TRUTH IN SEARCH OF A UNICORN

On Catching A Pinheaded Unicorn:
Steve Weinberg, Jeff Leen and Swinging Open the Unicorn Corral

By Buckley Wright Bragg for CPW News Service

       In 1997 Gary Webb appeared following the release of his book, Dark Alliance, at a Washington D.C. debate hosted by Steve Weinberg and the IRE, Investigative Reporters and Editors.

       Webb’s coverage of the growing U.S. crack cocaine epidemic had become the focal point of the nation’s leading journalists, of concerned citizens and especially the parents of inner city youth.  Webb’s opponent, Jeff Leen, was a student of the University of Missouri’s Journalism Professor, Steve Weinberg,  Professor Emeritus of the alma mater of Walter Cronkite. Weinberg moderated the event.  


Click box for video on the Iran-Contra cover up.

     Jeff Leen, an investigative journalist and editor for the Washington Post had moved to the Post from the Miami Herald in the critical year of 1999, just before the 2000 Presidential election in Florida that decided the arrival of the Bush agenda on the heels of the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act, ushering in deregulation, and the business and military bamboozling that some have called the "greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history." 
    Leen, like Steve Coll and Vernon Loeb, showed that his position was singular and clear in the Webb debate of 1997.   Webb had not done his homework, or so Leen said.    Leen had been in Miami, Florida before arriving at the Washington Post and he was sure that the flow of cocaine into the country did not begin in LA.    Webb, on the other hand, was also clear, decidely clearer,  about cocaine's distribution to the inner cities of the U.S. via the gangs of LA that had branched out with the influx of the drug to other cities and Webb traced his story’s development with well articulated clarity, conviction and supporting evidence all backed up on what was then the first web-based, evidence-supported layout accessible online to the general public.
 

The  Nov. 10, 1982 Green Bay News-Chronicle article by Ellen Tufts

showing Myron Du Bain and W.J. Hilliard in Wisconsin.Du Bain and Hilliard history

with American Express-Fireman's Fund, Wisconsin Employers Ins.

(WEG), W.J. Hilliard, President and co-founder. CLICK PHOTO TO ENLARGE.

      “Webb told how his unfolding story was triggered by a female acquaintance of  an LA cocaine middleman who was in jail and whose key witness against him, Danilo Blandon, had worked with the CIA.  The woman, Coral Marie Talavera Baca, had an interesting history with respect to the Carlos Lehder cartel from Colombia and she worked in the AIG office in San Francisco, AIG with its own history in the China Trade via Cornelius Vander Starr the AIG founder.  Webb relayed that Blandon would serve a fraction of his conviction and be hired by the DEA as an informant for about $150,000 per year after his release.   The woman, Coral Baca, was a family member of Norwin Mensese, the Contra-allied Nicaraguan drug trafficker and associate of Carlos Lehder,  a founder of the Medellin Cartel in Colombia, and she had visited Lehder's Norman's Cay in the Bahamas,” said Fabian Colbachi an independent freelance journalist who has followed Webb’s story and life ever since his resignation from the San Jose Mercury News on December 10, 1997.  "Michael Ruppert, the former LA cop who stood up at the Rep. Maxine Waters' and CIA Director's John Deutsch's town hall meeting in South Central LA that was meant to quell the anger raised by Dark Alliance said that the CIA had been dealing drugs for a very long time and then stated in his magazine, From the Wilderness, that Ms. Baca who claimed to be Carlos Lehder's wife was actually a fraud," said Colbachi.  

     Colbachi admitted that he didn't know whether Ruppert was a supporter of Webb or a name taker for the CIA.  "Why didn't this guy surface earlier and why was he so adamant that Webb's two shots to the head was a suicide?"  asked Colbachi who said that in his conversation with the father of Patrick Carr, a young man burned to death in his car near Ellington Field, that the father had contacted Ruppert asking for help.  "I told him in an email the whole story, told him I had it in writing and someone claiming to be his secretary said 'send us all you have and he'll keep it in his safe."   Ruppert came on the line.  To which the father said, "'A safe?   It's time for a revolution.' Ruppert said 'I wouldn't recommend it.'" said Colbachi noting that the father recounted the story in March 2006.

       Patrick Carr's father received a phone call from Ruppert later explaining that he was protecting an army officer, a woman, who needed a place to stay in Texas because she had become a whistleblower. A Texas minister and his family seemed just the place to "hide her out for a while." 

     With the conversation about putting the written account of his son's story in a safe the father refused and had no more direct conversations with Ruppert who would show up later in a couple of doomsday documentaries claiming he was broke while living in a town north of San Francisco not far from where Webb died.

       The father knew that he had struck a deep nerve not just after his conversation with Ruppert, but after he had called the mother of another young man burned to death in his car in Houston, Judith Dubose, a whistleblower on the GWB connected veterans support group, Helping a Hero. Dubose's replacement at the veterans' charity continued to have ethics issues, but was anything but a whistleblower. 

     "After my call I received a phone call from former Houston reporter for KTRH-TV, Wayne Dolcefino," said Pat Carr's father.  KRTK was the Houston station where Dan Rather had been the anchor in the 50's before moving to CBS News.   KTRK was the Houston rival to KHOU that had hosted the Joanne King Show of Joanne King Herring of Charlie Wilson's War fame.  Its longtime anchor was Ron Stone a member of Memorial Drive Presbyterian Church as had been Patrick Carr's father's family. "I called Peter Brewton who told me 'don't talk with the guy. You cannot trust him," the father told Colbachi who noted that the woman's son, Sean, had lived in Corpus Christi less than a mile from Pat Carr, but had also moved to Houston. They did not know each other, but Corpus Christi had a long list of Iran-Contra  personalities and supporters that show up in Brewton's book....Howard Pulver, John H. "Jack" Modesett and one that didn't, Modesett's close friend USN Commander Harold "Hal" Feeney, the number one and two in charge of U.S. intelligence at Guantanamo Bay Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion.  Modesett's daughter-in-law was Director of Public Relations and Communication for Enron Capital and Trade Resources in California when it opened up it marketing strategy for California in 1996 in the newly deregulated electric utility market.

     Jennifer Modesett had worked in California developing that state's key component to Enron's energy financial pipeline featured in the documentary Enron which also featured her co-worker in public relations and communications, son of U.S. Army colonel, defense and intelligence attaché, Rice University graduate and Hemmingway Fellow at the University of Idaho, Max Eberts.  Eberts had also overseen KPMG's Southwest region's audit proposal division as well as working at the KPMG's Global Energy Institute, positions that made the Enron insiders uniquely adept at understanding the legal implications of tax-related aspects of hidden profits.

     Pat Carr's father could look across his back fence and see the cemetery where John H. "Jack" Modesett had conducted Feeney's memorial service before he was buried in Arlington National and beyond was Santa Fe, the street where Sean Dubose had a previous address.  Sean's father, 35-year-old U.S. Army Maj. William T. Dubose had also died tragically while jogging in 1987 in Texas.   Sean was a graduate of Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, Texas a school with a long history with the U.S. Marine Corp and whose new President and CEO, Brg. Gen. Stephen Allen Cheney, had a close history with the CIA as evidenced by his affidavit in the Delaware lawsuit vouching for the work history of a former CIA agent  claiming that the agent had no actuarial history, an error that cost the county $100 million.

Patrick Carr who died on December 10, 2000
the anniversary of Gary Webb's resignation
from the San Jose Mercury News in 1997
and Webb's death in 2004.   His
body was found in his burning Bronco
near Ellington Field.   He had
the same name as the son of the key witness,
 Marian Carr Knox, in Dan Rather's 2004
Bush/Ellington Field story.
He had worked at the Austin company of
Rebecca Rather, Dan's niece and his
uncle was the fishing partner of Jim Bath's
attorney, William E. King.  Bath was GWB's
Texas Air National Guard roommate.

     The two young Corpus Christi men joined a third to die in a flaming car in Houston with ties to Corpus Christi, an associate of John H. "Jack "Modesett and Howard Pulver. It was Modesett's business partner, Ed Baker.  Ed Baker's and Jack Modesett's  business relationship was reported by Peter Brewton's investigation into the S&L crisis in the Houston Post.  Brewton  also wrote in his 1992 book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush (p.96):   "Houston real estate investor Jack Modesett, who had backed Ed Baker, the con man allegedly burned to death in his Jaguar, and had done business with Howard Pulver, headed the company that owned the Terlingua Ranch.  Modesett, who is noted for teaching a popular Sunday School class at the First Presbyterian Church in Houston and his father was in the oil business with Joseph Kennedy, denied any knowledge of the landing strip."   The landing strip was the one that Brewton's work would, as with Gary Webb's California connections, link directly to the CIA's drug dealings in Texas and it was this connection that Patrick Carr's father believed triggered Jeff Leen's reaction when Webb referenced Brewton in the 1997 debate. 

