“Behind every fortune lies a crime,” wrote Honore de Balzac several hundred years ago. But the quote only really became famous after it was used in “The Godfather” by Mario Puzo. So it’s somehow fitting that the Martha Stewart verdict and the highly-anticipated first episode of the new season of the Soprano’s were big news at the same time this weekend.

Although you’d never know it from listening to cable news, we discovered, quite by accident, that to a surprising degree their themes overlap.

The reason? Martha Stewart was involved in a stock scam thirty-two years ago which made her rich—it paid for her famous house in Westport—even while investors she conned into buying stakes in the soon-to-be-worthless company lost money hand-over-proverbial fist.

The three decade-old scandal today seems very much a case of ‘‘déjà vu all over again,’ especially given its similarities to more recent lootings, like the one at Enron.

Martha may just have been ahead of her time.

Stewart’s name had caught our eye during the course of the MadCowMorningNews' two-year long investigation into Mohamed Atta’s connections in Florida’s aviation “scene,” because of her involvement in a scandal which may yet offer clues to the shadowy “global network” said to have assisted the 9/11 hijackers while they were in the U.S.

And while the connection to Stewart is admittedly tangential, the story is intriguing, and concerns the fact that during the same month Mohamed Atta arrived to learn to fly at his flight school, Wally Hilliard had his Lear jet surrounded by machine-gun toting DEA agents at the Orlando Executive Airport who discovered 43 pounds of heroin stashed onboard.

Loving it (in a Lear) at Levitz…

Atta’s proximity to that much heroin is apparently assumed by the FBI to have been just a coincidence, because Hilliard’s name hasn’t surfaced anywhere but in the MadCowMorningNews.

Hilliard’s Lear jet was carrying what is known in the drug trade as “heavy weight.” In fact, it was the largest heroin seizure ever in Central Florida, said the Orlando Sentinel. And although Hilliard had purchased the Lear less than a year before, it had already made over thirty weekly runs down and back to Venezuela, the pilot admitted to the DEA.

So even though Hilliard lost his plane through seizure, he undoubtedly got his use out of it.

While we’re no experts on heroin trafficking, we figured that 43 pounds was a little steep for an individual. We figured that much dope no doubt belonged to an organization, a drug trafficking organization.

And so we suspected that the transfer to Hilliard of the Learjet before it was confiscated was probably not by accident, but was, instead, an exchange of assets within the organization.

And sure enough…when we looked up the previous owner of Hilliard’s Lear jet, we discovered a name we had already run across during research for “Barry & the boys:’ the CIA, the Mob, and America’s Secret History.”

Gary Levitz.

Wally Hilliard’s soon-to-busted Learjet became ‘available’ when Levitz, 61, was killed when his modified P-51 Mustang crashed during an air race at the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada in 1999.

Levitz, we knew, was the grandson of the founder of Levitz “You’ll love it at Levitz” Furniture, as well as an avid pilot and member of the Confederate Air Force, an organization of pilots who—among other things—fly vintage war planes.

What makes this like ‘totally’ ironic is that Levitz had earlier in his life been involved in big-time drug smuggling, convicted of money laundering along with the infamous Whittington brothers, two major Fort Lauderdale-based smugglers who, among their many accomplishments, had owned a Lear jet back in the early 80’s.

Small World…but you wouldn't want to paint it.

Levitz was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and fined $1 million for helping to conceal the Whittington’s marijuana-smuggling profits. The brothers had built a $16 million empire that included a Georgia road racing track, fixed-based aviation operations at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport and Fort Collins, Colo., and a 110-acre Georgia mobile home park.

When all three went to jail, they no longer had any use for the Lear. So they sold it. The buyer was a man named Barry Seal, who would become known as the biggest cocaine smuggler of the 1980’s.

When Gary Levitz was once again removed from the world of aviation, this time permanently, twenty years later, his Lear jet will be sold by the self-same Whittington Brothers… to Wallace J. Hilliard, the man whose purchase of twin flight schools began a flood of Arab pilot trainees, many of them suspected terrorists, to his schools in Florida.

Wow. Small world.

Hilliard’s purchase of Gary Levitz’s Lear, after Levitz’s death, from the Whittington Brothers—whose own Lear, when they went into “timeout” had been purchased two decades earlier by Barry Seal—can be seen as the work-a-day machinations of a secretive global organization at work…

Yet another freak coincidence?

Unless its all just another freak coincidence, what we are looking at hers is the hidden and still-unnamed network said to have assisted the terrorists while they were in the U.S.

What kind of organization both trains terrorists and runs drugs? The answer will have to wait, because the strange “coincidences” didn’t end there… Gary Levitz had other ties to Venice, Florida as well… with a man whose name we’d heard whispered about at the Venice Airport.

“Ben Bradley’s a DEA informant who got arrested for beating his wife,” Coy Jacob told us. “He set people up in Ft. Lauderdale and was given some of their toys. Gary Levitz got in the drug trade. He rolled on the Whittingtons, and so did Bradley.”

So…a DEA informant at the Venice Airport, still active when Mohamed Atta arrived, had also been a part of this earlier strange and twisted saga. A decade later the DEA wanted the much-traveled Bradley to follow a man named Glenn Goodman around, we learned. Goodman was the other Magic Dutch Boy—Arne Kruithof’s—partner in Florida Flight Training, where Siad Al Jarrah learned to fly.

Small world. And yet another strange ‘coincidence,’ and we haven’t even gotten to Martha Stewart, whose connection now becomes apparent.

