were ripped off by Doug McClain.”

Another woman, who remembers McClain from their time in Alaska, agrees. “A lot of money went to Doug McClain. Under the guise of tithing, Doug took money from a lot of people, including single mothers,” she recalled. “If a woman was married, the cult would tell her, ‘If your husband won’t come this way, you need to get a divorce.’”

“He came through Canton Ohio, one time, and got a huge tithe, even after announcing he was leaving the group. But he never really left. There’s still groups in Texas. One in Lubbock, one in Dallas, and a small group in Houston.”

“Doug stole quite a bit of money before he even left the Move,” said a third woman who was knowledgeable about what went on backstage at the cult.

“But whenever anything happened that was illegal, everything was covered up. We dealt with our own problems. Buddy believed that anything that happens to you is the will of God. 

Aprophrenia? Maybe. Doesn’t mean the number “23″ isn’t everywhere.”

Read Part II next. Then ponder these questions…  Is pursuing this line of thought a sign of delusional thinking? Could this be mere coincidence?

Apophenia is the perception of or belief in connectedness, where none exists, among unrelated phenomena. Its the tendency to find meaningful patterns—a heightened and abnormal meaningfulness— in meaningless noise.

Its human nature to seek patterns in random information. A gambler thinks he sees patterns in the winning numbers in the lottery. Someone else sees Jesus in french toast.

Apophenia is at one end of a spectrum. The opposite tendency— call it”randomania”—attributes chance probability to what are obviously patterns in the data.

The “coincidentist” theory of the Kennedy assassination is an example of randomania, because it denies the observable fact that real power in American society conveys the ability—under circumstances that would otherwise justify screaming bold headlines—to keep your name out of the newspapers.

Randomania is what American muckraker Upton Sinclair was talking  when he said, of fellow journalists, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was another great American sage. Here’s what he said: “I knew by now that when a group of individuals gravitated toward one another for no apparent reason, or inexplicably headed in the same direction as if drawn by a magnetic field, or coincidence piled on coincidence too many times, as often as not the shadowy outlines of a covert intelligence operation were somehow becoming visible.”

Apophenia or Randomania? You make the call.

(But read part II first, cause, hey, you never know.)

Doug McClain Sr’s financial fraud career as a grifter, racketeer, and flimflam man can be  traced back more than two decades, and likely extends much further into his past. The so-far unanswered question about him has been where he first acquired powerful patrons whose clout could—and did—keep him out of jail despite his record for flagrant financial fraud.  

While the ultimate answer may not yet be clear, for sheer greed, brazen theft and raw carnality—committed with the protection and apparent blessing of former leaders in both major political parties— it would be hard to top McClain’s stint during the early 1990’s at International Profit Associates (IPA) in Chicago.

An introduction to hyena packs, and a drug cartel?

All three of the top officers at IPA boasted felony convictions. The company chairman was a disbarred lawyer from New York, with a criminal record for larceny and patronizing a 16-year-old prostitute in a company board room.

The Vice Chairman pled guilty to conspiring to manufacture a key ingredient in methamphetamine less than two years before former President George H.W. Bush, recently turned out of office, arrived to speak to the troops at the company’s annual Christmas Party.

And the company was the scene of what a prosecuting attorney called “the most egregious case of sex harassment that Chicago has ever seen,”that victimized 113 women employees.

IPA was where McClain would hook up with key associates that will collaborate with him during the next two decades in a ‘hyena pack’ that will go from success to success in a series of lucrative financial scams. 

A hyena dressed up like a shepherd

It’s called “affinity fraud.” And its arguably the most egregious and degenerate crime anyone can commit against on a fellow human being. Bernie Madoff is an example. He sold his $66 billion Ponzi scheme mostly to fellow Jews, including, some of them, Holocaust survivors. 

Another is Doug McClain Sr., who has been preying on Christians for more than 20 years. 

“Affinity fraud”refers to investment scams that prey upon members of identifiable groups, like religious or ethnic communities, or the elderly, by fraudsters pretending to be members of the group. They enlist respected community or religious leaders to help spread the word, convincing their people, or “flock,” that a fraudulent investment is legitimate and worthwhile, oftentimes for a piece of the action.

