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Former CIA Official Lied in Boston Bombing Cover-Up

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By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: MadCowNews

Former top CIA official Graham Fuller lied in a press interview about his former son-in-law, Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of “The Brothers Tsarnaev,” Tamerlan, now dead, and Dzhokhar, soon to go on trial in Boston for allegedly planting a homemade pressure-cooker bomb packed with shrapnel near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. 

“A story on the Internet implying possible connections between Ruslan (Tsarni) and the Agency through me is absurd,” Fuller said in an Apr 27 2013 story headlined “Former CIA officer: ‘Absurd’ to link uncle of Boston suspects, Agency,” in Washington-D.C.-based Al-Monitor, which bills itself as the “Pulse of the Middle East.”

Fuller was responding to an exclusive report published here headlined “Was Boston Bombers ‘Uncle Ruslan’ with the CIA?”,which he and reporter Laura Rosen churlishly refused to credit, calling it merely a “story on the Internet” even as they labored to debunk it. Yet it was reported and re-published so widely in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon terror attack that Fuller felt compelled to respond.

Well,  compelled to respond may be a little strong. Still, respond he did, in an interview which marshalled arguments to indicate questioning whether Ruslan Tsarni’s connection with the CIA had been through his famous former father-in-law were not just an exercise in futility. They were absurd. 

Just to be clear, there is zero evidence to indicate either Uncle Ruslan Tsarni or the CIA hired the Tsarnaev Brothers to blow up Boston.  There is, however, abundant evidence that elements of the U.S. Government have been playing footsie with Chechen terrorists, presumably to divert Russia from committing the kind of rash Neo-Communist Gangster stuff they’d be doing already unless we’re very very  careful.

Here’s a troubling question: If it was blow-back from that campaign which blew up in Boston—throwing covert U.S. support at Chechen terrorists—do you think anyone in the U.S. Government is eager to let the American people in on that no-doubt classified-for-reasons-of-national-security secret?

Why, the very idea seems—to use Mr. Fuller’s word—absurd.

Uncle Ruslan meets ‘the boys’

In his interview, Graham Fuller admitted that a second bombshell disclosure in an exclusive Apr 26, 2013, report headlined Boston bombers’ uncle married daughter of top CIA official, also was true: The Tsarnaev Brothers’ uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, was his former son-in-law.

Tsarni was married to Graham Fuller’s daughter Samantha between 1994 and sometime near the dawn of the millenium, Fuller grudgingly admitted.  Still, he insisted,without explanation, that suggestions that law enforcement should be checking to see if Ruslan Tsarni had “hooked up” with the CIA through Fuller were “absurd.”

It was an odd assertion. At the very moment he was making it, investigators with the FBI—who remained convinced the Tsarnaev Brothers had outside help and support—were in an intensive manhunt to find foreign connections to the case.  Asking questions about links between Ruslan, the CIA, and the bombers would not be seen as out of bounds. Or would they?

Of course, statements by former top CIA officials should be taken with a large grain of salt. Double the salt allowance if the “former” official is still engaged in intrigue in Central Asia.

Hannibal crosses the Alps; Fuller fords his Rubicon

And that’s before discounting fstill further for being widely and infamously known as the man who convinced the Reagan Administration that it would be a neat idea to send a callow Marine Lt. Col. named Oliver North with a cake under one arm and some TOW missiles under the other to a meet-and-greet in Tehran with the Ayatollah.

But back to the body blows being thrown against the credibility of anyone with the temerity of reporting the obvious…

“Fuller retired from the agency almost a decade before the brief marriage,” sniffed Laura Rosen, the reporter  selected to give him a sympathetic hearing.

“I, of course, retired from CIA in 1987,” Fuller offered helpfully, suggesting his Agency past had receded into the far reaches of recorded history, a dimly-remembered time located somewhere just this side of Hannibal crossing the Alps.

If Fuller retired, moved to Florida, and taken up golf while decked out in the vibrant hues of lime-green and canary-yellow sweater-slack combinations favored in the Florida golfing fraternity, he might have a point.

That was not, alas, how Fuller chose to spend his dwindling years. Even today he keeps stirring the pot in Central Asia, a long-time player in what previous generations called the Great Game.

He’s a consultant at Rand Corp; and he’s written a prodigious number of books with Great-Game-y titles: “Turkey & the Arab Spring;” “The Arab Shia’a;” “The Future of Political Islam;” “Turkey’s Kurdish Question;” “The Geopolitics of Islam & the West. “

Kazakh-style crony capitalism, illustrated

Ruslan Tsarni’s former father-in-law isn’t his only link to the CIA. There’s also his decades-long work history, discovered in a press release from a dodgy oil-related company with no assets and a ridiculous name whose President had been somehow lured away from a life-long career with Halliburton.

