A five-year long
struggle to penetrate the mysteries of two huge drug busts in
Mexico on American-registered planes may soon receive answers,
courtesy an unlikely source: a Congressional investigation into
Operation Gunwalker, an ATF program with no discernible law
enforcement purpose that allowed arms traffickers to smuggle
2000 weapons across the border to Mexican drug lords.
If the CIA is
arming Mexican drug cartels, might they not also have been
behind the otherwise-puzzling effort to supply these same drug
lords with top-quality American-registered airplanes and jets?
Were the two now-infamous American-registered
planes busted in Mexico's Yucatan carrying almost ten tons of
cocaine part of this same so-far unnamed Operation behind the
ATF's Operation Gunwalker?
It is the second largest shipment of cocaine ever
seized in Mexico, the emblematic drug story of our times.
And its looking
more and more like a CIA operation.
denial on American
DrugLords
Pilot of 'Cocaine One' DC9 is Re-Re-Re-Arrested
July 6 2011--Venice FL
One of the
greatest escapes since Houdini was locked in handcuffs and
leg-irons, nailed inside a crate, and lowered to the bottom of
New York’s East River reached its conclusion two weeks ago, when
a drug pilot who has escaped from custody in three different
countries
and eluded an international manhunt was arrested in a van with
70 kilos of cocaine in a parking lot at the Radisson Hotel in
Caracas, Venezuela.
Carmelo Vasquez-Guerra, the pilot on two of the most famous and
controversial drug flights of the past decade, was taken into
custody by Venezuelan police without incident, along with two
other men, ending an incredible five-year long saga featuring
repeated arrest, but little detention.
During that time
Vasquez-Guerra was arrested, and then inexplicably released from
custody, in not onc...not two... but in three
different countries, located on two separate continents. And his
astounding ability to slither out of serious trouble raises
disturbing questions about who's winning—and losing—the war on
drugs.
Carmelo Vasquez-Guerra—in the world global drug trafficking—is
The Great Houdini II.
Even so, when his time ran out, and his run from the law finally
ended, he went out, not with a bang…
The criminal syndicate responsible for massive
drug moves using two planes from St. Petersburg, Florida-a DC9
caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine and a Gulfstream II busted
eighteen months later with four tons-include among its number at
least two well-known Americans whose names have not previously
surfaced.
One is a man present at the inception of a political scandal
which swirled for several decades around what was, at least
until recently, the world's most infamous bank: BCCI, the Bank
of Crooks & Criminals International.
It took the curiosity of a local cop in upstate New York, who
stumbled onto and then busted a summit meeting of the American
Mob in Apalachin in November of 1957 to finally force FBI head
J. Edgar Hoover to stop mincing (figuratively) around, and admit
the existence of organized crime in America.
But even in today's supposedly more enlightened times, for
America's DEA to admit to being "in denial" over the existence
of the American Drug Lords will probably take a
nationally-televised intervention in prime time, hosted by Dr
Phil.
The idea that Bert Lance, or former top U.S. military officials
Major General Richard Secord and Air Force Brigadier General
Heinie Aderholt were associated with a criminal syndicate using
American planes to haul tons of cocaine up from South America
may not be as shocking as it once was.
What does seem improbable is that, even if true, it would ever
make the news. When was the last time anyone heard about an
American General being arrested for anything?
German artist Jenny Holzer said it best: "Abuse of Power Comes
as No Surprise."
Not since nearly 50 years ago when the
CIA tried to pass off a man shown in two black and white
photographs taken outside the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City as
Lee Harvey Oswald, has the truth been so openly and casually
violated as during the ferocious campaign to roll back some of
what was already known and on the public record about Mohamed
Atta in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack.
The revelation last week that a key
eyewitness to the activities in Florida of the 9/11 hijackers
never changed his story about Mohamed Atta being drunk and
belligerent in his bar four days before the 9/11 attack raised
new questions about major news media coverage in the aftermath.
When former
Shuckum's bar manager Tony Amos re-affirmed his initial
account in an interview last week with the Miami Herald, it
became strikingly apparent that, with no explanation at all, and
without any retraction from him or the major news outlets which
reported his account, the quickly-congealing official story had
changed Mohamed Atta from a belligerent drunk pounding down
Stoli and orange juice to a meek teetotaler sipping cranberry
juice and playing video games.
There are only two possible
explanations for the discrepancy.
Neither reflect well on the state of
America’s vaunted free press.
May 18, 2011--Venice FL
The elaborate cover-up of the
activities in Florida of Mohamed Atta and the other terrorist
hijackers, first reported here and in “Welcome to
TerrorLand,” received spectacular confirmation last week from a
surprising source, The Miami Herald.
In a Osama Bin Laden postmortem,
reporter Elinor Brecher checked in on people in Florida whose
lives had forever been changed after intersecting with those of
the terrorist hijackers, and in the process clearly exposed the
mechanism of “instant revisionist history” used during the
aftermath of the 9/11 attack to cover-up reporting in the
mainstream media which contradicted or was otherwise at odds
with the official story then being assembled.
The paper tracked down the former
manager of Shuckum’s Raw Oyster Bar, Tony Amos, whose misfortune
was to have witnessed Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and a third
still-unidentified man getting drunk in his bar several nights
prior to the 9/11 attack.
And in the article’s opening sentence,
The Mami Herald confirmed what to some observers was never in
doubt: Tony Amos tells the same story today that he first
related in TIME, NEWSWEEK, and the AP wire service just two days
after the 9/11 attack:
“On Sept. 7, 2001, Mohamed Atta and
Marwan al-Shehhi pounded down drinks at Shuckum’s Oyster Bar on
Young Circle in Hollywood,” the paper reported…”forever changing
life for some in South Florida who unknowingly entered their
orbit. Like Tony Amos, the night manager who backed up waitress
Patricia Idrissi at Shuckum’s.”
Mohamed Atta got—not just drunk—but
drunk and belligerent.
For the past almost ten years the
official story has insisted exactly the opposite.
When I wrote
“Barry & the boys” almost ten years ago I had no idea the story
of America’s most famous drug smuggler would soon be
relevant to the biggest event of the still-young 21st Century,
the 9/11 attack... but it is.
When a Lear-jet
belonging to the owner of the flight school where Mohamed Atta
had just begun flight training was seized in July 2000 carrying
43 lbs of heroin (according to the Orlando Sentinel, a Central
Florida record) the story would have had huge implications for
the true identity of Atta’s 9/11 terrorist cadre, and why they
were living in a tiny retirement community with the second
oldest population in the entire United States.
Would have had
huge implications—except it was suppressed.
When one of the
men in the famous photograph from the cover of “Barry & the
boys,’ of Barry Seal and other members of the CIA’s super-secret
Operation 40 assassination squad in a Mexico City night-club 10
months before the Kennedy assassination was identified as Porter
Goss, picked by President George W. Bush to head America’s
Central Intelligence Agency in 2004... it should have been big
news.
Should have
been. But this news, too, was suppressed. But now here's a
bit of good news:
"Barry & the
boys, “currently selling for between $100 and $150
dollars on Amazon, is back in print, and available
for a donation on this website.
What's the connection between Mohamed Atta and ‘The Godfather’
of Sarasota County?
