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The Men That Don’t Fit In: The Factual History of a Rogues Life from 1934 to 1967 (subtitle: “which includes the very interesting period of the Pre-Cuban Revolution, the Post-Cuban Revolution and Times of Intrigue and Covert Action as well as adventures around the Defense Industrial Security Command Spooks and Characters, the Outfit, the Cuban Affairs Dept., with the bonus insiders view of Circus, Carnival and Outdoor Amusements Life”).
Interesting confluence of connections surrounding the circus culture in Florida. The intelligence asset Ringling Brothers facility in Venice, home to 9/11 flight school. JMWAVE, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, Bush family on Jupiter Island. It just expands outward from there.
Here's a Salon article I just came across that's peripherally related:
The Greatest Vendetta on EarthWhy would the head of Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey hire a former top CIA honcho to torment a hapless freelance writer for eight years?
Are we a big ol’ lucky dog of a city, or what? I couldn’t be more excited about Saturday’s Business section front-page story in the Dispatch. The lead told us: “Rickenbacker International Airport will begin receiving cargo shipments from Malaysia as a result of service added by Evergreen International Airlines.”
Thank God we finally got somebody to replace the former Southern Air Transport (SAT) after the company went bankrupt amidst allegations that its pilots and planes were used in CIA drug-running operations.
Evergreen began racing “time-sensitive cargo” from Kuala Lumpur to Rickenbacker on Sunday. They’re aiding some of our best corporate citizens “…such as The Limited and Eddie Bauer,” according to the Dispatch, where no doubt garments are made in state-of-the-art cheery facilities by well-paid Third World employees. I was so excited I took a few minutes to research Evergreen’s history.
Evergreen, originally based in McMinnville, Oregon, expanded from a small helicopter in the 1960s “to a major international airline with secret government contracts” according to the Portland, Oregon Free Press. The Oregonian reported that “Evergreen Airline Company, Evergreen International Airlines, Inc., was built on remnants of two older airlines—one a wholly owned CIA proprietary, or front company, and the other a virtual branch of the U.S. Forest Service that for years secretly had helped the CIA recruit paramilitary personnel.”
In 1975, after a series of embarrassing revelations during Senator Frank Church’s investigation of the CIA, the “company” liquidated Intermountain Aviation Inc. of Marana, Arizona near Tucson. Intermountain’s assets were purchased by two Oregon companies that the CIA selected: Evergreen and Rosenbalm Aviation Inc. But Evergreen was the big winner. One of the CIA’s top aviation officers, the legendary covert ops expert George Doole worked for Evergreen as a director. Prior to this, Doole managed all of the CIA’s proprietary airlines. The CIA selected Evergreen to take over the agency’s airbase at Marana. An investigation by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Oregonian documented that “The CIA offered Intermountain’s substantial Arizona assets only to Evergreen.”
What followed was a decade of privileged treatment and government contracts to the airline. Evergreen purchased the CIA’s Arizona assets at a fraction of their real worth. An Arthur Andersen and Co. financial statement indicates that Evergreen’s assets nearly doubled from $25 million to more than $45 million one year after the deal. Evergreen’s revenues rose from $8-10 million range in 1975 to $77.9 million by 1979, according to U.S. Civil Aeronautics Board documents.
The Washington Post reported on Evergreen’s CIA connection in 1980 after it was chosen to fly the former Shah of Iran from Panama to Cairo.
In 1984, CBS News reported that the CIA was using a “network of private companies” to fly military weapons to Central America to support the Contra rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. CBS named both Southern Air and Evergreen Air as involved in the arms shipments. The day after the broadcast, the Washington Post reported that “Private airlines, including Evergreen, were owned by the CIA during the Vietnam War, but the agency has said that the airline has since been sold.”
The New York Times jumped in a day later with the following lead: “The Central Intelligence Agency is using small private airlines to fly guns and other military supplies to United States-backed forces in Central America, and false flight plans are sometimes filed to cover up the shipments….” The Times mentioned Evergreen Air by name.