     Brewton documents that the Terlingua CIA airport was serviced by Great Western a Corpus Christi company.   On Great Western's records was listed John H. "Jack" Modesett, Harvie Branscomb the head of the Una Chapman Cox Foundation that funds respites for returning career U.S. Foreign Service employees and Charles W. Thomassson.  Brewton doesn't mention Branscomb, but by 2003 Brewton's son, an attorney like Branscomb was working in Branscomb's San Antonio office indicating just how close to the source of a convoluted enterprise were those running the Texas operation that mirrored Mena, Arkansas to the those who were reporting on it.  Branscomb was the son of the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University founded by Cornelius Vanderbilt, the ancestor of movie director of the 2015 film on the 2004 Rather/Mapes story about the GWB "memo-gate" issues, Truth, James Vanderbilt.

     Even fifteen years after Patrick's death, the father had written "John Updike said 'What is the past after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random shine.  When you've lost a child the past feels like a black hole threatening to inhale all of the light and with it your present and future."

     It was in Terlingua, Texas that the convicted Houston I-45 "program killer", Edward Harold Bell, was selling ranch land out of a Houston office before jumping his low bail set by a Houston judge for Bell's brutal murder of the brother-in-law of Houston Pontiac dealer and race car driver, Don Gay.    Bell fled to Manuel Noriega's Panama where he hid out for over a decade.    Like Bay of Pigs paymaster, Paul Helliwell whose Contra-connected bank, Castle Bank in the Bahamas shifted according to Brewton to the Isle of Jersey after Helliwell's death, Bell had run an offshore oil supply boat company out of Galveston, Texas.  Helliwell had an office of Miami-based American Bankers Insurance Company (Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil and War, 2003, p. 198) in Galveston.  Was Helliwell Edward Harold Bell's role model?  A fuller analysis of Helliwell's history with the OSS and CIA, who was succeeded by William Casey is covered by investigative journalist and University of California Professor Emeritus, Peter Dale Scott who placed Helliwell as paymaster of the Bay of Pigs invasion (Peter Dale Scott, The American War Machine, 2010, p. 285).  

     Another authority on Paul Helliwell besides Brewton and Scott had Corpus Christi connections. Sterling Seagraves attended Ray High School not more a mile from Harold "Hal" Feeney's home.  Seagraves wrote several books on U.S./China relations in the post-WWII era and one titled The Soong Dynasty about the three daughters of Charlie Soong each of whom married Chinese leaders... Sun Yat-sen, Chang Kai-Shek and H.H. Kung... three of the most powerful Chinese leaders in the first half of the 20th Century.  Charlie Soong's education was sponsored by North Carolina tobacco magnate, General Julian S. Carr.  One of Seagraves' books, The Gold Warriors, dealt with confiscated Pacific rim gold stolen by the Japanese and hidden in the Philippines until later removed by the U.S. and which never made it into Fort Knox, nor was it returned to its rightful owners who sued for its return.  Seagraves and his wife asserted that they had to go into hiding for a few years after the books was published, but then what could you believe?  Corpus Christi was the place to which the clergyman in Tennessee William's Night of the Iguana could not return and it produced the leader of the Heaven's Gate Cult that was going to catch a comet, Hale-Bopp, to outer reaches of the universe....the bug-eyed son of the Presbyterian pastor at Parkway Presbyterian Church, Rev. Applewhite, his boy, Marshall Applewhite.

  The Houston Chronicle reporter, Lise Olsen, was covering the Harold Edward Bell story that may well have led to the story of the unjust imprisonment of Michael Lloyd Self and his 2000 death in prison that included murders to which Bell had later confessed.   Self's case had been championed by Judge David Hittner who was the judge to have overheard the case of Robert Corson, son-in-law of Walter Mischer another key Iran-Contra player in Brewton's investigation,  to whose court Corson was traveling when he died.   Self had been convicted on the testimony of two crooked cops from Webster, Texas who were now in prison for bank robbery and there was the confession of Self, a man of limited intellect and with all the earmarks of a forced confession.  Self would have made a perfect magnet to attract attention from an I-45 psychopath like Bell, but Bell's psychosis would have needed outside cover and serious management.  In Self's case that management looked like it went all the way to the Supreme Court under Judge Hittner's apparent compassionate guidance which maintained that false confessions were not necessarily inadmissible evidence.  Neither did Bell's murder confessions of killing the young people along I-45 for which Self was charged prove admissible.  It was a win-win for silence. Lise Olsen was jerked from the Edward Harold Bell story, a story she had not been assigned, but came up with on her own, by  the Houston Chronicle  where Vernon Loeb had been imported from the Washington Post to become the Chronicle's Managing Editor.  True crime writer Kathryn Casey, formerly with the Houston City Magazine and Ultra the upscale regional magazine aimed at the rich and powerful whose castles were built on the profits of petro-chemicals, oil, sulfur, lead and exported wars was writing her book on the I-45 killing fields.  She had also written for Ladies Home Journal, Texas Monthly, Seventeen and Rolling Stone whose gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was not without his rumored involvement in the psychosis of  the American killing machinery.  "I like to kill," he told David Letterman.

     Gary Webb had frequently noted how difficult it was to pin down proof when dealing with a clandestine organization.  Webb covered this logical and difficult aspect of journalism by telling Jeff Leen when Leen demanded something like a written confession "I'm not in the proof business. I'm in the information business."  When Patrick Carr's father dug into the problem of finding out who killed his son, he ran into the same complaint.  "Texas Ranger Robert Garza asked 'did you see any drugs?"  When he talked with the protege' of the General Deputy of the FBI, Corpus Christi FBI Agent, Andy Walton, who like the General Deputy, had been a member of Patrick's father's church in Dallas, it was a game. Walton, more candid than Garza, said matter-of-factly, after hearing about what happened to Patrick and Russell Revell within 24 hours of each other...."It's a game.  It's all one big game."

       Peter Dale Scott and others had reported that William Casey's predecessor at CIA, Paul Helliwell, had run the American Bankers Insurance Co.  with headquarters in Miami, Florida also from a branch office in Galveston, Texas, but through a power of attorney whose specialty was bail bonding....something that came in handy for Edward Harold Bell who, having shot and killed a former Marine whose sister claimed that her brother, Larry Dickens, was a member of a Dickinson, Texas area motorcycle club, jumped his low bail and fled to Panama.  This seemed quite odd given that the judge in Bell's case had a long history of throwing drug dealers under the jailhouse, but who set Bell with a low bail for blowing away Larry Dickens in front of many witnesses in cold blood.  Was it Eugene "Mother" Chambers' Bandidos, from whose successor Patrick Carr's parents had bought their Corpus home?  Dickens' sister had married Don Gay, an I-45 GMC distributor and car racer who had sometimes traveled with Bill and Don Whittington who were implicated in the drug problems of Corpus Christi air racer, Gary Levitz, heir of the Levitz furniture fortune and who were later claimed by two Miami reporters to have been witnessed by Austrian intelligence agents flying their registered plane out of Guantanamo Bay Cuba raising the question...."What are Austrians agents doing with binoculars along the Guantanamo fence line?"



Miami Herald article on American Bankers Insurance Co. and Paul Helliwell
April 15, 1985.  Helliwell, a former OSS agent would be succeeded at CIA by
CIA Director and former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission,
William Casey, who was in business with Operation Lone Star defendant
Robert Vesco in hydroponics company in Louisiana.
(Click photo to enlarge)

     When Patrick's father pulled the records from the Galveston County courthouse for American Bankers Insurance he found out why Webb's concerns in finding any smoking gun documentation was so difficult.  America's secret establishment hides the truth under the cloak of national security as their ultimate firewall against citizen inspection and unwanted detection.

American Bankers Insurance Co.'s Galveston County power of attorney
documentation with Gerald Monks, founder, executive director and
first president of Professional Bail Agents of the United States (PBUS) and
signed by R. Spencer Douglass.  ABIC's Paul Helliwell was
succeed by CIA Director, William Casey, and Helliwell's
work with the CIA has been covered by respected authors
Peter Dale Scott, Sterling Seagraves and Peter Brewton.

      Hunter S. Thompson became the original gonzo journalist, one that puts himself in the story, of which it was said "Hunter is a moralist posing as an immoralist.  Richard Nixon is an immoralist disguised as a moralist."  Who knows what either really were.  Thompson took on the Hells Angels, but not the CIA.   When it came to the dark world of evil alliances into which Gary Webb was probing in 1995, 1996 and 1997, finding there the raw, un-insulated wire of the CIA's money sources and seeing another live wire in the shadows,  the exposed wire of Peter Brewton's 1992 S&L investigation with its meticulously drawn verbal diagram of connections to the same Iran-Contra network that Webb had found, was it any wonder that the Miami Herald's Leen had attempted in the 1997 debate to apply a generous wrapping of electrical tape to the wires in Webb's hands?  "You want a definition of gonzo? A real gonzo? Let someone kill Thompson's son and see where he takes it," said one follower of the Patrick Carr story in Texas.