Today he is all but forgotten, but long-time owner and publisher
of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, intimate of Presidents, and
arms peddler David B. Lindsay Jr. left an indelible mark on
almost everything in his former fiefdom of Sarasota County.
And nowhere is that stamp more visible than at the Sarasota
Herald-Tribune, the newspaper monopoly he created and ran for
three decades. The paper's coverage area—from Sarasota through
Venice and down into Charlotte County— is, as it happens,
exactly where Mohamed Atta spent most of his time while in the
U.S.
The
owner/publisher
of the terrorists' hometown paper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, spent the Second World War working
for General Claire
Chennault of the famous Flying Tigers, who numerous published
sources claim initiated the first use of heroin trafficking to
fund anti-communist operations by the CIA and the
American military.
When 43 lbs of heroin, a Central Florida record, according to
the Orlando Sentinel, were seized in July 2000 aboard a Lear-jet
belonging to Wally Hilliard, the owner of the flight school Atta
had begun training at just three weeks earlier, it can now be
seen as just another episode in the decades-long history of
drug trafficking in the town of Venice, the County of Sarasota,
and Florida's Gulf Coast.
The airport where three of the four
terrorist pilots in the 9/11 attack learned to fly was a hub of
operations in the 1970's and early '80's for "The Company," an
international drug smuggling organization headquartered in
Lexington, Kentucky and Mena, Arkansas.
Led by a mysterious Cuban exile, who
used the alias "Frank Guzman," The Company's contingent at the
Venice Airport numbered as many as a dozen pilots and
associates.
"The Company," whose name is a
commonly-used euphemism for the CIA, was profiled in Sally
Denton's best-selling book "The Blue-Grass Conspiracy," which
raised pointed questions about the involvement of the CIA with
the group.
"Venice was a kind of quiet Mena
(Arkansas)," stated a former drug pilot for The Company.
"Jackson Stephens built this huge headquarters next to the
airport. And he was in charge. But I do remember seeing Porter
Goss around the airport a lot."
The 60-year secret history of covert
CIA and military operations at the Venice Municipal Airport now
coming to light goes well beyond anything previously known to
have taken place there.
It is known as “the shark tooth capital of the world."
But tiny Venice, Florida might more truthfully be called "the
home of an original CIA SpookPort."
One of the current owners
of the former Huffman Aviation at the Venice Municipal Airport
had a strange involvement with a Mexican company used as a front
to launder drug money for a drug ring Federal prosecutors called
"the biggest cocaine smuggling organization in American
history."
It was led, until his assassination in 1986, by life-long CIA
pilot Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal.
Lurking behind the façade of what is today known as “Tristate
Aviation dba Suncoast Aviation,” we can reveal, is another man
named “Barry.”
Whether this is mere coincidence, or a message from the gods,
remains at this point unknown.
In either case, the link will be explored in an upcoming story.
But it demonstrates the remarkable continuity of control of the
U.S. drug trade—over decades—by a group which is
shy about only one thing: it's identity.
They don't want us to even know their name.
We call them the American Drug Lords. We think you should too.
It fits.
In sunny Venice Florida, we have been bearing witness to
something dark.
With the return of "'Barry & 'the boys," it just
got darker.
Mar
02,2011--Venice, FL.
A Dallas-based Gulfstream V luxury jet seized for gold smuggling
last month by authorities in the war-torn eastern region of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo is also under investigation for
drug trafficking by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
The plane seized in Goma was on the DEA’s watch
list, according to reporter Melanie Gouby from the Radio
Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) news service, as well as the BBC
World Service.
Behind the Gulfstream stands a motley crew of
Texas movers and shakers:
The owner of the plane, who the Dallas News repeatedly
refers to as “philanthropist David Disiere,”
although “convicted felon David Disiere” might
be a more accurate description.
As a co-defendant
of notorious former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, Disiere
was facing 200 years in prison until he rolled on
Edwards and testified against him in a 2002 trial that put
Edwards behind bars for eight years.
Desirie claims to
be an innocent owner, and denies any wrongdoing in the case. But
he does it through his spokesman, Dan Allen,
former press secretary of House Majority leader Tom DeLay,
until, of course, DeLay was convicted and forced to
resign from the House in disgrace.
His airplane, a
Gulfstream V top-of-the-line $60 million luxury jet, was leased
to a prominent Texas oilman, Desirie avers.
Accounts differ on
whether Houston oilman Kace Lawal is still a
fugitive from justice in his native
Nigeria, where he stands accused of stealing 10 million
barrels of oil from the Nigerian government. But opinion is
unanimous that Lawal had been a major fundraiser in Hillary
Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.
Ironically, just
last year Secretary of State Clinton found herself in the
frontier town of Goma in the Congo, where the Gulfstream is
currently impounded.
She was there
speaking out “against the trade in ‘conflict minerals’ that has
funded a cycle of conflict there that has left more than 5
million people dead since 1998 and spawned an epidemic of sexual
violence.”
Mexican Drug Cartels & 'The Enterprise' at the Venice
Municipal Airport
Call it The
Enterprise. The "Company." The Iran-Contra rackets. The Octopus…
A shady Mexican businessman implicated in the failure of a bank
in Florida involved in money laundering, arms trading and drug
smuggling co-owned an aviation business at the Venice Airport
with a pilot who flew weapons to the contras in Honduras for
Oliver North, and a pastor at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road
Baptist Church.
Maximo Haddad is a Mexican construction tycoon, a citizen of
Panama, lives in a $5 million mansion in Palm Beach, and served
as Panama's Honorary Consul in Tampa.
When Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
searched Haddad's private jet in 2004, they discovered such an
embarrassingly large pile of cash and bearer bonds that The
State Department requested that Panama ask him to resign his
position.
Maximo Haddad
was asked to turn in his diplomatic pouch, a harsh sanction
indeed.
The
tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches. New books, new
documentaries, saturated airwaves. Filled with sound, filled
with fury, signifying—most of them—more or
less nothing.
What have we learned?
What does Mohamed Atta
have in common with Carlos Salinas?
Carlos and Raul Salinas grow
up on the Mexican border, opposite Laredo Texas. Their father is
in charge of Mexican Customs along the border. In a country
notorious for smuggling, the post soon makes him one of Mexico’s
richest men.
On December 18, 1951, major
Mexico City dailies reported that two children, Raul, 5, and
Carlos, 3, and an 8-year old playmate found a .22 rifle in the
closet, and played a ‘game’ with the 12-year old maid, an Indian
named Manuela. She knelt down. They executed her.
The three year old, Carlos,
is quoted saying, “I killed her with one shot. I am a hero.”
When Carlos grows up to be
president his biography will be purged of this inconvenient
fact. Every newspaper account of the incident disappear from
libraries across Mexico. His official biography states the
8-year old companion did the killing.
It’s
the biggest story of our time… and the biggest taboo.
It’s a testament
to the power of America’s biggest taboo that drug connections
between terrorist hijacker Mohamed Atta and the owner of the
U.S. flight school Atta called home have never even been
addressed.
The elephant in
the living room has escaped exposure through the invocation of
the big taboo.
The word
‘taboo’ comes from the South Pacific island of Tonga. It
means a prohibition against speaking about something—the
‘taboo’ thing—for fear of harm from a supernatural force.
