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What
aren't they telling us about the new owners of Huffman Aviation--aka the Venice
Jet Center-- at the
Venice Municipal Airport?
The
hand-picked new ownership of the 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...
Perhaps
just in case.
Details
of how and what we found out in a moment.
The Venice Airport FBO, which used to be called
Huffman Aviation, is located on a government utility, paid for with tax
money, and without that government utility would not exist. It is
the only significant cash-flow business at the Venice Airport.
Now, in a grab
reminiscent of the so-called "privatization" of Russia during the early 1990’s,
it is about to disappear.
The return of
'Sarasota Art'
The
gloves came off again recently in the mostly covert war for control of the
Venice Airport.
The
flash-point, as always: who gets Art Nadel's crown jewel asset, the Venice
Airport FBO better known as Huffman Aviation?
Appointed
to unravel Art Nadel's massive $400 million Ponzi fraud, Tampa attorney
Burton Wiand has been gathering, to pass on to Nadel's thousands of
victims, what few wilted daisies remain in the trampled garden that was
Sarasota Art Nadel’s company, “Scoop Management.”
Scoop had been rather cleverly disguised as a “hedge fund.”
But it may
not, as popular wisdom has it, been named for the slang term for hot stock
tip.
It's name
could also refer to its function, as a scoop, “hoovering” small and loose change
from entire regions of the country at once.
To no one's surprise,
Nadel got
a lot of help in this endeavor, from a positively rocking wrecking
crew. One sad note is that the consummate skill displayed by these cool-headed
pros in successfully tiptoe-ing away with a very respectable $400 million
dollar score may never achieve the recognition it deserves.
Alas,
either out of modesty, or because of some plenty hefty well-placed
bribes, to date, their names remain unknown, apparently in danger of being lost
to history.
Alas, we
can hear the cynical talk starting already:
"Well, it
was only $400 million."
"And,
besides, this is Florida."
Here it it
useful to remember what Wally Hilliard said to somebody during a fairly recent
deposition.
At one point the
woman
suing him looked at him across the table and asked him if he ever worries about
getting caught and having to go to jail.
Hilliard's
reply, she told us later, was both enthusiastic and immediate.
"Not in
Florida, baby-doll! Nobody ever goes to jail in Florida!”
"Has not been completely persuasive."
It’s
impossible to miss the
pain and
humiliation felt by citizens of the decent, peaceful, and entirely pleasant city
of Venice, Fl. over the unwelcome recognition their community has received
because of it’s Municipal Airport, and its links to terrorism, drug smuggling,
and covert intrigue.
Disappointed city officials even wanted the town to buy the Jet Center to get a
rein on airport jet traffic. Some reckoned they might even gain a rein on the
Venice Airport itself.
(Others,
it must be said, find that idea “just
too naïve for words.”)
"It
stinks; it smells," Earl Niemoth, a Sarasota real estate investor and publisher who
wants to buy the Jet Center, said of the announcement.
So there’s
something incredibly, awfully—even suspiciously—odd about the
behavior of Federal Receiver Burt Wiand and his steadfast determination to visit
more tribulation on the countenances of the long-suffering and beleaguered
citizenry of Venice, Florida.
In a
caustic letter faxed to city officials
announcing the sale of Huffman Aviation, Wiand couldn’t resist taking a few
swipes at city officials.
"The
city’s lack of good faith in this matter and the continued sending of
self-serving disingenuous letters has not been persuasive,” trilled
Wiand.
He’d
reached an agreement “in principle” with a buyer, Wiand informed the city
imperiously, “a Florida company with a lot of experience running airport
maintenance facilities.”
Ho ho! Remember that phrase: "A Florida company
with a lot of experience."'
Wiand felt
free to steer the sale of the Art Nadel-owned FBO (think gas stations for
airplanes, but with slightly better bathrooms) towards…well,
towards just about anyone he damn well pleased, apparently.
And if they didn’t like it… well that was
just too bad.
Before
Burton Wiand got into what the unkind among us might call "the bankruptcy
dodge," he spent decades as an attorney at the SEC.
This, of
course, is probably not quite the credential one once thought.
"Rivulets of judicial wisdom
dribbled down his cheek..."
City
Manager Isaac Turner called Wiand’s characterizations “off base.”
