Bush Family Value$
The Bush clan's family business
By Stephen Pizzo
September 1, 1992
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/19...9/bushboys.html

In 1991, President Bush bristled at a flurry of news accounts that questioned the business ethics of three of his sons. "The media ought to be ashamed of itself for what they're doing," Bush complained. "They [the boys] have a right to make a living, and their relationships are appropriate," added a White House spokeswoman in June 1992.

Since George Bush has raised "family values" as a campaign issue repeatedly, though, it seems only fair to take a look at his own family. A computer search showed that over the past five years stories have periodically surfaced chronicling the individual business antics of the president's sons -- each riding comfortably through life in the slipstream of his father's growing power and influence.

Although a handful of good reporters for the New York Times, LA Times, Village Voice, and Wall Street Journal have diligently been digging through business records for months, something has been missing: an overview that "connects the dots" in the myriad deals that have been examined, making it clear that cashing in on influence has become a pattern of behavior extending through the first family.

Instead of criticizing reporters, the president might more wisely begin listening to those in government who have watched his sons with mounting worry. A year ago, I sat across a desk from a Secret Service agent who had been assigned to Bush-family security. I rattled off the names of a half-dozen questionable characters who had found their way into business deals with the Bush boys. How had these characters been allowed to get even close to the president's sons?

The agent slumped back in his chair and sighed. "We warn them," he said in a whisper. "But that's all we can do. We can't stop these kids from associating with someone they want to be with. All we can do after warning them is to sweep these guys with metal detectors when they come around."

What follows is a sourcebook of concerns about the president's three sons.

George W. Bush, Jr.

None of George Bush's offspring is more his father's son than George W. Bush. George Jr., or "Shrub" as Molly Ivins refers to him, began his own Texas oil career in the mid-1970s when he formed Bush Exploration. Like the business dealings of his brothers, George's company was not a success, and it was rescued in 1983 by another oil company, Spectrum 7, run by several staunch and well-heeled Reagan-Bush supporters. But by mid-1986, a soft oil market found Spectrum also near bankruptcy.

Many oil companies went belly-up during that time. But Spectrum had one asset the others lacked -- the son of the vice-president. Rescue came in 1986 in the form of Harken Energy, just in the nick of time. Harken absorbed Spectrum, and, in the process, Junior got $600,000 worth of Harken stock in return for his Spectrum shares. He also won a lucrative consulting contract and stock options. In all, the deal would put well over $1 million in his pocket over the next few years -- even though Harken itself lost millions.

Harken Energy was formed in l973 by two oilmen who would benefit from a successful covert effort to destabilize Australia's Labor Party government (which had attempted to shut out foreign oil exploration). A decade later, Harken was sold to a new investment group headed by New York attorney Alan G. Quasha, a partner in the firm of Quasha, Wessely & Schneider. Quasha's father, a powerful attorney in the Philippines, had been a staunch supporter of then-president Ferdinand Marcos. William Quasha had also given legal advice to two top officials of the notorious Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, a CIA operation.

After the sale of Harken Energy in 1983, Alan Quasha became a director and chairman of the board. Under Quasha, Harken suddenly absorbed Junior's struggling Spectrum 7 in 1986. The merger immediately opened a financial horn of plenty and reversed Junior's fortunes. But like his brother Jeb, Junior seemed unconcerned about the characters who were becoming his benefactors. Harken's $25 million stock offering in 1987, for example, was underwritten by a Little Rock, Arkansas, brokerage house, Stephens, Inc., which placed the Harken stock offering with the London subsidiary of Union Bank -- a bank that had surfaced in the scandal that resulted in the downfall of the Australian Labor government in 1976 and, later, in the Nugan Hand Bank scandal. (It was also Union Bank, according to congressional hearings on international money laundering, that helped the now-notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International skirt Panamanian money-laundering laws by flying cash out of the country in private jets, and that was used by Ferdinand Marcos to stash 325 tons of Philippine gold around the world.)

Stephens, Inc., also helped introduce the BCCI virus into US banking in 1978 when it arranged the sale of Bert Lance's National Bank of Georgia to BCCI front man Ghaith Pharoan. (The head of Stephens, Inc., Jackson Stephens, is a member of President Bush's exclusive "Team 100," a group of 249 wealthy individuals who have contributed at least $100,000 each to the GOP's presidential-campaign committee.)

If any of these associations raised questions in the mind of George Bush, Jr., he had little incentive to voice them. Besides getting Harken stock through the deal, Junior was paid $80,000 a year as a consultant (until 1989, when his wages were increased to $120,000; recently they were reduced to $45,000). He was also allowed to borrow $180,375 from the company at very low interest rates. In 1989 and 1990, according to the company's Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Harken's board "forgave" $341,000 in loans to its executives. In addition, Junior took advantage of the company's ultraliberal executive stock purchase plan, which allowed him to buy Harken stock at 40 percent below market value.

Such lavish executive compensation would suggest a company doing quite well indeed. But in reality, Harken had little going for itself. One Wall Street analyst called Harken's web of insider stock deals and mounting debt "a lot of jiggery-pokery." Harken was not making money and could not have continued into 1990 without at least some means of convincing lenders and investors that the company would soon find a lot of oil.

Suddenly, in January 1990, Harken Energy became the talk of the Texas oil industry. The company with no offshore-oil-drilling experience beat out a more-established international conglomerate, Amoco, in bagging the exclusive contract to drill in a promising new offshore oil field for the Persian Gulf nation of Bahrain. The deal had been arranged for Harken by two former Stephens, Inc., brokers. A company insider claims the president's son did not initiate the deal -- but feels that his presence in the firm helped with the Bahrainis. "Hell, that's why he's on the damn board," the insider says. "...You say, 'By the way, the president's son sits on our board.' You use that. There's nothing wrong with that."

Junior has told acquaintances conflicting stories about his own involvement in the deal. He first claimed that he had "recused" himself from the deal; "George said he left the room when Bahrain was being discussed 'because we can't even have the appearance of having anything to do with the government.' He was into a big rant about how unfair it was to be the president's son. He said, 'I was so scrupulous I was never in the room when it was discussed.'"

Junior alternately claimed, to reporters for the Wall Street Journal and D Magazine, that he had opposed the arrangement. But the company insider says, to the contrary, that Junior was excited about the Bahrain deal. "Like any member of the board, he was thrilled," the associate says. "His attitude was, 'Holy shit, what a great deal!'"

Through the Bahrain deal, the ties between BCCI and Harken Energy grew tighter. Sheikh Khalifah, the prime minister of Bahrain and brother of the emir, was also a shareholder in BCCI -- and it was Khalifah who played the key role in selecting Harken for the job. Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, in turn, was a business associate of BCCI front man Ghaith Pharoan; he bought a chunk of Harken's stock and placed his representative, Talat Othman, on Harken Energy's board of directors.

Did Junior or any of the other Harken Energy executives trade on the Bush name in these speculative business deals? None of the principals will answer questions. But this much is known: after the Harken-Bahrain deal was settled, Othman was added to the list of fifteen Arabs who met with President George Bush and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft three times in 1990 -- once just two days after Iraq invaded Kuwait -- while serving on Harken's board of directors.

The promise of hitting it big in the oil-rich gulf was certainly critical for Harken. News of the Bahrain deal kept investors buying stock and lenders making loans. Still, Harken had nowhere near the capital required for such a large offshore operation halfway around the world. This required real money. But not to worry: The billionaire Bass brothers stepped up to the plate and said they'd be happy to underwrite the cost of the drilling in return for a piece of the action. (Robert Bass is a member of President Bush's Team 100; he and other Bass family members have contributed $226,000 to George, Sr.'s, cause since 1988.)

But even well-heeled friends like the Bass brothers could not protect Harken from the troubles of the world. Just four months after the Bahrain deal was sealed, storm clouds developed over the gulf region, threatening the oil-exploration deal. In May 1990, the U.S. State Department sent a chilling but still classified report to Scowcroft. The report warned that Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was out of control and was threatening his neighbors:

May 16, 1990
SECRET
Attached is a paper containing a list of options for responding to recent actions and statements by the Government of Iraq. ...We ask that you pass this paper to Robert Gates [CIA] for his review.

Under "options" the memo suggested:
Ban Oil Purchases: The largest benefit Iraq receives from the US is through our oil purchases...
PRO -- A total ban on oil purchases would have some short-term impact.
CON -- Such action might also have an impact on US Oil prices.

Oil companies had learned, during the years of the long Iran-Iraq war, that trouble in the gulf hurts companies with oil interests because, for one thing, at the first sound of a rifle shot in the gulf region, Lloyds of London jacks up insurance rates on oil tankers and company installations. The "wartime" rates are very high and cut deeply into company profits and investor confidence. If things really get out of hand, pipelines are destroyed and waterways are mined.

The secret memo augured ill for Harken's fledgling venture. To compound matters, that same month, Harken's own financial advisers at Smith Barney produced a hand-wringing report voicing alarm at the company's rapidly deteriorating financial condition. (A former company official told Mother Jones that Harken owed more than $150 million to banks and other creditors at the time.) Since Harken wasn't producing anything, it was hard to find a revenue stream, unless you count the river of fees, stock options, and salaries running into the pockets of Junior and other top Harken executives. Junior, as a member of Harken's restructuring committee, could not have been ignorant of the report, since the board had met in May and worked directly with the Smith Barney consultants.

In June 1990, Junior suddenly unloaded the bulk of his Harken stock -- 212,140 shares -- for a tidy $848,560. A former business associate says that Junior's motivation was his desire to buy an expensive new house in Dallas, for which he wanted to pay cash. The June 1990 transaction was an insider stock sale, and security laws required that it be reported no later than July 10, 1990. But Junior filed no such report, at least not then.

Then, in August, Iraqi troops marched into Kuwait, and Harken shares plummeted 25 percent. Junior would have lost $212,140 if he'd waited to sell his shares until then. Still, he didn't file his SEC disclosure until seven months later, in March 1991 -- well after U.S. troops had finished fighting and the gulf war had moved off the front pages. Harken stock rebounded briefly, but quickly collapsed again.

Were government secrets discussed, directly or indirectly, that would have given Harken Energy a leg up in exploiting the Bahrain deal? The White House won't say. If Junior traded on exclusive, nonpublic, insider information, he committed a gross violation of SEC rules. Taken together, the company's critical need for success in its Bahraini deal and a possible oil embargo to be imposed by his father provided Junior with strong motivation to bail out of Harken stock before the public discovered either piece of news. (SEC spokesman John Heine says he is unaware of any enforcement action pending.)

The folks at Harken Energy weren't the only ones in Texas taking care of Junior during the 1980s. He was appointed the managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, even though his partnership contribution was only a fraction of the team's purchase price. Among those coughing up the money to buy the Rangers were William DeWitt and Mercer Reynolds, major contributors to the president's campaign who had also been in on the rescue of Junior's oil company.

Junior doesn't deny that being a Bush has helped him become a millionaire. "I recognize what my talents are and what my weaknesses are," he told Texas reporters last year. "I don't get hung up on it. Being George Bush's son has its pluses and minuses in some people's minds. In my thinking, it's a plus."

Junior might have been thinking that among the minuses were questions about his role at Harken. As this article was being prepared -- and in the midst of extensive interviewing of former and current Harken business associates -- Junior announced a six-month leave of absence as a consultant and member of the Harken board. His role in the presidential campaign, the statement said, precluded Junior's active involvement at Harken through the remainder of 1992.

In any case, Junior is stepping away from a company in deep trouble. Harken stock is trading near its all-time low. Recently, test wells in Bahrain turned up dry and the company has not produced anything else. "Harken is not hard to understand -- it's easy," says Charles Strain, an energy-company analyst in Houston. "The company has only one real asset -- its Bahrain contract. If that field turns out to be dry, Harken's stock is worth, at the most, 25 cents a share. If they hit it big over there, the stock could be worth $30 to $40 dollars a share. It's a pure crapshoot."

