Will secret deal bring old management
back to Venice Airport FBO?
January 5, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker
The hand-picked
new ownership at the former Huffman Aviation FBO (Fixed Base of Operations) at
the Venice Municipal Airport has links to private military contractors in
Georgia involved in CIA extraordinary renditions around the world, as well as
other covert activity on behalf of the U.S. Government.
This same company turned over between 12-15 mid-sized
regional jets to another owner of Huffman Aviation, Wallace J. Hilliard, ten
years ago, for Hilliard's doomed from the start “start-up airline,” an operation
so inept that on at least one publicized route, they never sold a single
ticket.
The company or network of companies which has had so much
involvement with recent owners of Huffman Aviation is known variously as
“Phoenix Air,” “Phoenix Air Services,” and “Phoenix Continental."
Oddly, long after his start-up airline quit flying
scheduled trips, Hilliard still had jets on the tarmacs and aprons of various
airports. And he continued to pay pilots to be ready...
During 2003 and 2004, elements of the U.S. Government took a surprisingly keen
interest in controversial Guyanese drug pilot
Michael Brassington.
Brassington was involved in-or the subject of-a secretive Miami-based U.S.
Government operation, according to interviews with former Customs Agents.
"Whenever Brassington entered the U.S., a special team from Miami was supposed
to come up," stated former Fort Lauderdale Customs Agent James Sanders.
Brassington was supposed to be met by Customs Agents from an operation with a
highly-checkered past called
"Operation Blue
Lightning."
"Operation Blue Lightning is some kind of joint task force. I found out later
from another chief inspector that was on the team that I wasn't even supposed to
inspect him," Sanders said.
The intent of Operation Blue Lightning's interest in Brassington remains
unclear.
Operation Blue Lightning fits the description provided by a top DEA official in
Miami when he informed us why the DEA had not mounted an investigation into the
owners of two planes caught carrying over 10 tons of cocaine in Mexico's
Yucatan.
The drug planes belonged to a
"rogue" operation
in U.S. Customs, said the DEA official. So the investigation properly belonged
to the Office of Investigations in the Dept of Homeland Security.
Was Brassington's "special handling" designed to impede criminal drug smuggling
activity? Or to facilitate it?
Brassington goes on trial next month in Federal Court in Newark for putting the
lives of passengers in danger in a near-fatal crash of a luxury jet at Teterboro
Airport in New Jersey in February 2005.
A U.S.
Customs Agent on duty when controversial drug pilot and “soldier of fortune” Michael Brassington attempted to re-enter the US through Fort
Lauderdale International Airport in April of 2004 was instructed by a Supervisor
at Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to treat Brassington as a “grave
threat to national security.”
Brassington was a long-time employee and business associate of Wallace J.
Hilliard, owner of the Venice FL flight school that trained Mohamed Atta to
fly.
The news
comes as the former Guyanese military pilot prepares to go on trial
in a Federal Courthouse in Newark next month for recklessly endangering the
lives of passengers, whose number includes ex-Presidents George Herbert Walker
Bush and Bill Clinton as well as numerous celebrities.
The
disclosure, contained in a soon-to-be-released documentary, “The New American
Drug Lords,” is a reminder, more than eight years later, of the unfinished
nature of the investigation into the 9/11 attack.
At the same time
Wallace J Hilliard's Huffman Aviation was teaching a still-unidentified
number of suspected terrorists, including many, like Souheil Seddik, who remain
unknown to the general public, he was also assembling a fleet of twin-engine
turboprop Jetstream airliners, airplanes normally used in regional airline
markets, to be used in the launch of his new start-up,
Florida Air.
"Dekkers, along with partner Wally Hilliard,
operates several air charter companies in Florida, including the Venice-based
Hoffman Aviation," reported the Sarasota Herald Tribune in February 2001.
"Six airplanes -- four scheduled for daily
runs, two on standby as backups --will be dispatched for the new service."
However a recent investigation into the current
war for control of the Venice Municipal Airport has discovered that secretive
financier Wally Hilliard bought-not six-but as many as twelve to eighteen
Jetstream airliners which seldom-if ever-flew paying passengers or scheduled
flights.
While Mohamed Atta attended his flight school,
Wally Hilliard owned a
"ghost airline" with a dozen 19-passenger Jetstreams whose use remains a
total mystery.
