Corrupting Israeli Agent Jew: Michael G. Cherkasky

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Corrupting Zio-Jew Cherkasky is likely an Israeli Placed Agent or deep Sayanim. --- CSR

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Michael G. Cherkasky - Altegrity, Chief Executive Officer

Michael G. Cherkasky is Chief Executive Officer of Altegrity, the global screening and security solutions company headquartered in Falls Church, Va., with approximately 10,500 employees in locations around the world. Altegrity is the holding company for USIS, Kroll, HireRight, and Explore Information Services.

For the past 25 years, Mr. Cherkasky has supported the law enforcement community in numerous oversight and policy development roles. Early in his career, he served as a law clerk in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, and later became an Assistant District Attorney in New York County. While in the District Attorney's office, Mr. Cherkasky served as a trial attorney, Trial Bureau Chief, Chief of the Rackets Bureau, and Chief of the Investigations Division. In this capacity, he led the division's investigations on fraud, corruption, money laundering, organized crime figures such as John Gotti, and the state investigation of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

In 1994, after his 16-year career serving the public, Mr. Cherkasky joined Kroll, Inc., and founded and led Kroll Monitoring Services. While in this position, he was appointed by various U.S. federal courts to oversee federal consent decrees with organizations such as the Long Island carting industry and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. From 2001 through July 2009, Mr. Cherkasky served as the Independent Monitor for the Los Angeles Police Department, using his extensive career as an attorney and experience with the law enforcement community to lead an official oversight board for policies and procedures associated with LAPD's organizational management, training, and investigative practices.

Mr. Cherkasky continues to be active in public leadership roles. Until January 2011, he was the Chairman of the New York State Commission on Public Integrity, and he served as the transition leader for Cyrus Vance, Jr., Manhattan district attorney, following his November 2009 election.

When named CEO of Kroll, Inc., Mr. Cherkasky led an organization focused on supporting the law enforcement community, both domestically and abroad, and providing training services for government and contractor personnel preparing to deploy overseas to support the global war on terrorism. In 2004, Kroll, Inc. was acquired by Marsh and McLennan Companies, Inc., a global professional services firm, and Mr. Cherkasky was appointed President and CEO. He held this position until 2008 and joined USIS in July 2008 in the same capacity. The USIS holding company name was rebranded as Altegrity in 2009.

http://www.altegrity.com/Leadership.aspx


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Altegrity to buy Kroll for $1.13 billion in cash

Published 9 June 2010

Altegrity, which does a range of contract work, mostly for the U.S. federal government, including security clearance investigations for the U.S. government and training and consulting for police departments at home and abroad, will buy Kroll, the corporate intelligence unit of Marsh & McLennan Cos., for $1.13 billion in cash; acquisition will strengthen Altegrity's business outside the United States

Altegrity, a privately held Falls Church company which provides security and screening services, said Monday that it will buy Kroll, a corporate intelligence unit of Marsh & McLennan Cos., for $1.13 billion in cash.

Altegrity does a range of contract work, mostly for the federal government, including security clearance investigations for the U.S. government and training and consulting for police departments in such places as Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, and Pakistan. The deal for Kroll, which is expected to close in September, would give it more access to commercial work, executives said.

Washington Post's Dana Hedgpeth writes that New York-based Kroll, best known for its corporate investigations and security business, helped track down hidden assets of Saddam Hussein and of Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos and his wife, Imelda, in the 1990s. Established in the 1970s, it has 3,000 employees in sixty-five offices around the world and had revenue last year of about $600 million. It was bought by Marsh in 2004. Michael Cherkasky, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office, ran Kroll from 2001 until 2004 and then Marsh for about three years. He became Altegrity's chief executive in 2008.

With this deal, Cherkasky said, Altegrity will go from being "U.S.-centric with 70 percent of its revenue coming from government contracts and 30 percent from commercial business, to being in 30 countries with revenue being 60 percent commercial and the rest government business."

Travis Sharp, a defense industry analyst at the Center for New American Security, said that Kroll will give Altegrity a "stronger foothold in the services market," allowing them to compete more with the likes of SAIC, DynCorp and Lockheed Martin.

"It gives us more capabilities and makes us more international," Cherkasky said. "It helps us compete in more ways with the big-four accounting firms by doing a range of services, from helping lawyers do electronic discovery to worldwide information-gathering for companies that need to do due diligence on the customers they're working with. We can now do these things."

Hedgpeth notes that the deal comes as credit markets and banks are showing increasing willingness to lend and private equity firms are ready to invest after a two-year slowdown. According to Bloomberg, buyout firms have announced transactions valued at $30.3 billion this year, five times the figure for the same period a year ago.

Altegrity was started in 1996 when the U.S. federal government privatized the investigative branch of the Office of Personnel Management. The company began with 600 employees and was originally called U.S. Investigations Services. Among its first contract work were security clearance background investigations. It has grown to 8,000 employees across the United States, with 300 employees at its headquarters in Falls Church and annual revenue of $900 million.

The Carlyle group invested in the company in October 1999 as a financial and strategic partner. In 2003, USIS employees cashed out and another investment firm, Welsh, Carson, Anderson and Stowe, acquired a majority stake in the company. Providence Equity Partners, a large, Rhode Island-based private equity firm, bought USIS in August 2007.

Altegrity also has other business units, including one that supplies background and drug screening for companies and another that monitors driving records for auto insurance companies.

http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com ... llion-cash


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Backdrop - Detecting The Puppet Masters
Part 6 of Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11: Truth Lies Legend

With the above-stated hypothesis in mind, one should perhaps cast a discerning eye toward those manning the counter-terror posts in Los Angeles today - for an important element in John O'Neill's New York circle has recently relocated to the West Coast. In particular, O'Neill's friend, John Miller, has left a lucrative job at ABC News in order to work under William Bratton in the Los Angeles counter-terror office. Miller, some might recall, was one of the very few Americans to conduct a face-to-face interview with bin Laden before September 11 (see Bin Laden Statements -ed). Before he had come aboard as a correspondent for ABC News, Miller had worked under Bratton in the NYPD. Bratton, through his acquaintance with O'Neill's friend Jerry Hauer, has also had intimate business dealings with Kroll Associates, the World Trade Center security firm which hired O'Neill.

