Who owns Cocaine One airliner?
Spooks, Saudis and another FAA coverup in FL
5.25.06 Daniel Hopsicker Mad Cow Prod.
Venice FL Losing 5.5 tons of cocaine on an airliner traceable to your govt agency was not a good career move for Porter Goss.
“The Feds have never wanted to clean up the sloppy way airplanes are registered,” one aircraft broker told us. “Registering a plane with the FAA is just a joke. They don’t even make you use a tax I.D. number or social security number to register a plane. You don’t even have to have your signature notarized."
"The result is that nobody can ever tell with any certainty what the hell is going on. Apparently that's the way they like it.”
Last registered American owner of the DC9 Frederic Geffon of Royal Sons Inc insisted he bore no responsibility at all for the plane’s recent misadventures. In 5.5.06 interview with the Tampa Tribune following a story they ran the previous day, Geffon said he sold the plane 10 days before it was seized by Mexican authorities, to a man named Jorge Corrales, who he identified as a Simi Valley CA aircraft broker.
A problem with Geffon’s explanation is that the California “aircraft broker” Geffon says bought the aircraft (N900SA) for resale to a client identified only as a “Venezuelan company" does not appear to be in the business of buying and selling planes.
Lexis-Nexis newspaper database search yielded no mention of Corrales and Associates. A Google search failed to find an aircraft broker named George or Jorge Corrales, or a Corrales and Associates. A visit to the 3 major online venues used to sell airplanes provided no evidence indicating that Jorge “George” Corrales is an aircraft broker.
A search for broker/dealers selling McDonnell Douglas DC9’s in California at The Controller, for example, reveals just 3 DC9’s for sale from just 2 dealers. An aircraft dealer at the Venice Airport told us, “There is a very small group of people involved in the market for jet airliners world-wide. If you had a party and invited every DC9 buyer in the world you could easily fit them all inside my hanger.”
OK Aviation is the listing broker for two of the three DC9’s currently for sale in California. OK Aviation's owner Jack Kendall knew the other DC9 dealers in the state, he told us. No, he'd never heard of George Corrales or Corrales & Associates.
A search for aircraft brokers and dealers in California at Trade-A-Plane reveals no listing for Corrales & Associates; it’s a free listing. A check of ASO’s list of Southern California aircraft brokers and dealers turned up a Titan Aviation in San Diego, as well as an Air America Inc., but no Corrales & Associates.
The Tampa Tribune story quoted FAA spokesman Roland Herwig stating that the FAA received a copy of a letter from Royal Sons, dated 4.7.06, asking that the plane be exported to Venezuela and that the FAA officially took Royal Sons' name off the books 3 days after the cocaine bust.
"We don't get involved with the sale of aircraft, only their registration or deregistration," Herwig told the Tribune.
Geffon himself, while insisting that the plane with 5.5 tons of coke wasn’t his, was otherwise close-mouthed. “Geffon provided the Tampa Tribune with a copy of what he says is a bill of sale he turned over to his title company,” the paper reported. “It had no information about the purchaser.”
Corrales "did not want me to know" who bought the aircraft "and I didn't care anyway," Geffon said.
Corrales contradicted this statement. He said that he did not know why Geffon claims not to know who purchased the DC-9. He said Geffon absolutely knew who had purchased the aircraft. “It was a Venezuelan company,” Corrales told the Tampa Tribune. “Royal Sons got a crew that flew the aircraft" to Venezuela, and obtained the permits needed to fly the plane out of the country.
Geffon denied it. He said he only "hired someone to find a flight crew to take it down there. Geffon would not identify that individual, saying only that the man is in Europe and unavailable for comment,” the paper reported. “Corrales, who owns Corrales and Associates, disagrees.”
There is no Corrales & Associates in California. The 'supposed' aircraft broker who from people in St Petersburg FL has been “suspended” from operation for several years by the California Division of Corporations. George Corrales listed in the Simi Valley phone books asked by phone “Mr. Corrales, we’ve been unable to find any evidence that you are in the business of buying and selling airplanes,” we began. “Can you point to anything to prove you are?” stated “I have no comment at this time".
Why is that? Who did you sell the DC9 to in Venezuela?
“I can’t comment on that.”
“Aren’t you leaving yourself open to charges that you yourself may be involved in drug trafficking? If you get arrested for running 5 tons of cocaine, will you have a comment then?”
There was a loud click. The line went dead.
SkyWay Aircraft, Miami atty Michael Farkas currently owns a North Miami co. which wants to market Israeli antimissile defense systems to U.S. aircraft manufacturers, after obtaining rights to a system developed by a subsidiary of Israel Aircraft Industries, Israel's biggest defense contractor.
15 of SkyWay Aircraft's biggest investors are from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. One of them appears to be the head of the Kuwaiti National Guard. While presiding over SkyWay’s bankruptcy, Federal Judge Paul M. Glenn said, "I have a great deal of concern about this case. There is a great deal we don't know." Two years ago, Judge Glenn called this case "murky.”
Mexico & U.S. ruling parties ties to blow bust
the Homeland Security rackets
7.5.06 Daniel Hopsicker Mad Cow Prod.
Venice FL On 4.10.06, an American-registered DC9 was caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine destined for the U.S., the Mexican military announced, at an airport in Ciudad del Carmen. In the more than 2 months since, the incident has slipped into a black hole.
Beyond a few half-hearted stabs at pinning blame for the crime on scapegoats du jour like the FARC in Colombia or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, authorities in both Mexico and the U.S. have had little or nothing to say about the case. Released FAA registration records from the American-registered DC9 (N900SA) airline show that documents informing the FAA the plane had been exported to new owners in Venezuela were not submitted until after its seizure in Mexico.
Several top executives of SkyWays Aircraft, the American firm which owned the DC9 in partnership with Royal Sons Inc. of St Petersburg FL, incl co. president James Kent, are former members of U.S. military intelligenceated one of SkyWay’s original employees, who contacted us after seeing a previous story.
Mexican newspapers last week began openly speculating last week on the role of high officials in the ruling party of President Vicente Fox in the huge drug load.
They are also reporting that the DC9's flight from Caracas to an airport in the western Yucatan was not a one-of-a-kind occurrence, but that the airliner had made at least 7 previous flights along the same route. The DEA has made a deliberate effort to downplay the importance of the seizure, underestimating its value by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The DC9, which we have dubbed “Cocaine One,” had an identical sister ship. In the most unusual detail of the case released so far, both airliners had been painted by their registered owners, SkyWay Aircraft and a partner with an interest in the company, Frederic Geffon of Royal Sons, Inc of St. Petersburg, Fl., to impersonate official U.S. Govt aircraft from the Dept of Homeland Security, complete with an official-looking Seal.
Previously reported close connections between management of SkyWay and the GOP, incl U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, who toured the company's facilities, praised its (non-existent) products designed for sale to U.S. Homeland Security, and flew a SkyWay plane in his barnstorming finish in his successful 2004 campaign.
Recently we were contacted by one of SkyWay's original employees who passed on more intriguing details of top SkyWay executive's govt & political connections.
(SkyWay president) “James Kent is a real strong Republican with a lot of connections in Washington, like U.S. Senator Mel Martinez,” the former SkyWay employee told us. “And he’s also in tight with a lot of politicians in Tallahassee, like (Republican gubernatorial candidate) Charlie Christ. He was a mole for military intelligence during the Vietnam war. He was with Air America over there, and I guess he told some people he worked for the CIA.”
According to SkyWay SEC filings, Kent “served in various govt contract management positions supporting projects of the Dept of Defense, National Security Agency, and Dept of the Navy.”
Kent also runs Online Satellite Communication, which uses an address in Las Vegas which also houses Voters Outreach of America, a GOP operation accused of illegal activity and electoral dirty tricks, including destroying thousands of Democratic registration forms, during the 2004 Presidential election.
More than ten weeks after the seizure in Mexico of a DC9 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine the FAA finally released the ownership records of the plane. Immediately reasons for the FAA foot-dragging became clear. Documents informing the FAA the plane had been exported to new owners in Venezuela were not submitted until the day after its seizure in Mexico.
FAA spokesman Roland Herwig told Howard Altman of the Tampa Tribune that the FAA received a copy of a letter from Royal Sons dated 4.7.06, asking that the plane be exported to Venezuela, and that the FAA officially took Royal Sons' name off the books 3 days after the cocaine bust.
While this statement appears on its surface to support Geffon’s protestation that he no longer owned the airliner at the time it was busted, a closer look at the FAA official's statement indicate he carefully avoided stating when the FAA received the change of ownership documents.
Instead, he cites the date typed on the letter, as if that provided some sort of definitive proof. He also makes clear that the documents the FAA received were copies. Fax numbers at the bottom of the letter indicate it was faxed to Geffon and Corrales just minutes after being submitted to the FAA.
An FAA spokesman stated they hadn't faxed the document to anyone, indicating it was submitted by a title insurance company, a common practice, and then faxed by them to the principals, probably as proof it had been delivered.
Thus one possible Geffon defense, that the letter dated 4.7.06 was in the mail for 4 days before reaching the FAA, is eliminated. The only apparent conclusion is that the documents submitted by Geffon have been back-dated.
The FAA’s stamp indicated they received the documents on 4.11.06. The plane was busted 4.10.06.
Another striking irregularity in the released FAA records is that the bill of sale indicates Geffon and his SkyWay partners bought the airliner in May of 2004. But he did not record the sale with the FAA until August of 2005, over a year later. Geffon came into sole possession of the DC9 after SkyWay Aircraft went bankrupt. But his claim to have paid for the plane is in doubt.
“At the time of the bankruptcy, Fred Geffon wanted to buy one of the planes. He had a charter pilot, a Venezuelan guy who lived in Venice, and they were going to use it for charters,” said our source.
That was how we learned that the plane's pilot, a slippery fellow who. as we earlier reported, managed to slip through the clutches of the Mexican military the day the DC9 was busted, may live in Venice FL. Geffon's company maintained an address at the Venice Airport in a hangar owned by terror flight school Huffman Aviation.
Apparently on his own authority, Geffon transferred the plane into the name of his company, Royal Sons Inc.
A spokesman for a lawyer working closely with the Bankruptcy Trustee for bankrupt SkyWay states they can find no record that Geffon paid SkyWay for the plane. Investors, of course, are crying fraud.
The transaction is currently the subject of litigation in Federal Bankruptcy Court in Tampa. “The bankruptcy trustee said, ‘these planes are grounded,’” the former SkyWay employee told us.
Among major developments which came to light last week is the speculation in Mexico’s press on the role of high officials in the ruling party of President Vicente Fox in the huge drug load. It had been learned almost immediately that 2 pilots, arrested in a corporate jet waiting for the DC9 to land, were employees of the Mexican federal govt. Both pilots previously spent time in prison for drug trafficking, apparently not hampered by their drug cartel connections when landing jobs flying for Mexico’s National Water Commission.
The Mexican Agency they work for is headed by a personal friend of President Fox, a man who had also served with Fox as a director of Coca-Cola in Mexico. Citing sources in the Mexican Dept. of Civil Aeronautics, Mexican newspapers reported last week that the “Cocaine One” DC9 made at least 7 previous flights along the same route before being caught.
Both the DC9, dubbed “Cocaine One,” and its sister ship, an identical DC9, had been painted by SkyWay Aircraft to resemble U.S. Govt aircraft from the Dept of Homeland Security, complete with official-looking Seal.
“I read what you wrote about having two planes tricked out to look like they belonged to Homeland Security,” stated the longtime SkyWay employee. “Everyone working there thought, there ain’t no way they’re going to get away with that. We couldn’t believe it. How in the hell is the govt letting us get away with that?"
"They also had a half-dozen black hummers tricked out the same way. Big seal on the side, lights and sirens on the top. Finally some local cops pulled the hummers over, and made them take the seals and lights off. But nobody ever said anything about the planes.”
The former SkyWay employee also indicated that govt officials went out of their way to assist the company.
“I was one of Skyways’ first ten employees, there from the start in the communications division, and I participated in the installation at the FDOT (Florida Dept Of Transportation) mentioned in your article,” he said. “The guy in charge there told us that airports in Florida were all told that the state of Florida would reimburse them 100% for any airport upgrades that had to do with security.”
The State of Florida created a ready-made market for SkyWay’s non-existent “Homeland Security” products by subsidizing their purchase by local govts.
“They got the first plane in the middle of 2003, and it was sent up to an airport in Chicago to get turned into an executive jet, with a marble bar and leather couches,” our SkyWay source explained. “They had it in Chicago 8-9 months before it came back. Then they got the second plane in mid-2004. They wrote it up in a press release, touting how they’d just received a big investment from the DuPont foundation. Which turned out to be bogus, just some guy at a desk in Costa Rica.”
DC9’s cost money. But the twin airliners weren’t being used to demonstrate SkyWay’s products, for the simple reason that the company never had a product to demonstrate.
A call to the DEA to inquire whether the Agency had mounted an investigation of an American-owned airliner busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine elicited a terse “no comment.” The duty officer at the Tampa Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration revealed no indication that the DEA has taken any interest in the case. Two days of phone calls to the Agency’s Public Information Officer in Miami yielded nothing but busy signals.
DEA has underestimated the value of the massive cocaine seizure. Initial wire reports quoted the DEA as estimating the value of the 5.5 tons of cocaine at $100 million. But news accounts of a seizure of the same amount of cocaine 2 weeks earlier stated that 5.5 tons of cocaine is worth in excess of a half billion dollars.
In a press release 3.16.06, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) congratulated Ecuador on the seizure of more than 5.5 tons of cocaine in the port of Guayaquil, Ecuador. The UN said the load had a street value of $556 million.
Mexican newspapers have been clamoring for officials to come forward to explain their curious silence.
“Where are the results of the investigations of the airplane seized with cocaine?” asked Expreso.com.mx on June 28. “Why is there nothing but silence? How is it possible that this confiscation, as important as it is, has not been explained? When will there be information about this?"
Sharp questioning in the Mexican press is in marked contrast to the tepid response of the mainstream media in the U.S. In news accounts of the massive cocaine bust, The Miami Herald dealt with the facts of the case by completely ignoring them, not mentioning that the busted DC9 airliner was American-owned and registered.
Their story on the massive cocaine bust placed the blame for the flight on Venezuela. The paper quotes an anonymous senior U.S. govt official, “The more traditional traffickers have discovered, from an interdiction and law-enforcement perspective, that Venezuela has now become a giant black hole where they have the least amount of resistance, the least amount of problems, the cheapest route to get their product to market.”
Thursday: Geffon said he "hired someone to find a flight crew to take it down there." He would not identify that individual, saying only that the man is in Europe and unavailable for comment.
In search of the American drug lords
7.28.06 Daniel Hopsicker Mad Cow
Venice FL Court documents obtained by the MadCowMorningNews. The company which owned the seized "Cocaine One" DC9, SkyWay Aircraft of St. Petersburg FL, leased a 70,000 square foot “repair” facility at DFW Airport in Dallas for more than $20,000 a month in a building owned by a man called “George W. Bush’s biggest supporter” and “the power behind the throne” during Bush’s first Presidential campaign.
SkyWay, a company with no products, and thus nothing needing "repair," nonetheless announced in July 2003 “their newly established Part 145 repair station” in a building owned by LIT Industrial Texas Limited Partnership, a venture of Texas real estate giant Trammel Crow, the flagship corporation in the far-flung empire of billionaire speculator Richard Rainwater. Ranked among the 100 wealthiest Americans, Rainwater backed George W. Bush in 4 separate business ventures, including the Texas Rangers baseball team from which Bush, who had been drilling “dry holes” until then, profited handsomely. In a heated 1994 Governor’s race, Texas Democratic Governor Ann Richards charged Rainwater “owned" her Republican opponent Bush.
Court documents in the SkyWay’s Federal bankruptcy proceedings in Tampa reveal that SkyWay signed a lease costing $21,000 a month in base rent and operating expenses. Why would a start-up company which doesn’t (and never will) have any products, spend $20 grand a month to rent a facility to “repair” them?
“We were told we were going to use the facility to service monitors and video equipt which airline’s use to provide onboard entertainment,” an ex-employee explained. “But when you think about it, fixing TV monitors on planes in a facility costing more than 20 grand a month doesn’t seem real economic, does it?”
SkyWay shared the facility with another firm, Airbase Services Inc. A month after the DC9 was seized in Mexico, Airbase filed for bankruptcy.
Court documents in the SkyWay’s Federal bankruptcy proceedings also provided more detail on the DC9’s ownership, which has been hotly disputed. At the time of the bust, 4.10.06, it was registered, not to SkyWay, which had already gone bankrupt, but to a SkyWay insider who had somehow wrested control of the planes for himself. In an example of ‘extra-judicial initiative,’ Frederic Geffon of Royal Sons Inc. registered the plane, N900SA, first in the name of his own company, Royal Sons Inc., and then in his own name.