John Ellis ("Jeb") Bush

After graduating from Texas University, Jeb Bush served a short apprenticeship at the Venezuelan branch of Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas before settling in Miami, in 1980, to work on his father's unsuccessful primary bid against Ronald Reagan. Campaigning for Dad was hardly a paying job. But Jeb was about to learn that being one of George Bush's sons means never having to circulate a r�sum�.

In the next few years, financial support flowed to Jeb through Miami's right-wing Cuban community. Republican party politics and a series of business scandals -- including Medicaid fraud and shady S&L deals -- were inextricably intertwined. A former federal prosecutor told MJ that, when he looked into Jeb's lucrative business dealings with a now-fugitive Cuban, he considered two possibilities -- Jeb was either crooked or stupid. At the time, he concluded Jeb was merely stupid.

Jeb and Armando Codina
Shortly after arriving in Miami, Jeb was hired by Cuban-American developer Armando Codina to work at his Miami development company as an agent leasing office space. A couple of years later, Jeb and Codina became business partners, and in 1985 they purchased an office building in a deal partly financed by a savings and loan that later failed.

The $4.56 million loan, from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida, was granted in such a way that neither Codina's nor Bush's name appeared on the loan papers as the borrowers. A third man, J. Edward Houston, borrowed the $4.56 million from Broward and then re-lent it to the Bush partnership. When federal regulators closed Broward Savings in 1988, they found the loan, which had been secured by the Bush partnership, in default.

As Jeb's father was finishing his second term as vice-president and running for the presidency, federal regulators had two options: to get Jeb Bush and his partner to repay the loan, or to foreclose on their office building. But regulators came up with a third solution. After reappraising the building, regulators decided it wasn't worth as much as was owed for it. The regulators reduced the amount owed by Bush and his partner from $4.56 million to just $500,000. The pair paid that amount and were allowed to keep their office building. Taxpayers picked up the tab for the unpaid $4 million.

After the Broward Savings deal was revealed, Jeb described himself and his partner as "victims of circumstances."

Jeb and Camilo Padrera
By 1984, Jeb had been made chairman of the Dade County Republican party, and it was as Republican party chief that he nuzzled up to con man Camilo Padreda. Padreda was serving as Dade County GOP finance chairman and had raised money for the party from Miami's Cuban community. (He had also been a counterintelligence officer for deposed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.) Padreda made his living as a developer who specialized in deals with the corrupt Department of Housing and Urban Development. In 1986, he hired Jeb as the leasing agent for a vacant commercial-office building, which Padreda had built with $1.4 million in federal loans -- loans approved by HUD officials, oddly enough, even though they knew there was already a glut of vacant office space in Miami.

Like so many of those who would attach themselves to the Bush sons over the years, Padreda brought some hefty luggage with him. In 1982, four years before teaming up with Jeb, Padreda, along with another right-wing Cuban exile, Hernandez Cartaya, was indicted and accused of looting Jefferson Savings and Loan Association in McAllen, Texas. The federal indictment charged that the pair had embezzled over $500,000 from the thrift. (Cartaya was also charged with drug smuggling, money laundering, and gun running.) But the Jefferson Savings case would never go to trial.

Soon after the indictment, FBI officials got a call from someone at the CIA warning the agents that Cartaya was one of their own -- a veteran of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion -- according to a prosecutor who worked on the case. In short order, the charges against Padreda were dropped and the charges against Cartaya were reduced to a single count of tax evasion. (Assistant U.S. Attorney Jerome Sanford was furious and filed a demand with the CIA, under the Freedom of Information Act, for all documents relating to the agency's interference in his case. The CIA, citing national-security reasons, denied Sanford's request.)

In 1989, Houston Post reporter Pete Brewton wrote about Jefferson Savings and Cartaya in a series of stories alleging that CIA operatives and contractors had systematically misused at least twenty-six savings and loans during the 1980s as part of a secret program to fund illegal "off-the-shelf" covert operations, particularly those aiding the Nicaraguan contras. (CIA officials denied the charge, but admitted to the House intelligence Committee in 1990 that former CIA operatives had been working at four of the S&Ls named in Brewton's article. A CIA spokesman claimed that agency operatives had done nothing illegal.)

The Jefferson Savings affair occurred four years before Jeb Bush met Padreda, and it is possible he missed earlier reports. But he could hardly have passed over the next batch of stories involving Padreda's questionable practices, because they were spread across the front pages of Miami's papers in 1985, just months before the two teamed up. These stories, in Jeb's hometown paper, alleged that Padreda had improperly influenced a local politician -- the Dade County manager, to be precise, who'd been made a secret partner when Padreda ran into trouble getting a parcel of land rezoned. The property was promptly rezoned, and the county official made a quick $127,000 profit when Padreda, in turn, "sold" it to an offshore Padreda partnership. That partnership was controlled from Panama by a fugitive Miami attorney, who had already been indicted for laundering drug money. (The official resigned, but Padreda was not charged in the case.)

Yet the 1985 scandal did not seem to lessen Jeb's enthusiasm for Camilo Padreda. Jeb enthusiastically accepted the task of finding tenants for Padreda's empty HUD-financed office building. Padreda, the government officials involved, and Jeb all refused to answer questions about the scandal. But of allegations that Padreda engaged in illegal behavior, there remains no doubt. In 1989, he pleaded guilty to charges that he defrauded HUD of millions of dollars during the 1980s.

Jeb and Miguel Recarey
With Miami awash in empty office space in 1986, it was no small event when bagged International Medical Centers as a key tenant for Padreda's HUD-financed building. IMC, which leased nearly all the space in Padreda's vacant building, was at the time one of the nation's fastest-growing health-maintenance organizations (HMO) and had become the largest recipient of federal Medicare funds.

IMC was run by Cuban-American Miguel Recarey, a character with a host of idiosyncrasies. He carried a 9-mm Heckler & Koch semiautomatic pistol under his suit coat and kept a small arsenal of AR-15 and Uzi assault rifles at his Miami estate, where his bedroom was protected by bullet-proof windows and a steel door. It apparently wasn't his enemies Recarey feared so much as his friends. He had a long-standing relationship with Miami Mafia godfather Santo Trafficante, Jr., and had participated in the illfated, CIA-inspired mob assassination plot against Fidel Castro in the early 1960s. (Associates of Recarey add that Trafficante was the money behind Recarey's business ventures.)

Recarey's brother, Jorge, also had ties to the CIA. So it was no surprise that IMC crawled with former spooks. Employee r�sum�s were studded with references to the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Cuban Intelligence agency; there was even a fellow who claimed to have been a KGB agent, An agent with the U.S. Office of Labor Racketeering in Miami would later describe IMC as a company in which "a criminal enterprise interfaced with intelligence operations."

Recarey also surrounded himself with those who could influence the political system. He hired Jeb Bush as IMC's "real-estate consultant." Though Jeb would never close a single real-estate deal, his contract called for him to earn up to $250,000 (he actually received $75,000). Jeb's real value to Recarey was not in real estate but in his help in facilitating the largest HMO Medicare fraud in U.S. history.

Jeb phoned top Health and Human Services officials in Washington in 1985 to lobby for a special exemption from HHS rules for IMC. This highly unusual waiver was critical to Recarey's scam. Without it, the company would have been limited to a Medicare patient load of 50 percent. The balance of IMC's patients would have had to be private -- that is, paying -- customers. Recarey preferred the steady flow of federal Medicare money to the thought of actually running a real HMO. Former HHS chief of staff McClain Haddow (who later became a paid consultant to IMC) testified in 1987 Jeb that directly phoned then-HHS secretary Margaret Heckler and that it was that call that swung the decision to approve IMCs waiver.

Jeb admits lobbying HHS for the waiver, but denies talking to Secretary Heckler -- and denies as well the charge that his call won the HHS exemption. "I just asked that IMC get a fair hearing," said later. After the IMC scandal broke in 1987, Heckler left the country, having been appointed U.S. ambassador to Ireland, a post she held until 1989. (Heckler is now a private citizen living in Virginia. We left a detailed message with her secretary, outlining our questions, but she declined to respond.)

In any case, the highly unusual waiver by federal officials allowed IMCs Medicare patient load to swell -- to 80 percent -- and the money poured in. At its height in 1986, IMC was collecting over $30 million a month in Medicare payments; in all, the company would collect $1 billion from Medicare. (Jeb would not discuss the IMC affair with Mother Jones. But in an opinion piece he wrote for the Miami Herald last May, he insisted that he had worked hard for IMC, looking for real-estate deals, and had earned his $75,000 in commissions. While acknowledging making a telephone call to one of Heckler's assistants on IMC Is behalf, he claimed the waiver was not granted on his account. The allegation of a connection, Jeb wrote, "is unfair and untrue.")

Despite Jeb's involvement, trouble began brewing for IMC when a low-level HHS special agent in Miami, Leon Weinstein, discovered that Recarey was defrauding Medicare through overcharges, false invoicing, and outright embezzlement. Weinstein had been following Recarey's activities since 1977, and as early as 1983 he believed he had enough information to put together a case. However, he found his HHS superiors less than receptive; they took no action on Weinstein's information.

But Weinstein kept digging and in 1986 renewed his investigation of Recarey and IMC -- and again his HHS superiors blocked the probe. "Washington just refused to pursue my evidence," Weinstein, now retired, told Mother Jones last spring. "And they made it perfectly clear that I was not to pursue IMC. When I did, they threatened me and threatened my job."

Weinstein dug in his heels. "I had them this time. I told my superiors I would fight this time because I had nothing to fear. I had just reached retirement age. They immediately backtracked," he says. Weinstein was allowed to continue his investigation -- though HHS still took no formal action against Recarey. Eventually Weinstein turned to Congressmen Barney Frank (D-NY) and Pete Stark (D-CA) with his information, sparking congressional hearings into the scandal.

Had it been up to HHS, Recarey would still be running his Medicare racket. But by chance, the now-disbanded U.S. Miami Organized Crime Strike Force was also investigating Recarey. (Recarey was bribing union officials in order to get them to sign workers up as patients at IMC, apparently so that IMC could meet its reduced non-Medicare patient requirements of 20 percent.) "We didn't know anything about the HHS investigation," former Organized Crime Strike Force special attorney Joe DeMaria says. "Recarey was bribing union officials.... But HHS never contacted us or told us anything."

Before Recarey's trial on bribery charges began, DeMaria's investigators also caught Recarey using his former spooks to wiretap IMC employees in an effort to discover who was talking to federal agents. DeMaria had Recarey indicted a second time, for the illegal listening devices. During Recarey's trial on the bribery charge, a lawyer who handled the bribe money testified that the money IMC gave him was not bribe money but "commissions" he had earned while doing work for the company. "See, that commission thing was Recarey's MO. They didn't call them bribes, they called them commissions," DeMaria explains.

After he was convicted, Recarey resigned from IMC and was immediately replaced by John Ward. (Ward had been law partner to Reagan-Bush campaign manager John Sears. And Sears had also been a lobbyist for IMC.) But Recarey's Medicare scam would never get to a public courtroom airing. Before his trial on the wiretap charge, Recarey skipped the country. His getaway was remarkable: just in time for his flight, the normally tight-fisted IRS expedited a $2.2 million income-tax refund, which Recarey claimed he had coming.

The tax refund was a windfall for Recarey. "Yeah, that was his getaway money," says a former IRS investigator who worked in the Miami office at the time but asked not to be named. "Though there is a special IRS procedure to expedite tax refunds for companies in financial distress, I don't think you can overlook the possibility that there was influence from the administration."

Recarey's last act before becoming a fugitive was an attempt to wire $30,000 into the bank account of Washington consultant and lobbyist Nick Panuzio -- whose partner was then managing George Bush's 1988 presidential campaign. (The wire transfer failed only because, in his haste, Recarey had gotten Panuzio's account number wrong.) It was only after Recarey was safely out of the country that the U.S. attorney in Miami -- a political appointee -- filed formal charges of Medicare fraud against him.

Whistle-blower Leon Weinstein retired in disgust from HHS and tried to get the IMC case before a judge by filing a Qui Tam suit. Such suits allow a private citizen to sue to recover money for the government in return for a share of any settlement. In his case, Weinstein named IMC and Recarey as defendants. But HHS continued to fight Weinstein, first challenging his right to bring such a suit and later accusing him of stealing HHS documents before leaving his job. When the courts supported Weinstein, HHS then stepped in, took over his lawsuit, and shouldered him out. The case remains in the courts and is still unresolved.