It is, in fact, security firms like Kroll Associates, Burns Security, Teg, Wackenhut, and their ilk that should garner our interest at least as much as the web of conservative think tanks that have welded in place the parameters of "mainstream" debate - for it is through these very firms that the former stars of law enforcement have gone through the revolving door into the lucrative private sector. It is a world where former military types mix with various operatives of the CIA, FBI, DEA and any number of alphabet soup agencies charged with the security of our nation.

Moreover, the top people in the private security sector have the authority, prestige, and, most importantly, the skill to carry out - successfully and below the radar - the kinds of domestic operations that have been pegged as the province of shaggy al-Qaida operatives. Who, after all, could best ensure that 19 terrorists would be able to make it aboard four separate flights without any real danger of detection? And who, after all, would be best placed to ensure a complete and successful implosion of not just the two [WWW] Twin Towers, but the neighboring building - [WWW] 7 World Trade Center Collapse - which housed a bio-warfare "command and control bunker" under the direction of Jerry Hauer?

With that in mind, we get a bit closer to the "how" of 9/11 - an important consideration in analyzing the Legend of 9/11. A good part of the early work on that legend had been accomplished through the offices of Michael Cherkasky, the managing director of Kroll Associates - in his capacity as a prosecutor working in the New York office of Robert Morgenthau. Cherkasky had worked on the case arising out of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, which had established Ramzi Yousef as the terrorist mastermind behind the attack. Cherkasky had also worked on the John Gotti and BCCI criminal cases, two cases that would not, at first glance, seem to be related, much less to the events of September 11.

Yet there is a curious continuity here - one that highlights the global infrastructure that has made 9/11 such a successful worldwide "op", with a legend whose global parameters defy the perceptions of even the most dogged investigators. As Peter Dale Scott has argued in great and persuasive detail, the "deep political structure" of American society - and I would argue that this now applies globally - is permeated by an interwoven nexus between political/corporate elites and an organized criminal subculture, whereby certain political or business arrangements are made in an extra-legal sphere, beyond the reach of sanction or salience. Although this dual-purpose netherworld has been with us for over a century - and roughly parallels the rise of an American industrial "Establishment" of which the Bushes and Rockefellers are most representative - for our purposes, we will date the true globalization of this "deep political structure" with the creation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, better known as BCCI.

The story goes that BCCI was founded by Pakistani financier Aga Hassan Abedi. In truth, it was mostly a British intelligence operation using Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as fronts, while C.I.A. elements allied with George H. W. Bush used the banking network to conduct a number of under-the-table operations throughout the '80's. Before it went under, BCCI served as the cardiovascular system for a global criminal milieu, its laundered arteries servicing the needs of various drug lords, arms dealers, fraudsters, dictators, corrupt politicians, terrorists, and intelligence agencies seeking loose cash for their extra-legal activities.


In short, BCCI was Disneyworld for the New World Order of political/corporate crime. With ample supplies of heroin leaving Afghanistan and heading stateside throughout the '80's, there were ample funds left to underwrite the activities of Osama bin Laden and his mujaheddin, ensconced in a battle to oust the Soviet occupation forces from their midst. And with cocaine coming stateside by way of Colombia, a little pocket money could be set aside to furnish the Nicaraguan Contras with their own anti-Soviet toys.

Could it, then, perhaps have been nothing more than a coincidence that a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, KhalidBin Mahfouz, was reported in the early 90's to own a 20% stake in BCCI - and that bin Mahfouz, as reported by the Houston Chronicle on June 4, 1992, had intimate business dealings with [Bath,James"], the personal representative of bin Laden brother Salim who had invested $50,000 in George W. Bush's company, Arbusto? Bin Mahfouz, incidentally, had taken over Salim bin Laden's interest in the Houston Gulf Airport after Salim met his demise in an airplane crash over Houston in 1988 (the same year that Iran-Contra witness, and Israeli counter-terror coordinator, Amiram Nir met his own fortuitous demise by airplane over Mexico, thus denying Congress one witness who could testify to Vice-President Bush's personal involvement in the scandal).

In the decadent 80's, Bush friend and C.I.A. asset Manuel Noriega served as a critical conduit for the drug transit through Panama. Meanwhile, C.I.A. asset Saddam Hussein played the essential role of wearing down the Iranian Revolution by throwing waves of Iraqi young men at waves of Iranian young men, costing over a million lives, though earning billions for a voracious world arms industry. As for John Gotti, on June 21, 1991, former C.I.A. agent Richard Brenneke gave a sworn deposition before Congressman William Alexander, fingering Gotti as an active detergent in "laundering" the C.I.A. drug shipments coming into the Mena Airport in Arkansas.

As history has shown, being a friend and/or C.I.A. asset of George H. W. Bush can be an uncertain proposition. One by one, once these psychopathic proxies had served their purpose, they were "taken out". In the case of Noriega and Gotti, they were silenced through the capable tools of the American justice system. And overseeing the prosecutions - Noriega, Gotti, and BCCI - happened to be a man who would, years later, be entrusted with overseeing the investigation into the causes of 9/11 - Robert Mueller III.


In the case of BCCI, Mueller had steered the case along the manageable "official" contours, away from the seamier aspects of American foreign policy, ensuring that the domestic aspect of this worldwide fraud would only singe the toes of two well-connected, designated patsies - Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. And while Morgenthau's New York office had indeed pushed the envelope in investigating BCCI, as always, the essential integrity - the goodness - of the American political/intelligence apparatus was left intact.

