Introduction: In a welcome return to our airwaves, groundbreaking investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker highlights the powerful criminal networks through which Mohamed Atta and some of the 9/11 hijackers infiltrated the U.S.
Michael Brassington was a pilot for Wally Hilliard’s operations, including flights on a Learjet to Venezuela. (Hilliard was the principal behind Rudi Dekkers’ Huffman Aviation–vehicle for the Atta & company infiltration). (Hilliard and Dekkers are among those pictured above.) It was on one of these flights that 43 pounds of heroin were discovered, one of the largest heroin busts in South Florida history. Brassington (pictured at left) was the co-pilot on that flight. He also was on a flight that skidded into a terminal at Teterboro airport in New Jersey.
A recent report links Brassington, Wolfgang Bohringer and Michael Misick in a criminal concatenation encompassing multiple forms of corruption on a massive scale. (Misick is the criminal leader of the Turks and Grand Caicos Islands, recently re-possessed by Great Britain. Bohringer is one of Mohamed Atta’s German associates, himself the subject of a recent FBI terror alert.)
Previous discussion of Bohringer has highlighted his involvement with a powerful Eastern European criminal network, which included the “Pirate of Prague”, Victor Kozeny. Profiting from privatization in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union following the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., Kozeny’s activities involved, among other elements, insurance giant and bailout recipient AIG.
In addition, this axis was deeply involved with powerful Russian oligarchs/mobsters such as Mario Hoffman, deeply involved with illicit activities in the Turks and Grand Caicos. Whereas Kozeny was known as “the Pirate of Prague,” Hoffman’s yacht is called “the Barricuda of Prague.”
Much of the program focused on the ongoing criminal nature and far-reaching scope of the wrongdoing inextricably linked to Huffman Aviation and Wally Hilliard’s other business enterprises. In our last visit with Daniel Hopsicker, we examined Art Nadel, a Ponzi scheme architect who succeeded Rudi Dekkers as head of Huffman Aviation, the flight school through which many of the 9/11 hijackers infiltrated.
Huffman Aviation kingpin Wally Hiliard has himself been sued for $100 million by angry investors in Green Bay Wisconsin.
Hilliard was also a partner in an airline called Florida Air. His business partner in that venture financed the operation in considerable measure through the looting of an investment operation that was one of the bigger investment scams uncovered before the enormous debacles that began to surface in 2008.
Another criminal connection to Huffman concerns a jet that was busted in Mexico with 5.5 million tons of cocaine. It had previously occupied a hangar at Huffman Aviation. One of the principals in this imbroglio was Iran-Contra scandal luminary Adnan Khashoggi. (Khashoggi got his start in business with a $25 million truck purchase, financed by the father of Osama bin Laden.) Huffman aviation principal Hilliard loaned Khashoggi a lear jet in the latter’s attempt to gain control of a Caribbean Island with an airstrip ideally suited for the smuggling of contraband.
Khashoggi (pictured at right) had previously been fingered for a massive stock swindle, which precipitated what a judge called the biggest failure of a brokerage in U.S. history.
Daniel also foreshadowed an upcoming article, setting forth Huffman Aviation kingpin Rudi Dekkers’ status as a deadbeat dad.
Program Highlights Include: Review of Hilliard’s links to an enormous pension fund-rip off in the Portland (Oregon) area; the links of former Meyer Lansky associate Alvin Malnik to the pension fund rip-off; Russian oligarch/don Mario Hoffman’s recruitment of former Slovak intelligence agents as “muscle”; review of the activities of Viktor Kozeny.
1. In a welcome return to our airwaves, groundbreaking investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker highlights the powerful criminal networks through which Mohamed Atta and some of the 9/11 hijackers infiltrated the U.S.
Michael Brassington was a pilot for Wally Hilliard’s operations, including flights on a Learjet to Venezuela. It was on one of these flights that 43 pounds of heroin were discovered, one of the largest heroin busts in South Florida history. Brassington was the co-pilot on that flight. He also was on a flight that skidded into a terminal at Teterboro airport in New Jersey.