A clue to their true use can perhaps be found,
however, in the names of the previous owners of Hilliard's fleet of airliners,
which include individuals closely associated with prominent military figures
active in U.S. covert operations in China, in Iran Contra, and closely linked to
figures like the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon.
New American Drug Lords Preview IV Behind the forces fighting for control of the
venice airport lie a treasure trove of secrets about America’s secret history,
and a startling new discovery that finally made sense of the metamorphosis of
the owner of Huffman Aviation—while Mohamed Atta
October 19,
2009
by Daniel Hopsicker
At the same time
Wallace J Hilliard's Huffman Aviation was teaching a still-unidentified
number of suspected terrorists, including many, like Souheil Seddik, who remain
unknown to the general public, he was also assembling a fleet of twin-engine
turboprop Jetstream airliners, airplanes normally used in regional airline
markets, to be used in the launch of his new start-up,
Florida Air.
"Dekkers, along with partner Wally Hilliard,
operates several air charter companies in Florida, including the Venice-based
Hoffman Aviation," reported the Sarasota Herald Tribune in February 2001.
"Six airplanes -- four scheduled for daily
runs, two on standby as backups --will be dispatched for the new service."
However a recent investigation into the current
war for control of the Venice Municipal Airport has discovered that secretive
financier Wally Hilliard bought-not six-but as many as twelve to eighteen
Jetstream airliners which seldom-if ever-flew paying passengers or scheduled
flights.
While Mohamed Atta attended his flight school,
Wally Hilliard owned a
"ghost airline" with a dozen 19-passenger Jetstreams whose use remains a
total mystery.
A clue to their true use can perhaps be found,
however, in the names of the previous owners of Hilliard's fleet of airliners,
which include individuals closely associated with prominent military figures
active in U.S. covert operations in China, in Iran Contra, and closely linked to
figures like the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon.
The man who owned the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta
to fly, Wally Hilliard, made millions selling his insurance company, back in
1981, to the man who paid “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”
Wally Hilliard’s links to
American intelligence go back (at least) to November of 1981, when his insurance
company, Wisconsin Employer’s Group, was bought
out by Myron Du Bain, then the Chairman of Fireman’s Fund of San
Francisco.
Du Bain, who died in 2002,
was a World War II OSS/CIA operative and the Chairman of Fireman's Fund of San
Francisco when it bought out the insurance company founded by Hilliard.
Hilliard later went on to own Huffman Aviation, the Venice FL flight school used
by Mohamed Atta his U.S. base.
We had discovered the
connection in a trip to Green Bay several years ago.
But only recently did we
learn that Myron Du Bain’s life-long
ties to the CIA included two stints at the helm of the Stanford Research
Institute (SRI), famous for its classified research into psychic viewing. the
results of which are currently on display in “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”
Stephen Ruth got
his start in business (as revealed by the first two stories in this series)
working for a corporate entity which those involved claim was the Central
Intelligence Agency, the CIA.
Active at the
Venice Municipal Airport over several decades, as well as in nearby Sarasota and
Charlotte County, Venice Florida native Stephen L. Ruth is a convicted drug
trafficker and friend of Pablo Escobar flying, by the late 70’s, back and forth
from Southwest Florida to Colombia and back several times a week.
When not flying
goodwill missions to our Southern neighbors in his DC4 Globemaster or Lockheed
Lodestar, Stephen Ruth developed the habit of putting out a number of
serious-as-cancer murder contracts.
Apparently,
Stephen Ruth’s unique curriculum vitae: experience in successful CIA “wet
work,” bolstered by proven ability to fly low over the Gulf from
Colombia to Florida… later qualified him for employment with the Florida
State’s Attorney’s office.
“Deep
History,” according to the man who coined the term, U.C. Berkeley Professor
Peter Dale Scott, “is the constant everyday interaction between the
constitutionally-elected government and the forces of violence and crime which
appear (on the surface) to be the enemies of that government.”
Just as he said he would,
after returning from Cuba, where, according to a police report he participated
in the assassination of one of the “four or five” men said to have been involved
in the Kennedy Assassination, Stephen Ruth got rich.
Big rich: $3 million
dollars, a lot back in the 1970’s.
While how he made it may not
surprise you, what he did then almost certainly will.
t
Big Safari, the Kennedy Assassination, & the war for control of the Venice
Airport
Sept
08 2009--A fierce war being waged for control of the Venice Municipal Airport
has led to the discovery of covert CIA and military operations, dating back to
at least 1959, which go well beyond what was previously known to have taken
place there.