It reveals that Tsarni had worked in Central Asia for the Agency for International Development (USAID)—a U.S. Government Agency often used for cover by the CIA, including a two-year stint in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan during the “Wild West” days of the early 1990’s, when anything that wasn’t nailed down in that country was up for grabs.

At a time when vast natural resources and enormous fortunes were ‘in play’ during the economic free-for-all in the “Stans” after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 24-year old Ruslan Tsarni was already a ‘player.’

Ruslan Tsarni is once again working (since 2010) working for USAID. Oddly enough, Russia, the country competing with the US for influence in the region, unceremoniously kicked USAID out of the country just months before the Boston Bombing terror attack, for, according to a Putin spokesmen, encouraging his political opposition.

Ruslan Tsarni & the Congress of Chechen International Organizations

In his interview with Laura Rosen, Fuller uncorked a whopper. Said Fuller,“Like all Chechens, Ruslan was very concerned about his native land, but I saw no particular involvement in politics [although] he did try to contact other Chechens around.”

Perhaps Fuller felt that no one would notice. Perhaps he felt immune to fact-checking, a sentiment common among Reagan-era CIA officials. But whatever his motivation, he has been caught in a provable lie.  Ruslan Tsarni, as Fuller well knows, has been up to his neck in Central Asian political intrigue for decades. 

On August 17,1995, while Ruslan Tsarni and Graham Fuller’s daughter Samantha were still virtual newlyweds, Tsarni incorporated a company in Maryland called the “Congress of Chechen International Organizations.” 

Ruslan Tsarni was listed as the company’s resident agent. The group sent aid to Islamic terrorists in Chechnya, including thousands of pairs of combat boots, coordinating its efforts with another so-called “charity,” Benevolence International, designated “financiers of terrorism” by the Treasury Department before being shut down by US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

The company’s listed address, 11114 Whisperwood Ln. Rockville MD., was the home address of former top CIA official s Graham Fuller.

Today, the home remains listed in his wife’s name.

“An impromptu press conference aired live on network television”

With worldwide attention on the upcoming trial of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, what facts could possibly be being deliberately de-selected and hidden from view?

In “Long Mile Home” a book about the Boston Marathon Bombing by two Boston Globe reporters,  everything they have to say about Ruslan Tsarni isn’t much:

“On the Friday morning after Tamerlan was  killed, with police still hunting for Dzhokhar, investigators and reporters found their uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, a corporate attorney living outside Washington D.C.

When he emerged after speaking to FBI agents inside his home, he walked up to television cameras and reporters gathered outside looking for the latest in what had become the biggest story in the world. In an impromptu press conference aired live on network television, Tsarni offered condolences to the bombing victims, denounced his nephews, and ordered Dzhokhar to turn himself in.

Asked to explain what provoked the brothers to attack, Tsarni said, “Being losers. Hatred for those who were able to settles themselves. These are the only reasons I can imagine. Anything else—anything to do with religion, with Islam –that’s a fraud. It’s a fake.”

Asked how he felt about the United States, Tsarni said, “I respect this country. I love this country.”

An opinion writer for the Washington Post called his words “inspiring,” and said his press conference was “a moment we all needed.”

The New Yorker said he “looked like he might hunt his nephew down himself.”

That’s it. That’s everything they wrote about Ruslan Tsarni. Nothing about his work overseas for USAID. Nothing about being the former son-in-law of a top CIA official, or about running an organization out of his house that was sending aid to Chechen terrorists. Most of all nothing about his being—at the same time he was calling his nephews “losers”— a guy involved, according to the London Telegraph, in the biggest bank fraud in history.

By anyone’s standards, that’s a lot not to report. The authors must be proud.

“Uncle” Ruslan Tsarni is the elephant in the living room

“News,” someone once wrote, “is selection.”

And selection is always  based on an ideology and an agenda. Just something to remember the next time you’re reading, or watching, the ‘news.’

As jury selection proceeds in Boston in the upcoming trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the most pressing question about the attack remains one which is so obvious even Time Magazine is asking it: Did They Really Act On Their Own? 

The logical place to start would be with Uncle Ruslan, who’s been married to the daughter of a former top CIA official who remains a”player” in Central Asia’s Great Game.  But, of course, it ain’t gonna happen.

Whether by accident or design, Ruslan Tsarni played the same role in the aftermath of the Boston terror attack played after the 9/11 terror attack by Rudi Dekkers,  manager of Mohamed Atta’s flight school in Venice. And just like Rudi Dekkers before him, his pronouncements were received uncritically.

