The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out (Chapter 10): The Mafia, the Markets, and a Message from Russia

The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out (Chapter 10): The Mafia, the Markets, and a Message from Russia

Posted on 29 May 2011 by Mark Mitchell 

In 2000, the FBI announced that it had arrested 120 Mobsters and Mafia-tied financiers as part of Operation Uptick, which was then the biggest Mafia bust in FBI history.

The FBI said that all of the 120 defendants were part of a large Mafia stock manipulation network, and that the various people in this network had committed various crimes, such as: “controlling and infiltrating broker-dealers…and employing tactics of violence, including threats, extortion, physical intimidation, and the solicitation of murder…”

This network included Russian Mobsters and members of La Cosa Nostra’s five major families – Genovese, Colombo, Gambino, Bonanno, and Lucchese.

Among the defendants (just to name a few) were Robert “Little Robert” Lino, a capo in the Bonanno crime family; Anthony Stropoli, a soldier in the Colombo crime family; Frank “Frankie” Persico, an associate of the Colombo crime family; Sebastian “Sebbie” Rametta, an associate of the Colombo crime family; Robert Gallo, an associate of the Genovese crime family; and John Black, an associate of the Lucchese crime family.

Also arrested that day was Gene Phillips, a real estate investor.

But Gene Phillips was not just a real estate investor. He was Michael Milken’s closest business associate. As real estate investors go, Phillips was, in the 1980s, the single biggest recipient of Milken’s junk bond finance, and the single most important figure in Milken’s junk bond merry-go-round.

With Milken’s finance, Phillips acquired during the 1980’s not just real estate companies, but also multiple savings and loans (such as the massive San Jacinto Savings and Loan), sometimes using the S&Ls to pick up assets from such Mafia luminaries as Morris Shenker and Herman Beebe.

Of course, most of the Phillips S&Ls were busted out and destroyed – a big factor (along with the BCCI bust outs) in the S&L crisis that nearly wrecked the economy in the late 1980s. San Jacinto’s collapse alone cost taxpayers over $1 billion, which was a lot of money in those days.

When Phillips was arrested as part of Operation Uptick, the government indicted him for working with the Mafia to manipulate the stocks of eight public companies and bribing pension funds (in league with the Mob) to induce the pension funds to pay inflated prices for shares in a large REIT called Transcontinental Realty.

Transcontinental, in turn, was affiliated with Income Opportunity Realty, American Realty, and other REITs that Phillips and his associates controlled, often shifting their assets back and forth among each other to create the illusion that the REITs were in good health when, in fact, they were being looted.

When Dean Starkman, then a reporter for The Wall Street Journal (and, as it happens, my successor at the Columbia Journalism Review) began reporting on some aspects of this story, Phillips told him, “You’re not supposed to be talking about me. You’re going to get buried.”

Starkman did write about Phillips, but it was a rather mild story, and no journalist to date has detailed Phillips’ extensive ties to the Mafia.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal and other media outfits seem to believe that Michael Milken is a reformed man – a “prominent philanthropist” – despite the fact that he is, to this day, helping manipulate the markets in league with other philanthropic Mafia figures.

And apparently unbeknownst to anyone, Milken was, at the time of Phillips’ arrest in 2000, a driving force behind Transcontinental Realty, the Mob-linked REIT that was key to the Operation Uptick Mafia bust.

Milken secretly owned a large chunk of Transcontinental through an outfit called Sunset Management. Not once did Milken reveal that Sunset was his company, and none of Sunset’s public records contain Milken’s name. But Milken certainly controlled Sunset.

Emails between Milken and Ken Lay of Enron show that Milken’s brother, Lowell (who then used the email address Lowell_Milken@sunsetmgt.com), was also behind Sunset. A few of the emails suggest that Milken was trying to get Enron into the business of securitizing water, much like other commodities and mortgages have been securitized.

Enron’s water business would later be a big factor in the company’s demise, but that is a story for another time.

It is probably no coincidence that when the Feds started looking into Phillips and his Mafia dealings, Sunset filed a lawsuit against Transcontinental, a move that would have served to put the dealings between Milken and Phillips under attorney-client privilege, making it difficult for anyone to investigate.

It was no doubt for similar reasons that Milken crony William Ackman purchased Transcontinental Realty shortly after Phillips was arrested. Recall that the former spy who was monitoring the Milken meetings in Costa Rica first brought Phillips and Ackman to my attention, noting that Ackman had been implicated in a scheme to seize and loot another REIT with Steven Roth (investment adviser to “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” Yasin al Qadi’s anti-terrorism company).

Recall also that the former spy said that REITs had something to do with the Milken network’s plans to destroy some big companies, and that some of those big companies (such as Lehman Brothers) were, as we will see in later chapters, subsequently destroyed.

It was not surprising that Ackman bought Transcontinental from Phillips. As we know, this is the usual pattern, similar to the move by Jonathan Curshen (host of the Milken meetings in Costa Rica) to purchase YBM Magnex (then controlled by Russian Mafia boss Semion Mogilevich) when that outfit came under investigation.

Once Transcontinental was in Ackman’s hands, the Feds would stop investigating the company, and it would be more difficult to force it to hand over evidence. Perhaps as a result, Phillips was ultimately acquitted.

As soon as Phillips was set free, Phillips repurchased Transcontinental from Ackman, and then Phillips sued Ackman and an outfit called Basic Capital, which was also invested in Transcontinental. Which was strange, since Phillips controlled Basic Capital.

In other words, Phillips was filing lawsuits against himself.

There could have been only two reasons to do this. One was to put all of the suspicious dealings among these people under attorney client privilege and prevent investigations. The other would to preempt others from filing real lawsuits.

People in the Milken network routinely play this legal game. In fact, one of the best methods for determining which Milken cronies are conspiring together is to check and see which Milken cronies have sued each other and themselves.

Given the Sunset lawsuit, and given that Transcontinental was clearly a rigged company, it seems more than likely that Milken was involved in manipulating Transcontinental’s stock. I do not know if this would have violated Milken’s lifetime ban from the securities industry, but Milken should not only be put back in prison – he should, as a wise man once said, be buried under the prison.

This is because at the time of the Operation Uptick Mafia bust, Milken and Phillips (and Transcontinental) sat at the center of a massive stock manipulation and money laundering network that included nuclear-trafficking Russian Mafia bosses, Al Qaeda’s most important bank, the Russian government, and people tied, variously, to the regime in Iran, Saudi intelligence, and the Pakistani ISI.

More on that in a moment. First I must tell you about some strange things that occurred in 2006, some months after I first began investigating the Milken network.

* * * * * * * * *

It was 2006, I was still working for Columbia University, and the former spy was rambling on about Gene Phillips, secret meetings in Costa Rica, a guy working out of the Israeli embassy in San Jose, a Goldman Sachs alum involved with Stinger missile sales to Pakistan, and something about REITs and mortgages – none of which was of particular interest to me at the time.

I ignored that former spy. I thought he seemed a bit suspect, and I escorted him out of my office, thinking the meeting was nothing more than a strange occurrence.

Days later, I had forgotten completely about the former spy, and had resumed work on my story. I thought the story would expose a big scandal, but I didn’t yet know what I was getting into.

I figured the scandal was pretty straight forward: a network of hedge funds using unscrupulous tactics (like planting false stories with compliant journalists) to attack public companies, most of them companies in their earlier stages of development.

In my spare time, I had begun looking into the Mafia’s involvement in market manipulation, but I didn’t yet know that the Mafia had anything to do with the Milken network. I figured maybe I’d write a separate story about the Mafia.

But I never wrote that story. And I never produced the story about the Milken network and compliant journalists that I had promised to write for the Columbia Journalism Review.

I did not write those stories because soon after my meeting with the former spy in September 2006, there were some additional strange occurrences, the first of which was a call that I received from a Mob enforcer who knew something about the death of a notorious short-side market manipulator named Alain Chalem, who had been murdered execution-style in 1999.

I agreed to meet the Mob enforcer, whom I will not describe in detail because it would reveal his identity. Indeed, I do not want to describe him to you, because he haunts my thoughts, he is a nervous twitch, something unsettling. In short, if I were to tell you that he had white eyes, sharp teeth, and rabid drool dripping from his mouth, it would only be a slight exaggeration.

This rabid dog-man was a close friend of Alain Chalem, and he had been with Chalem on the night before Chalem’s murder. On that night, according to the rabid-dog man, Chalem had met with a man named Mikhail Sheferofsky, and there had been an argument concerning a naked short selling scam that Chalem was running with the Russian Mob.

Indeed, Chalem had been part of an extensive Russian Mafia market manipulation network that involved the Russian government. But I didn’t know that yet.

I did some research on Michael Sheferofsky, but I didn’t find anything right away, so I returned to my work investigating the Milken network. I had no idea at this point that Sheferofsky was, in fact, an important member of the Milken network.

At any rate, I was now spending most of my time making calls, asking sources what I thought to be fairly innocuous questions about SAC Capital, and relationships among some hedge funds and corrupt financial journalists.

At this point, I knew that SAC Capital chief Steve Cohen was a close associate of Milken, but I didn’t yet know that he and Russian Mafia boss Felix Sater (the guy who escaped jail time by telling the Feds he could introduce them to his contacts in Russian intelligence and Al Qaeda) had been among the select partner-traders (along with the other Milken cronies I mentioned before) at the Milken-financed Mafia brokerage Gruntal & Co.

