Jeb Bush Linked to Drug Cartels, Money Laundering Jeb Bush Linked to Drug Cartels, Money Laundering
Jeb Bush Linked to Drug Cartels, Mon... 
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While Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush, glossed over his AWOL status with the Texas Air National Guard, Jeb does not have a military record to defend but he does have a CIA employment record to fess up to.
Jeb’s early work in Venezuela and south Florida is much more troubling than Dubya pretending to be on active duty in Texas while he was actually off in Alabama helping a GOP U.S. Senate campaign and getting sloppy drunk in redneck bars. Jeb should fully explain his relationship with Alberto Duque, a Colombian national who laundered drug money for the Medellin and Cali narco-cartels and Nicaraguan contras while serving as owner of City National Bank of Miami and president of the General Coffee Company of Colombia.
Apparently, there was more than coffee arriving in sacks of coffee coming into Miami from Colombia. Duque financed a $30 million real estate development project run by Jeb Bush.
In 1983, Duque was convicted for fraud and sent to federal prison. Duque hired a Bush family CIA crony to serve as City National Bank’s president.
He was Don Beazley, who previously worked for the CIA’s Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Before it collapsed, Nugan Hand was responsible for laundering money from the CIA’s Golden Triangle opium and heroin smuggling operations from Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and paying off U.S. surrogates in Asia, including Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Park Chung Hee in South Korea, and various Thai generals.
In return for CIA money gifts, Marcos ordered his Energy Minister, Geronimo Velasco, to have the Philippines National Oil Corporation enter into business relationships with three Bush family-owned businesses: Zapata Petroleum Corporation, Zapata Offshore Company, and Overbey Oil Development Corporation. The three Bush firms were also linked to various CIA activities, including the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Jeb Bush’s Texas Commerce Bank was also the bank used by the Zapata companies. Velasco died of a sudden heart attack in San Francisco in 2007. Velasco’s Republic Glass Corporation became a holding company that owned a number of British Virgin Islands-based subsidiaries.
Beazley had also been president of Great American Bank of Miami. The bank was indicted for drug money laundering in 1982. Beazley also negotiated the sale of Second National Bank of Homestead, a subsidiary of Great American, to Nugan Hand. It was in this environment of interconnected CIA money laundering banks that Jeb Bush found himself and his real estate business immersed in the 1980s.
On January 25, 1980, Frank Nugan, the Australian co-founder of Nugan Hand Bank, was found dead in his car near Bowenfels, New South Wales from a “self-inflicted” rifle shot wound to his head. The card of ex-CIA director William Colby, who, himself was found floating in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland in 1996, was found in Nugan’s pocket.
Colby was Nugan Hand’s legal counsel. Hand had planned to move with his wife and three young children to Florida but someone apparently did not like the idea of Nugan showing up in Florida during the year George H W Bush was trying to become the president of the United States.
After serving as vice president for Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas from 1977 to 1979, Bush joined his father’s presidential campaign in 1980. Serving with Bush on the campaign was the CIA official who gave him his in-brief at Langley in 1977, Robert Gambino, the deputy director of security at the agency.
In the 1980s, Jeb Bush provided liaison between his father’s national security adviser, Donald Gregg, and various Florida-based right-wing Nicaraguan and Cuban exile organizations helping to fight the clandestine war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.
Jeb was appointed by his father to the board of the National Republican Institute, the GOP branch of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA-financed money laundering operation that saw millions pour into the coffers of the Nicaraguan contras, Cuban exile groups, and Salvadorean, Guatemalan, and Honduran death squads.
Jeb acted as a liaison between Dr. Mario Castejon, a right-wing candidate for president of Guatemala, and Vice President Bush. Castejon sought funding for a secret shipment of arms to the contras and other right-wing rebel groups in Central America that would be masked as “medical supplies.”
Jeb Bush’s relationship with City National Bank, whose other senior director was Leonard Abess, a director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Foundation, ensured that a large share of NED money flowed to Israeli security firms like Tadiran, which helped Guatemala and Honduras track down leftist guerrillas and exterminate them.
Jeb Bush’s current support for Israel stems from his early business relationships with Zionists like Abess and other offshoots of the Meyer Lansky “Kosher Nostra” crime family in south Florida. Abess is currently a member of the Federal Reserve Bank branch of Miami. [See linked article below in “Summary” on pre-9/11 Fed money movement to Fed branch in Miami].