The mainstream media fawned all over him. He was soon being called “Uncle Ruslan. He  became the primary go-to source on the suspects, peddling his brief about the perfidy and all-around loser nature of his two nephews, one of whom, who he’d helped raise and bring to America, had just been killed in a hail of gunfire with police.

There were no tears for Uncle Ruslan. He was “protected,” and no doubt glad for it.

When Graham Fuller fibbed about Ruslan’s political activities, was it out of personal loyalty, or in support of a larger operation which had Ruslan Tsarni leading every 24-hour news cycle for more than a week during the biggest story of the year? Is there anyone in America who still thinks this happens by accident?

What does this say about the CIA’s ability to mold news coverage of a major event?

Already a valuable asset, Uncle Ruslan hadn’t even executed his most valuable task yet. Tsarni would soon be single-handedly responsible for leading the entire mainstream media of the Western World on a two-week long wild goose chase. Like a Pied Piper for the electronic age, he led the world away from whoever had actually punched the Tsarnaev Brothers ticket to jihad, towards something that didn’t even exist, “a chubby red-haired Armenian Muslim exorcist named Misha.”

More on this in our next story.

Uncle Ruslan’s  network for “international corruption”

When he was pontificating daily on live network television, why had no one thought to ask him about his contemporaneous  involvement in what London newspapers had begun calling “the biggest bank fraud in history?”

That’s the other side, the well-connected oil executive-side, of Ruslan Tsarni, that remains hidden. When one reporter had the bad manners to ask him what he did, Tsarni got touchy, and would say only, “I work for a living.”

End-of-story,CIA-style.

Tsarni is implicated in an international criminal investigation that oddly enough also involves another name currently in the news: Britain’s Prince Andrew, who sold his run-down estate to a Kazakh billionaire banker-turned-fugitive looking for asylum in London who paid Andrew $10 million more than it was worth.

Before he left Almaty for a more exciting life in London, the banker, with Tsarni’s help, had made off with a cool six billion dollars. Six billion. With a “B.”

More on this in our next story too.

When Graham Fuller was caught lying, it confirmed growing suspicions that huge chunks of the truth about the Boston Marathon Bombing—the biggest act of terrorism in America since the 9/11 attack— are deliberately being hidden from view.

In truth, news that another cover-up is underway comes as no great surprise. What is surprising is how much of cover-up, both in the 9/11 and the Boston Marathon terror attacks, was first identified here, in The MadCow Morning News, whose very name points out the surrealistic absurdity of contemporary American journalism.

Novelist Thomas Pynchon put it best: “If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”

Who got to CNN? Network pulls scheduled interview with Donald Sterling’s beat-up mistress

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By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: Mad Cow Morning News

Donald Sterling has unsavory links with the owner of the New York City boutique hotel where his former mistress was beaten up Sunday night.

Four developments during the past few days in New York City offer dramatic evidence that questions recently raised here (and elsewhere) about the links to organized crime of real estate mogul, sexual sleazeball, casual racist, and soon-to-to-ex LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling are both serious and well-founded.

The first thing that occurred has already received lots of coverage. The woman who blew the whistle on Sterling’s casual racism, his former mistress V Stiviano, was badly beaten Sunday night by two white thugs in hoodies at a swank boutique hotel  in New York City.

Dom-V

The second development involves the venue where the beatdown occurred, whose significance remains largely unknown.  The Hotel Gansevoort, outside whose doors Stiviano was assaulted, belongs to one William Achenbaum.

Until just three weeks before being busted, Hotelier Achenbaum had “owned”— as a straw front man for the CIA—a Gulfstream II luxury jet (N987SA) that was caught carrying 4 tons of cocaine in the Yucatan as part of the same operation.

During the time  the two men controlled the plane, it made numerous trips to the U.S. base in Guantanamo, the McClatchy Newspapers group reported,  flying extraordinary renditions for the CIA. 

Achenbaum’s partner in the hotel, Arik Kislin of Long Island, whose family is repeatedly linked to the Russian Mob in published reports,  also owned the Long Beach CA air charter company, Air Rutter Intern’l, offered the Gulfstream II for charter. 

Unsavory links to the global drug trade

Are these facts at all relevant to the current tawdry Donald Sterling saga? Absolutely. Because Donald Sterling and William Achenbaum both share an unsavory link to an expatriate Saudi named Ramy El Batrawi, a longtime lieutenant of notorious CIA fixer Adnan Khashoggi. 

