- Joined
- Apr 30, 2017
Have we found a marriage date for Mary Beth and Mike? I think if she came in the last few years you can't really blame her for Bella beyond negligence, the damage was probably already done.
Dr. Mary Beth Wilkas Janke PsyD - Stepmother of Isabella, former secret service special agent, security consultant, psychologist, professor, author
- Thread starter Greasy Spoon
- Start date
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- Feb 24, 2019
This woman was well known in certain circles her relationship with that therapist was really fucked up but I do not wanan derail the thread with it.
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- Oct 18, 2016
My god, she glows brighter than Mr. Burns in the X-Files crossover episode, holy shit.
I do pity her to a degree, I feel there's a good chance she barely knows Portobella Jenkem outside what glowhubby tells her.
I do pity her to a degree, I feel there's a good chance she barely knows Portobella Jenkem outside what glowhubby tells her.
Don't hate the poor fuck for doing the job on the quick and cheap, blame the client for hiring the cheapest option possible.
Triplethreat
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2019
This is quite interesting point - you so have to do the hours to get licensed, so I wonder if she actually did them. I checked California, Mew Mexico, Maryland, Virginia licensing boards - nothing. I do see that she had a security guard license in CA a few years ago. I’m now curious if she ever got licensed. Some people like the idea of the degree but suck at the actual work in the room.
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2017
I want to add I found the answer to my question in another thread, having missed it in the megathread (but that's why we have a subforum).
According to the below, Mary and Mike got married when Bella was six. (So circa 2008/9) However they only had partial custody (weekends and summers) until 2017 when there was an emergency custody order and Mike received full.
Give me a minute to revisit the post to try to get a clearer custody timeline. Because I'm on mobile.
Edit:
2001 Bella the Shroom is born. (8/18/01 to be exact per @greasyspoon)
2002/3 Mike and Athena divorce. (Incorrect, see: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/dr-mary-beth-wilkas-janke-psyd.97711/post-9741270)
2004/5 Mike and Mary start dating and get engaged. Bella is around 4/5/6. Mike was apparently still married to Athena while having full custody of Bella which is another little wrinkle.
2005/6 Mike and Athena divorce and partial custody begins. Mike gets his precious mushroom weekends and summers, Athena otherwise.
2006/7 Mike and Mary "merge lives on the East coast". Bella is around six years old.
2006/7 - 2017 As far as we know Mike and Athena kept to the prior custody agreement.
In 2017 there's an emergency custody order where Mike again gets sole custody. It's something to do with school attendance?
So from 2017 - 2019/20 Mike is sole custody.
These dates are approximate because we still don't know everything for sure and a lot is piecemeal conjecture from various sources.
https://kiwifarms.net/threads/isabe...e-of-extremely-sick-people.96787/post-9638710
Last edited:
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2021
Nice work Cripple, thanks. Bella's birthdate is 08/18/2001.
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- Mar 30, 2021
Shell be having a great birthday this year!
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- May 25, 2020
Her daughter should be grounds enough to strip her from the psychology license
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- May 21, 2020
Bobbing for hamsters? No likes or comments on any of her shit. The whole family is in lockdown/ damage control mode.
Mike and Athena officially divorced in 2006.
This is total conjecture, but combined with the statement from Mary that Mike had custody for the first five years, I think Athena dumped the baby on him and took off. Mike finally tracked Athena down for a divorce when he was ready to marry again.
I suspect at that point was when they hashed out the official custody agreement. Maybe Athena felt guilty for missing the toddler years, or maybe the state did the whole "biomoms are best caregivers" crap. Either way, she ended up with shared custody.
This observation probably belongs more in the Athena thread, but I get hints of narcissism from her. She's over 60, but all her social media still has young-looking photos. Either she's had a lot of work done or she wants to project her "glory days" on her public profiles. No doubt a lot of that rubbed off on Bella.
/armchair psychology
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2017
Thanks for the additional info and you're probably right. It's hard to get an exact beat on this stuff as we now have it spread across four threads (mega, Mike, Mary and Athena) but I think having a rough childhood timeline may help clarify some things. I'll update the above timeline.
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2021
Thanks for the information above, I have updated the information in the Summary thread to reflect the divorce date.
The timeline is very helpful for context. I'd missed the discussion from Mary's video until you posted it here.
