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Seal is purported to have flown guns to South America from Mena and drugs back into the United States, according to the memo. Dan Lasater, of course, was the celebrated Little Rock bond daddy. He carries it around and begins spending it, which attracts the attention of the local authorities. Barry Seal was an American-born Trans World Airlines pilot who . An "extensive joint investigation" by the FBI, Arkansas State Police and IRS revealed that Barry Seal used the Mena airport for "smuggling activity" from late 1980 until March 1984, according to . var sc_invisible=1; Yes. Seal's Drug Enforcement Administration file also supports this, noting that he was smuggling marijuana as early as 1976, then adding cocaine to his resume in 1978. Brown and the co-pilot, who never exchanged any more than a few words, remained on board. I guess he also thought Colombians would stick out like a sore thumb in Louisiana and they wouldn't come here." These are the equivalent of Barry Seal in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell covert operation. The movie's loose interpretation of the true story is echoed in the trailer when a voice-over by Tom Cruise as Barry Seal tells us that only "some of this sh*t really happened." Yes. There is no information on Barry Seal's net worth, but it must have been substantial. This draws the attention of the CIA. . Alexander said he has been meeting weekly with the GAO investigating team and has been in touch with the House and Senate subcommittees . "I resigned from the office in November of 1985, and my successor took over the investigation. "Doug and I are both aviators, so we both love to fly.". In American Made, Barry Seal's family consists of his wife and their three children, two boys and one girl, all seen at various stages in their lives throughout the film. Clinton appeared to have pressured Hale, the head of an Arkansas lending agency, into making loans to Susan McDougal, the Clintons Whitewater real estate partner. Seal, Brown says, talked knowledgeably about airplanes, and spoke of an operation he was planning. Bill Clinton's Mena, Arkansas drug smuggling and money laundering operation through the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA).. Seal was a Green Beret in the Vietnam war and later a pilot for TWA. He said the money had been brought back from Tegucigalpa. A flamboyant businessman who continued to deal in aircraft, Seal lost several planes among assets seized in Louisiana and Arkansas in a jeopardy assessment by the Internal Revenue Service in a $29,487,718 tax lien placed against his property. var sc_project=5585388; Leveritt was reluctant at first, but soon warmed to the task and got to work. Eight months later, Seals C-123 was shot down over Nicaragua with a load of ammunition and supplies for the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels. The FBI in Little Rock began investigating Seal's operation at the Mena airport in February 1984, according to the recently released FBI document. After being caught in Honduras with 40 kilograms of cocaine in 1979, Barry spent nine months in a Honduran jail. But there were still questions regarding the Mena airport and people who worked there, according to the FBI memo. Also, view a news story about Barry Seal's death. "Little Rock [FBI] is attempting to establish that [redacted] modified, maintained and stored Seal's aircraft with the knowledge that he was involved in cocaine smuggling activities prior to Seal's plea bargaining agreement on March 24, 1984," according to the memo. Images like the one earlier on this page show Medelln Cartel boss Pablo Escobar with Sandinista government officials and soldiers, who were loading cocaine onto Seal's plane, nicknamed the Fat Lady. Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal (July 16, 1939 - February 19, 1986) murdered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Jul 04, 2022 12:40 P.M. Movies have been made, books have been published, hundreds of articles have been written. In fact, even the Wikipedia links Ive included in this paragraph are mostly lies. "According to some reports, the [Mena] airport, from 1981 to 1985, was a major transit point for the entrance of cocaine and heroin into the United States," Sherwood wrote. The Ochoa Family, along with Pablo Escobar and others, were the founders of the Medelln Cartel. Owing to a case that Brown was then working on that could have implicated Tucker, Brown believes the demotion was illegal. And for thirty years, every attempt to get to the bottom of events at Menafederal, state, judicial, journalistichas failed. Over a quarter of a century ago, George