Update on the crashed coke jet with the CIA history

I'm sure you recall the Gulfstream II laden with tons of cocaine that went down in Mexico at the end of last month. A number of surprising facts brought this aircraft to our attention, not least among them its history as a CIA rendition jet. The jet underwent a series of rapid ownership transfers just before the Big Event.

The last owners of record -- the parties who officially bought the jet on the very day that it took off on its fateful journey (a trip that must have been arranged well in advance) -- were Florida businessmen Clyde O'Connor and Gregory D. Smith. O'Connor ran an aviation firm called Execstar.

An anonymous commenter just now left a message on an earlier post: Clyde O'Connor flew to the Azores from Canada on October 12.

I don't know how my reader learned this fact, if it is a fact. The last article to mention O'Connor -- and quite a juicy piece it is -- was published in the Broward Palm Beach New Times on October 11. That article was written by Bob Norman, who provides some top-notch journalism.

From the start, I considered O'Connor a noteworthy individual, since he declared bankruptcy in 1998 but somehow ran a four-million dollar company in 2002. The new story details the man's safety violations, his connections to three crashes, and his bankruptcies.

O'Connor is a man who drives too fast, disobeys the rules, falls into debt despite access to millions of dollars, and has been linked to no fewer than three plane crashes. He's never been an easy man to pin down, but he's been a veritable ghost since the September 24 crash, which is under investigation by authorities in Mexico, Colombia, and the United States.

So when the sandy-haired, six-foot-two O'Connor popped up in the lobby of an aviation business at Fort Lauderdale Executive just a week after the crash, it was the talk of the flying set.

"He was standing in the lobby of Banyan Air Service — and we all thought he was in jail in Mexico," said Joan Kuntz, a manager at Sheltair Aviation, O'Connor's former landlord.

Readers with really good memories may recall my earlier piece, in which I noted (in the final paragraph) that O'Connor had written a letter praising the duty-related death of a local cop, as recounted in a previous story by Bob Norman. O'Connor doesn't like policemen, it seems. But the law must have had an awful fondness for him: Authorities let him run around free for weeks after his coke-laden jet hit the jungle floor near Cancun.

I suppose I'll get my wrists slapped for speculating in public, but what the hell. (I'm a blogger, not Katie Couric.) If you, like me, are inclined to suspect that the CIA was still running that jet, then perhaps you will agree with my view that O'Connor seems to be the sort of fellow who, in a desperate-for-dollars moment, might lend his name to such an endeavor. I don't think he ran the show. The Agency often does not own the aircraft it controls or uses.

In earlier stories, we spoke of the Skyway jet captured in Mexico. That jet also carried tons of coke, and it also had a CIA history. The owner of record was a teflon-coated con artist named Brent Kovar, although I've seen no evidence that he ever actually used the jet. That plane also underwent a series of confusing, last-minute ownership changes in the days just before it went on its drug run.

If you are now muttering something about bloggers who wear their tin-foil hats too tight, that's your privilege. So how do you explain the fact that O'Connor was allowed to walk around free until his reported getaway?

Incidentally, O'Connor's partner, Greg Smith, who owns another aviation firm, refuses to discuss the matter. So does the DEA. So do most newspapers.