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. Later, an investigation held in the wake of the crash turned
up damning evidence of a pattern of illegal activity on the part of the charter
company so egregious the FAA came under rare criticism from another
Federal agency, the NTSB.
The
charter company's executives, including CEO and chief pilot Michael
Brassington, were arrested on felony criminal charges two weeks ago.
That the
company's pilots regularly experienced difficulties keeping their airplanes on
the runway has not been reported until now.
We pieced together the story after
finding a brief Associated Press dispatch about the incident:
"A business jet rolled off the runway at Peachtree-DeKalb
Airport in north Atlanta Thursday afternoon,"
the Associated Press reported on Feb. 26,
2004.
"The
Gulfstream 3...was
landing on Runway 20 Left when it rolled off the end of the runway. It was
registered to a Dallas-based company, 448 Alliance LLC."
We already knew that 448
Alliance, a Dallas outfit whose name will shortly prove important to this
investigation, turned over both Gulfstream jets it owned to Platinum Jet.
But there was nothing on the
plane marking it as belonging to any company or airline. Platinum Jet's name
didn't surface in the Peachtree incident.
Nor did the twin-engine Challenger
that crashed during takeoff at Teterboro carry any corporate or airline logo. No name was emblazoned on its tail.
The Man Behind "Loophole Air"
But
former inspector general Mary Schiavo of the U.S. Department of Transportation
says the airline it was flying for does have a name: She calls it
"Loophole Airlines."
Schiavo, an outspoken critic of the
nation's aviation regulators, said nobody knows how many other charter companies
are doing the same thing that got Platinum into trouble. "The charter outfits
don't have to file any reports," she said. "You only see it when there's a
crash."
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.
Schiavo 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
keeping Loophole Air airborne is Fort Lauderdale attorney Michael Moulis,
a former FAA prosecutor who has represented Guyanese pilot Brassington
since the Teterboro Challenger crash four years ago.
30 Days in the hole
Moulis,
who has a successful history of keeping shady charter flight operators flying,
has something of a checkered past himself... Two years ago
he was suspended from practice for 30 days by the Florida Supreme Court.
The Florida Supreme Court said
Moulis “committed an act that is unlawful or contrary to honesty and justice,
failed to provide competent representation to a client, failed to act with
reasonable diligence and promptness in representing a client, failed to keep a
client reasonably informed and inappropriately withdrew from representing a
client.”
Moulis had time to spare, however.
No one was in any hurry. A two-year long FAA and NTSB investigations led to
toothless sanctions, which Brassington was able to evade through the simple
expedient of going out of business as the defunct Platinum Jet, and
opening up under any of a number of brass plate front companies like
Aviation Management Professionals Inc., which
was set up by his brother Paul Brassington a year-and-a-half after the Teterboro
crash.
Criminal charges, which weren’t
filed until more than four years after the accident, came less than two weeks
after the Obama Administration took office, leading to speculation that the
indictment had been ‘held up” during the waning years of the Bush
Administration.
Throughout this period, Moulis
belligerently denied that his client did anything wrong. And he stonewalled the
FAA, maintaining that his client Platinum Jet didn’t need to release records
being sought by the FAA.
"Man, I need something to drink."
It’s
a well-practiced tactic that’s worked for him before, most spectacularly after
the crash of a charter plane in the Bahamas that killed teen sensation
Aaliyah and eight others in August of 2001 led to
a criminal investigation of his client.
The cause of Aaliyah’s crash was an
overloaded airplane, the same cause ruled responsible for the Teterboro crash.
And, like in the Teterboro crash, investigators found numerous flagrant
violations of U.S. law that directly led to the deaths of nine people...
In that crash, the plane
lifted off from Marsh Harbour Airport in the Bahamas, rose little more than 40
feet, banked left—then nose-dived into a marsh and burst into flame. 
"Bodies were
all about," says Marsh Harbour mortician Ernest Scott, who wrapped the deceased
in fire blankets, then placed them in canvas body bags. "I've been on some
gruesome ones, but this one was bad."
When emergency
teams arrived at the muddy scene minutes later, they found Aaliyah some 20 feet
from the fuselage, curled on her left side. She and five others had died
instantly; Aaliyah's
bodyguard Scott Gallin, 41, was barely alive in one of the fuselage remnants. "
"Man,
I need something to drink," Gallin told mortician Ernest Scott. He
did not survive the night.
FAA inspector who cleared doomed pilot, commits
"suicide"
Moulis
represented the shady Palm Beach Florida charter operator responsible for the
flight.
Gilbert Chacon,
the owner of Blackhawk International Airways,
wasn’t someone anyone
would describe as being above reproach. Chacon had a significant criminal
record. He pled guilty in 1993 to bankruptcy fraud involving another charter
service, in a $400 million insurance fraud run by a British scam artist from a
safe haven in the Caribbean.
Sound familiar?
Investigation
revealed that the pilot of
the doomed plane had been busted for possession of
crack cocaine, trafficking stolen airplane parts, theft and driving with a
suspended license.
