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A
DC9 registered to a company which
once used as its address the hanger
of Huffman Aviation, the flight
school at the Venice, FL Airport
which trained both terrorist pilots
who crashed planes into the World
Trade Center, was caught in Campeche
by the Mexican military
April 10th
carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine
destined for the U.S.
Beyond a few
half-hearted stabs at pinning blame
for the crime on ‘scapegoats du
jour’ like the FARC in Colombia or
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela,
authorities in Mexico and the U.S.
have had virtually nothing to say
about the case.
In the more than
three months since, the massive
seizure has slipped into a black
hole.
One of the chief
shareholders in SkyWay
Aircraft, the company which
owned
the DC9 airliner
(N900SA) seized in Mexico with 5.5 tons of
cocaine aboard, is a private
investment bank in Dallas which
also raised funds for a Mexican
industrialist with reported ties to
a Cali and Juarez Cartel narcotics
trafficker,
the MadCowMorningNews
has learned.
An investigation into
the circumstances surrounding
seizure of the DC9 airliner (dubbed
“Cocaine One” for its
paint job and Seal impersonation of
planes from the U.S. Dept. of
Homeland Security) has unearthed
evidence which is beginning to
pierce the heavy curtain behind
which the biggest taboo in the U.S.
mainstream media has remained
hidden: the identities of the
until-now anonymous American
Drug Lords.
Meet the Masters of the Universe
What local officials
blundered into at a remote airport
in the farthest corner of Mexico’s
Yucatan may have earth-shaking
reverberations felt around the
world… if the true
story of what happened there becomes
widely known...
The seizure in Ciudad
del Carmen has exposed the links of
a global narcotics cartel that may
be the most powerful political force
on the planet.
Based on court
documents, SEC filings, records of
incorporation, and interviews with
eyewitnesses, the elements which
comprise this global narcotics
cartel—all of which will be named
and covered in this series—include
the following:
Rogue U.S. defense
contractor Titan Corp
in San Diego; CIA proprietary
airlines; “fugitive” Saudi
billionaires, Gulf States
Sheiks and financiers; the
Israeli Mossad and right
wing Israeli political parties
identified with Jewish settler
interests; “retired” officers of the
CIA and U.S. military
intelligence; Texas
Republican kingmakers and
private investment banks; member of
U.S. organized crime...
Also... stock
swindlers in Vancouver,
Canada responsible for multi-billion
dollar financial fraud; officials
from the party of Mexican
President Vicente Fox;
Colombian and Mexican
drug cartels; Florida air
charter companies which
enjoy—as did the Florida aviation
companies associated with the
terrorist hijackers—apparent
official immunity from prosecution;
and Lebanese
“industrialists” in Mexico known to
the Mexican press as the “Narco-Pederastas,”
for their penchant for molesting
children, with apparent immunity
from prosecution, both boys and
girls, as young as four.
Five ton shipments must be the the
industry standard
Today’s story begins
in Dallas, Texas...
As stated in the lead
to this story, one of the chief
shareholders in the company which
owned the DC9 airliner (N900SA)
seized in Mexico with 5.5 tons of
cocaine aboard is a private
investment bank in Dallas which also
raised funds for a Mexican
industrialist who reportedly
financed a narcotics trafficker
linked to both the Cali and Juarez
Cartel.
In a major irony, the
trafficker involved, Manuel Vicente
Losada, was arrested in Chile after
being linked to another
five ton cocaine shipment, this one
over the high seas.
Private investment
bank
Argyll Equities LLC
in Boerne, Texas, is part of The
Argyll Group, headquartered in La
Jolla, CA., incorporated in Texas,
Nevada,, and Delaware, whose
undisclosed principals are involved,
according to their website, in
“providing creative financial
solutions globally.”
One example of the
firm’s creative financial solutions:
According to documents filed with
the SEC in 2005, Argyll Equities LLC
was paid to raise a $17.0 million
loan for Mexican industrialist
Jose Serrano Segovia’s
shipping line, GRUPO TMM.
The Santiago Times,
an English language newspaper in
Chile, reported on May 5, 1998 that
Segovia “provided significant
capital” to
a
“Chilean narcotics trafficker"
named Manuel Vicente Losada,
arrested in the Chilean capital of
Santiago after being “linked to a
shipment of five tons of
cocaine which U.S. drug
enforcement officials in Miami
intercepted over six years ago on
the vessel Harbour, as it headed
toward Guantanamo Bay.”
