Analysis
Is the Times Square Terrorist an asset of organized crime?
By Jeff Gates
Online Journal Contributing Writer


May 26, 2010, 00:20

Why is no one reporting that �Faisal the Fizzler� is tied to Israeli-American Leon Black and Israel-dominated organized crime syndicates dating back to the 1920s? Why is no one reporting the ties to junk bond king and Israeli-American Michael Milken? How can Americans make informed choices without access to the real facts?

Faisal Sharzad -- AKA The Times Square Fizzler -- reportedly was trained by the �Pakistan Taliban� for a deadly deed that went horribly wrong.

Not only did he lock his keys in the car, including his apartment key, his Rube Goldberg contraption of alarm clocks, Walmart propane tanks and firecrackers failed to explode.

Apparently he was also expertly trained to purchase fertilizer that could not possibly explode.

Happily, Pakistani Evildoers did not train him to drive. He could have ended up in New Jersey.

Somehow he found his way to one of the busiest streets in midtown Manhattan just as the United Nations -- in midtown Manhattan -- was preparing to debate a treaty to create a Middle East free of nuclear weapons.

Was that part of the story missing from the Fox News coverage you saw of this incident? In truth, for non-coverage any mainstream source would suffice.

That U.N. treaty, first proposed in 1995, would force Israel to forfeit its nuclear weapons, a goal first sought by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963. We know how that worked out.

What�s become of this Muslim Evildoer after he miraculously found his way to Times Square -- after miraculously eluding airport security during his 16 trips abroad to train with the Pakistan Taliban? Did he come and go through the same airports where security was provided by ICTS, the Israeli firm that played host to the dreaded �Christmas Day Bomber�?

Though Faisal refreshed a flagging storyline -- The Global War on Terrorism -- the Fizzler�s storyline has since become problematic. Let�s take a closer look.

News you can trust

CNN briefly showed a photo of Apollo Management, Sharzad�s employer. That photo appeared on CNN for about a second. End of story and no mention since. Why?

Here�s the online Newsweek account of where the Fizzler worked from 2006-2009:

May 4 (Bloomberg) -- Faisal Shahzad, charged with attempting to bomb New York�s Times Square, worked for three years at a company controlled by Leon Black�s private-equity firm, Apollo Management LP.

Who is Leon Black? What is Apollo? And why isn�t his three years of employment there newsworthy?

Remember Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood Shooter? His job history provided key clues to his bizarre behavior. Is that why Hasan too has disappeared from the news?

Are the clues hidden in plain sight?

Imagine this: what if the intelligence that induced the U.S. to war in Iraq was �fixed� around a preset goal. What if the common source of that treachery is poised to become transparent?

If you were complicit in a deception of that magnitude -- a clear act of treason -- how would you obscure the facts? What measures would you take to sustain the storyline?

If you are the Evildoer, how would you maintain a Muslim Evildoer narrative? What would be required to advance a storyline built on a belief in the threat of Islamo fascism?

What happens to the storyline if the pre-war intelligence is proven a fiction traceable to a common source? What then for the storytellers?

For those marketing The Clash of Civilizations, Major Hasan�s psychotic break at Fort Hood in Texas was a well-timed blessing. Likewise for the Christmas Day Bomber and the Times Square Terrorist.

See if you can detect a common thread in this marketing of the Hasan threat by Family Security Matters:

• President Carol Taber described this incident as �the Ft. Hood terrorist attack� by an �Islamist gunman.�
  
  
• Editor Pam Meister promoted �the shocking TRUTH [sic] behind these attacks so that we might ward off those yet to come.�
  
  
• Executive Vice-President Linda Cohen, a trustee of the Anti-Defamation League, offered this advice: �No one is safe now. Not you, not the military, not your children, not office workers nor subway riders, nor anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.�

Why was the Times Square Fizzler at just the right place at just the right time?

Advancing the Narrative

Is there a precedent for combining aberrant personal behavior and �terrorism� to advance a preset agenda? Do you recall the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C., in October 2002?

That murder spree began one day before debate commenced on Senate Resolution 46 proposed by Senator Joe Lieberman to authorize the use of U.S. forces in Iraq.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Lieberman and Arizona Senator John McCain urged that the U.S. focus its forces not on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan but on regime change in Iraq.

