Suncruz, Michael Hlavsa, Gerova, Galanis

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TAMPA, Fla. - SunCruz Casinos has turned over photographs and other documents to FBI investigators after employees said they recognized some of the men suspected in the terrorist attacks as customers.

Michael Hlavsa, chairman of the gambling cruise company, said Wednesday two or three men linked to the Sept. 11 hijackings may have been customers on a ship that sailed from Madeira Beach on Florida's gulf coast.

The cruise line also is turning over to the FBI video from a Port Canaveral cruise ship of a man that an employee says also resembled one of the suspected terrorists.

The FBI has not confirmed the men's identities and the cruise line is declining to specifically identify the men being investigated. An FBI spokeswoman declined comment.

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NYSE Suspends Trading In Troubled Gerova
February 24, 2011

Gerova Financial Group, Ltd., the troubled Bermuda financial services company, announced today [Feb. 24] that the New York Stock Exchange has elected to halt trading pending the firm’s disclosure of additional information involving its operations, management restructuring and business plans.

Gerova Chief Financial Officer Michael Hlavsa said: “After a discussion with the NYSE, we concur that the best decision was to halt the trading of our securities.

Gerova’s pending merger with British investment bank Seymour Pierce is now in doubt following revelations the firm had ties to both a $53 million Ponzi scheme shut down by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and buccaneering Wall Street financier Jason Galanis – fined and sanctioned in 2007 for accounting fraud involving his work with Penthouse’s pornography websites.

And a detailed report by investment firm Dalrymple Finance LLC concluded Gerova — which redomiciled in Bermuda from Cayman last year – was a “shell game.”

Keith Harris — chief executive of Seymour Pierce – has already postponed his previously announced appointment to serve as chairman and chief executive of Gerova under a merger agreement announced in December. The charismatic Mr. Harris is known as “Mr. Football” in British business circles. Deals he’s brokered include selling Chelsea to Roman Abramovich, Aston Villa to Rander Lerner and recently he was one of the “Red Knights” who attempted to buy Manchester United.

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Jason Galanis is the son of John Peter Galanis, "a notorious criminal" and brother of Derek Galanis, who was sentenced to 11 years for running an ecstasy ring in California in league with the Kosovan-Albanian Mafia and Tommy Gambino, son of convicted drug trafficker Rosario Gambino.

The Gambinos had a close relationship with the Italian banker Michele Sindona. When Sindona got in trouble and was indicted for the bankruptcy of the Franklin National Bank, John Gambino procured a false passport and helped to stage a bogus kidnap in August 1979, to conceal a mysterious 11-week trip to Sicily before his scheduled fraud trial. However, Sindona also had put the Mafia's heroin money at risk, due to his financial malpractice. The real purpose of the kidnapping was to issue sparsely disguised blackmail notes to Sindona's past political allies – among them Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti – to engineer the rescue of his banks and recuperate Cosa Nostra's money. The Gambinos accompanied Sindona's attempt to recover the money, but the plans failed and Sindona was arrested, leading to the indictment of the Inzerillo-Spatola-Gambino network. It remains unclear if any of the Mafia money Sindona had lost was recovered.[10] Rosario met Sindona and John Gambino upon his return at JFK Airport.

Michele Sindona was an Italian banker and convicted felon. Known in banking circles as "The Shark", Sindona was a member of Propaganda Due, a secret lodge of Italian Freemasonry.

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Marshall Manley was briefly CEO, Chairman of Gerova.

'Finley, Kumble, Wagner, Underberg, Manley, Myerson & Casey' was a notorious legal firm Manley was part of.

He also worked for 'Manatt, Phelps & Phillips,' founded by Charles Taylor Manatt, who later became chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Steven J. Kumble described Marshall Manley as "like a Mob godfather."

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The former CEO of Red Hat, a Raleigh-based software firm, claims his family's financial adviser blew more than $55 million in a series of questionable and now worthless ventures, including loans to "persons involved in illicit or potentially illegal activities".

