Author: Daniel Hopsicker

  • The Vanishing: Christian Cult’s Airport Disappears

    The Vanishing: Christian Cult’s Airport Disappears

      “Law enforcement always follows the drugs, because that leads to drug thugs no one cares about,” according to one former Federal official familiar with the case. “Following the money, which is much more effective, is discouraged,  because it leads to the suits—bankers, politicians, law enforcement types—people with social and political clout.”

  • Christian cult leader worked Tampa “BLACK ICE” Operation

    Christian cult leader worked Tampa “BLACK ICE” Operation

    All the really successful con men are politically connected.  Some of them cut out the middle man and run for President.” Douglas Aaron McClain Sr., 62, whose Argyll Equities was a shady and now-bankrupt “investment bank” in Boerne Texas which provided services to at least three drug smuggling operations, including supplying a DC-9 to a very-possibly criminal…

  • DANGEROUS BLACK ICE

    DANGEROUS BLACK ICE

    News that a DEA affidavit implicated Fort Lauderdale aviation impresario Don Whittington for brokering the now-famous Gulfstream II jet that crashed with 4 tons of cocaine in the Yucatan to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) black operation in Tampa came as a complete surprise, even to those closely following the case. But in…

  • Feds raid CIA-connected air charter in Fort Lauderdale

    Feds raid CIA-connected air charter in Fort Lauderdale

    An affidavit filed by a DEA Agent in Colorado sheds new light on the mystery surrounding two American-registered drug planes from St. Petersburg  busted with a total of ten tons of cocaine. The Gulfstream II jet which crashed in Mexico belonged to something called Operation Mayan Jaguar, an unexplained Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in…

  • Barry Seal, the Dallas get-away plane, and the JFK assassination

    Barry Seal, the Dallas get-away plane, and the JFK assassination

    It’s July 1, 1972. The TV series Bewitched is airing its final episode, Attorney General John N. Mitchell is resigning as chairman of President Nixon’s re-election  committee, and Sammy Davis JR’s aptly-titled single “Candy Man” is moving smartly up the charts. (This is the second of two parts. Read the first part here.)

  • Barry Seal, the CIA camp in Lacombe, & the JFK Assassination

    Barry Seal, the CIA camp in Lacombe, & the JFK Assassination

    It was in the sun-drenched Albuquerque study of one of America’s most prominent historians—a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Book Award winner—that I first heard what I later came to think of as “The Question.”  

  • NSA links to St Petersburg FL Drug Ring

    NSA links to St Petersburg FL Drug Ring

    Skyway Global LLC, the St. Petersburg, FL company that owned the DC-9 airline busted in Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, made its headquarters in a 79,000 sq ft building owned by Verint Systems (NASDAQ: VRNT), a foreign tele-communications company with a contract to wiretap the U.S. for the NSA through the communication lines of Verizon,…

  • The Mexican-ization of American Justice

    The Mexican-ization of American Justice

    Mexican-style South of the Border Justice has arrived in America with a vengeance, and is on display in a courtroom in Miami where three members of New York’s  Gambino Family, Anthony “Big Tony” Moscatiello, Anthony “Little Tony” Ferrari, and  James “Pudgy” Fiorello, are on trial for the murder of Suncruz Casino tycoon Gus Boulis. The…

  • The NSA, Drug Trafficking, & the Crash of Cocaine2

    The NSA, Drug Trafficking, & the Crash of Cocaine2

    This will someday be remembered as the year when shocking new discoveries about the National Security Agency became an almost daily occurrence. But amid the steady drumbeat of revelations, the one I’ve been waiting for hasn’t yet surfaced: The NSA’s involvement in the global drug trade.