H.W. A C-123K cargo plane, like this one, was out tted at the Mena airport and ew with various cameras to obtain photographic evi- dence of the Sandinistas in the act of smuggling narcotics, according to an entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette file photo). Some facts, however, are indisputable. He said, according to Brown, Thats Lasaters deal, thats Lasaters deal.. var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); Barry Seal, courtesy of the Baton Rouge Advocate. Scared the s---- out of me just taking off. Brown says that when the plane took off, he was sitting on a bench behind the two pilots. Later Seal confirmed Browns suspicions: the palettes contained M-16s for the Contras. He concluded by saying that Mena was a federal, not a state, matter. According to a 1988 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, Seal's associates at the Mena airport were also being investigated. Counterrevolutionaries, known as Contras, were battling the Sandinistas. He was shot to death by two machinegun-wielding men while behind the wheel of his Cadillac in the . When Brown returned to the Governors mansion, he recalls, Clinton greeted him jovially, You having any fun yet? he asked. Soon after, JB is killed by a car bomb. -Vulture. "I trusted him so I didn't ask questions," says Debbie. In the film, his abductors take him to a secret airstrip in the Colombian jungle where three businessmen, including Pablo Escobar, make him an offer he can't pass up. Judicial Watch: Fighting for Clean Elections. I knew the agency had an extensive file on Seal, Leveritt wrote, because Id read it decades earlier, shortly after Seals murder. In the 1980s, the Mena airport was the reported base of a drug-smuggling, money-laundering and arms-smuggling ring run by Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal, according to an Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry on the airport. About 25 pages of that trove refer to Arkansas or Mena. Money from the sale of weapons to Iran was used to help fund the rebels in Nicaragua. The state really had next to nothing to do with it. At this juncture, no one, including Brown, can say precisely what Clinton was doing at Mena. In another deposition in the case, John Bender, a mechanic, says he saw Clinton at Mena three times in the summer of 1985. Many names in the documents have been redacted. The mysteries of Mena revolve around a drug-smuggling pilot named Barry Seal. In February 1986, Seal was killed in a hail of machine-gun fire outside a Baton Rouge Salvation Army halfway house after allegedly crossing Pablo Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel. The man who made Baton Rouge headlines in the mid-1980s for the machine-gun killing of drug informant Adler "Barry" Seal died in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on Aug. 25, Louisiana. Other photos like the one below show Federico Vaughan (center, striped shirt), a man that Seal claimed was a top aide of Tomas Borge, the Sandinista Minister of the Interior. "Prior to his death, Seal admitted to smuggling large quantities of cocaine from South America (Columbia) to United States and testified before Senate investigative committee," according to the FBI memo, which referred to a telephone call between agents in Little Rock and Miami. Clinton also suggested that Brown study Russian, a suggestion Brown took seriously enough to begin making entries in his daybook in Cyrillic. Magruder, Brown says, asked him if he would be interested in paramilitary, counterintelligence and narcotics. Brown, who had worked in narcotics enforcement as a police officer, said he was interested. It was dark almost black, and had only the minimal tail markings necessary for civilian operation. In other words: nothing to see here, move on. Whatever the case, of all the Arkansas troopers who would later admit to knowledge of Clintons high life, Brown was the most hesitant to talk. The CIA stonewalled the release of information now sought by Judicial Watch on the Mena Airport controversy, said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. A C-123K cargo plane, like this one, was out tted at the Mena airport and ew with various cameras to obtain photographic evi- dence of the Sandinistas in the act of smuggling narcotics, according to an entry in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas(Arkansas Democrat-Gazette file photo). Bill Duncan, an IRS investigator, told me that he had numerous reports of automatic weapons fire, men of Latin American appearance in the area, people in camouflage moving quietly through streams with automatic weapons, aircraft drops, twin-engine airplane traffic. Duncan, along