The Won­der­ful World of Makram Chams

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Doc­u­ment­ing the career of Makram Chams, this pro­gram sets forth some facets of a man who must be the most remark­able con­ve­nience store owner of all time. In addi­tion to being an inti­mate asso­ciate of, and appar­ent col­lab­o­ra­tor of, 9/11 hijack­ers Mohamed Atta and Mar­wan Al-Shehhi, Chams has appar­ently worked as a “con­sul­tant” for Titan Cor­po­ra­tion, a major defense con­trac­tor. Chams also was part owner of a casino boat, another of whose partners—Max Burge—owned the planes that oper­ated out of Huff­man Avi­a­tion. (Huff­man was the flight school through which Atta and other 9/11 hijack­ers infil­trated. For more about Huff­man Avi­a­tion and Hopsicker’s work, see—among other programs—FTR#‘s 477, 482, 483, 484.) Burge had worked with Fred­er­ick Gef­fon, whose ‘Royal Sons’ com­pany owned a DC9 that was busted in Mex­ico with 5.5 tons of cocaine on board. Trac­ing the own­er­ship of the DC9, the broad­cast notes that the plane has belonged to a series of intel­li­gence fronts asso­ci­ated with the CIA and Iran-Contra drug smug­gling. Among the pre­vi­ous own­ers of the plane was Adnan Khashoggi, an Iran-Contra scan­dal player, financier of Al Qaeda and part­ner of John Gray, the New Age guru who has financed the 9/11-disinformation move­ment. Some con­ve­nience store owner!

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The use of Chams’ con­ve­nience store as an appar­ent meet­ing point for the 9/11 hijack­ers; the deliv­ery of a wire trans­fer of $70,000 to the hijack­ers at Chams’ store; Chams’ asso­ci­a­tion with a wealthy Saudi who took pos­ses­sion of a trunk filled with what may have been gold; the asso­ci­a­tion of Zacharias Mous­saoui (the 20th hijacker) with the wealthy Saudi and Chams; Chams’ sister’s alle­ga­tion that Chams worked with the FBI in San Diego; the alleged rela­tion­ship of Glenn Kovar (one of the own­ers of the DC9) with the Pres­i­dent, con­gress and the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity; a delin­eation of the com­plex own­er­ship struc­ture of the DC9 busted in Mexco with 5.5 tons of coke.

1. Per­pet­u­at­ing his jour­nal­is­tic trend of con­nect­ing dots between a num­ber of past and present events, Daniel Hop­sicker has linked a DC9 at the cen­ter of a mas­sive cocaine bust in Mex­ico to the Titan cor­po­ra­tion and—as we shall see—the CIA. At the cen­ter of this con­cate­na­tion is a Venice (Florida) con­ve­nience store owner named Makram Chams, for whom the broad­cast is titled. “A Mad­Cow­Morn­ingNews inves­ti­ga­tion into the own­er­ship of the DC9 air­liner caught car­ry­ing 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mex­ico last month has uncov­ered explo­sive new details about some of the many lin­ger­ing mys­ter­ies still sur­round­ing the 9.11 attack. San Diego defense con­trac­tor Titan Cor­po­ra­tion, already impli­cated in the fraud­u­lent bank­ruptcy of a shad­owy St. Peters­burg FL com­pany which owned the DC9 ‘Cocaine One’ flight busted in Mex­ico, employed a Lebanese con­trac­tor who assisted Mohamed Atta and other ter­ror­ist hijack­ers in Venice, Florida. For Titan, the rev­e­la­tion marks the lat­est in a remark­able series of recent scan­dals, includ­ing employ­ees charged with tor­ture and rape at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, a record $26 mil­lion fine and con­vic­tion for fix­ing a Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion in the African nation of Benin, and grow­ing infamy for being the biggest money backer of dis­graced and soon-to-be-jailed for­mer Con­gress­man Randy ‘Duke’ Cun­ning­ham.“
(“5.5 Ton Coke Bust Reveals New Details of 9/11 Attack” by Daniel Hop­sicker; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 5/17/2006.)

2. In his book Wel­come to Ter­ror­land: Mohammed Atta and the 9/11 Coverup in Florida, Daniel Hop­sicker noted some of the activ­i­ties of Makram Chams in Florida. Pro­vid­ing assis­tance for Atta and fel­low 9/11 hijacker Mar­wan Al-Shehhi, Chams owned a Kwik-Chek con­ve­nience store that was the des­ti­na­tion of a $70,000 wire trans­fer to the hijack­ers from the UAE. Chams left town shortly after the 9/11 attack, aban­don­ing his con­ve­nience store. “The story begins when, while research­ing ‘Wel­come to TERRORLAND’ three years ago, we dis­cov­ered that Makram Chams, a Lebanese national, had pro­vided sig­nif­i­cant logis­ti­cal sup­port for Mohamed Atta and Mar­wan Al-Shehhi. Chams, we learned, had even enter­tained recently-convicted Zacharias Mous­saoui in his apart­ment in Venice. Makram Chams owned a Kwik-Check con­ve­nience store in Venice, where the biggest over­seas money trans­fer to the ter­ror­ists, $70,000 from the UAE., was sent, accord­ing to the tes­ti­mony of FBI agents dur­ing the 9.11 Com­mis­sion hear­ings. Actu­ally the FBI tes­ti­mony never men­tioned Chams, or his store. They did how­ever show the receipt for the money order at the final hear­ing of the 9.11 Com­mis­sion, which we attended. And we were already famil­iar with the address where the money order went: 201 Nokomis Avenue. Makram Cham’s Kwik-Chek... Strangely, Chams left town soon after the 9.11 attack, aban­don­ing a thriv­ing con­ve­nience store which has stood vacant ever since.” (Idem.)

