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 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.
The Huffman Aviation Ponzi All-Stars
Far
from being alone, Art Nadel isn’t even the first owner of Huffman Aviation
to benefit from a huge Ponzi scheme...
He's
just the most recent.
Huffman Aviation’s first
Ponzi All-Star was Wallace J. Hilliard, the owner while Mohamed Atta practiced
touch-and-go’s on the airport’s runway. Yet, somehow, this
easily-verifiable fact surfaced nowhere in Southwest
Florida’s anemic mainstream media. Moreover Hilliard is
currently being sued by disgruntled investors in
Green Bay Wisconsin for $100 million.
Criminal
ventures involving Huffman Aviation will
each be
considered separately, and
at length, in a coming series of stories. They have often been so spectacular as
to earn “biggest ever” designations from authorities and the press.
Huffman's criminal highlight
reel contains a number of
criminal firsts:
-
The Sarasota Herald
Tribune
called Art Nadel’s $390 million swindle
the biggest fraud in Southwest Florida history."
-
When Wally Hilliard’s
Learjet was busted carrying 43 lbs. of heroin at Orlando Executive Airport on
July 25, 2000, the Orlando Sentinel called it the "biggest
bust of its kind in Central Florida history.”
-
Wally Hilliard’s partner
in Florida Air, an airline with high visibility at the Venice airport, paid
for the passenger planes the two used in their “airline” with loot from what
the Securities & Exchange Commission later called “the biggest fraud by
an investment manager in U.S. history.”
-
When a DC9 registered to
a company which used as its address a hanger at Huffman Aviation was caught in
Campeche, Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, Mexican authorities called it
the biggest drug
seizure in an airplane in Yucatan history."
-
Participants in that
escapade included Adnan Khashoggi. Hilliard sent a Lear jet to support
Khashoggi's
plan to gain control of Rum
Cay, a remote island in the Bahamas with a
recently-lengthened 5000 foot runway, as well as a Khashoggi lieutenant from
Saudi Arabia named Ramy el-Batrawi, both of whom were indicted three years ago
in an international stock swindle known as Stockwalk, which Federal
Bankruptcy Court Judge Victor B. Kenton said was responsible for “the
largest failure of a U.S. brokerage
in at least 30 years.”
Lady in Red
The
first fact immediately and painfully obvious about accused Ponzi fraudster Art
Nadel is that he’s clearly nobody’s idea of a financial “lone gunman.”
Nadel is a meek-looking
Woody Allen look-alike who is overshadowed in local Sarasota society by his tall
former model wife Peg.
In a pricey
status-conscious city redolent with with the sweaty scent of social climbing 'yachtsmen'
boasting waterfront mansions, Nadel lived in a $300,000 tract house, and drove
around town in a Subaru.
Two other factors about
Nadel may have some bearing on his case.
When Art and Peg Nadel
first surfaced as financial gurus in 1998 for a black-box stock-picking
“computer-based investment and trading system” called MicroStar Research, wife
Peg was strongly front and center in interviews.
Yet another un unexamined history
A
Sarasota Herald-Tribune company profile on Nov 18, 1997
headlined “INVESTORS STOCK UP ON DATA AT SARASOTA'S INSIDE SCOOP” quoted Peg
Nadel:
"We feel we are
really filling a void,'' (Peg) Quisenberry said, ''for people who just want to
become more informed about the financial part of their lives.''
And a company Peg Nadel
incorporated a decade earlier, well before meeting Piano & Ponzi Man Art,
has a name which rings similar to Peg & Art's later joint ventures:
As Marguerite Quisenberry, Peg incorporated a
Florida company called BUSINESS AND COMPUTER STRATEGIES, INC. Her fellow director in
that venture was then-husband Clement Blake Quisenberry.
In mid-December of last
year, just a few weeks before
Art Nadel went on the lam in mid-January, Peg Nadel’s former husband, Clement
Blake Quisenberry, filed for bankruptcy in Mulberry Florida.
We have no knowledge of
any relationship Quisenberry may have had with his former wife and her current
husband Nadel, but it is at the very least an interesting coincidence.
License to steal at the Venice Airport
Why
disbarred New York
lawyer Art Nadel, a man recently engaged playing show tunes in local lounges,
found it so imperative that he used some of the earliest proceeds from the Ponzi
scheme to buy both Huffman Aviation and a second aviation company in
Georgia, is one of the enduring mysteries of the case.
Located at a tiny and
out-of-the-way airport in a sleepy retirement community with the second oldest
population in the entire United States, Huffman Aviation—save for its
remarkable recent history of criminal activity—is an otherwise-insignificant
aviation business, grossing just several million dollars annually.
Although
the flight school was at the center of a firestorm of publicity after the 9/11
attack, no hint of the continuing criminal enterprise underway there made
it into any mainstream media.
However dozens of
stories published in this space have catalogued the variety of illegal
activities which authorities and their aviation peers accuse Rudi Dekkers and
Wally Hilliard of engaging in at the Venice and Naples Airports, both before and
after the 9/11 attack.
