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WELCOME TO TERRORLAND -- MOHAMED ATTA & THE 9-11 COVER-UP IN FLORIDA

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:  A BASTARD NAZI, A FLAMING GAY MAN & JACKSON STEPHENS

An investigation into the terrorist conspiracy's movements and activities led to an inquiry into the backgrounds of the people with whom Atta did business. So far we'd focused almost exclu sively on Rudi Dekkers, the man who assigned the bunks when they arrived in Venice.

As we've seen Dekkers, a Dutch national, was a fugitive from justice in his native Holland. After fleeing to Florida, he became the subject of a multi-agency federal law enforcement task force during the mid-90's, which investigated him for smuggling restricted high technology out of the U.S.

Unless smuggling high technology was just a crazy idea Rudi dreamed up one day -- unlikely -- Dekkers probably had so-far unrecognized ties to international organized crime.

And he ran a flight school in Venice, Florida, with the distinction of having trained-for sums far in excess of normal-both of the pilots crashing airplanes into the World Trade Center. At a time when Rudi Dekkers couldn't buy gas for cash at the Naples Airport, he had fronted for the purchase of Huffman Aviation in Venice.

By early 2001, it was now his rent at the Venice Airport that Rudi couldn't pay. Then, while Mohamed Atta was still in residence in Venice, Rudi launched an airline.

His airline partner was active at that moment in concert with the Mob in the massive looting of union pension funds controlled by an investment firm in Portland, Capital Consultants.

Somehow no one mentioned any of these connections to Larry King, or Dan Rather, or Bill O'Reilly, or Jane Clayson, or Greta Van Sustern, before they put Rudi Dekkers on the air, where he was instrumental in creating the 'official story' of Atta's time in Florida.

None of these fine journalists, working for esteemed major media organizations, had seen fit to do the tiniest bit of due diligence on a man who had been the terrorist ringleader's first major contact in America, contact which continued, as we'll soon see, until less than two weeks before the attack, although Dekkers testified it ended in December of the previous year.

We'd slipped down a rabbit hole. And we were mortally offended, on behalf of the entire American nation, at a government that was manifestly lying to us about important matters concerning 3,000 deaths.

***

We were examining the possibility that both men belong to a shadowy 'global network' which aided the terrorists while they were in this country, so Dekkers and Hilliard's connection with Rick Boehlke was of immediate interest.

Boehlke was going bankrupt at the exact same time as Professional Aviation in Charlotte County, while Atta was there, taking innocent people's dreams along with their money.

Some of them later wrote about it.

"The office is a ghost town and my phone calls are not being returned," wrote one disgusted student, in a discussion among bilked students over how to get their money back. Unfortunately these people got my block time money and ran away."

"Crossings Aviation took my money also and ran, does anyone know of a class action suit being filed? If so, please contact me," wrote another.

***

Rick Boehlke was bilking his flight students in Oak Harbor, Washington at the same time David Byers was slipping away with his student's money in Charlotte County, Florida, at the same time Rudi Dekkers couldn't, or wouldn't pay his rent at the Venice Airport.

The three supposedly unrelated flight schools were all on the ropes during the Spring of 2001. Boehlke's Crossings Aviation and David Byer's Professional Aviation at the Charlotte County Airport went under; Huffman Aviation wasn't bankrupt but they couldn't pay the rent. Maybe they couldn't let Huffman go bankrupt because the school was still training terrorists to fly, and would be, right up until days before the attack.

Like the other two schools, Boehlke's flight training school, Crossings Aviation, received a visit from the FBI, we learned. Investigators were looking into the background of a Federal Avia tion Administration electrical engineer who took flight classes with Boehlke in 2000, reported local papers. Moulay Lalaoi denied any wrongdoing, but said he'd also been interviewed by the Secret Service.

Are these similarities just coincidence? If not, we've located the 'global network' British Prime Minister Blair spoke about.

But, what was the name of the enterprise we had stumbled on?

Who had Rudi Dekkers and co. been working for? We didn't know anyone you could just walk up to and ask.

We maybe got a clue from Mike Pickett, the aviation executive who had watched Rick Boehlke with the same amazement with which aviation professionals in Florida watched Dekkers.

"When Boehlke came in he was just a restaurateur at the Gig Harbor airport," he said. "Then he became the General Manager for a German named Folker, a German industrialist buying up all the land in that area."

More Germans.

Jessica Daley, an attractive airline professional in her late twenties, worked for Rick Boehlke at Harbor Air and later transferred and worked for Rudi Dekkers at Florida Air. While Harbor Air was going under, Boehlke told Jessica to fly down to Florida and see Rudi.

"When I walked into his (Rudi's) office he was yelling and screaming at people," she recalled. "He said, 'People call me a bastard Nazi because I'm loud and I'm German. And I'm very demanding."'

Dekkers told her he was German, not Dutch, Jessica said.

"When I flew down to Florida from Portland during the first week of March, 2001, Rudi didn't even want me to go back, " she told us.

