July 14, 2021 • 23 mins
In 2006, the Mexican Army seizes 5 tons of cocaine on a plane that landed at the airport in Campeche, Mexico. In response to the news, journalists begin to search for the name of its owner.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
On April ten, two thousand and six, an old DC
nine jet landed in Sila del Garmin, a popular beach
town on the southwestern edge of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Another plane,
a Falcon business jet, was waiting for it, and so
was the Mexican Army. Airport workers and officials tried to
(00:31):
stop the soldiers from approaching the DC nine, but they failed.
The soldiers found the planes eighty five seats occupied, not
with impatient travelers, but with suit cases one hundred and
twenty eight suit cases, all taped shut and marked with
the word private written in Italian. The suitcases were filled
(00:53):
with one kilogram bags of cocaine, somewhere around five thousand,
five hundred kilogram bags of cocaine that's about the weight
of the average ambulance, or five times the weight of
indult male holder bear, or a giraffe or a great
white shark. At that weight, about five and a half
(01:14):
tons in cocaine that then had an estimated retail value
of over one hundred million dollars on the street. It
was the second largest shipment of cocaine to be confiscated
on an aircraft in Mexican history, and thus it was
of course a big story Venezuela. The DC nine's pilot
(01:56):
somehow slipped through the gauntlet, but the soldiers attained the
Venezuelan copilot and the two Mexican pilots of the Falcon.
The Mexican Army and the Attorney General's Office gave a
joint press conference the following day, April eleven, two thousand
and six, publicly announcing the bust. It would come to
(02:24):
seem that the Army's presence out on the runway that
day in April was not a coincidence. The fact that
a jet stuffed with cocaine had taken off from the
largest international airport in Venezuela, a country in the midst
of a Bolvarian revolution, would also raise a few eyebrows.
The cocaine is one of the more popular recreational substances
(02:45):
on the planet, available pretty much twenty four seven most neighborhoods,
much less most cities large and small across the globe.
The fact that it and a handful of other extremely
popular mind altering items, is illegal it is not an
impediment too, but rather the essential feature of the global
marketplace in which it is produced. Shipped, sold, and consumed
(03:10):
in this particular marketplace. It is illegality that creates the
commodity's high profit margin, and at the same time the
imperative need to maintain the idea that the global industry
is somehow hidden invisible. I emphasize idea here because it
is not invisible at all. Imagine trying to hide in
(03:31):
the era of iPhones, Google Earth, and satellite guided weaponry,
the global production and distribution of oranges, or almonds, or
even cigarettes. It just doesn't make sense. In January twenty
twenty one, colleagues at Thetive, a Mexico City based film
and podcast studio, reached out to me about a curious
(03:53):
individual they've been interviewing. The Detive have produced a podcast
in Spanish called Gran's Bautista, based on phone interviews they
conducted with this man using a clandestine's cell phone from
inside a prisoner to work Carolina, thank you for calling
my worst correctional institution, and went to North Carolina. The
man claimed to have worked as a pilot, entrepreneur and
(04:15):
air logistics coordinator in the international drug trade for some
thirty years. He also claimed to be the man behind
the DC nine and it's one hundred and twenty eight
suitcases stuff with coke. Imagine a Blaine pack tip with
five tones of cocaine in the platform, a plane on
the round way right under every once nosis man you
(04:39):
was lapable. My friends at the Thieve wanted to know
if I'd be interested in working on a sister podcast
in English looking into this curious individual in his story.
I listened to the still unreleased Spanish podcast, read the
interview transcripts, and did some initial digging around. Yeah, I said,
I'm interested, but I can't simply repeat this story that
(05:00):
this man told you all because I haven't spoken to him.
I'd need to do my own investigation and see what
I can find. Okay, they said, but there is one condition.