The real scandal of BCCI, however, was not simply that it was a worldwide Ponzi scheme defrauding its investors of billions - for that is the "limited", official version - but that, in the context of 9/11, it provides a glaring spotlight on the very networks most intimately connected with the corruption. BCCI, the brainchild of British intelligence, was the ideal tool by which a supra-national network of compromised politicians and corrupt officials would "play ball", fattened up with a stream of capital furnished through the fruits of drugs, arms, and terrorism.

As Oliver North had pioneered the use of the counter-terrorism office in dealing with narco-terrorists like Monzer al-Kassar (connected to the Pan Am explosion over Lockerbie), would it be such a stretch to posit that the counter-terror apparatus - this time under Richard Clarke and John O'Neill - was once again being employed to "work" the corrupt networks wrought by BCCI? Can it be a mere coincidence that the arteries of the bin Laden strain of terrorism were fed not by Iran or Syria - the "traditional" sponsors of the more low-key types of terrorism in the '80's - but rather by those very countries that have long served as agents and proxies of their American-Anglo cohorts in crime: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates (i.e. the principal countries fronting for BCCI)? Could it be that the mutually corrupt global relationships wrought by BCCI persist to this day, with a bevy of compromised political officials standing ready to make their contribution to the New World Order - and perhaps scam some extra pocket change on the side?


As they say - follow the money. And where are the big movers and shakers of 9/11 - those who are interpreting the threat for you - putting their money? In vaccines, pharmaceuticals, bio-tech, utilities, security consulting, and surveillance technologies. In other words, they are shifting their money toward those burgeoning industries where they can simply legislate the market need - the favored modus operandi of the "Establishment" captains of industry who had formerly used their clout in the political sector to secure their all-important interests in the oil and banking sectors.

And what of FBI Director Robert Mueller? Was it a coincidence that he was consistently chosen to oversee cases in which the whole bloody mess - Gotti, BCCI, Noriega et al - had threatened to spill over the "officially" designated sides? Was it a result of happenstance that Mueller officially had taken up his job as FBI Director only one week before September 11? Is it Mueller's job to cover the paper trails - or just cover them up?

http://911review.org/Wiki/TruthLiesBackdrop.shtml

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Kroll Connection

This past August, another scandal radiated from the Spitzer circle. This time it was Nixon's arch-strategist Roger Stone leaving a threatening voice mail for Spitzer's dad, Bernard. Stone allegedly claimed he would subpoena the elder Spitzer for the $5 million in illegal loans Spitzer senior made to his son during his 1998 Attorney General campaign. Stone denied he had made the call. To prove he did, the Spitzer family hired Kroll Associates to trace the call. Why Kroll? Spitzer has a long relationship with this powerful, cryptic security company.

Kroll's CEO on 9/11 was one of Spitzer's old mentors from the Manhattan DA's office, Michael Cherkasky. Cherkasky investigated bank BCCI (which had links to both Islamic terror and the CIA), and the mysterious 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing. Cherkasky's 2002 book Forewarned: Why the Government is Failing to Protect Us, and What We Must Do to Protect Ourselves is a confused mix of fear-mongering and insider's analysis. He sheepishly admits that the CIA was in part culpable for the 1993 WTC bombing, since they helped pull known terrorist "Blind Sheikh" Abdel bin-Rahman into the country. Cherkasky admits the FBI had a mole inside Rahman's 1993 WTC bombing cell, and lays blame for the bombing on the FBI.

After observing the 1993 WTC bombing as an operation penetrated by CIA and FBI, Cherkasky became head of Kroll, the "the CIA of Wall Street." Kroll took on the management of WTC after the 1993 bombing. Blackstone Group, the same financiers who backed the Larry Silverstein, have also been involved with Kroll, owning big chunks of Kroll stock on occasion, according to SEC reports.

Cherkasky has donated $14,500 to Eliot Spitzer's political campaigns.

The Anthrax Connection

Eliot Spitzer's connection to key 9/11 players extends to fellow life-long Democrat, Jerome Hauer, managing director of Kroll on 9/11. Only Jerome Hauer and his former boss, Rudolph Giuliani, were also indicted by the San Diego Citizens Grand Jury.

According to Bay Area News (a San Francisco-bay based publication) and Wikipedia, Jerome Hauer warned the Bush White House to go on Cipro, the anti-anthrax drug, on 9/11/01. Hauer denied this allegation to The Megaphone. The White House did go on Cipro. Six days later, the anthrax attacks started, and sent the country back into paroxysms of terror.

Government watchdog group Judicial Watch demanded to know who warned the Bush White House, but not the public, about anthrax. The White House stonewalled their Freedom of Information Act requests.

"I read that the White House did know, and they went on the antibiotics," says Judicial Watch founder Larry Klayman. He got involved because, "African American employees at Brentwood [US Postal Facility] were basically left out there to twist in the wind when the white guys up on Capitol Hill got immediate treatment."

Post-9/11, Jerome Hauer went on to be Coordinator of the National Institute of Health's investigation of anthrax deaths. His report blamed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. That assertion has been widely discredited, since the five deaths in 2001 were from a fine, "weaponized" form of anthrax, the "Ames Strain" that only the U.S. military and U.S. federal government possessed.

On 9/11, Jerome Hauer appeared on television with Dan Rather. Rather posited that the 9/11 attacks must have had state sponsorship. Hauer urged Rather to blame Bin Laden only. When Rather voiced suspicions about the way the buildings fell, Hauer offered that they simply came down because they were hit by a plane. Without an investigation, Hauer somehow knew two major parts of 9/11's official story before it emerged.

Hauer is a biological terrorism expert whose resume includes time at Science Applications International Corp (SAIC), a military contractor doing work in nuclear issues and psy-ops, and Bioport, manufacturer of the controversial anthrax vaccine.