“As
it headed for… Guantanamo
Bay?”
“In September 1997,
Mexican newspaper El Universal de
Mexico connected Losada to the
Juarez Cartel of Mexico, referring
to him as "the Chilean narcotics
trafficker," the paper reported.
“Both Losada and Jose
Serrano denied any connection to the
Juarez Cartel.”
Drug trafficker
Losada, said the paper, is a partner
in some 30 shipping companies.
Jose Serrano Segovia
owns shipping lines too, and until
recently controlled what used to be
Mexico’s flagship airline, Mexicana.
This would appear to be an excellent
example of what has been called the
corporatization of narcotics
trafficking which began
taking place during the late 1980’s,
while then-Vice President George H.
W. Bush led the DEA’s task force in
Miami .
Juan Serrano Segovia
is one of a handful of Mexican “big
corporate guns” lucky enough to have
been feted at a private dinner
several years ago hosted by Gov. Jeb
Bush, leading a Florida trade
mission to Mexico.
"The evening turned
into a kind of
let's-get-to-know-each-other-socially
affair." Joseph Lacher, BellSouth's
Florida president, confided to The
Miami Herald.
Ask Baby Doc: Toxic waste is good
business.
Was Argyll Equities
LLC the victim of “dashed bad luck”
in providing funding for an
operation which may be providing
cover for something else? Other
recent examples of Argyll’s
“creative financing globally”
provide at least a tentative
answer...
Remember the
infamous toxic garbage barge
which circled the world for more
than two years in search of a
country willing to accept its cargo
of toxic ash from a Philadelphia
dump site? The barge, the Khian
Sea, left the territorial waters of
the United States, went to the
Bahamas, then to the Dominican
Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea
Bissau, and the Netherlands
Antilles. No one would take it...
That is, until it got
to Haiti. There, U.S.-backed
dictator Baby Doc Duvalier issued a
permit for the "fertilizer," and
4,000 tons was dumped onto the beach
in the town of Gonalves.
Argyll Equities LLC
provided funding to the man who
owned the barge, one Louis D.
Paolino, who later, and perhaps
understandably, tired of the garbage
business, and sold his company to
Wayne Huizenga’s Waste
Management in Miami, which
runs, news accounts demurely report,
“much of New York's extremely
lucrative garbage industry.”
How unlucky can one
private investment bank get?
Maybe somebody left it on the plane?
Mr. Huizenga,
readers of
“Welcome to
TERRORLAND” may recall,
flew to the Naples, FL airport in
his private helicopter adorned with
the symbol of the Miami Dolphins (he
owned them at the time) to have a
private tête-à-tête on the runway
with mysterious financier
Wallace J. Hilliard, the
owner of Huffman Aviation in Venice.
Alert readers will
recall that during the same month,
July of 2000, that Mohamed
Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi
arrived to attend his flight school,
Hilliard’s Lear jet was surrounded
by DEA agents on the runway of
Orlando Executive Airport.
They found 43 pounds
of heroin onboard.
Argyll Equities is
currently involved in a
still-unexplained imbroglio which
may shed some light on this milieu
which seems to attract such large
quantities of narcotics…
According
to a federal indictment, the lucky
company was the recipient of $9.7
million dollars it didn't earn, in a
“purported stock loan program
operated by Argyll Equities, L.L.C,”
which resulted in criminal charges
earlier this year against three men.
“The complaint
alleges the men made false
statements to a hedge fund operator
so they could keep $25 million from
the fund that was invested this year
with Nevada-based American Trade
Industries, Inc., according to
US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald
and the US Secret Service in
Chicago,” the AP reported.
That's right. THAT Fitzgerald.
General Stroessner isn't dead. He's
on vacation with Franco.
The men were accused
of conspiring to perpetrate a $26
million dollar fraud on the
administrator of a private hedge
fund in Lake Forest, IL, who turns
out to be mother of “Wedding
Crashers” actor
Vince Vaughn.
According to the
indictment, one of the accused men,
Richard E. Warren,
apprehended as he attempted to board
a plane for London, told Sharon
Vaughn that he “had a special
government clearance,” was “licensed
by USG to participate in secret
trading programs.”
Also indicted was
Frank L. Cowles Jr., who
owns an Arabian horse farm near
Washington D.C., where he is
referred to in news accounts as a
“Virginia businessman,” and who is
married to the Ambassador to the
U.S. of the tiny country of
Paraguay,
Leila Teresa Rachid
de Cowles.
