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Eight
weeks after Mexican soldiers at a rural airport in the
Yucatan discovered 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard an
American-registered DC9 painted to resemble aircraft
from the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security, Mexican and
U.S. law enforcement officials seem no closer to
publicly identifying either the owner of the plane, or
the tons of cocaine.
Some suggest they may not be
trying very hard. If true, this is yet another indication that suspicions of CIA
involvement in the drug flight are on target. In fact, in the strange brew of
companies through whose hands the twin DC9's have passed, we will soon see even
more unmistakable signs of companies known to be CIA fronts and people
considered to be Bush Family retainers.
Even so, our suggestion that
CIA involvement in an imbroglio over 5.5 tons of cocaine led to Porter Goss’
surprise resignation as CIA Director just a few weeks later provoked someone to
chastise us for not offering proof.
CIA involvement is
the proof that Porter Goss,
had been placed in an embarrassing and ultimately untenable position, and that
he was sacked for committing what is regarded as
the cardinal sin...
Goss, a spook extraordinaire
since the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was (finally) caught holding.
"Starting at
power forward for your American Drug Lords..."
Especially before the
scandal potentially grows out of hand, this seems grounds for dismissal, even
among the jaded keepers of well-tended Cayman Island accounts.
Losing 5.5 tons of cocaine
on an airliner traceable to your Government Agency certainly does not appear to
have been, for Mr. Goss, an especially good career move.
And there's potentially much
worse to come... A probe into the tangled skein of companies and individuals in
what has clearly been a continuing operation lasting at least a
decade has revealed glimpses of what until now has been
the most elusive species on Earth:
The American Drug
Lords.
How is it possible that the
owner of a DC9 airliner caught with 5 tons of cocaine can remain hidden
for two months? The untimely bust came at a certain low ebb for the
owner/operators of "Cocaine One." This favorable conjunction
of the stars is about to allow a privileged glimpse into corruption so vast it
can only be what Prof Peter Dale Scott called
the "deep politics" of what sociologists refer to as
"state-sponsored crime."
Pull up a chair.
Going way
way wrong at the worst possible time
“The Feds have never wanted
to clean up the sloppy way airplanes are registered,” one aircraft broker told
us. “Registering a plane with the FAA is just a joke. They don’t even make you
use a tax I.D. number or social security number to register a plane. You don’t
even have to have your signature notarized."
"The result is that nobody
can ever tell with any certainty what the hell is going on. Apparently that's
the way they like it.”
Since April 11, the day things
went way wrong in a small town in the Mexican state of Campeche, the mystery of
the plane’s ownership has only deepened.
Recently the last registered
American owner of the DC9, Frederic Geffon of
Royal Sons Inc insisted he bore no responsibility at all for the
plane’s recent misadventures.
In a May 5, 2006 interview with the
Tampa Tribune following up a story they'd
run the previous day, Geffon said he sold the plane 10 days before it was
seized by Mexican authorities, to a man named Jorge Corrales, who he identified
as a Simi Valley, Calif., aircraft broker.
But the MadCowMorningNews has learned
that there is a problem with Geffon’s explanation: The California “aircraft
broker” who Geffon says bought the aircraft(N900SA)—for resale to a client
identified only as a “Venezuelan company”—does not appear to be in the business
of buying and selling planes.
Tangled Web
City, Next Exit
A LEXIS-NEXIS newspaper database
search yielded no mention of Corrales and Associates. A Google search failed to
find an aircraft broker named George or Jorge Corrales, or a Corrales and
Associates.
A visit to the three major
online venues used to sell airplanes confirmed the assertion…
We could find no
evidence indicating that Jorge “George” Corrales is an aircraft broker
A search for broker/dealers selling McDonnell Douglas DC9’s in California at
The Controller, for example, reveals just three DC9’s for sale, from just two
dealers.
An aircraft dealer at the
Venice Airport told us, “There is a very small group of people involved in the
market for jet airliners world-wide. If you had a party and invited every DC9
buyer in the world you could easily fit them all inside my hanger.”
OK Aviation is the listing broker for
two of the three DC9’s currently for sale in California.
So we called
OK Aviation's owner, Jack Kendall. He knew the other DC9 dealers
in the state, he told us. No, he'd never heard of George Corrales or Corrales &
Associates.
Maybe the
paperwork is still in the mail
A search for aircraft brokers and
dealers in California
at Trade-A-Plane reveals no listing for Corrales & Associates. And it’s a
free listing.
A
check of ASO’s list of Southern California aircraft brokers and dealers
turned up a Titan Aviation in San Diego, we were interested to
learn, as well as an Air America Inc.
But no
Corrales and Associates.
Frederic Geffon told the
Tampa Tribune he sold “Cocaine One” to an aircraft brokerage which
apparently doesn’t even exist.
