Khashoggi, Adnan

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BCCI

EPSTEIN

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https://gregolear.substack.com/p/deconstructing-the-epstein-myth-what}:

...SK

Well, was looking at all of the criminals around Donald, and I had a head start with a piece of information that I had gotten in 2005—before there was even an imagination that this man would run for president. I think to the layman’s understanding, if you knew who Trump was, which people did, that he was political in any way, just maybe he had been and we learned that he had been.

In 2005, Trump had this new reality show with Mark Burnett. And so I had a circle of people that I knew. I’m a writer, screenwriter. So I knew folks in that circle with that man.

Okay. Meaning Burnett.

Yes, Burnett. And I had learned that Donald was in a tremendous amount of debt to some Russians. And it was threatening this new thing—this idea of him as this self-made, you know, billionaire, whatever, whatever the thing was, a successful businessman, because it was all about to crumble. And there’s been a tremendous amount of reporting since I learned that. Verifying all of that. So I had that information at the time, back in the day.

And so when he came down that escalator, I knew, I was like, “Oh no, that’s the guy that’s in debt to a bunch of Russian gangsters!” And so I started trying to figure out who those Russians may be. And then in doing that, I came across Jeffrey Epstein.

Okay, interesting. So Trump to the Russians to Epstein.

## Tinker, Tailor, Mobster, Trump

Greg Olear

March 31, 2020

Yeah, well, organized crime—specifically Russian organized crime. And then trying to understand Donald and Fred, Fred’s empire, his father’s empire, which was built with the Genovese crime family. And then the building of Trump Tower in Manhattan that moved in—they had different territory as Fred would call it, as Donald has said on the record—that Manhattan wasn’t. According to his father, “That’s not our territory,” because it wasn’t, it was Gambino territory. For Donald Trump specifically to be able to build in Manhattan, develop in Manhattan, Fred arranged for, and Roy Cohn arranged for, the two crime families, the Gambinos and the Genovese to form what became known as a concrete cartel—all the five families were in there. And this was the bid-rigging over concrete contacts to develop in Manhattan. And it was called “the Donald Trump deal.” And so that was in the middle of it, for those U.S. crime families and the racket they were running, which is this very racket that Giuliani used to prosecute the five families. So…

Four of the five families.

Four of the five families. Castellanos was a holdout and then was killed, shot dead in the street. So that’s the history.

There’s way more than that. During that time, before the Russian mafia had really taken over New York—which it did; it rolled in in the late 80s, some of it even back to the 70s, but very specifically in the 80s and the 90s and just sort of rolled up a lot of the territories as their own. And they did it by laundering money through Donald’s casinos. There was a lot of ways that they did all of that. There was a very prominent Russian gangster named Ivankov, who had actually an office in Trump Tower in Manhattan, but he was ultimately caught, tipped off and caught by Andy McCabe’s team.

Like when you start learning about these characters, of what they were doing back in the day, both on the law enforcement side pursuing Russian organized crime and from the Russian organized crime side—the bosses and the key figures there were all in business in some fashion with Donald Trump.

Then in the mid early 2000s to like 2005, 2006, right around when I was hearing this stuff about him, what was happening was the Russians were wanting to keep using Trump to go internationally. So the properties: Trump Panama developing and Trump Toronto developing and Trump Georgia developing and all of these foreign developments, which we were watching. If you watch “The Apprentice,” it unfolds on “The Apprentice” as well. This sort of expansion of the Trump thing where he was just licensing his name to be put on these things, because he was really over-leveraged.

Like the one in Georgia, the country Georgia—the Trump Tower there, all they did was just stick a shovel in the ground, and a whole bunch of money was laundered. There’s Trump Baku, which, you know, there was quite a bit of reporting how that was probably a front for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Again, Iran and their corruption very closely tied in with Russian organized crime as well.

Right. Adam Davidson in the New Yorker.

So that’s the background. That’s why the Trump/Russia thing is not a hoax. Donald is the hoax. You know, he did. And there’s so much reporting and Trump, the company, Allen Weisselberg, all those people, they affirm this, they said, “Yeah, yeah, we took that money.” The problem with it is some of it was illegal, but a lot of it’s not illegal, right?

He couldn’t get a casino license in Australia, infamously. They would not give him a casino license because of his ties to organized crime, both U.S. organized crime and Russian organized crime.

So a major Five Eyes power decided that Trump couldn’t have a casino license because of his ties to organized crime—and specifically Russian organized crime. Let’s just underline that because it seems important. Australia is, as they say, a real country, you know—that is one of our strongest allies.

Right. Right.

So how you get to Jeffrey is, there was a time in the 80s where Donald was really having issues, and he was sort of over-leveraging himself. He was building in Atlantic City. He was doing these things and couldn’t get them funded. He always had a problem getting the money because legitimate banks would stop lending to him, which was the crisis he was facing in the early 2000s, mid-2000s. There was Deutsche Bank, but even Deutsche Bank was turning him down, so he had to go for this Russian money. You could get Russian money, you could get Chinese money, and the Chinese money hadn’t quite showed up yet. But the gangsters will invest in you. So the banks were difficult.

Now part of the stuff that made it hard to get finding from U.S. banks is because of what happened with him in the 80s with Bear Stearns. So there’s a guy that ran Bear Stearns.

(This is all the reporting done by Wayne Barrett. And I recommend everybody go read Wayne Barrett’s work on Donald and Fred Trump and that sort of “Trump Inc.” He did extraordinary work on that. He also did great work on Giuliani and showing what sort of a criminal and a fraud Giuliani was. And it still is, I guess.)

So Ace Greenberg ran Bear Stearns. Bear Stearns is the company that infamously went down in 2008 with all the credit-default swaps, all that kind of stuff that just crashed—you know, the Big Shorttype of thing.

But before that, they were a real player—Bear and Lehman and these other entities. Goldman Sachs. And so Donald had a very close relationship with Ace Greenberg. Ace Greenberg is the man whose daughter was Jeffrey Epstein’s student when Jeffrey Epstein was at the Dalton School. And Epstein did whatever he did at the Dalton School to leverage his just being a math teacher and tutor at this private school into working directly for Ace Greenberg.

So he went into the financial industry at Bear Stearns. And he didn’t come in as a low-level person and work his way up. He came in at a very senior level, and it caused a great sort of upset at Bear Stearns. Who is this guy? Where is he coming from? And why is Ace giving him this plum spot?

And he was handling private wealth management. And his big client that he had, that Ace gave him, was Edgar Bronfman, who’s Sam Bronfman’s son. Sam Bronfman, he established Seagrams, and he was Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano’s business partner during the bootlegging days. And Edgar Bronfman has a lot of ties to Russia as well, quite frankly. And it’s his daughters that were part of that NXIVM thing. That’s how people recognize that name, Bronfman.

He’s Canadian though, right? Sam Bronfman?

Yes, he was Canadian. So that was part of the bootlegging thing. Yeah.

But that was Jeffrey’s client, and he got into difficulties and troubles there at Bear Stearns with that particular client managing, you know, and he basically had to be fired. And Ace really resisted firing Jeffrey. And what I uncovered and discovered was that he didn’t fire him. He just moved him into Offshores. Jeffrey went into establishing offshore accounts and offshore money, sort of tax havens for Bear Stearns clients.

If you go into the Offshore Leaks database—which is where I found Jeffrey’s offshore accounts, some of them—you can see there are old Bear Stearns officers. In fact, Ace Greenberg’s partner at Bear Stearns is still connected and linked into those offshore accounts. So Epstein was very much doing that business, and he was doing that business for Bear Stearns right at the time that Bear Stearns was doing these wild, risky, money-backing things for Donald, for Donald developing his casino.

:{:{So thatis where I found him. And I’m like, “Who’s this Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this?” And then I started looking into Jeffrey Epstein, and I’m like, “My God, everybody’s some kind of sex-trafficking criminal.” He’s not the only one that was tied in with Donald’s business or his financial backing in some way that also was convicted for sex trafficking.}:

There’s another guy named Tevfik Arif, who was a big partner with Donald, who had that yacht with all the underage prostitutes and the trafficking that went on there. There’s a yacht, I think off of Turkey where they were finally caught, he was finally caught. So there’s the folks in Panama: his business partners in Panama were nailed for sex trafficking, international sex trafficking. And the people in Canada: there’s ties in there for his business partners in Trump Toronto and Canada, who were also Russian. The main partner there was the son-in-law of Semion Mogilevich’s business partner and consigliere—Semion Mogilevich being a great big Russian gangster.}:

And then there’s all the Craig Unger reporting on Mogilevich, that Donald was in fact laundering Mogilevich’s money himself. And that’s the man who originally compromised him. So that’s the money. It’s full of sex traffickers and it’s full of Russian gangsters.

So let’s underline again Semion Mogilevich. That’s an important connection because Semion Mogilevich, if I remember correctly, was at one point directly working with Robert Maxwell. That was in one of those books, right?

