When asked whether Armairco's government work included activities in Central America, an Armairco official said, ''That may well be.''
The Beechcraft King Air 200 has been in production since the mid 1970's. A little less than seven hundred of them have been manufactured to date. The twin engine turboprop has a pressurized cabin capable, with different configurations of seating up to nine passengers. It has a cruising speed of approximately 330 mph and a cruising range of more than 1,800 miles. New plane prices in1982 started at around $1,700,000 based on equipment.
N6308F
The convoluted, pretzel-like paper history of the airplane that once belonged to Barry Seal and is today used by Texas Governor George W. Bush begins when the title to the brand new aircraft was first recorded by Portland, Oregon dealer Flightcraft, Inc.
Flightcraft's President, David R. Hinson, a former military and commercial airline pilot active in the Republican Party in Oregon, was, according to The Oregonian, at the time under consideration to head the FAA. The paper stated that Hinson had met with Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Hanford Dole to express interest in the job after travelling to Washington to promote himself for the post. Helping Bill Casey subvert the will of Congress, presumably, did nothing to hurt his chances.
N6308F was spoken for, several times over, even before it arrived at Flighcraft's facilities in the Spring of 1982.
"I don't think we're going to help you - I mean "be able" to help you said a nervous Phil Carrell of Flightcraft, Inc. when contacted for information by FTW. Carrell, a sales executive who was working at Flightcraft when "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" was originally sold, told FTW that as far as he knew any records of the aircraft were no longer in existence. He referred us to the FAA title records for answers. We wish that answers were what we had found.
According to records located by Dan Hopsicker in his investigation, a now defunct Lake Arrowhead, California firm, Ken Miller Aircraft Sales, entered into leasing agreements with developer Eugene Glick in February 1982, two months before the manufacturer's title was transferred to Flightcraft. Ken Miller Aircraft appears nowhere in the FAA title history of the plane. Ken Miller Aviation is also no longer in existence. Nonetheless, in February 1982, Ken Miller Aviation entered into a leasing agreement with real estate magnate Eugene Glick for the brand new aircraft. In that agreement, Glick and his wife agreed to make eighty-four monthly payments of more than $37,000 ($2,835,672) for the airplane which had a new purchase price of $2,010,556. No record linking Ken Miller Aviation to Flightcraft is known to exist.
On paper at least, according to Contracts dating from February of 1982, the plane was owned by a Greyhound Bus Lines subsidiary, Greycas, which in turn leased it to a mysterious Phoenix firm in close proximity to John Singlaub's Enterprise operations named Systems Marketing, Inc." Systems Marketing then leased it to Continental Desert Properties which was the firm owned by Glick. In the final step, Glick leased the plane over to Barry Seal.
In a Contract dated March 21, 1983 N6308F was leased by Continental Desert Properties to Seal's firm Baton Rouge Aviation . Insurance policies found in Seal's private papers confirm that Barry Seal subsequently purchased an insurance policy on the aircraft.
What, exactly, was the purpose of this convoluted ownership record? What was it designed to conceal? The answer lies in the very definition of "tradecraft," a term for what it is that spies and covert operators do to operate in the dark. The "front" companies were in place to act as "cut-outs," layers of insulation, between the spy agency -- in this case Bill Casey's CIA--and the covert operative--, in this case, Barry Seal.
FAA ownership records show that Gene Glick, who lived on Hope Ranch near Ronald Reagan's Rancho del Cielo in Santa Barbara, California, leased "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" as well as several of Barry Seal's other planes during the same years that Seal was most active in drug and weapons smuggling 1982-5. Other documents located by Hopsicker confirm that Glick was also actively helping Seal purchase ocean-going vessels for use in drug smuggling activities and as stationary platforms for the CIA to use off the coast of Nicaragua in covert operations.
An FBI agent had dismissed Glick's importance to Dan Hopsicker, which fueled his suspicions early on. "He's just a money launderer," said Delbert Hahn, who was the Special Agent in Charge of an Inter-Agency Organized Crime Drug Task Force looking into Barry Seal's organization back in the middle 1980s. At least in this case, Glick's behavior was consistent with Iran-Contra "bust out" operations because the lease defaulted in two years. The plane was repossessed.