Bankruptcy trustees are currently negotiating a settlement with Geffon. They told us that SkyWay creditors had to date received no money from this beneficial (to Geffon) change of ownership.
Also last week, a second group of investors, mostly from Kentucky, have filed a lawsuit against Sky Way in Hillsborough County court, accusing the company and its principals of fraud, civil theft and conspiracy to defraud, among other charges. The company "shamelessly used the tragedy of 9/11 to concoct an elaborate scheme of fraud designed to prey upon the vulnerable mind set of the American public," the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit states that investors were told that “Sky Way's management team was invited to dinner with President Bush to discuss its operational status.” But the "dinner and talk was nothing more than a brief encounter along with a host of other political contributors," the lawsuit states.
SkyWay Aircraft appears to be a classic example of a “dummy front company.” The purpose of the firm was not to make money. They had nothing to sell. Even if they did no one would buy it. In their self-proclaimed niche market, the main competition of this firm was Boeing. Recall that terror flight school Huffman Aviation wasn’t in the business of being a flight school. Nothing about the actions of the two principals there made any business sense. They were losing $40,000 a month at their Naples location when they blithely decided to pay twice what it was worth in cash to buy a second flight school in Venice.
“When things don’t make business sense, sometimes its because they do make sense... just in some other way.” one former Huffman executive told us darkly. (He insisted on anonymity, because “I have a family, and I don’t want anything bad to happen to them,” he told us.)
In exactly this same way, now-defunct SkyWay Aircraft was never a real business either, in the sense of being a corporation set up to make money for its shareholders, a fact which angry investors have now begun to realize.
While burning through $40 million of investor’s money in 3 years, the bankrupt firm’s only accomplishment was amassing a mini-fleet (actually, just two) DC9’s, one of which was painted to impersonate an aircraft belonging to the U.S. Dept of Homeland Security.
SkyWay’s resident “boy genius,” Brent Kovar is no Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Kovar's neighbor lent him $300,000, one former exec told us, for a few days as a personal loan, without even bothering to write it up. His chances are slim to none, apparently, of getting his money back. SkyWay Communications Holdings Corp., a “holding company” that “held” only one company, SkyWay Aircraft, lost nearly $40 million between 2002 and its last annual report in January 2005.
Skyway, "has left a trail of tangled litigation and angry investors, including 24 Kuwaiti and Saudi nationals," said an article in the August 26, 2005 Tampa Business Journal. Investors "poured money into a company that promised to protect airplanes from terrorism and provide high-speed Internet at 30,000 ft.”
In a bankruptcy hearing, federal Judge Paul M. Glenn called the case "murky." "I have a great deal of concern about this case," Judge Glenn said. "There's a great deal we don't know."
The FAA accepted back-dated documents stating the plane had been exported before the bust. The registered owner wouldn’t say to who. The FAA claimed it wasn’t their problem. They just registered them. The DEA was undervalued the amount seized by $400 million dollars. Asked if they were investigating the American side of the 5.5 ton bust, the Tampa DEA office issued a terse no comment.
The DEA website has press release’s issued at about the same time as the cocaine bust… “7 Arrested and Thousands of Marijuana Plants Seized in East Bay Area,” heralds one.
“38 Members of a Palm Beach County Crack Gang Face Federal Charges,” another announced. A third release headlines this less-than-amazing fact: “Meth Sold For Sex On Wind River Indian Reservation.”
Cocaine One bust lifts veil on global narcotics cartel
8.8.06 Daniel Hopsicker
Mad Cow
Venice FL A DC9 registered to a company which once used as its address the hanger of Huffman Aviation, the flight school at the Venice, FL Airport which trained both terrorist pilots who crashed planes into the World Trade Center, was caught in Campeche by the Mexican military April 10th carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine destined for the U.S. Beyond a few half-hearted stabs at pinning blame for the crime on ‘scapegoats du jour’ like the FARC in Colombia or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, authorities in Mexico and the U.S. have had virtually nothing to say about the case. In the more than three months since, the massive seizure has slipped into a black hole.
One of the chief shareholders in SkyWay Aircraft, the company which owned the DC9 airliner (N900SA) seized in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard, is a private investment bank in Dallas which also raised funds for a Mexican industrialist with reported ties to a Cali and Juarez Cartel narcotics trafficker, MadCowMorningNews has learned.
Based on court documents, SEC filings, records of incorporation, and interviews with eyewitnesses, this global narcotics cartel include
• U.S. defense contractor Titan Corp in San Diego;
• CIA proprietary airlines;
• “fugitive” Saudi billionaires, Gulf States Sheiks and financiers;
• the Israeli Mossad and right wing Israeli political parties identified with Jewish settler interests;
• “retired” officers of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence;
• Texas GOP kingmakers and private investment banks;
• member of U.S. organized crime;
• stock swindlers in Vancouver, Canada responsible for multi-billion dollar financial fraud;
• officials from the party of Mexican President Vicente Fox;
• Colombian and Mexican drug cartels;
• Florida air charter companies which enjoy, as did the Florida aviation companies associated with the terrorist hijackers, apparent official immunity from prosecution;
• and Lebanese “industrialists” in Mexico known to the Mexican press as the “Narco-Pederastas,” for their penchant for molesting children, with apparent immunity from prosecution, both boys and girls, as young as 4 yrs.
One chief shareholder in the company which owned the DC9 airliner (N900SA) seized in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine aboard is a private investment bank in Dallas which also raised funds for a Mexican industrialist who reportedly financed a narcotics trafficker linked to both the Cali and Juarez Cartel. The trafficker involved, Manuel Vicente Losada, was arrested in Chile after being linked to another 5 ton cocaine shipment, this one over the high seas.
Private investment bank Argyll Equities LLC in Boerne, Texas, is part of The Argyll Group, headquartered in La Jolla, CA., incorporated in Texas, Nevada and Delaware, whose undisclosed principals are involved, according to their website, in “providing creative financial solutions globally.”
An example of the firm’s creative financial solutions: According to documents filed with the SEC in 2005, Argyll Equities LLC was paid to raise a $17 million loan for Mexican industrialist Jose Serrano Segovia’s shipping line, GRUPO TMM.
The Santiago Times, an English language newspaper in Chile, reported 5.5.98 that Segovia “provided significant capital” to a “Chilean narcotics trafficker" named Manuel Vicente Losada, arrested in the Chilean capital of Santiago after being “linked to a shipment of 5 tons of cocaine which U.S. drug enforcement officials in Miami intercepted over 6 years ago on the vessel Harbour, as it headed toward Guantanamo Bay".
“In September 1997, Mexican newspaper El Universal de Mexico connected Losada to the Juarez Cartel of Mexico, referring to him as "the Chilean narcotics trafficker," the paper reported. “Both Losada and Jose Serrano denied any connection to the Juarez Cartel.” Drug trafficker Losada, said the paper, is a partner in some 30 shipping companies.
Jose Serrano Segovia owns shipping lines too, and until recently controlled what used to be Mexico’s flagship airline, Mexicana. This would appear to be an excellent example of what has been called the corporatization of narcotics trafficking which began taking place during the late 1980’s, while then-Vice President George H. W. Bush led the DEA’s task force in Miami.
Juan Serrano Segovia is one of a handful of Mexican “big corporate guns” feted at a private dinner several years ago hosted by Gov. Jeb Bush, leading a Florida trade mission to Mexico. "The evening turned into a kind of let's-get-to-know-each-other-socially affair." Joseph Lacher, BellSouth's Florida president, confided to The Miami Herald.
Other recent examples of Argyll’s “creative financing globally” incl the infamous toxic garbage barge which circled the world for more than 2 years in search of a country willing to accept its cargo of toxic ash from a Philadelphia dump site? The barge Khian Sea left U.S. territorial waters, went to the Bahamas, then to the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau, and the Netherlands Antilles. No one would take it. until it got to Haiti. There, U.S.-backed dictator Baby Doc Duvalier issued a permit for the "fertilizer," and 4,000 tons was dumped onto the beach in the town of Gonalves.
Argyll Equities LLC provided funding to the man who owned the barge, one Louis D. Paolino, who later, and perhaps understandably, tired of the garbage business, and sold his company to Wayne Huizenga’s Waste Management in Miami, which runs, news accounts demurely report, “much of New York's extremely lucrative garbage industry.”
Mr. Huizenga flew to the Naples FL airport in his private helicopter adorned with the symbol of the Miami Dolphins (he owned them at the time) to have a private tête-à-tête on the runway with mysterious financier Wallace J. Hilliard, the owner of Huffman Aviation in Venice.
During the same month, July 2000, Mohamed Atta & Marwan Al-Shehhi arrived to attend his flight school, Hilliard’s Lear jet was surrounded by DEA agents on the runway of Orlando Executive Airport. They found 43 pounds of heroin onboard.
Argyll Equities is currently involved in a still-unexplained imbroglio. According to a federal indictment, the co. received $9.7 million dollars it didn't earn, in a “purported stock loan program operated by Argyll Equities, L.L.C,” which resulted in criminal charges earlier this year against 3 men.
“The complaint alleges the men made false statements to a hedge fund operator so they could keep $25 million from the fund that was invested this year with Nevada-based American Trade Industries, Inc., according to US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and the US Secret Service in Chicago,” AP reported.
The men were accused of conspiring to perpetrate a $26 million dollar fraud on the administrator of a private hedge fund in Lake Forest IL, who turns out to be mother of “Wedding Crashers” actor Vince Vaughn. According to the indictment, one of the accused men, Richard E. Warren, apprehended as he attempted to board a plane for London, told Sharon Vaughn that he “had a special govt clearance,” was “licensed by USG to participate in secret trading programs.”
Also indicted was Frank L. Cowles Jr., who owns an Arabian horse farm near Washington D.C., where he is referred to in news accounts as a “Virginia businessman,” and who is married to the Ambassador to the U.S. of the tiny country of Paraguay, Leila Teresa Rachid de Cowles.
Paraguay is suspected by the State Dept. of “helping to finance Islamic terrorist groups” through Lebanese traders in Ciudad del Este, a lawless border town, called South America’s "contraband capital.” A U.S. District Court judge in Chicago recently dropped criminal charges against Cowles. Ambassador Rachid is among the 5 percent of Paraguay's inhabitants of Arab descent. Her father was born in Homs, Syria; her mother is from Ba'albek, Lebanon.
¶
Argyll Equities LLC is the second-largest shareholder in SkyWay, according to bankruptcy filings, owning nearly 21 million shares of totally worthless stock.
SkyWay Aircraft had been leasing a “repair” facility for more than $20,000 a month at DFW Airport in Dallas, though the company had nothing to repair, from Richard Rainwater, called “George W. Bush’s biggest supporter” and “the power behind the throne” in news accounts during Bush’s first Presidential campaign.
SkyWay Aircraft was not a real entity, in the sense of a corporation engaging in commerce for profit. The now bankrupted-firm’s only utility was to serve as a dummy front company which provided cover for the larger operation, and as a vehicle to part innocent people from their investments. Individuals involved in the operation have extensive and wide-ranging connections to each other which clearly pre-date the brief life span of the front company which ostensibly controlled the twin DC9 airliners.
Based at the Clearwater-St. Petersburg International Airport, both “Cocaine One,” and its twin, a second DC9 (N120NE) were being used by an operation which includes the former head of the CIA proprietary airline used to ferry TOW missiles to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime in Iran, as part of the Iran Contra Scandal. Adnan Khashoggi lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi, who supplied one of the two DC9’s, is the former President of an admitted CIA subsidiary airline.
Jetborne Intl, a co. supposedly owned by El-Batrawi’s long-time boss, Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, folded after being indicted for illegally ferrying TOW missiles to Iran, an “enterprise” which netted someone, though not U.S. Govt or the Contras it was supposedly funding, $16 million, a U.S. Senate investigation estimated.
The Tower Commission Report into the Iran-Contra Scandal first exposed Jetborne as a CIA proprietary. When it came time to begin shipping the missiles, said the report, Oliver North had asked a CIA official for the name of a “reliable” charter airline.
“CIA’s Air Branch suggested the use of a proprietary, the proprietary was told to await a call, and “the airline was assured that the caller (North) had sufficient funds for the charter,” stated the report. The public commercial charter airline North called was Jetborne International. By the time the firm was “outed” as a CIA airline, it had already gone bankrupt.
Ramy El-Batrawi and Adnan Khashoggi’s other major connection with the founder of SkyWay Aircraft, Miami atty Michael Farkas reveal a larger, previously secret organization. Last month the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Khashoggi and Ramy Al Batrawi, his lieutenant for the past 20 years, with stock fraud in U.S. District Court for Central California. Both men are both currently on the lam after being accused of orchestrating a $130 million fraud, called the “Stockwalk case,” involving the stock price of another firm headed by el-Batrawi called GenesisIntermedia.
GenesisIntermedia was incorporated by the long-time attorney of the man once reckoned by the U.S. Govt to be the biggest drug smuggler in American history, CIA pilot Barry Seal. Seal was assassinated in 1986.
Michael Farkas and Adnan Khashoggi were partners in a $300 million scam. It was called “the largest brokerage industry failure in more than 30 years.”
“Just three months after GenesisIntermedia’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), the nearly $17 million raised in the offering was gone,” read one wire service story.
“The creative dealings of defendant El-Batrawi partly explains how this money disappeared so quickly,” reported the AP
Others involved include NJ stock finder with a criminal & civil record Kenneth D'Angelo , Intl Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 18 pres. & NJ brokerage employee Richard Evangelista, and Las Vegas
Strip club entrepreneur Bradford Keiller with strip clubs in London, Moscow, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, all called The Spearmint Rhino.
A recent headline about Keiller’s business in Las Vegas may have said it all: "FULL FRONTAL BATTLE OF THE BOOBS AS THE WORLD'S GAMBLING CAPITAL GOES BACK TO SLEAZE.”
Along with GenesisIntermedia, the stock of two other companies was used to generate fraudulent loans in the Stockwalk scam. One was a company called Holiday R.V. Stores. The other was Imperial Credit Industries.
Michael Farkas is involved with both firms. Holiday R.V. Stores was owned and controlled by Michael Farkas, through a holding company he founded called Atlas Recreational Holdings. Michael Farkas is also on the board of Genesis Realty, founded by Ramy El-Batrawi.
St. Paul Pioneer Press (where the fraud bankrupted one of that city’s biggest firms) reported 4.22.02 "SEC filings show ties among Imperial, Holiday and Genesis. For example, El-Batrawi owns a private company called Genesis Diversified Investments, which is an investor in a company called Aviation Group that in 2001 merged with a British Columbia company called Travelbyus. Travelbyus chair Lee Sanders is a director of Holiday. Riley is a former chief executive of Holiday and its largest shareholder. Riley also is among the largest shareholders of Imperial.”
Michael Farkas’ connections to right wing Israeli political parties, and to Israeli Mossad, have already been ably covered by others. Farkas was listed in 2005 as president of Manhigut USA. This is the US branch of the Israeli Manhigut Yehudit, involved in fundraising for the radical settlers who were trying to resist the Gaza withdrawal.
He serves as the American representative of an ultra-nationalist Zionist party in Israel; he is also the American sales agent for anti-missile technology developed by Israel Aircraft Industries, and is a Director of spy technology company CCS, along with individuals with similarly colorful histories.
CCS Intl’s Latin American sales manager Menachem Cohen was convicted in 2002 for illegally exporting passive phone interception equipt to individuals in Colombia conversant with the drug trade.
CCS commercializes and brings to market items said to have been invented by the CIA & Israeli Mossad.
If you’re looking for sunglasses fitted with a fiber-optic video camera, or have need of an umbrella that is bullet proof, a baseball cap that is strong enough to repel a hatchet blow, or a surveillance microphone that looks like a shirt button, Farkas & his partners can oblige.
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Early interest was shown in Farkas by the Titan Corp., who made an early investment in him in 2000.
SkyWay Aircraft was presumably still a gleam in Mr. Farkas’ eye when Titan put up $72,386 for 1,113,627 restricted shares of the company which became SkyWay.
One unexpected discovery was that the narcotics trafficking is just one of the lucrative criminal enterprises the enterprise is engaged in. The registration records of the twin DC9’s involved in the operation reveal at least 6 of the companies associated with “Cocaine One” and its twin airliner have been involved in massive fraud resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars being swindled from innocent investors and shareholders.
As well as SkyWay & Jetborne, Mexican industrialist Juan Serrano Segovia’s GRUPO TMM defaulted on $377 million in loans several months ago.
In the StockWalk scam, which easily netted as much as Jack Abramoff's casino fraud, the firm used to perpetrate the fraud was native American-owned. Called Native Nations Securities, it was the brainchild of a Hollywood actress named Valerie Red-Horse. Red-Horse, first Native American to control a securities firm, may have been a little light in the bond-trading business, but she learned financial fraud at the feet of the master.
"Red-Horse got her first exposure to Wall Street while a theater student at UCLA," read one news account. "She went looking for part-time work and was referred through the school's placement office to the Beverly Hills office of Drexel Burnham Lambert, where she landed a job as an assistant to junk-bond king Michael Milken."
