[NYTr] CIA Drug Plane Scandal Heating Up

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Mad Cow Morning News via Antifa Info Bulletin #887 - Dec 21, 2007
http://www.madcowprod.com/12212007.html

LAUDERDALE PILOTS FACE UNCERTAIN FUTURE 

CIA Drug Plane Scandal Heating Up

By Daniel Hopsicker

The scandal surrounding two CIA-connected drug planes which flew
from St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport to South America
before being busted in Mexico on the way back with multi-ton loads
of cocaine grew more serious last week.

A pilot arrested while awaiting the ill-fated landing in Mexico of
the DC9 airliner carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine committed suicide by
hanging himself... with his socks, in the maximum security Altiplano
prison facility outside Mexico City.

The death of Marco Antonio Perez Gracia is just the latest to be
blamed on the scandal surrounding the DC9 (N900SA) airliner, as
well as a Gulfstream II (N987SA) business jet which crash-landed
and broke into three pieces in September in Mexico, spilling 4 tons
of cocaine across a muddy field 25 km outside Merida.

Perez Gracia was in a Falcon business jet belonging to his employer,
the Government of Mexico's Water Commission when he was arrested
18 months ago, waiting for the cargo-laden DC9 to land for "emergency
repairs" at a small rural airport in Mexico's Yucatan.

Recently assassinated on his way to work was the Director of Civil
Aviation in the Yucatan, Jose Luis Soladana Ortiz. Earlier that
same day three tortured bodies were discovered alongside a road
near the Merida airport.

Also Martin Gomez Soto, a traffic controller at Cancun International
Airport, abducted a month ago, and now presumed dead.

Potemkin Villages: A mind-share time-share

New developments last week began to poke huge holes in the
hastily-constructed story behind the two massive drug seizures,
revealing a cardboard quality, a Potemkin Village-like false front.

One example: an FAA source confirmed to the MadCowMorningNews this
week, that neither of the two "aircraft brokers" through whose hands
the drug running planes are said to have passed (or been laundered)
before their ill-fated drug trafficking flights, had bought or sold
any other planes atB  all during the past year.

Buying and selling airplanes is, by definition, what an aircraft
broker does.

So an aircraft broker that only buys planes that fly drugs begins
rather quickly to look like a front for drug traffickers, and, if
he is charged with no crime, like someone being "protected" by the
very officials charged with bringing people just like him to justice.

The Gulfstream II which crash-landed in Mexico with four tons of
cocaine was the only plane this supposed "aircraft broker" bought
or sold all year.

Donna Blue Aircraft isn't an aircraft broker. It's a dummy front
company.

The two Brazilian principals in the company, Joao Luiz Malago and
Eduardo Dias Guimaraes, the FAA source told us, haven't purchased
or sold any planes in their own names either.

And the DC9 supposedly "bought" by California aircraft broker George
Corrales was his only aircraft transaction of the year.

Some "broker."

Scratch the surface of the official story, and "there's no 'there'
there."

Same old story: A Fox in the Henhouse

Gregory D. Smith, one of two Fort Lauderdale FL charter pilots left
holding the bag as the last registered owners of the Gulfstream II
business jet (Cocaine Two)B busted in Mexico with 4 tons of cocaine,
worked for the CIA and DEA as a pilot during the late 1990's Narco
News reported last week.

Smith had, indeed, been a CIA/DEA pilot, confirmed a long-time
aviation executive at Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport. But that's
not the only thing he was doing at that time that merits attention.

While Greg Smith was flying luxury jets to Colombia and back for
the CIA and DEA during the late 90's he was also in business with
a con man in the middle of stealing millions from shareholders in
a corporation for which Smith was a director.

Smith was one of only three directors of Hollywood Trenz, controlled
by Ed Showalter, already on probation for a felony conviction for
grand theft.

Showalter raised millions of dollars to build an ill-fated chain
of high-tech family entertainment centers that never opened. He has
been accused by securities regulators of defrauding investors and
engaging in illegal stock schemes... at least three times without
gong to jail, the most recent being in 2006, where a California
federal judge guessed he might have stolen as much as $20 million
from investors.