"He said, 'sit down.' He said, 'I want you to work for me. Make it feasible. What would it take to get you here?"'

Despite having reservations, she was immediately and enthusiastically hired by Dekkers to work Florida Air's station in Tal lahassee.

"He offered me $2,000 to stay, and said he'd have people move my things down from Portland. He was in such a hurry for me to come work for him that he burst into a pilot's meeting and had someone fly me round-trip up to Tampa to change my ticket."

Jessica soon was sorry she'd come. Conditions were chaotic. Employees began comparing notes ...

"All we knew was that Rick and Rudi had worked out some kind of sleaze deal," said Jessica. "Rudi had written a check for $500,000, and Rick was keeping it, no matter what. They were screwing each other so bad it was almost comical."

"Rudi came in with a lot of money, but he didn't know the first thing about running an airline. And Rick was a pilot, and he knew nothing about it either. At that time he owned the Oak Harbor, WA. Airport FBO. It: was weird."

"What I could never understand was Rick was in so much debt: it wasn't funny, yet he still flew up to Sun Valley, Idaho in the Albatrossalmost every weekend," she said. "He didn't seem to care."

Boehlke was never shy about exhibiting his ostentatious lifestyle, said Jessica. "You have to understand: Rick is a flaming gay man who, even though he was in desperate financial trouble, was having all the upholstery torn out of one of his planes because he didn't like the color."

Both Dekkers and Boehlke were devotees of the high life. What the kids call 'living large.'

"It was the need for cash that brought: Florida Air and Harbor Air together, and it was the lack of it that caused both to flounder in the months that led up to the terrorist attacks," reported the Tacoma News-Tribune, in a story on twin failed airlines.

"But former employees of Harbor Air said Boehlke mismanaged the company long before the deal with Florida Air. Keith Chvatal of Gig Harbor said Boehlke 'promised Dekkers the farm but had already slaughtered the cows and shut the doors on the barn.' He and one other former employee, who spoke privately, said extravagant parties and spending preceded financial troubles at Harbor Air," said the paper.

"Chvatal said he's owed $400 by Harbor Air. He also wants his former boss t:o be made accountable for the losses. 'It's time (for Boehlke) to tell everyone where all of the money went."'

If people like Boehlke ever tell people where 'all the money went,' we've missed it.

"The business had been there for thirty years and he had run it into the ground in less than three," said Jessica. "I remember taking a foreclosure notice on the FBO that came in the mail over to him one day. And when I handed it to him, all he was concerned about was whether the wine cellar on his yacht was stocked for his next weekend excursion."

"Rick owned a huge hangar at the Gig Harbor, WA. Airport where he would keep his 'toys,"' she continued. "We called the hangar 'The Toy Box.' He had two yachts in the hangar, the Grum man Albatross seaplane that he used a lot, a 'little' Lear jet, and a couple of 'tail-draggers."'

'Tail-draggers,' she explained, were old-style antique airplanes. Boehlke collected them.

"Things began disappearing from the toy box one by one," said Jessica. "First a Cessna, then the Lear. Things kept getting worse. Everything Rick touches that has to do with money ends up disappearing."

This we were able to verify for ourselves. Boehlke became wealthy when, in 1996, he sold his retirement home business to Alterra and cashed out. Then the rest of his businesses went under. And then Alterra tanked, too, someone that followed the stock told us.

"Even Boehlke's Alterra Health Care went sideways. The stock went down three years ago from $38 to 22 cents."

Somebody lost $37.78 a share. We're sure it wasn't Boehlke.

"Finally, just as they were about to be repo'd, they sent the rest of the planes down to Florida," said Jessica. "And then Rudi found out that Rick had let the insurance on the planes lapse. They were flying uninsured."

"When Florida Air folded several months later, I'd seen a lot of things I didn't like," she told us, "and I wasn't going to do anything illegal for them. Doug Hildebrandt (the then-President) called me and wanted me to get a U-Haul and go out to the Tallahassee Airport, after it closed, and get out all of the company computers and security badges and stuff. But I didn't want to be involved."

"They sent out some guy in a Suburban. When he tried to snag the airport security badges I got suspicious, and had one of my employees go tell the airport manager what was going on. The airline was out of business, so why would he need the airport security badges?"

"The airport manager came over in a hurry with security. He said 'Oh, no! This airline owes the city a lot of money.' And the guy in the Suburban just took off:"

Florida Air's attitude towards airline safety was as brazenly-casual as the ad hoc raid on the shut- down Tallahassee airline counter would indicate. In retrospect, some of this is more than appalling.

It's chilling, to borrow Rick Boehlke's phrase, to consider that Mohamed Atta continued to be active at the Venice Airport and was around the operation.

Jessica was getting her first tour of Venice, she said, when they passed a room where a security training class was underway for a roomful of Florida Air pilots. The class is required before airline personnel are issued the security badges they must have to pass through airport security, she explained.