with Arkansas State Police investigator Russell Welch, started digging into Seal and the Mena connection, suspecting a drug smuggling and money laundering operation. Follow him on Twitter @micah_morrison. Jacoby mentioned Seal's mission as evidence, which effectively outed Seal as a government agent. Things became worse when a report in the Washington Times on July 17 . As early as 1982, his firm had been censured by the Arkansas security commissioner for cheating customers. In essence, not only was the airport used to smuggle illegal drugs into the United States, but it was also a departure point for weapons used to arm the Contras in Nicaragua.". "The original information dates back to the activities of a pilot, Barry Seal (now deceased), who is purported to have flown guns to South America from Mena and drugs back into the United States," according to the memo. Lisa Seal Frigon, Barry's daughter from his first marriage, sued Universal, claiming that the studio should have purchased Barry's life rights from her, not his third wife Deborah who they paid $350,000. ", Copyright 2023, Northwest Arkansas Newspapers LLC. It must be noted now that Clintons efforts to distance himself from Mena have persisted for years. attorney.". And ABC producer told me at the time that Brown is telling the truth. Under the disguise of an aircraft refurbishing center, Mena was an arms and drug smuggling ring working for President Ronald ReagansContrawar against theSandinistas. Undercover cameras installed on Seal's plane captured photos on the tarmac of a Nicaraguan airport. In 1981, he was making daily deposits of $50,000 into an account at a bank in the Bahamas. Just prior to the movie's release, news broke that the family of deceased stunt pilot Alan Purwin was suing American Made's producers for wrongful death. If he had in fact been working for the CIA at the time, his connections didn't get him off the hook. Reprints and media inquiries: [emailprotected]. "The estimated value of the narcotics smuggled through the facility is $3 [billion] to $5 billion. All rights reserved. The pilot of the plane was Barry Seal, a legendary drug trafficker. After a barrage of requests from different people and media outlets under the federal Freedom of Information Act, on Wednesday the FBI released more than 1,000 pages of its file on Seal: vault.fbi.gov/recently-added. is above the law! : Then the plane dropped to what Brown calls an altitude a hell of a lot lower than what youd think youd fly. He suspected Seal was trying to evade radar. -Daily Mail Online, No. The book was to be called, The Mena File: Barry Seals Ties to Drug Lords and U.S. Officials. Leveritt knew the story well and had researched it earlier, writing about Seals murder and other related events. He had been arrested in 1972 by the U.S. Customs Service for trying to fly 1,350 pounds of plastic explosives to anti-Castro Cubans via Mexico. Cocainea lot of itflowed in. "Tom Cruise doesn't look like Barry Seal. I never saw drugs, that's for sure." Officials at the Arkansas Studies Institute suggested their concerns were legal and financial, associated with vetting the book, but Leveritt wasnt buying it. In the autumn of 1984, Brown found himself seated on a bench inside a cavernous C-123K cargo plane roaring over a Central American jungle. In the 1980s, the Mena airport was the reported base of a drug-smuggling, money-laundering and arms-smuggling ring run by Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal, according to an Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry on the airport. "He would tell me all these wild stories about the missions he had flown. -Daily Mail Online, "Mena" refers to the small town in Arkansas where Barry Seal moved his operation, smuggling in drugs to a clandestine airfield under the nose of then-Governor Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton? he replied: Yes, sir. "Tom did all his own flying in the movie," says director Doug Liman, who is a pilot himself (Vulture.com). As part of his reduced sentence, the judge had ordered Barry to spend his nights, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., at a Salvation Army halfway house for six months. Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal (July 16, 1939 - February 19, 1986) was an American commercial airline pilot who became a major drug smuggler for the Medelln Cartel.When Seal was convicted of smuggling charges, he became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration and testified in several major drug trials. Subsequently, the special prosecutor investigating Whitewater subpoenaed Brown to disclose what he knew about Clintons connections to David L. Hale. The extent of Barry Seal's involvement with the CIA in the 1980s has provided fuel for speculation and conspiracy theories. In an effort to reduce or altogether avoid his 10-year prison sentence, Seal first tried to make a deal with a U.S. attorney, volunteering to give up information on the Ochoa family, but the deal was rejected. Hadaway. Bill Clintons favorite bodyguard, but also a close friend. Then, Brown says, Seal reached again into the duffel bag and pulled out a kilogram of cocaine. Hagan said he didn't know how many pages of material on Seal have yet to be made public by the FBI. American Made stars Tom Cruise as Barry Seal, a real-life former airline pilot who embarked on a wildly successful cocaine smuggling operation between Colombia and a tiny airstrip in Mena, Arkansas, in the 1980s. The man said that despite the incident, he was still very fond of Barry. Past Addresses: See available information. The first is a CIA internal memo on an article written about Mena in 1995. Barry arrived that evening at approximately 6 p.m. and backed his white Cadillac into a parking space. He is married to Lucy (Sarah Wright) and has two children with her, with a third on the way. "I initiated a grand jury investigation in relation to money laundering through the Mena airport in 1985," Hutchinson said Friday. In court documents, the family alleged that "lapses in planning, coordinating, scheduling, and flight safety" contributed to the fatal crash in the mountains of Colombia. Ochoa was arrested in Spain on a U.S. warrant, but due to pressure from the cartel was never extradited to the U.S. -Court Documents (STATE of Louisiana v. Miguel VELEZ, Bernardo Vasquez, and Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz), Yes. In the American Made movie, Barry Seal (Tom Cruise) crash lands a plane in a suburban neighborhood in an effort to escape the DEA who ordered him to land. Miguel Velez was the man driving the getaway car. When Wattenberg reported this, an angry Tucker retaliated against Brown by demoting him from white-collar investigations to highway patrol. Seal Texaco.located corner Acadian Thruway andGoverment Street ,Baton Rouge La.Father Benjamin C Seal and the Sons Benjy Jr,Dean ,Jason ,Aaron, Curtis R,Wendell K, work the gas . "The estimated value of the narcotics smuggled through the facility is $3 [billion] to $5 billion. "You know, we're not making a biopic," said director Doug Liman. Barry Seal's smuggling operation began in Louisiana, and like in the American Made movie, he sometimes pushed packed duffel bags full of drugs out of his plane and into the Atchafalaya basin, to be collected by associates on the ground. The CIAs inspector general investigated and released a terse statement saying no evidence has been found that the CIA was associated with money laundering, narcotics trafficking, arms smuggling or other illegal activities at or around Mena. There was, however, a classified two-week exercise and some contracting for routine aviation-related services.. On Watch: The #COVID19 Crisis on our Southern Border the Media ISN'T Coveri On Watch: Marxism & the Current Insurrection in America. "I can state absolutely that Oliver North had nothing to do with my story as far as I knew, or as far as I know today," said Jacoby. MENA NOIR: Aircraft pilot Barry Seal, a Baton Rouge native who smuggled drugs into the U.S. for the Medellin Cartel during the 1980s, used this airport in Me. I dont want to be getting any more reports from Brown is the statement by Tucker that Colonel Tommy Goodwin, the recently retired head of the Arkansas state police, quoted in explaining the demotion to me in an interview. Brown, a narcotics cop, got upset. For a portion of this time, the alleged ringleader of the drug smuggling, Seal, appeared to have been working with the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Current Address: ZGFJ N 18th St, Phoenix, AZ. Fact-checking American Made revealed that Monty Schafer is a fictional character created to represent Barry Seal's contacts at the CIA. The explosives were supposedly going to anti-Castro Cuban fighters. "We're talking about one of the largest drug smugglers in America, and these agents loved him." As Slate notes, Seal stuck a plea deal, where he testified in three major drug trials and got five years' probation and six months at a halfway house. The assassination happened on February 19, 1986 in the parking lot in front of the Salvation Army building on Airline Highway (U.S. 61) in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Facility is $ 3 [ billion ] to $ 5 billion of material on Seal 's mission as,... 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