Psst. Don’t tell anyone. Here’s the biggest open secret of the 21st Century:

The drug trade—the raging river of illicit drugs flowing into the U.S.—provides corrupt officials and the elite deviants who run America’s national security state a slush fund bigger than The Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

Just don’t tell the truth about it… unless you want to become an American “non-person.” Its not a game for the weak-kneed or faint-hearted. 

Back during the Russian purges of the 1930’s, people who fell from favor were said to be “non-persons,” basically people whose existence –for reasons of ideological or political deviation— were systematically ignored and erased from public memory.

In Russia, such people were officially said to not exist. They were purged from documents, records, and even photographs, like ones showing Stalin with Molotov until  Molotov was “rubbed out”and  airbrushed out of history.

That sort of thing can’t happen here, though, can it?  Hell yeah.

It can.  And does.

Cuts like a knife, slices like a blade

The latest saw-toothed blade slicing through my thin-skinned hide is embedded in a recent book about the cocaine cowboys of the 1980’s.

Called “American Desperado, its being made into a major motion picture starring Mark Wahlberg. 

It’s an "as-told-to" about a guy, Jon Roberts, who claims to have been the de-facto “transportation chief” for the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, as well as famous drug smuggler Barry Seal’s boss.

Both claims would certainly surprise Seal, except he’s conveniently (at least for the book’s author) dead.

And since the book doesn’t even mention truly significant Miami players on the Medellin squad, such as Carlos Bustamonte,  its claims should probably be taken with a large grain of salt.

An industry technical term, defined

But the book’s true shoddiness shines through when author Evan Wright casually relates—without attribution or credit, as if they were common knowledge—shocking revelations from “Barry & the boys: The CIA, the Mob, and America’s Secret History,” my book about famous American drug smuggler and CIA pilot Barry Seal.

Even worse, it insinuates the revelations came from HBO’s 1991 “piece-of shit” (an industry term) movie “Doublecrossed,” starring (in an ill-considered move which should not be held against him) Dennis Hopper, back in his pre-Betty Ford days when his skin appeared almost completely translucent.

"Barry Seal, subject of the 1991 HBO film Double-crossed, is one of the most storied figures of the early drug smuggling era,” Wright reports.

So far so good. Now here’s the next line:

“In 1955, at age 16, Seal joined the Baton Rouge Civil Air Patrol, a flying club whose members included future Presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. By 1963 Seal had been recruited by the CIA to join Operation 40 as an arms smuggling pilot.”

Wait a minute! That’s not in “Doublecrossed.”

I’m the guy that dug out that nugget of wisdom.

After unearthing a picture of a young Barry Seal wearing a Civil Air Patrol uniform, I discovered that he and Lee Harvey Oswald had both been at a two-week CAP training program at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana in 1955. 

The point being, uncovering previously-unknown and very unauthorized intelligence like this cost me, first two years of research in Louisiana. 

And then, because I found out more than (literally) the law allows, I then had to watch helplessly as spurious lawsuits kept "Barry & 'the boys’” from reaching bookstores for almost five years.

That's Operation WD-40 to you, bub

But the real kicker is the next line, another uncredited revelation:

“The group, based in Mexico, included Frank Sturgis, who would later gain infamy as one of the Watergate burglars, and Porter Goss, later a congressman and then director of the CIA from 2004 to 2006.”

That is from the picture on the cover of “Barry & the boys.” It includes Barry Seal and Frank Sturgis, and Felix Rodriguez, famous from Iran Contra and a good friend of  George Bush the First.

Rodriguez, before publication of “Barry & ‘the boys,’” had through a third party threatened me with death if I identified him. Though I’m still here, it was not a threat to take lightly: Rodriguez reportedly has a jar on a bedroom chest of drawers containing the hands of Che Guevara, who he tracked down and helped kill in Bolivia in 1967.

The identification of Porter Goss seated next to Barry Seal was in an exclusive story published on this website on May 7, 2006, when a correspondent wrote me—credit where credit is due—with conclusive evidence proving Goss was in the picture.

Walking into the buzzsaw

All this would be less than earth-shattering, except it’s clearly deliberate.

How I know: the author made a fetish of noting his sources, to the point where many comments about the book at Amazon.com are actually about the footnotes.

One reads,  “This book is actually a history lesson, with the footnotes backing up what Jon has to say. I actually have had more fun reading them than I did reading the book.”

“This book would have been better without all the unnecessary footnotes,” says another. “Maybe the authors thought they were academics,  or that the readers would get a thrill with all the footnotes. But most of them I could have done without.”

Telling the truth in America today often feels like walking into a buzzsaw, which is the title of a very good book about American journalists—Pete Brewton, Robert Parry and Gary Webb come to mind—who were exiled to the American gulag, which is a sort of Siberia of the mind for anyone having the temerity to speak the truth about America’s big dirty secrets.

When you try to investigate or expose anything this country's large institutions want kept under wraps, the buzzsaw rips through you.

In Part Two of "How to become an American Un-person,"  I'll have more to say about this, as well as more about the truth that's being (kindly) fudged in American Desperado.

Evan Wright, a Vassar graduate and the son of a former District Attorney in Cleveland, legendary home of burning rivers, philanthropist-cum- Vegas gangster Moe Dalitz and his vassal, long-time Hollywood Uber-Lord Lew Wasserman, clearly knows which side his bread is buttered on.

It’s the chief reason his book isn’t very good.

Few events have exposed the secrets of America’s phony drug war like the 1986 assassination of the man the U.S. government called the biggest drug smuggler in American history, Barry Seal.

Barry Seal was assassinated on a "Night of the Long Knives" that decimated the top ranks of the Medellin Cartel. One of the seminal events in America’s phony ‘drug war, ’ that fateful night in February of 1986 remains a part of America’s Secret History.

Yet the official story— the Big Lie that Jorge Ochoa, head of the Medellin Cartel, ordered Seal’s death, has been churned out ad nauseum by the CIA's so-called Mighty Wurlitzer and its circus-full of media organ-grinders.

While flacking for one of the CIA’s Big Lies has never been a bad career move, a recent book about the drug war reportedly being made into an HBO miniseries and a major movie from Paramount starring Mark Wahlberg takes this ‘art form’— dissembling for dollars—to a new low, made possible only by assiduously ignoring known facts while simultaneously hoping your readers won’t notice.

“American Desperado,” an as-told-to book about the drug war by Evan Wright about supposed Medellin cartel transportation boss Jon Roberts, repeats the big lie that the Medellin Cartel was responsible for the assassination of Barry Seal.
 

Nothing borrowed, nothing gained

Wright was only too happy to borrow, without attribution,  as we recounted two weeks ago,  my discovery of Barry Seal’s CIA recruitment while a member of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol, where he met both Lee Harvey Oswald and Kennedy assassination factotum David Ferrie.

He was also happy to borrow—again without attribution—my discovery of the now-famous nightclub picture taken in Mexico City in 1963 showing Seal sitting next to a man who would later become George W. Bush's head of the CIA, Porter Goss.

His “borrowings” are convincing evidence of his familiarity with my work. 

So when Wright suddenly develops either scruples,  or more likely, cold feet, and neglects to borrow copious evidence in “Barry & ‘the boys’” about the assassination of Barry Seal, and instead repeats the canard (read: Big Lie) that Seal was murdered by the Medellin Cartel, it is safe to assume the mistake is not one of ignorance, but design.

Let’s hear how he retells the story, supposedly in the words of admitted sociopath and all-around scumbag Jon Roberts.

Meet the Forrest Gump of the Drug War

 “What I’m going to tell you will blow your mind,” Roberts begins.

“What happened is, in April 1983 the DEA busted Barry (Seal) at Fort Lauderdale Airport when he tried to fly in a load of counterfeit Quaaludes. Once they got Barry on the Quaalude charge they forced him to set up Pablo Escobar.”

This is flat-out wrong, but let it pass…

Incredibly, Robert’s places himself on the plane on the way to the famous sting in Nicaragua, which would surely be news to either Seal or Emile Camp, who really were there. Both of them are now dead.

“The time I flew with him to Nicaragua, I told him I was uptight. Barry laughed and said, don’t worry,  Jon. We're working for Vice President Bush,” Robert’s continues.  “Barry set up Pablo because that’s what they told him to do, probably to work off his Quaalude charges. For that Barry would have to be killed.”

Roberts next claim is to have been involved in Seal’s assassination. He was apparently everywhere. He is the Forrest Gump of the drug war.

“Max (Mermelstein) ran to me with a shoebox with $250,000 and begged me to hire a hitman. Of course its never that easy.”

Jon and Max fly to Baton Rouge, where while driving around they spot Seal, who is living in a halfway house, and Robert’s gets the bright idea to run him over and be done with it. 

“Maybe we can do something here Max,” says Roberts.

“But he’s under federal protection!” exclaims Max, apparently forgetting about the shoebox with $250,000 he’s already given Roberts to have Seal rubbed out.

Roberts, ever the hard-headed realist, replies, “So was Kennedy you asshole.”

“What are we doing?” Max exclaims again.

“Shut up,” replies Roberts. “We’re running him over.”

For his part, Max is now done exclaiming. Perhaps he somehow realized that no matter what he said, Robert’s would never give him any good lines.

He screams “No!” and locks his hand on the wheel. 

“Max won. I slowed down, and Barry got to live another day,” says Roberts, finishing  his (fairy) tale.

A blowhard blows. No one says a word.

Robert’s is not yet done with Seal, who he has earlier referred to as “his employee.”  This would no doubt have come as a surprise to, not just Seal, but also to real Mob bosses, like Salvatore Reale, who coordinated moving the cocaine Seal flew into Mena Arkansas up to New York for distribution.  

Talk about convenient. Through the simple expedient of never mentioning the word “Mena” in his book—which even the Wall Street Journal called “the scandal behind the Iran Contra scandal”— Wright avoids having to call out his writing partner Roberts on the error.

In a book about the cocaine epidemic of the 1980's, Wright doesn't mention Mena. That is some kind of new world record for dishonest reporting.

Roberts says,  “I had unfinished business with Barry Seal. Fabito slipped into Miami to emphasize how important it was to kill him.”

“When Rafa (Cardona, a Medellin lieutenant)  brought hit men from Colombia into the US to kill him, I told them they could find Barry driving his Eldorado on Airport Road between the Waffle House and the Salvation Army. I had Rafa draw them a map.”

“People say that a search of his briefcase turned up a piece of paper with George Bush’s direct phone number on it. A lot of good it did Barry.”

"It's the little things that trip you up."

“The most baffling part of Seal’s story is simply that after serving as an instrument of American clandestine policies, the case against him for Quaalude smuggling pressed ahead, with the results that Seal was ordered to live in a Baton Rouge halfway house for drug addicts, with scant police or federal protection,” says Roberts.

Proving that Robert’s has no idea what he’s talking about is a simple matter: In 1985, any real cartel insider would have been only too aware that Seal’s trial in Baton Rouge had nothing whatever to do with his Quaalude conviction in Miami.

In fact, Seal’s ‘beef’ with Vice President George Bush was because Seal believed his deal with Bush to clear up the Quaalude bust precluded other charges—like those in Baton Rouge—being filed against him.

That Roberts knows nothing about all this says more about author Wright—who accepts his tall tale as the truth—that it does about Roberts, a self-admitted sociopath.

Barry Seal was not murdered by the Medellin Cartel. A few simple facts—which we were lucky enough to rescue from the media hole to which they had been consigned—prove  it.

The official story—that Jorge Ochoa, head of the Medellin Cartel, ordered Seal’s death is a Big Lie which has been churned out ad nauseum by the CIA's so-called Mighty Wurlitzer, its media organ-grinders.

Just another organ-grinder

Who killed Barry Seal?

Just ten days before he died, in a typical display of the fearlessness for which he was justly famous, Barry Seal threatened to expose the gunrunning and drug smuggling that flourished in Mena Arkansas, according to his Baton Rouge attorney, who witnessed the phone call.

The man he threatened was the Vice President of the United States, George Bush.

Then, on the night Barry Seal was slain, at least three other top lieutenants of the Medellin Cartel were murdered, in coordinated hits across three continents.

On the night after Seal was assassinated, a local Baton Rouge TV newscast (see the accompanying video)reported the following:

“MetroNews has uncovered some new information in the assassination of Barry Seal. Reporter Dana Kaye has the story:

"MetroNews has learned there were a total of four drug-related killings the same day Barry Seal was gunned down here in Baton Rouge.”

“All of them seem to have been related to the same drug ring operated out of Colombia.”

“MetroNews reported last night that a lieutenant in the Medellin cartel named Pablo Carrera was shot and killed in Colombia the same night Barry Seal was gunned down in Baton Rouge by a professional hit squad. Carrera was identified as the number two man in the Colombian drug organization run by Jorge Ochoa.”

“Metro News has now learned that two other Ochoa associates were shot to death at the same time, including Pablo Ochilla, the brother-in-law of Jorge Ochoa, executed in Colombia, as well as an Ochoa associate, a woman identified only as  ‘Barbara,’ who was killed in Miami.”

Divide and conquer 101

The brother-in-law of Jorge Ochoa, the number two man in the Medellin Cartel, and  ‘Barbara’, at the time Barry Seal’s paramour in Miami, living in a home he owned in Plantation, Florida, and Barry Seal…all died in a coordinated hit ordered by…the Medellin Cartel?

A drug cartel doesn't whack its top lieutenants… but another drug cartel might.

We were told by a reliable source, but were unable to verify, that as many as 30 cartel soldiers were also murdered that same evening.

Seal’s assassination occurred as the U.S. switched horses from backing the Medellin Cartel to protecting their arch-rivals: the Cali Cartel.

Wright repeats the DEA canard that 80% of the cocaine entering the U.S. was coming from the Medellin Cartel. But when the Medellin Cartel had been decimated, and Pablo Escobar killed, cocaine didn’t  become more difficult to find, and its price remained stable.

According to prominent Miami attorney Richard Sharpstein, who defended Miguel Velez, one of the three Colombian shooters who went on trial for Seal's murder, all three of the men told their attorneys that once they reached the U.S. their actions had been directed by a U.S. military officer, who they learned was Lt. Colonel Oliver North.

Oliver North, American Drug Lord

"All three Colombians who went on trial always said they were being directed, after they got into this country, on what to do and where to go by an ‘anonymous gringo,' a US military officer, who they very quickly figured out was Oliver North," Sharpstein told me.

We should all thank Evan Wright. His highly selective use of known facts reveals more than it should about the true beneficiaries of the phony drug war: the American Drug  Lords.

A sad fact of American life is that 5o years from now you can pretty must rest assured  someone will still be out there flogging—and making a buck—touting probably the biggest of the CIA’s Big Lies, that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. If we weren’t paying for it, their persistence would almost be admirable.

The three men convicted of killing Barry Seal are still in prison in Homer, Louisiana.

All three men are from Cali, Colombia.

America's eyes are currently riveted on the twisted steel strewn around the site of the train wreck of plutocrat-turned politician Mitt Romney's campaign.

But other news this week points up the fact that—while inept politicians representing the parasitic rich come and go—the one constant in our national civic life remains America's endless drug war.

Like the 'dude' in The Big Lebowski, the drug war abides.

An under-publicized statement by Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney last week underlines how important this drug war-drug trade combine really is to the political elite of both major parties.

Speaking about US policy towards Honduras, Romney accused President Obama of backing a "pro-Marxist" leader in Honduras, faulting him for not more quickly and enthusiastically supporting the military coup in 2009 that deposed the elected President of a fledgling democracy.

That Romney chose to say anything at all about a small nation in Central America was somewhat surprising, especially since he hasn't been specific about much else.

But, as he must know, Honduras is important to US foreign policy for only one reason: Controlling Hondurus is important to controlling the drug trade. 

Romney was signaling that in a Republican Administration, a return to the good old days when death squads could just "disappear" inconvenient people would be A-OK with him.

Top military officials in Honduras—home of the original tin-horn Generals in mirrored shades—must have been delighted.

It was Mitt Romney's “Pinochet moment.”

Why nobody likes us

If you’re at all interested in American political life at the dawn of the 21st Century, Honduras is a place worth looking at closely.

Honduras is where the bodies are buried…in shallow graves. Case in point:

Reports last month that a DEA agent was killed when his plane, filled with cocaine, was shot down by a Honduran jet fighter, are untrue, announced the US Embassy in Honduras.

Reports in all three daily newspapers in the capital of Tegucigalpa had explained that the unprecedented step the United States took last month— turning off the radar used by Honduras to track suspected drug planes—was necause a Honduran fighter opened fire on a drug plane being used by the DEA.

Nonsense, said  Stephen J. Posivak, director of Public Affairs of the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. He denied any DEA agents were on the flight shot down by a fighter jet on June 13th over the eastern part of Honduras.

“There was no DEA agent on that plane,” Posivak asserted, speaking on Ambassador Lisa Kubiske’s behalf.

The statement was  decisive but something of a non sequitur, as if the lawyer for “Tot Mom” Casey Anthony announced his client had nothing to do with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

The reason was that Honduran newspapers, citing military sources, had reported the DEA drug flight shoot down happened—not on June 13—but in early August. Moreover the location of the incident, they reported, was over an island ten miles offshore in the Caribbean called Guanaja, not "over the eastern part of the country."

A statement rendered 'inoperative'

The papers reported one of the two men killed when the plane was shot down was a drug dealer, the other a DEA agent infiltrating drug cartels. The specificity of their reporting lent it a credence sorely lacking in the vague statement by the US Embassy.

The US Embassy spokesman in Honduras had even contradicted the Home Office, the State Department in Washington. William Ostick, spokesman for the State Department's Western Hemispheric Affairs Office, had explained the radar cut-off was because civilian aircraft had been shot down off the coast of Honduras.

Posivak may have figured the point was already moot. Days earlier, Lisa Kubiske, the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras, had announced that she was optimistic that Honduras’ radar would soon be restored.

The president of Honduras admitted his Air Force shot down several suspected drug planes during the DEA’s recently-concluded Operation Anvil. The incident cost the job of the head of the Honduran Air Force. And the downing of civilian aircraft is a violation of international treaties, even if the plane enters a country without authorization.

But that did nothing to explain the towering displeasure displayed by the US Government, which sent the head of the US Southern Command to Honduras on August 24 to demand changes.

Nor did it explain the rationale for cutting off radar to a country the DEA has just called the largest center for smuggling in Central America. Ninety percent of the drugs produced in South America and destined for the U.S. market, the DEA asserted, were passing through Honduras.

Always Open… to drug trafficking

“Without radar, Honduras is "open to drug trafficking," protested the Honduras  Commissioner for Human Rights Ramón Custodio.

But cutting off the radar had certainly gotten the Hondurans attention, and they had apparently decided to get with the program.

Honduras, located mid-way between coca fields in South America and noses in the United States, has served as a bed and breakfast for drug traffickers since at least the early 1980’s.

Yet now newspaper reports were raising the alarm, making the drug trade, a staple of life for decades, sound more frightening than an army of zombies massing at the border.

“The invasion has been massive,” reported El Herald. “By air and by sea, drug trafficking in Honduras is huge, according to reports of U.S. drug agencies.”

“According to the U.S. Southern Command,” the report continued, “last year 275 narccolanchas (vessels) entered the country (mostly speedboats), as well as 104 drug planes."

The ghosts of Tegucigalpa

The ghosts of Tegucigalpa continue to hover over Honduras. They haven’t forgotten that during the Reagan era, the CIA and Argentine dirty warriors ran roughshod over their country.

It was through Honduras, and specifically the good offices of the Honduran Army, that the cocaine blizzard that transformed millions of American lives would travel.