The Tampa Tribune story
quoted FAA spokesman Roland Herwig stating that the FAA received a copy of a
letter from Royal Sons, dated April 7, asking that the plane be exported to
Venezuela and that the FAA officially took Royal Sons' name off the books three
days after the cocaine bust.
"We don't get involved with
the sale of aircraft, only their registration or deregistration," Herwig told
the Tribune.
Geffon himself, while
insisting that the plane with 5.5 tons of coke wasn’t his, was otherwise
suspiciously close-mouthed.
Who you gonna
believe...Me? Or your
lying eyes?
Apparently Geffon knows all
the words to the hit song “It Wasn’t Me.”
But not much else... “Geffon
provided the Tampa Tribune with a copy of what he says is a bill of sale he
turned over to his title company,” the paper reported. “It had no information
about the purchaser.”
Corrales
"did not want me to know" who bought the aircraft "and I
didn't care anyway," Geffon said.
Corrales contradicted this
statement. He said that he did not know why Geffon claims not to know who
purchased the DC-9. He said Geffon absolutely knew who had
purchased the aircraft.
When people lie, its almost
always for a reason...
“It was a Venezuelan
company,” Corrales told the Tampa Tribune. “Royal Sons got a crew that flew the
aircraft" to Venezuela, and obtained the permits needed to fly the plane out of
the country.
Geffon denied it. He said he
only "hired someone to find a flight crew to take it down there."
Frederic Geffon was having
no trouble resisting the urge to fall all over himself clearing up any
misunderstandings...
'Men in
Europe' may be difficult to assemble all at once
"Geffon would not identify that individual, saying only
that the man is in Europe and unavailable for comment,” the paper reported.
“Corrales, who owns Corrales and Associates, disagrees.”

Although the paper didn’t
say so, it was a classic Mexican stand-off.
And, as the Tampa Tribune’s
Howard Altman noted wryly, the Federal Aviation Administration
was not about to untangle the knot.
Still, compared with the
little information which has managed to
trickle out about the case, Altman's story contains a major scoop:
“A man in Europe unavailable
for comment” has the answers to who owned the massive cocaine haul.
All we need do to find the
owner of “Cocaine One” is take all the males on the European
Continent, subtracting those who are available for comment, to
give us the subset of "Men in Europe" in whose ranks today can
almost certainly be found the man who knows who was using a DC9 tricked out to
resemble a U.S. Government plane to smuggle tons of cocaine.
That was simple. All we need
now is a stadium big enough to sort them all out.
I have no
comment on my no comment
More bad news for the now
rapidly-emerging official story: There is no Corrales & Associates
in California.
The 'supposed' aircraft
broker who bought the DC9 in the nick of time from people in St
Petersburg FL has been “suspended” from operation
for several years by the California Division of Corporations.
Thus, Corrales &
Associates cannot legally do business in the state of California.
However, there
is a Jorge Corrales, or rather a George Corrales, listed in the
Simi Valley phone books. We phoned to ask if he had any proof that he buys and
sells airplanes for a living.
“Mr. Corrales, we’ve been
unable to find any evidence that you are in the business of buying and selling
airplanes,” we began. “Can you point to anything to prove you are?”
“I have no comment at this
time,” he told us tersely.
Why is that? Who did you
sell the DC9 to in Venezuela?
“I can’t comment on that.”
“Aren’t you leaving yourself
open to charges that you yourself may be involved in drug
trafficking? If you get arrested for running 5 tons of cocaine...will you have a
comment then?”
There was a loud click. The
line went dead. We thought:
How very rude.
A murky
mystery; A "great deal of concern"
Hovering at all times at the
edge of the 5.5 ton cocaine scandal is the company responsible for painting twin
DC9's in what clearly appears to have been a deliberate deception:
SkyWay Aircraft.
Next we will
learn about the founder of what became SkyWay Aircraft, Miami attorney
Michael Farkas. But we can't resist teasing the story a little bit now.
Farkas, as
you might well imagine, isn't just anyone... For example, he
currently owns a North Miami company which wants to market
Israeli antimissile defense systems to U.S. aircraft
manufacturers, after obtaining rights to a system developed by a subsidiary of
Israel Aircraft Industries, Israel's
biggest defense contractor.
But before
engaging in the popular sport of blaming the Jews
it might be useful to recall that we've already seen Saudi billionaire
Adnan Khashoggi's involvement. Oddly enough, fifteen of SkyWay Aircraft's
biggest investors are from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
One of them even appears to be the head of the Kuwaiti National Guard.
While
presiding over SkyWay’s bankruptcy, Federal Judge Paul M. Glenn said, "I have a
great deal of concern about this case. There is a great deal we don't know."
Two years ago, Judge Glenn
called this case "murky.”
Since then, very little
appears to have changed.
NEXT (FINALLY): An
ultra-nationalist Israeli party & the head of the Kuwaiti National Guard |