In his federal complaint, Matthew Szulik says he wanted to put his family's money in a conservative portfolio of blue-chip stocks and bonds, so he turned to James S. Tagliaferri, a longtime family friend whom the Szulik children called "Uncle Jim."
But Szulik says that Tagliaferri and co-defendant Patricia Cornell, owners and operators of TAG Virgin Islands fka Taurus Advisory Group, used his family's money for their own benefit and took millions in kickbacks along the way.

Among the losses, according to the complaint, were: $3.8 million to Paseo de la Reforma Partners, a Mexico City business, secured by a deed of trust on a property that hosts "a so-called gentlemen's club" called Bleu Club, owned by or associated with Penthouse Media Group, the porn empire.

Tagliaferri founded Taurus Advisory Group in Connecticut in 1996, and was later a major backer of Big Brown, the thoroughbred who in 2008 won the first two legs of the Triple Crown: the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes.

Tagliaferri sat on the board of Gerova.

[Admin]

By Michael C. Ruppert - The Democrats' Dynamic Duo

Tony Coelho, Al Gore's Campaign Chairman and Charles Manatt go way back. The Atlantic Monthly in an October 1986 story by Gregg Easterbrook, described the dark days after the 1980 Reagan landslide when the Republicans had all the money and the Democratic Party could seemingly raise none. Two new stars arose to resurrect the party and make it financially competitive again.

"The Democratic camp stood in even worse disorder than usual, with a little known Los Angeles lawyer, Charles Manatt, taking over the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the utterly anonymous Tony Coelho, a thirty-nine year-old California congressman with no organizational experience, assuming leadership of the related Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which is charged with raising money for democratic congressmen. Twenty-five more seats in 1982 would have given the Republicans the House, and with it, full control over federal decision making. The conventional wisdom held that the Democratic Party would not get out of the Reagan revolution alive."

But get out alive it did. It was not without incurring the wrath of some of the Democratic old guard that Coelho and Manatt resurrected party finances. But, according to the article, "Coelho tripled the take from DCCC fund raising, from $2 million to $6 million, in his first two years."

"Another businesslike decision Coelho made early on was to invest a portion of the DCCC's rapidly increasing income. Previously, the money had immediately gone out to finance campaigns or to retire old debts; some of these venerable obligations date to the days of the Humphrey-Nixon race. Coelho set aside about $3.5 million of the first $6 million he raised to finance a media center and a direct-mail operation; at the DNC, Charles Manatt was doing much the same."

Manatt was a skilled attorney. He was also a banker. In 1965 had founded the Los Angeles law firm of Manatt and Phelps that was eventually to become one of the largest and most powerful Democratic law firms in the country. Manatt would mentor and stay close to leading California Democratic political figures like Maxine Waters, Gray Davis and Tom Bradley. Powerful behind the scenes, Manatt also became a deal maker and big time money man. Surprisingly however, Charles Manatt has also been linked to shady deals that connected to legendary drug smuggler Barry Seal and covert CIA operations of the Contra era.

Recently, From The Wilderness Contributing Editor Daniel Hopsicker finished writing an as yet unpublished biography of CIA pilot/operative and legendary drug smuggler Barry Seal. While co-writing the October 1999 From The Wilderness story entitled "Why Does George W Bush Fly In Drug Smuggler Barry Seal's Airplane?", Hopsicker discovered that a Beechcraft King Airplane 200, tail number N6308F, was directly connected to a CIA "front" company through a series of fraudulent financial transactions.

That particular airplane had been leased to Barry Seal by real estate mega-developer Eugene Glick. To his surprise, while going through boxes of Seal's personal records, Hopsicker also came across documentary evidence, in Seal's own handwriting, that Glick's attorney at the time (1982) was none other than Charles Manatt. From The Wilderness has called the offices of Manatt and Phelps several times and inquired if their records confirm Manatt's representation of Glick. As of press time the firm has not responded.

Could Manatt and Coelho have been solving some of the Democratic Party's financial problems with drug money? Bill Clinton was certainly doing that in Arkansas.

