Stew
Webb Whistleblower Witness Al Martin Whistleblower
Re: Criminal Leonard Millman
U.S. District Court Case No: 12-CV-2588 EFM/GLR Filed September 5, 2012
Breaking News October 2, 2012
The Conspirators
Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider
By Lt. Cmdr. Al Martin (US Navy, Ret.)
Copyright 2000, Al Martin. All
Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Confidential File: Alexander S.
Martin.......................................................…3
Chapter 2 The NPO and Operation
Sledgehammer.................................................... 14
Chapter 3 Oliver North: The Money Laundering Drug
Smuggling “Patriot”....... 26
Chapter 4 “Do Nothing” Janet Reno and Iran-Contra
Suppression....................….. 42
Chapter 5 Classified Illegal Operations: Cordoba Harbor
and Screw Worm ........50
Chapter6 The Don Austin Denver HUD Fraud Case
.........................................….. 66
Chapter 7 Bush Family Fraud & Iran-Contra
Profiteering .................................... 72
Chapter 8 Insider Stock Swindles for “The
Cause”....................................................89
Chapter 9 Corporate Fraud, Stock Fraud and Other
Scams....................................106
Chapter 10 The Tri-Lateral
Investment Group - Bush Family Fraud...................... 114
Chapter 11 Lawrence Richard Hamil:
The US Government’s Con Man............... 122
Chapter 12 US Government Narcotics Smuggling &
Illicit Weapons Sales...…... 136
Chapter 13 US Government Sanctioned Drug Trafficking ...................................... 141
Chapter 14 The Chinese Connection: US Weapons & High
Tech Graft................. 156
Chapter 15 More Iran-Contra Stories: Both Humorous &
Salient ........................ 171
Chapter 16 Chinese Money for US Weapons
.............................................................185
Chapter 17 US Government Narcotics Smuggling (Part 2)
...............………....… 192
Chapter 18 In Hiding Again
.........................................................................................209
Chapter 19 Corporate Fraud, Government Fraud and More
Fraud........................224
Chapter 20 The Real Story of
Operation Watchtower................................................234
Chapter 21 KGB & East German Activities in the US
(1985-87)................................240
Chapter 22 The Woman in Red (And
Black)..................................................................252
Chapter 23 Bush Family Corporate, Real Estate, and Bank
Frauds.........................260
Chapter 24 Iran-Contra Real Estate
Fraud....................................................................277
Chapter 25 More Chinese-Military
Connections.........................................................288
Chapter 26 ONI, CZX & Orpheus.
........................................................................... 295
NOTE: To all reading this I suggest you buy Al Martin’s
book: http://www.almartinraw.com
The below is just some of Al Martin’s evidence to be
present against Leonard Millman:
COMPLAINT_FOR_INJUNCTIVE_RELIEF_20120905.htm
EX_PARTE_MOTION_FOR_PRELIMINARY_INJUNCTIVE_RELIEF.pdf
Henry_Solano_Former_Denver_US_Attorney_Obstructed_Justice_20120414.htm
Stew_Webb_Grand_Jury_Demand_vs_George_Bush_US_District_Court_95Y107_03202012.htm
Stew_Webb_vs_Kerre_Millman_Civil_RICO_July_31_1997_case_97_N_1498.htm
Exerts
from The Conspirators by Iran Contra Whistleblower Al
Martin
Trinity Oil and Gas purchased Argentine and Brazilian oil
and gas leases for about
RE: Leonard Millman, Stew
Webb’s ex-in-law
Page 109
$30,000 or $40,000 per lease from Gulf
Oil Drilling Supply.
Of course, these leases were effectively worthless.
Gulf Oil Drilling Supply obtained these leases originally
from Zapata. They bought
these
leases for a dollar each from Bush-controlled Zapata Oil, which had held these
leases for
some time. But they were tantamount to worthless.
Suddenly these leases are effectively given from father
to son and they wind up in
the hands of the Jeb
Bush-controlled Gulf Oil Drilling Supply Company.
Gulf Oil Drilling Supply Company hypothecated these
leases, borrowed money from
these
leases with numerous Iran-Contra friendly banks in the Miami area, principally
Capitol Bank.
Later they would default on these loans, and when
Brazilian authorities got word that
these leased
areas were being used for fraudulent purposes in the United States,
Brazilian authorities mounted an investigation.
It was a half-assed investigation, but it was enough for
Jeb Bush to disgorge. He
didn't
want anything more to do with these leases, so consequently he sold them to
Trinity Oil and Gas, which again made the same claims
that Gulf Oil Drilling Supply
Company had previously made. They said that these leases
were, of course, fabulously
valuable,
when in fact, they were tantamount to worthless.
To further illustrate the Arkansas connection to Trinity
Oil and Gas, it should be
noted
that the general counsels with the law firm of Rose and Hubbel
-- their bank was
another
infamous Arkansas Iran-Contra bank -- the Twin Cities Bank of North Little
Rock, Arkansas.
The officer there, later a Director of the bank who
handled the account was the
infamous
Jonathan Flake. Flake was the one who helped Seal and Hamil
put together
limited
partnerships and syndications, while the bank provided bridge loans.
Also, in general partnerships of oil production, proved
up production (which they
didn't
have, but they simply made it appear that they had), interests were sold by, of
all
people,
Dan Lasater.
Flake, by the way, was an officer and Director of Twin
Cities Bank of North Little
Rock -- a key figure in Iran-Contra fraud in Arkansas.
Flake was involved in numerous oil and gas scams and
bogus real estate limited
partnerships
that the bank also marketed and/or financed. He was also involved with
numerous
U.S. congressmen.
In all of these bogus oil and gas deals or bogus real
estate deals that Congressman
Alexander, Congressman Solarz,
Congressman Dellums and others got hurt, the
common
factor is Twin Cities Bank of North Little Rock Arkansas and its senior loan
110
officer and
later Director, Jonathan Flake.
A precise example of Flake's involvement would be that
Twin Cities Bank of North
Little Rock was both was a submarketer
through its securities division as well as a
financier in terms
of holding non-recourse and fully recourse paper on bogus limited
partnerships.
However, Flake was directly involved in the marketing and
subsequently financing
of the fraudulent real
estate investment trust known as the Boulder Property Limited
Series of Partnerships.
It was through these partnerships that Congressman
Alexander lost about $3 million.
Now Alexander didn't actually lose the $3 million. He
didn't have it to lose. But he was
forced to
default on the debt and forced to declare personal bankruptcy because of it.
Later we will agains touch on
Twin Cities Bank of North Little Rock, Arkansas, and
see how that bank is a
key element in the so-called Denver Daisy Chain.
Through this bank, it will be possible to see that Neil
Bush was a substantially larger
Iran-Contra fraud and Iran-Contra profiteering player
than the public has been led to
believe
because there is a direct connection between Silverado and the Twin Cities
Bank of North Little Rock.
That connection exists through Phil Winn of the Winn
Group in Denver and his
partners
Leonard Millman and Steve Mizel,
as well as Millman's company, MDC
Holdings, a publicly listed company and its then
brokerage subsidiary, the National
Brokerage Group.
These are all infamous Iran-Contra artifices, but we are
going to explore in the Denver
Daisy Chain and make the connection between the Denver
frauds and how that filters
through
Arkansas. This is an area which has not been extensively researched in the
past.
Moving on to the infamous Gulf Oil Drilling Supply
Company -- this was Jeb Bush's
favorite oil
and gas fraudulent artifice. Many of these Iran-Contra frauds would
borrow
names from large existing well-known corporations, such as “Gulf.”
You will see in virtually every oil
and gas fraud in Iran-Contra the word "Gulf" is
used.
However, it is commonly and correctly presumed that the
word “Gulf,” as in Gulf
Coast Investment Group and its subsidiaries refers to the
southeastern United States
region, meaning
“Gulf,” which is the common presumption.
In the case of Gulf Oil Drilling Supply -- Jeb Bush's
deal -- that referred to the Arabian
Gulf.
This is not commonly known publicly. But it really should be.
It's rather obvious when one looks where Gulf Oil
Drilling Supply Company
111
supposedly did
business.
Its principal foreign office was in Bahrain, which was
headed by, of course, Richard
Secord.
Gulf Oil Drilling Supply of Miami, New York and Bahrain
was, I believe, a more
sizeable
fraud than has been publicly thought in the past.
When one adds up total losses taken by banks and security
houses, it is in the $300 or
$400 million range, so it is what I would consider to be
a medium to larger size fraud.
The fraud was rather simple.
Richard Secord arranged through then Vice President
George Bush Sr.'s old friend,
Ghaith Pharaon, the then retired head of Saudi intelligence, for
Gulf Oil and Drilling to
purchase
from the Saudi government oil and gas leases in the Gulf which were
effectively worthless.
As you know, most Gulf Oil production is onshore and not
offshore.
The reason is that it is very expensive to extract
offshore.
And, of course, these leases would be dummied up, then
prettied up to make them
look
like they were just worth a goddamn fortune.
The leases again would be hypothecated or borrowed
against in some other fashion,
again,
through Intercontinental Bank, Great American Bank and Trust of West Palm
Beach which subsequently failed under
the weight of unpaid Iran-Contra loans.
Marvin Warner, of course, was the chairman of that bank.
Also, in the case of Gulf
Oil Drilling Supply, there was
some moderately large international lending to that
company.
As you would suspect, it was principally out of the old George
Bush friendly banks --
Credit Lyonnais and Banque
Paribas, which, combined lent $60 million dollars to Gulf
Oil Drilling Supply, which, of course
was defaulted on later.
It has always been my personal opinion that the reason
the Kerry Committee, the
Hughes Committee, the Alexander Committee, and other
Iran-Contra investigating
committees on
the Hill as well as some people in the media shied away from Gulf Oil
Drilling Supply -- and why there is so little known about
it publicly -- is because it
directly
relates to the great conundrum.
The minute it is seen that Gulf Oil Drilling Supply had
relationships with Credit
Lyonnais, Banque Paribas and
others -- that puts it in a whole different much higher
realm.
The old George Bush connections of deep old fraud is
something that everyone in the
media and
on the Hill is frightened of because -- if you started with Gulf Oil Drilling
Supply and investigated it to its logical conclusion, you
get into that whole bigger
112
picture
where there is multi-billion dollar fraud -- something no one really wants to
look at.
And Gulf Oil Drilling Supply is very difficult to
segregate, to look at it as one
individual
company, or one individual fraud, or a series of frauds because it's really
much
more than that -- and it taps into a much larger pre-existing fraud.