Correct. In Maxwell’s biography, Mogilevich is named several times. I believe the source for that was Ari Ben-Manashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer who also worked for the Kremlin. But that Robert Maxwell biography—this is Ghislaine Maxwell’s father—outlines Robert Maxwell as a Mossad and a KGB spy. That means that he was an intelligence officer. It looks like he also did—there’s quite an FBI file on him. He probably worked with U.S. intelligence at times, and it looks like he definitely worked for the Queen. He was very close with, very close with the Queen. He touched the Queen. There’s video of him, footage of him touching her, like walking alongside her and touching her like.

He was friends with the Queen. Yeah.

That’s very rare and weird and very strange.

It’s very strange. Robert Maxwell also, when he died in 1991, in November of 1991, by falling off a yacht off the coast of the Canary Islands—as happens, I guess, all the time, so no foul play at all, none suspected; it’s weird how that thread keeps going up—but remember, he had defrauded the pensions of the company, the publishing company that he bought. So he was about to collapse before he died, like his entire...

That’s right.

…financial empire was a house of cards, and it was all bullshit. So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

That’s right. And he knew Donald. Donald knew him directly. There’s a lot of images and photographs. They were on the yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, that he named after his daughter. So yeah.

They were on the yacht, in Page Six. With Ivana, which is interesting because Robert Maxwell is born Jan Hoch and is from Czechia. And Ivana Trump is also Czech. So I envision a scenario where the two of them are on the yacht talking in Czech, and Trump is just standing there like an idiot.

I’m sure, yeah. Junior, I believe, is fluent in Czech. People underestimate Don Jr.

Yeah, and Baron is fluent in Slovenian, yes.

But you know, another character that was in that world with them, with Robert Maxwell—and it’s important because his money shows up in Jeffrey Epstein’s next big financial scam after the Bear Stearns moving him—is a man named Adnan Khashoggi, who is Jamal Khashoggi’s uncle. And there’s not a lot of Khashoggis, actually, by the way.

Donald knew the Khashoggis very, very, very well. Ivana called Adnan her best friend quite often. When Donald bought the one and only yacht he’s ever bought, he bought Khashoggi’s yacht. So he bought Khashoggi’s, yeah.

And Khashoggi was a known intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia, but he was at one point the wealthiest man in the world.

He was an arms dealer, right? Wasn’t he an arms dealer?

He was a big arms dealer. Yeah.

I remember that, even in the moment, people knew who he was. Like, he wasn’t some hidden figure. I remember reading about him in the 80s. I didn’t know what these people were at the time. But I knew their names.

Paul Manafort was also in this mix, Tom Barrack was in this mix. There were a lot of folks that we saw show up in Trump 1.0 as President, helping with his campaign, that were swirling around in this—what I call the underworld. But it’s where crime syndicates and intelligence services are just, you know, intertwined.

And that’s what MAGA is aware of when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. They can kind of feel that there’s something odd there. There are intelligence services there.

Now, it’s important to point out that before Robert Maxwell died—there are several people who are credible witnesses and know what they’re talking about that have identified that Robert Maxwell was taking Jeffrey Epstein around and sort of introducing him as his protégé. So this myth—this lie—that Ghislaine and Jeffrey told that he showed up after Ghislaine’s dad died, that she moved to New York and that’s where she met Jeffrey? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They knew each other before her father died or was killed or whatever happened off the side of that yacht. So that’s kind of key.

And then Jeffrey went from there to creating one of the biggest Ponzi schemes, the biggest Ponzi scheme ever before Bernie Madoff. He almost kind of invented it. That was called Towers Financial. And I talked a lot with Steve Hoffenberg; you talked with him as well. He was a tricky character. He’s passed away now, but he went to prison for quite a long time, and he got out of prison right at the beginning of Trump’s first term. The first person to call him when he was out of prison actually was Roger Stone, he told me.

But Hoffenberg was mortified with what Jeffrey had done with the victims. That reporting had kind of just come out when he was just out of prison. And he did contact the victims, and he did want to kind of make good. Because the money from Towers Financial was never fully recovered, Hoffenberg didn’t understand why he went to prison and Jeffrey got off.

I talked to Hoffenberg a bit. I’m like, “Well, what are some of the ways that someone gets out of being prosecuted for a big crime financial crime like this?” And it looks like Jeffrey very much cooperated with prosecutors. Now, there were a lot of criminals that were part of Towers; that was a big money laundering vehicle. Quite a lot of the money from Iran-Contra, Steve Hoffenberg suspected, was pushed—that Jeffrey got his hands on—it was pushed through Towers.

That is money that Robert Maxwell was in charge of that also disappeared around the time of his pension scandal. And so there was a lot of pressure on Robert Maxwell right before his death. It wasn’t just that his empire was crumbling. There was a lot about to be exposed of the kind of places he’d had his hands in, money that disappeared that he should never have been anywhere near it. And it exposed nation-states, intelligence services, doing what maybe they shouldn’t have been doing.

So that’s the world. It’s like a private intelligence rogue operatives. Private arms dealers like Adnan Khashoggi or the guy that Nicolas Cage played in that movie, Lord of War—like those guys, that world.

There’s also: you don’t have to just deal in arms or traffic in arms. You can traffic in kompromat, right? You can traffic in other things that would have value to intelligence services of both our nation and other nations. And it does very much look like that Robert Maxwell was in that business. It looks like Ghislaine took the mantle, and Jeffrey took the mantle from him and developed their own little operation. So all of the pieces are there for Epstein to have that connection.

And Towers Financial, I think, is also a great big piece that doesn’t get talked about enough, in terms of, What kind of deal did this guy cut with those prosecutors, that he got out of facing prison? And his business partner went in for 20 years, 18 years or whatever.

And knowing the kind of money, the kind of players that Epstein ran with, just with that one fraud and scheme alone—those are very valuable names, and a lot of money that he could have turned over to prosecutors to cut himself a deal. That could very well be the key to Alex Acosta’s phrase about Jeffrey, when he says he was told Epstein “belonged to Intelligence.” Because he would have some really big names in Towers, and really powerful players that maybe were on a sanction list, quite frankly.

So just to review quickly, Towers Financial ran from 1988-1993. He’s now worked, Jeffrey has, as a math teacher at Dalton (where he got fired), at Bear Stearns in some weird capacity (where he got sort of fired). And then he went to work, if I remember correctly, Hoffenberg said Epstein went to work for Douglas Leese, who was another person in that world.

Leese, yes—who was an arms dealer for the Queen. Right.

And he, Leese, according to Hoffenberg, recommended Epstein to Hoffenberg by saying, “He’s smart and he has no moral compass.” So Hoffenberg knew he was going to do this Ponzi scheme, and he needed like a guy to help him with it. And that’s why he hired him. Like, specifically.

And that would have been while Robert Maxwell was still alive or just sort of on his way out to the next world. Yeah. Right. All right around that time.

Right. Again; so now, we’re all the way into the early 90s, and so far it’s money and offshores and arms deals and Russian mobsters and shady characters, but we haven’t even—we haven’t gotten to the sex trafficking part yet, right?

Yeah, as far as we know, it wasn’t happening then. And that’s just—we only know what’s in those court documents, with what the prosecutors brought to light. And a lot of it’s still redacted. But yeah, then he’s setting up, and he’s got Les Wexner, you know, somehow come folding him in.

Les Wexner being the guy that owns Victoria’s Secret and these other big retail chains. And that was the time when Jeffrey was walking around saying he was a model scout for Victoria’s Secret, you know, as a pickup line that he was using.

That’s correct. There is a journalist in the Ohio area, Bob Fitrakis, who’s really good, a great muckraker, and he did a lot of work on Wexner and Wexner’s ties to organized crime. And Wexner as a potential…what’s called a non-official cover, a NOC, for our own intelligence services. Wexner has an airfield there in Ohio, a private airstrip, and there were planes coming in and out of there that Fitrakis believed and tracked to our own intelligence services.

Right, and Wexner’s the guy that owns the lovely, huge mansion on the Upper East Side of New York, on East 73rd, where he’s like, “Why don’t you just live in my mansion? You know? Why don’t you Kato Kaelin this? And you just move in. I don’t need it, it’s fine, it’s good.”

Right. Yeah. To Epstein, yeah, Wexner handed over the most valuable piece of property, the most valuable private residence in Manhattan to Jeffrey—just gave it to him.

Which is, I think, I would say odd, unusual, strange, whatever word you want to use. Weird.

It’s odd.

The other odd thing, and we talked about this this past week a lot, but we kept talking about it at the time, too. We do know that that all of these homes, New York, down in Palm Beach, out in New Mexico, the island and the plane, that these properties that either Jeffrey owned or had access to or were his in some way or form, all had surveillance technology wired throughout them. That’s in the underlying evidence in the court cases against him. So we’re not just speculating about this. It’s in the evidence. And you have to understand that we’re talking about properties that he was using for the—you know, for the abuse, while he abusing these minors and raping the minors.