Jerry Hauer and anthrax go way back. In May of 1998, he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations on the topic of "Building a 'Biobomb': Terrorist Challenge." That evening Hauer co-presented on the topic Steven Hatfill. Yes, that Steven Hatfill, the one who later became the FBI's prime suspect in the anthrax mailings. A year after their CFR presentations, Hatfill and Hauer would become coworkers at SAIC's Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.

Hatfill had worked at Ft. Detrick, the U.S. Army's bio-weapons lab in Maryland. Hatfill was never convicted, nor even prosecuted, for anything. Today he's suing reporters for defamation. On Aug. 15, a judge ruled that five top national reporters would have to reveal confidential government sources who fingered Hatfill.

In his interview with The Megaphone, Hauer repeatedly referred to the Grand Jury as "a bunch of nutjobs" and he defended Steven Hatfill. But when asked directly if Hatfill was innocent, Hauer was less than clear:

"I think that the FBI should not have said anything about Hatfill until they knew more. I do not believe Hatfill is a murderer. And I think Steve Hatfill is very passionate, but I don't think he's a murderer, and I don't believe he did it."

Hauer was not willing to conclusively say that Hatfill was uninvolved in the anthrax attacks, stating, "I'm not going to get into those details."

Of the five people who died from anthrax exposure, one was a New Yorker. Kathy Nguyen, a hospital worker in the Bronx, was a victim of inhalation anthrax. She died alone in a hospital on October 31, 2001.

A 2004 petition gathered 100,000 signatures begging then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to investigate the real source of the 2001 attacks. A Zogby poll that year likewise found that 66 per cent of voters wanted Eliot Spitzer, to tackle these tough questions. What those poll respondents didn't know is that Spitzer can't investigate 9/11 or anthrax. He would have to indict his friends from Kroll, Jerry Hauer and Michael Cherkasky. That's the real scandal.

To listen to Sander Hicks's interview with Jerry Hauer, or see the Spitzer/Silverstein Amicus Brief in full, log onto the new www.nymegaphone.com. Your comments are welcome.

http://www.true-facts.co.uk/articles/spitzer.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Democratic Candidate for the United States Senate, Connecticut - 2012

People of Connecticut,

My pledge:  I pledge to always fight for what is in the best interests of  my country, the United States of America and my state - the great State of Connecticut.  

    I am a Progressive Democrat.  I am not anti-Semitic but I am anti-Zionist and vehemently anti-AIPAC. AIPAC is a cancer in our government.  AIPAC must be put in check.  As for Zionism:  I do not believe that a New Yorker has the God-given right to go to Israel and take the home of a Christian or Muslim family. All the while Israeli soldiers stand around to support the New Yorker because he is Jewish!   As a Progressive I do not rely on the bible or biblical prophecy to make present-day political decisions. I rely on the laws of man; in every culture, other than Israel, if you take something doesn't belong to you it is stealing. Modern-day Zionism is wrong and it is racial prejudice. Zionism makes all of us unsafe as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the number one reason for widespread anti-American sentiment.  

    There are Christians who are Zionists and Jews who are not.  Research what it means to be a Zionist as this is the heart and soul of the conflict.   This is especially important now due to the upcoming September United Nation vote when the world will decide on whether to grant the Palestinians autonomy.  Only the United States stands in the way.  Please know that Israel has always been the bottle-neck to peace - not vice-versa.  Fight against propaganda. The politics of delay have made Israel wealthy and 7x larger than its size when formed in 1947. In 1947 the UN Partitian gave the Zionists half and half to the Christian and Muslim indigenous culture.  But the Zionists wanted it all and more; they are STILL encroaching. There are over 500,000 settlers (mainly Americans) on Palestinian land. Settlers are not immigrants - they are zealots. Please see the videotape below. These children were put out of their home. I especially find amusing the American who attacks the kids, she is clearly a Fundamentalist Christian.  American Fundamentalist Christian Zionists are a huge, misguided, political force in our country.  Remember, the Christians and Muslims in the Occupied Territories (Palestinians) have been living in concentration-camp like despair for 3 generations since 1948 when 700,000 were pushed from their homes to make way for European and American Jews. This event was called the Nakba, please research it.  Israel needs to do right by its underclass; any decisions based on maintaining a "Jewish majority" is racial prejudice and, as Americans, we should reject it as it is contrary to our values.
     The video says it all in a nutshell.

       Netanyahu has refused our great President's repeated demands to stop the settlements. Why - because of AIPAC's power. Netanyahu is now the most powerful man in the world because he owns us:  It's simple - control 435 US Representatives and 100 Senators and you rule the world. He boasted that our Congress will be pro-Israel (in his pocket) for the next 20 years. Prove him wrong! Vote for one candidate who will fight to put this cancer, AIPAC, in check. I'm counting on you, the people of Connecticut to learn the truth.  If I can't teach the most educated state in the country – then we are all in trouble.  I'll be coming around on a book signing tour. Please come out, learn and support me.  

      It's all about money and turf. Israel is the largest recipient of US foreign aid for one reason:  AIPAC owns every politician. Even if I'm the lone, brave voice, I pledge to fight on the floor of the senate at EVERY opportunity to stop the funding for Israel until they stop the bloodshed and grant equality to all.  I'll fight to keep the $500 million that Connecticut annually pays to Israel here. Israel is not impoverished and it is no longer a strategic ally – just a financial drain - and regional instigator.  We are hated world-wide, and less safe,  for our blind support of Israel in light of so much injustice.  The worst Israeli practice: Collective punishment on civilian populations.  Imagine your neighbor breaks a law and tanks come in and level the entire neighborhood - houses with entire families in them.  Just because you don't see it on our news doesn't mean it isn't happening.  The world sees it - only Americas don't know. It's no wonder we are hated.