However, I would certainly recommend that it be pursued,
since I have substantial
information
about Gulf Oil Drilling Supply (I did business with them and with the
Orca Supply Company).
In some cases, I repackaged the worthless leases into
other partnership deals. But I
do have substantial
information about it.
There is a lot more information available about Gulf Oil
Drilling Supply than is
commonly presumed,
because when Iran-Contra unraveled the day after Thanksgiving
1986, there was a big effort to classify documents
concerning Gulf Oil Drilling Supply.
There wasn't any effort made to hide them under correct
analysis that no one would
want to
get into the deal and really pick it apart for fear of that big bugaboo -- for
fear
of getting into the
bigger picture of the deep old frauds.
It should also be noted that Gulf Oil Drilling Supply
also retained banking
relationships
with the Bank of Greece, Union Bank of Switzerland, and Jarlska
Bank of
Copenhagen.
One need only look to see who was on the Board of
Advisers of Gulf Oil Drilling
Supply to see what the fraud was all about -- essentially
the old cast of characters.
Ghaith Pharaon was on the Board of Advisers.
Andre Papandreou, the former Prime Minister of Greece was
on the Board of
Directors.
Marcel Dessault, Jr., the old
man's son, was on the Board of Advisers.
And, of course, we see these names again, again and again
in Iran-Contra frauds as
you saw these names ten
and twenty years earlier in other type of Bush-orchestrated
frauds.
To get back to Trinity Oil and Gas -- I wanted to mention
something that's been
completely
overlooked. Trinity Oil and Gas was a publicly listed company for a short
period of
time on the pink sheets.
It was a deal that was done in part through Meyer Blinder
(Blinder Robinson
Securities in Denver) as well as Atlantic Securities,
Balfour McClain Securities, Singer
Island Securities.
All of these companies had the same ownership through the
National Brokerage
Group of Denver.
113
Trinity Oil and Gas was backed into a shell which was
then pumped up. The stock
traded as
high as a dollar before the deal collapsed.
But returning to Trinity Oil and Gas -- a good example of
what I would list as a passthrough
fraud,
that is, a nuts to bolts fraud.
The company is started as a fraud to legitimize flow of
funds from Iran-Contra
sympathizers to
the hands of Oliver North and Richard Secord and others. Then it
would
pass into the hands of the political parties and the various members of the
Bush
family who
had financial interest in Trinity Oil and Gas vis-a-vis the connection
between
Trinity and their own corporations.
What I mean by “pass-through” is not only was the
oil-and-gas part of it a fraud (to
defraud
banks and securities firms), but you then back it into a public shell -- start
it
out at three or four
cents a share and pump it up to a dollar.
That is simply another way to exploit the fraud.
We have taken an oil and gas fraud, moved it into a
banking fraud, then into a
securities
fraud. It's called squeezing every last penny of fraud out of the initial
fraud,
which is
not directed towards anything else.
In the Florida connections (during 1983 to 1986) I was
friendly with Charlie Harper,
then SEC
Commissioner from Miami.
I used to see Charlie. Charlie used to go to a lot of
Republican functions. Charlie was
also a
team player, and when I mentioned the Trinity Oil and Gas, and Gulf Oil
Drilling Supply, Charlie said that those were on his
"red flag" list -- personally
provided to
him from his superiors in Washington. These were deals that he was not to
look at
or investigate.
Subsequently, in my 1987 testimony before the Kerry
Committee, I had mentioned
this to
Jeff Goldberg, then Counsel for John Kerry's office, and they approached
Harper.
Harper immediately denied that such a list existed, and
three weeks later, of course,
Charlie was promoted to Regional SEC Commissioner in
Atlanta.
Of course, at this time, Mr. Harper was also unable to
explain where the money had
come
from for him to purchase a $350,000 vacation home in the out islands, and where
the money had come from
for his sailboat and his Cessna 210 airplane.
He had always claimed that he was an honest public
servant, living on his salary of $
68,932 a year.
It should further be noted that when the Kerry Committee
attempted to ask then-
Florida State Controller, Gerald Lewis (the cousin, by
the way, of the infamous Marvin
Warner) and later subpoena him as to why he had not
investigated certain security
transactions and
businesses ongoing in Florida such as the Gulf Coast Investment
114
Group, Trinity Oil and Gas, and the Gulf Oil Drilling
Supply Company, the comptroller
promptly
resigned his position and elected to take an extended vacation in his luxury
Caribbean home, which he purchased for
the equivalent of ten years his public salary.
10. The Trilateral Investment Group Fraud
I’d like to discuss another infamous Iran-Contra cut-out
-- the Tri-Lateral Investment
Group, Ltd. This was another offshore corporation formed
early in 1984 by Larry
Hamil and
included as either its officers, principals, or directors, of Richard Secord,
Oliver North, Jeb Bush, Gen. Aderholt,
and the infamous, sinister and dreaded Col.
Robert Steele.
Steele, by the way, now runs a business in McLean,
Virginia called Outsource
Computers, Inc., whose soul contractee
is the National Security Agency.
Anyway I wanted to use the Tri-Lateral Investment Group
as a good example of one
business
which incorporated all phases of the old right-wing favorite frauds, i.e. oil
and
gas, real estate, gold
bullion, aircraft brokerage, security and banking fraud, insurance
fraud.
They were all wrapped up into one.
What Tri-Lateral would in real estate, for instance,
would be to form various
fraudulent
real estate investment trusts, which didn't exist as anything more than
paperwork in
somebody's file drawer. They would take out leases on the land, build a
few models, get bridge
loans, rehypothecate the bridge loans and so forth.
The net result is that in the end, the project would
collapse, and $20 or $30 million
would
disappear.
But on the real estate end of transactions, Tri-Lateral
is interesting for its
involvements in
a very infamous fraud -- the Topsail Development, Ltd. Fraud of
Pensacola, Florida.
This was the famous diversion of 22,000 acres in central
Florida, which was financed
115
by original bridge
loans from the American Bank and Trust of Pensacola, Florida,
which at
that time was owned by BCCI.
It seemed odd at the time, but this was not known until
some years later. People
thought it
was odd that BCCI would own a little nickel and dime commercial bank in
Pensacola, but it was essentially to launder money and to
provide bridge financing for
Iran-Contra profiteering.
In 1988, the American Bank and Trust of Pensacola,
Florida collapsed under the
weight of unrepaid illicit Iran-Contra loans. The Topsail Development
deal was the
largest
real estate fraud ever committed in the United States. It was ultimately bailed
out by the Coca-Cola
Corporation through those Belizian transactions.
Tri-Lateral Investment Group had become involved in that
transaction vis-a-vis the
leases
that Tri-Lateral held through Larry Hamil on 45,000
acres of coastal Belizian
property.
All it ever was -- was a first right of refusal and
tenuous leases. The land was never
actually
owned by Tri-Lateral. The loans, by the way, the $9 million in bridge loans to
purchase the
lease on those lands, came from Great American Bank and Trust of West
Palm Beach.
Marvin Warner personally approved the loans. I was
involved in several meetings. I
was sitting there, as a
matter of fact, when Marvin Warner was there and Hamil
and
Secord and others to discuss the bridge
loan.
Naturally, this $9 million was never paid back, but that
was the intent.
Simply transferring money from the bank into other
people's hands ostensibly for
“The Cause” which we all chuckled about, as everyone knew
that it was essentially
going
into other people's pockets.
As history recounts, of course, Great American Bank and
Trust also failed in 1988
under the
weight of unrepaid illicit Iran-Contra loans, to the
extent of about $156
million
that wasn't repaid.
In terms of oil and gas, Tri-Lateral also had an interest
in Gulf Coast Investment, Ltd.,
which
held a lot of marginal oil production and limestone production in Tennessee,
Kentucky, and
Oklahoma.
The old one-a-day pumper routine. In
oil terms, what's known as the Knox in Clay
County, Kentucky that extends up around
Olney, Illinois. These are all beat out one-aday
pumpers,
one-barrel-a-day, two-barrel-a-day pumpers that have been around for
fifty
years.
Hamil
made them look like they were simply pumping thousands of barrels a day.
What Tri-Lateral would do was to take its supposed
proprietary interest in Gulf Coast
116
Investment Group. Make it appear, in fact, this
proprietary interest was worth a lot
more
than it was.
It would then hypothecate that interest to commercial
loans, principally out of
Citibank. It
would then purchase with this money Citibank's securities, mostly Citibank
bonds.
I remember the large amount of the coupons in 1993 that
Tri-Lateral held with money
it was lent by
Citibank.
The notes would then be held at Merrill Lynch, where they
would be margined out.
Then the money, again, would be put into something else, usually a bankers
acceptances,
often at Chase Manhattan.
What I'm trying to say is that you start with $100,000
and at the end of a series of
frauds
that $100,000 is essentially turned into a $10,000,000 house of cards, of which
perhaps
$5,000,000 in cash was actually extracted before the whole house of cards falls
down.
As I've said before. what made
this possible is that all the financial intermediaries,
banks,
brokerage houses, or security companies, were all determined “Iran-Contra
friendly.”
Again, essentially it was transferring wealth from a
bank, from a brokerage, from
investors,
from one pocket to another.
Another reason I wanted to mention the Tri-Lateral
Investment Group is that it was
deals
concerning the Tri-Lateral Investment Group which eventually forced the
downfall of
Richard Hamil in May 1985.
When Hamil was transferring all
that cash out of Union Bank of Switzerland (in so
many of
these frauds I was involved with or familiar with or marketed or whatever)
Union Bank of Switzerland was invariably the butt end of
the fraud.
In other words, it was the last place a fraud was
hypothecated. It was where the final
cash
would be extracted.
You can pretty well see that the government of the United
States admits that in its
famous
Lake Resources civil suit against Richard Secord, which was filed in 1991.
The government makes the admission, that during this 1983
to 1986 time frame, that it
had funded a variety of
frauds on behalf of Richard Secord, and that Richard Secord
was its authorized
agent.
In fact, they admitted that the CIA had had a
longstanding relationship with the
Union Bank of Switzerland and that many powerful
Republican interests also had a
longstanding
relationship with the Union Bank of Switzerland.
The problem was that UBS was always supposed to be made
whole in the end. As I
117
attempted to
describe these frauds before, the last agent had to be made whole.
The last big agent in this case was UBS.
Unfortunately, Richard Hamil
and Richard Secord did not make UBS whole -- all that
money
that Hamil transported in physical cash they
laundered through Zurich.
Hamil
would board a plane. He would fly to Curaçao. The
money would get
deposited at Banque Z in Curaçao, and then the
money would be re-transferred to a
Banque
Paribas branch in Belize City.