HHS officials now pursuing the litigation claim that Recarey defrauded the Medicare system of at least $12 million. Leon Weinstein says the government is lowballing the loss and that Recarey's take from his IMC scam could easily be many times that figure.

Since skipping Miami in 1987, Recarey has been living comfortably in Caracas, Venezuela. Thomas Holladay, the consul general of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, told Mother Jones that officials there were aware of Recarey's presence and had formally requested his extradition. "We made a formal request for his extradition," Consul General Holladay says. "But we can't do anything until the Venezuelans turn him over to us, and they have not done that." The conversation then ended abruptly. "You know, I'm really not supposed to be talking to you about this," Holladay says.

In May, following inquiries from Mother Jones, Congressman Pete Stark, who sits on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, wrote to both the Department of Justice and the Venezuelan ambassador in Washington, demanding an explanation for six years of inaction on the Recarey case.

Jeb and the Contras
The fact that Recarey is living free in Caracas rather than in shackles at Fort Leavenworth could well be a result of the role IMC may have played in Oliver North's secret contra-supply network. Though members of the House Intelligence Committee claimed they found no reason to believe that Recarey was using IMC's Medicare facilities and funds to aid the contras, the evidence that IMC was involved remains compelling. In 1985, the same year that Jeb Bush was dialing for dollars to HHS officials for IMC, Jeb also hand-carried a letter from Guatemalan physician Dr. Mario Castejon to the White House -- directly to his father's office in the Executive Office Building. Dr. Castejon's letter to Vice President Bush requested U.S. medical aid for the contras. George Bush penned a note back to the doctor, referring him to Lt. Col. Oliver North -- whose pro-contra activities the president now claims he knew little about.

An entry in North's diary reads:
22-Jan-85
Medical Support System for wounded FDN in Miami -- HMO in Miami has oked to help all WIA [wounded in action] ... Felix Rodriguez.

(Rodriguez was a former CIA official who advised Vice-President Bush's national-security adviser, Donald Gregg, currently U.S. ambassador to South Korea.)

Veteran CIA operative Jose Basulto told the Wall Street Journal in 1987 that he had personally attended meetings at IMC headquarters in Miami along with contra leader Adolfo Calero and Felix Rodriguez. Basulto also said that he had personally brought sick and wounded contras to IMC hospitals in Miami, where they received free medical treatment. Former HHS agent Leon Weinstein is not surprised that Recarey has not been returned to the United States. "My investigation," Weinstein says, "led me to conclude that there may have been a deliberate attempt to obstruct justice...because Recarey, his hospital, and his clinics were treating wounded contras from Nicaragua...and part of the $30 million a month he was given by the government to treat Medicare patients was used to set up field hospitals for the contras."

Jeb and "Manny" Diaz
Manuel C. Diaz, another Jeb Bush business associate, runs a commercial nursery with headquarters in Homestead, Florida. Manny Diaz's previous business sidekick, Charles Keating, Jr., is now sitting in a California prison. But during Keating's days at the helm of the $6 billion Lincoln Savings, Diaz became a Keating insider, confidant, and beneficiary. For example, in 1987, as federal regulators closed in on his crumbling empire, Keating instructed his attorneys to transfer a large chunk of prime Phoenix real estate to Diaz, for just $1. And right before filing for personal bankruptcy, Keating transferred his $2 million mansion on the island of Cat Cay in the Bahamas to Diaz.

At the same time Diaz was palling around with Keating, Jeb, then serving as Florida's secretary of commerce, arranged a private meeting for Diaz with Florida's Republican governor Bob Martinez. Promptly afterward, Diaz Farms landed a lucrative, $1.72 million, state-highway-landscaping contract -- despite the fact that Diaz had little prior highway-landscaping experience. This raised howls of protest and charges of political influence-peddling from other contractors. But state officials explained that the extraordinary speed in issuing the contract had occurred because the state was anxious to spruce up 113 miles of freeway for the coming visit of the pope.

Did Jeb know about Diaz's business association with Charles Keating? Did he have reason to believe Diaz was qualified for the Florida highway contract that he helped Diaz land? These are the kinds of detailed questions that the Florida chairman of the Bush re-election campaign refuses to answer.

Neil Bush

In the March/April issue of Mother Jones, I detailed Neil Bush's activities and therefore only sketch his involvement here. Neil served as a director of Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan in Denver, Colorado, from 1985 until 1988. During that time, the now-dead thrift made over $200 million in loans to Neil's two partners in JNB Exploration, Neil's abysmally unsuccessful oil company. Silverado's failure was due at least in part to the fact that Neil's two partners welshed on $132 million in loans.

Federal regulators determined that, while Silverado was pumping loans to Neil's two associates, Neil was completely dependent on the two men for his income. The failure of Silverado -- its closure delayed until after the 1988 election -- cost taxpayers about $1 billion. After almost two years of hand-wringing had passed, an expert hired by regulators declared that Neil suffered from an "ethical disability," and he was required to pay a $50,000 fine for his ethical lapses at Silverado. Neil's estimated $250,000 in legal bills generated by the scandal are reportedly being paid for him by a banking-industry lobbyist who is fighting to get banks deregulated.

After Silverado failed, Neil started a new oil company, Apex Energy. This time, his money came from a $2.35 million loan through a Small Business Administration program, a loan arranged by an old family friend. When news of this reached the press in March 1991, the SBA discovered that the companies through which the loan was approved were technically insolvent, and it gave them up to thirty months to "self-liquidate." This meant that Apex would have to repay its SBA-guaranteed loans. Neil took this as his cue to move on, and he left Apex -- and its debts -- for others to worry about. If Apex Energy can't be sold for more than it owes, the SBA, and ultimately the taxpayers, will be stuck with the difference. The last time we checked, Apex's only known asset was an oil lease, which the company had purchased from Neil for $150,000 before he bailed out. That means taxpayers could get stiffed for another $2.2 million as a result of Neil Bush's wheeling and dealing. The public won't learn the precise outcome until later this year, though. The SBA allowed thirty months for liquidation of the SBA investment in Apex, putting the resolution date just past the 1992 general election.


President George Bush claims that only a return to traditional family values can cure the "poverty of spirit" that plagues places like our decaying inner cities. But after a closer look, particularly at his adult children, one cannot help but wonder about the values that matter to his own family.

Bush says he is proud of his sons. One of them rented himself out to a crooked developer who scammed HUD and helped pry millions out of Medicare to fuel a giant health-care scam. A second may have profited from an insider stock transaction in a gulf oil deal at the very time that U.S. soldiers were dying to make that region safe for oil. And the third son ran a savings and loan into the ground while shoveling millions of its taxpayer-backed dollars into the pockets of two deadbeat partners.

When President Bush speaks of the lack of family values he, of course, is referring to broken marriages, single mothers, and inner-city kids who join gangs and sell dope. But are these the only villains -- or the most important ones -- responsible for the shredded social fabric? What about well-to-do white boys who trade on family connections, welsh on loans, run with con men, and leave financial ruin in their wake as they line their own pockets? What about grown men, with access to the most powerful public office in the land, who participate in scandal but show no remorse for any of it -- and who take no responsibility for the consequences of their own actions?

It's certainly reasonable for candidate Bush to engage the public in a discussion of family values, to use his office as a bully pulpit on modern morals. But what of George Bush's inability or unwillingness to grasp the crisis of values festering within his own family? The pattern of behavior by the president's three sons raises questions -- about them and their father. These issues have yet to get the prime-time exposure of fictional Murphy Brown's fictional fatherless child.

Stephen Pizzo is author of Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans.

Research assistance by Peter Willmert and Chris Rosch�.

"A Policy Poisoned by Money": An Interview With Greg Palast
by Scott Thill
Morphizm.com
27 June 03

One thing investigative journalist Greg Palast is not is some blow-dried cream puff crowing the party line on CNN or Fox News. While America has gotten used to calling stuffed shirts like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Brian Williams et. al. journalists, those guys spend more time preening in the makeup room than sweating in the field finding out just what the hell the country is up to. Even Koppel's recent foray into Iraq during the war was a Tony Snow-job: embedded with the American military, however comfy it may be, cannot help but slant reportage, especially if the Marines are telling you where you can and can't go.

Greg Palast has no such directives compelling him towards -- or away, as is usually the case -- a real story. One look at his book -- The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: The Truth About Corporate Cons, Globalization, and High-Finance Fraudsters -- can tell you that this guy is neither afraid of digging up the dirty truth nor the goon squads sent his way to keep it from seeing the light of day. And we're talking big stuff: the Enron disgrace, the Exxon Valdez environmental disaster, the Florida election rigging, the Bush-bin Laden connections, international financial crime -- this is the stuff the X-Files' Mulder and Scully would have sniffed out if they weren't so bogged down with alien invasions.

But Palast might as well be an alien, since the mainstream American media has, almost without exception, declared him persona non grata. He's a hot potato, because he's uncompromising, refuses to be cowed, and isn't afraid of the money men that make shit happen in the United States and abroad. For that thankless job, he's given up the normal lives we all lead, in lieu of making justice happen. So the least we can do -- since the corporate-owned ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, NPR and onward will not -- is give him space to breathe some life into stagnant American journalism. After all, that's what the European continent has done, having granted Palast coveted posts at the BBC, as well as UK newspapers of note.

Think of that: an American dedicated to truth and justice, and only the Europeans will let him talk. Only in America!

Scott Thill: Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. I know you're a busy man.
Greg Palast: No problem, it's a great day. It's my birthday and I'm sitting on the beach, so eat your heart out. So what's on your mind, besides the president and his family coup d'etat?

ST: [Laughs.] Are you kidding? That's the only thing on my mind these days. I read your book and it floored me.
GP: It kinda floored me finding this stuff out.

ST: Yeah, but I'm just a reader. You're the guy who has to deal with the pressure. Do you ever wish for a normal life?
GP: Well, today I'm leading a normal life for my birthday, but it feels very unusual. But it gets kind of manic, getting all this information. When I was doing an investigation of the Exxon Valdez, I lived in native villages up in Prince William Sound. I was also in London, finding out who's trying to buy up Tony Blair's government. I had to pull an undercover operation -- which is something that's not in the book -- while doing an investigation of the Shoreham nuclear plant, which has since been dismantled. It was a dangerous, hot piece of shit that had to be taken apart.


Private enemy number one: Cynthia McKinney. "She knew she was taking on George Bush; what she didn't know, working in Atlanta, was that she was taking on Atlanta's black political establishment."
ST: Do you ever get worried about digging too deep?
GP: Well, yeah, but I'm not really worried about myself, because if I did that, I couldn't function. But I do worry very much about my sources. For example, I reported that George Bush's gold mining company bought property in Tanzania, which was then cleared of miners. The miners were on what they considered their own property (while the mining company considered it to be their own property), but were still removed by bulldozers that rolled over the pits. Except that there were fifty people still in the mines when they were sealed up. I don't think that it was done deliberately, but in the mayhem and chaos of a pitched battle over George Bush's goldfield, fifty miners were buried alive. I had many sources for that story, but a key investigator was a human rights lawyer named Tundu Lissu, who -- for uncovering this information and getting it to me -- has been since charged with sedition. He may end up in jail for quite some time, but that's only if he's lucky. There are people disappearing there over this story; it's dangerous stuff. This week I wrote about Cynthia McKinney, who got mangled trying to follow up on some of my stories.