A recent report links Brassington, Wolfgang Bohringer and Michael Misick in a criminal concatenation encompassing multiple forms of corruption on a massive scale. (Misick is the criminal leader of the Turks and Grand Caicos Islands, recently re-possessed by Great Britain. Bohringer is one of Mohamed Atta’s German associates, himself the subject of a recent FBI terror alert.)
Previous discussion of Bohringer has highlighted his involvement with a powerful Eastern European criminal network, which included the “Pirate of Prague”, Victor Kozeny. Profiting from privatization in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union following the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., Kozeny’s activities involved, among other elements, insurance giant and bailout recipient AIG.
In addition, this axis was deeply involved with powerful Russian oligarchs/mobsters such as Mario Hoffman, deeply involved with illicit activities in the Turks and Grand Caicos. Whereas Kozeny was known as “the Pirate of Prague,” Hoffman’s yacht is called “the Barricuda of Prague.”
A bitter fight to redact portions of the explosive final report of an official British Inquiry into systemic corruption in the Turks and Caicos Islands backfired last week when news of the redactions caused a firestorm of protest and the full report was leaked to freedom of information website WikiLeaks.
Some of the most sensitive redactions (pdf) in the British Commission of Inquiry’s Final Report concern much-traveled pilot Michael Francis Brassington, who first rose to the level of public scrutiny as co-pilot on a Lear jet (N351WB) belonging to the owner of a flight school that at the time had been teaching Mohamed Atta to fly was seized by DEA Agents who found 43 lbs. of heroin onboard.
The controversy over the redacted report has ironically shed light on a previously-unknown connection between Brassington and a second pilot, Wolfgang Bohringer, whose name also surfaces regularly in the background to the intrigue in Florida swirling around Mohamed Atta during the run-up to the 9/11 attack.
Brassington and Bohringer were not previously known to have been connected.
The controversy over the unredacted report changed that, when the resulting publicity illuminated dark corners in the background of the man whose deep pockets were keeping secret the full extent of Michael Misick and Michael Francis Brassington’s crimes.
Michael Brassington—still a close associate of Wally Hilliard’s, according to a former U.S. Customs Agent who has seen his file—and Wolfgang Bohringer, an “associate” of Mohamed Atta’s close enough for Atta to have frequently referred to him as “my brother,” have both been pilots for the Russian Mob.
The Tempest in a Turks & Caicos Teapot erupted when the British Commission of Inquiry into corruption in Prime Minister Michael Misick’s government backed down from releasing its full report in the face of an angry campaign threatening media outlets with lawsuits by lawyers for a shady Eastern European billionaire who stands accused in U.S. Senate documents of involvement in money laundering, as well as ties to international organized crime.
A weeks-long firestorm of negative publicity ensued, which ended when WikiLeaks published the full report. It was a rare victory for a free press and the democratic concept which Walter Cronkite famously called “the people’s right to know.”
Brassington figured prominently in the British Commission’s report on Misick’s corruption, as not only the personal pilot but Misick’s partner-in-crime as well.
As we first reported earlier this year, the Gulfstream jet Misick and Brassington were jetting around the world on belonged to a former White House Special Assistant to President Bill Clinton named Jeffrey Watson, who was once called “Florida’s insider at the White House” by the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. Watson is currently a Washington lobbyist.
The report shows the two men conspired to steal several million dollars from the coffers of the now-bankrupt Turks & Caicos government. Misick’s crimes included a highly-publicized rape, intimidation and beating of rivals, as well as his wife, with whom he had several knockdown (literally) fights which required both to seek emergency hospital care.
In front of the British inquiry, Misick was portrayed in vivid testimony by his former wife (pdf), American TV-actress Lisa-Raye Misick-McCoy, as being a dripping-in-gold-jewelry gangsta in command a small fleet of Gulfstream luxury jets traveling all over the world.