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- Aug 13, 2020
totallyrandomusername
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2021
This is a perfect example of being "too honest". Yes, I believe it is indeed possible to be "too honest". I have no doubt many will disagree with me. If it comes down to "brass tacks" and there is literally no way for someone to verify if something is true or not, you don't say a goddamn thing. She fucked herself, twice, over something that was never an issue. She didn't do anything illegal in Spain, so there was no record of what she did, other than her recall of the events in questions. There was literally no way for them to know what she disclosed, other than her disclosure of it. It would be completely impossible to verify since there is no 3rd party source.
I know many people will hem and haw about whether it is "ethical" or "moral", but for something that can literally fuck you entire life, when one did nothing wrong, and there is no external verifiable source, why would anyone willingly disclose said information? Just to be an "ethical" and "moral" person? If so, I hope that keeps you warm at night when you remember that it screwed your entire life.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2021
I agree with your sentiment, especially if enough time passed she would guarantee to piss clean. However, the thing she'd be nervous about is failing the polygraph, which is by design intended to intimidate recruits into confessing things up front they would (and should) otherwise keep secret. It's a psychological tool as much as a pseudoscientific one.
Info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#Security_clearances
totallyrandomusername
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2021
Polygraph is fantastically easy to manipulate. There are multiple ways, you can ever combine them. One trick is to create a high baseline. So, during the actual difficult questions, even if you lie, your physiological responses will still be at or below the baseline. Another is pharmacological. You could easily use low dose beta and alpha blockers to suppress HR and BP response, anticholinergic to suppress sweating. Take a non-conventional calming agent, like valerian root, which has benzodiazepine-like properties, without being an actual benzo, so you will be calm, and it will also dull memory slightly, so recall is less intense, also limiting physiological response.
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2020
- Joined
- Aug 5, 2019
I'm going to say this again.
Mary Beth got into psychology for similar reasons to why Bella started messing with CWC and doing the things that she does.
They both like to influence people.
They both like having control.
They both wish to make a name for themselves that people won't easily forget.
And there are more parallels.
Mary Beth got into psychology for similar reasons to why Bella started messing with CWC and doing the things that she does.
They both like to influence people.
They both like having control.
They both wish to make a name for themselves that people won't easily forget.
And there are more parallels.
- Joined
- Sep 16, 2017
That Hunter Services Group that Mary Beth works with is rather interesting. This is long, so I’m spoiling all of it.
Two main things to point out before we go further in depth: 1) Mary Beth worked on a security needs assessment for former President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia (more on him later) and other programs for his administration 2) 4 of the 10 main employees listed on the website worked for the US Embassy in Colombia at some point. They are all “former” spooks of one variety or another, and include retired Rear Admiral Ed Winters, who was in charge of SEAL Team 6 (aka DEVGRU) during the Bin Laden operation.
So Mike is not the only Janke with a significant SEAL Team 6 connection. Also, Mike has extensive Latin American drug war experience, and I think it is possible that he met Mary Beth through the Drug War at some point. Hunter Services provides “executive protection”, mostly for VIPs in Latin America and has an office in Bogota. I think we may have been mistaken in assuming that her main job currently is just “university lecturer”. I think her Hunter job likely takes up much more of her time.
What they claim to do:
“HUNTER is an elite private security and consulting firm. We are the discreet go-to source for corporations in response to an increasingly complicated global environment that grows more vulnerable by the day due to:
Cyberattacks
Hostile Competitors
Organized Criminal Activity
Terrorism
Aggressive Acts”
From Mary Beth’s Hunter bio:
“At the request of the U.S. Department of State, she worked for two and a half years as one of three U.S. Security Advisors under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia. She was responsible for executive protection assessment, threat analysis, and the provision of intelligence specific to the needs of the President, Vice President, and Minister of Defense of Colombia and the Mayor of Bogotá.At the request of the Vice President, Mary Beth created an executive protection training academy outside of Bogotá where she also served as an instructor, training members of the security teams of the President, Vice President, Minister of Defense, and Mayor of Bogotá. The academy has been a huge success and is used as a regional training center for several countries in Central and South America.
… Hunter is a leader in executive protection (EP) services both internationally and domestically. We operate in all types of environments around the world and are capable of providing these services in a “low profile” manner or a more robust, higher profile EP service operation. Our experience includes EP service from war zones to more traditional service."
Hunter is also a partner with a specific boat company.
"In collaboration with Eduardono Boats we provide police, military, commercial, and recreational boats worldwide. In addition, Eduardono is the authorized dealer for Yamaha motors in Colombia.”