“Fraudsters who carry out affinity scams frequently are (or pretend to be) members of the group they are trying to defraud,” notes the SEC. 

“Someone finds something in common — in this case religion, in other cases it may be that they are both with the Lion’s Club,” an Asst District Attorney in San Antonio, part of the team prosecuting Doug McClain Sr., explained to a reporter. “They say ‘trust me.’ … You are trying to do the right thing and assume others are playing by the rules, and it’s not the case.”

Oddly enough, based on his own behavior, Doug McClain isn’t even a Christian. Because going to church doesn’t make you a Christian, any more than going to a carwash makes you a car. McClain wasn’t shepherding his “flock.” He was circling it, like a hyena.

McClain became particularly deadly when he began leading his own ‘hyena pack.’

Suffer the little hyenas

We know where it ends…

Once Doug McClain Sr. had been connected to the DC-9 busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine, what followed— while horrific to those from whom he was still stealing millions—was basically a postscript, the twitching of half-dead nerves. Because McClain had already been “made”— by reporters, at least,  if not yet by authorities.

It was only a matter of time before he was caught. 

And we know quite a bit about the middle of the story. Today we’ll profile one of Douglas McClain Sr.’s “middle period” criminal frauds. Tomorrow (Tuesday) we’ll reveal the “Rosetta Stone” that illuminates Doug McClain’s long-running pack of hyenas, a mere division of a much larger politically-connected organized crime and drug trafficking group.  

But the definitive beginning of McClain’s career will continue to elude us until we understand whether or not his decade-long stint as a leader of a Christian cult called “The Move” was also his first exposure to affinity fraud. Later this week we’ll continue to examine that possibility. 

Before the “cult leader” business surfaced, my earliest reference to McClain had him in Chicago, in 1991.

If McClain ever writes an “as told to” book, I imagine it will cover things like this…

‘A life in crime, white-collar division’

Its cold in Chicago. It always is, in the middle of December. In a ballroom  at the downtown Hyatt Regency, a party—a black-tie affair—is getting underway. The ornate invitation, from International Profit Associates (IPA), is to their lavish company Christmas party. The year is 1999.

There’s an 8-piece orchestra. Acres of  hors d’oeuvres: shrimp, crab, sushi.  Dinner is filet mignon and lobster tail. At the head table, flanking the company’s Chairman is a jaunty, very recognizable figure wearing, according to at least one published account, a lop-sided grin. 

It’s former President George Bush. Earlier he had even been on hand to pose for photos, radiating congeniality.  He’s speaking for 45 minutes after dinner for a reported $82,000. Its well worth it, according to the company’s chairman. Ii gives the firm “instant credibility.” 

We know where Doug McClain Sr. was on this night because of a lawsuit filed by Denise Campbell, from Bruce Mines, Ontario, Canada, who suffered from Multiple Sclerosis. Her lawsuit against Douglas McClain Sr, and his alter ego Argyll Biotechnologies, covers one of his later frauds (which we’ll get to presently.)

But because it benefited from following on the heels of a half-dozen earlier suits, it contained a succinct, and nearly complete complete, later chronology. 

 Campbell’s lawsuit is just one of a number of lawsuits McClain chose to ignore—allowing judgments against himself  in the secure knowledge that his money is safely tucked offshore and he’ll never pay a cent. It showed what McClain, his son Doug Jr., and his sidekick James Miceli were up to at the dawn of the Millenium:

 “On or about August 26, 1999, MICELI was convicted of felony money laundering, forgery, perjury and theft over $100,000 in the State of Illinois.  Thereafter, MCCLAIN, SR., MCCLAIN and MICELI worked together at International Profit Associates (“IPA”) in Illinois.”

A “gimme,” as they say in golf… and armed robbery.

At a table at the Christmas Party, a reporter for INC. magazine doodled on his napkin, while listening to the former President speak. Bush, he figures, is  making $1,800 a minute. The 41st president of the United States hails the people of International Profit Associates as bearers of “The Right Stuff.”

