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

CHAPTER SIXTEEN:  "RUDI THE CROOK"

Since terror flight school owner Rudi Dekkers was not in any regular sense a businessman, we began to entertain slightly-darker scenarios for what he was doing and how he 'just happened' to be in such close proximity to Mohamed Atta's terrorist cadre.

Dekkers repeatedly evinced lack of interest in running the business side of Huffman Aviation, the Venice FBO, the bread and butter of the operation, and this fact was noted by the Venice aviation community.

"People with helicopters at FBOs are generally looking to defray their expenses by renting out things like helicopters. That's what they're in business for," explained Danny Schultz, who's been fly ing for fifteen years in the skies over Southwest Florida. He said he's still puzzled at the lack of interest shown by Dekkers in his nominal business.

"I needed to rent a helicopter for a property appraisal a while back," he continued, citing an example. "I called his (Dekkers) office several days in advance, because he was the local chopper supplier, he's got the FBO in Venice. And they told me he would call me back. It was a sizable usage of the chopper, which would be very financially rewarding. But he never got back to me. He didn't even give me the courtesy of a reply."

"All I can say is that, at the time, I thought it was odd," stated Schultz, shaking his head. "And this was long before Rudi became famous after 9/11."

Whatever Rudi Dekkers was about, it wasn't making a buck in general aviation. Longtime local pilot Schultz described abrupt changes in the aviation 'scene' once Dekkers took over at Huff man ...

"We have a designated flight examiner at our small airport, he was one of the few in this area," explained Schultz. "He stayed busy most of the time with foreign students, giving them their FAA check-rides. I often went to lunch with him, and these folks would come too, and some of them could hardly speak English. They were from places like Libya; various countries in the Middle East."

It hadn't always been that way in Southwest Florida.

"This was a recent influx of this type of trainee," said Schultz.

And that's why understanding the true identity of the Dutch national who in 1999 purchased Huffman Aviation is so important: Rudi Dekkers was responsible for the flood of Arab student pilots that began "marching across the tarmac."

Mohamed Atta and his Hamburg cadre were part of that 'flood.'

So, who is Rudi Dekkers?

We interviewed a number of people who worked with or for Dekkers in the last few years, they were unanimous in the opinion that Dekkers is a highly dubious character.

Danielle Clarke has observed Dekkers close-up at the Naples Airport since the early 1990's. Born in Lyons, France, she was pas sionate about flying since girlhood. She moved to Naples, Florida a decade ago, after a long marriage to an English flight instructor, during which they taught flying in Britain. When he died, she told us, it was time for a change of scene.

And Florida had a reputation as a sunny place.

"Rudi was a wheeler-dealer back to 1990 in Naples," she recalled. "First time I saw him I said to myself, 'There's a crook! Never get associated with him. He'll be bankrupt before the end of the year.' Then, after I'd seen him for a while, I'd say to myself, 'There goes Rudi the Crook."

Danielle was a shrewd judge of human nature, apparently, because Rudi is a crook. He's wanted in his native country. We learned from a law enforcement source in Venice that after Dutch authorities recognized him during his many appearances on CNN, he was re-indicted on financial charges in the Netherlands. The cop credited 'Larry King Live' with performing a function usually reserved for America's Most Wanted.

Even in the U.S., ordinarily such a friendly and forgiving place for him, Dekkers' legal troubles were mounting. By the end of 2002 he had also been indicted on a charge of criminal fraud by the state of Florida. When we called Dekkers for comment on his indictment, he professed to be unaware of any pending charges.

"My lawyer in the Netherlands has said nothing to me about any indictment," he said. "I can't imagine that I could have done anything wrong."

The Florida State's Attorney was telling a different story. "Dekkers owes $3 million to the government of the Netherlands, from the mid-1990's, we discovered," stated Florida State's At torney Jonathan Greene, leading the prosecution of Dekkers in Sarasota.

Dekkers owed $3 million in the Netherlands as the result of pledging assets he didn't own to secure loans he had no intention of repaying, the same crime for which he'd just been charged in Florida.

After a judge in Sarasota signed a warrant for Dekkers' arrest, the local Gondolier called him for a comment.

Dekkers said: "Wow, I'm surprised."

Florida State's Attorney Greene sounded faintly amused at the intrigue swirling around Dekkers.

"I knew nothing about Rudi Dekkers, except the particulars of this one charge, but I've learned more," he said, figuratively rolling his eyes. "I've gotten at least 15 to 20 calls, for example, just to congratulate me for charging him."

"There was also a Federal investigation alleging illegal ex portation of technology against him a while back, " Greene told us. "They're working on some Federal stuff on him now."

This confirmed a big piece of the 'Rudi Dekkers puzzle.' We'd been hearing, from numerous sources, that Dekkers had been the subject of a multi-agency federal investigation in the mid-90's. An investigation in which several federal agencies pool resources must have indicated some strong federal interest in Rudi Dekkers' activities.

John Vellada, the tanned and smiling son of an expatriate Cuban family who came to America in the early '60's, knew Dekkers when he was exciting all that federal attention. He was also, until recently, the jet manager for Wally Hilliard's fleet of planes.

"There was a warrant for Rudi's arrest for smuggling computer chips. Both the DEA and U.S. Customs were interested in him back in '93 and '94," he said.

"What I heard was that he was buying the chips, taking boxes and putting a certain amount of chips in, and then hiding the rest underneath to evade customs."

"He has a warrant in Holland for smuggling in chips," Vellada said. "He's not allowed back in Holland. He got busted for smug gling chips and money fraud. I remember when DEA, Customs, everyone was after him over here."

To have aroused the interest of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Dekkers must have been involved with smuggling some thing besides computer chips ...