***

"The guy teaching the class didn't have the 'SIDA badge' that said he was qualified to teach the course. And he wasn't. I had a SIDA badge from Seattle, so I ended up teaching and certifying the class for the course," she said. "What I remember about the 30 or so pilots was that so many of them were foreign."

"That was very unusual. I'd never seen that many foreign pilots in the same room. There was several French guys, a Russian guy, several Brits. It's incredibly difficult for a French pilot to get a work visa to fly for the airlines in the U.S. When I asked about it what they told me was that 'restrictions were looser in Florida."'

***

Two years later, Jessica Daley is still paying for her stint with Rick Boehlke and Rudi Dekkers. "Just a few months back I heard from a hospital I'd gone to after a horseback riding accident in 1999," she said.

"They wanted me to pay the insurance portion of my bill. That's when I found out that they had been taking money out of my paycheck for medical coverage, but then not buying the coverage. Isn't that amazing?"

What did it mean that Rick Boehlke operated his aviation business with as little regard for employees and the law as Rudi Dekkers did? Boehlke's Harbor Air's sudden halt to operations left customers without connecting flights, employees without paychecks, and creditors without payment. Dozens of lawsuits and liens were filed.

Dekkers had an interesting and fairly extreme managerial style, said John Villada, a jet manager in Naples. "He got in a minor dispute with a mechanic over something, and Rudi was interested in going out and burning this guy's house down. He was serious. I couldn't believe it."

Like Boehlke, Dekkers thought nothing of stiffing someone leaving his employ by stopping payment on their payroll check. His Florida Air ran aground when pilots refused to fly because they hadn't been paid.

"A Harbor Air pilot, who had gone to Florida for the airline, said the company not only issued him bad checks for his pay, but also failed to pay him the living expenses it had promised," reported the Tacoma News Tribune on May 26, 2001.

Seeking comment from Boehlke, the paper came up with an unintentionally funny line which perfectly describes the attitudes of men who routinely get away, for whatever reason, with breaking the law: "A house sitter at the Gig Harbor home of Harbor Air President Rick Boehlke said Boehlke was in Europe."

"Rudi acted like he had diplomatic immunity," the managing editor of the Venice Gondolier had told us.

Perhaps he did, because, in another freak coincidence, some impressively well-connected people are involved from both sides of the political aisle.

Capital Consultants, later taken over by Mobsters, had been founded by Charles J. 'Butch' Swindells, an Oregon financier and philanthropist who helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to elect President George w: Bush. In April 2001 Swindells was said by the Portland Oregonian to be waiting "in line to become the next U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand."

He wouldn't have to work an extra decade before retiring.

And the Laborers Union, whose pension fund money was still supporting Rick Boehlke in the style to which he had become ac customed, long after his businesses went bust, was led by Arthur Coia, a man who curried and got Bill Clinton's attention, and was often invited to official White House events and personal dinners with the Clintons.

Coia and his union were longtime big players in the chase for campaign money. The union's various political committees con tributed more than $2.6 million in regulated and unregulated, so- called "soft money" donations in the 1996 election cycle.

When Coia was indicted under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, he told his compatriots: "I talked to Bill Clinton ... don't worry."

And indeed, the complaint had been quashed. Coia was only tripped up by the same ostentatious style which made John Gotti so eminently expendable.

***

"Arthur Coia's love of Ferraris, including one that cost more than $1 million, proved his undoing," reported the January 28, 2001 New York Times. "Until recently the president of the national laborers' union, representing workers at the bottom of the con- struction pecking order, Coia has agreed to plead guilty to fraud charges for failing to pay about $100,000 in taxes on the purchase of not just one Ferrari, but three."

In a spasm of truthfulness, the Times said, "There could be any number of other questions it might be interesting to ask of a Fer rari-collecting union official, but not in this country."

***

The chief and, indeed, only accomplishment of Boehlke and Dekkers unsuccessful airline was that it provided a rationale for the presence on the tarmac of the Venice Airport of a half dozen British Aerospace Jetstreams poised within easy reach of Caribbean hot spots.

Well, the airline did have one other accomplishment: it was publicly endorsed by than then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

"As one of Florida's top politicians, Katherine Harris doesn't have much time to do a lot of personal traveling," reported the April 16, 2001 Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville.

"But twice in the past month or so, the secretary of state -- who received national attention for her role in the November presiden tial election -- has taken the 75-minute plane ride from her current home in Tallahassee to her old stomping grounds in Sarasota. Her choice of airline? Florida Air, a start-up commuter airline based here, grasping to be an air-taxi for the entire state."

"'She has taken the airline twice,' Harris spokesman Ben McKay said. 'She appreciates the convenience that Florida Air offers."'

When we discovered this, it seemed innocuous. But then We thought: does Katherine Harris seem the kind of gal who goes around endorsing businesses run by guys who can't pay their rent?

"Sometimes when things don't make business sense," ex-Florida Air exec Bill Bersch told us, "its because they do make sense ... just in some other way."