 “When I was asked to come celebrate the success of this company,” Bush tells the crowd, “that was a gimme, as they say in golf.” 

In fairness, the former President we now know as George H.W. Bush is far from the only public official to lend luster to IPA’s reputation. Gerald Ford spoke at an earlier company Christmas party; so did  Bob Dole. And former President Bill Clinton took home $125,000 for an appearance in 2001.  

None noticed, apparently, that all three of the company’s top officers were convicted felons. The company chairman was a disbarred New York lawyer with a criminal record for larceny and patronizing a 16-year-old prostitute. 

Then too, the Vice Chairman pled guilty— less than two years before Bush addressed their Christmas Party—to conspiring to manufacture a key ingredient in methamphetamine. 

A convention of crooks

The doodling reporter was there because he was trying to figure out what a former President was doing giving a speech to a convention of crooks. 

The reporter could have asked Doug McClain, Sr. Or James Miceli, one of McClain’s ace partners in crime for the next decade. Both were there. 

Miceli got rich as a Chicago-area real estate developer. His favorite trick was taking people’s money to build custom-built homes. Then he did…nothing at all. When he was sued, he once again did, nothing at all. He didn’t even bother showing up in court. Civil judgments didn’t faze him a bit.

Or he could have asked Doug McClain Jr, a chip off the old block, who today is serving a 20 year sentence in a federal penitentiary. 

Dougie  Jr. will increasingly need to stand in, or front, for his Father as an officer of whatever public company the men happened to be looting at the time. These positions require filing a brief biography, listing convictions, and lawsuits, and such, a bio for which the elder McClain’s life was no longer suitable. 

“In 1999, Doug McClain Jr. joined International Profit Associates, a business consulting firm,” reads his bio in an SEC file, “as a Senior Executive responsible for mergers and acquisitions, and corporate finance, where he was employed until 2001.”

“The boys” will be boys

Finally, company executives also had a hard time keeping their hands, well—let’s just say—keeping their hands in their pockets… 

“This is probably the most egregious case of sex harassment that Chicago has ever seen,” a prosecuting attorney told reporters, when she filed the first sexual harassment lawsuit against them. She said 113 women had been victimized. The IPA office must have been quite a place.

When it was published in INC. magazine, the reporter’s article began, “International Profit Associates is a $100-million company selling $40,000 management consulting  packages to thousands of small businesses . But before you let IPA into your company, there are some things you might want to know.”

After IPA, McClain Sr. got lucky, and hit a $6 million score, pumping the stock of several companies that today trade for oo.ooo a share. From Campbell’s lawsuit:

“Through IPA, MCCLAIN SR. became involved with a public entity known as Nextpath Technologies. MCCLAIN SR. was able to obtain and sell a large volume of shares of Nextpath Technologies to unsuspecting investors, based on false information concerning the company, for approximately $6,000,000.

MCCLAIN SR. received funds and/or distributed Nextpath Technologies stock certificates through the US mail or other carriers interstate to unsuspecting investors, violating the Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”) and committed numerous other racketeering activities.”

That takes us up to FIT Technologies, another master McClain fraud. More on that later.But we’re still barely scratching the surface. 

“A hyena pack, a flock of sheep...what ‘dya expect to happen?”

But where did he acquire the powerful patrons—political and otherwise—whose clout kept him out of jail? As he became a full-time financial swindler, McClain needed partners. So he joined a “hyena pack.”

“In large publicly-held companies, stockholder fraud and looting is by people working together inside the company,” a financial fraud expert explained.

“Smaller publicly-held companies are looted by people who comprise what’s called a ‘Hyena Pack.’ Publicly each member acts as a representative of companies and entities which are supposedly independent of each other. At the same time, they are secretly conspiring together for criminal  gain.” 

“These guys very openly looted public company after public company,” said the financial fraud expert. “I’ve seen a list of as many as seventy small public companies busted-out by this one hyena pack.”

Doug McClain Sr. was a member of a hyena pack that took down SkyWay, through his Argyll Equities’ ballyhooed-but-bogus “investment,” which made McClain’s Argyll  SkyWay Aircraft’s largest shareholder.