ST: I read that one, "The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney."
GP: Yeah, that was the headline given by Alternet, but I was actually looking at a wider issue. That was only part of a longer piece about the endless fibs, fabrications and fractured news given to us by the New York Times, NPR -- what I like to call National Petroleum Radio -- and the rest of the mainstream press in America. I used McKinney's case as only one example of that longer story. Basically, she was trying to follow up on the Tanzania story -- she read the transcripts of my reports from BBC television when she was in Congress -- with the Human Rights Subcommittee, of which she was a ranking member. She knew she was taking on George Bush; what she didn't know, working in Atlanta, was that she was taking on Atlanta's black political establishment. She didn't know that two of the people also involved in that gold mining company were Vernon Jordan and Andrew Young. And that meant she was setting herself up for the slaughter; they waited in the bushes until they got her. She also called for an investigation into another one of my reports, about the quashing of the investigation of the bin Laden family and Saudi financing of terror before September 11th. Which had nothing to do with George Bush knowing about September 11th; it was an intelligence failure that had to be investigated. And when she called for that investigation, they mangled her words, basically said that she was accusing George Bush of joining hands with Osama bin Laden in masterminding the killings of September 11th. She said no such thing, and denied it, but they killed her with that. So I worry a lot about the people who feed me information. But fear for myself? Nah.

ST: I figure that the mainstream media is a hopeless cause, but shouldn't they at least try to cover these stories, if only to honor the people who risk their lives to get them out there?
GP: Look, if a whistleblower goes to the New York Times and says, "I want to tell you what's going on inside this corporation or inside this agency," they just get blown off. Thirty years ago, the Washington Post ran the Watergate story, so that would make this the thirtieth anniversary of the Post not running an investigative story! Name one thing they've done. For example, the Iran/Contra story was broken by Bob Perry of the Associated Press, for which he was duly fired. You're really talking about news guys who are afraid and, simply, lazy. They're lazy little press puppies who want everything packaged for them. Even places like 60 Minutes; almost all their stories are handed to them pre-fabricated. Here's the people on camera, here's the story, here's the evidence. And it's not a question of it being light news, it's that they can't go one day without saying what our president did. And the thing is, it crowds out real news. Three million people have been killed in civil war in the Congo, but what news do we have? We get these weird blips once in a while, about peacekeeping forces going in. Millions of people! We don't know shit about the Mideast; the Mideast coverage for us is what's going on in Israel and Palestine. And for all the arguments about bias -- the U.S. is biased towards Israel, Europe is biased towards the Palestinians -- the main problem is that it's biased towards a tiny piece of a giant place. We don't know what the **** is going on in Syria, we don't know what the **** is going in the Sudan. I pick up the Times and I just want to ****in' throw it against the wall.

ST: Damn, what do you do when you turn on something like Fox? That shit must drive you insane.
GP: I don't have a television. And I produce television! But I won't watch it. In Britain, I can turn on BBC and get programming that doesn't always embarrass me. But there's no place to turn in America. They give you these pseudo-liberal oases like Charlie Rose or something, but that's just more of the officialdom talking at you. I think the worst thing that ever happened to America was the public broadcast system. PBS is more dangerous than Fox, because it is the lie that you're getting some type of alternative, that you're getting a fuller picture, when in fact you're just getting more syllables to tell you what Mobil Oil wants you to hear. In fact, NPR pulled me off the air the other day. They were going to run a show about the "Screwing of Cynthia McKinney," until someone realized that I said that NPR had fabricated her words as much as everyone else. Actually, it's the NPR report on McKinney that was the worst; they took two separate parts of a radio interview, linked them together and completely misstated her words. So, at the last minute, they pulled me off the air just before I was supposed to go on.

ST: Yeah, I was listening to NPR the other day and they had some guy from the Heritage Foundation on there. If I want to hear what the Heritage Foundation thinks, I can go to Fox.
GP: Exactly. Obviously, some assistant producer at NPR thought it would be good to have me on there to talk about the media, but only to have some general blather and definitely not to talk about NPR, of course. Basically, it tends to be more liberal -- what I like to call social liberal -- but there's no challenge to the basic economic program of the New World Order. Every one of their writers is pro-globalization. Do you realize that one of the most left-wing writers in America with any stature is Thomas Friedman, who once wrote that all of our economic problems were solved by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan? That's our most liberal columnist.

ST: It's scary how you're not accepted in America for your reportage, while the Europeans are eager to give you a chance to speak.
GP: The fact is that I report for the most prestigious television news show on the planet -- BBC television's Newsnight -- and I write for prestigious newspapers, the Guardian and Observer. I have George Orwell's old post, and yet somehow I'm treated like the Unabomber. "He's gonna take some hostages and demand his stuff get printed!" The only thing I can hope for is the miracle of the Internet. Which is why the establishment keeps saying, "Look out for the Internet; it's so scary out there! You can't rely on that information." Like you can rely on the information on the Los Angeles Times, although I should be careful, because the L.A. Times did a glowing profile of me. But, on the other hand, I went through the Times with the reporter who did that story and said, "Look at this crap!" [Laughs.] It's true! I mean, I'm happy to get a lovely profile, but the information is missing. They even had a story that said there was unanimous praise for the appointment of Paul Bremer as the viceroy of Iraq. Unanimous? Having the former business partner of Henry Kissinger take over Iraq? There wasn't anyone out there who had a problem with that idea? They looked all over the newsroom and even called the White House but couldn't find anyone who thought it wasn't a brilliant idea. [Laughs.] So what can you do? I won't watch TV here, and I certainly won't let my kids. I glance at the newspaper to see what the latest lie is, and about the only exception, because it follows the money, is the Wall Street Journal. But I do read Hustler, because I'm the latest issue! [Laughs.] The only American outlets for my writing are Harper's and Hustler. I've got the H's down.

ST: Yes! Well, we'd love to have you at Morphizm. I'm a political guy, but I love music and film, too…
GP: That's the thing. I think the thing is that we have to be very careful for is this: progressives should not become grim. The success of the antiwar movement was not built on the grim speeches of Tom Hayden but more on the antics and fun of Abbie Hoffman. When we created our own counterculture (although the other side wasn't really culture, just official distratction), we had our own music and images, control of our own fun. Don't go to Disneyworld; throw away the TV! [Laughs.] People who have done those two things have already started the revolution. I bet that's where you'll find the great dissident America.

ST: That's what we're about here: the place where you don't get crap. For example, I noticed that you had Winston Smith's artwork in your book.
GP: Yeah! I'm glad you noticed that.

ST: Oh absolutely. I talked to Jello Biafra who was sued by his band mates for control of their Dead Kennedys catalog, and one of his chief complaints was that they made Smith's album art so small that no one could read it. And that was always the point, having that voice of protest.
GP: That's funny, because my publisher, Penguin, didn't understand why I had all those Winston Smith illustrations in the book. I think the book is worth the price just for Smith's artwork. And they didn't get it. I told them it was as important as the pictures of the FBI documents; it was key. I'm really glad you grabbed onto that, because the Winston Smith illustrations are crucial to the book. The Italians understand this; in their country, Winston Smith and I have equal billing on the book. But in America, I put it there for those who know, or those who should know.

ST: Speaking of those who should know, why is the Bush administration so intent on blocking this 9/11 probe, when they've used it to justify every war they've started since, plus some of the draconian domestic programs like Total Information Awareness?
GP: I just did a one-hour documentary on this for the BBC, "The Bush Family Fortunes," which you can't see, of course. It's going out all around the world, except America. We know that Bush's energy policy was completely Enronized. We know all about the secret meetings between Ken Lay and Dick Cheney; and even though people say we don't know what went on in those meetings, I have a lot of those letters and minutes. Lay simply said, "Here's the people I want as head of the agencies that are regulating me." He got to pick his own regulators, rewrite the energy laws of America; we know that.

But the oil patch continues on through foreign policy, although oil has always been at the heart of it, which in turn poisons our intelligence community. For example, George W's first business was funded by the U.S. financial agent of the bin Laden family, a guy named James Bath. Then we get to Harken, which is funded by a guy named Sheik Bahksh, out of Saudi Arabia. We have the government of Bahrain giving Harken a Persian Gulf drilling contract. You have to understand that some tiny oil driller out of Texas is never, ever given a Persian Gulf drilling contract; it just doesn't happen. But it turns out in this case, George W. Bush, whose daddy was president at the time, was put on the board. And throughout we've got Saudi and other Gulf money enriching George W. Bush.

So what was he doing in the summer of 2001? Previously, Bill Clinton had sent two delegations to Saudi Arabia saying, "Stop funding terrorists. Here's a list of people in your kingdom, in your royal family that are funding terrorists. Knock it off." Those delegations stop under Bush; plus, he disbands the unit investigating Saudi financial ties to terrorism, and removes the FBI team investigating Al Qaeda from Yemen. Now is this because Bush was planning to help Osama attack America? No. It's because he was making sure that his former business partners, and his Saudi friends, are not embarrassed about the revelations about who's backing terrorism. And none of the small incidents, like the Cole or the embassy attacks, touched the U.S.

So what's happened is that you have a foreign policy poisoned by money. Bush is saying, "Don't investigate my friends." In fact, some of these people, like Bahksh, are under investigation by European intelligence agencies for sponsoring Al Qaeda, although sometimes unknowingly. Al Qaeda runs a shakedown operation, but that's details. A lot of it is this: "We don't bother the Saudis, they're our friends, they're our buddies, they provide our oil." Well, the Saudis have not been our buddies, they've been George W. Bush's buddies. They're not my buddies, especially when they're funding people that attacked the United States. I worked in the World Trade Center; they attacked my building. Fifteen of those nineteen hijackers were Saudis, but we attacked Iraq without one shred of evidence that there was any connection between Hussein and Al Qaeda. Saddam Hussein, a horrible guy, but still.

And now they're selling us on Iran's connection to Al Qaeda. Keep this in mind: the United States was not Al Qaeda's first target. Their first target was Iran; almost no one knows or understands that in America. They hate the Iranians. Al Qaeda slaughtered the Iranian embassy delegation in Afghanistan; they came in and machine-gunned everyone. Iran is their number one target, because they are Shi'ites, and considered to be horrible apostates. The idea that the Iranian government has anything to do with Al Qaeda is insane. The Saddam Hussein thing was off the wall, but we're going to fight a government that hates Al Qaeda even more than we do. Now, Iran is a fascist Islamic government that should be deposed -- by their own people. Like I said, you pick up the paper, and you're ready to tear your hair out.

ST: Right. Accusations against Bush for being a part of the 9/11 attacks aside, there's simply no denying his connections to all of the parties involved. He's a part of this whether he wants to be or not.
GP: That's the thing. Now, this continues on something that Clinton started, but he sent two delegations to Saudi Arabia in the year 2000, saying cut it out. And all the Saudis had to do was wait it out for their boy George. And they did, and this one of the big goddamn problems. Plus, we're given the bullshit that the Gulf is no longer dangerous? Think about this: Okinawa's government has been requesting the removal of American troops for five decades; World War II is over! We won't leave Okinawa, but we'll leave Saudi Arabia? It's the only place I know of where we're abandoning bases, and it's the only place on the planet that Al Qaeda wants us to abandon our bases. So basically now we've got a chickenshit, draft-dodging coward of a president who's decided that he's going to give in to Al Qaeda's laundry list. I think giving in to terrorists like Al Qaeda is a very bad move, and it led directly to those explosions in Riyadh. Because we said we were removing all our troops but 500, and that was Al Qaeda's way of saying, "No, no, no, that's not what we asked for." That's the problem inherent in bargaining with terrorists, and no matter what Bush says, that's exactly what he's doing. He's bargaining with Al Qaeda, because he doesn't want another attack before the election. Right now, he's heroic. If there's another attack, people will say, "What was all this bullshit for?"

ST: That's another thing. Right now, I think he's vulnerable to the Democracts, Fox-sponsored polls aside.
GP: Yeah, with the exception of Lierberman, who's seems to be at a dead loss. I'm not sure he knows if he wants to be a Democrat. Think about this: Clinton was utterly unknown. No one would run against Bush Sr. in 1992, because he was the Desert Stormtrooper. He was supposed to be invincible, and all the Democrats could find was some philanderer from Arkansas, and that's how we ended up with Bill Clinton. So no one's ever heard of these guys, but they're not miracles. But compared to what the Democratic party has produced? Everyone running right now is head and shoulders above Al Gore. Gore is a confused loser, and the problem is that he doesn't know what he stands for.

