Dave Emory’s entire life­time of work is avail­able on a flash drive that can be obtained here. (The flash drive includes the anti-fascist books avail­able on this website.)

Recorded Octo­ber 31, 2004
REALAUDIO

Intro­duc­tion: The sec­ond of an ini­tial series of three inter­views Mr. Emory did with Daniel Hop­sicker (the author of Wel­come to Ter­ror­land: Mohamed Atta and the 9/11 Cover-Up in Florida), this pro­gram high­lights the extra­or­di­nary irreg­u­lar­i­ties in the busi­ness oper­a­tions of Wally Hilliard, Rudi Dekkers and Arne Kruithof, as well as Hilliard and Dekkers’ air­line part­ner Rick Boehlke. Recall that these were the peo­ple at whose “flight schools” many of the 9/11 hijack­ers enrolled. These schools were the hijack­ers’ con­duit into the United States. After detail­ing the extent to which Dekkers could break every rule of busi­ness and avi­a­tion with impunity, the pro­gram high­lights Florida Air—a dummy air­line that Hilliard and Dekkers ran in part­ner­ship with Rick Boehlke. Boehlke’s oper­a­tions in the Pacific North­west mir­rored the stun­ning irreg­u­lar­i­ties that char­ac­ter­ized Dekkers’ activ­i­ties in Florida.

In addi­tion to set­ting forth the sus­pi­cious air crashes that almost claimed the lives of Kruithof and Dekkers within a few months of each other, the broad­cast presents infor­ma­tion about a wealthy Saudi who worked with Atta, a con­ve­nience store owne, and alleged 20th hijacker Zacharias Mous­saoui in Florida.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Florida Sec­re­tary of State Kather­ine Har­ris’ endorse­ment of Hilliard and Dekkers’ dummy air­line Florida Air; the fact that Dekkers’ sus­pi­cious crash occurred as he was on his way for a show­down with Wally Hilliard; an appar­ent attempt on the life of Pres­i­dent George W. Bush on the morn­ing of 9/11/2001; dis­clo­sure of the fact that Dekkers is still enter­ing and leav­ing the U.S. ille­gally (in part­ner­ship with some Ger­mans with whom he is appar­ently under­go­ing jet train­ing in Ten­nessee); the pres­ence of covert oper­a­tions lumi­nary Jack­son Stephens in the Venice (Florida) area; Rick Boehlke’s involve­ment in the man­aged care indus­try and the extra­or­di­nary irreg­u­lar­i­ties in all aspects of his busi­ness activ­i­ties; Boehlke’s involve­ment with Mob loot­ing of union pen­sion funds.

1. The pro­gram begins with dis­cus­sion of an appar­ent attempt on the life of Pres­i­dent Bush on 9/11. Appar­ently mod­eled after the suc­cess­ful attempt on Ahmed Shah Mas­soud (the head of the North­ern Alliance) who was killed on 9/9/2001 by Islamists pre­tend­ing to be reporters, this attempt has gone almost unre­ported in the U.S. news media. It should be noted that the per­sons involved in this appar­ent attempt were allegedly from a group opposed to the Islamist gov­ern­ment in Sudan (the for­mer pro­tec­tors of Osama bin Laden). Among the pos­si­bil­i­ties to be con­sid­ered is that the would-be assas­sins were actu­ally pro-Islamist and, pos­si­bly, infil­tra­tors into a CIA guerilla train­ing pro­gram for the oppo­nents of the Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ist gov­ern­ment of Sudan. “ . . . We did our job by piec­ing together two sep­a­rate news reports from Sarasota—one a local tele­vi­sion news­cast, the other a town newspaper—that together lead to the inescapable con­clu­sion that dur­ing the intrigue which was swirling in Sara­sota before dawn that day, ter­ror­ists were look­ing to kill George W. Bush. The first report stated that a pre-dawn warn­ing of immi­nent attack had been deliv­ered to Pres­i­dent Bush’s Secret Ser­vice detail in Sara­sota, and aired on the Sara­sota ABC affiliate’s evening news­cast.”
(Wel­come to Ter­ror­land Mohamed Atta & the 9–11 Cover-Up in Florida; by Daniel Hop­sicker; Mad­cow Press [HC]; Copy­right 2004 by Daniel Hop­sicker; ISBN 0–9706591-6–4; p. 40.)

2. “ ‘The warn­ing of immi­nent dan­ger was deliv­ered in the mid­dle of the night to Secret Ser­vice agents in Sara­sota guard­ing the Pres­i­dent,’ reported Mon­ica Yadov of ABC’s Sara­sota affil­i­ate, ‘and it came exactly four hours and thirty-eight min­utes before Mohamed Atta flew an air­liner into the World Trade Cen­ter.’ The sec­ond story is a chill­ing eye­wit­ness account of the attempted assas­si­na­tion in progress. It came from the Long­boat Observer, which lit­er­ally cov­ers the water­front in upscale Long­boat Key, where Bush spent the night before the attack.” (Idem.)