Brassington is a key figure in several recent scandals, fingered in a military procurement scandal in his native Guyana recently.
He also goes on trial in Federal Court (pdf) in Newark New Jersey later this year, where he is charged with 23 felony counts accusing him of putting the lives of passengers in danger in the near-fatal crash of one of his charter company’s luxury jets at Teterboro Airport outside New York City in 2005.
Most notably, as reported in this space and quoted extensively in overseas media, Brassington’s “checkered past” included a stint as co-pilot on 39 weekly flights between Florida and Venezuela of the Lear jet (N351WB) which was owned by Huffman Aviation’s owner Wallace J. Hilliard, and was aboard the plane when it was finally busted by DEA agents at Orlando Executive Airport in July of 2000 carrying 43 lbs. of heroin.
At the same time, pilot Wolfgang Bohringer, a close associate of Mohamed Atta’s in Florida, was flying for notorious financier Viktor Kozeny, accused of involvement in the Russian Mob’s successful looting of hundreds of millions of dollars in Czechoslovakia during the privatization frenzy which took place in the 199o’s after the fall of Communism.
Kozeny is currently fighting extradition from the Bahamas to face charges of massive fraud in Federal Court in New York.
His former pilot Bohringer was himself the subject of a well-publicized manhunt in the South Pacific in 2006. The FBI issued a “terror alert” seeking his arrest.
Kozeny at one point in the mid-90’s controlled one-third of the entire Czechoslovakian economy. With his ill-gotten gains, Kozeny tried to buy off top officials in the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan to gain control of that country’s state-owned oil company.
One man convicted in the scheme, Hans Bodmer, belonged to a network of Russian oligarchs that includes Pyotr Aven, accused by a Russian corruption task force of drug trafficking.
These unsavory associations did not prevent Kozeny from partnering in the Azeri scheme with a managing director of Hank Greenburg’s American Insurance Group (AIG), recently bailed out by U.S. taxpayers to the tune of $166 billion.
Greenberg was forced to step down amid Eliot Spitzer’s probe while New York Attorney General, which was rumored to involve major international money-laundering operations spanning several generations. His firm was founded by Cornelius V. Starr, an Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative in Southeast Asia during World War II whose nephew Kenneth Starr later became President Bill Clinton’s Whitewater antagonist.
Kozeny, who owns his own private island in the Bahamas, was traveling on an Irish passport before being arrested. His luxury jets were used during the Northern Ireland peace talks by the talk’s chairman, former Senator George Mitchell.
Although he today stands accused on two continents of defrauding thousands of people around the world, he has so far successfully—and inexplicably– fought extradition to the U.S. to face felony charges of massive financial fraud.
The man funding efforts to keep Misick and Brassington’s crime secret, Mario Hoffman, is a full-fledged Russian Mob oligarch.
In written evidence presented to the UK Parliament as well as to the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Hoffman’s company Istrokapital was described as a conduit for “Russian money” and a front for money laundering,” described as having the “strongest ties to the underworld,” which reportedly “draws its muscle from former officers of the Slovak intelligence service.”
Hoffman was the first registered stockbroker in Czechoslovakia. He grew fabulously rich in Viktor Kozeny’s “privatization vouchers” scam.
Viktor Kozeny is known around the world as “The Pirate of Prague.”
Today Mario Hoffman’s sleek white yacht regularly patrols off the coast of the Turks & Caicos.
Hoffman’s yacht is named “The Barracuda of Prague.”
Michael Brassington—still a close associate of Wally Hilliard’s, according to a former U.S. Customs Agent who has seen his file—and Wolfgang Bohringer, formerly a close enough associate of Mohamed Atta’s for Atta to refer to him frequently as “my brother,” have both been pilots for the Russian Mob.
Stay tuned.
2. Much of the program focused on the ongoing criminal nature and far-reaching scope of the wrongdoing inextricably linked to Huffman Aviation and Wally Hilliard’s other business enterprises. In our last visit with Daniel Hopsicker, we examined Art Nadel, a Ponzi scheme architect who succeeded Rudi Dekkers as head of Huffman Aviation, the flight school through which many of the 9/11 hijackers infiltrated.
