- Five Star Trust, the entity that, according to
well-placed
business and U.S. intelligence sources, is tied to the financing of a
scheme
to pay individuals posing as U.S. law enforcement and electronic voting
machine technicians to rig the vote in favor of George W. Bush in at least
four key states - Florida, Texas, Ohio, and California - represents a
Byzantine
network of offshore shell corporations and individuals tied to various
Bush and Saudi-connected business enterprises.
-
- Kevin Russell, a Nassau, Bahamas-based attorney
representing
Five Star Investments, Ltd., which maintains an office in Nassau and is
the corporate entity that received a bank check for $29.6 million that
was allegedly associated with paying vote rigging technicians, claims the
check has not yet been cleared for payment. In addition, Five Star
Investments
claims the money has nothing to do with election scamming. Sources familiar
with the vote rigging have reported that some of those involved in the
operation balked when they were not paid the amount of money they were
promised for their services and began revealing the nature of their
roles.
-
- In 1997, the U.S. District Court for the Seventh Circuit
affirmed the conviction of Robert L. Ferrera, an individual that court
records indicate was connected to Five Star Investments, Ltd. Ferrera was
convicted of fraud involving $11 billion in counterfeit Mexican promissory
notes. Ferrera claimed to be a general in the Mexican army and an official
of the PRI party in Mexico. Judge George Marovich, at Ferrera's sentencing,
said "there are aspects of this like the Over-the-Hill Gang."
Moreover, the court proceedings referred to the case as
"unusual."
Ferrera and his associates used two shell corporations in their scheme,
American Credit Corporation and Union International Bank and Trust, Ltd.
of Grenada. In the case summary it is stated that Ferrera "assigned
and delivered some of the Mexican notes to an associate in Lexington,
Kentucky,
who owned Five Star Investments, Ltd." According to information from
the Internal Revenue Service, Tax ID Number 61-6234232 was issued to Five
Star Trust, a Foreign Asset Protection Trust registered in the Isle of
Man. Five Star Investments claims it has nothing to do with Five Star
Trust.
-
- Ferrera's name also surfaced in a 1994 Securities and
Exchange Commission investigation of Northstar Investors' Trust of
Bellevue,
Washington. In that case, Grady Lewis Hand was indicted for a $3 million
investment fraud. However, Hand was defended by the former head of the
Drug Enforcement Administration's secret "CENTAC" unit, Dennis
Dayle. Hand and Dayle claimed the investment fraud was actually a CIA front
to fund off-the-books intelligence operations being hidden from Congress.
They said the money actually went to "General Robert L. Ferrera,"
said then to have worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
forerunner of the CIA.
-
- New information obtained from knowledgeable U.S.
intelligence
sources reveal that much of ex-Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos's
billions of embezzled gold and money made its way into Five Star Trust,
which was actually established in the late 1980s as a Houston-based
repository
for Marcos's ill-gotten loot. Some of the Marcos money was stashed in
accounts
in the Cook Islands, a dependency of New Zealand that has its own banking
and corporation laws. Cook Islands accounts have been associated with some
of the money used in the Votergate scandal.
-
- Since the late 1980s, Five Star Trust has been
supplemented
by additional money from the Saudis. According to Houston sources, the
trust has been extensively used by the campaigns of both George H. W. Bush
and George W. Bush. These sources also claim that the Saudis and Bushes
use "Five Star" entities as vehicles to move large amounts of
money for special purposes. Other names associated with this large
Saudi-Bush
multibillion dollar tranche are Five Star Group, Five Star Company, and
Five Star LLC. The money used to move the money for the vote rigging was
also said to involve accounts in Phoenix, Arizona and Houston.
-
- The use of foreign nationals as election machine
technicians
on Election Day has also been confirmed. Sources with details of the vote
rigging stated that some foreign nationals were involved in the
reprogramming
of Diebold and other machines in the four key states of Florida, Ohio,
Texas, and California. The technicians successfully padded votes in Ohio
to ensure that state's 20 electoral votes went to the Bush column. In
populous
counties in Florida, Texas, and California, the vote padding ensured that
Bush's nationwide popular vote margin was well in excess of 3 million
votes,
giving him 51 percent of the national vote over John Kerry. One
unsuccessful
Democratic candidate in California voiced concerns about whether the
alleged
vote padding in his state affected his own vote count.
-
- Vote padding for Bush's popular vote may have also been
used in Maryland. Diebold ran a training program for volunteer election
technicians on October 29, three days before Election Day, at a warehouse
in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Volunteers were paid $14 an hour for their
services.
According to a Diebold insider, U.S. citizenship was not a qualification
to work on Diebold election machines on Election Day and the volunteers
could have been assigned "anywhere in the state [Maryland] on Election
Day."
-
- Sources familiar with the Votergate scandal have stated
that foreign nationals from Mexico, Brazil, and Russia were used to
"fix"
selected machines in critical counties and precincts in Florida, Ohio,
Texas, and California. Moreover, some of these individuals have been
associated
with organized crime activity, including computer hacking, in the United
States and abroad. Those familiar with the use of Diebold machines to
commit
voter fraud have revealed that the hardware and software used in Diebold
machines used in casinos and polling places is essentially the same,
including
the back door used to dial in over telephone lines to change payoff odds
in gambling machines. The same mechanism was used to change votes, the
sources contend.
-
- This is a followup to Saudis, Enron money helped pay
for US rigged election and More on the buying of electoral fraud by the
Bush campaign.
-
- Thanks to members of the Democratic Underground for
sending
me news items, leads, contacts, and other relevant information.
-
- - Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative
journalist, author, and columnist. He is the author of the forthcoming
book, "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates" and
wrote "Genocide & Covert Operations in Africa: 1993-1999"
(Mellen Press).
-
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