Financial fraud to beat the band

This might be written off as simply a bad character judgment, except
that Showalter was allowed to steal millions from unsuspecting
shareholders through frank, outright, and most of all, unpunished
fraud, the MadCowMorningNews can report exclusively... exactly like
the Kovars and their henchmen at SkyWay Aircraft--owners of the the
DC9, the "other" CIA drug plane.

Showalter was a Teflon-coated con artist whose securities fraud
playbook seems strikingly similar to that of the owners of the
SkyWay Aircraft DC9 caught eighteen months ago with 5.5 tons of
cocaine.

Showalter pleaded no contest to grand larceny in Orlando in 1988
and stayed out of prison by agreeing to pay $149,000 in restitution
during a 15-year probation term.

So when he was arrested on March 10, 1997 in Phoenix, Ariz. on
charges involving "fraudulent schemes" and "theft" involving he and
Greg Smith's little company called Hollywood Trenz, he was already
serving a 15-year probation sentence for the 1988 no-contest plea
to grand theft in Florida.

He could have his probation revoked, and be made to serve out the
remaining years in a Florida prison for violating terms of the
probation.

If convicted on the new charges, he faced a possible 12-year prison
sentence in Arizona. The Arizona Republic reported he'd written
$82,000 in bad checks to contractors.

Showalter posted a $72,000 bond, left jail, then left Arizona,
violating his probation. A month later police arrested Showalter
again, this time in Pompano Beach, FL., and put him in an Orlando
jail. But a month after that he was released from Orlando on $2000
bail.

It took Showalter all of two months to get back to business.

This went on another ten years, until July 6, 2006, when the L.A.
Times wrote he was had been accused "of defrauding investors in a
wide-ranging real estate scam has agreed to plead guilty to one
count of wire fraud, a federal prosecutor said."

Investor losses in the latest scam were put as high as $20 million.

Two CIA drug planes share interlocking ownership

SkyWay Aircraft was not a real business, either, in the sense of
being a company engaging in commerce and selling a product for
profit.

The company didn't have one. Instead, they boasted a nearly worthless
patent that a court last month--citing criminal intent--ruled
belonged to another company, Satellite Access Systems.

Glenn Kovar and his son, Brent Kovar, who ran SkyWay as Chairman
and President, respectively, earlier ran Satellite Access Systems
(SAS). The scam was amazingly similar to SkyWay, with the same
result: investors losing millions of dollars.

With no apparent fear of legal consequence, Bernie Kovar, and his
father, Glen Kovar, who used to boast of working for the CIA,
blithely stole $40 million from shareholders in SkyWay Aircraft in
St. Petersburg, FL.

The Kovars, notorious scamsters who "busted out" (stripped of value)
and bankrupted several public companies before getting to SkyWay,
appear to be receiving official "protection." Meaning if it was
thee or me, we'd be in jail.

As we will see in our next story, their aviation venture SkyWay
Aircraft was a fraud. They said so themselves, in an official
deposition.

The San Diego Connection, Again

Yet somehow tiny SkyWay, with a balance sheet showing the company
was worth about one stapler and a few paper clips, managed to attract
an early investment from San Diego defense giant Titan Corp., located
in San Diego, on the other side of the country from Miami.

Weren't there fly-by-night companies run by fast-talking con men
with no product and no prospects either a little closer to San
Diego?

SkyWay also got money from investment bank Argyll Equities, a private
firm with offices near Austin and in La Jolla, CA., that appears
to offer specialty financing for drug traffickers.

Talk about a sweet market niche. Argyll will quickly become SkyWay's
second leading shareholder.

In addition to SkyWay, another one of Argyll's clients--they only
have three--is Jose Serrano Segovia, a Mexican industrialist accused
in published reports of involvement in drug trafficking, and of
passing on Argyll's investment in his company as a loan to a major
Chilean drug trafficker with whom Serrano was in business.

While stories like this usually surface only in the arcane corners
of alternative news, surprisingly, that isn't the case this time.

"No law to keep it from happening"

The Tampa Tribune reported several weeks ago that St.
Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport is a focus of an
international investigation into the purchase of airplanes by a Mexican
drug cartel.