Huffman Aviation kingpin Wally Hiliard has himself been sued for $100 million by angry investors in Green Bay wisconsin.
Hilliard was also a partner in an airline called Florida Air. His business partner in that venture financed the operation in considerable measure through the looting of an investment operation that was one of the bigger investment scams uncovered before the enormous debacles that began to surface in 2008.
Another criminal connection to Huffman concerns a jet that was busted in Mexico with 5.5 million tons of cocaine. It had previously occupied a hangar at Huffman Aviation. One of the principals in this imbroglio was Iran-Contra scandal luminary Adnan Khashoggi. (Khashoggi got his start in business with a $25 million truck purchase, financed by the father of Osama bin Laden.) Huffman aviation principal Hilliard loaned Khashoggi a lear jet in the latter’s attempt to gain control of a Caribbean Island with an airstrip ideally suited for the smuggling of contraband.
Khashoggi had previously been fingered for a massive stock swindle, which precipitated what a judge called the biggest failure of a brokerage in U.S. history.
Art Nadel, the recent owner of Huffman Aviation accused of running a Ponzi scheme which allegedly stole almost $400 million from investors, is the only person so far charged with a crime.
However if authorities persist in claiming Nadel was a “lone-nut financial gunslinger” they will be ignoring the richly-documented history of criminal fraud involving the owners of Huffman Aviation that goes back for more than a decade.
At least four financial scams, each looting more than $100 million, have criminal roots in the fertile soil— the “Octo-Mom” fertile soil—of the Venice Municipal Airport.
Almost immediately after its purchase in the summer of 1999 by Wallace J. Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers, the aviation facility became the center of a series of financial scams that included Ponzi schemes, pension fraud, international stock swindles, and fraudulent bankruptcies which have altogether looted more than $1 billion from the American economy.
Huffman Aviation, the flight training facility which housed both of the terrorist pilots who crashed passenger jets into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, has been operating as a continuing criminal enterprise, as defined by the Federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) Act.
The Huffman Aviation Ponzi All-Stars
Far from being alone, Art Nadel isn’t even the first owner of Huffman Aviation to benefit from a huge Ponzi scheme...
He’s just the most recent.
Huffman Aviation’s first Ponzi All-Star was Wallace J. Hilliard, the owner while Mohamed Atta practiced touch-and-go’s on the airport’s runway. Yet, somehow, this easily-verifiable fact surfaced nowhere in Southwest Florida’s anemic mainstream media. Moreover Hilliard is currently being sued by disgruntled investors in Green Bay Wisconsin for $100 million.
In addition, Hilliard was also a partner in an airline called Florida Air. Hilliard’s business partner in that venture financed the operation with proceeds from a massive stock swindle.
Criminal ventures involving Huffman Aviation will each be considered separately, and at length, in a coming series of stories. They have often been so spectacular as to earn “biggest ever” designations from authorities and the press.
Huffman’s criminal highlight reel contains a number of criminal firsts:
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The Sarasota Herald Tribune called Art Nadel’s $390 million swindle the biggest fraud in Southwest Florida history.”
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When Wally Hilliard’s Learjet was busted carrying 43 lbs. of heroin at Orlando Executive Airport on July 25, 2000, the Orlando Sentinel called it the “biggest bust of its kind in Central Florida history.”
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Wally Hilliard’s partner in Florida Air, an airline with high visibility at the Venice airport, paid for the passenger planes the two used in their “airline” with loot from what the Securities & Exchange Commission later called “the biggest fraud by an investment manager in U.S. history.”
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When a DC9 registered to a company which used as its address a hanger at Huffman Aviation was caught in Campeche, Mexico carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine, Mexican authorities called it the biggest drug seizure in an airplane in Yucatan history.”
