Reno Air Show Finds Leeward Side of Risk Taking

Jimmy Leeward Leaned On Questionable Tradition

by Winsip Custer CPW News Service

         The deaths of eleven spectators and pilot Jimmy Leeward should come as no surprise to organizers at the Reno Air Show says independent high performance air show investigative reporter John “Tickle” Torpidson of Sleepy Hollow, New York.

     “Just as NASCAR has a history laced with its connections to bootlegging and high speed car chases, so the sport of air racing has a history in fight or flight.  The fight part comes from the military component when planes are outfitted with machine guns for dogfights, but the flight part comes mostly from being chased and not necessary in military combat.  In the case of the Reno Air Races, the pilots often have criminal records for being drug runners,” said Torpidson.

     “Yes, it’s a fact of life.  Big risk takers often take risks on multiple levels and these planes are not cheap to fly.  On September 18, 1999 a year before the 2000 Presidential election that had the nation sitting on the edge of its seat chasing hanging chads in Florida, folks at the Reno Air Show sat on the edge of their seats when catastrophic mechanical failure sent air speedster and heir of the Levitz Furniture fortune, Gary Levitz, crashing to the ground.  Only Levitz died, but he had already shown the connection to the air race culture and drug runners.  He had been convicted with the infamous Whittington brothers, Don and Bill, who often flew with Leeward and Levitz,” said Torpidson.

     Gary Levitz’s father had employed the father of presidential speech writer, Peggy Noonan, and Levitz’s fortunes were made with the help of a Wall Street risk taker turned home beautification expert, Martha Stewart.   Steward was responsible for taking Levitz Furniture public.   “You don’t often connect lace doilies, cream puffs, cakes and sweet tarts with high speed airplanes and high rollers, but there they are side by side in this delicious confection of weird bedfellows,” said Torpidson.  “It's  the Junior League meets the back alley,” Torpidson said sipping his black coffee from a stainless steel mug.
     Reporter Daniel Hospicker has argued convincingly that Iran-Contra smuggler, Barry Seal, was a close associate of the Whittington brothers from Lubbock, Texas.  “Everyone knows the story of Barry Seal’s connection to Eugene Hasenfus whose downed Fairchild C-123 cargo plane, N4410F, formerly USAF 54-679, shot down over Nicaragua on October 5, 1986 blew the lid off of the Reagan/Bush adminstration's covert activities in Central America.  Hasenfus' credibility was tarnished though not neutralized in the Iran-Contra case by a June 2000 indictment for indecent exposure in a K-Mart parking lot in Wisconsin months before the Bush/Gore Florida standoff.  Busy summer....that run up to the GWB/Gore election, like major house cleaning," said Torpidson.   "Hasenfus' capture in Nicaragua and subsequent release by Daniel Ortega several years earlier triggered the Iran Contra investigation that led to the indictment of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, John Poindexter, Oliver North and others.  Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh, argued in his book, Firewall, that the Iran-Contra  investigation should have included the interrogation of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush,” said Torpidson who insisted that the connections from to top bottom are so transparent that “a blind billiard ball would have no trouble finding the deep pockets during a midnight blackout in a coal mine."

Reno Air Show fatalities, pilots Gary Levitz and
Jimmy Leeward.

    The public remains  a by-in-large sleepy and ignorant peanut gallery wanting to be energized by the buzz of the whirling blades and whizzing engines, says Torpidson.  "As long as they are, there will be those who will feed their desires for excitement and risk.  So they shouldn’t complain when the plane or NASCAR comes flying apart and falls into their laps.  I think the same could be said for the nation as a whole,” said Torpidson lamenting the losses he has suffered in the recent Wall Street bailout and throwing his mug of coffee against a shelf of books.
     As far back as 1978 this tight knit group of barn burners were zipping just feet above people’s heads.  The magazine Flight International recorded that year that …..

“The roar of engines Dopplered down the scale and the aircraft were gone, glinting in the sun as they arrowed towards Outer 6.  The field stretched out as the six lap race went on, settling down into their finishing positions. Well out in front was Bill Whittington, one of two air-racing brothers, in a beautifully finished but essentially stock P-51H.  Twenty seconds behind but never much more than a second apart were Confederate Air Force Colonel Lefty Gardner, the 1976 Unlimited winner, and furniture fortune heir Gary Levitz, both in P-38’s.  Next was Jimmy Leeward, who flew well to push the two Lightenings hard.”

   “That was then,” said Torpidson.  Eleven years before Levitz’s crash at the Reno Air Show that claimed his life and more than 30 years before Leeward’s disaster this week.  Meanwhile the folks on the ground are surely feeling like Harry M. Whittington…. taking a quick face full of buckshot from Vice President Dick Cheney while longing to see the birds in flight and trusting that the risk is minimal,” said Torpidson.