Three weeks after the
Aaliyah crash, the FAA inspector in
Fort Lauderdale who signed the crack-head pilot off as ready
to fly committed suicide. The New York Post broke the story, but
oddly neglected to identify the "suicided" FAA inspector.
After the Aaliyah crash, Moulis
admitted his client Chacon’s culpability, then offered a “suffered enough”
defense.
“My client knows he hired a bad
pilot who killed nine people,” Moulis told reporters. “It cost him his career.
He can't go to the Bahamas. He is done in aviation - but that's not good enough
for the federal government.”
For responsibility in negligence
leading directly to the deaths of nine people, attorney Moulis got
his client Gilbert Chacon three years....
Three years of probation.
Up in the air without a leg to stand on
In the
Teterboro crash, Assistant U.S. Attorney Scott McBride said the pilots had not
received the training to fly paying passengers, and the company simply ignored
the records and safety requirements. "This was a charter company that
disregarded all the rules," said McBride.
"They were operating by the seat of
their pants, trimming around the edges of safety and regulatory compliance. It
clearly rose to the level of fraud. There was a continuous pattern in their
efforts to deceive their clients, their brokers and the FAA," said Michael
Drewniak of the U.S. Attorney's Office, District of New Jersey.
Platinum flights, including one the
day before the accident on Feb. 2, 2005, altered records to make it look
as though the jet "was operated within weight and
balance limitation when it may not have been."
"Essentially, they were cooking the
books," the investigation charged.
"This is a basic airmanship, Flying
101-type of thing," National Transportation Safety Board investigator Steve
Demko told the board.
NTSB Chairman Mark Rosenker blasted
the crew's decision-making as "truly, truly disturbing."
The captain's employment history was
sketchy. He last held a full-time flying job eight months before the accident,
and he’d been fired twice for poor judgment and
decision-making. And although he claimed to have type ratings on six different
aircraft types, he couldn't produce a flight log.
The co-pilot was worse. He hadn't
completed training to serve as a first officer, and even if he had, as a citizen
of Venezuela in the U.S. on a tourist visa, he was ineligible to serve as a
commercial pilot.
The crew did not have a passenger
manifest. And in violation of U.S. laws barring flights by foreign entities
between two U.S. points, chief executive officer Michael Francis Brassington was
not a U.S. citizen.
A crash, a witch hunt, and a frenzy
Moulis
was unfazed. "Just because
we had a crash, they get into this frenzy. They just changed the law because of
this accident."
"The F.A.A. has no clue what's going
on with respect to this investigation,” Moulis told another newspaper. “And they
don't even have the time or decency to talk to the NTSB and now they're on a
witch-hunt."
Moulis told reporters, "For those
guys to represent to you that that is somehow illegal, they need to go back to
aviation school 101. The charges are bogus and part of a ‘witch hunt.’
Moulis
left unexplained why he felt the FAA, FBI, and DEA were all on a witch hunt against Brassington,
a man who they had
let "walk" in a major drug trafficking bust five years earlier.
Brassington
was the co-pilot on a Learjet belonging to
terror flight school owner Wallace J. Hilliard, when it was surrounded by DEA agents brandishing sub-machine guns on a
runway at Orlando Executive Airport in late July of 2000. Onboard, agents
found 43 lbs of heroin, an amount known in the drug trade as “heavy
weight.”
According to the Orlando Sentinel,
it was the biggest heroin bust in Central Florida history.
During the same month as the heroin
bust, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi began flying lessons at heroin Lear
jet owner Wally Hilliard's flight school in Venice.
The link between Mohamed Atta’s
presence at a flight school whose owner’s Learjet flies a drug run to South
America and back each week for 39 weeks has never been investigated or
explained.
All drugs are bad... Ours a little less so.
Hilliard’s plane was seized, and
those aboard busted.

Or, at least, some of
them were.
The pilot was let go, to the obvious
distaste of the DEA Special Agent
who filed the affidavit in court. Even so, his
affidavit fails to even mention the co-pilot’s name. Brassington doesn’t even
come up.
We first heard the name of the man
who had co-piloted the doomed drug flight —Michael Francis Brassington—from
aviation executives in Naples FL.
The link between Brassington and the
heroin flight was confirmed by a former U.S. Customs Inspector in Fort
Lauderdale, who lost his job after a run-in with Brassington.
“Brassington was a pilot that I came
into contact with on April 6th, 2004 while working at the General Aviation
Facility at the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport as a Customs Inspector,”
James Leif Sanders told us.
“He had a ‘lookout’ from the DEA for
heroin smuggling, which said he had copiloted a Lear jet (N351WB) on the 25th of
July 2000 into Executive Airport in Orlando.”
"But he also had a letter from
Customs stating that his record would be modified, so he would no longer receive
close scrutiny when going through Customs. This may have been an attempt by
Customs to illegally override a DEA lookout.
Why would one Federal agency,
Customs, now a part of the Dept. of Homeland Security, want to "illegally
override" a "lookout" placed by another, the DEA?
STAY TUNED.