Saturday, October 20, 2012

The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out (Chapter 15): Ali Nazerali in Aruba, and an Al Qaeda Financial Weapon Called PTech

The Miscreants’ Global Bust-Out (Chapter 15): Ali Nazerali in Aruba, and an Al Qaeda Financial Weapon Called PTech

Posted on 12 June 2011 by Mark Mitchell 

In 2006, the DTCC in New York was enabling massive failures to deliver stocks, bonds, ETFs, and all manner of derivatives, including CDOs and CDSs. As it happened, it would continue to permit those failures to deliver well into the financial crisis of 2008.

But as I mentioned, while the boys were partying in Aruba*, the DTCC was coming under some pressure to reform. It seemed like there might be a small chance that the settlement loopholes that permitted manipulations (such as naked short selling) through the DTCC in New York could become more difficult.

Maybe that’s why the boys in Aruba were talking about Penson Financial, which had innovated so-called “sponsored access”, which allowed traders to conduct their transactions anonymously, bypassing the exchanges and the DTCC.

Maybe that’s also why they were so excited about this character Andy-Joseph-Anthony-Mann-Tripoli-Napoli.

And they really were excited, they couldn’t say enough good things about this Andy Joseph Anthony Mann Tripoli Napoli – this smuggler of a quarter billion in Mexican bonds, this crazy “system-fucking genius” who had set up his very own DTCC, based in the Caribbean, so at least some of the Mafia’s illegal trading could be “cleared” off-shore, out of sight – completely risk-free.

Yes, the boys loved this Andy-Joseph-Anthony-Mann-Tripoli-Napoli – you gotta respect him, they said, he knew how to play the risks, he was two steps ahead of the suckers who obeyed the law, and the suckers who thought they could enforce the law.

Andy Anthony Joseph Mann Tripoli Napoli had, in fact, had some troubles with the law, but never spent much time in prison and in 2006 he was still operating out of the Caribbean. The boys at the party in Aruba said he was a hero, and he had done damn well for himself. He once had his own brokerage and online stock exchange. It was called GTrade, and all the phantom stock traders had used it.

By 2006, Gtrade had been shut down, but the boys at the pool in Aruba were still talking about it, and one of them said–yeah, didn’t GTrade do a deal with Ali Nazerali and…oh shit! Nazerali!–that reminded Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich that he had to make a phone call.

So he snorted another line of coke, pulled out his mobile phone, and dialed the number of Buck Revell, who was the former chief of counter-terrorism at the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

* * * * * * * * * *

Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich and Buck Revell are old friends, and Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich didn’t call the former FBI counter-terrorism chief to report Nazerali’s ties to terrorists. He called retired FBI Special Agent Buck Revell to see if he should do a business deal with Nazerali.

It’s not that Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich didn’t know Nazerali. You see, Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich was setting up a “foundation” to help the Russian government litigate (or maybe extort) American tobacco companies, and his partners in this venture were Buck Revell and a Nazerali associate named Sergei Chemezov.

Chemezov is a former Russian intelligence officer who served in East Germany with Vladimir Putin, future president and prime minister of Russia. Nowadays, Chemezov is considered one of Putin’s closest associates, and serves as the Russian government’s most important arms dealer. He has been implicated in secret sales of sophisticated weaponry to Iran and Syria.

Chemezov also had authority over the Luch nuclear weapons facility in 1992, when a quantity of highly enriched uranium disappeared from that facility. The Russian government later charged a low level Luch engineer with stealing the uranium, and claimed that the nuclear material had been recovered. We can only hope that the Russian government doesn’t lie.

Yank Barry’s partnership with Chemezov was arranged by another one of Nazerali’s associates, a fellow who has multiple aliases, one of which is Egor Chernov.

Nazerali is friends with Chernov because Chernov, like Felix Sater and Vitali Leiba, is associated with the Mogilevich organization. Ali Nazerali has a thing for Russians, he spends a lot of time meeting them at parties, but also at business meetings.

Now, before we delve any further into retired FBI Special Agent Buck Revell and his connections to this network of miscreants, Deep Capture wishes to make perfectly clear that we are not accusing Buck Revell of doing anything untoward. Buck Revell is a decorated hero. For example, according to his speaker’s bureau biography:

“In September 1987, Revell was placed in charge of a joint FBI/CIA U.S. military operation (Operation Goldenrod) which led to the first apprehension overseas of an international terrorist. President Reagan commended him for his leadership of this endeavor. In 1989, President Bush awarded Revell the Presidential Rank Award of Distinguished Senior Executive and in 1990 the President conferred upon Revell the Meritorious Senior Executive award. In May 1991, he was awarded the FBI Medal for Meritorious Achievement and the following month received the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal by the Director of Central Intelligence, William H. Webster.”