3. “ ‘At about 6 a.m. Sep­tem­ber 11, Long­boat Key Fire Mar­shall Car­roll Mooney­han was at the front desk of the Colony Beach & Ten­nis Resort as Bush pre­pared for his morn­ing jog. From that van­tage point, Mooney­han over­heard a strange exchange between a Colony recep­tion­ist and secu­rity guard,’ the paper reported. ‘A van occu­pied by men of Mid­dle East­ern descent had pulled up to the Colony stat­ing they had a ‘pool­side’ inter­view with the pres­i­dent, Mooney­han said.’” (Ibid.; pp. 40–41.)

4. “Nei­ther of the two reporters knew of the other’s report. But both had cov­ered dif­fer­ent angles of the same story. . . .a con­certed attempt by four Arab men pos­ing as jour­nal­ists to gain access to Pres­i­dent George W. Bush at 6 a.m. on the morn­ing of Sep­tem­ber 11th, for the pur­pose of end­ing his life. Here’s how it went down:” (Ibid.; p. 41.)

5. “Zain­lab­deen Omer, a Mid­dle East­ern native resid­ing in Sara­sota, con­tacted Sara­sota police in the mid­dle of the night to tell them a friend of his, who had made vio­lent threats against Pres­i­dent Bush in the past, had just shown up—and unexpectedly—in Sara­sota, ABC’s Yadov reported. The man who Omer warned author­i­ties about was iden­ti­fied in the Sara­sota police report of the inci­dent only as ‘Ghandi.’” (Idem.)

6. “Omer said ‘Ghandi’ told him he was in town to get a friend out of jail . . But Omer had heard ‘Ghandi’ make vio­lent remarks about Bush in the past, and since the Pres­i­dent was in Sara­sota at the same time, Omer feared his friend might be in Sara­sota to kill the Pres­i­dent. The warn­ing was ini­tially given to the Sara­sota police, who called in the Secret Ser­vice. Within hours Secret Ser­vice agents were search­ing an apart­ment in Sara­sota. Turns out, Omer was right. They arrested three men, all from the Sudan, and took them in for inter­ro­ga­tion. The ques­tion­ing lasted, accord­ing to one of the three, Fathel Rah­man Omer, for ten hours. ‘The police came and arrested me and three other peo­ple,’ Fathel Rah­man explained in the ABC inter­view. Rah­man said he couldn’t help the Secret Ser­vice. . . .” (Idem.)

7. “ . . . Mov­ing quickly, the Secret Ser­vice next swooped down on a local beauty sup­ply store, whose owner had been fin­gered by Omer as being a close asso­ciate of ‘Ghandi.’ . . . Agents detained and ques­tioned the owner of the beauty sup­ply store, a Mus­lim named Hakim. Hakim, too, had dis­turb­ing infor­ma­tion for the Secret Ser­vice about Ghandi, reported Yadov. He told agents Ghandi was a mem­ber of the SPLA, or Sudanese People’s Lib­er­a­tion Army, a Chris­t­ian and ani­mist guerilla group fight­ing the fun­da­men­tal­ist Mus­lim gov­ern­ment in Sudan. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 42.)

8. “ . . . Maybe they had been receiv­ing covert train­ing in the swamps, which is a south­west Florida tra­di­tion. Bay of Pigs invaders stormed the beaches here prac­tic­ing for Cuba, a local Sher­iff told us. And why would oper­a­tives of a guerilla orga­ni­za­tion fight­ing against a gov­ern­ment of Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ists closely allied with Osama bin Laden want to assas­si­nate, of all peo­ple, George W. Bush? It didn’t make sense. . . .” (Idem.)

9. “ . . . Until reporter Yadov went look­ing for Hakim, the owner of the raided beauty sup­ply store, and dis­cov­ered that Hakim’s beauty sup­ply store wasn’t there any­more. Hakim was miss­ing, too. He left in some­thing of a hurry after being released by the Secret Ser­vice, Yadov learned. Gone. No one knew where. And Hakim wasn’t the only wit­ness to dis­ap­pear in Sara­sota. Zainelab­deen Omer was miss­ing too. The man whose warn­ing of immi­nent havoc had been right on the money was now unavail­able for com­ment. He
quit his job and left town, just ahead of reporter’s ques­tions. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 43.)

10. In a digres­sion from the sub­ject of the 9/11 hijack­ers, the dis­cus­sion turns to a pic­ture that Daniel Hop­sicker obtained of a meet­ing in a Mex­ico City night­club in Jan­u­ary of 1963. In addi­tion to CIA oper­a­tive Barry Seal, Oswald dou­ble William Sey­mour; Iran-Contra oper­a­tive Felix Rodriguez, and Water­gate Bur­glar Frank Stur­gis, the pic­ture appears to show Porter Goss, a long­time CIA offi­cer and recently name by Bush to become Direc­tor of the Agency. The soiree is a gath­er­ing of Oper­a­tion 40 per­son­nel. Oper­a­tion 40 was a no-holds-barred guerilla cam­paign waged against Castro’s Cuba. Many JFK assas­si­na­tion researchers sus­pect a link between Oper­a­tion 40 and Kennedy’s mur­der. As dis­cussed in Guns of Novem­ber #3, Stur­gis’ name also crops up in con­nec­tion with the inves­ti­ga­tion into the assas­si­na­tion of Pres­i­dent Kennedy.
(“CIA Nom­i­neee in Pic of Agency’s 60’s Assas­si­na­tion Squad” MadCowMorningNews.com.)