     Brewton also documented that the CIA airport in West Texas was owned by Jack Modesett about whom Brewton wrote (p. 53):  "A partner and financial backer of Baker was Houston real estate investor Jack Modesett.   Modesett's company had owned land in West Texas on which part of a landing strip near Big Bend National Park used by the CIA was located." 





Marriage license of John Harvey"Jack"
Modesett Jr.'s son in Corpus Christi,
May 2013.  Jack Modesett, Jr. and
Commander Harold "Hal" Feeney had been
 in charge of Guantanamo Bay
during the Bay of Pigs. Jack Modesett, Sr.
was reported by Peter Brewton to have
been an oil production partner with the Kennedy
patriarch removed from his
Ambassadorship of Britain by FDR for his
Fascist sympathies, Joseph P. Kennedy.
(Click to enlarge).

     Ed Baker had married Mary Ann Walker from Corpus Christi and Modesett's son returned to Corpus Christi where he was married in 2013 by the uncle of the young man with whom Patrick Carr had talked from a pay phone outside of Banana Joe's Club on NASA Road One about an hour before his death.  This was the young man whose family owned land adjacent to the airport where Salem Bin Laden had died in 1988 in Cibolo, Texas in an inexplicable incident....a skilled jet pilot flying directly into a high power line, an incident falsely reported by CBS newsman, Lowell Bergman, as being Salem's BAC-111 jet.

     Patrick Carr's father made a statement about it: "When I read that Modesett's father had been Joseph P. Kennedy's drilling partner in Texas oil while Modesett, Pulver and Baker were connected to the secret base in Terlingua, I immediately wondered just why Patrick had been befriended in Austin, Texas by Diana Southwood Kennedy, the 'Julia Child of Mexico,' remembering that Child has been a member of the OSS and her husband was in the CIA.  Diana was a mainstay at the Austin eatery, Fonda San Miguel, where George W. Bush had proposed to Laura Welch after they moved to Austin from Midland to attend UT.  Pat delivered organic veggies to Fonda San Miguel as well as working with Rebecca Rather's trio of companies in Austin, Rather Sweet, Ellas and Ranch 616. 

    Pat Carr's father was outspoken.  "Texas' Secretary of State on-line records do not provide, as does some other states, an easy search for the agents and lawyers of corporations like Ellas, Ranch 616, or Rather Sweet.  You have to physically go to Austin to get the names of the earlier officers off of the actual records.  I had downloaded the names from the existing incorporation records in 2015, that matched names on the back of the business card, but as soon as the truth was published the incorporation records  at the Texas Secretary of States online site were updated and the names changed.  A Jeff Leen or his friends will find this quite advantageous in that unless the regional reporters have the means to travel the story goes cold quickly," said Pat Carr's father.  "In this case I got copies and the names on the incorporation records were  on the back of the business card so I included them in a letter to Peter Brewton and to Jeff Leen and read: 'Pat had written out her partner's names and numbers on the back of her partner's business card, Darryl Sneary....Kevin Williamson, Sharon Gerhardt.   Gerhardt's mother had been the clerk of the Texas House of Rep. for years!'   There was the link between Ben Barnes and his 2000 deposition in the memo story and Rebecca Rather's friend the daughter of the Texas House of Representatives secretary who would have worked very closely with Ben Barnes."



Diana Southwood Kennedy book
signed with note to  Patrick Carr
in Mexico in January 1998.
(CLICK PHOTO FOR STORY
ON KENNEDY AND FONDA
 SAN MIGUEL)

     He continued...."Patrick had visited Diana Southwood Kennedy's home in Mexico in 1998 and while I couldn't prove a direct connection to the New England Kennedys her husband, Paul, had been the reporter for the NY Times and The Nation who blew the CIA's cover on their secret training base at Retalhuleu, Guatemala that was preparing soldiers for the Bay of Pigs.  Not knowing any of this beforehand and arriving at the Presbyterian Church in Corpus Christi while being asked by Dr. Jack Stotts of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary to underwrite the Doctor of Ministry degree program for the head of the Reformed Church in Castro's Cuba would have.....should have..... come with Stotts' cautionary statement and advice, but didn't.  The tragedy of errors relative to the murders in Texas in 2000 showed us just how paranoid the U.S. intelligence apparatus has become....and ineffectual and criminal."



Patrick Carr's card from Rebecca Rather's "Rather Sweet" in
Austin where Patrick worked at both Ranch 616 and Ella's.
(CLICK PHOTO FOR AUSTIN CHRONICLE STORY)

    Texas had been important to Modesett, Baker, Pulver and other connections given Modesett's relationship to Harold "Hal" Feeney who with Modesett were the number one and two at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba during the Bay of Pigs.  The U-2 spy planes that flew over Cuba during the Bay of Pigs had flown from a base in Del Rio, Texas not far away.  The same type of funding operation that had underwritten the Bay of Pigs and opposition to Castro had likely morphed into Iran-Contra with some of the same players....only older.

    There was another important angle to the November 8, 1985 death of Edward Gerald Baker in Houston.  A story about him was carried on Unsolved Mysteries that first aired on October 7, 1992 just as Brewton was fighting to get his book published before the 1992 November Presidential election.   Ed Baker's second wife, Mary Ella Walker, was the daughter of Attie Mae Barnett Walker, a founding member of Corpus Christi's Parkdale Baptist Church, the home of the Corpus Christi "bug man" turned Congressman, Thomas Dale DeLay, who along with his brother Randall Lee Delay, had been married by Rev. Carr's Associate Pastor, Arnott Ward, at Jackson Wood Presbyterian Church (Tom to Christine Ann Farrh on Aug. 23, 1967 and Randy to Drucilla Lynn Carter on Aug. 13, 1971)    

      Brewton noted that the medical examiner had verified that it was Ed Baker's body in the car and whose wife said he had been killed by friends of either Leonard Capaldi or Alvin Malnik a protégé of Myer Lansky.  It has also been posited that Baker had staged his death in order to disappear into South America, a claim that could be easily verified by DNA analysis, today.

     It wasn't until after Patrick's death that his father looked more closely into the Corpus Christi community's love of Mexican cuisine like that championed by Diana Southwood Kennedy at Austin's Fonda San Miguel where Patrick Carr had a part-time job delivering organic vegetables.  Indeed, Erin Hicks-Miller had owned a restaurant in Corpus from 1991 to 1998 and while there were no direct links between Patrick Carr and Ms. Miller's business, her later book used recipes from her friends Shannon Wood Bush and Molly Mirkle who were among the book's recipe donors.  Shannon was the wife of Christopher Bush from Refugio, Texas, GWB's first cousin, who owned the large block of commercial real estate directly in front of Corpus Christi's First Presbyterian Church while Molly Mirkle became in 2013 the daughter-in-law of John H. "Jack" Modesett.  Erin Hicks-Miller had been a partner in Pepe's Mexican Restaurant in Corpus Christi's Gaslight Square where Randy DeLay had also had his restaurant before he went to work in Texas helping in the merger of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads.  

     More than a decade after Reconstruction, the Southern Pacific had transversed the continent.   It followed essentially the Jefferson Davis proposed rail route which he had laid out in the 1850's before the U.S. Civil War.  In Houston, the firm of Baker & Botts had been the Union Pacific's leading lawyers.  The Union Pacific went through Promontory Point  and roughly followed Russell's Pony Express route from Omaha to San Francisco.  Randy DeLay, under contract, took a hand in bringing the two competing routes together more than a century after their race to the Pacific had begun, interrupted as it was by the Civil War, controlled by two San Francisco businessmen, but also now drawing criticism of the merger's monopolistic nature.  In June 2005, Texas Monthly Magazine carried a Tom DeLay quiz which asked the question....

The Congressional Accountability Project, a Washington, D.C., watchdog group, claims that DeLay helped his lobbyist brother, Randy, in which of the following ways?

A. by submitting an op-ed piece to the Houston Chronicle arguing that Mexican companies should not be subject to dumping tariffs, without mentioning that his brother was a lobbyist for one such company  B. by working to win support for a merger of Southern Pacific Railroad with Union Pacific, a client of Randy’s C. by fighting to win congressional funding for Interstate 69 while Randy was representing the Pharr Economic Development Corporation, a consortium of four cities pushing for the construction of the highway. D. All of the above.  Answer: All of the above.

     Pat Carr's death and his father's subsequent readings led him to contact fellow professors of Mike White and William Gardiner, whose work on hydrogen fuel cells could have been seen as a Oppenheimer-type attack on the oil industry's monopoly on the world's energy supply.  Elements of this investigation are recorded in the article Wolf Dance In Gasland including the conversation with these two experts  in chemical kenetics who knew White and Gardiner at the University of Texas.

