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Barry & the Boys
an underground classic

 

 


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BACK IN STOCK!!

Barry & the Boys
an underground classic

 

 

SHIPPING NOW!!

The NEW American DrugLords


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BOOKS

Welcome to
TerrorLand



 

BACK IN STOCK!!

Barry & the Boys
an underground classic

 

 


Clips from
documentaries here

Madcow Morning News
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BOOKS

Welcome to
TerrorLand



 

Barry & the Boys
an underground classic

 

 

 
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Clips from
documentaries here

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             Pilot of 'Cocaine One' DC9 is Re-Re-Re-Arrested

July 13 2011--Venice FL

A five-year long struggle to penetrate the mysteries of  two huge drug busts in Mexico on American-registered planes may soon receive answers, courtesy an unlikely source: a Congressional investigation into Operation Gunwalker, an ATF program with no discernible law enforcement purpose that allowed arms traffickers to smuggle 2000 weapons across the border to Mexican drug lords. 

If the CIA is arming Mexican drug cartels, might they not also have been behind the otherwise-puzzling effort to supply these same drug lords with top-quality American-registered airplanes and jets?

Were the two now-infamous American-registered planes busted in Mexico's Yucatan carrying almost ten tons of cocaine part of this same so-far unnamed Operation behind the ATF's Operation Gunwalker?

It is the second largest shipment of cocaine ever seized in Mexico, the emblematic drug story of our times.

And its looking more and more like a CIA operation.

Read the whole story here


            EA still in

denial on American DrugLords

Pilot of 'Cocaine One' DC9 is Re-Re-Re-Arrested

July 6 2011--Venice FL

One of the greatest escapes since Houdini was locked in handcuffs and leg-irons, nailed inside a crate, and lowered to the bottom of New York’s East River reached its conclusion two weeks ago, when a drug pilot who has escaped from custody in three different countries and eluded an international manhunt was arrested in a van with 70 kilos of cocaine in a parking lot at the Radisson Hotel in Caracas, Venezuela.

Carmelo Vasquez-Guerra, the pilot on two of the most famous and controversial drug flights of the past decade, was taken into custody by Venezuelan police without incident, along with two other men, ending an incredible five-year long saga featuring repeated arrest, but little detention.

During that time Vasquez-Guerra was arrested, and then inexplicably released from custody, in not onc...not two... but in three different countries, located on two separate continents.  And his astounding ability to slither out of serious trouble raises disturbing questions about who's winning—and losing—the war on drugs.

Carmelo Vasquez-Guerra—in the world global drug trafficking—is The Great Houdini II.

Even so, when his time ran out, and his run from the law finally ended, he went out, not with a bang…

But a Twitter.

 

Read the whole story here


DEA still in denial on American DrugLords

 

June 16, 2011--Venice FL

The criminal syndicate responsible for massive drug moves using two planes from St. Petersburg, Florida-a DC9 caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine and a Gulfstream II busted eighteen months later with four tons-include among its number at least two well-known Americans whose names have not previously surfaced.

One is a man present at the inception of a political scandal which swirled for several decades around what was, at least until recently, the world's most infamous bank: BCCI, the Bank of Crooks & Criminals International.

It took the curiosity of a local cop in upstate New York, who stumbled onto and then busted a summit meeting of the American Mob in Apalachin in November of 1957 to finally force FBI head J. Edgar Hoover to stop mincing (figuratively) around, and admit the existence of organized crime in America.

But even in today's supposedly more enlightened times, for America's DEA to admit to being "in denial" over the existence of the American Drug Lords will probably take a nationally-televised intervention in prime time, hosted by Dr Phil.

The idea that Bert Lance, or former top U.S. military officials Major General Richard Secord and Air Force Brigadier General Heinie Aderholt were associated with a criminal syndicate using American planes to haul tons of cocaine up from South America may not be as shocking as it once was.  

What does seem improbable is that, even if true, it would ever make the news.  When was the last time anyone heard about an American General being arrested for anything?

German artist Jenny Holzer said it best: "Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise."

 

Read the whole story here 

 


  Truth, lies, & The Sarasota Herald Tribune

 

May 23, 2011--Venice FL

Not since nearly 50 years ago when the CIA tried to pass off a man shown in two black and white photographs taken outside the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City as Lee Harvey Oswald, has the truth been so openly and casually violated as during the ferocious campaign to roll back some of what was already known and on the public record about Mohamed Atta in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack.

The revelation last week that a key eyewitness to the activities in Florida of the 9/11 hijackers never changed his story about Mohamed Atta being drunk and belligerent in his bar four days before the 9/11 attack raised new questions about major news media coverage in the aftermath.

When  former Shuckum's bar manager Tony Amos re-affirmed his initial account in an interview last week with the Miami Herald, it became strikingly apparent that, with no explanation at all, and without any retraction from him or the major news outlets which reported his account, the quickly-congealing official story had changed Mohamed Atta from a  belligerent drunk pounding down Stoli and orange juice to a meek teetotaler sipping cranberry juice and playing video games.

There are only two possible explanations for the discrepancy.

Neither reflect well on the state of America’s  vaunted free press.

Read the whole story here.



/
 

May 18, 2011--Venice FL
The elaborate cover-up of the activities in Florida of Mohamed Atta and the other terrorist hijackers, first reported here and in “Welcome to TerrorLand,” received spectacular confirmation last week from a surprising source, The Miami Herald.

In a Osama Bin Laden postmortem, reporter Elinor Brecher checked in on people in Florida whose lives had forever been changed after intersecting with those of the terrorist hijackers, and  in the process clearly exposed the mechanism of “instant revisionist history” used during the aftermath of the 9/11 attack to cover-up reporting in the mainstream media which contradicted or was otherwise at odds with the official story then being assembled.

The paper tracked down the former manager of Shuckum’s Raw Oyster Bar, Tony Amos, whose misfortune was to have witnessed Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and a third still-unidentified man getting drunk in his bar several nights prior to the 9/11 attack.

And in the article’s opening sentence, The Mami Herald confirmed what to some observers was never in doubt: Tony Amos tells the same story today that he first related in TIME, NEWSWEEK, and the AP wire service just two days after the 9/11 attack: 

“On Sept. 7, 2001, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi pounded down drinks at Shuckum’s Oyster Bar on Young Circle in Hollywood,” the paper reported…”forever changing life for some in South Florida who unknowingly entered their orbit. Like Tony Amos, the night manager who backed up waitress Patricia Idrissi at Shuckum’s.”

Mohamed Atta got—not just drunk—but drunk and belligerent.

For the past almost ten years the official story has insisted exactly the opposite.

Read the whole story here.



"Barry & 'the boys'" back in print!

April 22, 2011--Venice, FL.

When I wrote “Barry & the boys” almost ten years ago I had no idea the story of America’s most famous drug smuggler would soon be relevant to the biggest event of the still-young 21st Century, the 9/11 attack... but it is.   

When a Lear-jet belonging to the owner of the flight school where Mohamed Atta had just begun flight training was seized in July 2000 carrying 43 lbs of heroin (according to the Orlando Sentinel, a Central Florida record) the story would have had huge implications for the true identity of Atta’s 9/11 terrorist cadre, and why they were living in a tiny retirement community with the second oldest population in the entire United States. 