Paraguay, in Latin
America’s infamous triangle region,
is suspected by the State Dept. of
“helping to finance Islamic
terrorist groups” through
Lebanese traders in Ciudad del
Este, a lawless border town, called
South America’s "contraband
capital.”
Of anecdotal interest
only—since a U.S. District Court
judge in Chicago recently dropped
criminal charges against Cowles— is
the fact that Ambassador Rachid is
among the five percent of Paraguay's
inhabitants of Arab descent. Her
father was born in Homs, Syria; her
mother is from Ba'albek,
Lebanon.
"We used the shares for toilet
paper... and still made out
like bandits."
Argyll Equities LLC
is the second-largest shareholder in
SkyWay, according to bankruptcy
filings, owning nearly 21 million
shares of totally worthless stock,
which might be considered something
of an investment black eye,
unless other undisclosed
considerations were involved.
Last week we reported
the discovery that SkyWay
Aircraft had been
leasing a “repair” facility for more
than $20,000 a month at DFW Airport
in Dallas—even though the company
had nothing to repair— from
Richard Rainwater, called
“George W. Bush’s biggest supporter”
and “the power behind the throne” in
news accounts during Bush’s first
Presidential campaign.
New evidence
unearthed since then has begun to
fill in the picture of an operation
which boasted a bewildering
international cast of characters, in
San Diego, Israel, Miami, Dallas,
and in the case of two prominent
principals,
on the lam…
SkyWay Aircraft was
not a real entity, in the sense of a
corporation engaging in commerce for
profit. The now bankrupted-firm’s
only utility was to serve as a dummy
front company which provided cover
for the larger operation, and as a
vehicle to part innocent people from
their investments.
Individuals involved
in the operation have extensive and
wide-ranging connections to each
other which clearly pre-date
the brief life span of the
front company which ostensibly
controlled the twin DC9 airliners.
"Cocaine, TOW Missiles,
renditions... We're a flexible
airline."
Since the
MadCowMorningNews was successful
last month in obtaining the FAA
registration records for “Cocaine
One,” the accumulating evidence has
all pointed to a clear conclusion:
the DC9 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine
was a CIA plane which
belongs to the Agency’s
no-longer-totally-secret airline.
Based at the
Clearwater-St. Petersburg
International Airport, both “Cocaine
One,” and its twin, a second DC9
(N120NE) were being used by an
operation which includes the
former head of the CIA proprietary
airline used to ferry TOW
missiles to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s
regime in Iran, as part of the Iran
Contra Scandal.
Adnan Khashoggi
lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi, who
supplied one of the two DC9’s, is
the former President of an admitted
CIA subsidiary airline.
Jetborne
International, a company
supposedly owned by El-Batrawi’s
long-time boss, Saudi billionaire
Adnan Khashoggi, folded after being
indicted for illegally ferrying TOW
missiles to Iran, an “enterprise”
which netted someone—though not the
U.S. Government or the Contras it
was supposedly funding—a tidy bit of
change a U.S. Senate investigation
estimated to be $16 million dollars.
The Tower
Commission Report into the
Iran-Contra Scandal first exposed
Jetborne as a CIA proprietary. When
it came time to begin shipping the
missiles, said the report, Oliver
North had asked a CIA official for
the name of a “reliable” charter
airline.
“CIA’s Air Branch
suggested the use of a proprietary,
the proprietary was told to await a
call, and “the airline was assured
that the caller (North) had
sufficient funds for the charter,”
stated the report.
The public commercial
charter airline North called was
Jetborne International. By the time
the firm was “outed” as a CIA
airline, it had already gone
bankrupt.
Six degrees of deviated septums
But none of this does
anything to explain Ramy El-Batrawi
and Adnan Khashoggi’s other
major connection with
the founder of SkyWay Aircraft,
Miami attorney Michael Farkas.
Their hidden connections may reveal
a larger, previously secret
organization.
Last month the
Securities and Exchange Commission
charged Khashoggi and Ramy Al
Batrawi, his lieutenant for the past
20 years, with stock fraud in U.S.
District Court for Central
California. Both men are both
currently on the lam after being
accused of orchestrating a $130
million fraud, called the “Stockwalk
case,” involving the stock price of
another firm headed by el- Batrawi
called GenesisIntermedia.
