PIML 96062510 / Forwarded to Patriot Information Mailing List: [One of these days, before long, Clinton will be wishing he had never heard of Mena, Arkansas.] PIML =================================================================== From: "Cravens, Roger D." Subject: FW: Leach's Mena Investigation Date: Mon, 24 Jun 96 12:37:00 EST Subject: Leach's Mena Investigation Date: Monday, June 24, 1996 12:10PM Everyone, and I mean *EVERYONE* should contact Leach's office and encourage him to look into this widely known aspect of corruption by our "agents" of government!!! ============================================================== GEOFFREY STEWART NIMMO THE INTERNET RADIO NETWORK E-mail: nextwave@one.net ********************************************* Story (forwarded to me) by Anthony Kimery Worried expressions are daily becoming more evident on the faces of many of the men who lurk in the shadows of power. These worried men are the ones who cut deals in the name of national security. Their deals are almost always questionable, sometimes illegal, and now very worrisome. Typically cool under fire, the glints of perspiration are showing on the brows of these powerful politicians, the bureaucrats, and the businessmen becoming fearful of how deeply James Leach, the unpredictable Republican chairman of the House Banking and Financial Services Comittee, will dare to probe into the sordid Arkansas underworld of money laundering and drug trafficking. Leach already has committee investigators sifting through [Image] evidence on the First National Bank of Mena, evidence that the bank was used to launder money from the late drug smuggler Barry Seal's multi-million dollar narcotics trafficking operations out of Mena's mountaintop Intermountain Regional Airport. Both Seal and that obscure airstrip have previously been linked to Reagan era covert intelligence activities, and Jackson Stephens, linked to the bank, has been a backer of Bill Clinton. Leach's probe, which is supported by other committee members convinced that activities in Mena have been covered-up at the highest levels, is the first formal investigation into all the evidence that's been collected in nine former federal and state probes of drug trafficking, money laundering, and gun running out of Mena. Go To: Failed Banks and Farhad Azima Leach seems intent on following the course of the investigation wherever it leads, and it appears to stretch from the razorback hog-infested hills of Mena to the state house in Little Rock, and all the way to the Reagan and Bush White House, and now, peripherally, Clinton's White House. An iconoclastic liberal foreign policy dissenter among the ranks of die-hard anti-Communist Republicans, Leach is well-suited to his Mena mission. An outcast GOP leader, he not only broke ranks with his colleagues to oppose Reagan's militaristic policies toward Central America, but he was also a vehement critic of U.S. funding of the contras, so much so, that he teamed with California Democrat Mel Levine to introduce a bill to prohibit private aid to the contras. Still outraged over the Iran-contra foibles after all these years, Leach is set to lift the nearly ten year old cloak of national security that's been draped over the 1980's activities in tiny Mena. This veil allegedly covers evidence of: o Clandestine flights of Iran-contra connected arms to Central America o Cargos of drugs on the arms flights return trips; o Money laundering through southwest Arkansas banks; and o Former White House administration's interventions in both state and federal investigations. and federal investigations. [Image] Agents of the IRS, the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Arkansas State Police worked for years in the mid-to late-1980s compiling substantive evidence of drug smuggling and money laundering by Seal's outfit at Mena. The evidence was so strong that indictments were drawn up, but never pursued by then U.S. Attorney for the region, J. Michael Fitzhugh, or by the IRS, or by any other federal or state agency. Why were these indictments not pursued? Because, investigators told Congress, their probes were squashed from on high. In testimony before a House subcommittee that briefly probed the matter, IRS agent Bill Duncan testified that he was ordered to "withhold information from Congress and perjure myself," and added that he had never experienced "anything remotely akin to this kind of interference. Alarms were going off!" In 1988, a Senate subcommittee on narcotics concluded that "despite the availability of evidence sufficient for an indictment on money laundering charges and over the strong protests of state and federal law enforcement officials, the cases were dropped" following grand jury probes into the activities in the Mena area. Also in 1988, after hearing the recurring charges that Fitzhugh was deliberately dragging his feet on orders from Washington, Arkansas Congressman Bill Alexander asked the General Accounting Office (GAO), to investigate whether federal agencies had acted improperly in handling the Mena case. Before the GAO could get anywhere, though, the National Security Council stepped in and ordered the State, Justice, and Defense Departments not to cooperate with the GAO on grounds of national security. From that point until today there has been little done at the federal level to get to the bottom of all the mysterious goings-on. It wasn't until the House banking committee's Whitewater investigations began tripping over the Mena activities that Leach decided something had to be done. "In the course of the committee's work on Whitewater," Leach told committee members in a recent memo, "a number of tangential issues have come to the