3. Chams has now sur­faced in Saudi Ara­bia, hav­ing filed a law­suit against Titan, a major defense con­trac­tor. Chams appears to have worked as a con­sul­tant to Titan Corp. “In a story in the Sara­sota Her­ald Tri­bune, reporter Earle Kimel, who first broke the story of Mohamed Atta’s Amer­i­can girl­friend, Amanda Keller, called Chams’ aban­doned store ‘A pocket of urban blight in the oth­er­wise smartly tai­lored suit of down­town Venice.’ An under­stand­ing of what Makram Chams had been doing while in Venice–and for whom–had eluded us, and been one of our biggest unan­swered ques­tions, one which might shed light on whether the U.S. Gov­ern­ment pos­sessed guilty foreknowledge–or even culpability–in the 9.11 attack. Our search for Chams had been unsuc­cess­ful. No one knew where he was, or why he’d left. But now Chams has re-surfaced in Saudi Ara­bia, where he worked in an unlikely capac­ity: as a con­trac­tor for Amer­i­can defense firm Titan Corp.” (Idem.)

4. The pro­gram relates how Daniel uncov­ered Chams’s iden­tity: “News of Makram Chams’ cur­rent where­abouts came to us when a researcher recently sent this adden­dum to Titan Corp’s 2005 SEC fil­ing: ‘On March 14, 2005, Makram Majid Chams, a for­mer con­sul­tant of Titan filed a claim with the Pre­lim­i­nary Com­mit­tee on Labor Dis­putes Set­tle­ment in Saudi Ara­bia. Mr. Chams alleges that Titan wrong­fully ter­mi­nated his con­sult­ing agree­ment and that he was defamed by Titan’s pub­li­ca­tion in a local news­pa­per of a manda­tory notice that he is no longer rep­re­sent­ing Titan. The plain­tiff is seek­ing approx­i­mately $21.9 mil­lion in dam­ages. We intend to defend our posi­tion vig­or­ously.’ Was the man suing Titan in Saudi Ara­bia, ‘Makram Majid Chams,’ the same ‘Makram Chams’ who’d lived in Venice? The answer was ‘yes.’ A mar­riage announce­ment in the Sara­sota Her­ald Tri­bune from Jan­u­ary of 1998 gave us the full name of the Makram Chams who’d lived in Venice, iden­ti­cal to the name of the man suing Titan in Saudi Ara­bia. ‘Makram Majid Chams,’ said the announce­ment, had mar­ried ‘Rim Ghazi Abou Zein, both of Venice.’ The news was noth­ing short of aston­ish­ing. The man who’d assisted ter­ror­ist hijack­ers in Venice...working for an Amer­i­can defense con­trac­tor in Saudi Ara­bia? What was Chams doing for The Titan Corp? What made him think they owe him $22 mil­lion dol­lars? And most impor­tantly... Was Makram Chams already work­ing for Titan while in Venice?” (Idem.)

5. Relat­ing infor­ma­tion pre­sented in Welome to Ter­ror­land, the pro­gram reviews Venice cab dri­ver Bob Simpson’s expe­ri­ence with Chams, an unnamed Saudi prince and a man who appeared to be Zacharias Mous­saoui, the so-called 20th hijacker. Simp­son relates that Atta and Al-Shehhi fre­quented Chams’s con­ve­nience store, and that Chams asso­ci­ated with the hijack­ers at a Venice apart­ment. “While we didn’t know the answers to any of these ques­tions, one thing we did know was that Bob Wood­ward would not be on the case. The major media steered com­pletely clear of sto­ries about what was clearly the biggest 9.11 crime scene that wasn’t reduced to rub­ble: Venice, Fl., home to three of the four ter­ror­ist pilots. We decided to take a closer look at Makram Chams. A Venice Yel­low Cab dri­ver, Bob Simp­son, first told us that the Mid­dle East­ern man who owned the con­ve­nience store had been close to the hijack­ers, and that Atta and Mar­wan Al-Shehhi fre­quently met at an apart­ment in Venice which he rented. (Watch him talk about it.) Simp­son had been ques­tioned closely by the FBI three days after the Sept. 11 attack. ‘I heard a voice say ‘this is Spe­cial Agent Joe Ander­son from the FBI call­ing,” he told us. ‘My heart sort of skipped a beat. Then he said, ‘Don’t worry, you haven’t done any­thing wrong.’” (Idem.)

