Before there was Jesus, there was John the Baptist.

And before there was Donald Trump, there was Jerome Corsi.

Jerome Corsi briefly made news last week when he launched a salvo in a well-coordinated Trumpland counterattack, rejecting a plea deal with the the Special Counsel’s office, and calling Mueller’s team ‘thugs.’  

Even without the overheated rhetoric,  Corsi has become an increasingly-intriguing figure in RussiaGate. His career has made him an expert in ‘weaponized’ propaganda.

Disinformation and propaganda— and their effective delivery —is what RusssiaGate is all about.

Trump immediately signaled approval, praising Corsi, Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, manly men, joining him in getting ready to go the mattresses.’

 

Smash the Gang of Four!

He made it sound like a glorious undertaking.  They weren’t rats.  Only rats talk.  Trump was channeling John Gotti.

They were four old dragons. Trump. Manafort. Stone. Corsi. Like the Chinese ‘Gang of Four’ that clung to power too long after the death of Mao Tse Tung. Before being deposed they’d been the masters—anti-capitalist roaders!— of a vast propaganda machine.

So, too, is Jerome Corsi, on a suitably diminished scale.

Headlines about him missed the mark. He was identified as ‘a friend of Trump ally Roger Stone;’ a ‘Roger Stone associate;’ and ‘Roger Stone’s pal.’

But the gnome-ish Corsi is more than a shadow lurking behind Roger Stone’s white suit; his importance to RussiaGate is orders of magnitude beyond what’s been reported. The reason?

 

Jerome Corsi has a secret life

The first thing to know about Corsi is that hacking and spam in support of disinformation are what he’s all about. Clicking on his jeromecorsi.com website, for example, adds an unwanted search extension (in Chrome).

The 72-year old Jerome Corsi sat behind the controls of a highly successful propaganda machine, using an array of  shiny tools created through the largess of prominent right wing American oligarch Richard Mellon Scaife, whose Arkansas Project spent several decades digging up dirt on saxophone-playing Bill Clinton.

Using hackers to capture and then blast emails to untold millions of addresses across the internet, Corsi managed to convince a good-sized chunk of the American electorate that an authentic war hero really wasn’t.

His “Swift Boat” book campaign effectively killed John Kerry’s chances in the 2004 presidential election.

Corsi didn’t rest on his laurels. A few years later he lobbed another grenade over the transom disguised as a book  called “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President.”

(Trump possesses a very dog-eared copy.)

Corsi brags that he studied with the “father of propaganda” Edward Bernays.

And as if that weren’t enough to confirm Corsi’s disinformation bona fides,  he is currently making money offering a monthly paid subscription service that offers “in depth decodes” of Q-Anon, a high-profile disinformation meme.

 

RussiaGate is about more than just the Russians

In the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, Americans learned that an arsenal of weaponized media— spam, infomercials that look like documentaries, and more—tipped a close election to Donald Trump.

But it wasn’t just Russians that did it. There were dozens of Americans —as well as some Brits—among their number.

One way to identify American conspirators is what they did to bring in cash.  All of them ran ‘pump and dump’ stock frauds, usually using thinly traded micro-stocks, by issuing coordinated barrages of press releases through pop-up press release services that began to proliferate.

Available evidence suggests some of the new ‘business wire’ press services may be secretly owned by nominees of press baron Rupert Murdoch.

If America’s recent past is any guide, RussiaGate will become this nation’s next “modified limited hangout.”

One thing that won’t be hung out will be the identities of the Americans acting in concert with Russian mobsters for over a generation.  (Please help ensure this doesn’t happen!) 

Tell them to remember that both Al Ralsky and Jonathan Curshen were at the top of  a big This Decade in Spam list.

 

Adventures in Poland

Most Americans don’t know anyone doing business with the suspected Russian hackers.  Corsi does.

Until 2014 he worked as senior managing director and self-described “financial services marketing specialist” at seriously-corrupt Manhattan securities firm Gilford Securities, whose Mob pedigree was exposed by the FBI’s Operation Uptick.

 

Earlier, Corsi ripped off two dozen investors from Minnesota in a multi-million dollar fraud, convincing them to give him money for investments in post-communist Poland.

After Corsi’s group made a trip to Poland, according to The Boston Globe, the money mysteriously disappeared. Investors sued, and won judgments, but weren’t able to collect because “Corsi had moved the money into his wife’s name … There was nothing to get out of him.”