Meanwhile the nation�s capital became a city under siege as those random attacks created widespread insecurity and heightened anxiety as serial murders left 10 dead and three wounded over a 10-day period.

Those murders quickly transformed the emotionally wrenching terror of 9/11 into a personal reality for Washington residents, including U.S. lawmakers pondering whether to invade Iraq.

Meanwhile Lieberman and McCain -- citing phony intelligence -- promoted a U.S. military invasion of a nation that had no hand in that mass murder.

Assets and transnational treason

Was Faisal Sharzad a Pakistani patsy? In the psy-ops parlance, was he an �asset�?

An asset is a term from psy-ops used to describe someone whose personality has been profiled in great depth. A reliable asset can be catalyzed to act out known personality traits in ways that advance an agenda based on the time, place and circumstances of that catalyst. While an asset�s behavior is never 100 percent foreseeable, it is reliable within an acceptable range of probabilities.

Walk Monica Lewinsky in front of Bill Clinton, what was the probability of his response. If a U.S. official orders that an American Muslim be held for 18 months in solitary confinement in a jail in Yemen, what�s the probability that Anwar al-Aswlaki would emerge radicalized and bearing a grudge against the U.S.?

The facts suggest that Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan was such an asset. Don�t expect to find this analysis on the Rupert Murdoch-controlled Fox News or in his many newspapers. Or on CNN despite its branding as �News You Can Trust.�

Assets are typically profiled and developed over lengthy periods of time. Their potential to act out a known personality disorder is held in reserve in much the same way that a military commander holds troops in reserve for deployment at an opportune time.

How is an asset developed in plain sight and �tasked� at the opportune time? Only a careful investigation can identify those influences particular to Dr. Hasan. Or to Faisal Sharzad. A good faith investigation would include the decisions that led to Dr. Hasan�s transfer to Ft. Hood and the circumstances there that triggered his behavior.

That�s also true for The Times Square Fizzler. While obviously not the brightest light in the shed, he was sufficiently competent to drive a car. And apparently he was bright enough to do financial analysis for Leon Black even though he apparently bought the wrong fertilizer at Walmart.

God only knows where he bought the fireworks. Perhaps in New Jersey.

A similar history of befuddled behavior surrounds the comically inept Christmas Day Bomber, a young Nigerian whose failed �terrorist incident� mirrors that of Sharzad. An unidentified Indian gentleman led The Crotch Bomber through Amsterdam airport security without a passport where he boarded a flight to the U.S.

Here�s an experiment. Try entering Amsterdam�s Schiphol airport without a passport. Then try boarding an international flight. Did it help that airport security was managed by ICTS, an Israeli firm? What�s the common component in each of these well-timed �incidents?�

Who had the means, motive, opportunity and insider intelligence to perpetrate this �terrorist� act in midtown Manhattan? What role was played by Leon Black and Apollo management?

Is The New York Times correct in its May 22 editorial: �As the aborted Times Square and Christmas Day bombings proved, militant groups are determined to strike here again.� Is that what these incidents �proved�? Really?

Is it sufficient to report that this latest incident is traceable to the �Pakistan Taliban�? Does that alone -- and in isolation -- explain how such operations are pre-staged and orchestrated?

As a combat-stress psychiatrist, Dr. Hasan dealt daily with injured and mentally troubled veterans at Walter Reed Hospital where the most grievously wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan are sent for treatment. Many of them are amputees, burned, disfigured, brain-damaged or otherwise handicapped for life. Their care -- or lack thereof -- is a national scandal.

While coping with that vicarious trauma, Dr. Hasan was taunted for his Muslim beliefs. He was also harassed and ridiculed for his Middle Eastern heritage even though he was born, raised and educated in the U.S.

What happened to Faisal Sharzad during his three years at Apollo? Did he encounter an experience similar to Hasan? Is that why the Leon Black connection disappeared so quickly?

