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A MadCowMorningNews
investigation has learned that the
company which owned the DC9
airliner
caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine at an airport
in Mexico’s Yucatan last year was engaged in other
illegal activities as well, including massive “pump
and dump” stock fraud involving a network
of companies led by scandal-ridden San Diego defense
contractor Titan Corp.
Between 2003 and 2005 Titan Corp and a group of allied
firms combined to issue
a steady drumbeat of phony
press releases, announcing multi-million contracts
to purchase products which didn't exist, and major
deals which never took place, as part of a concerted
effort to "pump up" the price of stock in
SkyWay Aircraft of St Petersburg, FL.
The goal was to inflate SkyWay’s stock price--the
pump--in advance of a massive sell-off--the
dump-- by company insiders.
The coup de grace was delivered by company
principals, who stripped the company’s remaining assets
before filing bankruptcy through sweetheart deals
with officers from other companies in the network.
The network of companies looted over
one billion dollars through financial
fraud; the sum easily eclipses the
drug trafficking payout generated by moving 5.5 tons
of cocaine.
Jeb Bush & "Enterprise Florida"

Several of the companies involved in the SkyWay stock
fraud scheme have received extraordinary government
assistance at both the state and federal level.
Triton Network Systems, for example,
closely-related to SkyWay through shared management,
was
not exactly a triumph for free enterprise...

Instead, the
firm was a “double-dipper." It
was founded with money from the CIA, and also pocketed
cash from a quasi-public state entity called “Enterprise
Florida,” controlled by Florida Governor Jeb
Bush.
This insider status may help explain why
officers and directors of the companies in the network
which engaged in blatant stock fraud-- not to
mention 5.5 ton shipments of cocaine--have
been operating with seeming impunity.
CIA moving in on Mob turf?
Some
of the companies involved in the SkyWay pump
& dump fraud were also implicated in the
epic
prosecution of major Wall Street brokerage houses
by Elliot Spitzer, then the Attorney General of New
York State.
Spitzer charged dozens of Wall Street brokers who
defrauded unwary investors of tens of millions of
dollars. Major brokerage houses paid over one billion
dollars in fines to avoid criminal prosecution.
"This
is a horror show. And that is why we as prosecutors
feel so determined to root out the merger of
organized crime and Wall Street,"
said New York Atty. Gen. Elliot
Spitzer.
Spitzer named more than thirty corporations whose
stock was run up and then dumped in the scheme. Little
attention seems to have been paid to how these companies
were chosen.
However three of the companies involved
in Spitzer's probe also are part of the network which
"busted out" SkyWay: L-3 Communications,
Net Command Tech Inc, and Triton Network Systems Inc.
Its called a 'get out of jail free' card
According
to Mexican authorities,
the
DC9 airliner busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine made
at least seven round trips to Venezuela with stop-overs
at airports in Mexico before being caught.
The airliner had even been painted in the familiar
blue and white colors used on official U.S. Government
aircraft, complete with an official-looking Seal:
an impressive-looking American eagle surrounded by
the inscription: "Sky Way Aircraft -- Protection
of America's Skies."
"We
never could figure out how they could get away with
that," one SkyWay employee told us. "They
had the same seal on the fleet of Hummers, and Tampa
cops pulled them over and made them take it off."
Yet the DC9 sat on the tarmac at Clearwater-St. Petersburg
International Airport less than one hundred
yards from the U.S. Coast Guard’s major Caribbean
air station, with no questions asked or interference
from the Coast Guard.
When questioned, officials at the Coast Guard Station
refused to comment.
An American-registered airliner caught with 5.5 tons
of cocaine is not an everyday occurrence,
even in Florida.
But
like Coast Guard officials, top DEA officials were
tongue-tied.
We phoned and emailed Oscar Negron, the
DEA’s press liaison officer in Miami, almost three
weeks ago, politely inquiring about the status of
the investigation, if any, into the huge seizure.
“Just to let you know,” he emailed back, “I am waiting
for information from our HQ.”
Oscar
is presumably still waiting. So are we.
Definition of "milk run"