Operations at the Venice Airport have involved individuals
whose names figure prominently in the Kennedy Assassination, for example a
defense contractor controlled by Texas oilman General D. H. (Harry) Byrd, which
in the late 50's and early 60's built and launched Regulus II cruise missiles
from the beach directly in front of the Venice Airport as part of a program run
out of at Eglin AFB in Florida’s panhandle.
Byrd’s Chance-Vought Aircraft, later re-named LTV, would
become—almost immediately after the JFK assassination—a principal beneficiary of
the massive military spending accompanying the growth of American military
involvement in the Vietnam War.
General Byrd, of course, was also the owner of the Texas
School Book Depository in Dallas, where the Warren Commission alleged Lee Harvey
Oswald fired the shots which killed President John F. Kennedy.
Byrd also ran the Texas and Louisiana Civil Air Patrol, at
the same time cadets Barry Seal and Lee Harvey Oswald were meeting Kennedy
assassination conspirator Capt. David Ferrie at a two-week summer camp of the
Louisiana Civil Air Patrol at Barksdale Air Force Base in July of 1955.
Amazingly—especially for a tiny airport located in an
out-of-the-way retirement community—according to a recently-uncovered police
report there is a second man active at the Venice Airport with relevance to the
Kennedy assassination as well.
The
news these last days of summer contains at least one story which—because key
elements of it remain unspoken, in other words, taboo—doesn't make
sense.
In the current furor over
the Justice Department’s opening of an investigation into the torture of
prisoners under the Bush Administration, during the same week that a federal
court found that John
Ashcroft,
then-attorney general, violated the rights of U.S. citizens by ordering arrests
when the government lacked probable cause,
Dick Cheney
vociferously claimed that that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were
“absolutely essential” in stopping another terrorist attack on the United States
after Sept. 11, 2001.
If it is true, then
perhaps Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush, and especially U.S. General Tommy Franks can tell
us why they let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora two months after the
9/11 attack?
The reputation of Huffman Aviation principal
Rudi Dekkers,
whose dozens of television appearances in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack
shaped the public perception of
Mohamed Atta and Marwan
Al-Shehhi, took another big
hit recently when a Dutch television show came to light.
"Spooloos," or "Vanished," a popular
reality TV show in the Netherlands that travels around the world locating
missing relatives for worried family and friends, portrays Dekkers' as a callous
and negligent "deadbeat dad" who abandoned a young wife in the Netherlands while
she was three months pregnant.
His son Patrick's attempts to establish
contact with Dekker's, the father he has never known, are repeatedly rebuffed.
A translated except from the program is part of the just-released second preview
of the upcoming
"The New American
DrugLords" documentary
at
www.danielhopsicker.tv
Dekker's description of events leading up to
the 9/11 attack were uncritically received on network and cable news shows in
America and around the world after the 9/11 attack.
A
bitter fight to redact portions of the explosive final report of an official
British Inquiry into systemic corruption in the Turks and Caicos
Islands backfired last week when news of the redactions caused a firestorm of
protest and the full report was leaked to freedom of information website
WikiLeaks.
Some of
the most sensitive redactions in the British Commission of Inquiry's Final
Report concern much-traveled pilot Michael Francis Brassington, who first rose
to the level of public scrutiny as co-pilot on a Lear jet (N351WB) belonging to
the owner of a flight school that at the time had been
teaching Mohamed Atta to fly was seized by DEA Agents who found 43 lbs. of
heroin onboard.
The
controversy over the redacted report has ironically shed light on a
previously-unknown connection between Brassington and a second pilot, Wolfgang
Bohringer, whose name also surfaces regularly in the background to the intrigue
in Florida swirling around Mohamed Atta during the run-up to the 9/11 attack.
Brassington and Bohringer were not previously known to have been connected.
The
controversy over the unredacted report changed that, when the resulting
publicity illuminated dark corners in the background of the man whose deep
pockets were keeping secret the full extent of Michael Misick and Michael
Francis Brassington’s crimes.
Michael
Brassington—still a close associate of Wally Hilliard’s, according to a former
U.S. Customs Agent who has seen his file—and Wolfgang Bohringer, an "associate"
of Mohamed Atta's close enough for Atta to have frequently referred to him as
“my brother,” have both been pilots for the Russian Mob.
Huffman Aviation Was 'Continuing Criminal
Enterprise'
NEW!! watch a preview of the
New American Drug Lords
& discuss this story at http://www.danielhopsicker.tv
our new blog!