Jeb’s thank you letter to Gambino after his 1977 CIA in-briefing at Langley. Texas Commerce Bank was owned by the family of James Baker, an early George H W Bush adviser as well as close friend.
It could be argued that Jeb Bush, from his in-brief by Gambino at the CIA in 1977, to his unsuccessful run for governor of Florida in 1994 was a reliable CIA and Israeli asset.
In 1990, Jeb urged his father to pardon Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, a man wanted for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian passenger plane that had taken off from Bridgetown, Barbados.
Jeb Bush was also a supporter of the U.S. House of Representatives candidacy of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, one of the most rabid anti-Castro and pro-Israeli members of Congress. Jeb also succeeded in having his father name Dexter Lehtinen, Ileana’s husband, to be U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida.
Lehtinen permitted a number of Jeb’s friends in the Cuban and Jewish communities in southern Florida to escape prosecution for crimes ranging from drug money laundering to narcotics smuggling and contract assassinations to banking fraud.
Most of Jeb’s business friends were CIA-linked bankers. In addition to Beazley, Duque, and Abess, these included Paul Helliwell, a Miami-based lawyer and the owner of two CIA money laundering banks, Great American Bank of Miami, later bought by Nugan Hand and indicted in 1982 for drug money laundering, and Castle Bank & Trust Ltd. of Nassau in the Bahamas.
Helliwell, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Security (OSS) during World War II, died at the age of 62 on Christmas Eve of 1976, just a few weeks before George H W Bush departed as CIA director.
The autopsy said Helliwell died from “complications of emphysema.” Castle Bank shut down in 1977, the same year that Jeb moved to Caracas to work for Texas Commerce Bank.
An affiliated bank that shared directors with Castle Bank, Mercantile Bank & Trust of Freeport, Bahamas, also suspended operations in 1977. Castle Bank, which had laundered CIA money to pay off such dictators as Marcos in the Philippines, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, saw much of its revenue initially come from Nationalist Chinese drug smugglers operating out of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia.
In addition to Nassau, Helliwell’s Castle Bank operated out of the Cayman Islands and Panama. Among the bank’s account holders were the Pritzker family of Chicago, which owns the Hyatt Hotel chain, and the daughter of President Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan. Between 1964 and 1975, Helliwell’s major CIA front company, Sea Supply Corporation, ran covert military operations against Cuba from Andros Island, the largest island in the Bahamas.
Jeb’s business deals also put him in close contact with two other Florida banks, Northside Bank of Miami, owned by the Cali cartel, and the Popular Bank and Trust Company, once owned by Nicaragua’s Somoza but transferred to CIA control after his assassination by Sandinista commandos in Paraguay in 1980.
After his return from Caracas to Florida in 1979, Jeb befriended the right-wing Nicaraguan community as much as he did the right-wing exiled Cubans. Much of the billions of dollars that the Somoza family stole from Nicaragua ended up in CIA-connected banks that helped finance Jeb’s many real estate and other ventures.
Jeb Bush as CIA “NOC” in the late 1970s [left]. Is Jeb Bush [right circled] at the 1980 funeral of ex-Nicaraguan fascist dictator Anastasio Somoza at Miami’s Woodlawn Park Cemetery? Others in attendance included U.S. Representatives Larry McDonald (D-GA) and John Murphy (D-NY). Somoza was assassinated by a Sandinista car bomb in Asuncion, Paraguay. The explosion left only Somoza’s feet intact.
One of Gambino’s last acts as the CIA’s director of security was to preserve the myriad of CIA special clearance categories, including those that permitted NOCs like Jeb Bush and drug- and arms-smuggling proprietary companies and money laundering banks to flourish.
The Carter administration had ordered the intelligence community to reduce its compartmented access system with over 50 code words to just five special code word compartments by July 1980. The National Security Agency and Gambino balked and the new system, code named APEX, never materialized.
When Jeb’s father became vice president in 1981, APEX was scrapped for the original system, which saw the number of special compartments grow in number in order to accommodate operations that included trading weapons for hostages with Iran and covertly funding the Nicaraguan contras.