In addition to my inquiries about SAC Capital, I had also just told a CNBC spokesman that I had information that Milken’s most famous criminal co-conspirator, Ivan Boesky, was back in the game. CNBC’s Jim Cramer (host of “Mad Money”) had once planned to run a hedge fund out of Boesky’s offices, and by this time I had established that Cramer was helping the Milken network manipulate stocks.

I didn’t yet know at this time that Boesky had spent a year in Iran currying favor with the Islamic regime. I didn’t know that after prison, Boesky had moved to Russia, where he cemented ties to the Russian Mafia, including Felix Sater’s associates in the Mogilevich organization.

And I didn’t know that Boesky and Ali Nazerali (hedge fund partner of Osama bin Laden’s favorite financier) had met recently at the offices of Lines Overseas Management, an off-shore hedge fund and brokerage outfit. Though the former spy had told me about the Milken meetings in Costa Rica, I did not yet know that Nazerali had attended them.

But I had recently met the former spy and the rabid dog-man, and I was making a lot of phone calls about Ivan Boesky and SAC Capital. After one long day of work, I headed to my neighborhood bar for a drink, maybe two.

While I was sitting at the bar, three guys in slick suits entered and sat down next to me. One of them announced that he was a former employee of Ivan Boesky – Michael Milken’s famous criminal co-conspirator. I thought, “Wow, what luck! I will have to ask this guy some questions.”

But before I could get a word out, this supposed former Boesky employee proceeded to tell me a story about a guy who was savagely murdered after he was caught peeking into the dressing rooms of the ladies underwear department at Saks Fifth Avenue.

As soon as he finished telling this strange story about the underpants murder, the supposed former Boesky employee and his friends, having never ordered a drink, got up and departed.

This, it seemed to me, was a strange occurrence.

Indeed, it crossed my mind that I might have been threatened. Telling a story about an underpants murder at Saks Fifth Avenue was a peculiar way to convey a threat, but anything seemed possible.

I asked a bartender if he knew who the guys in the slick suits were, and he said: “No, and I don’t wanna know, either.”

That was not encouraging, but I shrugged it off. I finished my drink, and by the next day I had determined that there was no way I had been threatened. I thought maybe I was losing my mind, so I tried to keep it together, and I continued the investigation.

Still, I told some people about the encounter, marveling at how strange it was that this supposed former Boesky employee would have told me about an underpants murder in, of all places, Saks Fifth Avenue.

Some people remarked that SAC Capital, the hedge fund I had been investigating, was often referred to as “Saks”. So maybe I’d received a coded threat from SAC Capital.

After all, I was closely collaborating with Patrick Byrne, who at this point had become quite famous for his crusade against “miscreant” short sellers who were manipulating the markets. And Patrick had issued a coded threat of his own, publicly announcing (in an interview with BusinessWeek magazine and in other forums) that he was going to — hint, hint — “sack up” to the name of a big hedge fund that was clearly a central figure in the criminal network.

Everyone except me seemed to know that Patrick’s “sack up” hint was a reference to SAC Capital, sometimes known as “Sack,” other times known as “Saks.” As it happens, SAC Capital is now (as of this writing in 2011) the principal target of the largest insider trading investigation ever conducted by the FBI.

Of course, for one to think that it is possible he has received a coded threat, is for one to think that he is not thinking straight. So at this point I was in a state of some confusion.

This state of confusion only worsened when, a few days later, I received what seemed like another threat. It was Halloween day, and I was in Chicago, visiting family and taking care of a five-year old. I had just handed the child back to his mother, and had gone into a big chain book store to do some work on my laptop.

I was, at this point, no more than three weeks away from publishing my first story about the Milken network of hedge funds. Or so I thought.

While I was typing in the book store, an ordinary looking guy in khakis sat down next to me and announced, apropos of nothing, that everyone should take better care of their relatives. This was followed by a long silence, after which he said that it so happened that he had seen me with one of my relatives, and I should take better care of this particular relative.

Then the man made a somewhat dramatic display of slamming a book on the table. It was one of those thick, encyclopedic books with glossy photographs. On the cover, the book said, in big letters — “THE MAFIA”.

After slamming the book down, the man told me to have a nice day, and he walked away. I would have thought nothing about it, but there had been the incident in the bar, so I thought this was a bit strange.

In fact, I sort of panicked. I told the book store’s security guard that this guy had just threatened me, and I called some people, including Patrick Byrne, to tell them what had happened.

Patrick Byrne offered to get in touch with some Chicago cops he knew. Meanwhile, the book store’s security guard (a big guy who didn’t mess around) found the man out on the street, dragged him back into the book store, and delivered him to me with a smile.

The guard said, “Now, what’s the problem between you two?”

Well, I couldn’t quite articulate the problem. I mean, this man had said I should take care of my relative, and he’d slammed down a book about the Mafia. That was about it. On its surface, the story sounded ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the man who’d slammed down the book became extremely polite, and apologized profusely. He even asked if he could buy me a coffee, anything I want. He asked if I wanted him to buy me a book or (oddly) a new thumb drive for my computer.

In retrospect, I see that the man was far too polite and far too apologetic, given that I had gotten a security guard to haul him back to the book store. If he had done nothing wrong, he should have been indignant.

Later, I would learn that this man had, in fact, conveyed a threat. But at the time he seemed so polite, I thought maybe I had made a mistake. I thought, in fact, that I really was losing my mind. So I told the security guard to forget it, and the man left.

A few days later, I was in a small Manhattan coffee shop sitting at the barista bar. Someone grabbed me from behind, and literally dragged me to the street. There, I was introduced to two more thugs, one of whom punched me hard in the eye. When I put up my fists to defend myself, the thug embraced me, and said he was sorry.

I was in such a daze that I didn’t know what to say as the three thugs walked me down the street, and deposited me on the front step of my apartment building. The thug who had punched me apologized again and shook my hand. He said that the coffee shop was owned by the Mafia and he was just trying to protect me.

As he and his two companions departed, the thug said: “Just stay away from your Irish friend.”



This, it seemed, was another strange occurrence. And the next day my eye was black and blue, swollen shut. I was having difficulty staying focused, and I really didn’t know what had happened. I told my work colleagues I had gotten into a bar fight, and I continued the investigation, making more phone calls.

About a week later, the manager of a hedge fund called Kingsford Capital appeared in my offices and announced that he had made a donation to Columbia University with instructions that the money should be used to pay my salary.

The Columbia Journalism Review in a non-profit publication that receives much of its operating capital in the form of grants, most of which come from big, reputable philanthropic outfits, like the Ford Foundation. But now, for the first time in history, a hedge fund would be funding the magazine, and specifically providing the money that would be used to pay my salary.

I was to be called “The Kingsford Capital Fellow.”

This seemed strange because Kingsford Capital was one of the hedge funds that I was investigating. I had strong evidence that Kingsford had engaged in manipulative short selling, and that it had planted deliberately false stories (attacking public companies) with corrupt journalists, including a one-time BusinessWeek reporter named Gary Weiss.

I also knew that Kingsford was closely tied to SAC Capital, Rocker Partners, Dan Loeb’s Third Point, and others in the Milken network.

When I began this investigation in 2006, there was only one other mainstream journalist seriously investigating the problem of short-side stock manipulation. His name was Justin Hibbard and he worked for BusinessWeek.

But Hibbard never wrote his story. Instead, he resigned from BusinessWeek in September 2006, two months before Kingsford Capital’s manager appeared in my offices. After resigning from BusinessWeek, Hibbard went to work as a private investigator. His first client: Kingsford Capital.

In an interview with an online publication (that was quickly removed from the internet, along with Hibbard’s bio, which stated that he worked for Kingsford), Hibbard described his new job in detail.

He said he was helping short sellers by “covertly” gathering information on their target companies. He said he used spy cameras. And he set up surveillance, with multiple cars following corporate executives. Which seemed like a pretty sophisticated operation considering that Hibbard was not a spy by training, and had only been in business for a month.

As I also knew in 2006, Kingsford and its manager Mike Wilkins had also worked in partnership with a gregarious Cuban trader named Manuel Asensio. When I called Asensio, he freely admitted that he had engaged in naked short selling. He also said he had multiple journalists on his payroll. Then he offered me a job (I declined the offer, and regret to this day not asking him how much it costs to buy a journalist).

Asensio was formerly a principal at First Hanover, a Gambino Mafia brokerage. The government has described First Hanover as being tied to other Mafia brokerages, including Hanover Sterling (controlled by the Genovese Mafia) and Adler Coleman (the outfit controlled by the Mafia-tied Irving Kott, formerly of the BCCI brokerage First Commerce).

Another principal of First Hanover was Stephen Ilya Taub, who also worked out of Global Securities (the Mafia outfit tied to some guys who worked for the Iranian Assa Corporation, charged with espionage in 2009). Taub was the preferred broker for Russian Mafia boss Felix Sater and the whole pack of traders I described in earlier chapters –including the Mafia-tied Ali Nazerali (Irving Kott’s First Commerce partner) and Anthony Elgindy.

Ali Nazerali, we know, had been a top employee of Abbas Gokal (the major BCCI figure who worked for Pakistani intelligence and the regime in Iran). Nazerali and his relative, Swaleh Naqvi (CEO of BCCI) were linked (along with Adnan Khashoggi) to Capcom, the Saudi intelligence outfit that conducted trading (much of it manipulative) worth $90 billion through Michael Milken’s outfit at Drexel Burnham.