"Why was the DEA interested in Rudi? Nobody ever knew. That was everyone's big question," Villada replied. "All I know is the DEA was here, US Customs, Holland officials ... That's when I learned he had had to flee Holland."

We had confirmation from Florida State's Attorney Jonathan Greene that it was true. Dekkers had been under suspicion of il legal exportation of high technology, Greene had said. So a man wanted in his home country, and also the target of a multi-agency federal investigation, was invited to testify in front of the Congress of the United States of America, where he was free with tips on preventing future terrorist attacks.

How was this possible?

Even more importantly, after the 9/11 attack Rudi Dekkers had been seemingly instantly relieved of suspicion. No journalist inquired about whether he had been engaging in illegal activity at the same time the terrorist conspiracy was making use of his facilities.

We called the Netherlands Embassy, Washington, D.C.. Was it true Dekkers was a wanted man in Holland?

"We don't give this information out to journalists," explained Embassy spokesman Harry De Witt, who nonetheless said "you can make what you will of the fact that I am referring you to the Min istry of Justice for an explanation. I've been told to say nothing."

The man at Huffman Aviation standing in front of the TV cameras, Rudi Dekkers, was a linchpin in the official story. His testimony had shaped the initial accounts of the hijackers.

Why had Dekkers been anointed designated Interview-EE? Didn't the U.S. know Dekkers was a crook before he went on television? There is only one answer, we think. Rudi Dekkers was one of their own, or he belonged to them, at least. He said what they wanted him to say ... because he had to.

He was a criminal. He had been caught by federal authorities back in the mid-90's. But he had never been charged. Why not?

The answer is simple, and yet stunning: Rudi Dekkers had 'rolled," and become a government 'confidential informant.' He was, in criminal parlance, "working off a beef."

In the dozens of sound bites he fed to the world's media about Atta and Marwan in the days after the attack, he lied, and lied effectively ... for the people for whom he worked. They even coached him on what to say.

***

This explains how two Dutch nationals, Kruithof and Dekkers, could each buy flight training schools at the off-the-beaten-track Venice Airport, and not face questioning about it later when three of their students are found to be piloting planes used as guided missiles on a September morning.

There were people taken into Federal custody whose connections with the terrorists were far less suspicious than theirs.

Plus, both men were foreign nationals presumed to be flight risks as a matter of law.

Yet neither was being held.

***

While dozens of journalists milled aimlessly at Huffman Aviation in the frenzied days after the attack, only one noted that Dekkers' story kept changing. Reporter Rochelle Renford expressed her suspicions about Dekkers on September 29, 2001, in the Sarasota Weekly Planet. "Would it be reasonable to expect Dekkers to give the same information to every news outlet?" she asked.

"Perhaps. But that was not the case. When Dekkers first appeared before the press on the day after the attack, this is what he said; He didn't know the suspects. He wasn't the one who took their money so he was unsure how they had paid for their training. He didn't see their passports so he wasn't sure where they were from. He denied having had many interactions with them at all."

"On Wednesday, he told some reporters, including me, that his interaction with the two suspects came from a couple of brief conversations when he passed them in the halls," Renford wrote. "His employees had dealt with their enrollment."

"But by Sunday's reports, Dekkers was serving up anecdotes about the two men, telling one reporter, 'He sat right there last year when he came to talk to me about taking lessons here."'

According to Renford, on the day after the attack a reporter from the New York Times asked Dekkers about reports that the two men (Atta and Al-Shehhi) were from Germany.

"Didn't it strike you as odd that they were from Germany? They didn't look German, did they?"

"Don't tell me what people tell you," Dekkers barked in response. "I have never heard that they're from Germany. I have never heard that they speak German." Renford wrote.

***

"Dekkers gave a different answer on Larry King Live. Now he did know where they were from ... Dekkers now recalled that Atta told him he had come from Germany. But when Dekkers, a Dutch native, began speaking to Atta in German, the Middle Eastern man just got up and walked out of his office. Dekkers said he found it odd."

"Whereas on Wednesday he'd blasted a reporter for asking about a German connection," wrote Renford, "on Thursday he told me an anecdote about one of the suspects saying he was German."

"Dekkers wasn't just remembering new details," she concluded. "He was learning how to tell a story."

Because national reporters apparently had no clue about his shady local reputation, and his inability for six months straight to pay his rent on time, no one questioned how Dekkers had come to be so flush with cash just three weeks before the attack.

But it did strike some people as strange, like Bill Warner, a private investigator in Sarasota who made it his business to delve into Rudi Dekkers' financial affairs to explain his sudden pre-9/11 change in liquidity.

"Rudi Dekkers somehow came up with $10,000 in late October (2001)," he told us, "to finally pay off the woman's (Nicole Antini) sex ual harassment suit. He also came up with $56,000 in early November to pay off another law suit with FH1100 Manufacturing Corp."

"But he had filed a UCC with M&I Bank Northeast for all inventory of Huffman Aviation way back in March of 2000. So he appears to have had no source of additional financing for this $65,000 cash outlay in late October and early November 2001."

"There are enough judgments in his name and his companies name to paper his office walls," said Warner. "How do you obtain that much cash under such severe conditions?"

If somebody had been 'protecting' Rudi Dekkers from financial harm, all that changed with 'the INS thing' six months after 9/11, said airport insider Max Burge.

"Rudi got indicted because he embarrassed the President of the United States with the INS bullshit."

The "INS bullshit" refers to Rudi Dekkers' return to the national stage exactly six months to the day after the attack. He'd gotten a second 15 minutes of fame and made headlines again when he called in reporters to reveal a government bungle when he received in the mail, on the six month anniversary of the attack, INS approval of visas for Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi.