Her bio says she's been in a movie called "Naturally Native." She has guest-starred on "Babylon 5." She recently starred in the acclaimed ABC made-for-television movie "The Secret of Lizard Woman." As an actress, she is perhaps best known for serving as the model for Mattel's Pocahontas doll. She helped or was used by some well-connected fraudsters steal over $300 million dollars.
Express One International is one of the bankrupt firms which was also an owner of the DC9s. Express One International's look-alike DC9 was sold to Skyways/Royal Sons just before they went bankrupt. Now they're back. Today the president of Express One Intl is David Byers, at whose flight school Mohamed Atta trained at the Charlotte County Airport, according to Charlotte County Sheriff William Clements.
The airline was founded by Kenneth Good, who, with Neil Bush's help, received one hundred million in loans from Silverado Savings which he never repayed. Taxpayers ended up footing the bill.
The co. issued a press release recently to announce their plans to assist the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma in developing an aviation business called Bearskin Aviation Service, hiring Bearskin to provide fleet & baggage handling services at 2 Air Force bases in England.
"Chief Leaford Bearskin, leader of the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma, founded Bearskin Aviation Service out of his love for aviation and his vision that a well-run aviation company would provide revenue for Tribal health and education programs," said the press release.
U.S. arrests 3 in hedge fund case
11.21.05 Terence O'Hara Wash.Post p D4
Frank L. Cowles Jr. is known in the northern VA business community as the owner of car dealerships and a founding director of Virginia Commerce Bank in Arlington. Now, at age 76, he is facing allegations of a criminal conspiracy to defraud an Illinois hedge fund out of $25 million. Cowles was arrested at his Scottsville horse farm last week and released on $1 million bail, said spokesman Randall Samborn for in Chicago U.S. attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Cowles made his first appearance in U.S. District Court in Chicago on Thursday.
In a criminal complaint filed by Fitzgerald on Tuesday, Cowles was accused of lying to a hedge fund manager, who was not identified, about the nature of a $25 million investment. According to the complaint, Cowles and two associates induced the hedge fund manager to make the investment, promising 10 percent profit per week in a deal that they claimed was being overseen by a Federal Reserve administrator.
Samborn said the full $25 million from the hedge fund has been recovered.
Cowles could not be reached for a comment. A person who answered his home phone Friday said he was traveling. In a statement, Virginia Commerce said Cowles, a former chairman of the board, had resigned from the bank Wednesday. "The bank has found no indication of any involvement in this matter by the bank or any of its employees or other directors." The bank said Cowles denied the allegations against him.
Cowles was a founding director of Virginia Commerce in 1988 and owns about 4 percent of the bank's stock. He owns Nissan and Chrysler dealerships in Woodbridge, as well as a large Arabian horse farm in central Virginia.
According to the criminal complaint, Cowles is the secretary of American Trade Industries Inc. Richard E. Warren, 63, of Fredericksburg, identified as the president of American Trade, and "associate" David L. Myatt, 41, of Los Banos, Calif., were implicated with Cowles in the alleged conspiracy.
The govt alleged that beginning in March 2005, Myatt & Warren pitched the Illinois hedge fund manager on an investment program in which American Trade Industries would use the money to trade bonds, promising a 10 percent profit each week. While Myatt & Warren returned $3.4 million to the hedge fund, the hedge fund manager could not get the 2 men to provide a written accounting of where the $25 million investment was being held, the complaint said.
The complaint alleges that the hedge fund manager flew to Washington to meet with Warren & Cowles 10.21.05. In later phone conversations that the hedge fund manager tape-recorded for the Secret Service, Cowles allegedly described how the hedge fund manager's money was tied up in foreign bank accounts and said that the "Fed administrator" was tying up the funds. The hedge fund manager's last phone conversation with Cowles was 11.10.05, the complaint said, when Cowles said the fund manager would have to pay Myatt an additional $500,000 for the "Fed administrator" to return the funds.
Warren was arrested 11.12.05 at Dulles Intl Airport, holding a ticket for a flight to London, Samborn said. He was scheduled to appear at a detention hearing Friday. Myatt was arrested at his California home 11.12.05 and was released on $300,000 bond, Samborn said.
The men who bit the dog
11.17.05 G.Netwon Naked Shorts
Frank L. Cowles Jr of Scottsville, Va. (shown at left with his wife, Paraguay’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and former ambassador to the US, Leila Teresa Rachid de Cowles), 74, is prominent Virginia businessman. A founding director of Virginia Commerce Bankcorp (VCBI), where he was chairman from 1989-99. VCBI yesterday filed an 8K announcing that
Cowles had resigned from his positions as a director of VCBI and its wholly owned subsidiary, Virginia Commerce Bank “in order to focus upon a personal matter unrelated to his service as a director.”
According to his biography, he owns two auto dealerships, Scottville Hardware, and Greenfields Farms, the home of Hidden Hill Arabians, an Arabian horse breeder. He was also, for several years, a member of the VA Motor Vehicle Dealer Board.
Among other interests, Cowles was counsel to Cowles Rinaldi & Arnold, now Cowles, Rinaldi, Judkins & Korjus Ltd, a “law firm concentrating in construction claims, business and contract law, with lawyers practicing in VA, MD, and Wash.DC". Call to managing partner Vic Rinaldi to confirm whether or not Cowles is still associated with the firm was not returned.
Cowles was several years ago among the victims of an investment fraud by Motilall Sudeen, a sometime radio evangelist in New Orleans who was sentenced to 18 years in jail after his Jan. 2003 conviction on a 38-count indictment of conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering charges. When Sudeen was indicted June 2002, The Times-Picayune, of New Orleans reported that “One of the investors listed in the indictment, Northern Virginia car dealer Frank Cowles, was first approached by Sudeen in London in the fall of 1998. In papers filed in a civil lawsuit by Cowles against Sudeen, Cowles said he was impressed with Sudeen's supposed international trading in fertilizer and claims he ended up losing $3.4 million in the investment scheme.”
Sudeen’s operation was essentially a prime bank scheme that he claimed would deliver returns of between 15 and 50% a month. Cowles was chairman of VCBI at the time he was defrauded. No record exists of any SEC action against Sudeen.
Richard E. Warren, 63, leaves a much shorter paper trail. In 1997-98, US Securities & Exchange Commission acted against Richard Warren & Associates, and Richard E. Warren, for prime bank fraud. A spokesman for the US Attorney’s office in Chicago declined comment on whether the two Richard E. Warrens are the same individual.
The SEC case alleged that RWA and Warren, in 1996, raised $8 million from at least 48 investors through two fraudulent offerings. The first was of “Prime Bank Debentures” offering a return of 180% a year; the second was for trading debentures that would generate a return of approximately 1600% within 66 days.
The case apparently ended in October 1998, when the US District Court for the Northern District of California issued permanent injunctions enjoining RWA and Warren from securities law violations and ordering the disgorgement of $7.2 million. Additionally, the relief defendant, Citadel Enterprises Ltd, an Isle of Man entity based in London, was ordered to disgorge $2.05 million it held on behalf of both RWA and Warren.
Citadel Enterprises Ltd has no connection with the well-known “Chicago area hedge fund,” Citadel Investment Group.
According to Nevada corporation records, Warren was president of American Trade Industries Inc, the company in which the hedge fund invested $25 million, and Cowles was its secretary. A third individual, Doyle M. Conway, is listed as its treasurer; he was not indicted and has not been accused of wrongdoing.
David L. Myatt, of Los Banos, Calif., said by federal prosecutors to be “an associate” of American Trade Industries Inc, is much more of a mystery man. Nevada state records list him as being associated with several companies:
Akela Capital Inc, registered on Mar. 24, 2005. He is named as secretary, director, and treasurer of the firm. One Sharon E. Vaughn, of Lake Forest, Ill., listed as the president of Akela Capital Inc, is the principal of Directors Financial Group Ltd, “a comprehensive fee-only financial services firm providing substantial value as an investment advisor, fiduciary and consultant to high net worth individuals.” Ms Vaughn had not returned a call, or an email, seeking comment by the time this article was published.
Akela Capital Inc is not related to the Cary NC based convertible arbitrage manager Akela Capital LLC, headed by Anthony B. Bosco.
Capital Investment 525 Inc, registered on Feb. 28, 2005. Myatt is secretary of this company, which has as its president Tokuo Aida, of Tokyo, Japan. Its other listed officers are Ronald Ninowski (Treasurer), of Reston, Va., and Richard Warren (Director), of Woodbridge, Va., the third defendant in the alleged hedge fund fraud.
Prestone Inc, registered on Aug. 25, 2005. As with Akela, Myatt is named as secretary, director, and treasurer of the firm. Its president is listed as one Jean-Baptiste Vivet, of Autun, France.
Apart from Myatt, the entities have several common themes. In each case, the “resident agent” is an Eric Rueker, at an address that appears to be a mail drop. No listed telephone number could be found for an Eric Rueker; two other companies, Dalemy Inc, and Plex Capital Inc, appear under his name but both are classified as in default with their filings, and no officers are listed.
Likewise, the Los Gatos, Calif., address given for Myatt appears to be a mail drop, and no listed telephone number could be found for him in either Los Gatos, or Los Banos. The addresses given for Ninowski and Warren similarly appear to be mail drops. No phone number could be found for Ninowski in Virginia, and the Woodbridge VA phone listing for Warren appears to be out of order.
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FAA stonewalls release of DC9 'Cocaine One' records
Homeland Security Inc scandal off and running
6.22.06 Daniel Hopsicker
Mad Cow
Venice FL Less than 2 weeks before the co., which owned the DC9 recently busted in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine onboard, declared bankruptcy, FL gov. Jeb Bush’s Dept of Transportation issued a
press release touting the firm’s bright future in Homeland Security and announcing it had been selected to be the state’s primary provider of airport security applications.
This is not the first time Jeb Bush has been involved endorsing a drug trafficking aviation co.. Nor is it the first time SkyWay Aircraft has been the recipient of unexplained govt favoritism.
Two months and eleven days after the firm’s American-registered DC9 was caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Campeche, Mexico destined for distribution in the U.S., the FAA is still stonewalling requests for the release of what are, by statue, public records of the registration and ownership of the plane.
Experienced and respected aviation executives cited in “Welcome to TERRORLAND” stated they had witnessed the FAA protecting, both before and after 9.11.01, corrupt aviation companies in Florida which played host to Mohamed Atta and the other terrorist hijackers.
Cocaine One's registered owner, “Royal Sons LLC,” had once been housed in a hanger owned by terror flight school Huffman Aviation at the Venice Fl Airport.
SkyWay is owned by an international assortment of spooks, Saudis like the long-time lieutenant of Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi, and a number of other connected individuals. SkyWay was founded by a Miami lawyer who is also the U.S. President of a banned Israeli ultra-nationalist political party.
SkyWay has provided material assistance to Florida Republicans associated with Jeb Bush, like current Florida Senator Mel Martinez, who barnstormed around Florida during his run for office in a plane provided gratis by SkyWay Aircraft.
Like SkyWay, Glen Kovar’s earlier "business venture" went bankrupt as well. Satellite Access Systems had something vaguely to do with satellites, at least according to an interview with Kovar in The Tampa Business Review headlined “Satellite firm scans universe of new markets.”
“Some men follow their dreams,” it began. “Glenn Kovar chased the 28th parallel. Which is primarily why several weeks ago the 64-year-old president of Satellite Access Systems moved his company from Pasadena CA to St. Petersburg Fl".
The Long Island native explained why his offices sit atop the 16-story Plaza Towers, near the St. Petersburg Pier:
“Of the umpteen imaginary lines encircling the globe, the northern hemisphere's 28th happens to be among the most popular parallels for high-flying communications satellites, SAS' electronic lifeblood,” said Kovar. "And if you look at a globe, there aren't that many cities in the world on the 28th parallel that are nice to live in. St. Petersburg is."
We read a man who used to design satellites for Hughes, world’s leader in satellite technology the quote.
“Its utter horseshit,” he told us bluntly. “The man obviously doesn’t know the first thing about satellites.”
In late December 2004, SkyWay announced a new $24 million dollar loan from Lantax, Ltd, described as “a Private Investment Group consisting of four Western European and Northern African families.” A representative of Lantax, Dr. Thabo Stephens, waxed enthusiastic. "We are confident in the technology and the business plan presented by Messieurs Kovar and Hansen. With anticipated organizational changes and the proposed funding presented by us, we believe that SkyWay will meet its business objectives. We will stand behind SkyWay Communications, with additional funding if necessary, as they enter the security and in-flight broadband communication sector."
“Dr. Thabo Stephens” isn't a Doctor; he's a Nigerian fraudster.
Less than a month later the Manager of Aviation Systems and Support for Jeb Bush’s FL Dept of Transportation issued a press release praising SkyWay, stating, "This is a great accomplishment for the FDOT's Aviation Test Center. The FDOT wants to make Florida's airports safe and secure with the use of the latest technology available. We are looking forward to working with SkyWay."
Two weeks after this ringing public endorsement SkyWay's biggest stockholders sued the firm's management for fraud. Bankruptcy was just around the corner.
The Florida Governor himself had provided a celebrity endorsement to terror flight school owner Wally Hilliard's operation well after the company's Lear (N351WB) had been busted by DEA agents armed with machine guns, who, during the same month Atta arrive at his school, found 43 pounds of heroin onboard.
Hilliard's air charter service was utilized at virtually no cost, despite the fact that rentals for Lear jets can run as high as $1,800 an hour, by Florida Governor Jeb Bush at the same time their planes were flying back and forth from Venezuela loaded with heroin. Gov. Jeb Bush honored Hilliard's operation, called at various times Florida Air, Sunrise Airlines and Discover Air, with a personal visit, even posing for photos with the "Discover Air family."
As described in a previous story, the “Cocaine One” DC9 had a twin, whose records we have been able to pry out of the hands of the FAA. And we retailed the long list of CIA front companies which owned the this plane before SkyWay, including the owner just before SkyWay, Adnan Khashoggi lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi.
SkWay founder Farkas is a major investor in one of El-Batrawi’s other front companies, Genesis Realty.
SkyWay Aircraft was a phony co. which lost $40 million of shareholders money before going bankrupt. SkyWay's purpose was providing an excuse for twin DC9’s to sit on a runway in St. Petersburg FL painted to impersonate official U.S. Government planes.
Saudi billionaire and long-time CIA asset Adnan Khashoggi, who first emerged in the 1970s as a middleman for U.S. defense contractors looking to do business with Saudi Arabia, then later helped arrange the sale of U.S. arms to Iran to fund the anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. He's currently wanted by Thailand on suspicion of embezzling $64 million from a failed bank in 1996.
Khashoggi’s henchman Ramy El-Batrawi, currently under indictment with Khashoggi for looting over $120 million from a bankrupt company called GenesisIntermedia, the company that owns the marketing rights to the creative output snake oil salesman John Gray.
Gray is also the man who funded the disinformation campaign calling itself the 9.11 Truth movement. Saudi billionaire Adnan Khashoggi is a force behind a well-financed disinformation campaign billing itself the “9.11 Truth Movement.” The U.S. military has 1200-man psychological warfare battalion.
Michael Farkas, a Miami attorney who founded and was a major stockholder of SkyWay Communications Holding Company, the last registered owner of the Cocaine One DC9.
Farkas serves double duty as the American representative of an ultra-nationalist Zionist party in Israel; hr is as well a sales agent for anti-missile technology developed by Israel Aircraft Industries' for the Israeli Defense Force.
...And we mustn't forget Al Ali Al Sabah, Chief of the National Guard of Kuwait as well as the oldest member of the ruling Kuwaiti Royal Family, one of the dozen Saudi and Kuwaiti "investors" in SkyWay brought to the deal byNazar Talib, a native of Baghdad Iraq who is today a securities trader in Arkansas.
Finally let's take a quick peek at what the disgraced owners of SkyWay are doing today. Sweating out indictments, perhaps?
They're already waist-deep in their next big score. Check out SkyWay President Bernie Kovar's old business card, above.
Then his--Mon Dieu!-- his new business card, just below it, from his new company.
5.5 TON DC9 COKE BUST: WORSE THAN SNAKES ON A PLANE
AUGUST 23, 2006--Venice,FL.
by Daniel Hopsicker
http://www.madcowprod.com/08232006.html
An unidentified 40-year old American wearing a green polo shirt was in charge of the contingent of drug traffickers on the ground awaiting the arrival of the DC9 “Cocaine One” airliner arriving from Venezuela on the evening of April 11th with a spectacular haul of 5.5 tons of pure cocaine aboard, according to a recent article in Mexican newspaper Proceso by a respected Mexican journalist.
Although much about the journey of the airliner is still shrouded in mystery, amid the conflicting reports the outlines of what happened are beginning to become clear.
