Mexican Drug Cartels & The Enterprise at the Venice Airport

by Daniel Hopsicker
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It is 11 a.m. on the morning of June 30, 1997.

On the steps of the Sarasota County Courthouse a public auction is underway. Being auctioned off is the lease of a bankrupt company at the Venice Municipal Airport.

Before it went under, 4Square Aviation was owned by two people. One is a pilot, Joe Duncan. Joe is a likeable guy, but has what can charitably be called a checkered past. 

Several years earlier, he had been charged with bank fraud. It was a misunderstanding.

Several years before that one of his charter jets went down in San Diego, killing just about every member of country singer Reba McIntire's band.

Several years before that, he was flying weapons to the contras in Honduras from Venice, as part of Oliver North's contra resupply operation, and became a close associate of an infamous drug smuggler from Venice named Stephen Ruth.

(See Confessions of a drug smuggling CIA hit man.)

Duncan’s co-owner at the aviation company isn’t a soldier of fortune like Joe. He is a pastor at Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg Virginia. 

That must be why they call it 4Square Aviation. Rent a biblically-inerrant Gulfstream, or prepare for the fires of damnation.

"Pirates of the Caribbean for $500 please Alec"

Pastor Wayne Booth is also Chairman of the Endowment Fund at Falwell’s Liberty University, which means he’s good at raising money. This is good, cause, at least while he was still alive, Jerry always needed money. 

We were looking at this old transaction only because there’s another faintly dodgy Christian aviation company at the Venice Airport currently, occupying the same space and same hanger where 4Square use to be. La plus ca change...

(see Pirates of the Caribbean: Christian fundamentalists & the CIA.)

But we're glad we did. Because while reading the tiny print of one of those boilerplate Public Notice of Sale listings in the newspaper that no one ever reads—you know, the ones announcing bank sales of foreclosed property and tax lien and bankruptcy sales— we saw the name of a third man with an ownership interest in the 4Square foreclosure sale.  

Remember the question we posed in  "The 9/11 Social Network": "What does Mohamed Atta have in common with Carlos Salinas?" The unexpected presence at the Venice Airport of Maximo Haddad is, at the very least, a very big clue.

Who is Maximo Haddad?

Máximo Haddad is a shady Mexican businessman implicated in the failure of a Florida bank which intelligence officials say was involved in everything from money laundering to weapons and drug smuggling.

In 2002, The Miami Herald reported that bags of cash from Latin American political leaders were routinely being flown to Hamilton Bank for money laundering.

After US bank regulators moved in on Hamilton, the first thing they did was prohibit the bank from making any more loans to Máximo Haddad.

The 9/11 Social Network offered a brief profile of the richest man (until he died several years ago) in Mexico,Carlos Hank Gonzalez, a behind the scenes kingmaker who had made Carlos Salinas President of Mexico.  

Haddad was in business with Carlos Hank González in a Panamanian highway construction project which never gets built, but does get paid for.

A DEA investigation in 1997 code-named Operation White Tiger accused Carlos Hank Gonzalez and his sons of laundering billions of dollars of drug money through American banks for the jefes of Mexico's most infamous drug cartels.  That investigation’s findings were officially suppressed by the Dept of Justice.  After “White Tiger” documents are leaked to The Washington Post, the paper reports, “The Hank family poses a significant criminal threat to the United States."

The diplomatic pouch: Elite Deviant fashion accessory of choice

Although he lived in a $5 million estate in West Palm Beach, Máximo Haddad was Panama's Honorary Consul for Tampa.

In 2004, based on a tip from the FBI, which had been conducting surveillance of Haddad, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) searched Haddad's private plane, a Jetstar II, which he had acquired through Duncan Aviation at the Venice Airport.

Agents discovered such an embarrassing large pile of cash and bonds on the plane that The State Department felt compelled to request Panama to ask Haddad to resign his position.

Haddad had to turn in his diplomatic pouch.  Ouch!

Haddad took frequent business trips to Panama with Mario Villanueva. Villanueva was the fugitive Governor of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, wanted for drug trafficking and money laundering. He was recently extradited to the U.S.

Villanueva's home state, where the resorts of Cancun and Cozumel are located, is ruled by a vicious—even by Mexican standards—cabal of Mexican-Lebanese drug traffickers who are also known pedophiles.

They are involved in the international trafficking of children. In the Mexican press—which is far braver than our own—they are known as “The Narcopederastas."

There is more to tell about Maximo Haddad. He is, at the very least, an extremely odd associate for one of Jerry Falwell's Pastors.

Then again, maybe not.

History is what we say it is

Partners in an aviation company at the tiny Venice Municipal Airport were: An Iran Contra pilot with some blemishes on his record...

A pastor for Jerry Falwell, who already has suspicious links to the Venice Airport...

And a shady Mexican businessman who’s in a score of businesses with Mexican drug cartel “kingpin of kingpins” Carlos Hank Gonzalez...

Yet any decades-long history of continuing criminal activity at the Venice Airport is completely unrelated to Mohamed Atta's presence there.

Drug trafficking gangsters at the Venice Airport are a matter of indifference in the story of the 9/11 attack. 

That is the United States Government’s official position.

How did things get this way?  What follows is merely my own editorial opinion, and is openly labeled as such. We don't know about you, but...  

We blame Ronald Reagan. Seriously.