 |
Hajecate case appears in
Dr. Ingo Walter's book on
capital flight |
From the initial AP story the Miami
Herald, given the Fort Lauderdale connection, began its own coverage which
was quickly dropped. "McMahon", a key source in the initial AP article is never
identified. Those AP and Herald stories are as
follows:
Miami Herald, The (FL) - Sunday, November 7, 1982
Author: ASSOCIATED PRESS
More than 100 people
-- including organized crime leaders, Bahamian
government officials and international financiers -- are targets of an inquiry
into the laundering of billions of
dollars through foreign banks, a newspaper reported Saturday.
"Operation Lone Star" began two
years ago as an investigation of foreign laundering of money to conceal its
sources from narcotics deals. The project has expanded to include money from
questionable oil deals and coal tax shelters moving through foreign banks and
corporations and then being reinvested in U.S. companies, The Houston Chronicle
reported. It also has been marked by an alleged
assassination plot against a federal prosecutor and the murder of a witness, it
reported. The investigation by the U.S. Customs
Service and the Internal Revenue Service now centers on the Grand Cayman
Islands and the Bahamas, sources close to the inquiry told The Chronicle.
Targets of the inquiry include a Bahamian
financier, the accused ringleader of an international drug smuggling operation,
a Norwegian ship broker and international grain merchant, a Miami tax attorney
and a former vice president of a Florida shipping company allegedly used as a
front for narcotics smuggling, officials said. One federal official who asked not to be identified said there
were enough leads to occupy investigators indefinitely. Assistant
U.S. Attorney John Johnson resigned from the investigation last July. He had
been the target of an alleged assassination plot, the paper said.
The alleged plot, along with the murder of
a witness, were mentioned in an affidavit filed to obtain a warrant last May to
search the offices of two Houston oil companies, which have not been
identified. The body of the witness, Sibley
Riggs , 40, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., was found in the trunk of her car
last December. She had been beaten and apparently held under water until she
died, officials said. Riggs was
scheduled to testify before grand juries in Houston and Atlanta, McMahon said. Riggs
had sold luxury yachts to some Florida-based suspects, McMahon said. Some
yachts were used later in narcotics trafficking, he said.
BROWARD SLAYING LINKED TO OIL PROBE
Miami Herald, The (FL) - Sunday, November 7, 1982
Author: From Herald Staff and Wire Reports
Federal investigators
in Houston have linked an 11-month- old Fort Lauderdale murder
mystery to alleged drug and oil schemes involving the laundering of billions
of dollars.
Investigators say Sibley Riggs
, 43, of Fort Lauderdale, whose beaten
and strangled body was found stuffed into the trunk of her car at Fort
Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport last December, had been subpoenaed
to testify before a federal grand jury investigating the drug smuggling case. Authorities
have targeted more than 100 people, including international financiers and oil
resellers, in the case. The investigation was code-named Operation Lone Star,
the Houston Chronicle reported Saturday. The newspaper said the massive
investigation, which began as a probe of the Houston-based Uni Oil Co. almost
two years ago, blossomed into a probe of transactions through banks and
corporations, primarily in the Cayman Islands. The transactions involved money
from drug trafficking, crude oil reselling and questionable coal tax shelters,
authorities said.
Also targeted in the investigation, the
Chronicle reported, was Allen Rivenbark, a Fort Lauderdale shipping executive,
now dead. Broward County sheriff's spokesman Gary Gow said Saturday that Riggs'
death remains an open, unsolved case.
"We were aware of the connection with
the federal case," he said. "The detectives explored that angle but
were unable to turn up any concrete evidence while working with the federal
investigator. Riggs was killed a week after she was subpoenaed
to testify before the Houston grand jury, which at the time was looking into the drug
smuggling and money laundering case. A
divorcee who lived alone at 1625 SE 10th Ave., Riggs sold yachts for the Fort
Lauderdale office of Richard Bertram and Co. yacht brokers for several years
before her death.
The first Operation Lone Star indictments
are not expected for several months.Grand juries in Houston and Atlanta still
are hearing evidence about the case,which has been slowed because of reported
leaks by a former assistant U.S. attorney, a reported assassination plot
against another former prosecutor and the slaying of Riggs.