Even in newspaper profiles of Dekkers new airline in its hope ful pre-launch phase, aviation executives said they found it to be a highly dubious enterprise.

"Other start-up commuter airlines have run into problems in the past trying to serve Florida, including Air South and Air Florida," the paper reported.

"Quite a few airlines have tried to make money serving an intra- Florida market,' said Bill Pet tit, head of marketing at Jacksonville International Airport, 'but they have all found it to be very difficult.'"

How did Rick Boehlke and Rudi Dekkers know each other? Who brought them together? Dekkers claimed he met Boehlke through a mutual friend in Ohio.

He's lying.

Portland reporter Eric Mason explained. "Richard Boehlke started in business creating freestanding retirement homes, and he at one point had the largest company, the largest holding of these freestanding retirement homes in the country."

"One of the retirement homes that belongs to the company that Richard Boehlke once held was just a stone's throw from the airport where Mohamed Atta was trained. You have to ask yourself, there's a lot of coincidences here. Are they just coincidences, or is there something more to it?"

The official story provides an answer. They are just coincidences. Or they are 'freak' coincidences.

But, just a few hundred feet down the block from Huffman Aviation in Venice, Boehlke's company, Alterra, built a gleaming new assisted living facility during the 1990's. Surely there couldn't be any connection between the assisted living industry and covert operations? Could there?

There could. We needed to look no further than a round-up of the usual suspects. A block away from the Venice Airport, on the opposite side of the street from Boehlke's assisted living home facility, is a large and stately colonial building which looks eerily like the plush digs of the law firm in the Tom Cruise movie "The Firm".

The elegant building certainly seems out of place alongside the weed-strewn airport perimeter. It was built, we learned, to house the national headquarters of nursing home giant Beverley Enter prises, which was owned at the time they built it by a name almost synonymous with American covert operations.

Gleaming like a movie set in Florida's sunshine, the opulent three-story red brick building is a monument to the rivers of money which have flowed through the financial empire of Jackson Stephens, whose name has been linked with every major Ameri- can scandal of the past generation, from BCCI to contra cocaine through Mena, Arkansas.

Today the stately building still houses Stephen's former law firm, local political powerhouse Boone Boone & Boone, a firm which worked so closely with client Stephens that at least one of his executives was permanently housed there. Some credit the Boone law firm with running the town of Venice still.

"I don't think you could safely say that they (Boone & Boone) run everything in town," one local journalist told us. "But you could safely say they run almost everything. They exert a strong influence here, including out at the airport."

In an ironic twist worthy of the spy fiction of John LeCarre, the very thing that made Venice seem to us such an unlikely desti nation resort for Arab terrorists-its elderly population-attracted the home office of a nursing home company controlled by a man whose name is synonymous ith American covert operations during the past several decades.

The name of Jackson Stephens, though rarely the man himself, made appearances in all the most whispered-about scandals and cover-ups in America. He was named in the BCCI criminal bank scandal, figured somehow in the story of the death of Vince Foster, was linked to the stolen Promis software scandal of the Justice De partment, as well as the 1996 campaign finance scandal involving allegations of Red Chinese money.

Most notably, Jackson Stephens was a figure in the huge scandal -- involving gun-running and cocaine smuggling at Mena, Ar kansas during the 1980's -- that was behind both the Iran Contra and Whitewater Scandals.

Were Stephens to be implicated in another intelligence-related scandal, it would be, for him, something like three or four in a row.

Stephens' colorful curriculum vitae also included having been the college roommate of President Jimmy Carter at the US Naval Academy. Interestingly enough, the U.S. intelligence agency to which Jackson Stephen's name has been persistently linked, the National Security Agency, was accused by furious government in telligence officials with destroying data pertinent to the Sept. 11 probe, meaning that possible leads stemming from the Sept. 11 attack weren't being followed because of the NSA action, reported the Boston Globe.

The founder of Stephens' law firm in Venice, Dan Boone, we discovered, was no slouch in the college roommate department. Back when both were Florida Gators his roommate had been former Florida Governor Lawton Chiles.

Bringing things full circle, Lawton Chiles, although a Democrat, had given Republican Katherine Harris her start in politics, naming her to the Board of the Ringling Art Museum in Sarasota.

Small world.

Stephens was the chief domestic campaign contributor to both George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton, in, of course, different campaigns.

"At first glance it might seem curious that former President George Bush would attend an event honoring Jackson T. Stephens, the biggest Democratic power broker in Bill Clinton's home state," read a typical report in the Arkansas press. "But Mr. Stephens, a self-made billionaire investment banker and philanthropist, is financing a cause that transcends politics: golf."

When not occupied with enough philanthropic activities, Mr. Stephens found time to later be fingered as the "Old Man," as Barry Seal called him, behind the Mena, Arkansas cocaine smuggling scandal which dogged Bill Clinton throughout his time in office.