Would have had huge implications—except it was suppressed.  

When one of the men in the famous photograph from the cover of “Barry & the boys,’ of Barry Seal and other members of the CIA’s super-secret Operation 40 assassination squad in a Mexico City night-club 10 months before the Kennedy assassination was identified as Porter Goss, picked by President George W. Bush to head America’s Central Intelligence Agency in 2004...  it should have been big news.  

Should have been. But this news, too, was suppressed. But now here's a bit of good news:

"Barry & the boys, “currently selling for between $100 and $150 dollars on Amazon, is back in print, and available for a donation on this website.  

Available here. Right here. Right now:

Read the whole story


The Return of

April 14 2011--Venice, FL.

What's the connection between Mohamed Atta and  ‘The Godfather’ of Sarasota County?

Today he is all but forgotten, but long-time owner and publisher of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune,  intimate of Presidents, and arms peddler David B. Lindsay Jr. left an indelible  mark on almost everything in his former fiefdom of Sarasota County.

And nowhere is that stamp more visible than at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, the newspaper monopoly he created and ran for three decades. The paper's coverage area—from Sarasota through Venice and down into Charlotte County— is, as it happens, exactly where Mohamed Atta spent most of his time while in the U.S.

The owner/publisher of the terrorists' hometown paper, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, spent the Second World War working for General Claire Chennault of the famous Flying Tigers, who numerous published sources claim initiated the first use of heroin trafficking to fund anti-communist operations by the CIA and the American military.

When 43 lbs of heroin, a Central Florida record, according to the Orlando Sentinel, were seized in July 2000 aboard a Lear-jet belonging to Wally Hilliard, the owner of the flight school Atta had begun training at just three weeks earlier, it can now be seen as just  another episode in the decades-long history of drug trafficking in the town of Venice,  the County of Sarasota, and Florida's Gulf Coast.

Read the whole story


The Return of "Barry & 'the boys'"

Venice Was a Quiet Mena: Former Drug Pilot

April 16, 2010--Venice, FL.

The airport where three of the four terrorist pilots in the 9/11 attack learned to fly was a hub of operations in the 1970's and early '80's for "The Company," an international drug smuggling organization headquartered  in Lexington, Kentucky and Mena, Arkansas.

Led by a mysterious Cuban exile, who used the alias "Frank Guzman," The Company's contingent at the Venice Airport numbered as many as a dozen pilots and associates.

 "The Company," whose name  is a commonly-used euphemism for the CIA, was profiled in Sally Denton's  best-selling book "The Blue-Grass Conspiracy," which raised pointed questions  about the involvement of the CIA with the group.

"Venice was a kind of quiet Mena (Arkansas)," stated a former drug pilot for The Company. "Jackson Stephens built this huge headquarters next to the airport. And he was in charge. But I do remember seeing Porter Goss around the airport a lot."

The 60-year secret history of covert CIA and military operations at the Venice Municipal Airport now coming to light goes well beyond anything previously known to have taken place there.

Read the full story here:

http://www.madcowprod.com/04162010.htm


The Return of "Barry & 'the boys'"

Mar 30,2011--Venice, FL.

It is known as “the shark tooth capital of the world."

But tiny Venice, Florida might more truthfully be called "the home of an original CIA SpookPort."

One of the current owners of the former Huffman Aviation at the Venice Municipal Airport had a strange involvement with a Mexican company used as a front to launder drug money for a drug ring Federal prosecutors called "the biggest cocaine smuggling organization in American history."

It was led, until his assassination in 1986, by life-long CIA pilot Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal.

Lurking behind the façade of what is today known as “Tristate Aviation dba Suncoast Aviation,” we can reveal, is another man named “Barry.” 

Whether this is mere coincidence, or a message from the gods, remains at this point unknown.

In either case, the link will be explored in an upcoming story. But it demonstrates the remarkable continuity of control of the U.S. drug trade—over decades—by a group which is shy about only one thing: it's identity. 

They don't want us to even know their name.

We call them the American Drug Lords.  We think you should too. It fits.

In sunny Venice Florida, we have been bearing witness to something dark.

With the return of "'Barry & 'the boys," it just got darker.

Read the whole story


Congo Gold Smuggling Ring's Big Texas Ties

Mar 02,2011--Venice, FL.
A Dallas-based Gulfstream V luxury jet seized for gold smuggling last month by authorities in the war-torn eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is also under investigation for drug trafficking by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The plane seized in Goma was on the DEA’s watch list, according to reporter Melanie Gouby from the Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW) news service, as well as the BBC World Service.

Behind the Gulfstream stands a motley crew of Texas movers and shakers:
The owner of the plane, who the Dallas News repeatedly refers to as “philanthropist David Disiere,” although “convicted felon David Disiere” might  be a more accurate description.

As a co-defendant of notorious former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, Disiere was facing 200 years in prison until he rolled on Edwards and testified against him in a 2002 trial that put Edwards behind bars for eight years.

Desirie claims to be an innocent owner, and denies any wrongdoing in the case. But he does it through his spokesman, Dan Allen, former press secretary of House Majority leader Tom DeLay, until, of course, DeLay was convicted and forced to resign from the House in disgrace.

His airplane, a Gulfstream V top-of-the-line $60 million luxury jet, was leased to a prominent Texas oilman, Desirie avers.

Accounts differ on whether Houston oilman Kace Lawal is still a fugitive from justice in his native Nigeria, where he stands accused of stealing 10 million barrels of oil from the Nigerian government. But opinion is unanimous that Lawal had been a major fundraiser in Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.

Ironically, just last year Secretary of State Clinton found herself in the frontier town of Goma in the Congo, where the Gulfstream is currently impounded.

She was there speaking out “against the trade in ‘conflict minerals’ that has funded a cycle of conflict there that has left more than 5 million people dead since 1998 and spawned an epidemic of sexual violence.”

But wait. There’s more.

 

Read the whole story


Mexican Drug Cartels & 'The Enterprise' at the Venice Municipal Airport

 

Call it The Enterprise.  The "Company." The Iran-Contra rackets.  The Octopus…

A shady Mexican businessman implicated in the failure of a bank in Florida involved in  money laundering, arms trading  and drug smuggling co-owned an aviation business at the Venice Airport with a pilot who flew weapons to the contras in Honduras for Oliver North, and a pastor at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church.

Maximo Haddad is a Mexican construction tycoon, a citizen of Panama, lives in a $5 million mansion in Palm Beach, and served as Panama's Honorary Consul in Tampa.

When Agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) searched Haddad's private jet in 2004, they discovered such an embarrassingly large pile of cash and bearer bonds that The State Department requested that Panama ask him to resign his position.

Maximo Haddad was asked to turn in his diplomatic pouch,  a harsh sanction indeed.

Read the whole story



The 9/11 Social Network

The tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches. New books, new documentaries, saturated airwaves. Filled with sound, filled with fury, signifying—most of them—more or less nothing.

What have we learned?

What does Mohamed Atta have in common with Carlos Salinas?

Carlos and Raul Salinas grow up on the Mexican border, opposite Laredo Texas. Their father is in charge of Mexican Customs along the border. In a country notorious for smuggling, the post soon makes him one of Mexico’s richest men.