 

Don't let anyone downplay the importance of this issue.  In his book "Forewarned" Michael Cherkasky sites a survey that was conducted of the people in several countries including: Egypt, Arab Emirates, and Kuwait.  The conclusion '...majority in all five countries said that the Palestinian issue was the single most important issue to them personally."        

Unlike my Democratic and Republican rivals I don't put my campaign before the best interests of my country.   A candidate for the US Senate should not have to pledge allegiance to another country (Israel) in order to get elected here; this is, unfortunately, the current reality. With your help we can change the status quo. I'm Lee Whitnum candidate for the US Senate and I pledge allegiance to one country and one country only – the United States of America.

Lee Whitnum
Candidate for the US Senate D-CT

http://www.leewhitnum.com/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Looks like Cherkasky's "Kroll" was involved in covering up the Mossad hit on Robert Maxwell...


New York Magazine Dec 2, 1991

http://books.google.com/books?id=--gCAA ... l+P.I.%27s

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

BCCI the Dirtiest Bank (and... N.M, Rothschild - Marc Rich - Soros run of course... probably Maxwell crossed them on a deal...)

by Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne/New York

with Cathy Booth/Miami - Jay Branegan/Hong Kong and Helen Gibson/London Monday

July 29, 1991

from Time Website

        "I could tell you what you want to know, but I must worry about my wife and family - they could be killed."
        -- a former top B.C.C.I. officer

        "We better not talk about this over the phone. We've found some bugs in offices that haven't been put there by law enforcement."
        -- a Manhattan investigator probing B.C.C.I.

Bank-fraud cases are usually dry, tedious affairs. Not this one.

 

Nothing in the history of modern financial scandals rivals the unfolding saga of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), the $20 billion rogue empire that regulators in 62 countries shut down early this month (July 1991) in a stunning global sweep. Never has a single scandal involved so much money, so many nations or so many prominent people.

Superlatives are quickly exhausted:

    it is the largest corporate criminal enterprise ever, the biggest Ponzi scheme, the most pervasive money-laundering operation and financial supermarket ever created for the likes of Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein and the Colombian drug barons.

B.C.C.I. even accomplished a Stealth-like invasion of the U.S. banking industry by secretly buying First American Bankshares, a Washington-based holding company with offices stretching from Florida to New York, whose chairman is former U.S. Defense Secretary Clark Clifford.

But B.C.C.I. is more than just a criminal bank.

 

From interviews with sources close to B.C.C.I., TIME has pieced together a portrait of a clandestine division of the bank called the "black network," which functions as a global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad. Operating primarily out of the bank's offices in Karachi, Pakistan, the 1,500-employee black network has used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping and even, by some accounts, murder.

 

The black network - so named by its own members - stops at almost nothing to further the bank's aims the world over.

The more conventional departments of B.C.C.I. handled such services as laundering money for the drug trade and helping dictators loot their national treasuries.

 

The black network, which is still functioning, operates a lucrative arms-trade business and transports drugs and gold. According to investigators and participants in those operations, it often works with Western and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. The strange and still murky ties between B.C.C.I. and the intelligence agencies of several countries are so pervasive that even the White House has become entangled.

 

As TIME reported earlier this month, the National Security Council used B.C.C.I. to funnel money for the Iran-contra deals, and the CIA maintained accounts in B.C.C.I. for covert operations.

 

Moreover, investigators have told TIME that the Defense Intelligence Agency has maintained a slush-fund account with B.C.C.I., apparently to pay for clandestine activities.


But the CIA may have used B.C.C.I. as more than an undercover banker:

    U.S. agents collaborated with the black network in several operations, according to a B.C.C.I. black-network "officer" who is now a secret U.S. government witness. Sources have told investigators that B.C.C.I. worked closely with Israel's spy agencies and other Western intelligence groups as well, especially in arms deals.

     

    The bank also maintained cozy relationships with international terrorists, say investigators who discovered suspected terrorist accounts for Libya, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization in B.C.C.I.'s London offices.

The bank's intelligence connections and alleged bribery of public officials around the world point to an explanation for the most persistent mystery in the B.C.C.I. scandal:

    why banking and law-enforcement authorities allowed the bank to spin out of control for so long.

In the U.S. investigators now say openly that the Justice Department has not only reined in its own probe of the bank but is also part of a concerted campaign to derail any full investigation.

 

Says Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, who first launched his investigations into B.C.C.I. two years ago:

    "We have had no cooperation from the Justice Department since we first asked for records in March 1990. In fact they are impeding our investigation, and Justice Department representatives are asking witnesses not to cooperate with us."

B.C.C.I. was started in 1972 with the putative mission of becoming the Muslim world's first banking powerhouse.

 

Though it was incorporated in Luxembourg and headquartered in London, had more than 400 branches and subsidiaries around the world and was nominally owned by Arab shareholders from the gulf countries, B.C.C.I. was always a Pakistani bank, with its heart in Karachi.

 

Agha Hasan Abedi, the bank's founder and leader until his ouster last year, is a Pakistani, as are most of the bank's former middle managers. And it was in Pakistan that the bank's most prodigiously corrupt division was spawned.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the resulting strategic importance of neighboring Pakistan accelerated the growth of B.C.C.I.'s geopolitical power and its unbridled use of the black network. Because the U.S. wanted to supply the mujahedin rebels in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles and other military hardware, it needed the full cooperation of Pakistan, across whose border the weapons would be shipped.

 

By the mid-1980s, the CIA's Islamabad operation was one of the largest U.S. intelligence stations in the world.

    "If B.C.C.I. is such an embarrassment to the U.S. that forthright investigations are not being pursued, it has a lot to do with the blind eye the U.S. turned to the heroin trafficking in Pakistan," says a U.S. intelligence officer.

The black network was a natural outgrowth of B.C.C.I.'s dubious and criminal associations.