     Pat Carr, whose uncle was the fishing partner of William E. King, Mayor of Kemah, Texas and a member of Lakewood Yacht Club, where Shanon Bush sometimes sailed in J-class boat races,  Jim Bath's attorney/agent at Southwest Airport Services at Ellington Field, was also the grandson of a U.S. Marine who had served in two wars, who then went to work for another insurance company, Fireman's Fund, that began in San Francisco, California after the Great San Francisco earthquake. 

     President and CEO of Fireman's Fund was Myron du Bain, a leader in the Stanford Research Institute of the 1980's, the reputed model for the film, The Men Who Stare At Goats, and whose 1980's paranormal research included the fraud of an Israeli psychic, Uri Geller, who was exposed on national television, courtesy of Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, by Carson and the magician  The Amazing Randi, James Randi,  whose documentary, An Honest Liar, explored the Geller connection to SRI (Stanford Research Institute), the CIA and the U.S. intelligence apparatus.   The SRI "research" attempted to get tax-backed funding, but had to settle for private donations, like Iran-Contra used private donations not unlike funding from the private channels of Carl R. "Spitz" Channel.

     Myron du Bain had a  history with Wally Hilliard who was reported to have had a history with Rudi Dekkers, owner in Venice, Florida of the Huffman Aviation Flying School where Mohammed Atta was trained and who may well have been apprehended with the FinCEN investigation into Saudi influencing peddling in full force through the 1990's. 

     Not surprisingly, the mainline media did not carry the Dekkers and Hilliard connections to Huffman in Venice, Florida, but the outspoken LA cop that appeared at the Waters/Deutch town hall meeting in LA had joined with another alternative media reporter, Daniel Hopsicker, to carry the connection republished in Ruppert's From the Wilderness from Hopsicker's MadCow magazine which is where the connection stayed and for good reason when other reporters tried to unwind their alleged causal loop in Venice, Florida through Florida incorporation records. 

     Hopsicker stated "Orlando Executive Airport is also where Huffman Aviation's owner Wallace J. Hilliard's Learjet had been confiscated just months earlier, by DEA agents with guns drawn, after 43 pounds of heroin was found aboard. Hilliard also owns a flight school and commuter airline, Discover Air, there as well."  Peter Brewton had met with Daniel Hopsicker in Houston where Hopsicker was accompanied by the widow of Barry Seal, the murdered CIA pilot and associate of Iran-Contra pilot downed in Nicaragua, Eugene Hasenfus, who was flying Seal's plane at the time of the crash.  Brewton relayed the Hopsicker/Seal's widow-connection to Pat Carr's father in one of their discussions on Brewton's book and findings.  Hopsicker would produce his own documentary assessment of the drug connection to the U.S. government and to Gary Webb's coverage.

From Florida Secretary of State Office (click to enlarge)

     While Wallace J. Hilliard and Dekkers showed no signatures on the same incorporation records in the Florida Secretary of State website neither could this reporter  find Hilliard on the same Huffman Aviation, Inc. incorporation with Dekkers.   Was this the "deniability" that Gary Webb had assured his IRE audience that the CIA was always sure was in place?   Were Ruppert and Hopsickers agents of misinformation, nearly accurate information, semi-accurate information that provided a close, but easily disprovable alleged source and no proof. Otherwise, why hadn't Hopsicker and Ruppert done their homework?  The father wasn't trusting Ruppert after his conversation with him and by associtation Hopsicker, either.   There was the insurance link of Hilliard to du Bain, to the aviation industry in Florida and specifically in Naples only miles from Venice which would have put them in very close proximity, but not the smoking gun that joined du Bain to Hilliard and Hilliard to Dekkers and Mohammed Atta.  Dekkers, indeed the owner of the school where Atta, the 911 mastermind trained, was arrested for drugs in Houston, an odd occurrence for a Florida resident and reminiscent of the magnetism of the justice department's draw of parties in Operation Lone Star from Florida and Georgia to Houston.  Dekkers claimed he had unknowingly accepted a drug-stuffed briefcase in a sting operation that ruined his life and destroyed his marriage.

     Pat Carr did not have a chance to know his grandfather who worked across the street for his other grandfather at Union Texas Petroleum, the company founded by J. Howard Marshall.  Marshall had been FDR 's oil procurement official during WWII and editor at the Yale Law Review.  Patrick's maternal grandfather died of a heart attack at forty-eight, three weeks after his parent's wedding at First Presbyterian Church, Galveston, Texas in 1975.  This death left two young sons one of which would become William E. Kings' fishing partner.   He was also a boat insurer, but had also been a deck hand on the yacht owned by John Mecom.  The Mecom's owned Houston's Warwick Hotel by the Mecom Fountain across from the First Presbyterian Church where John H. "Jack" Modesett taught Sunday School and the Warwick  had been the favorite hotel of both the Rigg's National Bank owner, Joe Allbritton, with Riggs connections to the CIA's support of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and of Chicago mobster, Sam Giancana.  Brewton contributed about five pages to John Mecom's connection to the dark alliances in New Orleans and Houston (The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, pp. xxv, 15, 315-318) and one page to the FBI's Oliver "Buck" Revell about whom he wrote:  ".....Oliver North went to his old buddy Oliver "Buck" Revell, then Assistant FBI Director (and now special agent in charge of of the FBI's Dallas office) to try to stop an FBI investigation into Southern Air Transport's suspicious activities." (p. 115).  Revell was a parishioner in Carr's Dallas church.  His grandson died in Dallas of a mysterious suicide the night after Patrick Carr's death in Houston.

     It was in the fellowship hall of the Galveston First Presbyterian Church that Patrick's father had met Admiral Sherman Wetmore, the USN Admiral in charge of Project Azorian that had used Howard Hughes' ship, Glomar Marine, to raise from 16,000 feet a Russian submarine clearly demonstrating to the powerful oil and petro-chemical industry the depths of its abilities to extract crude oil from the sea bottom.  Project Azorian produced little reported intelligence about the raised Russian sub, costing the equivalent of about 2 billion of today's dollars, but the event was a landmark for deep water exploration.  In the meantime, Stanford professor and Hoover Institute fellow, Anthony Sutton, produced The Best Enemy Money Can Buy and other books that asserted, an assertion affirmed as accurate by Zbigniew Brzezinski, that over 90% of Soviet technology was exported to the USSR by the West, predominantly the U.S., thus making the Cold War a well choreographed political game raising the specter that even the Cuban missile crisis may have been an elaborate ploy to build consent for war in both nations, a method that two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Darlington Butler, defined in his book War Is A Racket.

     Sherman Wetmore had helped to create Texas A&M's merchant marine school in Galveston, while Hughes' first marriage had welded the Houston oil and rail establishments through his wedding to an heir of the powerful Rice and Botts families.  Did these powerful oil industry connections inform the attack of Rice President, Kenneth Pitzer, along with William Liscum Borden, on J. Robert Oppenheimer, who wished to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes while the oil companies argued increasingly that nuclear energy was too dangerous for civilian use and should be increasingly limited to powering nuclear ships that carried ever larger nuclear warheads?  Were these same concerns exploited to reduce the threat from renewable energy like hydrogen with at least two University of Texas experts in the development of the permeable membrane used in fuel cells recently dying, one by a witness-less biking accident and the other by inexplicable heart attack?  Was fuel-related-academia being held hostage like Copernicus and Galileo or like the global warming debate locked out of Houston's education system and museums?

     Patrick's father wondered.  Botts was the Botts in Baker & Botts Law Firm of Secretary of State James A. Baker, the company from whose ranks George W. Bush had put in place at FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Pat Wood, III, whose anti-energy-regulation at FERC led directly to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's rape of California by the Enron business model of scorched earth, extreme-Darwinian capitalism, laying bare the growing attack on a balanced social-capital environment that had made America great.  Corpus Christi resident, Molly Hipp Hubbard, had moved to Houston to become the Director of Special Projects at Rice University's Baker Center for Public Policy.  Among her special projects was not the funding of education or museum exhibits about global warming that nearly 100% of scientists argued was real, human-made, and from carbon and fossil fuel-based pollution. 

     Across Main Street the local Houston museum carried nothing on global warming while school students walked amid fossil bones and wondered at the distant galaxies at the Burke Baker Planetarium.  And why should there be?  Dominique De Menil was the heir of the inventor of the first oil charting device for petroleum discovery adding scientific analysis to a process previously akin to holding a divining rod.  From the Conrad and Marcel Schlumberger fortune she underwrote the Contemporary Art Museum nearby where both Mark Lombardi and celebrated novelist Donald Barthelme worked.  From that vantage point it would have been easy for two bright minds to analyze the cultural climate as Mark Lombardi did relative to the Iran-Contra network in graphic design and as Peter Brewton had done journalistically at the Houston Post, nearly derailed by Simon & Schuster with what Brewton felt was influence from Bush associate and friend, Hugh Leidtke of Pennzoil. 