ST: I talked to Dennis Kucinich a couple weeks ago, and he's my favorite out of all of them so far.
GP: It doesn't matter at this point. Democrats are very good at having firing squads within a circle. They need to make sure that the primary doesn't become a drinking of the Kool Aid, where everyone slaughters or shoots at each other. That would be the great tragedy of the Democratic party, but the Democratic party is tragic anyway. I never say who I vote for, so I won't say the Democrats get my vote. But they do get my pity.

Why Does George W. Bush Fly in Drug Smuggler Barry Seal's Airplane?
by Daniel Hopsicker and Michael C. Ruppert
As Published in the October, 1999 Issue

N6308F
The convoluted, pretzel-like paper history of the airplane that once belonged to Barry Seal and is today used by Texas Governor George W. Bush

It has all the makings of a major box office thriller: Texas Governor and Republican Presidential contender George W. Bush and his brother Jeb, allegedly caught on videotape in 1985 picking up kilos of cocaine at a Florida airport in a DEA sting set up by Barry Seal…

An ensuing murderous cover-up featuring Seal's public assassination less than a year later by a hit team…the members of which, when caught, reveal to their attorneys during trial that their actions were being directed by then, National Security Council (NSC) staffer - Lt. Colonel Oliver North…

And a private turboprop King Air 200 supposedly caught on tape in the sting with FAA ownership records leading directly to the CIA and some of the perpetrators of the most notorious (and never punished) major financial frauds of the '80s. …Greek shippers paying bribes to obtain loans from American companies that would never be repaid.…An American executive snatching the charred remains of a $10,000 payoff check from an ashtray in an Athens restaurant…Swiss police finding bank accounts used for kickbacks and bribes…

Add to this mix the now irrefutable proof, some of it from the CIA itself, that then Vice President George H.W. Bush was a decision maker in illegal Contra support operations connected to the "unusual" acquisition of aircraft and that his staff participated in key financial, operational and political decisions…

All these events lead inexorably to one unanswered question: How did this one plane go from being controlled by Barry Seal, the biggest drug smuggler in American history, to becoming, according to state officials, a favored airplane of Texas Governor George W. Bush?

-----------------------------------

Three months into an exhaustive investigation of persistent reports dating to 1995 that there exists an incriminating videotape of current Republican Presidential front-runner Bush caught in a hastily-aborted DEA cocaine sting, the central allegation remains unproven…

But some startling details have been confirmed, amid a raft of new suspicions emerging from conflicting FAA records. Those records, along with other irrefutable documents, point to the existence of far more than mere happenstance or dark "conspiracy theorist speculations" in the matter of how George W. Bush came to be flying the friendly Texas skies in an airplane that was a crown jewel in the drug smuggling fleet of the notorious Barry Seal. Those documents reveal - beyond any doubt - that in the 1980s Barry Seal, with whom the CIA has consistently denied any relationship, piloted and controlled airplanes owned by the same Phoenix Arizona company, Greycas, which in a 1998 bankruptcy filing, was revealed to have been a subsidiary of the same company that owned the now defunct CIA proprietary airline Southern Air Transport.

The investigation started with a lead into the history of the aircraft (a 1982 Beechcraft King Air 200 with FAA registration number N6308F - Serial Number BB-1014). The handwritten tail number was found in records kept by Seal's widow and later linked to other "hard paper" records left by Seal after his 1986 assassination by "drug traffickers" who were subsequently connected to Oliver North. Those records, including leasing agreements, insurance policies and maintenance records, exhibit a deliberately-confusing "paper trail" of convoluted ownership recalling the 'glory' days of the Iran Contra hearings, where the machinations of American covert intelligence operators were unmasked before a disbelieving public.

Combined with revelations in a 1998 CIA Inspector General's report of Contra-era cocaine trafficking in which the CIA admits to "briefing" then Vice President Bush on how it lied to Congress about cocaine trafficking by its agents, it becomes clear that father and son have common secrets to conceal from the American public. That report, Volume II of the CIA Inspector General's report into allegations of Contra cocaine trafficking can be viewed at http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/cocaine2/index.html. A detailed discussion of that report, along with relevant excerpts is available at www.copvcia.com.
Unraveling the plane's tangled and colorful history requires, first, a brief look backwards at the momentous year of 1982, when President Reagan first introduced the public version of "Project Democracy," in which he called for a "crusade for freedom."

What it became instead was a license to murder, loot and steal. This climate was the nursery into which N6308F was born.

"The War of '82"
The detonations had rumbled like Armageddon along the rocky course of the Rio Negro in Nicaragua throughout the night of March 14, 1982... Concrete bridges groaned suddenly under their own weight, crashing in avalanches of black dust in a dark landscape seen through night-vision goggles… In Washington D.C., it was time to break out the champagne. War was breaking out in Central America. Just two days later Barry Seal took possession of the first of many planes supplied to him through CIA Director Bill Casey's "off-the-books" Enterprise.

There were more than 100 U.S. advisers in Honduras by March of 1982. In April, the chief of the Honduran Army, General Gustavo Alvarez, said that his country would agree to U.S. intervention in Central America if it were the only way to "preserve peace."



"Up to March 1982 you could still change your policy," recalled a member of the NSC Core Group In Charge as he spoke to reporters later. "The issue was still the question of support for El Salvador's rebels. If that ended, so could pressure on Managua. But once the first forces of Nicaraguan exiles were trained and set in motion, any real negotiating became much harder. The blowing of the bridges was an announcement."

Throughout 1982, Democrats, fearing that President Reagan was pushing the United States into another Vietnam-style quagmire, tried to cut off aid to the Contras. It was precisely at this time, the height of CIA Director Bill Casey's frenetic efforts to ward off these Congressional efforts, that Barry Seal acquired use of not one but several brand new Beech Craft King Air 200s. Ownership of the planes had been deliberately obscured through a number of convoluted transactions involving Phoenix-based corporations suspected of being "fronts" for General John Singlaub's "Enterprise" activities. Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Retired Major General Singlaub organized in early 1982 an American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), called the United States Council for World Freedom (USCWF), with a loan from Taiwan. Funding for Seal's planes would come from sources close to those efforts.

"Jack" Singlaub had a long history of involvement in covert operations, beginning with service in the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He had served as CIA Desk Officer for China in 1949 and Deputy Chief of Station in South Korea during the Korean War, and during the Vietnam War he commanded the Special Operations Group Military Assistance Command, Vietnam--Studies and Observation Group (MACVSOG), which participated in the CIA's Operation Phoenix assassination program.

Singlaub's efforts, and Seal's as well, had been necessitated by the shocking scandals of the 1970s combined with drastic reductions in "official" CIA capabilities in the Carter years. Until then, the CIA. had controlled a huge network of planes, pilots and companies for use in paramilitary situations. But with the end of the Vietnam War and the public revulsion at disclosures of out of control CIA covert operations, many of those assets (such as the infamous Air America) were dissolved or sold off.

Consequently, when the Reagan Administration sought to expand covert paramilitary operations in Central America and elsewhere, the Agency was forced to rebuild much of its capabilities illegally, relying frequently on outside assets, usually retained under contract, like Barry Seal. The Contra war put everything into high gear.

The CIA and the Army jointly agreed to set up a special aviation operation called "Seaspray," New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh revealed in 1987. [This was old news to local and state police in affected areas. Cops had already seen the cynical (and perhaps intentional) manipulation of this operation flooding America with a river of drugs. When law enforcement authorities debriefed convicted "drug smuggler" Seal in late 1985, one of the cops present brusquely began by stating, "We already know about Seaspray."]

Everybody Will Be There.
The "boys" were getting ready to go to war in the Spring of 1982:

-- CIA agent Dewey Clarridge put a proposition to Contra leader Eden Pastora. "He would become the star of the second revolution as he had been the star of the first," -- John Hull, whom Congressional sources said worked for the CIA since at least the early 1970s, rented a Contra safe house in San Jose, Coast Rica at CIA request. -- Retired Air Force Major General Richard Secord began managing an operation in which Israel shipped weapons captured in Lebanon to a CIA arms depot in San Antonio, Texas, for re-shipment to the Contras. -- Felix Rodriguez drew on his Vietnam experience and wrote a five-page proposal for the creation of an elite mobile strike force, called the Tactical Task Force (TTF), that would "be ideal for the pacification efforts in El Salvador and Guatemala."-- And at this exact same time, in the Spring of 1982, Barry Seal began flying private planes into a then-obscure airport in the secluded mountains of western Arkansas known as Mena. He moved his base of operations from Louisiana to hook up with the CIA, which was anxious to use Seal's fleet of planes to ferry both legal and illegal supplies to Contra camps in Honduras and Costa Rica.

Rodriguez dubbed the search and destroy units "Pink Teams" and advocated using napalm and cluster bombs to give them "more destructive power." Rodriguez's proposal included a map of Central America which indicated that Nicaragua would be a target of Pink Team operations (based in El Salvador and Honduras).

Favorably impressed, Vice President George (Poppy) Bush's National Security Advisor Donald Gregg sent Rodriguez's Pink Team plan to then Deputy National Security Adviser Bud McFarlane on March 17, along with a secret one-page memo on "anti-guerrilla operations in Central America."

This was also, according to later Iran-Contra testimony of Medellin Cartel money man Ramon Milian Rodriguez, when he began to launder, at Felix Rodriguez' request, $10 million from the cartel for the Contras. In secret, sworn testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Milian Rodriguez claimed that he had been solicited by his old friend Felix Rodriguez.

Also early in 1982 a new covert unit of the Armed Forces was set up by General Richard Stilwell. Known as the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA), it became a separate entity in the Army's secret world of special operations, with its own commander, a Col. Jerry King. The army's involvement in secret operations would first became known to the House and Senate intelligence committees in early 1982, when they discovered a project known as Yellow Fruit, which ferried undercover Army operatives to Honduras, where they trained Honduran troops for bloody hit-and-run operations into Nicaragua.

Through private front companies, like the ones that supplied Barry Seal with his fleet of smuggling aircraft, Operation Yellow Fruit ferried weapons like rapid-fire cannons to CIA operatives. It was these same operatives who later mined Nicaragua's harbors and raided oil depots, all in violation of Congressional legislation barring the Defense Department and the Agency from taking any action aimed at overthrowing the Sandinistas.

The Army went to outside businessmen and arms dealers to make off-the-books airplane purchases, with funds that had been "laundered" through secret Army finance offices at Fort Meade, Md. More than $325 million was appropriated for the Special Operations Division of the Army between 1981 and the autumn of 1983. Had any of these operations become public then it would have caused enormous political damage to the Reagan Administration's campaign in Central America, according to a 1987 New York Times report by Seymour Hersh.

"Enter CIA Agent Adler Berriman Seal"
The flight plans for Seal's drug enterprise provided the perfect cover for the illicit resupply missions. Seal's planes would fly from Mena to Medellin Cartel airstrips in the mountains of Colombia and Venezuela, make refueling stops in Panama and Honduras, and then return to Mena, where, en route, the planes would drop parachute-equipped duffel bags loaded with cocaine over Seal-controlled farms in Louisiana.

"His well-connected and officially protected smuggling operation based at Mena accounted for billions in drugs and arms from 1982 until his murder four years later," said Dr. Roger Morris and Sally Denton in their book Partners in Power. They also reported that coded records of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) showed Barry Seal on the payroll beginning in 1982.

"My investigation established a conspiratorial period, chronologically, with a first overt act and a last overt act. The first overt act was April 12, 1982," stated Arkansas state criminal investigator Russell Welch, who was charged, he thought, with digging into Seal's Mena activities. Between March and December 1982, according to law enforcement records, Seal fitted nine of his aircraft with the latest electronic equipment, paying the $750,000 bill - as was his custom - in cash.

The effects of Barry Seal's efforts to take weapons one way and bring drugs the other were soon visible, in ruined lives in the U.S. and in the maimed bodies appearing all over Central America.

"Riding the Elephant Herd"
Barry Seal was not alone. When small private planes began to bomb the Nicaraguan capital, resulting in the crash of a Cessna 404 at the Managua airport, an account of how three Cessnas were secretly transported from the New York Air National Guard to Central America for the raid on Managua reached the press. It was later learned that custody of a number of additional planes were moved from the U.S. Air Force in a top-secret Joint Chiefs operation code-named "Elephant Herd," on to the CIA, via a Delaware aviation company where they were armed, and then transferred to their ultimate destination, the Contras.

