Planes, Stocks, and the Decentered Velocity of American Power
Another book review
I’ve been reading Gangster Planet, the last book by the late, great maverick journalist Daniel Hopsicker. I was gifted the book by Linda Minor—a stellar researcher with a long history in the analysis of political and economic subterfuge and a fellow chronicler of the Empire Trust Company. Linda’s specialty is complex genealogy, corporate histories and the mapping of land ownership, which led her to act as a research partner and co-author for Hopsicker. We get a taste of her approach early on in the book:
When Linda Minor and I were first doing research together back in the early 2000s or so”, writes Hopsicker, “she was deep into studying Texas railroads. She once said something totally off the wall like ‘it all goes back to the Texas Railroad Commission”.
Even today, when she tells me she has the answer to the question we’re researching, I tell her I already know: it goes back to the Texas Railroad Commission.
I read through the bulk of Gangster Planet in a single day. I was trapped in the Dallas Fort Worth airport—severe weather had led to the closure of every departure and arrival path for the planes except for one. We were shuffled terminal to terminal, gate to gate, waiting for the LaGuardia-bound flight that seemed incapable of arriving. Tempers were flaring, a group of Wall Street interns freshly graduated from college were in near-tears about missing work. At one point a suited man took to the intercom and gave a rousing speech: it’s our destiny to make it onto this flight… We will make it to New York sometime today. Don’t worry, it’s still quicker than driving. I later learned that this man was our pilot. It was neither inspiring nor encouraging.
A day spent first sitting in the airport, then spent sitting on the tarmac in the infinite aircraft taxi position, was the ideal setting to reading Hopsicker (and Minor). His focus has always been on airplanes: Gangster Planet is the last plank of a trilogy that began with Barry and the Boys and continued with Welcome to Terrorland. Barry is probably the best book written on Barry Seal, the CIA-connected pilot who ferried massive amounts of marijuana and cocaine into the United States—until he was cut down in a spray of cartel-fired bullets in Baton Rouge in 1986. After gaining access to a trove of Seal’s personal papers, Hopsicker was able to trace a labyrinth of government-sanctioned and sponsored drug traffickers, a tentacular web moving from Colombia through Mexico to Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Florida. It’s the other side of Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance.
Terrorland continues the analysis of these drug networks, particularly their Gulf Coast-based arms, but with a suprising through-line: Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 hijackers, who trained at a flight school in Venice, Florida. What Hopsicker found was that the owner of the flight school and some of their pilots were, in fact, connected to the early networks around Barry Seal. It was all an ongoing operation: a plane connected to the flight school was busted for smuggling cocaine, right in the same time window when Atta and his cohorts were traipsing around Florida. And yet these critical details, like so many others when it came to the events of September 2001, appear nowhere in the government’s squeaky-clean narrative.
The trail resumes in Gangster Planet. The pivotal event here took place on Monday, April 10th of 2006, when a DC-9 airliner, tail number N900SA, was seized by Mexican authorities at a small airstrip in the coastal town of Ciudad del Carmen. Onboard the DC-9 was an astonishing 5.5 tons of cocaine. The plane had previously departed from Venezuela (an intriguing locale, given the geopolitical climate of ‘06), but it had originated in Florida. The company that owned the plane operated from the same aircraft hangers as Huffman Aviation—the flight school where Mohammed Atta had trained.
Hopsicker then begins to weave a complex trail of ownership structures, company mergers and acquisitions, dummy fronts and dead ends, stock swaps and byzantine financing mechanisms. It’s almost impossible to follow the torrent of names, numbers, dates, and digressions. The DC-9 was owned by a Royal Sons Inc. (that’s the one that shares the hanger with Huffman Aviation). This company began its life as a Florida-based seller of rugs and cleaning products. When it purchased the DC-9, it hadn’t done so alone: it partnered with another firm called Skyways Communications. The mother of Brent Kovar, Skyways’ founder, had taught speedreading at the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California during the height of the Cold War.
The trail splinters, fractures, goes haywire at this point. Kovar had landed far from JPL: he was a penny stock-conman who peddled advanced technologies to the Department of Defense—anti-IED devices and satellite communication platforms—as part of the War on Terror contracting bonanza. The privatization of warfare had opened the floodgates to every snake-oil salesman in the country and he toted military telecommunications with a messianic fervor.