You'll need to use Cosil's recordings. That Tective had invited
the legendary Mexican actor jaquin Cosio to read the English
translations of Transport Vistas quoted interviews with Manuel Laius, originally
(05:24):
planning to translate the Spanish podcast into English. You may
remember jaquin Cosio as the Bolivian general in the James
Bond film Quantum of Solace, or, more recently, in the
Netflix show Narcos Mexico cosil's portrayal of the drug trafficker
cochi Loco and director Luisestra's Drug Wars satire film Elinfierno
(05:46):
or Hell became emblematic of the narcocultural representations during the
first years of President Philippe Calderon's so called drug war
and highlighted this gem of moral ambiguity and the contemporary
lexicon una cosa nakoza hiltracoza, meaning literally, one thing is
(06:08):
one thing and another thing is another thing. But in
April two thousand and six, when the ill fated DC nine,
stuffed with cocaine, landed in Gampiche, such characterizations of the
naarticle were still relatively regional and minor cultural figures in Mexico.
At that time, much of the country was focused on
the presidential election campaigns that were then in full swing.
(06:32):
Among the major political issues of the day were the
democratic transition of power, violent and equality impunity, the impacts
of the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA on the
Mexican countryside, and the corresponding waves of forced economic displacement
and emigration to the United States. On July second, two thousand,
(06:53):
a swashbuckling Coca Cola executive from the right wing National
Action Party rode a wave of social content into the
presidential palace, unseating the confoundingly named Institutional Revolutionary Party. The
head ruled Mexico for seventy one years, said Little, and
(07:22):
by two thousand and six, at the end of Vicente
Fox's single six year term, the presidential elections were at
the same time a referendum on Fox in the pa
n and on the idea of this democratic transition itself.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the southern Mexican
state of Chiapas launched their other campaign on January one,
(07:46):
two thousand and six, running parallel to the presidential electoral campaigns.
Instead of promoting a candidate and asking for votes, the
other campaign proposed to send a kind of anti candidate
(08:07):
to travel across the country to listen. Marcos was thus
dubbed the Delicate Zero and tasked by his commanders setting
off across the nation to listen to stories of injustice
and social struggle. His travels provide an organizing vehicle to
set the groundwork for a national coalition of anti capitalist
(08:29):
grassroots organizations. One of their much miscoded and misunderstood slogans
at that time was vote or don't vote. Organize an.
(08:59):
I grew up in Texes and it worked as a
volunteer with a few human rights organizations in Mexico in
nineteen ninety nine and two thousand. By April two thousand
and six, I've been following the other campaign through some
twenty states in southern and central Mexico, working as a
freelance reporter writing for what was then called the Alternative Press.
(09:20):
I remember reading stories in the newspaper with a few
gruesome executions and a mysterious plane filled with cocaine, but
that was still months away from the declaration of a
new drug war. The images then filling newspaper front pages
with those of protests, not murdered bodies. Anything seemed possible
during those months, in the midst of the combined energies
(09:43):
of so many diverse grassroots organizations linking indigenous and Camposino
and student and women's and queer and workers struggles, all
in what proposed to be a single, unwieldy, leaderless vibrant,
anti capitalist national strugg and then two months later, the
failed repression of a teacher strike in Whaka City ignited
(10:06):
a bold, creative, unarmed insurrection. I remember thinking that in
the other campaign and in the Ohaka rebellion, something of
world importance was getting started, or maybe not getting started
at all, but in the process of transforming, blooming, and
taking on a new dimension. And even though the repression
of those movements was brutal, I had no idea what
(10:29):
was about to be unleashed. And now, some fifteen years later,
still in the midst of this misnamed, misunderstood war, I
continues to take and destroy lives. I find myself listening
to the adventures of a pilot as told to a
reporter on an illegal cell phone from inside a federal prison.
(10:50):
When I first started digging around on the story, I
searched the pilot's name online. Found a Twitter account, complete
with a photograph, thirteen followers, a location to scription reading
currently incarcerated in the United States, and a short autobiographical
paragraph that begins, my lies, My lies make me special.