Wiand
spurned overtures to purchase the Jet Center from at least one other buyer, as
well as from the city of Venice itself. Amid loud protestations from several
quarters that he’d ignored other bids, he negotiated a deal and presented it as
a fait accompli.
Wiand’s
actions indicated how little sympathy he possessed for the town’s majority
opinion, which wanted the Airport to slip quietly away one night under cover of
darkness.
It's called
"rubbing salt in the wound."
Knowing the Venice City Council would have to
approve the sale, Wiand was in effect saying: “Get
over it.”
Incredibly, he was warning them:
Things could get worse.
"If
they don’t act nice, they’ll be dealing with Judge Lazzara,” Wiand
warned city officials though the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.
He was
referring to the Federal Judge overseeing the receivership, Richard Lazzara, who
has found rivers of judicial wisdom running through every motion Receiver Burton
Wiand has filed so far.
There's one thing that's
extremely important to note:
The Venice
city officials responsible for the mess at the airport have never
ever faced the threat of any legal consequences for
standing idly by and allowing the airport’s
mission-critical FBO to fall into the hands—twice in six years— of
men involved in continuing criminal enterprise.
Aren't there any criminal
sanctions
for abdication of “fiduciary responsibility?”
While Burton
Wiand, the FAA, the Sarasota Herald Tribune, the FBI, and the Florida State
Police (FDLE) have all eagerly lined up to “investigate,”
on one pretext or other, the current slate of city officials in Venice, those
same officials have tried to do the job they were elected to do:
stop it from happening yet again.
“Working to win your trust.
No. Really.”
The
recently named buyer of the Venice Airport's FBO is “TriState Aviation Group LLC."
There was
little if nothing to find out about TriState, which by itself is not terribly surprising.
TriState is a
company which exists only on paper.
They were
less than two weeks old as a company.
So the
company could probably use a little time in the bull-pen before being thrown
into regular rotation.
What is surprising--and
worthy of official investigation--is this:
Before the ink was dry on their incorporation papers, Tristate had
received Burton Wiand’s nod to buy the major business at the
Venice Airport.
All we
could do was put
together a few simple questions to put to Huffman's Aviation's hand-picked new owners.
We checked the names of the three lads listed on the company’s
registration.
Then we
picked up the phone and began making a few calls.
And
ironically, we owe all the credit for discovering the continuing efforts of U.S. covert
agencies and their contractors to influence events at the Venice Airport to one
of TriState’s three principals.
Go figure.
Florida's Newest Captain of Industry
His
name is
Henry Paulino.
We
figured him for the easiest to reach. We're lazy. And someone had sent us the
phone number where he works at Volo Aviation’s FBO at the airport in Manassas
Virginia.
Alas,
Henry Paulino wouldn’t return our calls. He successfully avoided us,
which is a surprisingly-easy feat to accomplish, it turns out.
Then someone
answering the phone at the Manassas
Airport FBO got tired of hearing us call, and encouraged us in the
direction of sending Henry an email.
An email!
Of course! Why hadn’t we thought of that?
So we sent
an email to
Henry Paulino, (email address
hpaulino@airproperty.net),
asking:
“Are you the “Henry Paulino" from this Feb. 15 2004
police report in the
Westchester County Journal News?
CLARKSTOWN
Grand larceny charge:
Henry Paulino,
37, of Jersey City, N.J., was arrested Feb. 15 and charged with felony
fourth-degree grand larceny, fourth-degree criminal possession of stolen
property and second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument. He is
accused of shoplifting about $1,600 in clothes from Filene's department store in
the Palisades Center. Police said he also had forged identification on him. He
was arraigned and sent to the county jail without bail for future court dates.
"Henry
Paulino,"
the paper had reported, had been 37 when he was arrested for felony grand
larceny, possession of stolen property, and possession of a forged instrument,
etc.
And there
are, of course, lots and lots of Henry Paulino's. Chances are, the ages don't
match.
Did Henry
Paulino, about to become an owner of a multi-million dollar operation that
is a tax-payer funded public utility get busted
shoplifting $1,600 in clothes from a Filene's Department store?
While carrying
multiple bogus identifications?
There's no
telling. Certainly we don’t know. We haven’t heard back from him.
'All things come to those that
wait"
But...we
don't recall hearing anything about a company called "airproperty"
in the Venice Airport FBO deal.
We
wondered:
Why
was Henry Paulino’s email address at something called “airproperty.net?”
Who were
they?
