- In the second of a four-part series, Insight investigates
the relationships between a convicted felon, a prominent U.S. security
firm, government officials and mobsters.
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- Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers Sean McDade
and Randy Buffam set out in January 2000 on an eight-month secret investigation
in the United States. The two were attempting to determine whether Canada's
law-enforcement and intelligence agencies were using an allegedly pirated
software program called PROMIS that had been modified to be monitorable
by shadowy interests said to have the electronic key; and, if so, whether
Canada's national security had been compromised because of the suspected
electronic backdoors installed in the software.
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- Much of the Mounties' investigation focused on the reported
activities and relationships of Michael Riconosciuto, a computer wizard
who claimed to have modified the PROMIS software for illegal use. A convicted
felon, Riconosciuto also claimed knowledge of a compendium of suspicious
characters and activities that include:
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- a.. Arms development for an alleged joint venture between
the Cabazon Indians of Indio, Calif., and the Wackenhut Corp.;
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- b.. A former high-ranking Justice Department attorney
named Mike Abbell and his alleged relationship with the Cali drug cartel;
and
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- c.. Riconosciuto's own activity as an undercover operative
in a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sting operation in Lebanon.
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- Insight has followed the trail of the two RCMP investigators
as they moved secretly throughout the United States collecting hard data
from a variety of sources and interviewing witnesses, including Riconosciuto.
They ultimately returned to Canada to continue their still-secret national-security
probe that raises troubling questions about international espionage, crime
and scandalous cover-ups said to date back more than a decade.
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- In this second installment of an exclusive four-part
series, Insight focuses on Riconosciuto, on whom the RCMP investigators
invested so much time, expense and effort to examine and try to confirm
his shocking stories. By following the Mounties, Insight has assembled
new information that sheds light on the shadowy world in which Riconosciuto
operated and what the RCMP found - including long-sought computer tapes
that Riconosciuto has said contain a version of PROMIS that was stolen
by high-level U.S. government officials and that he then modified for illegal
purposes.
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- This was not the first time such claims had been made.
Before the RCMP got involved, a great deal of this information was provided
to Congress (among others) and surfaced during a 1992 taped telephone conversation
between Riconosciuto and an FBI agent at a time Riconosciuto was on trial
for the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine and was attempting to trade
information to the FBI in exchange for entry to the federal Witness Protection
Program.
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- But, as so often with Riconosciuto, the stories he offered
to federal agents were not confirmed or just ignored. That is, until the
RCMP entered the picture last year and got a break. Helping the Mounties
was Cheri Seymour, a Southern California journalist turned private detective.
Years before, in January 1992, she had retrieved boxes of documents from
Riconosciuto's hidden desert trailer. The Mounties spent three days copying
these documents and, with the help of Seymour, returned to the trailer
where yet more documents were retrieved.
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- These combined Riconosciuto papers revealed the dark
and disturbing landscape of crime, espionage and betrayal of which he had
been part - one that ever since his arrest and conviction in 1992 had been
labeled the fictional embellishments of a convicted felon.
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- Each new twist and turn of the covert investigation took
the Mounties deeper into a forest of bizarre machinations as they sought
to validate information which, though it had no direct connection to the
alleged theft of the PROMIS software, raised astonishing questions about
national security and organized crime. This is not to say the RCMP agents
didn't probe the allegations that Canada's law-enforcement and intelligence
services were operating a stolen version of the software developed years
before by Bill and Nancy Hamilton.
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- The Hamiltons own a company called Inslaw, and it is
they who, in the early 1970s, developed a version of PROMIS for the Justice
Department. At some point, they have claimed, a proprietary version of
their software was stolen and a dispute arose with the government. In March
1991, just before Riconosciuto was arrested on illegal drug charges, he
provided a sworn affidavit to Inslaw stating that between 1981 and 1983
he had made modifications to a pirated version of PROMIS. He told Inslaw,
and subsequently Congress and federal investigators, that he did so when
he was director of research for a joint venture between the Cabazon Indians
and the Wackenhut Corp.