Later, recall, Nazerali was the hedge fund partner of Yasin al Qadi (Osama bin Laden’s favorite financier). I will repeat a few other facts, because I know there are some people who have not read the first nine chapters of this long story, and these facts are important to understanding what follows.

As Chapters 8 and 9 described in detail, Global Securities client Anthony Elgindy, a famous Egyptian-American short seller, was tied to the Russian Mafia and multiple leaders of jihadi terrorist outfits. Elgindy destroyed MJK Clearing, the nation’s largest clearing firm, with Adnan Khashoggi and others, including Rafi Khan, son of a Pakistani diplomat (or spy) and a principal at Nazerali partner Irving Kott’s JB Oxford.

Federal prosecutors said (with good reason) that Elgindy had advance knowledge of the 9-11 attacks. Others in his pack included Mansur Ijaz (who bragged of knowing Osama bin Laden and works for the Pakistani government); Rakesh Sakena (leader of the Naxalite Marxist rebel group); Ramy El Betrawi (funder of Hamas); and a few others still to be discussed.

Manuel Asensio was certainly a member of this pack. He traded through Global Securities, and he had been one of Elgindy’s closest associates. Asensio and Elgindy (along with Kingsford Capital) had also been important sources of information for the corrupt journalist Gary Weiss, who was best known for having written a BusinessWeek cover story called “The Mob on Wall Street.”

Gary Weiss wrote a number of other stories about the Mafia’s infiltration of Wall Street, and all of his stories contained important omissions and bias. Most of the omissions concerned the Russian Mafia and the crimes of people like Manuel Asensio and Anthony Elgindy.

Whenever the FBI implicated the Russian Mob in a crime, Weiss would go to lengths to make it seem like the crimes were small-time and irrelevant. Many of Weiss’s stories were especially favorable to Russian Mafia boss Felix Sater, who, in addition to having relations with Al Qaeda, is one of Gary Weiss’s close friends.

In addition, Weiss seems to have covered up a murder. This will be difficult to believe for anyone who has not read Deep Capture’s extensive files on Gary Weiss. I encourage you to search our archives, because that additional information will corroborate what follows.

The rabid-dog man I met in 2006 told me that he offered to meet with Gary Weiss and provide evidence that the Russian Mob had been responsible for the execution-style murder of Alain Chalem. But Weiss refused to meet anyone who suggested that the Russian Mafia was involved, and instead wrote a transparently false story pinning the murder on Italian Mobsters who then happened to have been feuding with the Russians, including Felix Sater.

Meanwhile, using multiple anonymous screen names, Weiss bombarded the interent with commentary ridiculing a book called “The Scorpion and the Frog”, which was all about the adventures of Felix Sater (who was named “Lex Tersa” in the book presumably because the author didn’t want to make Felix angry by using his real name). This book mentioned that Felix Sater had once threatened to have Alain Chalem murdered.

Since Gary Weiss was friends with Felix at this stage, it is interesting that he would refuse to meet someone who had evidence that Chalem had died at the hands of the Russian Mob. It is all the more interesting given that the FBI believed it was the Russian Mob, and the evidence pointed to Felix Sater as a possible culprit. Gary Weiss was the only person on the planet implicating those Italian mobsters, who were Felix’s enemies.

Weiss might also have attempted to cover-up the murder of Paul Klebnikov, the Forbes journalist who was assassinated after he wrote a book (“Godfather of the Kremlin”) that accused Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky of multiple crimes and of having ties to the Mafia. Shortly after Weiss was fired by BusinessWeek, Weiss joined, and then proceeded to dominate Project Klebnikov, an organization that had been set up to investigate Klebnikov’s murder.

This was strange because Weiss had meanwhile devoted great effort to trashing Klebnikov and his book on the internet. Using multiple anonymous screen names (that future Deep Capture reporter Judd Bagley traced to Weiss’s IP address), Weiss wrote countless negative reviews of Klebnikov’s book on Amazon and other websites.

This was not just the work of a guy who didn’t like a book. It was a concerted effort to to smear Klebnikov’s reputation and completely discredit his work.



Sources familiar with Project Klebnikov say that Gary Weiss campaigned to divert attention away from the possible role of Berezovsky and the Russian Mafia in Klebnikov’s murder. Instead, he angled to have the murder pinned on a Chechen separatist.

In 2007, Weiss wrote an article for Forbes magazine, calling Klebnikov (whom he was anonymously trashing on the internet) a “brilliant investigative journalist” and blaming his murder on Chechens. He did not even mention widespread suspicions that Berezovsky or his Russian Mafia associates might have been responsible.

This was almost certainly because Gary Weiss and Berezovsky were old friends. At a minimum, Gary’s other close friends, such as Russian Mafia boss Felix Sater, are on extremely close terms with Berezovsky. At one point in the 1990s, Felix brokered a deal for Berezovsky to buy Salomon Brothers, then one of the biggest investment banks in America. In the end, though, the deal didn’t happen.

Aside from his relationship with Felix Sater, Weiss deals often with a lawyer named Edwin Mishkin.

Mishkin, recall, was the receiver in the bankruptcy of Adler Coleman, the Mafia brokerage controlled by Ali Nazerali’s BCCI partner Irving Kott, with funding from Berezovsky. In his stories for BusinessWeek, Weiss wrote that Adler Coleman was a victim of Italian mobsters, rather than a criminal Mafia brokerage with ties not only to Berezovsky but also the Russian Mafia and the Genovese organized crime family.

Weiss’s pal Mishkin was also Berezovsky’s personal lawyer and represented Berezovsky when Berezovsky sued Klebnikov after Klebnikov published “Godfather of the Kremlin”. I could be wrong, but it seems strange to me that Gary Weiss (who seems to be on close terms with the Berezovsky crowd) would have gone to such lengths to stear the investigation of Klebnikov’s murder away from Berezovsky.



Weiss even had help from Kroll, the private investigative agency, which played a significant role in diverting attention away from Berezovsky. When Berezovsky sued Klebnikov, Klebnikov tried to hire Kroll to help him collect additional evidence of Berezovsky crimes. Kroll not only declined to help Klebnikov; it leaked word to the press that Klebnikov’s book was false.

After Klebnikov’s death, Kroll operatives in Moscow and Gary Weiss told investigators they had information (none of which has been substantiated) that Chechens had committed the murder. No doubt, Kroll was eager to help Gary Weiss and Berezovsky because Berezovsky was a Kroll client.

Kroll was founded by Jules Kroll, whose first-ever client was Michael Milken, a close associate of Berezovsky. Indeed, Milken made Kroll’s career. Later, the Kroll agency set up a special unit that catered exclusively to short sellers in the Milken network. For a time, this network employed Kroll to investigate my Deep Capture colleague Patrick Byrne.

Kroll had a separate unit that catered to Russian oligarchs with ties to the Mafia, even as it claimed to be investigating the Mafia on behalf of naive clients who thought they were being protected. It is interesting to read the literature that Kroll’s Moscow operatives have published about the Russian Mafia. Nowhere does this literature mention even one name of a Russian Mobster. Indeed, it goes to some effort to suggest that the Russian Mafia does not exist.

Berezovsky’s business empire, we know, was until recently a joint venture with Roman Abramovich, who is Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man. Berezovsky, who orchestrated Putin’s rise to power, apparently had a falling out with the Russian leader, at which point he revealed his ties to Chechens who were doing battle with those who had been accused of Klebnikov’s murder.

After that, Ali Nazerali’s friends in the Abu Dhabi royal family brokered the deal to divide the Berezovsky-Abramovich business empire. It was when this was all happening that Berezovsky’s employee, Alexander Litvinenko, was poisoned and killed by radioactive polonium.

The Russian government said Litvinenko was using the polonium to build a nuclear bomb for Al Qaeda. Before he died, Litvinenko said it was Putin and the Russian intellience services who had ties to Al Qaeda. Most likely, they all had ties to Al Qaeda because they had all worked with the Mogilevich organization, which tried to sell highly enriched uranium to Al Qaeda, and has sold plenty of other weapons to the jihad.

Recall that the Orange Diviner account at that little Chicago brokerage Tuco Trading (which transacted manipulative trading equal to more then 20 percent of the volume at the largest brokerage on the planet in the month before the 2008 collapse of Bear Stearns) was controlled by some top henchmen of Abramovich, Russian Mafia boss Semion Mogilevich, and Russian oligarch Mikhail Fridman, who is funding Iran’s nuclear program.

We have already met some of the other Milken cronies who were tied to Tuco, and we will learn much more about Tuco and affiliated brokerages and hedge funds that were manipulating the markets in 2008. I mention them now only because it is clear that the corrupt journalist Gary Weiss was intimately familiar with these brokerages and hedge funds, and sought to cover-up their crimes.

Indeed, since the beginning of 2006, Gary Weiss has been employed almost full-time orchestrating (in league with people tied to the Mafia) a propaganda campaign aimed at convincing the world that short-side market manipulation does not occur, while smearing the reputations of people who say otherwise.

As part of this effort, Weiss once worked with a woman named Linda Mack to hijack the Wikipedia pages on naked short selling and related topics. After hijacking the Wikipedia pages (so that nobody else could edit them), Mack and Weiss made certain that they stated unequivocally that short-side market manipulation was not a problem.

This was no small indiscretion. It was a major undertaking that had profound implications for our public discourse. After all, Wikipedia, for better or worse, is quite influential. It is the first thing many people read on any given subject, and people tend to believe what they read.