The FBI opened an investigation but never filed charges. Corsi, his money safely transferred into his wife’s account, which his creditors couldn’t get to, faced no consequences.

Unfazed, Jerome Corsi moved on to become a major source raising money, awareness, and support, in Donald Trump’s effort’s to ‘drain the swamp.’

 

A “China-Israeli micro stock play”

Corsi’s standard intro on radio and TV shows states: “Dr. Jerome Corsi, Number 1 New York Times bestselling author and the Senior Managing Director in the Financial Services Group at Gilford Securities.”

The company only had a few dozen stockbrokers in Manhattan at the time. We don’t know if Corsi ever met him; his online resume shows a gap during this time period.

But if he did, he wouldn’t have forgotten this crooked stockbroker’s weird name, which began with two initials: M.S. Gregg Berger.

His real name, Gregg StickelBerger, may be more odd yet.

Berger, or StickelBerger, ran an international network involved in micro-cap stock fraud using eight companies headquartered overseas in the People’s Republic of China, Canada, and Israel.

His scheme netted a payday of $33 million dollars.

That’s small change compared to his transnational criminal network partner Adnan Khashoggi, who walked away with almost $300 million with major assistance from Germany’s criminal Deutsche Bank.

The U.S. Government later made Deutsche Bank give $279 million back. Not Khashoggi. He walked away without suffering any criminal penalty. The SEC merely politely asked him not to do it again.

Deutsche Bank appears to be a central player in RussiaGate. Even Steve Bannon thinks so.

 

Number Seven on Russian Hacker Top Ten List

The important thing about M.S. Gregg Berger of Guilford Securities in Manhattan are his connections to his fellow conspirators.

One, Alan M. Ralsky, is America’s Spam King. Another, Peter Levashov, is one of Russia’s most accomplished hackers.

All three were charged in the same indictment. Proving nothing more than that guys at Jerome Corsi’s old brokerage seem to get around a lot. Unless there’s corroborating evidence…

Russian hacker Peter Levashov— Number 7 on the world’s Top 10 Worst Spammers list compiled by a Russian cyber-security company, so they should know—was safe in Russia for more than five years after his American partners were convicted and sent to prison.

Then he made a crucial mistake: he took his wife on vacation in Spain, where he was arrested by Spanish police on a U.S. warrant.

The FBI says Levashov, currently in federal custody, did not participate in hacking the 2016 presidential election. That’s a questionable conclusion, not least because of what Levashov’s wife told a sympathetic Russian reporter from RT after her husband was arrested:

“When she spoke to her husband he told her he had been shown “some papers in Spanish without a stamp, with a bad quality picture of him, and heard the law enforcement mentioning “something about a virus he allegedly created linked to Trump winning the elections.”

But of course, there’s more.

 

China Digital Ventures

Levashov was the long-time Russian partner of American Al Ralsky, originally from Skokie, Illinois, living in West Bloomfield Michigan, whose possible ties to organized crime—in his case, Chicago’s Outfit—remain unknown at this time.

The Berger-Levashov-Ralsky federal indictment charged the men with using millions of spam emails to fraudulently pump the potential—and then dump—of thinly-traded Chinese, Israeli and Canadian microcap companies looking for a back door into U.S. financial markets through reverse mergers with American companies.

The trio had an unindicted co-conspirator that the Feds had already nailed for 20 years in a related case. Testimony in Curshen’s trial showed he participated in fraudulently pumping one of Ralsky and Berger’s shell companies in China.

Called “China Digital Ventures,” it promptly changed its name to Paradigm Resource Management Corporation to escape the effects of bad publicity.

 

Losing your sanction is always a sad day

In addition, Jonathan Curshen and Gregg Berger jointly and successfully helmed efforts to pump and pump the stock of another little nothing company—literally, there was no ‘there’ there—called CO2.

So although the two men were a little puzzlingly charged in separate indictments, one in Miami, the other in Michigan, both were part of an over-arching conspiracy, which also included  Steven Bannon’s business partner and top lieutenant Andrew Badolato.

Badolato and Curshen, Sarasota’s Grifter Twins, made money together on a number of deals. They let their buddy Mike Muzio in on the fun sometimes too. One example is  a stock rip called “Industrial Business Ventures.”

Muzio is currently doing a 13-year ‘time-out’ in Federal prison for his role in the company. Badolato, the ‘company’s Senior Vice President, walked.