El Batrawi and Achenbaum both owned airplanes used in a drug trafficking enterprise in Florida between 2005-2008 that top DEA officials in Miami called an out of control “rogue operation” of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Tampa.

For his part, El Batrawi has made “fronting” for the CIA, with planes and even airlines, into a career. During Iran Contra,  he posed as the owner and president of an airline in Miami called Jetborne that secretly flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to the mullahs in Iran.

Later court testimony, during bankruptcy proceedings, revealed that Jetborne had all along been a CIA proprietary airline.

“Closest thing to a real scandal we’re like to see hereabouts, nowadays”

In July 2003, the drug trafficking operation that DEA officials say was being protected by federal agents in the Tampa ICE Office received a second DC-9 (N12ONE), “sold” or “transferred”  or just ‘passed along” to  the operation by Ramy El Batrawi.

The operation, called Operation Mayan Jaguar, would soon blow up into the closest thing to a real scandal that anyone is likely to see in America for a long time.

It resulted in the forced sale of America’s 4th largest bank, Wachovia, after that bank was discovered to be laundering drug money from Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel used to purchase a fleet of 50 American aircraft to be used as drug planes.

Links between recent owners of the two drug planes, first discovered during an examination of FAA registration records, suggested a long-running and continuing criminal conspiracy to engage in massive drug trafficking.

Before the Gulfstream II business  was “parked” in the name of New York real estate developer Achenbaum and his partner Kislin with ties to the Russian Mob, the plane had passed through the hands of a secretive Midwestern media baron named Stephen Adams, also a Republican fund-raiser extraordinaire (he was one of the ‘elite’ Bush’s Rangers), who was personally buying over $1 million of billboard ads for George W. Bush for his 2000 Presidential election bid.

Scammers, fraudsters, grifters & bunco artists of the national security state

Adams had another business partner, Michael Farkas, whose company SkyWay owned a DC-9 (N900SA) which became the first drug plane the Tampa operation lost to a big bust in the Yucatan. 

SkyWay, the company whose DC-9 was busted in April 2006 in the Yucatan with 5.5 tons of cocaine, for example, had been founded the year before by a slippery Miami  attorney named Michael Farkas. 

According to SEC filings,  Stephen Adams and Michael Farkas jointly control Holiday RV Superstores, Inc.,  used by mastermind Adnan Khashoggi in the complicated securities fraud which stole as much as $300 million from investors and taxpayers. 

Companies Farkas controlled, like Holiday RV and Imperial Credit, were full partners in the stock manipulation scheme, along with Stephen Adams’ company, which passed on the Gulfstream II luxury jet to William Achenbaum.

In an example of extremely sloppy tradecraft, Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s partners in the massive fraud were men who’d provided planes to the drug trafficking operation, making “plausible deniability” something of a sticky wicket. 

“The complex sale of the Gulfstream II jet and its end in the Mexican jungle highlight the increasingly complicated illicit drug trade,” read the McClatchy Newspapers’ account on September 29, 2007.

From ‘whack-a-mole’ to ‘hide the pea,’ its still a sordid business

The ‘players” were an ecumenical cast of international characters:  Republican fund-raiser Adams, Saudi arms dealer Khashoggi, oligarchs in the Russian Mob,  elements of American military and civilian intelligence who populated the executive ranks at SkyWay, and a large but dirty San Diego defense contractor called Titan Corp. that would soon get even larger when it was merged into L3, one of today’s behemoth defense contractors. 

What this means, should any courageous federal prosecutor take note, is that the drug plane’s rapid series of ownership changes are nothing more than sham transactions, part of the CIA’s traditionally sophisticated game of “hide the pea” designed to conceal the aircraft’s true owners. From what we’ve begun to learn of Sterling, he appears to fit right in.

Just knowing unsavory characters who are also acquainted is hardly a crime. What involvement does Donald Sterling have in the sordid business?  

The answer comes several months after the SEC charges Ramy El-Batrawi and his boss Adnan Khashoggi, in April 2006, with masterminding a massive financial fraud that resulted in investor and taxpayer losses of more than $100 million (The figure later doubled.) 

The two Saudis were the lead actors in a massive financial fraud that earned the name Stockwalk, that complemented the drug trafficking operation by using stock from the same companies—led by Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s company, GenesisIntermedia—that had been supplying drug planes.

The ‘other’ Donald issues a bizarre press release

Donald Sterling enters the action just as the two Saudis are being hammered by bad publicity from their recent indictment, which gets so bad that both men consider going on the lam to avoid the police. Khashoggi eventually will, living quite comfortably, according to a source in Palm Beach Florida, in a guest cottage on the grounds of Donald Trump’s Mar a Largo Mansion.