Now it appeared that a corrupt journalist with ties to the Mafia and some woman named Linda Mack were using Wikipedia to define the public debate on a crime that had the potential to collapse the American financial system.

When Deep Capture reporter Judd Bagley figured out what Gary Weiss and Linda Mack had done, it became one of the biggest scandals in the history of Wikipedia. Millions of words were written about it in Wikipedia forums, and respected tech publications made a fuss. (See The Register, “Emails Show Journalist Rigged Wikipedia’s Naked Shorts“).

Amidst this scandal, an ABC News reporter named John Cooley wrote a public letter (now posted at DeepCapture.com) stating that Linda Mack (the woman who helped Gary Weiss hijack Wikipedia) had once worked for ABC News but ABC had fired her after legendary ABC newsman Pierre Salinger concluded that she was a spy.

According to Cooley, Mack had been hired to help ABC investigate the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Mack had claimed that her boyfriend had been killed in the bombing, and that might have explained her interest.

However, Cooley noted that Mack seemed less interested in catching the perpetrators than in developing relationships with Jordanian intelligence, which believed Iran was responsible for the attack. Meanwhile, Mack maneuvered to pin the bombing on Libya, when there was strong evidence that Iran had, indeed, been the culprit.

Since then, a number of others, including former CIA operative Robert Baer, who spent many years investigating this terrorist attack, have stated that all evidence pointed to Iran, and that it was strange that some investigators went to lengths to implicate Libya instead.

At the time, many dubious operators were lobbying to exonerate Iran, and one of them was the above-mentioned Ali Nazerali, who subsequently went into multiple lines of business with Buck Revell, who led the U.S. government’s investigation of the Pan Am bombing (and who blamed Libya) when he was the FBI’s director of counter-terrorism.

In his letter, Cooley said that ABC News believed that Linda Mack was working for MI5, the British domestic spy service. Indeed, Linda Mack openly announced to some people that she was an MI5 operative.

In 2006, I interviewed Edwin Boillier, who was suspected (perhaps falsely) of manufacturing the suitcase bomb that was ultimately used to blow up Pan Am 103. Boiller said that Linda Mack had visited him at his office in Switzerland and told him that she was working for MI5. Boillier also said that Mack seemed inclined to implicate Libya and to exonerate Iran.

It seems clear that Mack was, in fact, spying for somebody. However, it would have been blatantly illegal for MI5 to spy on ABC News or any other international news organization. So it is possible that Mack was posing as an MI5 operative, but working for some other foreign intelligence agency.

Alternatively, she might have been working for criminals (like Ali Nazerali, another friend of Felix Sater and Gary Weiss) who had an interest in deflecting attention away from Iran. But, of course, it is impossible to reach any definitive conclusions, other than the obvious one that there was something strange about this woman Linda Mack.

The corrupt journalist Gary Weiss is also a bit of a mystery. Shortly before Weiss went to work full time orchestrating an all-out propaganda and disinformation campaign to cover up short selling crimes, his wife, who hails from India, was caught posing as a journalist in order to gain access to diplomats working at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Indeed, Mrs. Weiss had been working as a “journalist” at the UN for three years, and had an office in the UN building, but she had not written a single story for any news publication. Instead, to maintain her ruse, she used a computer program to create fake news clippings with her name on them.

What, precisely, she was doing in the UN building all those years remains unclear, but when she was caught in 2005, the director of the UN’s media division immediately wrote a letter to UN security (the letter is posted at DeepCapture.com), making it clear that Mrs. Weiss’s infilitration of the UN was a rather big deal.

The letter to UN security noted that the documents that Mrs. Weiss had used to gain access to the UN were an “outright forgery.”

The letter continued: “Because of the serious nature of the fraud perpetrated by [Mrs. Weiss] for the past three years, I hereby revoke her accreditation, and request that she be made permanently and irrevocably ineligible for any type of United Nations pass.”

Stressing the urgency of the matter, the letter stated: “As early as possible, MALU…will accompany [Mrs. Weiss] to Room S-301 to clear out her desk, and will then escort her from United Nations premises. In light of this grave breach…I would greatly appreciate your help in the Safety and Security Service in implementing this decision.”



A couple of years later, Deep Capture got its hands on a computer that had belonged to a grifter named Floyd Schneider, who had been employed by Anthony Elgindy, the guy tied to the Russian Mafia, Al Qaeda, and several other jihadi terrorist groups.

This is the same Anthony Elgindy whose family settled Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian in the United States, at which point Sami al-Arian began taking directions from Iranian diplomats working out of the United Nations headquarters in New York.

We didn’t just get a few emails. We got the whole computer (by means we consider to be reasonably legal). The documents on this computer proved that Schneider was working closely with the corrupt journalist Gary Weiss on the campaign to cover-up short selling crimes. Floyd and Gary plotted character assassinations, disinformation schemes, etc.

Among the many schemes that Weiss and Schneider hatched together was one to derail the story about short selling crimes that I was working on for the Columbia Journalism Review.

In addition, Gary Weiss indicated that he was working directly with the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the Wall Street outfit responsible for clearing trades (i.e. making sure stock sold short is delivered, so that it does not artificially boost supply and manipulate markets).

Indeed, Judd Bagley traced Weiss’s internet traffic, and found that he was, for a time, working from an office inside the DTCC. That the DTCC had been infilitrated by a guy like Gary Weiss speaks volumes about the reliability of the nation’s clearing and settlement system, which is really the foundation of the financial system.

Even worse,there is reason to believe that Gary Weiss found work with the DTCC with help from Felix Sater (Russian Mafia boss with ties to Russian intelligence and Al Qaeda). More on this in later chapters.



There was a lot of other interesting stuff on the computer of Floyd Schneider (former employee of Anthony Elgindy, who had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks). For example, documents on the computer proved that Schneider was being paid under the table by a convicted felon named Michelle McDonough.

McDonough, in turn, had been hired by (among others) hedge fund manager Dan Loeb to run a stable of grifters, corrupt journalists and internet message board posters whose job was to cover-up market manipulation crimes and bash public companies targeted by Loeb and his short-selling associates.

Loeb, recall, is a close Milken crony and was one of the hedge fund managers who discussed stock manipulation schemes on Elgindy’s private internet chat site (which was hosted by a company, Infocom, owned by top leaders of Hamas, the jihadi outfit that takes directions from Iran and others). Loeb is the guy who went by the screen name “Mr. Pink.”

In 2006, Loeb’s Third Point Captial and affiliated hedge funds–including Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital, Jim Chanos’s Kynikos Associates, Dirk Ziff’s Och-Ziff Capital, and Exis Capital (essentially a subsidiary of SAC) –were attacking a Canadian insurance company called Fairfax Financial. Fairfax filed a lawsuit, and obtained emails between these hedge funds.

These emails make it clear that Loeb was in close communication with Kingsford Capital, the outfit that was going to be paying my salary at Columbia University.

Other documents and emails obtained by Fairfax show that these hedge fund managers had hired a thug named Spyro Contogouris to harass Fairfax’s executives. Spyro had threatened the executives’ children and gone so far as to mail a letter to the priest of Fairfax’s CEO stating that the CEO was a fugitive from the law who had stolen millions of dollars from the Vatican.

This, needless to say, was false. The Fairfax CEO had never been implicated in anything untoward. The only people on the planet suggesting that he had done anything wrong were these short sellers, their hired thugs, and a few corrupt journalists.

Meanwhile, the same Spyro Contogouris had been hired by Kingsford Capital to spread the false news that Affinsa, a Spanish philatelic company, was smuggling cocaine through the port of Cartagena. This utterly false story was part a of short selling attack that these same hedge funds were waging against one of Affinsa’s U.S. subsdiaries, a company called Escala.

The Spanish press later reported that Kingsford had corrupted the Spanish government as part of an effort to get Spanish law enforcement to raid Affinsa’s offices. The raid occurred, but to this day, Affinsa has not been convicted of any crime. The hedge fund perfidy was a big scandal in Spain, widely reported in the Spanish press, but the U.S. media continue to treat these hedge fund managers like gods.

Soon after I was jumped by those three thugs, Spyro Contogouris was arrested by the FBI and charged with ripping off a Greek shipping magnate. The FBI arrested Spyro hoping that he would turn evidence against the hedge funds that were employing him. One of these hedge funds, of course, was SAC Capital, otherwise known as “Saks.” Another was Kingsford Capital, which, it now appeared, was going to be paying my salary.

I left Columbia University, and my successor was named “The Kingsford Capital Fellow”.

Meanwhile, I found still more connections between Kingsford and the hedge funds and journalists whom I had been investigating. (See my previous Deep Capture stories, including, “New Evidence Raises Serious Questions about Kingsford Capital’s ‘Donation’ to the Columbia Journalism Review.”).

My Deep Capture colleagues and I also gathered a good deal of new evidence demonstrating that these hedge funds were up to no good. In one email obtained by Fairfax, hedge fund manager Jim Chanos expresses his concern that people were beginning to believe that some short sellers (namely, Chanos and others in the Milken network) were dirty players.

The email also made it clear that Chanos was worried that some people were highlighting his association with Milken. The only people highlighting his connection to Milken at this point were Patrick Byrne and others (including myself) who were working with Patrick.