GenesisIntermedia was
incorporated by the long-time
attorney of the man once reckoned by
the U.S. Government to be the
biggest drug smuggler in American
history...CIA pilot Barry Seal.
Seal was assassinated
in 1986 at the reported behest of
then-Vice President George Herbert
Walker Bush, the father of our
current President.
Hey. Is it a small
world,
or what?
How to make a billion dollars
without hardly trying
Along with
GenesisIntermedia, the stock
of two other companies was used to
generate fraudulent loans in the
Stockwalk scam. One was a
company called Holiday RV. Stores.
The other was Imperial Credit
Industries.
Michael Farkas is involved with both
firms.
Holiday R.V. Stores
was owned and controlled by Michael
Farkas, through a holding company he
founded called Atlas Recreational
Holdings.
Michael Farkas and
Adnan Khashoggi were partners
in a $300 million
scam. It was called “the
largest brokerage industry failure
in more than 30 years.”
Michael Farkas, is
also on the board of Genesis Realty,
founded by Ramy El-Batrawi, a man
who is clearly no piker when it
comes to pilfering money from a
public company…
His
GenesisIntermedia exploits
put Glenn and Brent Kovar’s $40
million theft at SkyWay in the
shade.
“Just three months
after GenesisIntermedia’s
Initial Public Offering (IPO), the
nearly $17 million raised in the
offering was gone,” read one wire
service story.
“The creative
dealings of defendant El-Batrawi
partly explains how this money
disappeared so quickly,” reported
the AP
Board meeting on Tuesday at the
Spearmint Rhino
While we can detain
ourselves only a moment longer with
the colorful Stockwalk Scandal, a
brief mention of a few of the other
stalwarts involved would include:
Kenneth D'Angelo, a
New Jersey stock finder with a
criminal and civil record Richard
Evangelista, an employee at a New
Jersey brokerage and President of
Local 18 of the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters; and
Bradford Keiller, a Las Vegas
Strip club
entrepreneur with a tastefully named
string of strip clubs in London,
Moscow, Las Vegas and Los Angeles,
all called The
Spearmint
Rhino.
A recent headline
about Keiller’s business in Las
Vegas may have said it all: "FULL
FRONTAL BATTLE OF THE BOOBS AS THE
WORLD'S GAMBLING CAPITAL GOES BACK
TO SLEAZE.”
Before leaving the
ties between Michael Farkas and Ramy
El-Batrawi and Adnan Khashoggi, we
discovered a story from the St Paul
Pioneer Press (where the fraud
bankrupted one of that city’s
biggest firms) that may help explain
our contention that what we are
witnessing is the daily workaday
transactions of
a very large but
still-invisible organization:
“SEC filings show
ties among Imperial, Holiday and
Genesis,” reported the Saint Paul
Pioneer Press on April 22 2002.
The Israeli Connection, Pt. 1
“For example,
El-Batrawi owns a private company
called Genesis Diversified
Investments, which is an investor in
a company called Aviation Group that
in 2001 merged with a British
Columbia company called Travelbyus.”
“Lee Sanders, the
chairman of Travelbyus is a director
of Holiday. Riley is a former chief
executive of Holiday and its largest
shareholder. Riley also is among the
largest shareholders of Imperial.”
Michael Farkas’
connections to right wing Israeli
political parties, and to Israeli
Mossad, have already been ably
covered by others. Farkas was listed
in 2005 as president of Manhigut
USA. This is the US branch of the
Israeli Manhigut Yehudit, involved
in fundraising for the radical
settlers who were trying to resist
the Gaza withdrawal.
Suffice it to say
that he
serves as the American
representative of an
ultra-nationalist Zionist party in
Israel; he is also the American
sales agent for anti-missile
technology developed by Israel
Aircraft Industries, and is a
Director of spy technology company
CCS, along with individuals with
histories so colorful that—were we
to start—we could go on about them
all day.
Oh, maybe just one
example: CCS International’s Latin
American sales manager, Menachem
Cohen, who was convicted in 2002 for
illegally exporting passive phone
interception equipment to
individuals in Colombia conversant
with the drug trade.
Titan Corp was thinking ahead, Pt 1
CCS commercializes
and brings to market trinkets said
to have been invented by innovative
minds at the CIA and Israeli Mossad.