     Pat Carr's father's interests following the death of his son near Ellington Field and the Bin Laden's Houston airports were drawn to the Walsh Report on Iran-Contra.  Corpus Christi was as central to Iran Contra funding as it had been to the retirement place of Guantanamo Bay's chief officers, Harold Feeney and Jack Modesett.  "Spitz" Channell was the leading Iran-Contra money man about which the report stated... "Beginning in January 1986, Channell through Fischer was able to set up private meetings with the President for the top contributors, who included Barbara Newington, Fred Sacher, Mr. and Mrs. David Warm, Ellen Garwood, Hunt, May Dougherty King and Robert Driscoll.  Fischer said he set up photo opportunities for donors with the President through the Office of White House Chief of Staff Regan."  Hunt was the wealthy Presbyterian Hunt brother from Dallas whose pastor was Clayton Bell the brother-in-law of Rev. Billy Graham who when The American Mercury Magazine was acquired from H.L. Menken by McAllen Texas' Jason Chilton Matthews did a 180 degree ideological shift from left to right and incorporated Graham's writings. Bell was also, not surprisingly, the pastor at H. Ross Perot's Highland Park Presbyterian Church.  Perot had sent a team to Missouri to interview Gunther Russbacher who claimed special knowledge of the 1980 "October Surprise".  He had also gathered the support of Bush/Armitage critic, Col. Bo Gritz.  









The  Nov. 10, 1982 Green Bay News-Chronicle article by Ellen Tufts showing Myron Du Bain
and W.J. Hilliard in Wisconsin.
Du Bain and Hilliard history with American Express-Fireman's Fund,
Wisconsin Employers Ins. (WEG), W.J. Hilliard, President and co-founder (Click to enlarge).



     May Dougherty King was May Dougherty Carr King from Corpus Christi whose Ocean Drive home was a stone's throw from Pat Carr's house and from Harold "Hal" Feeney's and John H. "Jack" Modesett's houses.   Was Marian Carr Knox aware of the Ellington Field connection to the historic I-45 smuggling route from Houston to Galveston alongside of which was Ellington and Houston Gulf Manor Airports and the Houston ship channel to the Gulf of Mexico and regions beyond...China, Central America....Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and the whole world? What was the recurrence of the family names among the players indicating?

     Pat Carr's father wondered if his house, previously owned by the President of the Bandidos whose founder from San Leon, Texas not far from Ellington Field and the Bin Laden's Houston Gulf Manor Airport, ex-Marine Eugene "Mother" Chambers,  had also, according the Harris County marriage records, been married in Houston by Rev. Phineas Washer at St. Stevens Presbyterian Church near Hobby Airport (Harris County license #435010177, 1966) , the airport along with Bush International and Ellington Field that found Gregory Howard Walker becoming the security chief.  Walker was the private investigator recommended by FBI Deputy Director and friend of Oliver Revell, Houston Judge Julie Mogenis, daughter of Robert Mueller's close colleague at FBI, Bronislaw Mogenis, then a security chief at Lockheed Martin.  "Walker told us that it wasn't our fault that Pat died.  Then he took six months to find us the name of the last person to talk with him, a woman named Careen who turned out to the be the wrong woman,"  the father told Colbachi.  Walker had purchased his Houston home from Leonard Capaldi (Harris County Clerk file # 006731909), about whom Brewton said was a member of the Detroit mob (Brewton, pp. 50-53, 75, 228), an associate of Ed Baker, Modesett's business partner, and tied to Houston's Mainland Savings...another  major player in the S&L scandal. 

     Dolcefino's contact opened for the father another avenue of concern.  Appearing at the Helping A Hero fund raiser in 2014 was GWB and William E. King, the business partner of James R. Bath and attorney with Bracewell & Giuliani.  Helping A Hero paid Bush $100,000 for his speech inviting broad criticism on top of the already questionable activities of the charity.   King was there front and center, too, and was the fishing partner of Pat Carr's uncle and Mayor of Kemah, Texas where the Kemah Boardwalk was leased from Melanie Wiggin's family by Tillman Fertitta, whose father had run the restaurants and clubs for the Maceo family, the well established Texas connection to Carlos Marcello's New Orleans syndicate.  Then there was the wedding in Midland's First Presbyterian Church, the congregation of GWB and family in Midland, between a grandson of the Fertitta patriarch from Beaumont, Texas and a grand niece of Hugh Liedtke, the Pennzoil founder about whom Peter Brewton had said was the most likely board member of Simon & Schuster directors to have derailed his 1992 book. 

     Pat Carr's father had been to Sumner Redstone's Houstonian in 1988, the high rise condo in Houston where GHWB maintained his Texas residence for political purposes.  It was there that he incidentally met a member of the Carollo family that preceded Carlos Marcello as head of the New Orleans Mob.  It was at the Houstonian that William E. King, Bath's business partner, had purchased the apartment of a previous owner named Maria Sada.....a name familiar to the father from his readings. 

     A Maria Sada had owned a well-known hotel along the West Texas smuggling route near Marfa and Lijitas," said Colbachi.  "Was this a trophy condo not unlike Donald Rumsfeld's purchase of Maryland's Misery Plantation where Frederick Douglass was "renditioned" before being returned to slavery?  Douglass, formerly Frederick Bailey, had laid the hulls of opium cutters in the Gardner Ship Yard in Baltimore according to Thomas Layton author of Voyage of the Frolic.  Is this why Dan Rather, whose family owned the historic Nassau-Waldec Plantation where the Union Buffalo Soldiers picked up Jefferson Davis' idea of a camel caravan across Texas to San Diego and Los Angeles, also co-owned a ranch in New Mexico with Rumsfeld at the same time Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were doing a CBS documentary on Abu Ghraib claiming in 2004 that they had broken the story previously told by Amnesty International in 2003 for which the New England Brahmin publishing power, Peabody, gave Rather and Mapes a Peabody Award? Colbachi wondered.

     Pat Carr's uncle had in the early 1980's been a deckhand on the yacht of a Houston businessman, John Mecom, about whom Peter Brewton wrote along with Mecom's friends Morris Jaffee and Oscar Wyatt whose wife was, like Joanne Herring, a Houston socialite...."Jaffe also came into the oil business with his buddies Oscar Wyatt, the cantankerous Texas oilman who went to Iraq with John Connally during the Gulf War....John Mecom, Sr., the rich Houston oilman whose son, John Mecom, Jr. allegedly hobnobbed with mobsters." (Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush," p. 314).      

     Wyatt is remembered for pleading guilty in 2007 in the Iraq-based UN "oil for food" scandal.  Mecom, on the other hand, owned Houston's Warwick Hotel across the street from the First Presbyterian Church where Jack Modesett taught Sunday School and just down Main Street from the Contemporary Art Museum where Mark Lombardi worked when charting his artwork of the Iran-Contra connections.  Sam Giancana stayed at the Warwick when he visited his physician, Dr. Michael DeBakey and Brewton noted that when Carlos Marcello came to Houston he stayed at Mecom's Warwick Hotel (p. 317).   It was also the address on the Harris County marriage license of Riggs National Bank's owner, Joe L. Allbritton (Rm. 927, license # 435120781).  Riggs is the Washington D.C. bank with longstanding ties to the CIA.  Riggs had made a $9 million payment to Chile's Augusto Pinochet and had to make restitution payments to Pinochet's victims (Terence O'Hara, "Allbrittons, Riggs to Pay Victims of Pinochet," The Washington Post, February 26, 2005).  It was also investigated by the FBI for Saudi connections to the 911 attack.  Allbritton had helped build the highway linking Houston to Galveston, the I-45 Highway along which Ellington and the Bin Laden-owned Houston Gulf Manor airports were located beside the Houston ship channel.

      With Peter Brewton piecing together his side of the Iran-Contra story in Texas, in California, Webb's research had been verified by U.S. Congresswoman, Maxine Waters, who laid out her investigation (video 48:00 following).  Waters had Webb appear before a Congressional Committee.  The Congresswoman was hardly an impartial observer, but certainly a serious and engaged observer.  Ricky Ross' cocaine marketplace headquarters was, after all, Ms. Waters' District.  Webb appeared on CSPAN to talk about his findings.  Did Waters not know what Webb had discovered and what Ruppert claimed was going on in LA for a long time?  It begs the question.

     Colbachi continued his research following the death of Patrick Carr who died in Houston near  Ellington Field on December 10, 2000.  The date rang a bell.  Then with Webb’s supposed suicide by two shots to the head on December 10, 2004 just after George W. Bush won the 2004 election on the heels of the Dan Rather and Mary Mapes story that became known as “Memo-Gate” it rang another bell, in fact, a carillon of bells.   "Memo-gate focused on George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard record at Ellington Field back in 1972, a story that is the subject of the new film to be released on October 16, 2015, starring Robert Redford, Truth.  When Pat Carr's father read that Mary Mapes knew of the Bush Air National Guard story at Ellington Field in 1999 and didn't report it before the 2000 election, four years before its airing and that Marian Carr Knox's son was also named Pat Carr there was rekindled a new fire to solve the arson/murder cases in Houston....cases reported, like Webb's death, as suicides or accidents.

