The most interesting character among the players of the Sarasota ‘hyena pack’—it’s a professional designation used by law enforcement and financial fraud specialists— is Ramy El Batrawi.

Plus, he’s still active.

Ramy El-Batrawi has been around major cocaine transactions for decades, yet he appears to have emerged unscathed.  He is untouchable and knows it. He doesn’t pretend to false modesty. It’s part of his charm. The smirk is real.

He’s got moxie. He is a man so comfortably ensconced in the good life that he couldn’t be pried away with a crowbar.

On his  many colorful resumes—he has so many, because he incorporates so many companies—there is no hint of his role in Iran-Contra, where he and Khashoggi  and CIA Director  Bill Casey did whatever it took to find the money to fund Oliver North’s extraconstitutional hijinks.

With help from  El Batrawi, Casey and Khashoggi created “The Enterprise.  The Enterprise still lives.

He puts it right out there.

There are pictures of Ramy everywhere. Ramy with Donald Trump at Studio 54; with Ivanka at a daytime do; Ramy with boss Adnan and his glamourous wife Lamia, who towers over the tiny fixer like a redwood, with Khashoggi and Paul McCartney’s future wife Heather. McCartney will later divorce her when he learns she’d been a regular on Adnan’s yacht.

“Well here’s another clue for you all. The Walrus was Paul.”

 

Do you YayYo?

To recapitulate. A Customs Agent in New Orleans was telling the truth when he told me over crawfish etouffee in Plaquemine Parish outside New Orleans—that major drug smugglers “pretty much all know each other,” also applies to financial fraudsters and money launderers.

And there may even be times when the talents of a good money launderer are more valuable than the skills of an ace pilot like Barry Seal, whose piloting chops marked him among the elite of the elite. Seal could have flown the Space Shuttle. He was that good, from the time he was sixteen. A Natural.

Ramy today owns YayYo, a publicly traded company. YayYo is what kids are calling cocaine these days. Pretty brazen, no?

(I hope to meet him someday, preferably in a setting a courtroom. “Russia if you’re listening?”

Just kidding.

Ramy appears  on a half hour TV show on the Discovery Channel.  He plays a Vegas whale—a big gambler, which bossman Adnan was.  On the show he is paired with an exquisite looking blond woman who expresses disdain at every moment possible.

Which is unfortunate, because that adds up to a lot of moments, from the moment they  exit the Lear jet at the Vegas general aviation terminal and step into the limo.

Plus, there’s this other thing. They’ve got  a 2-camera setup, so they’re getting double coverage, each vying to cover the dainty foot of  the beautiful blond woman which slowly slides out of  the darkness inside the cab. There appears  to be an implicit agreement that neither camera impedes the other.  Plus, each  its own foot. And—a  guess—it look likes all she can think about—whoever she was—was how much she missed her bartender boyfriend.

 

The Cousins in Vienna

Today nobody remembers Robert MacFarlane, Ronald Reagan’s national security advisor, who had a nervous breakdown during the Iran Contra scandal while on the job.

Years later, MacFarlane quietly came back in a minor role in stock fraud in Vienna, Austria. By then everyone’s  forgotten the queasy feeling of being stressed by the Iran  Contra details beginning to seep out.

 

“Send in some economic hit men!”

Four years after the Berlin Wall collapsed, two years since the USSR disintegrated, and a recently retired Washington, D.C. consultant and  economist founds the Czech Fund, to help the newly created Czech Republic convert to a capitalistic economy.

This is why they hate us. The newly liberated economies of the 1990’s  were taken to the cleaners by swarms of swindlers and  economic hit men from K  Street in Washington DC.

If forced to choose between the 12th century memory of  the Mongol horde devouring everything in its path and hyena pack consultants with back doors into the White House is a no-brainer. They’d pick the Golden Horde every time.

Enter a “fake” brokerage company called Stratton Oakmont, led by Jordan Belfort, later depicted in the movie “Wolf of Wall Street.”

An Esquire article said Stratton Oakmont “started as a phone bank in the show room of an abandoned car lot in Queens.” Founder Jordan Belfort called his job description”— pump and dump’—  “something that sounds like getting a colonic. Instead, called himself  a ‘stock manipulator.’

