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A
Venezuelan man busted with
forty-three pounds
of heroin
on
a Lear jet belonging to the owner of
the Venice FL flight school at which
Mohamed Atta and his
bodyguard Marwan Al-Shehhi
were enrolled is a major kingpin in
an international drug trafficking
network run by the Russian Mob.
Edgar Valles Diaz was
arrested on Wally Hilliard’s
Lear jet (N351WB) at Orlando
Executive Airport on July 25, 2000,
in what the Orlando Sentinel called
“the biggest bust in Central Florida
history.” The paper quoted officials
stating it was “the largest find of
its kind
in the
southeastern United States in recent
years.”
Court documents revealed that Valles
Diaz was a major narcotics
trafficker in his native Venezuela
who had flown Hilliard’s Lear jet
for thirty-nine weeks in a row. Each
flight originated in Venezuela,
stopping in Fort Lauderdale and
Orlando before flying to New York.
According
to one of the flight crew on the
Lear jet, Valles Diaz would be
greeted upon arrival
by an organized crime
figure from the Russian enclave in
Brighton Beach named Igor Borisovich
Rabaev.
“When we landed in New York
Valles-Diaz would
be met by his ‘boyfriend,’” a
member of the Lear jet’s flight crew
stated.
“He gets picked up at the airport by
an Uzbek named Igor Rabaev, his
heroin connection from Central
Asia.”
The Russian Mob
is an equal opportunity employer
Currently wanted on two continents,
Igor Rabaev is a
prominent member of a Russian Mob
family which uses the Uzbek capital
of Tashkent as a
transshipment point for heroin from
Afghanistan, we learned.
“Igor Rabaev is a name to be
conjured with in certain circles,” a
former U.S. covert operative in
Central Asia told us.
“He’s from
Uzbekistan, and escaped from Russia
to Israel by saying he was Jewish,
back when it was the only way you
could get out. But he’s not Jewish.
He’s Muslim, and he’s got close
ties with radical Muslim circles in
the ‘Stans’ who serve as a conduit
for heroin coming out of
Afghanistan.”
(Uzbekistan
is finally on the map, if only
because of the new Borat
movie.)
“Non-Jewish Russian mobsters often
fraudulently claimed Jewish ancestry
in order to gain easier movement in
and out of
Israel, where the Russian Mafia has
established a large operating base,”
said the source. “It was a real scam
by Russian organized crime; it was
easier for lots of these people to
say they were Jewish to get into
Israel, and then from Israel to
become instant citizens, get Israeli
passports, and then into the U.S.”
We received confirmation that there
were, indeed, Muslim Mobsters from
the former USSR posing as Jews in
“Red Mafiya,” by Stephen I Friedman,
the definitive book about the
Russian Mob in Brighton Beach.
Brighton Beach:
the new Berlin?
The
head of the New York FBI’s Russian
Mob unit told Friedman that there
were three or four major Russian
crime families operating in Brighton
Beach; the largest consisted
primarily of Jewish émigrés from
Odessa, followed by a second family
from Tashkent, in Uzbekistan, which
the FBI had pegged as Muslim, but
which people in the community
insisted was Jewish.
In addition to being associated with
the Russian Mob, Valles Diaz was
also a partner in the company
“leasing” the Lear jet,
American Jet Charters, along
with the planes owner, 75-year old
Wallace J. Hilliard, the Wisconsin
insurance executive who says he
“retired” to Florida, but who,
instead—within a year of his
supposed “retirement”— had assembled
a fleet of between twenty to thirty
long-range private jets, as well as
flight schools like the now-infamous
Huffman Aviation.
The
news that Wally Hilliard’s Lear jet
had been used by Russian Mobsters
came hard on the heels of the recent
revelation about one of Mohamed
Atta’s closest associates in
Florida,
Wolfgang Bohringer,
the personal pilot for Victor
Kozeny, known as the “Pirate
of Prague,” and also purported
to have Russian Mob connections.
