by Daniel Hopsicker
WORLD EXCLUSIVE
August 7, 2006
from
Madcowprod Website
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, the
MadCowMorningNews has learned.
An investigation into the circumstances surrounding seizure of the DC9
airliner (dubbed “Cocaine One” for its paint job and Seal impersonation of
planes from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security) has unearthed evidence
which is beginning to pierce the heavy curtain behind which the biggest
taboo in the U.S. mainstream media has remained hidden:
the identities of
the until-now anonymous American Drug Lords.
Meet the Masters of the Universe
What local officials blundered into at a remote airport in the farthest
corner of Mexico’s Yucatan may have earth-shaking reverberations felt around
the world… if the true story of what happened there becomes widely known...
The seizure in Ciudad del Carmen has exposed the links of a global narcotics
cartel that may be the most powerful political force on the planet.
Based on court documents, SEC filings, records of incorporation, and
interviews with eyewitnesses, the elements which comprise this global
narcotics cartel - all of which will be named and covered in this
series - include the following:
-
Rogue 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 Republican kingmakers and private investment banks
-
member of U.S. organized crime...
Also...
-
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
-
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 four
Five ton shipments must be the the industry standard
Today’s story begins in Dallas, Texas...
As stated in the lead to this story, one of the chief shareholders 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.
In a major irony, the trafficker involved, Manuel Vicente Losada, was
arrested in Chile after being linked to another five 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.”
One 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 $17.0 million loan for Mexican industrialist Jose Serrano Segovia’s
shipping line,
GRUPO TMM.
The Santiago Times, an English language newspaper in Chile, reported on May
5, 1998 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 five tons of cocaine which
U.S. drug enforcement officials in Miami intercepted over six years ago on
the vessel Harbour, as it headed toward Guantanamo Bay.”
“As it headed for… 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”
lucky enough to have been 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.
Ask Baby Doc - Toxic waste is
good business
Was Argyll Equities LLC the victim of “dashed bad luck” in providing funding
for an operation which may be providing cover for something else?
Other
recent examples of Argyll’s “creative financing globally” provide at least a
tentative answer...
Remember the infamous toxic garbage barge which circled the world for more
than two years in search of a country willing to accept its cargo of toxic
ash from a Philadelphia dump site? The barge, the Khian Sea, left the
territorial waters of the United States, went to the Bahamas, then to the
Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau, and the Netherlands
Antilles. No one would take it...
That is, 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.”
How unlucky can one private investment bank get?
Maybe somebody left it on the plane?
Mr. Huizenga, readers of “Welcome to TERRORLAND” may recall, 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.
Alert readers will recall that during the same month, July of 2000, that
Mohamed Atta and 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 which
may shed some light on this milieu which seems to attract such large
quantities of narcotics…
According to a federal indictment, the lucky company was the recipient of
$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 three 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,” the AP
reported.
That's right.
THAT Fitzgerald.
General Stroessner isn't dead
- He's on vacation with Franco
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 government 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, in Latin America’s infamous triangle region, 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.”
Of anecdotal interest only - since a U.S. District Court judge in Chicago
recently dropped criminal charges against Cowles - is the fact that
Ambassador Rachid is among the five percent of Paraguay's inhabitants of
Arab descent.
Her father was born in Homs, Syria; her mother is from Ba'albek, Lebanon.
"We used the shares for toilet paper... and still made out like bandits"
Argyll Equities LLC is the second-largest shareholder in SkyWay, according
to bankruptcy filings, owning nearly 21 million shares of totally worthless
stock, which might be considered something of an investment black eye,
unless other undisclosed considerations were involved.
Last week we reported the discovery that SkyWay Aircraft had been leasing a
“repair” facility for more than $20,000 a month at DFW Airport in
Dallas - even 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.
New evidence unearthed since then has begun to fill in the picture of an
operation which boasted a bewildering international cast of characters, in
San Diego, Israel, Miami, Dallas, and in the case of two prominent
principals, on the lam…
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.
"Cocaine, TOW Missiles, renditions... We're a flexible airline"
Since the MadCowMorningNews was successful last month in obtaining the FAA
registration records for “Cocaine One,” the accumulating evidence has all
pointed to a clear conclusion:
the DC9 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine was a
CIA plane which belongs to the Agency’s no-longer-totally-secret airline.
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 International, a company 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 the U.S. Government or the Contras it was supposedly
funding - a tidy bit of change a U.S. Senate investigation estimated to be $16
million dollars.
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.