When CIA pilot Barry Seal was caught in 1979 on the island of Roatan, just a few miles from where the DEA drug plane was supposedly shot down, he was carrying what in those more innocent times was a huge load of cocaine: 40 kilos.

Seal landed his twin-engine plane in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of then-Honduran President Juan Alberto Melgar.

"Barry paid off the wrong people,” a long-time Seal associate told us. "He went to Ecuador, and when he came back to Honduras there was a whole new set of Generals running the show."

By the time Seal was arraigned on trafficking charges in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, newspapers there were reporting his arrest on the front page, with headlines reading he’d been caught red-handed carrying  17 kilos of cocaine.

The original banana republic

Some Honduran General must have smiled when he read the figure. Maybe he patted a suitcase sitting on the bed beside him, in which he’d packed the other 23 kilos.

Honduras is the place the term "banana republic" was invented to describe. American interventions in Honduras—by the DEA, the CIA, the FBI and the Southern Command—are notorious.

One reminder of this history sits across from a runway at Soto Cano Air Base, where Honduras new Air Force chief was based.  Behind a high fence is a compound once used by Oliver North's clandestine drugs and weapons bazaar from the Iran-contra operation.

Tropical undergrowth is slowly erasing traces of the site. But its still visible. And no one there has forgotten.

Since the military coup on June 28, 2009, the US has built three new military bases in the country. Military bases are expensive.

Its safe to assume that they're not down there protecting banana plantations.

For more than a year the CIA has been trafficking 300 kilos of cocaine a month from Ecuador to Chile for export on to Europe, according to recent credible media reports from Santiago, the Chilean capital.

Proceeds from the 300 kilo-a-month business have been used to create a war-chest to finance a Cocaine Coup in Ecuador that was scheduled to be “green-lighted” after the expected win in the just-concluded U.S. Presidential election—expected, at least, by some Agency officials—of Mitt Romney.

It's a CIA “Ay, there’s the rub” moment.

He's a leftist. Isn't that enough?

The machinations were part of a plan to topple current Ecuador President Rafael Correa, who is unpopular in Washington.

An unexpected side effect of the revelation of the plan, which has received little publicity, has been to focus an observer's attention on what's going on in the drug trade in Ecuador lately. The country's history in the drug business, almost as rich as Switzerland's with banks, goes back a long way.

When it comes to efficiently moving drugs, this is far from Ecuador's first rodeo, and the drug network there is one of long-standing, (Wikileaks PDF).

So too is its relationship with both the the CIA and DEA.

For example, when famous CIA drug pilot Barry Seal was first caught smuggling cocaine way back in 1979, he picked up his huge load of cocaine—it was 45 kilos; those were more innocent times—in Guayaquil, one of Ecuador’s three major seaports.

The Americans recently convicted of laundering money for the Ecuador-based network are no parvenus, either. One is a prominent Louisiana attorney; the other an aviation broker in Oklahoma.  And both took direction from a drug pilot with his own long pedigree in the drug trade.

Jorge Arévalo Kessler has been flying drugs out of Ecuador since 1989, he states in an affadavit at his trial.  He is the nephew of a long-time Mexican Secretary of Defense, and was the personal pilot of disgraced former Mexican President Carlos Salinas.

His American connections are visible too. When finally arrested, Arévalo Kessler was flying a former U.S. military plane that was part of the 1990’s Forest Service scandal,  involving planes intended for firefighting diverted into CIA covert drug running operations, the most spectacular result being the C-130 busted on a runway at Mexico City’s Intl Airport carrying cocaine worth $1 billion.

Or maybe the most spectacular result was this: 14 firefighters burned to death in an out-of-control forest fire in Colorado in August of 1994. No planes were available to help. They'd all been leased out on more lucrative assignments.

Why no "Drug Money Times?"

News in the drug trade is almost always surprising, and there's a good reason why: Imagine the world’s huge automobile industry without “Auto Week.”

Or the even more massive weapons business—the death trade—without “Jane’s Defense Weekly.”

Why drug traffickers don’t have a slick weekly magazine reporting on current events—whose head is still screwed on straight, whose not so much anymore—is a question better left unasked by those with no relish for being tagged  “conspiracy theorists.”

Because there is no trade publication chronicling the drug business—by any measure one of the world's largest industry—current events come as a surprise.

Example: the current kerfuffle concerning Ecuador led to a belated discovery:

The same drug trafficking network active in Ecuador was also behind the doomed flights of two American planes from St. Petersburg Fl. seized in Mexico carrying almost 10 tons of cocaine. Evidence can be seen in Kessler's indictment, whose 'headliner' is Alejandro Flores-Cacho. Both men worked for Colombian Pedro Antonio Bermudez Suaza, "The Architect, now called the mastermind behind the St Petersburg flights by no less an authority than the DEA.

Bermudez Suaza is one of the world's richest and most sophisticated drug lords, worth perhaps a half-billion dollars. In law enforcement recordings he can be heard talking with the frantic pilot in the cockpit of the second of the two American planes busted in the Yucatan,  a Gulfstream II (N987SA) which went down in the jungles of the Yucatan.

Tracing the provenance of the two planes led the Mexican Atty. General's office to where the money was being laundered; the startling discovery that $378 billion in drug money had been laundered through Wachovia Bank in Charlotte, NC…in just six years.

It was a  “faux pas” from which Wachovia never recovered, and the cause of the bank’s demise in a forced sale to Wells Fargo.

Nepotism, bane of the drug trade

One of the Americans convicted of laundering money and buying planes for the Ecuadorian drug network is prominent Louisiana attorney Hugh Sibley. A glance through his court case shows his trial produced more uestions than answers, and enough sealed documents to raise questions about the privatization of justice.

Apparently, rank has its privileges.

The other convicted American owned an aviation brokerage in Broken Arrow.  Lee R Snider, (PDF) the son of a respected local football coach, admitted to laundering drug money and arranging the purchase of eight planes, including a 727, in court documents.

Both Sibley and Snider worked under the direction of a 43-year-old drug pilot, Gustavo Jorge Arévalo Kessler(PDF), who testified he had been smuggling drugs through Ecuador since 1979.

As already reported, Kessler is the nephew of a long-time Mexican Secretary of Defense, who served under Miguel de Madrid, President of Mexico between 1982 and 1988.

After that he became the personal pilot of disgraced former Mexican President Carlos Salinas, now living in exile in Ireland.

Kessler, busted in Mexico several years ago, was flying a Gulfstream II (former registration N914MH) that was one of the "mis-placed" airplanes in the US Forest Service scandal during the 1990′s. Briefly, that scandal involved U.S. government airplanes intended for firefighting that were diverted into CIA covert drug running operations; the most spectacular of which was, as stated, the  C-130 busted on a runway at Mexico City’s Intl Airport  carrying $1 billion dollars worth of cocaine.

Kessler's "ride" had been "exported" to become a drug plane by an Arizona company called INTERNATIONAL AIR RESPONSE INC said to be deeply–deeply!–involved in the CIA operation.

The jig was finally up after 14 firefighters burned to death in an out of control forest fire in Colorado in August 1994.  The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration subsequently cited the Forest Service for "inadequate use of aviation resources." Where were all the planes?

Out of the country, many of them, doing anything but fighting fires.

A personal note: I knew the courageous man who broke that scandal. Gary Eitel was a former military pilot in Vietnam, who went on the become a CIA pilot and then later a lawyer for the Agency. Now deceased, Eitel was fearless in pursuit of the truth.

“Prepping” for the next Iran Contra Scandal

The story of the CIA-DEA's earmarked 300 kilos a month in support of an alleged CIA cocaine coup begins with Fernando Ulloa.   Ulloa was an Inspector in the Chilean Federal Police (Policia de Investigaciones, or PDI). Over a year ago, he uncovered a drug ring operating out of the local CIA and DEA stations;  with assistance and support from Chilean political authorities and the Chilean Army, the ring trafficks 300 kilos of cocaine a month.

Most cops see the world in black and white. So Ulloa immediately took his evidence to the Chilean Minister of the Interior in Santiago’s La Moneda Palace, mostly remembered for having been destroyed by the Chilean Air Force in the coup which took Socialist President Salvador Allende’s life in 1973.

No investigation was launched, however, and no action was taken.

When 10 Chilean police officials were recently charged with assisting a much smaller drug smuggling ring, the resulting public scandal gave Ulloa the opening (and the media coverage) to publicly accuse the Interior Minister, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, of covering up the much larger—and still active—CIA cocaine trafficking.

"He must be a leftist, too. Put him on the list"

Chilean intelligence sources confirmed Ulloa’s allegation to Chilean reporter Patricio Mery Bell of Panorama News in Santiago: the CIA is using proceeds from the monthly sale of 300 kilos of cocaine to fund opposition to Rafael Correa  in next year’s Ecuadorian election.

“An anonymous source from the Agencia Nacional de Inteligencia (ANI) told Panoramas News that the smuggling of 300 kilos of cocaine was in fact a highly sensitive CIA/DEA operation to raise money to topple the government of Ecuador,” reported Mery.

“The operation is similar to the one carried out by the Agency in Central America during the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980’s, the source said.”

Also offering corroboration for the charge (but not proof) was the controversial former British diplomat Craig Murray, who alleged the CIA has invested $87 million for a campaign to bribe and blackmail media and government officials to prevent Correa’s  reelection.

Location, location, and…logistics

The answer to what makes Ecuador important enough to merit its own CIA cocaine coup emphasizes the point made by UPS commercials: Logistics.  

Ecuador, strategically situated between the two major drug producing nations of Colombia and Peru, has long been an important transshipment point for cocaine, a fact not lost on previous generations of drug traffickers.

States a U.S. Congressional Research Service report,  “The country’s lengthy maritime and land borders have long provided an attractive and relatively unregulated environment for drug trafficking.”

That means—translating the reports Congressional-ese—fewer people to pay off.

According to numerous reports Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s President, stirred the ire of the U.S.  when he ordered the eviction of the U.S. military and CIA-DEA presence at a large military base in Manta, one of Ecuador’s three main ports.

So what was at Manta that made it so valuable? On Wednesday, we'll tell you.

Stay tuned.

The owner of the Learjet  whose crash in Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains killed popular singer Jenni Rivera is from a prominent family in Monterrey which supplied drug planes during the 1990’s to drug baron Amador Carrillo, known as “The Lord of the Skies” for flying tons of cocaine, often on Boeing 727’s, into the U.S.

50-year old Christian Eduardo Esquino-Nunez is the owner—at least, on paper—of Starwood Management LLC, the Las Vegas aviation charter company which is the registered owner of the crashed Lear jet.  

It is, at best, a legal fiction.

Virtually nothing about him should be taken at face value.  And with good reason: he lives in a web of international intrigue.

One example: Eduardo Esquino-Nunez was part of a conspiracy last year to smuggle Moammar Khadafy’s son, Saadi Gaddafi, into Mexico.

He was contacted, he said, by a representative of a Canadian developer who asked for a Mexican-registered aircraft charter to North Africa.

Even more telling: he was one of four people arrested and imprisoned  while awaiting trial.  Yet, alone among the four, he was recently and mysteriously released. And, according to an interesting English language blog in Mexico City, he is scheduled to testify this Friday in Mexico City about his role in the plot.

Do such things 'just happen' in Mexico? Did he just get lucky? Or is Eduardo Esquino-Nunez, perhaps, really well-connected?

"No matter how cynical you get, it's hard to keep up"

(If you answered (c), you're probably also aware of the truth of Lily Tomlin's statement.

Eduardo Esquino-Nunez's family ties with major drug traffickers were first exposed when, during his campaign for the Mexican Presidency in 1994, (and before his assassination) PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio used a plane (a Sabreliner SC 80) that had been owned by (the already dead) Amada Carrillo Fuentes.

Still, it was reported by a Mexico City reporter named Juan Ruiz Healy, who exposed the Esquino-Nunez brothers sordid ties in Monterey with various and sundry Mexican gangsters and politicians.

Colosio was provided the drug baron’s plane by a “company” called Air Siesta, Inc., located at Meacham Airport in Fort Worth, Texas, owned by Ed Nunez’s brother, Salvador Esquino Nunez (also deceased.)

It was a minor scandal, like the one in the U.S. a decade ago after we discovered Texas Governor George W Bush was flying around on–of all things!--one of Barry Seal’s (also deceased) favorite airplanes, when some people drew a sharp breath, if only for a moment.

And it revealed the interesting fact that the Esquino-Nunez brothers were already well-known in, um, certain quarters.

Nooks & crannies, warp and hum

It begins on a Saturday night in Monterrey, the northern industrial capital of Mexico. After performing a concert before more than 15,000 fans, singer Jenni Rivera and her small entourage, including her lawyer and manager, prepare for take-off for Toluca, a general aviation airport just outside Mexico City. (More on that later.)

She is being flown aboard an aging Lear Jet owned by Starwood Management. But why was a woman on the cusp of a huge show-biz cross-over success flying in a 45-year old plane?

The true story of the death of Jenni Rivera, which has not yet been revealed, will be like one of those rumors about a ‘funny’ uncle that get told in a self-deprecating tone, but passed along anyway, just in case… and later turn out to be true.

It’s the story of the infiltration of the gargantuan international drug trade into every nook and cranny in the warp and fabric of modern life, which is the elephant in the living room that no one wants to talk about.

Something's burning

Examples are everywhere.  Start with the crash site.

Victoriano Escobedo, a shepherd in the mountains of Nuevo Leon, sees it first, in the distance, between two mountains.

Something is burning.

To get there—15 miles from Galeana—you have to walk five miles through the mountains, in this rough part of the Sierra Madre Oriental, then two more across a plateau.

The authorities arrive in heavy-duty trucks. From Monterrey, but not from the nearest town, Galeana. All 35 local police officers in Galeana were recently taken into custody, and they have not yet been replaced.

There was no notice or explanation. None was needed.  The empty police station spoke volumes.

Local residents serve as guides to the arriving authorities. There is no hurry. There are only small pieces left, of the plane, and of human remains, they tell the Federales, strewn across a stony landscape.

The Libyan Connection

Jenni Rivera, 43, known as "La Diva de la Banda," was born in Long Beach, California to a family of Mexican immigrants.

She received numerous awards, sold over 15 million albums, was nominated for several Grammy’s, and after several successful reality shows was being groomed for her own show on ABC.

Not surprisingly for someone in show business, she’d had her own brush with the law. Customs Agents at the Mexico City Airport found her carrying $50,000 in undeclared cash into the country.

But she got “lucky,” and was let off with a warning.

Eduardo Esquino-Nunez recently served two years in the federal penitentiary at Lompoc California. Upon his release was deported from the U.S.  Then, somehow, Ed Nunez got 'lucky' too.

Less than a year later, his wholly-owned Starwood Management “owned” a fleet of more than a dozen aircraft, including a half-dozen luxury Gulfstream’s, three or four Hawker Siddeley 600’s, a twin-engine mid-sized corporate jet, several Dassault Falcons, and some twin-engine Cessna’s and Beechcraft King Airs.

Did Esquino-Nunez strike it rich making license plates while in prison?

Even if he did, he owes millions in back taxes and fines to the U.S. Government. His Starwood Management filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Norma Gonzalez, the only listed officer, is his sister-in-law.

So the true owner of the Lear 25 (N345MC) that plowed into a mountain at 600 miles per hour killing a beloved cross-over Mexican-American singer is—pretty much—anyone’s guess.

And, pretty much, that is just how the U.S. Government’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) likes it.

The Toluca Connection

Starwood’s air charters are currently being run out of Toluca, whose airport in recent years has been at the center of numerous major drug trafficking scandals, many of which have been extensively covered here.

In June, the DEA subpoenaed Norma Gonzalez of Starwood Management LLC, seeking documents related to a San Diego security firm as part of a controlled substances investigation.

In a transparent ruse similar to one used by wily old Uber-Mob boss Meyer Lansky 40 years ago,  who listed his hotels—including famous resorts, like the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach—in the names of strippers and prostitutes who worked in his clubs, Norma Gonzalez, Eduardo Nunez's sister-in-law, is listed as the sole officer of Starwood Management. Her signature is on all FAA registration documents.

Here's a question: Does the FAA know about this? Here's a better one: How could they not?

At the San Diego phone number listed on registration documents for some of Starwood Management's fleet of planes, there is a voicemail message, left by a male voice, saying, “Hi, please leave me a message.”

It is as terse and uninformative as the information Starwood Management LLC provides to the FAA.

The American Connection

Being fingered for responsibility in the death of a beloved singer…Being charged with conspiring to help the son of a ruthless dictator avoid facing the music in his own country…

Christian Eduardo Esquino-Nunez's current imbroglio's mark him as a member in good standing in a ring of well-connected financial fraudsters and soldiers-of-fortune-turned-private-security-contractors, many of whom have been accused—and convicted—for a variety of high profile crimes, including drug trafficking, securities fraud, and money laundering.

Take Jasper Knabb.  Until his conviction earlier this year for a $30 million stock swindle, Knabb was the CEO of publicly-traded Pegasus Wireless Corp.

Esquino-Nunez has extensive business connections with Knabb, including using one of his own shell companies to finance Knabb’s Gulfstream II luxury jet.

Jasper Knabb is part of Ed Nunez's American connection.

So, did he own Starwood's 14 planes? Probably not. But we're getting warmer. He may have fronted the money for whoever did.

When Knabb was sentenced in June, something extraordinary happened, which tells us something about Jasper Knabb, Eduardo Esquino-Nunez, and the whole issue of state-sponsored aviation crime (otherwise known as "drug trafficking.")

At Knabb's sentencing, prosecutors were seeking a sentence of seven years and three months, while defense lawyers argued for three years and four months.

But U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White smelled a rat, and sentenced Knabb to 21 years in federal prison—nearly three times as long as the term sought by government prosecutors.

“I give very little credit to what the government has done,” said Judge White in an extraordinary summation. “I don’t think they have adequately, accurately, or aggressively pursued the money this man (Knabb) stole.”

From the bench, White told Knabb he had caused “unspeakable … misery” to investors who’d lost their life savings.  “His instinct has always been to lie and cheat,” the judge said.

And he ordered Knabb jailed immediately after the hearing.

What makes this an American scandal

Esquino-Nuñez has had numerous run-ins with the law.

A decade ago he was indicted in Florida for providing drug planes to traffickers busted while smuggling half a ton of cocaine into South Florida from Colombia.He later spent two years in Lompoc Federal Penitentiary for aircraft fraud. Then, as previously stated, at the end of his sentence he was deported from the U.S.

More recently he was accused by the DEA of providing planes to facilitate operations for a remnant of the Tijuana Cartel. The allegation remains unproven.

What Ed Nunez's record has to do with Jenni Rivera's fatal crash on one of his planes is simple. For such people—who sneer at weak enforcement at the SEC, the FAA, and the DEA—a fast buck beats properly maintaining airplanes, which is why, when a drug plane gets busted, more often than not it's because–owing to poor maintenence–the plane experienced mechanical difficulties. 

Drug pilot Michael Brassington, currently in prison, provides the perfect example.

Christian Eduardo Esquino-Nunez, convicted of numerous felonies and then deported, couldn’t even vote in most states. He probably couldn't even get a drivers license.  Yet he is listed as the owner of record of more than a dozen American-registered airplanes.

So the biggest crime in this story isn’t something Christian Eduardo Esquino-Nunez did. The biggest crime is U.S. government malfeasance.

Because of the laissez-faire attitude of the FAA—which knows less about who owns luxury $40 million luxury jets than the California Department of Motor Vehicles does about the owner of a 10-year old used car—Jenni Rivera, a popular Mexican American “cross-over” singer as well as the mother of five children, is dead.