At this crucial moment Sterling steps in to help stem the tide of bad publicity swamping Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s efforts to move on to another scam. Sterling, of course, has considerable public relations clout. He  regularly buys full-page ads touting his charitable achievements in the Los Angeles Times.

In early August Donald Sterling  names Ramy El Batrawi the winner of Sterling’s non-existent “Humanitarian of the Year Award” for El Batrawi’s (also non-existent) efforts to solve the problem of the homeless on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles.

No one was more surprised at being named “Humanitarian of the Year” than Ramy El-Batrawi himself, judging by his reaction. He freely admits to the LA Times that he’s made no contribution of money or time to helping the homeless.

But it’s what happened in the aftermath of  the Sterling mistress beat-down that provides the biggest shock. 

Did CNN cave before the bell?

Sterling’s  former mistress V Stiviano was in New York to appear in an hour-long interview scheduled with Anderson Cooper on CNN Monday night. 

After the beating, her camp leaks to the press that Sterling’s former mistress “started getting death threats almost immediately after Sterling’s racist rants — which she recorded — were made public,” said a well-placed source to Radar Online, which was consistently out in front of the pack on the story.

“Most of the threats were made on social media, “the source continued, “and this is one of the reasons why she has scaled back her activity. It has been very scary for V, and she also hired a bodyguard.” 

But plucky Ms V is undeterred, her attorney tells reporters late Sunday night.  “Stiviano will still be on Anderson Cooper’s show Monday night. No one will intimidate her.”

Maybe no one will intimidate Stiviano. But somebody sure did get to CNN.

 A story nobody is talking about…yet

Just hours before the scheduled sit-down, and with no explanation, CNN removed Anderson Cooper from the broadcast.  Producers notified Stiviano that Cooper was unavailable, and that Chris Cuomo would now be conducting the interview. 

Stiviano immediately backed out. Thanks but no thanks, the former mistress’ replied. Nothing against Cuomo, her attorney explained. “But Anderson had previously met with V and Donald Sterling several weeks ago when he flew out to Los Angeles. Her camp has a relationship with  Anderson.” 

Makes sense.  What doesn’t make sense: Who kept Anderson Cooper from doing an interview he’d already prepared for? And why?

To put it bluntly: Who got to CNN? 

Police Commissioner comes down with virulent case of hoof in mouth

What happened next, the 4th development, is possibly the most revealing. On Monday night NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton weighs in with gratuitous comments about his feelings towards Sterling’s former mistress.  

Asked about V Stiviano’s lawyer’s claim that she was punched out by a pair of N-word-spewing punks outside a Meatpacking District hot spot on Sunday night, Bratton said he wished Donald Sterling’s infamous ex had never shown up in the Big Apple. 

“I wasn’t even aware she was in town,” he stated. “We would have hoped that she would stay on the West Coast.”

A follow-up question to Bratton I’d have loved to hear someone ask: “Commissioner Bratton, who do you mean by ‘we’?”

Up for the lead in “Vile little Man”

Don’t all victimized citizens deserve to be treated with respect by the police? Apparently, if you’ve offended someone as “connected” as Sterling, the answer is probably no.

Given Sterling’s unsavory links with William Achenbaum, owner of the New York City boutique hotel where V Stiviano was beaten up,  makes Bratton’s comments seem particularly menacing and gratuitous.   

The FBI has long touted its success in critically weakening the forces of organized crime through its efforts to break up the Mafia in New York City. 

But they clearly remain powerful enough to pull strings at CNN.

Donald Sterling’s Secret History

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By Daniel Hopsicker

Source: MadCow Morning News

Since his highly injudicious comments about Asian girlfriends, Magic Johnson and race almost a month ago, the name Donald T. Sterling, casual racist, parasitic landlord, and thoroughly-disgraced owner of the NBA’s L. A. Clippers, has been much in the news.

The more salacious elements are on the record. He ran newspaper ads for “hostesses” interested in meeting “celebrities and sports stars.” He hired a former model to be an assistant GM for the Clippers.

Yet only now are more serious questions beginning to be asked about some of the more improbable aspects of what might be called “The Donald Sterling Story.”

He’s the son of immigrant Jews from Russia, born in the same West-Side Chicago neighborhood that a generation earlier spawned Jacob Rubinstein, AKA Jack Ruby. He grew up in Southern California’s Boyle Heights in the 1940s,  attending grade school, middle school, and high school in the same town lived in and controlled by notorious mobster Mickey Cohen.