On December 18, 1951, major Mexico City dailies reported that two children, Raul, 5, and Carlos, 3, and an 8-year old playmate found a .22 rifle in the closet, and played a ‘game’ with the 12-year old maid, an Indian named Manuela. She knelt down. They executed her.

The three year old, Carlos, is quoted saying, “I killed her with one shot. I am a hero.”

When Carlos grows up to be president his biography will be purged of this inconvenient fact. Every newspaper account of the incident disappear from libraries across Mexico. His official biography states the 8-year old companion did the killing.

It is all just a misunderstanding.

They are making the truth disappear.

Read the whole story



Daniel Hopsicker needs your help

 It’s the biggest story of our time… and the biggest taboo.

 

It’s a testament to the power of America’s biggest taboo that drug connections between terrorist hijacker Mohamed Atta and the owner of the U.S. flight school Atta called home have never even been addressed.

The elephant in the living room has escaped exposure through the invocation of the big taboo.

The word ‘taboo’ comes from the South Pacific island of Tonga. It means a prohibition against speaking about something—the ‘taboo’ thing—for fear of harm from a supernatural force.

Most taboos concern avoiding objects and actions considered important to maintenance of the social order. 

While taboos exist in all societies, anthropologists say, only the Tongans, apparently, felt free enough to give it a name.

Today’s Drug Lords don’t look like Tony Montana in “Scarface,” but preppy Yale and Harvard-educated scions of America’s traditional political elite, which in point of fact is what that they are.

Some consider this fact injurious to the current social order. Not me, though...

Because taboos aren’t things that only exist in places like Borneo or the pages of National Geographic.

They exist here, too. Right here. Right now.

Read the whole story

 


 
Uairm
DEA to Hugo Chavez: "Find Your Own Trampoline"

Monday December 6 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

An investigation into the indictment for drug trafficking last month of a former crony of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez has revealed a case of “deja coup all over again."

Makled-Garcia is accused of being behind a drug move on May 10 2009 which ended in a fatal crash  of a Jetstream 19-passenger turbo-prop airliner which was carrying 1.5 tons of cocaine, on Utila, one of the Bay Islands just off Honduras' northern coast.

"The flights from Venezuela came in every week," confirmed a resident of Utila, in an exclusive interview. "It's a small island; so the flights were an open secret."

The Utila resident corroborates elements of Wakled's indictment, but what he witnessed also raises new questions of whether critical details have been deliberately left out.

For example: As the drug plane approached Utila, its  timing could not have been worse. One day earlier massive demonstrations had erupted in major cities across Honduras,  protesting what turned out to be an imminent military coup.

FULL STORY



Chairman Chavez, Oliver North & "Co-Conspirators Not Named as Defendants"

December 9 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

The now-famous  DC9 from St Petersburg Florida caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in the Yucatan four years ago is back in the news, as the centerpiece of a new DEA campaign of “projective or reverse propaganda."

Today the DEA is gearing up to go after—to Noriega-ize—Hugo Chavez, accusing him of engaging in a global drug trafficking conspiracy of staggering dimensions.

The propaganda campaign began in earnest last January,  when an unidentified official from the Dept. of Homeland Security announced the discovery of a pipeline, using cargo planes and even Boeing 727’s, pumping cocaine from Venezuela across the Atlantic to West Africa.

"Al Qaeda linked to rogue air network: U.S. official”  read the headline on a January 14, 2010 wire service report.

From the FARC to Chavez to Al Qaeda... It was a terrorist tri-fecta.

It must have been the closest thing to a wet dream that grizzled old U.S. drug war apologist Gen. Barry McCaffrey has had since Jane Russell starred in “The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown.”

Too bad it isn't true.

FULL STORY



Tampa Bay to Timbuktu: American Drug Lords in the News

August 4 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker
The powerful American-led global cartel exposed when a DC9 from St Petersburg Florida was busted in Mexico in April of 2006 carrying an astonishing 5.5 tons of cocaine has been in the news... everywhere from Tampa to Timbuktu.

Frederic Geffon, the owner of record of the DC9, was never charged with any crime.Yet he was no stranger to Federal law enforcement officials.

Geffon, our investigation has learned, was the subject of a Federal drug trafficking investigation in 1995. According to a DEA report on the DC9 sent to Luis Correa, the Director of Venezuela's National Anti-Drug Office, Frederic J. Geffon was the subject of an investigation by US Customs in Tampa, Florida in 1995, after being identified as an aircraft-broker-dealer working with drug traffickers.

While U.S. law enforcement was doing nada about Geffon, the Mexican government was also taking a siesta in the sun regarding another dug cartel factotum involved in the ill-fated DC9 drug move.

The DC9's pilot, Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, was-inexplicably and with no explanation-released by Mexican authorities sometime after being taken into custody.

When it comes to this particular drug trafficking organization, both nation's drug policy appears to be "Catch and Release."

FULL STORY


 

November 18, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker


In a much-criticized move, Acting DEA administrator Michele Leonhart spent more than $123,000 to charter a private jet, instead of one of the DEA’s own 106 planes, to fly to Colombia two years ago.

The level of disapproval might have been even higher had it been known that the DEA chartered the jet from a contractor with a major investment in a shell company in Florida that owned a DC9 caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico.

“Just as the nation was reeling from the worst economic crisis in decades, with the national  debt climbing toward $10 trillion, Leonhart chose an expensive outside jet charter company instead of one of the DEA’s own 106 planes for her trip to Bogotá, Colombia last fall,” reported Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers.

In a Feb 16, 2009 story headlined “DEA official's private charter cost $123,000,” Taylor reported that the DEA chartered the jet for Leonhart's trip from L-3 Communications, which bills itself as the nation's sixth largest defense contractor, and which made more than $32 million from the DEA in 2008 for transportation services, while the company's largest subsidiary, "Titan Group of L-3 Communications,"  had a $70,000 investment in a shell company in Miami with no employees, no earnings and no prospects, but which somehow wound up as the true and legal owner of a DC9 with a cargo of 5.5 tons of cocaine.

Some suggest that had been the purpose of the investment all along.

FULL STORY



9/11 Heroin Pilot's 10-Year Crime Spree Ends

 Nov 16 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker
email the author

The Bombardier Challenger 600 jet that went hurtling towards the end of the runway at Teterboro Airport at nearly 200 miles an hour before plowing through a steel perimeter fence and plunging across a six-lane highway before crashing into a clothing warehouse and bursting into flames finally put an end to Michael Brassington’s decade-long crime spree in a federal court in New Jersey.

Until a federal jury in New Jersey returned verdicts of guilty on the most serious charges facing him yesterday, nothing had come close to stopping—or even slowing down—Guyanese pilot Brassington’s flagrant disregard for American justice.

The jet had sheared the tops off of two cars and nearly decapitated one of the occupants, who had bravely shouted a warning to his companion to duck an instant before being struck by the wing of the plane, leaving him permanently brain-damaged. Both pilots and two other people on the ground were also seriously injured.

As a result of the convictions, Michael Brassington faces 20 or more years in prison.

But questions remain.

Full Story


                        

Nov 16,2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

“The Brassington Files,” is a partial list of stories published on this website during the past eight years in which eyewitnesses implicate Michael Brassington in drug trafficking for a continuing criminal enterprise of breathtaking scope and magnitude and ties right at the top of the national Republican Party.

