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.
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.
Nadel
may have stolen as much as $350 million
from his hedge fund investors, many of them middle-class retirees who do not fit the
typical hedge fund investor profile of wealthy people willing to risk their entire investment.
New York tabloids, already in overdrive on the story of Bernard Madoff,
instantly dubbed Nadel Mini-M,
for Mini-Madoff.
Before turning himself in late January, Nadel spent several weeks
on the lam. Rumors spread that Nadel was already dead.
He
wasn't... Instead he was flying above the clouds on a
sleek luxury jet, from Sarasota to San Antonio to Los Angeles, San Francisco,
and New Orleans. His high-end
Learjet 31-A offers performance
matched by few other civilian airplanes; it cruises
comfortably at 500 miles an hour, and at an altitude of 51,000 feet,
A few questions no one is asking
Nadel
was worried, he wrote, about being murdered. But not, we suspect,
by one of the blue-haired widows from whom he stole millions.
For most of his life, Art Nadel was a "jazz pianist," meaning he
played the piano in hotel lounges, not seen as a springboard to
careers of looting at will.
Take a closer look at the Learjet he was flying before his arrest.
Does that look like the ride of a piano player?
While previous owner Wallace J. Hilliard owned Huffman
Aviation, and Mohamed Atta was taking flying lessons, DEA agents busted
Hilliard’s Learjet carrying 43 lbs. of heroin. It was July 25, 2000, at
the Orlando Executive Airport.
43
lbs of heroin is known in the trade, we have been told, as " heavy weight."
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?
How many small towns with barely ten
thousand people “boast” a tiny local airport which play host to terrorist
hijackers? Or been run by a heroin trafficker disguised as a flight school
owner, or a man accused of stealing $300 million in a huge financial fraud?
Why do
shadowy underworld figures have the permanent run of the airport in Venice,
Florida?
It Happened in Venice
Before
each man had purchased the major business at the tiny
Venice Airport, neither Art Nadel nor Wally Hilliard’s background offered much
in the way of clues indicating involvement with organized crime.
After Nadel went on the lam reporters discovered he
had been a lawyer in New York who was disbarred in 1982 by the New
York Supreme Court. Nadel 'kept' a client's $50,000 escrow check,
and
neglected to return it.
He was worried, at that time,
according to Sarasota
Private investigator Bill Warner
(whose reporting on Nadel has outpaced the entire staff of the local Sarasota
Herald-Tribune) over an unpaid
$50,000 loan to a
loan shark.
If Nadel was able to borrow $50,000
from a loan shark in New York in 1980, he already had connections with the Mob.
Loan sharks are not listed in the New York City phone book.
For his
part, Hilliard, who owned Huffman Aviation between 1999 and
2003, was an insurance executive who supposedly ‘retired’ to Florida in 1996
from Green Bay, Wisconsin, not a known hot-bed of Mafia activity.
Hilliard did have connections,
however. Not with the Mob, perhaps, but with the CIA, through
Myron DuBain, a World War II
OSS/CIA operative who became the chairman of Fireman's Fund Insurance, which
announced plans to acquire the insurance company founded by Hilliard
back in 1982.
DuBain
later founded a San Francisco supper club with
oilman Gordon Getty and Reagan Secretary of State George Shultz; his "Pacific
Institute" kept former Bush Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld busy in the
1990s.
"He needed a little alone time."
Nadel’s fraud began to unravel
soon after
he left his four-bedroom home for work on the morning of Jan. 14 and
didn’t return. By that weekend the Federal Bureau of Investigation had joined
local police to search for him.
Nadel's attorneys initially denied he was trying to run away. One of them
told reporters, “He went away for a while just to be alone.”
But
it was soon clear to all that Nadel was on the run.
Panicked and desperate investors began beseeching Sarasota police and the FBI to
find and apprehend him.
Like
Madoff, but in a smaller social arena, Art
Nadel was considered a trusted and generous
philanthropist in Sarasota. But unlike Madoff, many
more "ordinary" and perhaps slightly less-sophisticated investors were
devastated by Nadel’s Ponzi scheme.
The big
question which people in this dire circumstance are understandably concerned
with is simple:
"What
happened to the money?"
"Fast planes, yep, and lots of hangars too!"
One
answer has already become
obvious. Nadel spent an enormous amount of money on airplanes and aviation
facilities.
Nadel used proceeds from the fraud to purchase what
he re-named the Venice Jet Center at the Venice Airport,
the same building whose blue awning became well-known internationally
after the 9/11 attack as the home of dozens of young
Arab men suspected of being terrorists learned to fly.
His
"passion for aviation" led him to illegally divert $4 million to the Venice Jet Center and
Tradewind LLC, an aviation company he owns which has aircraft and hangars
in Georgia and North Carolina.
Managers of Nadel’s hedge funds told clients that
their money was gone; that the man behind it had vanished; and that they were
frankly not real hopeful any of it would ever be recovered.
Strangely, however, there were two Florida law enforcement agencies which were
seemingly unconcerned by Nadel’s disappearance.
The Sarasota County Sheriff's Office even
announced it was ending its search for Nadel on the dubious ground that since
the Florida financier's car had been found at a Sarasota airport, he wasn’t
really missing.
According to a
January 21 Associated Press story
headlined “Authorities think money manager planned to
vanish,” the Sarasota Sheriff’s Department reasoning was that
Nadel, who had not yet been charged with any crime, had planned his own
disappearance, and left on his own volition.
"He
doesn't want to be found," shrugged a Sheriff’s Dept. spokesman.
Perhaps the Sheriff's Department
didn't want him to be found. The man picked by Art
Nadel to look after his interests at the Venice Airport, Roger Jernigan, worked
for the Sarasota Sheriff’s Dept as a helicopter pilot until forced to resign
under a cloud.
The second Florida law enforcement
agency exhibiting strange behavior during the search for Art Nadel is the
Florida Department of Law Enforcement, or FDLE.
And what they did deserves its own
story.
NEXT: The War
for Control of the Venice FL "Plaza"