(11:10):
That got my attention. Who is this person? What is
he telling us? How much of it is true? How
can we know? Why should we care? What? In this
gregarious and as we'll come to learn, litigious pilot's story
can help us understand the war we live in. My
name is John Gibbler, and this, in a sense is
(11:33):
Transportista Episode one, Cocaine one. At the press conference in
(11:57):
Mexico City on April eleven and six, Mexican Army official
said that the DC nine had departed from Venezuela bound
for Mexico, returned after about an hour of flight due
to a supposed mechanical failure, and then departed again sometime
later for Slaman. This irregular flight pattern raised suspicions, he said.
(12:24):
The Army commander for the state of Campecher, however, told
the press that the airplane had made an unscheduled emergency
landing there in Campeche due to yet another supposed mechanical failure.
Both armies spokespeople said that airport officials had tried to
keep soldiers from inspecting the plane, arguing first that it
was only making a brief stop, and then that the
(12:47):
plane was leaking oil and less dangerous to approach. The
two pilots from the Falcon, officials said, had flown from Toluca,
near Mexico City to Si La Delcataman to pay the
DC nine's airport sees. In May two thousand and six,
two Tampa Tribune reporters published an article titled Mystery surrounds
(13:08):
plane filled with five point five talents of cocaine. I
called Howard Altman, the lead reporter on the story, now
the editor of the Military Times. I asked him what
he remembered about reporting on that plane. This plane had
been sold and flown out of Saint pe Clearwater International Airport.
So I started doing some research about who owned it.
(13:29):
A contacted the Federal Aviation Administration, looked at their records
and it indicated that it was registered to accompany called
Royal Son and Zinc. McClellan, our based care to charter service.
Then on April eleventh, the day after the plane was seized,
the FAA received a request from Royal Signs to cancel
(13:51):
the registration, and so I did a bunch of research.
I had looked at the website of flight Aware at
the time was really a relatively new site. There was
track in the flight and kind of follow the trail
on that. I worked with my colleague, Careen Branch Brioso,
(14:12):
who was a fluent Spanish speaker, and she was able
to talk to officials in Mexico, Mexican Attorney General's Office,
and then she was able to look at the press
conference with the Mexican Army Operations sub Chief and were
today we will piece together the story describing what they
called the colorful history of a plane. They wrote was
(14:36):
well known to officials at the Saint Petersburg Clearwater International Airport.
The two reporters noted that it had a logo that
appeared similar to the symbol of the Transportation Security Administration.
The logo, which includes the image of an eagle clutching
olive branches and arrows, reads Skyway Aircraft Protecting America Skies.
(14:58):
That logo Florida based reporter Daniel Hopsicker to dub the
plane Cocaine one. The logo belonged to Skyway Communications Holding Corporation,
a now defunct shell company of sorts that in the
early two thousands had a lot of plans and promises
and ties to the Republican Party, but no assets and
(15:20):
no products. By April two thousand and six, Skyway faced bankruptcy,
several investor lawsuits, and its phone line was out of service.
A listing still available for Skyway on Bloomberg's business website reads.
Skyway Communications Holding Court operates an aircraft communications and security business.
(15:41):
The company supplies broadband network communications with a nationwide coverage
infrastructure for both government and civilian applications to a variety
of airborne customers. Skyway also provides a ground monitoring surveillance system.
A February seventeen, two thousand and four Skyway press release
quotes Brent Covar, president of Skyway, saying the following the
(16:05):
second FCC license allows Skyway to further its quest for
seamless national tower network to support Southeast airlines, aircraft, defense contractors,
and government agencies. And the press release also states we
are excited and proud of the many homeland security solutions
we can provide to our nation's infrastructure. They might have
(16:29):
been excited and proud in two thousand and four, but
two years later they'd be bankrupt and sued. Solitarycap a
forty year old jet painted to look like a US
homeland security plane, but the logo of a shell company
boasting about its connections to defense contractors and government agencies,
shows up stuffed with cocaine at a small coastal Mexican airport.
(16:54):
The plane's pilot disappears, The plane's owner says that he
had recently sold the air craft and provides the bill
of sale, and the new owner remains unidentified. Fred Geffen,
the owner of Royal Son's Ink, showed US federal agents
the bill of sale from March two thousand and six.