But Jenni Rivera's tragedy has, at least, some meaning. Because of it, we know that there are more than a dozen American-registered aircraft out there whose true owner is someone the FAA doesn't want us to know about. 

That should be a national scandal. But its not, which speaks volumes about the infiltration of the drug trade into political life in–not Mexico–but the United States of America.

Venezuela is a country in mourning over their late president, Hugo Chavez. "The fight goes on! Chavez lives!" shouted the mourners in unison, many through eyes red from crying late into the night. But even as  his flag-draped coffin floats over a sea of supporters on its way to the cemetery today, “conspiracy theories” continue to  spread about a CIA role in his passing.

If the tone of a piece in the New York Times on the day of Chavez’s death offers any indication, official Washington very much wanted him dead.  “In Caracas, Venezuela, you could tell a summit meeting mattered to Hugo Chavez when government workers touched up the city’s rubble,” the story began. Ouch! Whatever happened to speaking only good about the dead?

 So, did the CIA ‘give’ Hugo Chavez cancer? No one knows.

On the other hand, something is known on a more interesting question: “Could the CIA have given Chavez cancer?

There is good evidence, from at least three separate sources, which indicates the Agency has been taking the question of whether they could develop ways to induce cancer very seriously… for the past 50 years.

But first, a brief recap on the current situation, and the questions being asked.

"A riddle wrapped in an enigma"

Trying to make sense of what’s happening in Venezuela today is as difficult as Kremlinologists during the Cold War cobbling together who’s up and who’s down in the Kremlin based on nothing more than the top brass’ arrangement on the viewing platform during the annual May Day parade.

Today in Venezuela, conditions seem akin to those in America in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack. Until the day he died, there was a very real news blackout on Hugo Chavez’ true condition. And only the Chavista rank and file are said to believe the official story.

The time, cause, and location of Chavez's death is disputed. Where he died is a particular issue.

Chavez was faulted for seeking treatment in Cuba until the bitter end, even though Brazil’s Lula offered him the best cancer treatment center in Brazil (Sao Paulo's Syrian-Lebanese hospital).

Guillermo Cochez, a Panamanian diplomat, gave interviews to  Spanish newspapers a week ago saying that Chavez was dead. His life support had been switched off four days previously, Cochez said, at the request of his daughters.

The Cuban (and Vatican?) Connection

Chavez died in Cuba on New Years’ Eve, say others, pointedly noting, in all seriousness, that the Vatican's chief embalmer was in Cuba the first week of January.

Then, on the day before Chavez died, two U.S. military attaches were expelled for allegedly trying to destabilize the nation. U.S. State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell denied charges that Washington was trying to destabilize Venezuela.

The suggestion that the United States had a hand in Chavez's illness, he said, was "absurd."

What’s not absurd, say local observers, is that, all of a sudden, a lot of money is at stake.

Chavez had been tight with the Castro’s—Fidel and Raul—for the past ten years. He entrusted them with everything from his personal security detail to running the political police, most of the country's strategic assets, and providing Cuba with an estimated yearly subsidy of $10 billion.

It is a subsidy, opposition observers suggest darkly, the Cubans will not part with willingly.

Thus setting the stage for the fierce debate currently in progress…

Amigo, there's a lot of cancer going around

Chavez’s handpicked successor, Nicolas Maduro, said the president had been "attacked" by the country's "historical enemies" and called for a scientific investigation. Maduro went so far as to call Chavez’s death an assassination, according to The Washington Post.

Chavez himself had earlier suggested several times that the U.S. might have “invented technology to spread cancer.” And he warned his allies, left-wing heads of state Evo Morales of Bolivia and Ecuador's Rafael Correa, that they could be targeted next.

He pointed out that five major leaders in South America, including himself,  all got cancer around the same time.  The popular former leader, of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was diagnosed with throat cancer, and Brazil's current president Dilma Rousseff has also been struck by the disease.

Argentine president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has thyroid cancer. Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo, 60, was diagnosed with lymphoma in August 2010.

And now…it was Chavez’s turn.

No nonsense. No kidding.

Nonsense, replied several American news organizations. The best evidence the CIA wasn't involved? Logic.

"It's just not effective," Kel McClanahan, a D.C.-based national security lawyer who has studied CIA habits for years, told Foreign Policy. "While some cancers can be intentionally induced, they take years to kill you. If an intelligence agency wants you dead, it wants you dead now.”
 
“You can’t ‘give’ someone cancer” declared the president of the American Cancer Society Elmer Huerta, an oncologist and cancer researcher. "That's impossible. To poison someone with a toxic chemical to develop cancer would require "a very long exposure time" with constant doses.”

And South American newspapers are quoting Argentinean oncologist, Luis Romero Acuña, who concurs, calling the conspiracy theory "madness."

Not madness, doc. Madness takes its toll

No, doc. It's not "madness." I know something first-hand about the topic of cancer and the CIA, as do two  authors who have written much more extensively about it than I have.

In the book "Me and Lee" Judyth Vary Baker asserts she worked for a program in the early 60’s to give Castro cancer.

A science prodigy, Judyth Vary Baker was only 19 when she was manipulated into joining an off-the-books CIA project  where she met Lee Harvey Oswald, in New Orleans for the summer to pretend to be a pro-Castro activist in order to gain credibility with the Cuban government.

The project, she says, was being run by David Ferrie for Dr. Alton Ochsner, head of the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. By the end of the summer, they had developed a strain of "galloping" cancer and had tested it on monkeys as well as mice. All that remained was to test it on humans.

Ed Haslam, whose father worked under Oschner at Tulane University, concurs. He used the 1964 murder of a nationally known cancer researcher to set the stage for a gripping exposé of medical professionals enmeshed in covert government operations in his book, "Dr. Mary’s Monkey".

The book offers evidence proving that JFK assassination prosecutor Jim Garrison was right when he alleged CIA agent David Ferrie was experimenting with cancer-causing viruses for the CIA. The point was to kill Fidel Castro with cancer.

My interest in David Ferrie was because he was, always, first and foremost a pilot, who had personally recruited the most famous pilot in CIA  history, Barry Seal. Seal was the focus of my book, “Barry & the boys.”

When he recruited Barry Seal, Ferrie was running a fleet of fivr DC’s out of Lakefront Airport for the CIA.  The Southern Air Wing, if you like.

Ferrie died—murdered, most believe today—in 1967.

The New Orleans Station

While reading court documents from Seal's trial in 1972  for running weapons and explosives, I came across a transcript where a Seal associate who'd gone to work for the FBI was wearing a wire. In it, he boasted to an undercover US Customs agent in New York that the organization could deliver weapons anywhere in the world… with their fleet of 5 DC3's.

After Ferrie's death, CIA pilot Barry Seal had been given control of the same fleet of five DC3's that David Ferrie had been in charge of during the '60's.

From New Orleans natives, who knew Ferrie at the time, I heard stories consistent with Haslam and Baker's, that he was attempting to induce cancer in lab mice kept in cages in his clandestine laboratories.

But what made them believable was when I discovered that, of the many fringe controversies swirling around Dave Ferrie's life, the "fringe-iest" one—that Ferrie was a gifted hypnotist—was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, true.

Ferrie associate Jack Martin’s, in his first FBI interview, had been the first to suggest that Oswald had been several times hypnotized by Ferrie. Martin suggested he may have then somehow ordered Oswald to go to Dallas and kill the President.

After a long search I found and interviewed several of Ferrie’s most prominent Civil Air Patrol acolytes. I wanted to know about flying. But one of them, Eddie Shearer, who knew and worked with Dave Ferrie, brought the subject of hypnotism up himself.

"More things in heaven and earth Horatio"

Shearer gave unsolicited first-hand testimony about Ferrie's preoccupation with hypnotism, and his ability to hypnotize people, that confirmed Martin’s account.

"The hypnotism thing with Dave Ferrie was the one thing about him that bothered me the most," Sheare stated. "One time I remember, we were marching in formation—drilling—out at Lakefront Airport, getting ready to go to the CAP nationals drill competition. And this kid was twirling a ‘guidon’—a metal thing, a fleur de lis on the top of the pole with the units' colors—and it got away from him and it cut his hand up pretty good. I mean a real deep gash."

"And the kid gets up, holding his hand, and there's blood running all down his arm past his elbow, and Dave walks over to him and puts his hand out in front of the kid's face, like he's giving him a stiff-arm, and says, 'Sleep. You will feel sensation but no pain,'" Shearer continued.

"And then, while we're all waiting for an ambulance to take the kid to the hospital, the kid is bleeding all over, but he's not in pain anymore now, okay? And then Dave goes over to him again, and says to him, 'You will stop bleeding.'"

"And he did."

"Now, later, when I was in the Air Force," Shearer continued, "I learned that this is all possible, that it can be done. But it can't be done with a subject unless you've been working, hypnotically, with that subject for a pretty long period of time. You can't just walk over to someone, in other words, and tell them to stop bleeding."

"So it became clear to me that Dave Ferrie had been working hypnosis with that kid for a long time…without anyone knowing it. At least I had never heard of it before, and I spent a lot of time out there, hanging around that airport."

Biological precedent

Before returning to Chavez, it may be important to note that his death is not the first time a supposed natural death of a high-profile international politician has been the subject of controversy and speculation.

Last year the body of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was exhumed amid claims his death in 2004 was caused by poisoning.

Following an assassination attempt in late 2004 during his election campaign, Ukrainian President Yushchenko suffered disfigurement when he was poisoned with the most powerful dioxin, from which he is still recovering.

Most observers fingered the KGB.

And just last week the British government tried to censor information to be disclosed at a planned inquest into the death of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died of radiation poisoning in London six years ago, in a suspected KGB 'hit.’

There was the poisoning by umbrella-tip of Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov, assassinated by the KGB in 1978 using an “umbrella gun” that shot a ricin pellet.  Markov died three days later.

And, of course, there's Jack Ruby, who died of cancer in prison in 1967, and who told guards he had been injected with cancer-causing agents.

Even for his American admirers, Chavez was no saint. Although he lived in a country not know for them, he had a troubling record on protecting basic democratic freedoms.  His rein also coincided with a boom in violent crime.

But Chavez did not become a U.S. bugaboo because of squeamishness in Washington about democratic norms. It was because his full-throated advocacy of socialism represented a fundamental critique of neoliberal economics.

Even worse, it also delivered some indisputably positive results.

So, is it "madness" to suspect something other than the hand of God in the demise of Hugo Chavez?

No one knows. But even if it's not, there's been a lot of it going around.

Its called a "burn run."

When the government of Costa Rica asked for assistance in disposing of a huge stash of cocaine and other drugs they’d accumulated during the past two years worth of drug trafficking busts—in airports, in airplanes, and on the high seas—the US was only too willing to help.

According to a spokeswoman for the DEA in Miami, it went off without a hitch. At least that's what the DEA says. If anyone actually saw the drugs destroyed, they're not talking.

A 24-ton no peek burn run

From Dover AFB, the Air Force sent crew of 12 aboard a C-17 Globemaster called the “Spirit of Delaware,” a huge military cargo plane half-a-football field long and almost as wide, that despite its size can land on short (3500 ft) runways even if they’re unpaved or unimproved.

The C-17 picked up the cocaine at San Jose’s International Airport. Pallets of cocaine from the OIJ evidence warehouse were loaded in two vans. The transfer was overseen by 200 Costa Rican military and law enforcement officers in tactical vehicles.

“I can confirm that we did assist Cost Rica in destroying 24 tons of cocaine. It took place at an undisclosed location outside Miami,” a DEA spokeswoman stated. “You’re the first person to ask.”

24 tons of cocaine is worth as much as three-quarters of a billion dollars. Yet the spokeswoman was unfazed.  Her tone was matter-of-fact. “We just took care of it,”  she said.

Except, if anyone saw Costa Rica’s cocaine go up in smoke, they have yet to come forward. 

So far, the explanations on offer are less than satisfactory.

Seldom-asked questions

It started with a question that hardly ever comes up. “How are we going to get rid of all this cocaine?” 

But law enforcement officials in Costa Rica were asking it several months ago. Or, at least, “allegedly" asking it. 

Because while no one is questioning that Costa Rica sent 24 tons of cocaine to the US to be incinerated, the operation has been received with what can be characterized as somewhere between skepticism and disbelief.

For one thing, the atmospherics are all wrong. Like the ritualized perp walk every notorious drug baron endures when caught, drug burnings are spectator events in Latin America, filled with ritual pomp. If he's there, El Presidente wears the sash of office. Generals in mirrored Raybans, decked out like beauty queens, medals shining like bling.

When Latin American drug agencies incinerate huge amounts of seized narcotics, which happens on a regular basis, there’s often a reviewing stand. Representatives from all the federal agencies involved in the bust stand around and smile.  They watch each other. They eye the drugs. There’s a couple of speeches. There's the traditional group picture in front of the piled-up dope.

Only then do they fire up the torches, and set fire to the bonfire. Spectators discreetly move downwind.

But not this time.

24 tons of cocaine, representing two years worth of interdiction by Costa Rica’s Coast Guard Service, the Justice Dept (OIJ), the Border Police, the Fuerza Publica (national police force) will meet a peculiarly low-key fate.

When the C-17 arrives in Miami, a Costa Rican judge is on the plane. At least, he's rumored to have been on the plane. The judge and the Costa Rican Consul in Miami are supposed to be on hand to confirm the delivery and destruction of the cocaine.

No such advisory has been forthcoming.

The biggest question: “Why?”

Most Latin American nations get rid of seized drugs by piling it up in a field and lighting a match. So why not Costa Rica?

“It had to do with new regulations from the Costa Rican EPA,” said the DEA’s spokeswoman. Cocaine, she insisted,  requires special incinerators that burn at 816 Celsius (1,500 Fahrenheit), with multiple chambers that filter out the hazardous fumes and leave nothing but carbon dioxide.

Pieced together from several Costa Rican newspapers, the story of how 24 tons of cocaine flew to Miami on a US Government plane goes like this:

Prior to the massive airlift of cocaine to Miami in late July, Costa Rica's Justice Dept (the OIJ) used to destroy seized drugs at a cement factory incinerator, until several unfortunate incidents resulted in the cancellation of the contract.

Bags holding 20 kilograms of pure cocaine began to go "missing."

Costa Rica went back to stockpiling their seized swag. Later, when employees began to complain they couldn’t walk around the drug warehouse because it was stuffed to the brim with cocaine, the cement factory agreed to donate a mini-incinerator, which burns up to 300 kilograms per hour of cocaine.

“By February of 2012 they’d burned so much coke that the incinerator began to malfunction. Fumes began escaping the incinerator’s chambers. Those involved—including judges supervising the destruction—began getting high.”

Math for Meth-heads

While DEA officials are understandably reluctant to look a 24-ton gift horse made of cocaine in the mouth, Costa Rica’s big donation raises a puzzling question:  Why doesn't the math add up?

Where exactly did Costa Rica get the 24 tons of cocaine they're turning over to the gringos?

"The cocaine had been seized over the course of the last two years during anti-drug operations in the country,” reported Costa Rica’s online newspaper CRHoy.com.

Two years. Two years worth of seizures would be June 2011 through June 2013.

In 2012 Costa Rican drug seizures totaled 15.5 tons. In 2011 they seized 7.4 tons. This year, when the US Air Force came calling, they were at about 5 tons.

Take half of the 2011 total (3.5), all of 2012 (15.5 tons) and year to date through July in 2013(5 tons.)

That’s roughly 24 tons, about the same amount they turned over to the DEA.

Except… remember that mini-incinerator the cement factory gave them that broke, but not before successfully incinerating what newspapers said was up to 300 kilograms per hour, for an unspecified length of time?

If the mini-incinerator worked for just one day before it broke down, Costa Rican officials would have shaved 7 tons of  cocaine off their total. The C-17 cargo flight to Miami would have had just 14 tons of cocaine aboard.

So—in addition to the cocaine seized by Costa Rica over two years—where did the additional 7 tons of cocaine the USAF flying to Miami come from?

50-yard line seats for the Army-Navy game?

After 24 tons of pure cocaine from Costa Rica fell into their laps, US officials were perhaps understandably smug. It was the first hopeful sign that the Mexican drug cartels’ vise-like grip on US cocaine supply may be easing. The 24-ton import allowed the DEA to cut Mexican cartels’ market share in the US by at least five percent. 

To convey the thanks of a grateful nation, Costa Rican officials should expect at least some 50-yard line seats at next year’s Army-Navy game. Especially if the coke is as pure as has been rumored.

"Costa Rica is today the closest the U.S. has to a protectorate in Central America," said Sam Logan, director of Southern Pulse, a risk-analysis firm focused on Latin America.

Perhaps because of the publicity, Costa Rica’s Dept. of Investigations (OIJ in Spanish) announced they will “no longer send” cocaine or other controlled substances to the United States. The way they phrased it suggests the 24 ton shipment was more than a one-time event.

Of course, in the drug trade, one never knows. Apparently, that’s the point.

Irregularities surrounded the flight.

Although it was a big story all over Central America, the massive coke haul to Miami didn’t make the papers in the States. One reason it played big in Costa Rica involves a curious circumstance peculiar to that country.

Because Costa Rica has no military, their constitution requires legislative permission for any foreign military forces to enter the country. And, in fact, a Commander Bradley Ripkey from the US Coast Guard sent a letter to Costa Rican officials requesting permission for the Air Force plane to land.

A brief investigation discovered that Bradley Ripkey is, as advertised, a US Coast Guard Commander. So, there's that.

But the Costa Rica Star revealed that no official permission had been given to allow the U.S. military flight into Costa Rican airspace. Nor were legislators informed about the massive transfer of narcotics into American hands.

"We are investigating the government for what happened,” said the leader of one of Costa Rica’s leftist parties.

“There is no law regulating the export of drugs. It's a unique situation to put them onto a U.S. military plane.”

A unique situation? Not hardly. The legislator was being too kind.  

A long history of unique situations

 Surely he remembered the Contras. Surely he remembered Oliver North?

Surely he remembered CIA pilot Barry Seal flying weapons down to the Contras on old C-123 military cargo planes, and then flying back with a cargo hold filled with tightly-wrapped packages of cocaine.

Surely he remembered CIA official John Hull, who used a landing strip on his ranch in Costa Rica to send planes north filled with drugs?

None of them are allowed into the tiny nation-state of Costa Rica today. They've been permanently barred for drug trafficking. 

It is comforting to know that DEA chief administrator Michelle Leonhart, who traipsed around Afghanistan a few years ago on the arm of American drug trafficker Oliver North, will someday face sanctions too, just maybe not in this life.

Six years ago this week an American-registered luxury jet, a Gulfstream II—later dubbed “Cocaine 2”—crashed just before dawn in the middle of the jungle in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying four tons of cocaine. The event, and its aftermath, changed forever an official narrative of the war on drugs which has for years been pushing the notion that there is no significant American involvement in the global drug trade, and no American Drug Lords.  

When the Gulfstream's fuselage split into pieces on impact, spilling cocaine across an area the length of three football fields, a chain of events was set in motion that would prove that nothing could be further from the truth.  

Several hundred miles away, and more than a year earlier, in May 2006, the Gulfstream’s ‘sister ship,’ a DC-9 which became known as “Cocaine1" because it was painted to impersonate an official US Government plane, had been caught carrying more than 5.5 tons of cocaine.

The two planes shared too many identifying characteristics, including interlocking owners and a shared base in the sleepy retirement Mecca of St Petersburg FL  on Florida’s Gulf Coast, to be coincidence. 

The twin events represented the biggest sea change in the global drug trade since the death of Pablo Escobar in 1992, or the assassination of Barry Seal in 1986. Today, despite the intervening years, new details continue to emerge about the case. 