One CIA official who was alarmed over APEX was the man who CIA director George H W Bush named as deputy director for covert operations in 1976, Ted Shackley, aka the “Blond Ghost.” Shackley was an old colleague of George H W Bush stemming from his days as the station chief of JMWAVE, the Miami CIA office dedicated to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba.
It was there that Shackley and Bush became involved with Cuban exile and mafia parties that were later tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.
The “Cuba thing” was mentioned by President Richard Nixon on Oval Office tapes subpoenaed in the Watergate scandal. It is now known that the “Cuba thing” was code for the assassination of Kennedy and the CIA’s involvement in the operation.
Shackley was also involved with Donald Gregg in the Phoenix assassination program in South Vietnam and Project FUBELT, the CIA operation to overthrow President Salvador Allende of Chile on September 11, 1973.
An undated TOP SECRET memo to Shackley from a CIA official whose name is redacted but believed to be Gambino provides details of Shackley and the CIA’s security division opposition to APEX.
The memo states:
“there is no intention of establishing under the Community Security Group responsibility for a centralized computerized data base of all SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] approvals. The CSG has no functional role in this area at this time, and one is planned for the future. The CIA Special Security Center’s Compartmented Information Branch is the home of the community service on special access certifications and records. They handle SPECLE . . . Any effort to upgrade the SPECLE system is years away. Further, NSA has taken no steps toward inputting their COMINT clearances.”
In other words, the policy of President Jimmy Carter and his CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, to limit CIA special compartments and display more accountability was being undermined by two Bush embeds in Langley, Gambino and Shackley.
Shackley and Gambino were eventually forced by Turner to retire. The almost limitless penchant of the CIA to create special compartments permitted assets like Jeb Bush at the Texas Commerce Bank and Barack Obama, Jr. at Business International Corporation to evade public scrutiny as CIA employees.
In a January 24, 1980 memo, to Gambino from the CIA member of the APEX Steering Group, special compartments are described as as protecting “industrial” personnel working for the CIA, NSA, and Defense Intelligence Agency.
Shackley became involved in the “October Surprise” plot by Bush and William Casey against Carter, also known as the “arms-for-no-hostages” conspiracy. Gambino joined the 1980 Bush for President and, later, the Reagan-Bush campaign. According to Jeff Stein, writing for Newsday’s July 25, 1980 issue, joining Gambino on the campaign were at least 40 other ex-CIA officers hired by Bush and Casey.
Jeb Bush’s rise to financial and political power in Florida is coupled with a trail of dead bodies, failed banks and savings and loan institutions accused of laundering money for the CIA, and dubious characters who served as CIA assets.
Until Jeb Bush fully accounts for his business activities in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, he is actually more unfit for the presidency than his draft-dodging and AWOL status brother, George W. Bush.
Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist who consistently exposes cover-ups from deep within the government. Want to be the first to learn the latest scandal? Go to WayneMadsenReport.com subscribe today!
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton visited New Hampshire on Tuesday, in part to talk about the heroin abuse crisis that voters have repeatedly told her about on campaign stops throughout the state.
On Aug. 28, 1990, Carl Babbitt, in the midst of a cocaine- and alcohol-fueled blackout, killed a man. Almost a quarter-century later to the day, he stood 50 feet from Hillary Rodham Clinton and revealed his past.
“You look at me as a regular person. But I served 11 years in prison," he began.
As unpredictable as New Hampshire town hall meetings can be for presidential candidates, it was nevertheless a jaw-dropping start to an audience member's question.
Babbitt, 54, said he was thrown out of his home by his mother as a child and later sexually abused by a foster parent.
“I turned to drugs and alcohol to cover that pain,” he recalled. He would eventually seek treatment but was denied care because he lacked insurance, and six months later stabbed a man to death during a fight. He served 11 of the 15 to 18 years he was sentenced to for manslaughter and was released from prison in 2000.
“I’ve been out clean and sober for 15 years, and I cannot find a full-time job because every time they run a background check, ‘You’re a convicted felon,’” he told Clinton, adding that it is a roadblock that he and many others face.
“What would you suggest we do?” he finally asked.
This wasn’t a standard New Hampshire town hall meeting, and on a day of headlines about her email server and her attacks on Republicans, it was precisely the kind of issue Clinton had come to Keene to address.
