There's Something About
Rudi...
Dekker's helicopter crashed
on way to showdown over Huffman Aviation
Venice, FL.—January 28,
2003
by Daniel Hopsicker
Despite settling his lawsuit
with former partner Wally Hilliard, Rudi Dekker's legal woes may be just
beginning, says State's Attorney Jonathon Greene.
Meanwhile it was learned
that Dekker’s still-unexplained helicopter crash last Friday came while
he was en-route to a Venice, FL. meeting to sign papers relinquishing control
of terror flight school Huffman Aviation.
Although the two events
have not been linked by law enforcement, the strange timing adds another
bizarre twist to the saga of the 46-year old Dutch national, who gained
international notoriety for running the flight school that trained both
terrorist pilots who crashed into the World Trade Center.
In the space of little more
than a week the tumultuous Dekkers crashed his helicopter into the Caloosahatchee
River, learned he would be arrested on felony fraud by the state attorney's
office, and signed over the flight school that gave him his 15 minutes
of fame.
Rudi Dekker’s picaresque
adventures made the news from Sarasota to South Africa, testifying to an
abiding public curiosity about him.
At theaters everywhere: 'There's
Something about Rudi.'
"Real life never seemed so
deranged."
Take his helicopter crash.
Did Dekkers suspect trouble was in store?
Though the trip to Venice
from the Naples-Fort Myers area is less than an hour long, Dekkers prevailed
on another helicopter pilot headed in the same direction to fly alongside
him, "in an effort to stave off boredom."
"Who you calling 'we,'
white man?"
Then things begin going very
wrong for Rudi, even before his chopper begins experiencing difficulties.
When his more powerful helicopter
surged ahead, pilot Tony Douangdara told the Venice Gondolier, Dekkers
seemed upset.
"He was calling me on the
radio saying 'Slow down, slow down!" said Douangdara.
"A couple minutes later,
I heard him say, 'I'm going down.' "
All things considered, it
was a bad week for Rudi. Just several days before the helicopter crash
he learned he was being arrested for fraud.
Dekker's response was "Wow,
I'm surprised."
Later, after he overcame
his incredulity, he called the charge "political," heaping some thinly-veiled
scorn on the man prosecuting him, State's Attorney Jonathon Greene.
"We're drawing the paperwork
as we speak that resolves the deal. We have a deal, we know about it. Everybody
knows about it except the state attorney."
Wally Hilliard, present at
the contract signing Friday, was agreeable to dismissing the suit, confirmed
Jim Beach, director of operations for Triple Diamond enterprises, the new
owners.
When he completed the sale
of Huffman Friday, Dekkers expected his problems to go away. He indicated
his legal woes would end when Wally Hilliard dropped his lawsuit, an action
which he believed would trigger the dismissal of the criminal fraud charge
filed against him in connection with a $200,000 loan...a loan he secured
with a mortgage on property in the name of a company which had no interest
in the property.
This is what people mean
when they say "Nice work if you can get it."
Dekkers said, "We don't have
problems anymore."
In Deep Dutch
Not so fast, says State's
Attorney Jonathon Greene. "Wally Hilliard called me and asked for a waiver
of prosecution," he told us.
"But I told him that nothing
has changed on our end. We're going forward with the charges."
Greene indicated that Dekkers
record includes a number of blemishes, like owing $3 million in the Netherlands,
some of which is also the result of pledging assets he doesn't own to secure
loans he doesn't plan on repaying.
A Dutch court had adjudged
him guilty of acting "in a manifestly improper fashion;" saying his "manifest
failure to properly manage the company was an important cause of bankruptcy."
Aviation sources in Naples
confirmed rumors we had heard to the effect that Dekkers had been the subject
of a federal investigation in the mid-90's, with several federal agencies
expressing interest in his activities.
State Attorney Greene confirmed
that Dekkers had been under suspicion of illegal exportation of high technology.
Coming full circle, officials
indicate that there is renewed prosecutorial interest in Dekkers at the
federal level.
What makes the controversial
Dekkers something more than a run-of-the-mill con-man and quick-fading
historical footnote is an important fact that remains unacknowledged, except
obliquely, by U.S. officials:
Rudi Dekkers sits at the
critical nexus of the terrorist conspiracy. Much relies on his claims to
having been just an innocent business owner.
Cliff notes on a national
tragedy
Should Dekkers not be telling
the truth--an action he takes with awe-inspiring regularity--the clear
conclusion will be that Mohamed Atta didn't 'just happen' to stumble onto
Venice, FL. like a guy who's been listening to Tom Petty albums all his
life.