Art
Nadel, the recent owner of Huffman Aviation accused of running a Ponzi scheme
which allegedly stole almost $400 million from investors, is the only person so
far charged with a crime.
However
if authorities persist in claiming that claim Nadel was a "lone-nut financial
gunslinger" they will be ignoring the richly-documented history of criminal
fraud involving the owners of Huffman Aviation that goes back for more than a
decade.
At least four financial
scams, each looting more than $100 million, have criminal roots in the fertile
soil— the “Octo-Mom” fertile soil—of the Venice Municipal Airport.
Almost immediately after its
purchase in the summer of 1999 by Wallace J. Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers, the
aviation facility became the center of a series of financial scams that included
Ponzi schemes, pension fraud, international stock swindles, and fraudulent
bankruptcies which have altogether looted more than $1 billion from the American
economy.
Huffman Aviation, the flight
training facility which housed both of the terrorist pilots who crashed
passenger jets into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, has been
operating as a continuing criminal enterprise, as defined by the Federal RICO
(Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act.
An
investor claiming a nearly six million dollar loss in hedge funds of the accused
Sarasota Florida Ponzi artist who is also the current owner
of flight school Huffman Aviation
figured in the story of the St. Petersburg DC9 busted in Mexico's Yucatan with
5.5 tons of cocaine aboard.
Louis D. Paolino,
once known
as the“Garbage
King of New Jersey,” was one of only a handful of
entities ever funded by Texas "investment bank" Argyll Equity LLC, the
major investor in the company whose DC9 was busted on April 11, 2006 in Mexico’s
Yucatan, carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.
Terrorist
ringleader Mohamed Atta probably never met anyone named “Fat Pete”or “Joey Cakes” while learning to fly at Huffman Aviation at
the Venice Airport.
But ever-mounting
evidence points to the conclusion that the men who owned the
flight school—both then and now—have more than a passing
acquaintance with organized crime.
mar
20, 2009-Another
owner of the flight school in Venice Florida that trained Mohamed Atta and
Marwan Al-Shehhi to fly is in trouble with the law; current owner Arthur G.
Nadel, 75, was arrested recently for running a Ponzi scheme which methodically
looted investors in his Sarasota-based hedge funds of more than $300
million.
New York tabloids,
already in overdrive on the story of Bernard Madoff, instantly dubbed Nadel
Mini-M, for Mini-Madoff.
Nadel's arrest
marks the second time in recent years that the owner of Huffman Aviation, the
FBO (fixed base of operations) at the Venice Airport has been involved in crimes
traditionally associated with the Mob.
Ponzi schemes, of
course, are a trademark Mafia specialty. So, too, is the crime of heroin
trafficking in which previous owner Wally Hilliard was implicated.
How did city officials in Venice allow the
airport's mission-critical FBO to fall into the hands--not once but twice--of
people otherwise engaged in organized crime?
Why is it that
shadowy underworld figures seem to enjoy the permanent run of the airport in
Venice, Florida?
mar
5--09 The owner of the
flight school in Venice FL where the two hijackers who crashed airliners into
the World Trade Center
took flight lessons, was arrested last May after assaulting his 17-yr old
step-daughter outside a sports bar in Naples, Florida.
78-year old Wallace J. Hilliard
of Naples FL was charged with misdemeanor battery on May 28 2008, according to
Collier County, FL arrest records.
In the seven years since 9/11
Wally Hilliard has remained embroiled in controversy. He is currently the
subject of a multi-jurisdictional fraud investigation into a scheme which may
have cost investors as much as $100 million.
Though no charges have yet been
filed, the FBI and investigators from the state of have interviewed numerous
witnesses, including over 50 people from Wisconsin who lost millions. They
allege Hilliard never alerted investors that he was under investigation, had a
federal tax liability going back to 2001, and had been denied an airline
license by the FAA.
Frequent Hilliard “business
associate” Tommy Barranza is reportedly under investigation for money laundering
for allegedly structuring cash transactions to avoid currency reporting.
Hilliard is suspected of
funneling large amounts of cash to the Bahamas.
Fort Lauderdale attorney
Michael Moulis, described in an article yesterday as “The Man Behind Loophole
Air,” is threatening to sue Daniel Hopsicker on behalf of Michael Brassington,
the pilot arrested two weeks ago in a 23-count federal indictment for the crash
of a corporate jet in New Jersey.