 

The bank was in a unique position to operate an intelligence-gathering unit because it dealt with such figures as,

        Noriega

        Saddam

        Marcos

        Peruvian President Alan Garcia

        Daniel Ortega

        contra leader Adolfo Calero

        arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi

Its original purpose was to pay bribes, intimidate authorities and quash investigations.

 

But according to a former operative, sometime in the early 1980s the black network began running its own drugs, weapons and currency deals.

    "I was recruited by the black network in the early 1980s," says an Arab- born employee who has ties to a ruling family in the Middle East and has told U.S. authorities of his role in running one of the black units.

     

    "They came to me while I was in school in the U.S.; they spoke my language, knew all of my friends and gave me money. They told me they wanted me to join the organization, and described its wealth and political power, but at first they never said exactly what the organization did."

This operative - call him Mustafa - underwent a year of training that began with education in psychology and the principles of leadership and proceeded into spycraft, with lessons in electronic surveillance, breaking and entering, and interrogation techniques.

    "Then the nature of our advisers changed," says Mustafa. "The pleasantness was gone, and we moved to Pakistan, where we trained with firearms."

Mustafa's first operational assignment took him to London.

    "They gave us passports and identification, and we moved a shipment of (unidentified) goods. In England they had more I.D. waiting for us, because customs and immigration are strict, but when we moved many places, into India or China or Latin America, matters were taken care of, and we just slipped through borders. We would be met. It was always all arranged."

A typical operation took place in April 1989, when a container ship from Colombia docked during the night at Karachi, Pakistan.

 

Black-unit operatives met the ship after paying $100,000 in bribes to Pakistani customs officials. The band unloaded large wooden crates from several containers.

    "They were so heavy we had to use a crane rather than a forklift," says a participant.

The crates were trucked to a "secure airport" and loaded aboard an unmarked 707 jet, where an American, believed by the black-unit members to be a CIA agent, supervised the frantic activity.

The plane then departed for Czechoslovakia, taking the place of a scheduled Pakistan International Airlines commercial flight that was aborted at the last minute by prearrangement.

 

The 707's radar transponder was altered to beep out the code of a commercial airliner, which enabled the plane to overfly several countries without arousing suspicion.

    "From Czechoslovakia the 707 flew to the U.S.," said the informant, insisting that none of the black-unit workers had any knowledge of what was in the heavy wooden crates.

     

    "It could have been gold. It could have been drugs. It could have been guns. We dealt in those commodities," Mustafa told U.S. authorities.

Other informants with details about the black network have come forward as the banking disaster has unfolded.

    "B.C.C.I. was a full-service bank," says an international arms dealer who frequently worked with the clandestine bank units.

     

    "They not only financed arms deals that one government or another wanted to keep secret, they shipped the goods in their own ships, insured them with their own agency and provided manpower and security. They worked with intelligence agencies from all the Western countries and did a lot of business with East bloc countries."

In Lima, where a probe of B.C.C.I.'s stewardship of Peru's central-bank funds is under way, local investigators are trying to trace what happened to money in an aborted B.C.C.I.-brokered deal to sell French-made Mirage jet fighters to the impoverished nation.

 

Sources in the clandestine arms trade say B.C.C.I. eventually sold the planes to Pakistan and India.

U.S. intelligence agencies were well aware of such activities.

    "B.C.C.I. played an indispensable role in facilitating deals between Israel and some Middle Eastern countries," says a former State Department official.

     

    "And when you look at the Saudi support of the contras, ask yourself who the middleman was: there was no government-to-government connection between the Saudis and Nicaragua."

As an equal-opportunity smuggler, the bank dealt in arms from many countries.

    "It was B.C.C.I. that financed and brokered (Chinese) Silkworm missiles that went to Saudi Arabia," the former official says, "and those were equipped with sophisticated Israeli guidance systems. When you couldn't use direct government transfers or national banks, B.C.C.I. was there to hot- wire the connections between Saudi Arabia, China and Israel."

The bank also helped transfer North Korean Scud-B missiles to Syria, a B.C.C.I. source told TIME.

Yet the bank's arms business was benign compared with the black network's other missions. Sources say B.C.C.I. officials, known as protocol officers, were responsible for providing a smorgasbord of services for customers and national officials: paying bribes to politicians, supplying "young beauties from Lahore," moving drugs and expediting insider business deals.

When it came to recruiting and persuading, the black network usually got its way.

    "We would put money in the accounts of people we wanted to seduce to work for us," says Mustafa, "or we would use terror tactics," including kidnapping and blackmail. "The Pakistanis were easy to terrorize; perhaps we might send someone his brother's hand with the rings still on it."

Adds Mustafa:

    "We were after business cooperation or military or industrial secrets that we would use or broker, and we targeted generals, businessmen and politicians. In America it was easy: money almost always worked, and we sought out politicians known to be corruptible."

The black network was the bank's deepest secret, but rumors of its activities filtered through the bank's managerial level with chilling effectiveness. Senior bankers voice fears that they will be financially ruined or physically maimed - even killed - if they are found talking about B.C.C.I.'s activities.

 

High-level bank officers know what happened to a Karachi-based protocol officer whom the black network suspected of unreliability last year.

    "They found he had been trying to liquidate his assets and quietly sell his house," says Mustafa. "So, first they killed his brother, and then they sent brigands to rape his wife. He fled to the U.S., where he is hiding."

U.S. investigators confirm the account but have little hope he will volunteer any secrets if he is located.

Businessmen who pursued shady deals with B.C.C.I. are just as frightened.

    "Look," says an arms dealer, "these people work hand in hand with the drug cartels; they can have anybody killed. I personally know one fellow who got crossed up with B.C.C.I., and he is a cripple now. A bunch of thugs beat him nearly to death, and he knows who ordered it and why. He's not about to talk."

Currently the black units have focused their scrutiny and intimidation on investigators.