Most taboos
concern avoiding objects and actions considered important to
maintenance of the social order.
While taboos
exist in all societies, anthropologists say, only the Tongans,
apparently, felt free enough to give it a name.
Today’s Drug Lords don’t look like Tony Montana
in “Scarface,” but preppy Yale and Harvard-educated scions of
America’s traditional political elite, which in point of fact is
what that they are.
Some consider this fact injurious to the current
social order. Not me, though...
Because taboos aren’t things that only exist in
places like Borneo or the pages of National Geographic.
UairmDEA to Hugo Chavez: "Find Your Own Trampoline"
Monday December
6
2010
by Daniel Hopsicker
An investigation into the
indictment for drug trafficking last month of a
former crony of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has revealed a
case of “deja coupall over again."
Makled-Garcia is accused of being behind a drug move on May 10
2009 which ended in a fatal crash of a Jetstream 19-passenger
turbo-prop airliner which was carrying 1.5 tons of cocaine, on
Utila, one of the Bay Islands just off Honduras' northern coast.
"The
flights from Venezuela came in every week," confirmed a resident
of Utila, in an exclusive interview. "It's a small island; so
the flights were an open secret."
The
Utila resident corroborates elements of Wakled's indictment, but
what he witnessed also raises new questions of whether critical
details have been deliberately left out.
For
example: As the drug plane approached Utila, its timing could
not have been worse. One day earlier massive demonstrations had
erupted in major cities across Honduras, protesting what turned
out to be an imminent military coup.
Chairman Chavez, Oliver
North & "Co-Conspirators Not Named as Defendants"
December 9
2010
by Daniel Hopsicker
The
now-famous DC9 from St Petersburg Florida caught carrying 5.5
tons of cocaine in the Yucatan four years ago is back in the
news, as the centerpiece of a new DEA campaign of “projective
orreverse propaganda."
Today
the DEA is gearing up to go after—to Noriega-ize—Hugo
Chavez, accusing him of engaging in a global drug trafficking
conspiracy of staggering dimensions.
The
propaganda campaign began in earnest last January, when an unidentified official from the Dept. of Homeland
Security announced the discovery of a pipeline, using cargo
planes and even Boeing 727’s, pumping cocaine from Venezuela
across the Atlantic to West Africa.
From
the FARC to Chavez to Al Qaeda... It
was a terrorist tri-fecta.
It must have been the closest thing to a wet
dream that grizzled old U.S. drug war apologist Gen. Barry
McCaffrey has had since Jane Russell starred in “The
Fuzzy Pink Nightgown.”
Tampa Bay to Timbuktu: American Drug Lords in the News
August
4 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker The
powerful American-led global cartel exposed when a DC9 from St
Petersburg Florida was busted in Mexico in April of 2006
carrying an astonishing 5.5 tons of cocaine has been in
the news... everywhere from Tampa to Timbuktu.
Frederic Geffon, the owner of record of the DC9, was never
charged with any crime.Yet he was no stranger to Federal law
enforcement officials.
Geffon, our investigation has learned, was the subject of a
Federal drug trafficking investigation in 1995. According to a
DEA report on the DC9 sent to Luis Correa, the Director of
Venezuela's National Anti-Drug Office, Frederic J. Geffon was
the subject of an investigation by US Customs in Tampa, Florida
in 1995, after being identified as an aircraft-broker-dealer
working with drug traffickers.
While U.S. law enforcement was doing nada about
Geffon, the Mexican government was also taking a siesta in the
sun regarding another dug cartel factotum involved in the
ill-fated DC9 drug move.
The DC9's pilot, Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, was-inexplicably
and with no explanation-released by Mexican authorities
sometime after being taken into custody.
When it comes to
this particular drug trafficking organization, both
nation's drug policy appears to be
"Catch and Release."
In a much-criticized
move, Acting DEA administrator Michele Leonhart spent more than
$123,000 to charter a private jet, instead of one of the DEA’s
own 106 planes, to fly to Colombia two years ago.
The level of
disapproval might have been even higher had it been known
that the DEA chartered the jet from a contractor with a major
investment in a shell company in Florida that owned a DC9 caught
carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico.
“Just as the
nation was reeling from the worst economic crisis in decades,
with the national debt climbing toward $10 trillion, Leonhart
chose an expensive outside jet charter company instead of one of
the DEA’s own 106 planes for her trip to Bogotá, Colombia last
fall,” reported Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers.
In a
Feb 16, 2009story
headlined “DEA official's private charter cost $123,000,”
Taylor reported that the DEA chartered the jet for Leonhart's
trip from L-3 Communications, which bills itself
as the nation's sixth largest defense contractor, and which made
more than $32 million from the DEA in 2008 for transportation
services, while the company's largest subsidiary, "Titan
Group of L-3 Communications," had a $70,000 investment
in a shell company in Miami with no employees, no earnings and
no prospects, but which somehow wound up as the
true and legal owner of a DC9 with a cargo of 5.5 tons of
cocaine.
Some suggest
that had been the purpose of the investment all along.
The
Bombardier Challenger 600 jet that went hurtling towards the end
of the runway at Teterboro Airport at nearly 200 miles an hour
before plowing through a steel perimeter fence and plunging across
a six-lane highway before crashing into a clothing warehouse and
bursting into flames finally put an end to Michael Brassington’s
decade-long crime spree in a federal court in New Jersey.
Until a federal jury in New
Jersey returned verdicts of guilty on the most serious charges
facing him yesterday, nothing had come close to stopping—or even
slowing down—Guyanese pilot Brassington’s flagrant disregard for
American justice.
The jet had sheared the tops off
of two cars and nearly decapitated one of the occupants, who had
bravely shouted a warning to his companion to duck an instant
before being struck by the wing of the plane, leaving him
permanently brain-damaged. Both pilots and two other people on the
ground were also seriously injured.
As a result of the convictions,
Michael Brassington faces 20 or more years in prison.
“The
Brassington Files,” is a partial list of stories published on this
website during the past eight years in which eyewitnesses implicate Michael
Brassington in drug trafficking for a continuing criminal enterprise of
breathtaking scope and magnitude and ties right at the top of the national
Republican Party.
Why
did elements of the U.S. Government take such a surprisingly keen
interest in controversial Guyanese drug pilot Michael Brassington
during 2003 and 2004? Was Brassington
involved with—or the subject of—a
secretive Miami-based U.S. Government operation?
Why, when Michael Brassington
attempted to re-enter the US through Fort Lauderdale International
Airport in April of 2004 was a Supervisor at Immigrations &
Customs Enforcement (ICE) instruvted to treat Brassington—a
long-time employee and business associate of Wallace J. Hilliard,
owner of the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta to fly— as
a “grave threat to national security?"
In
a week which began with the dubious Pentagon assertion that video
footage of a missile launch shot by a KCBS news helicopter over
Los Angeles was a vapor trail from a commercial jet distorted by
light on the horizon at sunset, the notion that another federal
agency could come up with a more ridiculous claim before the week
was out seemed well-nigh impossible.
But that’s just what happened...
Just months after Wachovia Bank was assessed a record $160 million
fine for laundering drug money used to buy a fleet of drug planes
for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, the curious case of an
American-registered airliner busted in the Yucatan carrying a
massive multi-ton load of cocaine has burst back into the news...
with a vengeance.
