As part of the application process, Brown had written an essay: Marxist Influence in Central America. "The apparent reason was that the prosecution might have revealed national security information, even though all of the crimes which were the focus of the investigation occurred before Seal became a federal informant.". At a press conference in October 1994, for instance, he was asked a rambling question about the remote air strip, and gave an equally rambling answer. Connor Hagan, a spokesman for the FBI in Little Rock, said the release of so much information into the FBI's public "vault" doesn't mean that the documents haven't previously been made public. Later Brown would come to know them as kickers. Three Colombians eventually were arrested and convicted of the murder. By providing your phone number, you are consenting to receive calls and recurring SMS/MMS messages, including autodialed and automated calls and texts, to that number from the Judicial Watch. What is certain is that Barry Seal did work for Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas as a drug smuggler for the Medelln Cartel and single-handedly had one of the largest impacts on the cocaine epidemic in the U.S. in the early 1980s. One mission involved a C-123K cargo plane that was outfitted at the Mena airport. Doug Liman had previously modeled Chris Cooper's villain in The Bourne Identity after North, which reveals Liman's feelings about the controversial figure North. A Baton Rouge, Louisiana native, Barry Seal was eventually forced to move his drug smuggling operation after he drew the attention of Louisiana authorities. "We're talking about one of the largest drug smugglers in America, and these agents loved him." No. var sc_project=5585388; After it left Mena, the plane made a refueling stop Nobody got off, Brown says and then resumed flight. Ochoa was arrested in Spain on a U.S. warrant, but due to pressure from the cartel was never extradited to the U.S. -Court Documents (STATE of Louisiana v. Miguel VELEZ, Bernardo Vasquez, and Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz), Yes. Seal, a government informant, was murdered outside a halfway house on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge. "I can state absolutely that Oliver North had nothing to do with my story as far as I knew, or as far as I know today," said Jacoby. Trooper Bobby Walker has told me that sometime in the mid-1980s he was at Mena with Clinton. Yes. People in Mena say the drugs never got there, that the drugs were jettisoned over drop zones in the Louisiana swamps before Seal's planes made it back to Mena. Rayburn House Office Building, Chairman James Leach (R-IA), Committee on Banking and Financial Services, and staffer . The mysterious events surrounding Mena Airfield in remote western Arkansas during the gubernatorial reign of Bill Clinton have teased the popular imagination for more than three decades. View Alex Mena results in Phoenix, AZ including current phone number, address, relatives, background check report, and property record with Whitepages. Yet, it's also certainly possible that Seal had no involvement with the CIA in the early 1980s at all, given there is nothing to support the claim but rumors. Lisa Seal Frigon, Barry's daughter from his first marriage, sued Universal, claiming that the studio should have purchased Barry's life rights from her, not his third wife Deborah who they paid $350,000. Three early drafts of the essay contain interpolations in Clintons handwriting. He spent his spare time hanging around the old Downtown Airport, now Independence Park, working odd jobs in exchange for flight time. Other photos like the one below show Federico Vaughan (center, striped shirt), a man that Seal claimed was a top aide of Tomas Borge, the Sandinista Minister of the Interior. Current Address: ZGFJ N 18th St, Phoenix, AZ. The poster for the movie "American Made," to be released Friday, Sept. 29, shows a grinning, cocky Tom. He was not only Gov. The gunman hurried into a waiting Buick, which sped away. Walker said a huge dark-green military plane was parked there, and that when he expressed surprise at seeing a military plane at Mena, Clinton said it was not military; it served another purpose. CIA and DEA activities flowed out of Mena in the Clinton years. In 1986, he was convicted of drug distribution, and lost his state securities license. While there, he had a chance meeting with Jorge Ochoa's New Orleans business manager. The name of another person under investigation was redacted. They shared an interest in books, ideas, and night life. As stated in the previous question, there is no strong evidence to confirm that Barry Seal was working with the CIA prior to becoming an informant after his arrest in 1983. "In other words, the charges of drug smuggling and money laundering were not enough to warrant the release of information about the use of the airport in the Iran-Contra Affair," wrote Sherwood for the Arkansas encyclopedia. "Prior to his death, Seal admitted to smuggling large quantities of cocaine from South America (Columbia) to United States and testified before Senate investigative committee," according to the FBI memo, which referred to a telephone call between agents in Little Rock and Miami. Mena is the small town in Arkansas where Barry Seal, who was born in Baton Rouge, conducted operations. Then both men got into the front set of the car, and Seal reached into the duffel bag, and pulled out a manila envelope with $2,500 in it. Owing to a case that Brown was then working on that could have implicated Tucker, Brown believes the demotion was illegal. The Sandinistas