Remember the "Skyway Coke" issue?

[Joanne98]

Time flies, and so does cocaine:
http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/index.html

A year ago, an America-bound jet laden with 5.5 tons of coke was surrounded by police on a tarmac in Mexico. The jet bore the insignia of a pseudo-firm called Skyway, run by a scamster named Brent Kovar who has bragged about working for the CIA. The pilot got away -- even though cops surrounded the jet -- and Kovar has not gone to jail.

Daniel Hopsicker has been working this story doggedly, and as you will see, he has made real progress. The evidence seems clear that this was a "protected" (as in, spook-approved) flight -- all of which leaves us wondering how many such flights have made their way to the United States -- and how much of the drug trade goes to fund the world of covert operations.

SkyWay’s genesis can be traced to In-Q-Tel Inc., a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group owned, operated, and financed out of the black box budget of the Central Intelligence Agency.

· SkyWay was part of a network of companies, three of which—L-3 Communications, Net Command Tech Inc, and Triton Network Systems Inc.— were cited by Elliot Spitzer, then the Attorney General of New York State, for being used by Wall Street brokers in “pump and dump” schemes which cost unwary investors tens of millions of dollars.

· The suspicious involvement of L-3 Communications subsidiary Titan Corp of San Diego, the biggest donor to Southern California Congressmen convicted or being investigated by fired San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam.

· The Israeli connection to SkyWay, including the involvement of an Israeli tele-com firm, Tadiran, accused of being involved in worldwide espionage, and which owned the headquarters of SkyWay in Clearwater, Florida.

· The involvement of Gulf Arab financiers, including an overseas bank, Banque Francaise de l'Orient, long associated with the Saudi bin Laden family.

· Evidence of Republican party involvement in the network, which included the free use of one of the smuggling aircraft by the current head of fund-raising for the national Republican party, U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, who "traveled to nighttime rallies in luxury," the St. Petersburg Times reported, “on a DC-9 owned by Skyway Global, a Clearwater security company whose owners are Martinez supporters.”
Folks, we have barely scratched the surface of this one. Meet me on the flip side, and we'll take a closer look at this strange In-Q-Tel firm, as well as the Israeli connections...

(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)

Although owned by SkyWay, the airliner was registered to Royal Sons Inc., a company controlled by an aircraft broker from Tampa, FL. named Frederic Geffon.
And:

“Geffon was under court order to not let the planes leave the St Petersburg-Clearwater Airport,” stated a source close to the Bankruptcy proceedings. “The Airport Tower had even been ordered not to let the plane take off."

"Geffon was in direct violation of the court order when that DC9 took off for Venezuela,” the source stated last week.

Yet Frederic Geffon has suffered no legal sanction at all, either for violating the court order, or for owning a plane busted with a plane filled with a box-car's worth of cocaine, evidence that, legally speaking, Frederic Geffon walks on water.
Hopsicker earlier quoted Geffon on Kovar:
"Their company is a scam and he’s a scammer. I got sold a bill of goods about his stock. Everybody out here at the (Clearwater-St. Pete International) airport invested with him, and we all lost it all."
These words carry a thieves-falling-out quality. And perhaps we can find here an explanation as to why the flight was seized. These flights were apparently routine; the airports and authorities are paid to look the other way. Either somebody didn't get his envelope, or somebody was trying to backstab a former partner.

Kovar knows a thing or two about water-walking himself. He and his family are now running another firm called “Homeland Security Tracking Enforcement.” I'm sure that this is a fine company providing both an important service and a reasonable rate of return for their investors.

Oh...one other thing:
Geffon’s Royal Sons Inc has one other distinction that needs to be mentioned: The firm occasionally listed its address as 224 E Airport Ave at the tiny Venice, FL airport, in a hangar belonging to terror flight school Huffman Aviation.
In case you've forgotten, Huffman is the place Mohammed Atta called home. Funny coincidence, that.