The U.S. claims to have identified
the global narcotics trafficker and “king among kingpins”
who “coordinated the transportation to Mexico” of the now-famous
last flight of a DC9 which took off from St. Petersburg FL on
April 5 2006 before being busted, five days later, carrying 5.5
tons of cocaine.
In an
indictment unsealed this week in Manhattan, Federal prosecutors
fingered Syrian-born Walid Makled-Garcia, 43, a
former crony of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, as
the man behind the flight.
The meaning
of the massive drug bust on an American-registered plane, in which
the American owners suffered no consequences for
having their plane caught with 5.5 tons of cocaine, has ignited
controversy and been the subject of an ongoing investigation
reported almost exclusively by this website for the past four
years, and is the subject of
a just-released 2-hour documentary.
And it is
now becoming even more contentious, if anything, in Venezuela and
much of Latin America, where it is dominating headlines in a
growing scandal which, for very different reasons, is becoming as hot as a five-alarm fire.
It’s hard to
imagine a cover-up in a case where someone has been charged with a
27-count Federal indictment.
But that’s
what’s happening in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, where the
trial of controversial Guyanese pilot Michael Francis Brassington
completed its third week of testimony last Friday, in what can be
viewed as a case study about just how much of the truth can—and
cannot—be spoken in America today.
It’s as if “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz were on
trial for double-parking his car while committing his string of
violent homicides… but he wasn’t being charged with the murders.
The news the
jurors won’t get to hear includes:
Just three days before the scheduled start of
Brassington’s trial, his attorney filed a
pre-trial motion asking U.S. District Judge Dennis
Cavanaugh to exclude testimony mentioning terrorism or the Joint
Terrorism Task Force.
During the
investigation into the crash of the Challenger CL-600 luxury jet
flown by Brassington’s Platinum Jet Management, the motion
revealed, the FAA’s lead investigator had an Agent from the
Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) “assigned” to be with
him when he interviewed witnesses.
Among the
chilling conclusions of The New American Drug Lords, a new 2-hour documentary by investigative journalist Daniel
Hopsicker:
An
international drug trafficking network has been operating in
Venice since the early 1970’s, when the notorious paramilitary
drug trafficking organization known as The Company had a base at the Venice Airport.
Today, the successor to The Company appears to be the
major drug trafficking operation an hour up the coast
from Venice, at the St. Petersburg-Clearwater Int’l Airport,
where two American-registered airplanes took off before being
busted in the Yucatan carrying a cumulative total often tons of cocaine.
Using
“cut-outs” like foreign pilots and Saudi money-man Adnan
Khashoggi to provide plausible deniability to the drug network’s
U.S. sponsors, the organization was run—or at least received
protection from—America’s Central Intelligence Agency,
with powerful connections to prominent figures and top
financiers in the
national Republican Party.
Wally
Hilliard’s drug operation in Venice has strong links to the St.
Petersburg operation. Many have
already been reported. New
ones are still surfacing.The two
operations may in fact be the same operation.
The identity of
the pilot of the American-registered DC-9 (N900SA) from St.
Petersburg FL caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico's
Yucatan several years ago, long a mystery, finally saw the light
of day recently in Mexico.
Carmelo Vasquez
Guerra,
a Venezuelan, was the DC9’s pilot who was said to have “escaped”
from the airport while his airplane was being seized, and four
other members of his crew were arrested.
He was later taken
into custody by Mexican authorities, and charged with flying an
airplane packed with 128 identical suitcases filled with cocaine.
Getting caught
with 5.5 tons of cocaine would seem to call for some serious jail
time. Reporters in Mexico assumed he’d been sent to prison for,
like... forever.
So imagine
reporter Francisco Gomez of Mexico City's
El Universal surprise when
he made a startling discovery: Carmelo Vasquez Guerra—amazingly
and inexplicably—had been released from prison less
than two years after being arrested.
The arrival en
masse of Mohamed Atta’s terrorist cadre at the Venice
Municipal Airport was happenstance, goes the official story, and
the terrorist’s presence there an accident of history, unrelated
to any pre-existing climate of crime or corruption.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
This was illustrated again recently when decades of
old newspaper clippings became
available online,
revealing the full range of the
extraordinary history of criminal mischief and international
intrigue at
the Venice Airport.
For example: our recent story headlined
"60 year history
of drug trafficking at Venice Airport" was off by fifteen
years, according to a “Looking Back” feature from
the Aug 28 1964 Sarasota Herald Tribune, which reveals that the
oldest report of drug trafficking at what will become the Venice
Airport occurred thirty years earlier.
In unbroken succession in the decades since, the
Venice Municipal Airport— decade-in and decade-out—has played host
to drug smuggling, gun running, the launching of coups in the
Caribbean, mercenary training, even murder...
It is a remarkable history of international
intrigue with a distinctly ‘spooky’ flavor.
An investigation
into suspicious circumstances surrounding the sale of the former
Huffman Aviation has unearthed an explosive secret at the heart of
an otherwise unremarkable aviation facility.
Almost since its
inception, the specter of heroin trafficking has hung over the
airfield which would later become the Venice Municipal Airport.
During World War
II, when it was known as the Venice Army Air Field, it was home to
the Stateside operations of a man widely and credibly accused of
using proceeds from international heroin trafficking to prop up
the war machine of a corrupt Chinese warlord whose army, even
after its defeat, hung on to a lion's share of Southeast Asian
real estate which became known as the
Golden Triangle.
Contemporary
newspaper clips from the time show that the Venice Airport has had
an extraordinary six-decade long history, and been the scene of
covert activities including gunrunning, international heroin and
cocaine trafficking, and being used as a launch pad for coups in
the Caribbean and Central America.
These activities
required, available evidence will show, the regular and systematic
corruption of officials in Venice and Sarasota County.
The recent infamous
and still-painful history of the Venice Airport, home base for
Mohamed Atta and his crew of terrorist hijackers, it turns out, is
just the most recent in an extraordinary history of elite
deviance, criminal mischief, and international intrigue.
Art Nadel guilty; New hedge fund owner takes over Huffman Aviation
March
1 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker
In a surprise court appearance last
Wednesday hedge fund owner Art Nadel pled guilty in a New York
Federal court.
It was a bitter disappointment to
swindled investors, as well as to interested onlookers anxious
for a glimpse of not only how he did it, but who
he did it with.
Nadel’s guilty plea may have removed
the best—maybe the only—chance to make accountants
and bookkeepers and managers at feeder hedge funds, all
of whom had front row seats to the scandal, face public scrutiny
while testifying about what went on at Scoop Management.
Most people find it impossible to
believe he acted alone
But if things look bad for Nadel's
hapless investors, the outlook for the citizens of Venice, Florida,
where Nadel owned the same business that earlier trained Mohamed
Atta to fly, is even more bleak.
For them, Nadel’s descent from hedge
fund owner to handcuffs may be going from the frying pan
to the fire.
That's because the new owner of the
former Huffman Aviation owns a hedge fund, too.
Even
worse, the new owner's top henchman, who often fronts
for his various financial entities as their President, was at
the heart of a Wall Street scandal that looted more money from
investors than Art Nadel ever dreamed of stealing, and which was—until
the financial meltdown last year—the biggest fraud Wall Street
had ever seen.