In the email, Chanos did not state explicitly that he was concerned about his ties to Milken being exposed, but he made it clear to the email’s recipients (a long list of Milken-tied hedge fund operators and billionaires like Carl Icahn, who owed their careers to Milken) that they should communicate the party line that Chanos and his crowd were not affiliated with a “certain junk bond king” (Milken).

The party line would be that, in fact, Chanos had been Milken’s nemesis in the 1980s because he was the most active short seller of companies that had been financed by “a certain junk bond king.”

As everyone on that email list knew, this was hogwash. Chanos and his network had certainly shorted companies financed by Milken, but those were all companies that Milken or his cronies were busting out. After Milken and his cronies looted the companies, they called in their affiliated short sellers, including Chanos, to put the companies out of business.

Indeed, Chanos got his big start by shorting a company called Baldwin United, as was revealed in a Wall Street Journal story published in 1985 (read it, as it was the last serious investigative report on short-side market manipulation published before the media was captured by Chanos and his short seller lobby). According to this story, Chanos went so far as to go to Baldwin’s bankers with false information that convinced the bankers to cut off Baldwin’s access to credit.

As a result, Baldwin went bankrupt, and Milken got himself named as the advisor to the bankruptcy. According to a well-known and highly respected businessman who was involved in the bankruptcy proceedings, Milken abused his advisory role and ensured that all of Baldwin’s assets were delivered to his cronies at firesale prices.

This success brought Chanos to the attention of Michael Steinhardt (son of the biggest Mafia fence in America), who was then a leading short seller in the Milken network. The 1985 story in The Journal called it a “network” and made it clear that it was network of miscreants who used underhanded tactics to destroy or maim public companies.

At the time, Chanos (who is now revered by The Journal) was working for a Mafia brokerage called Gilford Securities. In 2000, five Gilford brokers were arrested in Operation Uptick, the Mafia bust that swept up more than 100 other Mafia tied financial operators, including Milken’s closest associate Gene Phillips. Gilford’s brokers were charged with manipulating stocks in league with ten members of La Cosa Nostra and a corrupt New York cop.

When I called Chanos’s former boss, H. Robert Holmes, to ask about the Mafia’s infiltration of his brokerage, he said: “This is bullshit.” Then he claimed to have no idea that the FBI had charged that his brokers were manipulating stocks with ten Mafia goons, despite the fact that the FBI had vigorously publicized these charges and Operation Uptick.



By then, though, Chanos had left Gilford to start his own hedge fund, receiving his intitial finance from Steinhardt (son of the biggest Mafia fence in America) and Steinhardt’s limited partner, Ivan Boesky (Milken’s most famous criminal co-conspirator). Steinhardt’s other limited partner, Marty Peretz, introduced Chanos to Dirk Ziff, and for a while Chanos ran his hedge fund out of Ziff’s offices.

While Chanos was launching his hedge fund, future CNBC reporter Jim Cramer (who had once planned to work in partnership with Boesky) was running a hedge fund out of Steinhardt’s offices. Later, Cramer and Chanos were the biggest fund raisers for the political campaign of New York Governor Elliot Spitzer, who had been Cramer’s college roommate. Spitzer’s favorite hooker, “Ashley Dupree” lived for a time at Jim Chanos’s beachside villa. She called him “Uncle Jim.”

As Patrick Byrne once said, Ashley should be ashamed of herself for associating with this crowd.

At any rate, SEC filings make it clear that Chanos regularly trades in league with other hedge funds in the Milken network, and in 2006 they were attacking Fairax Financial, one of the largest financial institutions in Canada. And they were using the same tactics (such as trying to cut off the company’s access to credit) that they had been using since the 1980s.

In one email, an employee of Exis Capital (the SAC subsidiary) wrote that “the way to get this thing [Fairfax] down is to get them where they eat, like the credit analysts and holders. We’re taking this baby down for the count.”



This email was addressed to Johnathan Kalikow, son of Peter Kalikow, who was once among the largest investors in Ivan Boesky’s criminal outfit. Kalikow is also a former owner of the New York Post. In this capacity, he handed over control of the newspapers’ fleet of delivery trucks to La Cosa Nostra.

The operation was run by Bonanno Mafia soldier Richard “Shellack-head” Cantrella. Soon enough, the New York Post delivery fleet began transporting cargos of smuggled weaponry and cocaine, in addition to newspapers. Pretty much par for the course for members of the Milken network.

At any rate, back in 2006, this network was going to take Fairfax “down for the count.” Fortunately, Fairfax was a strong company. Its bankers did not cut off access to credit, and it had the good sense to buy a lot of credit default swaps that massively boosted its profits.

However, two years later, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and other banks were taken “down for the count.” By then, the network had refined its tactics to include bigger volumes of manipulative short selling, the deployment of REITs (which we will discuss later), manipulation of credit default swaps, and synthetic CDOs, which, we know, were all designed to self destruct for the benefit of short sellers.

The above-mentioned Steve Cohen and Dirk Ziff have been sued by Lehman’s creditors, who claim the two hedge fund managers (along with Citadel Investment) destroyed Lehman with manipulative short selling. And we have begun to identify some of the people (like Ivan Boesky’s brother, Stuart) who perpetrated the self-destruct CDO scam.

Add to that list, the above mentioned Kalikow (son of a former Boesky partner), who helped run a hedge fund called Stanfield Capital, which specialized in synthetic CDOs.

I know this is a long story with a lot of names, but we must know them all. There are more to come, all tied to the Mafia. In fact, it should be clear by the end of this story that the Mafia (or at least people who have extremely close relations with the Mafia) busted out the global economy. But it’s not just the Mafia; it’s entities even more dangerous.

* * * * * * * * *

Ack…I should have listened to what that former spy was telling me back in 2006. But I didn’t listen. And I never wrote that story for Columbia. Because of the strange occurrences.

But could it possibly be that I had received coded death threats? Wasn’t it probable that the goombas who punched me had mistaken me for someone else? And could all of this have happened right at the time when a hedge fund I had been investigating paid off my employer?

I thought the threats were real. I figured that the warning about staying away from my “Irish friend” referred to my collaboration with Patrick Byrne, who is very much Irish, as had often been noted by the Wall Street characters whom I had interviewed – the sorts of New York characters who make a big deal about ethnicity and one’s neighborhood of origin. (“Ehh, that Byrne – he’s Irish, you gotta wonder about the Irish.”).

But at the same time, I couldn’t believe that it was happening.

In fact, I became certain that this was all having a rather severe effect on my nerves. So I decided that what I really needed was some leisure time. I gave up the investigation, and quit my job, which is one of my life’s great regrets, right up there with not listening to that former spy.

Well, I now know that the threats were real. I know because sources who have worked with some of the characters in this story have confirmed they were real.

In addition, when I resumed my investigation for Deep Capture, a convicted felon named Sam Antar began posting threatening messages on the Internet. He didn’t just threaten me; he also threatened my Deep Capture colleague Judd Bagley, at one point even posting the names and address of Judd’s young children on the Yahoo! message boards.

In one internet message addressed to me in 2008, Antar asked whether I remembered the time that I had “lost it” after being “forcefully escorted” out of a public building because of my “behavior.” I have only once had the pleasure of being “forcefully escorted” out of a building. That was the time when the thugs dragged me out of a coffee shop and punched me in the eye. And, naturally enough, I had indeed “lost it” after that incident.

I wrote Antar an email, asking how he came to know that I had been jumped by thugs and “forcefully escorted” from a building. He replied, “I’m asking the questions, not you.”

Then he seemed to conclude that he better come up with some explanation for how he would know that I had been jumped. So he wrote a blog quoting my email and expressing surprise at having received it. Then he delivered an amazing whopper, stating that he had only been referring to the time when I was “forcefully escorted” from my offices at Columbia University.

Antar also wrote in this blog that I was a drug addict with a shady past and that’s why I had been “fired” by Columbia. In this ludicrous version of events now being related by Antar, Columbia was so alarmed by my drug binges and my shady (maybe even criminal) past that the university had been moved to hire security guards to restrain me and “forcefully escort” me from the building.

This story was repeated (citing Sam Antar as the source) by Gary Weiss, the corrupt journalist (whose wife was escorted from the UN building).

Anybody at Columbia, my former bosses included, will confirm that I was not fired or asked to resign, and that I was never escorted from any building, forcefully or otherwise. To the contrary, when I resigned, I was still on good terms with my editor, who said he was disappointed that I was leaving.

Anybody who knew me at the time will also confirm that I was not using drugs of any sort. And unlike the Mafia-connnected convicted felon Sam Antar (more on him in a moment), I have no shady or criminal past. If I were in any way cut out to be a criminal, I might have some money. I would have accepted that job offer from Gary Weiss’s pal Manuel Asensio.

Unfortunately, I went into the journalism business, which is not at all lucrative, especially for a reporter (like me) who has spent five years investigating criminals, and is now publishing, free of charge, a 263-page report on a public service website, Deep Capture, that operates with zero revenue.

Again, the only building I was ever escorted from was the coffee shop, and my former co-workers at Columbia will recall that I subsequently showed up at work with my eye completely swollen shut. Some people there will no doubt also remember that I was not at all myself, that I had been severely shaken up by this incident.

The bosses at Columbia will confirm all this, despite the fact that they are not at all happy that I have since raised hell about the Kingsford Capital bribe.

In another internet message referring to me Antar wrote, “…Mark Mitchell. A package is awaiting delivery. Do you recall what happened last Halloween?” The previous Halloween I had been doing some work for Rotary International, the charitable organization, interviewing a small-town Rotary club about their Halloween canned food drive.