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hmmn

an unofficial investigation into RussiaGatehas uncovered a shocking and previously-unknown new connection— a CIA-connected man who became instantly famous after the Boston Marathon bombing — involved in recent allegations against Trump associate Felix Sater that he laundered $440 million of stolen money for billionaire oligarchs in Kazakhstan through American real estate.

Evidence in the case also showed a startling similarity between suspicions of money laundering in Trump’s sale of a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian billionaire gangster and a billionaire gangster from Kazakhstan purchasing a similarly over-priced mansion in London from Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, a member of the British royal family, son of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and at one time second in line to the throne.

When Donald Trump filed suit yesterday to keep his business dealings with Germany’s criminal Deutsche Bank secret, it prompted a review of notes for clues that led to long-unanswered questions about why Mueller’s investigation showed no apparent interest in linking crimes Deutsche Bank was committing while Trump was doing business with the bank with a man with whom he had clear ties: Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.

Was an unwillingness to unmask CIA involvementbehind both situations?

Donald Trump’s Palm Beach ‘homies’ in the news

Adnan Khashoggi, one of Donald Trump’s longtime Palm Beach ‘homies,’ was committing crimes with Deutsche Bank, and, as this website never tires of pointing out, during the same time period Trump was involved in what many suspect was similar business, money laundering, with the bank.

PRO TIP: If investigators also subpoena information about criminal dealings between Deutsche Bank and Adnan Khashoggi—whose death a year ago makes accessing information about his criminal dealings with the bank easier—progress may be made.

It’s just a suggestion, but probably a good one.

Khashoggi is one of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach ‘homies.’ Moreover his criminal collusion with Deutsche Bank has already been proven in court.

Deutsche Bank was forced to pay a hefty $278 million fine for its illegal actions with Khashoggi which included a spectacularly-successful pump and dump scheme that stole more than $300 million from investors.

Clues to what was going on during that fascinating journey into the underworld of global criminal banking could help prosecutors quest to use three words criminals involved in organized crime fear most: “continuing criminal conspiracy(RICO).”

Khashoggi participated in banking giant Deutsche Bank’ssuccessful scheme to launder $10-billion dollars into the bloodstream of the Western economy for Russian gangsters, for which the bank was fined more than a half-billion dollars.

The scheme only came to light after a massive 500-man strong police raid at Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, an act which would have probably caused immediate cardiac arrest in U.S. authorities like former Attorney General Eric Holder.

Fur hats vs the fedoras

Another revelation sheds new light on suspicions about the connection between Felix Sater and the ultra-orthodox Jewish Chabad Lubavitch sect.

Because Felix Sater’s name appears on 28 separate pages in the Mueller Report, his many and various connections with Chabad Lubavitch have been receiving increasedattention.

Sater himself has also become a more intriguing figure. Alawsuit filed against himearlier this month by the quasi-state bank of the country of Kazakhstan claims Sater used money hestole from the bank (and by extension the people of Kazakhstan) to develop his project to create a Trump Tower in Moscow.

Sater was feted as at Chabad’s synagogue in Port Washington on Long Island, a location seen as having been used as something like a dead drop between Putin and Trump.

As first reported in author Craig Unger’s excellent “House of Trump, House of Putin”, Vladimir Putin used Chabad Lubavitch to consolidate power in Russia, through putting Berel Lazar, the Chabad’s chief Rabbi in the country, in charge over a new Russian national organization for Jews.

With Putin’s support, reported Unger, “Chabad’s Lazar became Russia’s chief rabbi, and the alliance provided direct connections between Putin and Donald Trump.”

Putin’s Jewish outreach, Unger found, had helped him counteract rising resentment over the Russian Mafiya—sometimes called the Kosher Nostra for its heavily-Jewish gangster ranks—as well as Russia’s new class of billionaire oligarchs, many of them Jewish.

Putin’s new Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia was designed to replace what before Putin had long been the leading Jewish organization in Russia.

Called the Russian Jewish Congress, it had been cofounded by Russian oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky, who Israeli newspaper Haaretz called the “Number 1 Jew in Russia.”

Not anymore.

Chabad Lubavitch

“Felix Sater and others at Bayrock with close ties to Chabad—like Tamir Sapir and his son-in-law Rotem Rosen—were part of an extraordinarily powerful channel between Trump and Putin,” Unger reported.

[pix soho twr launch don jr ivanka]

When the late Russian billionaire Tamir Sapir first arrived in New York in 1976, he opened an electronics store in the Flatiron district, which largely catered to KGB agents, according to the New York Times.

Over time Tamir Sapir became a significant partner in Bayrock.

Donald Trump, who called Sapir “a great friend,” hosted the wedding of Sapir’s daughter at Mar-a-Lago, an event featuring performances by Lionel Ritchie and the Pussycat Dolls.

The wedding’s groom, Rotem Rosen, became Sapir’s son-in-law, the CEO of the Sapir organization, and the head of the American branch of Putin oligarch Lev Leviev’s holding company, Africa Israel.

At the time, the busy Rosen was already a lieutenant of Israeli diamond king Lev Leviev, Chabad’s biggest backer.

Felix Sater in Kazakhstan

Sater was back in the news as the defendant in a lawsuit brought by the government of Kazakhstan on behalf of the country’s chief bank. The suit describes him as “a notorious New York ‘businessman’ and “two-time felon’ before claiming he participated in an international criminal conspiracy to launder $440 million stolen from Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank though American real estate.

According to the lawsuit, Sater helped Mukhtar Ablyazov, the former chairman of BTA Bank, and Ilyas Khrapunov, the son of the former Mayor of Almaty, the capital of Kazakhstan, to funnel money out of the country to the U.S., where it was invested in U.S. real estate.

In our notes was something noteworthy: Also popping up in the scandal is someone whose involvement proves something a retired Customs Agent in Louisiana once told me:

“There aren’t that many players out there. Pretty much, they all know each other.”

The return of Uncle Ruslan

Ruslan Tsarni shot to fame six years ago on the day after the Boston Marathon bombing as the uncle of the two men accused. He roundly and vociferously condemned his nephews, and quickly became the chief source of information about the two men.

For days he was ubiquitous on television. Now he has a prominent role in accusing Felix Sater of laundering money for two billionaires from Kazakhstan through American real estate.

It was exclusive reporting here which first revealed that Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of the suspected Boston Marathon bombers, had been married to the daughter of former top CIA official Graham Fuller, who was still active in the region, although not, he claimed, on behalf of the CIA.

Two years earlier Tsarni was involved in the international criminal investigation into a Kazakh billionaire banker-turned-fugitive who allegedly absconded with more than $6 billion from Kazakhstan’s BTA Bank before settling down in London.

“Tsarni was a US lawyer who has had dealings in Kazakh business affairs,” reported the May 8, 2011 London Sunday Times.

“A statement by Ruslan Zaindi Tsarni claimed that the two Kazaks involved bought properties in Mayfair with $96 million derived from a complex series of deals intended to disguise money laundering.”

“Tsarni alleged that the money came from the takeover of a western company, which had been used as a front to obtain oil contracts from the Kazakh state.”

Felix Sater & Ruslan Tsarni

During the “Wild West” days in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan in the early 9o’s— when anything that wasn’t nailed down in that country was up for grabs—Uncle Ruslan Tsarni had been in Kazakhstan working as a Halliburton contractor as well as for the Agency for International Development (USAID), which is often used for cover by CIA agents overseas.

The “takeover of the western company” mentioned in the lawsuit was Big Sky Energy Corporation, where Tsarni was a top executive. The soon-to-be-bankrupt US oil company had oil leases in Kazakhstan’s Caspian Basin, and was being run by a long-time Halliburton top executive.

At the time I contacted a reporter at Oilgram News, a respected oil industry trade publication, for information about U.S. oil companies in the ‘Stans, one of a myriad of subjects about which I knew nothing.

After requesting anonymity, he replied. “Big Sky, Ablyazov, Kulibayev and the rest, were all on my watch list for intelligence connections and pay-offs of various kinds.”

As if that weren’t enough— and its never enough— the Felix Sater-Ruslan Tsarni connection offered one more piece of intriguing information on a subject that should ring a bell to anyone following the RussiaGate scandal…

No? Prince Andrew? Laundering dirty cash just like Trump?

Prince Andrew, the younger brother of Prince Charles and the second or third heir to the throne, sold one of his chief residences to a man named Timur Kulibayev, one of the billionaire Kazakh oil tycoons who “controlled that country’s oil industry.

Conveniently, he was also married to the daughter of Kazakhstan’s autocratic then-President, Nursultan Nazarbayev.