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Participants in that escapade included Adnan Khashoggi. Hilliard sent a Lear jet to support Khashoggi’s plan to gain control of Rum Cay, a remote island in the Bahamas with a recently-lengthened 5000 foot runway, as well as a Khashoggi lieutenant from Saudi Arabia named Ramy el-Batrawi, both of whom were indicted three years ago in an international stock swindle known as Stockwalk, which Federal Bankruptcy Court Judge Victor B. Kenton said was responsible for “the largest failure of a U.S. brokerage in at least 30 years.”
Lady in Red
The first fact immediately and painfully obvious about accused Ponzi fraudster Art Nadel is that he’s clearly nobody’s idea of a financial “lone gunman.”
Nadel is a meek-looking Woody Allen look-alike who is overshadowed in local Sarasota society by his tall former model wife Peg.
In a pricey status-conscious city redolent with with the sweaty scent of social climbing ‘yachtsmen’ boasting waterfront mansions, Nadel lived in a $300,000 tract house, and drove around town in a Subaru.
Two other factors about Nadel may have some bearing on his case.
When Art and Peg Nadel first surfaced as financial gurus in 1998 for a black-box stock-picking “computer-based investment and trading system” called MicroStar Research, wife Peg was strongly front and center in interviews.
Yet another un unexamined history
A Sarasota Herald-Tribune company profile on Nov 18, 1997 headlined “INVESTORS STOCK UP ON DATA AT SARASOTA’S INSIDE SCOOP” quoted Peg Nadel:
“We feel we are really filling a void,” (Peg) Quisenberry said, ”for people who just want to become more informed about the financial part of their lives.”
And a company Peg Nadel incorporated a decade earlier, well before meeting Piano & Ponzi Man Art, has a name which rings similar to Peg & Art’s later joint ventures:
As Marguerite Quisenberry, Peg incorporated a Florida company called BUSINESS AND COMPUTER STRATEGIES, INC. Her fellow director in that venture was then-husband Clement Blake Quisenberry.
In mid-December of last year, just a few weeks before Art Nadel went on the lam in mid-January, Peg Nadel’s former husband, Clement Blake Quisenberry, filed for bankruptcy in Mulberry Florida.
We have no knowledge of any relationship Quisenberry may have had with his former wife and her current husband Nadel, but it is at the very least an interesting coincidence.
License to steal at the Venice Airport
Why disbarred New York lawyer Art Nadel, a man recently engaged playing show tunes in local lounges, found it so imperative that he used some of the earliest proceeds from the Ponzi scheme to buy both Huffman Aviation and a second aviation company in Georgia, is one of the enduring mysteries of the case.
Located at a tiny and out-of-the-way airport in a sleepy retirement community with the second oldest population in the entire United States, Huffman Aviation—save for its remarkable recent history of criminal activity—is an otherwise-insignificant aviation business, grossing just several million dollars annually.
Although the flight school was at the center of a firestorm of publicity after the 9/11 attack, no hint of the continuing criminal enterprise underway there made it into any mainstream media.
However dozens of stories published in this space have catalogued the variety of illegal activities which authorities and their aviation peers accuse Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard of engaging in at the Venice and Naples Airports, both before and after the 9/11 attack.
After the first shock of the 9/11 attack faded, a certain officially-encouraged amnesia struggled—perhaps understandably—to take hold at the Venice Airport.
Huffman Aviation was re-named the Venice Jet Center. The facility received a complete face-lift and a new façade, clearly designed to obscure its identity as the American home of Mohamed Atta.
But all to naught. It was, to quote our current president, “like putting lipstick on a pig.”
Happy Secretary’s Day!
Wally Hilliard was a grateful beneficiary of a huge Ponzi scheme run out of Portland Oregon which looted an estimated $300 million dollars, according to the Portland Oregonian. The money was looted—in a highly-organized and systematic fashion—from the pension funds of mostly-Mob-led unions.
Hardest hit ($60 million) by the pension looting were secretaries and laborers from the Laborers Union, called the biggest Mob-run union in America.
