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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 the seizure of the DC9
airliner (dubbed “Cocaine
One” for its paint job and
Seal designed to impersonate 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, at whose flight
school Mohamed Atta trained
at the Charlotte County Airport,
according to Charlotte County Sheriff
William Clements. t
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 in 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.
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