6. More about Bob Simpson’s expe­ri­ences with Makram Chams, Atta and Al-Shehhi. “‘He asked if I’d seen pic­tures of the ter­ror­ists, and if I had, wanted to know if I rec­og­nized any. I said yes, I rec­og­nized Mohamed Atta. I’m the day dri­ver for Yel­low Cab in Venice, and he was in my cab a bunch of times in August,’ cab­bie Simp­son explained. ‘The night dri­ver had him even more than I did.’ Simp­son picked up Atta at the con­ve­nience store owner’s apart­ment on sev­eral occa­sions. He told the FBI he had been asked to drive to Orlando by a rel­a­tive of the Mid­dle East­ern man who owned the con­ve­nience store. ‘Their (the ter­ror­ists) best friend used to live upstairs on the sec­ond floor,’ stated Simp­son, point­ing to the Bur­gundy Square Apart­ments in down­town Venice. I saw Atta and Al-Shehhi there.’ ‘They were always hang­ing out together at the store. Most of the time, I’d be called by their friend, or they would call say­ing pick them up there at the mar­ket.’” (Idem.)

7. In addi­tion to the infor­ma­tion that cab dri­ver Simp­son pro­vided (and is pre­sented in Wel­come to Ter­ror­land), Daniel relates that a Venice psy­chi­a­trist had encoun­tered Atta at Chams’ Kwik-Check. Atta’s “dead eyes” impressed the psy­chi­a­trist. “That the ter­ror­ist hijack­ers spent much time hang­ing out in Makram Chams’ Kwik-Check was inde­pen­dently con­firmed by numer­ous observers, includ­ing a local psy­chi­a­trist who con­tacted us recently. ‘Nokomis Ave runs right behind the hos­pi­tal in Venice,’ stated the psy­chi­a­trist. ‘Each day as I left the hos­pi­tal for the office I’d head north on Nokomis. At the cor­ner of Nokomis and Miami there was this lit­tle (Kwik-Chek) con­ve­nience store run by middle-eastern types.’ ‘Half the time I’d be late for the office and I’d stop in there and grab some­thing awful for lunch. A woman and a large man were usu­ally behind the counter. Some days I’d go in there and no one would be behind the counter but there would be loud talk­ing in the back.’ ‘A few times I saw Atta in there, hang­ing around. Once I made eye con­tact with him—dead on! Empha­sis on ‘dead’ because when we locked eyes a chill went through me and I thought: ‘He’s got ‘dead’ eyes.’ ‘When you become a shrink you some­times get attuned to what might be going on with a per­son just from see­ing how they look—their faces and eyes—on the street or in pub­lic. The chill I got when I saw Atta was not the chill of fear. It was a chill about how sick he looked. He looked to be one of the most depressed per­sons I’d ever laid eyes on.’ ‘He looked so depressed that it was as if he was already gone. In ret­ro­spect I feel he may have been just as happy to die for the sake of end­ing it all as he was to die for Allah.’ ‘A cou­ple of weeks after 9/11 the con­ve­nience store closed up,’ stated the psy­chi­a­trist, who has since moved out of state. ‘I was down there last sum­mer vis­it­ing the old psych unit crew, nurses and staff, at a yearly reunion at Sharkey’s, and the store was still closed up. I found a ref­er­ence to the store on the TERRORLAND web­site, and it got me think­ing.’ ‘I wish I’d paid more atten­tion back then… but who knew?’” (Idem.)

8. Recap­ping infor­ma­tion pre­sented in Wel­come to Ter­ror­land, the broad­cast relates Simpson’s account of encoun­ter­ing an appar­ent Saudi prince (or rich busi­ness­man) who retrieved a very heavy chest from the Venice apart­ment. The extremely heavy weight of the chest struck Simp­son as unusual. That enor­mous weight may well have indi­cated that the chest con­tained gold. Zacharias Mous­saoui may well have been the “big bald guy” who helped Simp­son carry the chest down. “Cab­bie Simp­son told of how he had picked up a wealthy Saudi busi­ness­man at the Orlando Air­port after pick­ing up the con­ve­nience store owner at the apart­ment in Venice. The FBI expressed inter­est in the rich Saudi, he said. ‘They were espe­cially inter­ested in a rich Saudi guy that I’d been sent to pick up at the Orlando Air­port. They said they already knew that he’d rid­den in my cab because they’d got­ten my cab num­ber from a sur­veil­lance cam­era at the air­port.’ ‘He flew in on a pri­vate jet, and was dressed in Armani and shades, with his wife, who wore tra­di­tional Arab cloth­ing. After clear­ing inter­na­tional cus­toms, they pro­ceeded back to a Venice apart­ment rented by the con­ve­nience store owner. Six weeks later, he drove the wealthy Saudi’s wife back to the Orlando Air­port, Simp­son told the FBI. Again they left from the con­ve­nience store owner’s Venice apart­ment. When he arrived to pick up his fare, Simp­son was asked to come up to the apart­ment to help carry a chest down to the cab. ‘The chest was so heavy it took two peo­ple to carry,’ Simp­son said. ‘A big bald guy who was there helped me carry the chest down.’ The man who helped him carry the chest down the stairs to the cab, said Simp­son, was Zacharias Mous­saoui.” (Idem.)

