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From
Robert Parry, who broke the Iran
Contra Scandal while working as a
reporter for the Associated Press:
“In the mid-1970s,
Cartaya launched his most ambitious
endeavor, an international financial
holding company called the World
Finance Corp., later renamed WFC
Corp. The firm's maze of banks
reached to the United Arab Emirates,
Switzerland, London, the Caribbean,
Miami, Colombia and Panama.”
“As the investigation
developed, authorities uncovered
other corporate links between WFC
and Aerocondor, a South American
airline that had been caught
smuggling drugs. Police also
discovered that WFC agents had
contacts with the Mafia drug
syndicate of Santo Trafficante, Jr.,
whose lucrative narcotics operations
had dominated Cuba prior to Castro's
revolution. Police came to suspect
that WFC was an intelligence front.
Sex Drugs &
the CIA
"It was drugs, it was
money-laundering, it was
everything," South Florida detective
James Rider told The Consortium. "I
know the CIA was in there
somewhere."
“Police and federal
prosecutors reported pressure from
Washington and CIA headquarters in
Langley to back off WFC. Too many of
WFC's principals, it turned out, had
cooperated with U.S. intelligence."
From
the magazine
Canadian Business and
Current Affairs
When the FBI tried to
prosecute World Finance Corporation
an international lending company)
for laundering drug money, the
Bureau was reportedly informed by an
Internal Revenue Service agent that
"WFC was a legitimate company: if it
dealt in drug money so much the
better narcotics money that stayed
in the U.S. was good for the
economy."
From the book
In God's Name, by
David Yallop:
“During an
investigation by the Dade County,
Florida District Attorney's office,
their investigators discovered that
a local bank, the World Finance
Corporation, was the largest and
oldest North American money
launderer for cocaine traffickers.
The World Finance Corporation was
regularly sending cocaine profits to
the Sisalpine Bank in the Bahamas.
The Sisalpine Bank was partly owned
by Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, the
manager of the Vatican bank...”
From Forbes
Magazine:
"Recent events, such as the arrest
of Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya in
Miami by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (for entering the U.S.
on a false passport), suggest that
massive fraud may have been involved
in the Ajman collapse. Hernandez-Cartaya,
a Cuban who did time in a Havana
jail for fighting on the losing side
of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, was until
recently chairman of WFC Corp. -- a
$90-million-assets Coral Gables
merchant bank that owned 40% of the
Ajman Arab Bank. (The local Ajman
potentate owned another 40%.) WFC
Corp., whose London branch has
already been shut down, is
reportedly being investigated by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and
the House Select Committee on
Narcotics & Drug Abuse for possible
criminal violations in a number of
areas."
We could go on... You
get the idea.
"I
want either less corruption, or more
chance to participate in it."
The
MadCowMorningNews has
also learned that the modus operandi
of companies which have been
associated with Wilkes are bizarrely
similar to those employed by MZM,
Inc., the other
defense contractor involved in the
Cunningham scandal.
Though it opened its
doors in 1993, MZM’s first federal
contract didn’t come until 2002.
Still, its first federal client was
certainly impressive: the Executive
Office of the President. But
observers have puzzled over the fact
that the first federal
contract for the self-described
defense contractor specializing in
“intelligence service’s” was for...
furniture.
Oddly, Brent Wilkes
also has an employment history with
a company with a similarly eccentric
product line.
Wilkes’s
entree into the world he then
exploited for all it was worth, the
San Diego Trib reported, had been
through employment at a company we
will learn more about shortly,
World Finance Corporation.
Today World Finance
Corp is a pay-day loan company with
a sideline as mystifying as a
defense contractor selling office
furniture.
A recent story
in the
local paper in Dunklin,
MO. (the aptly-named Daily Dunkin Democrat,
once again proving that the truth is
stranger than fiction) quotes a
company spokesman for World Finance
Corporation discussing the company’s
specialty: making loans to customers
with poor credit histories. "Our
purpose is to provide loans between
$150 and $3,000. We want to try to
help customers rebuild good credit."
But the company
doesn’t just make loans.
It also sells furniture.
How odd is that?
"America:
one of the finest countries anyone
ever stole."
"We sell furniture
through a catalog," the spokesman
added. "When customers fill out a
loan application, they usually
receive a catalog with
our furniture in it."
These two odd facts
are far from conclusive. But taken
together with other clues we’ll
learn about shortly, they bolster
an argument for the proposition that
both Brent Wilkes and his
counterpart Mitchell Wade at MZM,
INC. work at separate
subsidiaries... of the same Home
Office.
Or, to put it in
spook-speak: they are dummy front
companies with the same real owner:
a larger and as-yet unnamed
organization which secretly serves
as the parent company of both their
seemingly-unrelated (except by
national scandal) firms.
Referred to in
Justice Dept. documents released
after Cunningham pled guilty as
"co-conspirator No. 1" (MZM Inc
is “co-conspirator #2”)
Wilkes defense contractor
subsidiary, ADCS, in Poway,
California, has a level of
expertise which remains hazy (or
“Foggo,” the name of Wilkes CIA
contact), in a field familiar to
anyone who has ever entered a copy
room.
Nonetheless the firm
boasts on its website of receiving
more than $500 million in
Cunningham-assisted government
appropriations.
Moreover, the various
“companies” which comprise the
Wilkes Corporation seem to comprise
something resembling an
extremely invisible empire.
Call me Ishmael
As
reported by
Joseph Cannon and
others it consists of phony
false-front companies with
non-existent addresses and 1-(800)
numbers that don't work which are
touted at seemingly bogus and
suspiciously non-functional
websites.
Even Wilkes
employer of record in the 80’s
seems quite stingy with information
on its website.
In this regard these
companies seem eerily reminiscent of
a number of similar “front”
companies associated with Florida
Governor Jeb Bush’s technology
advisor, which we reported on, and
puzzled over, over a year ago.
Perhaps there’s a
connection to be made here. Perhaps
we are looking at the organization
which in
“Barry & the boys” we called,
simply, “the boys.”
Call it what you
will. There may be better names for
this secretive and hugely
influential outfit. Call it
“Leviathan.” Just don't,
whatever you do, call it late for
dinner...
What’s undisputed is
that Wilkes’ firm was one of two
obscure defense
contractors that secretly showered
Cunningham with an estimated $2.4
million in cash and expensive gifts
— including a Rolls-Royce, money to
buy a posh 8,000-square-foot house,
and a cornucopia of antique
furniture, Oriental rugs and
jewelry.
In addition to
passing over $600,000 in bribes to
the now-convicted Cunningham, the
busy San Diego businessman was also
paying hundreds of thousands of
dollars to a lobbying firm run by
two top former aides to Tom DeLay
and suspected of being controlled by
Jack Abramoff.
The answer
is an unequivocal "yes."
So calling Wilkes an
important figure in the various
federal investigations currently
underway may be something of an
understatement.
The Cunningham
Abramoff Scandal is no longer about
greedheads gaming the
system.
The essential
question posed by the
Abramoff-Cunningham scandal is
chilling in its ramifications:
Did U.S. intelligence
agencies assist in funneling rivers
of cash from suspect defense
contractors into the campaign
coffers of pro-war Republican
lawmakers?
Was U.S. taxpayer
money secretly used to subvert
American democracy?
Stay tuned.
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