The FBI is investigating a 30-year-old
former federal prosecutor who is suspected of trying to sell sensitive
information to some of the targets of the probe. The prosecutor, who had been
with the federal attorney's office in Houston for three months, was fired by
U.S. Attorney Dan Hedges. No charges have been filed against him. The fired prosecutor's lawyer, Mike Hinton,
said his client -- whom authorities refused to name -- has appeared before the
Atlanta federal grand jury and is "cooperating fully."
The assassination plot against the federal
prosecutor was mentioned in an affidavit last May when authorities requested
permission to search the offices of two Houston-based oil companies -- Houston
Oil and Refining Inc. and HOR Energy Co. Uni Oil executives Thomas H. Hajecate and his
son, Thomas M. Hajecate, along with Miami tax attorney Lance Eisenberg, are
fighting a 1981 indictment on tax evasion charges. The indictment alleges they
concealed the Hajecates' interest in a Cayman Islands bank account. Eisenberg,
34, could be sentenced to as long as 15 years in prison and fined as much as
$30,000, or both, if he is convicted of helping the Hajecates evade income
taxes and smuggle $1.5 million into the United States by laundering it overseas.
According to the indictment, Eisenberg
helped the Hajecates falsify their 1976 income tax returns and aided them in
failing to report their transfer of $1.5 million to the Southeast First
National Bank of Miami. Eisenberg and the Hajecates claim their indictment
resulted from "prosecutorial vindictiveness" after a federal judge
dismissed an indictment accusing them of illegally mispricing and selling old
crude oil at higher "new oil" prices.
DEAD MEN AND
WOMEN TELL NO TRUTHS
Like
Barry Seal, Sibley Riggs died before she could give direct testimony in the Thomas
Hajecate or Operation Lone Star case relating her work at Richard Bertram's boat company in Florida
and to the drug and capital
flight issues linking Florida to Texas.
All of that was in 1981 and 1982 with evidence in the Hajecate case
withheld by the FBI's which claimed that 70 boxes of materials had been
misplaced in the middle of the upsurge in Iran-Contra reporting. This effectively shut down the investigation until
the Reagan/Bush White House could do damage control with the proper underlings
taking the fall and providing the umbrella under which the administration could
stand before a deluge from the bottom up as it rained down cats and dogs.
For Patrick Carr, the Texas pastor's son,
there was another non-serendipitous event that put him in great peril during
the 2000 Bush/Gore election. In May 1985
BBC reporter Martha Honey had written about a Fort Lauderdale born Iran-Contra
mercenary named Steven Carr whose story together with that of Barry Seal and Sibley Riggs painted an incontrovertible
claim: The U.S. government had become a
criminal enterprise and its wars were a racket.
Steven Carr had been unceremoniously jailed in Costa Rica believing that his work there had the backing of the U.S. and Costa Rican governments. Angered at the turn of events he spoke to reporter Martha Honey. Costa Rica whose Pacific Coast is dotted with United Fruit Company plantations would find that with the shift of banana imports from the Caribbean to Indo-China the company began developing its plantations into high priced subdivisions for sale worldwide, but the primary broker for the United Fruit land lived in Corpus Christi, Texas. United Fruit, Coca-Cola and other U.S. multinational companies were the strongest supporters of Reagan/Bush's Contra initiative.
Vince Bielski and Dennis Bernstein covered
Steven Carr's story leading up to his planned testimony in Marth Honey's libel suit. Like
Steven Carr, Patrick Carr's father had been born in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Had someone assumed wrongly that they were related? Bielski and Bernstein wrote:
SOLDIER OF FORTUNE
DIES MYSTERIOUSLY AFTER TALKING TO
CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATORS
by Vince Bielski and
Dennis Bernstein
A county coroner in Los Angeles has yet to
announce the cause of death of Steven Carr, a 27-year-old U.S. mercenary who has
provided Congress with much of what it knows about weapons shipments to the
contras. Had Carr lived, he was also expected to testify in federal court against
29 contra supporters allegedly involved in cocaine trafficking, an
assassination attempt on former contra leader Eden Pastora and a scheme to kill
U.S Ambassador to Costa Rica Lewis Tambs. While Detective Mel Arnold of the Los
Angeles Police Department said the department is investigating the possibility that
Carr was murdered, at this point he said there doesn't appear to be any
evidence of "foul play." But in the days before his death, Carr told
several people that he feared he would be assassinated. He was "very
paranoid and frightened" because of his role as a witness, Carr's sister
Ann of Naples, Fla., said.