I assume Antar was referring to the Halloween before that, which was when (as several people whom I called that day will testify) I received the threat from the man in the book shop. This was shortly after I had been told about the underpants murder at “Saks” and it was a few days before I was attacked by the thugs.

At the time when Antar posted this message, nobody other than the security guard at the book shop and the few people whom I had called knew anything about the incident on Halloween. And very few people knew about the other incidents that occurred immediately before and after Halloween.

Later, Antar wrote another message, saying that I had “awakened the fury” of his “dear friend” Barry Minkow. As I knew, Minkow was a convincted criminal who once ran a massive carpet cleaning fraud called ZZZZ Best in cahoots with the Genovese Mafia, Michael Milken and a famous Mob enforcer named Jack Catain.

This was the same Jack Catain (recall from an earlier chapter of this story) who was involved in the Ponzi scheme run by Tom Petters, partner of Milken boy Andrew Redleaf, formerly of Mafia brokerage Gruntal Securities, where Russian Mafia boss Felix Sater and future SAC Capital boss Steve Cohen were trader-partners.

Antar was not just threatening me. He seemed to be employed almost full time smearing the reputations of Deep Capture founder Patrick Byrne and his other company, Overstock.com. Antar’s partner in this effort was the corrupt journalist Gary Weiss, who regularly cited Antar’s blogs while describing Antar as a reformed man and a heroic figure who deserved to be taken seriously.

Antar has also attacked a couple of other companies, working in league with Gary Weiss and his “dear friend” Barry Minkow, who did seven years jail time for his role in ZZZZ Best, the fraud he operated with the protection of Mob enforcer Jack Catain, and finance from the Genovese Mafia and Michael Milken.

In early 2011, the government indicted Minkow for publishing false information about companies he was selling short, and Minkow took a plea bargain with a 5 year sentence. So he’s going back to jail.

In charging Minkow, the DOJ issued a press release noting Minkow’s “deceit and abuse of trust.” The DOJ also stated that Minkow’s “manipulation of the market…caused a severe drop in the stock price of a large local corporation…When false statements are disseminated to deceive the investing public, whether to prop up a company or tear it down, the FBI…will bring disseminators of such falsehoods to justice.”

In short, Minkow was charged with committing precisely the sort of crime that Deep Capture has been seeking to expose, thereby “awakening the fury” of Minkow, and prompting threats of bodily harm from the likes of Antar and others in his network of miscreants.

Antar, of course, is one of Michael Milken’s closest associates. In the 1980s, he was the chief financial officer of an appliance retailer called Crazy Eddie’s, famous for its television commercials – “Our prices are Insaaaaane!”

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Re: The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out Chapter 1 - 
Post by sandi66 on May 30, 2011, 9:23am

In 1989, Crazy Eddie’s was revealed to be what was then the biggest corporate fraud in history. Sam Antar avoided prison only by ratting on his cousin, Eddie Antar, who had founded the company.

Sam now signs all of his internet messages, “Sam Antar, convicted felon,” or “Sam Antar, mug shot on file” — as if he has nothing to hide, but there is plenty that he does not reveal about himself and his friends.

When Crazy Eddie’s first came under investigation, Milken and some of his other closest associates – namely, the Belzberg brothers (Sam and Hymie, who, according to government reports, were also doing business with Genovese Mafia capos) – initiated an effort to buy Crazy Eddie’s.

In addition, the Belzbergs have been implicated in multiple stock manipulation schemes with others in the Milken network, including Ali Nazerali, hedge fund partner of Yasin al-Qadi (“Specially Designated Global Terrorist”).

As we know, when miscreants in the Milken network are targeted by government investigators, others in the network often try to buy the miscreants’ company to ward off investigations into the company’s broader criminal activities. And Crazy Eddie’s was certainly a larger criminal enterprise.

Indeed, sources close to the company have told Deep Capture that it was a massive narco-trafficking operation. The televisions that Crazy Eddie’s shipped around the country were often filled with cocaine.

In the end, the Belzbergs did not buy Crazy Eddie’s. Instead, another fellow, Victor Palmieri, bought it. Palmieri hired a guy named Robert Marmon to run the company. Marmon didn’t know the company was trafficking cocaine, and he found out that it was a fraud only after he took the job.

And his new job quickly proved to be a nightmare. As he told Deep Capture, he was unable to inspect the company’s operations because all its top employees — the key people who previously been the only employees who had direct access to the Antars – were burly, armed thugs who claimed to be former operatives of the Mossad, Israel’s spy agency.

But I can assure you, they were not spies–they were Mobsters and narco-traffickers.

* * * * * * * *

I am not the only journalist who has been threatened by the Milken network. In 2002, Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch was investigating Michael Ovitz, a Hollywood mogul who had been Milken’s best friend in high school and was still one of Milken’s closest business associates.

Some way into her investigation, the L.A. Times reporter found, in the front seat of her car, a dead fish and a rose. In the windshield of her car, there was a bullet hole and a note that said, simply, “Stop!” Soon after, the LA Times reporter was nearly killed when two men in a black Mercedes tried to run her over.

As was later revealed in court, all of this was the work of an Ovitz “consultant” — Anthony Pellicano, who was once a soldier in the Genovese Mafia family. When Pellicano was in court, Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Saunders announced that Pellicano had “conspired with known organized crime connections to place a ‘hit’ on [a witness]…to keep [the witness] from testifying against him.”

As was also revealed in court, Pellicano (who was convicted and jailed for these activities) had done some work for others in the Milken network, including Adam Sender, a former top trader for SAC Capital who now runs Exis Capital, which is funded by Steve Cohen and is, for all intents and purposes, a subsidiary of SAC (also known as “Saks”).

Exis Capital was among the hedge funds (including Kingsford Capital) that also employed the thug Spyro Contogouris (who later did time for ripping off a Greek shipping tycoon).

Sender had gotten into some kind of dispute with a business partner and had hired Pellicano for help. In a phone conversation taped by the FBI (the tape of the full conversation is posted at DeepCapture.com), Sender told Pellicano, “You have 100 percent free reign to do whatever you feel will make this cocksucker as unhappy as possible…I’d like to make the fucking asshole as uncomfortable as possible…I’m going to continue the lawsuit until doomsday…when the time is right I’m going to fix him.”

According to prosecutors, Pellicano later offered to have Sender’s business partner disappear. He said he’d make his move while the business partner was driving to Los Angeles from Las Vegas. He said he’d force the business partner off the road – then Pellicano would kill the “cocksucker” and bury him in the Nevada desert. Nobody would know a thing.

Sender claims that he turned down the murder-for-hire offer, and perhaps he did, but one gets the impression that people in the Milken network do not find such offers to be particularly unusual.

* * * * * * * * *

So, yes, after I was jumped, and after Kingsford Capital paid off my employers, I went into a sort of temporary seclusion.

A few weeks into my convalescence, U.S. Senator Orinn Hatch summoned my colleague Patrick Byrne to his home in Utah. The first thing the Senator said when Patrick walked through the door was that he was worried. He had looked into some of the people Patrick was calling attention to, and he was seriously alarmed because he thought Patrick might be murdered.

A month or so after that, an offshore businessman who had provided some information to our investigation received in the mail a beautiful, lacquered, Russian matryoshka doll. And inside this doll, there was a slip of paper.

On the paper was the letter “F” — with a cross on it. The businessman knew right away that the letter “F” stood for “Felix” – Felix Sater.

The businessman said he had called Felix Sater to see what the deal was with the doll. And after talking to Felix, the businessman invited Patrick Byrne to a greasy spoon diner in Long Island. It was urgent, said the businessman — so Patrick made haste.

And when Patrick arrived at the diner (along with two other people, who can testify to this) the offshore businessman, discarding with formalities, said, “This meeting can be very short. I have a message for you from Russia.”

The message, said the businessman, was this: “‘We are about to kill you. We are about to kill you.’ Patrick, they are going to kill you – if you do not stop this crusade [the investigation into destructive market manipulation], they will kill you. Normally they’d have already hurt you as a warning, but you’re so weird, they don’t know how you’d react. So their first step is, they’re just going to kill you.”

According to the businessman, this threat had come straight from the mouth of Felix Sater. At almost precisely the same time that Felix delivered this threat, the corrupt journalist Gary Weiss wrote a blog stating that Felix seemed to be basically a good guy who had obviously reformed since the days when he was nothing more than a small-time “penny stock” fraudster (as opposed to a top boss in the Russian Mafia who seemed to have ties to Russian intelligence and Al Qaeda).

This has been a consistent pattern ever since Weiss wrote his “Mob on Wall Street” article. He covers up, and at times assists, the crimes of his sources (such as Felix Sater, Anthony Elgindy, and Manuel Asensio), while trashing their enemies.

At the time when Patrick received the death threat, we had no idea who Felix Sater was. Now, of course, we know some things about Felix. We know, for example, that he is a Russian Mafia boss affiliated with the Mogilevich organization, which stands accused of everything from market manipulation to attempted sales of highly enriched uranium to Al Qaeda.

We know that in the 1980s Felix was a trading partner of Steve Cohen (future head of SAC Capital, also known as “Saks”) at the Milken-financed Mafia brokerage, Gruntal & Company.

We also know that Sater now runs Bayrock, an outfit that has a partnership with Apollo, the fund controlled by Leon Black, who is one of Milken’s closest associates. Apollo employs Milken’s son, Lance.