After leaving “The Move,” McClain moved to Raleigh, North Carolina to set up his own church, several sources stated. And it may be in North Carolina where Doug McClain met the man with a network of politically-connected criminals, politicians, and con men with ties to the military who ran the organized crime ring behind the DC-9 busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine in Ciudad del Carmen, Mexico, on April 10, 2006. 

North Carolina is for Jesse Helms, RJR Tobacco, Wachovia Bank

Doug McClain joined a hyena pack run—or ‘fronted,’ at least until he went to prison—by a former staffer to North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms, Marc Harris, who was involved in the massive drug move on the DC-9  that  ended up being busted in Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of pure cocaine.

Harris, a self-described Iran Contra insider, claimed to have learned the ‘art’ of money laundering while involved in Reagan-era covert operations, where his associates numbered at least three convicted drug traffickers.

His ties to the national Republican Party go back to at least 1988, when he was the Florida manager for the presidential campaign of General Alexander Haig, former White House Chief of Staff under Nixon.

According to a newspaper in Panama, where he operated while on the lam, many of Harris’ biggest clients were prominent Republican politicians.

Harris is currently in Federal prison, after being extradited from Panama and sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for felony fraud and money laundering.  

His ring, accused of looting dozens of publicly-held companies, operated as a textbook  hyena pack. They bankrupted like SkyWay Communications, after using ‘pump and dump’ schemes to dupe shareholders and investors.

“Iran Contra…was that before Oliver North got “War Stories” on Fox?”

Harris boasted of his association with Iran Contra stalwarts like General Jack Singlaub, and had extensive connections to figures in global organized crime, including Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos, who escaped arrest by fleeing that country  after the exposure of the CIA’s role there in Marc Harris’ jet. 

Others participating in the company’s demise included its own Chairman, Glenn Kovar;  his son,  Skyway’s President  Brent Kovar;   Saudi arms dealer (and CIA fixer) Adnan Khashoggi; his chief lieutenant and fellow Saudi Ramy El-Batrawi, who was the former President of Jetborne, a CIA proprietary airline in Miami which flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to the Iranians during the Iran Contra Scandal;  and Jonathon Curshen.

Curshen, an American con man from Sarasota Florida, ran Red Sea Management, which generously provided—in return for 28,000,000 shares of stock in SkyWay worth less than the cost of the ink on the certificates—another of SkyWay’s two eventual DC-9’s.

“You know, the DuPonts. Better living through chemistry.”

There is no better example illustrating the continuing history of the organized crime and drug trafficking organization we call “The New American Drug Lords” than the fact that the group successfully used the same exact scam on two separate  occasions more than 20 years apart.

At the same time, SkyWay was putting out a press release heralding a major new investor in the company, with a clunky headline that reads like old Soviet propaganda about tractor factories: 

“The DuPont Investment Fund 57289, Inc. Satisfies $7 Million Funding Agreement with SkyWay Communications Holding Corp.”

Announcing that the DuPont family had just made a big investment in SkyWay pumped the company’s stock for a few days, allowing insiders to sell their shares and cash out.

“They wrote it up in a press release, touting how they’d just received a big investment from the DuPont Foundation,” a former SkyWay executive explained. “It turned out to be bogus. No DuPont’s,  just some guy (Jonathon Curshen) at a desk in Costa Rica.”

 Not coincidentally, twenty years earlier the same group, or Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO) a phrase  only the DEA uses, but never applies it to any group north of the Rio Grande), used the exact same tactic. 

After Barry Seal’s assassination in 1986, his attorney sold “Trinity Energy” to “Miami Jack” Birnholz, another member of the same organization, who then announced with a flourish that he had a new investment partner, “Sloan DuPont,” a member of the “DuPont Family.”

Sloan DuPont, in reality, turned out to be a con-man from Oklahoma named James Rice.

The man who facilitated the purchase of several DC-9's for SkyWay Aircraft in St. Petersburg Florida was the company's  largest shareholder, Doug McClain Sr.'s Argyll Equities.  So how did he get such an important job in such a thriving Enterprise?