11. Next, the pro­gram focuses on the extra­or­di­nary fis­cal and aero­nau­ti­cal irreg­u­lar­i­ties that char­ac­ter­ized the oper­a­tions of Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard—at whose “flight schools” sev­eral of the 9/11 hijack­ers trained. It appears that the schools and their own­ers enjoyed high-level pro­tec­tion. There was seem­ingly no rule that “the Magic Dutch Boys” and Hilliard couldn’t break with impunity. “ . . . Time after time, we dis­cov­ered that gov­ern­ment enti­ties had inex­plic­a­bly smiled on the for­tunes of Dekkers and Hilliard’s avi­a­tion part­ner­ship, until it began to seem as if they had a ‘rich uncle’ in gov­ern­ment some­where. The FAA, for exam­ple, pro­tected Dekkers on a num­ber of occa­sions. An avi­a­tion mechanic who worked for him told of crim­i­nal acts Dekkers com­mit­ted which the mechanic had been forced by law to report to the FAA eigh­teen thou­sand feet in the air, safety is an impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tion. . . At least it’s sup­posed to be.” (Ibid.; p. 187.)

12. “ ‘Rudi 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. This ren­ders an air­plane un-airworthy. And yet he still sold the plane. I turned Rudi Dekkers into the FAA. They didn’t do a damn thing.’ Another avi­a­tion mechanic who worked for Dekkers over a period of years, Dave Mont­gomery, laughed when we asked him if this story could be true. Mont­gomery said when he found some­thing wrong with an air­plane Dekkers bought, Dekkers had fired him. Adding insult to injury, Dekkers then bounced his last pay­roll check.” (Ibid.; pp. 187–188.)

13. “John Vil­lada, who man­aged Wally Hilliard’s huge jet fleet, con­firmed Montgomery’s story. ‘Dave Mont­gomery worked for Rudi for three years as his Chief Mechanic till he found some­thing wrong with an air­plane Rudi bought. Rudi fired him, and then bounced his last pay­roll check.’ Rudi Dekkers rep­u­ta­tion at the Naples Air­port got so bad, we learned, that he couldn’t even buy gas there . . . for cash. ‘When he bought Huff­man Air­port,’ said a Naples avi­a­tion exec­u­tive ‘His rep­u­ta­tion as a dead­beat was so bad that the local Fixed Base Oper­a­tor refused to sell him avi­a­tion fuel, even for cash.’” (Ibid.; p. 188.)

14. “ . . . He put lives at risk to make a buck. ‘He would take in people’s planes to rent out while they were idle,’ one avi­a­tion mechanic who worked for him stated. ‘Then he would come to me and want me to pout switches on the Hobbes meter. It’s like dis­con­nect­ing an odome­ter on a car. It’s a direct FAA vio­la­tion and an extremely dan­ger­ous prac­tice, because you can no longer tell when the plane is due for ser­vice,’ the mechanic explained.” (Ibid.; p. 189.)

15. “ ‘But he wanted to do it because it let him rent out planes with­out hav­ing to pay the plane’s owner their cut.’ Huff­man was the only full-service fixed base oper­a­tor, or FBO, at the Venice air­port. An FBO sells gas, pro­vides mechan­i­cal ser­vices and oth­er­wise caters to pri­vate avi­a­tion, and is usu­ally a cen­ter of activ­ity at the air­port. In other words, some­thing of a civic resource. ‘When Wally found Rudi Dekkers, Dekkers had already been thrown out of Naples as a con artist,’ said Naples avi­a­tion observer Rob Till­man. ‘Plus he had tax prob­lems. He didn’t pay tax on shit. And this is the guy to whom Wally sold Florida Air.’” (Idem.)

16. “Who approved Dekkers buy­ing the FBO in Venice?’ asked an irate avi­a­tion insider at the Venice Air­port. ‘He’d been thrown out of Naples. . . how come they let him buy the ‘dia­mond’ of Venice?’ . . . We found a num­ber of peo­ple will­ing to talk about Dekkers on the record. We heard from numer­ous sources that Rudi Dekkers had been the object of a seri­ous multi-agency fed­eral inves­ti­ga­tion dur­ing the mid-90’s. Appar­ently author­i­ties found a num­ber of fruit­ful inves­tiga­tive leads to pur­sue. . . ‘Rudi owned a com­puter busi­ness doing ille­gal activ­i­ties at the Naples Air­port,’ explained Till­man. ‘When Wally and Rudi were romanc­ing, Rudi was smug­gling air­craft back into the U.S. over the Arc­tic. Inter­na­tional Com­puter Prod­ucts was the name of Dekkers’ com­puter firm, active dur­ing the 1990’s, we learned. Naples avi­a­tion exec­u­tive John Vel­lada con­firmed the accounts. ‘There was a war­rant for Rudi’s arrest for smug­gling com­puter chips,’ he told us. ‘Both the DEA and U.S. Cus­toms were inter­ested in him back in ’93 and ’94. Every­thing he ever did, from A to Z, was ille­gal. A major source of con­jec­ture around the air­ports in both Naples and Venice was what were the two part­ners doing together. They were con­sid­ered an Odd Couple—universally, so far as we can tell—by observers at both air­ports. . . ” (Ibid.; p. 190.)