People tried to trace that down before and they found out
there isn't any branch there.
Well, yes there is. It's not incorporated in Belize,
however. It's an offshore branch of
Banque
Paribas Panama Branch.
This was the ultimate deep repository for Secord and Hamil, where the money
ultimately got
skimmed off, which ultimately accumulated to about sixteen and twothird
million
dollars, as I later identified in a whistleblower complaint to the
government and
to the Treasury Department.
The Treasury Department duly informed me that they had
found about sixteen and
two-third
million dollars in the account.
I had known in 1985 the account had contained about eight
million dollars. And I
didn't
know what transactions had been committed after that time, or how much that
account was
ultimately worth.
I would add a personal note here. This was another
whistleblower complaint that I
got screwed out of.
I had been promised and I still have the letter, as a matter
of fact, from the Treasury
Department's FARCO (Foreign Asset Recovery Control
Office) then under Rich
Newcomb that I would receive a $623,000 finders fee for the identification
of that
account,
which the United States government subsequently froze.
However, I was then informed that under that 1986
Administrative Whistleblower
Act, that there were pre-existing claims or pre-existing
information, which of course the
Treasury Department doesn't have to tell you what they
are or anything.
I have complained bitterly before about the holes in that
Whistleblower Act that you
could
drive a truck through.
I've never known anyone who’s identified a surreptitious
account that's ever received
a finder’s fee that
they're supposedly entitled to by the law.
The Tri-Lateral Investment Group, Ltd. is also one of the
deals (one of the very few
deals,
perhaps only a few dozen deals in that era by this group of guys) that you
could
connect
Jeb, Neil, George, Jr., Prescott, and Wally Bush.
All five -- you can put in the Tri-Lateral Investment
Group, Ltd.
118
You can put Neil in it vis-a-vis Tri-Lateral's dealings with Neil's Gulf Stream Realty.
Then you back up a step and put Neil Bush into
Tri-Lateral Investment Group's
dealings
with the Winn Financial Group of Denver run by the infamous former
Ambassador to Switzerland, Phillip Winn.
You can put George, Jr. in the deal vis-a-vis the Tri-Lateral Group Ltd.'s
fraudulent
relationship
with American Insurance General (AIG) , of which George, Jr. was a part
through the
same series of fraudulent fidelity guarantee instruments issued on behalf
of Harken
Energy from American Insurance General. Tri-Lateral Investment Group
then
sold bogus oil and gas leases to AIG.
This is a direct fraud that George, Jr. profited to the
extent of (not a lot) $1.6 or $1.7
million.
But it was a clear out-and-out fraud.
Finally, I want to make note of the Tri-Lateral
Investment Group because I think it's
worth
noting that it was allegations of receiving illicit campaign donations from the
Tri-Lateral Investment Group which ultimately led to the
defeat of Republican Senator
Paula Hawkins in 1986.
Tri-Lateral Investment Group (in terms of gold bullion
fraud, another old right-wing
favorite for
the generation of illegal, covert revenue streams) was also involved in that
20,000 ounce transaction that Larry Hamil and Richard Secord did.
I use Larry and Richard Hamil
interchangeably but the man's real name is Lawrence
Richard Hamil. In various
public documents and in congressional testimony, he is often
referred to
as either Larry Hamil or Richard Hamil.
Anyway, Hamil had in
conjunction with Richard Secord (using a letter of
recommendation
from Jeb Bush) borrowed money from Citibank to buy 20,000 ounces
of gold bullion from Deak Perrera in New York.
The said bullion was then transferred to the Royal Trust
Bank of Canada, actually its
branch in
Nassau, the Bahamas.
The bank then issued a bonded warehouse receipt, as it is
entitled to do. The Nassau
branch of
the Royal Trust Bank of Canada is authorized to issue bonded warehouse
receipts.
The said bonded warehouse receipts -- at the price of gold at that time was
perhaps $7
million worth of bullion.
The said bonded warehouse receipts are then rehypothecated back here in the United
States through a variety of Iran-Contra
friendly institutions.
Ultimately, Hamil and Secord
hypothecate the same 20,000 ounces of bullion thirteen
times. At thirteen different lending institutions. This is one of
the oldest tricks in the
book. The gold bullion trick.
I mean this was Jack Terrell's original scheme. This was
a scheme that had been used
119
in the 1970s by the
CIA. The hypothecation of gold bullion in ten different
places.
Of course, those deals all fell apart in the end.
By the end of 1986, all those deals fell apart. And as
usual, the bank simply wrote off
the money -- about 2.3
million dollars. It was about a 2.3 million dollar loan issued by
Bayshore
Bank and Trust of Miami, Florida and this was certainly one of the lynchpin
loans
which involved Jack Singlaub.
Gen. Jack Singlaub was the one
that got the money. Of course, this was probably the
straw
that broke the camel's back -- which caused Bayshore
Bank to fail.
The reason why the media doesn't like to go after it
because it is cumbersome and
tedious.
But you can see how one fraud started out with two Iran-Contra players --
Larry Hamil
and Richard Secord. And yet, you can see all the way
through the
transaction of
these frauds how others benefitted.
In this case, Gen. Singlaub. And
the common denominator in so many of these
frauds, is
Jeb, Neil, George, Jr., Prescott, and Wally Bush. There have been very few
that
have made a real effort to put all this together.
One thing that’s interesting to note here is why Lawrence
Richard Hamil continues to
be so hot today -- to
this day in fact?
Why is it he can never be found?
Why is it he is either in jail or out of jail?
When he's in jail, there's never any
records that he's ever been in jail?
Why is that he’s still both protected and punished by
certain people in the
government?
What are the texts of his old and deep relationships with
the Department of Defense
and the Department of
Justice and so forth?
The principal reason why?
Just examine his frauds.
Look at all the people involved (who are still in office today, or seeking a higher
office, or
in certain agencies who have been promoted) in Hamil's
principal group of
frauds:
Gulf Coast Investment Group, Tri-Lateral Investment Group, LRH Associates,
Trinity Oil and Gas and a few others.
There's perhaps six at the very top of the list of all
the hundreds of corporations that
he's
formed.
But look at the people who can be hurt, and, in some
cases, who have been hurt.
Look at those involved. Look at the number of Republican
Congressmen and Senators
that
profited from these illicit deals within the Iran-Contra time frame of 1983 to
1986.
And look at how many of them are still in power today.
120
They are much more powerful than they were then.
Certainly Henry Hyde, now Chairman of the Judiciary
Committee, in recent years
was quietly,
non-publicly censured by the House and fined $835,000 as a final
resolution to
that Oak Brook, Illinois real estate scam and the hypothecation scam at
Key Bank of New York.
That was directly related to his involvement in LRH
Associates.
Porter Goss was also quietly reprimanded by the House
(secretly you could even say,
since
anybody that ever tried to obtain information about Hyde or Goss' reprimand has
never
been successful in obtaining any documentation of it).
Goss was reprimanded and fined $365,000 by the House, by
the Ethics Committee,
the internal component
of it. But Goss made a fortune.
It was in the millions that Goss made through the Destin
Country Club Development
Group, through the Topsail Development Group, through his
surreptitious investments
in Zapata, and Apache,
and Tidewater, and Harken Energy. The Harken Energy stock
fraud. It
really is tremendous. And it is directly related to the reason why Hamil
continues to
be such a bone of contention and such a sore spot for the government and
for many in the
government to this day.
In late 1995, when I was in my most recent difficulty
with the FBI and was
incarcerated,
Jesse Helms intervened on my behalf and pressured Janet Reno.
Consequently I was let out of jail and not further
pursued.
You don't think Jesse Helms did that out of the goodness
of his heart, do you? It's
because
when I was in jail, I called Paul Rodriguez at the Washington Times and gave
him more information
that he had been pestering me about for a long time.
The Washington Times (Paul Rodriguez more specifically
and his friend, Jamie
Dettmer)
had pressed Jesse Helms about all the money that he and Oliver North had
skimmed out
of those big series of 501c3's in the mid '80s - the National Eagle Forum,
the National Freedom
Alliance, and the whole panoply.
You'll see it's all common
language that Oliver North used when he formed these
things.
But millions were taken out of these supposedly tax-exempt organizations
illicitly and
Helms profited by them, and Pete DuPont profited by them as did various
members of
GOPAC.
Helms didn't help me out out of
the generosity of his heart.
It's that I rattled his goddamned cage.
And I threatened to reveal more information about that.
And to this day, when a reporter calls up Jesse Helms and
throws up Oliver North or
Larry Hamil's name in his face,
he turns white as a goddamned ghost.
121
Now as we get into larger and more intriguing Iran-Contra
frauds, I want to mention
my involvement with the
infamous Churchill Matrix Group, Ltd., which had operations
in London, Paris, and
Brussels.
Its United States operations were headquartered, of all
places, in Columbus, Ohio.
Churchill Matrix was supposedly engineering and
industrial components. It had a
relationship
with the infamous TKF Engineering & Trading International, Ltd. of Santa
Barbara, California. It also had a relationship with the
equally infamous International
Systems and Components (not to be confused with
International Signals and Controls
of Scranton,
Pennsylvania).
International Systems and Components Corporation of
McLean, Virginia, also had
offices in
Dallas, Texas.
In that Churchill Matrix deal, it was later discovered
that the entire thing was an MI-6
British intelligence front, which unraveled in 1991 in
those big series of trials in
London, when that guy, Paul Anderson, was finally forced
to admit he was a British
Intelligence agent, and that in fact the whole deal had
been an MI-6 operation put
together at
the request of the CIA during Iran-Contra to surreptitiously get certain
components to
Iraq, which the CIA wanted to be gotten to Iraq.
The only reason the deal fell apart and became public is
that, in this country Mark
Thatcher got listed as a co-defendant in the original
indictment.
Finally, his mother, then Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, decided to preempt the
U.S. action by pulling the plug in London and forcing the
MI-6 to admit what it was.
That's the only reason, by the way, that the whole deal
fell apart, was because of the
Mark Thatcher angle.
What British Intelligence was trying to hide at the time
was the connection between
MI-6, the Agency, and Carlos Cardoen.
Had Thatcher been forced on the stand, he would have
spilled the beans about Carlos
Cardoen,
and that was the link that both the Agency and MI-6 wanted hidden at the
time.
122
11. Lawrence Richard Hamil: The
US Government’s Con Man
Next I’d like to explore the background and various
dealings of the infamous Larry
Hamil.