Bayrock’s former CFO, Jody Kriss, has filed a lawsuit in which he claims that Felix once threatened to torture him to death, and that Bayrock is (according to Kriss) is a massive money laundering operation. A source close to Bayrock has told us that Felix has laundered money for Steve Cohen.

We also know that one of Bayrock’s other partners is The Sapir Organization, run by Russian Mafia boss Tamir Sapir, who used to run what he has called a “Crazy Eddie’s” for Russian spies – a one stop shop where KGB operatives in New York could buy high-tech electronics equipment. Sapir’s partner in that business, recall, was Semion Kislin, who has been named as a close business associate of “Little Japanese” – the one-time top boss of the Russian Mafia in the United States.

The Sapir Organization is in the real estate business. Its large property portfolio was, for a long time, managed by Frederick Contini, whom the government has named as an associate of the Genovese Mafia family. In 2008, Contini entered a secret plea to racketeering. He has also faced charges for stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a broken wine glass.

Felix Sater, of course, was also once charged with stabbing a man in the face with the stem of a broken wine glass. It seems to be the thing to do.

* * * * * * * * *

Felix Sater’s former partners (one of whom wrote about this in “The Scorpion and the Frog”) also say that Felix once announced that he was going to murder Alain Chalem, shortly before the day in 1999 when Russian hit men entered Chalem’s New Jersey mansion and ordered him to get down on his knees. Maybe the hit men even listened as Chalem begged for his life. Maybe they listened before they shot Chalem in the back of the head, execution-style.

But that wasn’t enough. The hit men had a message to deliver. They wanted it to be known that they were not nice killers, they were not the sort of killers who would leave a corpse to rest. They were the coldest killers on the Street, men who would humiliate a corpse by mutilating it, and so they fired many more bullets into Chalem’s face, and into Chalem’s ears, until his head was mush. Then they disappeared and were never caught.

This was the murder I was investigating back in 2006, when I met the rabid dog-man, who had been with Chalem on the night before his death. And the murder was still on my mind in the fall of 2010 when I called Zuhair Karam again.

Zuhair, recall, is the jihadi who worked for that little, unregistered brokerage, Tuco Trading, which flooded the markets with more than 2 billion shares (equal to 20 percent of the volume at the biggest brokerage on the planet) in the month before the collapse of Bear Stearns.

One reason why I called Zuhair is that I was looking for more information about the Orange Diviner account, controlled by henchmen of Semion Mogilevich and Roman Abramovich (whose business empire was, until recently, a joint venture with Felix Sater’s friend Boris Berezovsky).

I had also noticed that the report by Tuco’s bankruptcy receiver stated that one of the other traders who worked out of Tuco was a guy named Warren Sulmasy.

Back when I met the rabid-dog man in 2006, I was told that Chalem was Sulmasy’s partner in a brokerage called Harbor Securities. I also knew that Chalem had been the proprietor of another brokerage called Toluca Pacific, which had orchestrated short selling attacks with Mafia capo Phillip Abramo, also known as “The King of Wall Street.”

By 2010, I was aware that Abramo was among the pack of traders, including Ali Nazerali (partner of “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” Yasin al Qadi) and Anthony Elgindy (he with advance knowledge Al Qaeda’s September 11 adventure) that had traded through Global Securities, the outfit with ties to the Russian Mafia and the guys working for Assa Corporation, the Iranian espionage front that took its orders from Iran’s mission at the UN.

I figured maybe when I told Zuhair about all this, he would tell me more about Orange Diviner and help me confirm the identity of the Iranian trader who had set up the two other accounts (one with more than 2,000 subaccounts in China) that had unleashed those 2 billion shares.

I had received word that the Iranian trader was tied in with some of Felix Sater’s Russian Mafia pals. Maybe if Zuhair knew I was on to the Chalem murder, he would confirm the identity of the Iranian and give me some details, just to make me go away.

But Zuhair was not yet ready to talk. He maintained his routine — “I’m just one of the little guys”. So I called Warren Sulmasy, the Tuco trader who had been Chalem’s former partner.

I wanted to ask Sulmasy about Tuco Trading, the Russians, the Iranian, Felix Sater, the murder of Alain Chalem — I wanted to ask him a lot of things, so I called him.

He picked up the phone, and said, “Yeah?”

I said, “Hello, Mr. Sulmasy, Mark Mitchell here, there’s an investigation I want to tell you about, I see that you were operating through Tuco Trading…”

And – “click” — Mr. Sulmasy hung up on me.

So I never did get to ask Mr. Sulmasy about those huge volumes that went through Tuco. And I didn’t get to tell him what I had learned about his partner’s death.

One thing I had learned was that the New Jersey media (quoting FBI sources) had reported that the last person to see Chalem alive was Allen Barry Witz. You might remember that Witz was one of the first people Milken crony Carl Icahn hired after leaving Gruntal & Company (also known as Gruntal Securities), which Ichan had run with help from Felix Sater, who, of course, had threatened to kill Chalem.

I had also learned something about Mikhail Sheferofsky. Recall that Sheferofsky is the guy who argued with Alain Chalem on the night before Chalem’s death, according to Chalem’s friend, the rabid-dog man.

I didn’t get to ask Sulmasy about Sheferofsky, but by this time an organized crime expert who has provided an immense amount of help to my investigation had found that the U.S. government sometimes spells Sheferofsky’s name as “Sheferovsky.”

Mikhael Sheferovsky is a high-level Russian Mafia boss with ties to the Russian intelligence services in Moscow. And Sheferovsky has another name– Michael Satter, sometimes spelled “Sater” with one “t”

Not only that, but he has a son. And his son’s name is – Felix Sater. That’s the same Felix Sater who sent a matryoshka doll to an offshore businessman and told the businessman to deliver a “Message from Russia” to my colleague Patrick Byrne.

That businessman had worked closely with Felix Sater and other Russian Mafia figures. He was a major client and business partner of Jonathan Curshen.

Curshen, of course, was the white knight for Semion Mogilevich’s YMB Magnex and seems to be on close terms with the Russian Mafia. He also has a lot of jihadi friends, including his one-time close trading partner Anthony Elgindy. And for some reason he chose to house his offices in the same building that housed the Israeli embassy in San Jose.

This is the same Curshen who hosted the meetings in Costa Rica where the Milken network (including Ali Nazerali, hedge fund partner of Osama bin Laden’s favorite financier) talked about the destruction of some big companies.

Companies that would, in fact, be destroyed in 2008.

* * * * * * * * *

Shortly before Chalem was murdered in 1999, Gennady Klotsman was at a Manhattan Mini Storage facility in Soho, loading up a locker with two handguns, a shotgun and documents outlining a global stock manipulation and money laundering scheme.

Klotsman was another former employee of the Milken-financed Gruntal Securities, and now he was a partner – along with Felix Sater, and bunch of other former Gruntal employees – in White Rock Partners.

While Klotsman was loading the locker with guns and documents, Felix’s other partner was in Europe, soliciting the services of Aleks Paul, a diamond merchant and money launderer whom prosecutors would later tie to White Rock.

Paul was a business associate of Ibrahim Bah, a Libyan intelligence operative whose principal mission was, for a time, to help Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi foment chaos in Africa.

Later, Bah was (according to former Washington Post reporter Douglas Farah and Global Witness, the preeminent experts on blood diamonds) the principal broker of diamond deals between the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone and Al Qaeda, which used the diamonds to launder money for Osama bin Laden.

It was around this time that Felix was trying to broker the deal for his close associate, the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, to buy Salomon Brothers.

Sater and his partners were also doing a lot of business with MOST Bank, a big Russian financial institution that was run by former KGB First Deputy Chairman Filipp Bobkov and an oligarch named Vladimir Gusinsky. MOST Bank, which then had close ties to Vladimir Putin (Putin and Gusinsky have since had a falling out, according some reports) had a 1,000 man private security force made up of former KGB operatives and mercenaries.

According to declassified CIA reports, MOST Bank also had ties to organized crime – which obviously it did, if it was doing business with Felix. In addition, there were widespread allegations, reported in the Russian press and by Russian NGOs, that MOST Bank’s boss, Bobkov, was a major league narcotics trafficker who dealt in Afghan heroin.

Not only that, but MOST Bank was tied in with the $7 billion Russian Mafia and Russian government stock manipulation and money laundering operation that centered on the Bank of New York.

During one of Felix Sater’s trips to Moscow, the Feds found the locker that Sater’s partner, Klotsman, had filled with guns and documents, and so the Feds launched an investigation. Soon enough they were closing in on Felix and White Rock. Two years later, White Rock would be charged (along with at least five associates of La Cosa Nostra) with manipulating stocks in league with two other Mafia brokerages – A.R. Baron and D.H. Blair.

I have already discussed D.H. Blair and A.R. Baron. They were both closely tied to Michael Milken and financed by one of Milken’s closest associates, Zev Wolfson (who provided Carl Icahn’s fund with its start-up capital).

A.R. Baron (which was also the clearing firm for Datek Securities, owned by Omar Amanat, who founded the Islamic TV station with Hamas) came under increased scrutiny from the authorities in 1998, when two individuals — Stuart Creggy and Andrew Warren – were arrested and charged with helping create off-shore corporations on behalf of A.R. Baron president Andrew Bressman.