A senior administration official admitted that small noncombatant military aircraft had been transferred from the Air Force to the Contras through the CIA. One company involved, Summit Aviation, was doing regular business with Barry Seal according to records in his widow's possession. In addition, according to Congressional sources, Summit, known to do Contract work for the CIA, had former CIA personnel on the payroll, and was linked through ownership records to the Cessna that crashed while bombing Managua.

That aircraft, according to FAA records, was purchased by Summit Aviation in October 1982 from Trager Aviation Center in Lima, Ohio. On the same day that Summit purchased the plane, the company sold it to Investair Leasing Corp. of McLean, Va.. Investair, which has an unlisted telephone number, does Contract work for the CIA, according to Congressional sources. Bruce W. Trager, who sold the Cessna to Summit for $308,872, says the deal was "put together" by Patrick J. Foley, Summit's "military director."

In addition to its work for Investair, Summit maintained and modified planes for Armairco, another company involved in covert government projects. Armairco, organized in 1982, also bought several multimillion-dollar Beechcraft King Airs, like Barry Seal's. Those aircraft were purchased directly from Beech in a procedure normally used only for military projects, according to Beech officials and aviation experts.

When asked whether Armairco's government work included activities in Central America, an Armairco official said, ''That may well be.''


The Beechcraft King Air 200 has been in production since the mid 1970's. A little less than seven hundred of them have been manufactured to date. The twin engine turboprop has a pressurized cabin capable, with different configurations of seating up to nine passengers. It has a cruising speed of approximately 330 mph and a cruising range of more than 1,800 miles. New plane prices in1982 started at around $1,700,000 based on equipment.

N6308F
The convoluted, pretzel-like paper history of the airplane that once belonged to Barry Seal and is today used by Texas Governor George W. Bush begins when the title to the brand new aircraft was first recorded by Portland, Oregon dealer Flightcraft, Inc.

Flightcraft's President, David R. Hinson, a former military and commercial airline pilot active in the Republican Party in Oregon, was, according to The Oregonian, at the time under consideration to head the FAA. The paper stated that Hinson had met with Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole to express interest in the job after travelling to Washington to promote himself for the post. Helping Bill Casey subvert the will of Congress, presumably, did nothing to hurt his chances.

N6308F was spoken for, several times over, even before it arrived at Flighcraft's facilities in the Spring of 1982.

"I don't think we're going to help you - I mean "be able" to help you said a nervous Phil Carrell of Flightcraft, Inc. when contacted for information by FTW. Carrell, a sales executive who was working at Flightcraft when "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" was originally sold, told FTW that as far as he knew any records of the aircraft were no longer in existence. He referred us to the FAA title records for answers. We wish that answers were what we had found.

According to records located by Dan Hopsicker in his investigation, a now defunct Lake Arrowhead, California firm, Ken Miller Aircraft Sales, entered into leasing agreements with developer Eugene Glick in February 1982, two months before the manufacturer's title was transferred to Flightcraft. Ken Miller Aircraft appears nowhere in the FAA title history of the plane. Ken Miller Aviation is also no longer in existence. Nonetheless, in February 1982, Ken Miller Aviation entered into a leasing agreement with real estate magnate Eugene Glick for the brand new aircraft. In that agreement, Glick and his wife agreed to make eighty-four monthly payments of more than $37,000 ($2,835,672) for the airplane which had a new purchase price of $2,010,556. No record linking Ken Miller Aviation to Flightcraft is known to exist.

On paper at least, according to Contracts dating from February of 1982, the plane was owned by a Greyhound Bus Lines subsidiary, Greycas, which in turn leased it to a mysterious Phoenix firm in close proximity to John Singlaub's Enterprise operations named Systems Marketing, Inc." Systems Marketing then leased it to Continental Desert Properties which was the firm owned by Glick. In the final step, Glick leased the plane over to Barry Seal.

In a Contract dated March 21, 1983 N6308F was leased by Continental Desert Properties to Seal's firm Baton Rouge Aviation . Insurance policies found in Seal's private papers confirm that Barry Seal subsequently purchased an insurance policy on the aircraft.

What, exactly, was the purpose of this convoluted ownership record? What was it designed to conceal? The answer lies in the very definition of "tradecraft," a term for what it is that spies and covert operators do to operate in the dark. The "front" companies were in place to act as "cut-outs," layers of insulation, between the spy agency -- in this case Bill Casey's CIA--and the covert operative--, in this case, Barry Seal.

FAA ownership records show that Gene Glick, who lived on Hope Ranch near Ronald Reagan's Rancho del Cielo in Santa Barbara, California, leased "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" as well as several of Barry Seal's other planes during the same years that Seal was most active in drug and weapons smuggling 1982-5. Other documents located by Hopsicker confirm that Glick was also actively helping Seal purchase ocean-going vessels for use in drug smuggling activities and as stationary platforms for the CIA to use off the coast of Nicaragua in covert operations.

An FBI agent had dismissed Glick's importance to Dan Hopsicker, which fueled his suspicions early on. "He's just a money launderer," said Delbert Hahn, who was the Special Agent in Charge of an Inter-Agency Organized Crime Drug Task Force looking into Barry Seal's organization back in the middle 1980s. At least in this case, Glick's behavior was consistent with Iran-Contra "bust out" operations because the lease defaulted in two years. The plane was repossessed.

According to FTW contributing editor Catherine Austin Fitts who, as a former Wall Street investment banker and Assistant Secretary of Housing, served on the Resolution Trust Corporation in the wake of the S&L scandal, "This could have been a substantial cash pay-off to the concerned parties." Fitts, who also served on the "clean-up" committee for BCCI (a bank with abundant connections to CIA covert operations, financial fraud and drug trafficking) observed that the pattern here is typical of those seen by enforcement officials in that era.

“It is worth researching to see if there were substantial cash pay-offs to the concerned parties,” said Fitts. “If the lease were insured at or near its full value and defaulted early as it did here in around two years; if the total value of lease > payments were $2.8 million and if the lessor had paid only $2.1 million for the aircraft then any insurance pay-off or “write down” after only a year or two could have netted a profit of a half million dollars or more for the covert operators. This type of insurance fraud was used routinely during Iran-Contra to finance covert operations.”

The CIA Gets Busted --Yet Again
The circle was completed with the discovery that "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot," as well as several other planes used by Barry Seal, was in reality owned by the same company revealed in 1998 bankruptcy proceedings to have owned the notorious CIA airline Southern Air Transport (SAT). Congressional and public records from the era establish Southern Air as a legendary CIA proprietary - second only to Air America - and as being connected to Secord, Singluab, Rodriguez, Casey and George H.W. Bush.

Among its long list of dubious "achievements," Southern Air had owned the C123 used by Seal in the Nicaragua sting operation which made Barry Seal famous. That same aircraft was later shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 and the lone survivor Eugene Hasenfus was captured alive by Sandinista soldiers.. That is what started the Iran-Contra scandal to begin with. No one knew--or admitted knowing--just who owned Southern Air Transport back in 1986, although government officials all swore up and down that it wasn't the CIA.

Southern Air's ownership by Greyhound Leasing, which became the entity called Finova, was only disclosed after no one was looking, when SAT went into bankruptcy in 1998. This is the first time the holding company, Finova, has been revealed for what it clearly is, an Agency front, set up in Arizona and headquartered in Canada to escape American financial disclosure requirements.

Suddenly, on June 14, 1984, after passage of the second Boland Amendment and the consolidation of Contra operations under Oliver North the plane was sold twice in one day. According to journalist, producer and author Dan Hopsicker, "This was at a period in time when Barry knew he was on the way out." The plane went first to a mysterious Morgan B. Mitchell of Vale, Oregon, and then to Chevrolet Dealer Merrill Bean of Ogden Utah. Bean, curiously, gave the Dover, Delaware address of the "Prentis Hall [sic] Corporation" on his FAA registration.

Students of the CIA have long been aware of the Agency's affinity for hiding its assets in Delaware shell corporations. But, to be fair, many other companies do so for reasons of convenience. In an interview Bean stated that he had incorporated in Delaware as a legal necessity because of the needs of his investors. "Delaware is a very convenient place for many kinds of corporations to incorporate and many large corporations and multi-nationals do so," Bean told FTW. "Because other companies I was in partnership with were incorporated there I chose to do so also. It was much easier that way and it was a requirement of the partners who were investing."

However, Delaware officials in the Secretary of State's office said that Bean's company, Prentis Hall [not Prentice Hall], does not exist. And in the FAA records connected to Bean's ownership of "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" we find yet another unexplained gap in FAA records. Whenever major mechanical repairs are made on an aircraft, the involved mechanic is required to complete an FAA Form 337. In December 1989, FAA certified mechanic Irvin Strayer installed some routine de-icing equipment on the plane. The mechanic, reviewing what should have been original ownership documents, listed the owner as United Insurance of Ogden Utah. Nowhere in FAA title paperwork does United Insurance appear as an owner. And a spokesman for the Utah State Department of Insurance told FTW that there had never been a United Insurance licensed to do business in the state.

"It was an insurance company that a group of car dealers had formed to handle title and financing and other insurance for car sales," said Bean. "I bought the other guys out of the airplane and had some repairs done before I sold to Corporate Wings."

Someone should have told the FAA. Or perhaps someone changed the FAA's records. Stranger things have happened. Bean does not recall if he changed the records to reflect this or not.

A Likely Suspect
In what will become a long litany of links between Barry Seal's activities and the financial fraud of the 1980's, Merrill Bean was also involved in what The Salt Lake City Tribune called "the worst financial disaster in Utah since the Great Depression." That disaster was the en masse 1980s failure of Utah thrifts -- hybrid financial institutions that offered high interest rates and consumer loans -- and the collapse of the insurance fund that was supposed to protect their deposits.

Because Utah's thrifts were heavily underinsured, the actions of Bean's thrift, Western Heritage Thrift and Loan, left a trail of broken hearts, and broken people.

"We had just moved to Utah from California two years ago," 58-year old Irene Culver told The Salt Lake City Tribune in 1986. "My husband Kent was an aircraft mechanic but he has Parkinson's Disease. We put half our savings in there [Western Heritage] and bought a little fixer-upper with the other half. When the State closed everything, I thought, 'I suppose we're lucky.' My Social Security should start in four years. We were going to put a new roof on and install a gas furnace because the electricity's expensive. Now we can't do it, so we've got half the house closed off."

Bean told FTW, "I was Director of that failed thrift. I came aboard when it was almost going under. And I poured some money into it to try to save it and it didn't happen. I was hoping that my $75,000 that I put into it would help revive it." While admitting that he was on the Board of Directors of Western Heritage, Bean stated emphatically that he was not "a Honcho."

FTW wonders how an obviously savvy businessman who owns several aircraft and car dealerships believed that $75,000 would turn around a failing savings and loan. In The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush, Texas journalist Pete Brewton documented how much of the S&L scandal was connected to Iran-Contra operations and illegal covert operations of the CIA. In many of those schemes a $75,000 or similar "buy-in" might have secured the mighty a seat at a highly-lucrative but completely criminal feeding frenzy.

'Disappearing' Money
Following the "paper trail" of Barry Seal's King Air 200 revealed connections to some other unsavory perpetrators of the major financial frauds that -- like the S&L scandal -- marred the 1980s. Greyhound Leasing, or "Greycas" for short, was at the center of a huge and seemingly inexplicable financial fraud that, like the half-trillion dollar S&L scandal, no one seemed too concerned about unraveling. The corporation was openly and eventually very publicly looted. Afterwards, company management pretended to be "baffled" as to how it could have happened.

It went down like this:

Greycas Inc. and another Greyhound unit, Greyhound Leasing & Financial Corp., were bilked of over $ 75 million by one Sheldon Player, a former Vernal, Utah, resident assumed to be in the machine and oilfield equipment sales business, who gained the money through fraudulently obtained loans from Greyhound. Greycas then devised an elaborate cover-up scheme to prevent disclosure of details about the loss.