The story, headlined “Prince’s home in ‘laundered cash’ inquiry,” reported that the President-for-Life’s son-in-law, amid allegations of money laundering, paid millions over the asking price to Prince Andrew for his home, paid through a network of offshore companies to hide his ownership.

This money laundering tale bears a startling similarity to Donald Trump’s sale of a Palm Beach mansion to a Russian mobster at about the same time.

No doubt it is just a coincidence.

Still, it is now clear, but too late to do any good, that buying anonymous real estate in friendly Western countries has been the main way Russian gangsters use to get their dirty cash laundered out of Russia and into the Western economy.

The Messiah of Brooklyn & Jared Kushner’s Dad

Chabad Lubavitch is a tiny Brooklyn-based sect centered on the teachings of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, who some Jews, in all seriousness, called the messiah or Mashiach.

The sect is anti-abortion, anti-homosexual, and big-time fundamentalist. Although it has less than a hundred thousand adherents, it has more than 1100 outposts around the world.

In Russia, recognizing Chabad as the official state representative for Jews would be like America naming Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church— remember them? Running anti-gay protests at military funerals while carrying signs reading “thank God for dead soldiers” and “God blew up the troops?”— as official spokesman for Protestants.

One of Chabad’s biggest financial backers was Russian billionaire oligarch Lev Leviev, who, because of his stature in the diamond trade, is known as ‘The King of Diamonds.”

Another is Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner.

Coming disclosures to come will push the story of RussiaGate ever-deeper into the high cotton, to places the timid Mueller Report feared to tread.

Sarasota grifter & Semion Mogilevich

Trump-Bannon-Khashoggi associate Jonathan Curshen tried to save Russian Mob Uber-Boss Semion Mogilevich’s nuts from the fire in the YBM Magnex affair.

Individuals close enough to Trump to stroll around the block with him outside the Ravenite Social Club, metaphorically-speaking, were doing the bidding of Russia’s most powerful gangster…back in 1998.

Jonathan Curshen has been the subject of reporting here for a decade. Still, it was a shock to discover he was involved in a major financial fraud with the Maestro himself, ‘the Brainy Don,’ the ‘Russian Meyer Lansky’… Semion Mogilevich.

Curshen’s connection with grifters associated with Donald Trump can be found in corporate documents available to anyone online. What’s lacking?

Grainy security-camera footage of Curshen passing a suitcase stuffed with cash up the ladder to his capo.

There’s more news about Donald Trump and the ultra-orthodox Jewish sect Chabad Lubavitch—whose chief defining characteristic is its Mormon missionary-type zeal to bring in new recruits worldwide— which may be nothing nothing more than cover for criminal and espionage operations.

Russian gangsters living in the U.S. appear to have been involved in a Whitman’s Sampler-assortment of criminal operations which have been supporting efforts to subvert sovereign nation-states on the planet…

Including our own.

Hackers, Mob Bosses & Alt-Right Grifters

The Russian Mob nexus with U.S. organized crime has been operational for at least the past 30 years.

Even before that, the “outreach” of the tiny Chabad Lubavitch sect began spreading across America — as I will soon personally and ruefully attest— have been in existence for 50 years or longer.

Close business associates of Donald Trump — including his former campaign manager Steve Bannon and Bannon’s lieutenant and former employee Andy Badolato— were in business in 2003 with Russia’s premier hacker, who was fingered by name by the FBI in July of 2016 for hacking election databases in the United States.

No one has laid a finger on Pavel Vrublevsky.

As long as he confines himself to the vast steppes of his Russian homeland, “Red Eye,’ as he’s called, remains safe.

But that can’t last. Can it?

:{===

---

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

:{:{The 'Brokers of Death' arms case (officially United States v. Samuel Evans et al^[1][2]) was a US criminal case in the 1980s relating to the attempted shipment of $2.5bn worth of US-made arms to Iran. The Los Angeles Times in 1986 described the case as "the largest arms conspiracy prosecution ever brought by the Justice Department".^[3]}:

The case (with indictments in May 1986, following a four-month investigation) was dropped in January 1989 after the prosecution said it could not prove the defendants did not believe their dealings were officially sanctioned. The planned deals were being arranged at the same time as the White House was secretly seeking to arrange arms sales to Iran, in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair; some evidence indicated that defendants were aware of these efforts.^[4]}:

Overview

:{:{In December 1985, the case began when Iranian banker Cyrus Hashemi approached US Customs with a deal. Hashemi, described by Assistant Treasury Secretary John M. Walker, Jr. as a "major figure in international arms trafficking", had been indicted in July 1984 over arms dealing with Iran, and sought leniency in exchange for cooperation.^[5] The US agreed to drop the charges against Hashemi in exchange for his cooperation.^[3]}:

Hashemi said he had been approached in late 1985 by Samuel Evans, an advisor to Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, leading to US Customs setting up a sting operation. The four-month investigation, costing over $100,000, led to arrests in April 1986 in New York and Bermuda, with the involvement of Special Agent Joseph F. King.^[5] Evans was recorded by US Customs saying that he had received assurances of "full and complete cooperation" from Israeli officials, and was expecting to discuss the matter with Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin on his next trip.^[5]}:

In April 1986, 17 suspects were indicted in the case, accused of planning to use false end-user certificates to bypass the US arms embargo against Iran. Three suspects were named as retired Israeli general Avraham Bar-Am, William Northrop, and Samuel Evans. The deal was said to involve over 100 aircraft, as well as tanks and missiles.^[6] Tanks were promised by Bar-Am, who said they were Soviet tanks captured from the Syrian Army in 1973.^[5] Indictments were issued on 5 May 1986.^[7] According to Victor Ostrovsky's The Other Side of Deception, a contact at Mossad asked Ostrovsky to call Bar-Am on 8 April 1986 and tell him that the deal had been approved. Ostrovsky said he made the call, knowing that Bar-Am was walking into a trap - his contact had told him that Bar-Am's contact had been "turned" by the FBI.^[8]

Evans' lawyer later told the court that Evans had first been introduced to Hashemi by Roy Furmark, a close friend of Central Intelligence Agency Director William Casey, in January 1985.^[9] Furmark was alleged to have repeatedly assured Evans that according to Casey the US approved of supplying arms to Iran.^[9] Northrop sought Casey's telephone logs, claiming to have spoken with Casey on a monthly basis since 1981 and that Casey knew of and approved of the deals.^[3] Testifying to Congress, Casey stated Furmark told him in October 1986 about the possible diversion of funds from arms sales to Iran.^[10] One of the defendants met with US Ambassador Maxwell M. Rabb in Rome, and was recorded telling Hashemi that he was waiting for Rabb to confirm official approval (Rabb later admitted the meeting but denied discussing the arms deal).^[3] An arms dealer with a diplomatic passport, John Delaroque, not indicted, assured Hashemi on 7 February 1986 that the matter had gone as far as the Vice President.^[11][12]

:{:{In November 1986 Iran-Contra affair revelations forced the Justice Department to launch a review of the case.^[13] After a Supreme Court decision in an unrelated case narrowed mail and wire fraud prosecutions, 46 of the 55 charges were dropped in mid-1988.^[14][15]}:

The case against the 12 defendants was finally dropped in January 1989, with prosecutor Rudy Giuliani conceding that the prosecution was unable to prove that the defendants did not believe the planned deals "were officially sanctioned or that approval of the United States for such sales could be obtained".^[7] The planned deals were being arranged at the same time as the White House was secretly seeking to arrange arms sales to Iran (including suspending enforcement of the Arms Export Control Act in January 1986^[16]), in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair; some evidence indicated that defendants were aware of these efforts. Some defendants were close associates of Adnan Khashoggi, who became a middle-man in arms sales to Iran which were officially approved and carried out.^[4]}:

Books

Hermann Moll and Michael Leapman (1988), Broker of Death: An Insider's Story of the Iran Arms Deals Macmillan, ISBN 978-0333459423

References

:{===

hmmn

https://www.madcowprod.com/2018/03/03/jerome-corsis-inks-to-alt-right-connected-russian-hackers/}:}:

...Corsi, InfoWars’s DC bureau chief, as well as the man many think invented the alt-right, was riding high earlier this week, after USA Today, the country’s highest-circulating paper, published an opinion piece he wrote.

Then, yesterday, he was kicked off YouTube… for life.He had only recently received his first two You Tube strikes—for harassment and/or bullying—late last month.

[img]

Since his banishment, he’s been posting increasingly irate tweets that make it clear than his relationship with the truth is currently a bit stand-offish.

One of his headlines reads: “Dr Jerome Corsi: My YouTube Channel Restored! Alex Jones Infowars.”

[screensht]

A screenshot of Corsi’s shut-down site gives the lie to that little bit of fake news. Maybe it was just wistful thinking.

Say what you want about him, Jerome Corsi traffics in pro-style disinformation. He delivers the goods. He knows what makes his people’s blood race.