overthrew Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, ending 46 years of dictatorship by the Somoza family. He was shot to death by two machinegun-wielding men while behind the wheel of his Cadillac in the . Eight months later, Seals C-123 was shot down over Nicaragua with a load of ammunition and supplies for the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels. Miguel Velez was the man driving the getaway car. Seal became a federal informant in March 1984. The respected Arkansas journalist Mara Leveritt recently outlined what appears to be a continuing effort to cover up the Mena affair. He is married to Lucy (Sarah Wright) and has two children with her, with a third on the way. -Daily Mail Online, The movie proposes that Barry Seal's first foray into smuggling drugs happened in 1980 after he was kidnapped while refueling his plane in Colombia. He relocated to a small regional airport in Mena, Arkansas, which had a population of only 5,000. Barry Seal's smuggling operation began in Louisiana, and like in the American Made movie, he sometimes pushed packed duffel bags full of drugs out of his plane and into the Atchafalaya basin, to be collected by associates on the ground. FBI agents in Miami wanted to know what Seal might have told people at Rich Mountain Aviation regarding his smuggling activities, according to the document. Two years later, he would be shot dead in Louisiana. Gov. He decided to talk about Mena. Jacoby mentioned Seal's mission as evidence, which effectively outed Seal as a government agent. Fact-checking American Made immediately revealed that Tom Cruise looks nothing like the real Barry Seal, who weighed around 280lbs and was nicknamed "El Gordo" (The Fat Man) by his bosses. He carries it around and begins spending it, which attracts the attention of the local authorities. The Louisiana attorney general would tell the Justice Department that Seal had "smuggled between $3 billion and $5 billion in drugs into the U.S." AboutPressCopyrightContact. It is believed that the Colombians put a hit out on Barry after they learned he was going to help the feds with the extradition of Jorge Ochoa from Spain, one of the heads of the Medelln Cartel. Brown says he never saw the bags again. His character is inspired by the stories we learned about Barry." (NWA Media). In the 1980s, the Mena airport was the reported base of a drug-smuggling, money-laundering and arms-smuggling ring run by Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal, according to an Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry on the airport. But when he asked his brother, Whos pushing this his brother, Dwayne Brown says, nodded over towards the Governors Mansion. From then on, until he left Clintons security detail in June, Dwayne Brown says, his brother was at a high level of despair. He says he had feared he might be suicidal. Seal's mysterious activities have spawned books, movies and a cornucopia of conspiracy theories. An interesting fact we learned while researching the true story was that while training for the Civil Air Patrol in Baton Rouge, Barry Seal met President John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Yes. Bill Duncan, an IRS investigator, told me that he had numerous reports of automatic weapons fire, men of Latin American appearance in the area, people in camouflage moving quietly through streams with automatic weapons, aircraft drops, twin-engine airplane traffic. Duncan, along with Arkansas State Police investigator Russell Welch, started digging into Seal and the Mena connection, suspecting a drug smuggling and money laundering operation. Evidence emerged suggesting that the CIA was operating in the area in the early 1980s; that a major cocaine and gun smuggler was based at the airfield; and that the U.S. military was somehow involved. An entry in Browns daybook indicates that the flight with Seal took place on October 23, 1984. In the American Made movie, Barry Seal's boredom with piloting commercial flights leads him to perform stunts that cause the oxygen masks to fall and frighten passengers. In its review of the 2017 movie "American Made" -- about Seal -- the New York Times called it the Conspiratorial Industrial Complex. "It's my understanding that no drugs ever came to the airport," said Fred Ogden, the current airport manager. In the 1980s, the Mena airport was the reported base of a drug-smuggling, money-laundering and arms-smuggling ring run by Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal, according to an Encyclopedia of Arkansas entry on the airport. Even before he graduated from Baton Rouge High School in 1957, Seal had already earned his private pilot's wings. During the past few years, the activity at the airstrip has aroused the interest of local law enforcement, who then attempted to conduct some investigations but were blocked by the U.S. How could that be? But of the charges levelled at Brown by the White House, the most unintentionally revealing was that Brown had flunked a CIA examination in the mid-1980s. When ABC News interviewed Brown in the fall of 1994, the White House tried to malign him. The real Barry Seal never had a brother-in-law who was killed by a car bomb. Then, he started the engines, and Brown remembers, ThisI mean just thunderous noise. Flight with Seal took place on October 23, 1984 exchange for flight time ThisI mean just thunderous.... Sandinistas overthrew Nicaraguan President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979, ending 46 years of dictatorship the... Mena affair the local authorities the airport, '' said Fred Ogden, the plane made a refueling stop got... 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