17. “ ‘Rudi would write a lot of bad checks, dis­ap­pear for a while, and come back with lots of cash,’ an air­port observer recalled. ‘Huff­man Avi­a­tion was a lit­tle jewel when he bought it, and it had a really good rep­u­ta­tion,’ another avi­a­tion exec­u­tive told us. ‘He took a prof­itable busi­ness and ran it right into the ground. So he’s got a busi­ness that’s los­ing money had over fist, and yet he was awash in cash. It just doesn’t add up right. ‘I can recall times when Dekkers owned money to every­one at the (Naples) air­port,’ said a busi­ness owner there. ‘And then he would leave town for three weeks or so in the Lear, and come back flush.’” (Ibid.; p. 191.)

18. “Rudi Dekkers’ finan­cial pro­file changed overnight, said Coy Jacob in Venice. ‘Just about a year before he bought Huff­man, he asked me for a ride from Venice to Naples, an air­plane ride, which is maybe a 20-minute flight. I said yeah, sure, I’ll take you down there with one of my pilots if you buy the gas,’ Jacob related. ‘He didn’t even have the money to buy gas for an air­plane to go down and back, and yet a year later he shows up and plops a mil­lion seven, a mil­lion eight or two mil­lion dol­lars on the table as if it were paper money.’” (Idem.)

19. Exem­pli­fy­ing the extra­or­di­nary oper­a­tions of Dekkers and Hilliard was their ini­ti­a­tion of an airline—called Florida Air—at the same time as their other busi­nesses were hem­or­rhag­ing money, air­craft and per­son­nel. Again, it appears that the pro­tec­tion they enjoyed ensured that they could break any and all rules with impunity. “In the spring of 2001—while Mohamed Atta was at his school—Rudi Dekkers did some­thing so incred­i­ble that we spent over a year exam­in­ing it in befud­dled amaze­ment. At the same time he was receiv­ing the most painful kind of humil­i­at­ing cov­er­age in the local press (‘Huff­man Rent Is Late, Again’), Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard blithely launched an air­line. They called it Florida Air, or FLAIR.” (Ibid.; p. 213.)

20. Dekkers and Hilliard’s part­ner in Florida Air was Rick Boehlke, whose avi­a­tion and man­aged care busi­nesses in the
Pacific North­west mir­ror the unusual activ­i­ties of Hilliard, Dekkers and Kruithof in Florida. Boehlke was involved with the mob-led loot­ing of union pen­sion funds in the Pacific North­west. “We were not sur­prised to dis­cover no one in the local avi­a­tion com­mu­nity thought the move made any busi­ness sense. All agreed that FLAIR was a doomed ven­ture from day one. Once again, the ques­tion was why were they doing it. If both had not had busi­ness with Mohamed Atta, it might not have mat­tered. But they had. They chose, as part­ner, a man named Rick Boehlke, who owned an air car­rier called Har­bor Air, in Gig Har­bor, Wash­ing­ton. Boehlke was also, just then, a par­tic­i­pant in Port­land, OR., in the $340 mil­lion loot­ing of pen­sion funds of mostly Mob-led unions, like the Labor­ers Union. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 213–214.)

21. “ . . . What were the odds that Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard would go look­ing for a busi­ness part­ner and come up with a guy with Mob ties who’s help­ing pull off a spec­tac­u­lar $300 mil­lion heist? . . . Florida Air, the new air­line, used Rick Boehlke’s Har­bor Air’s license to fly. Boehlke also ended up sup­ply­ing the new air­line with both planes and pilots. What Dekkers and Hilliard were bring­ing to the party was an open ques­tion. Mean­while, Mohamed Atta was still at Huff­man Avi­a­tion, doing no one knows quite what. Was it out­side the realm of pos­si­bil­ity that all three men—Dekkers, Boehlke, and Hilliard worked for the same com­pany? A com­pany, or net­work, spe­cial­iz­ing in ‘niches’ like loot­ing pen­sion funds and train­ing ter­ror­ists to fly? Or . . . was this just another freak coin­ci­dence? What are the odds, that the men who helped ter­ror­ist ring­leader Mohamed Atta estab­lish his Amer­i­can beach­head would be in busi­ness with a part­ner who robs banks . . . from the inside.” (Ibid.; p. 214.)

22. “How­ever it played out, our under­stand­ing of what the ter­ror­ist con­spir­acy was doing in Florida would be shaped by what it was Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard were dis­cov­ered to have been doing—and with whom—while Mohamed Atta prac­ticed touch and go’s at their facil­i­ties in Venice and Naples. Florida Air launched with great fan­fare in the Spring of 2001. Dekkers and Hilliard had started another avi­a­tion busi­ness that did not make busi­ness sense.” (Ibid.; p. 215.)