According to FTW contributing editor Catherine Austin Fitts who, as a former Wall Street investment banker and Assistant Secretary of Housing, served on the Resolution Trust Corporation in the wake of the S&L scandal, "This could have been a substantial cash pay-off to the concerned parties." Fitts, who also served on the "clean-up" committee for BCCI (a bank with abundant connections to CIA covert operations, financial fraud and drug trafficking) observed that the pattern here is typical of those seen by enforcement officials in that era.
“It is worth researching to see if there were substantial cash pay-offs to the concerned parties,” said Fitts. “If the lease were insured at or near its full value and defaulted early as it did here in around two years; if the total value of lease > payments were $2.8 million and if the lessor had paid only $2.1 million for the aircraft then any insurance pay-off or “write down” after only a year or two could have netted a profit of a half million dollars or more for the covert operators. This type of insurance fraud was used routinely during Iran-Contra to finance covert operations”
The CIA Gets Busted --Yet Again
The circle was completed with the discovery that "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot," as well as several other planes used by Barry Seal, was in reality owned by the same company revealed in 1998 bankruptcy proceedings to have owned the notorious CIA airline Southern Air Transport (SAT). Congressional and public records from the era establish Southern Air as a legendary CIA proprietary - second only to Air America - and as being connected to Secord, Singluab, Rodriguez, Casey and George H.W. Bush.
Among its long list of dubious "achievements," Southern Air had owned the C123 used by Seal in the Nicaragua sting operation which made Barry Seal famous. That same aircraft was later shot down over Nicaragua in 1986 and the lone survivor Eugene Hasenfus was captured alive by Sandinista soldiers.. That is what started the Iran-Contra scandal to begin with. No one knew--or admitted knowing--just who owned Southern Air Transport back in 1986, although government officials all swore up and down that it wasn't the CIA.
Southern Air's ownership by Greyhound Leasing, which became the entity called Finova, was only disclosed after no one was looking, when SAT went into bankruptcy in 1998. This is the first time the holding company, Finova, has been revealed for what it clearly is, an Agency front, set up in Arizona and headquartered in Canada to escape American financial disclosure requirements.
Suddenly, on June 14, 1984, after passage of the second Boland Amendment and the consolidation of Contra operations under Oliver North the plane was sold twice in one day. According to journalist, producer and author Dan Hopsicker, "This was at a period in time when Barry knew he was on the way out." The plane went first to a mysterious Morgan B. Mitchell of Vale, Oregon, and then to Chevrolet Dealer Merrill Bean of Ogden Utah. Bean, curiously, gave the Dover, Delaware address of the "Prentis Hall [sic] Corporation" on his FAA registration.
Students of the CIA have long been aware of the Agency's affinity for hiding its assets in Delaware shell corporations. But, to be fair, many other companies do so for reasons of convenience. In an interview Bean stated that he had incorporated in Delaware as a legal necessity because of the needs of his investors. "Delaware is a very convenient place for many kinds of corporations to incorporate and many large corporations and multi-nationals do so," Bean told FTW. "Because other companies I was in partnership with were incorporated there I chose to do so also. It was much easier that way and it was a requirement of the partners who were investing."
However, Delaware officials in the Secretary of State's office said that Bean's company, Prentis Hall [not Prentice Hall], does not exist. And in the FAA records connected to Bean's ownership of "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" we find yet another unexplained gap in FAA records. Whenever major mechanical repairs are made on an aircraft, the involved mechanic is required to complete an FAA Form 337. In December 1989, FAA certified mechanic Irvin Strayer installed some routine de-icing equipment on the plane. The mechanic, reviewing what should have been original ownership documents, listed the owner as United Insurance of Ogden Utah. Nowhere in FAA title paperwork does United Insurance appear as an owner. And a spokesman for the Utah State Department of Insurance told FTW that there had never been a United Insurance licensed to do business in the state.
"It was an insurance company that a group of car dealers had formed to handle title and financing and other insurance for car sales," said Bean. "I bought the other guys out of the airplane and had some repairs done before I sold to Corporate Wings."