fore. One relates to allegations of money laundering at Mena Airport in Southwestern Arkansas. The Mena-related allegations involve possible improper conduct spanning several federal administrations." Other Republican members of the House banking committee are also convinced there's more to what went on at Mena. Those members seem to be serious about the evidence that the Mena airport was used for covert arms shipments to the contras and other anti-insurgency forces around the world. And they are taking very seriously evidence that federal and state officials allowed drugs to be carried on return trips, and that the filthy drug profits were laundered through area banks; and that some of the money may have been stuffed into the back pockets of Arkansas officials to get them to look the other way. Leach has directed the committee's investigators to look into whether "past government reviews and investigations associated with Mena Airport were handled properly," and to probe whether businesses at the Mena airport "engaged in systematic money laundering" for Seal's other operations. Evidence amassed by Leach's committee (which includes records [Image] of former federal and state investigators who had Mena under the microscope) clearly indicates that money was being laundered by Seal and his associates, and that federal authorities, including IRS and bank regulators, failed to take civil and criminal actions that were called for in reports and indictment proposals. Tens of thousands of dollars in cash transactions, in amounts below the $10,000.01 threshold that triggers filing an IRS CTR (Currency Transaction Report) were made at three Mena banks throughout the early- to mid-1980's. The banks involved were The Union Bank of Mena, First National Bank of Mena, and Security National Bank. Boxes of records of federal and state criminal investigators made available to SOURCES show that there was a concerted effort made by Seal and his associates, with the help of bank officials and employees, to avoid filing CTRs on these transactions. These same records also show that the evidence of laundering was convincing enough to the investigators that there were grounds for several dozen indictments. Indeed, draft indictments were drawn up, but they were never presented to the grand jury. The Union Bank of Mena ($90 million in assets) is of particular interest to Leach's committee because it served as a depository for much of the cash federal investigators had tracked from the Mena airport. The investigators suspected several bank officials of complicity in money laundering, one of whom was named in a draft indictment. Union Bank clearly had a close relationship with the Mena airport. A 1992 FDIC report on the bank's lending practices reviewed by SOURCES states the bank's management was involved with the "Mena Airport Commission" and "has provided financing for aircraft hangers at the Mena airport." A number of financial transactions by Seal associates pertaining to the loans for the hangar construction were questioned by the criminal investigators probing Mena. What Leach's committee has dug up so far suggests that federal bank examiners uncovered the suspicious transactions, but then their bosses in Washington failed to bring enforcement actions for the banks' apparent failure to comply with anti-money laundering laws. According to banking committee sources, regulatory records on the banks requested from the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, or OCC, indicate bank examiners did their jobs, but that officials in Washington at the time may have refused to take enforcement actions based on what the examiners found. SOURCES found no enforcement actions taken by either the FDIC or the OCC against any of the banks since 1989 when bank enforcement records were made public. Members of Leach's banking committee may seek to question former top bank regulators about what they knew, and when they knew it, committee sources are saying. What they will likely want to know the answers to are questions about what bank examiners may have uncovered, and, why, if there truly were indictable offenses, no enforcement actions were taken against the banks. The revelation that bank regulators ignored scores of violations of anti-money laundering laws buttresses recurring charges that efforts to investigate the goings-on at Mena were squashed at every level. But the revelation may also reverberate more widely. The evidence of laundering raises questions about whether bank regulators regularly ignore violations by banks that are used to launder or channel money associated with intelligence operations, banks such as BCCI. Scores of BCCI violations of money-laundering laws have now been acknowledged by regulators. Some of these violations were missed, but others, they admit, were deliberately ignored. Evidence gathered by the criminal investigators who probed Seal's operations at Mena reveals numerous potential violations of money laundering laws by all three banks at Mena which are now under the scrutiny of Leach's committee. The evidence shows that at least tens of thousands of dollars in cash deposits were made at the banks over a four-to-five year period. Deposits made in such a way that they should have set off alarm bells in the minds of bank regulators, particularly as they occurred at a time when bank regulators were getting tough on banks for failing to comply with these laws. <=============================================================> "The openness of the web is a powerful attraction. Everyone can not only read what's on the web, but contribute to it. Everybody is in a sense equal. 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