23. “Dur­ing its brief two-month exis­tence, Mohamed Atta may well have flown for the air­line as a co-pilot. No one will admit it, but there were ter­ror­ists inside the cock­pit of an Amer­i­can air­line plane dur­ing the year 2001 who didn’t need box-cutters to get there. We dis­cov­ered that the chance to fly as a com­mer­cial pilot with Florida Air, after tak­ing flight train­ing at ‘sis­ter com­pany’ Huff­man Avi­a­tion, had been a big part of Rudi Dekkers Euro­pean sales pitch, and was played up in the company’s adver­tis­ing. . . .” (Idem.)

24. It appears that Florida Air was a major pro­mo­tional ele­ment in Dekkers’ lur­ing of Arab and Euro­pean pilots from Ger­many and Europe to his school in Florida. “ ‘I kept ads from fly­ing mag­a­zines from 2000,’ said Bill Bersch, a for­mer man­ager at Huff­man. ‘Come to Huff­man to train, and then fly with our Florida Air air­line.’ The flight school was adver­tised as a feed into Florida Air as future employer of Huffman’s flight school stu­dents. Florida Air put the ads in every­where, but when it came down to it they couldn’t offer fly­ing jobs, because there wasn’t an air­line for very long.’ While this would seem to be a pretty seri­ous crime, there had been no FAA inves­ti­ga­tion, which isn’t sur­pris­ing. Dur­ing the course of his ‘avi­a­tion career’ in Florida, Rudi Dekkers received so many free ‘passes’ from the FAA that they should enshrine it with an exhibit at the Air & Space Museum.” (Idem.)

25. “ . . . We needed to take a closer look at Rick Boehlke, at Florida Air, and at Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard’s moti­va­tions for start­ing it. How many busi­ness­men behind on their rent for six month in a row have the gall, or chutz­pah, to at the same time start a new air­line? Was it not enough for Rudi and Wally that they were already los­ing money hand-over-fist in their flight school ven­ture, they decided they might as well be los­ing mil­lions in an air­line as well?” (Ibid.; p. 217.)

26. “Bill Bersch, a long­time avi­a­tion pro­fes­sional with expe­ri­ence as senior pilot for a regional air car­rier, rues the day he hired on to help launch Florida Air. . . . Bersch’s pro­fes­sional frus­tra­tion showed. ‘Wouldn’t you think you would have at least weekly meet­ings if you were try­ing to start an air­line? And then when you could get a meet­ing sched­uled, some­body would tell you that it had been can­celed, because Wally was in Havana.’ Why ‘Wally was in Havana’ would become a focus of our inves­ti­ga­tion, but at that time we hadn’t any idea what it meant. Bersch passed on another big clue a moment later, while speak­ing of how poorly the com­pany was man­aged. ‘It was just ridicu­lous,’ he said. ‘For the bet­ter part of a year, we were pay­ing eight pilots to do noth­ing.’” (Idem.)

27. “ ‘Rudi and Wally were run­ning a whole bunch of com­pa­nies as if they were just one entity,’ Bill Bersch explained. ‘They had Florida Air, Dekkers Avi­a­tion Group, Florida Air Hold­ings, LLC and even Florida Air Hold­ings, Inc. but since they inter­min­gled funds all the time, I just thought of them as one com­pany. They all had the same per­son­nel and the same man­age­ment, and they were all the same com­pany.’” (Ibid.; p. 221.)

28. “So com­min­gling funds was the pre­ferred way of doing busi­ness for Wally Hilliard. We’d thought it was ille­gal. This became more impor­tant when we learned that Hilliard was involved with another flight school bank­ruptcy, in Orlando, where hun­dreds of stu­dents at Dis­cover Air were ripped off when Hilliard’s part­ner the school’s owner, skipped town. ‘Nobody will ever know the extent to which these guys engaged in under­handed busi­ness deals,’ said Bersch. ‘They didn’t pay state taxes, they didn’t pay employee taxes.’” (Idem.)

29. Although Florida Air was, to all appear­ances, a phan­tom entity, it did gar­ner the endorse­ment of the Florida Sec­re­tary of State Kather­ine Har­ris. Har­ris, of course, presided over the elec­toral irreg­u­lar­i­ties that gave Florida to Bush in the 2000 elec­tion. “The chief and, indeed, only accom­plish­ment of Boehlke and Dekkers’ unsuc­cess­ful air­line was that it pro­vided a ratio­nale for the pres­ence on the tar­mac of the Venice Air­port of a half dozen British Aero­space Jet­streams poised within easy reach of Caribbean hot spots. Well the air­line did have one other accom­plish­ment: it was pub­licly endorsed by then-Florida Sec­re­tary of State Kather­ine Har­ris. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 239.)