What could YOU buy with $378 billion in laundered drug money?

Almost every news story that day, September 25, 2007, played bigger than the downed drug plane: The dozen people who died in a suicide bombing in Baqubaa Iraq. The report that 829,000 Americans were arrested for marijuana possession the previous year. And the Forbes magazine story announcing that there were so many billionaires in the world that 82 of them weren't rich enough to make the Forbes 400 List.

But none would have the eventual impact that the story of the Gulfstream crashing in the jungle did. During the course of the investigation which followed it became clear that the money used to purchase both planes—the Gulfstream and the DC-9—was laundered and funnelled through Wachovia Bank, and more importantly, that it represented just a tiny sliver of the more than $380 billion of drug money that had been laundered during the past six years through what was then America’s 4th largest bank. 

Wachovia was fined a record $165 million. The sullied bank was forced to sell itself to Wells Fargo Bank in Salt Lake City.

Some observers found it ironic that America’s first full-service narco-bank was headquartered—not in New York or San Francisco—but in the conservative bastion of paleo-Republican Jesse Helms's North Carolina. 

The true meaning of "cartel du jour."

At about three a.m. the normal quiet of the town of Tixkobob  (pop. 17000), located an hour outside of the Yucatan capital of Merida, was disturbed by the deafening noise of a low-flying twin-engine jet circling overhead, and the whine and buzzing of several military helicopters in pursuit. 

The noise went on for an incredible two hours until, out of fuel, the jet crashed three miles outside town on a plantation, Rancho San Francisco, identified by Mexican journalists as belonging to an American named Martin Wood.

Although remote, the crash site quickly drew a crowd. Slightly after dawn a Mexican Army unit from the Tenth Military Region deployed to the site, secured it, and then guarded it over the next 36 hours, repelling intrusions from other Mexican law enforcement agencies, as well as from the DEA, which flew six agents to the scene from Mexico City to reconnoiter, only to see them turned away from the site.

The history of the flight.

Days earlier, the Gulfstream jet had begun its journey at Fort Lauderdale’s notorious Executive Airport, flying southwest across the Gulf of Mexico to Cancun. There the pilot made arrangements with the airport’s general manager that they would be able to land without incident at the airport on their return from Colombia laden with cocaine. 

The next day, negotiations being successfully concluded, the Gulfstream  took off for Colombia. Nothing unusual was noticed. The plane was on a well-worn path. The airport in Cancun was the busiest drug port in Mexico.

After loading its cargo of cocaine the following day, the Gulfstream took off from the international airport just outside Medellin, in Rio Negro Colombia, bound once more for the exclusive Mexican Caribbean resort of Cancun, in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo.

Among the mysteries surrounding the flight, the one which looms largest is this: Why did authorities at the Cancun airport change their minds, renege on their promise, and refuse the plane permission to land? 

At a press conference a year earlier after the crash of the DC-9, Mexican Attorney General Daniel Cabeza de Vaca said officials from Federal security agencies in the Yucatan were known to be in collusion with drug traffickers. Curiously, with his next breath he mentioned Kamel Nacif, 69, a Lebanese businessman in Cancun who was in the news for alleged links to an international network of pedophiles.

On the off-chance the Mexican Attorney General was dropping hints, and not just free-associating, I did a quick search on Nacif, who I was surpised to learn is (or was) the biggest high-stakes gambler  in Las Vegas, a “whale” who won and lost millions of dollars at a time. 

In a Nevada Gaming Commission staff report questioning the association of Ted Binion, chairman and CEO of the Horseshoe Casino, with what the report called “certain individuals,” the report cited Kamel Nacif by name,  chiding Binion for putting up $2 million to bail Nacif out of jail. 

Nacif, the Commission staff reported, was associated with  “narcotics, firearms sales, and money laundering.” 

Unsung heroes of the drug trade: The Americans

During that time the plane was “parked” or “sheepdipped” in the hands of a motley crew of politically well-connected ‘straw’ owners.  

With that in mind, I paid a visit (along with a pilot friend pictured, above)  to the address, 4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 in Coconut Beach FL. that “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” listed on FAA documents as well as with the Florida Dept. of Corporations.

What I found was an empty office suite with a blank sign out front, and no visible sign of any entity called Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc.

What there was, however, oddly enough, were a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite.  

Today documents from the FAA cast new suspicion on the story told by two Brazilian businessmen in Boca Raton who had—just weeks earlier—purchased the Gulfstream II, according to the FAA, through a dummy company they owned called Donna Blue Aircraft (DBA,"doing business as," get it?).

Joao Malago and Eduardo Dias Guimaraes both stated repeatedly that they were no longer responsible for the plane when it went down, having sold it to two pilots from Fort Lauderdale, the week before it scattered cocaine litter across the jungle floor. 

They may not have been telling the truth.  

Two very very lucky Brazilians 

"We are not the owners of the plane," said Guimaraes, reached in Goiania in central Brazil.

He deferred most questions to his partner, Malago, who said from Sao Paulo that Donna Blue purchased the aircraft in July from a company that had owned it for 10 years. Then they quickly flipped it, reselling it to two Florida pilots who they said paid for it in full.

Malago, who said he'd been a pilot for 25 years and had bought and sold planes throughout Latin America, said he learned of the crash only after after receiving a phone call from an insurance company, had been unable to reach the new owner by phone and feared he was dead.

He stated that he knew nothing of the plane's history or what use it had been put to previously. "Generally, (when you buy a plane) you don't know the history of the plane," he said.

That was a red flag. Anyone with even limited knowledge of general aviation knows this statement to be untrue. Scrutinizing an airplane’s logbooks,which  contain its flight and repair history, is one of the first things checked out by potential buyers.  

Raising further suspicion was the company's website, which seemed a clumsy and half-hearted attempt to construct a plausible “legend,” or cover, for what was clearly a dummy front company. The company’s bogus phone number (415.555-5555) contributed to the effect. And when the site featured a quote from a supposedly satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer, it gave his name as “John Doe.” 

The FAA "weighs in"

“As you know,” my note began, “when a plane is sold, the owner is required to report the sale to the FAA. Yet when it was deregistered in February, 2008, five months after crashing, the FAA still listed the plane's owner as Donna Blue Aircraft.

“The Brazilian owners of Donna Blue Aircraft said they'd sold the plane a week before its last flight South for $2 million to two pilots from Fort Lauderdale, Clyde O'Connor and Greg Smith. Smith wrote them a check for $2 million to purchase the plane, the Brazilians claimed. 

“Yet within the aviation community in Fort Lauderdale Greg Smith is known to be so penurious that charter flight operators make sure to give him extra cash to take when he flies a charter for them, because he never has any money, and if the plane needs to refuel, they're stuck.

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.

Surprised? So was I, at first. But the NSA does a lot more than just signals intelligence. More than a decade ago, long before the current brouhaha,  I heard credible allegations about an NSA role in the cocaine trade in Bolivia, from someone who was there. What I know of the NSA’s links to drug trafficking requires a brief excursion back to the year 2000. More on that in a moment.

Today the NSA is mapping American’s social networks, using cell-phone geo-location to track their movements , cracking the encryption guarding their bank accounts, medical records, e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls.

Just this week we learned that the NSA spied on everyone from Mohammed Ali to Martin Luther King to Republican Senator Howard Baker during the Vietnam War. 

The NSA’s new Utah Data Center is already up and running, and they didn’t even announce it. No big "Grand Opening" sign outside, no balloons, no parade, no open house… and no sense of humor. 

Art Buchwald, Enemy of the State. 

Here's two horrific facts about the NSA: The Surveillance State is menacing our basic political liberties. Equally important: they have no sense of humor.  

The most revealing single nugget of information about the NSA which has come to light, to me, is the recent discovery that they even spied on humorist Art Buchwald. Many won’t remember him–Buchwald is dead, and from another era—but  he was utterly harmless. Even his humor was gentle.

So how did he became a ‘person of interest’ to the NSA? 

The answer tells you everything you need to know about why the NSA today represents a clear and present danger to the Republic.  At the time (1967) someone had figured out that the Vietnam War was costing the Pentagon $300,000 per enemy combatant killed. 

Buchwald wrote a column suggesting the US should offer any Viet Cong who defect to our side a new house in the US, a new car, a color television set and a paid-up country-club membership. We’d still be saving money, he figured, not to mention creating jobs right here in the US.  

Running Bolivia for the NSA

“Spying is spying. You have to make up your mind that you are going to have an intelligence agency, protect it as such, and shut your eyes and take what is coming.” Senator John Stennis, Democrat from Mississippi.

It’s the year 2000. In the middle of a mild winter in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, home to the John C. Stennis Space Center, a NASA rocket testing facility, on the banks of the Pearl River that forms the boundary between Mississippi and Louisiana, fifty miles east along the Gulf Coast from New Orleans. I’m there doing research for my book, “Barry & the Boys.” 

At the invitation of a retired US Customs Agent, I’m At Dan B’s, a popular local bar and restaurant on a waterfront crowded with yachts and shipbuilders, to meet a man who knew and worked for more than a decade in Central and South America with life-long CIA pilot and famous American drug smuggler Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal. 

With a touch of awe in his voice, the Customs Agent told me the man I’m there to meet was such a “big dog” during the ‘80’s  that the US Customs Service had a 17-man squad (he was on it) assigned to do nothing but track every movement he made, both inside and outside of the U.S. 

He had been running Bolivia for the NSA, the Customs Agent said, while Barry Seal was flying round-trips to South America on military cargo planes loaded with weapons and cocaine. American intelligence is a competitive world. So, of course, U.S. Customs was intrigued. 

A visitor and a warning

From across the room I see a man slip into the restaurant almost  unnoticed, heading this way. My NSA informant turns out to be a steely blue-eyed middle-aged man  dressed in a tight-fitting olive drab t-shirt. 

He moves across the room with a quiet sense of power that belies his smallish frame. He has the kind of erect former military bearing that becomes increasingly recognizable as you approach Mobile, Alabama, where they seem to congregate in the winter. 

When we met, he requested anonymity. It was, he said,  ‘mission critical.’ 

One reason for his reluctance to use his real name became clear with the first words out of his mouth.  “The day after we first met, something happened,” he said with obvious annoyance.

 “I got a visit from a well-known man I haven’t seen for a half-dozen years. He warned me against talking with you. Then he asked me if I had everything I need. 

“‘Got enough money, Russ? Need anything?’" He shrugged. 

So in “Barry & ‘the boys’” I called him “Gus.” But a few years ago he passed away. So there’s no harm now in using his real name.  

His name was Russ Eakin.

In the here and now

"We are here," said muckraking American  journalist H. L. Mencken,  "and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.” 

While this story is not about Russ Eakin, a sense of who he was may be important in understanding what comes next. Also, he was such a picture-perfect example of the type of American, for better and worse, who strode the continents of Earth during the American Century. 

Russ Eakin was born in Bay St Louis in 1944 and raised in the small town of Bunkie, Louisiana (pop 5000), which bills itself, perhaps over-enthusiastically, as the “Best Spot Topside on God’s Green Earth!”

My first question to him was how had he become a spook.

“I was asked if I was interested in taking a trip to Honduras in the summer of 1964,” he replied. “I learned Spanish quickly, in two weeks, and loved the culture. And I ended up living in Central and South America and working for two different factions of the U.S. Government: Customs and NSA.”

Two weeks seems an incredibly short time to learn a language. Then I learned of his family’s record of achievement. His mother, one of Louisiana’s most celebrated historians, edited a scholarly edition of “Twelve Years a Slave,” the autobiographical memoir of a free black man who was kidnapped into slavery in  1841, working on plantations in Louisiana for 12 years before his release. 

The book, considered  “the best firsthand account of slave life in existence,” was turned into a movie starring Brad Pitt, and is being released this month.  

His father, according to his obituary in the Feb 8, 1995 Alexandria Daily Town Talk, was a newspaper publisher who graduated magna cum laude from Louisiana State University. Among the children he left behind was  “Russell  Eakin of Mexico City, Mexico and Mandeville, LA.” 

A job is a job is a job

“If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” Thomas Pynchon

“I first met Barry Seal in the lobby of the Hotel Maya in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, back in the mid-70’s,” he told me. “Barry was good friends with the owners of the hotel, which was the center of intrigue in Central America back then.”

“And just by looking at each other, we both knew what the other was doing, although neither of us stated it openly. It was just…understood. Besides, what we were doing wasn't as important as the fun we were having doing it. We were—both of us—making more money than we knew what to do with, and having a great old time.” 

“What did you do down there?” I asked.

 “My job was to corrupt the governments of Central America,” he stated crisply. “And I was so good at it I didn’t come back for 17 years.” 

“I was working for NSA. I owned two arms manufacturing plants in Bolivia. They were set up through the Catholic Church. I worked out daily with (Bolivian) President Bandar. We built SM-90 machine guns.”

“We manufactured 5000 machine guns a day, using  computer-driven lathes from Rockwell International. Each one cost us 35 bucks. And we’d sell ‘em for $1200 apiece.”

“We field-tested them against the Israelis, who had designs on the biz but could never get their foot in the door, because they were so mistrusted. Row after row of Bolivian Generals in tents, our weapons against the Israelis, and we won.”

The Great Cocaine Coup

Eakin was in Bolivia during the Cocaine Coup in 1980.

“Garcia-Meza brought in the neo-fascist paramilitary squads with the swastika armbands. They called themselves the ‘Fiancées of death.’ He put the Interior Ministry under the nephew of Roberto Suarez, the self-styled King of Cocaine.”

“I knew Roberto Suarez very well,” Eakin said quietly. “I was married to one of the Suarez’s.” 

Eakin also knew Sonia Atala, the other well-known drug figure in Bolivia at the time. Known as the “queen of the cocaine business," she may be the most important figure of the Iran Contra era to avoid wide exposure.

“Sonia ran the cocaine biz in Bolivia,” said Eakin. “And that was where the business was run from. The guys you heard about—the Ochoa’s and the Escobar’s and the Lehder's—they were just Vice Presidents fronting for the company.”

“And Barry Seal worked directly for Sonia.”

Things take a turn for the worse

It was right about then that I pissed off Russ Eakin. I’d had a drink or two by then, and must have wanted to impress him with my knowledge of the drug business, a ridiculous thought, because peeking in through the window from outside is no substitute for being there. 

Plus by that point in my investigation I’d lost interest in romantic tales of drug pilot daring do. Skimming ten feet over the surging waves of the Gulf of Mexico on a 'dangerous' drug run. Looking over your shoulder all the way.  

But tracing the money back up the line–now there was an endeavor promising real adventure. 

I tried to make my voice as casual as possible. “So, ah, Russ, what can you tell me about Bernardo Dominguez?” 

I was unprepared for the vehemence of his response. There was instant silence. Then a glare. 

“How do you know about Bernardo Dominguez?” he demanded. He didn’t bother to wait for a reply.

 “Listen,” he told me. “I agreed to talk to you about Barry Seal, who died 20 years ago. And now you’re asking about Bernardo Dominguez. I don’t know if I can talk to you anymore.”

“I was only asking a question,” I said lamely. “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

“Don’t you know what you’re doing? Just by asking? You’re threatening to compromise current operations. And that can get you in real trouble.”

"Threatening to compromise current operations'

We’ll come back to Russ Eakin. He didn’t stay mad long. But he never said a word about Bernardo Dominguez, or even mentioned him, and neither did I. There were plenty of other topics I wanted to know about. 

And we'll return to Bernardo Dominguez, and explain his links to Barry Seal, andhis links to, incredibly, the crew running the Venice Airport today, and how he  represents the corporatization of drug trafficking.

You’ve got to look closely at the information they’re giving out. And then look even closer at what they’re leaving out. 

Here's an example: A control tower employee in Ciudad del Carmen, the airport where the DSC-9 landed, causing something of a fuss, told authorities at a crucial juncture in what was an extremely tense situation, as the American-registered DC-9 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine circled and requested permission to land, she was approached inside the airport terminal by an American she'd never seen before.  

She described him as being 40 years old, with blond hair and a deep tan, and he was wearing a green polo shirt. The American, she said, hadn’t just wanted officials in the airport to let the plane land. He wanted the tower to certify the flight, meaning the DC-9 could then continue its journey, as a domestic flight, which would not need to clear Mexican Customs. 

Its in. Passed ‘go.’ Pop the champagne.

Make sure everybody brought cash. 

Said green polo shirt-wearing American remains unidentified. He just disappeared from narratives of the event… except for one respected journalist at Mexican newspaper Proceso, who wisely picked up on this detail, followed up, and then reported that among the contingent of drug traffickers awaiting the arrival of the plane on the ground with as much nonchalance as they could muster…the American had been in charge. 

It’s not outlaws who run the drug trafficking industry. It’s the parasitic rich. The deviant elite. The bankers. There’s even a link in our story to Goldman Sachs.  

In every country in the world in which drugs are present, and illegal, control of the drug trade is the most important tool in perpetuating that country’s oligarchy, more important than a police force with a billion Billy clubs. 

Profits from the drug business can purchase a billion Billy clubs and have enough change left over to meet the needs of venture capital (cf: the British Empire).

The guys chopping off heads in Mexico while wearing bandoliers strapped across their bare chests are barely into middle management. 

And the guys whose names you read in newspapers, where they're identified as bosses, jefes, and kingpins... 

They’re not the guys that get the best girls. 

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."

Enroute from Los Angeles to New Orleans, where I would spend the next two years researching and writing a book about renowned CIA pilot-turned-infamous drug smuggler Barry Seal, I stopped to visit Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton, the writers who first brought serious national attention to the CIA operation in Mena, Arkansas led by Oliver North, and Barry Seal.

We were drinking cokes in the warm sun and exchanging tidbits of information each of us had gleaned about our common subject, when at one point Morris leaned forward.

“What have you heard,” he asked, “about Barry Seal having flown a get-away plane out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination?”  

I stared at him blankly. I replied that I didn’t know there had even been a get-away plane. And that was the end of it. The conversation quickly moved on.  But the moment changed my life. In the two years of research which followed, I never forgot the question.

Months later, while collecting old news clippings in Barry’s hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I struck up a conversation about Seal with the morgue librarian at the Baton Rouge Advocate. She had a kind of smoky whiskey voice you generally don't associate with librarians.

"Its another world, New Orleans"

"Hell, she said, “a good 20 years. I've been remarried for ten."

Later, after I heard a story  about Barry Seal from John Odom, a friend and classmate of Seal’s in high school, I began to realize that the rumor might be something more than that.  While it wasn’t common knowledge, in certain circles in Louisiana it is what is known as an “open secret.”

Big shout out to Oliver Stone

Even if  you’re not a JFK assassination researcher—and I wasn’t—you know who Ferrie was. Everyone’s seen Joe Pesci’s brilliant portrayal of Ferrie in Oliver Stone’s JFK. Many recall that Ferrie – just forty-eight hours after Kennedy died—was brought in for questioning on suspicion that he had been involved in the assassination.

Odom watched them confer, he said, and saw Ferrie point to the 50-or-so wooden crates staged next to the tarmac.

On the way back to Baton Rouge, Barry Seal told him that he was working for Ferrie, who he said was "CIA.”  (Ferrie's CIA link was confirmed by Victor Marchetti, former Deputy Assistant to Richard Helms, who testified that Helms disclosed, in executive discussions during the Garrison investigation, that Ferrie had in fact been employed by the CIA.)

“Seal said he making $400 a week flying "runs" of crates of weapons and ordinance for Ferrie,” said Odom. He asked me, How'd you like to make that kind of money?”

Odom said he told Barry, 'I'll think about it.'  But they never discussed it again. Decades later, the incident remains puzzling to Odom. "Our dad made about $400 a month back then, and we weren't poor, but I was stunned and didn't know what to say.”