Eduardono boats are not merely popular with the police and military, but are quite the item among the smuggling cartels.
https://www.soundingsonline.com/news/c-g-takes-aim-at-drug-smugglers
“On Oct. 8 a Navy P-3 patrol aircraft working for Homeland Security spotted a blue 40-foot high-performance boat with triple outboards speeding across the Colombian Basin with four crewmembers aboard. The boat, an Eduardono built in Medellin, Colombia, is the one that Colombian smugglers prefer for offshore operations, says Coast Guard spokeswoman Petty Officer Anastasia Burns. Eduardonos center consoles are popular in Latin America as work and pleasure boats, but smugglers also like them. The United States recently gave Panama four refurbished Eduardonos for use in drug patrols after seizing them in anti-drug operations. “
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/nearly-two-tonnes-of-powder-believed-to-be-cocaine-seized/
“Federal forces arrested an Ecuadorian citizen and seized nearly two tonnes of what appeared to be cocaine in southern Guerrero yesterday. An armed forces aircraft first spotted a small vessel with a suspicious cargo about 160 kilometers southeast of Acapulco. The Eduardoño-made boat with two big outboard motors was forced to the shore by four navy vessels and three aircraft. At least nine people jumped off and fled when the boat hit the beach at Punta Maldonado in the municipality of Cuajinicuilapa but only one was arrested.”
TLDR: The Executive Protection company Mary Beth works for is also a partner with a boat company whose product is popular with both the cops AND coke smugglers. I’ll give Hunter the benefit of the doubt that they may just be part of a sting and that they are doing something like hiding GPS units on boats they suspect are being part of a cartel operation. I’m generous like that! Also, keep in mind, that just because someone is listed as part of Hunter does not mean they are involved deeply in anything nefarious. People like this put their names on all kinds of advisory boards as they lend credibility to an org in exchange for cash and a title, though they have little involvement with the company. This is how Elizabeth Holmes operated at Theranos. However, Mary Beth is "Director of Special Projects", which sounds pretty "hands-on".
And, yet… that “consultant to Alvaro Uribe” item I mentioned from Mary Beth’s bio makes me wonder if I am being too generous? Having Alvaro Uribe on your resume as a highlight as late as 2021 is a hell of a statement. Hell, who knows, maybe Mary Beth is part of an op to finally bring Uribe to justice? You go, girl!
Who is Alvaro Uribe?
www.latimes.com
‘By Associated Press
Aug. 5, 2020 1:41 AM PT
BOGOTA, Colombia —
"Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe will be placed under house arrest while the Supreme Court pursues a witness-tampering investigation against him, dealing a titanic blow to one of the nation’s most enduring but controversial political leaders.
The high court’s unanimous decision published late Tuesday states that magistrates found “possible risks” of obstruction of justice as they continue delving into accusations that Uribe had a role in bribing potential witnesses against him.
Throughout his career, Uribe has been dogged by allegations of ties to drug cartels and right-wing paramilitaries. The civil aviation agency he led in the early 1980s was accused of giving air licenses to drug traffickers. Declassified U.S. State Department cables from a decade earlier show that American officials were told the up-and-coming politician had ties to cartels, but the U.S. offered Uribe strong support.”
Here is that Defense Intelligence Agency report ( I think the “State Department” mention by the AP in the paragraph was just a mistake) and the National Security Archive’s summation of the report.
“Then-Senator and now President Álvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia was a "close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" who was "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels," according to a 1991 intelligence report from U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials in Colombia. The document was posted today on the website of the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research group based at George Washington University.
Uribe's inclusion on the list raises new questions about allegations that surfaced during Colombia's 2002 presidential campaign. Candidate Uribe bristled and abruptly terminated an interview in March 2002 when asked by Newsweek reporter Joseph Contreras about his alleged ties to Escobar and his associations with others involved in the drug trade. Uribe accused Contreras of trying to smear his reputation, saying that, "as a politician, I have been honorable and accountable."
The newly-declassified report, dated 23 September 1991, is a numbered list of "the more important Colombian narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations." The document was released by DIA in May 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Archive in August 2000.
The source of the report was removed by DIA censors, but the detailed, investigative nature of the report -- the list corresponds with a numbered set of photographs that were apparently provided with the original -- suggests it was probably obtained from Colombian or U.S. counternarcotics personnel. The document notes that some of the information in the report was verified "via interfaces with other agencies."
President Uribe -- now a key U.S. partner in the drug war -- "was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the United States" and "has worked for the Medellín cartel," the narcotics trafficking organization led by Escobar until he was killed by Colombian government forces in 1993. The report adds that Uribe participated in Escobar's parliamentary campaign and that as senator he had "attacked all forms of the extradition treaty" with the U.S.