He was born Lawrence Richard Hamil
in Rockville, Maryland on November 16, 1944,
the firstborn child of
Harry and Virginia Hamil.
Harry Hamil was a thirty-two
year veteran of the Department of Defense, retiring as
a senior policy
analyst on their Southern Desk.
The Southern Desk was a military policy desk involving
the Caribbean, Central and
South America.
Virginia Hamil worked for many
years as a secretary at the National Security
Agency. It
should be noted that before her retirement, Larry's half-sister, Nancy, also
was a secretary at the
National Security Agency. And during the Iran-Contra years,
she worked directly in
the Director of the National Security Lt. Gen. William Odom’s
office.
Larry Hamil has used so many
aliases during his lifetime, that actually very little
is
known
about his early life. He attended but did not graduate Georgetown University
in the early 1960s. In
1966 he had a brief marriage which resulted in the birth of one
daughter,
Samantha.
The father Harry Hamil passed
away in 1984 of natural causes. Hamil's mother,
Virginia, had left Rockville upon retirement and took up
residence in West Palm Beach,
Florida.
123
The earliest of Larry Hamil's
business dealings comes from the late 1970s -- when
Larry and other parties, one of them being his longtime
friend and associate, Martin
Cohen, became involved in a scheme to smuggle American
Express cards into
Argentina.
In the late 1970s, a financial embargo was put on
Argentina by Washington in an
attempt to
pressure the military junta there out of power.
The American Express Corporation turned to the CIA, who turned
to all the players
in the shadows of
Washington, including Larry Hamil and his erstwhile
sidekick,
Martin Cohen, to conspire with American Express to
smuggle American Express credit
cards
into Argentina contrary to this financial embargo.
Hamil got
paid a hundred dollars per card.
They took the cards down there by the thousands. It was a
rather large operation.
The Washington Post finally discovered this operation and
the CIA connection in
1980. American Express was rather severely fined and the
CIA was substantially
embarrassed,
but, of course, denied all knowledge of it.
The next illicit business transaction -- I am aware of --
that Larry was involved in was
only a
year after, in 1980, during the infamous Dominican Sugar Embargo, when the
United States was attempting to pressure the military
government of then Raphael
Trujillo out of office.
One way of doing this was to embargo Dominican sugar. Hamil became involved in
a series of
transactions to surreptitiously transport sugar out of the Dominican Republic
at a substantially
reduced price, and to disguise that sugar through Jamaica and Haiti,
where it
was sold at a tremendous profit.
It's sketchy. I don't know all the people he was involved
with in this conspiracy. I do
know
that one of the people he was involved with was the infamous Frank Snepp.
Frank had just retired that year from the CIA and was
looking for little things to get
himself
involved in. I do know that Hamil made a substantial
sum of money in this
endeavor. I
also know that he lost a substantial sum of money when the government
froze
some of his accounts in late 1981. I don't know how much of the money he was
actually
ever able to retain.
The next illegal transaction Mr. Hamil
got himself involved in was in 1982, during the
so-called
Falklands War.
It was a scheme where he and Marcel Dessault,
the famous French industrialist, in
conjunction
with the famous Brazilian industrial shadow player and longtime CIA ally
(and longtime George Bush
friend) Amaro Pintos Ramos, attempted to smuggle into
Brazil and to transport across the border and sell to the
Argentinian government Exocet
124
missiles
which proved during that campaign to be the most effective weapon Argentina
had against British
warships.
The Argentinians were desperate
during that conflict to get their hands on more of
those
missiles. They were willing to pay whatever it took -- ten or twenty times the
normal
price of what one of those missiles fetched on the open market.
I don't know what quantity of missiles
were smuggled in. I think it was a very small
number,
thirty or forty missiles perhaps.
My impression though was that
the profit was in the millions from that transaction.
Later on during the Iran-Contra period, from 1983 to
1986, Hamil would continue to
transact a
lot of business with Marcel Dessault and with Pintos
Ramos.
Pintos Ramos is one of the common connections that Hamil had with George Bush, Sr.
And it was the common connection that he had with all the
Bush sons. That's how he
knew the
sons before Iran-Contra came along.
For a point of reference, Dessault
Industries in France is the largest French defense
contractor. It
makes jet fighters and missiles for the French government and for export.
If Larry Hamil were to be
categorized, he would wear the label of one of the legions
of quasi con men with
government connections who wait in the shadows of
Washington for the next illegal, covert operation of
state to come along from which he
can profit.
And he's not the only one. There are legions of these
guys.
It just so happens that Larry Hamil is probably king of the hill wearing this moniker.
Larry knew -- prior to the beginning of Iran-Contra
operations in 1983 -- about Iran-
Contra, or what later became known as Iran-Contra as
early as 1981.
Larry actually had physical copies -- voluminous,
thousands of pages -- of the
original CIA
white papers on Operation Eagle, as it was formulated in 1981 by Bill
Casey.
It was always a mystery to people how Hamil
obtained these documents.
How he obtained them was through Dewey Clarridge.
Hamil and
Dewey go back a long way into all sorts of fraudulent, shadowy mischief.
Hamil was
subsequently became quite friendly with the infamous Clair George, who
a few years later was
became a Deputy Director of the CIA.
Other friends of Larry's within the Agency were Assistant
Deputy Director, Allen
Friers,
and Costa Rican Station Chief, Jose P. Fernandez.
The reason why Hamil was let in
so readily to these operations and the reason he was
allowed to
commit fraud and to profit by it -- he did serve some useful purpose in
terms of
money laundering and his absolute specialty: hiding money and secreting
125
money.
Both were very valuable commodities and valuable skills for
the Agency.
He was looked on very kindly by Bill Casey. He knew Bill
Casey. He had known
Bill Casey most of his life.
Bill Casey and his wife and Harry and Virginia Hamil
had
played
bridge for years. They knew each other. And Bill Casey knew what Larry was,
but he also knew that
Larry could be helpful in certain ways.
Therefore, if Larry wanted to make a few million
fraudulently in what was already
an illegal operation of
the CIA anyway, it didn't make any difference to Bill Casey.
Of course, to say it didn't make any difference to Bill
Casey is rather a broad
statement.
The actual quid pro quo between Hamil
and the CIA always seemed to be to me (and
Hamil
pretty much said so) that he could pretty well do what he wanted providing he
was helpful to them when
asked and providing that his individual frauds did not
expose or
embarrass the CIA.
Of course, eventually by 1985, it was his frauds that did
threaten to expose the CIA
and did threaten to
embarrass them.
So consequently Hamil's position
changed from being on the inside to being
somewhere
between being on the inside and being on the outside.
In August of 1983, when Operation Eagle was dusted off
the shelf, reformulated as
Operation Black Eagle, and put into operation, Hamil was involved almost from the
get-go.
Hamil
immediately set up a series of thirty to forty shell companies, both
domestically and
offshore domiciled, of course, mostly involving oil and gas, banking
transactions,
gold bullion, brokering transactions, real estate -- all of the old right-wing
favorites for
the generation of illegal, covert revenue streams.
Hamil's
principal artifices were the Gulf Coast Investment Group and everything
around it
that had the word "Gulf" in it.
He had initially wanted to also pick up the old Gulf
Realty out of west Florida, but
Neil Bush wanted that for himself.
So Neil and his partners, Bill Waters and Ken Good,
picked that up.
Hamil
always felt kind of nicked on that. That's why Neil, in order to smooth the
waters,
let Hamil get into Gulf Realty frauds via an artifice
that Hamil had created
called LRH
Associates and Gulf Coast Limited Partnerships, which was his principal
real
estate fraud artifice.
And you will see that both Gulf Realty, Neil Bush's Gulf
Realty, and Hamil's Gulf
Realty Limited Partners too were involved in that
fraudulent Destin Country Club
126
development
deal.
Subsequently, we're involved in the fraudulent Boca Chica development deal. And
ultimately
we're involved in the largest real estate swindle ever enacted in the United
States, the Topsail Development Limited deal out of
Pensacola, Florida, which involved
the swap of that 26,000
acres here in Florida for that land in Belize.
The business commonality during this period of time
between Larry and Jeb Bush
came
through Larry's Gulf Coast Investment Group and Larry's partial control, along
with
Barry Seal's and Larry Nichol's of Trinity Oil, as we have discussed.
But, the commonality between Jeb Bush and Larry was in a series
of both onshore and
offshore
bogus oil and gas lease swindles, Also, there was some commonality in some
of the banking fraud
between Jeb and Larry, as you will notice in a careful study that
both Jeb
and Larry tended to do business at the same banks and tended to know the
same
Directors, all at the same banks, at Iran-Contra friendly banks.
Larry's connections with George, Jr., have always been
considered rather nebulous.
People have never been able to really put it together.
It's not as obvious as his
connections are
with Jeb and Neil.
But the real connection is between American Insurance
General (AIG) and that series
of frauds instituted by
Jack Singlaub in the World Anti-Communist League,
when he
had Mitch Mar and
Barbara Studley acting as front people for him.
And that is the real connection with George, Jr, because George, Jr. got a piece of that
through an
interest in a Dallas-based oil company that he controlled.
There is also some commonality between Larry Hamil and George, Jr. vis-a-vis
Harken
Energy and Zapata and Apache and Tidewater Corporations insofar that Larry
was involved in various
stock frauds surrounding those companies, of which George,
Jr. and George, Sr. profited by.
And, of course, Larry was very close to the partners of
the infamous Houston Energy
Partners, and was friendly with Don Regan, James Baker,
Lloyd Bennett, and John
Tower. He
had known these guys for some years because his father had known these
men.
Larry was never short of being able to boast about
himself.
Part of his own downfall was his mouth.
But, he was never short to say how he was a member of the
old Texas Republican
drinking
club, of which John Tower was the de facto leader.
But, it is really John Tower that introduced Larry to
Walter Mischer and Bobby
Corson.
So you can imagine that Hamil
took those introductions to the biggest S&L's in Texas
127
and proceeded to rape
and pillage them pretty good in a series of oil and gas and gold
bullion
frauds.
Later, he, Jeb and George, Jr., all participated in (I
wouldn't call it a swindle, but I
would
call it certainly) a marginal transaction in terms of borrowing money from
those
banks to
short the stocks of those banks, and then defaulting on the loans.
Of course, the banks ultimately failed.
Stocks went off the board almost for pennies.
And, I wouldn't call that an out-and-out stock swindle,
but it was certainly a fraud.
We all benefited quite handsomely from it. Jeb and
George, Jr. made a fortune from
it. Neil had a
substantial short position in Silverado. And when Silverado collapsed,
Neil made $3 or $4 million out of that, and then of
course, never repaid the loan.