Dr. Jerome Corsi may know a few Russian hackers

Jerome Corsi has more to worry about than how many views his video rants are currently receiving. He may be involved in a half-visible criminal conspiracy powering the Russiagate scandal, which is beginning to unravel.

If, as expected, Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicts a gaggle of Russian hackers next week, it will be surprising if some of the Americans who facilitated and helped pay for the hackers aren’t taken down as well.

Many are waiting impatiently for the American fellow-conspirators of the Russian hackers’ to be fingered and publicly shamed.

The notion that this number “might could” include Jerome Corsi is enough to set bitter hearts aflutter. But, is this just wishful thinking?

Under America’s racketeering laws, everyone involved in a criminal organization is supposedly guilty of the crimes committed by other members of the group, which could truly trigger a bloodletting.

“Fed up with knives that just won’t cut? Need an Icy Hot Sleeve, a Glass Wizard, or 6 Second Abs? Could you utilize a Bun & Thigh Roller? A Magic Bullet?”

The Russiagate conspiracy has been around — in one form or another— for 15 years, since March of 2003, when a Russian hacker later to become famous named Pavel ‘Red Eye’ Vrublevsky moved into a house in Howard Beach, Queens which was already occupied by a company owned by a Tampa Mobster named Mike Muzio.

Vrublevsky’s re partners LLClisted its business address as 158-49 90th St, a single family residence in Howard Beach. So too Mike Muzio’s blue moon group Inc. involved in pornography and cyber crime. Vrublevsky’s company handled the back end, taking credit cards, through his Moscow company Chronopay.

And this is where things begin to get interesting.

In 2004, Muzio’s Blue Moon Group was a subsidiary of Genesis Intermedia, an Internet start-up used by Saudi arms dealer and ‘fixer’ Adnan Khashoggi in what will become a massive and masterful stock fraud generating a sweet $300 million dollar payday.

Whether Muzio was an active participant is unknown. But he was not shy getting involved in stock fraud later, after he went from working for Adnan Khashoggi t0 an “alt-right” stock fraud ring run by a business partner and Breitbart collaborator of former Trump advisor Steve Bannon,Sarasota’s own Andrew Badolato.

It does not seem to have been a difficult leap, especially since Khashoggi is a charter member of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach ‘homies.’

It was at this time—in 2003—that Russian Mobsters, including Semion Mogilevich, Russia’s Mob’s Mr. Bigski, began colluding with elements of the American Mafia, the nascent alt-right, and Adnan Khashoggi, who was right at home in this company, having been in operations for over 40-years in his long career as a CIA fixer.

Khashoggi’s longevity owed partly to being able to offer the requisite plausible deniability (he’s a foreigner!). As well, they offered the chance to meet starlets, like Paul McCartney’s future wife Heather, in decidedly relaxed circumstances.

Until his death last year inNew York Adnan Khashoggi was a fixture in nearly every American scandal since Watergate. He was around for so long that clips from his first big scandal—something to do with bribes and Lockheed—are in black and white.

The staple of spammers everywhere was Viagra, in all its hundreds of mutations. Penile enlargers sold well. Aftersales might include an antenna booster.

The secret life of an agent provocateur

Jerome Corsi, alt-right rabble-rouser, led a secret second life.

Who knew?

In 1995, before his career peddling smears began to take off, reported The Boston Globe, Corsi was involved in ripping off two dozen investors in Minnesota by convincing them to give him money which then magically disappeared, supposedly for investments in Poland.

The FBI didn’t charge Corsi. Several investors sued and won judgments against him, but were unable to collect. Corsi reportedly transferred all his assets and funds to his wife’s name.

Another leader in the American wing of the Russiagate conspiracy was stockbroker Gregg M.S. Berger. Gregg M.S. Berger, however, is not his real name. His real name is Gregg StickelBerger. Easy to see why he changed it.

Both Berger and Corsi worked at shady Gilford Securities, widely rumored to have Mob ties.

Stockbroker StickelBerger used Gilford Securities to serviced two sets of players, in what looks to be the same ongoing conspiracy. One is a Mob-Mafiya strand; the other is Khashoggi’s GenesisIntermedia fraud.

From Reuters:

NEW YORK, Feb 1 (Reuters) – A New York stock broker has been charged with orchestrating a fraudulent $30 million scheme to illegally “pump-and-dump” thinly traded Chinese and Israeli penny stocks, the U.S. Justice Department said. Gregg Berger, 47, was chargedwith one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, in an indictment unsealed Tuesday in U.S. district court in Detroit. He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

In a related case, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil fraud charges against Berger, seven other people, and three companies involved in the alleged scheme, including one company in Canada.

A “China-Israeli micro stock play”

Gregg Berger worked with Alan M. Ralsky, known as America’s Spam King. The two men commit financial fraud together, then plead guilty in 2009 to conspiracy.

In their joint effort, Berger ran a $33 million international microcap stock scheme involving the stocks of eight small U.S. companies “headquartered” overseas, in the People’s Republic of China, Canada, and Israel.

The companies were used in reverse mergers with local non-U.S. companies looking for a back door into U.S. financial markets.

Stockbroker Berger ran two conspiracies. One was the China-Israeli micro stock play, for which Berger was eventually indicted, along with Al Ralsky, a cast of virtual unknowns… and a Russian named Peter Severa.

Make that Russian hacker Peter Severa. Who was safe in Russia, until, five years after his American partners are convicted, makes the mistake of going on

[pix]

vacation in Spain…. Or… he was lured to Spain.

In either event, under Spanish skies, the Russian hacker was arrested by Spanish police, where it turned out Peter Severa was not his real name.

It was Peter Levashov, #7 on the world’s Top 10 Worst Spammers list, according to a Russian cyber-security company. A Justice Department indictment asserts Levashov is the long-time Russian partner of American Alan Ralsky of West Bloomfield Michigan.

After the U.S. won a titanic struggle with Russia for control of where he would be extradited, he was recently extradited to the United States.

It’s a simple declension. Jerome Corsi has ties to Gregg Berger. Berger was partners with America’s Spam King Al Ralsky. He partnered with Peter Levashov. As well as with Jonathan Curshen.

One of Khashoggi’s partners named Michael Farkas bought a spy store in Miami. The group began soliciting sales over the Internet in earnest.

“Need a pair of sunglasses fitted with a fiber-optic video camera? A shirt button concealing a surveillance microphone? How about a bullet-proof umbrella, or a baseball cap strong enough to repel a hatchet blow?

Uber-hackers working for uber-oligarchs

At the same time he was working with Ralsky and his crew, busy fraudster (but on whose behalf?) Gregg Berger was also part of a criminal conspiracy involving Sarasota native Jonathan Curshen, another example of that Florida city’s lack of either ethics or charm.

With Curshen’s lavish assistance, Berger helms an effort to pump and dump the stock of a little nothing company (literally, there was nothing there) called CO2.

Back to the first conspiracy. One of the eight American shell companies located overseas that Berger and Ralsky are using is something called “China Digital.”

Which leads back to Jonathan Curshen, part of Berger Conspiracy No. 2.

In Berger’s Conspiracy no 1. Curshen helped manipulate “China Digital’s stock price. So Berger’s two known criminal conspiracies must be part of one larger overarching conspiracy.

Which means that — in the best of all possible worlds — each and every ‘connected’ miscreant who has helped move the conspiracy forward is now, as a matter of law, guilty of every crime committed by each one of their fellow conspirators.

Jonathan Curshen was in business with Steve Bannon’s alt-right business partner Andy Badolato in Sarasota, Florida.

According to a criminal Complaint filed Sept 4, 2008, Curshen, along with someone named Bruce Grossman, schemed to defraud investors in a company called Industrial Biotechnology Corporation (“IBC”) by paying secret cash kickbacks to an undercover FBI agent, who was posing as a middleman willing to recruit corrupt stockbrokers.

Who controlled Industrial Biotechnology Corporation (“IBC”)? Serial alt-right fraudster Andy Badolato.

Teddy bears. Some Viagra? A mail-order bride? Fake diplomas were steady earners. But of course they didn’t sell nearly as well as hard-core pornography videos. Nothing did.

###

Before there was Jesus there was John the Baptist

Before there was Donald Trump, there was Jerome Corsi. His supremely distasteful “Swift Boat” book, filled with lies and calumny, did in an authentic war hero (no matter what you thought of his politics), 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry.

Later Corsi lobbed another grenade over the transom called “Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President.”

Slight problem: in a bit of horrific timing that makes you question whether there might not be a God after all, Corsi’s book came out three weeksafter Obama’s birth certificate had been released, and promptly tanked.

That’s when Alex Jones told his audience he and Corsi were receiving warnings from “top government officials”—presumably because a mid-level functionary wouldn’t convey the seriousness of the matter—while preparing to publish the true story of something or other.

“Threats started pouring in,” Alex Jones told his listeners. Even his own lawyers, he said, advised him against breaking the story.

It’s enough to give you chills.