Translated into today's money, Barry Seal was making $2500 weekly…on the weekends.

A piece of real history slipped through the cracks

Then a fortuitous happenstance brought me a photograph that spoke volumes about Barry Seal's career, and the people involved in the JFK assassination.

Seal left it to his wife, Debbie, now his widow. And despite the 7-man "clean-up crew" from the State Department that came down from Washington to her home and combed through all of Barry's records in early 1995, it is still in her possession. The photo, which she considered a keepsake, remained untouched in her safe.

The photo was in a cardboard frame of the kind used by nightclubs and tourist attractions, with the date it was taken, January 22,1963, stamped on the back. It was taken in the nightclub of the Aristos Hotel in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa.

At the time the photo was taken, the CIA's covert action chief in Mexico City was David Atlee Phillips. Philips, AKA Maurice Bishop, reportedly met with Oswald in Dallas before the assassination.

The photo shows a group of ten men, wearing black suits and skinny ties, drinking around a table. They appear to be a mixed group of Cuban exiles, Italian wise guys, and square-jawed military intelligence types.

Identifying the men in the photo took months. And when I had, I realized that it is the only extant photograph of the members of  the CIA’s super-secret assassination squad known as “Operation Forty."

A young (24-year old) Barry Seal is seated third from left.  Seated to Seal’s right is former CIA chief Porter Goss. Front left, beside Goss, is the notorious Cuban "freedom fighter" Felix Rodriguez.  Rodriguez, a vice cop under the corrupt Mob-run Batista regime in Cuba, later became an Iran Contra operative and a confidant of the first George Bush.

Felix Rodriguez has long been known to be one of the CIA's most vicious assassins. According to law enforcement authorities, he keeps Che Guevara's hands in a jar atop his dresser. 

On the other side of the table, the only celebrant displaying any regard for tradecraft is  covering his face with his sport coat. However, his swept-back “Big Wave in Hawaii” pompadour made him fairly easily identifiable as Frank Sturgis. Sturgis has often been mentioned in connection with the JFK assassination.

Sturgis will later become famous as one of the Watergate burglars.Beside him, front right, is a man well-known among Kennedy assassination researchers.  William Seymour was the New Orleans representative of the Double-Chek Corporation, a CIA front used to recruit pilots (like Seal).  Researchers identify Seymour as the man said to have impersonated Lee Harvey Oswald, while Oswald was out of the country.

It is certainly a well-connected group. Just the fact that the man who will become the biggest drug smuggler in American history had been  consorting back in 1963 with a man whose job was recruiting pilots for the CIA makes allegations of CIA involvement in the drug trade far more than just another conspiracy theory.

So, if there had been a get-away plane flown out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination—and assuming there had been an authentic investigation into the assassination, which there was not—Barry Seal would have been high on the list when authorities told the police to call in the “usual suspects.”

But that puts the cart somewhat in front of the horse. Is there evidence that there was a get-away plane?  The answer is yes.

Three men in suits at Redbird Airport

At about 1:00 P.M. that same afternoon, half an hour after the president was shot, neighbors who lived along the road that runs by the Redbird Airport, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Dallas, began calling the police.  A small private plane, they reported, was behaving very strangely.  

For an hour it had been revving its engines, not on the runway, as per usual, but parked at the end of the airstrip on a grassy area next to the fence. The noise was so loud it prevented nearby residents, glued to their TVs for the news about the terrible event downtown, from hearing.

The police, perhaps understandably, were too busy to check it out. The question became moot when shortly thereafter  the plane took off. 

An FBI file of March 10, 1967, describes statements made by Louis Gaudin, the government's air traffic control specialist at Redbird airport, who recalled observing three men in business suits board a Comanche-type aircraft at about 2:00 P.M.

Thirty-seven years later, I  tracked down Louis Gaudin in retirement in the tiny town of Long Branch, Texas. “I filed that report in ’67 for only one reason,” Gaudin told me. “Sometime in 1967 I received a visit from an Assistant District Attorney in (New Orleans District Attorney) Jim Garrison’s office.”

“He showed me pictures of four possible pilots involved in the incident that day. One was a weird-looking character with a funny-looking wig. Then, shortly thereafter I saw on the news that David Ferrie had committed suicide, said Gaudin.

“That’s when I smelled a rat.”

Redbird Airport (today Dallas Executive Airport) is  a  small airfield between Dallas  and  Fort Worth. But it wasn’t just any old airport.

“The  FAA  had  its  general  aviation  headquarters there, said Gaudin.  “Howard Hughes had a huge old WWII hanger there, with heavy security. People from Wackenhut all over the place. And there were the Porter planes from General Harry Byrd’s outfit.”

General D. Harry Byrd’s links to the Kennedy assassination begin with the fact that he owned the building, the Texas School Book Depository, from which Kennedy was supposedly gunned down.

Then, too, he founded an aircraft company that became one of the largest U.S. defense contractors during the Vietnam War, Ling-Temco-Vought (LTV), which also—and perhaps not coincidentally?—tested missiles at the Venice Airport in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

“What had happened was this,” he continued. “I was an air traffic controller working in the tower at Redbird that day. When I came on shift at 2 PM,  we received a bulletin to report any suspicious activity immediately to an FAA Security number. And we kept calling that number all afternoon, but got nothing but a busy signal. And then, after we heard they had caught the ‘lone gunman,’ I guess they called it, we stopped calling, and let the matter drop.”

From his perch atop the control tower, Mr. Gaudin, between handling twenty or thirty flights into and out of the airport an hour, had noticed something suspicious about three well-dressed men  in business suits standing, along with several suitcase,  beside a Comanche painted green-and-white.

So suspicious was he, Mr. Gaudin related, that when the plane took off on runway 17, he asked the pilot if he needed any assistance. The pilot said no. Gaudin asked which way the plane was heading. The pilot stated south.

Gaudin watched as the plane flew south for two miles, then made a hard left, and then flew north to Love Field.

The pilot had lied.

Suspicions aroused, Gaudin went over to the control tower’s receiver and listened as the plane made an approach and landed at Love Field, eight miles north of Redbird.

An hour later, the plane was back at Redbird. This time only two people were aboard. The third passenger—let’s call him the shooter–had been left at Love Field.

James Garrison, American hero

And that’s where the matter rested until Garrison’s investigator’s came calling. 

Then, after Gaudin became alarmed at the death of a man whose picture he had just recently been shown, he called the FBI, and filed the report which, he said, became something of a burden to him for the rest of his life.

“There was no Freedom of Information Act back then,” he says today. “That’s what’s  created some problems for me.”

This would be just a ‘suspicious sighting’ except for something that happened later, which clearly indicated to Gaudin that he was a witness to something he had no business seeing.

From the control tower, he says, he was too far away to be able to identify anyone who boarded the plane. But there was one person who could: Merrit Goble, who ran the fixed-wing operation, TexAir, at Redbird Field.

“Merrit and I were friends,” Gaudin relates. “So one day, after filing the FBI report, I went down to see if the FBI had been by to visit him as well. They hadn’t, he told me. So I asked him if he had anything, any gas receipts, any record of the fueling of the plane in question. And Merit acted very strangely. He told me, in effect, that it was none of my business. He said, ‘I will only answer questions from a bonafide law enforcement authority.’”

“I always thought that was strange: ‘I will only answer questions from a bonafide law enforcement authority.’ Because like I said, we were friends.”

Merrit Goble died last year, taking any secrets he possessed about the suspicious plane to his grave.

Means, Motive, Opportunity

 Was Barry Seal at the controls of the plane that took off from Redbird Airport on November 22 1963? We’ll never know for sure. But lacking an eyewitness willing to come forward and enough of a survivalist to live to tell his tale, we base a “yes” answer on his association with—and proximity to—the major players whose names get bandied about in connection with the assassination.

The central thesis of most writers on the  assassination is that the Kennedy assassination was the work of the Mafia, elements of the CIA, and right-wing Cuban exiles aligned with Guy Banister, Clay Shaw, and David Ferrie, all of whom were CIA-connected. Not to mention Lee Oswald, who had formed an alliance with the U.S. intelligence community as a young man in the Civil Air Patrol with David Ferrie.

Barry Seal knew them all.

He was a known associate of the ‘usual suspects’: David Ferrie, Carlos Marcello, Guy Banister, and Grady Partin. He was a gunrunner to Cuba, and a veteran of the Bay of Pigs. And his participation in Operation 40, the CIA’s assassination squad, the blackest of black ops, as attested by the photo taken in Mexico in January 1963.

About one longtime associate of Banister and Ferrie (Murray Kessler)  who was busted with Barry in 1972, one DEA agent said, “He (Kessler) had a lot of familiarity with that group of ‘yahoos’ in New Orleans; that’s how I figure he met Barry, who was known to have been involved with Guy Banister and Ferrie back then too.” 

Moreover, Barry Seal was a spectacular pilot, one of the best alive.

I believe Seal flew that ‘getaway’ plane out of Dallas; and that during his often-acrimonious dealings with his superiors, his participation in the JFK hit remained his ‘ace in the hole’ for the rest of his life.

But where did the shooters come from? I’ll take that up tomorrow, in “The Camp in Lacombe.” As far as I know, I’m the only investigator in recent times who was able to locate—and visit—the site of the CIA’s secret camp for assassins in Lacombe, Louisiana.

What do the 9/11 attack and the Kennedy assassination cover-ups have in common?

Mis-direction. On 9/11, New York City was where most of the killing took place. It took maybe an hour. In Venice, Florida, where the key conspirators got together, they spent more than a year.  Yet there’s been endless talk—leading absolutely nowhere—about thermite, about holograms, about Building 7. And its all hooey, or, to use the technical term, disinformation.

Why I’m so sure is because I was the only investigative reporter at the biggest 9/11 crime scene—Venice—that wasn’t reduced to rubble. And I was continually made aware that I didn’t belong—and wasn’t wanted—there.

The Kennedy assassination set the pattern. Debating the minutiae of Dallas—the ‘magic bullet theory,’ the changing parade route, the standing down of military intelligence, and dozens of other unexplained anomalies—has proven only that a conspiracy had indeed taken place.

But it was never going to put anyone in jail. Because the conspiracy was elsewhere. In New Orleans, Chicago, Miami, on No Name Key, and. most especially, in Lacombe, Louisiana, where the CIA kept a secret camp which trained  assassins.

Moreover the conspirators were pros. The Kennedy assassination was their calling card.  Unlike the “big find” about the identity of the second shooter which one prominent author is currently using to flog his book—who was told by a friend of a friend of a guy who had it on good authority that so-and-so, who’s now, regrettably, dead, was in on the hit— they didn’t disappear from history after November 23, 1963.

 For the next several decades, the people who killed JFK made history. In Laos, and Cambodia, at the Watergate complex, and in the drug trafficking scandal that was mis-named Iran Contra.

They were people like Barry Seal.  

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.)

And its also the date of Barry Seal’s arrest in New Orleans for conspiracy to export enough C4 plastic explosive to blow the island of Cuba half-way toward the Florida Keys, which will eventually result in confirmation that rumors he flew a get-away plane out of Dallas are true.

His arrest—though no one suspects it yet— is part of the Watergate Scandal. When Customs Agents slap the cuffs on Seal in New Orleans, he says, angrily, “All I need is a bunch of Cubans after me.”

"All our secrets are the same."

It was in the sun-drenched Albuquerque study of two of America's most prominent writers —one a Guggenheim Fellow, National Book Award winner, and former member of the National Security Council, the other a celebrated investigative reporter whose first book took on  the entire power structure in Kentucky —that I first heard what I later came to think of as  "The Question."

Answering that question, to my satisfaction and hopefully yours, is where this story will end. In between are a few carefully chosen  fragments, shards from the broken mirror that I have—that we all have—been attempting to piece back together for the past 50 years.

To understand what follows, here are a few insights that seem to have particular relevance to this story from a few of Barry Seal’s contemporaries kind enough to share with me some of their accumulated wisdom.

An active and still-living(and thus necessarily anonymous) participant in American “clandestine operations,” for example, who once told me something that upon reflection seems obvious on  its face.

He said, “All our scandals are the same scandal. All our secrets are the same.”

What he meant, I believe, is that serious American scandals almost always arise from the fertile soil of this nation’s chief post-WWII money-making propositions: selling weapons and/or running drugs.

These are often said to be the No. 1 and No. 2 industries in the world, in terms of foreign trade, and it matters not which is ranked first, and which second, because they are two sides of the same coin. Many people to whom you would like to sell weapons can only pay you back with an equivalent quantity of illicit drugs.

Then there's something a famous Southern lawman named Rex Armistead told me, which helps me keep from getting my hopes up too much when there's an announcement that there will be a full FBI investigation of whatever the latest outrage happens to be: "The three most over-rated things in this world,” he told me, “are home cooking, home loving…and the FBI."

Finally there's what a retired US Customs Agent who had spent much of his career investigating Barry Seal said when he learned how shocked I'd been at the solicitousness of so many Americans towards Fidel Castro back in the 50’s, when he was just another bandito in the hills. These Americans had all shown their concern for Fidel by running weapons to him to defend his guerrilla band against the cruel Cuban tyrant Batista.

Their number included CIA guys, Mafia guys, and even a few characters from what they call the “Dixie Mob,' including Barry Seal, David Ferrie, and even Jack Ruby, who I was shocked to discover all knew each other!

“What did you expect?”asked my Customs informant with a bemused smile. "Of course they all know each other. There aren't that many ‘players’ out there."

Most of what follows drives home one or another of these points.

Welcome to Connected-land! 

Our story begins during the summer of 1972, a more innocent time where few suspected that the breaking Watergate scandal will contain links to narcotics trafficking and arms smuggling.

During the CIA’s shut-down of what Watergate investigators will later call “The Mexican Connection,” the arrest of Barry Seal will merely be “collateral damage” 

But it is what happened after Seal’s arrest that today provides persuasive evidence that Barry Seal was involved in the Kennedy assassination, and viewed it as his "ace in the hole" during his often-acrimonious dealings with his superiors. 

On July 3 The New York Times reports a DC-4 has been seized at the Shreveport Regional Airport, loaded with enough explosives to fuel a coup in a good-sized Latin American country. There’s almost seven tons of C-4 explosives, there’s 7,000 feet of  primer cord, 2,600 electric blasting caps and 25 electrical  detonators.

Authorities say the explosives are destined for Cuban exiles in Mexico, who plan to use them to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro. Federal officials say seven men in Texas and Louisiana have been arrested on charges of conspiring to smuggle munitions to Mexico. 

They include Richmond Harper, a millionaire rancher and bank director from Eagle Pass, Texas, a former Inspector with the INS, a New York Gambino-connected Mobster named Murray Kessler, and pilot Barry Seal.

Kessler, a  frequent house guest at the Harper ranch, has a record of six felony convictions on charges of interstate theft, transporting stolen property, bookmaking and conspiracy to possess heroin. 

A surveillance report written after he landed at the San Antonio airport  describes him as “50-ish and Jewish-looking, wearing a open-collar gray shirt with a gray sports suit, accompanied by a “bleached blond in white slacks and a red polka-dotted jacket.” 

More important than the bleached blond wearing polka dots, to our story, at least, is that Murray Kessler according to former DEA agent Dick Gustafson, who knew him, is “an anti-Castro guy, which was like a mantra he carried around with him.”

Stirring the pot a little thicker, Kessler was also a known associate of Guy Banister and David Ferrie in the 1960’s. 

“He had a lot of familiarity with that group of ‘yahoos’ in New Orleans,” Gustafson says. “That’s how I figure he met Barry, who was involved with Guy Banister and Ferrie back then too.”

The Shut-down of the Mexican Connection

It will come out at their trial that the men were busted by a US Customs undercover agent with CIA connections with whom Kennedy assassination aficionados are familiar named Cesario Diosdado, a participant in one of the stranger episodes occurring on November 22, 1963.

In Miami, Cuban Alpha 66 head  Antonio Veciana reported that several hours after the assassination Caesar Diosdado mysteriously showed up at his home unannounced.

“You don’t know anything about Kennedy, do you?” Diosdado asked.

When Veciana replied “no,” Diosdado seemed satisfied. Veciana felt he was being tested, so didn't tell Diosdado that he had seen Oswald in Dallas a month earlier, he later testified, because “he didn't want to get involved.”

JFK assassination investigator Gaeton Fonzi reported: "Veciana said as soon as Diosdado walked in the door he told him, ‘hey, don't worry about a thing, I don't even know why I'm doing this, they just told me to do it, interview some Cubans.’”

What’s been busted up, later court testimony reveals, is a weapons for heroin deal, masterminded by “rancher-banker” Richmond Harper, who is  described as a “tall lean guy wearing a string tie and cowboy boots  and a cowboy shirt with monogrammed initials “RCH.” 

It’s a description which fits him, Seal widow Debbie agrees, having seen him when she flew in to the airport in Eagle Pass with her pilot husband, so the two men could confer while awaiting trial.

Any friend of Zapata's a friend of mine

Time to stir the pot a little thicker: It was through Richmond Harper's’ Eagle Pass Texas ranch that Oswald’s friend in Dallas, oilman and CIA asset George DeMohrenschilt had entered Mexico en route on “a walking tour” of Central America that led him to be in Guatemala for the launch of “The Bay of Pigs invasion.

After DeMohrenschildt's sudden death by shotgun on the eve of his testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations—which his wife strenuously said was not a suicide—his personal address book was located, containing an entry reading: "Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio see also Zapata Petroleum Midland."

Richmond Harper is also an associate of the man known as Carlos Marcello's front man, Herman Beebe. And, according to a statement Barry Seal issued later, he had "very deep ties right into the (Nixon) White House."

Those ties were to the head of US Customs, Myles Ambrose, who was also a  Special Consultant to the President on Narcotics, and who was there at the birth, in 1973, of Nixon’s demon spawn, the DEA.

Myles Ambrose, according to former Customs officials who were disgusted at having had to work under him, would visit Harper and go hunting with him on his ranch on the border. He was a guest at what must have been the wedding of the year down in Eagle Pass, the nuptials of Richmond Harper’s daughter, an event her proud Daddy commemorated with the slaughtering of 600 steers. 

"We tried to warn him [Ambrose],” stated one Customs official at the time. “Tell him that this guy [Harper] is bad. He wouldn't listen."

When we finally reached Myles Ambrose for his version of events, and his recollections of Barry Seal, he was perhaps understandably defensive.

“Frank is dead now. We can talk.”

Ambrose said he had no recollection of the warning.  It was only after his visits that he discovered that Harper had been the defendant in a civil suit involving the mislabeling of dog food–food not intended for humans—that was then shipped over the border from Mexico to the United States.

At any rate, he had only ever visited the Harper ranch once, he said emphatically.

He had been the guy, he told me, changing the subject, who had shepherded the establishment of the DEA through Congress. “I got to Tip O’Neill,” he told us. “And that kept the partisan stuff out.”

During my  interview with him, I felt Ambrose’s displeasure at some of my questions, which, in fairness, may have sounded slightly more suspicious than someone is used to fielding who has been a Special Consultant on Narcotics to President Nixon.

But whatever the reason, Ambrose became a bit over-eager to share his thoughts on the involvement in the drug trade by folks on the other side of the aisle.

“I was with Treasury back in the late Fifties, when Bobby Kennedy was running the Kefauver Committee Hearings on Organized Crime,” Ambrose said. “I know for a fact that there was a yellow sheet (investigative report) on a meeting in Havana where Meyer Lansky gave two kilos of heroin to Frank Sinatra to bring back to the States so he (Sinatra) would have a little ‘walking-around’ money.”