Heroin abuse in particular has been an issue that voters have repeatedly confronted Clinton about on the campaign trail, and on Tuesday, she offered a window into a possible presidential role as convener-in-chief, discussing potential policy specifics and seeking more from a panel of locals with different perspectives on the crisis, including the county sheriff and treatment center and hospital representatives.
The first stop Clinton made this year in the state as a candidate was in Keene. And there for the first time she heard about an issue that had reached almost epidemic status in New Hampshire.
“I have to confess, I was surprised,” Clinton recalled Tuesday. “I did not expect that I would hear about drug abuse and substance abuse and other such challenges everywhere I went.”
Hands shot up throughout the school event room when the audience was asked whether someone's drug abuse had affected their lives. According to statistics provided by Clinton’s campaign, New Hampshire has the highest per-capita rate of addiction and second-lowest treatment capacity in the nation, with 320 drug-related deaths last year alone.
On Saturday, hundreds attended a candlelight vigil at New Hampshire’s Capitol in Concord to remember victims of drug overdoses. WMUR-TV reported two weeks ago that more than 400 people turned out in Manchester, the state’s largest city, at the first police forum on the heroin abuse crisis in the city.
“We know this is happening, but it’s not yet a big issue” in the campaign, Clinton said as she opened what the campaign called a community forum on substance abuse and opiate addiction. “Some people question why, since I’m running for president, would I be talking in New Hampshire about substance abuse?”
“Really, it’s simple for me. That’s what people talk to me about.”
Since her initial April visit, Clinton’s campaign staff have been holding meetings in the state and online to discuss possible policies she could offer as president to address substance abuse issues.
After the initial discussion, Babbitt, who two years ago earned a degree in drug counseling and now works as the volunteer director for a church’s after-prison ministry program, asked Clinton about how he could get nonprofit status to fund it and whether Pell Grants could be used to help provide education for people in and out of jail.
Clinton cited studies that found those who are educated while in prison had sharply reduced recidivism rates. She said that once people had “paid their debt to society” they should not only have voting rights restored, but be “given a chance to present yourself for jobs, for housing.”
“At the end of the day, people can make their own judgment. But you shouldn’t be automatically disqualified,” she said, referring to a campaign that seeks to remove questions about a criminal record in the early stage of a job application process.
In an interview after the event, Babbitt said prison was the best thing that had happened to him.
“If it weren’t for prison, I’d be dead,” he said.
But the Worcester, Mass., native, who now lives in Keene and said he had never before attended a campaign event, said he hopes Clinton “follows through on her promises.”
“Other candidates should get involved, because it’s not only a community problem, it’s a national problem,” he said. “When they get out, if we don’t help them ... they wind up right back in jail, costing us as taxpayers.”
www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-clinton-drug-abuse-survivor-20150812-story.html
A savage drug epidemic has seized New Hampshire, home of the presidential race’s first primary election. And that’s created a potent 2016 campaign issue—one that top candidates can’t afford to ignore.
In the past decade, the state government reports, the number of people admitted to state-funded treatment programs rose by 90 percent for heroin and 500 percent for prescription opiate abuse.
“We have in New Hampshire some of the highest per capita rates of addiction in the United States,” Tym Rourke, chairman of the New Hampshire governor’s commission on drug abuse, told The Daily Beast. “So we are very, very much at ground zero for addiction… Right now, we are having an overdose death every day.”
If a presidential candidate hopes to have sway over the state’s voters, Governor Maggie Hassan told The Daily Beast, they’re going to need to read up on heroin addiction.
“It’s going to be really important that all presidential candidates visiting New Hampshire be prepared on this issue, to understand how it’s wreaking havoc in our state,” she said. “You cannot go into a room in New Hampshire, of more than a couple of people, and not have them raise the issue of how substance abuse is impacting our state.”
“I think the candidates have come to New Hampshire surprised that in many of their first stops, substance abuse was a major issue for voters,” Rourke said.
“You cannot go into a room in New Hampshire, of more than a couple of people, and not have them raise the issue of how substance abuse is impacting our state,” Gov. Maggie Hassan said.