To answer that question required a look at the curious history of Mr. Black, his investment banking firm and a deeper inquiry into the question of what is �proven� by this latest in a series of well-timed, high profile �terrorist incidents.�

The mental environment

The National Crime Syndicate convened its first nationwide conference in Atlantic City in 1929. That�s where the U.S. component of transnational organized crime divided the U.S. into 24 exclusive markets in order to put an end to the political problems that accompanied murderous disputes over territory.

Those territories were finalized in 1931 at a Jews-only conclave at the Franconia Hotel in Manhattan. Five of the 24 markets were established in and around New York City.

The Outfit has long been a source of pop culture narratives, including The Godfather movies starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino and The Sopranos, a popular television series. Those storylines branded organized crime as Italian or Sicilian with Jews playing only a minor role.

This is Hollywood after all, home of the skilled storyteller and the master mythmaker.

To say Sicilian or Italian organized crime will not unleash the hounds. To say �Jewish� organized crime assures a snarling charge of anti-Semitism -- unless you�re Jewish. In that case, the offense is downgraded to �self-hating Jew.� Those remain the only two alternatives for anyone willing speaking candidly -- and factually -- about organized crime.

Estonian Kalle Lasn saw firsthand how myth could displace facts in plain sight by psy-ops specialists skilled at targeting the mental environment. In March 2004, he published an article in Adbusters, a Vancouver-based magazine that he founded. First, he cited key facts: less than three percent of Americans are Jewish (1.7 percent according to most sources). Yet when you examine a list of the top 50 neoconservatives advocating war in Iraq, 26 are are Jewish (52 percent).

Noting the wildly disproportionate numbers, he titled the article: �Why Won�t Anyone Say They�re Jewish?� He soon found out. He was attacked as an �anti-Semite� for asking the question.

Don�t ask. Don�t tell.

Yet the facts remain indisputable -- both for the neocons and for those who dominate transnational organized crime. The bulk of those who �fixed� U.S. intelligence to invade Iraq were either Jewish or �assets� whose careers were nurtured by pro-Israelis.

Lasn�s subtitle for Adbusters: The Journal of the Mental Environment. Could that environment be the target of this series of well-timed �terrorist� incidents? Were these incidents staged to advance, reinvigorate a faltering storyline with �incidents� that could plausibly be blamed on Muslim Evildoers? Is Faisal the Fizzler part of an ongoing psy-ops? What about Fox News? CNN?

Only a good faith investigation can answer that question. The answer may require a closer look at Leon Black and a glimpse into the �fields within fields . . . within fields� of relationships through which organized crime operates across time and distance.

Discrediting and disabling the U.S.

Leon Black first appeared on the national scene in 1975 when his father �fell� to his death from the 44th floor of Manhattan�s Pan Am Building. Two years later, the son emerged as head of mergers and acquisitions and co-head of corporate finance at Drexel Burnham Lambert where he worked closely with Michael Milken, the firm�s �junk bond� specialist in Beverly Hills.

In the 1970s, Cincinnati�s Carl Lindner and his American Financial Group began investing in United Fruit. To escape the firm�s notorious past, its name was changed to United Brands and then Chiquita Brands International. After the death of CEO Eli Black, Lindner assumed control.

United Fruit became a key conduit for moving Israeli arms into covert wars throughout Latin America, culminating in the Iran-Contra scandal of 1987. That scandal discredited the presidency of Ronald Reagan when he was forced to concede that his administration sold arms to Iran, an avowed enemy, and used the funds to arm Nicaraguan rebels despite a congressional ban.

The term �Banana Republic� traces to the corrupting influence of United Fruit. The U.S. was discredited throughout Latin America and the Caribbean by the firm�s multi-decade bribery of foreign officials and its use of force to control and impoverish indigenous peoples.

Lindner�s American Financial Group was an early investor in Drexel�s high-yield (�junk�) securities packaged by Milken in deals coordinated with Leon Black in midtown Manhattan. Other early junk bond investors included insurance firms owned by Saul Steinberg and Meshulam Riklis.

Riklis� Rapid-American Corp. became an acquisition vehicle for Lerner Shops, Playtex and RKO film studios, previously owned in part by bootlegger and stock swindler Joseph P. Kennedy, the politically ambitious father of John F. Kennedy. JFK was murdered five months after he sought to end Israel�s nuclear weapons program to preclude a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.