9. “Cab­bie Simp­son had been so clearly impressed with how heavy the chest had been that we too were intrigued. We called a man we knew to have worked for many years in Amer­i­can intel­li­gence to ask what he thought made the chest so heavy. ‘Gold,’ he replied imme­di­ately. ‘There was gold in that chest.’ The iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of Mous­saoui in Venice con­firmed what we had reported exclu­sively nearly four years ago, when we learned that the sec­ond Dutch national flight school owner at the Venice Air­port, Arne Kruithof, was ques­tioned for two days by offi­cials tak­ing depo­si­tions from poten­tial wit­nesses in Moussaoui’s trial. Fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion of Moussaoui’s pres­ence in Venice came much later from an unlikely and usu­ally highly-dubious source: Rudi Dekkers. Con­tin­u­ing the FBI cover-up about the terrorist’s activ­ity in Venice, jurors in the trial of Zacharias Mous­saoui were never told that Mous­saoui had been there. They did how­ever, hear tes­ti­mony which con­firmed the alle­ga­tion in ‘Wel­come to TERRORLAND,’ of a sys­tem­atic cover up by the FBI of the fact that Venice was the terrorist’s main base of oper­a­tions.” (Idem.)

10. Jurors in the Mous­saoui trial were given infor­ma­tion about Atta and Al-Shehhi’s pres­ence in a sin­gle engine plane belong­ing to Huff­man Avi­a­tion. This was two months after the FBI’s chronol­ogy states that Atta left Venice. Daniel also presents yet another detail about the won­der­ful world of Makram Chams: that he was a co-owner of a casino boat in Florida. This is no ordi­nary con­ve­nience store owner! Note that Sun­cruz casino boats are at the epi­cen­ter of the Jack Abramoff scan­dal. For more about Sun­cruz, Jack Abramoff and the mur­der of Gus Boulis, see—among other programs—FTR#516. “In Feb­ru­ary 2001, the jurors were told, Mohamed Atta and Mar­wan Al-Shehhi had been spot­ted in Clear­wa­ter Florida fly­ing a single-engine plane reg­is­tered to Huff­man Aviation...almost two months after the FBI’s offi­cial chronol­ogy states Atta left Venice and Huff­man for good. We had ini­tially thought that Makram Chams was prob­a­bly an Arab oper­a­tive sent in early to smooth the way for the hijack­ers. Then we dis­cov­ered that Chams had been a PARTNER in 1997 and 1998 in a gam­bling boat called ‘Vegas in Venice,’ which cleaned up in Venice for two years. This infor­ma­tion only added to our puz­zle­ment. We won­dered: Where does an immi­grant, boot­strap­ping him­self up in Amer­ica through the time-tested method of own­ing a con­ve­nience store, get the JUICE to be a part­ner in a gam­bling boat? Peo­ple kill to get jobs like that in Florida. Just ask Jack Abramoff.” (Idem.)

11. Next, Daniel Hop­sicker con­nects the won­der­ful world of Makram Chams with a DC9 that was recently busted in Mex­ico with 5.5 Tons of Cocaine aboard. (Hop­sicker dubs that plane “Cocaine One.”) One of the part­ners in the casino boat in which Chams was a part­ner is Max Burge—the owner of the planes used at Huff­man Avi­a­tion!! And Burge had appar­ently done busi­ness with Fred­eric Gef­fon, the part owner of “Cocaine One.” Geffon’s ‘Royal Sons’ used Huff­man Aviation’s address in some of its ads. “The con­trol­ling part­ner in the gam­bling ship in which Makram Chams was a part­ner is Ian Gold­farb, from Glad­wyne, Pa., a sub­urb of Philadel­phia. The only other local part­ner in the casino ship, we were shocked to dis­cover, was Max Burge, who we’d inter­viewed dur­ing research for ‘Wel­come to TERRORLAND,’ because Burge owned the planes used at Huff­man Avi­a­tion. Small world. But it soon got even smaller… Fred­eric Gef­fon from ‘Royal Sons,’ the aggra­vated part-owner of ‘Cocaine One,’ told us that he had done busi­ness with Burge. Royal Sons had used the address of Huff­man Aviation’s hanger at the Venice Air­port in a few air­plane ads. This is inex­plic­a­ble, at least it is to Royal Son’s Fred­eric Gef­fon, who denies ever plac­ing plane ads with a Venice Air­port address. His denial rang a lit­tle hol­low with his claim that any­one could have placed ads claim­ing to be him. Pos­si­ble, per­haps. But also, we think, highly unlikely.” (Idem.)