Ted Gatsas is the mayor of Manchester, New Hampshire, a town of just over 110,000 people where 50 have died from heroin overdoses since January. Because of the state’s role in picking presidents, he has far greater sway than almost any other mayor of a comparably-sized town, and he’s using it to talk about the addiction issue.
In this cycle alone, he says, he has met with Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Rand Paul, Donald Trump, John Kasich, Lindsey Graham, George Pataki, and Bobby Jindal. And to each of them he has stressed that they need to be paying attention to the nationwide problem of heroin addiction more broadly, and specifically its effects on the Granite State.
“When they come into my office, that’s what I talk to them about,” Gatsas said. “It’s something that the entire country should be drawing attention to, because people are dying.”
Ohio Gov. John Kasich name-checked the mayor last week during a presidential forum.
“We have the mayor of Manchester, who’s fighting a tsunami here,” Kasich said. “I think it’s very important that with economic growth comes responsibility and ability to help people who live in the shadows, whether they’re mentally ill or drug-addicted.”
Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been reaching out to local leaders in addiction treatment.
“I really commend Hillary Clinton, who just as she started her campaign… really began to bring the public focus on this issue,” Hassan said. “I would encourage all of the other candidates for president to follow her lead and focus on how they’ll address the epidemic.”
The issue has already made its way into Republican presidential forums, debates, and town halls.
“The first question I was asked in my first town hall meeting was about the heroin epidemic,” former Florida Governor Jeb Bush told the New Hampshire Union Leader editorial board.
“You talk about New Hampshire for a moment. One of the stories that has not been as reported nationally, is the fact that many of the people who today are dependent on heroin, is because they became dependent on prescription opiates,” Senator Marco Rubio said, in an answer about why he doesn’t support legalizing marijuana, at a forum in New Hampshire last week.
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie recently visited a local treatment center. “New Hampshire’s got its issues, but so does New Jersey and so does Iowa, and places I’ve been visiting have all been experiencing the same thing. This is an epidemic in our country,” he said.
“In my own state as governor, it is a drug that you don’t take. It takes you,” Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker recently told WMUR, a New Hampshire news network. “This has become a major concern particularly in rural and in less densely populated areas. It's not just a drug problem in the big cities. That is all the more reason why we need to take major portions of our resources and send them from the federal government—from Washington—back to our states and local communities.”
More than 8,200 people died of heroin-related overdoses nationwide in 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. And use of the drug has more than doubled among adults age 18-25 over the past 10 years.
Heroin is an opioid, the same general kind of drug used in many prescription painkillers, which are among the most commonly abused drugs in the country, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. If taken in amounts or ways other than prescribed, opioid pain medications like Oxycontin and Vicodin can have heroin-like effects: an initial euphoria, followed by a period of alternating between drowsiness and wakefulness.
The CDC notes that people who are addicted to prescription opioid painkillers are 40 times more likely to be addicted to heroin. Efforts to clamp down on prescription opioid painkiller abuse have partly—unintentionally—fueled the demand for heroin. Heroin is cheaper, and can often be obtained more easily, although illegally, than prescription drugs.
When New Hampshire clamped down on prescription drug abuse, local addicts turned to heroin, Rourke said. “This heroin epidemic has been a tsunami in health-care disasters 30 years in the making.”
But candidates have not yet gotten specific about how to deal with drug abuse. One potential reason for this is that treatment methods can be quite controversial, especially publicly-funded needle exchanges or more access to methadone, a drug used to help wean individuals off addiction.
“While Republican candidates brought this up during the debate, on the federal level the Republican Congress has moved to cut funding for substance abuse, and they also all are running against the continuation of the Affordable Care Act, which includes Medicaid expansion coverage for substance abuse and behavioral health,” Hassan said.
Republican candidates could turn to the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act, a piece of legislation co-sponsored by New Hampshire Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte and a number of other senators from both parties. Of the senators who are running for president, only Lindsey Graham has signed on. The bill would authorize the federal government to award grants to address the opioid and heroin use epidemic.
“We’re facing a public health crisis in our state. We’ve had a dramatic increase in heroin and opioid deaths,” Ayotte told The Daily Beast. “This is a very big issue, and that’s why I think you see the presidential candidates who are campaigning in New Hampshire mentioning it, on both sides of the aisle.”
www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/10/the-2016-heroin-primary.html