Now, I must be clear on one point: I am not personally accusing Tadiran (or Geffon, or anyone else) of wrongdoing. However, as regular readers know, these Israeli IT and telecommunications companies keep popping up in stories with "spooky" overtones. So I tend to keep an eye out for these guys. Here is some company info on Tadiran (which, incidentally, has a contract to supply radio equipment to the U.S. Army):

Tadiran Telecom is a private company, owned by Ron Bregman, Africa-Israel Communication Ltd., and Gifford Ltd. It is headquartered in Petach Tikva, Israel, with regional head offices in Port Washington, NY, USA, Moscow Russia, Beijing, China and Delhi, India.
After a brief scan, the only source I can find linking Tadiran with intelligence is Andrew and Leslie Cockburn's excellent book Dangerous Liaison, which reports that the company supplied the murderous Guatemalan military dictatorship with a computerized tracking system for subversives. The list included journalists, politicians, writers, students and so forth -- and anyone on the list was likely to find himself "disappeared."

In-Q-Tel, founded by former CIA Director George Tenet, is a pretty odd company in it's own right. See the New York Post story here, which describes the company as
a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group that is owned, operated and financed out of the black box budget of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The piece ends:
So tell me, people, are we OK with this? Are we OK with letting the CIA use taxpayer money to gamble on Wall Street for the personal profit of their own employees . . . and then not explain why?
There's much more to the Skyway story. You cannot attain Basic Life Competence unless you visit Hopsicker's site...
Permalink
# posted by Joseph : 3:49 AM 4 comments
Comments:
Boy, I haven't thought about In-Q-Tel since just a year ago, when Amit Yoran abruptly resigned as its head after only four months on the job. And there was also the suspicious apparent-suicide of its founder, Rick Yannuzzi, in April 2001.

Lots of weirdness there -- it would be nice if Hopsicker has managed to break some of it open.
# posted by starroute : 6:24 AM
watch out when talking about Coke Joe-- remember that such writing can lead to people committing suicide (with not one but two shots to the head!)
# posted by lee : 6:28 AM
Do you mean there's a conspiracy to import cocaine in the US by some rogue branch of the US government ??? do you know how many people would need to be involved in that conspiracy ?
# posted by Hyperman : 6:46 AM
"do you know how many people would need to be involved in that conspiracy ?"

THAT argument again. C'mon, think about it: ALL drug importation is a conspiracy. So the conspiracy Hopsicker is talking about requires no additional personnel.

These things always run on a need to know basis. Most of the people involved in the operation would simply be under the impression that they were running drugs. They would not know or care about who was in charge; they are just doing their (sleazy) jobs.
# posted by Joseph : 4:58 PM
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Tuesday, April 24, 2007

[Joanne98]

1. Oh lookie. The CIA's in the "pump and dump" business...

Penny Stock Spies
http://www.rgm.com/articles/nypost17.html
By Christopher Byron
New York Post
April 25, 2005

Shares in a high-flying penny stock called Ionatron Inc. had been climbing for months on a steady flow of press releases about the company's opportunities at the sword's point of high technology in the post-9/11 world of homeland defense.

hen suddenly, on March 18, with Ionatron's shares having climbed to a high of $10.41, the company's stock was hit with an avalanche of insider selling, as more than 50 Wall Streeters privy to Ionatron's innermost secrets bailed out of nearly every share of stock they held, knocking more than 30 percent off the price in the days that followed.

Another cautionary tale from the pump-and-dump annals of the penny stock market? In fact, it's a lot more than that, for behind last month's bailout at Arizona-based Ionatron Inc. lies an astonishing tale of taxpayer-financed intrigue on capitalism's street of dreams.