His brother-in-law, a Beverly Hills attorney, was once involved in a heated Mob vs. Mob-type war over who “owned” a famous prize fighter. with boxing promoter (and convicted felon) Don King.

He’s a former “personal injury” attorney—often called “ambulance chasers”—who somehow parleyed a lifetime of “slip and falls” into a real estate empire worth an estimated $1.9 billion dollars.

Getting rich in the dark?

But he’s a funny kind of real estate mogul. His sister demands tenants pay their rent in untraceable cash. Some of his properties are still today registered in the name of a woman— his grandmother—who’s been dead for more than 30 years.

And despite being filthy rich, Sterling  is nobody’s idea of a financial genius. When Sports Illustrated profiled him in 2000, they labeled him “a dismal failure” as a team owner. The low-budget Clippers regularly finished near the bottom of the league.

Perhaps more importantly, the magazine even calls his real estate acumen into question, devoting considerable space to describing the eerie silence inside the Louis B. Mayer Building, a seven-story, gilded and marble-lined LA landmark from Hollywood’s golden age built by the founder of MGM that Sterling uses as his headquarters. Except for Sterling’s own offices, the building was empty, the magazine reported.

Los Angeles magazine quotes the conventional wisdom: “He built his fortune by buying apartment  buildings when the market was low, back in the ’60s and early ’70s, and then not selling them.”

Buy low. Sell high. Make $1.9 billion. Really?

Donald Sterling’s Secret History

Still, his enormous wealth remains essentially unquestioned.  But that may be changing, however. A headline in USA TODAY issued a not-so-veiled threat: Go Now or Face Scrutiny.

“Reporters across the country have been combing through Sterling’s life and business,” the paper reported. “What else might they find? And who else could be caught up in it?”

The overwhelming question on everyone lips which is not yet being asked out loud— especially given the Sterling’s highly-litigious history —is this:  If Donald Sterling isn’t a financial genius, how did he get so rich? 

Is it really all his money? Or is Sterling  “fronting” for some larger, unnamed organization? In a nutshell:Does Donald Sterling have ties to organized crime?

It may already too late for Donald Sterling to just slink away. Because the answer is “yes.”

The evidence in a moment. First, a little background:  As Kennedy assassination researchers became only too well aware, when the Warren Commission dismissed Jack Ruby as a Mob “hanger-on” and “wannabe,” it prevented his true role as the Chicago Outfit’s representative in Dallas from being widely understood  for almost 50 years later.

High Weirdness: America’s chief export

Donald Sterling’s rise to riches is at least a little reminiscent of the story once told about another personal injury attorney  that proved to be a fairy tale under close scrutiny.

Remember Allen Glick?  His story was partly fictionalized by Martin Scorsese in the movie Casino. Kevin Pollock played Glick, a lightly-regarded front man, to Robert DeNiro’s Lefty Rosenthal.

Back in the 1970’s, Allen Glick went from being an ambulance-chasing attorney in Kansas City to the grateful recipient of $87 million dollars worth of Teamster Pension Fund largesse, which he used to purchase four of Las Vegas’ biggest and most profitable casinos  in the blink of an eye.

His rise to prominence aroused extreme suspicion in federal law enforcement. When Glick, to no one’s real surprise,  was found to have been fronting for the Mob, the casinos real owners, who, adding insult to injury, were skimming at least $15 million off the take, Glick turned state’s evidence, and put some aging slabs of marbleized Kansas City beef in federal prison.

Today Allen Glick lives quietly in La Jolla, California, home of the legendary La Costa Resort, where Mobsters once rubbed elbows (and perhaps more?) with the FBI’s  J Edgar Hoover.  More recently La Jolla served as the headquarters of Argyll Equities and Argyll Biotechnology, two recent examples of the more buttoned-up Mob pump-and-dump-type enterprises which have in large measure supplanted the Mob’s old “run-and-shoot’ strategy.

And this is where the Donald Sterling story begins to partake of some of the High Weirdness that America has been known for since the days when Richard Nixon walked the Earth. Because, as it happens, Donald Sterling and Allen Glick have long been such good friends.

You can call me Al…

In fact, it was while in Glick’s company, at a birthday party in Las Vegas for their mutual friend Al Davis, the now-deceased owner of the NFL’s Oakland Raiders, that Sterling met Alexandra Castro, who became Sterling’s mistress before the advent of the recent one,  who gleefully led him to ruin.

The N.F.L. was concerned about the decades-long business relationship between Davis, the Raiders’ managing general partner, and Glick, who newspapers coyly identified as “the former Las Vegas casino owner whom the Justice Department has identified as a ‘a straw party’’ for organized crime interests in Chicago.”

