New revelations in the broadening scandal kicked off by two CIA and Dept of Homeland Security-linked airplanes busted in Mexico with multi-ton loads of cocaine point to a level of criminality and turpitude well beyond the corruption at U.S. Customs in South Florida to which officials have already admitted.
A central figure in the Customs corruption probe is Guyanese pilot Michael Francis Brassington, the MadCowMorningNews has learned, a name familiar to readers who have followed the unfolding and still largely untold story of the activities and associates of the terrorist hijackers in Florida...
Michael Brassington was the co-pilot on a drug running Lear jet (N351WB) caught by DEA agents at Orlando Executive Airport in July of 2000 carrying 43 pounds of heroin.
The Lear jet's owner, Wallace J Hilliard, also owned the Venice FL flight school where, at that very moment, the two terrorist pilots who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center Towers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, were receiving flight training.
Today's $64,000 Question:
In the current Customs scandal Brassington is under suspicion for trafficking drugs, passports, people, currency, and diamonds into the U.S. through two airports in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with the assistance of high-level officials in U.S. Customs and the FAA.
Two American-registered drug planes busted in Mexico carrying four and 5.5 tons of cocaine are just the "tip of the iceberg" in a blockbuster aviation deal which sent 50 American-registered aircraft to the Sinaloa Cartel, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
According to an indictment released over the holidays by Mexico's Atty. General, Pedro Alfonso Alatorre, already indicted as the cartel's chief financier, purchased the DC9 (N900SA) airliner, the Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA), and 48 other planes not yet identified for Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel with laundered drug money, using a company he controls which owns currency exchanges at major airports in Mexico.
News of a 50-plane fleet of drug smuggling aircraft being sold to a Mexican Cartel by mysteriously unnamed American owners confirms rumors of a mushrooming scandal, one which may eventually implicate top officials in the U.S., Mexico, and Colombia.
WAS U.S. IN BUSINESS WITH MEXICO'S SINALOA CARTEL?
Two weeks after the MadCowMorningNews exclusively reported suspicious connections between the owners of the two American-registered planes busted with multi-ton loads of cocaine during the past 18 months on Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, the Mexican Attorney General confirmed that both planes were used by the same smuggling operation.
In coordinated raids Thursday on Casa de Cambio Puebla SA, a country-wide network of currency exchanges, many located at airports, squads of heavily-armed Mexican Federal Police took more than 70 people into custody, targeting a ring they said used laundered money to buy airplanes to smuggle drugs, Mexico's Attorney General's Office said in a news release.
Nabbed in the raid was Pedro Alfonso Alatorre Damy, identified by authorities as the major money launderer for Mexico's Pacific Cartel, sometimes called the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as the New Federation, run by fugitive Mexican kingpin Juan "Shorty" Guzman.
Both the DC9 airliner (N900SA) busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine 18 months ago and the Gulfstream II (N987SA) business jet which crash-landed with 4 tons of cocaine had been purchased by Alatorre with laundered drug money from his "Cambio de Pueblo" currency exchanges, said a statement Friday from Mexico's Attorney General Office.
Left unanswered by the raids in Mexico is whether anyone will suffer consequences on the American side of the border. or whether the DEA's operative assumption is that the Sinaloa Cartel was buying jets on Ebay, and distributing its own cocaine to retail, perhaps using vendors who sell oranges at freeway onramps.
Seventeen months after an American-registered DC9 airliner was busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine, a major international scandal is brewing over a second drug trafficking incident in Mexico's Yucatan involving an American-registered jet owned by a dummy front company of the kind usually associated with the CIA.
A weekend visit to "Donna Blue Aircraft Inc" of Coconut Beach FL., the company which FAA records show owned the Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) which crash-landed with 3.7 tons of cocaine aboard in Mexico's Yucatan two weeks ago, has revealed that the company's listed address is an empty office suite with a blank sign out front.