"Because both the source of the report and the reporting officer's comments section were not declassified, we cannot be sure how the DIA judged the accuracy of this information," said Michael Evans, director of the Archive's Colombia Documentation Project, "but we do know that intelligence officials believed the document was serious and important enough to pass on to analysts in Washington."
In a statement issued on July 30, the Colombian government took exception to several items reported in the document, saying that Uribe has never had any foreign business dealings, that his father was killed while fleeing a kidnap attempt by FARC guerrillas, and that he had not opposed the extradition treaty, but merely hoped to postpone a referendum to prevent the possibility that narcotraffickers would influence the vote.
The communiqué, however, did not deny the most significant allegation reported in the document: that Uribe had a close personal relationship with Pablo Escobar and business dealings with the Medellín Cartel.”
Many readers may not be familiar with Alvaro Uribe… but I bet you’ve all heard of El Chapo before, right? For those of you who have watched Netflix’s “ Narcos”, yes, it is highly fictionalized, but many of the key points made by the series are 100% based in reality, including the parts about Escobar, Ochoa, and Chapo. Also, don’t get too attached to the “right-wing vs. left-wing militias” and “good guy/bad guy” constructs and build your opinions based on your partisan bias: drug orgs will work with the Right, the Left, at the drop of a hat and betray their supposed ideological allies. Politics is politics, but business is business.
Occam’s Razor question: who has the upper hand in a drug war, the organization that has the most connections to federal authorities or the org that has the fewest connections? Forget all that “Omertà”, “snitches get stitches”, mob bullcrap you hear on TV. That’s for street soldiers and those who have lost their political/law enforcement protection, like Whitey Bulger. In the real world, politically-connected snitches get bitches, USM-grade weapons, US tax dollars and Presidential Honors for Assistance in the War on Drugs, DEA badges, speedboats, planes, gold, and cocaine monopolies while their snitch-free enemies get bullet holes and jail cells. It has likely always been this way.
“After Escobar was killed in 1993, things started to change and by the mid-2000s his successor as kingpin-of-kingpins, Mexico’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, allegedly came up with a simple solution to that smuggling dilemma. Why muck around in the bush when you can use one of the biggest and busiest hubs in Latin America to ship your illicit cargo?
According to multiple detailed reports in the Colombian and Mexican press, Guzmán turned flights out of Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport into his own cocaine delivery service for about two years using a now defunct company dubbed Air Cargo Lines. And he had plenty of help doing it.
The central allegations in the story are sourced to an anonymous whistleblower who claims that the deal was done through a broad narco-trafficking conspiracy involving a former Colombian president, a Colombian senator, Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel cohorts, airport officials, right-wing paramilitaries—and an ICE agent working out of the U.S. Embassy.
El Chapo himself already is serving a life sentence at America's supermax prison in Colorado. His lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Other alleged ringleaders in this aviation scam deny the claims. But the informant reportedly stands by his statements, and independent researchers find his testimony credible.
So, by this account, how did Chapo Air come to be? And since the whistleblower remains unavailable, apparently in hiding, what corroboration is there for this story that has sent shock waves through the Colombian political elite—and should shake up some American law enforcement officials as well?
The charges come courtesy of Richard Maok, a former detective with Colombia’s treasury police (the fiscalía), who now lives in Canada.
This isn’t the first time Maok has been a thorn in the side of Colombian government officials. In 2002, he uncovered a bloody nexus among military officers, right-wing politicians, and drug-trafficking paramilitaries. That scandal was widely covered by the New York Times and other international media, and resulted in a number of high-profile arrests. But it also led to death threats against Maok and, eventually, he sought asylum in Canada.
Apparently not one to be deterred by exile and what he says are several attempts on his life, Maok has continued to launch scathing attacks on corruption from afar, using his popular website as a platform. And he makes no secret of his fierce antipathy to former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who remains one of the country’s most powerful politicians. (The headline on Maok's version of the story is a hashtag, #ElFinalDeUribe, the end of Uribe.)
A few weeks ago, Maok says, he was contacted by a man we’ll call Señor Pista who provided evidence that in the 2000s he had worked as the security director for a Colombian air cargo company—and that he had bombshell accusations to disclose.
So, in early January, the whistle blew. Names were named. And a blow-by-blow description of an audacious drug trafficking scheme began to emerge, all of it catalogued in meticulous detail on Maok’s website.
The most sensational accusation brought by Maok’s informant was that former president Uribe had been involved in the scam during his time in office.
But perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. As Maok notes, "Uribe and his family have been accused of links to trafficking and organized crime for years."
