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The
exclusive "Cocaine One" series of investigative reports
by this reporter appearing on this website for the past two years made the
news, finally... not in the U.S., but in Mexico City, where it was cited by a principal in the drug trafficking
scandal in
newspaper interviews to support his allegation of selective prosecution against
the DEA.
It is one of several recent
new developments in the scandal, which began two years ago with the
capture in the Yucatan by
the Mexican military of two American-registered airplanes.
Both planes had taken off
from St. Petersburg FL., flown to Colombia and Venezuela, and then were busted
when they stopped in the Yucatan to refuel on the way back to Florida.
They were caught carrying an
astonishing cumulative total of ten tons of cocaine,
as well as a still-undisclosed amount of heroin.
Total immunity as a perk of employment
Carlos
Gutiérrez de Velasco is the paterfamilias of the influential
Veracruz-based family which owned the Casa de Cambio Puebla currency exchange,
accused of laundering enough drug money through U.S. banks to buy as many as 100
American planes for use in drug-running.
In a recent interview with
Mexico City’s Reforma newspaper, Gutierrez, who is also the father of a fugitive
from prosecution in the case, claimed his family is the victim of selective
prosecution, and alleged a cover-up of the involvement of influential Americans.
He called on Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon to become personally involved
in forcing the DEA to explain why only Mexicans are being tracked
down and jailed.
The Americans who sold
planes to the Sinaloa Cartel buyers
enjoy official immunity from prosecution, Gutierrez suggested, while people
like his fugitive son, José Antonio Gutiérrez, were being tracked
down and hung out to dry.

"Mexican authorities acted
based only on information from the United
States,” Gutierrez told Reforma, pointing to evidence unearthed by this
reporter’s investigation, which revealed the
high-level Republican
connections of the people selling planes to the Sinaloa Cartel.
Ricardo Ravelo, a reporter
for Mexico City' Proceso, has already picked up our evidence
of the interlocking ownership
of the two American drug-running airplanes
( a
DC9 and a Gulfstream business jet) busted in the Yucatan.
The owners of both
planes were also in business together in a
massive ($300 million) financial fraud, we have previously
reported, along with CIA fixer and
Saudi arms merchant Adnan
Khashoggi.
"'Facts that will never see the light of day' for $500, Alex."

Gutierrez told Reforma, “The U.S. is offering a deal
if my son turns himself in. But if he does, the complicity of the aircraft
owners in the U.S. will never come up at trial. We need to corroborate and
include information uncovered by journalist Daniel Hopsicker and
get to the truth.”
Mexicans are being punished
for crimes for which their American counterparts are getting a pass, said Gutiérrez, pointing to the dossier which requested the extradition of his
family, in which the DEA admits the Americans who sold the planes knew
their clients were criminals and drug traffickers. But the sellers are not
being pursued, Gutierrez told Reforma, and he wants to know:
what's up with that?
Given this background, his
relative does not intend to surrender in Mexico seek relief, he
stated.
How to walk on a 10-ton coke beef