From various accounts in the Mexican press, we have pieced together the following story of what occurred during the shipment from Venezuela to Mexico of 5.5 tons of cocaine on its way to the U.S. until interdicted almost by accident at a tiny airport that closes each night at 6 p.m.
Reinforcing what we’ve learned about the powerful forces behind the DC9’s flight in the U.S., the plane’s progress through Mexico was being arranged through the involvement by Mexican Federal officials.
Ironically, the seized plane has been spotted at an airport in Mexico City, complete with new paint job and registration, put back into service by the same Mexican Federal investigative agency being accused of responsibility for the flight.
"It's French Connection Meets Monty Python's Holy Grail"
It was a scene right out a spy movie...
In the air, gliding in on balmy tropical updrafts at dusk, is an American-registered DC9 airliner, painted in quasi-governmental livery, a gold-bordered blue stripe running down the side, and a blue and gold Seal next to the door in the front of the plane, an American eagle clutching an olive branch in its talons.
The last rays of sunlight glint off its wings of the plane, which looks for all the world as if it were carry potentates from the US Department of Homeland Security to a conference on drug interdiction at a posh Cancun hotel.
Except this plane isn’t carrying diplomats or FBI agents...
Instead, it is loaded with 128 identical black leather suitcases, each tightly packed with cocaine, an incredible quantity of cocaine, 5.5 tons in all. Stenciled on the side of each suitcase was a single word: “Privado.”
Inside the suitcases, the packages of cocaine were stamped with different symbols: a scorpion, a star, a horse, among others, as though they were going to different drug gangs for onward smuggling up through Mexico to the U.S.
On the ground, scanning the sky nervously, are officers from the Mexican Federal Preventive Police (PFP, dressed in civilian clothes. But they aren’t there to interdict the drug shipment.
They’re there to protect it.
There’s an atmosphere of increasing tension in the terminal. A significant number of the airport’s regular security detail has made themselves scarce. The smart ones called in sick, including several suspected of involvement in drug trafficking.
Everyone working at the airport knows something unusual—as well as potentially unpleasant—is afoot.
The pilot of the DC9 radioed the airport to report a problem with the undercarriage of the plane. So the airport is kept open past its normal closing hour to allow the airliner to make an emergency landing.
Some news accounts will later speculate that this is a ruse to get airport authorities to allow the plane to land. However FAA repair records for the plane show it experienced a similar malfunction a year earlier in Tallahassee, where it slid right off the runway before coming to a stop.
Milling around in the small airport terminal awaiting the plane is a motley collection of people with a shared characteristic: they are all behaving strangely. They include agents of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP) Intelligence Branch, as well as four presumed narcotics traffickers who flew in the previous day on a corporate jet, a Falcon 20, from the capital.
The pilot and copilot of the Falcon, Marco Aurelio Perez de Gracia and Fernando Poot Perez, will turn out to be employees of a Mexican Federal Agency, the Water Commission. They are both ex-military. They have both spent recent time in prison for drug trafficking.
They are not there by accident.
Home free with a big wad and a bottle of Jack
Nor is it an accident, apparently, that they are Mexican Federal government employees.
One control tower employee is approached by an American, described as about 40 years old, with blond hair, a deep tan, and a green polo shirt.
The American not only wants the airport to allow the plane to land... he also wants the tower to certify the flight, which means the DC9 can then continue its journey into Mexico as a domestic flight. No need to go through customs.
Home free.
The American, cliché that he is, carries a Big Wad. He offers to pay cash. But his money was in dollars, the controller explained later. The airport operations office doesn’t take foreign currency, they told him. They didn’t want his bribe. His offer was refused.
Surely they had been asked to bend the rules before. The tension was palpable...The continuing mystery is why she turned him down.
“He indicated to me that the plane would just refuel and then head towards Toluca,” the employee stated.
She knew what he wanted. He isn't going to get it.
The DC9 rolled to a stop on the apron as far from the terminal as it could get. Even though the pilot had radioed the tower to alert them to a problem in the hydraulic system in the undercarriage of the plane. A flaw in a brake line. And indeed, while it was landing smoke was visible coming from the area around one of the tires.
With the danger of a fire, firefighters rushed to the plane. But they were waved away from the plane when they tried to approach.
And despite the alarm shown earlier about an undercarriage malfunction causing sparks, the pilot now was insisting on refueling. The air controller was suspicious. The American in the control tower said he was going to find the captain of the Falcon, who could smooth things over.
But that’s not what happened. And soon the DC9 bearing the American registration number N900SA was being surrounded by Mexican soldiers pressed into service in what might charitably be called Mexico’s “uneven” War on Drugs.
The news that an American was involved in the drug shipment is just one of the new details which can be gleaned by reading what newspapers in Mexico and Venezuela have been reporting. In both countries, unlike the U.S., the story has been front page news for several months.
The Mexican press is filled with reports of the involvement of a sizeable number of officers in the Federal Preventive Police (PFP), a 7-year old FBI-trained federal police force whose main mission, ironically, is enforcing Mexico’s laws against drug trafficking.
Ricardo Ravelo, author of a recent book on drug cartels in Mexico, interviewed airport personnel in Cuidad del Carmen, a city tucked into the most remote corner of the Mexican Yucatan. They told him that intrigue had already been swirling for several days before the DC9 landed.
Agents of two Mexican federal law enforcement agencies, the Policía Federal Preventiva (PFP) and of the Federal Agency of Investigación (AFI), reportedly attempted to prevent airport personnel from calling in the military to search the DC9 after it had aroused suspicions.
“On the evening before the DC9 came in Ramon (a PFP officer) appeared to the airport with González Virgen, who said he was in the intelligence division of the PFP,” said one civilian worker at the airport.
“He said they were installing new procedures for registering landings, and that he would need to speak with all the civil employees of the terminal.”
What he wanted to talk about, the man said, was an “economic adjustment” to allow the landing of the plane loaded with 5.5 tons of cocaine.
As many as a dozen Federal PFP officers may have been working to ensure the success of the drug move. Five were in Cuidad del Carmen, and reportedly attempted to keep airport personnel from calling in the Mexican military. Others visited Mexican airports where the DC9 was scheduled to land, presumably to drop off part of the load, in Toluca and Monterrey.
“I noticed three men loitering in the airport, in white guayabera shirts and dark trousers,” an airport security man told Ravelo. “One I had seen in the airport before in Federal (PFP) police uniform. He began asking about our drug-sniffing dog, things like what drugs could he detect.”
The PFP has been widely criticized in the Mexican press for breaking up student demonstrations and worker’s strikes, for the large percentage of military personnel in its ranks, and for the fact that its presence has had little effect on the bloodletting between drug rings.
But now the Federal force, and its local police and military support all over the country, seems squarely in the crosshairs of the Mexican news media, which is much less controlled in its reporting on drug trafficking than the mainstream American press.
The crew of the DC-9 reportedly made frequent trips to Caracas, Venezuela. And they had close ties to the two Falcon pilots, Poot Perez and Perez de Gracia. They reportedly all worked for the same criminal organization.
There were, still, loose ends. The Mexican army had managed to capture the aircraft's co-pilot, but not the pilot. He escaped. No one appears to be too concerned.
"I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.”
But there was one major point of contention in Spanish language news accounts.
Venezuelan newspapers related that the DC9 had stopped in Colombia after leaving Caracas to pick up the load.
Newspapers in Mexico supporting the Vicente Fox government tended to feel Hugo Chavez had probably personally supervised the loading of the 128 suitcases, and that probably there were FARC guerrillas standing around with machine guns watching.
They even tried to pin the DC9’s massive haul on the poor fellow from whom they had just stolen the election for President. It was, however, a half-hearted effort which didn’t stick. The charge was ridiculous on its face. Imagine Al Gore as a drug lord. You get the picture.
Another point of speculation concerned which cartel was responsible for moving the load. In Mexico, the choices seem almost endless. The Sinaloa Cartel was the favorite, followed by the Tijuana cartel, the Jalisco cartel, and an outfit supposedly strong in the area the DC9 came down in, called the Southeastern Cartel.
One thing news accounts in both Mexico and Venezuela agreed on, however, was that the DC9 was U.S. registered and American-owned. But, as if to make amends for their impudence, both countries media retailed the unlikely story that the plane was owned by “the American airline Fly,” or “US air charter company, Fly.”
There is no such carrier.
The biggest question remains unanswered.
Why was the American-registered DC9 airliner(N900SA) busted in the first place, while flying what evidence indicates was a “milk run”—a routine flight flown many times before without incident? What happened? What changed?
When you’re flying a commercial airliner carrying 128 suitcases—but no passengers—you’re clearly not expecting any serious scrutiny.
So, the most amazing thing about the seizure of 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico four months ago is simply that it happened in the first place.
"I'm not a member of any organized party. I'm a Democrat."
A second major question posed by the bust of an American plane with 5.5 tons of cocaine may be even more mystifying:
In the face of mounting evidence that the drug trafficking organization involved in the flight maintains close ties both to President George W. Bush as well as to the national Republican Party, why haven’t the ghosts who populate the Democratic Party made an issue of the flight?
The disheartening answer is likely to be found in what we do know—for a certainty—about the uncertain business of narcotics trafficking...
Veteran Miami Private Detective Gary McDaniel educated us on the basics of the industry while we were doing research for “Barry & the boys.”
"Every successful drug trafficking organization needs four things to be successful,” he had told us, ticking them off on his fingers… “Production, distribution, transportation, and protection.”
When you think about it, this is only common sense. But it also completely undermines the unstated myth behind mainstream media reporting in the U.S. about the international narcotics trade… that it is hidden from law enforcement, in a way that requires diligent police work to uncover.
How can you hide the daily workings of an industry shipping 5.5 tons of cocaine at a crack from a government that can read the make of your golf ball from outer space?
The answer is: you can’t. The police chief of every good-sized American city knows the name of the wholesale distributor selling product to street-level dealers to retail in his town.
And—this is a mini-editorial—that’s why voters should take every opportunity to defeat hypocrites like Asa Hutchinson, now running for Governor in Arkansas.
Hutchinson served as the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Arkansas, where he specialized in looking the other way while the biggest cocaine smuggling operation in recorded history hummed along right outside his office window.
As a reward for Asia’s lack of effort, he became George W. Bush’s choice to become the head of America’s DEA. But that’s the U.S. side.
This series has illustrated the complicity of agencies of the U.S. Government in the case. The owner of the airplane in question, for example, today walks the streets a free man.
The DEA appears unconcerned.
Before going bankrupt, the company which painted the plane to look like it belonged to the U.S. Government, SkyWay Aircraft, was clearly up to no good. They had no use for one DC9. Yet they controlled two. The Chairman of SkyWay was a former employee of the U.S. Forest Service who claims to have been a long-time CIA agent.
He has not been taken in for questioning.
Perhaps government complicity in the protected drug trade may be easier to spot in Mexico, not because its more prevalent, but because its easier to imagine the worst when dealing with foreigners.
But we have plenty of drug lords of our own.
9.11: The American Connection
New scandal spotlights terror flight school's hidden ties
5.27.05 (?) Daniel Hopsicker MadCow Prod.
In absence of the govt “white paper” promised by SecState Powell in the wake of 9.11.01, it was left to British PM Blair to release a “summary of evidence” making the case against Osama Bin Laden
.
Blair said: “Al Qaeda is a terrorist organization with ties to a global network."
A controversy over the sudden closing of a flight school in Orlando in early March reveals a hidden connection between the bankruptcy in Orlando and the secretive organization which ran Huffman Aviation in Venice, the unacknowledged home base of Mohamed Atta and his Hamburg cadre during almost their entire time in the U.S.
The investigation into the disappearance of millions of dollars which students had been forced to pre-pay in tuition has led to 70-year old Wallace J. Hilliard of Naples, FL, the shadowy financier whose purchase of Huffman in partnership with Dutch national Rudi Dekkers, currently awaiting trial on felony fraud, set in motion a chain of events culminating in two former students piloting Boeing 767's into the World Trade Center Towers.
When 21-year-old Tiffany Traynor moved from Michigan to Central Florida last year to pursue her childhood dream of becoming an airline pilot at the Airline Training Academy (ATA) in Orlando, the last thing she expected was to lose $75,000 and have her career placed on hold when the school closed without warning and its owners dropped out of sight.
But that’s what happened to her, and 300 other fledgling pilots whose career dreams were dashed by the loss of millions they had pre-paid the school in tuition for training they will never receive.
In the blink of an eye, bright futures turned bleak, as 20-yr-old students were suddenly left with $100,000 student loans to pay off and nothing to show for it.
Individual losses were so large because the Airline Training Academy, owned and run by the family of retired Delta pilot Jim Williams, followed the unusual practice of forcing students to pre-pay, in full, for training.
It appears in hindsight that the Williams family was thinking ahead.
"No big deal. It only filled two suitcases."
But while the sudden closing of ATA in Orlando is a heavy blow to hopeful future airline pilots, it has proven useful in illuminating the murky world of aviation from which the 9/11 tragedy sprung.
“Mystery financier” Wally Hilliard is the common thread between the flight school ‘bust-out’ in Orlando and the story of the terrorists flight training. How and why Hilliard, a retired insurance executive from Green Bay, Wisconsin, has come to play a pivotal role in aviation in Florida is just one of the many critical questions about 9/11 which remain unexplained.
Besides playing host to Mohamed Atta, Hilliard’s most notable recent aviation involvement was as owner of a Learjet surrounded by machinegun-toting DEA agents on the runway of Orlando Executive Airport in July of 2000--the same month Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi began training at his flight school--and discovered to be carrying 43 pounds of heroin aboard. Officials later described the haul as the largest seizure of heroin in Central Florida history.
But none of the frantic would-be airline pilots seeking to discover what had happened to their money when the doors clanged shut at the Airline Training Academy had yet heard of Wally Hilliard.
But that was about to change.
The student's nightmare began when they showed up for classes on a typical Friday morning, only to learn that the school’s doors had closed.
They went looking for the school’s owners and managers—all members of the Williams family—for answers.
"Mum's the word in Orlando."
But there wasn't anybody from the school's management to ask. What the students found, instead, were grim-faced security guards, who told them to leave and ushered them away from the school by mid-morning. For the students the frustration was only beginning...
The company's phones went unanswered. Executives could not be reached. The corporation's Orlando lawyer did not respond to phone calls at his office or at home. Amid rumors that some had skipped town, the school’s management had dropped from sight.
Students questioned why the school had continued taking large sums of money for tuition even as it was about to shut down.
“They closed on a Thursday night,” student Ted Ballard told the Orlando Sentinel. “On that Thursday, they took tuition money as late as 11 a.m., had it deposited in the bank by 2 p.m. and closed the school at 5 p.m.”
The owners weren’t talking. The Williams family made no statements. When the school shut down, "they basically just disappeared,” said student Ballard.
And this is where Wally Hilliard enters the picture, after students began to suspect that some criminal sleight of hand might have played a role in stripping the school of assets. They suspected they may have been the victims of a particularly cruel scam.
Attempting to protect any remaining assets, the students went to court, and sued.
"The family that preys together..."
The suit alleged that in the weeks leading up to ATA's sudden closure the defendants had been “fraudulently soliciting new students, and requesting and accepting payments of substantial tuition, all in cash and in advance.”
At the same time, according to the lawsuit, the Williams had been acquiring expensive luxury automobiles for their personal use and otherwise engaging in a lifestyle free from signs of financial distress or difficulty.
The family seemed to have money to burn, the students alleged. Their money.
Suspicion focused on a transaction the previous year in which the William’s family sold a charter air carrier, Discover Air, to Sunrise Airlines, an aviation holding company controlled by Wally Hilliard.
"At least three million got siphoned out of ATA and into Discover Air," an attorney for the students told us. "The money flowed out of the country to the Bahamas."
Conveniently, Wally Hilliard owns an aviation facility in Nassau called Executive Air, run by Alfonso Bowe, a South African native, where the busy Mr. Hilliard also owns a winery.
Students wanted to know: is there a connection between the transfer of ownership of Discover Air to Hilliard and the disappearance of millions of dollars of the student's money? Had the Williams family concealed the assets of their about-to-be-bankrupted flight school through the ruse of transferring them into another company?
While they were unable to get answers about much of anything else, the students discovered that they could get a loud and immediate answer to this question.
Don't be silly. ATA’s bankruptcy had nothing to do with Discover Air, the students were told.
The general manager at Discover Air, Tommy Barraza, said ATA and Discover Air were "definitely not connected;" they ‘just happened’ to share the same officers, members of the family of "Captain Jim" Williams, head honcho of the flight school, and his son Scott, Discover Air's CEO.
"They're just a big family," said Barraza.
Katherine Harris: the gift that keeps on giving
Scott Williams wasn’t available to speak to a reporter, he said, because "he's not around much."
Since they were separately owned, it must have just been coincidence that Discover Air went bankrupt within a month of the closing of the flight school.
There had been no commingling of funds. No transfer of assets.
But look at the Discover Air website, the students countered, which identified the flight school as "the parent company of Discover Air."
There was no response from the school's owners. Well, there was one...