Here
is what the police are saying about Carr's death. He died at 4 am on December
13 in a parking lot near his friend's apartment in Van Nuys, Calif., where he
was staying. In the predawn hours on
this Saturday morning, while his friend, Jacqueline Scott, was asleep, Carr
left the apartment for an unknown reason.
After spending an undetermined amount of time outside, Carr began making
noise which awoke Scott. Arnold said he
could not describe the type of noise Carr was making. Scott found Carr in the
parking lot, who was "distressed and having coordination problems."
Soon after he died from a "probable cocaine overdose." Asked if the
police found any physical evidence of cocaine
use in the area of the apartment or parking lot, Arnold said "no comment."
Dan Sheehan, an attorney with the Christic
Institute in Washington which filed the law suit against the 29 contra supporter,
said Carr used cocaine, but called him "an educated user." Martha
Honey, a reporter for the BBC, became friends with Carr while he was a
mercenary in Costa Rica. She said Carr was not the type of person who would
kill himself because he was under pressure. "Stevie was a survivor. He had
this ability to get himself in trouble but he always seemed to bounce back. He
had a great sense of humor."
The source of his fears were not just the
contra supporters whose alleged crimes he revealed, but also the U.S. government. Carr said that while he was in Costa Rica,
U.S. embassy officials threatened to jail him if he squealed on their contra
operation in Costa Rica.
In April 1985 Carr was arrested by Costa
Rican authorities for violating the country's neutrality and sent to prison.
Carr was one of several mercenaries based in northern Costa Rica on land owned
and managed by a U.S. citizen and reported CIA operative named John Lloyd Hull. Evidence from several sources suggests that
the contras operate what amounts to a military base on property controlled by
Hull as well as an airbase for the movement of cocaine from Columbia into the
United States.
While in jail, Carr spilled the beans
about the contra operation. To reporters, he claimed that Hull had told him
that Hull was the CIA liaison to the contras and was receiving $10,000 a month
from the National Security Council to help finance the operation. Carr told Honey why he was revealing such
secrets:"Carr said that the mercenaries had been led to believe that their
mercenary activity was sanctioned by top U.S. military and Costa Rican
officials. He was extremely bitter at having been arrested."
Honey compiled information from Carr and
other sources into a book focusing on the role of Hull and other contra
supporters in the May 1984 assassination attempt against Pastora in Nicaragua in
which a bomb explosion killed eight people and injured Pastora. Hull sued
Honey, and her colleague Tony Avirgan, for libel in May 1986. Carr received a
subpoena to appear at the trial, where he was to be a key witness for the
reporters' defense.
On
May 16, Carr was released from jail. He later described the events which took
place in his life over the course of the next week to Honey and an U.S.
congressional aide involved in an investigation of the arms supply network to
the contras.
Carr
said that Hull bailed him out of jail as a way of persuading him to testify on
Hull's behalf. Hull requested that Carr testify that the reporters forced him
to make the charges against Hull, Carr said.
That same day, Carr said he went to the
U.S. embassy to determine why he was arrested for participating in a war that
the U.S. supports. He said he met with two officials, Kirk Kotula, the counsel
general and John Jones, the acting chief of the consulate.
According to Honey's notes of her
conversation with Carr about his meeting with the officials, Carr said:
"The officials told me they knew all about Hull's contra operation and
they had me call him. He picked up the phone instantly, as if he had been waiting
for my call.
"They said if I go to court and
testify in your behalf I'll go to jail whether I tell the truth or not. I had
no choice in the matter. The embassy told me to get the hell out of Dodge or I'd
go back to La Reforma prison. They told
me that the bus to Panama leaves at 7:30 pm and to be on it," he said.
Carr spent the next three days staying at
Honey's house. On the night of May 19, Carr left the house to visit a friend,
and the following day, the U.S. embassy told the court that Carr was in their
custody and that he would appear at the trial, Honey said. However, Carr said
on May 20,following U.S. embassy orders, he took a bus to Panama, and with the
help to the U.S. embassy there, flew to Miami a few days later. Upon his
return, Carr was put in jail in Naples, Fla., for a prior offense.
Kotula said he had talked with Carr, but
denied the he had threatened him or forced him to leave Costa Rica.