Although airproperty does not appear
to have any real existence as a company, the company
which owns the registered
the "airproperty" domain
certainly
does.
It's
called
"Airside Investors.”
And Airside
Investors
is slightly famous. The company
owned a Gulfstream I, it was
revealed in 2006, that was flying daily flights off the coast of Cuba.
The
Bush White
House itself gave the green light for the inclusion of funds for the
plane's acquisition in the federal budget last year.
What was
it doing there? If you answered "beaming Spanish language soap operas
(non-communist TV) to a grateful Cuban nation," you probably are a Cuban in
Miami, or work for the national Republican Party, or both.
The resulting bad publicity
mostly fell on the broad shoulders of
Phoenix Air, which by now is used to bad publicity.
The
company has a lucrative sideline doing CIA renditions.
Read all about it here.
On Florida incorporation
documents, Phoenix Air's address is on the
Navy's Key West Base.
And
Phoenix Air, Phoenix Air Group,
is where Wally Hilliard got all those
Jetstreams.
And as for the Navy's Key
West facility, alert readers may even recall that Mohamed Atta his-ownself
used to hang out there some.
Over two
decades of operation, this little government fiasco
cost
more than $500 million.
The airplane part of the deal
was a relative steal at $5-10 million a year.
The other problem with this otherwise admirable gravy train?
Nobody watches it.
So what was one of the
principals of brand spanking new TriState Aviation, Henry
Paulino of Airside Investors, doing hanging out (leasing a plane) to a
notorious private military contractor like Phoenix Air?
We may find out...
someday. But not, we fear, till long after TriState Aviation takes over the FBO
and gets comfortably
ensconced behind the desk out at the Venice Municipal Airport.
No socks, no
shirt, no corporate logo
TriState
Aviation’s
biggest selling point?
The company hasn’t been around long enough to
have a corporate history.
Less to
know. Less to worry about.
Wiand’s
statement—that he was selling the facility to “a Florida company with a
lot of experience running airport maintenance facilities—” may not be a
complete lie.
But its
far from being the truth.
But he
should at least release something saying that statement is no longer
“operative.”
TriState probably doesn’t have a corporate logo, or even a motto.
Is this just
sloppy tradecraft? That they didn't at least register the
dummy company six months in advance borders on being insulting. Maybe even
crosses the line.
Whatever you want to say about Wally Hilliard, his Wisconsin
medical insurance company at least had a really cool corporate motto that was
tongue-in-cheek droll too...
“Love God, Hate Sin, and Back the Pack!”
What
TriState Aviation does have
Marty
Kretchman was gamely--and even winningly—trying to keep his story straight.
Kretchman said the
ownership of his company includes private investors whose names he refuses
to disclose.
And he
reiterated that the hangars under dispute will have to be built
where they are designated on Nadel's plans.
But we
shouldn’t let that little things like offshore ownership and
non-transparency keep us all from being friends...
"We're
trying to be very transparent about this," Kretchman said. "We're just a bunch
of guys who loved airplanes as kids."
In a
letter to Venice’s citizen-journalist and watchdog John Patten, he wrote,
“TriState
Aviation Group LLC. is comprised of myself Brian Ciambra
and Henry Paulino.”
“Collectively, we have over 40 years of combined experience owning and operating
Fixed Base Operations, including the management and structuring of the Volo
Aviation chain of FBO's across the country.”
One
question we’d like to hear someone ask Marty, just for the record, is:
“Pardon
me… But which FBO was it that y’all claim to have owned, and when?”
Don't get us wrong. We're big fans.
Marty
Kretchman is totally smooth enough to have a future in
successful indirection.
One example:
“Brian has
more recently served as the Vice President of Operations for Volo Aviation, an
FBO venture of Merrill Lynch,” he said.
Alas, Volo
Aviation isn’t
an FBO venture of Merrill Lynch. Merrill Lynch doesn’t have an “FBO venture.”
Marty Kretchman's
boss, however, does have an FBO venture. And its partially funded by Merrill Lynch. But
its not their deal.
It's
Kretchman's boss’s deal. Maybe his boss asked him: See
if you can keep my name out of the papers.
For
the moment at least, we’ll respect his anonymity, too.
It's a topic we can always come back and revisit.
STAY TUNED
NEXT: BURTON WIAND'S GREATEST
HITS & BRUTAL COURTHOUSE FACE-OFFS.
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