It had been a very bad day for the INS. In addition to provoking "outrage" on Capital Hill, the hapless INS's bungling was said to have made even President George W Bush "pretty hot."

The CIA and FBI had been taking all the post-9/11 heat.

But suddenly the tide of public opinion turned against the lowly INS, and a finger of blame began to be pointed towards what was no doubt a swell bunch of guys forced to spend their time standing around in the hot sun at border crossings doing their best to look the other way. It didn't seem fair.

Dekkers displayed the INS letter to reporters. He said the arrival of the yellow INS forms had come as a shock.

"We thought we had put this behind us," he said. "And it had to happen right on the six-month anniversary."

"Poor Rudi" caught the public relations break of the new century. The cameras were rolling again, and he was back in the limelight -- jetting to Washington, D.C., this time to advise the INS on how they might improve their system.

Even The New York Times raised an eyebrow. "The error seemed particularly difficult to explain, because Mr. Atta and Mr. Al-Shehhi were among the most infamous of the 19 hijackers," said the Times.

It was a triumphant performance for Dekkers, who said he viewed the INS mistake as long-sought vindication. He told re porters, "When they hit the buildings they were approved to be here. I could not show (until now) that we applied for the right paperwork. "Therefore I am happy that I can do that now."

A reporters asked: "So you feel vindicated?"

"Yes," Dekkers replied. "I don't expect when I get in on Monday morning to get two permits for Atta and Al-Shehhi. I thought they were behind me already and my life goes on."

When we saw him speak these words on camera, we thought: Not so fast, pal.

He was clearly enjoying the moment, however, and dispensed some advice to the American government. "The flight schools didn't do anything wrong. The government needs to look at itself and look at procedures and see what they can change so this will not happen again. "

Dekkers, at that point, seemed to need some kind of turnaround in his fortunes to alleviate all the bad publicity he had been getting locally. A Gondolier editorial even suggested, for the first time, that it might be time for Dekkers to go. "If he won't be more helpful, the city should re-examine whether it wants Dekkers' business to remain at the airport," said the editorial.

When we originally asked people in Venice how they had felt on learning the news that the terrorist pilots had trained right in their town, a woman in the deli of Publix market echoed widespread community sentiment when she told us, "They wanted to go burn down the airport."

So, slipping quietly out of town would have seemed the outcome the Dutch national would be desperately seeking. But Dekkers called attention to himself just when he should have been laying low. And now the President of the Unites States himself was pissed. Certainly no one enjoys being left hanging, twisting slowly, slowly, in the wind.

We remembered that budding screenwriters are taught that sometimes the best thing that could possibly happen to your character turns out to be the worst thing. Because that's the way life is.

Rudi's second moment in the headlines would come back to haunt him. Aviation consultant Max Burge told us, "He hasn't been protected for at least a month."

It was a measure of revenge for Burge. Rudi and Max had crossed swords in an aviation deal. Dekkers had looked at him, Max said and sneered:  "You're not a player."

Now Max Burge was returning the favor. He said, proudly, "I made sure that the indictment developed. I made sure Wally had the right attorney."

The first time we met him, Max Burge had identified himself as a business consultant for the American government. He was a square-jawed, no-nonsense, former Marine and riverboat pilot from Mississippi, in Venice to broker the sale of Huffman Aviation to new owners. It appeared he might be playing an unofficial role at the Venice Airport; a position that might, in hindsight, have been filled a little sooner.

Max had had business at the Venice Airport with some of the 'players' involved, he told us, so after 9/11 he had checked "with some people" to ascertain if any of his business associates at the Airport had any culpability in the attack.

"I was told that Rudi doesn't check out clear," he said. "When I asked about Dekkers, I was told, 'He's bigger than national. He's transnational.' And I was warned to stay away from him."

Something had now changed, apparently, because Burge was talking about Dekkers.

"In the drive to indict Rudi," he told us, smiling, "virtually every branch of the U.S. government lent a helping hand. Everybody offered to help in any way they could. The INS was especially helpful."

"I hear Rudi owes $5.5 million to Wally," he tossed out casually. "I hear Rudi's helicopter has a stolen government engine in it."

"His indictment opens up Pandora's Box," Burge concluded. "If he runs, you'll have it. It's also about getting a hold of him. And it opens up a big can of worms."

We couldn't believe it. There it was. The can of worms we'd been waiting for.

Burge made a prediction. "If he doesn't flee, he'll be arrested in the next couple of weeks."

He was.

When Rudi Dekkers tried to use the INS snafu to his public relations advantage, even as he was claiming to feel "vindicated," new details were being released that showed he was nothing of the kind.

Dekkers shared the now-famous INS form with the Associated Press, which noted that, on the visa application, Atta's name is misspelled "Mohomed." It was an understandable mistake, since the Huffman Aviation assistant who filled them out, 18 year-old Nicole Antini, was just then being sexually harassed by a middle-aged Dutch boor.

We saw something else important; the AP said that the INS documents indicated the academic term cost each of the two terrorist pilots $27,300. This was now the third, and highest, figure that had come out, since somehow the exact amount Dekkers charged the terrorists was one of those things that never gets pinned down.

Dekkers had changed his story twice. And now it was revealed that Atta and Al-Shehhi had paid nearly $30K each, almost $60,000 between them.

Dekkers had been quoted in numerous places saying that be tween his two schools he had been training 500 foreign nationals a year. And 500x $30,000 is a fairly significant 7-figure number. So how come, out at the Venice Airport, Dekkers had been unable to pay his rent?

It was clear that Rudi Dekkers was more than an innocent business owner victimized by wily terrorists. There was a darker reality lurking behind his widely-promoted public persona.

