From the S&L scandal to 9/11

Daniel Hopsicker's fine book about Mohammed Atta, Welcome to Terrorland, details the strange history of the "flight school" in Florida attended by Atta, a school which seems to be a front for various dubious activities related to drugs and covert operations. Spooked up and mobbed up, some would say. Both the operator and the owner have histories most would consider shady. All of which leads Hopsicker -- and the rest of us -- wondering why Atta would choose this school instead of the many others available to him.

One name in this book lept out at me: Kenneth Good, the partner of Neil Bush in the sleazy Silverado Savings & Loan scandal. Good's name became briefly notorious in the 1990s -- but what has happened to him since?

As it turns out, he seems to be doing fine. Such is the state of our society: A poor man can go to jail for life for stealing a frozen pizza, while a rich man can be forgiven for emptying out an S&L. And if you decry that state of affairs, conservatives accuse you of "class warfare."

How does the crooked partner of our current president's brother figure into the tale of the Venice flight schools? He does so in an admittedly roundabout fashion. One could say, with some justification, that we are here playing a game of six degrees of separation. But in this case, the degrees are few and closely-spaced.

The first thing you have to know: The moneyman behind the flight school is a man named Wally Hilliard. Hilliard, in turn, is a business partner in varying aviation enterprises with a CIA veteran named Mark Shubin.

Shubin had quite a bit of business with Wally Hilliard, we learned. He had a company, Sky Bus, Inc., whose planes were shared in common with Hilliard's Plane 1 Leasing to Sky Bus between March and August 2000. Plane 1 Leasing remained an 'owner of sorts.' Two of the planes that flowed from Hilliard's Plane 1 Leasing, tail numbers N11UN and N111UN, were listed as being owned by both Plane 1 Leasing and Sky Bus. We thought the 'UN' designation on the tail number might be a clue. We were right. We discovered Shubin had established a company called 'International Diplomatic Courier Services,' on August 28, 2001....

We asked an aviation business owner about the planes with 'UN' numbers. Coy Jacob said the last letters in an ‘N’ number are picked by the individual plane owner. So Shubin and Hilliard’s two planes either flew for the UN or were trying to look like they did. Then we recognized the name of another business partner of Shubin's, a man who gained a bit of fame during the Savings and Loan Scandal of a decade ago. Mark Shubin was in business with the notorious Ken Good.

Kenneth Good was a big part of the Silverado Savings and Loan collapse. He was in business with Neil Bush. In fact, Ken Good had been so clearly a Bush family retainer that it strained credulity to think that Shubin—and Wally Hilliard—now were not similarly connected. In 1983, Neil Bush, President George H.W. Bush's son, and our current president's brother, became partners in an oil venture with Ken Good and William Walters, a Denver developer."

Good paid a hefty chunk of change to Neil, who found a spot on the board of Silverado Savings & Loan, which "loaned" Good millions of dollars. The money disappeared. Good declared bankruptcy -- and then, a year later, somehow found enough spare change behind the sofa cushion to give the Republican party $100,000.

None of which means, of course, that Good's current businesses cross the legal line, or that he had any foreknowledge of 9/11, or that he had any link to the many questionable activities taking place within the world of aviation in Venice, Florida. As I said: This is a degrees-of-separation game. However, since the players aren't separated by much, further investigation would seem worthwhile.