In reality, nearly every one of the more than four dozen insiders who dumped their Ionatron shares on March 18 have now been identified by The Post as employees of a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group that is owned, operated and financed out of the black box budget of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

The group, which calls itself a "venture capital fund," and goes by the name of In-Q-Tel Inc., was set up in 1999 by the C.I.A's then-director, George Tenet. His idea: that by investing in promising young companies in digital technology, the fund would be able to keep the agency abreast of developments in this fast-changing world while they were still on the drawing boards.

Whether Tenet was troubled by the many worrisome consequences of allowing the CIA to become a force on Wall Street, he clearly saw at least one problem with the approach, and sought to address it by setting up the fund as a not-for-profit corporation -- in this way presumably sanitizing it from any suspicion that employees of the spy agency might be using it to speculate with taxpayer money for their own personal benefit.

Nonetheless, a review of various financial documents filed at the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals at least three public companies in which the CIA-backed fund has taken major equity positions. And in each of the three cases, the fund's employees were able to stage an end-run around In-Q-Tel's not-for-profit legal status and benefit personally from the fund's investments.

They accomplished this by buying shares for themselves in a separate and parallel "for profit" entity called the "In-Q-Tel Employees Fund LLC."

Using the cash contributions from the employees, the LLC there upon took equity stakes on their behalf simultaneously in each of the three companies in which the not-for-profit fund was itself buying shares -- an arrangement almost identical to the so-called "Raptor" partnerships through which top officials at Enron Corp were able to cash in personally on investment activities of the very company that employed them.

In a public-relations strategy that amounts to hiding in plain sight, In-Q-Tel Inc. issues a steady flow of press releases describing various of its activities, while maintaining a Web site at www.in-q-tel.org where yet more information is available.

The information raises many more questions. The Web site says In-Q-Tel has a total of 50 employees and a board of trustees, but names only two fund officials -- a former executive of the Hasbro toy company, Gilman Louie, who now serves as In-Q-Tel's "CEO"; and a lawyer from Long Island named Stephen Mendell, who serves as the fund's "executive vice president." No members of the board of trustees are listed.

The Web site lists some 67 different companies, both public and private, in which the fund claims to hold investments. But nothing from the fund specifies which companies are public, which are private, or the size of the stakes the fund holds in any of them.

Two of the companies listed on the Web site -- Convera Corp of Vienna, Va., and Electro-Energy Inc. of Danbury, Conn., -- are currently traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market, and SEC filings show that in both cases blocks of stock wound up with In-Q-Tel's employee fund as well as with In-Q-Tel Inc. itself.

In the case of Electro-Energy, which had been struggling for more than a decade as a private company to develop and market a new kind of "bi-polar" battery, the In-Q-Tel investment was hardly treated as a long-term stake in a promising technology either.

Filings show March of 2004, In-Q-Tel Inc. paid $500,000 to acquire 268,594 shares of private Electro-Energy at an imputed price of roughly $1.86 per share. The fund transferred 67,148 of those shares to the employee fund.

Three months later, Electro-Energy merged with a Florida penny stock in the employee leasing business, and began trading on the Over The Counter bulletin board at more than $3 per share -- creating a public market (and an instant profit of nearly 100 percent) for the In-Q-Tel gang.

Two weeks ago, Electro-Energy filed papers with the SEC to register the shares of In-Q-Tel and other early investors, enabling them to be sold on the open market.

With the shares selling last week for more than $6.50 each, the In-Q-Tel employees have thus snagged a profit of more than 250 percent in barely a year.

But that's nothing compared with the profit of more than 1,000 percent they've reaped on In-Q-Tel's investment in Ionatron Inc. -- another quick killing in a deal set up by the employees for the ostensible purpose of helping the CIA stay up-to-speed on developments in high technology.

In the same way that In-Q-Tel invested in Electro-Energy when it was still privately held and preparing to go public through a "reverse merger" with a defunct penny stock shell company, the fund invested in Ionatron in October of 2003 when it was still privately owned and controlled by a businessman named Robert Howard.