    "Our own people have been staked out or followed, and we suspect tapped telephones," says a New York law-enforcement officer.

The black unit's mission eventually became the pursuit of power and influence for its own sake, but its primary purpose was to foster a global looting operation that bilked depositors of billions of dollars.

 

Price Waterhouse, the accounting firm whose audit triggered the worldwide seizure of B.C.C.I. assets earlier this month, says the disarray is so extreme that the firm cannot even put together a coherent financial statement. But investigators believe $10 billion or more is missing, fully half of B.C.C.I.'s worldwide assets.

How did it happen? B.C.C.I.'s corporate structure allowed the bank to operate virtually without regulation all over the world.

 

The bank's organizational web consisted of dozens of shell companies, offshore banks, branches and subsidiaries in 70 countries. It was incomprehensible even to its own financial officers and auditors. The bank's extensive use of unregulated Cayman Islands accounts enabled it to hide almost anything.

 

The bank's complex organization and unique method of accounting - longhand in paper ledgers, written in Pakistan's Urdu language - make it unlikely that most of the missing money will be traced. Nor is it likely that anyone will ever know just how much Abedi, who has incorporated a new bank, called the Progressive Bank, in Karachi, stole from the rest of the world.

B.C.C.I.'s downfall was inevitable because it was essentially a planetary Ponzi scheme, a rip-off technique pioneered by American flimflam man Charles Ponzi in 1920. B.C.C.I. gathered deposits, looted most of them, but kept enough new deposits flowing in so that there was always sufficient cash on hand to pay anyone who asked for his money.

 

During the years of its most explosive growth in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, B.C.C.I. became a magnet for drug money, capital-flight money, tax-evading money and money from corrupt government officials. B.C.C.I. quickly gained a reputation as a bank that could move money anywhere and hide it without a trace.

 

It was the bank that knew how to get around foreign-exchange rules and falsify letters of credit in support of smuggling.

 

Among its alleged services:

        In Panama, according to a little-known racketeering suit that the country brought against B.C.C.I., the bank systematically helped Noriega loot the national treasury.

         

        B.C.C.I. allowed the leader to open secret offshore accounts under the names of the Panamanian National Guard, the Panamanian Defense Forces and the Panamanian Treasury, to transfer national funds into those accounts and then to tap the funds himself.
         

        In Iraq, B.C.C.I. became one of the principal conduits for money that Saddam Hussein skimmed from national oil revenues during the 1980s. According to investigator Jules Kroll, who is tracking Saddam's fortune, B.C.C.I. helped the dictator move and hide money all over the world.
         

        In Guatemala the collapse of B.C.C.I. has triggered a government probe into a $30 million loan that the bank extended to the country in 1988-89.

         

        Government officials told TIME they suspect that some of the money may have gone to pay bribes to stifle a four-year-old investigation of a major B.C.C.I. client, coffee smuggler and arms merchant Munther Bilbeisi.

         

            "If the $30 million was given to corrupt public officials and that can be proved, then the loan should be wiped out or reduced," says Fernando Arevalo Reina of the Guatemalan Attorney General's office. (Bilbeisi has denied any wrongdoing.)

As B.C.C.I.'s influence grew, a corrupt core of middle management evolved, described by bank employees as "100 entrepreneurs," usually branch officers in foreign countries who were free to pursue their own agendas.

 

One such was Amjad Awan, the B.C.C.I. officer who was convicted in Florida for the money-laundering services he provided for Noriega. As long as these remote managers kept on gathering deposits, they were given wide latitude to do as they pleased, which increasingly meant serving a core clientele of what investigators estimate to be some 3,500 corrupt business people around the world.

The more B.C.C.I. became a conduit for such money, the more deposit gathering became the bank's chief goal.

 

At annual meetings, founder Abedi would harangue his employees for days on the importance of luring deposits. That was probably because billions of dollars were vanishing. At the highest levels, B.C.C.I. officials whisked deposits into secret accounts in the Cayman Islands. These accounts constituted a hidden bank within B.C.C.I., known only to founder Abedi and a few others.

 

From those accounts, B.C.C.I. would lend massive amounts to curry favor with governments - as in its $1 billion loan to Nigeria - or to buy secret control of companies.

U.S. regulators discovered recently that such loans had enabled B.C.C.I. to buy clandestine control in three American banks:

        First American Bankshares in Washington

        National Bank of Georgia (later purchased by First American)

        Independence Bank of Encino, Calif.

The latter two were bought officially by Abedi's front man, Ghaith Pharaon, the putative Saudi tycoon who received an ) estimated $500 million in B.C.C.I. loans in the 1970s and '80s.

 

Those loans were secured only by shares of stock in the companies Pharaon purchased, which meant that they were never to be repaid.

What Abedi got in return for such loans was de facto ownership of three American banks, since he held their shares as collateral for the unrepayable loans. More important, this "nominee" shareholder arrangement meant that B.C.C.I. itself remained invisible to U.S. banking regulators.

 

Following its discovery earlier this year that B.C.C.I. owned both First American and Independence Bank, the Federal Reserve ordered it to sell them off.

B.C.C.I.'s deposits also disappeared through the black network, which used the money to pay bribes and conduct its weapons and currency deals. According to a former officer, B.C.C.I. bought virtual control of customs officials in ports and air terminals around the world. In the U.S. millions of dollars flowed through B.C.C.I.'s Washington office, allegedly destined to pay off U.S. officials.

The bribes and intelligence connections may offer an explanation for the startling regulatory inaction.

 

The Justice Department has hindered an investigation by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, whose Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations was the first to probe B.C.C.I.'s illegal operations.

 

According to Kerry, the Justice Department has refused to provide documents and has blocked a deposition by a key witness, citing interference with its own investigation of B.C.C.I.

 

To date, however, the Justice Department investigation in Washington has issued only one subpoena.

    "We have had a lot of difficulty getting any answers at all out of Justice," says Kerry.