Will secret deal bring old management back to Venice Airport
FBO?
January
5, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker
The
hand-picked new ownership at the former Huffman Aviation FBO (Fixed
Base of Operations) at the Venice Municipal Airport has links
to private military contractors in Georgia involved in CIA extraordinary
renditions around the world, as well as other covert activity
on behalf of the U.S. Government.
This same company turned over between 12-15
mid-sized regional jets to another owner of Huffman Aviation,
Wallace J. Hilliard, ten years ago, for Hilliard's doomed from
the start “start-up airline,” an operation so inept that on at
least one publicized route, they never sold a single ticket.
The company or network of companies which has
had so much involvement with recent owners of Huffman Aviation
is known variously as “Phoenix Air,” “Phoenix Air Services,” and
“Phoenix Continental."
Oddly, long after his start-up airline quit
flying scheduled trips, Hilliard still had jets on the tarmacs
and aprons of various airports. And he continued to pay pilots
to be ready...
During 2003 and 2004, elements of the U.S. Government took a surprisingly
keen interest in controversial Guyanese drug pilot Michael
Brassington. Brassington was involved in-or the subject
of-a secretive Miami-based U.S. Government operation, according
to interviews with former Customs Agents.
"Whenever Brassington entered the U.S., a special
team from Miami was supposed to come up," stated former Fort
Lauderdale Customs Agent James Sanders. Brassington was
supposed to be met by Customs Agents from an operation with a
highly-checkered past called "Operation
Blue Lightning."
"Operation Blue Lightning is some kind of joint task force.
I found out later from another chief inspector that was on the
team that I wasn't even supposed to inspect him," Sanders
said.
The intent of Operation Blue Lightning's interest in Brassington
remains unclear.
Operation Blue Lightning fits the description provided by a top
DEA official in Miami when he informed us why the DEA had not
mounted an investigation into the owners of two planes caught
carrying over 10 tons of cocaine in Mexico's Yucatan.
The drug planes belonged to a "rogue"
operation in U.S. Customs, said the DEA official.
So the investigation properly belonged to the Office of Investigations
in the Dept of Homeland Security.
Was Brassington's "special handling" designed to impede
criminal drug smuggling activity? Or to facilitate it?
Brassington goes on trial next month in Federal Court in Newark
for putting the lives of passengers in danger in a near-fatal
crash of a luxury jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey in February
2005.
A
U.S. Customs Agent on duty when controversial drug pilot and “soldier
of fortune” Michael Brassington attempted to re-enter
the US through Fort Lauderdale International Airport in April
of 2004 was instructed by a Supervisor at Immigrations & Customs
Enforcement (ICE) to treat Brassington as a “grave threat
to national security.”
Brassington was a long-time employee and business associate of
Wallace J. Hilliard, owner of the Venice FL flight school
that trained Mohamed Atta to fly.
The
news comes as the former Guyanese military pilot prepares
to go on trial in a Federal Courthouse in Newark next
month for recklessly endangering the lives of passengers, whose
number includes ex-Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill
Clinton as well as numerous celebrities.
The
disclosure, contained in a soon-to-be-released documentary, “The
New American Drug Lords,” is a reminder, more than eight years
later, of the unfinished nature of the investigation into the
9/11 attack.
At the same time
Wallace J Hilliard's Huffman Aviation was teaching a still-unidentified
number of suspected terrorists, including many, like Souheil Seddik,
who remain unknown to the general public, he was also assembling
a fleet of twin-engine turboprop Jetstream airliners, airplanes
normally used in regional airline markets, to be used in the launch
of his new start-up, Florida
Air.
"Dekkers, along with partner Wally
Hilliard, operates several air charter companies in Florida, including
the Venice-based Hoffman Aviation," reported the Sarasota
Herald Tribune in February 2001.
"Six airplanes --
four scheduled for daily runs, two on standby as backups --will
be dispatched for the new service."
However a recent investigation
into the current war for control of the Venice Municipal Airport
has discovered that secretive financier Wally Hilliard bought-not
six-but as many as twelve to eighteen Jetstream airliners which
seldom-if ever-flew paying passengers or scheduled flights.
While Mohamed Atta attended
his flight school, Wally Hilliard owned a
"ghost airline" with a dozen 19-passenger Jetstreams
whose use remains a total mystery.
A clue to their true
use can perhaps be found, however, in the names of the previous
owners of Hilliard's fleet of airliners, which include individuals
closely associated with prominent military figures active in U.S.
covert operations in China, in Iran Contra, and closely linked
to figures like the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon. FULL STORY
October 15, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker
The
man who owned the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta
to fly, Wally Hilliard, made millions selling his insurance
company, back in 1981, to the man who paid
“The Men Who Stare at
Goats.”
Wally
Hilliard’s links to American intelligence go back (at least)
to November of 1981, when his insurance company, Wisconsin
Employer’s Group, was bought
out by Myron Du Bain, then the Chairman of Fireman’s
Fund of San Francisco.
Du
Bain, who died in 2002, was a World War II OSS/CIA operative
and the Chairman of Fireman's Fund of San Francisco when
it bought out the insurance company founded by Hilliard.
Hilliard later went on to own Huffman Aviation, the Venice
FL flight school used by Mohamed Atta his U.S. base.
We
had discovered the connection in a trip to Green Bay several
years ago.
But
only recently did we learn that Myron Du Bain’s life-long
ties to the CIA included two stints at the helm of the Stanford
Research Institute (SRI), famous for its classified
research into psychic viewing. the results of which are
currently on display in “The
Men Who Stare at Goats.”
Stephen
Ruth got his start in business (as revealed by the first
two stories in this series) working for a corporate entity
which those involved claim was the Central Intelligence
Agency, the CIA.
Active
at the Venice Municipal Airport over several decades, as
well as in nearby Sarasota and Charlotte County, Venice
Florida native Stephen L. Ruth is a convicted drug trafficker
and friend of Pablo Escobar flying, by the late 70’s, back
and forth from Southwest Florida to Colombia and back several
times a week.
When
not flying goodwill missions to our Southern neighbors in
his DC4 Globemaster or Lockheed Lodestar, Stephen Ruth developed
the habit of putting out a number of serious-as-cancer murder
contracts.
Apparently,
Stephen Ruth’s unique curriculum vitae: experience in successful
CIA “wet work,” bolstered by proven ability
to fly low over the Gulf from Colombia to Florida… later
qualified him for employment with the Florida State’s
Attorney’s office.
“Deep
History,” according to the man who coined the term, U.C.
Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott, “is the constant everyday
interaction between the constitutionally-elected government
and the forces of violence and crime which appear (on the
surface) to be the enemies of that government.”
Just
as he said he would, after returning from Cuba, where, according
to a police report he participated in the assassination
of one of the “four or five” men said to have been involved
in the Kennedy Assassination, Stephen Ruth got rich.
Big
rich: $3 million dollars, a lot back in the 1970’s.
While
how he made it may not surprise you, what he did then almost
certainly will.
t
Big Safari, the Kennedy Assassination, & the
war for control of the Venice Airport
Sept
08 2009--A fierce war being waged for control of the Venice
Municipal Airport has led to the discovery of covert
CIA and military operations, dating back to at least 1959,
which go well beyond what was previously known to have taken
place there.