The filings show that initially In-Q-Tel agreed to pay $500,000 for 1,028,076 shares, representing an oddly precise imputed price of 48.6 cents per share. Thereafter it merged with a failed penny stock in the weed killer and grass seed business and began trading in April of last year on the Over The Counter bulletin board at roughly $3 per share.

Whether the fund began to develop doubts about the viability of Ionatron's claims for its product -- a kind of Buck Rogers ray gun for battling terrorists -- SEC filings show that In-Q-Tel began to back away from Howard's company, and by last November had negotiated its exit, agreeing to settle for 725,000 shares of Ionatron instead of the nearly 1.03 million.

It was those 725,000 shares -- 75 percent of them held by the not-for-profit fund and the rest owned by the employee fund -- that were sold on March 18. At the adjusted purchase price of 69 cents per share, and a March 18 high of $10.41, the result has been a staggering 1,400 percent profit for the fund's employees, 17 of whom netted more than $50,000 each -- all for their investment in a stock that started to keel over the instant In-Q-Tel and its employees began to bail out.

Phone calls to Ionatron regarding its relationship with the CIA were not returned. And requests for comment from In-Q-Tel itself on its activities were also turned down. Explained the fund's press spokesman, who uses the name Gayle V Von Eckartsberg on In-Q-Tel press releases but goes by the name of "Katherine" Von Eckartsberg when filing SEC documents as a member of the In-Q-Tel Employee Fund, "We don't comment on the reasons for our investments."

So tell me, people, are we OK with this? Are we OK with letting the CIA use taxpayer money to gamble on Wall Street for the personal profit of their own employees . . . and then not explain why?
http://www.rgm.com/articles/nypost17.html

[ftr23532]

2. Zionist Nationalists working with Gulf Financiers?! Oh wait, we're talking about our modern world

It's hard to find investigative journalism more important than what he's working on. I'm looking forward to ten straight days of new Hopsicker stories. Thanks for posting this!

[Joanne98]

3. Your very welcome...

[nam78_two]

4. K&R.nt

[ftr23532]

5. Here's some Hopsicker interviews on Skyway, the attorney general firings, and more

There's a bunch of Hopsicker interviews that folks can find http://wfmu.org/playlists/DX">here. Do a text search for "Hopsicker" and there are around 15 of him. Here are a few interviews that are more directly related to the SkyWay topic:
http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=19369">FTR #554 Conversation with Daniel Hopsicker: The Wonderful World of Makram Chams (at about 20 minutes into the show they get to SkyWay stuff)

http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=19443">FTR #555 Conversation with Daniel Hopsicker: My Way is the Skyway

http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=22777&archive=34592">FTR #590: Interview with Daniel Hopsicker: The Silencing of the Lam (this show talks about how the Gonzalez firings tie into this whole mess)

Happy listening! :-)

[Joanne98]

6. Thanx. I can't wait for the rest of the story...

[dapper]

7. Area 51 and Skyway

Skyway rings a bell. If I am remembering correctly, there was a show about Area 51 that stated that Skyway was the airline that flew people into Area 51.

Dapper

[Joanne98]

9. All I know about Area 51, is that EG&G provides their security.

My dad used to work for a company that was sold to EG&G. He got their stock in his retirement pkg. He use to get brocheres from them. Very interesting reading. BTW. For some strange reason EG&G stock goes on and off the stock exchange. It comes on starting at $16 and goes to $45 then drops off. Very wierd but fascinating. You know, now that I think about it, you could be right. I remember seeing a show on the history channel...

[dapper]

14. It might have been the history channel...

I've seen it twice where a few guys stake out the place at different locations and do some of their own investigating. One guy ends up having his place ransacked.

I'll have to see if it comes on again or see if I can download the episode somewhere.

Dap

[Joanne98]

10. Here's some info from some pilots who worked for Key Air..

Top Secret Military Bases
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/bases025.html
Area 51

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Area 51 - Cheshire Airstrip

The source of this story is a commercial pilot who flies for a regional airline. This is a secondhand story, in that the source was told the story by others. The source appears to be highly reliable, but the reliability of the initial story is unknown. However, it was related as firsthand knowledge to the source by more than one individual.