When Doole died on March 9, 1985, the Times reported that Evergreen International Aviation in Marana placed a bronze plaque on the wall acknowledging Doole’s more than 20-year service with the CIA. Like Rickenbacker, the huge airfield formerly operated by the CIA was now owned by the county government (Pinal County, AZ). The plaque noted that Doole was “founder, chief executive officer & board of directors of Air America, Inc., Air Asia Company Ltd., Civil Air Transport Company Ltd.” Air America’s planes were used, according to U.S. Intelligence documents, to facilitate the transportation of opium from Laos to U.S. military bases in the Philippines and Thailand during the Vietnam War. The airline’s nickname was “Opium Air.”
Following the incident when Sandinistas shot down a Southern Air Transport C-123K cargo plane that led to the Iran-Contra arms and drug-running scandal, the Washington Post reported that SAT President William G. Langton had been previously associated with Evergreen International Airlines. The Oregonian investigative report came out in 1988 revealing how well Evergreen Airlines was doing. But by 1994, the airline had defaulted on $125 million in junk bonds, according to the Portland Free Press.
In 1997, Evergreen was caught up in a huge scandal when scores of former military planes were diverted to covert CIA operations under the guise of “firefighting.” The Free Press reported that Evergreen International Airlines was involved in the covert activities. Gary Eitel, a decorated Vietnam combat pilot and law-enforcement officer, found employment at Evergreen and “observed that card-carrying CIA personnel were on Evergreen property acting as Evergreen employees.”
In last Saturday’s paper, the Dispatch’s last sentence stated that: “Still, Rickenbacker officials are hoping for even more cargo activity, and [Jeff] Clark said Evergreen is in the process of determining whether it will operate additional flights from Columbus to South America.”
Columbia may be a good place to start for those “time-sensitive” deliveries, eh?
For that, we need to look at some of the more infrequently noted details of Henry's life history, many of them provided by Lucas himself. Henry, as it turns out, has some interesting stories to tell. In 1985, just a couple years into his incarceration, he attempted to tell his story in a book, written for him by a sympathetic author. The book, titled The Hand of Death: The Henry Lee Lucas Story, tells of Henry's indoctrination into a nationwide Satanic cult. Lucas claimed that he was trained by the cult in a mobile paramilitary camp in the Florida Everglades in the fine art of killing, up close and personal. Other training involved abduction and arson techniques.
http://www.whale.to/b/henry.html
Facebook killing creepy even for Florida: Mallick
I have never been to Florida. I’m not telling you not to go there because I know you’ve already been. We Canadians go to Florida because it’s near, it’s cheap and we were at a peak of vacation desperation, which I understand, but Florida is a swampy hellscape in which human decency wrestles with reptiles, drugged-up hillbillies and Republicans for dominion. It loses.
For reasons of sanity, I would not normally write about Florida but I hit my vastly expandable tolerance fence this week when I read the news story that typifies the state and its sneaking baleful influence. I refer to Derek Medina, the Miami man who allegedly killed his wife and posted the news and a photo of her fresh corpse on Facebook.
It wasn’t the photo that put me over the edge, or even his friends’ surprised responses. It was the “Likes” of those responses that upset me. If you see your friend’s dead body— shot, slashed and spread on the kitchen floor — you call the cops. But it’s worse. Friends tagged the actual corpse photo and other friends “liked” it!
The husband, who bears a remarkable resemblance to George Zimmerman, is the author of a self-published ebook marriage guide, How I Saved Someone’s Life and Marriage and Family Problems Thru Communication. Although he confessed to police, he still blamed his wife for provoking him.
Medina is the worst, but he’s only the worst so far. Every day brings a new vision of Florida, like a blackened snapshot rescued from a fire. Read the great Craig Pittman on Slate.com. Read @_FloridaMan’s latest headlines on Twitter. Florida men are regularly arrested for “. . . Stealing 20 Turtles at Gunpoint from Man in Parking Lot,” “Hitting Child, Covering Bruises with Fake Tattoos,” “Flashing Kids at Walmart while Wearing Translucent Shorts” and the mysterious “Rearranging Walgreens Beverage Aisle.” The headlines are from the last two weeks.
I cannot convey the Florida-ness of this, except to say that when a Florida man is arrested for having sex with a donkey, it is always a miniature donkey named Doodle. When a hunter shoots his wife by accident in the dark in Flagler County, it’s always because he thought she was a wounded hog. They are still married.