For example, we learned to our amazement that at the same time Dekkers had been unable to pay Huffman Aviation's rent for six months in a row, he had been launching an airline.

We weren't the only ones taken aback at this development. There had been amazement at the Venice Airport as well ...

"When we heard that Hilliard and Dekkers were starting an airline by early 2001, everybody at the airport's jaw dropped," Coy Jacob told us. "When someone walked in my office and told me Dekkers was starting an airline, I told him 'Sure, and I'm build ing a shuttle launch facility here at the Venice Airport. That's how ridiculous it was."

***

Yet, we found a glowing paean to Dekkers' business acumen in a Sarasota Herald Tribune article on Rudi's new airline, called Florida Air, or FLAIR.

"Run by an ambitious, optimistic and fast-talking Dutch citizen named Rudi Dekkers, the airline, using 11-seat Cessna Grand Caravans it borrowed from Alaska Air subsidiary Harbor Air, opened for business February, 15. By March, it added Jacksonville to its route list, and if the airline catches on with Florida travelers it might expand to other cities, including Pensacola, Atlanta and Savannah, Ga."

And right about then was when we learned that Dekkers' partner in his new airline was in business with the Mob.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: SECRETARY'S DAY

In the history of crime in America the golden age of bank robbery was supposedly the 1930's, a decade that spawned the legends of John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, and Willie Sutton, famous for robbing banks because "that was where the money was." But perhaps the real Gilded Age of Crime will someday be recognized as having been our own ... After all, more cash just disappeared at Enron than has ever been stolen in all the bank robberies in America put together. And Enron is just one example, and may just be the tip of the iceberg ...

In the Spring of 2001 -- while Mohamed Atta was at his school -- Rudi Dekkers did something so incredible that we spent over a year examining it in befuddled amazement. At the same time he was receiving the most painful kind of humiliating coverage in the local press ("Huffman Rent Is Late, Again"), Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard blithely launched an airline.

They called it Florida Air, or FLAIR.

We were not surprised to discover no one in the local aviation community thought the move made any business sense. All agreed that FLAIR was a doomed venture from day one. Once again, the question was why were they doing it. If both had not had business with Mohamed Atta, it might not have mattered.

But they had.

They chose, as partner, a man named Rick Boehlke, who owned an air carrier called Harbor Air, in Gig Harbor, Washington. Boehlke was also, just then, a participant in Portland, OR., in the $340 million looting of pension funds of mostly Mob-led unions, like the Laborers Union.

We wondered: who had the temerity to steal pension money from Mob-led unions? Then we learned newspapers were calling the looting "Mob-led", too.

What were the odds that Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard would go looking for a business partner and come up with a guy with Mob ties who's helping pull off a spectacular $300 million heist?

Was this just wretched bad luck, on top of the misfortune they'd already experienced because their flight school had become a magnet for terrorists?

Wally and Rudi must have been two really star-crossed dudes ... Because if they weren't, then something sinister was going on.

***

Florida Air, the new airline, used Rick Boehlke's Harbor Air license to fly. Boehlke also ended up supplying the new airline with both planes and pilots. What Dekkers and Hilliard were bringing to the party was an open question. Meanwhile, Mohamed Atta was still at Huffman Aviation, doing no one knows quite what.

Was it outside the realm of possibility that all three men -- Dekkers, Boehlke, and Hilliard -- worked for the same company?

A company, or network, specializing in 'niches' like looting pension funds and training terrorists to fly?

Or ... was this just another freak coincidence? What are the odds, that the men who helped terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta establish his American beachhead would be in business with a partner who robs banks ... from the inside?

However it played out, our understanding of what the terrorist conspiracy was doing in Florida would be shaped by what it was Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard were discovered to have been doing -- and with whom -- while Mohamed Atta practiced touch and go's at their facilities in Venice and Naples.

Florida Air launched with great fanfare in the Spring of 2001. Dekkers and Hilliard had started another aviation business that did not make business sense.

During its brief two-month existence, Mohamed Atta may well have flown for the airline as a co- ilot. No one will admit it, but there were terrorists inside the cockpit of an American airline plane during the year 2001 who didn't need box-cutters to get there.

We discovered that the chance to fly as a commercial pilot with Florida Air, after taking flight training at "sister company" Huffman Aviation, had been a big part of Rudi Dekkers European sales pitch, and was played up in the company's advertising.

"I kept ads from flying magazines from 2000," said Bill Bersch, a former manager at Huffman. "'Come to Huffman to train, and then fly with our Florida Air airline."'

"The flight school was advertised as a feed into Florida Air as future employer of Huffman's flight school students. Florida Air put the ads in everywhere, but when it came down to it they couldn't offer flying jobs, because there wasn't an airline for very long."

While this would seem to be a pretty serious crime, there had been no FAA investigation, which isn't surprising. During the course of his 'aviation career' in Florida, Rudi Dekkers received so many free "passes" from the FAA that they should enshrine it with an exhibit at the Air & Space Museum.

When Dekkers and Hilliard's short-lived airline became germane to the 9/11 investigation, Rick Boehlke and Rudi Dekkers competed to see who could heap the most scorn on the other, attempting to divert attention from themselves. As someone once said, there's no honor among thieves.

Boehlke accused Dekkers of not having any experience running a commuter airline and training facility. "He (Dekkers) was an oxymoron the day I met him," Boehlke told Portland, Oregon KABC reporter Eric Mason. "I can't believe anyone handed him millions of dollars to run a business he had no experience in."

Boehlke also charged that Dekkers suggested his Huffman Aviation students hone their skills by acting as co-pilots on FLAIR's commuter routes in Florida, urging him to allow student ride-alongs on scheduled airline flights.