12. Adding depth to our under­stand­ing of the won­der­ful world of Makram Chams, Daniel relates infor­ma­tion from Chams’s sis­ter. She claims that Chams was in San Diego help­ing the FBI. Hop­sicker con­cludes that Chams was work­ing for Titan Cor­po­ra­tion while still in Venice. Hop­sicker notes that Titan Cor­po­ra­tion has touched many bases, includ­ing the Randy “Duke” Cun­ning­ham scan­dal. Titan per­son­nel also appear to have been involved in the Abu Ghraib scan­dal. In weigh­ing the alle­ga­tion made by Chams’ sis­ter, one should not lose sight of the fact that San Diego was another area fre­quented by 9/11 hijack­ers. Two of the hijack­ers were put up in San Diego by an FBI infor­mant. Was Chams func­tion­ing in a sim­i­lar fash­ion? (For more on the San Diego con­nec­tions of the 9/11 hijack­ers, see FTR#507.) “We finally found some­one who knew what had hap­pened to Makram Chams. It was his sis­ter, May Chams. She was then work­ing at the same phar­macy in Venice where we dis­cov­ered, much later, that Mohamed Atta had brought his father, less than two weeks before the attack. We per­sisted in ques­tion­ing May, in the face of her obvi­ous hos­til­ity, and were finally rewarded. ‘Mak is in San Diego,’ she told us,’ help­ing the FBI.’ Only now does her state­ment make sense to us. But, if Makram hot­footed it to San Diego on ‘busi­ness’ after the 9.11 attack, it would be a strong indi­ca­tion that he had a rela­tion­ship with Titan Corp... while he was still in Venice. It has since been revealed that Titan trains mer­ce­nar­ies, and pro­vides mer­ce­nar­ies for oper­a­tions. Cur­rent oper­a­tions. Ongo­ing oper­a­tions...” (Idem.)

13. Fore­shad­ow­ing infor­ma­tion con­tained in his next story, Hop­sicker high­lights the appar­ent pres­ence in the com­pli­cated back­ground of ‘Cocaine One” of Adnan Khashoggi. Khashoggi was a major player in the Iran– Con­tra scan­dal, chan­neled money to Osama bin Laden and has been a part­ner with John Gray, a finan­cial backer of the so-called “9/11 Truth Move­ment.” “Dis­clo­sures in the Duke Cun­ning­ham scan­dal lead directly to Titan. Before it is done, this may present some­one with some very thorny prob­lems. As a result of our inves­ti­ga­tion so far, for exam­ple, we will be report­ing in our next story that by delv­ing into the rela­tion­ships between the cor­po­ra­tions involved in the 5.5 ton cocaine caper we have been able to uncover evi­dence of the unmis­tak­able pres­ence, behind the scenes in the scan­dal, of Saudi bil­lion­aire Adnan Khashoggi... The very same Adnan Khashoggi who has been a force behind a well-financed dis­in­for­ma­tion cam­paign billing itself the ‘9.11 Truth Move­ment.’ The U.S. mil­i­tary has a 1200-man psy­cho­log­i­cal war­fare bat­tal­ion, we learned recently. They prob­a­bly aren’t all work­ing in Iraq. In all like­li­hood, a psy-op has been waged against the Amer­i­can peo­ple to draw atten­tion from ques­tions about who the ter­ror­ists were asso­ci­at­ing with–and what they had been doing–while they were in the U.S.” (Idem.)

14. “Ques­tions with answers. Some­one would pre­fer they not become pub­lic. But you won’t find much about any of this on the innu­mer­able web­sites of the ‘9.11 Truth Move­ment.’ Most seem to be utterly fas­ci­nated cur­rently with spec­u­la­tion about mate­ri­als which might have been secreted inside the Twin Tow­ers which could have made them col­lapse. They used to utterly fas­ci­nated with prov­ing that no plane hit the Pen­ta­gon. Before that there were utterly fas­ci­nated with the idea that the planes were flown by remote con­trol. And on and on. Con­trol­ling the debate is easy when a bil­lion­aire is foot­ing the bill. Advan­tage Khashoggi. But it ain’t over till its over... And there’s a DC9 sit­ting in Mex­ico tonight whose anx­ious own­ers know some­thing about this pow­er­ful truth: It ain’t over.” (Idem.)

15. Pre­sent­ing an arti­cle that received only pass­ing dis­cus­sion in FTR#554, this dis­cus­sion high­lights Hopsicker’s the­ory that CIA direc­tor Porter Goss’s res­ig­na­tion was due to the bust of the DC9 in Mex­ico. As this arti­cle demon­strates, that plane was part of a CIA-connected air fleet, ele­ments of which fig­ured in the Iran-Contra drug smug­gling oper­a­tions. (For more about the Iran-Contra drug smug­gling, see AFA#‘s 29–34—avail­able from Spitfire—as well as FTR#‘s 01, 503. For more about links between the Iran-Contra drug smug­gling and the milieu of 9/11, see FTR#‘s 482, 483, 484.) “The ‘mys­tery’ of Porter Goss’ res­ig­na­tion last month as CIA Direc­tor is appar­ently directly related to the huge seizure in Mex­ico sev­eral weeks ear­lier of over 5.5 tons of cocaine, accord­ing to gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments recently obtained by the The Mad­Cow­Morn­ingNews. After Goss’s sur­prise res­ig­na­tion last month he told reporters his rea­son for resign­ing was ‘just one of those mys­ter­ies,’ offer­ing no other expla­na­tion for his sud­den depar­ture after almost two years on the job. Goss’ res­ig­na­tion appears to be con­nected to the unprece­dented with­hold­ing by the Fed­eral Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion of the reg­is­tra­tion records for the DC9 (N900SA) which more than six weeks ago was caught car­ry­ing a cargo of five-and-a-half tons of cocaine, neatly packed into 126 iden­ti­cal black suit­cases at a jun­gle airstrip in the Yucatan. At the time of the plane’s seizure on April 11, FAA offi­cials stated the aircraft’s title records would become avail­able to reporters within two weeks. Six weeks later that state­ment, in a phrase famous from the Water­gate Scan­dal, has been ren­dered ‘inop­er­a­tive.’”
(“Porter Goss Res­ig­na­tion ‘Mys­tery’ Solved: DC9 with 5.5 Tons of Cocaine Was CIA Plane” by Daniel Hop­sicker; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 5/25/2006.)