Brassington is also linked to a
massive corruption scandal roiling South Florida, over the sale during the past
few years of as many as one hundred American-registered planes to Mexico’s
dominant Sinaloa Cartel.
According to a high-ranking DEA
official in Miami, a corrupt U.S. Customs operation is to blame. The fact that
more people are not aware of these facts owes something to the many forms of
intimidation practiced against independent journalists. Such intimidation takes
many forms.
Some would say lawsuits, and
threats of lawsuits, are one of its milder manifestations. Such people probably
haven't been sued for libel recently.
But attorney Michael Moulis
didn’t stop with just offering to sue for libel...
He threatened criminal
prosecution in Federal Court.
Less than a year before the Teterboro crash
of a Challenger corporate jet that ran off a runway and hurtled into traffic on
a busy 6-lane highway on Feb 2 2005, the company responsible for that crash,
Platinum Jet Management of Fort Lauderdale, ran a private jet off a runway at
Peachtree-DeKalb Airport in Atlanta.
The Teterboro crash was so
spectacular that it led all three evening
newscasts. The crash sparked a
federal criminal investigation that led to the recent 23-count indictment
against Brassington, and four other executives of Platinum Jet Management.
The
investigation turned up damning evidence of a pattern of illegal activity on the
part of the charter company so egregious that the responsible Federal agency,
the FAA, came under rare criticism from another Federal agency, the NTSB.
Former inspector general Mary Schiavo of the U.S. Department of Transportation
calls Brassington’s charter company "Loophole Airlines."
Schiavo, an outspoken critic of the nation's aviation regulators, told the NJ
Star-Ledger that the company that flew the jet was an unqualified charter
operator, flying U.S. skies only by circumventing federal regulations.
"This is rampant. It isn't just one operator. This
goes on everywhere in every part of the country," she charged. "They are
loophole airlines."
If Schiavo is right, then the man behind "Loophole
Air" is Fort Lauderdale attorney Michael Moulis, a former FAA
prosecutor who has represented Guyanese pilot Brassington since the Teterboro
Challenger crash four years ago,
The
pilot arrested two weeks ago on felony charges in the crash in the February 2005
crash of a Challenger business jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey has since
been flying illegal charters for the Premier of the Turks & Caicos in luxury
Gulfstream III jets owned by a Washington lobbyist and former aide to President
Bill Clinton.
Testimony at the British Commission of Inquiry Turks & Caicos Islands corruption
probe last week revealed that Guyanese pilot Michael Brassington, currently
facing a 23-count indictment in Federal Court in Newark for endangering
passengers lives at charter company Platinum Jet Management, is in business
with former Clinton White House aide Jeffrey Watson, now a Washington lobbyist.
The Commission heard that Brassington and Turks & Caicos Premier Michael Misick
conspired to induce the island's government to pay hundreds of thousands of
dollars a month to Watson to lease two high-end Gulfstream III luxury business
jets.
The men engineered an air charter deal that paid Watson more than
$160,000-a-month from the coffers of the Turks & Caicos' nearly-bankrupt
government, which was at the same time eliminating all student scholarships.
Watson is
a former housing official in Miami who became a Clinton White House Aide,
responsible for doling out $75 million in Federal government largesse after the
devastation of Hurricane Andrew.
The Fort
Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel called him “Florida's insider at the White House.”
3Four
years after the spectacular crash of a business jet at Teterboro Airport across
the Hudson River from New York City injured 20 people and left one man with
permanent brain damage, the owner and chief pilot who was arrested on felony
charges in the crash last week was also named as a key figure in a corruption
probe in the Turks & Caicos Islands.
Even as FBI
agents were arresting him in the New Jersey crash and charging him in a 23-count
indictment in which he stands accused of compromising passenger safety, former
Guyanese military pilot Michael Francis Brassington was making headlines in a
Watergate-like British Commission of Inquiry investigating allegations of
corruption in office against Michael Misick, Premier of the Turks & Caicos
Islands.
On the
Challenger flight that crashed, more than 20 people were injured. Authorities
expressed amazement that nobody was killed. According to the NTSB, neither the
pilot nor the co-pilot were rated to fly the flight they were flying. The flight
attendant was a dancer at the Voodoo Lounge in Miami.
A month later
the FAA shut Brassington's Platinum Jet charter company down. It didn't faze
Brassington. He just changed the name of his company and kept on hauling.