"That's illegal," said Boehlke. He left no doubt as to where he came down on the proposition. He said he had rejected the idea at the time.

Looking back, Boehlke said he was alarmed that Dekkers' desperate attempt to save his failing airline could have had dire consequences. "Having a student without enough hours or that type rating as a co-pilot is not legal," an FAA spokesman said about Dekkers' scheme.

Boehlke demonstrated an eye for a good headline.

"There could have been terrorists on a ride-along!" he told reporter Eric Mason. He said a 'chill' runs through him when he thinks about it.

"1 was amazed knowing how close we'd been to that training environment. It would have given them legal access to cockpits and other secure areas in airports across the country," he exclaimed.

As we learned more about Rick Boehlke's checkered past, his claim to be "amazed" would begin to sound like the French In spector in Casablanca who tells Bogie he's shocked -- shocked -- to find gambling going on at Rick's ... while at the same time pocket ing his winnings.

Reporter Mason had been interested in Boehlke for obvious reasons. "The financing that had gone between Mr. Boehlke and Florida Air, which was a sister operation to the flight training center which trained Mohamed Atta, was murky."

'Murky' is not a word you want to see applied to people who trained Mohamed Atta to fly.

We needed to take a closer look at Rick Boehlke, at Florida Air, and at Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard's motivations for starting it. How many businessmen behind on their rent for six months in a row have the gall, or chutzpah, to at the same time start a new airline? Was it not enough for Rudi and Wally that they were already losing money hand-over-fist in their flight school venture, that they decided they might as well be losing millions in an airline as well?

Bill Bersch, a longtime aviation professional with experience as senior pilot for a regional air carrier, rues the day he hired on to help launch Florida Air. When he checked-in to start work at the airline's Venice headquarters, he was surprised at what he found.

"I functioned as the director of operations," Bersch said, "which meant my job was to decide which flights to cancel every day. I used to look at Wally and Rudi and wonder whatever made them think they could start an airline."

Flying the friendly skies for fun and profit played no apparent part of Dekkers and Hilliard's motivation that he could discern, Bersch said. It had all left him feeling baffled.

"I mean, I was on the executive team and here they were, trying to start an airline, and from August 2000 to the present we had all of four business meetings."

Bersch's professional frustration showed. "Wouldn't you think you would have at least weekly meetings if you were trying to start an airline? And then when you could get a meeting scheduled, somebody would tell you that it had been canceled, because Wally was in Havana."

Why "Wally was in Havana" would become a focus of our investigation, but at that time we hadn't any idea what it meant. Bersch passed on another big clue a moment later, while speaking of how poorly the company was managed.

"It was just ridiculous," he said. "For the better part of a year, we were paying eight pilots to do nothing."

"Paying eight pilots to do nothing" must have raised suspicions, we figured, around the Venice Airport. It had.

Coy Jacob said suspicions about Dekkers and Hilliard had been widespread, since well before Mohamed Atta came to town. Since 9/11 it had only grown more intense.

***

"When people operate suspiciously at airports around here, people start investigating," he told us. "I mean law enforcement hovers around most airports in the Southeast United States. They hover around airports around here, obviously. And they were told to stay away from that operation."

'Told to stay away from that operation?'

We had already discovered that, whatever else he was, Rudi Dekkers wasn't a businessman or flight school owner in any conventional sense, illustrated by the fact that at the same time he was launching a commuter airline he was thought of as a deadbeat in Venice and Naples. So he wasn't a "flight school owner."

Now we heard he hadn't been an "airline owner" either.

"The whole thing was strange as hell to me," said Bersch. "Here we had a business to run, but only a couple of times over the years did we even have staff meetings. The business didn't make any sense."

The airline made no more sense than the flight school.

What, then, had been its purpose? Had it served as 'cover' for other activities?

"When something doesn't make business sense," former Huffman bookkeeper Voss said, "sometimes its because it does make sense ... just in some other way."

***

"FLAIR started out of here (Venice) which was a Dekkers-Hilliard thing which, again, just never made sense," Coy Jacob stated. "That airline startup thing was ... the chances of that working were slim and none. It was a joke around here."

But after 9/11, this particular joke was no longer funny.

Bill Bersch's bad experience with Florida Air began as soon as he was hired. "Rudi hired me, August 2000, and shortly after, in October or November 2000, I met Wally," he said.

"We flew a Lear up to North Carolina to see people at Corporate Express, where Wally was looking to use other peoples' Certificates. They were always trying to run an angle around the regulations. The Department of Transportation doesn't like it when they find someone doing what Rudi and Wally were doing."

***

"They nearly crashed the Lear in a hard landing," continued Bersch. "Earlier I had told Dale (Kraus) that the tires were bald. Now we were landing in North Carolina in a rainstorm, the tires were bald, there were crosswinds, the plane spun 90 degrees, and from a passenger window I found myself looking straight down the runway."

Welcome aboard Florida Air.

Florida Air's first CEO, said Bersch, was Ian AIexander, whose business performance was somewhat hampered by the fact he was drunk most of the time.

"He used to live in Atlanta, came to work for FLAIR, and has since fled to Canada," said Bersch. "Wally and Rudi both directed him; Wally would tell Ian to do one thing, Rudi would tell him the opposite, or to do something else. I heard Rudi tell Ian to 'fudge numbers, shift them around.' Rudi would do this, Ian said, when ever Rudi had to show the numbers to an investor," said Bersch.

We wanted to know why Ian "fled to Canada."

"It was rumored Ian tried to take $90,000 using a company credit card," said Bersch. "FLAIR was like a money spigot. Ian never accepted responsibility and was drunk all the time, even in the morning ... Is this any way to run a business?"

The long-suffering financier behind all these inexplicable money-losing aviation ventures, Wally Hilliard, was in the midst of taking yet another financial bath.

