“Hollywood Head” Was Drug Cartel ‘Concierge’

The decapitated head found in a plastic bag on a hiking trail in the shadow of the  Hollywood Sign four months ago belonged to a man known to local authorities as  the former “concierge” in Los Angeles for the now-defunct Cali drug cartel, the Mad Cow MorningNews has learned exclusively.

“His activities were legal; he booked hotels, limos, dinner reservations, that sort of thing,” a source inside the LAPD told us. “We didn’t consider it relevant because he was most active back in the early 90’s.”

A spokesman for the LAPD didn’t just fail to mention Medellin’s former status as a cartel employeehe actively misled reporters, concealing the brazen intrusion into American life of the signature atrocity of Mexican drug cartels by insinuating that Medellin’s beheading had been, somehow, a “gay thing.”

The disinformation was reported in hundreds of places.

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The San Diego DEA’s Dirty Secret

If the San Diego DEA is looking for suspects with more than a little bit of coke dust sticking to their lapels or a few marijuana seeds in a car ashtray, we’d like to help.

Nine college students got together on a Friday night recently in an off-campus apartment in San Diego to commemorate a group of teenagers calling themselves the Waldos, who met during the school year back in 1971 promptly at 4:20 pm every day beneath a statue of Louis Pasteur at San Rafael High School to smoke pot.

At the San Diego office of the Drug Enforcement Administration, this harmless bit of frivolity apparently caused something of a hissy fit. The next day, Apr. 21, DEA agents with guns drawn burst through the door at the apartment of a friend of Daniel Chong, and took all nine people inside into custody.

The result—as is now well-known—was that Daniel Chong, a senior engineering student at a California university, was handcuffed and then abandoned for nearly five days in a federal holding cell, where he was forced to drink his own urine to stay alive.Chong says he suffered kidney failure and nearly died.

But that wasn’t even the worst thing that happened.

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Art Nadel and the Wall Street Wise Guys

The death in prison of Art Nadel last week left numerous questions about the scandal that may never be answered.

Authorities will now be rolling up the sidewalks on the Art Nadel scandal, continuing the trend of American scandals going unexplained and largely unexplored stretching back to Iran Contra.

Art Nadel was a disbarred NY attorney with a recent work history consisting of playing gigs in second rate piano bars. Yet apparently the FBI's best "thinking" is that Nadel was a lounge act who stole $166 million… all by himself.

Was Art Nadel the mastermind of a huge financial fraud, or just a hapless front man?  A Ponzi all star? Or a Ponzi patsy? We may never know.

Two matters cry out for more attention.  The first involves the names of the firms which made Nadel’s fraud possible:  Wachovia Bank, whose assistance enabled Nadel’s scheme, and  Goldman Sachs, the Wall Street firm which cleared his trades.  

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Fat Cops, Official Lackeys & The Parasitic Rich

My beat is drug trafficking and the American Drugs Lords, but there will be occasional digressions, as the spirit moves me. Last week, it moved me a lot…

Remember the pepper-spraying cop at that UC Davis Occupy Wall Street rally last November? The official government report was released last week, and it makes interesting reading.

Once again your government has failed you. Once again no one’s to blame. Once again, nobody’s going down.

44 years after the world watched squads of thugs wearing police uniforms at the Democratic Convention in Chicago commit felony assault with vicious intent to do bodily harm against Americans seeking redress for grievances (the generation-long Vietnam War), little has changed.

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Narco-Banker: The Allen Stanford Story

With his recent conviction on 13 counts of money laundering—ensuring that a man who once lived in a $57 million mansion with a moat will be doing his entertaining behind bars for a very long time—the Allen Stanford scandal would seem to be all but over.  

But Allen Stanford’s Ponzi scandal is ending before the most important question about the scandal has even been asked…

How did a gym owner filing bankruptcy in Texas happen to wake up a year later owning an offshore bank?

In 1982, Allen Stanford was the bankrupt owner of a bankrupt chain of athletic clubs in Waco Texas. In his personal bankruptcy filing he listed $13.6 million in debt against less than $200,000 in assets.