The real story of the Russian hackers is a story of the increasing levels of expertise they began to display. They were working hard to master the Internet’s arts of persuasion.

As the Russians began stretching their computer skills beyond the reach of their American cousins, Adnan Khashoggi and sidekick Ramy El Batrawi’s GenesisIntermedia provided the only outfit who could stay with them.

Spammers—in Russia and the U.S.—sold vacation giveaways, mortgages, work-at-home opportunities…Loans!

Successful spammers were soon living large.

This is what hackers, Russian and American, did. Control millions of servers. Write a zesty little sales pitch. Slam some cloak-and-dagger software through a massive database of e-mail addresses.

Then deluge the planet like the wrath of a vengeful God.

A threat to proto-fascists everywhere

Not since the glory days of Iran-Contra has the group Donald Trump is fronting for—the so-called “Alt-Right”—received so much bad publicity. Yet even after all this time the group— as a long-standing drug trafficking, financial fraud and money laundering operation— remains recognizable. One anchor over the decades, for example, has been Adnan Khashoggi.

Khashoggi, and his lieutenant Ramy El-Batrawi, both of whom were deeply implicated in Iran Contra, would have a last hurrah in Russiagate.

So too would Americans like Tampa Mobster Mike Muzio, currently away doing 13 years at a federal penitentiary in Minnesota. There he tweets about looking forward to getting out in 2020.

While the players on the ground were releasing press releases announcing orders from each other for billions of dollars worth of product that didn’t exist, from other businesses which were members of the conspiracy.

The phony companies were often led by former agents from U.S. military intelligence, the CIA, and the NSA (atSkyway Aircraft,which we’ll get to presently), as well as alt-right factotums like Andy Badolato, Jerome Corsi, and Jonathan Curshen.

Facing them across the table was a roving posse of Russian hackers, as well as a squadron of Russian Mobsters like Oleg Deripaska.

The story of our time is about Donald Trump and the globalization of organized crime. It’s intrinsically more interesting than the one being surfaced so far.

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https://www.madcowprod.com/:(style="background-color:#ffffffff"):}::{2016/09/21/:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{trump-campaigns-bannon-ties-to-sarasota-grifter/

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just for fun, the Forest Gump of late c20:

http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=174&name=Adnan-Khashoggi}:

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The 1971 declaration of a "war on drugs" by President Nixon resulted in the targeting of Turkey as an opium source but, in effect, also resulted in the growth of the opium production in Southeast Asia. The Golden Triangle continued to lead in opium production until US interests moved from that region to Afghanistan. Deep state activities continued to play a major role in the transition of drug production from one region to another.

Chapter 7 of American War Machine is perhaps the most interesting, as it describes the global drug connection and its ties to a "shadow CIA," which has functioned as a tool for international overworld interests including those referred to as the Safari Club. OPC officer Paul Helliwell figures prominently in this chapter, in part for his role in creating the CIA-related Castle Bank, which laundered money and helped finance off-the-books operations, and for his ties to organized crime. Castle Bank's connections to the overworld are discussed as are its links to agent C.V. Starr, whose insurance empire evolved into the company we know as AIG.This chapter also introduces Adnan Khashoggi, who appears throughout the deep history of US foreign policy and played a major role in the activities of Castle Bank's successor, the Bank of Credit and Commercial International (BCCI).

Scott writes about some of the deep events in which these players converge. He states that -- "BCCI provided the initial infrastructure for the CIA intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 and the ensuing alliance with the major drug trafficker Gulbeddin Hekmatyar." Additionally, "Shackley, Khashoggi, and BCCI were instrumental in inaugurating the illegal Iran-Contra connection of 1985-1986."

---

perle:

In January, 1993, Richard Perle met with Adnan Khashoggi to discuss possible investment in Perle's company Trireme. Trireme was set to become successful if there was an Iraq war. It was this appearance of corruption that forced Perle to step down as chairman of the Defense Policy Board.

---

http://www.gregpalast.com/poppy-strikes-gold/

How did he go from busted stereo maker to demi-billionaire goldbug? The answer: Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi arms dealer, the "bag man" in the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage scandals. The man who sent guns to the ayatolla teamed up with Munk on hotel ventures and, ultimately, put up the cash to buy Barrick in 1983, then a tiny company with an "unperfected" claim on the Nevada mine. You may recall that Bush pardoned the co-conspirators who helped Khashoggi arm the Axis of Evil, making charges against the sheik all but impossible. (Bush pardoned the conspirators not as a favor to Khashoggi, but to himself.)

Khashoggi got out of Barrick just after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, long before 1995, when Bush was invited in. By that time, Munk's reputation was restored, at least in his own mind, in part by massive donations to the University of Toronto. Following this act of philanthropy, the university awarded Munk–adviser Bush an honorary degree. Several students were arrested protesting what appeared to them as a cash-for-honors deal.

---

* Adnan Khashoggi'sfather, Mohammed Khashoggi, was Mohammed Bin

Laden's family physician;(funded trucks for adnan1srt deal?)

BCCI, the beatles, princess Di

"Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi," Part 4The 9/11 edition.

:{By Timothy Noah Posted Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001,

As Chatterbox previously noted (here, here, and here), Adnan Khashoggi is connected to every shocking event that has occurred since 1960, usually by no more than one or two degrees. A partial list would include Iran-Contra, Wedtech, BCCI, the Marcos Philippine kleptocracy, the Synfuels fiasco, and the discovery of buried mustard gas in the pricy Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington, D.C. To these we must now add the tragic events of Sept. 11.

http://www.slate.com/id/2058706

As always, Chatterbox emphasizes that Khashoggi's proximity to these events does not demonstrate criminality on his part. But it does illustrate Khashoggi's "Where's Waldo?"-like ubiquity in the noir environment where shocking events tend to take place. Khashoggi is what the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has termed a "connector," that is, a person who stands at the intersection of many social networks. (For more on Gladwellian connectors, click here.) At the moment, Khashoggi appears to be preoccupied with a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation and pending class action concerning some alleged financial improprieties on the part of a Khashoggi-controlled telemarketing and infotainment company called GenesisIntermedia. This story has been bird-dogged by David Evans, the small-caps columnist for Bloomberg News. Hence our first connection to 9/11: Bloomberg News' founder, Michael Bloomberg, just got himself elected mayor of New York City in the confusing aftermath of the World Trade Center's collapse.

Khashoggi's second connection to 9/11 is more direct but also more difficult to verify: An Oct. 7 article by Frank Connolly in Ireland's Sunday Business Post quotes unnamed U.S. intelligence officials alleging that Khashoggi has made "protection payments" to Osama Bin Laden.

The other connections mostly fall into the category, "If You're a Rich Guy From Saudi Arabia, It's a Small World." We begin with this passage from Peter Bergen's new book, Holy War, Inc.:

During this period Mohammed bin Laden [a.k.a. Osama's rich dad, now deceased] would also jump-start the career of another Saudi billionaire, Adnan Khashoggi, known in the West for his flamboyant spending, his walk-on part in the Iran-contra scandal, and his nephew, Dodi Fayed, who died along with Princess Diana in the Paris car crash. In the early 1950s Mohammed needed some trucks for his construction business in a hurry. Khashoggi was able to make a $500,000 purchase of trucks in the United States, for which Mohammed paid him a commission of $50,000. It was Khashoggi's first business deal.

Also, drawing from a Sept. 23 article by Greg Burton in the Salt Lake Tribune:

* Adnan Khashoggi's father, Mohammed Khashoggi, was Mohammed Bin Laden's family physician;

* Adnan Khashoggi attended college in Alexandria, Egypt, with some of Mohammed Bin Laden's children (though not Osama, who's a good 20 years younger).

* Soon after Sept. 11, it was alleged, apparently inaccurately, that the CIA had once funded Bin Laden. Khashoggi has almost certainly received financial assistance over the years from the CIA.

* Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani once tried (unsuccessfully) to prosecute Adnan Khashoggi for fraud in connection with a real estate venture. Khashoggi accused Giuliani of grandstanding in order to get elected mayor of New York. Giuliani was New York City mayor on Sept. 11.

Bonus Non-9/11-Related Khashoggi Sighting: Reader Jon Lasser sent in the following snippet from "The Curse of the Sevso Silver," a long yarn by Peter Landesman in the November Atlantic about intrigue surrounding some ancient Roman treasure:

In late September, Van Rijn met with Yard detectives at the British embassy in Madrid. He had with him an old friend, a man he and the detectives had been referring to in telephone conversations as "our friend in Spain." The friend was Felice Cultrera, an amateur art-and-antiquities collector; the owner of casinos in Paris, Belgrade, and Prague; someone who was allegedly linked to the Sicilian drug-running Santapaola Mafia; and a money man for the weapons merchant Adnan Khashoggi [italics Chatterbox's].