They took the website down.
Nor is this the only documentation to disappear in connection with the case. There is the famous visit by Gov. Jeb Bush to Discover Air commemorated on their website, and then erased after the MadCowMorningNews called attention to it.
And at the same time ATA and Discover Air were going bust, corporate filings relating to Wally Hilliard and his operations had begun to go missing at the Secretary of State’s office in Tallahassee—Katherine Harris’s office.
A leading 9/11 researcher gave us an early ‘heads up’ about the problem...
“It should be very simple to look up earlier annual reports and documents...but in the past two months the Secretary of State has made many documents unavailable online,” she told us over a year ago.
“It's as though this was a parting gift from Katherine Harris.”
Harris, we recalled, was one of two Florida officials—the other being Gov. Jeb Bush—who somehow found it necessary to publicly praise Wally Hilliard’s airline—then flying as “Florida Air”— even though it too had been going bankrupt at the time, six months before the 9/11 attack.
A document that would have gone 'missing.'
We began keeping a running total of bankruptcies of Wally Hilliard-related aviation concerns.
Already we were up to three.
After being warned of the government’s chicanery in Florida—not, most would agree, a particularly unusual event—staffers at the MadCowMorningNews downloaded from the Florida Secretary of State’s website a number of documents.
One of these documents, we discovered, contains crucial evidence in the Orlando flight school’s bankruptcy, proving that two years before the Williams’ family say they ‘sold’ Discover Air to Wally Hilliard, Discover Air CEO Scott Williams filed incorporation papers with the Florida Secretary of State’s office...
The company he was incorporating, oddly enough, was Wally Hilliard’s Sunrise Airlines, the same company which supposedly purchased his company two years later.
This faux pas represents breathtakingly poor planning on some one's part, because it clearly and unmistakably reveals skullduggery that only the fainthearted would not term corporate fraud.
Corporate fraud was commonplace at Wally Hilliard’s various aviation enterprises, we learned from a former Director of Operations at Hilliard's Sunrise Airlines.
"I was the Director of Operations, which meant my job was to decide which flights to cancel every day... Rudi and Wally were running a whole bunch of companies as if they were just one entity. The Dekkers’ Aviation account, for example, was used to fund Sunrise debt," Bill Bersch told us.
“They had Florida Air, Dekkers Aviation Group, Florida Air Holdings, LLC, and even Florida Air Holdings, Inc., but since they intermingled funds all the time, I just thought of them as one company. They all had the same personnel and the same management, and they were all the same company,” he said.
"A blemish, sure, but nobody's perfect."
"The airline lost $800,000 in two months. All together, (Florida Air) ended up costing Wally almost $8 million.
“Nobody will ever know the extent to which these guys engaged in underhanded business deals. They didn’t pay state taxes. They didn’t pay employee taxes.”
Not paying taxes is a blemish, to be sure. But commingling funds is a criminal act. Presumably the U.S. Government frowns on this sort of thing.
But when it comes to Wally Hilliard’s various aviation enterprises, the U.S. Government— for still unexplained reasons—often shows itself to be surprisingly generous...
One example with relevance to the Orlando controversy involves yet another Hilliard-related aviation bankruptcy, Sunrise Airlines, in November of 2000.
For those of you keeping score at home, we’re up to four.
The assets which the students suspected of having been illegally transferred out of the school before it went bankrupt were a number of Jetstreams, a 19-passenger commuter jet, which students had grown accustomed to seeing sit idle on the tarmac in front of the school's hanger.
Although they were being used by Discover Air, the MadCowMorningNews has discovered Government documents—copies of the leases between Jet Acceptance Corporation and Airline Training Academy—which reveal that these jets were being paid for by the flight school.
Now the Jetstreams were ‘missing.’ Gone.
Incredibly, this is not the first time these planes have been made to disappear.
"Hiding Jetstreams from the Marshal"
Before it filed for Chapter 11, Sunrise was collecting more than $ 3.3 million a year in federal subsidies under the DOT's Essential Air Service program, a federal program implemented 20 years ago that offers subsidized service between rural airports and larger, urban airports.
In its bankruptcy petition, Sunrise Air said it was forced to shut down after it lost the six Jetstreams it was leasing when the lessor "improperly" terminated their lease.
The November 4, 2000 Las Vegas Review-Journal reported it this way:
“The only airline serving Ely is suspending its operations, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday. Sunrise Airlines notified the U.S. Transportation Department it was stopping service because British Airways was ending its aircraft leases, Reid's office said he was told by the department.”
It was a lie--but a convenient lie, which apparently kept the Dept of Transportation from asking for their three million dollars back--because when Wally Hilliard’s Sunrise Airlines went belly up, the six Jetstreams were merely “transferred” to two other of Hilliard’s false-front airline operations: Florida Air...and Discover Air.
When Sunrise Airlines ceased operations, they walked away with both the Jetstreams and the U.S. Government's $3.3 million. It was like going on “The Price Is Right” and getting to keep both the money and the car.
The proof was right there in the newspapers...
“Dekkers, one of Sunrise's owners, said 32 pilots are being trained to fly the six 19-passenger Jetstream J31 turboprops in its fleet,” the Sarasota Herald Tribune reported two months after the Jetstreams were supposed to have been repossessed.
These were the Jetstreams Senator Reid told his Nevada constituents had been suddenly taken back by BAE, resulting in the airline going under. They were now in Florida, and were it not for Rudi Dekker's ceaseless self-promotion no one would ever have been the wiser.
Discover Air also used these Jetstreams when they launched charter flights connecting Miami, Orlando, St Petersburg and West Palm Beach with Key West and the Bahamas.
Even if he did represent Nevada, a real life U.S. Senator had lied for Hilliard, which is certainly an impressive credential. How well-connected does one have to be—or how rich—to receive that kind of treatment from one's elected representatives?
"What's Wally doing in Havana?"
Just weeks after launching the intra-state commuter service Florida Air went bankrupt, too, lasting barely long enough to get their only celebrity endorsement, a plug from Katherine Harris.
If you're still counting, we’re now up to five. Idle thought: how many companies going bankrupt are there that have been endorsed by both Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris?
For Hilliard, abject failure may be easier to endure when you encounter so much of it. The few professional airline personnel involved in Hilliard's operations found themselves baffled and puzzled about even the purpose of the enterprise.
“I used to look at Wally and Rudi and wonder what made them think they could start an airline,” former Director of Operations Bersch told us.
“I mean, I was on the executive team and here they were, trying to start an airline, and from August 2000 to the present we’ve had all of four business meetings.”
“Wouldn’t you think if you were trying to start an airline you’d have at least weekly meetings? And even when you could get a meeting scheduled, somebody would tell you that it had been canceled because Wally is in Havana.”
When Discover Air went bankrupt after ballyhooing new commuter air service between Orlando and Daytona Beach, reporters learned that not one person had bought a ticket on the flights.
That’s pretty brutal...if your aim is to be an airline.
If scheduled passenger service is the true aim of your enterprise, having not one person buy a ticket on your flights is a real embarrassment.
But flying passengers may not have been the purpose behind Discover Air or Florida Air or Sunrise Airlines. Some aviation observers see something more than just monumental incompetence in an operation simultaneously running drugs, 'busting out' companies at will, and training terrorists to fly.
Some suspect Wally Hilliard’s on-again off-again airlines were just cover.
Take, for example, the number of key personnel who have since been forced, as they say, to flee the country...like Pakistani national Pervez "P.J." Khan.
"Forced to flee town in something of a hurry."
"Khan was flying Lear jets around for Wally, and crashed one of them in Punta Gorda, injuring eight people last year," one of Hilliard's current executives told us in the middle of a derisive personnel run-down. "He was running a shady operation for Wally, flying to Havana daily in a Cessna 402."
"The latest I hear about P.J. is that he has to flee the country for one particular reason, and I don’t know what that reason is," he said coyly.
Or another Sunrise Airlines executive, former CEO Ian Alexander...
"He came to work drunk all of the time," said Bill Bersch. "He used to live in Atlanta, came to work for Florida Air, and has since fled to Canada."
Recall that when British Prime Minister Blair named Al Qaeda as the terrorist organization responsible for the 9/11 attack, he didn’t say it was a global network...
He said it had ‘ties’ to one.
Nearly 18 months later U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham referred to “the most important information” obtained in the Congressional probe of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Graham couldn’t reveal the information, however. It was classified.
His co-Chairman, Sen. Richard Shelby, who called it a “bombshell,” wasn’t at liberty to say either.
But what both men did indicate was that explosive evidence was being hidden from the American people involving an international organization or government which, the Senators said, had “facilitated the activities of the terrorist conspiracy while they were in the United States.”
The Senators sound like they're talking about Tony Blair’s unnamed ‘global network.’
Living underground has its drawbacks
Certainly the notion that Mohamed Atta and his henchmen got help from an international organization while they were in Florida is easy to understand...
Logistical support is difficult to arrange from caves.
But to this day the identity of the organization in question remains a closely-guarded secret.
Now the recent events in Orlando—a central Florida crossroads which Mohamed Atta frequented often enough to have opened a second bank account there—may help change all that.
The man who owned the ‘terror’ flight school in Venice Florida is involved with false front airlines, dummy front companies, shadowy charter operations of dubious intent and a politically-well-connected network plugged in to everyone from First Brother Jeb Bush to Clinton "fund-raiser" Truman Arnold.
This is indisputably a ‘global network;’ it is both covert and unacknowledged, and it was the American interface with the terrorists while they were here.
And nobody is investigating it...except the MadCowMorningNews.
In the hours and days after the terrorist attack front man Rudi Dekkers loudly proclaimed his innocence of collusion with the terrorists. This statement did nothing to explain their puzzling move from a rough port famous for its red light district to a retirement community offering a broad choice of assisted living environments.
Federal authorities have apparently so far bought the story. Like almost everything else to do with the 9/11 attack, it has escaped official comment, not to mention notice in the major media.
The silence has been deafening.
It's too bad these guys are so politically—and every other way—-connected.
Otherwise somebody would probably look into it.
Cointelpro 9.11: John Gray and Saudi Genesis
"John has a personal life history which I think helps explain why he would become a 9/11 skeptic. His father, a Texas oil millionaire, tried to warn authorities in Dallas that JFK's life was in danger, prior to Nov 22."
http://www.madcowprod.com/mc6712004.html
October 6 2004-Venice,FL.
by Daniel Hopsicker
A MadCowMorningNews investigation into allegations that “Mars & Venus” author John Gray and Saudi Billionaire Adnan Khashoggi's bankrupt GenesisIntermedia.com has been used in an effort to spread disinformation about the 9/11 attack on the Internet uncovered evidence last week that the firm had numerous underworld connections.
Testimony in an extortion trial in Tampa, Florida, the MadCowMorningNews learned exclusively, fingered Michael Muzio, President of Genesis subsidiary www.opendoormusic.com as the intended victim of a Mafia hit ordered by a business associate, Joseph Forlizzo of Queens.
While the court transcripts offered no explanation for why Forlizzo believed Genesis exec Muzio 'had it coming,' when Officers of public companies need key man insurance against the prospect of being rubbed out it can be bad for business.
Meanwhile the controversy continued over the hugely-successful self-help guru's funding of the recent International Citizen’s Inquiry into the 9/11 attack, even as he finds himself drawn in with his erstwhile partner in a growing financial scandal beginning to unspool in courtrooms across the country.
"The 'C'Mon Back' Scandal"
Dubbed “Stockgate” by business journalists, it involves massive looting and financial fraud, on a scale not seen since… well, since the last bout of massive looting and financial fraud in America, which informed sources indicate took place “not that damn long ago.”
The massive lawsuit was filed under the RICO racketeering statues in Federal Court in Minneapolis, and cites Gray for allegedly allowing use of his trading account in furtherance of the scam, which netted more than $100 million.
Despite the huge sum involved, the scandal at GenesisIntermedia is but a piece in a larger mosaic of dozens of companies being systematically looted by people recently characterized in Jack Anderson's column as “criminals, money launderers and terrorists.”
For whatever reason, associates of Gray & Khashoggi apparently feel they belong to a charmed circle of people that fiscal watchdogs in the U.S. have given the 'high sign' to “back up a truck.”
"The One-Two Punch of Love"
Even as one of the best-selling authors of all time continues to spread money around to 9/11 'Truth Movement” principals, a business partner continues to pursue his lawsuit against one of only a few investigative journalists challenging the government's official story with eyewitness evidence. Wow. How unlucky is that? Is it just a coincidence?
The answer is almost too obvious for words. No one was bothering to hide the pathetic flailing-about of third-rate scrubs denied more glamorous employment in their chosen field.
John Gray also has strange and so-far unexplained connections to two Middle Eastern men "of interest" in the 9/11 investigation, both of whom reside in San Diego.
The first is a Saudi Professor who housed two of the hijackers, cited recently by Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Intelligence Committee Hearings, as evidence of involvement in the attack by people working for the government of Saudi Arabia.
The second is an Iranian exile, running a network used to infiltrate hundreds of Middle Eastern men illegally into the United States, according to court documents. And it is likely that the Saudi Professor also belongs to this ring. Consider the following:
Until moving to California Iranian Sam Koutchesfahani had been a retainer to the Shah. He's been one busy expatriate ever since. Faster than you can say "Savak" he was running a network used to infiltrate Middle Eastern men into the U.S., while also finding time to hang out with the Heaven’s Gate cultists, 39 of whom died in his mansion in the wealthy San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe, in March of 1997.
"Can't we see the replay before we decide?
Is it coincidence that a man running a ring slipping Middle Eastern men into the U.S. also rented out a 'safe house' to cultists ramping up for a launch towards Hale Bopp and the Level Above Human?
We know what they'd say on NFL Sunday: "You make the call."
But anyway you slice it, its a small world. Even John Gray knew cult leader Marshall Applewhite, apparently, back in Houston, Texas. where both lived in the 60’s and 70’s. Even the Heaven's Gate cult's Internet Service Provider may have links to Khashoggi's fine family' of companies, all of whom carry the code word Genesis in their name. We call them, collectively, "Saudi Genesis."
Our mind protested the conclusion staring us in the face. After all, John Gray is the best selling author in the Solar System, responsible for annual revenues totaling more than the budgets of countries with seats at the United Nations.
He would certainly have been heavily scrutinized by dozens of journalists. If he knew the dopey Applewhite, wouldn't it have surfaced before now?
Similarly, the Heaven’s Gate cult was the news for several weeks when it occurred seven years ago. What could remain hidden after that kind of media attention?
Apparently…a lot.
"It's like Iowa, but with a beach."
But first, here's a brief introduction into the intrigue we will soon see swirling in San Diego…
The clue which would eventually lead to a ‘protected’ network came from researcher Kelly Cooke http://researched.blogspot.com/ who tipped us to a man we’d never heard of before, Sam Koutchesfahani.
While it was our first exposure to Koutchesfahani, TV news crews had made his mansion so recognizable after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide that neighbors voted to change the name of their street to deter lookie-loos.
Sam, too, we discovered, has since changed his name.
Sam is from an Iranian family close to the Shah of Iran, stated wire service reports. He’d moved to San Diego after the Shah was deposed. Sam’s San Diego network, we learned, paid bribes to dozens of college and university instructors for bogus student transcripts then used to help insert hundreds of middle eastern men, most of whom were anything but students, into the U.S. under the guise that they were.
Sam and the Unnamed Saudi were clearly both in the same business. A connection seems obvious. The flying school patronized by the San Diego terrorists, for example, was run by another Iranian exile, Fereidoun Sorbi.
Has this not occurred to the FBI? They've said nothing about the network, so it appears they've “overlooked” it in their “massive” investigation into the biggest crime in US history. Another case of FBI bungling?
No, unfortunately. The silence owes something to the fact both men were the FBI’s “own.”
Like Rudi Dekkers, both Saudi Professor Abdussattar Shaikh and Iranian ‘facilitator’ Sam Koutchesfahani were confidential informants for the FBI's San Diego office. And “colleagues” of the Professor were named in court documents as having been paid off by Koutchesfahani. The 9/11 Commission Report hinted the two hijackers living with the Saudi Professor arrived via this connection.
But there's more... The Saudi “Professor,” now retired, taught at a bogus “University” in San Diego, we discovered, run by the same people who awarded “Dr.” John Gray” his—we almost said bogus but stopped ourselves—his much-disputed “PhD.”
How amazing is that? Saudi “Professor” Abdussattar Shaikh is so well protected by the Bush Administration that they wouldn't even let the FBI serve a subpoena to compel his testimony before the Intelligence Committee investigation into the 9/11 attack, even though it was the only subpoena issued by the congressional inquiry.
The Senate Intelligence Committee would have had better luck calling the "Make A Wish" Foundation.
“That was a smoking gun,'' Graham said, although inexplicably no one in the media was paying him any attention. “The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House.''
"You're not cleared for any of that information."
We were entering territory considered “too sensitive” for the American people to know about. We were mucking around on the edges of the 27 blank pages in the Congressional Intelligence Report.