In 1967, in one of the first junk bond-financed leveraged buyouts (Michael Milken was still an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley), Riklis acquired Lewis Rosenstiel�s shares in Schenley Industries based in Cincinnati, Lindner�s hometown.

The Istanbul-born Riklis paid for Schenley with junk bonds issued by Rapid-American, a firm partly owned by Lindner. Under Lindner�s leadership, United Fruit�s purchase of 40 percent of Rapid-American reportedly provided majority owner Riklis and his colleagues with resources to purchase for Israeli General Ariel Sharon his ranch in Israel�s Negev Desert where the Jewish state�s nuclear arsenal was developed at the Dimona reactor facility.

Fields within Fields

Rosenstiel�s wife, Leonore, left him to marry Walter Annenberg, Ronald Reagan�s �best friend for 50 years,� according to Nancy Reagan. Annenberg also served as Richard Nixon�s ambassador to Great Britain. Son of Chicago mobster Moses �Moe� Annenberg, Walter laundered profits from the family�s racing-wire service through Triangle Publications, publisher of T.V. Guide and Seventeen.

As the National Crime Syndicate was being formed, 1929-31, the Annenberg-inspired racing wire service provided the sinew that bound together organized crime�s gambling operations dispersed across the U.S. and Canada and into Mexico and Cuba. As Walter Annenberg steadily distanced himself from organized crime beginning in the late 1940s, he steadily gained legitimacy and influence in Republican Party politics through his ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Leonore Annenberg was raised by her uncle, Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures. First married to Belden Kattleman, a Las Vegas businessman, she then married Rosenstiel. During Prohibition, Rosenstiel bootlegged liquor from England, Europe, and Canada via Saint Pierre and then by truck into Cincinnati, building what became Schenley Distillers.

One of Rosenstiel�s closest colleagues (and competitors) was Canadian Sam Bronfman whose Distillers Corporation made a fortune in bootlegging during Prohibition in collaboration with organized crime, including Chicago�s fabled Al �Scarface� Capone. Bronfman (Yiddish for �liquor man�) acquired in 1928 what became Seagram Co. Ltd. From that fortune emerged the World Jewish Congress.

Prohibition and gambling capitalized organized crime. The combination of the Annenberg racing wire and high-profit bootlegging created a nationwide distribution network with those 24 territories still operating as key nodes in this network. The political corruption from that era identified pliable and reliable assets whose careers could be nurtured along with their successors, a key role assumed by the Israel lobby as the syndicate became more sophisticated and its operations moved more deeply into government operations.

Johnny Lazio was a key participant in the 1929 Atlantic City conference as the representative of the Pendergast political machined in Kansas City that was then nurturing the political career of Harry Truman. Two decades later, this asset was persuaded to extend state recognition to this syndicate when its operatives established a post-WWII beachhead in the oil-rich Middle East.

Enabling the networks

In 1989, Annenberg liquidated $3 billion of his wealth, including The Racing Form, in a sale to Rupert Murdoch. With those proceeds, he donated $150 million to Annenberg communication schools at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California.

Annenberg�s friend Ronald Reagan traces his political career to Chicago when Annenberg, Chicagoan Jules Stein and Cleveland�s Lew Wasserman helped �brand� him in the early days of television as the friendly face of General Electric Theater. It was during his presidency of the Screen Actor�s Guild (and with Nancy on the board) that the guild extended a �special exemption� to the Stein/Wasserman-run Music Corporation of America, providing MCA a competitive advantage that gained them disproportionate influence in music, television and film-making.

While president, Ronnie and Nancy routinely spent their New Year�s vacation at Sunnylands, Annenberg�s extensive estate in Rancho Mirage, California, near Palm Springs. Walter�s father also gravitated to sunnier climes. After double-crossing a partner in Chicago, Moe fled to south Florida to seek the protection of National Crime Syndicate �Chairman� Meyer Lansky until he and his son relocated to Pennsylvania.

The Annenberg political savvy found its way back to Chicago to nurture the political prospects of an articulate young political activist whose work there with the Annenberg Education Challenge gained him statewide and then nationwide political exposure. When elected president in 2008, Barack Obama appointed Eric Holder, former counsel to Carl Lindner, as his attorney general.