"The airline lost $800,000 in two months," said Stuart Burchill, Hilliard's former accountant. "All together, the airline ended up costing Wally almost $8 million."

Bersch's puzzling tale was typical of experiences we heard from a number of former employees of how Dekkers and Hilliard ran their new airline. "We were going to use Sarasota as a hub, fly state people up to Tallahassee, fly to Jacksonville with military people," he explained.

"Then they had to get Rudi out of the picture because he wasn't an American citizen. And so Rudi told them to name Doug Hilder brandt to run it, who until two years ago was just a mechanic for Huffman Aviation who worked on Rudi's helicopter. What Doug really wanted to do was to be an airline pilot, but Doug has never worked for an airline in his life," continued Bersch.

"Yet in the business plan next to his name, it says he has 18 years of airline experience. And six months later, when they updated the business plan, it now said he had twenty years of airline experience. And when they introduced the management of the airline, Doug was listed as Director of Safety, an important job for a carrier."

"But Doug was just a Navy mechanic."

Florida Air's history was nasty, brutish, and short. Danielle Clarke, who has been around general aviation much of her life, says she had no idea what the two were doing.

"I like to think I'm pretty smart," she told us. "But Rudi and Wally would discuss Florida Air in front of me and I would never understand what was going on."

"They were losing absolutely horrendous amounts of money and I often wondered why Wally bothered to work."

Although Rudi Dekkers was listed as the airline's CEO, he wasn't even supposed to be an officer, we learned. Once again, his Dutch Uncle, "Uncle Sugar" was protecting him.

"Rudi, is not a U.S. national, I don't believe he's a U.S. citizen," explained Coy Jacob. "And historically the FAA is pretty picky about who they allow to even own U.S. registered airplanes. Non-US citizens cannot register an airplane in the United States, let alone own an airline."

"Rudi was involved in the start-up of FLAIR, I think it was called, which was Florida Airline, simply," recalled Gondolier Edi tor Bob Mudge. "And I know he had a lot of problems with that. I think he was briefly in service, but FLAIR's period of service was real brief."

Mudge shook his head in mock disbelief.

"I've heard a lot of things about why that airline went into trouble, there were a lot of financial problems and I've heard problems with people not getting paid, and I had discussions with Dekkers about that at some point and he was blaming it on ... I forget who."

Illegality was not just rampant at the airline; it was de riguer.

***

"Rudi and Wally were running a whole bunch of companies as if they were just one entity," Bill Bersch explained. "They had Florida Air, Dekkers Aviation Group, Florida Air Holdings, LLC, and even Florida Air Holdings, Inc. But since they intermingled funds all the time, I just thought of them as one company. They all had the same personnel and the same management, and they were all the same company."

So commingling funds was the preferred way of doing business for Wally Hilliard. We'd thought it was illegal. This became more important when we learned that Hilliard was involved with another flight school bankruptcy, in Orlando, where hundreds of students at Discover Air were ripped off when Hilliard's partner, the schools owner, skipped town.

"Nobody will ever know the extent to which these guys engaged in underhanded business deals," said Bersch. "They didn't pay state taxes, they didn't pay employee taxes."

No matter how many aviation observers we spoke with about Rudi and Wally, they were uniformly incredulous at the pair's actions. Longtime airline professional Bill Bersch, while ruminating out loud one day, may have put a finger on it.

"Rudi's name was popping up everywhere in DOT (Department of Transportation) or FAA records," said Bersch. "He was trying an angle with Air Tahoma, an Ohio and San Diego-based operation -- it would shift locations as business arose. Rudi's name was associated with it. I have never seen a business run like that in my life. It was like they were only pretending to run a business."

His words rang in our ears.

"They were only pretending to run a business."

"Just a guess, but FLAIR probably lost $7 million," he continued. "There were other investors, this wasn't all Wally's money, but still ... You have to wonder why Wally kept giving Rudi money. It didn't make any business sense."

***

Rick Boehlke, their new partner in FLAIR, was also in the business of general aviation. And he owned Harbor Air, called the "Navy's airline" because it serviced the big Whidbey Naval Air Station in Oak Harbor, Washington. Boehlke was as controversial in his hometown of Gig Harbor, Washington, we learned, as Rudi Dekkers was in Venice. How had Rick Boehlke 'got in for a piece' of the massive looting of workers pension funds in Portland?

Hardest hit ($60 million) by the theft were secretaries and laborers from the Laborers Union, called the biggest Mob-run union in America. To make up for the money stolen from their pension funds, analysts said, some of the unfortunate secretaries would have to spend an extra decade working.

Happy Secretary's Day.

The looters not only got away clean, they even managed to keep it from making big headlines. If someone broke into Citibank over Labor Day and made off with $300 million, we're pretty sure it would lead the Evening News.

This appeared to be a classic inside job. Just as in the half-trillion lost in the Savings and Loan Scandal, almost no one was going to jail, and no one was offering to give any of the money back. The local Portland newspapers just claimed to be sort of puzzled by it all.

We asked ourselves: How much clout does that take?

Dekkers' partner, Richard Boehlke, was one very fortunate man. He got $26 million in pension funds to build a high-rise condominium which he had only budgeted at $12 million. So Boehlke pocketed $14 million before he even broke ground.

We wondered: Where do you go to apply for that kind of work?

Boehlke participated in what the Securities & Exchange Commission called "the biggest fraud by an investment manager in U.S. history." This would be newsworthy all by itself. But he did it while simultaneously being involved in still-more funny business with Wally Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers, who were at that same time "in business" with Mohamed Atta.

This could be construed as one major fraud too many for coincidence.

