The owner of the flight school in Venice FL where the two hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center took flight lessons launched a new aviation company with a partner who was convicted in a 2002 drug sting in Miami whose target was O.J. Simpson, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Former owner of Huffman Aviation Wallace J. Hilliard filed articles of incorporation for PRESTIGE AIRWAYS, LLC with the State of Florida on June 8th, 2006, government records reveal. In a mysterious move, six months later he surreptitiously removed his name from company records.
He is partners with convicted drug smuggler Philippe Gornail, who pled guilty to selling 37,000 ‘hits’ of ecstasy in February 2002 in a drug case which involved a highly-publicized raid on O.J. Simpson's house in Miami by the combined forces of the FBI, DEA and Miami-Dade police.
Newspapers reported before his sentencing that Gornail’s conviction would earn him 20 years in prison. But less than four years later he was out and serving as a corporate officer with Wally Hilliard, the Green Bay insurance executive who supposedly "retired" to Florida but soon owned a fleet of globe-trotting private jets and terrorist-training flight schools.
Losing their religion… and more
Hilliard's business moves during the time frame when Mohamed Atta attended his flight school are being critically scrutinized in legal proceedings in Green Bay Wisconsin, where he is being sued by several dozen irate former friends and investors in Florida Air, or FLAIR.
"The plaintiffs in this case have lost every penny of their investments," their suit begins. "Wallace J. Hilliard painted a wondrous picture of immediate success (for Florida Air)… but neglected to mention back taxes and… his own problems with the FAA."
One unspoken question raised by his current legal difficulties is how a man owing back taxes with problems with the FAA avoided being investigated after the 9/11 attack, pointing to an evident lack of investigation after the 9/11 attack of the terrorist's American business connections.
Nor is Philippe Gornail the only current associate of Hilliard's with a highly-checkered past.
My name is legion
The activities of Prestige Airways LLC are shrouded in mystery. While normal procedure is to file an amendment when there's a change in corporate officers, six months after Prestige first incorporated the company incorporated again, only this time minus Wally Hilliard’s name as a corporate officer.
Why would anyone incorporate the same company twice? Hadn't the first incorporation taken?
An official at the Florida Secretary of State’s office termed the action "highly unusual."
But she said a loophole in current law allows it, until a new law making the practice illegal takes effect in July.
Between August and December of 2006 Prestige Airways flew an enormous number of flights (419!),records at the U.S. Dept of Transportation reveal, between Florida and Haiti.
On these flights Prestige used air carrier Air Solutions LLC, a company also founded by Wally Hilliard, along with his frequent associate Tommy Barranza, who is affiliated with a half-dozen Hilliard ventures.
Typical of Hilliard's "boxes-within-boxes" business approach, Air Solutions itself is managed by a third company, Badger Air, which Hilliard also controls.
Now, that's insulation.
Takes the checkered flag for 'highly-checkered'
Philippe Gornail, before his drug conviction and involvement with Wally Hilliard, operated Tropical Airways, a fly-by-night airline which offered service in Haiti until being shut down after a horrible accident in Port-au-Prince in 2005.
Ten days before the fiery plane crash, the U.S. State Department warned Americans in Haiti not to fly Tropical Airways. But not everyone got the memo, apparently, and 21 passengers died in the crash.
“Shortly after takeoff, eyewitnesses reported seeing smoke coming from th
e aircraft's forward door,” read one wire service account of the accident.
“The aircraft then crashed and burned in a sugar cane field. An official at Cap Haitien's airport said the 19-passenger aircraft departed with too many people aboard and too much baggage.”
Gornail also faced a spot of bother in April of 2000 over allegations that Tropical Airways was flying stolen planes from former Soviet republics into Africa and then repainting them in a military-occupied zone at the old Entebbe airport in Uganda. But the trouble has apparently 
been taken care of, because today Tropical Airways operates all over West Africa and in the Sudan.
Hilliard and Gornail have a third partner in Prestige named Victor Mena. Mena hasn't been responsible for any fiery plane crashes that we're aware of. But he was in the thick of a pretty sticky wicket in a controversy over cockroach-infested 727's.
Make that a "pretty icky wicket."
The Agony & the (37,000 Hits of) Ecstasy
What is it about Haiti that makes people--Christians, even-– want to fly there and back with such frequency?
One former business partner of Hilliard's has a ready answer, stating flatly, “He's back in the drug business. That is, assuming he ever left."