Davis and Glick were partners in an Oakland shopping center that they mortgaged through a loan from the International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ Central States pension fund.

Davis’ Mob ties, of course, had been the subject of conjecture for decades. But they were only investigated after he filed suit against the NFL to move his team from Oakland to Los Angeles, but the Federal judge in the anti-trust case ordered that there be no mention of Davis’ organized crime connections during the trial.

”The jury should not be asked to speculate on this highly prejudicial matter,” said United States District Court Judge Harry Pregerson.

Unusually, the Judge blamed the NFL for this state of affairs, implying the current situation was to the league’s benefit. “The evidence is clear that there has been a cabal among some past and present officials of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, some of its Strike Force offices, and the NFL, which, through its long-term sweetheart relationship with a variety of law-enforcement agencies, has been a direct beneficiary of this situation,” said the Judge. “This raises serious questions about possible conflicts of interest as well as activities that border on sheer political corruption.”

This all happened back in 1983. Judges don’t talk like that anymore.

2-line headline with not a single grain of truth

It was as if Madonna were being given a Life-Time Achievement Award from Focus on the Family.

The press release began: “Donald T. Sterling and friends honored Ramy El-Batrawi as the humanitarian of the year for his support of the homeless people of Los Angeles.”

 A casual perusal of the headline turns up nothing that bears the faintest resemblance to the truth:

“Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center Honors Ramy El-Batrawi With Humanitarian of the Year Award for His Support of the Homeless People of Los Angeles.”

There was no “Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center,” back then, just for starters.  Nor is there one today. No institution. No employees. No Board of Directors to mull over who to choose for next year’s award.

The “Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center” is just a lie someone invented, and then delivered—not verbally, where it could later be denied—but in a press release, a form explicitly designed for maximum visibility.

Sterling must have been acting with the sure knowledge that no one would ever call him on it; and with a rock-solid confident expectation that he was operating with total impunity.

Donald Sterling, Adnan Khashoggi, and Ramy El Batrawi

Ramy El Batrawi is a Saudi national who has been Saudi arms merchant and CIA fixer Adnan Khashoggi’s chief lieutenant in America from more than 30 years. More than once in the past decade, the two men have gone “on the lam” and become fugitives from justice at the same time to avoid arrest.

Back in the days of Iran Contra, El-Batrawi fronted for Khashoggi and posed as the owner and president of an airline in Miami, Jetborne, that flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to the mullahs in Iran. Court testimony revealed that Jetborne was a CIA proprietary airline, helping to explain how Khashoggi and El Batrawi manage to repeatedly commit financial crimes with impunity.

Khashoggi and El Batrawi also have well-documented links—El Batrawi, for example, “owned” SkyWay’s second DC-9—to the drug trafficking ring operating in St. Petersburg Florida that DEA officials say was being protected by federal agents in the Tampa ICE Office.

Just as the drug trafficking operation out of St Petersburg got underway, in July 2003, ownership of the operation’s second DC-9 (N12ONE) was transferred to El Batrawi.

The airliner came via Finova Corp., which, as was discovered while researching “Barry & ‘the boys,’” is a CIA finance company that was the true owner of Southern Air Transport, Richard Secord’s re-supply cargo airline supplying the Contras with weapons… and the U.S. with cocaine, a fact revealed only much later, when no one was looking, during Southern Air Transport’s bankruptcy proceedings.

El Batrawi and Khashoggi were the lead actors in massive financial fraud which accompanied the drug trafficking. They engineered and ran what came to be called the Stockwalk scandal, which cost investors and U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. It led to what was, at the time, the largest brokerage failure in American history, a record that has been eclipsed many times since.

“Just three months after the company’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), the nearly $17 million raised in the offering was gone,” read one wire service story.

“The creative dealings of defendant El-Batrawi partly explains how this money disappeared so quickly,” reported the AP.

He’s no one’s idea of a prototypical Mobster. He doesn’t sound like he comes from Brooklyn. Nor does he have a colorful nickname. But, like Mobsters of old, Ramy El Batrawi operates with his boss Adnan Khashoggi’s carefully-purchased impunity. In that, he probably something of a poster boy for transnational organized crime in the 21st Century.

So, why was Donald Sterling honoring him as “Humanitarian of the Year?”

The answer was surprisingly simple. El-Batrawi and Khashoggi had just been charged by the SEC with massive financial fraud, and accused of basically stealing more than $100 million. (The figure would later double.)

And Donald Sterling was using his considerable public relations clout—he regularly bought full-page and double-truck spreads in the Los Angeles Times—to stem the tide of bad publicity swamping Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s efforts to move on to the next scam.