He had borrowed the money in Silverado to begin with.
They were in unique
positions.
They knew that these banks were failing, and were going to fail, under the
weight of unrepaid Iran-Contra/CIA loans.
The CIA, as was later revealed in The Houston Post, had
borrowed from and had
used the
three big banks in Texas -- Allied Bancshares, Texas America Bank and
Commerce, and
MCorp. The CIA ultimately defaulted on about $350
million worth of
loans in
the end.
Others of Hamil's close friends
in the government at that time were National Security
Adviser, Frank Carlucci.
Hamil
used to meet Frank quite often in Florida at the Ocean Club for lunch. This is
at the same time that
Frank Carlucci exposed himself by being seated at the same table
with the
infamous CIA doper, Jack Devoe. And what a mistake
that was. I don't know
how they allowed that to
happen. Someone took the photograph.
Bobby Gates got wrapped up into the same problem with
that townhouse, exactly the
same
deal when he allowed himself, the then Deputy Director of the CIA, to be
photographed through
a security camera in the lobby with the infamous Carlos
Cardoen.
At the State Department, Hamil's
principal friend there was Larry Eagleburger. “Fat
Larry” -- we used to call him.
Larry Eagleburger had also known Harry Hamil for a number of years. As a matter
of fact, it was Harry Hamil (this is a very little known fact) that got Eagleberger his first
job in the State
Department some years ago.
Of course, Larry EaglebUrger at
this time rose to the position of Under Secretary of
State.
Larry was also very friendly with the Assistant Secretary
of State, the infamous
128
Richard Armitage. Armitage would consistently act to protect him at the State
Department.
Although Armitage was Assistant
Secretary, he was also Chief of the Internal Security
section of
the State Department, which had consistently acted in concert with the CIA
and other parties to
authorize narcotics trafficking.
This has been mentioned in the press, and it’s been
written about before, i.e.
Armitage's
role in narcotics and his knowledge of it.
As you know, Carlucci and Armitage
are now in business together at the Carlisle
Group.
It was really because of Hamil's
personal friendship with Don Regan that he was able
to commit all that
securities fraud through Merrill Lynch.
Merrill Lynch would lend him real good quality securities
(Citicorp bonds, things like
that ) but
they were actually financing the inventory of this stuff in his corporate
accounts.
He wasn't paying for any of this. He was paying for it
with bogus cashier's checks
from the
British American Insurance Trust Co. of the Bahamas, which was an offshore
bank
that he controlled, which was also bogus.
They would post bogus fidelity and guaranty instruments
to Merrill Lynch, backed
up by a standby letter
of credit, which was actually a good standby letter of credit from
American Insurance General.
Of course, it was all a fraud.
American Insurance General would never pay any claim.
That was the deal. It was
just to
stand his collateral against a marginable position in Citicorp bonds and high
quality
securities that Hamil would then use to rehypothecate at other institutions.
Ultimately, Merrill Lynch had to write off some money
because of this. It wasn't
much, $2
or $3 million. But they did ultimately get stuck with it. And, of course,
Hamil's
relationship with Merrill Lynch fell apart when Don Regan left as Chairman
and Ray Birk came in.
Another friend and business partner of Hamil's was the infamous Marvin Warner.
Marvin Warner and Larry Hamil were
partners in a lot of bogus real estate deals
being run
through ESM. The bridge money for these deals was coming out of Marvin's
bank in
Florida, the Great American Bank and Trust, which was headquartered in West
Palm Beach. It ultimately failed as well with losses to
the taxpayers of about $170
million.
But you will see them in partners in a whole variety of
deals through ESM.
As a matter of fact, it is one of the real estate deals
financed through ESM through
129
Ohio State Savings that gets rehypothecated
at the Glen Brook Savings and Loan in
Illinois.
This was the deal that Henry Hyde became involved in when
Henry wanted his piece
of the Iran-Contra pie.
The interesting connection is that Henry Hyde, subsequent
to this, introduces Hamil
to Key Bank of New
York.
Hyde knew everybody at Key Bank because of his friendship
with Alphonse
D'Amato, and Alphonse's brother, Louis, the lawyer, who
was the general counsel at
Key Bank.
Louis, you may remember, subsequently got himself into trouble,
and was close to
being
charged with murder. He ultimately served eight months in jail.
Anyway, it was transactions at Oak Brook Savings and Loan
in Illinois and Key Bank
in New York, for which
Henry Hyde was secretly censured by the House later on,
wherein
Henry Hyde admitted he had illegally profited to the tune of about $850,000 in
certain
bogus real estate transactions.
The connection between Hamil
and Porter Goss was through Jeb Bush.
Jeb kept letting Congressman Porter Goss into all of his
deals -- the crossover
transactions
that he had with his brother, Neil, in those bogus Gulf Realty
Developments.
Porter consistently had an interest in all of these deals
that collapsed. The difference
was he actually got to
sell his interests, before the deal collapsed, of course.
Porter made a lot of money during the Iran-Contra period.
Henry Hyde and Porter Goss are just two examples.
We could go on and on and on with Republican Congressmen
and Senators who
profited vis-a-vis Iran-Contra fraud.
It's not limited, by the way, to Republicans. There were
some Democrats like Senator
Graham who profited quite handsomely through that Swissco Management fraud, the
tax-free
land swap he arranged for himself with Carlos Cardoen
and Swissco
Management.
When the FBI finally raided Swissco
offices, the Senator's documents were
conveniently
missing from the evidence they collected.
Anyway, that's another whole story that will require
another ten hours just on that
fraud.
BY 1985, Hamil was violating
the mandate that was given him and, by extension,
given to
me as his partner in 1984 from Gen. Secord.
The mandate was quite clear. Part of it was that Larry
was not to commit frauds on
130
individuals. That
would become messy and hard to cover up, which is precisely what
Hamil
did. In his greed, he wanted to squeeze every dollar he could out of his
perceived
protection from Washington.
Hamil
then proceeded to commit fraud on unauthorized individuals.
The original Gulf Coast Investment scheme was supposed to
be strictly an artifice that
would
legitimize the flow of funds from sympathetic Republicans to "The
Cause," as
Oliver North calls it.
To "The Enterprise," as Richard Secord called
it.
To "The Government Within a
Government," as Assistant Secretary of State, Elliott
Abrams would call it.
That’s what we were doing.
Of course, being a private individual, you could not
donate money to an illegal,
covert
operation of state.
But you could have an intermediary.
You buy bogus oil and gas interests, which essentially
become used as a laundering
device to
get the money to Oliver North and other parties.
The problem with Larry is that we were given lists of
selected wealthy Republicans
who wanted to do this.
Larry went outside of that list and started to raise money from
unauthorized
people. And consequently, this created a problem.
By late April or early May, it was obvious that something
had to be done about
Hamil,
and of course something was done.
On May 5, 1985, Hamil was
arrested by the FBI in Miami. He was on his boat, The
Capital Delight, at the Bahia Mar Marina in Ft.
Lauderdale.
Finally the much vaunted FBI agent of Miami office, Field
Agent Ross Gaffney got his
man.
But their incompetence frankly borders on hilarity.
They went to the wrong boat and arrested the wrong man.
Hamil was
right in the next pier, in the next dock, ten feet from them in his bathing
suit
looking at them, waving at them.
And they didn't realize it. Ross Gaffney didn't have a
photograph of Hamil and didn't
know
what he looked like.
Larry's last transactions that I knew about during this
timeframe came in April of
1985, when he was at Union Bank in
Switzerland, where he did a lot of business. He
was delivering that
$432,000 in cash to Banque Z in Curaçao
and was depositing it into
one of the accounts of
the infamous Intercontinental Industries SA, controlled by Oliver
North and Richard Secord.
131
Before we go further in this, it should be mentioned that
not all of Hamil's dealings
were
with Republicans.
How Hamil got involved in
Arkansas (this has been another question that people
have
always wanted to know) wasn’t just through the Trinity Oil and Gas deal.
It also wasn't simply through fraudulent securities
transactions with Stephens
Investment Group.
And it was not simply through bogus banking transactions
at Twin Cities Bank of
North Little Rock, Arkansas.
In fact, Hamil acted as a
Republican bag man in Arkansas. He used to transport
money for
the Agency for operations in Mena. He would transport a large amount of
physical
cash in a briefcase.
One of the things that Larry was often used for was a
courier of cash.
That's how Larry becomes so involved and so intimately
knowledgeable about Buddy
Young because he meets Buddy Young.
He and Buddy and Barry got into Trinity Oil. They then,
in turn, got Danny Lasater,
and Patsy and Harry Thomasson into transactions.
Larry set up more bogus corporations in Arkansas, of
course, through the Rose Law
Firm -- and Hubbell acts as general
counsel.
As a matter of fact, Hillary, herself, was the counsel on
several of these bogus
corporations,
including the sinister Trinity Oil and Gas deal.
Bruce Lindsay, then deputy to Governor Clinton, and
Betsey Wright, then the
Governor's personal secretary,
knew precisely what Hamil was doing in Arkansas.
They also knew his itinerary -- who he was meeting and
the amounts of money that
were
involved.
It was obvious that they were being briefed on Oliver
North's Guns For Drugs
operations in
Arkansas. And it also became subsequently revealed through further
conversations
that Attorney General Winston Bryant was also familiar with this.
As a matter of fact, when Bill Duncan was with the
Attorney General's office, it was
Bill who leaked the word out to Col. Tommy Goodwin, the
Commander of the
Arkansas State Police.
Goodwin gets on the phone to Governor Clinton. He’s all
pissed off because he is not
being
kept informed of all the CIA narcotics and weapons transactions in the state.
Clinton says he's well-advised of it, and that it's an
authorized operation of the US
Government.
And that was a key problem -- that conversation.
By the way, Goodwin had an internal taping system. He
taped all of his calls. That
132
tape was
one of the three tapes out of the infamous series of forty, during the FBI
sponsored
break-in of Goodwin's office.
It was when Asa Hutchinson,
then US Attorney in Little Rock, Republican, ordered
the Arkansas State
Police Commander’s office be broken into, and three tapes were
stolen out
of the forty tapes that he had regarding this matter.
One of the tapes taken was that conversation.
Tommy Goodwin went out and tried to tell people about it.
And subsequently he suffered a heart attack.
In September 1985, Hamil's
original bill of indictment was about a foot thick in terms
of documentation. He
was indicted on a variety of counts -- mail fraud, wire fraud
mostly.