Late last month Kozeny was ordered
extradited to New York by
a court in the Bahamas to face
charges of defrauding American
investors, including former Senate
Majority Leader George Mitchell, of
almost $150 million. During the
Northern Ireland peace talks, which
Mitchell brokered in 1999, he had
been flown to the negotiations in
Kozeny’s personal jet, according to
published reports.
The disclosures raise the question
of the Russian Mob’s possible role
as the “global network” which
British Prime Minister said had
assisted the terrorists while they
were in the U.S.
The Global
Network which supported the
terrorists?
FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who
former Attorney General John
Ashcroft went all the way to the
Supreme Court to silence, revealed
she saw documents indicating the
U.S. State Department was covering
up a drug trafficking network
associated with the terrorists
involved in the 9/11 attack.
Could this “drug trafficking
network” be, or involve, the Russian
Mob?
The
recent news underlines the
significance of the Central Asia
“Stans’”— Uzbekistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan—which has
become increasingly apparent
recently, even in news stories where
they appear to be only peripherally
involved.
Take Republican Rep. Curt
Weldon’s current
difficulties, for example, in
providing his daughter with entrée,
lobbying assistance, and money that
foreign governments and companies
are only too happy to provide for
friendly access in Washington D.C.
Just a few years ago, this scandal
would have had a Saudi face.
Today its centered in the Central
Asian “republics.”
Hey
Ney, Hey Ho, Iran Contra ops have
got to go
Then
there’s the soon-to-be-incarcerated
Bob Ney.
On the road to his bribery
conspiracy plea, Rep. Bob Ney of
Ohio crossed paths with a colorful
Broward ex-con who swindled Elvis
and snitched on the mob. But that’s
not all…
In addition to being one of
Jack Abramoff’s “altar
boys,” he was gambling in
London with a Syrian “businessman”
named Fouad al Zayat,
known as the “Fat Man.” Al-Zayat is
one of the top dozen high stakes
gamblers in the world, owns cargo
aviation companies, and freely
consorts with known criminals…
In other words, he’s
a junior
Adnan Khashoggi. Only
his playground isn’t Riyadh. It's
Tashkent.
We had already discovered, in
“Welcome to TERRORLAND,”
that “retired insurance executive”
Wally Hilliard had friends in high
places… everyone from former
Democratic fund-raiser Truman Arnold
to Florida Republican Governor
Jeb Bush. Even reviled
former Florida Sec’y of State
Katherine Harris put in a
good word, praising his non-existent
airline.
Hilliard doesn’t restrict his
wheeler-dealing to domestic
politicians, either. We’ve already
reported extensively, for example,
on his involvement with Saudi
billionaire and Iran Contra figure
Adnan Khashoggi.
The man who came up to Venice from
his $4 million estate in Naples FL
“only when the newer jets came in”
apparently has ties to almost
everyone fingered in the
Iran Contra Scandal.
Not
a great scandal, but it sure has
lasted a long time
Adnan
Khashoggi lieutenant
Ramy El-Batrawi ran an
air cargo carrier company for
Khashoggi called Jetbourne
International which flew 23
tons of missiles to Iran for Oliver
North.
El-Batrawi also is in business with
SkyWay Aircraft,
the shadowy St Petersburg FL
aviation company which has an
apparent “green light” from the DEA
to load 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard
DC9’s and get away with it.
But Hilliard is also
in business, we recently discovered,
with two more Iran
Contra veterans, in a company
offering HD-TV chips called
SPATIALIGHT, INC.
Farhad Azima and
Mansour Rasnavad both
have illustrious CIA
pedigrees. Azima, an Iranian whose
family was close to the Shah, owns a
cargo airline in Miami that
delivered whatever Iran Contra swag
El-Batrawi’s cargo airline left
behind.