Attempts to reach Hilliard for comment were unsuccessful. But it is a remarkable allegation to be leveling at a man so closely associated with the story of the terrorist hijackers in America.
Nor is having a partner convicted for drug trafficking Hilliard's first brush with the international narcotics trade.
While his flight school began training Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, his Lear jet was swarmed by DEA agents on a runway of Orlando Executive Airport in July of 2000.
Government documents on the heroin bust, called "the largest seizure of heroin in Central Florida history" by the Orlando Sentinel, have become increasingly hard to come by.
So today we're placing online in perpetuity the affidavit of the DEA Agent who was in charge of the bust, as well as the forfeiture hearing, which ruled that Hilliard was not an innocent owner, and he was forced to forfeit the plane.
"No one ever goes to prison in Florida, baby girl"
Prestige Airways LLC is just one of Wally Hilliard's dizzying array of aviation ventures, in Florida, Wisconsin, and Nevada; his company structure seems designed to be complicated and confusing. And now we know why…
One of of Hilliard's partners, the MadCowMorningNews has learned, is a notorious Las Vegas scamster named William S Reed, whose company has been convicted and enjoined from marketing illegal “corporate secrecy techniques” which their literature says is aimed at helping corporate owners hide their assets, and even their identities.
Hilliard found these corporate shape-shifting techniques useful while he was being implicated in fraud three years ago surrounding the bankruptcy of an Orlando flight school in which dozens of young flight students lost their life savings.
The investigation into the disappearance of millions already pre-paid for student's tuition led straight to Wally Hilliard.
The flight school's assets were stripped out and transferred illegally to the school’s parent company, which Hilliard owned, alleged the students.
"At least three million got siphoned out of ATA and into Discover Air," one attorney for the students told us. "The money flowed out of the country to the Bahamas."
Nothing came of the investigation. Hilliard has friends in high places, after all, including both former Secretary of State Katherine Harris and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
During a recent settlement hearing, a woman suing a Hilliard partnership told us she asked Hilliard if he ever worried about going to jail.
"Not in Florida, baby doll," he replied. "No one ever goes to jail in Florida!"
Maybe he's right.
Never call a federal judge "capricious"
William S. Reed's literature offered asset protection against what it called “capricious federal judges and any government agency."
Reed’s partner in the scam was sentenced to 18 months in Federal prison recently by a federal judge who may have found “capricious” a poor choice of words to use when describing the nation’s judiciary.
Hilliard’s partnership with Reed was revealed in documents naming him an officer in one of Hilliard's companies, sent from a fax at Plane 1 Leasing in Naples, the Hilliard-owned company made infamous as the listed owner of the Lear jet busted with 43 lbs of heroin.
More about William S Reed: The U.S. Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee held hearings in April in which members expressed concerns that Nevada corporation laws being abused by Reed were enabling criminals to "hide drug money, launder money and evade income taxes,
and potentially finance terrorism."
Newspapers report that Federal officials are currently looking for $10 million Reed hid for innocent business owners looking to avoid what Reed's literature calls “America’s lawsuit explosion," an explosion which probably owes something to the large number of people currently suing Wally Hilliard.
More 9/11 "freakish coincidence"
To recap: Consider the case of a man… whose flight school welcomed terrorists associated with Osama bin Laden (Prince of all he surveyed at the time in the world’s heroin capital of Afghanistan)…and who also had his Lear jet seized in what the Orlando Sentinel called “the largest heroin seizure in Central Florida history.”
The man has a partner in Las Vegas whose financial schemes just faced Congressional scrutiny because of their ability, said a sub-committee report, "to hide drug money, enable money laundering, and potentially finance terrorism."
And nothing about this man has surfaced in the major media, (save only a surprisingly kind review "Welcome to TERRORLAND received from Hilliard's hometown Green-Bay Gazette.)
The man has still not been the subject of any official investigation.
In fact the official story of the 9/11 attack remains what it has been from the start, since the opening words of PBS’s FRONTLINE 9/11 documentary dribbled from the willing lips of Pulitzer-prize winning former New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith, who intoned, as if he had a friggin' clue, which, come to think of it, maybe he does, that..“19 hijackers moved through Europe and America unnoticed.”
Given the enormity of the stakes involved, the discovery that people proclaiming themselves champions of 9/11 Truth are beside themselves with utter fascination over the melting point of steel comes as no surprise.
And so it goes.