Why did elements of the U.S. Government take such a surprisingly keen interest in controversial Guyanese drug pilot Michael Brassington during 2003 and 2004? Was Brassington involved with—or the subject of—a secretive Miami-based U.S. Government operation?

Why, when Michael Brassington attempted to re-enter the US through Fort Lauderdale International Airport in April of 2004 was a Supervisor at Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE) instruvted  to treat Brassington—a long-time employee and business associate of Wallace J. Hilliard, owner of the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta to fly— as a “grave threat to national security?"

Full Story


s Chavez Crony Drug "King of Kingpins?"

Nov 12,2010

by Daniel Hopsicker

In a week which began with the dubious Pentagon assertion that video footage of a missile launch shot by a KCBS news helicopter over Los Angeles was a vapor trail from a commercial jet distorted by light on the horizon at sunset, the notion that another federal agency could come up with a more ridiculous claim before the week was out seemed well-nigh impossible.

But that’s just what happened...

Just months after Wachovia Bank was assessed a record $160 million fine for laundering drug money used to buy a fleet of drug planes for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, the curious case of an American-registered airliner busted in the Yucatan carrying a massive multi-ton load of cocaine has burst back into the news... with a vengeance.

The U.S. claims to have identified the global narcotics trafficker and “king among kingpins” who “coordinated the transportation to Mexico” of the now-famous last flight of a DC9 which took off  from St. Petersburg FL on April 5 2006 before being busted, five days later, carrying  5.5 tons of cocaine.  

In an indictment unsealed this week in Manhattan, Federal prosecutors fingered Syrian-born Walid Makled-Garcia, 43, a former crony of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, as the man behind the flight.  

The meaning of the massive drug bust on an American-registered plane, in which the American owners suffered no consequences for having their plane caught with 5.5 tons of cocaine, has ignited controversy and been the subject of an ongoing investigation reported almost exclusively by this website for the past four years, and is the subject of a just-released 2-hour documentary.

And it is now becoming even more contentious, if anything, in Venezuela and much of Latin America, where it is dominating headlines in a growing scandal which, for very different reasons, is becoming as hot as a five-alarm fire.

Full Story 


 

   

Nov 2,2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

It’s hard to imagine a cover-up in a case where someone has been charged with a 27-count Federal indictment.

But that’s what’s happening  in U.S. District Court in New Jersey, where the trial of controversial Guyanese pilot Michael Francis Brassington completed its third week of testimony last Friday, in what can be viewed as a case study about just how much of the truth can—and cannot—be spoken in America today.

It’s as if “Son of Sam” serial killer David Berkowitz were on trial for double-parking his car while committing his string of violent homicides… but he wasn’t being charged with the murders.

The news the jurors won’t get to hear includes:

Just three days before the scheduled start of Brassington’s trial, his attorney filed a pre-trial motion asking U.S. District Judge Dennis Cavanaugh to exclude  testimony mentioning terrorism or the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

During the investigation into the crash of the Challenger CL-600 luxury jet flown by Brassington’s Platinum Jet Management, the motion revealed, the FAA’s lead investigator had an Agent from the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) “assigned” to be with him when he interviewed witnesses. 

Full Story


October 18,2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

Among the chilling conclusions of The New American Drug Lords, a new 2-hour documentary by investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker:

     An international drug trafficking network has been operating in Venice since the early 1970’s, when the notorious paramilitary drug trafficking organization known as The Company had a base at the Venice Airport.

Today, the successor to The Company appears to be the major drug trafficking operation an hour up the coast from Venice, at the St. Petersburg-Clearwater Int’l Airport, where two American-registered airplanes took off before being busted in the Yucatan carrying a cumulative total of
ten tons of cocaine.

Using “cut-outs” like foreign pilots and Saudi money-man Adnan Khashoggi to provide plausible deniability to the drug network’s U.S. sponsors, the organization was run—or at least received protection from—America’s Central Intelligence Agency, with powerful connections to prominent figures and top financiers in the national Republican Party.

Wally Hilliard’s drug operation in Venice has strong links to the St. Petersburg operation. Many have already been reported.  New ones are still surfacing.The two operations may in fact be the same operation.

 
   

July 15, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

The identity of the pilot of the American-registered DC-9 (N900SA)  from St. Petersburg FL caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico's Yucatan several years ago, long a mystery, finally saw the light of day recently in Mexico.

Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, a Venezuelan, was the DC9’s pilot who was said to have “escaped”  from the airport while his airplane was being seized, and four other members of his crew were arrested.

He was later taken into custody by Mexican authorities, and charged with flying an airplane packed with 128 identical suitcases filled with cocaine.

Getting caught with  5.5 tons of cocaine would seem to call for some serious jail time. Reporters in Mexico assumed he’d been sent to prison for, like... forever.

So imagine reporter Francisco Gomez of Mexico City's El Universal  surprise when he made a startling discovery:  Carmelo Vasquez Guerra—amazingly and inexplicably—had been released from prison less than two years after being arrested.

nd     FULL STORY


 
   

April 11, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicke

The arrival en masse of Mohamed Atta’s terrorist cadre at the Venice Municipal Airport was happenstance, goes the official story, and the terrorist’s presence there an accident of history, unrelated to any pre-existing  climate of crime or corruption.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

This was illustrated again recently when decades of old newspaper clippings became available online,  revealing the full range of the extraordinary history of criminal mischief and international intrigue at the Venice Airport.

For example: our recent story headlined "60 year history of drug trafficking at Venice Airport" was off by fifteen years, according to a “Looking Back” feature from the Aug 28 1964 Sarasota Herald Tribune, which reveals that the oldest report of drug trafficking at what will become the Venice Airport occurred thirty years earlier.

On that date in 1934, “A dope-smuggling plane was captured by Federal Agents near Venice,”  the paper reported.

In unbroken succession in the decades since, the Venice Municipal Airport— decade-in and decade-out—has played host to drug smuggling, gun running, the launching of coups in the Caribbean, mercenary training, even murder...

It is a remarkable history of international intrigue with a distinctly ‘spooky’ flavor.

nd     FULL STORY


 
   

March 8, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

An investigation into suspicious circumstances  surrounding the sale of the former Huffman Aviation has unearthed an explosive secret at the heart of an otherwise unremarkable aviation facility.

Almost since its inception, the specter of heroin trafficking has hung over the airfield which would later become the Venice Municipal Airport.

During World War II, when it was known as the Venice Army Air Field, it was home to the Stateside operations of a man widely and credibly accused of using proceeds from international heroin trafficking to prop up the war machine of a corrupt Chinese warlord whose army, even after its defeat, hung on to a lion's share of Southeast Asian real estate which became known as the Golden Triangle.

Contemporary newspaper clips from the time show that the Venice Airport has had an extraordinary six-decade long history, and been the scene of covert activities including gunrunning, international heroin and cocaine trafficking, and being used as a launch pad for coups in the Caribbean and Central America.

These activities required, available evidence will show, the regular and systematic corruption of officials in Venice and Sarasota County.