The investigation into Stuart Creggy and Andrew Warren’s activities also focused on their ties to Westfield Financial, which employed Felix Sater’s partner Eugene Klotsman (the guy who was loading the locker with guns and documents), and was closely affiliated with White Rock Partners, the brokerage owned by Felix and Klotsman.

When Milken crony Gene Phillips was arrested in Operation Uptick in 2000, the Feds were beginning to close in on Felix, and at this time the government also discovered that several financial companies in addition to MOST Bank were being used to help the Russian government and the Russian Mafia – especially the Mogilevich Organization – launder massive amounts of money through the Bank of New York.

In fact, the Mafia stock manipulation network busted in Operation Uptick, the outfits tied to Felix Sater, the Milken-tied brokerages, and the Bank of New York money laundering network were probably part of the same criminal operation.

Former Deputy Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Jonathan Winer says he was told by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as early as 1998 that “Russian organized crime figures appeared to be utilizing off-shore money laundering mechanisms that previously had been used by cocaine traffickers,” and these mechanisms “involved manipulations of publicly traded stock both to defraud unwary investors, and to turn dirty money into clean money.”

The connections between the Bank of New York scandal and the stock manipulation network would become more evident when the government learned that Andrew Warren, Felix Sater’s business partner (i.e. the fellow tied to Westfield and arrested for his involvement with the Wolfson-financed A.R. Baron), was being investigated for setting up companies that had dealings with two other shady outfits, Benex International and BECS International LLC.

These two companies, both of which were directed by a Russian man named Peter Berlin, had sponsored visas for members of the Mogilevich organization, and had been used as vehicles for laundering Mogilevich money through the Bank of New York. Authorities also linked Benex to Milken crony Marc Rich (the fellow who was indicted for trading with Iran), and Grigory Loutchansky, a Russian Mafia figure who has been accused of trafficking in nuclear weapons materials.

Peter Berlin, meanwhile, was invested in various companies (Rnetthealth and Glenrose Petroleum, to name just a couple) with Michael Milken’s closest associate, Gene Phillips, the guy arrested in Operation Uptick.

Another fellow, Peter Bond, was laundering Mafia money through the Bank of New York on behalf of Milken crony Robert Brennan, who was, in the 1990s, one of Wall Street’s most notorious Mafia-tied stock manipulators. Brennan was also financing Omar Amanat’s Datek Securities, which was, we know, running trading accounts for Mafia capo Phillip Abramo’s right hand man Phil Gurian.

Abramo, the “King of Wall Street” is the Nazerali crony who was involved with Nazerali and Kott in the BCCI venture First Commerce. See ealier chapters for details on Datek and it ties to Tuco Trading and Bernie Madoff’s brokerage.

Bond set up more than 30 shell companies that Brennan used to manipulate stocks in league with (who else?) — A.R. Baron (convicted for manipulting stocks with Felix Sater and D.H. Blair).

At the same time, employees of Bond’s company, the Valmet Group, worked with Brennan’s accountant, Dennis Gaito, to run stock manipulations through Patterson Travis, the brokerage headed by Judah Wernick, who (as you might remember) was manipulating stocks with Datek client Diamond Joe and was engaged in a $200 million stock manipulation scheme with Randolph Pace, who received much of his finance from Milken.

Wernick would later be indicted, as would Pace’s Mafia brokerage, Rooney Pace. And in the course of all this, it was eventually determined that a total of around $10 billion was laundered through the Bank of New York, at least $7 billion of which belonged to the Russian Mafia and the Russian government.

Some of this money, recall, made its way to the Bank of New York via the Inter Maritime Bank, owned by Bruce Rappaport and Abbas Gokal (the BCCI figure who once employed Ali Nazerali, and still works for Pakistan’s ISI and the regime in Iran).

But the most important outfit in this scandal was the California-based Sinex Bank. All told, more than $4 billion was laundered through Sinex, then to Benex and BECS (the outfits tied to a nuclear weapons trafficker and Marc Rich, crony of the Iranian regime), and from there into Bank of New York.

Among the people associated with Sinex Bank were Russian Mafia associates Alexsey Volkov and Maxim Barksi. A subsidiary of the bank, Sinex Securities, which was the vehicle used by Mogilevich, was managed by a man named Debabish Banerjee.

Some of that has been reported in the press. What has not been previously reported is that Debabish Banerjee was working for none other than Michael Milken’s closest business associate, Gene Phillips. Indeed, Phillips secretly controlled Sinex Securities.

When Sinex was implicated in the multi-billion dollar Mogilevich money laundering and stock manipulation scheme, Phillips changed Sinex’s name to National Alliance, and officially registered it in his son’s name.

It was also Phillips who hired Sinex employee Mark Salter, who had previously worked for two brokerages – Westcap Securities, which was controlled by Ali Nazerali (partner of “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” Yasin al Qadi; formerly with Gokal; and BCCI luminary tied to Capcom, the Saudi intelligence outfit that traded $90 billion through Milken); and Greystone Securities, which had been owned by Nicholas Camilleri, proprietor of Navigator Asset Management, which employed a woman named Anna Chapman.

In 2010, Anna Chapman was among ten Russian spies whom the FBI charged with espionage and deported back to Moscow. Recall that Phillips was first brought to my attention by the former spy who was monitoring those meetings in Costa Rica. As we will see, there were many other reasons why a former spy would have taken an interest in Phillips.

Phillips’ other company, Transcontinental (the company in which Milken’s Sunset was a major shareholder), placed more than 700 thousand of its shares with Sinex as “collateral for borrowings”. This suggests that some of that dirty Mafia and Russian government money was making its way back to Phillips and his criminal co-conspirator, Michael Milken.

In conclusion, between 1998 and 2001, various parts of the US government prosecuted the single biggest stock manipulation and money laundering network ever exposed. It is clear that most of the government’s intiatives—from Operation Uptick, and the prosecution of Felix Sater’s White Rock, D.H. Blair, A.R. Baron, YBM Magnex, and the Bank of New York scandal – were related.

Meanwhile, the government was investigating Global Securities (the outfit with ties to people who worked for the Iranian Assa Corp.) and a few other Canadian brokerages (to be discussed later) that were catering to Anthony Elgindy, Ali Nazerali, and the rest of thier pack. It is clear that these investigations were related to the others that occured between 1998 and 2001.

In other words, the government was going after a distinct network of financial operators who were doing serious damage to the U.S. economy.

What is also clear is that this network was run by the closest associates of Michael Milken in league with various organized crime outfits, including the Mogilevich organization, which seemed to be operating in cahoots with the Russian government.

In addition, some of the people involved in this massive market manipulation scandal were tied, variously, to the Pakistani spy services, the Iranian regime, Al Qaeda, Saudi intelligence, and the trafficking of nuclear weapons.

But U.S. officials did not succeed in shutting down the network. Mogilevich and his henchmen, for example, are still at large. So are many of Milken’s closest associates.

After Gene Phillips was arrested in Operation Uptick, he was acquitted. And until now, his role in the Bank of New York scandal was not exposed. A number of these people, we have seen, were also involved with Bernie Madoff’s market manipulation operation until Bernie was arrested in December, 2008.

In Chapter 11, we will have a closer look at some of the other dangerous financial operators (including high ranking Hamas operatives and Al Qaeda’s most important financiers) attached to this network. Then we will begin to examine in greater detail whether this network has had something to do with our more recent economic troubles.

To be continued…

http://www.deepcapture.com/the-miscreant....e-from-russia /

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Re: The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out Chap 1 - 10
Post by sandi66 on Jun 1, 2011, 7:45am

Comment from a CMKX shareholder


By: oldepro 
30 May 2011, 10:47 AM EDT 
Rating: Msg. 1020162 of 1020256 

No Sting, Ehh?? 

In conclusion, between 1998 and 2001, various parts of the US government prosecuted the single biggest stock manipulation and money laundering network ever exposed. It is clear that most of the government’s intiatives—from Operation Uptick, and the prosecution of Felix Sater’s White Rock, D.H. Blair, A.R. Baron, YBM Magnex, and the Bank of New York scandal – were related. 

Meanwhile, the government was investigating Global Securities (the outfit with ties to people who worked for the Iranian Assa Corp.) and a few other Canadian brokerages (to be discussed later) that were catering to Anthony Elgindy, Ali Nazerali, and the rest of thier pack. It is clear that these investigations were related to the others that occured between 1998 and 2001. 

In other words, the government was going after a distinct network of financial operators who were doing serious damage to the U.S. economy. 

What is also clear is that this network was run by the closest associates of Michael Milken in league with various organized crime outfits, including the Mogilevich organization, which seemed to be operating in cahoots with the Russian government. 

In addition, some of the people involved in this massive market manipulation scandal were tied, variously, to the Pakistani spy services, the Iranian regime, Al Qaeda, Saudi intelligence, and the trafficking of nuclear weapons. 

But U.S. officials did not succeed in shutting down the network. Mogilevich and his henchmen, for example, are still at large. So are many of Milken’s closest associates. 

After Gene Phillips was arrested in Operation Uptick, he was acquitted. And until now, his role in the Bank of New York scandal was not exposed. A number of these people, we have seen, were also involved with Bernie Madoff’s market manipulation operation until Bernie was arrested in December, 2008. 

In Chapter 11, we will have a closer look at some of the other dangerous financial operators (including high ranking Hamas operatives and Al Qaeda’s most important financiers) attached to this network. Then we will begin to examine in greater detail whether this network has had something to do with our more recent economic troubles. 
http://www.deepcapture.com/the-miscreant....e-from-russia / 

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