Major Democratic Party figures doing business with drug traffickers and intelligence agencies is not as surprising as it might sound. Hopsicker also interviewed Iran-Contra insiders who told him that Democratic powerhouse attorney Richard Ben Veniste had - also in 1982 - incorporated a company named Trinity Oil for Barry Seal as a vehicle to launder Seal's enormous cocaine cash flow. Clearly, by 1982 the Democratic Party had learned from watching the old US espionage veterans from the OSS and CIA who had acquired decades of drug dealing experience in Corsica, France, Vietnam, Laos, Korea, Thailand and Taiwan. They had used the drug trade to finance elections, form political cadres, buy institutions and they had used that experience to elect Ronald Reagan.

The Democrats were now back in the game as tons of CIA-protected cocaine began to flow through Mena Arkansas and much of the money flowed through Arkansas banks, state agencies and law firms. The key was placing yourself to be in control of the right strategic locations ahead of time. In the 1980s Arkansas, Louisiana and California were the places to be if you were a Democrat.

Manatt has other interesting bona fides. According to US FDIC records, and his own published biography, Charles Manatt founded and served as Chairman of First Los Angeles Bank in 1973. The bank got into serious trouble in 1989 and was later criticized for mismanagement by the government and the courts before being finally sold in 1995. This was at the same time that Tony Coelho's questionable association with junk bond king and L.A. resident, Michael Milken forced him to resign abruptly from Congress.

Manatt's law firm, including as a partner future Clinton crony Mickey Kantor, also represented the Bank of Credit and Commerce International's [BCCI's'] insider and number two man, Swaleh Naqvi. BCCI bank's well documented connections to drug money laundering and the CIA suggest other possible intelligence connections for Manatt. Internal BCCI bank documents are said to show that the bank used the Manatt firm to lobby the National Security Council in 1992 in an attempt to close down the investigations of New York DA Robert Morgenthau into BCCI operations.

It is also revealing that Manatt, Phelps and Kantor, (later to become Manatt, Phelps and Phillips) also represented Mochtar Riady's Lippo Group and the Worthen Bank of Arkansas, which was then owned by Jackson Stephens (Jimmy Carter's roommate at Annapolis). Both the Lippo Group and the now defunct Worthen Bank turn up like a carpet weave throughout Bill Clinton's history, the history of Mena Arkansas, Democratic Party fundraising and the story of BCCI. We also noticed that. Conveniently, Charles Manatt also sits on the Board of Federal Express.

It seems that Charles Manatt also served as a Director of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). The CIA subsidized NDI organization, counted among its directors, Manatt, Walter Mondale and Edmund Muskie according to records in the National Endowment for Democracy. The NDI's ostensible purpose was to help facilitate elections in such CIA areas of operation as Northern Ireland, Taiwan, South Korea, Nicaragua, Panama and Chile.

It is not surprising then that Tony Coelho, who left Congress in 1989 under a storm front of allegations regarding his financial practices, in the middle of his sixth term as a Representative from California, is the Chairman of Al Gore's Presidential Campaign. He is the rainmaker. On him, and the money he can raise, ride the hopes of the emerging dominant faction in American politics.

But recently, Tony Coelho has fallen under investigation from the State Department regarding his alleged misuse of government funds while serving as the U.S. Commissioner General at Expo 98 in Portugal. A very detailed March 23, 2000 article by Bill Hogan in The National Journal, describes Coelho's expensive tastes and questionable business practices. Not only did Coelho rent a lavish beachfront apartment, he used U.S. government staff for his personal business, sought donations of airline tickets from various political cronies and then used his position at the trade Expo to solicit investments for his private ventures including a now defunct Internet Mortgage Loan Brokerage venture called LoanNet.

It is also not surprising then that, "Coelho invited Manatt and Democratic party power attorney, Coelho associate and fund raiser William Cable and their spouses to Portugal Coelho's government-paid Portuguese chauffeur, Samuel Silva, picked up the Manatts and the Cables at the Lisbon airport. The two couples stayed gratis for at least part of their trips in Coelho's $18,000-a-month luxury apartment, which had been restocked at his direction with Johnnie Walker whisky, Bacardi rum, vodka, gin, and other bar essentials - all purchased on government accounts." According to The National Journal, Manatt and Cable both invested $200,000 apiece in Coelho's soon to fail LoanNet.