The recent infamous and still-painful history of the Venice Airport, home base for Mohamed Atta and his crew of terrorist hijackers, it turns out, is just the most recent in an extraordinary history of elite deviance, criminal mischief, and international intrigue.

nd FULL STORY


Art Nadel guilty; New hedge fund owner takes over Huffman Aviation

March 1 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

In a surprise court appearance last Wednesday hedge fund owner Art Nadel pled guilty in a New York Federal court.

It was a bitter disappointment to swindled investors, as well as to interested onlookers anxious for a glimpse of not only how he did it, but who he did it with.

Nadel’s guilty plea may have removed the best—maybe the only—chance to make accountants and bookkeepers and  managers at feeder hedge funds, all of whom had front row seats to the scandal, face public scrutiny while testifying about what went on at Scoop Management.

Most people find it impossible to believe he acted alone

But if things look bad for Nadel's hapless investors, the outlook for the citizens of Venice, Florida, where Nadel owned the same business that earlier trained Mohamed Atta to fly, is even more bleak.

For them, Nadel’s descent from hedge fund owner to handcuffs may be going from the frying pan to the fire.

That's because the new owner of the former Huffman Aviation owns a hedge fund, too. 

Even worse, the new owner's top henchman, who often fronts for his various financial entities as their President, was at the heart of a Wall Street scandal that looted more money from investors than Art Nadel ever dreamed of stealing, and which was—until the financial meltdown last year—the biggest fraud Wall Street had ever seen.

FULL STORY


Will secret deal bring old management back to Venice Airport FBO?

January 5, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

The hand-picked new ownership at the former Huffman Aviation FBO (Fixed Base of Operations) at the Venice Municipal Airport has links to private military contractors in Georgia involved in CIA extraordinary renditions around the world, as well as other covert activity on behalf of the U.S. Government.

This same company turned over between 12-15 mid-sized regional jets to another owner of Huffman Aviation, Wallace J. Hilliard, ten years ago, for Hilliard's doomed from the start “start-up airline,” an operation so inept that on at least one publicized route, they never sold a single ticket. 

The company or network of companies which has had so much involvement with recent owners of Huffman Aviation is known variously as “Phoenix Air,” “Phoenix Air Services,” and “Phoenix Continental." 

Oddly, long after his start-up airline quit flying scheduled trips, Hilliard still had jets on the tarmacs and aprons of various airports. And he continued to pay pilots to be ready...

Perhaps just in case.

FULL STORY


December 22, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker

During 2003 and 2004, elements of the U.S. Government took a surprisingly keen interest in controversial Guyanese drug pilot Michael Brassington. Brassington was involved in-or the subject of-a secretive Miami-based U.S. Government operation, according to interviews with former Customs Agents.

 "Whenever Brassington entered the U.S.,  a special team from Miami was supposed to come up," stated former Fort Lauderdale Customs Agent James Sanders. Brassington was  supposed to be met by Customs Agents from an operation with a highly-checkered past called "Operation Blue Lightning."

"Operation Blue Lightning is some kind of joint task force. I found out later from another chief inspector that was on the team that I wasn't even supposed to inspect him," Sanders said.

The intent of Operation Blue Lightning's interest in Brassington remains unclear.

Operation Blue Lightning fits the description provided by a top DEA official in Miami when he informed us why the DEA had not mounted an investigation into the owners of two planes caught carrying over 10 tons of cocaine in Mexico's Yucatan.  

The drug planes belonged to a "rogue" operation in U.S. Customs, said the DEA official.  So the investigation properly belonged to the Office of Investigations in the Dept of Homeland Security.

Was Brassington's "special handling" designed to impede criminal drug smuggling activity? Or to facilitate it?

Brassington goes on trial next month in Federal Court in Newark for putting the lives of passengers in danger in a near-fatal crash of a luxury jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey in February 2005.

Full Story



December 1, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker

A U.S. Customs Agent on duty when controversial drug pilot and “soldier of fortune” Michael Brassington attempted to re-enter the US through Fort Lauderdale International Airport in April of 2004 was instructed by a Supervisor at Immigrations & Customs Enforcement (ICE)  to treat Brassington as a “grave threat to national security.” 

Brassington was a long-time employee and business associate of Wallace J. Hilliard, owner of the Venice FL  flight school that trained Mohamed Atta to fly.

The news comes as the former Guyanese military pilot prepares to go on trial in a Federal Courthouse in Newark next month for recklessly endangering the lives of passengers, whose number includes ex-Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and Bill Clinton as well as numerous celebrities.

The disclosure, contained in a soon-to-be-released documentary, “The New American Drug Lords,” is a reminder, more than eight years later, of the unfinished nature of the investigation into the 9/11 attack.  

FULL STORY


October 19, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker

At the same time Wallace J Hilliard's Huffman Aviation was teaching a still-unidentified number of suspected terrorists, including many, like Souheil Seddik, who remain unknown to the general public, he was also assembling a fleet of twin-engine turboprop Jetstream airliners, airplanes normally used in regional airline markets, to be used in the launch of his new start-up, Florida Air.

"Dekkers, along with partner Wally Hilliard, operates several air charter companies in Florida, including the Venice-based Hoffman Aviation," reported the Sarasota Herald Tribune in February 2001.

"Six airplanes -- four scheduled for daily runs, two on standby as backups --will be dispatched for the new service."

However a recent investigation into the current war for control of the Venice Municipal Airport has discovered that secretive financier Wally Hilliard bought-not six-but as many as twelve to eighteen Jetstream airliners which seldom-if ever-flew paying passengers or scheduled flights.   

While Mohamed Atta attended his flight school, Wally Hilliard owned a "ghost airline" with a dozen 19-passenger Jetstreams whose use remains a total mystery.

A clue to their true use can perhaps be found, however, in the names of the previous owners of Hilliard's fleet of airliners, which include individuals closely associated with prominent military figures active in U.S. covert operations in China, in Iran Contra, and closely linked to figures like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

FULL STORY


October 15, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker

The man who owned the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta to fly, Wally Hilliard, made millions selling his insurance company, back in 1981,  to the man who paid “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

Wally Hilliard’s links to American intelligence go back (at least) to November of 1981, when his insurance company, Wisconsin Employer’s Group,  was bought out by Myron Du Bain, then the Chairman of Fireman’s Fund of San Francisco. 

Du Bain, who died in 2002, was a World War II OSS/CIA operative and the Chairman of Fireman's Fund of San Francisco when it bought out the insurance company founded by Hilliard.  Hilliard later went on to own Huffman Aviation, the Venice FL flight school used by Mohamed Atta his U.S. base.

We had discovered the connection in a trip to Green Bay several years ago.

But only recently did we learn that Myron Du Bain’s life-long ties to the CIA included two stints at the helm of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI),  famous for its classified research into psychic viewing. the results of which are currently on display in “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

Full story



The Deep History of the Venice Municipal Airport

Sept 24, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker

Stephen Ruth got his start in business (as revealed by the first two stories in this series) working for a corporate entity which those involved claim was the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.  

Active at the Venice Municipal Airport over several decades, as well as in nearby Sarasota and Charlotte County, Venice Florida native Stephen L. Ruth is a convicted drug trafficker and friend of Pablo Escobar flying, by the late 70’s, back and forth from Southwest Florida to Colombia and back several times a week.  

When not flying goodwill missions to our Southern neighbors in his DC4 Globemaster or Lockheed Lodestar, Stephen Ruth developed the habit of putting out a number of serious-as-cancer murder contracts.   