There was no sign of Donna Blue Aircraft, Inc., at the address listed at the Florida Dept. of Corporations, 4811 Lyons Technology Parkway #8 in Coconut Beach FL
However, there were, oddly enough, a half-dozen unmarked police cars parked directly in front of the empty suite.
Phone calls to Butters Development, the industrial park's leasing agent, went unreturned.
Moreover the brief description of Donna Blue on its Internet page, apparently designed to "flesh out the ghost a little," is such a clumsy half-hearted effort that it defeats the purpose of helping aid the construction of a plausible "legend," or cover, and ends up doing more harm than good...
The owner of one of the air charter companies involved in the airlift of Saudi Royals and bin Laden family members out of the U.S. after the 9/11 attack has been identified in numerous published reports as a business partner and "close associate" of New England Mob Boss Raymond J. (Junior) Patriarca, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Frank Zammiello's Northstar Aviation in Warrick R. I. flew four Saudis, including a Saudi Sheikh (name unfortunately redacted) on a flight which left Providence R.I. September 14, 2001 and flew to Paris.
Curiously, however, there is no mention of the organized crime connections of air charter owner Zammiello in either the 9/11 Commission Report, which covered the Saudi flights, or in recently-released FBI documents rebutting allegations that bin Laden family members were allowed to leave the U.S. without being interviewed by authorities.
The omission is surprising, especially considering Frank Zammiello's relevance to the story of President George W. Bush's amazing claim of executive privilege in early 2002 for all records of the Boston FBI.
The MadCowMorningNews has obtained the first photo ever published of the never-before-seen Learjet that flew the so-called Saudi "phantom flight" from Tampa Florida... a flight FBI and Bush Administration officials for more than three years denied ever took place.
Last week's newly-released FBI documents on flights out of the U.S. after the 9/11 attack by Saudi Princes and bin Laden family members generated headlines about the FBI's admission that Osama bin Laden may himself have chartered one of the planes. But the documents contain an even-more startling revelation:
The Bush Administration, the FBI, the FAA, and even defense contractor Raytheon knowingly lied in repeated denials of newspaper and magazine accounts of the "phantom flight."
The documents show that FBI agents and analysts, to buttress what was then the official government position, misstated, misrepresented, and even intimidated witnesses (an FBI specialty) into silence.
They illustrate the inside anatomy of an FBI cover-up, using the same tactics which eyewitnesses in Florida reported the FBI used after the 9/11 attack.
Reading them, you can watch a cover-up being born.
The owner of the flight school in Venice FL where the two hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center took flight lessons launched a new aviation company with a partner who was convicted in a 2002 drug sting in Miami whose target was O.J. Simpson, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Former owner of Huffman Aviation Wallace J. Hilliard filed articles of incorporation for PRESTIGE AIRWAYS, LLC with the State of Florida on June 8th, 2006, government records reveal. In a mysterious move, six months later he surreptitiously removed his name from company records.
He is partners with convicted drug smuggler Philippe Gornail, who pled guilty to selling 37,000 'hits' of ecstasy in February 2002 in a drug case which involved a highly-publicized raid on O.J. Simpson's house in Miami by the combined forces of the FBI, DEA and Miami-Dade police.
Between August and December of 2006 Prestige Airways flew an enormous number of flights (419!),records at the U.S. Dept of Transportation reveal, between Florida and Haiti.
Nor is Philippe Gornail the only current Hilliard partner with a highly-checkered past.
Terrorist Ringleader was President of Orlando Firm Government records in Florida reveal that terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta was the President of a company in Orlando, with a partner whose web of 'dummy' corporations appear characteristic of the type law enforcement officials say are used by terrorist financiers in illicit money laundering, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
On April 5th, 2001, one day after the 9/11 Commission Report states the terrorist ringleader finished making withdrawals in Virginia Beach, VA. totaling $18,000 from a SunTrust Bank account, an Orlando man named Hassan Erroudani filed incorporation papers with the state of Florida listing the President of KARAM LLC as "Mohamed Atta."
The document lists an address for Atta in Marseilles, France, which traces to a graphic design firm there. Once again, Amanda Keller's testimony is vindicated. Atta told her he was French.