Analysts said that to receive the same retirement benefits they would have before their pension fund was looted, the unfortunate secretaries would have to spend an extra decade working.
A Gig-Harbor WA man named Richard Boehlke was part of the pension fraud.
Boehlke shoveled trunk-loads of cash—more than $12 million—into the back of whichever of his fleet of luxury cars he happened to be driving that day, and used the cash from the Ponzi scheme to purchase a half-dozen British-made Jetstream regional jets for a new “airline” he was starting up with his good pal Wallace J Hilliard.
There. He said the “M” word.
“Boehlke would do anything for money, he was so desperate,” an aviation executive who had witnessed Boehlke’s descent told us. “I’m surprised he hasn’t skipped the country by now, what with all the trouble he’s gotten himself into farting around with those Mafia boys down in Portland.”
Another grateful beneficiary of the Portland Ponzi scheme money which disappeared from the retirement pension funds of laborer’s and secretary’s was a Miami Florida man whose complex web of international connections is legendary.
Alvin Malnik was first called “Meyer Lansky’s heir” in Readers’ Digest, of all places, back in 1983. But it’s not Malnick’s gangster ties that make your jaw drop: its his connection with the Saudi Royal Family.
Jewish lawyer and alleged ‘gangster’ Malnick’s son married the daughter of a leading Prince of Saudi Arabia’s founding family.
“The Saudi Prince not only blessed the marriage, but regularly works with the US organized crime associates,” states one report on the connection. “The Saudi King would frequently send his private 747 to Florida to pick up Malnik and his associates, so they could conduct business on the plane away from prying eyes.”
Mr. Malnik, understandably, begs to differ.
“Contrary to popular belief, I (Al Malnik) never worked for Meyer Lanksy. I knew him, and he was a good friend who I spent a lot of time with, but I never represented him in legal matters. To me, Meyer was quite the grandfather type. If you knew him and talked to him, you could never imagine that any of the stories you heard about him had any veracity. You could never imagine that he was responsible for doing the things people said he did. He was not a person to give in to rage.”
“Phantom airline” had real planes, pilots
Although it flew virtually no scheduled flights, the suspiciously short-lived Florida Air thus was able to have a fleet of 19-passenger regional planes as well as a half-dozen pilots on stand-by at the Venice Airport, during the same time Mohamed Atta was supposedly taking flight lessons there.
The airline lost $800,000 in two months,” said Stuart Burchill, Hilliard’s former accountant. “All together, the airline ended up costing Wally almost $8 million.”
Florida Air itself became another scam, run concurrently with the pension looting in Oregon, stealing money from the airline’s investors, who are currently suing Hilliard for $100 million.
Hilliard was a “health insurance” executive from Green Bay, Wisconsin who “retired” to Florida, where he soon bought—not the usual set of golf clubs and matching sans-a-belt slacks and golf sweater combos in canary yellow & lime green—but two dozen luxury jets, and flight schools in Venice and Naples, FL.
Both of Hilliard’s flight schools (he also owned one in Naples, FL) enrolled an unknown but substantial number of Arab men who later were suspected of being terrorists.
“La plus ca change.”
A Portland ABC News Reporter Eric Mason, who interviewed Boehlke, said, “The financing that had gone between Mr. Boehlke and Florida Air, which was a sister operation to the flight training center which trained Mohamed Atta, was murky.”
Murky’ is not a word you want to see applied to the business affairs of the people who were doing business with Mohamed Atta.
Curiously, the same word was used to describe SkyWay Aircraft by Federal Judge Paul M. Glenn. While presiding over SkyWay’s bankruptcy proceedings, Judge Glen called the case “murky.”
“I have a great deal of concern about this case,” Judge Glenn said. “There’s a great deal we don’t know
Since then, very little appears to have changed.
While it may be small consolation to incarcerated (and reportedly forlorn) Art Nadel as he awaits trial, owning Huffman Aviation might be a lot like being head of the Teamsters Union:
“Going away for a while” may just be part of the job.