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- At the time, there were fewer than two dozen members
of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. John Nichols, who is not an American
Indian, was the administrator of the tribe's business affairs, which included
the joint-venture partnership with Wackenhut, one of the top private security
agencies in the world, run by former FBI and other intelligence specialists.
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- The Indian reservation presented unique opportunities
for secrecy, according to interviews and documents obtained by Insight.
Under broad state and federal exemptions, Indian reservations enjoy status
just short of being sovereign nations and are free to govern within the
confines of the reservation without outside intervention. Wackenhut was
one of the first corporations to take advantage of this special status.
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- Whether the Cabazon/Wackenhut "joint venture"
existed is not in question. What have been dismissed by federal investigators
are Riconosciuto's claims about what went on at the reservation and the
people involved.
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- For example, Riconosciuto has maintained that one of
the projects he was involved in dealt with new munitions he and the Cabazon/Wackenhut
partnership had created, not to mention a nifty new night-vision device.
RCMP officers McDade and Buffam obtained a copy of a 1991 "Special
Operations Report" (SOP) that was written by Gene Gilbert, an investigator
for the district attorney's office in Riverside, Calif. In this report
- a copy of which was given to the House Judiciary Committee in 1991 and
subsequently to the Justice Department in 1993 - Gilbert describes a weapons
demonstration that took place in September 1981 at the Lake Cahuilla Shooting
Range in Indio, Calif. Details of who attended this test nearly 20 years
ago, Riconosciuto claims, should corroborate his assertions about people
he associated with involved in the alleged theft of the PROMIS software
and other activities in which the RCMP officers now are probing.
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- U.S. federal investigators dismissed the report because,
they said, the document was a re-creation of 10-year-old events based on
recollections Gilbert had cobbled together at the request of federal authorities.
The RCMP officers traveled to Riverside in August 2000 to see for themselves.
According to a law-enforcement officer who asked not to be identified,
Gilbert not only verified the information in his 1991 SOP report but allowed
the Mounties to review all the contemporaneous backup in local police-department
files associated with the weapons demonstration and other activities at
the reservation.
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- Insight has obtained some of these crucial 1980s police-intelligence
files which Gilbert used for his 1991 SOP report. And these confirm that
there was a demonstration in 1981 consisting of tests for a new night-vision
device and a firing of special semiautomatic weapons. The records show
it was attended by Riconosciuto and 15 others - including two anticommunist
Nicaraguan freedom fighters identified as Eden Pastora Gomez (code-named
"Commander Zero") and Jose Curdel ("Commander Alpha");
John Vanderworker, a former CIA employee; Wayne Reeder, a wealthy California
developer and investor in the Cabazon Reservation; Peter Zokosky, a board
member of Meridian International Logistics who also was a Cabazon investor
and former owner of Armtec Defense Products Inc.; and John Philip Nichols,
administrator of Cabazon, to name a few.
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- This is not the only story that emerged as the RCMP investigated
Riconosciuto's revelations. For instance, for years he had said he'd worked
for the government, briefing and lecturing military brass and Pentagon
officials. In a January 1992 letter obtained by Insight on Wackenhut stationery,
the company's director of corporate relations, Patrick Cannan, writes that
"John P. Nichols had first introduced Riconosciuto to Wackenhut (Frye,
V.P. of Wackenhut, Indio, Ca., office) on a May 1981 trip to the U.S. Army
installation at Dover, N.J., where Nichols, Zokosky, Frye and Riconosciuto
met with Dr. Harry Fair and several of his Army associates who were the
project engineers on the Railgun Project. Riconosciuto and these Army personnel
conducted an extensive and highly technical 'theoretical' blackboard exercise
on the Railgun and, afterward, Dr. Fair commented that he was extremely
impressed with Riconosciuto's scientific and technical knowledge in this
matter." The letter goes on to state that Dr. Fair considered Riconosciuto
a "potential national resource."
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- The significance of this is that it is consistent with
evidence unearthed by RCMP investigators that Riconosciuto's claims of
technical and scientific expertise and access are not rantings.