30. “ . . . Boehlke and Dekkers seemed too sim­i­lar for it to be just a coin­ci­dence . . . For exam­ple, Boehlke’s avi­a­tion com­pany was evicted from its ter­mi­nal at Sea-Tac Inter­na­tional for fail­ure to pay back rent. And Boehlke’s aviation-related busi­nesses didn’t make busi­ness sense, either. ‘Richard Boehlke’s for­mer employ­ees always won­dered what the avi­a­tion busi­ness was really doing,’ reporter Mason told us. ‘From the begin­ning they felt that the finances flowed from the real estate hold­ings and the retire­ment home into this avi­a­tion com­pany, and that there was really no way this avi­a­tion com­pany was really mak­ing money. So the ques­tion about what this avi­a­tion com­pany was really all about still remains to be seen.’” (Ibid.; p. 225.)

31. “Boehlke’s Har­bor Air had invested $8 mil­lion in new planes to accom­mo­date more pas­sen­gers in 1999, for exam­ple, and com­pany offi­cials said 2000 was a prof­itable year. But the firm’s debts had already mounted to the point where man­age­ment just cashed out and split. A Har­bor Air employee could only spec­u­late as to why the air­line was going under. ‘Mis­man­age­ment of funds,’ said the employee. ‘[Pas­sen­ger] loads have picked
up tremen­dously. We have five or six flights in and out a day.’” (Ibid.; p. 226.)

32. As men­tioned above, Boehlke was involved with man­aged care facil­i­ties. They, too, were con­ducted in an alto­gether irreg­u­lar fash­ion. “ . . . Was Rick Boehlke an inno­cent busi­ness­man hav­ing a hor­ri­ble string of bad luck? Or had he been feath­er­ing a bank account in the Cay­mans? Like Rudi Dekkers, all his com­pa­nies were losers. . . even his ‘flag­ship’ assisted liv­ing com­pany. ‘Even Boehlke’s Alterra Health Care went side­ways,’ said an avi­a­tion observer in Tacoma. ‘The stock went from $38 three years ago to 22 cents.’ The ‘cover’ story we heard was: Boehlke lost $40 mil­lion in the stock mar­ket. . . .” (Idem.)

33. “ . . . ‘For the 53 year-old Boehlke, the sun-drenched par­ties aboard his per­sonal Grum­man Alba­tross with friends in the San Juan Islands were sup­pos­edly over,’ reported the local paper in the San Juan Islands. ‘His huge fly­ing boat sits for sale at the Tacoma Nar­rows Air­port in Gig Har­bor, along with other assets from his bank­rupt avi­a­tion com­pany. Observers in Wash­ing­ton noted that he was not, how­ever, run­ning notice­ably short of cash.’” (Ibid.; p. 227.)

34. “ . . . Eric Mason explained. ‘Richard Boehlke started in busi­ness cre­at­ing free­stand­ing retire­ment homes, and he at one point had the largest com­pany, the largest hold­ing of these free­stand­ing retire­ment homes in the coun­try. One of the retire­ment homes that belongs to the com­pany that Richard Boehlke once held was just a stone’s throw from the air­port where Mohamed Atta was trained. You have to ask your­self, there’s a lot of coin­ci­dences here. Are they just coin­ci­dences, or is there some­thing more to it?’” (Ibid.; p. 240.)

35. One of Boehlke’s Alterra facil­i­ties was located right near Dekkers’ Huff­man Avi­a­tion in Venice, Florida. “ . . . But, just a few hun­dred feet down the block from Huff­man Avi­a­tion in Venice, Boehlke’s com­pany, Alterra, built a gleam­ing new assisted liv­ing facil­ity dur­ing the 1990’s. Surely there couldn’t be any con­nec­tion between the assisted liv­ing indus­try and covert oper­a­tions? Could there? There could. We needed to look no fur­ther than a round-up of the usual sus­pects. A block away from the Venice Air­port, on the oppo­site side of the street from Boehlke’s assisted liv­ing home facil­ity, is a large and stately colo­nial build­ing which looks eerily like the plush digs of the law firm in the Tom Cruise movie ‘The Firm.’” (Ibid.; p. 241.)

36. Inter­est­ingly (and per­haps sig­nif­i­cantly), a nurs­ing home owned by Jack­son Stephens was right across the street from Boehlke’s Alterra facil­ity. Jack­son Stephens’ name has been linked with covert oper­a­tions and scan­dals for the bet­ter part of the last two decades. “The ele­gant build­ing cer­tainly seems out of place along­side the weed-strewn air­port perime­ter. It was built, we learned, to house the national head­quar­ters of nurs­ing home giant Bev­erly Enter­prises, which was owned at the time they built it by a name almost syn­ony­mous with Amer­i­can covert oper­a­tions. Gleam­ing like a movie set in Florida’s sun­shine, the opu­lent three-story red brick build­ing is a mon­u­ment to the rivers of money which have flowed through the finan­cial empire of Jack­son Stephens, whose name has been linked with every major Amer­i­can scan­dal of the past gen­er­a­tion: from BCCI to con­tra cocaine through Mena, Arkansas.” (Idem.)