"That's not true, at least by me. I did not threaten him with any such
thing. I couldn't do that, what would be the possible motive. I can't put people in jail and I can't get
people out of jail.
"I tried to convince Steve Carr when
I first met him not to go and join up with some bunch of guys. He was nothing
but a overgrown child who had read too many John Wayne comic books."
Jonathan Winer, an aide to Sen. John Kerry
D-Mass., said the Senator's office is investigating the matter. "There are
obviously some very serious questions regarding the U.S. embassy's role in
Steven Carr leaving Costa Rica," he said.
After Carr's return to the U.S.,
congressional investigators said they had planned on bringing him before
Congress. His testimony, based on his participation on a March 6, 1985 arms shipment
from Fort Lauderdale to Ilogango Air Base in El Salvador, would have linked
Felix Rodriguez--the ex-CIA agent who reportedly met with Donald Gregg, aide to
Vice President George Bush--to that weapons shipment, Sheehan said.
"He
is the guy that can prove that the March 6 shipment of weapons that flew out of
the Fort Lauderdale Airport went to Ilopango airport," said Sheehan. "He witnessed and can identify Felix
Rodriguez as the guy who off loaded the weapons t smaller planes which were
then flown to Hull's ranch in Costa Rica."
In early 1986, Carr and two other
eye-witnesses told federal authorities that several major players in the arms
supply network were involved in the shipment, including Tom Posey, head of the mercenary
group Civilian Materiel Assistance, Robert Owen, reportedly a liaison to fired
Lt. Col. Oliver North, and Hull, Sheehan said.
With no criminal indictment by October,
Sheehan alleged before a congressional committee that the Justice Department
had engaged in a "willful conspiracy...to obstruct justice....A number of
telephone calls were then placed to Mr. Kellner (the U.S. Attorney in Miami)
personally by Edwin Meese...instructing Mr. Kellner 'to proceed very, very,
very slowly' in any investigation of this case." Kellner has said he has
talked with Meese about the case, but denied Sheehan's allegations.
A grand jury has recently formed in Miami
to reportedly hear evidence about the March 6 weapons shipment. But the one
person who could have provided the grand jury with an eye-witness account that
the weapons were transported from U.S. soil to El Salvador--evidence which is
essential in making a case that the U.S. Neutrality Act and the Arms Export
Control Act were violated--is not testifying."
A great deal of the information Carr
provided did check out. It will now be harder for anyone to bring a prosecution
with Steven's testimony now unavailable, and I think that is very unfortunate,"
Winer said.
IRAN-CONTRA AND LOS ANGELES
Steven Carr had died in Los Angeles of a drug overdose before he like Sibley Riggs, Barry Seal, and Tilton Lamar Chester and so many others like Danny Casalaro, Paul Wilcher and Mark Lombardi, Don Henry and Kevin Ives, could shed light on the Iran-Contra operation.
On December 5, 2004 Patrick Carr's father had sent an email to well connected Presbyterian pastors showing many of the connections to the Iran-Contra tentacle running from Florida to Houston to Los Angeles including a statement that Gary Webb, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Dark Alliance, had nailed down the West Coast supply route, then been abandoned by the San Jose Mercury News owned as it was by Knight Ridder. On December 10, 2004, the anniversary of Patrick Carr's death, Gary Webb was reported to have killed himself with two shots to the head in his California home after telling friends that he was being followed and that if he turned up dead of a suicide, "Don't believe it." The LA coroner and medical examiner declared it a suicide.
Fabian Colbachi had a clear assessment of 27-year-old Steven Carr's odyssey. "No one was there to tell him that the government he thought he was serving was a fraud. John Lloyd Hull, the Contra organizer and supplier, would be charged by the government of Costa Rica with murder. He escaped to hide in a small village in Northern Nicaragua before fleeing to the U.S. where George Herbert Walker Bush stopped his extradition. Hull knew far too much about what Danny Casalaro called The Octopus, to send Hull back. The countries of Central America remember William Walker from his 1850's attempt to take over Honduras as his personal fiefdom after failing in California to appropriate Baja in an Aaron Burr-style filibuster attempt. Americans have forgotten, if they ever really new it, their own history. George Washington gave them liberty and freedom from tyrants. Now they are getting the product of their sloth: the secret government they deserve that thrives on ignorance, brutality and endless warfare," said Colbachi.