16. The actual own­er­ship of the DC9 was obscured, due to the FAA’s reluc­tance to dis­close the reg­is­tra­tion infor­ma­tion of the plane. The DC9 and its sis­ter plane have belonged to a series of front com­pa­nies asso­ci­ated with the CIA. Many of those front com­pa­nies have been looted, leav­ing investors hold­ing the bag. “How­ever, the Mad­Cow­Morn­ingNews was suc­cess­ful in obtain­ing the FAA records last week of the con­fis­cated plane’s sis­ter ship, an iden­ti­cal twin DC9 (N120NE) owned and oper­ated by the same part­ner­ship. Both air­craft, painted to resem­ble U.S. Gov­ern­ment air­craft from the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, were parked for sev­eral years at the gen­eral avi­a­tion ter­mi­nal at Clear­wa­ter St Peters­burg Inter­na­tional Air­port. The reg­is­tra­tion records reveal that the past ‘own­ers’ of ‘Cocaine One’s’ iden­ti­cal twin are well-known ‘front’ com­pa­nies of America’s Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency. The twin to the DC9 burst­ing with 5.5 tons of cocaine is a CIA plane. The plane’s own­ers over the past two decades, in fact, com­prise a vir­tual Who’s Who of avi­a­tion com­pa­nies known to serve as ‘fronts’ for the CIA, whose true iden­ti­ties came to light dur­ing the Iran Con­tra Scan­dal. More­over, the FAA’s reluc­tance to release the reg­is­tra­tion of ‘Cocaine One,’ which should already be a mat­ter of pub­lic record, is the clear­est pos­si­ble indi­ca­tion that those reg­is­tra­tion records will dis­close the same thing. At least three com­pa­nies to which ‘Cocaine One’s’ twin was reg­is­tered have been looted, to the over­all tune of almost $300 mil­lion dol­lars. The plane’s own­ers have left a trail of tears for investors, engag­ing in mas­sive finan­cial fraud, of a par­tic­u­lar kind... Soci­ol­o­gists call it ‘state-sponsored crime.’” (Idem.)

17. The present owner of the DC9 known as “Cocaine One” and its sis­ter plane is Sky­Way Air­craft, a com­pany owned by Glenn Kovar. “Inno­cent investors and share­hold­ers get swin­dled, the bad guys get away, and news­pa­pers go silent. There is clearly some­thing about these par­tic­u­lar DC9’s which give their own­ers a license to treat share­hold­ers and investors like marks, and steal mil­lions from ordi­nary cit­i­zens. Work­ing back­wards from the present, the plane’s reg­is­tered owner at the time it was busted was Sky­Way Air­craft, the only tan­gi­ble asset of Sky­Way Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Hold­ing, a firm whose exis­tence, as we’ve pre­vi­ously seen, served as noth­ing more than a mea­ger excuse to run a penny stock fraud scam which bilked investors of a reported $40 mil­lion dol­lars... in less than three years. Sky­Way share­hold­ers will no doubt be grat­i­fied to learn that the bank­ruptcy of the firm seems not to have adversely affected the firm’s top offi­cers finan­cially.” (Idem.)

18. Glenn Kovar—chairman of SkyWay—claims to have con­nec­tions to the con­gress and the pres­i­dent of the United States. “SkyWay’s 74 yr. old Chair­man Glenn Kovar is cur­rently build­ing a six bed­room vaca­tion chalet on a lake sev­eral miles north of Duck­town, Ten­nessee, tucked away in a pic­turesque rural set­ting boast­ing splen­did white­wa­ter raft­ing. Kovar, appar­ently eager to begin­ning to fill the six bed­rooms in his new manse, has an online dat­ing pro­file which reveals, among other things, that he’s eager to con­vey that he’s a roman­tic kind of guy, the kind who likes to take long walks on the beach at sun­set. The affect is some­what marred by the fact he don’t spell two good: ‘basicly i’m a roman­tic, touch and snug­gle per­son,’ Chair­man Kovar enthuses. There is also this nugget, which we hope a pros­e­cut­ing attor­ney some­day asks him about, prefer­ably under oath: ‘i’m for­tu­nate to be a senior advi­sor to the us con­gress and have dined with the pres­i­dent.’ Who might that be, Chair­man Glenn? Do tell.” (Idem.)