…At the time, Uribe was governor of Antioquia department, which has Medellín as its capital.
Despite these allegations in official Pentagon communications, when Uribe was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010 he was able to position himself as a staunch U.S. ally in both the War on Drugs and the fight against Marxist guerrillas. Those postures made him something of a darling in D.C., and that fact granted him a certain amount of political immunity back home in Colombia.
In the trenches of the War on Drugs, it’s sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Often, it’s more like “our” bad guys against other, maybe worse, bad guys. But the distinctions can get pretty subjective.
…Uribe has dismissed accounts of his ties to Escobar as “fake news,” but former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette, who served from 1994 to 1997, gave an interview in 2015 for a book on his tenure in Bogotá in which he said Uribe had "no interest in being honest with me or other people. That's who Álvaro Uribe is." Frechette, a career diplomat, also called Uribe's use of U.S. funds to arm drug-trafficking right-wing militias a "setup that Washington swallowed."
At the moment, ex-President Uribe is also under investigation by Colombia’s supreme court for attempting to bribe and manipulate witnesses who have linked him to widespread extrajudicial killings, including the massacre of 15 villagers in 1997, while he was still a governor. Nonprofit organizations from at least four countries, including the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Lawyers Without Borders, have sent observers to monitor Uribe’s trial.
According to the Colombian newspaper Vanguardia, Uribe is also the subject of 276 additional pending investigations by the country’s Congressional Accusation Commission—from wrongful contract infractions to violations of international humanitarian law—although he declares himself innocent of all charges.
Uribe, now a senator, remains one of the most influential—and widely feared—men in Colombia. Current President Iván Duque is often described as Uribe’s protégé, or his puppet, depending on who you ask.
…On January 24, during an interview with the magazine La Semana, Colombian senator and former mayor of Bogota Gustavo Petro also accused Uribe of having ties to the Sinaloa Cartel and specifically mentioned the El Dorado cocaine scandal."Doesn't this merit an investigation?" he said. "[Isn't it] terrible what this could mean?"
Gonzalo Guillén, a Colombian journalist and director of the magazine La Nueva Prensa, also finds Maok’s reporting credible.
“The relation between Chapo and Uribe is unmistakable,” Guillén says, and cites his own research to back up the connection. “I had already interviewed a pilot for Chapo Guzmán, who had all the information…. So this was no shock to me.”
In that interview, Chapo's pilot claimed that the DEA had managed to catch at least one of the Sinaloa Cartel's flights into Bogotá. A Boeing 707 had been sent from Mexico full of cash and expected to return with "several tons" of cocaine, but ended up being sold for scrap after it was seized. Interestingly, that could imply the cartel was using other airlines, as Maok's whistleblower makes no mention of a Boeing jet being involved in the Air Cargo Lines scheme.
Guillén also points out family ties between Uribe and Chapo, notably the fact that Uribe’s brother was married to the sister of a man named Alex Cifuentes, who just happened to be Chapo’s head of operations in Colombia. Both Cifuentes and his sister have since been extradited to the United States on charges of narcotics trafficking. Another of Uribe’s brothers has been charged by the Prosecutor General’s Office in Colombia with leading death squads to carry out “social cleansing” in the 1990s.
These allegations about Colombia follow on the heels of several similar and possibly related disclosures about drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America.
In December, Genaro García Luna—Mexico’s former national security secretary and the architect of the nation’s long-running drug war—was arrested in the U.S. on charges of taking bribes from Chapo’s Sinaloa outfit. In Honduras, the sitting president has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a drug-trafficking case by U.S. prosecutors, as was a former president of that country.
During Chapo’s New York trial last year, Mexico’s most recent commander in chief, Enrique Peña Nieto, also was accused by a witness of being on Chapo’s payroll. That same witness also alleged Chapo’s criminal organization had bribed the Colombian air force for information on aircraft flight routes and strategic installations, and bought off General Oscar Naranjo, the national police commissioner under Uribe. Those charges were denied. But the witness in question? None other than Uribe’s brother-in-law Cifuentes.
…From 2006 to 2007, some 10 metric tons of cocaine were shipped from El Dorado airport to Sinaloa, using Air Cargo Lines as a shell company, according to Maok’s informant. Uribe, who allegedly was known to the traffickers by the alias “Gobierno” (Government), is supposed to have arranged for a special hangar to be built at El Dorado solely for the purpose of handling contraband for Chapo and his partners.
“Uribe authorized the Aerocivil, or civil aviation authority, to build a cold storage facility close to the tarmac,” Maok says. “That’s where they kept the cocaine.” Most of it came from the Antioquia region, and allegedly was supplied by the same far-right paramilitaries Maok had exposed in 2002.