     Pat Carr died on December 10, 2000, on the eve of Al Gore's withdrawal from the Supreme Court battle deciding the Florida "hanging chad" case.  Pat Carr had the same name as the son of the key witness in the Rather/Mapes “Memo-Gate” story in 2004, who had come to the defense of his mother when she was attacked by former Bush Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi of the Associated Press. 





Dick Thornburgh, former
Attorney General who visited
Marian Carr Knox with former
head of the Associated Press,
Louis Boccardi.  Thornburgh
had his own issues with memos...
"The Thornburgh Memo" that
assaulted attorney/client
privilege.  Thornburgh also
attacked former FBI Director
Louis Freeh's investigation into
the Jerry Sandusky scandal for
Penn State.  Freeh had been
replaced at the FBI by
Robert Mueller
who had championed the
"Thornburgh Memo". Click
photo for Thornburgh on Freeh.
(photo public domain)



     "The young man who was found in his burning Ford Bronco near Ellington Field was very close to a facility that has had a long history with the CIA and even with an earlier drug connection, not to Colombian cocaine, but to Middle Eastern opium sold in China by the Chinese Green Gang that supported Chaing Kai Chek whose pre-WWII air support came from General Claire Chennault," said Colbachi.  Those drugs originated in the Middle East's Golden Cresent of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India and, of course, Afghanistan.

General Clair Chennault from
Commerce, Texas.  Because of
Chennault's relationships during
WWII, his decoration was opposed
by a number of key U.S. military
leaders including General
Henry Harley"Hap" Arnold.
(Photo courtesy U.S. War
Department).

 

     "Chennault’s leading fighter pilot was David “Tex” Hill who would become the head of the Texas Air National Guard based at Ellington Field,” said Colbachi who sees the Gary Webb story as part of a much longer history of the U.S. that is now steeped in an alternate mythology.    “Before  the 1980's Iran-Contra affair and Peter Brewton's 1992 book that meticulously laid out the connections between Iran-Contra operatives and the savings and loan scandal,  and long before Webb's 1996 book based on the same Iran-Contra connections there was the historic push West across the Great American Southwest by Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, a close friend of the U.S.’s leading opium smuggling family, that of John Perkins Cushing and Caleb Cushing from Boston,” said Colbachi noting their well documented support of the leading Ivy League repository for the future OSS and CIA members, Yale University.  "That this alternate mythology is localized in Texas with Gary Webb pulling on the California fiber of a well-connected tapestry and this alternate reality gives the background for Webb's highly volatile and accurate reporting," according to Colbachi. 

David Lee "Tex" Hill, son of
Presbyterian minister from
San Antonio, Texas, Rev.
Pierre B. Hill.  "Tex" had
served as head of the Texas
Air National Guard. (photo
public domain).

     "Domiciled for fifty years at Rice University, Houston where JFK gave his 'we're going to the moon speech' and where the key opponent of Robert Oppenheimer's vision of peaceful nuclear energy, Rice President Kenneth Pitzer, whose testimony before the Gordon Gray Committee (son is Bush White House counsel, C. Boyden Gray, both heirs of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company) caused 'Oppy' to be stripped of his national security clearance while ratcheting up the nuclear debate and protecting big oil, historian Frank Vandiver sat over the letters of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, to Franklin Pierce.   Found among them is one which ruminated on their close brotherhood with Caleb Cushing from Boston.  Cushing had negotiated the first U.S./Chinese trade agreement, but little has been made of the connection and certainly not by Vandiver or his colleagues at Rice.  Cushing would be accompanied on his trip to China by William Tecumseh Walthall whose family members would become ministers in the San Antonio church of David Lee "Tex" Hill.   This was also the congregation of Texas Attorney General Dan Morales who attempted to cut out for himself a piece of the monumental Texas tobacco settlement.  The Wanghia Treaty that Cushing negotiated was based on the notion that the U.S. would not do to the Chinese what had been done to them by the British, dumping Middle-Eastern, Golden Crescent, opium on their people as a trading chip. This foreign policy blunder led directly to the Chinese Cultural Revolution  and is as mind-blowing as the failure of the U.S. to properly handle its relationship with the USSR following the fall of the Berlin Wall.  

     If modern journalists have failed to adequately report the fictitious War On Drugs as Gary Webb believed, the U.S. historians have, likewise, failed to report the opium, railroad to the Pacific and U.S. Civil War nexus that is background for understanding what happens to serious Fourth Estate investigative journalists who seek to shed real light on these dark alliances.  The hero of the big tobacco story was Lowell Bergman played by Al Pacino in film The Insider. Bergman also reported falsely that Salem Bin Laden's death at Cibolo, Texas just outside of San Antonio was in his BAC-111 jet when it was in a borrowed ultra-light that flew inexplicably into a high power line in 1988 after he and Jim Bath and Khalid Bin Mahfouz purchased the Gulf Manor Airport in Houston near Ellington Field.

      Every day some of the nation's leading historians.... Vandiver and Douglas Brinkley among them.... have walked by Robert Herring Hall on the Rice campus directly adjacent to the Jefferson Davis papers in the heart of a campus that is named for the father of the daughter of Howard Hughes' first wife, Ella Botts Rice.  Hughes not only took part in the 0SS's early missions with the building of spy planes, but provided the Glomar Explorer, the ship that lifted a Russian submarine from about 16,000 feet of frigid water, five times the depth of the Deep Water Horizon disaster.

     Robert Herring was the husband of Joanne King Herring, whose pressure on Texas Representative, Charlie Wilson, fueled the war against the Russians in Afghanistan through the recruitment of Al Qaeda as freedom fighters with the Mujahedeen.   The Muslim Brotherhood spawned Al Qaeda in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak.  Al Qaeda  then used the chummy relationship between the Saudi royals and Houston's oil companies to fly up the nation's unsecured transportation pipeline to the World Trade Center with fifteen of the 911 hijackers coming from Saudi....no Iraqis among them.  "Our best minds are being held captive like Copernicus and Galileo, but by the oil cartel from whose nipple we must be quickly weaned, or so the world's brightest scientists are telling us," said Colbachi.  

     Salem bin Laden owned the Houston Gulf Manor Airport, the favorite private airport of NASA astronauts, purchased by James R. Bath and the Saudi royal banker, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, at a time when the FinCEN investigation into Saudi influence peddling in the U.S. received a stand-down order in 1992, the year that Peter Brewton's book was to have been published by Simon & Schuster.  

     "The 23-year-old Pat Carr who died near Ellington Field between the Bath (Ellington) and Bin Laden (Houston Gulf Manor) airports a few miles away had grown up in the Houston church of Edgar A. Smith whose company, Alamo Barge Lines, was purchased in 1985 by Robert Herring's company, Houston Natural Gas, before HNG became Enron.  Enron, of course, everyone knows as the poster child of U.S. capitalism run amuck in the aftermath of the 1999 repeal of Glass-Steagall and the 2000 arrival of GWB whose business connections to Enron, Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling have been well documented," said Colbachi.  Colbachi noted that Pat Carr's father had traced persons from the Hajecate boat that his son had been on the night of his death to a house adjacent to the Bin Laden airport in League City, just south of Ellington Field. The Bin Laden airport was razed after 911. 

     The Port of Houston's largest client in the 1980's was Iraq that received FDIC guaranteed loans under a U.S. agriculture program that found the funds being spent on weapon systems in Iraq's war against Iran that killed millions.  Talk of Iraq-gate included the Vinson & Elkins related First City Bank with the Vinson & Elkins law firm being the attorney for both First City and Enron.  When First City filed for Chapter 11 along with other S&L Scandal banks of the 80's the restructuring included 50% of its common stock going to a Waco company named J-Hawk of which Ed Smith was a major stockholder.  In fact, First City Bank had evolved from J-Hawk in Waco.  A Lebanese American banker from Boston and Chicago, A. Robert Abboud, sometimes called "Rude Abboud", figured prominently into the conversations about the build up of U.S. weapon systems in Iraq before the invasion of Kuwait, but nothing was proved.  Noting Houston's place in supplying Iraq, Abboud's attorney argued that Abboud was out of the loop when the scandal came.   J-Hawk had another distinction.  It had figured into what became known as the Hamilton Securities Case pursued by a whistleblower at HUD, Catherine Austin Fitts, the HUD Undersecretary.  A twelve page letter outlining the case was sent to Senator Fred Thompson, head of the Governmental Affairs Committee showing a pattern of fraud in the S&L industry.  Thompson's firm had been the attorney for Farhad Azima, the key Iranian middle-man in the Iran arms shipments whose Buffalo Airlines Peter Brewton had traced to Waco, Texas (Brewton, 199-208) which, perhaps not incidentally, was home to the gun dealing religious cult The Branch Davidians in McClennan County,  home to the Bush Crawford White House.  Taking over the Branch Davidian affair from the ATF  was former FBI Deputy Director under William Sessions and GHWB, Oliver Revell, from Pat Carr's father's church in Plano, Texas and whose grandson died the night after Pat Carr in Dallas.  (For a fuller discussion of First City Bank see Eustace Mullins).