37. “Today, the stately build­ing still houses Stephens’s for­mer law firm, local polit­i­cal pow­er­house Boone, Boone & Boone, a firm which worked so closely with client Stephens that at least one of his exec­u­tives was per­ma­nently housed there. Some credit the Boone law firm with run­ning the town of Venice still. ‘I don’t think you could safely say that they (Boone & Boone) run every­thing in town,’ one local jour­nal­ist told us. ‘But you could safely say they run almost every­thing. They exert a strong influ­ence here, includ­ing out at the air­port.’” (Idem.)

38. “In an ironic twist wor­thy of the spy fic­tion of John LeCarre, the very thing that made Venice seem to us such an unlikely des­ti­na­tion resort for Arab terrorists—its elderly population—attracted the home office of a nurs­ing home com­pany con­trolled by a man whose name is syn­ony­mous with Amer­i­can covert oper­a­tions dur­ing the past sev­eral decades. . .” (Ibid.; pp. 241–242.)

39. Next, the pro­gram details two sus­pi­cious air crashes within a space of a few months that almost claimed the lives of the Magic Dutch Boys—Arne Kruithof and Rudi Dekkers. Dekkers appar­ently antic­i­pated trouble—he asked a col­league to fly along­side him. That col­league appar­ently saved his life. It is worth not­ing that Dekkers was on his way for a show­down with his boss Wally Hilliard. “ . . . On Fri­day morn­ing, Jan­u­ary 24, 2003, Rudi and his heli­copter ‘splashed down’ at the mouth of a river spilling into the Gulf. He had been en route to a show­down over Huff­man Avi­a­tion with his erst­while part­ner Wally Hilliard, with whom he had been pub­licly feud­ing.” (Ibid.; p. 288.)

40. The air­craft that almost claimed the life of Arne Kruithof was com­pacted before the FAA could exam­ine it. Another extra­or­di­nary cir­cum­stance sur­round­ing the Magic Dutch Boys. “Just a few short months ear­lier it had been fel­low Magic Dutch Boy Arne Kruithof’s turn. Kruithof was one of three men who barely sur­vived the crash of their Twin Beech D-18, which plum­meted from 100 feet in the air to a run­way at the Venice Air­port. The men were able to drag them­selves out of the man­gled fuse­lage and dash to safety moments before the plane’s 300 gal­lons of fuel exploded in a fire­ball. It made for a great pic­ture in the next-day Venice Gon­do­lier.” (Idem.)

41. “When the tumul­tuous Dekkers crashed his heli­copter into the Caloosa­hatchee River, his lat­est mis­ad­ven­ture made the news every­where from Sara­sota to South Africa. The cov­er­age revealed an abid­ing and con­tin­u­ing pub­lic curios­ity about him, even in the face of the offi­cial black­out. What was most reveal­ing about Dekkers’ crash was that before he took off for what was to be a show­down with Hilliard, he had been seri­ously wor­ried about hav­ing an in-flight ‘mishap.’” (Idem.)

42. “Although the flight from the Naples-Fort Myers area to Venice takes barely half an hour, Dekkers pre­vailed on another heli­copter pilot headed in the same direc­tion, Tony Douang­dara, to fly along side him an effort, as he explained it, uncon­vinc­ingly ‘to stave off bore­dom.’ Either Dekkers was psy­chic, or he was afraid some­one might want him dead. Some­thing clearly was going very wrong for Rudi Dekkers even before his chop­per began expe­ri­enc­ing dif­fi­cul­ties.” (Ibid.; p. 289.)

43. “The first sign of trouble-to-come came when one of the heli­copters began pulling away. When his more pow­er­ful heli­copter surged ahead, pilot Tony Douang­dara told the Venice Gon­do­lier, Dekkers seemed remark­ably upset. ‘He was call­ing me on the radio say­ing ‘slow down, slow down!’ said Douang­dara. ‘Then, just a cou­ple of min­utes later, I heard him say ‘I’m going down!’ Douang­dara seemed to be sug­gest­ing he’d been recruited to be nearby if some­thing went wrong. . . .” (Idem.)

44. “ . . . Rudi Dekkers’ unex­plained heli­copter crash came while he was on his way to a Venice meet­ing to sign papers relin­quish­ing con­trol of ter­ror flight school Huff­man Avi­a­tion to Wally Hilliard. The two simul­ta­ne­ous events—the crash, and being forced out of busi­ness by his partner—weren’t linked by law enforce­ment. But the strange tim­ing added another bizarre twist to the saga of the 46 year-old Dutch national, who had already achieved inter­na­tional noto­ri­ety.” (Ibid.; p. 290.)

45. The pro­gram notes Mohamed Atta’s “Saudi Cover”—his links with the Saudi power elite. A cab dri­ver who had picked Atta up on a num­ber of occa­sions related Atta’s links with a wealthy Saudi and a con­ve­nience store owner. One of the p

eople appar­ently involved with this group was Zacharias Mous­saoui, the alleged 20th hijacker. “On Fri­day, Sept. 14, three days after the Sept. 11 attack, cab dri­ver Simp­son was con­tacted by the FBI, who ques­tioned him closely about an asso­ciate of Atta’s, a Mid­dle East­ern man who owned the con­ve­nience store across the street from the apart­ment build­ing where Simp­son said he picked him up. . . . ‘I said yes, I rec­og­nized Mohamed Atta,’ Simp­son con­tin­ued. ‘I’m the day dri­ver for Yel­low Cab in Venice, and he was in my cab a bunch of times in August, 2001. The night dri­ver had him even more than I did.’” (Ibid.; pp. 309–310.)