     

    "We've been shuffled back and forth so many times between bureaus, trying to find somebody who was accountable. These things are very serious. What's shocking is that more energy hasn't been expended. Somebody consciously or negligently took their eyes off the ball in this investigation."

According to Jack Blum, Kerry's chief investigator in 1988-89, the lack of cooperation was so pervasive and so successful in frustrating his efforts to investigate B.C.C.I. that he now says he believes it was part of a deliberate strategy.

 

Says Blum:

    "There's no question in my mind that it's a calculated effort inside the Federal Government to limit the investigation. The only issue is whether it's a result of high-level corruption or if it's designed to hide illegal government activities."

The Justice Department denies any reluctance to investigate.

 

Said spokesman Dan Eramian:

    "We believe there has been good cooperation between law-enforcement (agencies) in this investigation. We're often accused of dragging our feet, and part of that we believe is partisan in nature."

Yet the evidence of a cover-up is mounting:

        In one of the most mysterious events in the case, B.C.C.I. bank records from Panama City relating to Noriega "disappeared" in transit to Washington while under guard by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

         

        After an internal investigation, the DEA said it had no idea what had happened to the documents.
         

        Lloyd's of London, which is enmeshed in a racketeering lawsuit against B.C.C.I., has fruitlessly made offers to provide evidence of bribery and kickbacks and has made "repeated pleas" to U.S. Attorneys in Miami and New Orleans to seize B.C.C.I. records.

         

        Lloyd's accuses B.C.C.I. of taking part in smuggling operations and falsifying shipping documents. The insurance underwriters offered the results of their voluminous research into the bank's illegal activities. The Justice Department attorneys ignored the offers, Lloyd's says.
         

        The U.S. Attorney General has assigned only a handful of FBI agents to its Washington grand jury investigation of B.C.C.I.'s relationship to First American Bankshares. The department's main probe of B.C.C.I. itself is being handled by a sole Assistant U.S. Attorney in Tampa, who has recently been assigned another major case.

         

        Similar understaffing is evident in a Miami grand jury probe of the relationship between B.C.C.I. and the CenTrust savings and loan, whose failure is estimated to cost taxpayers $2 billion.

         

        This may help account for the fact that a 16-month investigation has yielded no indictments.

Just as perplexing is why the Bank of England and other authorities took so long to intervene.

 

Britain's main financial regulator waited more than a year after seeing a Price Waterhouse audit that raised serious questions about B.C.C.I.'s viability before seizing its 25 branches in Britain.

 

One explanation:

    the Bank of England was conducting extended negotiations with Abu Dhabi authorities, apparently hoping that B.C.C.I.'s current owner, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, would shore up the bank.

But more suspicious experts raise questions about B.C.C.I.'s links to Western intelligence agencies.

 

Leaders in Parliament have expressed outrage at the regulatory failure, which among other things has endangered deposits from as many as 45 municipalities and four utilities.

As authorities sift through B.C.C.I. subsidiaries around the world, they are trying to cope with potentially massive losses of depositors' money. The Pakistani press spoke of "panic withdrawals," and one paper added that "smugglers and drug barons" were desperately trying to rescue their offshore accounts.

 

In such countries as Nigeria and Botswana, officials were worried that central-bank deposits at B.C.C.I. might be lost.

Still to be probed, with potentially explosive results, is B.C.C.I.'s Washington office. Sources have told TIME that one of B.C.C.I.'s Washington representatives distributed millions of dollars in payoffs to U.S. officials during the past decade. If that is true, the banker's black book may be the single hottest source since Deep Throat in the Watergate investigation.

 

U.S. authorities are searching for the Washington representative and other B.C.C.I. protocol officers, but most have fled to Pakistan. In this investigation, many roads lead to Karachi, where the infamous black network is enduring its most desperate hour.

 

As it falters, the testimony by once fearful witnesses is likely to yield a succession of startling details about one of history's most ornate and ruthless frauds.
 
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/socio ... ing118.htm

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Jack Blood Interviews Richard Andrew Grove, an AIG Insider and Whistleblower

BY JACK BLOOD, SEP 19, 2008

Jack Blood show with some incidental coverage on 9/11:

[googlevid-]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6546044203900048624&hl=en[/googlevid-]

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6546044203900048624&hl=en

Jack Blood of gcnlive.com interviews Richard Andrew Grove, an AIG insider and whistleblower. This is an insider expose of the AIG / Kroll spook company, their ties to 9/11 and their new financial 9/11. This is taken from the second hour of the Deadline Live show with Jack Blood from 9/18/2008. Get the archive at Gcnlive.com.

Summary of points made: History of AIG China 1919 origins... (which follow up through the Bush family in the 70's and Greenberg and Bush in 1992, where Hank accompanied George Sr.) Partnership with Wild Bill Donovan and Frank Wisner OSS/CIA Drug Smuggling (Peter Dale Scott) Fraud (AIG/Marsh insurance fraud and Spitzer investigation) Hank Greenberg ousted from AIG Frank G. Wisner Jr. (son of CIA cofounder) on both AIG and Kroll boards of directors. 9/11 (taking the history and applying it to AIG involvement with Kroll, Wisner Jr., CFR/Fed Reserve) Pete Peterson (Blackstone/CFR/Fed Res) also involved in financing of wtc. Robt. David Steel's comments on WTC disaster (he's ex-CIA but affirms 9-11 was done as insurance fraud)... Crash of AIG and bailout by Fed Reserve, Greenberg steering to re-take control, using Fed Res as a proxy.

Other subjects covered: Nature of insurance (protection money) Spitzer Elliot Spitzer's connection to AIG via Michael Cherkasky, President and CEO of Kroll Inc Robert M. Morgenthau of the French Connection Skadden Arps SEC Kroll Iran Contra BCCI Paul Bremer.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 8624&hl=en