     Concerned that his son might have stumbled into a hornets nest of criminality and political intrigue the father phoned a colleague in ministry who had reason to know the Bush family inner workings.  He called Rev. Joseph Gossett who had conducted the wedding of Neil Bush's ex-wife, Sharon Jones Bush, to John William Mahoney in 1987.  "Be careful," said Gossett who recollected a story about a Houston builder hiding out "somewhere in Eastern Europe like Serpico going to Switzerland," said Colbachi. 

     "I didn't have the heart to tell the father that moving from the Serpico Commission in New York was the FBI's Brian Bruh to the FinCEN investigation that stood down on the Bath investigation in 1992 or that the then 23-year-old New York DA for the Knapp or Serpico Commission was a young lawyer named Rudy Giuliani  who would move to Houston's Bracewell & Patterson law firm to become Bracewell & Giuliani that employed not only William E. King, Bath's partner at Ellington Field, but also the sister of the DEA Director whose husband was a best friend of the FBI Deputy Director whose grandson died in Dallas the night after Pat Carr near Ellington Field," said Colbachi.  "I am especially concerned that arson was used in Houston to cover the crimes and that in Pat Carr's case a van that looked identical to the Houston Fire Department's crime scene van had come and gone from the scene of Patrick's death the hour before his body was found, seen by a group of students gathered at a nearby park.  They were adamant that they could not have confused the two vans since one had three or four men in it and was at Clear Lake Blvd and El Dorado between 10:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m..  The crime scene van arrived about 1:00 a.m. according to police reports and the students' account.  Amazingly, William E. King works closely with the Houston Fire Department while his fellow attorney at Bracewell & Giuliani, Patrick C. Oxford, is working overtime to privatize the firemen's pension fund," said Colbachi who also noted the anger of many New York firefighters for the lack of leadership by Mayor Giuliani prior to and during the 911 disaster.

     Colbachi also noted that Edgar A. Smith's brother, Weldon Homer Smith, a lifelong Presbyterian and board member of Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary,  as well as an elder like his brother, Ed,  in Patrick Carr's home church, had strangely been eulogized at Houston's St. Martin's Episcopal Church, home of ex-President, George Herbert Walker Bush, and not in a less oligarchical Presbyterian congregation.  This is also the congregation of Jimmy Joste, a pioneer in directional drilling, whose wife shot and killed him in Austin, Texas claiming self-defense and a bizarre Joste/Bush connection.

      As to the California and Texas connection.....“Carlos Lehder had imported the cocaine through the Bahamas and his California partner was George Jung, whose character was played by actor Johnny Depp in Blow, but Gary Webb had not connected Lehder’s supply line at Norman's Cay to a similar island transfer station at Darby Cay, that involved Tilton Lamar Chester (http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1985-06-22/news/8501250244_1_plane-crash-federal-investigation), a key personality in what would become known as Operation Lone Star for its focus in Texas, specifically Houston, but also in the Bahamas, Florida and Georgia.   Robert Vesco had figured prominently in both of Ledher’s Bahama island drop shipping points.    Vesco was in partnership in a Louisiana hydroponics company called Multiponics with CIA Director and former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, William Casey (Alan A. Block, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Servicein the Bahamas, p. 149).  
     As head of the Securities and Exchange Commission William Casey had asked New York Judge Stanley Spoorkin to halt a probe into Multiponics and the Vesco connections to this and other business dealings. Spoorkin was the CIA's General Counsel during the Iran-Contra case.
     Frontline carried an interview with Carlos Lehder's PR man, Carlos Toro, who said that U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, knew about the operations in the Bahamas but did nothing about it.  Meanwhile, there appeared to be a concerted effort to cover-up the fact that murders along the I-45 Houston smuggling route were random events and that what had become known as "the most dangerous road in American" was simply a fluke.  The attempt to deflect attention from this road included books by Kathryn Casey who had, according to Houston Chronicle reporter Lise Olsen, taken over the Houston Chronicle's investigation into the killings of "program killer" Edward Harold Bell after the arrival of the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb.  Another denial of the I-45 smuggling connection came from DEA's Don Ferrarone and his consulting work for the film Texas Killing Fields.
     Carlos Ledher would become the key witness in the U.S. case against Panama's Manuel Noriega for which some unsubstantiated reports have circulated as to Ledher's receiving an early prison release, while former CIA agent from Angleton, Texas, John Robert Stockwell, reminded the nation that Noriega had said "I have George Bush (GHWB) by the balls."

     Darby Cay was purchased by a member of the New York Columbo crime family named Thomas Ralph Farese (from Tuscaloosa News, June 10, 1984).    
     The organized crime connection is one that Webb obviously suspected, Robert Vesco showing up in the post-mortem book by Webb's son Eric, The Killing Game: Selected Writings By the Author of Dark Alliance, but Gary had not yet tied the LA gang distribution problem to the traditional Italian, Irish and Jewish crime elements.  Brewton had done that, but not with emphasis on drugs, but on the S&L scandal.  For Brewton the drugs were tangential.  For Webb they were central.  Both men were correct and the media power brokers decidedly wished to keep them apart.  Putting together the Colombo's ownership of Darby Cay or Whitey Bolger's part in an FBI corruption conspiracy in the hometown of John Perkins Cushing and Caleb Cushing that ran concurrent with the Lehder and Vesco enterprises would have been explosive apart from Leen's attempt in the IRE debate to show time-line disconnects in Webb's story.  There is no major disconnect.  America's drug history from its usurpation of the British opium connection is seamless. 
 

     Leen criticized Webb for not providing a seamless timeline in the unfolding Iran-Contra and Ricky Ross cocaine connection and no clear confession from CIA higher-ups.   Webb flattened Leen's argument as if with the flick of a wrist, to which Weinberg came to the rescue with  some subtlety, but easily discernible as one and then another reporter from the major news outlets in the audience tried to pile on with Leen and Weinberg. 
     What is not disconnected is Leen's loathing of Webb with his tasteless post-Kill The Messenger release of an article in the Washington Post,  "Gary Webb Is No Journalistic Hero." 
     "Well, Mr. Leen, he's as close as America has ever had considering the subject he tackled.  Did Edward R. Morrow ever take on the OSS's or CIA's drug connections?  Disconnects?  Really?" asked Colbachi.  "This is about as disconnected as two rabbits copulating," he reasoned.
     Operation Lone Star’s key witness who would have gone to Houston to give testimony, Sibley Riggs, a Miami, Florida boat broker, had been murdered by strangulation and drowning and stuffed into her car trunk that was later found at the Miami International Airport.

     “She never made it to Houston to give testimony that involved a corrupt DA’s office in Harris County and the indictment of an assistant DA, Frank Robin, (reported by UPI),  who had sold testimony in the Operation Lone Star case to the indicted parties' attorneys,” said Colbachi noting that Riggs' case was not unlike that of Barry Seal or Robert Corson, the son-in-law of Houston financier, Walter Mischer, who according to Peter Brewton  had helped to establish a CIA airport like that in Mena, Arkansas in Lajitas, Texas.   That would have been the same one connected to Modesett and his business partner, Ed Baker.   Frank Robin, the Houston D.A., was disbarred.
     Houston D.A., Frank Robin, reaped the ire of Ronald Reagan's Attorney General and personal lawyer William French Smith who took the lead in moving the FBI into drug enforcement under the man who became the head of the FBI from Texas District Judge, John Howland Wood's ("Maximum John's") vacated bench, William Sessions. With CIA operatives moving freely throughout the Gulf Coast drug smuggling network that was supporting Iran-Contra, it is not entirely clear who are the "good guys" and "bad guys" in this convoluted scenario.   However misguided was Reagan/Bush White House with its backing of the Iran-Contra scheme, William French Smith's alma mater, Pepperdine University Law School, has continued to promote the importance of the Magna Carta and the roots U.S. law in English Common Law, especially at its annual William French Smith Lecture series. Its message: no one is above the law of the land.  Of course, given that the power of the English empire was built upon the imports and exports that moved along the world's sea lanes with the David Sassoon's Middle Eastern opioids, the subject of drug policies and drugs wars has also been well-convoluted in both national histories. 
     Pepperdine's President, Kenneth Starr, the nemesis of William Jefferson Clinton, who as Governor of Arkansas would have had intimate knowledge of the CIA's Mena, Arkansas operation, like Brewton had discovered about the CIA sister airport in Lejitas, Texas would move from Pepperdine to Baylor University to become its President in the Texas County where Iran-Contra's leading supplier, Farhad Azima, had owned Buffalo Airways; where J-Hawk had morphed into First City Bank; and where the Branch Davidians posed some yet to be fully understood threat.  McClennan County was also home to the Crawford White House.  No major newspapers carried the family connections between Kenneth Starr and founder of AIG whose China connections to insurance, shipping and opium made his company a major recipient in the 2008 bailout, Cornelius Vander Starr. 
     Brewton would write of the University of Texas' John Connally-appointed chairman of the board of the University of Texas Board of Regents, Frank Erwin, a position now occupied by Admiral William McRaven the commander of SEAL Team 6 and JSOC, the subject of the documentary Dirty Wars by Jeremy Scahill...."Erwin was close to Ben Barnes too, close enough to be called Barne's 'chief political strategist.'  Barnes said it was Erwin who introduced him to Eagle Pass rancher Richmond Harper, the same man caught in the 1972 explosives scheme with Barry Seal and a Gambino associate." (Brewton, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, p. 141). 
     It was Barnes who took special interest in the Dan Rather and Mary Mapes story of GWB's Texas Air National Guard escapades that Mapes says she discovered in early to mid-1999, but couldn't report until 2004 because her mother had died, thus leaving CBS' 60 Minutes with an image of its leadership asleep at the switch or, more accurately, like Nero fiddling when what would be at stake in 2001 was would be Rome burning.  Inside our outside job it is clear that there was big bamboozle going on!