After the first shock of the 9/11 attack
faded, a certain officially-encouraged amnesia struggled—perhaps
understandably—to take hold at the Venice Airport.
Huffman Aviation was re-named the Venice Jet
Center. The facility received a complete face-lift and a new façade, clearly
designed to obscure its identity as the American home of Mohamed Atta.
But all to naught. It was, to quote our
current president, “like putting lipstick on a pig.”
Happy Secretary's Day!
Wally Hilliard was a grateful
beneficiary of a huge Ponzi scheme run out of Portland Oregon which looted an
estimated $300 million dollars, according to the Portland Oregonian. The money
was looted—in a highly-organized and systematic fashion—from the pension funds
of mostly-Mob-led unions.
Hardest hit ($60 million)
by the pension looting were secretaries and laborers from the Laborers Union,
called the biggest Mob-run union in America.
Analysts said that to
receive the same retirement benefits they would have before their pension fund
was looted, the unfortunate secretaries would have to spend an extra
decade working.
A Gig-Harbor WA man named
Richard Boehlke was part of the pension fraud.
Boehlke shoveled
trunk-loads of cash—more than $12 million—into the back of whichever of his
fleet of luxury cars he happened to be driving that day, and
used the cash from the Ponzi scheme to purchase a half-dozen British-made
Jetstream regional jets for a new “airline” he was starting up with his
good pal Wallace J Hilliard.
There. He said the "M" word.
"Boehlke would do anything
for money, he was so desperate," an aviation executive who had witnessed
Boehlke's descent told us. "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."
Alvin of Arabia
Another
grateful beneficiary of the Portland Ponzi scheme money which disappeared from
the retirement pension funds of laborer's and secretary's was a Miami Florida
man whose complex web of
international connections is legendary.
Alvin Malnik was first
called "Meyer Lansky’s heir" in Readers' Digest, of all places,
back in 1983. But it's not Malnick’s gangster ties that make your jaw drop: its
his connection with the Saudi Royal Family.
Jewish lawyer and alleged
'gangster' Malnick’s son married the daughter of a leading Prince of Saudi
Arabia's founding family.
"The Saudi Prince not only
blessed the marriage, but regularly works with the US organized crime
associates," states one report on the connection. "The Saudi King would
frequently send his private 747 to Florida to pick up Malnik and his associates,
so they could conduct business on the plane away from prying eyes."
Mr. Malnik, understandably,
begs to differ.
“Contrary to popular belief,
I (Al Malnik) never worked
for Meyer Lanksy. I knew him, and he was a good friend who I spent a
lot of time with, but I never represented him in legal matters. To me, Meyer was
quite the grandfather type. If you knew him and talked to him, you could never
imagine that any of the stories you heard about him had any veracity. You could
never imagine that he was responsible for doing the things people said he did.
He was not a person to give in to rage.”
"Phantom airline" had real planes, pilots
Although
it flew virtually no scheduled flights, the suspiciously short-lived Florida Air
thus was able to have a fleet of 19-passenger regional planes as well as a
half-dozen pilots on stand-by at the Venice Airport, during the same time
Mohamed Atta was supposedly taking flight lessons there.
The airline lost $800,000 in two months,” said Stuart Burchill, Hilliard’s
former accountant. “All together, the airline ended up costing Wally almost $8
million.”
Florida Air itself became
another scam, run concurrently with the pension looting in Oregon, stealing
money from the airline’s investors,
who are currently suing
Hilliard for $100 million.
Hilliard was a “health
insurance” executive from Green Bay, Wisconsin who “retired” to Florida, where
he soon bought—not the usual set of golf clubs and matching sans-a-belt slacks
and golf sweater combos in canary yellow & lime green—but two dozen luxury jets,
and flight schools in Venice and Naples, FL.
Both of Hilliard’s flight
schools (he also owned one in Naples, FL) enrolled an unknown but substantial
number of Arab men who later were suspected of being terrorists.
"La plus ca change."
A
Portland ABC News Reporter Eric Mason, who interviewed Boehlke, said, “The
financing that had gone between Mr. Boehlke and Florida Air, which was a sister
operation to the flight training center which trained Mohamed Atta, was murky.”
Murky’ is not a word you
want to see applied to the business affairs of the people who were doing
business with Mohamed Atta.
Curiously, the same word
was used to describe SkyWay Aircraft by Federal Judge Paul M. Glenn. While
presiding over SkyWay’s bankruptcy proceedings,
Judge Glen called the case "murky."
"I have a great deal of concern about this case," Judge Glenn said. "There's a
great deal we don't know
Since then, very little
appears to have changed.
While it may be small
consolation to incarcerated (and reportedly forlorn) Art Nadel as he awaits
trial, owning Huffman Aviation might be a lot like being head of the
Teamsters Union:
“Going
away for a while” may just be part of the job.