(17:15):
Geffen told reporters that he was a shareholder in Skyway
and that they'd ripped him and everyone else who invested
in them off. Geffen also told the Tampa Tribune reporters
that he had sold the plane to an unidentified Venezuelan
man through an aircraft sales broker from California named Jorge Corralis.
(17:35):
Gevin told the reporters that he did not know who
bought the jet. Coralis told the reporters that Geffen did
know who bought the jet, and he had even arranged
to have the plane flown to Venezuela for delivery on
April five that year. Either way, the buyer's name was
not released by Geffen, Corralis, or the government. That all
seems odd enough, but it gets stranger yet Another plane
(17:58):
sold out of Florida and loaded with cocaine would crash
in the Yucatan in September two thousand and seven, the
pilots would be arrested and the plane would be linked
to CIA renditioned fights to Wantanamo. After some two years
of investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration or d EA would
claim that the money used to purchase the planes was
(18:18):
moved through the US bank Wakovia, then a part of
Wills Fargo. That would lead WA Covia to settle with
the US government paying one hundred and ten million dollars
of forfeitsure and a fifty million dollars fine. So the
US government went after the bank in two thousand and nine.
Kind of the one hundred and sixty million dollars was
a tiny fraction of the bank's twelve point three billion
(18:40):
dollar profit that year, but they never announced who the
owner of the plane was. The Mexican government would say
that the cocaine belonged to a chappoguzman, would not offer
a shred of evidence to support that claim. However, a
May two thousand and six internal DA report had traced
the Falcon twenty that was also confiscated in Campeche in
(19:03):
April to a Guadalajara based business owned by a Mexican
man named Fernando Blanchio Sesena. The DA report, which is
quoted in the Venezuelan court case against the Karakas airport
workers charged in connection with the five plus tons of cocaine,
linked Sisenna to an alias, And yet years would go
(19:26):
by and the second largest aircraft cocaine bust in Mexican
history would lead to a few minor arrests with Covia's
fine and little else. The Florida based reporter Daniel Hopsicker
spent years following the story on his blog mattcalprad dot com,
looking into every possible angle of US government involvement with
(19:47):
these two planes. But who was the mysterious buyer of
the DC nine whose five plus tons of cocaine got busted?
Who had to pay for the confiscated plane and cocaine.
A possible answer to these questions would only become visible
when in twenty eleven, a middle aged man introduced as
Fernando told a judge in Miami, Florida that unfortunately it
(20:13):
was also role. My full name is Fernando Blanks, Senor,
and I am currently fifty years old. I am a pilot, precisely,
and well, I also had Well that's because with the
(20:39):
other Allians that I had. I was only flying, and
I had the license, and I was also doing commercial
jobs executive flights, characters and area lambeland flights well. Unfortunately,
also under the name of Trawl Himan. This Fernando was
(21:07):
also Raoul, and it would turn out, was also yet
another Fernando and the Luis. He was the very person
who had reached out to the victive using a band
cell phone from inside the River's correctional institution and offering
to tell a story that would show how the politicians
are bigger cooks than the narchles. On the next episode,
(21:33):
we'll learn a bit more about this rather adamant and
complex pilot with multiple identities, a man who claims to
have worked with the largest drug traffing organizations in the world.
That Ransportista is at the Tective production with Exile Content
(21:55):
Studio in partnership with iHeartRadio's Michael Dura podcast Network. Directed
and narrated by John Gibbler, Transportsa's voice by Jaquinkosio, editing
and sound design by Ferdando de la Rossa and Pedro
je Garcia. Reporting by John Gibler and Manuelarios, Produced by
Julu Gonzalez. Voice recording by Ugo Merino and Rene Garcia.