It was all very "Hush Hush."For example,while the Saudi Professor’s case is discussed in the text of the 9/11 Commission Report, he is not mentioned once by name.
“Hamzi and Midhar finally found a room to rent in the house of ‘an individual’ that they met at a mosque in San Diego,” the report says. “According to the ‘homeowner’…
The 9/11 Commission report of this story sets a new record, we realized while reading it, for most lies packed into a single sentence in a government document. A high degree of difficulty was involved. Its like participating in a “record drug bust in Florida.”
There’s a lot of stiff competition for the title.
“The housemate who rented the room to Hazmi and Mihddar (two of the 19 hijackers) is an apparently law-abiding citizen," lied the report, "with long-standing friendly contacts among local police and FBI personnel….who saw nothing unusual in (their) behavior to prompt him to report to his law enforcement contacts.”
FBI counter intelligence informant Abdussattar Shaikh hosted two of the hijackers while providing more than enough information for San Diego field agents to request an investigation.
But FBI headquarters refused the plea from a San Diego FBI agent to investigate the two hijackers-in-training. They increasingly seem to us to have been operating on some other agenda which has not yet been fully explained to the American people. Because incompetence only cuts it as an explanation for so long.
At some point questions of the FBI's "motive" must begin to be asked.
A comet, sure! But with a spaceship in its tail!
Is there anything about author Gray, other than his association with Khashoggi, which suggests his truthfulness might be in question?
Biographies of Gray have him being born in Houston, Texas, in, variously, 1950, 1951, or 1952.
After high school he attended St. Thomas University and the University of Texas before "hooking up" with the Maharishi.
Thus Khashoggi (whose family of cultists will be covered later) and Gray both have backgrounds which fit nicely with last week's theme of “cultish involvement” in a 9/11 “Truth Movement” chock-full of people who sometimes slip and say "data crystal" when they mean "diskette."
A profile of Gray called “TOWER OF PSYCHOBABBLE; HEALER OR HUCKSTER?” in TIME magazine revealed that the cult’s guru, Marshall Applewhite, had known John Gray’s mother, who owned of a New Age bookstore in Applewhite’s adopted hometown of Houston.
Gray fired off a letter of protest to TIME making the point that anyone who ever walked into her bookstore could be said to have “known” his mother. But conspicuously absent in Gray’s angry letter to the editor were any indications that Gray himself might have known Applewhite, a dead ringer for My Favorite Martian.
John Gray was a student at the tiny University of Saint Thomas in Houston, we discovered, while Applewhite was teaching there and becoming embroiled in a messy scandal involving a homosexual affair with one of his students.
“Born in Houston, Texas, in 1951, after high school Gray attended St. Thomas University and the University of Texas,” begins Gray’s author biography. Curiously, his most recent bios leap right past this sticky wicket entirely, going from his being awarded a high school diploma—the only undisputed educational credential he apparently possesses—to his nine years as private secretary to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, where he became one of the first TM'ers to 'fly' (read: bounce) during meditation.
A total psychic re-construct
Enter Marshall Applewhite, complete with his trademark weird beady eyes. Two strands most stories highlighted about Applewhite were his conventional religious background and his torment about his homosexuality.
“The University of St. Thomas in Houston hired him as an associate professor in 1966. He became a driving force behind the university-sponsored Houston Festival Chorus and at one time was head of the music department,” said The Toronto Sun.
“St. Thomas fired Applewhite in 1970 for what the college called "health problems of a mental nature," reported a Houston Chronicle story headlined “Leader was recruited here; Nurse told him God had kept him alive."
Gray was a student while Applewhite was getting into trouble rubbing male students the wrong way. A call to the University of St Thomas’s Admissions Office in Houston elicited information that there were only a few hundred students at the school at the time. So Gray and Applewhite almost certainly knew each other, during what was a bad time for at least one of them.
“His particular crisis came in 1970, when university administrators learned Applewhite was in a relationship with a male student and asked him to leave,” read one local news account.
"The firing followed a homosexual affair he had with a student," said the Washington Post. “Suffering from depression and shame, hearing "voices" (Applewhite) then checked into a hospital, asking to be "cured" of his homosexual desires,” reported the Post.
Marshall Applewhite fled to a psychiatric hospital in such disgrace that he must have felt only a total psychic makeover would do. During psychiatric re-programming he became involved with a New Age nurse and amateur astrologer named Bonnie Nettles. They “bonded.”
Maybe Applewhite saw her as offering a way out. Maybe Nurse Betty said, "Look into my eyes."
There were no "maybe's about the result. The result was Heaven’s Gate.
"Hot pants in Heaven"
“My mother was involved with all of this back in the early '70s when it all started -- back when I was just a kid, 12 years old," said Bonnie Nettle's son after the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide.
He remembered a gathering at Applewhite's Montrose-area residence: "He had some people over there, and I noticed they were kind of strange. Some of the guys wore makeup, hot pants, a lot of weird things. And I didn't know what a gay person was."
So the re-programming may not have been totally successful..
Straight guys only rarely wear hot pants.
In an apparently unrelated development Gray left Houston at about the same time for Switzerland, where he became—for the next nine years--the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's private secretary. Two separate lives intersected at a tiny Catholic college before spinning off in bizarrely unexpected directions for both men.
This is probably just a coincidence.
But what happened next had nothing to do with coincidence whatever. There was clearly something in the mental conditioning Marshall Applewhite received at Bellaire Hospital in Houston, where he also completely adopted Nurse Betty's science fiction-cum-Christianity fantasies, that set poor gay Marshall Applewhite onto his tragic course to immortality as the answer to a question in Trivial Pursuits.
Despite this obvious conclusion, in the millions of words written about the cult in the wake of their mass suicide, we could find not one news report that even raised the question. Mass cult suicides apparently don't raise eyebrows anymore, or questions of possible brainwashing or mental programming.
Wow. We were shocked. Shocked! So we decided to commit journalism. What the hell, we figured...
We could always raise bail.
"Break on through to the other side."
We come now to the defining episode, apparently, in John Gray’s life. He describes it often, in interviews, in seminars and in his infomercials. It concerns the death of his father, and when we first heard the story it sounded too weird to be true. So we checked it out.
Guess what? It is too weird to be true.
Gray grew up in the well-to-do River Oaks section of Houston, Texas…
John was “one of seven children of a well-to-do oil executive who died in 1985 after hitchhikers robbed him and locked him in the trunk of his car. His mother ran a spiritual bookshop and knew Heaven's Gate cultist Marshall Applewhite,” says the TIME profile Gray found offensive.
Here’s the story from a sympathetic newspaper profile in the Dallas Morning News:
“It was 1985, and Gray had just gotten remarried. He and his bride, Bonnie, were honeymooning in Canada when he got an urgent phone call from his mother in Houston. His father, David Thomas Gray, had been found dead in the trunk of his car.
A retired oil executive, David Gray was a good Samaritan who enjoyed doing charity work. He also had a habit of giving rides to hitchhikers. One stifling hot day in July, as David Gray drove to Nacogdoches to visit relatives, he picked up a couple of hitchhikers.
"They robbed him and left him in the trunk," John Gray says. "I guess they thought he might chase them. He wouldn't have. He'd been happy to give his money to them, and he did."
Someone, perhaps one of the hitchhikers, placed an anonymous call to police to report the abandoned car. "But the police didn't get the directions right," John Gray says.
Finally, Virginia Gray called police when her husband didn't show up in Nacogdoches. "She described the car, and they found it, and he was dead in his trunk. He died of heat asphyxiation in the Texas sun. He cooked in there. It was very traumatic."
As the family gathered in Houston for the funeral, John Gray acted on an unusual impulse. "I wanted to get into the car and see what happened. It just sounded so horrible."
“He crawled into the trunk and closed the lid," reported the paper. "He could see where his father had taken a screwdriver and banged on the hood. He also noticed that the tail light had been pried open, apparently for air. John Gray pushed his hand through the opening.”
"My brother said, 'See if you can reach the button from there.' I went outside with my hand and reached around to the button and opened the trunk."
John Gray's face betrays only a trace of irony. "So that was another layer in the whole thing. He could have reached the button and let himself out. He wasn't a stupid guy _ I'm not a stupid guy. But when you're inside the trunk, you're panicking and trying to get out, you don't think about how you would get in. You have to have a different perspective to see that."
It was as if his father had left him one last valuable lesson, he says. "And that was, there are so many problems in this world where people are locked in trunks, and they just need a different perspective. You need to go on that other side to solve the problem.
"And that's kind of what I feel I've done with 'Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus'.
"I'll paint any car for $39.95!"
A Gray associate’s website drives home the sales pitch. “If only their father had thought of this, he would still be alive,” wrote Kathy Gates, Professional Life Coach, at www.reallifecoach.com
"But it took his brother on the outside to notice the button. The lesson? Sometimes you have to step outside the situation you feel trapped in to see that you're not trapped after all.”
Even leaving aside for a moment the horrible tackiness of using the death of your father as part of your sales pitch, we had some problems with this. So we began to make inquiries.
We learned that the incident had happened in Nacogdoches, Texas, a small town thirty miles outside the middle of nowhere. Robbie Goodrich, the editor of the local paper, remembered it vaguely.
“I don’t remember too many details. I remember the police never did classify the death as a homicide. He was somebody that liked to put himself in strange situations or something.”
Robbie kindly dug through the paper’s computerized files, and found a story about Strange Deaths and Unsolved Murders in Nacogdoches County.
“David Thomas Gray — July 5, 1985 — “Gray’s body was found in the trunk of his 1973 Mercedes off U.S. Hwy, 59 south of Nacogdoches,” stated the story, which ran on July 12, 2004.
“The death was ruled accidental, as Gray evidently died from asphyxia due to suffocation and heat exhaustion. Family members said Gray had gotten into his trunk before just to see if he could get out.”
Well now. This was curious, and warranted further investigation.
A guy gets carjacked, locked into a car trunk, and dies of asphyxiation… And the death’s not ruled a homicide. Hmm. A few phone calls later we were speaking with former Sheriff Joe Evans, who had worked on the case.
"None of that would be true."
“He died in the trunk of his BMW, that’s right,” he told us. “He was rich and had retired, and supposedly spent all his time pretty much driving aimlessly around. According to the family he’d locked himself in the trunk before, just to see if you could get out,” Evans stated.
So he hadn’t been carjacked?
“He was not robbed,” Evans said. “He had all his credit cards, his wallet, and plenty of cash when we found him. So robbery was not a motive.”
Don’t carjackers usually rob their victims?
“The case has always puzzled me,” he admitted. “You could see the family were all highly intelligent and very well-educated. But they were really strange. It seemed like they all had completely different lifestyles, and there was no cohesiveness, they seemed to be all going off in different directions. It was the most dysfunctional family I’ve ever seen.”
We told the Sheriff the outlines of the story Gray tells, about his dad being a good Samaritan and getting carjacked, and the police not being able to follow directions and get to the car in time.
“None of that would be true,” he said slowly.
So what did happen?
Sheriff Evans said he didn’t know. “We know what his movements were. He’d visited someone here, stopped at an ATM, got gas and a quart of oil. One family member made the comment that it was typical of his father to have done something like this, lock himself in a trunk. So in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the death was ruled accidental. But what he did has never made sense to me.”
When a homicide detective in Houston drove out to the mother’s Aquarian Age Bookstore to relay the news that her husband had been found dead, Sheriff Evans relayed, he found her reaction strange.
“She was having a meeting in the bookstore, and when the detective said her husband had been found dead, she asked him if he could come back later, after her meeting was over. The detective told me he said: 'that’s not the way it worked.'”
The death remains a mystery. Before hanging up, the Sheriff asked us to get in touch with him if we found anything out.
“You know, in a lot of unsolved cases, we’re still in touch with the family years later, because for them there's no closure. But they seemed like they just wanted to pick up the body and forget about it. Its not like they were calling us all the time wondering if we’d found any leads.”
Then we discovered a statement about John Grays’ father made recently by Canadian talk host Barrie Zwicker to researcher Brian Salter. Zwicker is reportedly in business with Gray, making him a seemingly credible source.
Apparently there has been some talk that David Gray had worked for the CIA.
“John has a personal life history which I think helps explain why he would become a 9/11 skeptic,” wrote Zwicker. “He has reason to be deeply suspicious of the power elite. His father, a Texas oil millionaire, tried to warn the authorities in Dallas, prior to Nov. 22, 1963, that JFK's life was in danger. He had heard the rumors circulating.”
When we read this we thought, "Now we gettin' into it!"
In our next story we’ll profile the dozen or so companies that together comprise “Saudi Genesis,” owned or backed by Khashoggi’s network, and take a look at how they've corporately affected us all...
But we want to close today's story where it began...with an attorney who’d incorporated Genesis, and later led the effort to take it public. In yesterday’s email, we received a notice that he is--even as we speak!--taking another company public.
The press release was routine. Everyone always has nothing but nice things to say about each other. No talk of anyone getting 'rubbed out" to mar the air of sunny optimism in the face of an ever-brighter tomorrow.
He stated, "The…story is a fresh and compelling one…” The company’s President and CEO, Dominique Einhorn, said "We are privileged to be associated with US EURO Securities..."
The reason we mention it is the name of the company ‘ol Michael Roy has got hisself excited about.
Cointelpro pt 3: Khashoggi, Cults, Cover-ups and Mars & Venus do lunch
The story of the auto thief from Cleveland who discovered 39 dead bodies in Rancho Santa Fe Ca. in March of 1997 in the Heaven’s Gate cult mass suicide is a reflection in a fun house mirror of America's secret history of freakish cults, financial fraud, and the occasional member of the Rockefeller family, all of which helped make possible today's 9.11 cover-up
October 13 2004-Venice,FL.
by Daniel Hopsicker
http://www.madcowprod.com/MC6812004.html
After finding the bodies of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult on a balmy afternoon in Southern California, arrayed in neat rows and wearing brand new Nikes, Nick Matzorkis became instantly famous.
Soon he’d sold rights to the story of the cult suicide to the Hollywood entertainment company for which both he and some of the dead cultists worked. It was a smart move.
But fame can be a two-edged sword, and Matzorkis wound up suffering the twin fates common to people in certain circles in L. A.: a short-lived production deal, and jail time.
A probation officer saw him on national television, and 'made' him as a wanted felon who'd skipped out on his sentence. He was jailed and returned to Cleveland, coincidentally the home of financier Carl Icahn, who will figure later in our story for allowing his name be used to prop up Adnan Khashoggi and John Gray’s Genesis Intermedia in an announcement he’d extended the company a $100 million credit line even as company principals were filling their pockets with pens and staplers on their way out the door. Nothing was left behind...except thousands of angry investors.
Ichan, strangely, also figures peripherally in the Heaven’s Gate saga: when the cultists threw themselves a final going-away-to-Hale Bopp party in January of 1997, they held the bash at Icahn’s Stratosphere Casino in Vegas, which he was then in the process of purchasing out of bankruptcy.
A 10-year old girl, looking out to sea
We were first tipped to the interesting Mr. Matzorkis by researcher Kelly Cooke, adding a human dimension to a story that otherwise sometimes seems to take place in the 13th Dimension. Sadly for Ms. Cooke, both of whose parents committed suicide under the influence of the group, it didn’t.
After the mass suicide, a Marin County, Ca. newspaper reported, “Michael Sykes of Modoc County, a former owner of Point Reyes Books, remembered the couple fondly. "Nick was an artist and philosopher and very much a conversationalist, talking late into the night," he said. "Suzanne was lively, animated, and interested in the arts."
“Sykes… recalled she took Kelly with her to Washington State to plant trees for a timber company. It was upon her return that she started following a group that preached of heavenly UFOs, he said.
"I thought they went off the deep end," said Susan Deixler of Inverness Park, whom they asked to take care of their daughter. Recalling their determination to leave, Deixler said: "They seemed hypnotized. You would come up against the wall when you tried to talk to them about this. It was strange."
Mathewson and her ex-husband eventually accepted responsibility for Kelly. "It all happened very quick, and there wasn't much time for an explanation," she said.
“Charlie Morgan of Inverness recalled 10-year-old Kelly "standing on the corner [in Point Reyes Station] looking bewildered and alone because her parents were off with the space people."
While following the often-convoluted story, the memory of this image provided a simple illustration of what it is about.
Auto thieves drinking with 'the swells'
We became suspicions of Matzorkis after reading a neighbor of the cult, businessman Anthony Demopoulos, recall that the cultists seemed slow-talking, deliberate, almost robotic in their actions.
"They were not normal people," he stated flatly. "Something was done to them."
Pretty astute.. Demopoulos noticed that one cultist, John Craig, known as "Brother Logan," held sway over the others. "He would never let them even be on the phone alone to talk to me. They couldn't breathe without him."