Someone should have told the FAA. Or perhaps someone changed the FAA's records. Stranger things have happened. Bean does not recall if he changed the records to reflect this or not.
A Likely Suspect
In what will become a long litany of links between Barry Seal's activities and the financial fraud of the 1980's, Merrill Bean was also involved in what The Salt Lake City Tribune called "the worst financial disaster in Utah since the Great Depression." That disaster was the en masse 1980s failure of Utah thrifts -- hybrid financial institutions that offered high interest rates and consumer loans -- and the collapse of the insurance fund that was supposed to protect their deposits.
Because Utah's thrifts were heavily underinsured, the actions of Bean's thrift, Western Heritage Thrift and Loan, left a trail of broken hearts, and broken people.
"We had just moved to Utah from California two years ago," 58-year old Irene Culver told The Salt Lake City Tribune in 1986. "My husband Kent was an aircraft mechanic but he has Parkinson's Disease. We put half our savings in there [Western Heritage] and bought a little fixer-upper with the other half. When the State closed everything, I thought, 'I suppose we're lucky.' My Social Security should start in four years. We were going to put a new roof on and install a gas furnace because the electricity's expensive. Now we can't do it, so we've got half the house closed off."
Bean told FTW, "I was Director of that failed thrift. I came aboard when it was almost going under. And I poured some money into it to try to save it and it didn't happen. I was hoping that my $75,000 that I put into it would help revive it." While admitting that he was on the Board of Directors of Western Heritage, Bean stated emphatically that he was not "a Honcho."
FTW wonders how an obviously savvy businessman who owns several aircraft and car dealerships believed that $75,000 would turn around a failing savings and loan. In The Mafia, The CIA and George Bush, Texas journalist Pete Brewton documented how much of the S&L scandal was connected to Iran-Contra operations and illegal covert operations of the CIA. In many of those schemes a $75,000 or similar "buy-in" might have secured the mighty a seat at a highly-lucrative but completely criminal feeding frenzy.
.
'Disappearing' Money
Following the "paper trail" of Barry Seal's King Air 200 revealed connections to some other unsavory perpetrators of the major financial frauds that -- like the S&L scandal -- marred the 1980s. Greyhound Leasing, or "Greycas" for short, was at the center of a huge and seemingly inexplicable financial fraud that, like the half-trillion dollar S&L scandal, no one seemed too concerned about unraveling. The corporation was openly and eventually very publicly looted. Afterwards, company management pretended to be "baffled" as to how it could have happened.
It went down like this:
Greycas Inc. and another Greyhound unit, Greyhound Leasing & Financial Corp., were bilked of over $ 75 million by one Sheldon Player, a former Vernal, Utah, resident assumed to be in the machine and oilfield equipment sales business, who gained the money through fraudulently obtained loans from Greyhound. Greycas then devised an elaborate cover-up scheme to prevent disclosure of details about the loss.
This episode began at the beginning of the 1980's with one $ 600,000 loan. Player and his companies would sell Greycas heavy machine tools, lease them back and then pretend to sublease the expensive devices to end-users. In most cases the machines, which were collateral for the loans, were non-existent.
By 1984, Player had borrowed nearly $ 8 million from Greyhound in the same scheme. That year he asked for $ 40 million in new loans to continue his transactions. A total of $23.5 million had been disbursed by the time the company first got suspicious and confronted Player. He was told the company wanted to inspect the machinery that it was supposed to have owned. Remember, this was a company owned by the CIA front Finova. Player resisted, leading some company executives to wonder about the "integrity of the transactions with Player."
Then, incredibly, despite the company's doubts about Player's credibility and integrity, and in spite of Greycas' inability to make inspections of the equipment, the company lent Player another $ 24 million. In the ensuing months lucky Sheldon Player drew $66 million on the credit line authorized by the company.
This was an Iran-Contra bust-out.
Nice Work if You Can Get It
Anyone who has ever borrowed money for a car or home must admire the chutzpah of Sheldon Player, whom the business press took to calling an "admitted con artist." Yet Player had no history of financial fraud that we could discover before this, which took place at the same time that officers of a Swiss-based subsidiary were defrauding Greycas of another $120 million, in a purportedly unrelated scandal that sent shock waves from Athens to Phoenix.