Azima’s Global International
Air (executive
vice-president Mansour Rasnavad) was
part of Oliver North's
logistical network shipping
arms—including a shipment of 23 tons
of TOW missiles to Iran—to the
Ayatollah.
"Our guns go to
those who need them."
Their relationship with the agency
which goes back to the late 1970s
when he supplied air and logistical
support to EATSCO (Egyptian American
Transport and Services Corporation)
a company owned by former CIA agents
Thomas Clines, Theodore Shackley,
and Richard Secord, and which was
prominently involved in the
activities of former CIA agent Edwin
Wilson.
It doesn’t get any more Iran
Contra-y than that.
In fact, their company was once even
cited for chartering a Boeing 707 to
the PLO, who used it to ship a load
of weapons to the Sandinistas.
There were, presumably, red faces
all around. Still, the
level of
international intrigue this caper
attests to marks them as
spooks extraordinaire.
Before moving on, we feel obliged to
point out that the company on whose
behalf the two men were signing:
Argyle Capital.
Remember Argyle Equities,
the Texas investment firm with the
big stake in SkyWay Aircraft's DC9
Cocaine One?
This is all no doubt just a
coincidence.
That's a good
question to ask him... But only
under oath
Here we recall a question Wally
Hilliard’s former jet mechanic Dave
Montgomery once asked out loud over
a beer:
“I used to ask myself: ‘Why is Wally
doing business with all these
foreigners? Diego Levine, Alfonso
Bowe, Mark Shubin, Pervez Khan… It
didn’t make sense.”
Moreover there appears to be
no accountability at the
level these men are on.
Hilliard,
for example, was cited in a federal
complaint
accusing him and Magic Dutch Boy
Rudi Dekkers of numerous
"unauthorized and unsupervised
flights" during 1999. Two years
before the 9/11 attack, Hilliard and
Dekkers were
flying unnamed Saudis to unspecified
destinations in the U.S. on unknown
missions.
"They were ferrying Saudi
princes all over the U.S.,"
said an aviation executive familiar
with the operation. “You can go to
jail for the kind of things they’re
charged with. But all they're
getting is a slap on the wrist. What
they were doing is blatantly
illegal."
"Without
a Federal Aviation Administration
air carrier operating certificate,
the Government has no idea where
those planes went, or even who was
on board. Whoever they were flying
didn’t want anyone to know.”
That's a
diplomatic pouch, you moron. Hands
off.
Igor Rabaev is from Tashkent, a key
transshipment location as Afghan
heroin wends its way to Russia and
the West.
We wanted to learn more about the
Russian Mob figure who had been
flying a Wally Hilliard Lear jet
filled with heroin during the same
month Mohamed Atta arrived to attend
Hilliard's flight school.
So we asked the DEA to comment. They
declined.
Our subsequent frustration must have
been evident, because,
unbidden, a
source in Venice told us: “You
should ask Hilliard’s partner about
him. Mark Shubin knows
him.”
Mark Shubin?
Small world.
Mark Shubin had shared ownership of
a handful of top-of-the-line private
jets—Gulf stream’s, Fokker's,
Challengers—with Wally Hilliard,
including two with highly
unusual ‘tail’ numbers: N11UN
and N111UN.
Shubin also owned a company in
Florida called ‘International
Diplomatic Courier Services.’
And did we mention, he used to be
a
U2 pilot for the CIA?
We couldn’t locate Shubin. Perhaps
he was busy doing renditions, and
unavailable for comment. But we
found someone who used to fly with
him, and learned that, as tall as we
thought the cotton already was… it
was about to get a lot taller. And a
lot more serious.
Geo-politically speaking, that is.
Because Igor Rabaev had tried to
murder the Minister of Energy for
the Ukraine.
The
biggest lie told about the September
11th attack was the first one: “19 hijackers moved through Europe and
America unnoticed.”
NEXT: THE PLOT TO KILL VITALY Gayduk
AND TAKE OVER THE WORLD.
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