This episode began at the beginning of the 1980's with one $ 600,000 loan. Player and his companies would sell Greycas heavy machine tools, lease them back and then pretend to sublease the expensive devices to end-users. In most cases the machines, which were collateral for the loans, were non-existent.

By 1984, Player had borrowed nearly $ 8 million from Greyhound in the same scheme. That year he asked for $ 40 million in new loans to continue his transactions. A total of $23.5 million had been disbursed by the time the company first got suspicious and confronted Player. He was told the company wanted to inspect the machinery that it was supposed to have owned. Remember, this was a company owned by the CIA front Finova. Player resisted, leading some company executives to wonder about the "integrity of the transactions with Player."

Then, incredibly, despite the company's doubts about Player's credibility and integrity, and in spite of Greycas' inability to make inspections of the equipment, the company lent Player another $ 24 million. In the ensuing months lucky Sheldon Player drew $66 million on the credit line authorized by the company.

This was an Iran-Contra bust-out.

Nice Work if You Can Get It
Anyone who has ever borrowed money for a car or home must admire the chutzpah of Sheldon Player, whom the business press took to calling an "admitted con artist." Yet Player had no history of financial fraud that we could discover before this, which took place at the same time that officers of a Swiss-based subsidiary were defrauding Greycas of another $120 million, in a purportedly unrelated scandal that sent shock waves from Athens to Phoenix.

"Many borrowers failed to make even the initial monthly payment,'' court documents state. The company's accountants wrote that "fraudulent and dishonest acts . . . resulted directly in a loss of $119,684,598." Not so, said the company's hapless General Counsel, who responded, weakly, that the loss has been reduced to a mere $72 million.

The fraud included checks written as bribes on napkins in Swiss restaurants and then set afire… the reported possibility that one of the participants was blackmailing other participants and some mighty upset shareholders who filed lawsuits in Phoenix urging the Greyhound board to take legal action against top officials. The troubling question that puzzled business reporters never were able to answer was this: Why were they giving money away down at Greyhound during the 1980's?

Being Connected Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
The disposition of the resulting criminal trial of Sheldon Player is an illustration of the maxim that in George Bush's America, "Being connected means never having to say you're sorry."

When Sheldon Player was sentenced, he received a five-year sentence. Yup. Five years -- one year for each $13 million he stole. This is clearly a deal that, if offered to regular Americans--as opposed to the CIA-related kind who killed Barry Seal --would have people lining up around the Phoenix Federal Courthouse to sign up. After receiving this draconian sentence Mr. Player was given additional time to settle personal affairs before entering prison. No one can say American justice is not compassionate. And prison, for Mr. Player, consisted of the Lompoc Camp, a minimum-security facility known as one of 10 to 12 "country club" institutions in operation around the nation, according to Dick Murray, community programs manager for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in Phoenix.

Former Greycas official Robert Bertrand, who apparently covered up for Player's fraud, lucky fellow, never went to prison. Instead he resigned his position at Greyhound in 1986, and was soon appointed the new President and Chief Executive Officer of Finalco Inc. [Sounds like Finova doesn't it?], an equipment finance and brokerage company which just happens to be based in McLean, Virginia, the home of the CIA.

(Back?) Into the Hands of the Guvnah

Merrill Bean, the Utah Chevy dealer who acquired "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" in 1984 sold the plane in May of 1990 to Corporate Wings of Salt Lake City. Two days later Corporate Wings sold it to Gantt Aviation of Georgetown, Texas, which a month later sold it to the State of Texas Aircraft Pool where it resides today. Johnny Gantt, President of Gantt Aviation told FTW that he probably knew that the State of Texas had a bid out when he acquired "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot". At the time the Governor of Texas was Bill Clements and George "W", a good friend, was owner of the Texas Rangers.

A genial Gantt explained that he had probably been aware that the State was "putting out a bid" for a King Air and scooped up the plane. Press clipping show that Gantt Aviation is a large dealership with a long history of providing planes to the State of Texas. It was a done deal within weeks and Zero-Eight-Foxtrot found the home where it lives happily today.

At the beginning of this article we outlined briefly how a tail number in Barry Seal's papers started this investigation. It actually began when author Terry Reed announced at a Los Angeles public gathering in July, 1999 that a video tape might surface during the 2000 Presidential campaign "showing George W and Jeb arriving at Tamiami Airport in 1985 to pick up two kilos of cocaine for a party. Said Reed, "They flew in on a King Air 200." Subsequent statements made by Barry Seal and recorded in Reed's 1995 book Compromised recount how Seal bragged about how he had video of "the Bush boys" doing coke. Other witnesses located by both writers of this story, who were in relevant official positions in 1985, have confirmed that the described Tamiami sting took place. All, in fear for their lives, have refused to go on the record.

Does George "W" use Zero-Eight-Foxtrot? According to Jerry Daniels, Executive Director of the Texas State Aircraft Pooling Board, "He used to fly on that airplane all the time. He stopped when he became a Presidential candidate because the State won't let you fly its aircraft for political purposes." But FTW learned that if and when Dubyah is back in the state and on state business, he probably will because Dubyah is a licensed pilot and Zero-Eight-Foxtrot is one of his favorites though he doesn't get to pilot much any more.

Said one savvy Pol of George W, "The last thing we need in this country is another President with lingering drug scandals in his past--and maybe present."

The Life and Crimes of George W. Bush
Counterpunch
The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's brand new book, Grand Theft Pentagon, released by Common Courage Press this past week. I highly recommend ordering it today, this should be one of the hot books of 2006. -- jf

Part One: The Ties That Blind

The mad cowboys are on the loose. Pack only what you can carry. Liberate the animals. Leave the rest behind. The looters are hot on the trail. Only ruin stands in their wake. Not even women and children are safe. Especially not them. Run for the hills and don't look back. Don't ever look back.

So the story goes, anyway.

We find ourselves living out a scene in a bad Western. A movie filmed long after all the old plot lines have been exhausted, the grizzled character actors put out to pasture, the Indians slaughtered and confined to desert prisons, the cattle slotted into stinking feed lots, the scenic montane backdrops pulverized by strip mines. All that remains are the guns, bulked up beyond all comprehension, and the hangman and his gibbet. We've seen it all before. But there's no escape now. Someone's locked the exits. The film rolls on to the bitter end. Cue music: Toby Keith.

Perhaps only the Pasolini of Salo: 120 Days of Sodom could have done this celluloid scenario justice. Or the impish Mel Brooks, who gave us Blazing Saddles (one of the greatest films on the true nature of American politics), if you understand the narrative as comedy, which is probably the most emetic way to embrace it. Both Pasolini and Brooks are masters of scatological cinema. And there's mounds of bullsh*t to dig through to get at the core of George W. Bush.

Because it's all an act, of course, a put on, a dress game. And not a very convincing one at that. Start from the beginning. George W. Bush wasn't born a cowboy. He entered the world in New Haven, Connecticut, hallowed hamlet of Yale. His bloodlines include two presidents and a US senator. The cowboy act came later, when he was famously re-birthed, with spurs on his boots, tea in his cup and the philosophical tracts of Jesus of Nazareth on his night table. Bush is a pure-blooded WASP, sired by a man who would later become the nation's chief spook, a man frequently called upon to clean up the messes left by apex crooks in his own political party, including his own entanglements (and those of his sons) with the more noirish aspects of life. His grandfather was a US senator and Wall Street lawyer, who shamelessly represented American corporations as they did business with the Nazi death machine. Old Prescott narrowly escaped charges of treason. But those were different times, when trading with the enemy was viewed as, at the very least, unseemly.

His mother, Barbara, is a bitter and grouchy gorgon, who must have frightened her own offspring as they first focused their filmy eyes onto her stern visage. She is a Pierce, a descendent of Franklin, the famously incompetent president, patron of Nathaniel Hawthorne and avowed racist, who joined in a bizarre cabal to overthrow Abraham Lincoln. (For more on this long neglected episode in American history check out Charles Higham's excellent new book Murdering Mr. Lincoln.)

Understandably, George Sr. spent much of his time far away from Barbara Bush's icy boudoir, indulging in a discreet fling or two while earning his stripes as a master of the empire, leaving juvenile George to cower under the unstinting commands of his cruel mother, who his younger brother Jeb dubbed "the Enforcer." This woman's veins pulse with glacial melt. According to Neil Bush, his mother was devoted to corporal punishment and would "slap around" the Bush children. She was known in the family as "the one who instills fear." She still does...with a global reach.

How wicked is Barbara Bush? Well, she refused to attend her own mother's funeral. And the day after her five-year old daughter Robin died of leukemia Barbara Bush was in a jolly enough mood to spend the afternoon on the golf course. Revealingly, Mrs. Bush kept Robin's terminal illness a secret from young George, a stupid and cruel move which provided one of the early warps to his psyche.

Her loathsome demeanor hasn't lightened much over the years. Refresh you memory with this quote on Good Morning America, dismissing the escalating body count of American soldiers in Iraq. "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many," the Presidential Mother snapped. "It's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Even Freud might have struggled with this case study. Imagine young George the Hysteric on Siggy's couch in the curtained room on Berggasse 19. The analysand doesn't enunciate; he mumbles and sputters in non-sequential sentence fragments. His quavering voice a whiny singsong. The fantasy has to be teased out. It's grueling work. But finally Freud puts it all together. This lad doesn't want to **** his mother. Not this harridan. Not this boy. He wants to kill her and chuckle in triumph over the corpse. Oh, dear. This doesn't fit the Oedipal Complex, per se. But it explains so much of George the Younger's subsequent behavior. (See his cold-blooded chuckling over the state murder of Karla Faye Tucker.)

Perhaps, Freud isn't the right shrink for Bush, after all. Maybe the president's pathology is better understood through the lens of Freud's most gifted and troubled protégé, Wilhelm Reich. (I commend to your attention Dr. Reich's neglected masterpiece Listen, Little Man.) Sadly, we cannot avail ourselves of psychological exegises of either Freud or Reich. So Justin Frank, the disciple of Melanie Klein, will have to substitute. In the spirit of his mentor, Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, zeroes in on the crucial first five years of W's existence, where three factors loom over all others: an early trauma, an absent father and an abusive mother. It is a recipe for the making of a dissociated megalomaniac. Add in a learning disability (dyslexia) and a brain bruised by booze and coke and you have a pretty vivid portrait of the Bush psyche.

With this stern upbringing, is it really surprising that Bush evidenced early signs of sadism? As a teenager he jammed firecrackers in the orifices of frogs and snickered as he blew them to bits. A few years later, as president of the DKE frathouse at Yale, Bush instituted a branding on the arse-crack as an initiation ritual. Young pledges were seared with a red-hot wire clothes hanger. One victim complained to the New Haven police, who raided the frathouse. The story was covered-up for several decades until it surfaced in Bush's first run for governor of Texas. He laughed at the allegations, writing the torture off as little more than "a cigarette burn." From Andover to Abu Ghraib.

In his teens, this man child was shoved into a distant boarding school. It must have been a relief for him. The squirrely adolescent with the pointy ears did just enough to get by. At Andover they called him "Bushtail." Ambition wasn't his thing. And he didn't have the athletic talent or thespian skills to do much more than play the role of class goof. So he went on to an undistinguished academic career, highlighted only by his ebullient performances as a cheerleader and a reputation for selling fake IDs. Even in his youth he was adept at forgery.

George the Younger snuck into Yale on a legacy admission, a courtesy to his father and grandfather. He was a remedial student at best, awarded a bevy of Cs, the lowest score possible for the legacy cohort. Repositories like Andover and Yale know what to do with the dim children of the elite. George nestled in his niche. No demands were made of him. He spent much his time acquainting himself with a menu of designer inebrients. He was arrested twice. Once for petty theft. Once for public drunkenness. No one cared.

When Vietnam loomed, Lil' George fled to New Haven for Houston and the safe harbor of the Texas Air National Guard, then jokingly known as Air Canada--a domestic safe-haven for the combat-averse children of the political elite. It was a deftly executed dodge. His father pulled some strings. Escape hatches opened. The scions of the ruling class, even the half-wits, weren't meant to be eviscerated in the rice paddies of the Mekong--that's why they freed the slaves.