From the cold-storage unit it was flown to Mexico in a DC-8 four-engine cargo plane. In return, Uribe is supposed to have received jewelry and cash from the Sinaloa Cartel, including an emerald presented to him in the presidential palace, and at least a million dollars in U.S. currency, which Maok’s informant claims he delivered personally.
Uribe’s chief paramilitary ally, who is alleged by Maok’s informant to have delivered the cocaine to Bogotá, in turn is supposed to have received a shipment of high-powered 5.7 mm pistols, called “cop killers” because the rounds they fire can penetrate police body armor.
The whistleblower named other major players, such as Chapo’s son, Jesús Guzmán, who allegedly entered Colombia without passing through customs in order to speed up Air Cargo’s delivery efforts. And Sinaloa Cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who allegedly sent his own people to assist with logistics.
All told, the operation involved scores of people, including airline officials, Air Cargo Lines personnel, and various paramilitaries and sicarios. Due to restrictions on flight manifests, and runway scheduling, “If top officials hadn’t been involved,” says journalist Guillén, “they couldn’t have shipped out a single gram.”
One of the most eye-popping names on Señor Pista’s list of alleged conspirators is an American special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who was serving in Colombia at the time Pista was working as security director for the airline and as an ICE asset.
Pista says his handler went by the alias “Abastos” (Supplies).
“By 2006 I was [working with] Abastos, an ICE official for Colombia, who received me at the American embassy,” the whistlerblower says in Maok’s published report. “There I told him about all the illegal activities of Mr. Raúl Jiménez Villamil.” Villamil was president of Air Cargo Lines at the time, and is now in prison in Spain after he was caught using the airline to ship some two tons of cocaine into that country.
But to the informant’s dismay, he found that his handler at the embassy already knew all about the cargo runs out of El Dorado.
“After several meetings with [Abastos], he confirmed that there was no problem with Raúl Jiménez Villamil and that I could work for both of them,” that is, for Abastos and Jiménez Villamil, the source says.
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, ICE, and the DEA did not respond to interview requests for this article.
“Sometimes special agents work undercover out of the embassy, pretending to aid cartel operations so as to capture an entire criminal network,” Maok says. “The curious thing about [Abastos] of ICE is that it appears he knew what was going on, yet didn’t bust anybody, even while tons of cocaine were being flown into Mexico.”
FURTHER LINKS/RESOURCES ON THIS TOPIC.
First link is a key one as it discusses 2007 leaks from a whistleblower on this topic. Many stories mention the 2004 release of the 1991 DIA intel report, fewer bother to mention this 2007 leak, but it is important. There were efforts by the CIA-compliant elements of the media to debunk the 2004 leak, but this one received less attention, positive or negative.
www.latimes.com
www.theguardian.com
www.telesurenglish.net
(Yeah, this is the Daily Mail, but the pictures are interesting and all the material is based on credible info from non-tabloids.)
www.dailymail.co.uk
So Mike is not the only Janke with a significant SEAL Team 6 connection. Also, Mike has extensive Latin American drug war experience, and I think it is possible that he met Mary Beth through the Drug War at some point. Hunter Services provides “executive protection”, mostly for VIPs in Latin America and has an office in Bogota. I think we may have been mistaken in assuming that her main job currently is just “university lecturer”. I think her Hunter job likely takes up much more of her time.
What they claim to do:
“HUNTER is an elite private security and consulting firm. We are the discreet go-to source for corporations in response to an increasingly complicated global environment that grows more vulnerable by the day due to:
Cyberattacks
Hostile Competitors
Organized Criminal Activity
Terrorism
Aggressive Acts”
From Mary Beth’s Hunter bio:
“At the request of the U.S. Department of State, she worked for two and a half years as one of three U.S. Security Advisors under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia. She was responsible for executive protection assessment, threat analysis, and the provision of intelligence specific to the needs of the President, Vice President, and Minister of Defense of Colombia and the Mayor of Bogotá.At the request of the Vice President, Mary Beth created an executive protection training academy outside of Bogotá where she also served as an instructor, training members of the security teams of the President, Vice President, Minister of Defense, and Mayor of Bogotá. The academy has been a huge success and is used as a regional training center for several countries in Central and South America.
… Hunter is a leader in executive protection (EP) services both internationally and domestically. We operate in all types of environments around the world and are capable of providing these services in a “low profile” manner or a more robust, higher profile EP service operation. Our experience includes EP service from war zones to more traditional service."
