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New DEA Chief: Tough on Chavez, Soft on the American DrugLords

 Nov 16 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker
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 The Bombardier Challenger 600 jet that went hurtling towards the end of the runway at Teterboro Airport at nearly 200 miles an hour before plowing through a steel perimeter fence and plunging across a six-lane highway before crashing into a clothing warehouse and bursting into flames finally put an end to Michael Brassington’s decade-long crime spree in a federal court in New Jersey.

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

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

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

But questions remain.

Full Story

Nov 12,2010

by Daniel Hopsicker

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

But that’s just what happened...

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

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

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

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

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

Full Story 
 

Nov 2,2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

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

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

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

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

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

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

Full Story

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

March 1 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

FULL STORY

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

January 5, 2010
by Daniel Hopsicker

FULL STORY

December 22, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker

Full Story

December 1, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker

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

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

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

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

FULL STORY

October 19, 2009
by Daniel Hopsicker

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

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

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

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

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

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

FULL STORY
 

NEW blog!!!
"New American Drug Lords" Preview
at danielhopsicker.tv

The Man Who Paid the Men Who Stare at Goats

October 15, 2009 by Daniel Hopsicker The man who owned the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta to fly, Wally Hilliard, made millions selling his insurance company, back in 1981,  to the man who paid “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Wally Hilliard’s links to American intelligence go back (at least) to November of 1981, when his insurance company, Wisconsin Employer’s Group,  was bought out by Myron Du Bain, then the Chairman of Fireman’s Fund of San Francisco.  Du Bain, who died in 2002, was a World War II OSS/CIA operative and the Chairman of Fireman's Fund of San Francisco when it bought out the insurance company founded by Hilliard.  Hilliard later went on to own Huffman Aviation, the Venice FL flight school used by Mohamed Atta his U.S. base. We had discovered the connection in a trip to Green Bay several years ago. But only recently did we learn that Myron Du Bain’s life-long ties to the CIA included two stints at the helm of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI),  famous for its classified research into psychic viewing. the results of which are currently on display in “The Men Who Stare at Goats.” Full story

The Deep History of the Venice Municipal Airport

Sept 24, 2009 by Daniel Hopsicker Stephen Ruth got his start in business (as revealed by the first two stories in this series) working for a corporate entity which those involved claim was the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA.   Active at the Venice Municipal Airport over several decades, as well as in nearby Sarasota and Charlotte County, Venice Florida native Stephen L. Ruth is a convicted drug trafficker and friend of Pablo Escobar flying, by the late 70’s, back and forth from Southwest Florida to Colombia and back several times a week.   When not flying goodwill missions to our Southern neighbors in his DC4 Globemaster or Lockheed Lodestar, Stephen Ruth developed the habit of putting out a number of serious-as-cancer murder contracts.    Apparently, Stephen Ruth’s unique curriculum vitae: experience in successful CIA “wet work,” bolstered by proven ability to fly low over the Gulf from Colombia to Florida… later qualified him for employment with the Florida State’s Attorney’s office. Full story

The Deep History of the Venice Municipal Airport

Sept 21 2009-- “Deep History,” according to the man who coined the term, U.C. Berkeley Professor Peter Dale Scott, “is the constant everyday interaction between the constitutionally-elected government and the forces of violence and crime which appear (on the surface) to be the enemies of that government.” Just as he said he would, after returning from Cuba, where, according to a police report he participated in the assassination of one of the “four or five” men said to have been involved in the Kennedy Assassination, Stephen Ruth got rich. Big rich: $3 million dollars, a lot back in the 1970’s. While how he made it may not surprise you, what he did then almost certainly will. Full story

Preview II: "New American Drug Lords"

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

Sept 08 2009--A fierce war being waged for control of the Venice Municipal Airport has led to the discovery of covert CIA and military operations, dating back to at least 1959, which go well beyond what was previously known to have taken place there.  Operations at the Venice Airport have involved individuals whose names figure prominently in the Kennedy Assassination, for example a defense contractor controlled by Texas oilman General D. H. (Harry) Byrd, which in the late 50's and early 60's built and launched Regulus II cruise missiles from the beach directly in front of the Venice Airport as part of a program run out of at Eglin AFB in Florida’s panhandle.  Byrd’s Chance-Vought Aircraft, later re-named LTV, would become—almost immediately after the JFK assassination—a principal beneficiary of the massive military spending accompanying the growth of American military involvement in the Vietnam War. General Byrd, of course, was also the owner of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, where the Warren Commission alleged Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots which killed President John F. Kennedy. Byrd also ran the Texas and Louisiana Civil Air Patrol, at the same time cadets Barry Seal and Lee Harvey Oswald were meeting Kennedy assassination conspirator Capt. David Ferrie at a two-week summer camp of the Louisiana Civil Air Patrol at Barksdale Air Force Base in July of 1955. Amazingly—especially for a tiny airport located in an out-of-the-way retirement community—according to a recently-uncovered police report there is a second man active at the Venice Airport with relevance to the Kennedy assassination as well. Full story

t Reopen the 9/11 investigation   Sept 06 2009 The news these last days of summer contains at least one story which—because key elements of it remain unspoken, in other words, taboo—doesn't make sense. In the current furor over the Justice Department’s opening of an investigation into the torture of prisoners under the Bush Administration, during the same week that a federal court found that John Ashcroft, then-attorney general, violated the rights of U.S. citizens by ordering arrests when the government lacked probable cause, Dick Cheney vociferously claimed that that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were “absolutely essential” in stopping another terrorist attack on the United States after Sept. 11, 2001.  If it is true, then perhaps Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush, and especially U.S. General Tommy Franks can tell us why they let Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora two months after the 9/11 attack? Full story

ugust 20, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Huffman Aviation Was 'Continuing Criminal Enterprise'

NEW!! watch a preview of the New American Drug Lords
& discuss this story at http://www.danielhopsicker.tv our new blog!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

mar 20, 2009-Another owner of the flight school in Venice Florida that trained Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi to fly is in trouble with the law; current owner Arthur G. Nadel, 75,  was arrested recently for running a Ponzi scheme which methodically looted investors in his Sarasota-based hedge funds of more than $300 million. 

New York tabloids, already in overdrive on the story of Bernard Madoff,  instantly dubbed Nadel Mini-M, for Mini-Madoff.

Nadel's arrest marks the second time in recent years that the owner of Huffman Aviation, the FBO (fixed base of operations) at the Venice Airport has been involved in crimes traditionally associated with the Mob.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He threatened criminal prosecution in Federal Court.  
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, his earlier controversies were not celebrity-enhanced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mexican journalists have not been that timid…

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

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

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

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

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

Straight from the front lines of the Drug War…

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

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

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

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

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

Beat them at their own game.

VIEW IT HERE…

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

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

The exclusive "Cocaine One" series of investigative reports by this reporter appearing on this website for the past two years made the news, finally... not in the U.S., but in Mexico City, where it was cited by a principal in the drug trafficking scandal in newspaper interviews to support his allegation of selective prosecution against the DEA.

Carlos Gutiérrez de Velasco is the paterfamilias of the influential Veracruz-based family which owned the Casa de Cambio Puebla currency exchange, accused of laundering enough drug money through U.S. banks to buy as many as 100 American planes for use in drug-running.