      “The young man named Pat Carr who died in a suspicious death on December 10, 2000, near Ellington Field, Houston had been on a boat the night of his death named Sea Note, previously named Miss Heather, which was owned by the son-in-law of a Halliburton executive convicted in Operation Lone Star, Thomas "Mick" Hajecate and son, also Thomas Hajecate, owners of Houston-based Uni Oil.  Their lawyer in Florida, Lance Eisenberg, was named a co-conspirator with Chester Tilton Custer in Operation Lone Star.  Eisenberg was also an attorney for Robert Vesco's Columbus Bank & Trust.   The Hajecate's boat, a 60' Hatteras, had been sold in Melbourne, Florida and brought to Houston by Patrick Carr's uncle, the fishing buddy of William E. King, an attorney for Bracewell & Giuliani and the business partner of GWB’s Texas Air National Guard roommate, James R. Bath, of Southwest Airport Services that owned the fuel concessions at Ellington Field,” said Colbachi. 

From Texas Secretary of State Records (Public Domain)

     “Pat Carr had just moved to Houston, didn’t know Marian Carr Knox, but worked with the company in Austin owned by Dan Rather’s niece, Rebecca Rather,” said Colbachi who also noted that the young man’s father was the former pastor of the former General Deputy of the FBI whose grandson died mysteriously the night after Patrick Carr in Dallas.  Peter Brewton’s father, another Texas Presbyterian minister, graduated from Austin College in Sherman, Texas and Princeton Seminary.

       Colbachi believes after listening to the recording of the 1997 debate between Webb and Leen more than a dozen times that it is disingenuous to believe that Leen and Weinberg were not working together to discredit Webb.  “It was a typical ‘good cop’ (Weinberg) and ‘bad cop’ (Leen) pile on, both ganging up on Webb who was absolutely phenomenal in his argument.  Weinberg leaned on Webb.  Leen pounced on him.  It was when Webb made the connection to Houston, Texas through his conversation with Peter Brewton, the author of The Mafia, CIA and George Bush (Shapolsky Press, 1992) that Leen nearly lost it and went straight for Webb’s throat in calling him a conspiracy theorist," said Colbachi, who asked "was Iran-Contra a conspiracy?  Tammany Hall?  Credit Mobilier?  The Texas Veterans' Land Board Scandal?  Enron whose only serious critic was a Houston-based Merrill Lynch analyst, John Olson,  who was told to be quite about accounting irregularities he saw there?  The forced purchase of Merrill Lynch by Bank of America whose CEO, Ken Lewis, tried to reject the 2008 bail out money imposed by Goldman Sach's Hank Paulson and the Federal Reserve's successor of Alan Greenspan whose 'Greenspan Put' took eyes off of the removal of the Glass-Stegall firewall between investing and banking?  Bank of America was then forced to buy the troubled Merrill Lynch, formerly Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner and Smith, with the Pierce being a relative of Barbara Pierce Bush, at a premium with Merrill then paying out record executive compensation.  This was all like a Fascist's dream come true and reflected the type of raw Darwinian Socialism that eventually took down the Third Reich," said Colbachi.  "Here we see going on what Mussolini said plainly, 'Fascism should more accurately be called 'corporatism' since it is the merger of state and corporate power,' Colbachi surmised while stating... "I'm a big believer in social-capital, not the lunatic fringe of left and right political theories that got us to where we are today.  The choice of German-Colombian, Carlos Lehder, a founder of a Latin American neo-Nazi group, National Latin Movement, fits in with the Caribbean history of harbored everything from William Walker's 'Golden Circle' of slavery, William Rhodes Davis' oil procurements for Germany during World War II and even of the British Bahamas holding known Nazi sympathizers, the Duke of Windsor and wife Wallace Simpson.  Beyond this fascist connection one cannot discount the fact that within the U.S. was the German American bund that spawned the 1930's 'Business Plot' that attempted to use General Smedley Butler in a pro-Nazi coup," said Colbachi.

     Jeff Leen had claimed that the CIA connection to drugs was the rare unicorn that every journalist wanted to capture, but couldn’t.   "Webb and Brewton, to whom Webb referred in his debate with Leen, not only captured that unicorn, they broke and saddled it!   They did just what Leen had claimed from his experiences in Miami was impossible and where CIA Iran-Contra operative, Steven Paul Carr, had been recruited before he inexplicably died on December 13, 1986 of a drug overdose before he could give testimony in the Iran-Contra case.  Steve Carr was from Fort Lauderdale, Florida as was Pat Carr's father.   In Washington D.C. Jeff Leen's colleague, Vernon Loeb, the Washington Post's Metro-editor who had falsified the Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch stories as well as the co-author of the Paula Broadwell All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, seemingly provided some convenient cover for Leen.   Leen, Weinberg, Loeb, and by implication, their boss at the Washington Post, Steve Coll, raise all manor of serious ethical and journalistic impartiality and conflict of loyalty issues," said Colbachi.  "I call it a journalistic, non-random, copulative assembly," said Colbachi....."a newspaper editor's cluster-fxxx".

     Vernon Loeb is now the managing editor of the Houston Chronicle in the city where Dan Rather had cut his teeth in investigative journalism alongside television personality and wife of Enron progenitor, Joanne Herring, and where Dan's niece had been the bakery chef of Tony Vallone whose Galleria restaurant was the favorite Houston eatery of Frank Sinatra and friends.  This was also the city where Mark Lombardi had laid out in graphic design, while working at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum, a flow chart of the Iran-Contra conspirators and networks.  "Why Lombardi's works were hung on the walls at New York's Whitney Museum except to send a chilling warning to anyone wanting to do likewise is a real enigma," said Colbachi noting that FBI agents had gone to the Whitney to lend credence to the event.  "Rank and file FBI agents wouldn't have had a clue.  They would have been like Matt Gannon, the CIA agent on his way home from the Middle East to ask superiors at Langley why the rank and file agents across the Middle East had no files on Al Qaeda when it was spawned in Egypt under the nose of U.S. ally, Hosni Mubarak, who along with the Muslim Brotherhood had initially sponsored Al Qaeda and where together both groups of Muslim boogeymen were kicked out of Egypt after the Arab Spring."

      Like many others' “suicides”, Lombardi died by questionable self-hanging in Brooklyn, New York in highly charged political year of 2000.  Houston is also the city where when the Harris County Medical Examiners’ office came under fire for corruption with Michael Bromwich, the leading prosecutor in the Iran-Contra case, arriving not unlike former G.H.W. Bush Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh, who defended the Bush family against the claims of Mrs. Marian Carr Knox, whose son, Patrick Carr, defended her  against the Dick Thornburgh and Louis Boccardi attack in 2004, four years after the suspicious death of the other Pat Carr.”

     Colbachi is encouraging all of his friends to see the upcoming film, Truth, the story of the 2004 Dan Rather and Mary Mapes 60 Minutes account of George W. Bush’s 1972 Texas Air National Guard record and to ask the question…. “Why was this story not reported in 1999 when Mapes says in Truth and Duty the book upon which the James Vanderbilt and Robert Redford film is based, that she had learned of it then and why is the film being released in 2015 only a years before the 2016 election?" asked Colbachi.


Buckley Wright Bragg is a freelance, independent investigative author and founding member of Freedom of the Press Corp, or FPC.   He is a first-time contributor to CPW News Service.