One reason for the silence may be that the DC9 bust
carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine and represents
an historic opportunity to shine a spotlight on some
dark corners of America’s Deep Politics and expose
the plane's politically well-connected ownership.
Because the
DC9's bust is
not a romantic tale of daring pilots in drug-laden
aircraft skimming the surging waves of the Gulf of
Mexico.
The
days of the cocaine cowboys are long gone, and there
is nothing romantic, if there ever was, about their
escapades.
The process of flying narcotics into the United States
today is no more eventful than flying a commuter jet
between Houston and Dallas.
Now
they fly airliners. The pilots even wear uniforms.
This
is
a business story.
The discovery that Skyway's owners were involve in
massive financial fraud as well as drug trafficking
raises the stakes.
And it
raises a question, as well...
Where does all
the money go?
Buck
Rogers meets Elmer Gantry
SkyWay
Aircraft was not a real business, in the sense of
being a company engaging in commerce and selling a
product for profit. The company didn’t have one.
Instead, they boasted a nearly worthless patent that
a court last month—citing
criminal intent—ruled belonged to another
company, Satellite Access Systems.
Glenn Kovar and his son, Brent Kovar, who ran SkyWay
as Chairman and President, respectively, also ran
Satellite Access Systems (SAS), a scam
amazingly similar to SkyWay, with the same result:
investors losing millions of dollars.
Like SkyWay, SAS was touting a gee-whiz product: software
supposed to enable people to send or receive data
by radio wave at 103 times the speed
of ultra-fast T1 lines.
If they ever go straight, these guys clearly have
enough imagination to found a new science-fiction
religion. Scientology, beware.
A lot of bankruptcies, no doubt about
it

Of course, the SAS story also ended badly, with the
stock trading at
about three one-thousands of a penny per share. It
then became a wholly owned subsidiary of Corsaire,
Inc., which changed its name in 1999 to
Net Command Tech Inc.
Net Command also employed the Kovars, as well as other
SkyWay principals. The two firms were more than “kissing
cousins.”
And Net Command was where we first saw
the network of corporations to which SkyWay belongs
in action, after we came across, for the second time,
the name of Frank Musolino, aka Frank Musilino.
In a SkyWay bankruptcy filing we'd discovered his
then-unfamiliar name. Frank Musolino was
listed as a SkyWay company insider. So Musolino
had a (presumably sweet) deal with SkyWay...
Musilino
also had deals with SkyWay’s sister firm, Net Command
Tech Inc., and Triton, and Buzzeo, and...the list
goes on.
Cash out early... and often

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has started
proceedings to revoke the registration of Net Command
Tech Inc.
The SEC says the company has not filed any financial
results since 1999.
Net
Command flew to a $29.50 high in April, 1999.
Alas,
it last traded at just under a penny.
When Net Command Tech went bankrupt,
Frank Musolino had already cashed out. He came out
smelling like a rose, and made a big payday before
the company went belly-up.
So
too with Triton Systems. When Triton Network Systems
walked the plank, investors lost $200 million.
Not
Frank.
Not Frank Musolino

Triton
Network Systems was liquidated several years ago after
raising $250 million in venture capital.
Before going bankrupt Triton issued a press release:
“Triton
Network Systems, Inc. (the “Company”) has settled
a lawsuit with a shareholder, Frank Musolino, resulting
in a cash payment to the shareholder
of $3.65 million.”
Triton
was a joint effort between Tampa-based Military Command
Technologies Inc. and Lockheed Martin. Triton was
the largest recipient of money from Enterprise Florida.
Its initial funding from Finova Capital, which has
long been another way of saying CIA.
(SEE
Thursday’s story for details.)
Spitzer was right
Here
we recall that Level 3 (which has since purchased
Titan) XO Communications and Triton Network Systems
Inc. were all cited by Elliot Spitzer, then the Attorney
General of New York State, as having been used by
Wall Street brokers in “pump and dump” schemes which
cost unwary investors tens of millions of dollars.
And
this is where things really begin to get interesting.

XO
Communications issued press releases touting its purchase
of $6.5 million worth of Sky Way products.
XO
Communications also issued a press release announcing
it was using equipment from Triton Network Systems
Inc.
Frank
Musolino got a settlement from XO Communications.
The company's stock was around $65 in March 2000.
It was recently hovering, the page note, a little
bitterly, at around $0.07.
On
the Internet you can purchase beautifully engraved
stock certificates “worth more as a collectible than
the redeemable value of the stock” from XO Communications
as part of the “Boy, did I get the Wrong Number Package.”
A generic dummy front company