“In contrast, Beverly Hills computer businessman Nick Matzorkis, who employed about a dozen cult members to design World Wide Web sites, had the impression that they were not being coerced. His employee Richard Ford, or "Rio," is the former cultist who discovered the bodies,” read a wire service account. "The one thing that's been made very clear to me in conversations with Rio is that anyone was free to leave at any time," Matzorkis said.
Mohamed Atta's erstwhile lunch-mate Rudi Dekkers never saw anything amiss, either. Were they working from the same playbook?
Cultists deaths forgotten, Matzorkis went on to help raise $ 54 million in an Internet initial public stock offering for a heavily-advertised online venture called U.S. Search.com. Two years ago he founded a company in China with a partner with a slightly-more illustrious pedigree, Nicholas Rockefeller.
The press release announcing their company said the principals were “Nicholas Matzorkis, who in 1994 founded US SEARCH, the number one people locator service in the world, and Nicholas Rockefeller Esq., a leading venture capital counselor. GlobalAgora is believed to be the first U.S. company to launch first in the People's Republic.”
From auto thief to Beverly Hills businessman and partnered in an international company with a scion of the Rockefeller clan...just another heady American success story? To paraphrase Latin ballplayer Chico Esquella’s famous line on Saturday Night Live:
“Heaven’s Gate Been Berry Berry Good to Me.”
There’s no real way to ask the question politely: Are Matzorkis’ connections with Nicholas Rockefeller coincidental to his earlier involvement with the Heaven’s Gate Cult?
As they say in Hollywood… Let’s take a look.
What to Do Do when the Spot Spot won’t come Out Out?
The highly-visible campaign spreading ever-more implausible red herrings about the real mysteries of the 9/11 attack owes its existence to a simple fact of human nature.
As far back as the ancient Greeks—and as true today as then—is the idea that crime always shows itself, and is eventually discovered.
Certain news cannot be suppressed. Truth will come to light.
“Though it hide a year or two, or three,” wrote Chaucer, “Murder will out.”
Certainly this is a line to send a shiver down the spine of anyone with so far unannounced culpability in the 9.11 attack. For example, American national security officials conducting ‘business as usual’ before the attack must have felt they’d gotten caught without a stool when the music stopped. Who wanted to cop to playing "Dialing for Dollars" with the world’s Heroin Kingpins Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar before the plane's hit?
These two men dominated the world’s heroin market, yet there had been no reports in the press of any shortage of heroin during the months before the attack, either in the U.S. or abroad.Somebody had exposure.
The American people may be forgiving, but what if they had learned that the terrorists presence in the U.S. had been tolerated and even protected by U.S. officials engaged in international trafficking with Atta’s paymasters in Kabul? Picture Jerry Falwell trying to peddle forgiveness for that down the aisles at Liberty Baptist in Lynchburg.
You see the point. If only figuratively, heads would certainly have rolled.
Clearly, the revelation in “Welcome to Terrorland” that a Lear Jet with 43 lbs of heroin on board belonged to the man whose flight school Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al Shehhi had only recently begun attending was a bit of dashed bad luck for someone.
It didn’t help that the plane had been flying weekly milk runs to Venezuela and back for 30 consecutive weeks before getting caught.
That the pilot’s day job was as chief pilot on Venezuela’s Air Force One only made things worse….
That the co-pilot was himself reportedly a DEA agent stationed in Guyana was yet more bad luck…
The fact that the flight school owner actually has a close connection with the Reverend Falwell made this a sticky wicket of potential major consequence.
Did someone go a little queasy in the stomach at the discovery that a key player in the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy had been implicated in the biggest narcotics bust in the entire sordid history of Central Florida?
We like to think so.
Because when you’re going after people who could be charged with 3000 counts of 1st degree homicide, its important to savor the little victories. Because when you're waging a 9.11 info war with powerful people with a lot to lose, there may not be any bigger ones. Especially when they order up a circus:
“Send in the Clowns World Tour ’04.”
“The 9/11 Truth Movement gives one insight why the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ came to be shorthand for "discredited whacko" in the invisible guidebook of mainstream media,” wrote Sander Hicks. “Suddenly, it’s not hard to understand why the obvious anomalies in the JFK assassination never received proper attention in accepted media channels.”
"If you have just as many nutty theories about the driver of the limo turning around and shooting JFK as you have honest scientific inquiries about the real probability of multiple shooters, the wheat drowns in the chaff.”
Today's disinformation offensive on the real questions about 9.11 that must be answered, however, is not the first time Americans have been manipulated through being asked to “see the flash.”
So there's a paper trail. This is good news, but first, let's begin our journey with a visit to the psy-ops murk of Saudi Genesis. What's being lost in the White Noise is the news that evidence constituting inconvenient knowledge about the 9/11 attack continues to seep to the surface...It just isn't being noticed much anymore.
“Tired of dull knives that destroy your dinners? Fed up with knives that just won’t cut?”
“Do you see the flash? How about now? Do you see it now?”
Real Clues for Real People
Here’s a real clue to unraveling 9/11, a huge gold nugget, in fact, tucked unnoticed in a 9.11 third anniversary recap in the Chicago Tribune:
“Despite his comfortable origins, Atta was notorious for his frugality,” says the Sept 12, 2004 story, headlined “Kind teacher to murderous zealot; Acquaintances saw hijacker transform.”
“And yet his (Atta’s) bank and credit card records show repeated contributions to Islamic charities working in the Balkans, the mark of a devoted Muslim. In what appears to be a more noteworthy act of generosity to someone he barely knew, in 1995 Atta lent a Turkish baker, Muharrem Acar, some $25,000 to help Acar open a bakery.”
“Acar told the BKA that Atta didn't even ask for a promissory note when he made the loan.
“I don't know why El-Amir had so much money," he said. "I did not want to know either. I heard later that his father was a lawyer. Maybe his family supplied him well."
Where did penniless grad student Mohamed Atta get $25,000 in 1995, years before the official story has him joining Al Qaeda? Where did Atta get access to so much cash that 25k was no big deal?
Discovering who the terrorist ringleader’s paymaster was back in 1995 would be a huge piece of the puzzle. Following a money trail is not brain surgery either... Government prosecutors find answers to questions like that all day long... when they want to.
This is the essence of the concept of ‘the secret history.’
“6 Second Abs & 9.11 Conspiracies Revealed!”
“Ladies and gentlemen of the press, Peak Oil activists worldwide…”
See the Flash? Now? How ‘bout now?”
Rockefeller's Favorite Martian
The Rockefeller family got interested in the reptoids earlier than most, and apparently for different reasons. Most use stories of UFO's for mild amusement. Not the Rockefellers, though. They were interested in using the stories for control. In fact, if it weren’t for the Rockefeller Foundation's previous mass psychology experiments, which starred the Martians, today's cover-up effort by American officials might not be proceeding as smoothly as it has.
Here’s what happened:
At precisely 8pm on the evening of October 30th 1938, the Mercury Radio Network interrupted the music of Ramon Rachello and His Orchestra for a special news bulletin. A huge flaming object, believed to be a meteorite, had fallen on a farm near Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Moments later comes a correction…
“Its not a meteorite, no! Incredibly, there are Martian cylinders falling all over the country!”
The famous War of the Worlds broadcast has begun. With its terrifyingly real descriptions of an invasion from Mars, before the night is out a million people will run panicked into the streets.
But what has been--for almost fifty years--a closely guarded secret, is this: Orson Wells' broadcast was no mere show business stunt, but an Experiment in Fear, a psychological warfare test conducted for the Rockefeller Foundation.
Here's a quote from “America Under Attack” A Reassessment of Orson Welles War of the Worlds” by Paul Heyler of Willfrid Laurier University:
“A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to Princeton University helped create the Princeton Office of Radio Research. The director was Paul Lazersfeld, an Austrian Jewish émigré and a social psychologist whose expertise in quantitative methods was tempered by a humanist leaning. He teamed with two associates, psychologist Hadley Cantrell and CBS researcher Fred Stanton, a PhD in psychology who would eventually become network president.”
Paging Jerry Falwell
Pretty smart company. The book continues:
“The broadcast was a psychological warfare experiment conducted by The Princeton Radio Project. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the project in the fall of 1937. An Office of Radio Research was set up with Paul F. Lazersfeld as director, and Frank Stanton and Hadley Cantrell as associate directors. Using demographic data on the broadcast’s audience gleaned from a 10-page interview questionnaire given to 135 people, they created a book, “Invasion From Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic.”
The results were available to only a few, apparently, with no talk of any paperback release Yet more than 12 percent of the American radio audience had listened to the broadcast. More than half that number took it seriously. By sociologist Hadley Cantrell’s account, published in a landmark study for the Rockefeller Foundation, more than a million people were frightened by Welles' broadcast.
The strongest currents of fear were among less-educated people and poor Southern folk. (Jerry Falwell took note.)
The emergence of the comet Hale Bopp decades later will mark a resurgence in warnings of catastrophe; insistent messages of doom & gloom; the end of Life As We Know. Remember Y2K? There were actually people peddling the 'hot tip' that freeze-dried foods would soon attain the status of Kobe beef just after the clock struck "Y2K" and the grid went dark...
Imagine that.
Everything you need to know about Adnan Khashoggi
Info on Khashoggi runs the gamut from the ridiculous to the sinister. To get the serious stuff out of the way first:
"Khashoggi was among a number of prominent Arab businessmen, like Khalid Mahfouz, who agreed to continue what have been described by US intelligence officials as "protection payments" to bin Laden at a meeting in Paris in 1998, said London's Sunday Business Post October 7, 2001.
But there's also a fun side to Adnan's slightly-slimier side...
Back in the early 90’s satirical magazine “Spy” launched an operation to find the world’s cheapest man, and they sent checks for 64 cents to a couple dozen friends of 'The Donald.' Those that cashed the checks got another check from Spy, this one for 32 cents. If they cashed that check they got one for 16 cents.
Adnan Khashoggi was the last man standing. The billionaire cashed a check for 32 cents.
Any quick look at the Saudi arms dealer shows his notoriety stems from more than just singing too loud in church, or mosque, or whatever temple roof he and Imelda Marco huddle underneath together with their personal guru.
Even Khashoggi’s guru has CIA connections, we learned: the vastly rich swami has been under official suspicion in the assassination of Indian Premier Rajiv Ghandi, and was even arrested by Indian police for currency fraud.
Adnan Khashoggi revealed: He is wanted in Thailand, where he was convicted for fraud in absentia; is currently being sued, in a major and well-publicized case in Federal Court in Minneapolis for what may turn out to be criminal fraud; reportedly, he is also currently the subject of a massive investigation being conducted by the U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles.
Add to that the recently declassified American intelligence report from 1991 listing the top 100 drug traffickers and associates. It included lawyers, right-wing paramilitary fighters, a Peruvian rebel commander, a Colombian singer, a pre-dead Pablo Escobar, a pre-jailbird Manuel Noriega... and Adnan Khashoggi.
Well now. No wonder denials of impropriety in accepting money from Khashoggi's business partner John Gray were so quick from so-called 9.11 "Truth Movement" principals.
"I asked John personally about what connection, if any, he has or had with Adnan Khashoggi,” said Toronto talk host Barrie Zwicker. “John satisfied me that he is aware of the anti-life nature of Khashoggi's activities, that he has not associated with him and would never want to, that he was caught up in the aftermath of dirty dealings by Khashoggi and other dot com crooks and in fact was one of their victims.”
The Great 9/11 Bun & Thigh Roller Deception
"A victim of circumstance and “dot com crooks”
Here we do not believe Zwicker is referencing the friendly folks at Pinnacle Quest, a vehicle for international fraudsters endorsed by Michael C. Ruppert on his website. He also provides them a vigorous defense; perhaps he feels cheating widows and orphans reduces population pressure and so is ultimately all to the good.
Ruppert said, “PQI has presented some remarkable information that is totally suppressed in the US. That includes successful treatments for cancer and for many other serious diseases…”
Here we note that self-described “Detective-Journalist” Ruppert has apparently slipped in “Clinician” too, when no one was looking. We pictured Andy Griffith in the con man classic Elmer Gantry.
Some sample quotes about Ruppert’s fraudster friends:
“ Anderson was extradited to the United States a few days ago (December 4, 2002), his brother (Wayne Anderson) was recently sentenced to serve much of the rest of his life in a federal prison, most of his key people have been incarcerated, and his offshore empire has crumbled."
“On March 31, 2002, Global officially went out of business, replaced by Pinnacle Quest, International (PQI). At the official introductory gathering at the Hyatt Hotel in Bellevue... "
"A lawsuit has already been filed against Pinnacle Quest in Arizona.”
"On April 22, 2002, Squaw Valley California residents Terri Yvonne Lewis (42), and Steven Lyle Anderson (37), each pled guilty in US District Court/Fresno to charges related to conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The defendants are children of Wayne Anderson and they were charged with shredding documents and erasing computer files in an effort to thwart a federal grand jury investigation.”
“The reality is that Global, much like Investors International, holds seminars in exotic places where the true believers rally round and sing the system’s praises to new initiates while (more or less) independent hucksters promote their particular schemes to the attendees.”
“North Dakota issued a cease and desist order to keep the company from doing business there.”
“On top of the $1,200 audiotape package, Global members are invited to attend seminars in places like Cancun, Mexico and the Bahamas where independent entrepreneurs pay IGP to make their pitch. The cost of attendance: $6,250. For more than 12 hours a day, the attendees sit through one sales pitch after another for real estate prospects, tax avoidance schemes and high-growth investment opportunities.”
More that 12 hours a day? We wondered if it was one of these things where they won't let you pee.
Ruppert said, “Am I aware that some members of PQI have had criminal charges pressed against them? Absolutely! So have many dedicated patriots and whistleblowers throughout our country's history…”
"The Paul Revere Ponzi Scheme?"
We tried to picture it. It was a little hard. But "9/11 Flim-Flam Man" was an easy image to conjure up
Ruppert's PQI, with its fresh start to do right this time, has already been in trouble. In U.S. Court proceedings filed in Oklahoma against a former PQI consultant, for example, whose actions were described as being part of "perhaps the largest and most notorious tax fraud scheme in history."
The Massachusetts Securities Commission declared Global Prosperity Group (which was closed down in May last year and "re-opened" the next day as PQI) to be "an illegal pyramid scheme."
They were ordered permanently to cease trading in that state.
PQI sales consultants are in New Zealand promoting a "three-stage educational process," we learned. "First, you buy a set of instructional CDs (cost, $2200). Second, you attend a seminar. The next is in Mexico (cost, $10,800). Then, you attend another seminar on a cruise ship (cost, nearly $26,000). These fees cover entry to the seminar and purchase of the CDs. They do not include airfares, accommodation, food or expenses."
“Pinnacle Quest International (PQI) is a US company that promises to introduce you to "secret companies" that will provide returns of over 100 percent, and teach you how to avoid ever paying tax again. You'll also be in line for some hefty consultant commissions.”
"People like Queen Elizabeth II and Muhammad Ali are involved with PQI. Not many people know this," sales consultants confided.
"As for the secret companies, only the mega-rich have known about them up until now."
Could it all be somehow true?
"The lion will lay down with the lamb...But only one will get back up."
Neither Queen Elizabeth nor Muhammad Ali responded to MadCowMorningNews requests for confirmation of their involvement in secret companies for the mega-rich as touted by PQI. Could they be hiding something? Maybe they just don't want the masses in the cheap seats to know about it...
More likely that the self-appointed "pit-bull of 9/11" & the 'Fearless Leader' of the 9.11 'Truth Movement cadre' is all out of credibility except when hawking secret companies at 9.11 cadre functions, during those odd moments when they're not going all out in search for the real truth.
John Gray’s financing of infomercials touting Zwicker’s new 9-11 documentary were vastly more entertaining that Ruppert’s thoughts on cancer cures, anyway. Greedy People are as endlessly fascinating as their many schemes; those who have just "Gone Puffy" are only good for a laugh if they can also pull off sticking their hand inside their shirt, Napoleon-like.
http://fromthewilderness.com/members/090106_last_days.shtml#_edn1
http://fromthewilderness.com/members/082906_samurai_sunrise.shtml
Canadian talk host Zwicker's laissez faire attitude towards the controversy had a brazen quality that was not altogether unattractive... "John is helping out financially with various aspects of the 9/11 skeptics movement,” Zwicker sniffed. “In my own case there are no gifts. The money has to be paid back."
We try to think the best of people. At least Zwicker wasn't holding forth on curing cancer. In this crowd that's a plus. so we prefer to think his motivation for his new 9.11 infomercial reflects nothing more heinous that a desire to meet "Stop the Insanity's" Susan Powter.
As German author Broeckers said dryly, “That a 9.11 conference of investigators probing to learn the truth about the attack could be funded by the very people supposedly being investigated... came to me as quite a surprise.”
Unlike the droll Broeckers, some writers use a full wind-up first, before throwing their Khashoggi pitch…
“Adnan Khashoggi’s mercenary army of global corporate criminals lives in Mafia mansions, basks in the political limelight, enjoys the privileges of royalty in tyrannical desert dystopias, and sips vodka in the shadow of gleaming Moscow spires,” wrote Alex Constantine. “They are kings, Pentagon officials, priests, S&L thieves, assassins, prostitutes, Nazis, Big Oil executives, metals merchants, New Age cultists, drug barons, boiler-room con artists, mobsters, dictators…and terrorists.”