Hunter is also a partner with a specific boat company.
"In collaboration with Eduardono Boats we provide police, military, commercial, and recreational boats worldwide. In addition, Eduardono is the authorized dealer for Yamaha motors in Colombia.”
Eduardono boats are not merely popular with the police and military, but are quite the item among the smuggling cartels.
https://www.soundingsonline.com/news/c-g-takes-aim-at-drug-smugglers
“On Oct. 8 a Navy P-3 patrol aircraft working for Homeland Security spotted a blue 40-foot high-performance boat with triple outboards speeding across the Colombian Basin with four crewmembers aboard. The boat, an Eduardono built in Medellin, Colombia, is the one that Colombian smugglers prefer for offshore operations, says Coast Guard spokeswoman Petty Officer Anastasia Burns. Eduardonos center consoles are popular in Latin America as work and pleasure boats, but smugglers also like them. The United States recently gave Panama four refurbished Eduardonos for use in drug patrols after seizing them in anti-drug operations. “
https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/nearly-two-tonnes-of-powder-believed-to-be-cocaine-seized/
“Federal forces arrested an Ecuadorian citizen and seized nearly two tonnes of what appeared to be cocaine in southern Guerrero yesterday. An armed forces aircraft first spotted a small vessel with a suspicious cargo about 160 kilometers southeast of Acapulco. The Eduardoño-made boat with two big outboard motors was forced to the shore by four navy vessels and three aircraft. At least nine people jumped off and fled when the boat hit the beach at Punta Maldonado in the municipality of Cuajinicuilapa but only one was arrested.”
TLDR: The Executive Protection company Mary Beth works for is also a partner with a boat company whose product is popular with both the cops AND coke smugglers. I’ll give Hunter the benefit of the doubt that they may just be part of a sting and that they are doing something like hiding GPS units on boats they suspect are being part of a cartel operation. I’m generous like that! Also, keep in mind, that just because someone is listed as part of Hunter does not mean they are involved deeply in anything nefarious. People like this put their names on all kinds of advisory boards as they lend credibility to an org in exchange for cash and a title, though they have little involvement with the company. This is how Elizabeth Holmes operated at Theranos. However, Mary Beth is "Director of Special Projects", which sounds pretty "hands-on".
And, yet… that “consultant to Alvaro Uribe” item I mentioned from Mary Beth’s bio makes me wonder if I am being too generous? Having Alvaro Uribe on your resume as a highlight as late as 2021 is a hell of a statement. Hell, who knows, maybe Mary Beth is part of an op to finally bring Uribe to justice? You go, girl!
Who is Alvaro Uribe?
Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe ordered under house arrest
Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe will be placed under house arrest as part of a witness-tampering investigation against him.
‘By Associated Press
Aug. 5, 2020 1:41 AM PT
BOGOTA, Colombia —
"Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe will be placed under house arrest while the Supreme Court pursues a witness-tampering investigation against him, dealing a titanic blow to one of the nation’s most enduring but controversial political leaders.
The high court’s unanimous decision published late Tuesday states that magistrates found “possible risks” of obstruction of justice as they continue delving into accusations that Uribe had a role in bribing potential witnesses against him.
Throughout his career, Uribe has been dogged by allegations of ties to drug cartels and right-wing paramilitaries. The civil aviation agency he led in the early 1980s was accused of giving air licenses to drug traffickers. Declassified U.S. State Department cables from a decade earlier show that American officials were told the up-and-coming politician had ties to cartels, but the U.S. offered Uribe strong support.”
Here is that Defense Intelligence Agency report ( I think the “State Department” mention by the AP in the paragraph was just a mistake) and the National Security Archive’s summation of the report.
“Then-Senator and now President Álvaro Uribe Vélez of Colombia was a "close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" who was "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels," according to a 1991 intelligence report from U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officials in Colombia. The document was posted today on the website of the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research group based at George Washington University.
Uribe's inclusion on the list raises new questions about allegations that surfaced during Colombia's 2002 presidential campaign. Candidate Uribe bristled and abruptly terminated an interview in March 2002 when asked by Newsweek reporter Joseph Contreras about his alleged ties to Escobar and his associations with others involved in the drug trade. Uribe accused Contreras of trying to smear his reputation, saying that, "as a politician, I have been honorable and accountable."
The newly-declassified report, dated 23 September 1991, is a numbered list of "the more important Colombian narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection and enforcement of narcotics operations." The document was released by DIA in May 2004 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Archive in August 2000.