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- The RCMP investigators also discovered another link in
a Riconosciuto story that had been dismissed. The permit to hold the arms
demonstration in 1981 at Lake Cahuilla was obtained by Meridian Arms, a
subsidiary of Meridian International Logistics, owned by Robert Booth Nichols,
a self-proclaimed CIA operative and licensed arms dealer (and no relation
to Cabazon administrator John Nichols). Riconosciuto for years was a partner
with Booth Nichols in the Meridian Arms business and, at the time the permits
were approved for the Lake Cahuilla weapons demonstration, Nichols was
unaware that he was being investigated by the FBI for suspected mob-related
money laundering of drug profits and for stock fraud.
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- Booth Nichols also served on the board of First Intercontinental
Development Corp. (FIDCO), a building/construction company. Among Nichols'
corporate partners at FIDCO in the 1980s were Michael McManus, then an
aide to President Reagan; Robert Maheu, former chief executive officer
of Howard Hughes Enterprises; and Clint Murchison Jr. of the Murchison
empire based in Dallas.
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- Riconosciuto long has maintained that Booth Nichols and
FIDCO were associated with U.S. intelligence agencies and used as a cutout.
Again, whereas others summarily had dismissed this claim, the RCMP investigators
pursued the lead, poring over documents from the long-abandoned Riconosciuto
storage and in the files of U.S. law-enforcement agencies. For example,
RCMP obtained FBI wiretap summaries of telephone conversations between
Nichols and another of his then-partners in FIDCO, Eugene Giaquinto, who
at the same time also was president of MCA Home Entertainment Division.
The wiretap summaries reads like a who's who of alleged mob figures with
close ties to the motion-picture industry. The Mounties also received substantial
related information from classified internal FBI files.
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- But, based on Insight's own sources, what the RCMP investigators
were after wasn't just PROMIS but people associated with Riconosciuto and
their business ties in a vast array of enterprises that include intelligence
activities overseas. Somehow, this network was tied in to what the Mounties
were investigating involving security lapses such as those at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory last year that McDade and Buffam knew about - and shared
with Seymour and others - months before the news hit U.S. newspapers. And
it appeared that Riconosciuto and his cronies were in the thick of such
international intrigue - especially Booth Nichols.
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- In response to RCMP requests to help to corroborate Riconosciuto's
claims and connections to Booth Nichols, Seymour provided McDade a January
1992 recording of a telephone conversation between Riconosciuto and an
FBI agent. From this tape McDade heard Riconosciuto claim that Booth Nichols
was connected to a high-ranking Justice Department official. Riconosciuto
also tells the FBI agent that "the bottom line here is Bob [Nichols],
Gilberto Rodriguez, Michael Abbell [who's now an attorney in Washington
but then was with the Criminal Section of the Justice Department], Harold
Okimoto, Jose Londono and Glen Shockley are all in bed together."
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- Riconosciuto also details in the tape-recorded phone
call specific information about an alleged meeting between Booth Nichols
and Abbell. He subsequently provided the FBI agent a handwritten note with
additional information about the alleged Abbell meeting: "Bob [Nichols]
handed him [Abbell] $50,000 cash to handle an internal-affairs investigation
the Department of Justice was having that would lead to extradition of
[brothers] Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez and Jose Londono. Bob said it
was necessary to 'crowbar' the investigation because they were 'intelligence'
people."
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- What is significant, and of interest to the Mounties,
is that Riconosciuto fingered Abbell's ties to the Cali drug cartel three
years before Abbell was indicted in Miami on federal criminal charges that
the former official did work on behalf of the Cali cartel and its leaders.
(Abbell was convicted of money laundering in July 1998 and sentenced to
seven years in prison.) Interestingly enough, once McDade returned to Canada
with tapes of a dozen telephone conversations and his secret investigation
began to leak in the Canadian press (albeit briefly), he mailed to Seymour
a transcript of the Riconosciuto taped conversation with the FBI agent.
Was this a message?
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- The Mounties clearly were interested in Riconosciuto's
partner of nearly 20 years, Booth Nichols. This connection was strange,
according to those interviewed by Insight, because Booth Nichols apparently
had nothing to do with PROMIS and everything to do with other more nefarious
allegations. And the Mounties also were interested in claims Riconosciuto
has made about his participation in a DEA drug-sting operation in Cyprus.