As Dr. John Gray, "Ph.D." himself might put it: "Wow, what a powerful share."
"John-Boy of Arabia"
Constantine's litany of miscreants form the backbone of the organization we call "Saudi Genesis," whose backing and marketing prowess made John Gray a franchise and a household name, we discovered.
Here's what happened: Men Are From Mars was not an instant hit when it was first published. Almost ten months after its release, Gray’s flagship book had received little acclaim and climbed no best seller lists.
Enter Adnan Khashoggi and lieutenant Ramy El Batrawi, who, we learned, has also used the nom de guerre “Remy Al-Batswani,” while running an air carrier for Khashoggi used in illegal shipments of arms to Iran which was eventually placed on the State Department’s list of “unsavory” companies and barred from doing business with any agency of the U.S. Government. ( link )
"It took a year to get on the best-seller list,” said Jack McKeown, president and publisher of HarperCollins trade group, in an interview.' John Gray is the beneficiary of a turbocharged marketing campaign, in which the author is an active partner.”
So John Gray owes his huge success and resulting fortune to Khashoggi’s “Saudi Genesis,” an intricate web of rapidly changing corporate fronts and dummy corporations with the word “Genesis” in their name, involved in wholesale criminal fraud that looks to be a textbook example of a Continuing Criminal Enterprise.
Saudi money picked up John Gray's book (and Gray himself) and ran with it; creating infomercials that drove sales of until they became a worldwide publishing phenomenon. Michael C. Ruppert and the phony 9/11 'Truth Movement' are defending taking money from owes his fame and success to Saudi money from Adnan Khashoggi, provided through a company incorporated by Barry Seal’s attorney, the same man currently suing us for 'emotional distress.'
No doubt this is just a freak coincidence.
Gray is even alleged to be involved, in papers filed in a major lawsuit in Federal Court in Minneapolis, in the recent $200 million looting the Genesis principals engaged in while on their way out of town. His trading account was used in the scheme, alleges the suit.
But apparently that doesn't make him a close associate of Adnan Khashoggi...not at least for purposes of taking money from him. Not in Michael Ruppert's book. But then proof is something the former detective appears to disdain, as witness his incessant pushing of 9.11 Red herrings from "Bush Knew" to "No Pilots" to "No Planes" to "Peak Oil," his latest "the end of the world as we know it" pulpit-pounder.
"The boys" from Tampa & L.A.
From their base in Tampa Florida, Khashoggi and El Batrawi controlled a network of companies, all using the word “Genesis” in their name. The number of Khashoggi-owned Genesis companies we've found keeps growing. There is, or was, Genesis Aviation, Inc., Genesis Aviation II, Genesis Diversified Investments, Genesis Studio and Production Corp., Genesis Media Group, Genesis Properties, Genesis Intermedia; GenesisIntermedia.com.; Genesis Delaware; Genesis Florida... The list, it do go on. And on.
Versions of the company have traded under a number of stock symbols: GNNX; NTER; BMOO; GMGI; and GENI... What's the purpose? Clearly this is a difficult company to keep track of...exactly the idea. One innocent businessman who had a website mistakenly associated with 'the boys' at "Saudi Genesis" posted this desperate explanation for why he had nothing at all to do with them:
"Over the last several weeks, I have put together these facts:
The Scammers might be related to Genesis Media Group, a subsidiary of GenesisIntermedia Inc. GenesisIntermedia is in financial trouble. See the section below about GenesisIntermedia.
The Scammers have a website of www.familyproductsllc.com which is only an email front, there is no "real" website there. You can email customerservice@familyproductsllc.com which is their published email address. Most persons have not gotten a response.
The Scammers may use the following websites: www.ab-energizer-exercise.com, www.ab-fitness-exercise.com, www.familyproductsllc.com. More information about the owners of these websites follows in this email (Including address and phone numbers).
The Scammers may use the following phone numbers: 1-800-457-0825, 1-800-801-6130, 1-888-602-7878, 1-818-902-4100 fax: 123 123 1234, 1-888-255-2525..."
“The proof is in the patterns! And so are the trading profits!”
The "Saudi Genesis" companies specialized in marketing to the masses, through infomercials and on the internet. Everything from Plastic Surgeons Crème to ab-energizers to fraudulent get rich quick schemes like “Trade Your Way to Riches,” created after Ramy El-Batrawi of Genesis approached Jake Bernstein at a seminar in Burbank, California about the possibility of marketing Bernstein's futures trading products through the creation of an infomercial.
Jake Bernstein billed himself as the world's foremost authority on pattern recognition and cycles and author of over 25 trading books. (He must be pretty good at recognizing when its time to leave town, at least, cause he hasn't gone to prison recently.( Bernstein website ) "Jake found an easier way to get rich. Instead of trading futures he would trade on investor gullibility," wrote a whistleblower.
Bernstein starred in an infomercial that aired on 400 TV stations, hyping a video course called Trade Your Way to Riches. A farmer named Harold Henkel told viewers how well Bernstein's approach has worked for him.
Henkel later admitted he lost money trading using Bernstein's products. We hope his “endorsement fee” made up for it.
Critics were unkind to Jake. “There's one born every minute. Seasonal Suckers is the cold truth about Jake Bernstein's futures theories.”
"Jake Bernstein has a lousy record trading futures but has made plenty trading on investor gullibility"
The boys at Genesis Intermedia made out like bandits.
The C’mon Back Scandal Revisited
And then there's the Genesis Communications Network. There's actually two of them, seemingly unrelated, but they're so extremely similar in the fraud department to each other and to "Saudi Genesis" that the relationship appears strongly familial. We're still uncertain as to how close they all are; kissing cousins, at the very least.
The first GCN is a so-called "patriot" network hosting Alex Jones and Dave Van Kliest, the, ah, the individual fronting for the latest See the Flash extravaganza, advertisements for which are spamming the Internet at a rate that must be causing concern among conservationists of our digital landscape of '1's and ' 0's.'
VanKliest is our pick for Disinfotainer of the Year… an especial honor, considering that there was some fierce competition. Of course, "See the Flash Dave" from the powerhour, like Alex Jones, is part of the GENESIS Communications Network. ( gcnlive.com ) ( genesis radio hosts )
He reminds us of Tattoo from Fantasy Island, pointing and shouting “De Plane! De Plane!”
When we fingered this checkered crew in last week's story for involvement in what we termed the “C’mon back scandal,” we hadn't meant it literally... So we clearly underestimated them, because they’re not above personally getting behind the wheel when the opportunity arises to “to back up a truck.”
They're involved in an internecine scandal, documented on the web at some length by “Christians” for whom time must hang heavy during the long Montana winter... "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Matthew 7:15," their screed began.
“Christian Media has repeatedly sought to expose the treachery at the Genesis Communications Network…They stole their original equipment from another patriot network named Republic Radio. Fraudulently claiming they had purchased the network, the management of Genesis literally backed up a U-Haul, and loaded up the broadcasting equipment while the rightful owner was out of town!”
Lily Tomlin, Prophetess of Our Times, said, “No matter how cynical I get I just can’t keep up.”
Welcome Back to “Honk-if-You-Love-Jesus World.”
GCN programming “broadly ranges from provocative politics to gardening, health and pop culture, and targets
specific audiences with useful guidelines for surviving & prospering in an increasingly complex and challenging political and socio-economic environment."
The Exec VP at Genesis Communications Network in Minnesota is Michael@midasreport.com ( Midas Report ) We noticed the address at the bottom. Mike with the “Midas Touch” shares the same address as another website called "BRIDGES FOR PEACE," where you can "VISIT ISRAEL WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR COMPUTER."
Bridges For Peace is a Jerusalem-based, Bible-believing Christian organization supporting Israel and building relationships between Christians and Jews worldwide through education and practical deeds expressing God's love and mercy…
Whatever these people think they’re doing its clear their mind is on only one thing: TAKING THE RUBES FOR A RIDE. WARNING: The following links should not be clicked on by anyone with difficulty metabolizing sugar, or who are allergic to gagging…
celebratelove.com
mymasterytvnet.com
mymasterytvbiz.com
celebrateintimacy.com
authorsandspeakersnetwork.com
Take a peek at Larry, for example.
“Larry James - Internet secrets revealed! Larry reveals what he considers to be the most important key to shameless self-promotion on the Internet. This article has loads of shameless examples! This article appears in the book, "Confessions of Shameless Internet Promoters" by Debbie Allen. Now available in Larry's Book Store in the Author/Speaker Section.”
We appreciated that they didn't make a cheap buck commercializing the 9.11 tragedy in every sentence. Just in every other sentence...
"Midas Resources has a fully trained team of professionals with decades of experience in the coin and metal markets. We are here to assist you and to provide you with personal service and attention. We specialize in U.S. semi-numismatic coins. Coins of historical significance to collectors that derive a substantial portion of their value from their underlying gold or silver value…The new U.S. $20 dollar bill contains hidden pictures of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks!”
We like a Masonic message with our gold coins. It shows imagination. It reminds us of a documentary author Jim Marrs proposed we work on with him, which he said was about a hospital in New Mexico haunted by ghosts...
Before we could pass, he threw in the kicker: "But not just any ghosts. Ghosts of Aliens!”
The weird thing about the second Genesis Communications Network--in Florida--is that it doesn't appear that any of their listed websites were real websites. They look like ghost websites...Most have no links to them... at all. Some look like commerce sites, but they don’t appear to sell ‘nothin to nobody.’
They reminded us of a fake street front at Universal Studios Check a few out, then click the Alexa tag.
syncpac.net
bizbanc.net
ecommxpress.com
alexa details
alexa details
alexa details
They were like website “Ghost ships.”
consumer1st.com
advancedscientifichealth.com
savethe-usa.com
businessownersinstitute.org
commissionsoft.com
fsicorporate.com alexa details
It was spooky. And then we read something about the Genesis Communications Network in Florida that made out heart grow cold… or at least cold-er.
In the July 23, 2001 South Florida Business Journal was a story called “Florida's tech leader under investigation.”
“The state's chief information officer is under investigation for grand theft. Roy Thomas Cales Jr., 39, has been accused of using a forged letter to obtain a loan from the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Tallahassee on which he later defaulted,” the story started. The story said, “Cales was on a Latin American trade mission trip with Gov. Jeb Bush and was not available to discuss the investigation.”
We got a picture of "trade mission" that looked like a couple of guys bringing girls back to the hotel. But then, we're not trained Remote Viewers. But we saw something much more serious.
“Cales had complete decision-making authority over what kind of computers each state agency purchases, who gets hired to take care of them and what they do with them.”
The next line made some sense of the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida: “The current investigation on Cales is not his first brush with the law.”
“When Bush was elected Florida's governor in 1998, he vowed his administration would bring honesty, integrity and truthfulness to state government. A key aspect of that quest has been the use of technology, such as the state's MyFlorida.com Web site, to provide full information to the public.
“The point person behind the effort had been Cales, whom Bush has publicly referred to as his "chief tech dude."
“Point dude” had full authority as the state’s chief information officer to do pretty much anything he wanted. In a controversy surrounding a fishy no-bid computer sales, newspapers around Florida reported that EMC2, a Boston-based computer company, had sold $4.3 million in computer equipment to three state agencies without having to go through competitive bidding. Financing for the deals at all three agencies, it turned out, was worked out by Cales.
We really really really wanted to know if they’d used the computers in the states’ election efforts...
But we were frankly too afraid to find out to read further. Everybody has their limits. We’d just reached ours.
SEE THE FLASH! THIS PICTURE JUST IN! SEE THE FLASH!
Like the attack itself, the story of the secret network involved in a coordinated and apparently government-sponsored cover up of the 9/11 attack sprawls across the widest canvas imaginable.
“It involves a fugitive arms dealer, two convicted drug dealers (one reportedly murdered by a Colombian cocaine hit squad), the CIA, and golden oldie (operatives) from the Iran/Contra scandal,” wrote business journalist extraordinaire Christopher Byron in an article about Genesis called “Kiosks, Cocaine, and Khashoggi.”
Its a succinct summation, and we’d be tempted to let it stand, except to mention added elements including, the Power Hour, the Solar Temple, the Heaven’s Gate cult, dozens and dozens of shell corporations and dummy front companies…
Start with this scene from the Heaven’s Gate story. The world first learned something was amiss with Hale Bopp on the Art Bell Show. A beautiful and fiery display in the heavens, Hale Bopp was wowing all...
Then one evening in November the Art Bell program received a call from Chuck Schramek, an amateur astronomer from Houston, home of John Gray. Schramek said he’d been "imaging" the comet with his telescope and a camera, and had taken a photo of what appeared to be another body close to the comet with a "ring like" form.
Schramek called it a "Saturn Like Object.” The frenzy began.
People wondered: “What on earth could that Saturn-like image be to the right of the comet?”
Following Schramek as a guest on Bell's show was Professor Courtney Brown -- a tenured political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, author of a book called "Cosmic Voyage," and president and owner of
Farsight Institute, a company specializing in "scientific remote viewing."
Their remote viewers had found the mysterious "companion" object to be larger than Earth, hollow and "under intelligent control" -- a kind of planetary spaceship hitching a ride on the comet.
Now people really wondered. But we discovered that Prof. Brown may have been experiencing something of a "personal crisis" at the time, when we found this quote he’d spoken the year before in a profile...
“Following the discovery of life on Mars, Professor Courtney Brown of Emory University, Atlanta, has revealed that civilization there is dying, so the aliens have established an underground colony in New Mexico,” the piece read.
"All the prestige I've got is resting on whether there is anything in this," Brown revealed. "I'd be crazy if I went public without being certain."
A Mello Yellow Mars & Venus
For ourselves, we wish he'd held that thought somewhat longer. Because when Brown appeared again on Bell's program, he brought along Prudence Calabrese, his 'assistant,' who told Bell's audience that a well-known astrophysicist at a "top ten university" had sent Brown information confirming Farsight's remote-viewing results.
This astrophysicist, she went on, had taken several hundred photographs of the luminous object, which was not only real, but emanating "unambiguous radio signals."
More significantly, the unnamed gentleman from the prestigious university planned to hold a press conference in a week to announce his findings. Meanwhile, he’d sent three rolls of undeveloped film, one of which had "very good astronomical photographs," in Calabrese's estimation.
This is where it gets really interesting. Calabrese today heads a commercial venture called Transdimensional Systems in—where else—San Diego.
She claims to have been part of the CIA's onetime effort to learn more about the Soviets via extrasensory perception (ESP), in a project channeled through (or by) California's formidable Stanford Research Institute. But guess what’s she’s doing now?
If you said “Protecting the Homeland in the fight against terrorism” you could probably get a job there yourself... Or at least a gig working for the San Diego FBI, which retained the services of her firm's 14 employees to assist their efforts to guess where the terrorists will strike next.
This required, she told reporters, "thinking out of the box."
So that's three people in our story making their way in the world with the help of the San Diego FBI: The Unnamed Saudi, our Iranian friend Sam the Sham, and a woman who can see things a really really loooooog ways off. This is a curious crew, and makes one wonder what can be gleaned from it about the San Diego FBI's criterion for employment.
Fast forward: The mysterious astronomer never turned up. The photos turned out fake. A cleverly manipulate photo taken from the university of Hawaii website, reversed and rotated to conceal its origin. And according to a sci fi zine called Ansible, Schramek had used his tech skills for hoaxes before. ( link )
“The thing is, Charles Schramek and I went to high school together,” said Gregory Frost. “We occasionally cooked up batches of helium, filled dry cleaner bags with it, attached pie tins containing flares to the bottoms, then sent the bags off into the night….we would call the local airport and report having sighted UFOs. Now and then, especially when other people saw our little flare balloons and called in, too, we made the local papers.”
"I was on hand on one occasion when he ran his voice through a filter that made him sound like Sonar the Warp Master while he communicated with some gullible ham radio operators elsewhere. Chuck convinced a whole flock of them that he was a space alien from Venus.”
Chuck was an inveterate prankster, a ham radio operator, and deviously technological. Just like John Gray, who’d called himself a computer programmer at one time. We wondered if they knew each other. We're pretty sure 'mum's the word' with Gray; and Schramek is dead and can't tell us, either, unless we can cough up enough money for a Ouiji board.
Said his high school buddy: “He told us one night that he had pulled a great prank on a neighbor who numbered among the believers by dressing all in black and wrapping his head in aluminum foil, then peering into the windows of the neighbor's house. So when I discovered that the UFO dogging comet Hale-Bopp had been photographed by one Charles Schramek, and that this "discovery" was making a splash in national news, I had a lot of trouble sitting upright for awhile.”
“Chuck was the only person I ever knew who'd actually tried smoking banana peels. It gave him a headache.”
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