Asking if Sterling was doing it as a favor for an unnamed organization to which both he and the two Saudi men belonged is just speculation.

But what isn’t speculation is that Sterling clearly thought no one would notice. And until his recent difficulties thrust him into the harsh glare of a media spotlight, no one did.

The “Humanitarian of the Year Award” headline was a complete misnomer. It implied that the non-existent “Homeless and Medical Center” has given out “Humanitarian of the Year Awards” previously. They had not.

 The Legendary Raw Deal

After Sterling announced his “homeless initiative” in a press release in full-page newspaper ads in the L.A. Times, it received widespread and skeptical coverage in the media in Los Angeles.

At the City Planning Department, no one had filed plans for the property. The Building and Safety Department said there were no demolition requests or building permits requested in conjunction with the project.

“Aside from these ads, no one has seen anything,” said Estela Lopez, the head of the Central City East Assn., a business advocacy group representing an area of downtown that includes skid row. “What’s the plan? Where’s the proposal?”

The real estate agent for the project said the Sterling family trust was in escrow on the property, purchasing it for a “significant discount” from the $12-million asking price. He would not elaborate.

Sterling’s strategy for real estate investment was to buy properties, hold on to them until the market moves into a hot cycle, then refinance and pour the equity into new acquisitions. Some downtown watchers wondered whether he wasn’t doing the same with the skid row property, waiting out a surge in property prices as downtown gentrifies.

Donald Sterling was exploiting homeless people—who do exist—to aggrandize himself and a select few of his cronies. The homeless got nothing. Not even a reach-around. It was the legendary raw deal.

Thoughts of the Humanitarian of the Year

Apparently no one was more surprised than Ramy El-Batrawi himself to have been chosen Humanitarian of the Year.

The Times dutifully sent out a reporter to ask some questions of the newly-minted Humanitarian of the Year. How had he demonstrated support for the homeless?

El Batrawi freely admitted he’d made no contribution of money or time to helping the homeless.

Another celebrity who seemed more than a little vague about the deal was singer Natalie Cole . She appeared with Ramy El Batrawi  in one of Sterling’s full-page ads, where she was identified as a “leader” providing support for the homeless, and as a “special guest” at the dinner.

The event’s producer, Tami Bennett, said Cole was a big supporter of Sterling’s project, in part because she herself was once homeless. The next day, Cole’s publicist, sounding miffed, contacted the Times to say the singer was never homeless, was only “a recent acquaintance” of Sterling’s, and had merely told him she would attend his event.

The next day, the publicist phoned the Times reporter again, saying the singer was on “voice rest” and would not be attending the event at all.

A $270 million dollar blemish

he Times also coolly noted the current blemish on El-Batrawi’s record.  “El-Batrawi was sued earlier this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which alleged that he and a partner, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, orchestrated a $130-million scheme to manipulate the stock of a Van Nuys-based company,” reported the story.

“The manipulation, the SEC alleges, resulted in the largest bailout in the history of the Securities Investor Protection Corp.”

“In an interview with the Times, El-Batrawi said the federal charges were untrue and have nothing to do with his interest in helping Sterling launch his homeless center. The businessman said he has not donated money to the cause but has introduced Sterling to other potential donors.”

“I’m devoting a lot of my time, my efforts, in being available,” El Batrawi said. “I’m making introductions … trying to figure out the things he needs.”

It all sounded more than a little vague. What wasn’t vague, not at all, was the massive financial wreckage caused by the swindling Saudi financial fraudsters Khashoggi and El Batrawi, as a news account announcing the huge settlement one of the companies involved signed with the SEC in lieu of going to trial made clear.

“Deutsche Bank, the German financial services giant, will pay as much as $270 million to settle charges stemming in part from the fraud-induced failure of a Twin Cities brokerage subsidiary in 2001.”

“The complicated case involves a trade-clearing subsidiary of Minneapolis-based Stockwalk Group, and several other brokerages that became ensnarled in one of the securities industry’s biggest swindles in history, by a group that included fugitive Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.”

Paying $270 million to settle charges is a rough indication of how much real pain and human suffering the scam caused real people.

Whatever Ramy El Batrawi found to say in his acceptance speech at the semi-star-studded dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in West Hollywood is now lost to history, which is some consolation.

But there’s no consolation at all in the discovery of a tweet Ramy El Batrawi  sent just two weeks ago to homegrown American financial pirate Carl Icahn,an icon of 1980’s greed as well as one of the original “barbarians at the gate.”

Tweeted El Batrawi @Carl_C_Icahn “hi Carl how are you its been a long time.”