35-year
old Guyanese pilot Michael Francis Brassington was indicted in New Jersey
federal court this week, the result of an investigation into the spectacular
crash of a airplane outside New York City in February of 2005, which injured 20
people and provoked widespread outrage in New York.
Brassington, the principal owner of defunct air charter company Platinum Jet
Management, was indicted Wednesday along with four other company executives,
charged with recklessly endangering the lives of passengers. He has survived
previous scrapes with American law enforcement, each time emerging curiously
unscathed.
However,
his earlier controversies were not celebrity-enhanced.
He first
achieved notoriety and became a footnote to the history of the 9.11 attack as
the co-pilot of a Lear jet(N351WB) which was busted carrying 43 lbs of heroin in
Orlando on July 22, 2000. The Lear jet’s owner was Wallace J. Hilliard, the
secretive 75-year old Naples FL financier whose Huffman Aviation flight school
in Venice just three weeks earlier had enrolled soon-to-be-famous terrorist
pilot trainees Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi.
Less
well-known about Brassington's history of brushes with U.S. law enforcement is
that several years ago he was the subject of a Multi-Agency Federal Task Force,
Operation Blue Lightning; Brassington was suspected of trafficking drugs,
passports, people, currency, and diamonds into the U.S. through two airports in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Tasked
with tracking Brassington's movements during Operation Blue Lightning, a Customs
Supervisor in Miami had even warned Customs Agents at Fort Lauderdale
International Airport to treat Brassington as a "grave threat to national
security.”
Carlos
Slim, the Mexican billionaire whose $250 million cash infusion bailed the New
York Times out of a tight cash crunch last week, has long-standing business ties
with wealthy Mexican businessmen suspected of involvement in Mexico's so-called
“Cartel of the Southeast,” the drug trafficking organization (DTO)
based in Cancun which came to light two years ago with the crash on Mexico’s
Yucatan Peninsula of an American-registered (N987SA) Gulfstream jet
carrying nearly four tons of cocaine.
A long-time lieutenant of
Carlos Slim's, Fernando Chico Pardo, left Slim's employ to take over ASUR,
a publicly-traded corporation which observers accuse of moving large quantities
of cocaine through Cancun International Airport, which the company runs and
manages. Slim's big investment represents an encroachment into the ownership of
an icon of American democracy of a man, and a massive fortune, whose provenance
have gone largely unexamined.
But on the topic of Slim's
shady dealings, all eyes seem to be curiously averted. However it seems highly
doubtful the Times' ownership is unaware of them. The barely-concealed facts
regarding Carlos Slim’s shady connections are well-known to journalists in
Mexico.
They deserve to become more
well-known here in the U.S.; the links between Mexico's exploding narco-economy
and current-world's-richest-man Carlos Slim don’t end with Fernando Pardo's
ASUR.
Two
of the four prominent Chavezistas charged with illegally acting on
Hugo Chavez’s behalf in the recently-concluded
Suitcase-Gate Trial in Miami were inside players in a previous Venezuelan
scandal that took place well before Chavez ever took office, the
MadCowMorningNews has learned.
The Suitcase-Gate Trial was
supposed to spotlight a criminal Venezuelan elite of Castro-loving
Chavezistas, who taunt America,
threaten war with Colombia, and give sanctuary to Hezbollah.
Instead,
testimony showed that Chavez's Venezuelan cronies are anything but wild-eyed
radicals. The vanguard of the working class drives Ferraris and lives in
McMansions in Miami, and is too busy making money, in oil, real estate, and
weapons and narcotics to wear masks over their faces, or raspberry-red berets
Neither man has
built a better mousetrap, or done anything more
clever than align themselves with a Venezuelan elite which resembles the
vanguard of the working class much less than it does a kleptocracy very much like the
one which has just looted trillions of dollars from the American economy.
At least two of the four defendants convicted of working as illegal foreign agents in Florida for Venezuelan President Hugo
Chavez in the Suitcase-Gate Scandal had ties to an international criminal organization which was operating successfully in Venezuela, and with
seeming official impunity, long before Chavez himself came to power, The MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Both the recently-convicted Franklin Duran, and Carlos Kauffmann, who pled guilty before the trial, took part in a $7
billion bank scandal during the mid-1990's that involved insiders looting Venezuelan banks, and led more than 200 Venezuelan bankers to flee Caracas
for exile in Miami.