46. “So the FBI clearly knew—much ear­lier than we—that Atta was in Venice just before the attack. ‘They were espe­cially inter­ested in a rich Saudi guy that I’d been sent to pick up at the Orlando Exec­u­tive Air­port. They said they already knew that he’d rid­den in my cab because they’d got­ten my cab num­ber from a sur­veil­lance cam­era there.’ The FBI agents asked spe­cific and direct ques­tions focused on sev­eral trips to the Orlando Exec­u­tive Air­port begin­ning in Decem­ber 2000, said Simp­son.” (Ibid.; p. 310.)

47. “Simp­son told the FBI he had been asked to drive to Orlando by a con­ve­nience store owner in Venice, a Mid­dle East­ern man who was an asso­ciate of Atta’s and who left town shortly after the attack. ‘I took the store owner, and when he got to Orlando Exec­u­tive Air­port, we waited together for a flight to come in. then out comes this really wealthy Saudi busi­ness­man, dressed in Armani and shades, as well as his wife, who was wear­ing tra­di­tional Arab cloth­ing.’” (Idem.)

48. “ ‘The store owner knew him really well. They hugged, and I am sure he was bring­ing the store owner a lot of money, because you could tell that he had a lot of money. The first thing they wanted to do was go to a good restau­rant, so there we were, steak, lob­ster, every­thing. The guy had a lot of money. I just know this meet­ing had to do with this wealthy Saudi busi­ness­man bring­ing him money.’ After din­ner they pro­ceeded back to the Venice apart­ment of the con­ve­nience store owner, the one where Simp­son said he picked up Atta sev­eral times. ‘I took them back to Venice, and to the apart­ment, where I had to carry in lug­gage. I guess this wealthy Saudi busi­ness­man stayed there at the apart­ment too, at least that’s where I left him.’” (Ibid.; pp. 310–311.)

49. “Six weeks later, Simp­son said, he drove the wealthy Saudi’s wife back to the Orlando Air­port, once again leav­ing from the con­ve­nience store owner’s Venice apart­ment. When he arrived to pick up the fare, he was asked to help carry a chest down to the cab. The chest was so heavy, he said, it took two peo­ple to carry. The man who helped him carry it down the stairs to the cab, says Simp­son, was Zacharias Mous­saoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. ‘He was a big, bald buy, and he helped me with the chest.’” (Ibid.; p. 311.)

50. “Simpson’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Mous­saoui in Venice added con­fir­ma­tion to the story we’d heard about the sec­ond ‘Magic Dutch Boy,’ Arne Kruithof, being grilled for two days at the Sara­sota, Florida, Cour­t­house about his con­nec­tions to Mousaoui by a Jus­tice Depart­ment Asst. Attor­ney Gen­eral and top-level offi­cials from the FBI, there tak­ing depo­si­tions from poten­tial wit­nesses in Moussaoui’s upcom­ing trial. So Mous­saoui was in Venice too. The FBI has said noth­ing about it.” (Idem.)

51. “Also of major sig­nif­i­cance was Simpson’s state­ment that on sev­eral occa­sions he drove Mohamed Atta and Mar­wan Al-Shehhi from Venice to the Orlando Exec­u­tive Air­port, a con­sid­er­able dis­tance, on one-way trips. This places the two men at the same scene where Huff­man Aviation’s true owner, Wally Hilliard, lost a Lear jet after it was dis­cov­ered to have 43 pounds of Heroin onboard. Hilliard also owns a flight school and com­muter air­line in Orlando as well.” (Idem.)

52. One of the strik­ing aspects of Hopsicker’s nar­ra­tive is the fact that many of the peo­ple he inter­viewed would speak only on con­di­tion of anonymity. They appar­ently feared for their lives or the lives of their fam­i­lies. “ ‘I know more about Wally Hilliard than I ever want to know, said a for­mer Huff­man Avi­a­tion exec­u­tive. . . .Like many oth­ers, this exec­u­tive demanded anonymity. He explained: ‘I’ve got a fam­ily.’” (Ibid.; p. 256.)

53. One of the star­tling rev­e­la­tions in this interview—repeated in FTR#484—concerns Daniel’s asser­tion that Rudi Dekkers, and some Ger­man and Egypt­ian asso­ciates are still able to enter the coun­try. Fur­ther­more, Daniel main­tains that Dekkers and com­pany are tak­ing jet train­ing in Ten­nessee. This would indi­cate that the oper­a­tions in which the hijack­ers were tak­ing part are ongoing!!

54. In both FTR#’s 482 and 483, Daniel reveals that one of the Ger­mans asso­ci­ated with Atta had threat­ened to sue the Ger­man pub­lisher of Wel­come to Ter­ror­land in order to main­tain his anonymity.