First, we have word of earwitness evidence in the murder of Gus Boulis, the fast-food magnate turned casino boat owner, who paid the price for refusing an offer he couldn't refuse:
Sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas five years ago, the plan to kill Fort Lauderdale business tycoon Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis unfolded inside a shiny, black Mercedes Benz, if the man who appears to be the state's star witness is to be believed.That's Kidan and Abramoff, folks.
From the back seat of the luxury car, Dwayne Lavade Nicholson listened as the man he served as a bodyguard, Anthony "Little Tony" Ferrari, spoke with another man about a troublesome situation, according to court records make public Wednesday.
The other man, said Nicholson, was Anthony "Big Tony" Moscatiello, a known associate of deceased New York City mob boss John Gotti and his Gambino crime family.
The conversation, relayed by Nicholson to Fort Lauderdale police detectives three days after Boulis' murder, discussed the escalating business dispute between Boulis and the men who bought his SunCruz Casino business.
According the Josh Marshall, the Boulis killing has been directly tied to congressional corruption:
You know that when the casino boat line SunCruz was owned by Jack Abramoff and Adam Kidan, the company paid the men who blew away SunCruz founder Gus Boulis.The Miami Herald has more:
Now it turns out they also had the company pay the National Republican Congressional Committee (the House GOP election committee) $10,000 on behalf of Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH). That was in exchange for Ney's putting anti-Boulis remarks in the congressional record that helped Abramoff and Kidan pressure Boulis to sell them SunCruz.
The guy who helped arrange Ney's anti-Boulis-trash-talking and the later pay-off was none other than Mike Scanlon, who later did public relations work for SunCruz, in addition to going into the Indian gaming bilking biz with SunCruz owner Abramoff.
Scanlon is the guy who just agreed to testify against, well...everybody in the Abramoff cases.
When U.S. Rep. Bob Ney assailed the owner of SunCruz Casinos in 2000, it seemed puzzling that an Ohio lawmaker would go out of his way to attack a South Florida businessman who was trying to sell his floating gaming empire.More:
It turns out, according to federal investigators, Ney publicly called SunCruz founder Konstantinos "Gus" Boulis a "bad apple" in exchange for the company's new owners contributing $10,000 -- in his name -- to a national campaign fund to help elect Republicans to Congress.
In his plea agreement, Scanlon agreed to help federal authorities in Washington and Miami.Finally, this note:
He admitted to helping Abramoff and Kidan buy SunCruz by persuading Ney to insert comments into the Congressional Record that were "calculated to pressure the then-owner to sell on terms favorable" to the buyers.
According to court papers, both Scanlon and Abramoff "engaged in a course of conduct through which one or both of them offered and provided a stream of things of value to public officials in exchange for a series of official acts."
According to federal court records, Kidan also diverted $310,000 from SunCruz to pay for luxury sports skyboxes in the Washington-Baltimore area -- part of Abramoff's GOP fundraising enterprise where he entertained politicians and donors at FedEx Field, MCI Center and Camden Yards.I hope Ney had a real good time at those games. He may be entering another box soon -- the non-luxury kind, the kind with bars on the door.
In a civil court deposition, Kidan said $236,000 in SunCruz profits went for a skybox in Maryland at FedEx Field in 2000.
The rest of the money went for another box at MCI Center in downtown Washington.
Daniel Hopsicker makes this observation about the Boulis murder, a point I've seen nowhere else:
After failing to pay for his purchase of Boulis’ SunCruz casino ship empire, Kidan added injury to insult, investigators now suspect, by using Boulis’ purloined company to pay for his own death.Keep in mind, as you read all this, that Abramoff's major partner in this series of scams was professional Christian Ralph Reed. Reed's major function (if I may over-simplify matters) was to cajole naive fundamentalists into bringing anti-gambling pressures against Indian casinos, who would then pay Abramoff to lobby those troubles away.
Remember those old "Dead End Kids" movies? "Hey Mister -- we'll watch your car for a quarter." Anyone who didn't pay the quarter found his tires slashed. Abramoff and Reed were plying the same trick, albeit on a much more rarified level.
The bottom line: Abramoff, representing the Bush interests, seems to have been the point man in a crusade to take over non-Vegas gambling. At the same time this Republican "mob" asserted ever-growing control over the Indian casinos, they forced they way into the regulation-free cruise ship industry attempted to acquire the major share of online gambling.
An interesting parallel. Daniel Hopsicker pointed out an eerie historical parallel which deserves wider comment. Here's how Gus Boulis met his end:
Boulis, 51, was driving on Miami Road on the night of Feb. 6, 2001, when a car swerved in front of his BMW and slammed on brakes. After Boulis stopped, a black Mustang going the opposite way pulled alongside and its driver fired several shots into Boulis' car. Boulis drove off and crashed into a tree.In 1987, "Poppy" Bush's friend Don Aronow -- the "speedboat king" who was heavily involved with drug-running -- was murdered in a substantially similar fashion. In the Aronow case, the shooter was on foot and the victim was given no chance to try to get away.