THE STORY:

The source, as mentioned, is a commercial pilot with a strong interest in Area 51. While socializing with his fellow pilots the topic of Area 51 came up, and he discovered that several of his friends and acquaintances had previously worked for EG&G and Key Air. They had flown the "commuter runs" between Las Vegas and the Groom Lake and the Tonopah Test Range facilities.

That in itself was of some interest, but occasionally they flew to somewhere else in the Nellis Complex. This "somewhere else" is what made the story of such interest to pilots as it was far from routine flying.

Before these flights left Las Vegas, the pilots had to get clearance from NORAD to ensure there weren't any foreign spy satellites overhead. As they approached their destination, they contacted the ground and set up their landing pattern. What made this difficult from a pilot's viewpoint was that there wasn't a runway in sight, only miles of sagebrush covered desert. Then, as they continued their approach a runway suddenly appeared in the midst of this sea of nothingness.

How was this accomplished? According to the pilots, the runway was painted (and perhaps textured) to match the surrounding desert. As the plane approached, sprinklers within the runway were turned on to wet the surface, thus making it stand out from the adjacent terrain. After landing, the passengers quickly got off, as the planes were not allowed to linger. The pilots related that the substantial complex the passengers then entered was camouflaged to look like a series of hills, or may have actually been built partially into the hills.

There is no information as to just what this facility's function is. When asked if he was told the location of the airstrip, the source took out a Las Vegas aircraft sectional chart and indicated a location at the very northern portion of the Test Site: Dead Horse Flat within Area 19. The source wasn't 100% certain of his recollection on this point, and said it could also be in the Gold Flat area, just north of Area 19. This is in the no-man's-land between NTS and the Tonopah Test Range. In either case, the approximate location would be the very far northern reaches of the NTS.

It was the source's recollection that the aircraft involved were primarily 737s. When asked how long a runway would be required, the source (who was quite familiar with 737 operations) said that based upon density altitudes for the area, typical loadings and normal safety factors, 8,000' would be a reasonable minimum.

So, is there a mystery facility at the far northern end of the Test Site? Perhaps, but there may be a difficulty with this story. While an airstrip as described could be hidden quite well visibly, it would be much harder to hide it from satellites carrying multi-spectral scanners. Scanners such as these, with the ability to "look" at things in a number of different wavelengths, can usually see through most camouflage. The good ol' USGS sells just such a thing with their very nice Landsat Thematic Mapper images of the Pahute Mesa and Cactus Flat 1:100,000 maps. No such facility is present on either image, although the old airstrip on Buckboard Mesa shows clearly. There is always the possibility the images have been manipulated in the interest of national security, but we have no such control over the Russians.

The story itself awaits some type of confirmation, but it might be one to keep an eye on.
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Shadowlands/6583/bases025.html

Back To Top Secret Military Bases

[dapper]

13. Thanks

I didn't have time to read it as I'm heading home for the day. I did not want it to drop off my radar.

Dapper

[dapper]

15. Cools stuff...

I hope one day someone comes out and tells all about the place.

Dapper

[Joanne98]

8. Here's a link to Madcownews...

For anyone who is waiting to hear today's report...
http://www.madcowprod.com/index.htm
:popcorn:

[Joanne98]

11. Damn. No report yet...

[ftr23532]

12. still no report, so here's some more Hopsicker interviews to pass the time

This one has lots of good background info on Hopsicker's work:
http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=18523">FTR #542: Interview with Daniel Hopsicker - Catching up with the Boys in Florida.

And there are even some connections to Jerry Falwell in the second half of this interviews:
http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=15609">FTR #516: Interview with Daniel Hopsicker about the Venice, Florida coverup

Happy Listening! :-)