“But because Sinatra was helping Kennedy get elected, his brother removed all reference to this from the Committee’s report.”

Ambrose left office shortly after his friendship with Harper was revealed. Years later, Nixon aide Chuck Colson told Senator Lowell Weicker two pieces of information on Myles Ambrose that should never go together. 

1.  "Ambrose set up the CIA in the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

2.   Ambrose had cordial relations with certain Mafia figures.”

Even the DC-4 Barry Seal was piloting loaded with 7 tons of C4 plastique had some heavy connections.  It was owned by a man, James Boy of Fort Lauderdale, with whom Seal will be arrested in Miami in 1983 as part of the DEA’s Operation Screamer.

As a result of that arrest, Barry Seal will “get with the program” and move his smuggling activities up to Mena Arkansas. And the rest, of course, is history.

“The trial of the C4 Seven”

One clue to Seal’s status is that, after having been caught illegally exporting 7 tons of C4 explosives, no one was in any hurry to bring him to trial.

But when they did, an extraordinary document surfaced, which clearly shows that Barry Seal viewed his participation in the Kennedy assassination as a bargaining chip, a laminated "get out of jail" card to be for the rest of his life. 

 Both the prosecutor and the judge received an anonymous (though the envelope bearing the letter is clearly in Barry Seal’s handwriting) letter threatening that unless the charges were dismissed, the sender would blow the cover off matters pertaining to “national security.”

The heading reads “CJ Simpson de Cuba.”

“Due to personal initiative and desire to see justice done this letter is mailed to you and your associates,” the letter reads.

“The United States two-count indictment against seven men on charges of conspiracy to ship “implements of war” out of the United States, without having approval of the government, has no chance to succeed.”

“I worked for the CJ Simpson de Cuba Drilling Company, which had three rotary drilling rigs operating in Cuba. Whether you or any of your associates are aware of the number of “implements of war” shipped by that company out of the United States as components of drilling equipment, I have no idea. But I advise you to find out!

These shipments of “implements of war” by the CIA had no known open approval of the United States Government. Yet I am sure that your attitude towards it would be that as long as it is done by a federal agency, it is correct. If this is your assumption, then you are dead wrong.

I can name names of agents involved in these shipments. The whole sorry mess of the CIA putting Fidel Castro into a position to overthrow the government of Juan Batista has never been told to the public.”

The letter, on its surface, is puzzling. While it might still have been embarrassing if the size of the assistance the CIA provided Fidel Castro became known, any resulting scandal would clearly have not risen to a level of seriousness where it might threaten to compromise current operations.

Vietnam and Cambodia were on the front burner in 72. Castro and Cuba was old news.

"That Bay of Pigs Thing"

The letter couldn’t be taken literally. But was it making some sort of oblique reference only understood by insiders? The way Nixon did while trying to get the FBI to call off the Watergate investigation?

"Look, the problem is that this tracks back to the Bay of Pigs,  the whole problem is that this will open the whole— the whole Bay of Pigs thing," Nixon is caught saying, on the Watergate Tapes. 

"And the President just feels that ah, without going into the details–don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is a comedy of errors, without getting into it, the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again and, ah…they should call the FBI in and (unintelligible) don't go any further into this case period!”

H.R. Haldeman later testified that Nixon's references to Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs was Nixon’s way of making an oblique allusion to the Kennedy assassination.

Could the "political dynamite" the letter-writer hoped to be flinging in the judge’s face have something to do with the company involved, CJ Simpson de Cuba?

The name CJ Simpson de Cuba, a little research reveals,  occurs in the literature of the Kennedy assassination in the most amazing context imaginable…  A report by a U.S. Secret Service agent in Chicago that a CJ Simpson de Cuba employee named Homer Echevarria knew about  the Kennedy assassination…before it happened.

The House Select Committee on Assassinations Report cited the incident as particularly troubling. 

The informant "reported that he had knowledge of a group of Chicago Cubans, allegedly anti-Castro, who were bitterly opposed to President Kennedy.”  The informant

had been attempting to negotiate a sale of machine guns to  Homer Echevarria. The day before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Echevarria told the informant that 'we now have plenty of money…as soon as 'we' take care of Kennedy.'”

Homer Echevarria, the man making threats against the President, worked for the CJ Simpson Oil Drilling Company in Cuba, and then later in Dallas.

It prompted an agent in charge of the Chicago field office of the Secret Service to write a memorandum about "a group in the Chicago area who may have a connection with the JFK assassination."

Again, for emphasis: three days after the JFK assassination, a Secret Service Agent in Chicago  reported that somone and who worked for CJ Simpson de Cuba, the company Barry Seal is citing to blackmail his judge with "national security concerns" in his trial for exporting explosives—knew President Kennedy was going to be assassinated before it happened. Moreover he was associated with connected with the DRE and the 30th of November Movement—the two groups said to be training at the CIA's "rogue" camp for assassins in Lacombe, Louisiana.

Cuba, the guns, New Orleans, everything"

New  Orleans sits  alongside not just the Mississippi, but a large freshwater lake, Lake Pontchartrain.  For well over twenty years assassination researchers and government investigators have suspected that a shooter team for the Kennedy assassination came from the anti-Castro guerrilla training camp on the north shore of Lake Pontchatrain, in the tiny town of Lacombe.

The two exile Cuban groups with which Echevarria was associated, the DRE and the 30th of November Movement, were the groups using what is often referred to as the CIA’s rogue, renegade, or black training camp in Lacombe.

The HSCA found that the 30th of November group was backed financially by a Chicago-based organization run by Paulino Sierra,  and that the DRE had  financial support from organized crime, and that Sierra's money came from "hoodlum elements, and that  Sierra was linked to the Lake Pontchartrain camp and the Mafia and the Castro assassination plots.

The camp referred to is the same one where New Orleans DA Jim Garrison suspected brothers Mike and Bill McLaney had been providing Cuban exiles with a renegade off the books training site and arms cache, courtsey the CIA.

 Garrison said there had been two anti-Castro groups training north of Lake Pontchatrain, one "overt," the other "covert."

The covert group, according to Garrison, was led by David Ferrie, who drilled five-man commando teams in guerrilla warfare practice and infiltration techniques on a site adjacent to the McLaney cottage. According to the New Orleans States-Item. "Immediately after the Lacombe raid, the so-called 'overt' Cuban group disappeared."

When we asked the engaging but slippery "CIA's man in '60's New Orleans" Gordon Novel if he had known the McLaney brothers,  his answer was interesting.  "I knew Mike McLaney by name, a CIA guy, supposedly. Dead now."

"But," he continued, "here's the problem of dealing with intelligence: its a beehive. Each cubicle is like this. McLaney over here and me over here, see? We're in separate cubicles, and our operations never overlapped. Just because he did this and I did that and we were both in New Orleans doesn't mean  we ever came in contact."

"Everybody know everybody in New Orleans"

While doing research in Louisiana in 2000, I identified and visited Mike McLaney’s Lacombe property. It's a spooky place, filled with ghosts, none of whom would agree to be interviewed on the record.

So, for what follows, I’ve relied on what I consider the most reliable JFK researched to cover the subject:

In July of ‘63 a group of Cuban exiles from Miami arrived and joined the anti-Castro guerrilla training camp at Lacombe.

Not long after the Miami exiles arrived, Lee Oswald offered his services to the exiles. Whether Oswald is patsy or conspirator or emissary from the Spiders From Mars, he was there, in the company of men like Guy Banister, David Ferrie, and CIA agent David Atlee Philips.

At some point,  Mike McLaney sent the CIA a detailed plan for knocking out three Havana refinerie. But instead of getting his plan approved, he got an urgent phone call from Washington warning him “not to attempt such a thing under any circumstances.”

Carlos Marcello associate Sam Benton had more than two tons of dynamite beside McLaney's cottage. to deliver this "big bang" Castro’s oil refineries Benton was negotiating to obtain a B-24 aircraft.Two planes were to take off from an airstrip near the Lacombe camp, then fly on to Havana . 

On the other hand, Royal Dutch Shell Oil Corporation retained a fondness for their seized refineries in Havana, as well as a  reluctance to return at some future date to discover bomb craters where their refinery once stood. The raid was set for August 1 1963. Prodded by Bobby Kennedy, on July 31st the FBI raided the house in Lacombe and the training camp nearby.

Fervent  anti-communism is all well and good, apparently; but business is business.

The FBI’s Lacombe raid assumed a prominent role in Jim Garrison’s investigation of the Kennedy assassination. He believed that the exiles training there—for an assassination attempt on Castro—had been ‘spun off’ into the successful attempt on Kennedy.

So just who were Mike and Bill McLaney?  Mike was a casino owner in Havana, where one of his employees, Lewis McWillie, was  Jack Ruby's best friend. When Fidel Castro took power, Mike McLaney was arrested for three months, then freed, and continued to operate under Fidel Castro in hopes of becoming gambling czar of Cuba, hopes nursed by having paid out $102,000 to Fidel Castro's Ministry of Gambling, Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis.

When the Casino Nacional was nationalized in 1960 he lost $7 million. McLaney's brother, Bill, owned the Carousel Club in Las Vegas. It is presumably "just a coincidence" that Jack Ruby's club in Dallas is also called the Carousel Club.

Life Magazine once printed a story linking McLaney with Meyer Lansky, and he responds by filing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit. When the magazine produced newspaper clippings that confirmed that no casino operated in Havana without the consent of Meyer Lansky, his suit was thrown out.

The Internal Revenue Service then rubbed a little salt in Mike's wound by filing income tax evasion charges him. He was convicted of evading $118,000 in taxes and sentenced to three months in Federal prison.

A personal friend of J Edgar Hoover

Because of the Life brouhaha, the Miami Police began an investigation of McLaney. "In the course of the conversation Mr. McLaney named some of his close friends," their report said. "Those named included  J. Edgar Hoover, John S. Knight, publisher of the Miami Herald and Rocky Pomerantz, Chief of the Miami Beach Police Department. He (McLaney) stated that he could use these people as references, along with the Chief of Police and Mayor of New Orleans."

We have the feeling he could have quit after mentioning Hoover, but you know how Mob guys  like to boast.

Garrison charged that David Ferrie, Jack Ruby, and Lee Oswald were all involved in training two paramilitary groups of Cuban exiles and American "neo-Nazis"

The covert group,  he  said, was  led  by  David Ferrie, who  drilled  five-man  commando  teams  in  guerrilla  warfare  practice.

There are eyewitness accounts of Dave Ferrie, Lee Oswald, and  numerous Cubans dressed in military fatigues and carrying automatic rifles involved in extensive military training maneuvers on the site.

Several people, including a CIA asset named Colonel William Bishop, shortly before his death  in  1990,  who told  author Dick Russell that he’d seen Oswald and Ferrie in a have seen a training film shot at the site.

So too, did HSCA lawyer and later Beverly Hills Mayor Robert Tenenbaum, who claims that after the House assassination investigation got hold of a copy of the training film shot at the Lacombe camp, it was stolen.

“MIKE MCLANEY WAS a good friend of mine, a wonderful athlete, a national tennis champion, and  a  splendid  golf  hustler,”  said venerable old New  Orleans  antiques  dealer  Dave  Dixon, who “just happened” to have been Barry Seal’s CIA handler.

But  none  of  these  attributes  which  Dixon  ascribed  to  his  friend made McLaney important enough to burglarize the US House of Representatives.

“What was there about the McLaney's training camp on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain that made it important enough to risk burglarizing the US House of Representatives?”

The answer is simple. What else?

Finally, we return to where we began: in the sun-dappled study of Roger Morris and Sally Denton, whose question had sent me on my quest. One question I wished I’d asked them was where they first heard the rumor.

Later, I learned from Sally Denton that her father, a prominent attorney in Las Vegas, had been Mike McLaney’s lawyer.

They combed through the trash. They searched dozens of planes. And while TV cameras from all the Miami TV network affiliates looked on, they loaded box after box filled with aviation records into government SUV’s parked in plain sight on the tarmac in front of the office.

But today— more than two weeks after more than 100 Federal agents from the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security descended on the headquarters of the infamous and notorious World Jet Inc. at the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport—if you want to know why they were there or what they were looking for, you’re two weeks too late.

That’s because the detailed 35-page affidavit supporting the request for a search warrant of Don and Bill Whittington’s air charter company filed at the United States District Court in Grand Junction Colorado has been sealed.

But not, thankfully, before it was discovered and leaked onto the Internet in an exclusive story by reporter Joe Hamel from The Durango Herald in Durango Colorado.  

“I found a search warrant and one affidavit during a regular trip down to the Federal Courthouse to check on what’s new,” reporter Hamel said in an interview. “But when I went back a week later to check for new filings, it was gone. The whole case has been sealed.”

"The whole case has been sealed." 

Alone among major crimes, drug trafficking is often treated as a matter of “grave” national security. No one will say why. But there's a lot of money involved…

This penchant for secrecy is especially clear in the case of the two American-registered drug planes from St Petersburg Florida busted in the Yucatan, whose seizure revealed that Wachovia, then America's 4th-largest bank, had laundered $378 billion for Mexican drug cartels. 

For example, “Raul Jimenez Alfaro,” who investigators identified the man in charge of bringing the DC-9  busted in the Yucatan carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine north to the U.S.,  pled guilty under an alias to drug charges in a Federal Court in Miami, keeping his role in the massive 5.5 ton drug move secret.  

Another recent example is Juan Carlos Abadia. The DEA called him the biggest drug cartel boss since Pablo Escobar, the leader of the world’s biggest drug cartel, and the man responsible for exporting more than 500 tons of cocaine—worth in excess of $10 billion to the United States.

Yet when Abadia pled guilty to drug trafficking and racketeering in a US Federal Court in 2011, not one newspaper in America covered his conviction. It went completely unreported. The DEA didn't didn’t even issue a press release.

Compounding this "anomaly"is another strange fact: Although Abadia was sentenced to 25 years in Federal prison,  a search of the prisoner locater at the Federal Bureau of Prisons website does not list his name as among those currently incarcerated. Phone calls asking about his whereabouts to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons were met with a terse "no comment."

"Gaming the system" is "Call of Duty" for elite deviants

The DEA affidavit details a year-long investigation of aircraft dealer Reginald “Don” Whittington, 67. 

The Whittington’s, the affidavit states, are suspected of illegally leasing aircraft from Florida to cocaine cartels and laundering drug-related profits through a hot springs resort hotel and a ranch in Colorado.

 It contains startling information about the ease with which Mexican and Colombian drug cartels are able to purchase US aircraft—as well as a certain amount of protection— from brokers like Whittington, or the unmentioned Larry Peters of Skyway Aircraft in St Petersburg, who has also sold numerous drug planes to Mexican cartels with apparent impunity.

The scheme works like this: the Whittington’s company would sell airplanes at inflated prices to drug traffickers, but maintain the title and American registration number in the name of World Jet or a designated nominee.  Then, after the smugglers were done with the planes, World Jet would “repossess” them, at a tidy profit. 

The clear virtue of this strategy is it provides “plausible deniability.” And even if the airplane is caught, by claiming to be an "innocent owner," there's a good chance the participants will get back the plane.  

Donna Blue, Donna Blue, wherefore art you?

The affidavit confirms reporting published here which called into question the very existence of Donna Blue Aircraft, the Florida company which the FAA listed as the owner of a Gulfstream II which went down in the Yucatan on September 24 2007 carrying four tons of cocaine.

Suspicions about the two plane's "unusual" chain of ownership turned out to be right on the money.

The affidavit states, “On September 24, 2007, a 1975 Gulfstream II turbo jet bearing tail number N987SA crashed in the Yucatan Peninsula while carrying 3723 kilograms of cocaine, which was recovered by the Mexican Government, as documented by DEA Mexico City.”

“N987SA was owned by Donna Blue Aircraft Inc, which was subsequently identified as a front company for a Tampa Florida-based ICE undercover operation named Operation Mayan Jaguar.” (emphasis mine.)

The “Tampa-based ICE undercover operation” likely provided “cover” for a CIA operation, which “sheep-dipped”  an already-owned CIA plane, the Gulfstream II, to a dummy front company, Donna Blue Aircraft.

As I reported five years ago, the registration history of the Gulfstream II (N987SA) indicated the plane had been “parked” or “sheep-dipped” in and out of the hands of a motley crew of politically well-connected ‘straw’ owners, whose ranks included a secretive Midwestern media magnate who bought more than a million dollars of billboard advertising for Presidential candidate George W Bush in 2000; a lieutenant to Saudi “fixer’ and long-time CIA asset Adnan Khashoggi; and most recently individuals in New York with strong connections to the Russian Mafiya.

"Hail hail, the gang's all here!"

Several days after the crash of the Gulfstream II in the Yucatan, I paid a visit to the address—4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 in Coconut Beach FL—that “Donna Blue Aircraft Inc” listed as its home address on FAA documents.

What I found was an empty office suite, with a blank sign out front. There was no visible sign of any entity called Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc.

What there was, however, were a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite. 

Donna Blue Aircraft (d-b-a- doing business as, get it?) was a dummy front company cut from the same cloth as decades-worth of CIA dummy front companies.

Moreover the brief description of Donna Blue on its Internet page  was such a clumsy half-hearted effort that it defeated its purpose of constructing a plausible “legend,” or cover.

The website featured a quote from a satisfied Donna Blue Aircraft customer whose name, unfortunately is “John Doe.”  The company’s listed  phone number was right out of a movie: 415.555-5555.  

A "pilot of interest" flying loads all over

Here is where the affidavit reveals perhaps more than was intended.

 “Earlier in 2007 this aircraft was sold from a Delaware-based company SA Holdings LLC of Donna Blue Aircraft, which in turn produced bill of sale for the aircraft to Clyde O’Conner and Greg Smith.”

A little later, the affidavit states that Federal agents had Don Whittington under surveillance on a flight from Fort Lauderdale to their resort in  Pagosa Springs New Mexico in mid-April of last year.

The flight was piloted by “Gregory Dean Smith.”

“Gregory Smith has been identified in other DEA investigations as a pilot of interest due to intelligence that indicated he was a contract pilot who had flown loads of cocaine from South and Central America to points in the US and Mexico.”

Brazilian Joao Malaga of Donna Blue Aircraft—now known to have been fronting for an ICE operation— explained to authorities that pilots Greg Smith and Clyde O’Conner paid him $2 million in cash to purchase the Gulfstream.

Malago’s statement was greeted with derision by insiders at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport who know both men, I reported. Neither man is anywhere near wealthy. One, Smith, is anything but. 

“Greg Smith’s a good pilot, and dependable, and I never thought twice about hiring him to fly a charter for me,” a charter aviation manager told me.  “Except I always had to be sure to always front him money for expenses, or I’d get phone calls from the backside of nowhere telling me they didn’t have enough money to gas up the plane to fly home.”

"Operation Mayan Jaguar"

Bill Conroy of NarcoNews had reported that the now-mangled drug plane had been used for at least a decade by the CIA to fly "extraordinary renditions “to the US base in Guantanamo and to ferry extradited drug traffickers from Colombia to the USA.

The DEA affidavit, which states that the two pilots had been under investigation for drug trafficking, would seem to indicate otherwise.

“Clyde O’Conner and Greg Smith had long been targets of DEA investigations for the trafficking of cocaine from South America to Central America and Mexico," states the affidavit.

"As well, Gregory Smith currently works as a contract pilot for World Jet. Don Whittington and World Jet were implicated in brokering the sale of N987SA from SA Holdings LLC to the undercover company Donna Blue Aircraft.”

On the other hand, is it possible the DEA was looking at pilots O’Conner and Smith as “persons of interest” in drug trafficking investigations at the same time the CIA was employing them as pilots?