But soon George grew bored of the weekend warrior routine. And who among us wouldn't? He slunk off to Alabama, and promptly went AWOL for a year and a half. Nobody seemed to miss him. He wasn't a crucial cog in anyone's machine. George? George Bush??

How did the president-in-training fritter away those idle days? Supposedly he was lending his expertise to the congressional campaign of Winton "Red" Blount. But he apparently soon went AWOL from this assignment as well. Other campaign staffers recall young George ambling into the campaign office in the late afternoon, propping his cowboy booted heals on a desk and recounting his nocturnal revels in the bars, strip joints and waterbeds of Montgomery. The other staffers took to calling him the "Texas Soufflé.". As one recalled, "Bush was all puffed up and full of hot air."

Precisely, how did he wile away those humid nights on the Gulf Coast? According to the intrepid Larry Flynt, he spent part of his time impregnating his girlfriend and, like a true southern gentleman, then escorting her to an abortion clinic. Checkbook birth control, the tried and true method of the ruling classes. A year later, according to Bush biographer J.H. Hatfield, George W. got popped in Texas on cocaine possession charges. The old man intervened once again; George diverted for six months of community service a Project PULL in a black area of Houston and the incident was scrubbed from the police blotter and court records. Today, Bush denies all knowledge of those squalid indiscretions. Just two more lost weekends in George's blurry book of days.

Speaking of cocaine, Bush, by many accounts, had more than a passing familiarity with the powder. Several acquaintances from his days at Yale tell us that Bush not only snorted cocaine, but sold it. Not by the spoonful, but by the ounce bag, a quantity that would land any black or Latino dealer in the pen for at least a decade. Young Bushtail had become the Snow Bird of New Haven.

Even the Bush family, so smugly self-conscious of its public image, didn't seem to care much. Jr wasn't the star child. They just wanted him alive and out of jail. (The habitual drunk driving was already a nagging problem. On a December night in 1973, George came up from Houston to visit his family in DC. He took his younger brother Marvin out drinking in the bars of Georgetown. Returning home after midnight, Bush, drunk at the wheel, careened down the road, toppling garbage cans. When he pulled into the driveway, he was confronted by his father. Young Bush threatened to pummel his old man, mano-a-mano. Jeb intervened before young George could be humilated by his father. A couple of years later, the drunk driving would later land him in the drunk tank of a Maine jail-his fourth arrest.) No need to plump up his resumé with medals or valedictory speeches. Anyway back then, the inside money was riding on Neil, who they said had a head for figures, or perhaps young Jeb, whose gregarious looks hid a real mean streak. (Neil, of course, came to ruin in the looting of the Silvarado Savings and Loan (though he deftly avoided jail time), while Jeb proved his utility in Florida and amplified his presidential ambitions.)

By all accounts, the family elders saw George as a pathetic case, as goofy as a black lab. They got him out of the National Guard eight months early (or 20 months, if you insist on counting the Lost Year) and sent him off to Harvard Business School. He didn't have the grades to merit admission, but bloodlines are so much more important than GPA when it comes to prowling the halls at the Ivy League. The original affirmative action, immune from any judicial meddling. In Cambridge, he strutted around in his flight jacket and chewed tobacco in class. The sound of Bushtail spitting the sour juice into a cup punctuated many a lecture on the surplus value theory. At Harvard, one colleague quipped that Bush majored in advanced party planning and the arcana of money laundering. George met every expectation.

Then came the dark years. Booze, drugs, cavorting and bankruptcy in dreary west Texas. There he also met Laura Welch, the steamy librarian who had slain her own ex-boyfriend, by speeding through a stop sign and plowing broadside into his car with a lethal fury. (Rep. Bill Janklow got 100 days in the pen for a similar crime; Laura wasn't even charged.) They mated, married, raised fun-loving twins. In 1978, George decided to run for congress. His opponent cast him as carpetbagger with an Ivy League education. It worked. And it didn't help his chances much that Bush apparently was drunk much of time. After one drunken stump speech, Laura gave him a tongue lashing on the ride home. Bush got so irate that he drove the car through the garage door. He lost big.

Eventually, Laura got George to quit the booze--though the librarian never got him to read. It wasn't a moral thing for her. Laura still imbibes herself, even around her husband. She smokes, too. Refreshingly, so do the Bush Twins, who have both been popped for underage drinking.

George was Laura's ticket out of the dusty doldrums of west Texas. She sobered him up and rode him hard all the way to Dallas, Austin and beyond. "Oh, that Welch girl," recalled a retired librarian in Midland. "She got around." Wink, wink.

If the son of a millionaire political powerbroker can't make it in Midland, Texas, he can't make it anywhere. George was set up in his own oil company in the heart of the Permian Basin. His two starter companies, Bush Exploration and Arbusto, promptly went bust, hemorraghing millions of dollars. His father's cronies in a group called Spectrum 7 picked up the pieces. It flatlined too. A new group of savoirs in the form of Harken Oil swooped in. Ditto. Yet in the end, George walked away from the wreckage of Harkin Oil with a few million in his pocket. One of the investors in Harken was George Soros, who explained the bail out of Bush in frank terms. "We were buying political influence. That was it. Bush wasn't much of a businessman."

Among the retinue of rescuers in his hours of crisis was a Saudi construction conglomerate, headed by Mohammad bin Laden, sire of Osama. The ties that blind.

Flush with unearned cash, George and Laura hightailed it to Arlington, the Dallas suburb, soon to be the new home of the Texas Rangers, perennial also rans in the American League. Bush served as front man for a flotilla of investors, backed by the Bass brothers and other oil and real estate luminaries, who bought the Rangers and then bullied the city of Arlington into building a posh new stadium for the team with $200 million in public money, raised through a tax hike, for which Bush, the apostle of tax-cuts for the rich, sedulously lobbied. Here's a lesson in the art of political larceny. The super-rich always get their way. When taxes are raised, public money is sluiced upward to the politically connected. When taxes are cut, the money ends up in the same accounts. As William Burrough's hero Jack Black (the hobo writer, not the rotund actor) prophesied, you can't win.

The Rangers deal was never about building a competitive baseball team for the people of Dallas/Ft. Worth. No. The Bush group seduced the city into building a stadium with nearly all the proceeds going straight into their pockets. It was a high level grifter's game, right out of a novel by Jim Thompson, the grand master of Texas noir. Bush played his bit part as affable con man ably enough. Even though he only plunked down $600,000 of his own cash, he walked away from the deal with $14.7 million-a staggering swindle that made Hillary Clintons's windfalls in the cattle future's market look like chump change.

As team president, Bush printed up baseball cards with his photo on them in Ranger attire, endulging his life-long fetish for dress-up fantasies. He would hand out the Bush cards during home game. Invariably, the cards would be found littering the floors of the latrines, soaked in beer and piss.

--Jeffrey St. Clair

WANTED: THE PHOTO OF DUKE CUNNINGHAM, TOMMY KONTOGIANNIS AND GEORGE W. BUSH, 3 CRIMINALS WORKING ON A PRESIDENTIAL PARDON SCHEME
Down WithTryanny


I don't know if the San Diego Union-Tribune has turned into one of the best investigative newspapers in America or if they just happen to have the most crooked officials in their area to write about (between Duncan Hunter, Jerry Lewis, Brian Bilbray, Howard Kaloogian, Dana Rohrbacher and, of course, former area resident Randy "Duke" Cunningham). But whatever the reason, anyone who wants to follow the intricacies and machinations of the Republican Culture of Corruption in Washington DC is better off reading the San Diego Union-Tribune than even the New York Times or Washington Post!

Today Joey Cantupe has penned a much-needed follow-up on a side road of the Cunningham scandals few reporters have ventured down: sleazy New York Republican mystery man and big time briber Thomas "Gus" Kontogiannis. I started looking into Kontogiannis last summer when it started to look like Cunningham was getting caught for all the millions and millions of bribes he was taking as part of the criminal conspiracy that was Jerry Lewis' Defense Appropriations Committee.

You'll find my Kontogiannis research-- with some huffing and puffing-- on the link I've attached to his name above. The Union-Tribune has some of that background too. They make a good point that I missed, namely that Cunningham was like a kept-woman for Kontogiannis-- as they call it "a congressman on retainer." He was hoping that-- and bankrolling-- Cunningham's future, not as a prison inmate but as the next Donald Rumsfeld. An FBI agent working on the case put it like this: "Let's look at it this way. Duke Cunningham had power and no money, and Tommy Kontogiannis had money [$70 million range, not Cheney or Bush kind of wealth] but no power." (And on this not too complicated concept, Tom DeLay and Rick Santorum were able to subvert the American democratic system into the Republican Culture of Corruption that has come to rule in DC-- and that has already sent Cunningham to prison and will soon send dozens of Republican elected officials to the same fate.) Oh, and Kontogiannis is also a two-time convicted criminal, both times for bribery, and must have a pardon in order to avail himself of lucrative business opportunities with Uncle Sam.

In 2000, Kontogiannis was arrested for receiving more than $2 million in kickbacks in a bid-rigging scheme involving junk computer foisted on the Queens School District. The district Superintendent, Celestine Miller, a Republican scam artist, with absurd pretensions to get elected to Congress helped Kontogiannis defraud the district. He financed her doomed campaign, in part by giving her a brown paper bag filled with $50,000 in cash. That Cunningham sold him a presidential pardon for $400,000 is the most covered-up part of the Randy "Duke" Cunningham scandals. That's because there's only one person who can grant presidential pardons and it isn't Randy "Duke" Cunningham (nor is it Vice President Cheney, nor Irving Libby, nor Michael Brown, nor Gale Norton, nor Tom DeLay nor any of the myriad corrupt scoundrels Bush has surrounded himself with. Only Bush can grant a presidential pardon. What was his cut of the $400,000 bribe from Kontogiannis?

My favorite paragraph in the Union-Tribune story is: "The two men also visited the White House together. Kontogiannis had his picture taken with Cunningham at a White House reception, and friends of Kontogiannis say the businessman kept a photo of himself with Cunningham and President Bush in his house." I bet federal prosecutors would love to have it!

But there's more-- Kontogiannis and a shady Saudi operative living in Southern California, Ziyad Abduljawad, took Cunningham and another crooked Republican California congressloon, Ken Calvert, to Saudi Arabia. Calvert and Cunningham were not there for sightseeing-- nor on government business, at least not legitimate government business.

Kontogiannis is the very worst kind of human detritus, a wealthy crook who has stolen and cheated his way to the top of the financial heap, an utter scumbag treating everyone "below" him with haughty contempt. He has dozens of law suits pending against him, mostly for cheating everyone he's done any kind of business with. That he found the GOP and low-life whores and rogues like Duke Cunningham, Peter King, Ken Calvert and George W. Bush is completely fitting. Hopefully they'll all share a prison cell someday.

Questions Linger About Bushes and BCCI

NEW YORK, Apr 4, 2007 (IPS) - Now that the U.S. Congress is investigating the truth of President George W. Bush's statements about the Iraq war, they might look into one of his most startling assertions: that there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Critics dismissed that as an invention. They were wrong. There was a link, but not the one Bush was selling. The link between Hussein and Bin Laden was their banker, BCCI. But the link went beyond the dictator and the jihadist -- it passed through Saudi Arabia and stretched all the way to George W. Bush and his father.

BCCI was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a dirty offshore bank that then-president Ronald Reagan's Central Intelligence Agency used to run guns to Hussein, finance Osama bin Laden, move money in the illegal Iran-Contra operation and carry out other "agency" black ops. The Bushes also benefited privately; one of the bank's largest Saudi investors helped bail out George W. Bush's troubled oil investments.

BCCI was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, with the support of Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and head of the United Arab Emirates. Its corporate strategy was money laundering. It became the banker for drug and arms traffickers, corrupt officials, financial fraudsters, dictators and terrorists.

The CIA used BCCI Islamabad and other branches in Pakistan to funnel some of the two billion dollars that Washington sent to Osama bin Laden's Mujahadeen to help fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. It moved the cash the Pakistani military and gover