(22:19):
Transportisa's interviews translated by Carlo riz Argais. Production supervision by
Nando Vila and alvar Rosespedes. Associate producers Alonso Aguilar and
Alejandro Duran Diego and Driquezoro Is the creator and executive producer,
along with Danielle Ailembert and Isaclei. Executive producers for iHeartMedia
are Conald Byrne and just Sell Bunzes. For more podcasts
(22:43):
from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
On April ten, two thousand and six, an old DC
nine jet landed in Sila del Garmin, a popular beach
town on the southwestern edge of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Another plane,
a Falcon business jet, was waiting for it, and so
was the Mexican Army. Airport workers and officials tried to
(00:31):
stop the soldiers from approaching the DC nine, but they failed.
The soldiers found the planes eighty five seats occupied, not
with impatient travelers, but with suit cases one hundred and
twenty eight suit cases, all taped shut and marked with
the word private written in Italian. The suitcases were filled
(00:53):
with one kilogram bags of cocaine, somewhere around five thousand,
five hundred kilogram bags of cocaine that's about the weight
of the average ambulance, or five times the weight of
indult male holder bear, or a giraffe or a great
white shark. At that weight, about five and a half
(01:14):
tons in cocaine that then had an estimated retail value
of over one hundred million dollars on the street. It
was the second largest shipment of cocaine to be confiscated
on an aircraft in Mexican history, and thus it was
of course a big story Venezuela. The DC nine's pilot
(01:56):
somehow slipped through the gauntlet, but the soldiers attained the
Venezuelan copilot and the two Mexican pilots of the Falcon.
The Mexican Army and the Attorney General's Office gave a
joint press conference the following day, April eleven, two thousand
and six, publicly announcing the bust. It would come to
(02:24):
seem that the Army's presence out on the runway that
day in April was not a coincidence. The fact that
a jet stuffed with cocaine had taken off from the
largest international airport in Venezuela, a country in the midst
of a Bolvarian revolution, would also raise a few eyebrows.
The cocaine is one of the more popular recreational substances
(02:45):
on the planet, available pretty much twenty four seven most neighborhoods,
much less most cities large and small across the globe.
The fact that it and a handful of other extremely
popular mind altering items, is illegal it is not an
impediment too, but rather the essential feature of the global
marketplace in which it is produced. Shipped, sold, and consumed
(03:10):
in this particular marketplace. It is illegality that creates the
commodity's high profit margin, and at the same time the
imperative need to maintain the idea that the global industry
is somehow hidden invisible. I emphasize idea here because it
is not invisible at all. Imagine trying to hide in
(03:31):
the era of iPhones, Google Earth, and satellite guided weaponry,
the global production and distribution of oranges, or almonds, or
even cigarettes. It just doesn't make sense. In January twenty
twenty one, colleagues at Thetive, a Mexico City based film
and podcast studio, reached out to me about a curious
(03:53):
individual they've been interviewing. The Detive have produced a podcast
in Spanish called Gran's Bautista, based on phone interviews they
conducted with this man using a clandestine's cell phone from
inside a prisoner to work Carolina, thank you for calling
my worst correctional institution, and went to North Carolina. The
man claimed to have worked as a pilot, entrepreneur and
(04:15):
air logistics coordinator in the international drug trade for some
thirty years. He also claimed to be the man behind
the DC nine and it's one hundred and twenty eight
suitcases stuff with coke. Imagine a Blaine pack tip with
five tones of cocaine in the platform, a plane on
the round way right under every once nosis man you
(04:39):
was lapable. My friends at the Thieve wanted to know
if I'd be interested in working on a sister podcast
in English looking into this curious individual in his story.
I listened to the still unreleased Spanish podcast, read the
interview transcripts, and did some initial digging around. Yeah, I said,
I'm interested, but I can't simply repeat this story that
(05:00):
this man told you all because I haven't spoken to him.
I'd need to do my own investigation and see what
I can find. Okay, they said, but there is one condition.