During the 90's, Doug McClain Sr. belonged to an organized crime ring run by Robert Colgin Wilson, an obese six-foot-five-inch con man, who—according to the Wall Street Journal (“High, Wide &…” Feb 24, 1997— fast-talked investors in the U.S. and Canada out of more than $100 million  in the 1990's alone.

“Wilson dazzled his victims by treating them to jaunts to Las Vegas and the Cayman Islands on his luxurious corporate jets, promising super-high returns in supposedly risk-less investments, and employing high-profile, unwitting company directors –among them Chip Carter, son of the former President, and Carter budget chief Bert Lance,” the Journal reported.

“At one point Wilson was hawking his loan-finding services with Dennis Levine, who had been jailed in the 1980s with Ivan Boesky in an insider-trading scheme.”

Not every name in organized crime ends in a vowel

In the early 1990’s Wilson’s crew pulled off a signature fraud against a Christian organization in New York State,  called the Cleft in the Rock Foundation.

Wilson and McClain were joined by a number of accomplices, who we will learn more about when the Cleft in the Rock Foundation swindle is explored in depth. Tracking Wilson and McClain’s confederates—Samuel L. Boyd, Gary Long, Robert Carter Dye, Peter Dale, Dieter Wicki, and James Garro—will lead to other partners in the criminal conspiracy…

Like the Butcher brothers, Jake and his brother C.H. Butcher, Jr.,  whose rise to control of  a $3 billion financial empire in Tennessee is a tale filled with fraud, suicide, adultery, cocaine and Indian gambling that rivals anything on popular TV shows of the time like Dallas or Dynasty.

The brothers brought a Worlds Fair to Knoxville. Jake won the 1978 Democratic nomination for Tennessee governor. His brother C.H. Butcher, Jr owned 22 banks in Tennessee and Kentucky which were declared insolvent by federal investigators, triggering  the fourth-largest bank failure in US history up to that time.

And Chip Carter, Jimmy Carter’s eldest son, who was in a small bar in Mexico Beach, Fla., drinking beer on the afternoon of July 20, 1977  with  the skipper of a boat he’d chartered before, when his Dad, the President, Jimmy Carter, called and suggested he get out of town immediately, just before  federal agents swooped in and busted his drinking buddies in a drug raid that netted a boat just offshore carrying four tons of Colombian marijuana.

Chip Carter & Bert Lance

There were no allegations at the time that the unlucky Chip Carter was involved in drug trafficking. But he was obviously impressed with the New Money in the New South, and it would have been hard not to be. Later, after he began working with Robert Colgin Wilson, he was very impressed that a meeting Wilson called was attended by a former vice president of the World Bank.

And who wouldn't be?

Then there’s Bert Lance, and his son C. Beverly Lance, two of Robert Colgin Wilson's less innocent partners. 

When Wilson went to federal prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy and tax evasion in a scheme they were both involved in,  part of the deal was that the plaintiffs agreed that the Lance's had been duped, and dropped them from their civil suit. It was a gesture that probably did not go unrewarded.

And Manuel Bello, whose history of stock manipulation brought him in contact with McClain, became famous in an old political scandal that is today ancient history.

Bello, a close associate of New England Mafia boss Raymond Patriarca,  was doing time in federal prison, when two aides to the House Speaker, Democrat John McCormack of Massachusetts, used his office to try to pull some strings and get Bello released on probation.

“Robert Wilson’s Enterprise.”

But what is of immediate interest is that it was as one of Robert Wilson’s henchmen that Doug McClain learned of a template—which I learned dated all the way back to the 1950’s— used by organized crime to defraud and “bust out” coal companies.

Much of what follows is condensed from contemporary news accounts as well as the  decision issued by District Judge Spatt of the Eastern Division of the U.S. District Court of New York.

The law firm representing Cleft, which seemed well-connected locally in New York, included former mayor (from 1978 through 1989) of New York Ed Koch .

As always, Robert Colgin Wilson was the “central figure” in the case.

Doug McClain worked for Wilson as the Director of Wilson’s Euro America Insurance Company Limited, and an officer in others of Wilson’s various and constantly shifting business entities.