3. Daniel also foreshadowed an upcoming article, setting forth Huffman Aviation kingpin Rudi Dekkers’ status as a deadbeat dad.
The reputation of Huffman Aviation principal Rudi Dekkers, whose dozens of television appearances in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack shaped the public perception of Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, took another big hit recently when a Dutch television profile of him came to light.
Since the 9/11 attack Dekkers has been charged with criminal fraud in Sarasota, been accused of ferrying Saudi princes on illegal unsupervised flights by the U.S. government , and even had an attempt made on his life—which he blamed, to universal amazement, on Al-Qaeda—after the helicopter he was piloting went down enroute to a show-down meeting scheduled with Huffman Aviation owner Wallace J Hilliard.
None of these blemishes on an already-tarnished character, however, has dealt Dekkers’ as grievous a blow as his appearance on a popular reality TV show in the Netherlands, “Spoorloos,” or “Vanished,” which travels the world locating missing relatives and reuniting them with worried family and friends back in Holland.
Rudi Dekkers abandoned his young wife in the Netherlands while she was three months pregnant, the show reveals, and then emigrated to America, never to be heard from again.
Months later his wife bore him a son, who today is known as Patrick Scheur.
Patrick stated on the show that he discovered in the late 90’s through the internet that Dekkers’ was running a flight school in Florida, and attempted to contact him on numerous occasions to arrange a meeting.
“Deadbeat Dad” & an international web of intrigue
Patrick’s attempts to establish contact with Dekkers, the father he never knew, were repeatedly rebuffed. Dekkers never replied.
“The curiosity about my father started when I was around sixteen, I also told the parents of a boy I was seeing at that time and they were so touched that they were prepared to pay for a trip for their son and me, so that we could look for him.”
“When I told my mother, she replied, “Do you realize that if you do this, Rudi might slam the door in your face and you’ll left standing there?”
“So instead I just sent him an email, stating who I am, who my mother is, where I am and how old I am. Then I sent another email. I tried to more or less force him to get in contact. But I never got a response.”
The show’s host sounds shocked. “He never reacted to the emails?”
“No, he never answered.”
About this time he also discovered, Patrick said, that his father had a far-from-sterling reputation in his native Holland.
“I read several very negative stories about him in the Dutch press about things he’d done in Holland before leaving. His name was closely connected to certain fraudsters on the internet, for example. And he had stolen money from a soccer team, and owed money to business partners, and was wanted by the Dutch government for back taxes.”
“Not exactly boiling over with enthusiasm”
According to court documents filed in cases against him in his native Holland, Dekkers was at the center of “a web of intrigue.”
Since then not much appears to have changed.
Then several days after the 9/11 attack, Patrick said he got a shocking phone call from his mother. She had unexpected news.
“Turn on the TV,” she told him. “ Your father is on.”
Patrick looked with astonishment at the drama unfolding live on television.
“I had never before seen my father. Now I was about to see him for the first time. It was a shock. And it felt like I was watching a movie. The image of those planes, that skyscraper…And the Dutchman that gave training to the hijackers that flew into the World Trade Center was my father.”
After arriving in Florida to track down Dekkers’, the show contacted him by phone.
“Dekkers isn’t exactly boiling over from enthusiasm about his son Patrick,” states the show’s host. “Maybe it’s because of his young Cuban wife. The two just got married and she doesn’t know anything about a son in the Netherlands.”
At least he’s not in prison... yet.
Dekker’s was apparently every bit as callous, negligent, and unfeeling–the very embodiment of a “deadbeat dad–” as we have heard he was. But we were not alone in reporting this about him. From the St. Petersburg Times”
“Even before 9/11, Dekkers had a long history of troubled businesses, run-ins with the Federal Aviation Administration and numerous lawsuits, including one in which he paid $15,000 to a female employee who accused him of “severe” sexual harassment.
It is the kind of checkered history, experts say, that should have raised questions both before and after the 9/11 attacks about Dekkers’ fitness to run a school that trained pilots.”