That is no small thing, and Deep Capture applauds the work of Revell and those like him. However, for the life of us, we cannot imagine what a retired FBI Special Agent would be doing mixed up with the riff-raff whom we are cataloging.

For example, and just for starters, we cannot fathom how it would come to pass that a criminal such as the Russian Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich would, while spending an afternoon snorting coke in Aruba at a gathering of Mafia-tied financial miscreants, take a break to call retired FBI Special Agent Buck Revell from his cellphone’s speed-dial.

However, it is our job to report the facts, and this is what happened.

When the Russian Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich called the former FBI anti-terrorism chief, Nazerali had finished up his Aga Khan meetings in Germany and had recently had lunch* with Egor Chernov. Also at this lunch meeting was Peter Maron, a Chicago art dealer who brokers sales of rare and expensive art works among Middle Eastern billionaires and Russian biz-nit men.

Peter Maron had got himself tangled up with the wrong people, and he would later suffer the consequences (which involved Thai prostitutes and brain damage). I will elaborate in the next chapter, but let me state from the outset that I think Peter Maron is a basically good man who means to do right by the world. If he has done anything illegal, I don’t know about it.

At any rate, Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich knew Nazerali, but he wanted to confirm with Buck Revell that he should do more business with Nazerali because – well, because the FBI’s former counter terrorism chief has himself done business with Nazerali. Indeed, Revell is one of Nazerali’s close associates. They were partners in Imagis, and Imagis had been a really good deal.

Remember: Imagis was the company that claimed to have facial recognition software useful in spotting terrorists. It issued huge amounts of unregistered stock and warrants in the weeks before and after Al Qaeda’s Septembter 11 attacks.

Imagis, the anti-terrorism company, was set up by Ali Nazerali with help from his hedge fund partner, Yasin al Qadi who, in 2002, was named a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” The chairman of Imagis was the retired head of FBI counter-terrorism, Special Agent Buck Revell.

In time, Imagis ran into some problems. Christopher Byron, a journalist with Red Herring magazine, wrote a story in August 2002 suggesting that Imagis was a fraud – that it had entered into a partnership with a certain Treyton Thomas, and this Thomas had hyped the stock with false numbers.

Moreover, it wasn’t clear who Treyton Thomas was. He was a mystery man. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, I maintain that Thomas is the same person as the Mogilevich-tied felon Norbert Grupe. They are, in any case, married to the same wife.

When Byron published his story, Revell sued the journalist. Soon after that, the journalist was fired from his job. This led to some discussion in the media world that Revell had maneuvered to destroy Byron.

Then, in testimony at a hearing before the United States Senate, Byron stated that Revell or someone working for him had engaged in “pretexting” to obtain copies of his (Byron’s) phone records.

So Imagis had caused Revell and Nazerali some headaches.

I suppose it was only natural that these strange inter-locking relationships would spawn some nutty conspiracy theories. For example, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School wrote a long treatise about Revell, and posted this treatise in the comments section of the Columbia Journalism Review’s website.

In 2000, Revell sued the Columbia Journalism Review, so the nutty treatise is gone, but it alleged that Revell had advance knowledge of the 1988 terrorist attack on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Other nutty conspiracy theorists have said that Revell’s involvement with Imagis suggests that he had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks as well.

As evidence that Revell had “advance knowledge” of the Pan Am Flight 103 terrorist attack, the conspiracy theorists noted that Revell’s son had been ticketed on Flight 103, but did not board the plane. Revell says his son was ticketed on the plane but his wife switched their son to another flight three weeks before Pan Am 103 took off.

In fact, the Israeli military had recently raided a terrorist camp in Lebanon and found evidence that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had hatched plans to attack an American airline, possibly Pan Am Flight 103. American embassies subsequently put out a general warning to government employees about flights (such as Pan Am 103) that originated in Frankfurt.

So it is possible that Buck Revell was merely heeding one of those warnings. It is also possible that Revell was not even aware of those warnings, and it was mere luck that his son (like the dozens of other people who cancelled their reservations on Pan Am Flight 103) decided to travel on another date.

But the conspiracy theorists didn’t buy these explanations. They also said that it was odd that Revell and other investigators had blamed the Flight 103 bombing on a Libyan government agent, when others (including Pan Am) had blamed the attack on Palestinian groups (such as the PFLP) that were in contact with the U.S. government.