You'll need to use Cosil's recordings. That Tective had invited
the legendary Mexican actor jaquin Cosio to read the English
translations of Transport Vistas quoted interviews with Manuel Laius, originally
(05:24):
planning to translate the Spanish podcast into English. You may
remember jaquin Cosio as the Bolivian general in the James
Bond film Quantum of Solace, or, more recently, in the
Netflix show Narcos Mexico cosil's portrayal of the drug trafficker
cochi Loco and director Luisestra's Drug Wars satire film Elinfierno
(05:46):
or Hell became emblematic of the narcocultural representations during the
first years of President Philippe Calderon's so called drug war
and highlighted this gem of moral ambiguity and the contemporary
lexicon una cosa nakoza hiltracoza, meaning literally, one thing is
(06:08):
one thing and another thing is another thing. But in
April two thousand and six, when the ill fated DC nine,
stuffed with cocaine, landed in Gampiche, such characterizations of the
naarticle were still relatively regional and minor cultural figures in Mexico.
At that time, much of the country was focused on
the presidential election campaigns that were then in full swing.
(06:32):
Among the major political issues of the day were the
democratic transition of power, violent and equality impunity, the impacts
of the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA on the
Mexican countryside, and the corresponding waves of forced economic displacement
and emigration to the United States. On July second, two thousand,
(06:53):
a swashbuckling Coca Cola executive from the right wing National
Action Party rode a wave of social content into the
presidential palace, unseating the confoundingly named Institutional Revolutionary Party. The
head ruled Mexico for seventy one years, said Little, and
(07:22):
by two thousand and six, at the end of Vicente
Fox's single six year term, the presidential elections were at
the same time a referendum on Fox in the pa
n and on the idea of this democratic transition itself.
The Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the southern Mexican
state of Chiapas launched their other campaign on January one,
(07:46):
two thousand and six, running parallel to the presidential electoral campaigns.
Instead of promoting a candidate and asking for votes, the
other campaign proposed to send a kind of anti candidate
(08:07):
to travel across the country to listen. Marcos was thus
dubbed the Delicate Zero and tasked by his commanders setting
off across the nation to listen to stories of injustice
and social struggle. His travels provide an organizing vehicle to
set the groundwork for a national coalition of anti capitalist
(08:29):
grassroots organizations. One of their much miscoded and misunderstood slogans
at that time was vote or don't vote. Organize an.
(08:59):
I grew up in Texes and it worked as a
volunteer with a few human rights organizations in Mexico in
nineteen ninety nine and two thousand. By April two thousand
and six, I've been following the other campaign through some
twenty states in southern and central Mexico, working as a
freelance reporter writing for what was then called the Alternative Press.
(09:20):
I remember reading stories in the newspaper with a few
gruesome executions and a mysterious plane filled with cocaine, but
that was still months away from the declaration of a
new drug war. The images then filling newspaper front pages
with those of protests, not murdered bodies. Anything seemed possible
during those months, in the midst of the combined energies
(09:43):
of so many diverse grassroots organizations linking indigenous and Camposino
and student and women's and queer and workers struggles, all
in what proposed to be a single, unwieldy, leaderless vibrant,
anti capitalist national strugg and then two months later, the
failed repression of a teacher strike in Whaka City ignited
(10:06):
a bold, creative, unarmed insurrection. I remember thinking that in
the other campaign and in the Ohaka rebellion, something of
world importance was getting started, or maybe not getting started
at all, but in the process of transforming, blooming, and
taking on a new dimension. And even though the repression
of those movements was brutal, I had no idea what
(10:29):
was about to be unleashed. And now, some fifteen years later,
still in the midst of this misnamed, misunderstood war, I
continues to take and destroy lives. I find myself listening
to the adventures of a pilot as told to a
reporter on an illegal cell phone from inside a federal prison.
(10:50):
When I first started digging around on the story, I
searched the pilot's name online. Found a Twitter account, complete
with a photograph, thirteen followers, a location to scription reading
currently incarcerated in the United States, and a short autobiographical
paragraph that begins, my lies, My lies make me special.
(11:10):
That got my attention. Who is this person? What is
he telling us? How much of it is true? How
can we know? Why should we care? What? In this
gregarious and as we'll come to learn, litigious pilot's story
can help us understand the war we live in. My
name is John Gibbler, and this, in a sense is
(11:33):
Transportista Episode one, Cocaine one. At the press conference in
(11:57):
Mexico City on April eleven and six, Mexican Army official
said that the DC nine had departed from Venezuela bound
for Mexico, returned after about an hour of flight due
to a supposed mechanical failure, and then departed again sometime
later for Slaman. This irregular flight pattern raised suspicions, he said.