Operations at the Venice Airport have
involved individuals whose names figure prominently in the
Kennedy Assassination, for example a defense contractor
controlled by Texas oilman General D. H. (Harry) Byrd, which
in the late 50's and early 60's built and launched Regulus
II cruise missiles from the beach directly in front of the
Venice Airport as part of a program run out of at Eglin
AFB in Florida’s panhandle.
Byrd’s Chance-Vought Aircraft, later
re-named LTV, would become—almost immediately after the
JFK assassination—a principal beneficiary of the massive
military spending accompanying the growth of American military
involvement in the Vietnam War.
General Byrd, of course, was also the
owner of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, where
the Warren Commission alleged Lee Harvey Oswald fired the
shots which killed President John F. Kennedy.
Byrd also ran the Texas and Louisiana
Civil Air Patrol, at the same time cadets Barry Seal and
Lee Harvey Oswald were meeting Kennedy assassination conspirator
Capt. David Ferrie at a two-week summer camp of the Louisiana
Civil Air Patrol at Barksdale Air Force Base in July of
1955.
Amazingly—especially for a tiny airport
located in an out-of-the-way retirement community—according
to a recently-uncovered police report there is a second
man active at the Venice Airport with relevance to the Kennedy
assassination as well.
The
news these last days of summer contains at least one
story which—because key elements of it remain unspoken,
in other words, taboo—doesn't make sense.
In
the current furor over the Justice Department’s opening
of an investigation into the torture of prisoners
under the Bush Administration, during the same week
that a federal court found that John
Ashcroft,
then-attorney general, violated the rights of U.S.
citizens by ordering arrests when the government lacked
probable cause,
Dick Cheney vociferously claimed
that that the “enhanced interrogation techniques”
were “absolutely essential” in stopping another terrorist
attack on the United States after Sept. 11, 2001.
If
it is true, then perhaps Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush, and
especially U.S. General Tommy Franks can tell us
why they let Osama bin Laden
escape from Tora Bora two months after the 9/11 attack?
The reputation of Huffman Aviation principal
Rudi Dekkers,
whose dozens of television appearances in the aftermath of the
9/11 attack shaped the public perception of
Mohamed
Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi,
took another big hit recently when a Dutch television show came
to light.
"Spooloos,"
or "Vanished," a popular reality TV show in the Netherlands
that travels around the world locating missing relatives for worried
family and friends, portrays Dekkers' as a callous and negligent
"deadbeat dad" who abandoned a young wife in the Netherlands
while she was three months pregnant.
His son Patrick's attempts
to establish contact with Dekker's, the father he has never known,
are repeatedly rebuffed.
A translated except from the program is part of the just-released
second preview of the upcoming "The New
American DrugLords" documentary at
www.danielhopsicker.tv
Dekker's description of events
leading up to the 9/11 attack were uncritically received on network
and cable news shows in America and around the world after the
9/11 attack.
A
bitter fight to redact portions of the explosive final report
of an official British Inquiry into systemic corruption
in the Turks and Caicos
Islands backfired last week when news of the redactions caused
a firestorm of protest and the full report was leaked to freedom
of information website WikiLeaks.
Some
of the most sensitive redactions in the British Commission of
Inquiry's Final Report concern much-traveled pilot Michael Francis
Brassington, who first rose to the level of public scrutiny as
co-pilot on a Lear jet (N351WB) belonging to the owner of a flight
school that at the time had been
teaching Mohamed Atta to fly was seized by DEA Agents who found
43 lbs. of heroin onboard.
The
controversy over the redacted report has ironically shed
light on a previously-unknown connection between Brassington and
a second pilot, Wolfgang Bohringer, whose name also surfaces
regularly in the background to the intrigue in Florida swirling
around Mohamed Atta during the run-up to the 9/11 attack.
Brassington and Bohringer were not previously known to have been
connected.
The
controversy over the unredacted report changed that, when the
resulting publicity illuminated dark corners in the background
of the man whose deep pockets were keeping secret the full extent
of Michael Misick and Michael Francis Brassington’s crimes.
Michael
Brassington—still a close associate of Wally Hilliard’s, according
to a former U.S. Customs Agent who has seen his file—and Wolfgang
Bohringer, an "associate" of Mohamed Atta's
close enough for Atta to have frequently referred to him as “my
brother,” have both been pilots for the Russian Mob.
Huffman Aviation Was 'Continuing
Criminal Enterprise'
Art
Nadel, the recent owner of Huffman Aviation accused of running
a Ponzi scheme which allegedly stole almost $400 million from
investors, is the only person so far charged with a crime.
However
if authorities persist in claiming that claim Nadel was
a "lone-nut financial gunslinger" they will be ignoring
the richly-documented history of criminal fraud involving the
owners of Huffman Aviation that goes back for more than a decade.
At
least four financial scams, each looting more than $100 million,
have criminal roots in the fertile soil— the “Octo-Mom” fertile
soil—of the Venice Municipal Airport.
Almost
immediately after its purchase in the summer of 1999 by Wallace
J. Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers, the aviation facility became the
center of a series of financial scams that included Ponzi schemes,
pension fraud, international stock swindles, and fraudulent bankruptcies
which have altogether looted more than $1 billion from the American
economy.
Huffman
Aviation, the flight training facility which housed both of the
terrorist pilots who crashed passenger jets into the Twin Towers
of the World Trade Center, has been operating as a continuing
criminal enterprise, as defined by the Federal RICO (Racketeer
Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act.
An
investor claiming a nearly six million dollar loss in hedge funds
of the accused Sarasota Florida Ponzi artist who is also the current
owner of flight school Huffman
Aviation
figured in the story of the St. Petersburg DC9 busted in
Mexico's Yucatan with 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard.
Louis
D. Paolino, once known
as the“Garbage
King of New Jersey,”
was one
of only a handful of entities ever funded by Texas "investment
bank" Argyll Equity LLC, the major investor
in the company whose DC9 was busted on April 11, 2006 in Mexico’s
Yucatan, carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.
Terrorist
ringleader Mohamed Atta probably never met anyone named “Fat
Pete”or “Joey Cakes” while learning
to fly at Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport.
But
ever-mounting evidence points to the conclusion that the men who
owned the flight school—both then and now—have
more than a passing acquaintance with organized crime.
Another
owner of the flight school in Venice Florida that trained Mohamed
Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to fly is in trouble with the law; current
owner Arthur G. Nadel, 75, was arrested recently for running
a Ponzi scheme which methodically looted investors in his Sarasota-based
hedge funds of more than $300 million.
New
York tabloids, already in overdrive on the story of Bernard Madoff,
instantly dubbed Nadel Mini-M, for Mini-Madoff. Nadel's
arrest marks the second time in recent years that the owner of
Huffman Aviation, the FBO (fixed base of operations) at the Venice
Airport has been involved in crimes traditionally associated with
the Mob.
Ponzi
schemes, of course, are a trademark Mafia specialty. So, too,
is the crime of heroin trafficking in which previous owner Wally
Hilliard was implicated.
How did city officials in Venice allow the airport's
mission-critical FBO to fall into the hands--not once but
twice--of people otherwise engaged in organized crime?