Hmm. Well, it is impossible for me to believe that an American public official would knowingly hide information about impending terrorist attacks, so I don’t buy the conspiracy theory. It seems especially implausible to me that Revell would have have known and failed to warn the nation about something as horrific as the September 11 attacks.

But it is entirely possible that Ali Nazerali and his hedge fund partner Yasin al Qadi (Osama bin Laden’s favorite financier) knew that Osama bin Laden had something big in the works, and positioned themselves to profit (through Imagis) from the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, it is certainly worth asking what the former chief of American counter-terrorism was thinking when he agreed to serve as chairman of a company (Imagis) that was set up by people who have ties to terrorists. Not just terrorists, but also (as we have seen) the Russian Mafia, Russian spies, Pakistani intelligence assets, and the Iranian regime.

Maybe nobody at the FBI knew that Nazerali and Yasin al Qadi were tied not only to jihadis, but also to Mafiosi who work for Semion Mogilevich — known as the “most dangerous mobster in the world” in part because he tried to sell highly enriched uranium to Osama bin Laden. Or, maybe nobody at the FBI knew that Semion Mogilevich was #2 on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Or, perhaps there are other explanations that are just too nutty to contemplate.

When Revell attached himself also to Yank Barry’s tobacco foundation, he perhaps had no idea that his close friend Yank Barry’s real name was Gerard Falovich, or that Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich was close pals (and a partner in multiple business ventures) with Mogilevich-tied Mafia boss Egor Chernov.

He might also have failed to realize that Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich had ties to organized crime going back to the 1970s, when his close associates included the Montreal Mob boss Frank Catroni.

Of course, Yank Barry says he never did business with the Mob. He says, “I felt pretty cool rubbing elbows with these people [mobsters]. I wasn’t involved in their business; it was just being able to know them. It was almost like hanging out with superstars. I knew Frank Catroni. I knew Vince Catroni. You’d go to clubs and they give you free drinks.”

Be that as it may, Barry was eventually implicated in a Mafia-linked extortion scheme.

The precise nature of the charges remain unclear, but Yank Barry says that at the time he was involved with a company called McConnell Records, which was owned by a guy named John McConnell. One day, says Yank Barry, “I flew down to Jamaica and my ex-wife was there with a prostitute who was supposed to be one of the Don’s [Catroni’s] girlfriends or mistresses. The prostitute met John [McConnell] at a bar…He picked her up, took her home to sleep and the next day got a phone call that said, ‘You were sleeping with the Don’s mistress.’

After hearing about this, says Barry, he told McConnell to pay $82,000 cash to the Don, or the Don would have McConnell whacked. Barry says that’s why he got accused of extortion. He was just trying to help McConnell out.

And who knows? Maybe Barry is telling the truth. But he later ended up in jail on other charges and was bailed out by Egor Chernov’s business partner, a man named Rex Judd (the bail documents can be viewed at DeepCapture.com). Not long after that, Judd was murdered, allegedly by Chernov after one of their deals went sour.

When Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich called Revell to ask whether he should do some more business with Nazerali, he also thanked Revell for speaking to a judge on his behalf. And the charges against him, had, in fact, been dropped, which was something of a miracle.

So perhaps Revell did know that Yank Barry was really the criminal Gerald Falovich, associate of known mobsters. Perhaps he knew who Ali Nazerali and Yasin al Qadi were.

Perhaps Revell was conducting some kind of undercover operation. Maybe it is good that he was friends with all these characters. Maybe he was just keeping an eye on them to keep the United States safe.

Actually, though, I will admit, I have my doubts. From what I have learned after spending five years studying the “capture” of America’s institutions by rogue elements, it has come to seem almost normal to me that a retired top FBI counter-terrorism official would go into business with a terrorist financier.

Sometimes that “capture” can be at once subtle and mezmermizing. Sometimes the current or former government official in question is genuinely convinced that bad guys are actually good guys. Either way, let us remain optimistic–let us believe that Buck Revell was doing the right thing.

One thing he did was tell his partner Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich that he should definitely do some more business with Ali Nazerali. And after Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich got clearance from Revell, Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich called Nazerali and told him to come join the party in Aruba.

Nazerali caught the first flight, and a day later, he showed up at the pool, where Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovich and some of the boys were still snorting lines of coke.

After some small talk, Yank Barry a.k.a. Falovitch and Nazerali went into the hotel for a private discussion. Following close behind was a guy Nazerali had brought with him – a big meat-head with a buzz cut, gun strapped to his side.

And the boys at the pool wondered about the guy with the gun. They said, what’s with the thug? Why did Nazerali bring protection?

We’re all friends here…aren’t we?

