Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Remember the Skyway coke jet?

Time flies, and so does cocaine: A year ago, an America-bound jet laden with 5.5 tons of coke was surrounded by police on a tarmac in Mexico. The jet bore the insignia of a pseudo-firm called Skyway, run by a scamster named Brent Kovar who has bragged about working for the CIA. The pilot got away -- even though cops surrounded the jet -- and Kovar has not gone to jail.

Daniel Hopsicker has been working this story doggedly, and as you will see, he has made real progress. The evidence seems clear that this was a "protected" (as in, spook-approved) flight -- all of which leaves us wondering how many such flights have made their way to the United States -- and how much of the drug trade goes to fund the world of covert operations.
SkyWay’s genesis can be traced to In-Q-Tel Inc., a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group owned, operated, and financed out of the black box budget of the Central Intelligence Agency.

· SkyWay was part of a network of companies, three of which—L-3 Communications, Net Command Tech Inc, and Triton Network Systems Inc.— were cited by Elliot Spitzer, then the Attorney General of New York State, for being used by Wall Street brokers in “pump and dump” schemes which cost unwary investors tens of millions of dollars.

· The suspicious involvement of L-3 Communications subsidiary Titan Corp of San Diego, the biggest donor to Southern California Congressmen convicted or being investigated by fired San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam.

· The Israeli connection to SkyWay, including the involvement of an Israeli tele-com firm, Tadiran, accused of being involved in worldwide espionage, and which owned the headquarters of SkyWay in Clearwater, Florida.

· The involvement of Gulf Arab financiers, including an overseas bank, Banque Francaise de l'Orient, long associated with the Saudi bin Laden family.

· Evidence of Republican party involvement in the network, which included the free use of one of the smuggling aircraft by the current head of fund-raising for the national Republican party, U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, who "traveled to nighttime rallies in luxury," the St. Petersburg Times reported, “on a DC-9 owned by Skyway Global, a Clearwater security company whose owners are Martinez supporters.”
Folks, we have barely scratched the surface of this one. Meet me on the flip side, and we'll take a closer look at this strange In-Q-Tel firm, as well as the Israeli connections...

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)
Although owned by SkyWay, the airliner was registered to Royal Sons Inc., a company controlled by an aircraft broker from Tampa, FL. named Frederic Geffon.
And:
“Geffon was under court order to not let the planes leave the St Petersburg-Clearwater Airport,” stated a source close to the Bankruptcy proceedings. “The Airport Tower had even been ordered not to let the plane take off."

"Geffon was in direct violation of the court order when that DC9 took off for Venezuela,” the source stated last week.

Yet Frederic Geffon has suffered no legal sanction at all, either for violating the court order, or for owning a plane busted with a plane filled with a box-car's worth of cocaine, evidence that, legally speaking, Frederic Geffon walks on water.
Hopsicker earlier quoted Geffon on Kovar:
"Their company is a scam and he’s a scammer. I got sold a bill of goods about his stock. Everybody out here at the (Clearwater-St. Pete International) airport invested with him, and we all lost it all."
These words carry a thieves-falling-out quality. And perhaps we can find here an explanation as to why the flight was seized. These flights were apparently routine; the airports and authorities are paid to look the other way. Either somebody didn't get his envelope, or somebody was trying to backstab a former partner.

Kovar knows a thing or two about water-walking himself. He and his family are now running another firm called “Homeland Security Tracking Enforcement.” I'm sure that this is a fine company providing both an important service and a reasonable rate of return for their investors.

Oh...one other thing:
Geffon’s Royal Sons Inc has one other distinction that needs to be mentioned: The firm occasionally listed its address as 224 E Airport Ave at the tiny Venice, FL airport, in a hangar belonging to terror flight school Huffman Aviation.
In case you've forgotten, Huffman is the place Mohammed Atta called home. Funny coincidence, that.

Now, I must be clear on one point: I am not personally accusing Tadiran (or Geffon, or anyone else) of wrongdoing. However, as regular readers know, these Israeli IT and telecommunications companies keep popping up in stories with "spooky" overtones. So I tend to keep an eye out for these guys. Here is some company info on Tadiran (which, incidentally, has a contract to supply radio equipment to the U.S. Army):
Tadiran Telecom is a private company, owned by Ron Bregman, Africa-Israel Communication Ltd., and Gifford Ltd. It is headquartered in Petach Tikva, Israel, with regional head offices in Port Washington, NY, USA, Moscow Russia, Beijing, China and Delhi, India.
After a brief scan, the only source I can find linking Tadiran with intelligence is Andrew and Leslie Cockburn's excellent book Dangerous Liaison, which reports that the company supplied the murderous Guatemalan military dictatorship with a computerized tracking system for subversives. The list included journalists, politicians, writers, students and so forth -- and anyone on the list was likely to find himself "disappeared."

In-Q-Tel, founded by former CIA Director George Tenet, is a pretty odd company in it's own right. See the New York Post story here, which describes the company as
a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group that is owned, operated and financed out of the black box budget of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The piece ends:
So tell me, people, are we OK with this? Are we OK with letting the CIA use taxpayer money to gamble on Wall Street for the personal profit of their own employees . . . and then not explain why?
There's much more to the Skyway story. You cannot attain Basic Life Competence unless you visit Hopsicker's site...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Boy, I haven't thought about In-Q-Tel since just a year ago, when Amit Yoran abruptly resigned as its head after only four months on the job. And there was also the suspicious apparent-suicide of its founder, Rick Yannuzzi, in April 2001.

Lots of weirdness there -- it would be nice if Hopsicker has managed to break some of it open.

Anonymous said...

watch out when talking about Coke Joe-- remember that such writing can lead to people committing suicide (with not one but two shots to the head!)

Hyperman said...

Do you mean there's a conspiracy to import cocaine in the US by some rogue branch of the US government ??? do you know how many people would need to be involved in that conspiracy ?

Joseph Cannon said...

"do you know how many people would need to be involved in that conspiracy ?"

THAT argument again. C'mon, think about it: ALL drug importation is a conspiracy. So the conspiracy Hopsicker is talking about requires no additional personnel.

These things always run on a need to know basis. Most of the people involved in the operation would simply be under the impression that they were running drugs. They would not know or care about who was in charge; they are just doing their (sleazy) jobs.