Why
is it that shadowy underworld figures seem to enjoy the permanent
run of the airport in Venice, Florida?
mar
5--09
The owner of the flight school in Venice FL where the two hijackers
who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center took flight
lessons, was arrested last May after assaulting his 17-yr old
step-daughter outside a sports bar in Naples, Florida.
78-year
old Wallace J. Hilliard of Naples FL was charged with misdemeanor
battery on May 28 2008, according to Collier County, FL arrest
records.
In
the seven years since 9/11 Wally Hilliard has remained embroiled
in controversy. He is currently the subject of a multi-jurisdictional
fraud investigation into a scheme which may have cost investors
as much as $100 million.
Though
no charges have yet been filed, the FBI and investigators from
the state of have interviewed numerous witnesses, including over
50 people from Wisconsin who lost millions. They allege Hilliard
never alerted investors that he was under investigation, had a
federal tax liability going back to 2001, and had been denied
an airline license by the FAA.
Frequent
Hilliard “business associate” Tommy Barranza is reportedly under
investigation for money laundering for allegedly structuring cash
transactions to avoid currency reporting.
Hilliard
is suspected of funneling large amounts of cash to the Bahamas.
Fort
Lauderdale attorney Michael Moulis, described in an article yesterday
as “The Man Behind Loophole Air,” is threatening to sue Daniel
Hopsicker on behalf of Michael Brassington, the pilot arrested
two weeks ago in a 23-count federal indictment for the crash of
a corporate jet in New Jersey.
Brassington
is also linked to a massive corruption scandal roiling South Florida,
over the sale during the past few years of as many as one hundred
American-registered planes to Mexico’s dominant Sinaloa Cartel.
According
to a high-ranking DEA official in Miami, a corrupt U.S. Customs
operation is to blame. The fact that more people are not aware
of these facts owes something to the many forms of intimidation
practiced against independent journalists. Such intimidation takes
many forms.
Some
would say lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits, are one of its milder
manifestations. Such people probably haven't been sued for libel
recently.
But
attorney Michael Moulis didn’t stop with just offering to sue
for libel...
He
threatened criminal prosecution in Federal Court.
Less than a year before the Teterboro crash of a Challenger corporate
jet that ran off a runway and hurtled into traffic on a busy 6-lane
highway on Feb 2 2005, the company responsible for that
crash, Platinum Jet Management of Fort Lauderdale, ran a
private jet off a runway at
Peachtree-DeKalb Airport in Atlanta.
The Teterboro crash was so
spectacular that it led all
three evening newscasts.
The crash sparked a federal criminal investigation that led to
the recent 23-count indictment against Brassington, and four other
executives of Platinum Jet Management.
The
investigation turned up damning evidence of a pattern of illegal
activity on the part of the charter company so egregious that
the responsible Federal agency, the FAA, came under rare criticism
from another Federal agency, the NTSB.
Former inspector general Mary Schiavo of the U.S. Department of
Transportation calls Brassington’s charter company "Loophole
Airlines." Schiavo, an
outspoken critic of the nation's aviation regulators, told the
NJ Star-Ledger that the company that flew the jet was an unqualified
charter operator, flying U.S. skies only by circumventing federal
regulations.
"This is rampant. It isn't just
one operator. This goes on everywhere in every part of the country,"
she charged. "They are loophole airlines."
If Schiavo is right, then the
man behind "Loophole Air" is Fort Lauderdale attorney
Michael Moulis, a former FAA prosecutor who has
represented Guyanese pilot Brassington since the Teterboro Challenger
crash four years ago,
The
pilot arrested two weeks ago on felony charges in the crash in
the February 2005 crash of a Challenger business jet at Teterboro
Airport in New Jersey has since been flying illegal charters for
the Premier of the Turks & Caicos in luxury Gulfstream III
jets owned by a Washington lobbyist and former aide to President
Bill Clinton.
Testimony at
the British Commission of Inquiry Turks & Caicos Islands corruption
probe last week revealed that Guyanese pilot Michael Brassington,
currently facing a 23-count indictment in Federal Court in Newark
for endangering passengers lives at charter company Platinum Jet
Management, is in business with former Clinton White House
aide Jeffrey Watson, now a Washington lobbyist.
The Commission
heard that Brassington and Turks & Caicos Premier Michael
Misick conspired to induce the island's government to pay hundreds
of thousands of dollars a month to Watson to lease two high-end
Gulfstream III luxury business jets.
The men engineered
an air charter deal that paid Watson more than $160,000-a-month
from the coffers of the Turks & Caicos' nearly-bankrupt
government, which was at the same time eliminating all student
scholarships.
Watson
is a former housing official in Miami who became a Clinton White
House Aide, responsible for doling out $75 million in Federal
government largesse after the devastation of Hurricane Andrew.
The
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel called him “Florida's insider
at the White House.”
3Four
years after the spectacular crash of a business jet at Teterboro
Airport across the Hudson River from New York City injured
20 people and left one man with permanent brain damage, the
owner and chief pilot who was arrested on felony charges in the
crash last week was also named as a key figure in a corruption
probe in the Turks & Caicos Islands.
Even
as FBI agents were arresting him in the New Jersey crash and charging
him in a 23-count indictment in which he stands accused of compromising
passenger safety, former Guyanese military pilot Michael Francis
Brassington was making headlines in a Watergate-like British Commission
of Inquiry investigating allegations of corruption in office against
Michael Misick, Premier of the Turks & Caicos Islands.
On
the Challenger flight that crashed, more than 20 people were injured. Authorities
expressed amazement that nobody was killed. According to the NTSB,
neither the pilot nor the co-pilot were rated to fly the flight
they were flying. The flight attendant was a dancer at the Voodoo
Lounge in Miami.
A
month later the FAA shut Brassington's Platinum Jet charter company
down. It didn't faze Brassington. He just changed the name of
his company and kept on hauling.
35-year
old Guyanese pilot Michael Francis Brassington was indicted in
New Jersey federal court this week, the result of an investigation
into the spectacular crash of a airplane outside New York
City in February of 2005, which injured 20 people and provoked
widespread outrage in New York.
Brassington, the principal owner of defunct air charter company
Platinum Jet Management, was indicted Wednesday along with
four other company executives, charged with recklessly endangering
the lives of passengers. He has survived previous scrapes
with American law enforcement, each time emerging curiously unscathed.
However,
his earlier controversies were not celebrity-enhanced.
He
first achieved notoriety and became a footnote to the history
of the 9.11 attack as the co-pilot of a Lear jet(N351WB) which
was busted carrying 43 lbs of heroin in Orlando on July 22, 2000.
The Lear jet’s owner was Wallace J. Hilliard, the secretive 75-year
old Naples FL financier whose Huffman Aviation flight school in
Venice just three weeks earlier had enrolled soon-to-be-famous
terrorist pilot trainees Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi.
Less
well-known about Brassington's history of brushes with U.S. law
enforcement is that several years ago he was the subject of a
Multi-Agency Federal Task Force, Operation Blue Lightning; Brassington
was suspected of trafficking drugs, passports, people, currency,
and diamonds into the U.S. through two airports in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida.
Tasked
with tracking Brassington's movements during Operation Blue Lightning,
a Customs Supervisor in Miami had even warned Customs Agents at
Fort Lauderdale International Airport to treat Brassington as
a "grave threat to national security.”