* * * * * * *

So apparently, in 2006, the FBI’s former counter-terrorism chief Buck Revell and Ali Nazerali and Yasin al Qadi were friends. That’s good, because at the time, Yasin al Qadi’s bagman was running what looked like a successful black ops effort to infiltrate the American military and the nation’s financial system.

That Yasin al Qadi was capable of this perhaps should have been known to Buck Revell, given that his colleagues at the FBI had previously shut down another Yasin al Qadi operation that was doing precisely the same thing.

In 1994, Yasin al Qadi, working through his banking outfit, BMI Inc., delivered $5 million to a man named Oussama Zaide, who had instructions from the Muslim Brotherhood to set up a software firm in Boston.

Zaide quickly established the firm, and named it Ptech. According to FBI investigator Richard Wright, Yasin al Qadi was the “founder” of the firm.

Soon after Ptech was founded, it went to work selling sophisticated computer software to a select number of customers that included: the U.S. Air Force, NATO, the U.S. House of Representatives, MITRE Corporation (a company that specializes in defense, intelligence, and homeland security systems), the Naval Air Systems Command, the Federal Aviation Administration, and America’s biggest banks.

In 2002, the U.S. government raided Ptech’s offices as part of Operation Green Quest, its effort to crack down on financiers of Al Qaeda. The complete dossier of Ptech is too long to go into here, but I will name some of the other people involved.

Sitting on Ptech’s board of directors were multiple Muslim Brotherhood figures, including BMI president Soliman Biheiri (also an officer at the Al Qaeda-funding Bank Al Taqwa, financed by Yasin al Qadi); Hussein Ibrahim; and Muhammad Ashraf.

One of Ptech’s founders, meanwhile, was Abdurahman Alamoudi, an Al Qaeda operative who was sentenced to 23 years in prison after he was caught dealing with Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi and plotting to assassinate the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

Recall from Chapter 2 that Mr. Alamoudi ran an Islamic organization, GSISS, that was described by the FBI leadership as “the most mainstream Muslim organization in America” until Alamoudi was arrested and it was determined that the GSISS had been inserting Al Qaeda spies (operating as Muslim chaplains) into the U.S. military.

Mr. Alamoudi’s partner in GSISS, recall, was Sheikh DeLorenzo, the fellow who set up the Al Safi Trust, a naked short selling outfit that sinks U.S.. stock prices.

In other chapters, I discussed Mr. Alamoudi’s ties to naked short seller Anthony Elgindy, who was on close terms with leaders of multiple jihadi groups; and who seems to have had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks. Elgindy also had a couple of FBI special agents on his payroll; and he helped destroy America’s largest clearing brokerage (MJK Clearing) in September, 2001.

Mr. Alamoudi was also (like Yasin al Qadi) tied to Benevolence International, the outfit that had contacts with people who were trying to buy nuclear weapons for Osama bin Laden. As we know, Elgindy’s prosecutors later noted that Elgindy had “threatened” and attempted to “extort” Paul Brown, the head of Nuclear Solutions, a company that had access to decommissioned nuclear weapons.

Of course, Yasin al Qadi’s bagman Mr. Mirza (the fellow at the center of what government investigators call the “SAAR Network” of terrorist financiers) was also involved with Ptech. Mr. Mirza managed a fund, the Sterling P-Tech Fund, which was formed as part of his Sterling Management Group investment empire, specifically to invest in Ptech.

Meanwhile, two men – Suheil Laher and Muahmed Mubayyid – were hired to direct the technical applications of Ptech’s software. Both of those guys were also officers of Care International, a charity that was formed by the Al Kifah Refugee Center, which was founded by Osama bin Laden and his mentor, Abdullah Azzam. Al Kifah was the predecessor to Al Qaeda.

That is, before Osama bin Laden formed Al Qaeda, his operation was called Al Kifah. Abdullah Azzam would later have a falling out with bin Laden, but Care International, employer of the future Ptech executives, remained in the bin Laden camp. And by 2001, it was clear that many other people involved with Ptech were also supporters of Osama bin Laden.

Certainly there were some Ptech employees and even some top executives who did not know for whom they were working. But given that the government raided Ptech as part of Operation Green Quest (the government’s effort to crack down on Al Qaeda’s financiers), it can be assumed that government investigators believed that Ptech was, in fact, a front for Al Qaeda.

It was probably more than a front. Off the record, government investigators have whispered to journalists that Ptech seemed a lot like an Al Qaeda black ops effort to gain access to the computer systems that held the most sensitive data of the U.S. military, the U.S. government, and the institutions that were the bedrock of the American financial system.

Some also expressed concern that Ptech’s Al Qaeda-tied technology specialists had helped the Department of Energy design a facility at Colorado’s Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, which had recently been the subject of an urgent investigation into terrorist threats.