String and corkboard: Skyway used the services of a Miami attorney named Michael Farkas; Farkas also did work for Adnan Khashoggi, the man who once boasted the title of being the world’s wealthiest arms dealer (his rolodex contained the contact information for effectively every intelligence agency on the planet). Barry Seal’s old defense attorney was wrapped up in this somehow too, as was a Lichtenstein bank connected to Stratton Oakmont. The latter was the fake New York brokerage house run by Jordan Belfort, who some might recognize as the protagonist-antagonist of the Wolf of Wall Street. I’m not exactly sure how this all hangs together but there’s clearly something there.
One of the most fascinating digressions that Gangster Planet offers comes through an analysis of Skyways’ largest creditor (and thus, one assumes, one of the sources of the funds through which Skyways and Royal Sons purchased the DC-9). This was Argyll Equities, founded by one Douglas Arthur McClain Sr. McClain was a follower—and apparent moneyman—for Sam Fife, the head of an apocalyptic Pentecostal cult known as ‘The Move’. Hopsicker doesn’t go deep into Fife’s belief systems too much, but it suffices to say that the preacher’s teachings were about spiritual warfare. The world for Fife was stalked by demons; exorcisms were commonplace and often featured beatings and lashings of the so-called possessed. During the 1970s the cult built compounds, little communities to prepare for the coming doomsday, across the United States and with outposts in Canada and South America. The Move, curiously enough, boasted its own fleet of airplanes.
The trail running in the other direction: other money for the DC-9 flowed from something called the Du Pont Investment Fund, based in Costa Rica. Is this really the money of the storied American dynasty, as its name might imply? It’s hard to say. It isn’t uncommon for questionable financial outfits—especially those linked to intelligence activities—to name themselves after more venerable institutions. One example was how, during the 1980s and 1990s, a surprising number of phony stock brokerages with variation on the name ‘Lehman’ flashed into existence. Almost all of these had no connection to Lehman Brothers (aside from a small handful that had intriguing and inexplicable ties to the financial services firm).
We also can’t discount it: if the intrepid reader wishes to follow-up for themselves, they will find that the Du Pont family has long been involved in both aviation and the CIA. A sample of companies that they were involved with: Atlantic Aviation (which employed CIA assets like James R. Bath, an insider of the Bush family) and Summit Aviation (which lent its planes to CIA operations against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua, and which recruited drug pilots for those very same operations).
Drug planes, bogus defense contracts, penny stock frauds, flim-flam private equity outfits, Armageddon cults, strange names that may or may not point towards vast familial fortunes. These are the operational backends of the American Empire, where hard power dissolves into its hidden substrate—the pure euphoria of networks themselves. That’s the funny thing about power: it doesn’t reside in a central location, position, institution, or individual. It is diffuse and ephemeral, slippery and vague. You can’t grasp it1. You can’t even know if it is there. Perhaps it isn’t.
This is doubly true for America, as the perfection of network power. Hopsicker’s book isn’t so much about American intelligence services, American criminality and sun-baked intrigue. It’s about the mutation of localized circuits into transnational systems of criminal activity (today, states—the very institutions of law—are paradoxically themselves the greatest criminals). But this is still deeply, deeply American. Last week, I spoke to a man who offered the following insight: America looks like it is changing, but it really doesn’t. What America does change is Europe and the rest of the world.
On the one hand, I agree with him but on the other I don’t. The thing about America, and the uniqueness of American power, is that it is always changing and circulating, always working down upon itself—America is “like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point”. Ceaseless mutability as the greatest strength and greatest danger, and it’s the nation’s largest and most unspoken export. Maybe it begins with the Texas Railroad Commission, but it all ends in vapor.
This is why, despite my admiration for his work, I’m uncomfortable with Jameson’s dismissal of conspiracy theory. It’s a typical left-liberal knee-jerk response, albeit one draped in the trappings of continental theory: conspiracy theory, he suggests, is a malformed and malfunctioning act of cognitive mapping. Jameson acknowledges that the complexity of the world system is so immense, so interlocking, so absolute at the macrological and molecular levels, that it exceeds the cognitive abilities we use to make sense of the word, orient ourselves within it. When one ‘falls’ into the abyss of conspiracy theorizing, one is short-circuiting; they collapse from the inhuman totality into the machinations of sets of a malevolent series of actors and groups.
Elsewhere Jameson suggests that, while true cognitive mapping of the world eludes us, we can gain a sort of mediating foothold through the use of allegory. This is an aesthetic mechanism through which we might approach, understand and articulate the things that infinitely exceed us. My question is this: is conspiracy not precisely this sort of allegorical operation?