Six degrees of deviated septums
But none of this does anything to explain Ramy El-Batrawi and Adnan
Khashoggi’s other major connection with the founder of SkyWay Aircraft,
Miami attorney Michael Farkas.
Their hidden connections may 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. Government to be the biggest drug smuggler in American
history... CIA pilot Barry Seal.
Seal was assassinated in 1986 at the reported behest of then-Vice President
George Herbert Walker Bush, the father of our current
President.
Hey. Is it a small world, or what?
How to make a billion dollars without hardly trying
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 RV. 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 and Adnan Khashoggi were partners in a $300 million scam.
It
was called,
“the largest brokerage industry failure in more than 30 years.”
Michael Farkas, is also on the board of Genesis Realty, founded by Ramy El-Batrawi,
a man who is clearly no piker when it comes to pilfering money from a public
company…
His GenesisIntermedia exploits put Glenn and Brent Kovar’s $40 million theft
at SkyWay in the shade.
“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
Board meeting on Tuesday at the Spearmint Rhino
While we can detain ourselves only a moment longer with the colorful
Stockwalk Scandal, a brief mention of a few of the other stalwarts involved
would include:
Kenneth D'Angelo, a New Jersey stock finder with a criminal and civil record
Richard Evangelista, an employee at a New Jersey brokerage and President of
Local 18 of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; and Bradford Keiller,
a Las Vegas
Strip club entrepreneur with a tastefully named string of 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.”
Before leaving the ties between Michael Farkas and Ramy El-Batrawi and Adnan
Khashoggi, we discovered a story from the St Paul Pioneer Press (where the
fraud bankrupted one of that city’s biggest firms) that may help explain our
contention that what we are witnessing is the daily workaday transactions of
a very large but still-invisible organization:
“SEC filings show ties among Imperial, Holiday and Genesis,” reported the
Saint Paul Pioneer Press on April 22 2002.
The Israeli Connection, Pt. 1
“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.”
“Lee Sanders, the chairman of Travelbyus 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.
Suffice it to say that 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
histories so colorful that - were we to start - we could go on about them all
day.
Oh, maybe just one example:
CCS International’s Latin American sales
manager, Menachem Cohen, who was convicted in 2002 for illegally exporting
passive phone interception equipment to individuals in Colombia conversant
with the drug trade.
Titan Corp was thinking ahead, Pt 1
CCS commercializes and brings to market trinkets said to have been invented
by innovative minds at
the CIA and 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 for
all the world like a shirt button, Mr. Farkas and his partners can oblige.
Of particular interest for our purposes at least, is the early interest
shown in Mr. Farkas by
The Titan Corporation, who made an early investment
in his obvious potential, 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.
Are they forward thinking, or what?
Bankruptcy is a state of mind
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
that there is apparently something special about owning of these particular
planes...
You get a free pass to steal from unwary investors.
At least six 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.
SkyWay, Jetborne… even Mexican industrialist Juan Serrano Segovia’s GRUPO
TMM defaulted on $377 million in loans several months ago.
We will be keeping a running tally of companies associated with the
operation finding it necessary to declare bankruptcy… but only after being
stripped of anything not securely tied down.
"The only good Indians... are on our payroll"
Jack Abramoff played the Lone Ranger to a whole host of Indian casino
Tonto's. But this is just one of the many ways this secret organization has
recently used the special status of Native Americans.
In the StockWalk scam, which easily netted as much as 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.
Ms. Red-Horse, the 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. Probably not on her bio: She helped, or was used,
by some well-connected fraudsters steal over $300 million dollars.
Chief Bearskin & "the boys"
One more example will suffice, at least for now:
Express One International is one of the bankrupt firms which was also an
owner of the DC9's, a company whose colorful corporate history would make,
we think, an excellent episode of Babylon 5.
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 International is
David Byers.
Mohamed
Atta trained at a flight school at the Charlotte County Airport, Charlotte
County Sheriff William Clement told reporters four days after the 9.11
attack, before being told to keep his mouth shut.
The airline was founded by the notorious Kenneth Good, who got, with Neil
Bush's help, a cool hundred million in loans from Silverado Savings which he
never felt the need to repay. Taxpayers ended up footing the bill.
We don't imagine anyone's heard Neil Bush saying "thanks?"
The company issued a press release recently to announce their plans to
assist the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma inn developing an aviation business
called Bearskin Aviation Service, hiring Bearskin to provide fleet and
baggage handling services at two 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.
Only a cynic would quibble.
Right?