In 2002, the government charged some of Ptech’s top executives with money laundering and concealing Ptech’s relationship with “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” Yasin al Qadi. On the record, however, government spokesmen said that they did not believe that Ptech had managed to gain access to any top secret information stored in government computer systems.

Given the nature of Ptech’s software, it certainly was capable of obtaining classified material. But perhaps the government spokesmen were telling the truth when they said no government secrets were stolen.

Still, executives at some of the big banks say that there is no question that Ptech had access to all manner of data – trading records, data on the credit histories of the banks’ clients, and other information – that would be eminently useful to anyone wishing to manipulate the markets.

After Ptech was raided, a woman named Indira Singh went on a mission, ostensibly seeking to “expose” Ptech by giving interviews to dozens of journalists. Singh, who said she was a former employee of JP Morgan, focused her allegations on Ptech’s acquisition of data from the big banks, saying that Ptech had something to do with the collapse of Enron in November 2001, shortly after the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11.

But at the same time, Ms. Singh seemed to go to lengths to discredit herself by suggesting that Ptech was, in fact, a front for the CIA, that it was somehow involved with Skull and Bones and child sex parties, and that it was tied in with a CIA plot to demolish the World Trade Center and wipe out the financial markets – all part of a wide-ranging, top-secret CIA scheme to create a shadow government that would rule the world.

Indira Singh’s eccentric notions have inundated the internet, so that anyone doing a quick search on the Ptech case would quickly conclude that all people who believe that Ptech gained access to sensitive financial data must necessarily be psychotics. Thus, Indira Singh effectively discouraged mainstream journalists and politicians from continuing to investigate the Ptech scandal.

Which is interesting, because Indira Singh had actually worked for the SAAR Network of terrorist financiers. She had been a consultant to Mr. Mirza, bag-man to “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” Yasin al Qadi. So it is possible that she had some motivation for scaring people away from telling the truth about Ptech, lest they be seen as allying themselves with people who believed that the CIA was trying to take over the world.

Either that, or she was merely echoing perceptions that are common in jihadi circles.

In any case, most people in positions of authority did not seem keen to address the Ptech scandal. After a brief flurry of media stories, nobody (other than the 9-11 Truth crowd) paid much attention to it.

And while the government investigated Ptech for its suspected ties to terrorism, nobody paid much attention to Ptech’s principals – including “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” Yasin al Qadi’s bagman Mr. Mirza — who proceeded, amazingly, to invest in another company, LynuxWorks, which was in pretty much the same line of business as Ptech.

LynuxWorks CEO, Inder Singh, is also a director of Mr. Mirza’s SVC Financial Services. Recall that another principal at SVC Financial Services was Robert Gold, who was simultaneously a director of Sinex Securities, the Gene Phillips outfit at the center of the scandal that saw the Russian Mafia and the Russian government (and, quite likely, the Al Qaeda-tied Bank al Taqwa) manipulating the U.S. markets and laundering upwards of $7 billion through the Bank of New York.

In other words, LynuxWorks is just as suspicious as Ptech was. And from 2002 through the financial crisis of 2008, LynuxWorks, an outfit clearly tied to the SAAR Network of terrorist financiers, continued to supply important software to America’s biggest banks and brokerages.

LynuxWorks also continued to supply software to the American military and government agencies. And, to this day, this outfit, which is tied to the SAAR Network of terrorist financiers, continues to provide and maintain that software for the US government, while nobody (excluding people who insist it is all part of some kind of CIA plot) says a word about it.

Fortunately, Yasin al Qadi’s business partner, Buck Revell, the FBI’s former counter-terrorism chief, appears to be on the case.

To be continued…

* As mentioned previously, the description of the “Aruba” meeting is a composite of several meetings that took place in various locations. The description accurately describes the scene and various conversations that took place at various times. I had to mix it up a little to conceal the identities of my sources. 

* Deep Capture wishes to emphasize that we believe that it is incredibly improbable that retired FBI Special Agent Buck Revell would knowingly have done anything injurious to the interests of the United States. It is simply our duty to report the facts, and the facts are that over a decade ago Special Agent Revell became a business associate of dubious characters such as Yank Barry a.k.a. Gerard Falovich (who is closely tied to and a partner in multiple business ventures with Mogilevich-tied Mafia boss Egor Chernov), and served as chairman of a company that was funded by Ali Nazerali and Yasin al Qadi, one of whom the U.S. government named a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist”, and that at least some of these relationships persisted until 2006. We stand as bewildered by these facts as the reader may be.

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