(Atta liked the Beastie Boys--no
joke--but that's a story for another time.)
If Mohamed Atta didn't stumble
onto Venice, then we have stumbled onto that fabled Global Network... because
it's undeniable that when the Hamburg cadre made their their fateful leap
across the Atlantic, it was Rudi Dekkers assigning bunks when they arrived
on the other side of the Big Pond.
At one time officials in
Washington promised explanations in the wake of the Sept 11 disaster. They
were not forthcoming. The official explanation, such as it was, was delivered
by a seemingly-nice guy who calmly and clearly explained what we were supposed
to think had happened.
But he wasn't a U.S. official.
He isn't even American.
It was left to British Prime
Minister Tony Blair to publicly sketch out for the first time the Cliff
notes version of the case against Osama Bin Laden.
"Al Qaeda is a terrorist
organization with ties to a Global Network," Blair said.
There it was again. A Global
Network.
The idea that Mohamed Atta
might have benefited from ties to a Global Network (other than his own)
flatly contradicts the FBI's entire scenario, which rests on a firm contention
that the terrorists received no outside help while they were in this country.
It is a position the FBI
has held tenaciously during the year and some months since the disaster.
And it has probably helped the Bureau discourage speculation about 'anomalies'
in the terrorist’s milieu.
When you're playing for time,
every little bit helps.
But now the FBI's statement
of 'no outside help' is the first official pronouncement rendered ‘inoperative’
by the coming scandal, after the co-chairs of the Congressional Intelligence
investigation into 9/11 delivered a real bombshell (even though it went
largely unnoted, perhaps because of the current imbroglio known as the
"Showdown with Saddam.")
A foreign government had
been involved in supporting and facilitating the activities of the terrorist
conspiracy while they were in the U.S., Senator Bob Graham told reporters.
"I was surprised at the evidence
that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities
of at least some of the terrorists in the United States," said Graham.
"I think there is very compelling
evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted—not just
in financing although that was part of it—by a sovereign foreign government."
So much for the "Lone Cadre"
theory.
The Magic Dutch Boy theory--which
holds that two Dutch nationals buying the two flight schools in tiny Venice
at more or less the same time is just another freak coincidence--is next.
An unexplainable yearning
for blue-haired widow ladies?
So what's the name of the
foreign government involved?
Alas, in its infinite Total
Information-like wisdom, our government has decided that 'we're not cleared
for that information.'
Since the foreign government
involved presumably already knows who it is, this seems a bit difficult
to understand...
Because it seems that they're
not hiding anything from anyone but us.
"It will become public at
some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years
from now," Graham said.
In the under-statement of
the year, he went on, "We need to have this information now because it's
relevant to the threat that the people of the United States are facing
today."
Every once in a great while
an American politician utters something shockingly close to the truth.
Hearts beat faster, pulses
race, hope rises. You know what happens next.
But back to the unnamed foreign
government's involvement...
The logical place to go to
look for evidence would seem to be Venice, FL., the retirement community
on Florida’s Gulf Coast inexplicably chosen by Mohamed Atta and his Hamburg
cadre to be the American home of their ghastly operation.
While it is already well-known
that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi lived in Venice for the first six
months after their arrival, what's still being kept under wraps although
its been attested to both by credit card receipts and eyewitnesses, is
this:
Atta returned to Venice--and
often--during the last several months before the attack, visiting on at
least three occasions during just the last six weeks of his life.
Since the only rival to September
11 in its dramatic impact on the country is the Kennedy assassination,
it seems fair to ask whether the 9/11 Commission will be as ineffectual
as the Warren Commission in getting at the truth.
Might Rudi Dekkers turn out
to be the 9/11 Commission's David Ferrie ?
Most people remember Pilot
David Ferrie as the nervous guy played by Joe Pesci in Oliver Stone's JFK.
A shadowy figure, Ferrie had a mysterious relationship with the JFK scandal’s
early prototype for the Army of One: Lee Harvey Oswald.
Then Ferrie was found dead,
suspiciously, on the eve of testifying to investigators for Jim Garrison.
Ferrie committed ‘suicide,’ authorities said, which was odd,
because suicide was exactly the fate Ferrie had been worrying out loud
about suffering.
Forty years on, Rudi Dekkers
is just another in a long line of shadowy figures who have haunted more-recent
American history.
His image will grow even
shadier if it turns out that he had a slightly more complicated relationship
with the terrorist ringleader than has so far been revealed.
Still, in Hollywood, they're
probably already talking about the movie.
We have no opinion on who
should play Dekkers.
We just think somebody should
tell him not to fly for a while.
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