***

The Venice Airport also surfaced briefly in the news at this time. During questioning of Oliver North during the Iran Contra hearings, a man with an aviation business at the Venice Airport named Joe Duncan was alleged to have run guns to the Contras from the Venice Airport.

What are the odds you'd stroll down the quiet streets of your retired parent's retirement community, which just happened to have trained a bunch of terrorists, and stumble onto a gated palace stuck out in the boondocks, looking like Emerald City?

'1 think it is a crying shame that Dan Boone and his crowd can raise obscene sums of money to control the election and make it impossible for a candidate without great resource to run for city council," read an angry letter to the editor in the November 7th Venice Gondolier. "We might as well cancel future elections."

Jackson Stephens had been an influential presence for several decades in the tiny town of Venice, the Hamburg cadre's portal into the U.S.

Chances are, he still was.

CHAPTER NINETEEN:  A LEAR TOO FAR

As far as intelligence or drugs, I am more willing to think this is drugs-related -- but I am only looking at this different now ... Before, when I worked with FLAIR, I was threatened not to talk to anyone about FLAIR or about people there. But now I don't have a job and they owe me $8,000."

Less than three weeks after Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al- Shehhi began flying lessons on July 6, 2000, a Lear jet be longing to the true owner of Huffman Aviation, financier Wallace J. Hilliard, 70, of Naples, Florida, was seized by Federal Agents at the Orlando Executive Airport after they discovered 43-pounds of heroin onboard.

In the drug trade, 43-pounds of heroin is known as "heavy weight."

We first learned of the heroin seizure during an interview with John Villada, an aviation executive in Naples who was intimately associated with Dekkers' and Hilliard's various aviation businesses. He managed the firm's dozen or so jets, he told us, and he, too, had been shocked and amazed at the casual and arrogant way the two men dealt with various federal officials and agencies, like the FAA.

Dekkers forged Villada's signature on a repair order, he told us, stating required repair work on the helicopter had been completed. When he discovered it, Villada said, he was legally compelled to report the violation to the FAA.

"When Rudi was reported to the FAA for violations, an FAA guy came out and sat us down and said: 'I suggest you back out of this.' I couldn't believe it. I called the FAA to report a violation and was warned to leave him alone."

"Villada dropped a bombshell. "After Wally's plane was impounded with the heroin and his pilots had machine guns stuck in their faces, the DEA came to visit our maintenance facility and Wally shouted out to me -- right in front of the DEA guy -- 'Make sure all the heroin and cocaine gets hidden!"'

"That was in August of 2000. When I found out later that the DEA wouldn't let him have his plane back, I knew why."

Hilliard's mock warning to hide the drugs, explained Villada, had been Wally's way of telling the DEA how little he thought of them. The DEA hadn't forgotten. Villada seemed surprised we hadn't heard of the bust of Wally's plane. Not for the first time we realized how puny our investigative resources were before the immensity of the story of Atta and his cadre in Florida, itself just a part-though a crucial part-of the true story of 9/11 that has not yet been told or written.

We had soon confirmed Villada's assertion: Hilliard's Lear jet had been involved in a major bust in Orlando. Authorities called it the biggest seizure of heroin ever found in central Florida. Had Hilliard been an unwitting victim? Like Rudi, an innocent business owner victimized by a world he never made?

Financier Hilliard ran money-losing flight schools. Now we discovered he leased jets to drug smugglers too. Major drug smug glers. A story in the August 2, 2000 Orlando Sentinel called the bust "the largest find of its kind in the southeastern United States m recent years."

We had thus far been preoccupied with Wallis less camera-shy partner Rudi Dekkers. The "front man." When we asked ourselves what it is 'front men' do, we realized the answer was: deflect at tention. It was time to turn our attention to the other half of the "Wally-Rudi" equation.

Because while Dekkers busied himself training young Arab men to fly, his partner Wally Hilliard had been running a charter service providing jets used to carry heroin, not a line of work you'd expect a "retired Midwestern insurance executive" to take up as a hobby on retirement in Florida.

The city where the heroin bust occurred, Orlando, will figure more heavily in our story. Mohamed Atta used Orlando as a transportation hub.

Bob Simpson, a Yellow Cab driver in Venice, took Atta by cab from Venice to Orlando several times. The FBI asked him about ferrying the terrorist ringleader, Simpson told us. They'd identified him from the number of his cab, caught by a surveillance cameras at the Orlando Airport.

Orlando's growing importance as a major trans-shipment point for heroin prompted Congress to officially designate Central Florida a High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. Heroin overdoses, we learned, killed more people in Orlando each year than anywhere else in Florida.

The investigation which resulted in the seizure of Hilliard's Lear jet began after a Colombian national, Nassar Darwich, was arrested in Orlando with 1.3 kilos of heroin in the soles of shoes he was carrying, the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Busted, Darwich promptly 'rolled' on his bosses and cut a deal.

As a result, DEA agents were waiting two weeks later when the Lear jet landed at the airport on July 25. They swarmed the plane, according to eyewitnesses, brandishing machine guns.