Apparently, Stephen Ruth’s unique curriculum vitae: experience in successful CIA “wet work,” bolstered by proven ability to fly low over the Gulf from Colombia to Florida… later qualified him for employment with the Florida State’s Attorney’s office.

Full story



The Deep History of the Venice Municipal Airport

Sept 21 2009--

“Deep History,” according to the man who coined the term, U.C. Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott, “is the constant everyday interaction between the constitutionally-elected government and the forces of violence and crime which appear (on the surface) to be the enemies of that government.”

Just as he said he would, after returning from Cuba, where, according to a police report he participated in the assassination of one of the “four or five” men said to have been involved in the Kennedy Assassination, Stephen Ruth got rich.

Big rich: $3 million dollars, a lot back in the 1970’s.

While how he made it may not surprise you, what he did then almost certainly will.

Full story

Preview II: "New American Drug Lords"
 

t
Big Safari, the Kennedy Assassination, & the war for control of the Venice Airport

Sept 08 2009--A fierce war being waged for control of the Venice Municipal Airport has led to the discovery of covert CIA and military operations, dating back to at least 1959, which go well beyond what was previously known to have taken place there. 

Operations at the Venice Airport have involved individuals whose names figure prominently in the Kennedy Assassination, for example a defense contractor controlled by Texas oilman General D. H. (Harry) Byrd, which in the late 50's and early 60's built and launched Regulus II cruise missiles from the beach directly in front of the Venice Airport as part of a program run out of at Eglin AFB in Florida’s panhandle. 

Byrd’s Chance-Vought Aircraft, later re-named LTV, would become—almost immediately after the JFK assassination—a principal beneficiary of the massive military spending accompanying the growth of American military involvement in the Vietnam War.

General Byrd, of course, was also the owner of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, where the Warren Commission alleged Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots which killed President John F. Kennedy.

Byrd also ran the Texas and Louisiana Civil Air Patrol, at the same time cadets Barry Seal and Lee Harvey Oswald were meeting Kennedy assassination conspirator Capt. David Ferrie at a two-week summer camp of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol at Barksdale Air Force Base in July of 1955.

Amazingly—especially for a tiny airport located in an out-of-the-way retirement community—according to a recently-uncovered police report there is a second man active at the Venice Airport with relevance to the Kennedy assassination as well.

Full story


t
Reopen the 9/11 investigation

 

Sept 06 2009

The news these last days of summer contains at least one story which—because key elements of it remain unspoken, in other words, taboo—doesn't make sense.

In the current furor over the Justice Department’s opening of an investigation into the torture of prisoners under the Bush Administration, during the same week that a federal court found that John Ashcroft, then-attorney general, violated the rights of U.S. citizens by ordering arrests when the government lacked probable cause,

Dick Cheney vociferously claimed that that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were “absolutely essential” in stopping another terrorist attack on the United States after Sept. 11, 2001.

 If it is true, then perhaps Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush, and especially U.S. General Tommy Franks can tell us why they let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora two months after the 9/11 attack?

Full story


August 20, 2009

The reputation of Huffman Aviation principal Rudi Dekkers, whose dozens of television appearances in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack shaped the public perception of Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, took another big hit recently when a Dutch television show came to light.

"Spooloos," or "Vanished," a popular reality TV show in the Netherlands that travels around the world locating missing relatives for worried family and friends, portrays Dekkers' as a callous and negligent "deadbeat dad" who abandoned a young wife in the Netherlands while she was three months pregnant.

His son Patrick's attempts to establish contact with Dekker's, the father he has never known, are repeatedly rebuffed.

A translated except from the program is part of the just-released second preview of the upcoming "The New American DrugLords" documentary at  www.danielhopsicker.tv

Dekker's description of events leading up to the 9/11 attack were uncritically received on network and cable news shows in America and around the world after the 9/11 attack.

Full story  

A bitter fight to redact portions of the explosive final report of an official  British Inquiry into systemic corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands backfired last week when news of the redactions caused a firestorm of protest and the full report was leaked to freedom of information website WikiLeaks. 

Some of the most sensitive redactions in the British Commission of Inquiry's Final Report concern much-traveled pilot Michael Francis Brassington, who first rose to the level of public scrutiny as co-pilot on a Lear jet (N351WB) belonging to the owner of a flight school that at the time had been teaching Mohamed Atta to fly was seized by DEA Agents who found 43 lbs. of heroin onboard.

The controversy over the redacted report  has ironically shed light on a previously-unknown connection between Brassington and a second pilot, Wolfgang Bohringer,  whose name also surfaces regularly in the background to the intrigue in Florida swirling around Mohamed Atta during the run-up to the 9/11 attack.

Brassington and Bohringer were not previously known to have been connected.

The controversy over the unredacted report changed that, when the resulting publicity illuminated dark corners in the background of the man whose deep pockets were keeping secret the full extent of Michael Misick and Michael Francis Brassington’s crimes.

Michael Brassington—still a close associate of Wally Hilliard’s, according to a former U.S. Customs Agent who has seen his file—and Wolfgang Bohringer,  an "associate" of Mohamed Atta's  close enough for Atta to have frequently referred to him as “my brother,” have both been pilots for the Russian Mob.

Full story

Huffman Aviation Was 'Continuing Criminal Enterprise'

Art Nadel, the recent owner of Huffman Aviation accused of running a Ponzi scheme which allegedly stole almost $400 million from investors, is the only person so far charged with a crime.

However if  authorities persist in claiming that claim Nadel was a "lone-nut financial gunslinger" they will be ignoring the richly-documented history of criminal fraud involving the owners of Huffman Aviation that goes back for more than a decade. 

At least four financial scams, each looting more than $100 million,  have criminal roots in the fertile soil— the “Octo-Mom” fertile soil—of the Venice Municipal Airport.

Almost immediately after its purchase in the summer of 1999 by Wallace J. Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers, the aviation facility became the center of a series of financial scams that included Ponzi schemes, pension fraud, international stock swindles, and fraudulent bankruptcies which have altogether looted more than $1 billion from the American economy.

Huffman Aviation, the flight training facility which housed both of the terrorist pilots who crashed passenger jets into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, has been operating as a continuing criminal enterprise, as defined by the Federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act.

Full story
Accused Ponzi Fraudster investor linked to
 Texas "investment bank" behind DC9 5-ton coke bust
 

An investor claiming a nearly six million dollar loss in hedge funds of the accused Sarasota Florida Ponzi artist who is also the current owner of flight school Huffman Aviation figured in the story of the St. Petersburg DC9  busted in Mexico's Yucatan with 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard.

Louis D. Paolino, once known as the “Garbage King of New Jersey,” was one of only a handful of entities ever funded by Texas  "investment bank" Argyll Equity LLC,  the major investor in the company whose DC9 was busted on April 11, 2006 in Mexico’s Yucatan, carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine.

Terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta probably never met anyone named “Fat Pete” or Joey Cakes” while learning to fly  at Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport.

But ever-mounting evidence points to the conclusion that the men who owned the flight school—both then and now—have more than a passing acquaintance with organized crime.