Back in 1972 then-stockbroker Martha Stewart was getting rich touting the soon-to-be-bankrupt Levitz Furniture’s stock for a shady Wall Street stock brokerage, Mooness, Williams & Sidell, all of whose principals have long histories of unpleasantness with federal regulators.   

"Greed is bustin' out all over "

Stewart had been the top salesman at a firm described as having “little obvious purpose in life other than to peddle whatever was hot at the moment.” The main job of the firm, according to Christopher Byron’s “Martha Inc.,” was to “sell over-priced stocks to customers during the final blow-out phase of the 60’s bull market.”

“The movie Wall Street had nothing on this firm.”

Stewart was selling what the book called “junk,” like “wireless phone stocks before there was wireless telephony.” And Levitz Furniture, dubbed by one firm principal “the worst investment decision of my life.”

Just then the Mob was in the middle of “busting-out” (illegally stripping assets) Levitz Furniture.

“Levitz Furniture was not only one of the most spectacular and widely-chronicaled financial flops of the 1970’s, it was also a huge scandal,” the book states, “with allegations of kickbacks, market rigging and organized crime involvement.”

“Levitz operated a regional chain of discount furniture outlets….and its stock soared to astronomical heights on nothing more than a stampede of follow-the-money buying by late cycle speculators.”

“Late cycle speculators,” are what are otherwise known as “ordinary investors.”

They are not ‘in on the joke.’ And by the time they gobbled up Levitz, the smart money was already out. People who invested their money with Martha Stewart lost it. Martha had been steering her clients “into the market with a vengeance,” states “Martha Inc.”

“The hot stock of the day? Levitz Furniture.”

“The woman who would one day sell style and elegance with charm and grace was now peddling the financial merits of Levitz Furniture, who sold velour sofas to the masses,” wrote Jerry Oppenheimer in “Just Desserts: An Unauthorized Biography of Martha Stewart.”

"An apparent conspiracy"

Friends to whom she’d recommended the stock began taking “financial baths.” One witness said, “Nearly every person she called a friend lost money—in some cases a lot of money—following her advice.”

After the SEC suspended all trading in the stock, news shifted from the company’s fraudulent activates to the behavior of the brokerages involved in pumping the stock, one of whose top salesman was Martha Stewart.

Revelations began appearing in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal regarding “an apparent conspiracy on the part of some brokerages and their clients to rig the market for the company’s shares.”

In February 1973 the news broke that the New York State Attorney General’s Office was charging “unidentified stock brokerage firms and institutional investors with having taken kickbacks from Levitz Furniture for issuing favorable and bullish investment reports on the company.

Yet Martha Stewart was never indicted. On the contrary…she prospered, and bought her later-to-become famous house in Westport, though her lawyer husband was said to be making only $15,000 a year at the time. Stewart’s flight to the suburbs, scene of her eventual fame, was prompted, said one witness, because she was “fleeing a bad world she’d milked too well.”

“Martha was raking in enough in commissions to be able to run out one lunchtime—presumably humming the “You’ll Love it at Levitz” jingle—and buy a new Mercedes,” writes Oppenheimer.

While Levitz hit the skids, and the company was already in dire straits, Martha and the rest of the brokerage’s sales force had continued to push the stock.

“Trouble dogged the Levitz operation like a shadow,” wrote Byron in “Martha Inc.” As Levitz collapsed into bankruptcy the company’s president dropped dead of a ‘heart attack.’ One of the co-founders dropped dead, also from a ‘heart attack.’

In the aftermath of the scandal, the ex-wife of the founder was found dead in the ruins of her home, which had been set on fire, police said. And the then-current wife of the company’s founder, the furniture heiress Jacquie Levitz, disappeared in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

All police had to go on, said the local papers, was an empty house—and blood.

Rosie O' & Six Pack Joe: Together at Last!

They say politics makes strange bedfellows. But that didn’t prepare us for the spectacle of Joe ‘Six Pack’ Scarborough defending Martha Stewart (underneath a graphic reading: Was Martha Treated Unfairly?) while Rosie O’Donnell was professing, when asked about the verdict, to be outraged at the federal government.

Joe Scarborough and Rosie O’Donnell are an odd couple. Why were they being trotted out to defend a hugely-disliked woman with an unmatched reputation for rudeness, arrogance, and bullying? And it wasn't just them…Stewart's defenders were everywhere on cable news.

Martha Stewart was “a plucky gal, who came from nowhere to build an American empire. Isn’t that what its supposed to be all about?” asked Whitewater pinup Susan McDougal, who is herself a past master at understanding “what its all about.”

“The juror said it was a victory for the ‘little guy,’” she said. “Well, Martha Stewart was the ‘little guy.’

Was Martha Stewart just a “celebrity target” offered to the crowds while the ‘big bad wolves” on Wall Street go free?

Stewart’s trial depicted a cozy world where insiders routinely use their wealth and connections to benefit from insider information. And her clumsy attempts to fabricate alternative explanations for her stock sale were what did her in.

“Despite being a former stockbroker and director of the New York Stock Exchange,” read one typical news account, “Ms. Stewart's actions were openly contemptuous of the government's right to police the integrity of the markets.”

Maybe they always have been. Martha Stewart was one of the “wolves.”

We were looking at corruption—what sociologists call ‘elite deviance’—on a scale so massive that the only rational  response was a boogie board, some suntan oil, and an extra large pitcher of margaritas.

Even if we were in the 'no-spin' zone, we needed something to hold onto.

NEXT TUESDAY:

the finale to
 "Bush, Bath, Bones,& BCCI:"

"Lonesome cowboys, Bush family oil, & Halliburton's CFO"