The flight originated in Venezuela and then made a stop in Fort Lauderdale before landing in Orlando, with New York as its final destination, the paper reported. Passengers Edgar Valles and Neyra Rivas, both of Caracas, Venezuela, were arrested. Most of the heroin was found hidden in the soles of tennis shoes stashed in their luggage. Eventually five people in Orlando were convicted in connection with the seizure, including the two Venezuelans.

"The -pilot was not arrested, according to a DEA spokesman, because of a lack of evidence," said the Sentinel.

More on this sad fact in a moment. The DEA had a sad fact of their own...

"It confirms the sad fact that a massive amount of heroin is coming through Central Florida," U.S. Drug Enforcement Ad ministration special agent Brent Eaton told the paper. "It's very disturbing to the DEA that more and more high quality heroin is coming from Colombia and at a cheaper price."

The DEA had been "very disturbed" enough to look more closely at Wally Hilliard's jet charter operation. The result was their firm opposition to returning the Lear to Hilliard, even though no one from Hilliard's company, Plane 1 Leasing, had been charged with any crime.

"DEA would not return it, they auctioned it off; they told Wally they had 'reasons,"' said an aviation source in Naples. "It was the first seizure in history for a so-called 'innocent person' where they took and kept the plane."

It appeared there was strong evidence pointing to the conclusion that -- at the very least -- Hilliard's company knew what was going on. Affidavits later filed by the machine-gun toting DEA agents who surrounded the Lear jet indicated Hilliard's company's involvement went much deeper than anyone was willing to acknowledge publicly.

"It was just blatant," said a manager who worked there at the time. "That same plane flew that same run thirty or forty times, ferrying the same people. And they always paid cash for the rental! The red flags could not have been raised any higher."

We confirmed that Hilliard's Lear jet made frequent round-trips to South America with an official at Executive Jet Service, the facility which serviced it at Orlando Executive Airport. He said the plane made weekly down-and-back runs to Venezuela. It was what's called a 'milk run.'

Three weeks after the Lear was impounded by the DEA, Hilliard asked for it back. In a motion filed in the U.S. District Court in Orlando, he argued that he was an 'innocent owner' unwittingly duped by a known individual.

"Plane 1 and its officers shareholders and directors were not aware of the identity of the passengers utilizing the Lear 35A on this trip other than Mr. Valles," stated Hilliard's motion. The company had been "unaware that the individuals chartering the plane were engaging in criminal conduct." Company executives were also "not aware of any facts from which they should have been aware that individuals leasing the plane were engaging in criminal conduct."

A few facts about Lear jets: it's the most popular of private jets, the ultimate accessory for celebrities, and dates back to the late 1950's, when they were designed by American entrepreneur and inventor William Lear. The first Lear took off in October, 1963. Today, Lear jet is owned by Bombardier, and the planes are built in Kansas. They range in price from five to twelve million dollars new. The plane which golfer Payne Stewart was aboard when it crashed was a Lear 35A ... And Wally Hilliard wanted his Lear jet back.

The U.S. Attorney's office opposed the plane's return. Their motion said, "because the property was used or acquired as a result of a violation of the Controlled Substances Act."

The Justice Department, through the U.S. Attorney's Office in Orlando, declined to prosecute the pilot of the plane, even though affidavits filed by the plane-side DEA agent in charge revealed the pilot of the plane, Diego Levine-Texar, who worked directly for Hilliard, the Lear's owner, had guilty knowledge and should have been charged.

Even while machine-gun toting DEA agents swarmed the plane, the affidavit stated, "The pilot of the aircraft, DIEGO LEVINE- TEXAR, frantically attempted to make a telephone call using a cellular phone. LEVINE-TEXAR ignored agents and police officers who repeatedly ordered him to drop the telephone."

"Agents had to physically remove the telephone from LEVINE-TEXAR'S hands," the affidavit continued. "Based on my experience I know that narcotics traffickers maintain frequent contact with one another while transporting narcotics and currency, I believe LEVINE-TEXAR attempted to contact other accomplices as to the presence of agents and other law enforcement officials."

Picture the scene at Orlando Executive Airport. DEA agents are storming the plane brandishing sub-machine guns, but the pilot won't get off his cell phone. Agents have to "physically remove the phone from his hands."

Pretty ballsy. Or pretty blase. We wondered: Who is Diego Levine? We discovered that knowledge about Diego Levine was considered, at least in some quarters, highly sensitive. But even tually, from aviation sources in southwest Florida, some information surfaced ...

Like Dekkers and Wally, Diego Levine had a 'hall pass' from the FAA, which might explain his casual attitude while being busted.

"One time in Miami, Diego got busted because he had no pilot's license," related a Naples aviation insider. "He was a terrific pilot, but he just hadn't ever bothered to get his license. He should have been in trouble. But he said, 'the FAA lost my file,' and -- as a courtesy -- the FAA administered a 4-hour test on the spot and let him go on his way."

Diego had some juice.