19. Glenn Kovar and his son Brent are allegedly work­ing with the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity. This is inter­est­ing, con­sid­er­ing the fact that Sky­Way appears to have lost $40 mil­lion of investors’ money. The DC9’s pre­vi­ous owner (before Sky­Way) was Gen­e­sis Avi­a­tion, owned by Adnan Khashoggi. “Beyond mock­ing a man who needs mock­ing, in the same way South­ern law­men talk about a par­tic­u­larly bru­tal crim­i­nal who ‘needs killing,’ these details are impor­tant because, incred­i­bly... Kovar and his son are prepar­ing another scheme. A source in Duck­town con­tacted us after speak­ing with the obvi­ously relaxed Glenn Kovar, and told us us Kovar and his son Brent are in busi­ness together in a new ven­ture, work­ing hand in hand with the Dept. of Home­land Secu­rity. The devel­op­ment is trou­bling, in the same way going to bed on an ordi­nary school night and wak­ing up in Oz might be. But Sky­Way, which only lost $40 mil­lion of investors’ money, is an absolute paragon of excel­lence, cor­po­rate governance-wise, when com­pared to the DC9’s pre­vi­ous owner... Gen­e­sis Avi­a­tion is one of sev­eral dozen com­pany fronts, all of which con­tain the name ‘Gen­e­sis’ in the title, con­trolled by one of the key fig­ures in the Iran Con­tra scan­dal, Saudi bil­lion­aire and long-time CIA asset Adnan Khashoggi.” (Idem.)

20. “Last month the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion charged Khashoggi and Ramy Al Batrawi, his lieu­tenant for the past 20 years, with stock fraud in U.S. Dis­trict Court for Cen­tral Cal­i­for­nia. The men are accused of orches­trat­ing a $130 mil­lion fraud involv­ing the stock price of Gen­e­sis­In­ter­me­dia. When the help­ful Khashoggi worked with Oliver North to sell arms to Iran, Ramy El-Batrawi was there, as pres­i­dent of a Khashoggi com­pany, Jet­borne Inter­na­tional, indicted for ille­gally fer­ry­ing TOW mis­siles to Iran, an ‘enter­prise’ which net­ted someone—though not the U.S. Gov­ern­ment or the Con­tras it was sup­pos­edly funding—a tidy bit of change. Appar­ently nei­ther man learned that crime doesn’t pay, because Adnan and Ramy’s recent pil­fer­age make the Kovars look like kids steal­ing a candy bar from a 7–11 after school. ‘Just three months after the company’s Ini­tial Pub­lic Offer­ing (IPO), the nearly $17 mil­lion raised in the offer­ing was gone,’ read one wire ser­vice story. ‘The cre­ative deal­ings of defen­dant El-Batrawi partly explains how this money dis­ap­peared so quickly,’ reported the AP.” (Idem.)

21. “‘El-Batrawi had a side deal called ‘Trade Your Way to Riches,’ and he thus arranged to have its mail­ing lists sold to Gen­e­sis for $3.8 mil­lion of the pro­ceeds lifted from the IPO. Addi­tion­ally El-Batrawi gave him­self $362,149 for fly­ing him­self around in his pri­vate plane to pro­mote the deal on the IPO road show.’ Another area where Glenn and Brent Kovar might learn some­thing from past mas­ter Khashoggi is how, in your finan­cial fraud’s after­math, to make your­self scarce…” (Idem.)

22. Another of the plane’s pre­vi­ous own­ers was Finova Cap­i­tal, a front com­pany that owned the C123 mil­i­tary cargo plane owned by Barry Seal (the sub­ject of Daniel’s first book.) This same plane was shot down over Nicaragua, pre­cip­i­tat­ing the inves­ti­ga­tion known as the Iran-Contra scan­dal. “‘Lawyers for Mr. El-Batrawi and Mr. Khashoggi could not be imme­di­ately located for com­ment,’ reported the L.A. Times. ‘An SEC lawyer, Kara Brock­meyer, said the agency had not deter­mined who their lawyers were. Mr. El– Batrawi has no listed tele­phone num­ber in Los Ange­les, and Mr. Khashoggi’s where­abouts is not known, accord­ing to the com­plaint.’ The SEC may be inter­ested to learn what The Mad­Cow­Morn­ingNews dis­cov­ered El-Batrawi doing a year ago. The high-roller was spend­ing mil­lions gam­bling in Vegas, where he flew by pri­vate jet. The TV show ‘Casino Diaries’ even pro­filed him in action. The DC9 has also been ‘owned’ by Finova Cap­i­tal, revealed in the early 90’s as a CIA front which also ‘owned’ the C123 mil­i­tary cargo plane used by noto­ri­ous drug smug­gler and CIA pilot Barry Seal, which was later shot down over Nicaragua with Eugene Hasen­fus onboard.’” (Idem.)