Paul Holt,  a businessman in Waco Texas, watched as Stanford’s sketchy business career was getting underway. “I knew about Stanford’s failed health club in Waco, Texas, because that’s where I live, and I was there when it happened,” Holt told Vanity Fair in 2010. 

“Then one day I go online and out of the corner of my eye I see this headline: ‘Allen Stanford, Caribbean Banking King, in $8 billion Scandal.’”

“And I’m going, whoa! How does somebody go from bankrupting a Total Fitness Center to becoming a knight in the Caribbean?”

Whoa, indeed.

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Sarasota, Florida: “The Meanest City in America”

As their son’s killer was sentenced to life in prison last week, the parents of two vacationing Brits murdered in Florida expressed anger over receiving no message of condolence from President Barack Obama, even though the President had recently expressed sympathy in the slaying of a 17-year old black teenager, also in Florida.

The two young British tourists, still in their early twenties, were murdered by a sneering teen with a tattoo reading 'Savage' across his chest, who ‘capped’ them after ignoring their  pleas for their lives, squeezing off round after round until his gun was out of bullets. 

Unknown to the grieving parents was that Obama’s embarrassed silence may not have been a matter of race, but of place: Sarasota, where the young Brits were slain, has been called “the meanest city in America” for the less fortunate by one newspaper, USA TODAY, and "heartless" by another.

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Allen Stanford & ‘The Caribbean Two-Step’

Call it the “Caribbean two-step.”

The dance the U.S. Government has just pirouetted through with convicted mega-swindler Allen Stanford, repeats a familiar pattern its been using for at least 30 years. But rarely has it looked more like a lumberjack in  The Nutcracker.

According to final reports of investigations by the two hand-wringing U.S. Agencies most involved—the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (“FINRA”)—cowboy bandit Stanford was known to have been running a Ponzi scheme as early as 1997.

Those were simpler times. Back then, scientists were still trying to clone dolly the sheep. And Allen Stanford had “only” stolen a billion dollars. By the time he was busted the figure had gone up to  $7 billion.  

So, who was out the big bucks? Mostly investors from  Latin America:  Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela, most of whom are currently either suing the SEC, or thinking about it.

However jilted investors could probably make an equally good case against the DEA, because at the same time he had a Fly-Through Window open at his narco-bank laundering drug money, according to the BBC,  Allen Stanford was a DEA informant.

No word yet on whether the DEA felt this might present a concern.

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Allen Stanford, American Drug Lord

Missing from coverage of the conviction two weeks ago of Texas "financier" Allen Stanford for running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme was any mention of Stanford’s long-time role as an authentic—if no longer certified—American Drug Lord. 

"Sir" Allen (the title was bought) is an excellent example of a curiously under-publicized species: the American Drug Lord. (The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration claims the species doesn’t even exist; it may be they have their own reasons.)

To most observers in the Caribbean, however, Stanford’s narco-bank was as visible a manifestation of the global drug trade as a homemade semi-submersible submarine, or a convoy of SUV’s snaking through Sinaloa’s Sierra Madre Mountains. 

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America’s NarcoBank: Wachovia Bank was BCCI with a drawl

Convicted Sarasota Ponzi fraudster Art Nadel, currently holed up in a Federal prison in North Carolina, is back in the news, after a Federal bankruptcy receiver filed a lawsuit accusing Wachovia Bank of criminal complicity in Nadel’s theft of $168 million. 

This is a story about financial fraud, drug money,  and a global crime network that links BCCI, known as the Bank of Crooks & Criminals Incorporated, with North Carolina’s Wachovia Bank.

While Art Nadel's Ponzi scheme was at its peak, between 2003 and 2007,  Wachovia Bank was engaged in more continuing criminal activity than in all six seasons of The Sopranos. 

Wachovia helped Nadel—who had recently been playing piano lounges around Sarasota for a living— masquerade as a "hedge fund advisor," even though the bank knew he was nothing of the kind, the suit alleges.

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