When a U.S. jury in Miami recently convicted Venezuelan businessman Franklin Duran in the Suitcase-Gate Trial, the
verdict raised more questions than it answered.
From the start, observers saw the purpose of the prosecution as being to embarrass and point a finger at corruption
in the government of Venezuela's current President (and Bush Administration bete noire) Hugo Chavez.
But while Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution" was singled out by Bush Administration prosecutors, the men
acting on Chavez's behalf have connections which have so far been ignored to scandals which occurred under past Venezuelan Presidents as
well.
The luxury business jet carrying a suitcase filled with $800,000 in bribes whose discovery last August kicked off the
Suitcase-Gate Scandal playing out in a trial in Miami had the same registration, or" N" number, as that of a plane flying
for a CIA contractor in Iraq, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Newspaper photos taken of the Citation X top-of-the-line business jet after the ill-fated suitcase flight show 'N'
number N5113S on the tail. But a Florida-based CIA air contractor called Air-Scan Inc. is assigned that tail number, according to FAA
records, for a Cessna 182 flying in Iraq.
Air-Scan Inc. is an American military contractor which has—even for an American military
contractor—a checkered past.
Still, there has been no mention so far during the trial of the murky provenance of the Citation jet, whose flight
began what has become a growing international incident.
The
CIA Drug Plane Scandal grew exponentially last week when European Union officials broke an official 40-year-long silence on the previously-taboo
subject of the CIA's worldwide involvement in drug trafficking.
Last week Mexico City newspaper El Universal reported that The European Organization for the Safety of Air
Navigation has begun an investigation one of the planes, the cocaine-laden Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA), for suspected use in CIA
"rendition" flights in which prisoners are covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.
Neither of the federal agencies with apparent jurisdiction—the DEA and FAA—has so far offered answers about how
two American-registered jets with extremely politically well-connected owners, could have wound up carrying so much Colombian coke. But then, no
mainstream American journalists have bothered to ask.
Last week, two
wire services, Agence France Presse and the Associated Press, reported news that readers of the investigative reporting at this website have known
about for almost a year.
While happy to see the mainstream media waking up, a little "credit where credit is due" would be nice,
too. We broke this news on this website eleven months ago (Oct 8, 2007). When not unsuccessfully attempting to debunk it, America's corporate
media has assiduously ignored my reporting on a whole host of scoops we've broken.
Ultimately, the effort is designed to make me go away, for the same reason that stories about 9/11
"conspiracies" never mention real investigative reporting on 9/11, which, alas, appears in very few places. And, in combination with a
series of nuisance libel lawsuits, it has almost succeeded.
You can make the difference in keeping the news real by putting your money where your mouth is. Please send
advice, and donations, and pre-order both the book and DVD.
A sincere and heartfelt thank you to all the Mad Cow readers who have been supportive over these past
years...
"The NEW American Drug Lords" is a no-holes-barred look at into the Biggest Taboo story of our time: the
illegal drug trade.
The documentary pulls back the curtain on the biggest drug story of our time: the scandal which erupted when two
drug planes flying tons of cocaine were busted in Mexico's Yucatan enroute from Colombia to Fort Lauderdale in Florida.
Both were American-owned. Recent owners of the first plane busted—a DC9 with 5.5 tons of cocaine—have
interlocking business partnerships with recent owners of the second plane, a Gulfstream II business jet.
The Gulfstream had been previously used to fly for the CIA. The DC9 was painted like an official aircraft from the U.S.
Dept. of Homeland Security.
The New American Drug Lords. Meet them. Know them.
As the political conventions dominate our consciousness, remember that a major international
trafficking operation, like this one, kicks off vast amounts of fungible cash, day-by-day, month-by-month,
year-by-year...
If there is an arena where the a battle is being waged for the "soul of
America," as Joe Biden suggested last week... it is here.
The exclusive "Cocaine One" series of investigative reports by this reporter
appearing on this website for the past two years made the news, finally... not in the U.S., but in Mexico City, where it was cited by a principal in the
drug trafficking scandal in newspaper interviews to support his allegation of selective prosecution against the DEA.
Carlos Gutiérrez de Velasco is the paterfamilias of the influential Veracruz-based family
which owned the Casa de Cambio Puebla currency exchange, accused of laundering enough drug money through U.S. banks to buy as many as 100
American planes for use in drug-running.
"Threats of law suits against journalists have
become the hallmark of the Bush administration
in a not too clever tactic used to silence
independent media in the U.S. -Wayne
Madsen