America's most powerful smuggling ring?

I can't write much, since Blogger is scheduled to experience an outage within the hour. But if you've ever read a single story by Daniel Hopsicker, read his latest. Although he has not laid out his complex tale in the most easily-comprehensible fashion, I am convinced that the guy is on to something big.

Hopsicker is still hot on the trail of the Skyway drug jet -- the one found on a Mexican tarmac with 5.5 tons of coke aboard. Hopsicker makes the very large claim that this bust provides a glimpse of a larger underworld. The network includes...

Rogue U.S. defense contractor Titan Corp in San Diego; CIA proprietary airlines; “fugitive” Saudi billionaires, Gulf States Sheiks and financiers; the Israeli Mossad and right wing Israeli political parties identified with Jewish settler interests; “retired” officers of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence; Texas Republican kingmakers and private investment banks; member of U.S. organized crime...

Also... stock swindlers in Vancouver, Canada responsible for multi-billion dollar financial fraud; officials from the party of Mexican President Vicente Fox; Colombian and Mexican drug cartels; Florida air charter companies which enjoy—as did the Florida aviation companies associated with the terrorist hijackers—apparent official immunity from prosecution; and Lebanese “industrialists” in Mexico known to the Mexican press as the “Narco-Pederastas,” for their penchant for molesting children, with apparent immunity from prosecution, both boys and girls, as young as four.

Titan, you will recall, was the employer of Meekram Chams, the strange individual who appears to have had such strange interactions with Mohammed Atta.

So far, this may seem like loose "conspiracy babble," in which names are named but no connective tissue is provided. Hopsicker scores a breakthrough, however, when he identifies a major stockholder in Skyway (which, you will recall, was a scam operation designed to bilk investors): Argyll Equities of Boerne, Texas, a subsidiary of the the Argyll group of La Jolla.

Argyll previously arranged for a $17 million loan to a Mexican businessman, who in turn provided "significant capital" to a

“Chilean narcotics trafficker" named Manuel Vicente Losada, arrested in the Chilean capital of Santiago after being “linked to a shipment of five tons of cocaine which U.S. drug enforcement officials in Miami intercepted over six years ago on the vessel Harbour, as it headed toward Guantanamo Bay.”

"Guantanamo Bay"? asks Hopsicker. The implications hang in the air.

Hopsicker lists a few other indicators that Argyll may have a shady history. No less a figure than Patrick Fitzgerald investigated allegations that Argyll played a role in a scheme to defraud a hedge fund administered by the mother of actor Vince Vaughn. The plot led to the indictment of three men, including one Frank Cowles, a Washington D.C.-area businessman married to Paraguay's ambassador to the United States. (I cannot help but note that Cowles runs an Arabian horse farm, a resume item which should qualify him to run FEMA. I should also note that Hopsicker's sourcing here is not as clear as I would like, since he links to stories about Cowles which do not reference Argyll.)

Hopsicker identifies Miami attorney Michael Farkas as a founder of Skyway -- and Farkas appears to have had a colorful history indeed, He partnered up with the notorious Adnon Khashoggi in a massive brokerage industry failure. There are also allegations of fraudulently-generated loans.

Farkas has been linked to Mossad and to the Israeli ultra-ultra right.

There is much more. In a "teaser" toward the end, Hopsicker promises to tie all this in with the Mexican/Lebanese "businessmen" we mentioned in earlier posts -- the ones accused in the Mexican press of being "narcopederasts" with close ties to the Vincente Fox regime.

For now, I would say that a pattern is emerging. There exists a loose confederation -- a non-Italian "mafia," if you will -- of powerful "businessmen" involved with various forms of financial fraud. Their real businesses often involve shipping. One doesn't need much imagination to guess what is being shipped.

Actually, your ideas probably do require some expansion. I suggest that you pick up Jessica Speart's "Rachel Porter" novels, which are fun and well-researched, and which provide all sorts of juicy details on the non-narcotic side of smuggler's art.

More to come...