Daniel Hopsicker's new story reveals that the Mexican government has tied the two cases together.
Nabbed in the raid was Pedro Alfonso Alatorre Damy, identified by authorities as the major money launderer for Mexico’s Pacific Cartel, sometimes called the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as the New Federation, run by fugitive Mexican kingpin Juan “Shorty” Guzman.Right now, I'm dubious about one aspect of this account. So far, we've seen no evidence that Alatorre ever owned the planes.
Both the DC9 airliner (N900SA) busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine 18 months ago and the Gulfstream II (N987SA) business jet which crash-landed with 4 tons of cocaine had been purchased by Alatorre with laundered drug money from his “Cambio de Pueblo” currency exchanges, said a statement Friday from Mexico’s Attorney General Office.
This story says that Alatorre was nabbed while attempting to carry out a transaction with a Chicago bank for $2.7 million. In addition to that business, says Hopsicker, "23 accounts at the Wachovia Bank of Miami containing $11 million were frozen by U. S. authorities."
Representing Casa de Cambio in Miami, for example, is famed “white powder” attorney Frank Rubino, a former Secret Service agent who once protected Richard M. Nixon in Key Biscayne, Fl., then later the lawyer for Medellin kingpin Carlos Lehder. Most recently he has been the chief lawyer for Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.Alatorre works for "El Chapo" Guzman, a legendary crime lord who -- as noted in earlier posts -- tends to be the all-purpose fall guy in Mexico. Which brings me to the part of the story I still can't quite get my head around: Why would he purchase (if purchase he did) two jets that just happen to have had links to Bush family financial backers?
"At least $ 11 million of Noriega's fortune came from U.S. intelligence agencies," Rubino stated during the trial. “He dealt directly with the CIA, the NSA (National Security Agency) and various military intelligence.”
Between 2000 and 2007, the Gulfstream was -- I believe -- largely under the control of Arik Kislin, who has some rather remarkable associates. Among them was Michael Chernoy (also spelled Cherney), an Israeli citizen alleged to have strong links to the Russian mob. Chernoy arranged the "intelligence summit" which figures prominently in the strange story of Dr. Jill Dekkers.
(For a real mind-blower, read the post below this one -- and then read this.)
In closing: Here's a little nugget from Hopsicker about the Skyway jet -- something I may not have mentioned before:
The DC9 airliner was also used, without reimbursement, during the first-time Senatorial campaign of Florida Republican Senator Mel Martinez, who until recently was President George W Bush’s handpicked chairman of the national Republican Party.
7 comments:
Hopsicker said: "Alatorre, alias El Piri, was arrested moments after attempting to wire $2.7 million into an account at Harris Bank in Chicago, apparently to buy more planes."
HARRIS BANK OF CHICAGO, and their Foreign Exchange section, called ForEx, a unit of BANK OF MONTREAL owned principally by the whiskey-soaked BRONFMAN FAMILY [SEAGRAMS booze, Cineplex Odeon movie theater chain, as well as numerous operations of records-entertainment in California]. The former major owner of Harris Bank, now also a major stockholder of Bank of Montreal, is U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald (R.,Ill.). Harris Bank/Bank of Montreal are interlocked with the worldwide Mexican bank cartel, Grupo Financiero Bancomer. In May, 1998, Bancomer pleaded guilty to U.S. federal criminal charges of vast dope money laundering.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a389b6cef4189.htm
With the bank being in Chicago, I wonder about the connection of HW Aviation, Scott Aviation, Geoffrey Hodgson and Anthony Aiello to this alleged money laundering ring. HW Aviation, as you may know, sold N900SA to SkyWay Communications / Royal Sons. HW Aviation was owned by Geoffrey Hodgson and Jeffrey Wolfson.
Geoffrey Hodgson and Anthony Aiello are executives of Scott Aviation, a company which leased (or possibly purchased, at the end) N120NE from Genesis Aviation several times before they sold it to Royal Sons.