The indictment was reamended, reamended, and reamended until
finally a foot thick
stack of
documents, as filed in September 1985, wound up being a one-inch thick stack
of documents by 1986.
Hamil,
ultimately, pled guilty. He was sentenced to forty-five years or something.
And then began the great Hamil
odyssey of being in and out of jail all the time, which
persists to
this day.
I would estimate that the man has probably spent (I would
guess) six of the last
thirteen
years actually incarcerated in this continuous in-out, in-out, in-out.
First he's in jail someplace. Then he's in another jail
and another jail. He was
transferred
thirty-two times in six months between penal institutions -- always under
assumed
names. Or he wasn't there. Or there was no record of it.
But this continues to this day. For instance, one day Hamil would be in the Desoto
Correctional Facility in Florida,
or the Hudson Correctional Facility.
Two days later, he'd be seen in Zurich, Switzerland. Or
he'd be seen in New York, or
Washington in the company of
"Department of Defense officials."
Then a week later he'd be in some other penal
institution.
This yo-yo persists to this day. This is the ultimate
conundrum about Hamil. I can
understand why
people would want to protect him because of what he knows.
But in that case, it would be more logical, simply to
eliminate him. I mean, that
would be
the obvious step.
As discussed before, on December 20, 1985, Oliver North
simply wanted to liquidate
him. That would have
been the obvious, quick and easy solution.
There's got to be something that keeps this guy alive,
and I frankly don't know what
it is. Maybe it’s
because he's created documents. That's a possibility.
I know North was never able to get the documents he
wanted to recover from Hamil.
Page:
227
You have to understand I didn't make records at the time
of every nickel-and-dime
$10 and $20 million fraud. It
just wasn't possible.
In my personal logs at the time -- based on my own
business affairs and my
interaction with
others, particularly selling these fraudulent products, I used the cut-off
line of
$100 million in the real estate fraud category.
Another larger frauds I think is worth mentioning is the
Phoenix Development Fraud,
which
involved a combination of busted out HUD property and busted out Lincoln
Savings and Loan property.
It got lapped up into a limited partnership and resyndicated by the general partners,
including
Gen. Secord, Gen. Singlaub, Col. Gadd,
Col. Dutton, Jeb Bush, Neil Bush,
Walter Bush, the then-Vice President's nephew, Prescott
Bush, the then-Vice President's
older
brother, and Prescott's son.
Prescott himself became one of the problems in this fraud
later on.
But it involved busted out HUD property bought
surreptitiously through loans at
Lincoln Savings and Loan for anywhere
between ten and twenty cents on the dollar.
These were very expensive residential developments in
Phoenix, wherein Lincoln
Savings and Loan had a collateral guarantee against the
original loans used in the HUD
property.
It also provided bridge financing to build the
developments. Lincoln Savings and
Loan finally sells out to this partnership at about
seventeen cents on the dollar and
simply
writes the rest off.
What was not commonly known is that Lincoln Savings and
Loan through another
loan to
Stanford Technologies Overseas, Ltd. actually provided the capital to purchase
the property from
Lincoln Savings and Loan at an eighty-three cents on the dollar loss.
Ultimately, the loan itself by Stanford Technologies, a
$17 million bridge loan, was
also
defaulted on.
Stanford Technologies' two principals were Oliver North
and Richard Secord --
Secord, being the primary principal.
Ollie was just a director of Stanford Technologies
Overseas, Ltd., but this is one of the few links.
To link Ollie North into fraud, to get him away from the
narcotics and the weapons
and to link him into
fraud -- the best way is to link him through Stanford Technologies
Overseas, Ltd., or Intercontinental Industries, S.A. of San
Jose, Costa Rica, in which he
was the principal and
Richard Secord was the director.
These two are the most common ones. Lots of times,
Intercontinental would front as
a money-laundering
organization for disguised loans from other Iran-Contra
sympathetic
banks in the Caribbean.
228
A good example of which would include the Banco de Popular, more specifically the
Santa Domingo branch.
But Intercontinental Industries would launder proceeds
from what were essentially
illicit
loans back to Stanford Technologies, who would in turn direct these proceeds by
purchasing
interest in fraudulent real estate limited partnerships, to wit the Phoenix
Group Development.
Another example would be a large fraud like The Boulder
Property, Ltd. series of
limited
partnerships, in which Neil Bush, Bill Walters and Ken Good were all general
partners in
the deal.
The only difference in that deal was that the principal
financing came from Silverado.
The underlying property bought very cheaply had
originally been HUD property
bought by
MDC Holdings Corp. of Denver.
This gets into the Denver cast of characters -- Phil
Winn, Steve Mizel, and Leonard
Millman.
Millman is
the principal of MDC Holding Group.
There is a tremendous interlinkage
in this MDC Holding Group fraud through MDC's
subsidiary,
M&L Industries, Inc., which in recent years has been indicted several
times.
Its principal, Robert Joseph, is currently in the
Colorado State Penitentiary as a matter
of fact. He was offered
a deal -- if he would admit what Millman, Mizel and Winn's
involvement was
and how they profited by it. But he refused to talk and received about
a seventeen year
sentence.
It's quite humorous, that in the Phoenix Development
Fraud, one of the consequences
was that Gen. Secord, Gen.
Singlaub, and George Bush all wind up owning homes
together on
the same cul-de-sac in Phoenix near the country club -- for which they paid
nothing.
These homes are appraised between $400,000 and $800,000.
And it cost them absolutely nothing.
Further up the street, Col. Jack Terrell has a home and
this fraud is really blatant. But
people
have tried to look at it in the past, and they’ve been hit with a blizzard of
paperwork.
If you weren't there from the beginning and weren't
involved from the beginning as I
was, it's tough to
connect all the dots because there's so many of them.
But George Bush, Sr. would invariably be given a piece of
everything, of every fraud
that was
done, because he was at the very top of the pyramid, and much of this fraud
could not
have been committed without either his protection or his influence.
So he winds up with this house on a certain cul-de-sac in
the Riverdale development
229
of this Phoenix
project.
Although naturally it's not held in his own name, it's held
by an entity known as PHB
Trust, Ltd.
The PHB stands for Prescott Herbert Bush, Sr. who is
George Bush, Sr.'s father.
The way these real estate frauds work was all inside a
neat circle.
For instance, the limited partnerships themselves were
marketed by J. Walter Bush
Securities in Phoenix, which had a rent-free office in
the Lincoln Savings and Loan
complex.
J. Walter Bush is George Bush's nephew.
In turn, another entity that would raise money for these
deals was Prescott Herbert
Bush, Jr. Investment Banking Firm of New York.
The frauds were all kept in a very small circle -- MDC
Corporation in Denver, which
is a publicly listed
company and still trades on the American Stock Exchange .
Through their National Brokerage Group subsidiary, they would
then raise money
for the same deals.
Then National Brokerage Group winds up buying an interest
in another firm (at one
time the
largest penny stock firm in the United States) Meyer Blinder, which later
became
Blinder Robinson before it was closed down.
In turn, MDC owned pieces of penny stock houses
throughout Denver -- Balfour
McClain, Atlantis Securities, Singer Island Securities.
The list goes on and on, and you
will see
that most of these corporations in turn had offices in Florida, Nevada, and
Texas -- states where security regulations were rather
lax.
Also these were states where there was
a lot of Iran-Contra control features because
you had state
governments that were very loyal to George Bush.
Consequently the ability to control liability within the
various state securities or state
bank
examiner's offices was really remarkable.
The reason these frauds were able to operate for so long
-- in some cases, some are
still
extant and operating fifteen years later -- and rather discreetly is because no
individual
investors’ money was ever used.
There wasn't a series of warm bodies that bought one
hundred thousand dollars
worth of
these partnerships that got burnt.
The people who ultimately got burned were banks and
securities firms, and, of
course, by
extension, the American taxpayer who had to bail them out.
Another individual who was involved that you don't often
connect with Iran-Contra
fraud was
Malcolm Forbes and his son, Steve Forbes.
I have extensive information on one of the direct frauds
they actually postulated -- the
230
Forbes River Development deal in the Ozarks, financed by
Twin Cities Bank of North
Little Rock, Arkansas.
Again, Twin Cities comes to the fore.
Bridge loans were provided by another renowned Iran-Contra
friendly bank, Beach
Federal of Kingsville, Texas.
That was an out and out fraud, and that deal did get
busted out. Unfortunately,
Forbes had to come up with money out of his own pocket to
hush everything up. He
wasn't
very good at it. He was the only guy I ever knew that went into fraud to make
money,
and it wound up costing him more money in the end.
But I have all the original information on that deal. It
was very slick and glossy. It
was well done, and it
would have been a good fraud had Forbes actually known how
to turn it into a
fraud.
But that’s what you get when you have that idiot,
Jonathan Flake, in charge.
Flake is the former president of Twin Cities Bank of
North Little Rock who was
subsequently
indicted recently named in civil actions filed against the bank by
Congressman Alexander.
Alexander got whacked out of $3 million from that Boulder
Property Limited series
of partnerships which
Twin Cities Bank of North Little Rock cosyndicated
and acted as
a sales manager in Arkansas.
These were the Boulder Property, Ltd. Partnership Series
Six and Seven which got
used for
a very sinister purpose.
The purpose was to specifically defraud certain targeted
individuals. and those
individuals
were hostile congressional Democrats. This has been mentioned before.
They were offered lucrative deals, no cash down, all
recourse notes that had
tremendous tax
leverage and so forth, that these guys literally couldn't resist.
The people who got hurt in these deals were Steve Solarz of New York, Congressman
Dellums of
California, Senator Boren of Oklahoma, Congressman Alexander of
Arkansas, Congressman Hughes of Ohio -- and on and on and
on.
Look who got hurt. They were all leading congressional
Democrats who were
banging the
drum about Iran-Contra.
This was a way to control them.
And, boy, did it ever control them because it bankrupted
every one of them. All of
these
congressmen got suckered in.
It was the classic bait and switch. They were all offered
small investments which they
made out
of their own pocket -- usually $20,000 to $30,000 in various real estate
developments.
231
They were bogus pyramid schemes, but designed so that
these guys would get their
money
back and show a huge profit.
Then they wuld be very
susceptible to signing up into a much more major fraud later
on. That’s the routine
that was used.
In Alexander's case, he was offered a partnership
interest in Marine Research and
Development Corporation in Boca Chica,
Florida, which was a division of the Boca
Chica
Development Corporation, Ltd. whose principal was Jeb Bush.
Another point that can be made through close scrutiny of
Iran-Contra fraud is to link
seemingly
minor players into major players.