He said it sounded more reputable.

Martin Scorsese made the worst movie of his life about it. It’s High Concept. The Goodfellas Do Wall Street. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio in a madcap romp about the misadventures on Wall Street of a bunch of crooked Goodfellas covering their tabs at Scores.

When it was released no one was laughing anymore at corporate fraudsters. The economic pain was too widespread. Too real.

They called it the Great Recession. It wasn’t. It was a full-fledged Depression. Only nobody was standing around on street corners selling apples.

Just a year or so before everything went south, Bud MacFarlane left the brokerage. Talk about  impeccable  timing. And still Bill Casey and Adnan Khashoggi raised enough money to keep Fawn Hall in hair conditioner.

Stratton Oakmont’s collapse for fraud had no effect on Czech Industries which was still flush enough with cash to buy up much of the stock of a Viennese stock brokerage.

MacFarlane was back in the line-up in Vienna during the bust out of Vienna’s General Commerce Bank. At the time it was Austria’s largest private stock brokerage.

 

Back to: St Petersburg, Florida/Midday

And here comes SkyWay Aircraft. After some boring legerdemain, thusly: A new shell corporation is conjured into existence, Corsaire, Inc., which changes its name to Corsaire Snowboards, Inc., and then to Net Command Tech, Inc., and turned over to the Tampa crew,  ending up in the ands and eventually ended up in Brent Kovar’s hand’s. Remember him?

And this is where the real  fun begins.

Two Canadians— Rene Hamouth and William Dunavant— both with  sordid histories of fraud in Canada that included being blacklisted by the Vancouver Stock Exchange, now owned the stock. What followed had something to do with the involuntary  twitch of half dead nerves.

 

Like Father like son

A business writer in Vancouver explained:

“Dunavant jumped from horse shampoo to high-tech video compression technology. At a computer pornography convention in Las Vegas in 1997, the entrepreneur had become president of Summus Technologies, an affiliate of VERINT, the Israeli  eavesdropping firm.

A VERINT spokesman told a San Francisco Chronicle reporter that VERINT’s software was great for fast porno site downloads.

“People want to see it, do it and get out of a site fast,” Mr. Dunavant told the reporter. A year later, the Mane ‘n Hair and porno pitchman hooked up with Rene Hamouth.

Look for the tells. The presence of Iran-Contra insider Robert C. “Bud” MacFarlane was a tell.

As one of his last acts before leaving office, on Christmas Eve 1992, the lame duck President Bush pardoned his faithful retainer “Bud” MacFarlane—Reagan’s National Security Adviser back in 1982-83 when Bush oversaw everything from getting hostages back to overseeing the drug flights.

The Czech Fund—under the guise of selling American-style homes to Czechs— looted its way across Eastern Europe. Shortly thereafter the name was changed to Czech Industries.

It didn’t help.

 

A final new crewman

During those heady days in Florida in 1985, another former LA County arrival was Glenn Kovar, who says he was literally blown into town by Hurricane Elena in 1985.

Here now we finally come to the principals of the company which owned the 5.5 tons of cocaine embargoed in Mexico.

Also:  After Glenn Kovar sailed into the marina, he just happened to come across and save the life of a 13-year-old boy caught in the storm.

Q: They wouldn’t  pull s stunt like that, would they?

A: (Don’t ask.)

Impressed by the heroic rescue, newspapers forgot to ask  about why he was there, i.e. his gig as Captain Francesco, as Kovar called himself, modeling his pirate costume for the Tampa Times.

Kovar told the reporter he’d been living on the island of St. Thomas in the Caribbean, but often sailed back in the tall ship he named the Francesca. He said he was in the process of selling the boat to pay medical bills. Specifically, he was there to visit an unnamed friend who lived on the 11^th floor at 100 Pierce Condos, he told the Times.

He was careful not to mention the friend’s name.

Eventually, cat half out of the bag, even the Los Angeles tax attorney El-Batrawi hired to represent Khashoggi’s GenesisIntermedia in its 1999 IPO, ended up writing about the experience.

Maybe he was looking for a movie deal.