Flight School Owner Has Shady Ties
EXCLUSIVE--Venice, Fl. Authorities are probing the European
business associations of a Venice flight school owner, whose school at
the Venice airport trained the nucleus of foreign national terrorist
pilots, looking for possible links to international organized crime
groups, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday to be
laundering large sums of drug money for major terrorist organizations.
Organized crime said to launder billions for terrorists.
Three of the airliners involved in the September 11th terrorist
attack—two in Manhattan, and one wrested to the ground over
Pennsylvania—were piloted by terrorists who had trained at two flight
schools at the Venice, Florida airport.
Dekkers was widely interviewed on television after the disaster
expressing outrage over the terrorist attacks, and disclaiming any
responsibility for the actions of former students. But he may have been
lying in his portrayal of his association with the men who became
eventual terrorist pilots, when he repeatedly stated they were people
who had just basically "walked in" off the street into his school at the
tiny Venice airport.
Instead, Rudi Dekkers was actively marketing his flight school in
Germany at the exact same time Mohamed Atta and his terrorist cell left
Hamburg and moved to Florida, where several immediately enrolled in his
school. Both ringleaders, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Alshehri, each
believed to have piloted a plane into the World Trade Center Towers,
learned to fly at Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice, Fla.
Two years ago Dekkers began an aggressive European ‘marketing’
campaign, just after purchasing the flight school, reported the local
Venice Gondolier at the time. "The world is my working place," Dekkers
boasted to the paper. "I won't forget Venice, but I'm going to market
throughout the world, Germany, France, Belgium. That's our goal, to get
people to come in here from all over the world."
New owners of Huffman Aviation have global presence
His plans were so successful that they had soon changed the entire
makeup of his flight school. Foreign nationals came to account for over
80 per cent of the student pilots enrolled with him. Rudi Dekkers'
flight schools (he has another down the road in Naples) are training
four hundred foreign nationals a year.
According to German prosecutors, after Atta moved from Germany to
train with Dekkers' flight school in Venice, at least four other members
of the same terrorist cell moved there to train as pilots as well. Could
Atta have recruited by Dekkers, and not the other way around? Officials
involved in the September 11th investigation said early this
week that the key to unraveling the plot might lie in Germany, not the
United States.
In press interviews, Dekkers has inferred that students pilots were
just showing up at his flight school and thrusting fistfuls of dollars
(10,000 of them) across his counter. But what if it was the other way
around? What if Mohamed didn’t go to the mountain, but that the
mountain, in the guise of the portly Dekkers, came to Mohamed? If
Dekkers was actively marketing in Germany when the terrorists moved to
the U.S., he bears closer scrutiny...
In press accounts of Dekkers’ business dealings, prior to the
September disaster, he is revealed as a fast talking con man. And in the
first mention of him afterwards his hometown paper, the Venice
Gondolier, ran a headline saying
Huffman Aviation no stranger to headlines.
"Huffman Aviation Inc. has had problems in the last few months
with the city of Venice, Sarasota County and the state of Florida, but
the school keeps flying," the paper reported.
Rudi wasn’t paying his rent out at the airport.
Huffman rent is late again, the paper headlined on May 12th.
"When Huffman Aviation paid three months of overdue rent last Friday,
company president Rudi Dekkers said the rent wouldn't be late again.
"No, we won't have this any more," he said during an interview last
Friday."
Headlines in the Venice Gondolier about Dekkers grew even less
flattering as time goes by. City
threatens lessee with eviction, again.
"Huffman Aviation Inc. is again on notice from the city to catch up
on its rent payments or face eviction from the airport," the paper wrote
on June 9th.
Nothing had changed by mid-summer.
Huffman rent late, again, the paper reported in mid-July.
"For the sixth straight month, Huffman Aviation Inc. has failed to
pay its rent to the city on time."
A month before the September 11th tragedy, Huffman finally
paid the rent.
Huffman pays rent.
What makes this airing of Rudi's dirty linen of note is that while
Dekkers was receiving this humiliating deadbeat coverage he was
simultaneously launching a commuter air taxi service in Florida
(Flair Starts Service) a venture for which he had been provided both
planes and pilots by a Gig Harbor, WA man linked to current Mob
activities in Portland, Oregon. Richard Boehlke "owns" Harbor Air, or
what's left of it, and he was simultaneously actively involved in a
massive looting of workers pension funds in Portland, Oregon. Hardest
hit ($60 million) was the pension fund of the Laborers, called the
biggest Mob-run union in America.
Labor Leaders Troubles Follow History of Union Woes
While supplying both the planes and the pilots for the new Florida
Air, Boehlke's Harbor Air was simultaneously going bankrupt. So were two
other of Boehlke's companies, Crossings Aviation, and Crossings
Development, a Portland condo deal for which
Boehlke borrowed $17 million, mostly unpaid, through
Capital Consultants, a pension fund management company
that was in the midst of somehow "losing" $320 million dollars.
Worst-hit were the pension funds of laborers and secretaries. Some were
so badly looted that experts thought some workers would have to extend
their careers by another decade to receive the level of benefits
they'd have had if their money not been made to disappear in ludicrously
bad deals like Richard Boehlke’s.
Playing Catch Up in Retirement.
"Boehlke would do anything for money, he was so desperate," said an
aviation executive who had witnessed Boehlke's descent. "I’m surprised
he hasn’t skipped the country by now, what with all the trouble he’s
gotten himself into farting around with those Mafia boys down in
Portland."
Another recipient of the pension fund largesse is Alvin Malnick, whom
Readers Digest once called "Meyer Lansky’s heir as head of Organized
Crime." If one is looking for "international organized crime groups,"
they don't get much bigger that the Mob.
Firm Linked to Reputed Mob Figure Got Loans.
Little known, and even stranger, is the fact that Alvin Malnick, who
avows only to being a Jewish lawyer from Miami, has extremely close
ties—family, ties, actually—to a leading Prince of the Saudi
Royal Family.
In fairness it must be stated: whether any of these associations is
germane to answering questions about Dekkers' role in recruiting and
training foreign national pilots is at this point unknown. But its a
brand new world we have all been living in since September 11,
2001. No one is immune from pointed questions that lead to answers about
an international network helping the terrorist cadre that was able to
move so freely in our midst.
When President Bush said all evidence pointed to bin Laden and his
Al-Qaeda organization as responsible for the attacks, he also equated
the Islamic group to the Mafia, stating "Al-Qaeda is to terror what the
Mafia is to crime."
Our question is, do the two ever meet?
NEXT: Who owns Rudi Dekkers?