The scandal began with the bust of the two American planes; but it took off when the Mexican Attorney General’s Office traced the
drug money used to purchase the planes to Casa de Cambio Puebla.
That information exposed
a major money laundering conduit between Mexican drug traffickers and American
banks, notably Wachovia and the International Bank of
Commerce in San Antonio Texas, which, the Mexican Attorney General’s office
announced, had been used over the last several years to buy
as many as 100 aircraft in the U.S. from American owners.
Our investigation,
meanwhile, uncovered a paper trail of documents, including FAA
registration records, which illuminated previously-hidden connections between
Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by
Shorty Guzman, and their (officially non-existent) American
partners.
The
dual discoveries were a major
breakthrough in unmasking the identities of people who the DEA
strenuously insists don’t even exist:
The American Drug
Lords.
The case, at the very least, is a major
political embarrassment in the U.S.’s so-called war-on-drugs. Both of the
drug-running American planes—a DC9 airliner (N900SA) and a Gulfstream II
business jet (N987SA)—had
previously been flown or been connected to U.S. Government
Agencies: the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security.
"The Shuffleboard Mob?"
There is more than a whiff of official corruption
on both sides of the border, swirling around the story. In the U.S., it is a
situation with obvious and serious national security implications.
A U.S. Government connection
helps explain the curious fact that both planes were operating
out of the sleepy retirement community of St. Petersburg on Florida’s Gulf
Coast, a city perhaps previously known primarily as the home of the
International Shuffleboard Hall of Fame, or the birthplace of the
canary-yellow leisure suit; and confirmation would halt idle speculation about
the existence of some previously-unknown crime family in St. Petersburg, FL.
There
is no Shuffleboard Mob.
What there is, however, is
an airport, Clearwater St-Petersburg International, which has been
a federal installation since it was used to train General Claire
Chennault’s famous “Flying Tigers” during World War II.
The Flying Tigers, alert
readers will recall, is an outfit around which swirled rumors of
international narcotics trafficking in support of the Nationalist
Chinese.
Small world.
DEA: A Homeland Security internal investigation
In the U.S., the guilty
involvement of individuals in the Department of Homeland Security was confirmed
to us earlier this year by a high–level DEA official in Miami.
And the Mexican currency
exchange operated out of Mexico’s largest airports, requiring a high level of
official sanction, obtained in Mexico only through having cronies in high places.
The aforementioned Carlos
Gutierrez, for example, has been widely reported in the Mexican press to have
been a major behind-the-scenes force during recent Mexican President
Vicente Fox’s rise to power.
Amigos de Fox...and Bush?
Claims of selective
prosecution notwithstanding, for the past five years the Casa de
Cambio Puebla currency exchange was itself getting
something of a pass.
Far from being the surprise
discovery portrayed by the DEA and the Mexican Attorney General’s office, the
Casa de Cambio Puebla money laundering conduit recently shut down has been well
known to law enforcement for years.
Case de Cambio Puebla played
a central role in the “Friends of Fox” Mexican campaign finance
scandal which dogged Vicente Fox after his 2000 election.
The exchange was first
fingered by investigators, and in the Mexican press, more than six years
ago for laundering overseas money into the 2000 presidential campaign of
soon-to-be President of Mexico Vicente Fox, which is illegal under Mexican law.
Worse: The money was coming
from DEHYDRATION TECHNOLOGIES INC., a dummy front company located in
Alexandria, Virginia… right next door to the CIA.
Worse yet: For the
next six years, law enforcement in both the U.S. and Mexico did
nothing about it.
And they both use Tony Canales...
The
story is reminiscent of the blatant fraud engaged in by Jack Abramoff in the
U.S., whose generically named Capital Foundation laundered money with little
pretense of philanthropy.
During the run-up to the
Mexican Presidential election in 2000, an aide to Vicente Fox named
Miguel Hakim incorporated, in Puebla, the generically-named
“Institute of International Finance.”
The company existed to
receive money (a half-million dollars) from an overseas source:
Dehydration Technologies in Alexandria Virginia.
In a sophisticated
tri-cornered scheme, the money was then washed through the Casa de Cambio
Puebla, before ending up in the pocket of PAN Presidential candidate
Vicente Fox.
Mexico's Miguel Hakim and
Texas' Tony Sanchez, the owner of one of the banks named in the scheme, IBC of
San Antonio, both use one of the best drug lawyers around, a man named
Tony Canales.
Enter a Polish Count working for the World Bank
As if
the cast were not already colorful enough, Dehydration
Technologies was run by Paul Popiel, an apparent
Polish Count who escaped Poland when the Russians took over after World War II,
and who spent 20 years working at the World Bank.
When reporters from Mexico
City newspaper "La Reforma" visited Dehydration Technologies
‘headquarters’ in Belgium, they found that the company’s listed address was a
private home, whose long-time residents had no idea what they were talking
about, and had never heard of the company.
While
there, they picked up a copy of the company’s financial statement, required to
be filed by all companies "headquartered" in Belgium.
What immediately attracted
their attention was that, for a firm with no visible product, sales, or even
an office: Dehydration Technologies was moving a lot of money
around.
Everybody's got to be good
at something.
"It smelled really bad. We mean, like...really bad."

“Between 1994 and 1997
Dehydration Technologies Belgium SA received loans from an unidentified third
party totaling $15 million, while recording losses of $2.2 million, on sales of…
$330,000.
Three financial experts
contacted by Reforma all agreed.
“It smelled really
bad,” they stated.
The financial consultants
then asked the magazine not to reveal their identities. Reporters die unnatural
deaths with some regularity in Mexico...
Apparently financial
analysts are not immune either.
"The Homeland Security Rackets"
The
Homeland Security Rackets Scandal offers perhaps the best opportunity to catch a
glimpse of the shadowy forces behind the illicit drug trade in America since the
cocaine trafficking made visible by the Iran Contra Scandal some twenty years
ago.
Not since the downing of a
C-130 military cargo plane over Nicaragua in 1986 with Eugene Hasenfus
onboard—kicking off the Iran Contra Scandal while revealing massive
cocaine trafficking involving Reagan Administration stalwart
Oliver North—has an aviation incident been remotely as important or as
fraught with significance.
And not since the massive
cocaine smuggling through Mena, Arkansas has the CIA’s hand been so flagrantly
caught in the cookie jar.
Stay tuned.
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