Carlos
Slim, the Mexican billionaire whose $250 million cash infusion
bailed the New York Times out of a tight cash crunch last week,
has long-standing business ties with wealthy Mexican businessmen
suspected of involvement in Mexico's so-called “Cartel of the
Southeast,” the drug trafficking organization (DTO) based in Cancun
which came to light two years ago with the crash on Mexico’s Yucatan
Peninsula of an American-registered (N987SA) Gulfstream jet carrying
nearly four tons of cocaine.
A long-time
lieutenant of Carlos Slim's, Fernando Chico Pardo, left Slim's
employ to take over ASUR, a publicly-traded corporation which
observers accuse of moving large quantities of cocaine through
Cancun International Airport, which the company runs and manages.
Slim's big investment represents an encroachment into the ownership
of an icon of American democracy of a man, and a massive fortune,
whose provenance have gone largely unexamined.
But on the
topic of Slim's shady dealings, all eyes seem to be curiously
averted. However it seems highly doubtful the Times' ownership
is unaware of them. The barely-concealed facts regarding Carlos
Slim’s shady connections are well-known to journalists in Mexico.
They deserve
to become more well-known here in the U.S.; the links between
Mexico's exploding narco-economy and current-world's-richest-man
Carlos Slim don’t end with Fernando Pardo's ASUR.
Two
of the four prominent Chavezistas charged with illegally
acting on Hugo Chavez’s behalf in the recently-concluded
Suitcase-Gate Trial in Miami were inside players in a previous
Venezuelan scandal that took place well before Chavez ever took
office, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
The
Suitcase-Gate Trial was supposed to spotlight a criminal Venezuelan
elite of Castro-loving
Chavezistas, who taunt
America, threaten war with Colombia, and give sanctuary to Hezbollah.
Instead,
testimony showed that Chavez's Venezuelan cronies are anything
but wild-eyed radicals. The vanguard of the working class drives
Ferraris and lives in McMansions in Miami, and is too busy making
money, in oil, real estate, and weapons and narcotics to wear
masks over their faces, or raspberry-red berets
Neither
man has built a better mousetrap,
or done anything more clever than align themselves with a Venezuelan
elite which resembles the vanguard of the working class much less
than it does a kleptocracy very much like the one which has
just looted trillions of dollars from the American economy.
At least two of the four defendants convicted of working
as illegal foreign agents in Florida for Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez in the Suitcase-Gate Scandal had ties to an international
criminal organization which was operating successfully in Venezuela,
and with seeming official impunity, long before Chavez himself
came to power, The MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Both the recently-convicted Franklin
Duran, and Carlos Kauffmann, who pled guilty before the trial,
took part in a $7 billion bank scandal during the mid-1990's that
involved insiders looting Venezuelan banks, and led more than
200 Venezuelan bankers to flee Caracas for exile in Miami.
When a U.S. jury in Miami recently
convicted Venezuelan businessman Franklin Duran in the Suitcase-Gate
Trial, the verdict raised more questions than it answered.
From the start, observers saw the
purpose of the prosecution as being to embarrass and point a finger
at corruption in the government of Venezuela's current President
(and Bush Administration bete noire) Hugo Chavez.
But while Chavez's "Bolivarian
revolution" was singled out by Bush Administration prosecutors,
the men acting on Chavez's behalf have connections which have
so far been ignored to scandals which occurred under past Venezuelan
Presidents as well.
The luxury business jet carrying
a suitcase filled with $800,000 in bribes whose discovery last
August kicked off the Suitcase-Gate Scandal playing
out in a trial in Miami had the same registration, or"
N" number, as that of a plane flying for a CIA contractor
in Iraq, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Newspaper photos taken of the Citation
X top-of-the-line business jet after the ill-fated suitcase
flight show 'N' number N5113S on the tail. But a Florida-based
CIA air contractor called Air-Scan Inc. is assigned
that tail number, according to FAA records, for a Cessna 182
flying in Iraq.
Air-Scan Inc. is
an American military contractor which has—even for an
American military contractor—a checkered past.
Still, there has been no mention
so far during the trial of the murky provenance of the Citation
jet, whose flight began what has become a growing international
incident.
The
CIA Drug Plane Scandal grew exponentially last week when European
Union officials broke an official 40-year-long silence on the
previously-taboo subject of the CIA's worldwide involvement in
drug trafficking.
Last week Mexico City newspaper El
Universal reported that The European Organization for the Safety
of Air Navigation has begun an investigation one of the planes,
the cocaine-laden Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA), for suspected
use in CIA "rendition" flights in which prisoners are
covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.
Neither of the federal agencies with
apparent jurisdiction—the DEA and FAA—has so far offered answers
about how two American-registered jets with extremely politically
well-connected owners, could have wound up carrying so much Colombian
coke. But then, no mainstream American journalists have bothered
to ask.
Last
week, two wire services, Agence France Presse and the Associated
Press, reported news that readers of the investigative reporting
at this website have known about for almost a year.
While happy to see the mainstream
media waking up, a little "credit where credit is due"
would be nice, too. We broke this news on this website eleven
months ago (Oct 8, 2007). When not unsuccessfully attempting to
debunk it, America's corporate media has assiduously ignored my
reporting on a whole host of scoops we've broken.
Ultimately, the effort is designed
to make me go away, for the same reason that stories about 9/11
"conspiracies" never mention real investigative reporting
on 9/11, which, alas, appears in very few places. And, in combination
with a series of nuisance libel lawsuits, it has almost succeeded.
You can make the difference in keeping
the news real by putting your money where your mouth is. Please
send advice, and donations, and pre-order both the book and DVD.
A sincere and heartfelt thank you
to all the Mad Cow readers who have been supportive over these
past years...
"The NEW American Drug Lords"
is a no-holes-barred look at into the Biggest Taboo story of our
time: the illegal drug trade.
The documentary pulls back the curtain
on the biggest drug story of our time: the scandal which erupted
when two drug planes flying tons of cocaine were busted in Mexico's
Yucatan enroute from Colombia to Fort Lauderdale in Florida.
Both were American-owned. Recent
owners of the first plane busted—a DC9 with 5.5 tons of cocaine—have
interlocking business partnerships with recent owners of the second
plane, a Gulfstream II business jet.
The Gulfstream had been previously
used to fly for the CIA. The DC9 was painted like an official
aircraft from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.
The New American Drug Lords. Meet
them. Know them.
As the political conventions
dominate our consciousness, remember that a major international
trafficking operation, like this one, kicks off vast amounts of
fungible cash, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year...
If there is
an arena where the a battle is being waged for the "soul
of America," as Joe Biden suggested last week... it is
here.
The exclusive
"Cocaine One" series of investigative reports by this
reporter appearing on this website for the past two years made
the news, finally... not in the U.S., but in Mexico City, where
it was cited by a principal in the drug trafficking scandal in
newspaper interviews to support his allegation of selective prosecution
against the DEA.
Carlos Gutiérrez
de Velasco is the paterfamilias of the influential Veracruz-based
family which owned the Casa de Cambio Puebla currency exchange,
accused of laundering enough drug money through U.S. banks to
buy as many as 100 American planes for use in drug-running.