"Many borrowers failed to make even the initial monthly payment,'' court documents state. The company's accountants wrote that "fraudulent and dishonest acts . . . resulted directly in a loss of $119,684,598." Not so, said the company's hapless General Counsel, who responded, weakly, that the loss has been reduced to a mere $72 million.
The fraud included checks written as bribes on napkins in Swiss restaurants and then set afire… the reported possibility that one of the participants was blackmailing other participants and some mighty upset shareholders who filed lawsuits in Phoenix urging the Greyhound board to take legal action against top officials. The troubling question that puzzled business reporters never were able to answer was this: Why were they giving money away down at Greyhound during the 1980's?
Being Connected Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry
The disposition of the resulting criminal trial of Sheldon Player is an illustration of the maxim that in George Bush's America, "Being connected means never having to say you're sorry."
When Sheldon Player was sentenced, he received a five-year sentence. Yup. Five years -- one year for each $13 million he stole. This is clearly a deal that, if offered to regular Americans--as opposed to the CIA-related kind who killed Barry Seal --would have people lining up around the Phoenix Federal Courthouse to sign up. After receiving this draconian sentence Mr. Player was given additional time to settle personal affairs before entering prison. No one can say American justice is not compassionate. And prison, for Mr. Player, consisted of the Lompoc Camp, a minimum-security facility known as one of 10 to 12 "country club" institutions in operation around the nation, according to Dick Murray, community programs manager for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in Phoenix.
Former Greycas official Robert Bertrand, who apparently covered up for Player's fraud, lucky fellow, never went to prison. Instead he resigned his position at Greyhound in 1986, and was soon appointed the new President and Chief Executive Officer of Finalco Inc. [Sounds like Finova doesn't it?], an equipment finance and brokerage company which just happens to be based in McLean, Virginia, the home of the CIA.
(Back?) Into the Hands of the Guvnah
Merrill Bean, the Utah Chevy dealer who acquired "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot" in 1984 sold the plane in May of 1990 to Corporate Wings of Salt Lake City. Two days later Corporate Wings sold it to Gantt Aviation of Georgetown, Texas, which a month later sold it to the State of Texas Aircraft Pool where it resides today. Johnny Gantt, President of Gantt Aviation told FTW that he probably knew that the State of Texas had a bid out when he acquired "Zero-Eight-Foxtrot". At the time the Governor of Texas was Bill Clements and George "W", a good friend, was owner of the Texas Rangers.
A genial Gantt explained that he had probably been aware that the State was "putting out a bid" for a King Air and scooped up the plane. Press clipping show that Gantt Aviation is a large dealership with a long history of providing planes to the State of Texas. It was a done deal within weeks and Zero-Eight-Foxtrot found the home where it lives happily today.
At the beginning of this article we outlined briefly how a tail number in Barry Seal's papers started this investigation. It actually began when author Terry Reed announced at a Los Angeles public gathering in July, 1999 that a video tape might surface during the 2000 Presidential campaign "showing George W and Jeb arriving at Tamiami Airport in 1985 to pick up two kilos of cocaine for a party. Said Reed, "They flew in on a King Air 200." Subsequent statements made by Barry Seal and recorded in Reed's 1995 book Compromised recount how Seal bragged about how he had video of "the Bush boys" doing coke. Other witnesses located by both writers of this story, who were in relevant official positions in 1985, have confirmed that the described Tamiami sting took place. All, in fear for their lives, have refused to go on the record.
Does George "W" use Zero-Eight-Foxtrot? According to Jerry Daniels, Executive Director of the Texas State Aircraft Pooling Board, "He used to fly on that airplane all the time. He stopped when he became a Presidential candidate because the State won't let you fly its aircraft for political purposes." But FTW learned that if and when Dubyah is back in the state and on state business, he probably will because Dubyah is a licensed pilot and Zero-Eight-Foxtrot is one of his favorites though he doesn't get to pilot much any more.
Said one savvy Pol of George W, "The last thing we need in this country is another President with lingering drug scandals in his past--and maybe present."
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DID BUSH HAVE TIES TO BARRY SEAL?
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Originally Posted by beds
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