For instance, if you wanted to link George Bush, Sr.
directly into Iran-Contra fraud (I
mean,
his name on a piece of paper), then the corporation at the top you're going to
be
looking at
is, of course, Lone Star Corporation.
That’s Lone Star Development, Lone Star Cement, Lone Star Trucking. It’s a publicly
listed
firm, in which Bush was a substantial shareholder, as well as a director at one
time.
Lone Star has been mentioned many times vis-a-vis Iran-Contra fraud, the
transportation of
narcotics and weapons, Lone Star Cement's involvement, and other
real
estate frauds, etc.
The one deal that links him directly is to start with
M&L Industries in Denver and go
through Brodix Manufacturing in Mena, Arkansas.
You may remember Brodix
Manufacturing as one of the deals set up by the infamous
Mena player Freddie Lee Hampton and
Hubbell's father-in-law, Seth Ward.
Brodix
received letters of credit from Madison Guaranty, which in turn were
hypothecated to
Lone Star for a bogus real estate development outside Paris, Texas,
which in
turn is rehypothecated to the Victoria National Bank
in Texas and so on.
If you put it all in front of you, you can see how George
Bush directly profited from
this
fraud. It gives you tremendous ideas about where to go vis-a-vis George Bush,
Sr.'s connection with Lone Star.
Lone Star is also the starting point to connect George
Bush, Sr. into fraudulent
transactions
with E-Systems Corporation of Dallas, Texas.
Another fraud (not specifically real estate, although it
was partially a real estate
fraud)
was the medical equipment fraud that links George Bush, Jr. directly into
illegal
Iran-Contra profiteering -- the International Medical
Corporation (IMC) deal in Miami,
It was the infamous Miguel Recarey
who was the head of IMC. Jeb Bush was a
director of
the corporation and a major investor in it through the $4 million he
borrowed --
and later defaulted on -- from Broward Savings and Loan.
232
Jeb was pretty crafty though in trying to cover his ass
in that fraud by forming that
shell
corporation in the Bahamas and having Col. Duke Rome and Col. Lanny Thorme
head
that shell corporation, International Medical Overseas, Ltd.
That's how Jeb siphoned money out of IMC and consequently
out of Health and
Human Services. You
see IMC got most of its money from HHC in fraudulent billing
through all
of its clinics in Little Havana and so on.
When that deal fell apart, Thorme
got nailed, but Thorme would never talk. He was
one of those guys who
was going to swing in the wind.
Jeb Bush's two bagmen and gofers, Manny Diaz and Manny
Perez, were prepared to
talk
about the deal and, in fact, they had made arrangements to talk to Jeff
Goldstein of
the Kerry Commission.
Unfortunately, Manny Diaz died in an unusual car accident
before he could be
deposed.
Perez also unfortunately died in his swimming pool before
he could be deposed.
You may just remember the names Diaz and Perez. Sydney Freedberg did quite a bit
on them at the Wall
Street Journal.
They were Jeb's bagmen vis-a-vis Jeb's dealings with Eagle National Bank in Miami.
People in the media often ask me to give them examples of
frauds that began in Iran-
Contra and continue to this day, albeit under different
names.
It’s essentially the same fraud and the same cast of
characters.
The examples I always give (about which I have
substantive information, since I was
involved in
all three of the original frauds and also involved in marketing some of the
partnerships for
the secondary fraud) are the Ocean Reef Development Group, Ltd., the
Omni Development Group, Ltd., and the
Tri-Lateral Investment Group, Ltd.
Who were the common players who are links between all
three deals during Iran-
Contra?
They are Frank Carlucci and Richard Armitage.
When Frank Carlucci and Richard Armitage
left government service immediately
after
Iran-Contra (they literally had to leave in order to avoid being subpoenaed as
part
of the overall coverup), they become principals with Pete Peterson, the
infamous
Republican player and GOPAC money launderer, in the
Blackstone Investment Group,
which is
a big organization.
Then they simply continued the same real estate
development frauds which were
begun
under Iran-Contra.
This time all the original deals went bankrupt. A certain
set of banks got burned. The
property
reverted to them, and then they refinanced the property again through
233
Blackstone.
Subsequently they entered into an arrangement with
another similar sounding
company
(there's always been some confusion) the Capstone Development Group,
which was
also a post-Iran-Contra creature.
They are two separate organizations.
Some people will try to claim that Capstone was simply a
subsidiary of Blackstone.
It is not. It is a separate company.
Look at the directors. They are none other than Larry
Eagleburger and Bernie
Aronson, former co-workers of Frank Carlucci and
Assistant Secretary of State, Richard
Armitage.
However, the real estate frauds continued essentially
until the early 1990s. It's
interesting to
note how former government officials who were in the Reagan-Bush
Administration during Iran-Contra profit by subsequent
frauds, post-Iran-Contra
frauds if
you will.
For instance, in 1994-95, there was the great Mexican
Diversion Fraud, when
Blackstone immediately opened an office in Mexico City to
take advantage of American
taxpayers'
money being lent to Mexico vis-a-vis
the OCED and OPEC and other United
States lending and/or guaranteeing
agencies.
The opportunity to commit fraud against the United States
Treasury during that
Mexican bailout was just like a walk in the park.
You buy a busted out Mexican company for pennies on the
dollar, pump it up, make
it look nice, make sure
you've got your hands out for a twenty or thirty million dollar
loan
from somebody else, like the IMF, or a direct United States lending agency, and
you would be given Brady
Bonds which could then be rehypothecated.
And it was such a scam.
Dinerstein
alone documented $320 million of fraud committed by former officials of
the Reagan-Bush
Administration during the "Great Mexican Turkey Shoot" as it became
known.
And then what happened?
The Russian bailout.
Blackstone suddenly opens an office in Moscow and
promptly proceeds to do the
same
thing again. This time they were raping and pillaging the American taxpayer
with the
same corporate schemes to get money out of U.S. agencies and/or collateral
guaranty or
fidelity instruments that could be rehypothecated.
It’s exactly the same scheme.
It was another $38 million of fraud according to our
estimates at the time.
234
To follow fraud from the Iran-Contra period and to
continue to do it to this day -- just
look at
where the Blackstone Investment Group is opening up offices in the world.
You can usually tell what’s going to be the next place
where there's going to be a
fraud.
There’s something that I haven’t revealed until this
time, and that’s the fact that I had
the opportunity to
become involved in a Mexican diversion scheme with some of my
former
chums and other government hangers-on.
I probably could have made several hundred thousand
dollars or more.
Unfortunately, the position I was offered was the
position of front man -- meaning
my name and my
signatures would be on everything.
Of course, people like me learn that being a front man
means very simply that you
make the
least money.
And you're also the most expendable later on when
something goes wrong and
everyone
else is looking to cover their ass.
I therefore declined the offer to become involved.
Page 285
83
Security” in Iran-Contra sensitive fraud
cases to keep out the media.
Frankly, the practice was politically untenable after
1988.
In the Nevada properties, there had to be at least the
semblance of reality, particularly
in the mining deals.
All of the mining deals I marketed in Nevada, including the
Helena Mining deal and the Cosmos Development deal -- it
was similar to the oil and
gas frauds.
In other words, the oil and gas frauds were based on old
beat-out limestone pumpers
that
pumped one barrel a day perhaps and had been pumping a barrel a day for fifty
years.
Give them a shot of acid every ninety days, and they'll
pump fifty gallons of water
and one gallon of oil a
day.
But you just do manipulation of the logs and meters.
You make that one barrel a day appear like three hundred.
The mining deals were mostly the same way. In Nevada, all
of the mining deals that
I marketed -- the gold, silver, platinum mining deals --
were all what’s known as open
pit leach mines. And
they did, in fact, produce precious metals, but nowhere near the
production we
were actually claiming in these deals.
Let's put it that way. People familiar with mining would
know that in leach mining
you have to move an
incredible quantity of earth. You have to build these enormous
pools,
which almost look like swimming pools. Then there’s the acid and solution and
electrolytic
zinc rods which attract the metals from the sands.
But frankly, to make a leach mine profitable, it has to
be an incredibly large
operation.
Anybody with any brains who visited these sites would have known that
there
wasn't anywhere near the amount of metals coming out of these mines that what
we claimed.
Thanks to our Nevada friends in the Bureau of Natural
Resources in Nevada, which
was very solidly
Republican controlled, we could easily manipulate it to make it
appear
that much more was coming out of these mines than there actually was.
The final Iran-Contra note I wanted to make about Nevada
was the egregious swindle
that
George Bush Sr. himself instituted in concert with Frankie Sue DelPapa on that
Cosmos Development deal.
The scenario in question later became known as the
Peruvian Gold Certificate
Swindle, where DelPapa actually
substituted corporate records.
Bush had formed a corporation with a very similar
sounding name. This was so
commonly
done -- mimic corporations with similar sounding names.
You simply substitute the records and it was an
out-and-out swindle of the Durham
284
family.
This is the scenario that the famous California conspiracy theorist, E.E
Eckert,
got involved in.
Of course, he pounded away on this conspiracy for years
in that little rag sheet he
printed,
The Contact.
And he actually presented a pretty good case of it. We're
talking about a man and his
staff of
about three guys who spent years investigating this fraud. And they did have it
put together awfully
well.
But it was such an egregious fraud, an out-and-out theft
by George Bush.
What Eckert did was to connect this fraud to ever larger
frauds. He connected this
gold
certificate fraud into big money, tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in
bank
loans at Banque Paribas, Credit Lyonnais, Union Bank of Switzerland.
This is also part of the National Bank of Greece swindle
that was instituted by Prime
Minister Papandreou and George Bush together.
As a matter of fact, Bush's attorney, C. Boynton Grey,
flew to Athens.
You would see his travel records to the same places all
the time -- to Paris, Zurich and
Athens.
Eckert did a good job of pointing out who he met with --
the President of the National
Bank of Greece, for instance.
This wound up being an enormous swindle in the end and
this is what is called the
Grade One Swindles in Iran-Contra. These are the swindles
that nobody is ever going
to want to look at
because it gets far too close to the way everything works and what it's
really all
about.
Eckert for a long time tried to get the major media
interested in it.
And they would bite. ABC bit a couple of times on it. As
long as the fraud could be
contained, to
say, “Well, it's just a small $75 million fraud, and Bush was connected to
it.”
But the minute Eckert was able to show that this was up
in the clouds . This is one of
the frauds in the clouds
that makes the world go around, that ultimately were to
involve Daiwa
Bank and Sumitomo Bank.
It's an interesting example.
They had hired me at one time as a consultant to provide
some further information
for them, which I did.