Oddly, there are, or were, two seemingly separate companies in the same region of Florida named Sky Way Aircraft One was owned by the Kovars and was a subsidiary of SkyWay Communications. The other Sky Way Aircraft is located in St. Petersburg (as opposed to Clearwater for the first one) and is the company that owned N391SA, the Beech King Air caught in Nicaragua with signs of being used for smuggling, and the fake tail number, N168D, painted on. A number of places have claimed N391SA was owned by Royal Sons or the Clearwater Sky Way, but that is not the case. As a side note, they sold N391SA to Mario Gonzalez Restrepo, from Caracas, Venezuela, shortly before it turned up abandoned in Nicaragua. I wonder if he is in any way associated with this laundering ring.
Back on track, while people are often mistaken about the ownership of N391SA, there is at least one connection between the two Sky Way Aircrafts: N244DM. Hodgson and Aiello both owned it, then Aiello became the sole owner, and then sold it to the St. Petersburg Sky Way Aircraft. So Aiello and Hodgson have sold aircraft to both otherwise seemingly separate companies.
And, to end this long, hopefully coherent comment, one last Hodgson/Aiello connection to drug smuggling: N48PA. They both owned it, as well as Scott Aviation at one point, it was later sold to Robinson Air Crane, Inc., and then to Manoel Teineira Uzgra of Caracas on September 29, 2005. On November 21, it was caught with 4 tons of drugs. (Spanish news article)
Meanwhile, Blackwater bids on 5-year, $15-billion USD contract with DoD in support of the war on drugs. "Companies competing for the work might be called on to develop detection or surveillance technology; train U.S. and foreign forces; or provide logistics, communications and information-technology systems, among other areas."
Interesting, considering how often the MIC comes up as tangential to these big time smuggling stories.
Scott Aviation is also based in Chicago, IL:
http://www.ilsos.gov/corporatellc/
Brothers and sisters: Skyway Comm. and Sky Way Aircraft
All Skyway Entities:
SKYWAY COMMUNICATIONS, SKY WAY AIRCRAFT, SKY WAY.
Yes, SkyWay Communications is the parent company of several subsidiaries. Sky Way Aircraft, SkyWay Global (not sure if that's an official subsidiary, but it's definitely associated with them—the primary source connecting Mel Martinez to SkyWay mentions SkyWay Global), and possibly several others I can't recall offhand.
I may be missing some information, but I never did see anything connecting Michael Farkas directly to SkyWay Communications *after* it changed its name to SkyWay. Farkas's company created Mastertel, Inc. in 1998. It later became i-Teleco.com, Inc., and then, in 2003, changed its name to SkyWay Communications Holding Corporation. A week or two later, Sky Way Aircraft (controlled by the Kovars and James Kent) signed a letter of intent to merge with SkyWay Communications, and a month later, SWYC Acquisition Corporation, a subsidiary of SkyWay Communications Holding Corporation, merged with Sky Way Aircraft, the former executive resigned, and the Kovars and Kent became the new executives.
The company that created the company that became SkyWay, Inclusion Technologies, specialized in setting up dot com startups and then selling them off. (Genesis Energy, Genesis Realty, Concept Digital, and Wisedriver.com were several other startups they created.)
If there's any evidence Farkas remained associated with SkyWay after the sale, though, I'd certainly be interested in seeing it.
As a side note, around May 2006, swyc.us, a SkyWay Communications Holding Corporation website registered to Brent Kovar, was reactivated and announced they had partnered with the National Cooperative Tower Network and were planning to come out of bankruptcy and begin conducting business again. The SkyWay site claimed the National Cooperative Tower Network had been "in the forefront of the wireless and telecommunications industry starting in 1982," however, a Google search reveals nothing suggesting that's actually the case. (The only results for that name are a post I've made on the same subject.)
The last known sign: In June 2003 Farkas was a shareholder of 10%.
The first web appearance of Skyway Commun. was in March 2003:
Wayback Machine
Contact was:
Sky Way Wireless Networks, a division of Sky Way Global | 6021 - 142nd Avenue North | Clearwater, FL 33760
Contact person: Marisol Casablanca
Veromi People Search
Exactly the same adress was also:
TADIRAN TELECOM NETWORKS, INC
Veromi Business Search
now based in Port Washington, NY.
Sunbiz.org
NYS-Search
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