A mysterious missionary support organization flying weekly "relief flights" to Haiti from the Airport in Venice, FL. may be providing "cover" for CIA covert operations in the Caribbean, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Run by an ordained Southern Baptist minister, Agape Flights is a fundamentalist Christian operation which has been involved in some highly un-Christian activities like flying shipments of food and "religious supplies" on a regular basis to a man accused of plotting a coup in Haiti when he was caught importing into that troubled country an M-16, a Beretta, and a camouflage uniform with the words "God's Army" emblazoned across the chest.
The news marks the second time fundamentalist Christian groups have surfaced recently in unexplained operations at the Venice Airport, and comes on the heels of revelations of a million dollar unpaid loan to recently-deceased televangelist Jerry Falwell from Wally Hilliard, owner of terror flight school Huffman Aviation.
Televangelist Links to Terror Flight School in Florida
At the same time the Rev. Jerry Falwell was accusing pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU and People For the American Way of sharing responsibility for the 9/11 attack the televangelist owed over one million dollars in unpaid loans to the owner of the terror flight school in Florida which trained Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
In the days after terrorist hijackers murdered almost 3000 people, almost the entire American nation was numb and speechless with shock and horror.
Not Jerry Falwell.
The Baptist minister from Lynchburg, VA wasted no time in pointing a finger of blame for the attack. He said, "I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"
Falwell made no mention, then or ever, of his curious debt to secretive Green Bay financier Wallace J. Hilliard, whose flight school abetted, if unwittingly, the terrorist presence in the United States.
Strangely, this is not Jerry Falwell’s only link to 'covert activity at the tiny Venice, FL airport.
The company which owned the DC9 airliner caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine at an airport in Mexico's Yucatan last year was also engaged in a massive "pump and dump" stock fraud scheme which involved a network of companies, including scandal-ridden San Diego defense contractor Titan Corp.
Titan was one of a group of companies which issued a steady drumbeat of phony press releases a concerted effort to pump up the price of the stock of SkyWay Aircraft of St Petersburg, FL. The press releases announced multi-million contracts for SkyWay products which didn't exist, or trumpeted major deals with SkyWay which never took place.
The goal of the scheme was to inflate SkyWay's stock price--the pump--in advance of a massive sell-off--the dump-- by company insiders.
The CIA, the Narco-Republicans, & 5.5 tons of cocaine
The first anniversary of the April 10 2006 seizure in Mexico's Yucatan of a American-registered DC9 caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine passed virtually unnoticed last week. It shouldn't have...
Porter Goss resigned less than a month later, the same day the FBI executed a search warrant at the house of the No. 3 official in the Central Intelligence Agency, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, soon to go on trial for corruption with accomplice Brent Wilkes.
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 - 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.
Several little-noticed recent developments point towards major fireworks still to come in the current series of Republican scandals...
Fired San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam has disclosed the existence of a still-secret and presumably-sealed indictment of an as-yet unknown individual in the Randy 'Duke' Cunningham 'Hookergate' Scandal, issued by her office at the same time as indictments were made public last month of defense contractor Brent Wilkes and former CIA No 3. man Kyle 'Dusty' Foggo, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
The sealed indictment may name another California Republican, Representative Jerry Lewis, the powerful former head of the House Appropriations Committee.
The bombshell revelation, which came during Lam's March 29th testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, has been completely overlooked. It is just one of several recent examples of media squeamishness about the scandal.
Was San Diego US Attorney fired for knowing too much?
The Randy Cunningham "Hookergate" Scandal is not the first prostitution scandal involving close relatives of indicted defense contractor Brent Wilkes, The MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Brent Wilkes brother, Gregory Wilkes, managed the finances of The Wilkes Foundation, which was suspended by the State of California after failing to file financial statements for three years in a row.
At the same time he also worked for a "Bush Pioneer" named R.D. Hubbard, who was caught in June of 2001 flying almost a dozen hookers by private jet to a casino he owned to service men government documents have only identified as "48 wealthy guests."