It reminded us of what our Southern lawman friend said when we told him about two Dutch nationals owning terror flight schools in Venice. It was one damn Dutch boy too many.

Two words you hope you never hear applied to your retirement plan are 'Ponzi' and 'scheme.' Clearly, Jeff Grayson, the pension manager who helped Richard Boehlke and numerous others get rich for free, had experienced more than just one or two weak moments.

To give away $340 million dollars, you'd almost have to experience weak moments from dawn till dusk.

For years ...

Yet that's just what thousands of union members and their beneficiaries from Portland and  elsewhere began hearing had happened to their pension and 401 [k] retirement plans invested by Capital Consultants LLC, the Portland investment management firm headed by Jeff Grayson.

"There was a 'consultant' problem with Capital Consultants," someone close to the case said delicately. "The people he loaned money to were fast-talking sleaze-bags."

"Ex-money manager charged with fraud" read the October 6th 2002 headline of the Associated Press coverage of the looting.

"A federal grand jury indicted Jeffrey Grayson whose firm 'collapsed' losing hundreds of millions of pension investments. Grayson was charged with mail fraud, conspiracy, money laundering, witness tampering and paying a former union chief union trust funds in a scheme that cost Grayson's clients over $355 million in failed and fraudulent investments," said the account.

Moreover, the disgraced firm, Capital Consultants, had been instrumental in giving Richard Boehlke his business start. According to Boehlke they had underwritten Crossings International, his development company founded in 1984. With Grayson's backing, Boehlke got into the assisted living business, a hot market catering to America's growing population of senior citizens, and made a killing.

By 1995 Crossings International owned or operated 15 health care facilities on the West Coast, and was valued at more than $100 million. The money allowed Boehlke to indulge in his passion: fly ing. In 1987, the avid pilot started Crossings Aviation, a series of aeronautic-related businesses at the small Gig Harbor airport.

Amazingly, while supplying both the planes and the pilots for the new Florida Air, Boehlke's Harbor Air, like Florida Air, had also been going bankrupt. So were two other of Boehlke's companies, Crossings Aviation, and Crossings Development, the Portland entity which Boehlke used to build his condominium project.

Counting the number of bankruptcies associated with Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard, we realized, would require both hands, and our toes would be on-deck.

One last Boehlke note: his condo project was called "Legends Condominiums." Remember what your legend is?

Probably another freak coincidence. Or maybe somebody's sick joke.

***

Somebody said the 'M' word. We almost wished they hadn't.

"Boehlke would do anything for money, he was so desperate," an aviation executive in Gig Harbor Washington who had witnessed Boehlke's descent told us.

"I'm surprised he hasn't skipped the country by now, what with all the trouble he's gotten himself into farting around with those Mafia boys down in Portland."

Word of the 'M' word's use somehow got back to Boehlke ...

"I've known Jeff Grayson (Capital Consultants' former CEO) for 12 years," Boehlke huffed.

"I have never known him to have any shady or, you know, some have asked me about ... Mafia affiliations."

When reporter Eric Mason first met him, Richard Boehlke told him he was someone else. Spies do that sort of thing, don't they? Lie about who they are?

"It's interesting, in the first conversation that I had with him he denied being Richard Boehlke," Mason told us. "I asked him, from the description I'd gotten, I said, 'Mr. Boehlke, can I get an interview with you?'

And he said, 'Mr. Boehlke isn't here."'

"When I saw him again later, I said, 'Mr. Boehlke, I think you really need to speak to me. I've got some important questions for you.' He finally said okay, come on upstairs."

Rick Boehlke sounded like Rudi Dekkers in a Pendleton shirt.

"Boehlke owed retirement homes, pulled shenanigans, and got sued a lot," said Mike Picket, who owns an aviation business at the same small airport as Boehlke's bankrupt Crossings Aviation.

"He owned Crossings retirement homes. He got in trouble about something to do with a woman who passed away. He would do a lot for money."

Boehlke and Dekkers seemed too similar for it to be just a coincidence ... For example, Boehlke's aviation company was evicted from its terminal at Sea-Tac International for failure to pay back  rent. And Boehlke's aviation-related businesses didn't make business sense, either. "Richard Boehlke's former employees always wondered what the aviation business was really doing," reporter Mason told us.

"From the beginning they felt that the finances flowed from the real estate holdings and the retirement home into this aviation company, and that there was really no way this aviation company was really making money. So the question about what this aviation company was really all about still remains to be seen."

We have seen quite a bit of wondering about "what this aviation company is all about." About Dekkers and Hilliard as well. Then, too, Boehlke also was said to have often and inexplicably received blessings from the US government.

Did Boehlke have a 'Dutch Uncle', too?

Mike Pickett, of PAVCO Flight Center, owns one of the oldest aviation firms at the airport where Boehlke went bankrupt, and was very familiar with Boehlke's operation.

"The city gave this guy all sorts of favors," he told us.

Just like Rudi Dekkers.

We wondered why.

***

Boehlke's Harbor Air had invested $8 million in new planes to accommodate more passengers in 1999, for example, and company officials said 2000 was a profitable year. But the firm's debts had already mounted to the point where management just cashed out and split.

A Harbor Air employee could only speculate as to why the airline was going under. "Mismanagement of funds," said the employee. "(Passenger) loads have picked up tremendously. We have five or six flights in and out a day. "

"Mismanagement of funds."

"Only pretending to run a business."

***

Was Rick Boehlke an innocent businessman having a horrible string of bad luck? Or had he been feathering a bank account in the Caymans? Like Rudi Dekkers, all his companies were losers ... even his 'flagship' assisted living company.

"Even Boehlke's Alterra Health Care went sideways," said an aviation observer in Tacoma. "The stock went from $38 three years ago to 22 cents."