Anyone who remembers Barry Seal would seem to have no trouble answering, at least tentatively,  “yes.”

The DEA affidavit called the Tampa-based ICE operation  “Operation Mayan Jaguar.” Bill Conroy called it “Operation Mayan Express.”  

Especially when dealing with a government which jealously guards information on drug trafficking  that they themselves aren’t sponsoring as a matter of (usually ‘grave’)national security, that’s close enough for television. Or government work.

So far, so good. Kudos to Bill Conroy of NarcoNews, the only other reporter following the story, and to (immodestly) me as well.

ICE running amok?

This is a case of ICE running amok,” a DEA source told Conroy. “If this [operation] was being run by the book, they would not be doing it unilaterally” – without the participation of DEA – “and without the knowledge of the Mexican government.”

For my part, I’d interviewed the No 2 DEA official in Miami, who insisted on anonymity for reasons which will soon become obvious.

In my whiniest citizen-journalist voice, I asked him plaintively, “How come you guys aren’t investigating the planes out of St Petersburg busted with 10 tons of cocaine?”

He calmly replied that one Federal Agency does not, as a matter of course, investigate the operations of another Federal Agency.

What had been exposed by the Dc-9 and Gulfstream II seizures, he said,  was a rogue U.S. Customs operation (ICE is part of Customs, which in turn is part of Homeland Security).

For further answers, he pointed my to the Homeland Security’s Office of Professional Responsibility, charged with investigating internal misconduct.

Five years later, I’m still waiting to hear back from them.

Disneyland for Spooks

The Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport looms so large in recent American history that it may one day get national landmark status. It’s the hub of one of Florida’s biggest and most  lucrative industries. A playground for elite deviants from both North and South America.

It’s Disneyland for Spooks. An otherwise unprepossessing local airfield that’s just a hop skip and a jump from almost anywhere—the Bahamas, the Caymans, Turks & Caicos, Puerto Rico—that anyone in the drug trafficking/money laundering industry needs to go.

The Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport is the Little Airfield That Could.

Yet local state and federal authorities have been unable to summon the will to plug what is by now a glaringly visible national security loophole, perhaps because the enormously lucrative traffic in money, weapons, drugs, diamonds, and even terrorists that takes place using business jets cruising at up to 40,000 feet and available only to a select few among the international elite.

In the coming days, I will begin to detail some of the truly shocking revelations contained in the DEA affidavit that somehow has wiggled its way into the public domain.

But it strains credulity to think there is much there that the DEA didn’t know five or ten or even twenty years ago.

Now that the notorious Whittington brothers are— once again—the target of a major DEA investigation, the real question is: Why now? 

Doug McClain Sr’s financial fraud career as a grifter, racketeer, and flimflam man can be  traced back more than two decades, and likely extends much further into his past. The so-far unanswered question about him has been where he first acquired powerful patrons whose clout could—and did—keep him out of jail despite his record for flagrant financial fraud.  

While the ultimate answer may not yet be clear, for sheer greed, brazen theft and raw carnality—committed with the protection and apparent blessing of former leaders in both major political parties— it would be hard to top McClain’s stint during the early 1990’s at International Profit Associates (IPA) in Chicago.

An introduction to hyena packs, and a drug cartel?

All three of the top officers at IPA boasted felony convictions. The company chairman was a disbarred lawyer from New York, with a criminal record for larceny and patronizing a 16-year-old prostitute in a company board room.

The Vice Chairman pled guilty to conspiring to manufacture a key ingredient in methamphetamine less than two years before former President George H.W. Bush, recently turned out of office, arrived to speak to the troops at the company’s annual Christmas Party.

And the company was the scene of what a prosecuting attorney called “the most egregious case of sex harassment that Chicago has ever seen,”that victimized 113 women employees.

IPA was where McClain would hook up with key associates that will collaborate with him during the next two decades in a ‘hyena pack’ that will go from success to success in a series of lucrative financial scams. 

A hyena dressed up like a shepherd

It’s called “affinity fraud.” And its arguably the most egregious and degenerate crime anyone can commit against on a fellow human being. Bernie Madoff is an example. He sold his $66 billion Ponzi scheme mostly to fellow Jews, including, some of them, Holocaust survivors. 

Another is Doug McClain Sr., who has been preying on Christians for more than 20 years. 

“Affinity fraud”refers to investment scams that prey upon members of identifiable groups, like religious or ethnic communities, or the elderly, by fraudsters pretending to be members of the group. They enlist respected community or religious leaders to help spread the word, convincing their people, or “flock,” that a fraudulent investment is legitimate and worthwhile, oftentimes for a piece of the action.

“Fraudsters who carry out affinity scams frequently are (or pretend to be) members of the group they are trying to defraud,” notes the SEC. 

“Someone finds something in common — in this case religion, in other cases it may be that they are both with the Lion’s Club,” an Asst District Attorney in San Antonio, part of the team prosecuting Doug McClain Sr., explained to a reporter. “They say ‘trust me.’ … You are trying to do the right thing and assume others are playing by the rules, and it’s not the case.”

Oddly enough, based on his own behavior, Doug McClain isn’t even a Christian. Because going to church doesn’t make you a Christian, any more than going to a carwash makes you a car. McClain wasn’t shepherding his “flock.” He was circling it, like a hyena.

McClain became particularly deadly when he began leading his own ‘hyena pack.’

Suffer the little hyenas

We know where it ends…

Once Doug McClain Sr. had been connected to the DC-9 busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine, what followed— while horrific to those from whom he was still stealing millions—was basically a postscript, the twitching of half-dead nerves. Because McClain had already been “made”— by reporters, at least,  if not yet by authorities.

It was only a matter of time before he was caught. 

And we know quite a bit about the middle of the story. Today we’ll profile one of Douglas McClain Sr.’s “middle period” criminal frauds. Tomorrow (Tuesday) we’ll reveal the “Rosetta Stone” that illuminates Doug McClain’s long-running pack of hyenas, a mere division of a much larger politically-connected organized crime and drug trafficking group.  

But the definitive beginning of McClain’s career will continue to elude us until we understand whether or not his decade-long stint as a leader of a Christian cult called “The Move” was also his first exposure to affinity fraud. Later this week we’ll continue to examine that possibility. 

Before the “cult leader” business surfaced, my earliest reference to McClain had him in Chicago, in 1991.

If McClain ever writes an “as told to” book, I imagine it will cover things like this…

‘A life in crime, white-collar division’

Its cold in Chicago. It always is, in the middle of December. In a ballroom  at the downtown Hyatt Regency, a party—a black-tie affair—is getting underway. The ornate invitation, from International Profit Associates (IPA), is to their lavish company Christmas party. The year is 1999.

There’s an 8-piece orchestra. Acres of  hors d’oeuvres: shrimp, crab, sushi.  Dinner is filet mignon and lobster tail. At the head table, flanking the company’s Chairman is a jaunty, very recognizable figure wearing, according to at least one published account, a lop-sided grin. 

It’s former President George Bush. Earlier he had even been on hand to pose for photos, radiating congeniality.  He’s speaking for 45 minutes after dinner for a reported $82,000. Its well worth it, according to the company’s chairman. Ii gives the firm “instant credibility.” 

We know where Doug McClain Sr. was on this night because of a lawsuit filed by Denise Campbell, from Bruce Mines, Ontario, Canada, who suffered from Multiple Sclerosis. Her lawsuit against Douglas McClain Sr, and his alter ego Argyll Biotechnologies, covers one of his later frauds (which we’ll get to presently.)

But because it benefited from following on the heels of a half-dozen earlier suits, it contained a succinct, and nearly complete complete, later chronology. 

 Campbell’s lawsuit is just one of a number of lawsuits McClain chose to ignore—allowing judgments against himself  in the secure knowledge that his money is safely tucked offshore and he’ll never pay a cent. It showed what McClain, his son Doug Jr., and his sidekick James Miceli were up to at the dawn of the Millenium:

 “On or about August 26, 1999, MICELI was convicted of felony money laundering, forgery, perjury and theft over $100,000 in the State of Illinois.  Thereafter, MCCLAIN, SR., MCCLAIN and MICELI worked together at International Profit Associates (“IPA”) in Illinois.”

A “gimme,” as they say in golf… and armed robbery.

At a table at the Christmas Party, a reporter for INC. magazine doodled on his napkin, while listening to the former President speak. Bush, he figures, is  making $1,800 a minute. The 41st president of the United States hails the people of International Profit Associates as bearers of “The Right Stuff.”

 “When I was asked to come celebrate the success of this company,” Bush tells the crowd, “that was a gimme, as they say in golf.” 

In fairness, the former President we now know as George H.W. Bush is far from the only public official to lend luster to IPA’s reputation. Gerald Ford spoke at an earlier company Christmas party; so did  Bob Dole. And former President Bill Clinton took home $125,000 for an appearance in 2001.  

None noticed, apparently, that all three of the company’s top officers were convicted felons. The company chairman was a disbarred New York lawyer with a criminal record for larceny and patronizing a 16-year-old prostitute. 

Then too, the Vice Chairman pled guilty— less than two years before Bush addressed their Christmas Party—to conspiring to manufacture a key ingredient in methamphetamine. 

A convention of crooks

The doodling reporter was there because he was trying to figure out what a former President was doing giving a speech to a convention of crooks. 

The reporter could have asked Doug McClain, Sr. Or James Miceli, one of McClain’s ace partners in crime for the next decade. Both were there. 

Miceli got rich as a Chicago-area real estate developer. His favorite trick was taking people’s money to build custom-built homes. Then he did…nothing at all. When he was sued, he once again did, nothing at all. He didn’t even bother showing up in court. Civil judgments didn’t faze him a bit.

Or he could have asked Doug McClain Jr, a chip off the old block, who today is serving a 20 year sentence in a federal penitentiary. 

Dougie  Jr. will increasingly need to stand in, or front, for his Father as an officer of whatever public company the men happened to be looting at the time. These positions require filing a brief biography, listing convictions, and lawsuits, and such, a bio for which the elder McClain’s life was no longer suitable. 

“In 1999, Doug McClain Jr. joined International Profit Associates, a business consulting firm,” reads his bio in an SEC file, “as a Senior Executive responsible for mergers and acquisitions, and corporate finance, where he was employed until 2001.”

“The boys” will be boys

Finally, company executives also had a hard time keeping their hands, well—let’s just say—keeping their hands in their pockets… 

“This is probably the most egregious case of sex harassment that Chicago has ever seen,” a prosecuting attorney told reporters, when she filed the first sexual harassment lawsuit against them. She said 113 women had been victimized. The IPA office must have been quite a place.

When it was published in INC. magazine, the reporter’s article began, “International Profit Associates is a $100-million company selling $40,000 management consulting  packages to thousands of small businesses . But before you let IPA into your company, there are some things you might want to know.”

After IPA, McClain Sr. got lucky, and hit a $6 million score, pumping the stock of several companies that today trade for oo.ooo a share. From Campbell’s lawsuit:

“Through IPA, MCCLAIN SR. became involved with a public entity known as Nextpath Technologies. MCCLAIN SR. was able to obtain and sell a large volume of shares of Nextpath Technologies to unsuspecting investors, based on false information concerning the company, for approximately $6,000,000.

MCCLAIN SR. received funds and/or distributed Nextpath Technologies stock certificates through the US mail or other carriers interstate to unsuspecting investors, violating the Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (“RICO”) and committed numerous other racketeering activities.”

That takes us up to FIT Technologies, another master McClain fraud. More on that later.But we’re still barely scratching the surface. 

“A hyena pack, a flock of sheep...what ‘dya expect to happen?”

But where did he acquire the powerful patrons—political and otherwise—whose clout kept him out of jail? As he became a full-time financial swindler, McClain needed partners. So he joined a “hyena pack.”

“In large publicly-held companies, stockholder fraud and looting is by people working together inside the company,” a financial fraud expert explained.

“Smaller publicly-held companies are looted by people who comprise what’s called a ‘Hyena Pack.’ Publicly each member acts as a representative of companies and entities which are supposedly independent of each other. At the same time, they are secretly conspiring together for criminal  gain.” 

“These guys very openly looted public company after public company,” said the financial fraud expert. “I’ve seen a list of as many as seventy small public companies busted-out by this one hyena pack.”

Doug McClain Sr. was a member of a hyena pack that took down SkyWay, through his Argyll Equities’ ballyhooed-but-bogus “investment,” which made McClain’s Argyll  SkyWay Aircraft’s largest shareholder.

After leaving “The Move,” McClain moved to Raleigh, North Carolina to set up his own church, several sources stated. And it may be in North Carolina where Doug McClain met the man with a network of politically-connected criminals, politicians, and con men with ties to the military who ran the organized crime ring behind the DC-9 busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine in Ciudad del Carmen, Mexico, on April 10, 2006. 

North Carolina is for Jesse Helms, RJR Tobacco, Wachovia Bank

Doug McClain joined a hyena pack run—or ‘fronted,’ at least until he went to prison—by a former staffer to North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms, Marc Harris, who was involved in the massive drug move on the DC-9  that  ended up being busted in Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of pure cocaine.

Harris, a self-described Iran Contra insider, claimed to have learned the ‘art’ of money laundering while involved in Reagan-era covert operations, where his associates numbered at least three convicted drug traffickers.

His ties to the national Republican Party go back to at least 1988, when he was the Florida manager for the presidential campaign of General Alexander Haig, former White House Chief of Staff under Nixon.

According to a newspaper in Panama, where he operated while on the lam, many of Harris’ biggest clients were prominent Republican politicians.

Harris is currently in Federal prison, after being extradited from Panama and sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for felony fraud and money laundering.  

His ring, accused of looting dozens of publicly-held companies, operated as a textbook  hyena pack. They bankrupted like SkyWay Communications, after using ‘pump and dump’ schemes to dupe shareholders and investors.

“Iran Contra…was that before Oliver North got “War Stories” on Fox?”

Harris boasted of his association with Iran Contra stalwarts like General Jack Singlaub, and had extensive connections to figures in global organized crime, including Peruvian spymaster Vladimiro Montesinos, who escaped arrest by fleeing that country  after the exposure of the CIA’s role there in Marc Harris’ jet. 

Others participating in the company’s demise included its own Chairman, Glenn Kovar;  his son,  Skyway’s President  Brent Kovar;   Saudi arms dealer (and CIA fixer) Adnan Khashoggi; his chief lieutenant and fellow Saudi Ramy El-Batrawi, who was the former President of Jetborne, a CIA proprietary airline in Miami which flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to the Iranians during the Iran Contra Scandal;  and Jonathon Curshen.

Curshen, an American con man from Sarasota Florida, ran Red Sea Management, which generously provided—in return for 28,000,000 shares of stock in SkyWay worth less than the cost of the ink on the certificates—another of SkyWay’s two eventual DC-9’s.

“You know, the DuPonts. Better living through chemistry.”

There is no better example illustrating the continuing history of the organized crime and drug trafficking organization we call “The New American Drug Lords” than the fact that the group successfully used the same exact scam on two separate  occasions more than 20 years apart.

At the same time, SkyWay was putting out a press release heralding a major new investor in the company, with a clunky headline that reads like old Soviet propaganda about tractor factories: 

“The DuPont Investment Fund 57289, Inc. Satisfies $7 Million Funding Agreement with SkyWay Communications Holding Corp.”

Announcing that the DuPont family had just made a big investment in SkyWay pumped the company’s stock for a few days, allowing insiders to sell their shares and cash out.

“They wrote it up in a press release, touting how they’d just received a big investment from the DuPont Foundation,” a former SkyWay executive explained. “It turned out to be bogus. No DuPont’s,  just some guy (Jonathon Curshen) at a desk in Costa Rica.”

 Not coincidentally, twenty years earlier the same group, or Drug Trafficking Organization (DTO) a phrase  only the DEA uses, but never applies it to any group north of the Rio Grande), used the exact same tactic. 

After Barry Seal’s assassination in 1986, his attorney sold “Trinity Energy” to “Miami Jack” Birnholz, another member of the same organization, who then announced with a flourish that he had a new investment partner, “Sloan DuPont,” a member of the “DuPont Family.”

Sloan DuPont, in reality, turned out to be a con-man from Oklahoma named James Rice.

 Beleaguered LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling  numbers among his associates at least three figures who were involved in a troubled “rogue” drug operation  run by Tampa ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement) that consigned America’s reputation into the hands of people that other branches of the U.S. Government—even casino regulators in Nevada—wouldn’t trust not to cheat at penny-ante poker.

The operation has sporadically been under investigation for corruption for several years, and may well still be, by tight-lipped investigators from ICE’s OPR (Office of Professional Responsibility.) During its five year reign at St Petersburg-Clearwater Intl Airport, the group was successful, say observers, at bringing many more tons of cocaine into the U.S. than it managed to interdict.

Both Sterling’s pick for his “Humanitarian of the Year” Award in 2006, Ramy El Batrawi,  and owners Arik Kislin and William Achenbaum of trendy New York Hotel Gansevoort, where gal-pal V Stiviano was allegedly beaten up, supplied the effort with a mini-fleet of useable drug planes. This is no doubt just a statistical coincidence, but its nonetheless just a little creepy, too.

Conspiracy theorists’ dream team

Kislin and Achenbaum supplied the operation with a Gulfstream II (N987SA).  El Batrawi  turned over the second of the operation’s two DC-9′s (N12ONE.)

All three men have, at times, been in the news. Kislin and Achenbaum’s Gulfstream  gained a measure of infamy in September of 2007  when it crashed in Mexico’s Yucatan  while hauling back four tons of cocaine from Colombia tracked by Mexican military aircraft and helicopters. In the aftermath, it was learned that Kislin,  in particular, bears the burden of a colorful past.

While the crash was still news, reporters were told it had nothing to do with the two men, since it occurred fully three weeks after the men sold it on—at least ostensibly—to aircraft brokers in Fort Lauderdale, who in turn said they sold it on, to someone else, who is out of the country at present. They were lied to, a fact which came out in a gratifyingly official way some six years later.

Many knew they were lying six years ago. How you can tell: An Agency like the CIA doesn’t buy and sell planes. They buy them, and then they move them around. Then park them out in Marana, Arizona for a while. When they’ve got something that absolutely positively has to get there overnight, they don’t pick up “Trade-a-Plane” magazine and run through the ‘aircraft for sale’ classifieds.  They just don’t.

The vehicle for the admission that earlier expressions about the plane’s ownership had been rendered inoperative was a DEA affidavit, which was inadvertently leaked into the public domain for less than a week before being reclassified, admitting what every conspiracy buff on the Internet already knew: the Gulfstream’s sale was a CIA sham “paper” transaction.

In fact, the plane’s entire chain of possession, its record of registration, is replete with the kind of Delaware corporations whose names you never see on the sides of trucks in the real world.  It’s routine procedure, to help the Agency disguise its fleet of planes from those who would learn its secrets, a category consisting of the public at large, represented these days by admirably pesky plane-spotters.

The Gulfstream, before passing to the hoteliers, was “parked” (the preferable term) with a certain Stephen Adams.  Mr. Adams (you can look all this up) is a secretive Midwestern media baron with a sharp distaste for publicity. He is a proud  graduate of Yale, where he was, although he won’t confirm it, a member of Skull & Bones. More recently,  he was a “Bush Ranger” in the 2000 election, where he picked up a $1 million  tab for billboard advertising supporting the Bush Presidential campaign.

The man who couldn’t take a hint

In the coming weeks, remember this about Donald Sterling: he can’t say he wasn’t warned.  More than three weeks ago USA Today ran a prescient headline warning him by name: “Go now, or scrutiny may humble Donald Sterling.”  