When Florida women attack a tourist in a hotel lobby, it’s always because they were prostitutes who thought their turf was being threatened. When a clinic is closed down, it’s always a motel room where women were being injected with cement and tire sealant by a fake doctor performing buttock-enhancement surgery.
A 2012 U.S. Postal Service advisory asked Florida citizens to try not to crash their cars into post offices, Pittman writes. In September 2011, this had already happened eight times that year. The state has 455 licensed drivers over the age of 100.
“It happened so fast,” said one 100-year-old, who had crashed into a motorcyclist. “I looked out on the street and there was a fella laying there. I thought, ‘how did this guy get here?’ ”
Pittman’s numbers are dizzying. The state has killed 124,000 giant African land snails near Miami alone. The Everglades is clogged with killer Burmese pythons, which is one thing, but the area is going underwater this century so where will the pythons go, I ask. New York City?
The problem with Florida is that every statement of fact leads to a terrible chain of events. The state’s voting machines don’t just fail in 2000, they elect George W. Bush. The prosecutor who saw Zimmerman go free for killing black teenager Trayvon Martin is the same prosecutor who sent a black woman to jail for 20 years for firing a warning shot against her ex-husband.
Florida juries are notoriously terrible. When Ted Bundy escaped from prison in 1977, he could have headed anywhere in the U.S. He selected Florida.
Bundy was executed in 1989 in Florida after his appeals were limited by the efforts of Gov. Bob Graham, a strange mean-eyed man. All Florida governors are mean, from Jeb Bush to the crazy Rick Scott, who declined $2 billion in federal funds for a Tampa-Orlando high-speed rail line out of sheer spite.
But Graham was stranger than most. He ended a tentative presidential run when his diaries were revealed, meticulous notes from every minute in his day, including toilet visits, e.g. 1:20-1:30: MLTH. Bedroom, bathroom. Dress in blue slacks. 1:30-1:45: Rewind Ace Ventura. 2:00: Adele ready to go. Drive to Baptist Hospital. 2:15: Stop at to return Ace Ventura. (The excerpts come from the blog, notebookstories.com on interesting stories about notebooks. The fact that I have never forgotten Graham’s 4,000 notebooks does not make me as strange as this blogger.) And that’s just one Florida governor.
At this point, you don’t need stats, you need summaries. The Florida novelist Carl Hiaasen says Florida craziness outruns his ability to describe it. “I think in the old days, the nexus of weirdness ran through Southern California, and to a degree New York City,” he says. “I think it’s changed so that every bizarre story in the country now has a Florida connection.”
He calls it “an inversion of magnetic poles.”
For a 14th century rendering of Florida, I turn to the new translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy by the polymath critic Clive James, 73, now dying horribly under tragic circumstances. James is in hell, so he knows what it looks like. It looks like, well, Florida.
“I found myself lost in a wood so dark, the way ahead was blotted out,” reads his translation. “The keening sound I still make shows how hard it is to say how harsh and bitter that place felt to me.” And that’s visiting Dante’s famous circles. Take the I-95 and see the real thing.
Where did Gore think he was -- in some friendly Civics class? Hell no, he was in Florida, arguably the most Vicious & Corrupt state in the Union. ... Not only that, but he was brazenly invading Florida, trying to steal it from right under the noses of the whole Bush family. It was a bold move & brilliantly done, in some ways -- but then so was Lee's decision to invade the North & attack Gettysburg.
Gore was Doomed in Florida, and he knew it about halfway through Election night. The TV wizards had already given the state & its 25 precious Electoral Votes to Gore, which gave him an early lead and caused wild rejoicing in Democratic headquarters all over the country.
My own immediate reaction was bafflement & surprise, and I think I almost believed it. ... But not really. The more I brooded on it, the more I was troubled by waves of Queasiness & shudders of Gnawing Doubt. I felt nervous & vaguely confused, as if I had just heard a dog speak perfect English for 30 or 40 seconds. That will get your attention, for sure. ... Some people get permanently de-stabilized by it: Nothing they see with their own eyes will ever look quite the same to them again. As in "I know that the object I'm looking at is an Egg -- but I also know that if it talks to me like a person, it is not an Egg."
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