The 'cover' story we heard was Boehlke lost $40 million in the stock market. We thought, yeah, right. Boehlke lived in the San Juan Islands. Like Rudi, he owned a helicopter. He would use it, sources told us, to blow the leaves out of the yard of his house in Gig Harbor, on the Puget Sound. Boehlke had an expensive yacht. So did Rudi Dekkers ...

"Rudi has a $500,000 boat in Naples supposedly bought with Florida Air stock which is worthless, several planes, a helicopter grounded by the FAA for illegal parts and maintenance, a million dollar home, fancy cars, and lots of other toys," one scandalized Naples, Florida resident told us indignantly.

"Somehow he has all of these things and yet everyone of his businesses is a loser. He took cash from Huffman to pay the girl in the law suit. He intermingles funds between all of his businesses. He reportedly screwed Dale Krauss, former owner of an FBO at Venice airport which Rudi bought, out of 100K. He may even be in this country illegally."

It appeared that, for both of these men, crime had somehow been made to pay.

One difference was that Rick Boehlke was gay. We thought, at least we won't hear any stories about broom handle parties on his boat.

Then we learned he held orgies on his seaplane.

"For the 53 year-old Boehlke, the sun-drenched parties aboard his personal Grumman Albatross with friends in the San Juan Islands were supposedly over," reported the local paper in the San Juan Islands.

"His huge flying boat sits for sale at the Tacoma Narrows Airport in Gig Harbor, along with other assets from his bankrupt aviation company. Observers in Washington noted that he was not, however, running noticeably short of cash."

An aviation source in Tacoma told us, cryptically, "Money was being provided by the Mafia to smaller operators willing to do what needs to be done."

Speaking of the Mafia, the Mob, the Syndicate, and/or organized crime: Another grateful beneficiary of the money they were giving away in Portland from the retirement pension funds of the little people was a Boca Raton lawyer whose complex web of international connections was legendary.

Rick Boehlke's friend Jeff Grayson had made a $6 million investment with Title Loans of America, a Georgia company that lends to individuals with low credit ratings at extremely high interest rates. The loans are secured by the titles to the borrowers' cars.

Some call it legalized loan-sharking, which is pretty accurate, because Georgia Title is owned by Alvin Malnik, the man labeled in print as "Meyer Lansky's heir" so often he should put it on his business cards.

The New Jersey Casino Control Commission found Malnik to be a "person of unsuitable character" to have any role in the industry. Malnik was so intimately associated with organized crime figures that they denied licenses to two businessmen who had done deals with him. But it wasn't Malnik's gangster ties that made our jaw drop ... It was his connection with the Saudi Royal Family.

Alvin Malnik, who admits only to being a Jewish lawyer from Miami, has extremely close ties -- family ties actually -- to a leading prince of the Saudi royal family, King Fahd's brother, Prince Turki Al-Faisal.

Malnik's son, Mark, converted to Islam, changed his name to Shareef, and married the daughter of Sheik Al-Fazzi, whose other daughter is married to Prince Turki.

"The Saudi Prince not only blessed the marriage, but regularly works with the US organized crime associates," read one account.

"The Saudi King would frequently send his private 747 to Florida to pick up Malnik and his associates, so they could conduct business on the plane away from prying eyes."

In Miami, Malnik owns the Forge, a restaurant law enforcement sources call the biggest mob hangout south of New Jersey, attracting what one account called "men with big cigars and women with tiny resumes."

We wondered if Mohamed Atta ever smoked cigars there. As we have already seen, he and Marwan had been hanging out in the Miami area with women known to "consort regularly with high rollers."

An Islamic fundamentalist high roller sounds like a contradiction in terms.

We have been looking for evidence of a global network which authorities, early on, said must have been aiding the terrorists while they were in this country.

Boehlke, because of his proximity to terrorist flight school owner Dekkers and his concurrent participation in what the Securities & Exchange Commission has called "the biggest fraud by an in vestment manager in U.S. history," seemed to offer some clues.

Might the same "international network" responsible for stealing $340 million have been simultaneously training a terrorist air corps in Southwest Florida?

Reporter Eric Mason was thinking about it too.

"Boehlke received financing from Capital Consultants," he said, recapping. "And the financial officers of Capital Consultants, have been indicted on a number of charges, including fraud. Some labeled it a Ponzi scheme, and I think the prosecutors have made the case that there was a major fraud being perpetrated."

"And you have to ask yourself: where did all this money go? How much money can you lose and not have anything to show for it?"

Perhaps Rudi Dekkers, Wally Hilliard, and Rick Boehlke worked for s single unnamed airline, devoted exclusively to a very large client, a client -- after the pension fund scam -- more than $300 million dollars richer.

Call it 'Global Network Air.'

***

Lurking just beneath the surface of American life, it seemed, was massive corruption on an unheard of scale, presided over by modern-day Untouchables, members of an organization -- a global network -- operating well outside the law.

And getting away with it.

Tracking this enterprise, we sometimes felt as if we were watch ing the spotlight on a bathysphere playing across the dark shape of a giant octopus in the inky depths of the ocean, 20,000 leagues beneath the sea. It was fascinating, but also a little scary.

Of course, as with an iceberg, the real action's always down below the waterline ... Seafarers say the truly dangerous part of an iceberg is the unseen part.

And that's the part where the crimes of 9/11 reside ...

When President George W Bush said all evidence pointed to bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda organization as being responsible for the attacks, he equated the Islamic group to the Mafia. He said, "Al-Qaeda is to terror what the Mafia is to crime."

Said Naples jet manager John Villada, about Rudi Dekkers: "Everything that guy ever did, from 'a to z,' was illegal."

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