But what's lost in that gleeful name is that the massive corruption exposed by last week's indictment of former CIA apparatchik "Dusty Foggo" and defense-contractor-cum-bagman Brent Wilkes is the biggest national scandal, in terms of dollars, in American history
It's light years more serious than just another Washington sex scandal.
According to the company's own website, Randy Cunningham steered $500 million in defense contracts in less than a decade to Brent Wilkes’ start-up San Diego software firm.
A secret cabal of former Iran Contra "players"—Wilkes and Foggo both spent their salad days practicing in Honduras during the Contra war—have engineered the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even as the New York Times reported that attention to November's disputed Congressional election in Sarasota has faded, Sarasota Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent announced her intention this week to begin selling - presumably "as is" - hundreds of Sarasota's touch-screen voting machines proven defective by the November election, where they malfunctioned so badly that frustrated poll workers actually resorted to advising voters who were unable to get their votes to register to try using their knuckles.
Dent has resolutely denied that anything was wrong with the voting machines, despite a Sarasota Herald Tribune poll which reported that the overwhelming majority of precinct officials interviewed cited difficulty getting the electronic touch screens to register their votes as the biggest complaint.
Even though she is eminently responsible for disenfranchising as many as 18,000 voters from having their votes counted in the most hotly-contested Congressional race in the country, Dent appears defiant, and unabashed.
One reason for this intransigence has now become clear: There's a big payday involved.
The payday will enrich only voting machine vendors, who will be only too happy to take the defective machines off the county's hands for pennies on the dollar; then turn around and resell them to unwitting election officials in unsuspecting counties in another part of the country, whose voters will remain clueless about the machines "troubled" history until after the check's have been cashed.
Re-cycling bad product to new patsies is a familiar scenario in the election industry, and a sign of a return to "business as usual" for an industry which counts on the fact that Americans have short memories.
It was disturbing enough to see a massive undervote deprive approximately 13,000 Americans of their right to vote in the botched Congressional election in Sarasota FL.
What was even worse was the cavalier and arrogant attitude with which election officials in both Sarasota County and the office of the Florida Secretary of State shrugged it off. Election officials saw their arrogant behavior as normal; as business as usual.
It raised a disturbing question:"How long has this been going on?".
What most would prefer we all forget is that the answer to this question may well have relevance to the question: How did we get involved in a war in Iraq?
Precinct officials said voters biggest complaint didn't concern the confusing ballot design, but trouble getting the electronic touch screen to register their votes. Voter's testimony is more believable than that of shills for E S & S.
An analysis of early news accounts of the massive and unprecedented "undervote" in Sarasota FL after the hotly-contested Congressional race there indicates the major cause is not the innocuous "poor ballot design" and "voter disgust at negative campaigning" recently cited by The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, but rather electronic voting machine malfunction, or, in short, vote fraud.
Election officials, including Supervisor of Elections Kathy Dent and the Florida Secretary of State's office, appear uninterested in explaining just what the by now oft-cited phrase "massive 18,000 undervote" really means: approximately 13,000 voters in Sarasota County were arbitrarily disenfranchised, and had their votes go uncounted in the Congressional contest between Republican Vern Buchanan and Democrat Christine Jennings.
Moreover, the New York Times-owned Sarasota Herald-Tribune's recent election reporting is filled with falsehoods and misinformation on a scale not seen since the pro-war sales job performed by New York Times reporter Judith Miller during the run-up to the war in Iraq, when she debuted the slogan used to justify war: "The first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud.".
How to Steal An American Election : Location, Location, Location
Nowhere in America is corruption as sunny and open and in your-face brazen as in Florida, a fact demonstrated once again recently with the news that the state that couldn't count the votes in 2000 (but had no trouble training terrorists to fly) was playing host to yet-another botched election, this time in Katherine Harris' home Congressional district in Sarasota.