They needed some connecting pieces of the puzzle.
But this is a very interesting fraud that an entire book
could be written about. It’s a
fraud
that starts out with a $50,000 investment by George Bush. Ultimately it grows
into a
$2 or $3 billion international bank fraud.
285
How? By simply rehypothecating
loans and/or borrowing ever greater amounts of
money,
using proceeds to pay back the old loans, or in some cases to partially pay
them
back,
which was more common.
Then the corporate entity would go bankrupt. Credit
Lyonnais was one of the very
few banks to ever admit
that it lost money, that it had in fact lost about $68 million on
this
fraud.
Of course, they would have no comment when they were
asked about George Bush's
involvement
with this fraud.
But Eckert knew and the Financial Times London knew that
Bush's signature was on
loan
papers at Credit Lyonnais.
You may remember this famous scenario. FT London revealed
that Credit Lyonnais
had a fire in their
reserve document storage facility in Paris and (wouldn't you know
it?) there
were three or four file cabinets that got burned up, including all of the Bush
documents.
I had wanted to discuss Colorado to some degree because
it tends to be
misunderstood in
terms of Iran-Contra fraud. When a student of Iran-Contra hears
Colorado, they instantly think of HUD because Colorado
was the center for HUD fraud
in the west.
That's how Colorado tends to be looked at, but what is
always less looked at is the
huge
amount of securities fraud that was run out of Denver.
Denver, after all, was really the chief place for Iran-Contra-instigated
securities fraud
because so
many penny brokerage firms were located in Denver. They had by 1985
much
common ownership through the National Brokerage Group, which at that time
was run by the infamous
Dick Brenneke.
National Brokerage Group had equity interests in Blinder
Robinson, for instance,
which was
the largest penny house in the country. But they also controlled many
smaller
firms -- Butcher & Singer, Trotter & Company, Marco Island Securities,
Atlantis
Securities. We
could go on and on.
You would see that it was these small broker/dealers --
the same fourteen
broker/dealers --
that appeared on the pink sheets for all of the public penny deals that
I marketed.
Their officers, principals, directors, trustees and
boards of advisors consisted of
individuals
such as Oliver North, Richard Secord, Jeb, Neil or George Bush Jr. Or
people
like Colonel Robert Steele, Colonel James LeBlonde,
Colonel Dutton, famous
Iran-Contra names in the securities part of Iran-Contra
fraud where many names can be
pieced
together with the actual commission of fraud.
286
If we group Iran-Contra fraud into the subtexts of real
estate, banking, insurance,
securities,
mining, aircraft brokerage fraud, charitable foundation fraud, and so forth,
we find that securities
fraud has been the least investigated to this day.
Documents are significantly harder to get out of the SEC
than many other federal
agencies
because, for such a long time into the post-Iran-Contra coverup,
the
Republican party had such
control at the SEC that they were able to deny access to
documents for
a very long time.
Documents to which they could not deny access could very
quickly wind up in a
court
case in which a Republican-sympathetic judge would place them under seal.
Therefore, documents were either unavailable or under
seal.
The media will quickly lose interest because of the time,
effort and resources that had
to be devoted in any
thorough investigation of Iran-Contra securities fraud.
This is an area that I thought should be further
explored.
Who is going to explore it? I don't know because it would
be cumbersome, tedious
and difficult, although
the documents vis-a-vis
Iran-Contra securities fraud, are usually
more
easy to obtain because criminal cases and civil cases involving the SEC
regarding
these
brokerage firms and the penny deals they proffered are more readily available
today
than they were before.
I'll preface this by saying that many had thought that
the securities fraud aspect of
overall
Iran-Contra fraud was rather minor.
It wasn't as minor as people thought. As serious students
of Iran-Contra know, the
SEC did a very comprehensive review in 1992, in the
waning days of the Bush
Administration to try to quantify Iran-Contra
securities fraud.
After going through all of its field office and regional
office records, the SEC was
surprised to
learn that their own estimate was that public shareholder losses (the
ultimate bagholders, the public) amounted to some $3 billion through
Iran-Contra
fraudulent
penny stock deals.
I don't mean to imply that any of these were legitimate
because they weren't.
However, to get back to Colorado, we see the chain of
holding of these various security
groups.
National Brokerage was, of course, a division of MDC
Holding Group.
MDC was controlled by none other than the famed
Republican player in Denver,
Leonard Millman and his
associate, Steve Mizel and former ambassador to
Switzerland, Phillip Winn.
Their corporate counsel, by the way, was Norman
Brownstein.
Brownstein had been a former CIA counsel. And although
Brownstein did mostly
287
criminal
work, he was corporate counsel in Denver in the securities and real estate
deals.
They all have Iran-Contra connections.
Students of Iran-Contra would remember how Brownstein
became involved in
representing
people in many Iran-Contra/CIA sensitive narcotics cases.
You can point some of these Colorado deals to the
naysayers.
It is good ammunition to counter the Iran-Contra
naysayers.
Some would like to say Iran-Contra is long over. There
are no entrails. There are no
further
connections.
Read my lips.
Iran-Contra is not over. It's as alive as it ever was.
The same people, the same banks, the same firms. It's as
much alive as ever.
And you can demonstrate this by looking at the people
that were involved in deals in
the 1983-86 timeframe.
Look at the same people today. They continue to be in the
news.
In Colorado this is very true. There’s the U.S.
Attorney's office in Denver, the Norton
and Griffin affair vis-a-vis Federal District Judge Zita Weinshank, their active
covering
up of certain HUD
cases, and the involuntary scapegoats, such as Don Austin.
The relationships are still cozy to this day. When Norton is forced out of the U.S.
Attorney's office and ultimately the U.S. Attorney is
forced out, a Democratic
appointee,
Henry Solano, comes in.
Although he’s a Democrat, Solano then starts to do the
same political control feature
that had
been done before.
Solano owes his political patronage to Congressman Henry
Gonzalez.
He's the one that originally got him the appointment,
under the understanding (and I
got this directly from
Gonzalez's investigator, Dennis Caine) that Solano
was going to
be more forthcoming
with documents that Gonzalez wanted -- Iran-Contra-sensitive
banking and
security fraud documents that Gonzalez's committee was interested in.
Then Solano completely pulled the rug out from under
Gonzalez.
There really isn't anything that Gonzalez could say or do
because it was sort of a,
shall we
say, off-the-cuff type of deal to begin with.
I can tell you Gonzalez was really pissed off about what
Solano did to him.
HUD Secretary Federico Pena did exactly the same thing.
Pena really got his position because of Gonzalez. And
this is the little Mexican
Democratic cabal that these guys are
now.
Pena wouldn't give him any HUD documents.
But to get back to Norton -- Norton acts as a control
feature within the U.S. Attorney's
288
office in
Denver pursuant to HUD prosecutions.
This is all under the guise of Iran-Contra coverup. And then his wife Gail Norton
becomes
Attorney General of the State of Colorado and acts in exactly the same
capacity for
cases that are getting kicked out from the federal jurisdiction to the state
jurisdiction.
Recently Gail Norton resigned under pressure from her
position as Attorney General
of the State of
Colorado and became a senior partner in Norman Brownstein's law firm
with the
infamous Phillip Bronner, another former CIA counsel.
We could go on with the story. It just shows you how cozy
the relationships continue
to this day, and that
Iran-Contra activity is still both extant and the ensuing coverup
is
still
extant.
One of the last frauds I wanted to mention -- speaking of
Dick Brenneke -- are
crossover
frauds.
That is where Iran-Contra Frauds cross over into Iraqgate Frauds and/or weapons
schemes
and/or narcotics.
Brenneke
started the infamous Wa-Chang Trading Group of
Albany, Oregon, which
is well known to any
Iran-Contra and Iraqgate students.
It later became known as the Zirconium Diversion Deal,
wherein the principle was to
help
Iraq surreptitiously build up its nuclear weapons program.
We have to examine who is on the Board of Directors and
Advisors of that deal. That
will
give you an enormous clue of just who in the United States Government wanted to
see Iraq helped in
building its nuclear weapons program in 1986-1987.
25. More Chinese-Military Connections
The concept of the Chinese Government contributing large
amounts of political
monies to
both parties in this country is nothing new.
When we say “Chinese Government,” of course, we are
referring to the PRC or
People's Republic of China.
I was involved in a very similar scheme in 1985 to
launder money for the Republican
289
National Committee.
That became known as the CARICOM deal, and very little was
said
about it at the time. It's strange. One reason why there wasn't a lot of
interest in
the media at the time is
because it was regarded in 1985 as being old news.
But these connections had actually existed since the
mid-1970s and the entire notion
of illicit Chinese
money going into U.S. political coffers was, in fact, nothing new.
The scheme really had never changed, and the reasons
behind it have never changed.
The Chinese are giving this money for two reasons: 1) to
buy political access, and
more
importantly, 2) to buy weapons and technology access.
What is happening today and what has happened in recent
months is absolutely no
different
than what has happened in the past.
I would like to take this time to explain some of the
people who are involved.
We have heard on the major media, principally the Fox
Network, which is on the
cutting edge
of these Chinese revelations, all kinds of names being thrown out to the
American people -- General Ho, Colonel
Liu. But they're just names.
There was never any effort to tell the people who these
individuals are. And I
thought I
would take this time to explain it.
Gen. Ho is Lt. Gen. Ho, Chief of the North American Desk
of the Chinese Ministry of
State Security, Foreign External Operations Branch.
His equivalent, for instance, in the KGB would have been
Lt. Gen. Alexander Karpov,
Chief of the North American Desk of the
KGB.
His American equivalent would be the operational chief of
any large country desk or
continent
desk. It is no small position, certainly.
We have also heard much about his daughter, who was
consistently referred to as
Miss Ho. Her actual name is actually Yu-Fen Ho, meaning
"beautiful flower."
She is married to Col. Liu.
His full name is Col. Lang Liu.
Of course, what I don't like about the way these revelations
come out is that there's no
context for
who these people are.
Col. Liu is married to Gen. Ho's daughter.
Col. Liu is also Gen. Ho's adjutant at the Ministry of
State Security.
Col. Liu's immediate subordinate is Lt. Col. Lan Chin. Chin's immediate
subordinate
(he travels with him in the
United States) is Major Wei Pong.
Lan Chin (more commonly
referred to in the United States by those who know him,
including
myself, as Lanny Chin) operates under the cover of
being a Chinese arms
dealer,
when in fact he is an officer of the Ministry of State Security.
This is known by the CIA and it has been admitted by the
CIA -- they know he is an