“You would think that everyone surrounding that should have been scrutinized,” says Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “A flight school, unlike a beautician, represents a problem in that you have technical training that facilitates terrorism. You want to make sure that it is well run, so you look into the backgrounds of people.”
The severe sexual harassment, as we reported back in 2003, involved sticking a broom handle up the back of the dress of an 18-year old receptionist.
What a guy.
Making it up as he went along
“Dekkers got ‘tarred and feathered’ after 9/11,” stated the show’s host.
“There were wild stories about his involvement with the terrorists, according to him it was complete nonsense. But it did cost him everything he had. The flight schools were sold, on top of that came a divorce and starting a new business wasn’t going well.”
“It obviously gave me a tremendous stress level,” said Dekkers, of the aftermath of the 9/11 attack. “And I still have some of it. I became a diabetic. Nine months after 9/11 I got high blood sugar and I still have it. You can’t get rid of it. It’s pure stress.”
Dekker’s description of events leading up to the 9/11 attack were uncritically received on network and cable news shows in America and around the world after the 9/11 attack.
Except for the fact that Dekker’s testimony was received so uncritically on network and cable news shows after the 9/11 attack, the discovery of yet-another unflattering portrait of Rudi Dekkers—which certainly comes as no surprise— might be of nothing more than prurient interest.
Only later did it became painfully obvious that Dekkers, during his frequent television appearances, had been making it up as he went along.
In one interview, for example, Dekker’s explained his lack of knowledge of the particulars of Atta’s arrival at Huffman Aviation, saying Atta and al-Shehhi showed up from a flight school in Tampa.
Later that same morning Dekkers stated Atta and al-Shehhi arrived from a still-unnamed flight school, which Dekkers now stated was somewhere “out of Florida.”
By the second day Dekkers’ memory had definitely improved. Now he remembered…he hadn’t much cared for Mohamed Atta.
It wasn’t exactly time to stop the presses. Yet the media accepted everything Dekkers said at face value.
And to this date, he has never been forced to face critical questioning under oath before the American people.
How many people would place any credence in the testimony of a man who walked out on his wife when she was three months pregnant with his child, and even 20 years later refuses to meet his own son? Why did the United States Congress?
The mainstream press, and the American Congress tossed him nothing but marshmallows during their lackluster “questioning.”
Why? Because he’s such a likable fellow? Hardly. But the organization he worked for has a stranglehold on what passes for public discourse in this country.
An Oliver North for our times
The tiny Venice Florida airport was a nexus between the Establishment, organized crime, and international drug trafficking, and played a significant role in the story of how the hijackers came to be in the U.S. in the first place. And it also laid bare, more starkly than ever before, the reason we haven’t long ago read about these connections on the front pages of the New York times and the Washington Post.
According to the various indifferently-motivated federal investigations, none of this has anything to do with 9/11.
Even though the two men were doing land office business with Osama bin Laden’s organization before the 9/11 attack, the business associates of Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard, were of no interest to their investigation.
The FAA went out of its way to protect terror flight school honcho Rudi Dekkers, for example. An aviation mechanic who worked for Dekkers said he’d been forced by law to report criminal acts which he witnessed Dekkers commit.
“Dekkers did an import of an airplane,” the mechanic explained. “We found dents on the front of a wing and replaced sheet metal, and then we found ribs that were crushed, which renders an airplane un-airworthy. Yet Dekkers still sold the plane!”
“And when I turned him in to the FAA, they didn’t do a damn thing.”
A second example also involves Rudi Dekkers. Dekkers’ forged another aviation executive’s signature on a repair order to indicate required repair work on a helicopter had been completed. When that executive discovered it, he told us, he too was legally compelled to report it to the FAA.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said the Naples FL aviation executive indignantly. “I called the FAA to report a violation and was warned to leave Dekkers alone. An FAA guy came out and sat me down and said: ‘I suggest you back out of this.’ ”
“National security” has always been the excuse used to keep safe the cadre of “elite deviants” at the top.
Stay tuned.
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