Full story

mar 20, 2009-

Another owner of the flight school in Venice Florida that trained Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to fly is in trouble with the law; current owner Arthur G. Nadel, 75,  was arrested recently for running a Ponzi scheme which methodically looted investors in his Sarasota-based hedge funds of more than $300 million

New York tabloids, already in overdrive on the story of Bernard Madoff,  instantly dubbed Nadel Mini-M, for Mini-Madoff. Nadel's arrest marks the second time in recent years that the owner of Huffman Aviation, the FBO (fixed base of operations) at the Venice Airport has been involved in crimes traditionally associated with the Mob.

Ponzi schemes, of course, are a trademark Mafia specialty. So, too, is the crime of heroin trafficking in which previous owner Wally Hilliard was implicated.

How did city officials in Venice allow the airport's mission-critical FBO to fall into the hands--not once but twice--of people otherwise engaged in organized crime?

Why is it that shadowy underworld figures seem to enjoy the permanent run of the airport in Venice, Florida?

Full story

mar 5--09 The owner of the flight school in Venice FL where the two hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center took flight lessons, was arrested last May after assaulting his 17-yr old step-daughter outside a sports bar in Naples, Florida.

78-year old Wallace J. Hilliard of Naples FL was charged with misdemeanor battery on May 28 2008, according to Collier County, FL arrest records.

In the seven years since 9/11 Wally Hilliard has remained embroiled in controversy. He is currently the subject of  a multi-jurisdictional  fraud investigation into a scheme which may have cost investors as much as $100 million. 

Though no charges have yet been filed, the FBI and investigators from the state of have interviewed numerous witnesses, including over 50 people from Wisconsin who lost millions. They allege Hilliard never alerted investors that he was under investigation, had a federal tax liability going back to 2001,  and had been denied an airline license by the FAA.

Frequent Hilliard “business associate” Tommy Barranza is reportedly under investigation for money laundering for allegedly structuring cash transactions to avoid currency reporting. 

Hilliard is suspected of funneling large amounts of cash to the Bahamas. 

Full story

Fort Lauderdale attorney Michael Moulis, described in an article yesterday as “The Man Behind Loophole Air,” is threatening to sue Daniel Hopsicker on behalf of Michael Brassington, the pilot arrested two weeks ago in a 23-count federal indictment for the crash of a corporate jet in New Jersey.

Brassington is also linked to a massive corruption scandal roiling South Florida, over the sale during the past few years of as many as one hundred American-registered planes to Mexico’s dominant Sinaloa Cartel. 

According to a high-ranking DEA official in Miami, a corrupt U.S. Customs operation is to blame. The fact that more people are not aware of these facts owes something to the many forms of intimidation practiced against independent journalists. Such intimidation takes many forms.

Some would say lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits, are one of its milder manifestations. Such people probably haven't been sued for libel recently.  

But attorney Michael Moulis didn’t stop with just offering to sue for libel... 

He threatened criminal prosecution in Federal Court.  
 

Full story

Less than a year before the Teterboro crash of a Challenger corporate jet that ran off a runway and hurtled into traffic on a busy 6-lane highway on Feb 2 2005,  the company responsible for that crash, Platinum Jet Management of Fort Lauderdale,  ran a private jet off a runway at Peachtree-DeKalb Airport in Atlanta.

The Teterboro crash was so spectacular that it led all three evening newscasts. The crash sparked a federal criminal investigation that led to the recent 23-count indictment against Brassington, and four other executives of Platinum Jet Management.

The investigation turned up damning evidence of a pattern of illegal activity on the part of the charter company so egregious that the responsible Federal agency, the FAA, came under rare criticism from another Federal agency, the NTSB.

Former inspector general Mary Schiavo of the U.S. Department of Transportation calls Brassington’s charter company  "Loophole Airlines."  Schiavo, an outspoken critic of the nation's aviation regulators, told the NJ Star-Ledger that the company that flew the jet was an unqualified charter operator, flying U.S. skies only by circumventing federal regulations. 

"This is rampant. It isn't just one operator. This goes on everywhere in every part of the country," she charged.  "They are loophole airlines." 

If Schiavo is right,  then the man behind "Loophole Air" is Fort Lauderdale attorney Michael Moulis, a former FAA prosecutor who has represented Guyanese pilot Brassington since the Teterboro Challenger crash four years ago, 

Full story

The pilot arrested two weeks ago on felony charges in the crash in the February 2005 crash of a Challenger business jet at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey has since been flying illegal charters for the Premier of the Turks & Caicos in luxury Gulfstream III jets owned by a Washington lobbyist and former aide to President Bill Clinton.

 

Testimony at the British Commission of Inquiry Turks & Caicos Islands corruption probe last week revealed that Guyanese pilot Michael Brassington, currently facing a 23-count indictment in Federal Court in Newark for endangering passengers lives at charter company Platinum Jet Management, is in  business with former Clinton White House aide Jeffrey Watson, now a Washington lobbyist.

 

The Commission heard that Brassington and Turks & Caicos Premier Michael Misick conspired to induce the island's government to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to Watson to lease two high-end Gulfstream III luxury business jets.

 

The men engineered an air charter deal that paid Watson more than $160,000-a-month from the coffers of the Turks & Caicos' nearly-bankrupt  government, which was at the same time eliminating all student scholarships.

Watson  is a former housing official in Miami who became a Clinton White House Aide, responsible for doling out $75 million in Federal government largesse after the devastation of Hurricane Andrew.

The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel called him “Florida's insider at the White House.”

Full story

3Four years after the  spectacular crash of a business jet at Teterboro Airport across the Hudson River from New York City  injured 20 people and left one man with permanent brain damage,  the owner and chief pilot who was arrested on felony charges in the crash last week was also named as a key figure in a corruption probe in the Turks & Caicos Islands.

Even as FBI agents were arresting him in the New Jersey crash and charging him in a 23-count indictment in which he stands accused of compromising passenger safety, former Guyanese military pilot Michael Francis Brassington was making headlines in a Watergate-like British Commission of Inquiry investigating allegations of corruption in office against Michael Misick, Premier of the Turks & Caicos Islands.

On the Challenger flight that crashed, more than 20 people were injured. Authorities expressed amazement that nobody was killed. According to the NTSB, neither the pilot nor the co-pilot were rated to fly the flight they were flying. The flight attendant was a dancer at the Voodoo Lounge in Miami.

A month later the FAA shut Brassington's Platinum Jet charter company down. It didn't faze Brassington. He just changed the name of his company and kept on hauling.

And, for the next four years, that was that.

Full story

 

35-year old Guyanese pilot Michael Francis Brassington was indicted in New Jersey federal court this week,  the result of an investigation into the spectacular crash of a  airplane outside New York City in February of 2005, which injured 20 people and provoked widespread outrage in New York.  

Brassington, the principal owner of defunct air charter company Platinum Jet Management, was  indicted Wednesday along with four other company executives, charged with recklessly endangering the lives of passengers.  He has survived previous scrapes with American law enforcement, each time emerging curiously unscathed.

However, his earlier controversies were not celebrity-enhanced.

He first achieved notoriety and became a footnote to the history of the 9.11 attack as the co-pilot of a Lear jet(N351WB) which was busted carrying 43 lbs of heroin in Orlando on July 22, 2000. The Lear jet’s owner was Wallace J. Hilliard, the secretive 75-year old Naples FL financier whose Huffman Aviation flight school in Venice just three weeks earlier had enrolled soon-to-be-famous terrorist pilot trainees Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi.