(12:24):
The Army commander for the state of Campecher, however, told
the press that the airplane had made an unscheduled emergency
landing there in Campeche due to yet another supposed mechanical failure.
Both armies spokespeople said that airport officials had tried to
keep soldiers from inspecting the plane, arguing first that it
was only making a brief stop, and then that the
(12:47):
plane was leaking oil and less dangerous to approach. The
two pilots from the Falcon, officials said, had flown from Toluca,
near Mexico City to Si La Delcataman to pay the
DC nine's airport sees. In May two thousand and six,
two Tampa Tribune reporters published an article titled Mystery surrounds
(13:08):
plane filled with five point five talents of cocaine. I
called Howard Altman, the lead reporter on the story, now
the editor of the Military Times. I asked him what
he remembered about reporting on that plane. This plane had
been sold and flown out of Saint pe Clearwater International Airport.
So I started doing some research about who owned it.
(13:29):
A contacted the Federal Aviation Administration, looked at their records
and it indicated that it was registered to accompany called
Royal Son and Zinc. McClellan, our based care to charter service.
Then on April eleventh, the day after the plane was seized,
the FAA received a request from Royal Signs to cancel
(13:51):
the registration, and so I did a bunch of research.
I had looked at the website of flight Aware at
the time was really a relatively new site. There was
track in the flight and kind of follow the trail
on that. I worked with my colleague, Careen Branch Brioso,
(14:12):
who was a fluent Spanish speaker, and she was able
to talk to officials in Mexico, Mexican Attorney General's Office,
and then she was able to look at the press
conference with the Mexican Army Operations sub Chief and were
today we will piece together the story describing what they
called the colorful history of a plane. They wrote was
(14:36):
well known to officials at the Saint Petersburg Clearwater International Airport.
The two reporters noted that it had a logo that
appeared similar to the symbol of the Transportation Security Administration.
The logo, which includes the image of an eagle clutching
olive branches and arrows, reads Skyway Aircraft Protecting America Skies.
(14:58):
That logo Florida based reporter Daniel Hopsicker to dub the
plane Cocaine one. The logo belonged to Skyway Communications Holding Corporation,
a now defunct shell company of sorts that in the
early two thousands had a lot of plans and promises
and ties to the Republican Party, but no assets and
(15:20):
no products. By April two thousand and six, Skyway faced bankruptcy,
several investor lawsuits, and its phone line was out of service.
A listing still available for Skyway on Bloomberg's business website reads.
Skyway Communications Holding Court operates an aircraft communications and security business.
(15:41):
The company supplies broadband network communications with a nationwide coverage
infrastructure for both government and civilian applications to a variety
of airborne customers. Skyway also provides a ground monitoring surveillance system.
A February seventeen, two thousand and four Skyway press release
quotes Brent Covar, president of Skyway, saying the following the
(16:05):
second FCC license allows Skyway to further its quest for
seamless national tower network to support Southeast airlines, aircraft, defense contractors,
and government agencies. And the press release also states we
are excited and proud of the many homeland security solutions
we can provide to our nation's infrastructure. They might have
(16:29):
been excited and proud in two thousand and four, but
two years later they'd be bankrupt and sued. Solitarycap a
forty year old jet painted to look like a US
homeland security plane, but the logo of a shell company
boasting about its connections to defense contractors and government agencies,
shows up stuffed with cocaine at a small coastal Mexican airport.
(16:54):
The plane's pilot disappears, The plane's owner says that he
had recently sold the air craft and provides the bill
of sale, and the new owner remains unidentified. Fred Geffen,
the owner of Royal Son's Ink, showed US federal agents
the bill of sale from March two thousand and six.