“Sterling’s racist views, personal attacks on Magic Johnson and delusional ramblings already have ruined what was left of his image and reputation,” reported Nancy Armour. “Now the scrutiny is turning to his business dealings, and that fallout has the potential to be far more costly.

“Reporters across the country have been combing through Sterling’s life and business since NBA Commissioner Adam Silver banned the Clippers owner for life… What else might they find? And who else could be caught up in it?”

When a national media outlet addresses you personally in a headline, it is not an event to be taken lightly. Even less so when the topic under discussion is “Eventual Outcome Prediction for People Who Live in Glass Houses.”

Sterling himself must have have known that the gloves were coming off eventually, and his checkered past would become fair game for enterprising reporters. Today, calling attention to his more dubious business and personal associations is beginning to feel like something of a civic duty.

Reporters were combing. But I had a head start.  I was already aware of Donald Sterling’s strange ties to Ramy El Batrawi,  a “person of interest” in a decade-long journalistic investigation into the illicit drug trade in America.

Coincidence of the Year

After the plane crashed there were reports that a joint effort between the two men had supplied a drug plane (a Gulfstream II; N987SA) to a government operation in Tampa that was running what a top DEA official in Miami several years later characterized as a ‘rogue’ drug operation  in the Tampa office of ICE (Immigration & Customs Enforcement).

A New York Post account, Crash Jet Had Air of Mystery , caught the whiff of intrigue which surrounds the incident to this day. The plane had previously been detected flying extraordinary renditions to Guantanamo beginning in 2003, according to the European Union.  It was tacitly assumed someone from the CIA was using a spare desk inside the Tampa ICE office.

Arik Kislin owned the aircraft charter company, Air Ritter, that “loaned,” to the CIA for use in extraordinary renditions flights to Guantanamo, the Gulfstream II jet (tail number N987SA) owned by hotel partner, wealthy New York real estate tycoon William Achenbaum.

Back in the 90′s, he owned a company called Blond Management, which should be a modelling agency, but was, instead, purportedly a commodities trading firm.

For reasons best known only to other commodities traders, the firm found it necessary to bring over from Mother Russia a professional assassin from one of Moscow’s top gangs. Asked ‘what for,’  a company spokesman had no comment. Or, if you will, he “clammed up.”

Arik Kislin was also fingered in German court documents for being involved with top Russian Mob figures. According to a 2012 report in the New York Post, he is the nephew of a powerful Russian Mafia don named Semyon Kislin.

When the CIA does business with Mobsters, what’s the quid pro quo?

Here in the U.S., where he is now known as “Hamptons-hopping businessman Arik Kislin” he ran a war chest for a Russian gang whose activities included “engaging in robberies, extortion shakedowns, drug and weapons dealing, as well as illegal prostitution and money laundering,” according to a panel of three German judges.

“Caesars Drops Gansevoort From Vegas Project After Probe,” read a headline in an Oct 2013 Bloomsberg business story.  Caesars was dropping out of a $200 million project to brand the Hotel Gansevoort name in a high-end boutique hotel and casino operation on the Las Vegas Strip, Bloomsberg reported, “after regulators raised concerns about the hotel operator.”

Casino regulators in Nevada are apparently more worried about the growth of Russian Mob influence in the United States than U.S. intelligence agencies designed to protect the U.S.  from infiltration by exactly that kind of influence.

Caesar’s announcement promised to keep pushing for a high-end boutique hotel-casino project but maybe they were just being ironic when they identified a vendor they had in mind: “Bill’s Gamblin’ Hall and Saloon.”

Through the Decades with The American Drug Lords

Interest in Ramy El Batrawi  was first sparked when an attorney for famous American drug smuggler Barry Seal became instrumental, after Barry Seal’s assassination in the mid-80′s,  in incorporating a number of corporate shell companies for Saudi fixer and CIA bag-man Adnan Khashoggi and his underling El Batrawi, with a number of entities appearing with addresses in the Tampa-St Petersburg area.

Fast forward to 2006. The announcement that  Sterling had chosen a close Adnan Khashoggi associate for an award designed to honor service to the homeless raised  eyebrows in LA.  Wary of another Sterling exercise in self-promotion, a reporter for the LA Times bluntly asked El Batrawi to cite one thing he’d done for the unfortunates living on Skid Row in downtown LA.

El Batrawi admitted he couldn’t recall anything offhand. Despite this glitch, the award was announced with great fanfare in full page ads in the Times and in a  flurry of press releases, during the summer of 2006, at the same time the drug operation in Tampa  was in full swing.

Ramy El Batrawi had also just been indicted  along with Adnan Khashoggi for stealing more than $120 million of investor and taxpayer money. (The figure would later double.) Khashoggi was on the lam. Under normal circumstances, this might be considered to be another glitch. But con men and spooks have a lot in common: both lie for a living. El Batrawi haughtily explained that one had nothing to do with the other. 

Next question?

Sterling’s choice of Ramy El Batrawi  as “Humanitarian of the Year” remains unexplained.  Whether the plane (a DC-9; N12ONE)  he ‘donated’ to the rogue drug operation in Tampa had anything to so with it remains unknown.

Yet to hide that transaction, the DC-9 wase first was sold to Finova Corp., an admitted CIA front company in Phoenix and Toronto. Only then was it passed forward to Tampa.

Just a kid from Geneva

Ramy El Batrawi represents the  prototype of what a polished international gangster will look like during the rest of the 21^st Century.

Owing to his birth in Geneva, Switzerland, he exemplifies the bloodless idea that electronic transfers between anonymous accounts is somehow the new face of “transnational organized crime.” 

And he’s not an American, which means he can be used by U.S. intelligence services with the same added cushion of plausible deniability that made Dutch national Rudi Dekkers such an attractive asset in the years before the 9/11 attack.

He has made “fronting” airplanes and even airlines for the CIA into a career, posing during the Iran Contra scandal as the president of an Adnan Khashoggi-owned airline in Miami called Jetborne that secretly flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to Iran.

On his website, he describes himself as a “businessman.”  If bunco artists, grifters, charlatans, stock fraud scamsters, racketeers, swindlers and flimflam men count as  businessmen, that may even be true.

Take a Stockwalk on the Wild Side

El Batrawi and Khashoggi were the lead actors in a massive financial fraud called Stockwalk, that resulted in the biggest brokerage collapse in American history to the time (2005). It cost  investors and American taxpayers more than $200,000,000.

It was especially noteworthy for being both an ecumenical and an economical undertaking.  Ecumenical, because it brought together Israeli and Saudi fraudsters to work side-by-side with American and Canadian financial scam artists. And economical, because the financial hyena pack end of things did double duty, helping out at night, if you will. Example: Jonathon Curshen, doing 20 years for fraud just now, was a big help.

It also introduced a new way to illegally manipulate stock. The proof of concept was a Khashoggi and El Batrawi-led company called GenesisIntermedia.  German Deutchebank was eventually forced to pick up a pretty big tab: $265 million.

When Donald Sterling ‘gal-pal’ V Stiviano was punched out by a man she’d never met in front of New York’s Hotel Gansevoort, she’d entered—maybe not another dimension of space and time, exactly—but a place where the old rule don’t apply. 

Its a place where you can get slapped around, or punched around, and American icons suggest you’re running a “slip an fall.”

Former LA Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda said he hoped “she gets hit with a car.”

Donald Trump described her  as “the girlfriend from hell.” About the woman who taped her conversation with the Clippers owner, Trump told Fox & Friends, “It’s terrible. He got set up by a very, very bad girlfriend, let’s face it.”  Then, manfully ‘facing it,’ Trump called her a “terrible human being.”

NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton said he wished Sterling’s infamous ex had never shown her visor in the Big Apple.  “We would have hoped that she would stay on the West Coast.”

Placing America’s already shaky reputation in the hands of people that the New York Post calls the Shady Inn Crowd  should not be a decision left to an agency, the CIA, that has no problem with seeing a million American citizens go to prison for selling small amounts of what they offload by the ton.

When its all over, my money on who will be judged to have slipped and fallen in New York City two weeks ago will be on Donald Sterling,  a guy who wasn’t even there.

A six-year long investigation into the drug trafficking operation in St Petersburg Florida that was exposed when two planes were busted in the Yucatan carrying a total of 10 tons of cocaine revealed the planes had all been “parked,” or “sheep-dipped,” in the names of straw owners to conceal the CIA’s involvement.

The composition of this group of straw owners, composed of a fascinating collection of people with often interlocking connections through various other enterprises, says a lot about the circles the CIA runs in.

Among the few who lent their names to the registration of more than one of these CIA planes is the granddaughter of Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, who back in the 1930’s was known as the richest man in America. Hunt’s other singular distinction is having been accused by Russian newspaper Pravda of being behind the JFK assassination.

A disquieting discovery

The investigation uncovered incontrovertible, if unsurprising, proof of involvement in the operation by the Mob (in this case, the Chicago Outfit) by Texas oil interests, Saudi financiers,  and, of course, the CIA.

But unearthing new evidence about the CIA’s role in the drug trade for the past 50 years no longer provides much grist for the gossip mill. Time marches on. Gary Webb was right. Everybody knows it.

One sign of the times is that where once there was outrage over CIA involvement in drug trafficking, today many seem glad to see the Agency developing outside interests that don’t require access to a dungeon.

What is eye-opening however is the disquieting discovery that those involved in the enterprise,  like Adnan Khashoggi and his lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi, both of whom have long histories in past CIA operations, also used their ability to operate with impunity—their get out of jail free card—to act like the worst sort of double-dealing flimflam men, bunco artists and grifters.

They were doing the CIA “double-dip.” Keeping one eye on incoming flights at St Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport for news of  a drug plane’s safe return to Florida, and one eye on the fine print in SEC filings.

Khashoggi and El-Batrawi used a slick financial stock scheme to game the system, and plunder hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and taxpayers in what became known as Stockwalk, which led to what was then (2004-2005) the largest brokerage bankruptcy since the Great Depression.

Khashoggi and El-Batrawi participated in the wide-spread looting  of the American economy. But they were far from acting alone.

Was the plundering systematic?

The sheer number of clearly CIA-connected entities engaged in massive financial fraud, for example, by stripping companies of their assets and using bankruptcy laws to walk away, that I encountered while pursuing links to drug trafficking in St. Petersburg was astonishing. A big question today: Was the plundering systematic?

But first,today, a brief explanation of the overt role in the drug trafficking operation played by the two Saudi men. Khashoggi lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi supplied one of SkyWay’s twin DC-9’s.

Once I’d obtained the FAA registration records for the two DC-9’s, N900SA and N12ONE, it soon became obvious that both planes had been sheep-dipped through a number of owners of convenience to hide the identity of their true owners, the CIA.

Start here: Sometime in June of 2003 someone made the decision that SkyWay’s fleet of planes needed beefing up with a second DC-9.  

Khashoggi and El-Batrawi had one. But there was a problem. Given the controversy over the massive fraud involved in the bankrupting of Khashoggi and El-Batrawi’s GenesisIntermedia, by 2003 El-Batrawi’s aviation company, Genesis Aviation, was not exactly the CIA’s most discreet aviation front company.

How can you tell if a plane’s been sheep-dipped by the CIA?

An almost-always accurate test for picking a sheep-dipped CIA plane out of a line-up: Check out the previous owners. Why? Because when the CIA needs a specific make of plane, they don’t thumb through the “Planes for Sale” ads in Trade-A-Plane magazine.

They find the needed plane among the Agency’s own vast inventory. (Remember: the CIA at one time fielded the largest airline on the planet.)  Once they’ve found the plane they want, they will very often sell it back and forth a few times between a few of the Agencies’ thousands of off-the-shelf dummy front companies to throw anyone snooping around off the scent.

It makes for sloppy “tradecraft.”  But hardly anyone ever looks. And the biggest enemy to the anonymity of the CIA’s air fleet in recent years have been the planespotters, who don’t pore over registration records, but intuit a plane’s function by tracking the routes it flies over time.

Okay. Preamble over. So on July 3 2003, the registration records of N12ONE shows it being sold by El-Batrawi’s Genesis Aviation to Finova Capital Corporation in Scottsdale Arizona. So already there’s a big red flag.

Briefly, while writing “Barry & the Boys,” I began tracing one of CIA pilot Barry Seal’s favorite planes, a Beechcraft King Air, which later turned up in the aviation pool of Texas Governor George W. Bush, where it was reportedly Bush’s favorite plane. It was curious.

An offshore CIA front company

The Beech King Air 200, as well as several others used by Barry Seal, were  owned by Greyhound Leasing of Phoenix, a subsidiary of Finova, a CIA front company set up in Arizona and headquartered in Canada to escape American financial disclosure requirements.

Then there’s notorious CIA airline Southern Air Transport (SAT), which owned the C-123 used by Barry Seal in the Nicaragua sting operation which made him famous. The same C-123 was later shot down over Nicaragua in 1986, and the lone survivor Eugene Hasenfus was captured by Sandinista soldiers, setting off what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal.

Back then, no one knew, or admitted knowing, who owned Southern Air.

But when General Richard Secord’s airline went bankrupt a dozen years later, Southern Air was revealed to have been secretly owned by Finova.

So Finova’s presence is a big red flag. Another red flag: Finova  doesn’t show up just once in the FAA records of the plane.

The original owner of the DC-9 (N12ONE) was Finova subsidiary Greyhound Leasing of Phoenix, who also owned  some of CIA pilot and drug smuggler Barry Seal’s planes.  The company registered the plane in Nov of 1976.

An exercise in sheep-dipping

Yet another red flag, and a big one, is the record of what happened next in the history of N12ONE when Genesis Aviation sold the plane.

On the same day El-Batrawi’s Genesis Aviation sold the DC-9 to Finova, Finova turned around and sold the plane to Scott Aviation in Chicago, owned by a cement contractor with a hot temper named Anthony Aiello.

But apparently the day was still young, because also on July 2 Scott Aviation sold the plane to Anthony Aiello and Gregory Hodgson. In effect, Aiello was selling the plane to himself. While I was tempted to phone him and ask why, upon reflection I thought better of it.

The exercise in sheep-dipping is complete when Aiello sells the DC-9 to Skyway and Royal Sons Inc., a company owned by one of Skyway’s directors, Frederic Geffon.  It was presumably designed to thwart anyone making a connection between the St Petersburg-based Khashoggi and El-Batrawi and the St Petersburg-based SkyWay.

 Now things get really interesting. Because another now-bankrupt Chicago corporation, HW Aviation, co-owned by Geoffrey Hodgson, who as we’ve just seen also briefly owned N12ONE, also owned the other DC-9, (N900SA), the one busted in the Yucatan carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.

There are hundreds of DC-9’s still flying. The odds of one company owning both planes that ended up flying for SkyWay are pretty slim…unless there is a concealed entity moving both planes around.

Also, Anthony Aiello, Gregory Hodgson, HW Aviation, & Scott Aviation are all in the Chicago area. They appear to represent one entity; to be four different ways of saying the same thing.

This is not the only example of an owner which owned both planes. Recent owners of the St Petersburg FL-based DC9, for example, have interlocking partnerships with recent owners of the St Petersburg FL-based Gulfstream II business jet—whose owners we haven’t even addressed yet!—that crashed in the Yucatan in September 2007 carrying almost four tons of cocaine.

Revelation of the identity of another owner of  both DC-9’s pretty much rules out coincidence as being the cause for the same people and businesses stumbling into ownership of two of the hundreds of DC-9’s still flying …while otherwise having nothing to do with each other.

Oil Tycoon’s Granddaughter owned both planes

Texas oilman H.L. Hunt founded Hunt Petroleum Corp. In 1930 he purchased an oil well in Rusk County, Texas, and 5,000 acres surrounding it which locked up control of what turned out to be the largest pool of petroleum in the Lower 48.  By 1935 oil tycoon H. L. Hunt was known as the richest man in America.

His sons became famous after him. Nelson Bunker Hunt was famous for his far-right conservative views, and for one almost succeeding in cornering the silver market. Lamar Hunt, longtime owner of the Kansas City Chiefs,  spearheaded the creation of the American Football League.

When Forbes magazine published its first list of the 400 wealthiest Americans in 1982, the Hunt family claimed 5 of the top 10 spots.

H.L. Hunt’s granddaughter, Alinda Hill Wikert, has owned at various times both of the Dc-9’s made famous by SkyWay in St. Petersburg, through three separate companies, Wesael, JRW Aviation, and Express One International.

On November 20,1987, one of her companies, Wesael Corp of Dallas, buys the DC-9 N12ONE From Harrah’s Casino in Reno.

On the 31^st of May 1989 another of her companies, Express One International, purchases DC-9 (N12ONE) from Wesael Corp, another of her companies.

On the 22^nd of December 1997, JRW Aviation of Dallas, which she owns with her husband, aviation executive James Wickert, buys DC-9 (N900SA) from K.E.B. Aircraft.

On the 15^th of November 2000, JRW Aviation buys DC-9 (N900SA).

 What does it all mean?

At the very least, the interlocking ownership of just these two planes speaks to a large operation.

There remain several pieces of information important to the story.

Express One International was founded by Kenneth Good, who, with George Herbert Walker Bush’s son Neil Bush, got $100 million in loans from Silverado Savings which were never repaid.

Express One founder Ken Good was also in business with former CIA pilot Mark Shubin. Good’s airline supplied aircraft and crews to Sky Bus during his brief life an airline. In 1992, Express One supplied the campaign plane used by Presidential candidate Bill Clinton.

Bringing things roughly full circle, Mark Shubin was also partnered in several ventures and a hand-full of planes with Huffman Aviation flight school owner Wally Hilliard. Shubin’s Sky Bus, Inc. shared ownership of two planes, tail numbers N11UN and N111UN, with Wally Hilliard’s Plane 1 Leasing.

The ‘UN’ designation on the tail number seemed an obvious clue. And in fact Shubin owned a company called ‘International Diplomatic Courier Services,’ which apparently worked at the UN.

Being able to access diplomatic pouches must have been a great comfort.

Small world

Today the president of Express One International is David Byers, at whose flight school Mohamed Atta trained at the Charlotte County Airport, according to Charlotte County Sheriff William Clements.

Finally, there is a little more possibly pertinent information to pass on  about Alina Hill Wickert’s famous  grandfather. 

In 1963, Dallas billionaire H.L. Hunt poured millions into a ceaseless anti-Kennedy radio campaign; it was the dawn of extremist radio in the nation. Hunt’s program, “Life Line,” reached 10 million listeners a day with scorching attacks against Kennedy.

Hunt also controlled a vast private intelligence network, that included the John Birch Society.

Hunt’s son purchased a full-page ad in the Dallas newspaper the day JFK arrived, accusing the President of betraying the Constitution. A leaflet appeared all over town that accused JFK of treason.

Immediately after the JFK assassination H. L. Hunt was rushed to the airport and taken out of the country by the FBI. Supposedly, they’d received notice of a plot to kill him. But instead of protective custody, they moved Hunt to a secret destination in Mexico.

Lyndon Johnson’s former mistress, Madeleine Duncan Brown, told author Robert Gaylon Ross prior to her death in 2002 that Johnson was involved in the murder of JFK. The plot that had its origins in the 1960 Democratic Convention.

Johnson, according to Brown, colluded with oil tycoon H. L. Hunt to have Kennedy eliminated.

“It was a total political crime and H.L. Hunt really controlled what actually happened to John Kennedy — he and Lyndon Johnson,” said Brown. “It was a political crime for political power.”

On the night before the assassination Johnson allegedly said, “Those SOBs will never embarrass me again.”

The top Russian newspaper, Pravda, (which, for what its worth, means truth) announced that Texas oil man H.L. Hunt arranged JFK assassination.

Maybe it was just a lucky guess.