Considered the more interesting of the two by Caribbean money laundering newsletter Offshore Alert, Jonathan Curshen maintained dual U.S.-U.K. citizenship, lived in both Sarasota and San Jose, Costa Rica, and was  honorary counsel—after paying a bribe of $250,00—for the sovereign government of the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, a former British protectorate.

“Word was that he was untouchable,” stated Sarasota investor Joey Barquin, who lost money on investments with Curshen and Badolato. “They should have called him ‘Teflon Jon.’

No more. When your sanction is revoked—as we’re currently seeing in the trial of ‘El Chapo’ Guzman—you’re usually the last to know.

 

The Wild Wild West Vancouver Stock Exchange

Curshen trained as a stockbroker in the early 90’s at Pacific International, a Mafia-infested brokerage in and out of trouble, even in Vancouver, a city notorious for it’s Wild West stock exchange.

Curshen was convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for the Co2 fraud. The indictment charged that he’d opened an account at HSBC Bank in Vancouver, and during the next nine months wired $90.8 million into the account, and $91.5 million out, to accounts around the world.

“A Vancouver bank inadvertently played a key money-laundering role in an alleged penny stock manipulation ring based in Costa Rica,” reported a local newspaper in Vancouver that undoubtedly knew better than to use the adverb ‘inadvertently.’

And Muzio, and his boss at the time, Adnan Khashoggi, were in business in with Russia’s premier—and also most notorious—hacker.

 

Russian hacker moves into John Gotti’s neighborhood 

In March of 2003 Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky moved his first American company into a house in Howard Beach, Queens—John Gotti stomping grounds— with a Mike Muzio company called “Blue Moon Group” that was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Adnan Khashoggi’s GenesisIntermedia.

Vrublevsky’s “re partners LLC”—the ‘re’ stands for ‘red eye’— listed its business address at 158-49 90th St, a single family residence in Howard Beach.  So too did Mike Muzio’s Blue Moon Group Inc. 

Vrublevsky was running back-end servers and credit card operations for thousands of sleazy Mafia porn sites, like Muzio’s VoyeurDorm.com., through his Moscow company Chronopay.

A few years later both Muzio and Vrublevsky moved upmarket. Even before the presidential election in 2016 Vrublevsky had become the first Russian hacker accused by name by the FBI of election interference, for hacking election databases in Arizona and Illinois.

And Mobster Muzio’s next partner was Andy Badolato, the longtime business partner of Donald Trump’s chief adviser, Steve Bannon.

Curshen and Muzio are currently in federal prison.

 

Bannon’s Big Mistake

When the press hounded him mercilessly during the 2016 campaign for being registered to vote at the address of a vacant house in Miami, Steve Bannon took refuge in a beach-house in Sarasota Florida owned by Andy Badolato, his top lieutenant and one of his oldest business partners.

It was one of Bannon’s biggest mistakes.

Until then Sarasota’s Grifter Twins drifted serenely under the media’s radar.

Except… I had been gnawed by a feeling that I had heard the name of one of Andy Badolato’s partners a decade ago. It turned out  I was right.

More than a decade ago, while investigating major drug busts on two American-registered planes from St. Petersburg carrying a total of ten tons of cocaine, I discovered that Jonathan Curshen had been instrumental in providing SkyWay Aircraft a ‘fig-leaf’ of a rationale for why the company, soon to go out of business, needed so badly to own not one, but two DC-9’s, for which they—manifestly—had no business need.

Curshen issued a press release from his office in the Israeli consulate in San Jose, Costa Rica, announcing that lucky SkyWay, already under a bankruptcy watch, had just received a $7 million funding commitment from the hedge fund of a DuPont family heir. No serious reason was offered. Apparently the DuPont guy just liked the cut of SkyWay’ jib.

That the DuPont heir turned out to be phony probably surprises no one today. His real name was James Rice; he was soon to go to prison in the U.K. for passing a $6 million dollar bad check in London.

But maybe this will: Three decades earlier, the same “phony DuPont” story had worked like a charm for a Miami man named Jack Birnholz who was purportedly running a multi-billion dollar hedge fund. ‘Miami Jack’ had multiple connections with U.S. intelligence. He was in business in Eastern Europe, for example, with Robert McFarland of Iran Contra fame).

Miami Jack’s bogus DuPont heir press release followed hard on the heels of his purchase for $22 million dollars of  an ‘oil company” in Louisiana that drug trafficker Barry Seal used to launder drug money before his assassination in 1986.

Small world.