Less well-known about Brassington's history of brushes with U.S. law enforcement is that several years ago he was the subject of a Multi-Agency Federal Task Force, Operation Blue Lightning; Brassington was suspected of trafficking drugs, passports, people, currency, and diamonds  into the U.S. through two airports in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Tasked with tracking Brassington's movements during Operation Blue Lightning, a Customs Supervisor in Miami had even warned Customs Agents at Fort Lauderdale International Airport to treat Brassington as a "grave threat to national security.”

Full story

 

Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire whose $250 million cash infusion bailed the New York Times out of a tight cash crunch last week, has long-standing business ties with wealthy Mexican businessmen suspected of involvement in Mexico's so-called “Cartel of the Southeast,” the drug trafficking organization (DTO) based in Cancun which came to light two years ago with the crash on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula of an American-registered (N987SA) Gulfstream jet carrying nearly four tons of cocaine.
 

A long-time lieutenant of Carlos Slim's, Fernando Chico Pardo, left Slim's employ to take over ASUR, a publicly-traded corporation which observers accuse of moving large quantities of cocaine through Cancun International Airport, which the company runs and manages. Slim's big investment represents an encroachment into the ownership of an icon of American democracy of a man, and a massive fortune, whose provenance have gone largely unexamined.
 

But on the topic of Slim's shady dealings, all eyes seem to be curiously averted. However it seems highly doubtful the Times' ownership is unaware of them. The barely-concealed facts regarding Carlos Slim’s shady connections are well-known to journalists in Mexico.


They deserve to become more well-known here in the U.S.; the links between Mexico's exploding narco-economy and current-world's-richest-man Carlos Slim don’t end with Fernando Pardo's ASUR. 

Full story


"A portable rectangular problem"

 

Two of the four prominent Chavezistas charged with illegally acting on Hugo Chavez’s behalf in the recently-concluded Suitcase-Gate Trial in Miami were inside players in a previous Venezuelan scandal that took place well before Chavez ever took office, the  MadCowMorningNews has learned.

 

The Suitcase-Gate Trial was supposed to spotlight a criminal Venezuelan elite of Castro-loving Chavezistas, who taunt America, threaten war with Colombia, and give sanctuary to Hezbollah. 

Instead, testimony showed that Chavez's Venezuelan cronies are anything but wild-eyed radicals. The vanguard of the working class drives Ferraris and lives in McMansions in Miami, and is too busy making money, in oil, real estate, and weapons and narcotics to wear masks over their faces, or raspberry-red berets

Neither man has built a better mousetrap, or done anything more clever than align themselves with a Venezuelan elite which resembles the vanguard of the working class much less than it does a kleptocracy very much like the one which has just looted trillions of dollars from the American economy. 

Full story

At least two of the four defendants convicted of working as illegal foreign agents in Florida for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in the Suitcase-Gate Scandal had ties to an international criminal organization which was operating successfully in Venezuela, and with seeming official impunity, long before Chavez himself came to power, The MadCowMorningNews has learned.

Both the recently-convicted Franklin Duran, and Carlos Kauffmann, who pled guilty before the trial, took part in a $7 billion bank scandal during the mid-1990's that involved insiders looting Venezuelan banks, and led more than 200 Venezuelan bankers to flee Caracas for exile in Miami.

When a U.S. jury in Miami recently convicted Venezuelan businessman Franklin Duran in the Suitcase-Gate Trial, the verdict raised more questions than it answered.

From the start, observers saw the purpose of the prosecution as being to embarrass and point a finger at corruption in the government of Venezuela's current President (and Bush Administration bete noire) Hugo Chavez.

But while Chavez's "Bolivarian revolution" was singled out by Bush Administration prosecutors, the men acting on Chavez's behalf have connections which have so far been ignored to scandals which occurred under past Venezuelan Presidents as well.

Full story



'Player overlap' visible in trial

The luxury business jet carrying a suitcase filled with $800,000 in bribes whose discovery last August kicked off the Suitcase-Gate Scandal playing out in a trial in Miami had the same registration, or" N" number, as that of a plane flying for a CIA contractor in Iraq, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.

Newspaper photos taken of the Citation X top-of-the-line business jet after the ill-fated suitcase flight show 'N' number N5113S on the tail. But a Florida-based CIA air contractor called Air-Scan Inc. is assigned that tail number, according to FAA records, for a Cessna 182 flying in Iraq.

Air-Scan Inc. is an American military contractor which has—even for an American military contractor—a checkered past.

Still, there has been no mention so far during the trial of the murky provenance of the Citation jet, whose flight began what has become a growing international incident.

Full story

The CIA Drug Plane Scandal grew exponentially last week when European Union officials broke an official 40-year-long silence on the previously-taboo subject of the CIA's worldwide involvement in drug trafficking.

Last week Mexico City newspaper El Universal reported that The European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation has begun an investigation one of the planes, the cocaine-laden Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA), for suspected use in CIA "rendition" flights in which prisoners are covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.

Neither of the federal agencies with apparent jurisdiction—the DEA and FAA—has so far offered answers about how two American-registered jets with extremely politically well-connected owners, could have wound up carrying so much Colombian coke. But then, no mainstream American journalists have bothered to ask.

Mexican journalists have not been that timid…

Full story

Last week, two wire services, Agence France Presse and the Associated Press, reported news that readers of the investigative reporting at this website have known about for almost a year.

While happy to see the mainstream media waking up, a little "credit where credit is due" would be nice, too. We broke this news on this website eleven months ago (Oct 8, 2007). When not unsuccessfully attempting to debunk it, America's corporate media has assiduously ignored my reporting on a whole host of scoops we've broken.

Ultimately, the effort is designed to make me go away, for the same reason that stories about 9/11 "conspiracies" never mention real investigative reporting on 9/11, which, alas, appears in very few places. And, in combination with a series of nuisance libel lawsuits, it has almost succeeded.

You can make the difference in keeping the news real by putting your money where your mouth is. Please send advice, and donations, and pre-order both the book and DVD.

A sincere and heartfelt thank you to all the Mad Cow readers who have been supportive over these past years...

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Straight from the front lines of the Drug War…

"The NEW American Drug Lords" is a no-holes-barred look at into the Biggest Taboo story of our time: the illegal drug trade.

The documentary pulls back the curtain on the biggest drug story of our time: the scandal which erupted when two drug planes flying tons of cocaine were busted in Mexico's Yucatan enroute from Colombia to Fort Lauderdale in Florida.

Both were American-owned. Recent owners of the first plane busted—a DC9 with 5.5 tons of cocaine—have interlocking business partnerships with recent owners of the second plane, a Gulfstream II business jet.

The Gulfstream had been previously used to fly for the CIA. The DC9 was painted like an official aircraft from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.

The New American Drug Lords. Meet them. Know them.

Beat them at their own game.

VIEW IT HERE…


As the political conventions dominate our consciousness, remember that a major international trafficking operation, like this one, kicks off vast amounts of fungible cash, day-by-day, month-by-month, year-by-year...

If there is an arena where the a battle is being waged for the "soul of America," as Joe Biden suggested last week... it is here.

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.

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.

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