As the Holder-led Department of Justice began to brand Faisal the Fizzler as evidence of Pakistani Evil Doing, Senator Kit Bond, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee complained that Holder had �executed a hostile takeover of the intelligence community.�

Fields within fields . . . within fields

Why take you down this circuitous route in an account of the �Times Square Terrorist�? Read on to close the circle.

In the mid-1950s, former Phoenix mobster Gus Greenbaum managed and then sold the Riviera Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, one of the premier properties controlled by the Chicago Outfit. The buyer was Cincinnatian Riklis, a former member of the Haganah, a paramilitary outfit active in terrorizing Palestinians from 1920 to 1948 when it became the Israel Defense Forces.

Riklis tutored Milken, then a young bond broker, and reportedly was Milken�s first customer as Milken morphed into a major figure in the boom of leveraged buyouts that emerged during the Reagan era. Fellow Cincinnatian Carl Lindner emerged as a father figure to Milken who oversaw a massive �control fraud� at Lincoln Savings and Loan in Phoenix, Arizona.

The face on this fraud was Charles Keating who previously served as general counsel to the Linder-controlled, Cincinnati-based American Financial Group.

Arizona Senator John McCain led a group of five senators known as �the Keating Five� whose delay of needed reforms raised the taxpayer cost of that nationwide fraud by an additional $50 billion, to exceed $150 billion.

Lindner boasts on the firm�s website that he is the �largest non-Jewish contributor to Jewish causes in the U.S.� Alan Greenspan, then working for J.P. Morgan, was retained by Keating to help recruit the Keating Five.

To succeed with that task, Greenspan deployed the goodwill and political capital he amassed as chairman of the Social Security Commission (�the Greenspan Commission�). Its 1983 recommendation: Americans should work longer and pay higher payroll taxes.

A confidante of radical free market theorist Ayn Rand (Russian Alisa Rosenbaum), Greenspan reemerged as the Reagan-appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve where over the next 18 years he enabled the subprime mortgage fraud with sustained low interest rates and enthusiastic support for what this Rand disciple described as �financial innovation.�

John McCain wrote to Keating in 1983 after his first congressional victory, �Of the many things to be grateful for in this world, the friendship of the Keating family is certainly among the most meaningful.� McCain�s top supporters included Keating and father-in-law Jim Hensley.

Here begins the closing of the circle connecting the savings and loan fraud of the 1980s and the subprime mortgage fraud two decades later. And, the facts suggest, the role of misdirection aided by this latest in an ongoing series of well-timed �terrorist� incidents by Muslim Evildoers.

Murder Inc.

Notorious mobster Bugsy Siegel is widely credited with founding Las Vegas as a national crime syndicate haven for gambling and prostitution when he built The Flamingo, an early casino named after Virginia Hill, his mob courier girlfriend from Alabama who used Flamingo as her showgirl name.

The syndicate maintained discipline through Murder, Inc., a cadre of hit men. When Siegel was discovered stealing from the mob, his murder in 1947 required that the syndicate relocate Gus Greenbaum to Las Vegas from Phoenix, leaving Kemper Marley in charge of statewide corruption in Arizona. Marley hired Jim and Gene Hensley.

After two close scrapes with federal liquor violations for which the Hensley brothers reportedly took the heat, Jim Hensley emerged with a beer distributorship that has since grown to the fifth largest in the nation -- owned by Cindy Hensley McCain. Hensley�s Arizona lawyer, William Rehnquist, was appointed by Reagan as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

McCain met Hensley, then 24, when he was the married 42-year old U.S. Navy liaison to the U.S. Senate. Soon divorced, remarried and relocated to Arizona, he worked on public relations for his father-in-law while the Marley machine positioned this classic asset for election to the Congress -- four years before Arizonan Barry Goldwater�s pending retirement from the Senate

After 9/11, Republican Senator McCain emerged alongside Democrat Joe Lieberman as the most insistent high-profile voices for the invasion of Iraq -- selling that war with intelligence now known to be false. Lieberman soon chair of the Senate Committee handling Homeland Security. In that position, he collaborated with Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania and a product of the Annenberg political machine.