What we heard about Diego: He flies a huge Gulfstream jet that looks like the interior of a Ritz Carlton Hotel. .. His father owns a big furniture manufacturing plant in Venezuela ... Diego was trying to buy a Cheyenne (airplane) for the Venezuelan Air Force ... Diego's day job was chief pilot for Venezuela's Air Force One.

When he wasn't arrested flying Hilliard's Lear jet, was it just dumb luck?

That's too absurd. No, what we are looking at is protected drug trafficking. CIA-approved. Probably dressed up as a 'controlled delivery.'

No wonder information about him was considered 'sensitive.' Whoever he was, Diego Levine was no amateur free-lancer. Diego's calls to the FAA got promptly returned. Diego is "home team."

Space does not allow an adequate discussion of the concept that the narcotics which are distributed in the U .S -- with the same precision and re-shelving as any other commodity -- are imported through the good offices of this nation's "clandestine services." There are a shelf-full of books (one is ours) which explain this connection, and how it is that the world's largest consumer market for one of the world's largest industries can remain hidden from federal law enforcement authorities. (It can't.)

***

Here's why:

The DEA affidavit confirmed the frequency of Hilliard's Lear's trips to South America. It said pilot Levine "stated he had known (Venezuelan) VALLES-DIAZ for approximately nine months. He has flown VALLES-DIAZ to New York and Fort Lauderdale approximately 30 times during that time."

"LEVINE¬-TEXAR said that he and his company were paid a total of $600,000 for those trips, and that he was going to be paid $80,000 for the current trip after arriving in Orlando," the affidavit continued.

Thirty flights in nine months -- a weekly 'milk run' down and back to Venezuela -- would have ignited grave suspicions at any legitimate charter jet company, said aviation observers. But the discovery that Hilliard's operation was paid in cash for each of the 30 flights removes any question about the enterprise's legitimacy, in the unanimous opinion of aviation observers in southwest Florida.

It wasn't.

Wally Hilliard was involved in two ways, Florida records showed, as the principal of Plane 1 Leasing, which owned the Lear jet in volved, and as a partner in American Jet Charters LLC, the charter company that leased the Lear from Plane 1 Leasing. Hilliard was a partner and co-owner, along with Diego Levine and a man named Mark Shubin.

"They obviously weren't even bothering to hide what they were doing," noted one observer. Yet despite being caught red-handed Wally Hilliard claimed in court filings to have been an "innocent owner."

On November 3, 2000, Federal Judge James Glazebrook denied Hilliard's motion. Yet there are no public documents explaining why.

"Wally took a big hit on that one," stated someone at the Naples Airport. "The DEA was not going to let him have that plane back."

"The DEA was planning on adding it to their Border Patrol fleet," confirmed a spokesman for the Lear jet's current owner, East Coast Jets of Allentown, PA. They bought the plane, he told us, after an insurance company, which insured it against seizure for the lender, successfully wrenched it back from the DEA after Hilliard had been removed from the picture.

***

Then we made an amazing discovery. Wally Hilliard got his Lear jet from the same people who supplied the Lear jet -- two decades earlier -- flown by famous drug smuggler and CIA agent Barry Seal.

Federal records showed Hilliard got his Lear jet from World Jet, Inc., owned by the drug smuggling Whittington brothers, Don and Bill, of Fort Lauderdale, FL, who in their heyday in the early 1980s had been historic figures in the rise of the trade, commanding fleets of fishing trawlers, sailboats, power boats, and jets.

The Whittington Brothers were among the handful of major smugglers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when tons of marijuana, and the oceans of cash it created, flowed freely through the streets and canals of Fort Lauderdale.

When their prized Lear jet was seized -- after their indictment for smuggling and tax evasion -- it went to the man then on his way to becoming the biggest drug smuggler in American history, Barry Seal. Nor was this by accident. Here we were on familiar ground. Seal was the subject of our book "Barry and the Boys: the CIA, the Mob, and America's Secret History."

Until his assassination in 1986 at the reported behest of then-Vice President George H. w: Bush, Barry Seal was a close associate of Iran Contra figures like Frank Moss and Dietrich Reinhardt, who, as we have seen, are still "active," in the middle of all kinds of intrigue at the Charlotte County Airport.

***

The Lear jet confiscated in Orlando didn't 'get to' Hilliard by accident either. The man who owned it, Gary Levitz, 61, was killed in 1999 when his modified P-51 Mustang crashed during the National Championship Air Races in Reno, Nevada. Levitz, grandson of Levitz Furniture Corporation founder Richard Levitz, was an avid pilot and member of the Confederate Air Force, an organization of pilots whose members fly vintage war planes... and sometimes other things as well.

"Gary was a pretty amazing man," one of his managers told reporters. "He was a larger-than-life character. He would run the company day to day, and he flew warplanes and was a big-game hunter."

Gary Levitz was also a big-time drug smuggler. Back in the early '80s he was convicted of money laundering with the same Whittington brothers who sold his Lear to Hilliard.