E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.

see webodec text file

---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adnan_Khashoggi

Khashoggi was born in Mecca, the son of Muhammad Khashoggi, a medical doctor of Spanish, Basque and Turkish ancestry[citation ^needed] who was King Abdel Aziz Al Saud's personal physician. The family name means spoonmaker (Kaşıkçı) in Turkish. The family moved from the Iberian Peninsula and settled in Saudi Arabia. Adnan Khashoggi's sister Samira Khashoggi Fayed married Mohammed Al-Fayed and was the mother of Dodi Fayed.

Khashoggi was educated at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt, California State University, Chico, Ohio State University, and Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, USA. Khashoggi later left his studies in order to seek his fortune in business.

Business career

Khashoggi headed a company called Triad Holding Company, which among other things built the Triad Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, which later went bankrupt. He was famed as an arms dealer, brokering deals between US firms and the Saudi government, most actively in the 1960s and 1970s. In the documentary series The Mayfair Set, Saudi author Said Aburish states that one of Adnan's first weapons deals was providing David Stirling with weapons for a covert mission in Yemen during the Aden Emergency in 1963.

Among his overseas clients were defense contractors Lockheed Corporation (now Lockheed Martin Corporation), Raytheon, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation and Northrop Corporation (which have now merged into Northrop Grumman).

A shrewd businessman, he covered his financial tracks by establishing front companies in Switzerland and Liechtenstein to handle his commissions as well as developing contacts with notables such as CIA officers James H. Critchfield and Kim Roosevelt and US businessman Bebe Rebozo, a close associate of former US President Richard Nixon. He was also involved in diamond mining in the Central African Empire, working closely with the dictator Bokassa. He was considered the richest man in the world in the 1980s. His yacht, the Nabila, was the largest in the world at the time and was used in the James Bond film Never Say Never Again.

Iran–Contra affair

He was implicated in the Iran–Contra affair as a key middleman in the arms-for-hostages exchange along with Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and, in a complex series of events, was found to have borrowed money for these arms purchases from the now-bankrupt financial institution the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) with Saudi and US backing. In 1988, Khashoggi was arrested in Switzerland, accused of concealing funds, held for three months and then extradited to the United States where he was released on bail and subsequently acquitted. In 1990, a United States federal jury in Manhattan acquitted Khashoggi and Imelda Marcos, widow of the exiled Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, of racketeering and fraud.^[1] He has also worked for Col. Ghaddafi of Libya in 1992 as a mediator.

GenesisIntermedia insolvency

Khashoggi, along with Ramy El-Batrawi, was the principal financier behind GenesisIntermedia, Inc. (formerly NASDAQ: GENI), a publicly traded Internet company based in Southern California. After the September 11 attacks, Khashoggi's U.S.-based checking accounts were frozen and Khashoggi was unable to make a margin call with Native Nations Securities, whose CEO and largest shareholder, at the time, was Valerie Red-Horse, former office manager of junk bond king Michael Milken.

In turn, Native Nations and Red Horse were unable to meet their obligations on the margin loan to MJK Clearing, Inc.^[2][3] Trading in the stock of GenesisIntermedia was halted in September 2001. Khashoggi's unwillingness to pay his margin loan to Native Nations Securities, and Native Nations (and Red Horse's) inability to pay its debts to MJK Clearing,began a series of bankruptcies that ended in the largest payout in Securities Investor Protection Corporation history.^[4][5] Native Nations Securities and MJK Clearing both eventually filed for bankruptcy.^[6]

...

Did Adnan Khashoggi Throw the Election to Dubya?

:{Timothy NoahPosted Monday, Dec. 4, 2000,

On Dec. 1, the "Washington Wire" column in the Wall Street Journal published this gratifyingly noir item about the postelection drama in Florida:

"Madame Butterfly" Theresa LePore wasn't always an embattled Palm Beach ballots chief. In the 1980s, she moonlighted as a flight attendant on private planes owned by Saudi weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi, a middleman in Reagan administration arms sales to Iran.

Connoisseurs of Khashoggi-centric conspiracy theories should have little difficulty using this information to finger Khashoggi as the mastermind of the plot to deny Al Gore the presidency. Khashoggi has close ties, from Iran-Contra and elsewhere, to the Republicans, and vaguely defined ties to Dubya's father. (In a 1990 court case, Khashoggi's phone records revealed that Khashoggi had spoken at least twice with George Bush's vice-presidential office during 1985 and 1986.) LePore worked for Khashoggi during the 1980s, when, according to her official biography, she was chief deputy supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County, a job she held until 1996, when she was elected supervisor of elections. Ergo, LePore has been working as a Khashoggi asset to elect the son of Khashoggi's old comrade-in-arms, George Bush!

:{Chatterbox doesn't actually believe this, of course. But the Journal's tidbit does provide an occasion to play one of Chatterbox's favorite games, "Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi," in which the shadowy international arms merchant is connected to every scandal of the past 40 years and some that occurred even earlier.

(It helps that Khashoggi is a "connector," to borrow a term from Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point. Click here for Gladwell's explanation of how connectors rule the universe, and click here to read Chatterbox's favorable review of The Tipping Point in the Washington Monthly. See also Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball's classic 1987 New Republic article, "The Swami of Iranamok," which describes the connector role played by Khashoggi's spiritual adviser, Shri Chandra Swamiji Maharaj.) "Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi" is a slightly misleading name for this parlor game because in Khashoggi's case, it's rarely more than one or two degrees. Allow Chatterbox to demonstrate:}:

Iran-Contra. Khashoggi brought Manucher Ghorbanifar, Iranian arms buyer, into contact with the arms-selling Israelis. Khashoggi himself provided crucial bridge loans and lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million in the whole affair.

Imelda Marcos' Shoe Collection. In 1990, Khashoggi was tried, and acquitted, on charges that he helped the Marcoses conceal ownership of four buildings in New York.

Wedtech. Remember e.bob wallach, the crony of Ed Meesewho, maddeningly, spelled his name in lowercase letters? wallach was an adviser to Wedtech Corp., a now-defunct Bronx-based minority contractor to the Pentagon. In that capacity, he tried to get Khashoggi onto Wedtech's board. Khashoggi never joined Wedtech's board. wallach was eventually convicted of defrauding Wedtech.

BCCI. The most complicated bank scandal in human history. Khashoggi had a big account with BCCI's Monte Carlo branch.

The Death of Princess Di. Khashoggi was the uncle of Dodi Fayed, Di's rich boyfriend, in whose speeding limo both Dodi and Di perished.

The Gaudiness of Donald Trump. Trump bought his yacht, the Trump Princess, from Khashoggi (apparently via the Sultan of Brunei) after Iran-Contra put Khashoggi's finances in a brief tailspin.

The Kennedy Assassination. Joseph A. Ball, the principal author of the Warren Commission report on JFK's death, represented Khashoggi in his 1980 divorce from Soraya Khashoggi. After the death of her second husband, Aristotle Onassis, Jackie Kennedy was romantically tied in press accounts to Khashoggi, though in all likelihood they were just friends.

Watergate. Ball also represented John D. Ehrlichman during his Watergate troubles. Khashoggi had earlier contributed secret-but-apparently-legal funds to Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. Khashoggi attended Nixon's funeral in 1994.

The Breakup of the Beatles is often attributed to tensions that arose when John Lennon and Paul McCartney got married. In an interview this past October on British television, McCartney, now a widower, declared his love for a woman named Heather Mills, who was a toddler at the time of the Beatles' breakup. Had McCartney left his wife Linda for Mills at the time, perhaps the Beatles would have remained together. Prior to dating McCartney, Mills reportedly dated Adnan Khashoggi.

The Synfuels Fiasco. In a program promptly shut down by the Reagan administration and subsequently missed by no one, President Jimmy Carter passed a law empowering the Energy Department to provide loan guarantees for the manufacture of gasohol. Khashoggi used the money to set up an ethanol plant in Louisiana that went bust in the late 1980s. When it did, the federal government was forced to pay out $70 million to Khashoggi's creditors.

Charlie Chaplin's Seductions of Teen-Age Girls took place in a Beverly Hills mansion that was subsequently owned by Adnan Khashoggi.

Katharine Hepburn's Endorsement of Harris Wofford in the 1991 Pennsylvania Senate race apparently stemmed from her fury at Wofford's opponent, Dick Thornburgh, for falsely accusing Wofford of soliciting a contribution from Khashoggi when Wofford was president of Hepburn's alma mater, Bryn Mawr. Hepburn's endorsement wasn't scandalous. (Though it should be noted that Hepburn was a resident of New York at the time.) But Thornburgh's accusation that Wofford solicited money from Khashoggi was clearly a cheap shot. In fact, Khashoggi had asked to establish a Middle Eastern program at Bryn Mawr, and Wofford rejected the offer, advising Khashoggi to give money to Bryn Mawr's scholarship fund instead. Click here to see the Adnan Khashoggi Campus Center at American University in Washington, D.C.