It has become cliche to say that the Sunshine State has attracted such large contingents of drug barons, political mountebanks, assorted charlatans and nationally-recognized snake-oil salesmen that its tempting to think that nothing that happens there is surprising anymore... at least, that is, nothing short of a Burmese python stepping into an Octagon in the Everglades with a native Gator.
Bemused observers often have the sinking feeling that no matter how hard they try its impossible to keep up. Still, one wants to be seen as making an effort. What follows is our stab at painting a picture of an election so surreal it belongs in the Salvador Dali Museum.
VP at Election Giant ES&S Threatens to Sue MadCowMorningNews
A vice president of election giant Election Software & Services who figures in two separate controversies currently raging over the way American elections are run and American votes counted, has accused the MadCowMorningNews of slandering him in a recent article, and announced plans to sue in Federal Court in Washington, D.C.
Gary Greenhalgh was instrumental in bringing electronic touch screen voting to Katherine Harris' Congressional district. He sold $4.5 million worth of electronic voting machines to the Republican Election Supervisor of Sarasota County in Florida.
In addition to that brouhaha, Greenhalgh, a former employee of the Federal Election Commission, two decades ago helped establish the system of certification of U.S. electronic voting systems under increasing suspicion in a drama working its way out now concerning CIBER, Inc., a a company which tests voting machines.
Chairman of Barred Election Testing Lab Dumped Stock, Used "KINKY TAX TRICKS"
The Chairman of the laboratory barred last week from approving any new electronic voting machines after federal investigators discovered appallingly haphazard testing regimes at the firm dumped 25,000 common shares of stock in the company less than two weeks before the announcement, netting himself almost $175,000, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
In a little-noticed Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Dec. 21, CIBER Inc. Chairman Bobby G. Stevenson reported he sold the shares for about $6.71 apiece.
The bad news from CIBER, which tests the centralized software that local elections offices employ to tabulate votes recorded by the touch-screens, may even affect the outcome of the hotly-contested Congressional decision in Florida's 13th District, reported the Sarasota Herald Tribune in a story on the troubled firm with the headline "CIBER Inc. at center of District 13 controversy."
WAS MOHAMED ATTA "CLOSE ASSOCIATE" IN FLORIDA A CIA PILOT?
Wolfgang Bohringer, the German pilot who was one of Mohamed Atta's closest associates in Florida as well as the subject of an FBI terror alert in the South Pacific, was apprehended two weeks ago and taken into custody, but then was almost immediately released after he told authorities responsible for his capture that he works for the CIA
The drama began to unfold a year ago when Wolfgang Bohringer sailed a 47-foot yacht called "The Argos" to tiny Fanning Island in the scattered South Pacific archipelago of Kiribati, a former British colony and today one of the world's smallest nations.
"U.S. authorities raised an alarm over the plan by the German pilot - linked to the Sept. 11 terror attacks - to build a flying school in the remote South Pacific island nation," stated an AP report picked up by the New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune.
Russian Mobster Tied to 9/11 Conspiracy in Plot to Assassinate Energy Minister in Ukraine
Russian Mobster Igor Borisovich "Felix" Rabaev, the heroin trafficker waiting at the receiving end for the arrival of a weekly drug flight during the year 2000 coming in from Venezuela on a Lear jet owned by terror flight school impresario Wallace J. Hilliard, re-surfaced in the Ukraine last year as the mastermind of an assassination plot against a man appointed Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security Council last month, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Vitaliy Haiduk was then the West-leaning Ukrainian Minister of Energy, targeted for injury (or worse) in a deliberate crash landing of a private Challenger jet on January 5, 2005 at an airport in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. Tensions were running high at the time, as the world watched to see what would happen during the inauguration of Western-backed President Viktor Yushchenko, scarred by poisoning during the election campaign.
Haiduk, one of Ukraine's biggest oligarchs, had made enemies because of his pro-Western positions and hostility towards Russia on controversial energy issues during a showdown between Ukrainian and Russian officials over whether to hand over Ukraine's gas transport system under a concession agreement with Russia.
It was an epic struggle, a Trojan War with no Helen, just lots of black oily goop.