(17:15):
Geffen told reporters that he was a shareholder in Skyway
and that they'd ripped him and everyone else who invested
in them off. Geffen also told the Tampa Tribune reporters
that he had sold the plane to an unidentified Venezuelan
man through an aircraft sales broker from California named Jorge Corralis.
(17:35):
Gevin told the reporters that he did not know who
bought the jet. Coralis told the reporters that Geffen did
know who bought the jet, and he had even arranged
to have the plane flown to Venezuela for delivery on
April five that year. Either way, the buyer's name was
not released by Geffen, Corralis, or the government. That all
seems odd enough, but it gets stranger yet Another plane
(17:58):
sold out of Florida and loaded with cocaine would crash
in the Yucatan in September two thousand and seven, the
pilots would be arrested and the plane would be linked
to CIA renditioned fights to Wantanamo. After some two years
of investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration or d EA would
claim that the money used to purchase the planes was
(18:18):
moved through the US bank Wakovia, then a part of
Wills Fargo. That would lead WA Covia to settle with
the US government paying one hundred and ten million dollars
of forfeitsure and a fifty million dollars fine. So the
US government went after the bank in two thousand and nine.
Kind of the one hundred and sixty million dollars was
a tiny fraction of the bank's twelve point three billion
(18:40):
dollar profit that year, but they never announced who the
owner of the plane was. The Mexican government would say
that the cocaine belonged to a chappoguzman, would not offer
a shred of evidence to support that claim. However, a
May two thousand and six internal DA report had traced
the Falcon twenty that was also confiscated in Campeche in
(19:03):
April to a Guadalajara based business owned by a Mexican
man named Fernando Blanchio Sesena. The DA report, which is
quoted in the Venezuelan court case against the Karakas airport
workers charged in connection with the five plus tons of cocaine,
linked Sisenna to an alias, And yet years would go
(19:26):
by and the second largest aircraft cocaine bust in Mexican
history would lead to a few minor arrests with Covia's
fine and little else. The Florida based reporter Daniel Hopsicker
spent years following the story on his blog mattcalprad dot com,
looking into every possible angle of US government involvement with
(19:47):
these two planes. But who was the mysterious buyer of
the DC nine whose five plus tons of cocaine got busted?
Who had to pay for the confiscated plane and cocaine.
A possible answer to these questions would only become visible
when in twenty eleven, a middle aged man introduced as
Fernando told a judge in Miami, Florida that unfortunately it
(20:13):
was also role. My full name is Fernando Blanks, Senor,
and I am currently fifty years old. I am a pilot, precisely,
and well, I also had Well that's because with the
(20:39):
other Allians that I had. I was only flying, and
I had the license, and I was also doing commercial
jobs executive flights, characters and area lambeland flights well. Unfortunately,
also under the name of Trawl Himan. This Fernando was
(21:07):
also Raoul, and it would turn out, was also yet
another Fernando and the Luis. He was the very person
who had reached out to the victive using a band
cell phone from inside the River's correctional institution and offering
to tell a story that would show how the politicians
are bigger cooks than the narchles. On the next episode,
(21:33):
we'll learn a bit more about this rather adamant and
complex pilot with multiple identities, a man who claims to
have worked with the largest drug traffing organizations in the world.
That Ransportista is at the Tective production with Exile Content
(21:55):
Studio in partnership with iHeartRadio's Michael Dura podcast Network. Directed
and narrated by John Gibbler, Transportsa's voice by Jaquinkosio, editing
and sound design by Ferdando de la Rossa and Pedro
je Garcia. Reporting by John Gibler and Manuelarios, Produced by
Julu Gonzalez. Voice recording by Ugo Merino and Rene Garcia.
(22:19):
Transportisa's interviews translated by Carlo riz Argais. Production supervision by
Nando Vila and alvar Rosespedes. Associate producers Alonso Aguilar and
Alejandro Duran Diego and Driquezoro Is the creator and executive producer,
along with Danielle Ailembert and Isaclei. Executive producers for iHeartMedia
are Conald Byrne and just Sell Bunzes. For more podcasts
(22:43):
from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, and wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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