E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.

:{Timothy NoahPosted Monday, Feb. 26, 2001,

In an earlier item, Chatterbox introduced readers to the game "Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi." To play, you build a chain linking the shadowy international arms merchant to any scandal that occurred during the past 40 years. Players rarely need more than one link. Chatterbox was able to link Khashoggi to Iran-Contra, Wedtech, the Marcos Philippine kleptocracy, BCCI, the death of Princess Di, the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and the breakup of the Beatles. (There were also a few others.) None of these connections, Chatterbox hastens to add, is meant to suggest criminal activity on Khashoggi's part. Rather, they're meant to suggest that if Hollywood had made a movie about Khashoggi during the 1940s, he would be have been played by Sidney Greenstreet or Peter Lorre.

As the Clinton pardon drama has widened to include Hugh Rodham and other character actors, Chatterbox has wondered when the Khashoggi connection would reveal itself. Poking around news databases, Chatterbox quickly found it: a 1990 Fortune article by Mark Colodny with the headline, "Khashoggi To Team Up With Marc Rich?" Apparently, Khashoggi had plans in the early '90s to sell Western luxury goods in Moscow. The problem was what to do with the rubles that Russians would use to buy the stuff since the currency couldn't leave the country. Khashoggi's solution, he told Fortune, was to hook up with fugitive financier Marc Rich and swap the rubles for Soviet petrochemicals, which could then be exported. What the piece neglected to explain was how this deal could be made to seem attractive to Rich. When Fortune contacted Rich's Swiss lawyer, he said that Rich had not discussed any such deal with Khashoggi. And indeed, Chatterbox can find no evidence that the deal ever occurred. Still, it's a connection! Khashoggi maintains his perfect record.

[Update, March 3: An article by Bradley Burston in the March 2 Forward finds a link between Khashoggi and yet another last-minute Clinton pardon, this one to Adolph "Al" Schwimmer, convicted in 1950 of conspiring to violate the U.S. Neutrality Act and export control laws by smuggling arms to the newly created state of Israel. Khashoggi, Schwimmer, and Hank Greenspun, the eccentric former publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, collaborated on an abortive Middle East peace plan two decades ago. The pardon was sought by Greenspun's son Brian, who attended Georgetown University with Clinton.]

E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.

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3 Timothy NoahPosted Monday, July 9, 2001, at 5:49 PM ET

Once again, it's time to play "Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi"! As Chatterbox explained in two earlier items (click here and here), the shadowy international arms merchant holds the distinction of being connected to every scandal since 1960, usually by no more than one or two degrees. (This is not meant to suggest that Khashoggi has committed any crimes.) Previously, Chatterbox has shown Khashoggi to be linked one way or another to participants in the following events:

Bill Clinton's pardons for Marc Rich and Adolph "Al" Schwimmer

"Madame Butterfly" Theresa LePore's ballot boo-boo

Katharine Hepburn's 1991 Senate endorsement of Harris Wofford

Iran-Contra

Wedtech

The Marcos Philippine Kleptocracy

BCCI

The death of Princess Di

The vulgar excess of Donald Trump

TheSynfuels fiasco

The Kennedy assassination

Watergate

The breakup of the Beatles

Charlie Chaplin's seductions of young girls

Now Khashoggi has turned up, Zelig-like, in a new scandal involving the possibly illegal coverup of environmental contamination in Washington, D.C. For some years, it's been known that the Spring Valley area in upper northwest Washington--a leafy and prosperous neighborhood near American University--was a burial ground for mustard gas and other World War I-era chemical weapons. Until now, though, we thought that the presence of the chemical weapons was first discovered in 1993, when a home-builder dug up an unexploded shell. (Obviously, the Army had known about the toxic chemicals back in 1918 when they buried them in what then were woods adjacent to AU. Apparently, though, they'd forgotten a couple of decades later when builders started erecting houses on the site.) An article by Steve Vogel in the July 8 Washington Post reveals that the federal government's rediscovery of the buried weapons dates back not to 1993, but to 1986, when AU

embarked on the largest construction project in its history, the Adnan Khashoggi [italics Chatterbox's] Sports and Convocation Center. A preconstruction examination of the site's history found [a] 1921 university publication's reference to a chemical weapons burial pit on campus, and a study by the university's history department also concluded that there was a very good possibility that chemical weapons were buried on campus.

The Environmental Protection Agency was notified and passed the buck to the Army, which concluded that notifying the public "wasn't necessary," according to Deputy Army Secretary Lewis Walker. AU kept quiet about it, too. AU's student newspaper, the Eagle, reported in 1988 that chemical weapons might be buried near campus, but the Army said at that time that "all the chemicals were removed." Even when that was found not to be true in 1993, the Army Corps of Engineers conducted what appear to have been ridiculously inadequate tests, so that the true extent of the contamination is only coming to light now. The most obvious lesson is the reminder that the federal government is the nation's most irresponsible polluter. A more subtle lesson, though, is that Adnan Khashoggi's tentacles extend everywhere.

E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.

"Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi," Part 4 The 9/11 edition.

:{By Timothy Noah Posted Wednesday, Nov. 14, 2001,

As Chatterbox previously noted (here, here, and here), Adnan Khashoggi is connected to every shocking event that has occurred since 1960, usually by no more than one or two degrees. A partial list would include Iran-Contra, Wedtech, BCCI, the Marcos Philippine kleptocracy, the Synfuels fiasco, and the discovery of buried mustard gas in the pricy Spring Valley neighborhood of Washington, D.C. To these we must now add the tragic events of Sept. 11.

:{As always, Chatterbox emphasizes that Khashoggi's proximity to these events does not demonstrate criminality on his part. But it does illustrate Khashoggi's "Where's Waldo?"-like ubiquity in the noir environment where shocking events tend to take place. Khashoggi is what the journalist Malcolm Gladwell has termed a "connector," that is, a person who stands at the intersection of many social networks. (For more on Gladwellian connectors, click here.) At the moment, Khashoggi appears to be preoccupied with a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation and pending class action concerning some alleged financial improprieties on the part of a Khashoggi-controlled telemarketing and infotainment company called GenesisIntermedia.

This story has been bird-dogged by David Evans, the small-caps columnist for Bloomberg News. Hence our first connection to 9/11: Bloomberg News' founder, Michael Bloomberg, just got himself elected mayor of New York City in the confusing aftermath of the World Trade Center's collapse.}:

Khashoggi's second connection to 9/11 is more direct but also more difficult to verify: An Oct. 7 article by Frank Connolly in Ireland's Sunday Business Post quotes unnamed U.S. intelligence officials alleging that Khashoggi has made "protection payments" to Osama Bin Laden.

The other connections mostly fall into the category, "If You're a Rich Guy From Saudi Arabia, It's a Small World." We begin with this passage from Peter Bergen's new book, Holy War, Inc.:

During this period Mohammed bin Laden [a.k.a. Osama's rich dad, now deceased] would also jump-start the career of another Saudi billionaire, Adnan Khashoggi, known in the West for his flamboyant spending, his walk-on part in the Iran-contra scandal, and his nephew, Dodi Fayed, who died along with Princess Diana in the Paris car crash. In the early 1950s Mohammed needed some trucks for his construction business in a hurry. Khashoggi was able to make a $500,000 purchase of trucks in the United States, for which Mohammed paid him a commission of $50,000. It was Khashoggi's first business deal.

Also, drawing from a Sept. 23 article by Greg Burton in the Salt Lak e Tribune:

* Adnan Khashoggi's father, Mohammed Khashoggi, was Mohammed Bin Laden's family physician;

* Adnan Khashoggi attended college in Alexandria, Egypt, with some of Mohammed Bin Laden's children (though not Osama, who's a good 20 years younger).

* Soon after Sept. 11, it was alleged, apparently inaccurately, that the CIA had once funded Bin Laden. Khashoggi has almost certainly received financial assistance over the years from the CIA.

In late September, Van Rijn met with Yard detectives at the British embassy in Madrid. He had with him an old friend, a man he and the detectives had been referring to in telephone conversations as "our friend in Spain." The friend was Felice Cultrera, an amateur art-and-antiquities collector; the owner of casinos in Paris, Belgrade, and Prague; someone who was allegedly linked to the Sicilian drug-running Santapaola Mafia; and a money man for the weapons merchant Adnan Khashoggi [italics Chatterbox's].

E-mail Timothy Noah at chatterbox@slate.com.

Khashoggi, Adnan

Overview

Books

References

Dr. Jerome Corsi may know a few Russian hackers

The secret life of an agent provocateur

A “China-Israeli micro stock play”

Uber-hackers working for uber-oligarchs

Before there was Jesus there was John the Baptist

A threat to proto-fascists everywhere

"Six Degrees of Adnan Khashoggi," Part 4The 9/11 edition.

Business career

Iran–Contra affair

GenesisIntermedia insolvency

Attachments