***

Court documents said Levitz deposited large sums of money into bank accounts in Nogales, Mexico, and "helped disguise William Whittington's narcotics profits by investing into legitimate business ventures."

What we were seeing were clues left behind by a vast but hidden and still-unnamed global network.

The recently-deceased Gary Levitz also had ties in Venice, Florida, with a man whose name we'd heard whispered about.

"Ben Bradley's a DEA informant at the Venice Airport who got arrested for beating his wife," one aviation source in Venice told us bluntly, when we first asked around about Bradley.

"He set people up in Fort Lauderdale and was given some of their toys. Gary Levitz got in the drug trade. He rolled on the Whittingtons and so did Bradley. His life was threatened, he went to Polk County, and ended up mooring his boat in Venice."

Small world. Barry Seal got a Lear jet after a small-time informant 'snitched out' the Whittington brothers, making one available. Wally Hilliard's Lear jet came from a guy who got busted with the Whittingtons twenty years ago and died in a crash, making one available. We were looking at institutionally-deep corruption --  what sociologists call 'elite deviance' -- on a scale so massive that the only rational response is a boogie board, some suntan oil, and an extra large pitcher of margaritas.

***

Maybe that's where the FBI's been all along on 9/11. And maybe that's why FBI agents drink so much. Its hard to do your job with a straight face when you know the fix is in.

As early as a week after September 11 the FBI was pointedly stating that they had known about terrorists rotating through flight schools like Rudi Dekkers in Venice, Florida.

"The FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," said a Washington Post headline one week after the attack.

"Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States," the article stated.

What the FBI left unanswered was why they had done nothing to shut it down. But if what we were witnessing was some kind of CIA-protected drug trafficking operation, then the FBI's failure to take action against terrorists which the Bureau has acknowledged knowing were flight training in the U.S. can be explained by the Bureau's historical reluctance to meddle on another Federal Agency's turf.

"Early on I gleaned that these guys had Government protection," said a former Huffman executive. "We heard that 16 of the 19 terrorists had been on Interpol's Most Wanted list. They were let into this country for a specific purpose. It was a business deal."

The new information added to long-standing suspicions of drug trafficking voiced by local aviation observers in Venice. One told us he had learned that Dekkers and Hilliard's operation had what he termed a "green light" from the DEA at the Venice Airport.

"They were told to stay away from that (Dekkers) operation."

"Who was told?" we asked.

"The Sarasota County Drug Interdiction people," came the response. "They were told that they had a green light to operate and that they were to stay away from them, that they were some type of ... alluded to the fact that they may have some type of government protection. And the local Venice Police Department were also warned to leave them alone."

Government protection of Rudi Dekkers would explain his sweetheart coverage in the major media. The notion of a Federal "hands-off" policy towards the Venice operation would also ex plain another suspicious circumstance provoking speculation: how Rudi Dekkers, whose various businesses were all utter and abject failures, managed to live in a $2.5 million mansion in a private gated community. The rumor was that Dekkers had other sources of income.

Which part of the government was he being "protected" by? Who employed his services? As we've seen, the FBI was only one of several federal agencies that had pursued an interest in Dekkers. While still in Naples, Dekkers stirred the interest of the DEA as well.

The question of the extent of Wally Hilliard's charter company's involvement in trafficking needs to be asked by someone with the authority to compel answers.

"I used to ask myself: Why is Wally doing business with all these foreigners?" said jet mechanic Dave Montgomery, Hilliard's former chief aviation mechanic. "There was Diego Levine, Alfonso Bowe, Mark Shubin, Pervez Khan ... It didn't make sense."

Alfonso Bowe, we will learn, is a black South African, and also a former high-ranking Jamaican military officer. He runs Hilliard's FBO in Nassau in the Bahamas. Mark Shubin is Russian, and once flew for the Israeli air force. And Pervez Khan is Pakistani, and is one of only two people in the entire world with the State Department's permission to run regular flights to Havana.

Hilliard's business associates are the very definition of a 'motley crue,' and we'd barely scratched the surface. An air of mystery sur rounded the activities of Wallace J. Hilliard as well as unanswered questions about the terrorist conspiracy's activities in Florida.

Wally Hilliard is not a peripheral character in the story of the terrorist conspiracy in Florida. He denied it, but at least one eye-witness says he knew Mohamed Atta.

***

During one of his periodic visits to Venice, Amanda Keller said she stood beside Hilliard, looking out the window at Huffman Aviation. Hilliard only came around, she told us as an aside, "to meet the newer jets, it seemed."

"What's a pretty girl like you doing with a guy like Mohamed?" Hilliard asked her.

We would all, I'm sure, love to know what he meant by that.

***

"I know more about Wally Hilliard than I ever want to know, said a former Huffman Aviation executive. "Why do you think the u.s. military didn't close the passes into Pakistan during the Tora Bora bombing? This all goes far deeper than you think."

Like many others, this executive demanded anonymity.

He explained: "I've got a family."

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