The question of whether there "might could"
be a Central Intelligence Agency connection to the
DC0 airliner stuffed with 5.5 tons of cocaine is,
for some, akin to asking whether the Pope might
be Catholic.
An
overwhelming body of evidence points directly towards
this conclusion. But, even
if SkyWay Aircraft wasn't a CIA front,
someone appears to have gone to some little trouble
to make them appear as if they were.
-
The CIA's In-Q-Tel was set up in 1999.
-
SkyWay’s journey to infamy began that same year,
when a Brooklyn attorney named Michael Farkas
began setting up dozens of shell companies.
-
Farkas even incorporated a company called
Shell Corporations.com, Inc.
-
One of these shells, which became SkyWay Aircraft,
immediately attracted an investment
from crooked defense contractor Titan Corp of
San Diego, which became a subsidiary of L-3 Communications.
-
According to SEC documents, in early February
of 2000 Titan put up $72,386 for
restricted shares of a shell company Farkas created
which later became SkyWay.
-
At the time, according to SEC filings, Farkas’
company had only one full time employee: himself.
He mentions Titan five times in
the company’s business plan.
What could excited the early interest of a San
Diego defense contractor in a two-man corporate shell?
Three years later Titan issued a press release offering
to pay $500 million to a company going bankrupt for
a product which didn’t exist.
Why did Titan Corp.
blatantly and fraudulently plump the prospects of
a soon-to-be-bankrupt company with no product and
no prospects located a continent away?
If the Democrats are serious about taking back the
government for the people, this would be a good question
to ask, and a good place to start.
Any friend of Brent Wilkes...

A May 13, 2004 press release, since removed from Titan’s
site, gushed: “We are excited about the possibilities
Sky Way Aircraft System technology offers," said
Titan's David Stinson.
David Stinson has ties to another figure involved
in current scandal: Brent Wilkes.
Before signing on with Titan, Stinson was the executive
vice president of Intergraph, whose Original Equipment
Manufacturer (OEM) deal with Brent Wilke’s ADCS Inc.
first opened the money spigot for which Wilkes is
about to go on trial.
Titan is also, of course, the biggest donor to a raft
of U.S. Congressmen from Southern California, either
convicted (Randy Cunningham) or mentioned as possible
targets of the thwarted investigation of fired San
Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam.
Several top executives of SkyWays Aircraft, the American
firm which owned the DC9 in partnership with Royal
Sons Inc. of St Petersburg, FL. including the company’s
President, James Kent, are former members of U.S.
military intelligence.
Chairman Glenn Kovar liked to boast about his long-standing
ties to the CIA.
Not the smartest spooks in Spooktown
The
plane's registered owner, “Royal Sons LLC,”
a Florida air charter company, at one time used the
address of a hanger at the Venice Fl. Airport owned
by infamous flight school Huffman Aviation. No one
at the Venice Airport remembered them.
Of course “Royal Sons” was not the first phantom firm
we had discovered hiding inside Huffman Aviation.
Britannia Aviation was also “housed” inside the flight
school, and was the subject of a major brouhaha in
Jerry Falwell’s hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia, when
the virtually non-existent firm, with total assets
of $750, was awarded a fat government contract over
a local firm much better qualified.
Then, too, Skyway leased a 70,000 square foot
“repair” facility at DFW Airport in Dallas for more
than $20,000 a month in a building owned by a Richard
Rainwater, called “George W. Bush’s biggest
supporter” and “the power behind the throne” during
Bush’s first Presidential campaign.
One of the chief shareholders in SkyWay Aircraft was
a private investment bank near Dallas, Argyll Equities
LLC, which raised funds for a Mexican industrialist
with ties to narcotics traffickers in both the Cali
Columbia and Juarez Mexico Cartels.
Secrets of the black box budget
Individuals
involved in the operation have extensive and wide-ranging
connections to each other which pre-date the brief
life span of the company, revealing the outlines of
a larger and previously secret organization.
Michael Farkas, the company’s founder,
for example, has longstanding ties to Adnan
Khashoggi and his lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi,
who supplied one of the two DC9’s used in the operation,
who at one time ran a CIA subsidiary airline used
to ferry TOW missiles to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s
regime in Iran.
Both Khashoggi and El Batrawi are currently on the
lam in the $300 million Stockwalk scam,
which precipitated what news reports called the “largest
brokerage industry failure in more than 30 years.”
The fraud involved the stock of GenesisIntermedia,
a company incorporated by the long-time attorney of
a man once called the biggest drug smuggler in American
history, CIA pilot Barry Seal.
Along with GenesisIntermedia, the stock
of just two other companies was used to generate fraudulent
loans in the scam: Holiday RV. Stores and Imperial
Credit Industries.
Michael Farkas, founder of SkyWay Aircraft, owns
both companies.
Small world.
THURSDAY: THINGS GET SORDID. REALLY SORDID.
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"Threats of law suits against journalists
have become the hallmark of the Bush administration
in a not too clever tactic used to silence independent
media in the U.S. -Wayne
Madsen
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