If you’re looking for
sunglasses fitted with a fiber-optic
video camera, or have need of an
umbrella that is bullet proof, a
baseball cap that is strong enough
to repel a hatchet blow, or a
surveillance microphone that looks
for all the world like a shirt
button, Mr. Farkas and his partners
can oblige.
Of particular
interest for our purposes at least,
is the early interest shown in Mr.
Farkas by The Titan Corporation, who
made an early investment in his
obvious potential, in 2000.
SkyWay Aircraft was
presumably still a gleam in Mr.
Farkas’ eye when Titan put up
$72,386 for 1,113,627 restricted
shares of the Company which became
SkyWay.
Are they forward
thinking, or what?
Bankruptcy is a state of mind
One unexpected
discovery was that the narcotics
trafficking is just one of the
lucrative criminal enterprises the
enterprise is engaged in.
The registration
records of the twin DC9’s involved
in the operation reveal that there
is apparently something
special about owning of
these particular planes...
You get a free pass
to steal from unwary investors.
At least six of the
companies associated with “Cocaine
One” and its twin airliner have been
involved in massive fraud resulting
in hundreds of millions of dollars
being swindled from innocent
investors and shareholders.
SkyWay, Jetborne…
even Mexican industrialist Juan
Serrano Segovia’s GRUPO TMM
defaulted on $377 million in loans
several months ago.
We will be keeping a
running tally of companies
associated with the operation
finding it necessary to declare
bankruptcy…but only after
being stripped of anything not
securely tied down.
"The only good Indians... are on our
payroll"
Jack Abramoff
played the Lone Ranger to a whole
host of Indian casino
Tonto's.
But this is
just one of the many
ways this secret organization has
recently used the special status of
Native Americans.
In the StockWalk scam,
which easily netted as much as
Abramoff's casino fraud, the firm
used to perpetrate the fraud was
native American-owned.
Called Native Nations Securities, it
was the brainchild of a Hollywood
actress named Valerie
Red-Horse. Ms. Red-Horse, the
first Native American to control a
securities firm,
may have been a little light in the
bond-trading business, but she
learned financial fraud at the feet
of the master...
"Red-Horse
got her first exposure to Wall
Street while a theater student at
UCLA," read one news account. "She
went looking for part-time work and
was referred through the school's
placement office to the Beverly
Hills office of Drexel Burnham
Lambert, where she landed a job as
an assistant to junk-bond king
Michael Milken."
Her bio says she's been in a movie
called "Naturally Native."
She has guest-starred on
"Babylon 5." She recently
starred in the acclaimed ABC
made-for-television movie "The
Secret of Lizard Woman."
As
an actress she is perhaps best known
for serving as the model for
Mattel's Pocahontas doll.
Probably not on her bio: She
helped, or was used, by some
well-connected fraudsters steal over
$300 million dollars.
Chief Bearskin & "the boys"
One more example will
suffice, at least for now:
Express One
International is one of the bankrupt
firms which was also an owner of the
DC9's,
a
company whose colorful corporate
history would make, we think, an
excellent episode of
Babylon 5.
Express
One
International's look-alike DC9 was
sold to Skyways/Royal Sons just
before they went bankrupt. Now
they're back.
Today the president of
Express
One
International is David Byers.
Mohamed Atta trained at a
flight school at the Charlotte
County Airport, Charlotte County
Sheriff William Clement told
reporters four days after the 9.11
attack, before being told to keep
his mouth shut.
The airline was founded by the
notorious Kenneth Good, who got,
with Neil Bush's help,
a cool hundred million in loans from
Silverado Savings which he never
felt the need to repay. Taxpayers
ended up footing the bill.
We
don't imagine anyone's heard Neil
Bush saying "thanks?"
The company issued a press release
recently to announce their plans to
assist the Wyandotte Nation of
Oklahoma inn developing an aviation
business called Bearskin
Aviation Service, hiring
Bearskin to provide fleet and
baggage handling services at two Air
Force bases in England.
"Chief Leaford Bearskin, leader of
the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma,
founded Bearskin Aviation Service
out of his love for aviation and his
vision that a well-run aviation
company would provide revenue for
Tribal health and education
programs," said the press release.
Only a cynic would quibble. Right?
NEXT: Robb
Tiller on
In a land where
journalists occasionally turn up
dead, authentically brave Mexican
journalists, unlike their sleepy
sold-out American cousins, have been
avidly investigating story of
"Cocaine One."
Hear what they're saying
South of the Border. |