23. Hop­sicker notes that the DC9 was pre­vi­ously owned by Grey­hound Leas­ing, which also owned another drug smug­gling plane belong­ing to Barry Seal. That plane later became the favorite plane of then gov­er­nor of Texas George W. Bush!! “The crash cracked open the Iran Con­tra Scan­dal, and inspired an ambi­tious burst of emer­gency dam­age con­trol by Lt. Colonel Oliver North, who embarked on a three-day shred­ding spree report­edly designed to remove any trace of Barry Seal’s name from his files. U.S. offi­cials vehe­mently denied the plane belonged to the CIA. At the time the plane was reg­is­tered to Gen­eral John Singlaub’s South­ern Air Trans­port. Much later, South­ern Air Trans­port went bank­rupt, and the pro­ceed­ings revealed that the com­pany had been owned by an entity called Finova Cap­i­tal, a CIA front com­pany set up in Ari­zona and head­quar­tered in Canada to escape Amer­i­can finan­cial dis­clo­sure require­ments. By that time, in 1998, no one was pay­ing any atten­tion, so the CIA’s use of front com­pa­nies had once again been suc­cess­ful. Before Finova, the DC9 belonged, or, to use the spook phrase, ‘been parked’ with a com­pany called Grey­hound Leas­ing of Phoenix, AZ.” (Idem.)

24. Grey­hound leas­ing also expe­ri­enced some unusual finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties. “Grey­hound dur­ing this time period also ‘owned’ a Beech King Air used by CIA pilot and drug smug­gler Barry Seal. After his death it became the favorite plane of then Texas-Governor George W. Bush. But no good deed goes unpun­ished, and Grey­hound Leas­ing soon came up a lit­tle short. The com­pany had some­how ‘mis­placed’ $120 mil­lion dol­lars. The company’s accoun­tants wrote that ‘fraud­u­lent and dis­hon­est acts . . . resulted directly in a loss of $119,684,598.’ That’s just a few bribes short of $120 mil­lion dol­lars. Not so, replied the company’s hap­less gen­eral coun­sel, who responded weakly that the loss has been reduced to a mere $72 mil­lion. The mas­sive fraud included checks writ­ten on nap­kins in Swiss restau­rants and set afire after being cashed, the reported black­mail­ing, and sheep­ish looks all around.” (Idem.)

25. Symp­to­matic of the extra­or­di­nary his­tory of the com­pa­nies fig­ur­ing in the back­ground of “Cocaine One” is the sit­u­a­tion of Shel­don Player. After loot­ing $55 mil­lion from Grey­hound Leas­ing, Player only received five years in prison. The company’s chair­man never went to prison, but became the head of a new com­pany based in Mclean, Vir­ginia. Mclean is part of an area of North­ern Vir­ginia that is home to many key CIA facil­i­ties, includ­ing the agency’s head­quar­ters in Lan­g­ley. “The trou­bling ques­tion which puz­zled busi­ness reporters in Phoenix were never able to puz­zle out was this: Why were they giv­ing money away down at Grey­hound Leas­ing dur­ing the 1980’s? The dis­po­si­tion of the result­ing crim­i­nal trial of the major player in the scheme is yet another illus­tra­tion of the fact that, in Amer­ica, being con­nected means never hav­ing to say you’re sorry. When Shel­don Player was sen­tenced for steal­ing $55 mil­lion from Grey­hound Leas­ing, he received a five-year sen­tence. That’s one year for each $11 mil­lion he stole, which is a deal that—were it offered to ‘ordi­nary’ Americans—would have peo­ple lin­ing up around Phoenix’s Fed­eral Cour­t­houses to sign up for. The company’s chair­man, lucky fel­low, never went to prison. Instead he resigned his posi­tion at Grey­hound and had soon been appointed as the new pres­i­dent and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Finalco, an equip­ment finance and bro­ker­age com­pany based in Mclean, Vir­ginia, the home of the CIA.” (Idem.)

26. “This all began when Mex­i­can sol­diers arrested the Colom­bian co-pilot and the two Mex­i­can pilots of a cor­po­rate jet sent to await the DC9’s arrival. ‘But the DC-9’s pilot escaped,’ reports a story on the web­site of the mag­a­zine Flight Inter­na­tional, ‘fuelling con­spir­acy the­o­ries.’ Fuelling con­spir­acy the­o­ries in today’s Amer­ica amounts to putting out fires with gaso­line. And we cer­tainly don’t want to appear to do that... So, we has­ten to add, there is no doubt that this is all just a series of freak coin­ci­dences. There is also no doubt that the DC9 ‘Cocaine One’ still sit­ting on a run­way some­where in Mex­ico will even­tu­ally be shown to belong to some­one with a swarthy com­plex­ion and a foreign-sounding last name. We’d like to has­ten to add that as a direct result of the mar­tial spirit and can-do atti­tude of our cur­rent ‘war-time’ Pres­i­dent, there is also no doubt that Osama bin Laden will be caught and brought to jus­tice, per­haps some­time this cen­tury. Thank God our Pres­i­dent was able to steal the 2000 elec­tion from Al Gore... Who knows where we’d be today if he hadn’t done that.” (Idem.)

27. For more about the back­ground of “Cocaine One,” see Daniel’s arti­cle “Aircraft’s Own­ers in 5.5 Ton Cocaine Bust Include Tom De Lay Appointee, ‘Royal Sons LLC’”.)