His duties ran the gamut of financial fraud. In November of 1993, for example, McClain delivered, on Wilson’s behalf, $100 million of counterfeit Mexican bonds to a broker-dealer in Saint Louis called Pauli & Co.

The scheme to defraud detailed in the complaint was called the “Robert Wilson Enterprise.” It involved entities and individuals in the United States, Canada, Barbados, Ireland, Switzerland, the Channel Islands, and numerous other locations throughout the world, making his organization the very definition of transnational organized crime.

“Trinity. Triad. And Genesis”

The fun begins with Douglas McClain, by then a Wilson lieutenant, and Jack Kenny, a broker at Dean Witter in Saint Louis, who managed an account opened there by McClain  in the name of Trinity Capital.

(“Trinity”—as those who keep track of Iran Contra connections will recall— is a code word from that operation. Everyone from Barry Seal to Adnan Khashoggi to the Bass Brothers in Texas used it to name business entities.)

Much later, when Kenny later felt investigators closing in, he notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the counterfeit bonds, turned informant, and received a light sentence when the conspiracy collapsed.

McClain brought Kenny into Wilson’s orbit in 1990. Wilson impressed Kenny as a very “together” businessman, and said Wilson was an easy man to like: Rich and well-connected, he had business partners that included James “Chip” Carter, son of former President Carter, and Thomas Bertram “Bert” Lance, the Carter administration budget director.

Kenny said Wilson claimed to be “a large currency trader with accounts at various European banks.”

“He was very impressive. This guy is flying around in a $50 million jet, and there I am in meetings with guys like Chip Carter,” Kenny told one reporter.

“I flew out with Wilson one time to a business meeting at McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, and the way the military treated him, it was like King Tut was walking in.”

King Tut on a U.S. Air Force Base

Why would an element of the U.S. military—Air Force officers at McClellan AFB, roll out the red carpet for Wilson? In court proceedings and news accounts, I can find nothing to indicate anyone  ever asked the question, or determined an answer.

McClain initiated contact with the Cleft of the Rock Foundation in New York several years later. The Foundation’s lawsuit alleged, and the court agreed, that the defendants stole $3.99 million.

With the importance of Doug McClain and Robert Wilson’s relationship established, its time to move on to that relationship’s relevance to Doug McClain’s Last Big Play in the coal fields of Kentucky.   

Back in 1978, according to an appellate decision of the Fifth Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals  which can be found online, Wilson was convicted along with a Beverly Hills brokerage owner named Howard Carroll,  for fraud in the sale of securities for a coal mining company they jointly founded called Coal Creek Mining Company.

Prospective investors were told the proceeds would develop mining properties for the production of coal. Instead, the money they raised in a stock offering bought Texas real estate, and some good times in Vegas.

Carroll and Wilson formed the mining corporation, arranged for the sale of stock, and arranged for their names not to appear as the company’s owners and promoters, selecting a “front man” named Harry Niles to run the company and appear as majority stock owner when Carroll and Wilson were the true owners and retained actual control.

“The boys from Beverly Hills”

Beverly Hills brokerage owner Howard Carroll must have been quite a character, because he had been convicted on essentially the same charges almost 20 years earlier.

All I could find describing the fraud was a 1964 decision affirming Carroll’s conviction in 1957 from the Ninth Circuit of the U. S. Court of Appeals, written in a humorous acerbic tone that you can’t find in Appeals Court decision these days.

Carroll was convicted of using the stock of a Nevada mining company called Comstock, Ltd., whose shares were listed on the San Francisco Mining Exchange, to defraud investors.

The judges relate a teletype conversation which took place between two of Carroll’s offices showing them colluding to set the price of the stock in the mining venture.

“OK kid been working like a demon Comstock will be 33-40 in few minutes as soon as exchange opens,” types one.

“We have it worked out now and if your boys going to sell any they should do it quick-like.”

“OK Wonderful What price will we sell at now so as to correspond to market?”

“Well I would wait ten minutes until the market opens and then check with Aronson and see how its quoted. NY is retailing it at 40 a healthy price! Yes.”

The appellate judges then added their own droll take:  “Comment by us seems superfluous.”