Ridge stepped in when New York Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik, the initial appointee of G.W. Bush, withdrew after reports were leaked of his close ties to organized crime. Ridge was succeeded by Michael Chertoff, a rabbi�s son and a former senior official in the Criminal Division of the Justice Department on 9/11. With the election of Chicagoan Obama, who former Clinton White House counsel Abner Mikva described as our �first Jewish president,� the secretary of Homeland Security became Janet Napolitano, a former governor from mobbed-up Arizona.

Are these complex webs of relationships coincidental? Or is this typical of the overlapping links common to syndicate operations? Is this how organized crime is sustained through fields-within-fields of relationships that stretch across time, distance and, as here, both major political parties?

What does this have to do with the Fort Hood Shooter, the Crotch Bomb Sizzler and the Faisal the Fizzler? Are such �terrorist incidents� typical of how war is waged in the mental environment by creating -- and constantly refreshing -- a narrative? If so, who would have the motivation to do so?

Does a renewed fear of terrorism help divert attention away from the latest massive financial fraud? And from the need for reforms that are not yet forthcoming -- from either party? Meanwhile our financial institutions remain �too big to fail.�

Are these insecurity-inducing �incidents� a form of marketing? Are they akin to selling us a product?

Do they ensure defense spending is sustained while social services are sliced? Is it coincidental that Israel is the world�s third largest arms exporter?

Are these �incidents� clues to how we are persuaded to assume more debt to wage more wars with no end in sight? Are these incidents just business-as-usual for transnational organized crime?

Was the same criminal syndicate involved in the S&L fraud also active in the Enron fraud? The dot-com crash? The subprime fraud? The half-a-loaf �financial reform� legislation?

Did these massive financial �incidents� just happen? Or were they stage-managed from the shadows in an alliance between policy-making assets and transnational organized crime?

As counsel to the Senate Finance Committee (1980-87), I witnessed firsthand the embrace of debt-financed �supply-side economics� during the first year of the Reagan presidency. Its primary financial result was to dramatically increase the �free cash flow� essential to LBOs (leverage buyouts). At a time when the securitized debt of the U.S. hovered around $900 billion, this �fiscal conservative� championed a bill that authorized us to borrow $872 billion.

While those deficit-funded subsidies were cut back slightly in future years, their impact was certain to concentrate wealth and income and thereby undermine both democracy and markets -- all in the name of enhancing our freedom. As a colleague rightly concluded, we got the mortgage (the deficits) while they got the house, the assets financed with that �free cash flow.�

Is it coincidence that private equity/LBO firms most enriched by this debt-financed change in policy are also best positioned to recapitalize the banks most devastated by this latest round of debt-financed excess? Throughout history, debt has always been the prize for those adept at inducing nations to war. Is this all too familiar? Are these firms our Wall Street Dons?

Whose agenda?

In 1948, the Joint Chiefs of Staff cautioned Harry Truman against granting sovereign recognition to an extremist enclave that was already using ethnic cleansing to terrorize the indigenous population and occupy lands adjoining the Muslim-dominant Middle East.

Their rationale: Palestinian land was rightly theirs as The Chosen because it was long ago given to them -- by a God of their own choosing.

Truman was warned by U.S. military leaders about the �fanatical concepts of the Jewish leaders� and their plans for �Jewish military and economic hegemony over the entire Middle East.� Truman chose not to follow their advice nor that of his secretary of state, former WWII General George C. Marshall, who viewed recognition as a geopolitical disaster.

Did our military leaders fail to grasp the scope and scale of the threat posed by these extremists? Did these �fanatical concepts� include a plan to deceive the U.S. so that we would deploy our military to pursue their agenda for dominance in the region? Is that why a Democratic president�s policy in the Middle East is little changed from that of Republican G.W. Bush?

Working as a transnational criminal syndicate, did these extremists collaborate to damage the U.S. economy with disabling debt and discredit the U.S. abroad with an endless war? Could the presence of this syndicate help explain why the U.S. continues to dig itself deeper into debt regardless which political party is in power?

Could the criminal roots of this operation explain why we hear nothing about Leon Black�s employment of the Times Square Fizzler?

Is the sound of silence speaking to us with an eloquence we do not yet understand?