Interestingly, Aronow was aware that his life was in danger, and tried many times to call the elder Bush in the days leading up to the murder.
In earlier times, Bush -- who, as vice-president, was heading the war on drugs -- made sure that Aronow got a contract to supply the customs service with drug interdiction boats. Naturally, Aronow made sure that the cops received slower boats than those used by the smugglers.
Thomas Burdick, who wrote a book about the speedboat king, once spoke to a former convict named Tommy Teagle, who said that Aronow and Jeb Bush had been partners in cocaine trafficking and were $2.5 million in debt to their Colombian suppliers. Teagle, who claimed to be fearful that Bush would have him killed, later changed his story.
Question: Is there any way to make this nation's many naive Christophiles -- the ones who jumped every time Ralph Reed snapped his fingers -- understand the truth about the thugs who commanded their loyalites?
7 comments:
In a word--no. This has nothing to do with truth.
I mean that the fundies organize their perceptions of the world around a paradigm so fraught with flawed logic that it can't incorporate any truths into it. It is, as the fundies are proud to declare, a faith-based paradigm. Fortunately, such people are only a vocal minority--no matter what they claim. That is all they ever have been, any time in history--even when they were in power.
Pete, that's brilliant. I'm stealing that description!
The State of Florida is so corrupt that you can forget about getting an honest trial or honest election. Florida's new primary business besides unregulated river boat casinos is stripping elders of all their assets. It's the major scam of the century and Florida is home to one of the largest populations of retired in the country (if not the largest).
If you have elderly relatives who have relocated to sunny Florida for their health, please note that Florida's new major business is "elder scamming".
I have a friend whose Jewish parents relocated near Miami Beach/Ft. Lauderdale/W. Palm Beach area and the judges, the court appointed executors, prosecutors, are all in on stripping their assets and leaving next to nothing on the table for the beneficiaries. Probate is a long drawn out process in which the local judges, executors, make numerous court dates and then reschedule them, forcing the adult children to spend a fortune in airplane tickets to Florida.
My friend has spent several years and tens of thousands of dollars fighting a corrupt legal system in which his sister got away with stealing all of their mother's jewels and other assets from her safe deposit boxes and her house. The judge charged fees in the tens of thousands of dollars along with the court appointed executor. The judge issued many delays, prolonging probate to nearly 3 years. His mother was stripped of any assets in order to go into medicaid nursing home in which she died within a few short months due to poor care.
His parents estate was worth $1.5million, he was supposed to get 750k, but he has ended up with less than $30,000 after paying off lawyers bills.
message: DO NOT GO TO FLORIDA. DO NOT RETIRE IN FLORIDA. DO NOT SPEND A NICKEL BECAUSE FLORIDA HAS BECOME A 3RD WORLD BANANA REPUBLIC.
BushCo is stacking the courts with as many cronies as possible so there will not be any "justice" whatsoever. Once Alito is appointed, expect to see more of the same types of decisions that Scalia has made that benefitting Bush and his friends.
Steve Sailer posted this, which apparently ran in The American Conservative last week:
One of the more intriguing aspects of the federal investigation into the activities of Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff is his Israeli connections. His large $2.2 million bail is reported to be due to fears that he would flee to Israel, as some of his business associates have already done, to avoid prosecution. Abramoff, an Orthodox Jew and ardent Zionist, set up a charity called Capital Athletic Foundation, which illegally provided $140,000 worth of weapons and security equipment to hard-line Israeli settlers.
Abramoff also allegedly convinced Congressman Robert Ney, House Administrative Committee chairman, to award a contract worth $3 million to a start-up Israeli telecommunications firm called Foxcom Wireless. The contract was for the installation of antennas in House of Representatives buildings to improve cell-phone reception. Not surprisingly, such equipment can be designed to have what is known as a "back door" to enable a third party, in this case Mossad, to listen in. That an Israeli firm should be given such a contract through a selection process that was described as "deeply flawed and unfair" is explicable, particularly as there were American suppliers of the same equipment, and it suggest that the private conversations of some of our Congressmen might not be so private after all.
In a previous scandal in 2001, FBI investigators strongly suspected that two Israeli companies, AMDOCS and Comverse Infosys, which had been allowed to obtain U.S. government telecommunications contracts, were able to use back-door technology to compromise the security of DEA, Pentagon, and White House phones.
Abramoff is also connected to Mohamed Atta as has been reported in the past on this blog (Atta who had the "strange for an Islamic fundamentalist" ability to speak Hebrew and fondness for the Jewish rap group Beastie Boys, as reported by Daniel Hopsicker).
I agree with you that Abrahamoff is corrupt, but that has absolutely nothing to do with Don Aronow. If you had actually done research, you would know that Don Aronow had angered the mafia in Miami due to the fact that he had agreed to sell the faster boats to the CIA, leading to his murder. Get your facts straight.
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