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- In one of the taped interviews Riconosciuto had with
the FBI agent, he says that he was in Lebanon working on "communications
protocol" for FIDCO in the Middle East to rebuild the infrastructure
of two cities in Lebanon. Why the RCMP would be interested in this additional
twist in the intrigue is unknown, but Insight has obtained documents that
support the convicted felon's claims here as well. A June 1983 letter from
Michael McManus Jr., the Reagan assistant who also sat on the FIDCO board,
to George Pender, president of FIDCO, describes the administration's support
for the rebuilding of Lebanon: "Without question FIDCO seems to have
a considerable role to offer, particularly in the massive financial participation
being made available to the government of Lebanon."
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- There also is a July 1983 letter to the president of
Lebanon, Amin Gemayel, from Pender in which FIDCO's desire to participate
in the rebuilding of Lebanon is discussed. What is interesting about this
letter is that Pender advises the Lebanese president that he (Pender) "may
be reached via telex 652483 RBN Assocs. LSA." And whose address is
that? None other than Booth Nichols. The same Nichols who at the time was
a board member of FIDCO and under investigation by the FBI for suspected
drug trafficking, money laundering and connections to the mob - and the
same man who obtained the permits at the Cahuilla gun range for the weapons
demonstration to Nicaraguan Contra leaders and others.
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- The more the Mounties dug, the weirder the connections
got and the more the convicted felon's stories of the bizarre underground
seemed to be borne out. Besides its interest in the RCMP probe and what
it was uncovering, Insight also sought - and confirmed - the details of
many other Riconosciuto accounts of these intrigues.
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- Riconosciuto has said he was involved in that DEA drug-sting
operation in the Middle East while he was working on communications protocol
for FIDCO. What part he played in any alleged sting operation is unknown
but, based on what Riconosciuto told the FBI agent in those taped conversations,
detailed information about a safe house used by the DEA in Cyprus seems
accurate. According to Riconosciuto, the DEA safe house was located in
Nicosia, Cyprus, and operated under the code name of Eurame Trading Ltd.,
which was located on Collumbra Street. "It was an apartment and it
had a ham-radio station. It was ICOM," Riconosciuto said, "a
single side-band amateur radio setup. It [the apartment] was on the top
floor." There is corroboration for these details.
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- Lester Coleman, a former contract employee with the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) who was on loan to the DEA in the late 1980s,
wrote a book in 1993 called Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie,
Inside the DIA. Coleman claims there to have worked out of a safe house
in Cyprus at the same location Riconosciuto described and under the same
name, Eurame Trading Ltd. Coleman also confirmed secret Bekáa Valley
drug shipments and the names of the U.S. agents working undercover in Cyprus
that Riconosciuto had revealed to the FBI in 1992 - a year before it was
outlined in Coleman's book.
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- Insight asked Coleman who would know about such a secret
U.S. government safe house, let alone a cutout company? "I don't know,"
Coleman says, "unless he was there. . I have never met or talked with
[Riconosciuto], so I have no idea whether he was there or not. . But what
he is describing is accurate. No one would know about the ICOM radio unless
they had been there and seen it," Coleman says.
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- Again, like Riconosciuto's comments about Justice Department
attorney Abbell and his connections to the Cali drug cartel, Riconosciuto
knew detailed information well before the public. And he tried to tell
the FBI, among others, but to no avail. The stories then seemed too wild
and woolly to be credible.
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- But they were credible to these RCMP investigators, who
spent considerable time, effort and money to prove or disprove what Riconosciuto
has been saying. So clearly did this key source for their original inquiry
into the alleged theft and misuse of the PROMIS software lead the RCMP
afield that one must wonder why. Is it possible that the Canadian investigators
focused so much interest on these associates and tales by Riconosciuto
to test his credibility about allied espionage matters and PROMIS?
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- No one is talking about what the RCMP probe ultimately
was after or what was taken back to Canada, let alone McDade. However,
according to RCMP spokesman Michelle Gaudet, this investigation is "ongoing
within the national-security perspective."
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- To be continued next week.
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