Now, from FOX News, of all places, we learn the fact that Mexican
drug lords have been buying jets at the local airport has greatly
disturbed some residents of St. Petersburg, Florida.

"You want to know what's going in and what's going out and when
you're not keeping track, anything can happen," reproved Tamara
Jackson in an interview with the local FOX affiliate.

Another angry local resident, sounding outraged at the clear
implications of the story, told FOX, "They screen every passenger,
but they don't screen smugglers who want to buy entire jets."

Local residents showed surprising sophistication about the legal
loopholes necessary to ensure the smooth distribution network
possible in the U.S.

"Private plane brokers rent space at the public airport, and sell
jets for profit. Mexican police say members of the Sinaloa drug
cartel showed up with money and made off with jets," stated the FOX
report.

The Loophole of the Century Award to...

"The airport director said it's not his job to scrutinize his
tenants. The FAA said it's not their job either. Homeland Security
also does not police who buys and sells private jets at our public
airports. Neither does the Transportation Security Agency."

"They make you take your jacket off, they make you take your belt
off. They make you take almost everything off, yet we can have a
major drug dealer right in our own back yard," fumed Pinellas County
Commissioner John Morroni.

"And there is no law to stop this from happening."

Missing from the FOX report was any awareness that the fact that
"there is no law to stop this from happening" may not be entirely
an accident.

Somebody (or something) really powerful wants it that way.

This week's revelations provide further proof of CIA and DEA
involvement, not just with the planes, but with at least one of the
pilots as well.

While fleeing the U.S. for sunnier climes with, ironically, less
heat, Fort Lauderdale pilot Clyde O'Connor, was recently busted in
Canada on weapons charges. Freed in Canada after paying a fine,
O'Connor made for the Azores.

He recently sold his personal plane there, the MadCowMorningNews
has learned. Current whereabouts: unknown.

Hanging with Mark Foley at the Lying Low Hotel

One place to look, we suggest, would be wherever they whisked
Republican Congressman Mark Foley away to the moment the page scandal
began to break last year.

Private lodgings. The Lying Low Hotel.

O'Connor and his fellow Fort Lauderdale pilot Greg Smith, of course,
first gained notoriety as the last registered owners of the Gulfstream
II business jet which crash-landed in Mexico two months ago laden
with four tons of cocaine.

Now lying in three pieces in a field 25 km outside the Yucatan
capital of Merida, the Gulfstream (N987SA) was previously reported
to have been used to fly CIA rendition flights to Guantanamo Bay
Cuba.

The Yucatan is fast-becoming the drug route of choice that it was
during the heyday of drug trafficking in the 1980's, when it was
known as the "Trampoline."

The region's location roughly halfway between Colombia and the
United States made it ideal as a place for twin-engine private
planes to land and refuel before "bouncing" back into the air for
the last leg of the journey to Florida.

The Sound of 50 Gay Republican Senators...

Despite the obvious complicity and ever-ready for a good proposition
Mexican elite, twice during the past 18 months, Mexican officials
have stumbled upon one of America's big dark secrets, when two
American planes with confirmed connections to the CIA were busted
there, carrying between four and five-and-a-half tons of cocaine.

What people with (at least implied) connections to American
intelligence were caught doing, first at a remote rural airport in
the furthest reaches of the Yucatan Peninsula, and then in a muddy
field 25 km from Yucatan's capital, Merida, is to the War on Drugs
what Abu Ghraib was to the War in Iraq.

The story reminds us--and in no uncertain terms--that two million
people in this country are in jail for dealing small amounts of
what American covert operatives feel comfortable bringing in by the
ton.

It is disheartening and despicable. But most of all it reeks with
hypocrisy.

Picture 50 Republican Senators in 50 different public men's rooms
at once. Now picture them running their hand suggestively back and
forth beneath the bathroom stalls, while assuming that typically-wide
Republican stance.

That's American drug policy.

"So, um, do you, ah... come here often?"


[Now Available! Welcome to Terrorland: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11
Cover-up in Florida, by Daniel Hopsicker, madcow at gmail.com. The
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associates in Florida. English and German editions. Order a signed
copy now; $29.95: http://MadCowProd.com. ]

Copyright 2007 Daniel Hopsicker