The source of the report was removed by DIA censors, but the detailed, investigative nature of the report -- the list corresponds with a numbered set of photographs that were apparently provided with the original -- suggests it was probably obtained from Colombian or U.S. counternarcotics personnel. The document notes that some of the information in the report was verified "via interfaces with other agencies."
President Uribe -- now a key U.S. partner in the drug war -- "was linked to a business involved in narcotics activities in the United States" and "has worked for the Medellín cartel," the narcotics trafficking organization led by Escobar until he was killed by Colombian government forces in 1993. The report adds that Uribe participated in Escobar's parliamentary campaign and that as senator he had "attacked all forms of the extradition treaty" with the U.S.
"Because both the source of the report and the reporting officer's comments section were not declassified, we cannot be sure how the DIA judged the accuracy of this information," said Michael Evans, director of the Archive's Colombia Documentation Project, "but we do know that intelligence officials believed the document was serious and important enough to pass on to analysts in Washington."
In a statement issued on July 30, the Colombian government took exception to several items reported in the document, saying that Uribe has never had any foreign business dealings, that his father was killed while fleeing a kidnap attempt by FARC guerrillas, and that he had not opposed the extradition treaty, but merely hoped to postpone a referendum to prevent the possibility that narcotraffickers would influence the vote.
The communiqué, however, did not deny the most significant allegation reported in the document: that Uribe had a close personal relationship with Pablo Escobar and business dealings with the Medellín Cartel.”
Many readers may not be familiar with Alvaro Uribe… but I bet you’ve all heard of El Chapo before, right? For those of you who have watched Netflix’s “ Narcos”, yes, it is highly fictionalized, but many of the key points made by the series are 100% based in reality, including the parts about Escobar, Ochoa, and Chapo. Also, don’t get too attached to the “right-wing vs. left-wing militias” and “good guy/bad guy” constructs and build your opinions based on your partisan bias: drug orgs will work with the Right, the Left, at the drop of a hat and betray their supposed ideological allies. Politics is politics, but business is business.
Occam’s Razor question: who has the upper hand in a drug war, the organization that has the most connections to federal authorities or the org that has the fewest connections? Forget all that “Omertà”, “snitches get stitches”, mob bullcrap you hear on TV. That’s for street soldiers and those who have lost their political/law enforcement protection, like Whitey Bulger. In the real world, politically-connected snitches get bitches, USM-grade weapons, US tax dollars and Presidential Honors for Assistance in the War on Drugs, DEA badges, speedboats, planes, gold, and cocaine monopolies while their snitch-free enemies get bullet holes and jail cells. It has likely always been this way.
Inside Colombia’s ‘Air Chapo’ Cocaine Shipping Scandal
Allegations that Mexico’s most famous drug lord teamed up with top officials and a U.S. ICE agent have shocked even cynical Colombians.
www.thedailybeast.com
“After Escobar was killed in 1993, things started to change and by the mid-2000s his successor as kingpin-of-kingpins, Mexico’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, allegedly came up with a simple solution to that smuggling dilemma. Why muck around in the bush when you can use one of the biggest and busiest hubs in Latin America to ship your illicit cargo?
According to multiple detailed reports in the Colombian and Mexican press, Guzmán turned flights out of Bogotá’s El Dorado International Airport into his own cocaine delivery service for about two years using a now defunct company dubbed Air Cargo Lines. And he had plenty of help doing it.
The central allegations in the story are sourced to an anonymous whistleblower who claims that the deal was done through a broad narco-trafficking conspiracy involving a former Colombian president, a Colombian senator, Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel cohorts, airport officials, right-wing paramilitaries—and an ICE agent working out of the U.S. Embassy.
El Chapo himself already is serving a life sentence at America's supermax prison in Colorado. His lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. Other alleged ringleaders in this aviation scam deny the claims. But the informant reportedly stands by his statements, and independent researchers find his testimony credible.
So, by this account, how did Chapo Air come to be? And since the whistleblower remains unavailable, apparently in hiding, what corroboration is there for this story that has sent shock waves through the Colombian political elite—and should shake up some American law enforcement officials as well?
The charges come courtesy of Richard Maok, a former detective with Colombia’s treasury police (the fiscalía), who now lives in Canada.
This isn’t the first time Maok has been a thorn in the side of Colombian government officials. In 2002, he uncovered a bloody nexus among military officers, right-wing politicians, and drug-trafficking paramilitaries. That scandal was widely covered by the New York Times and other international media, and resulted in a number of high-profile arrests. But it also led to death threats against Maok and, eventually, he sought asylum in Canada.
Apparently not one to be deterred by exile and what he says are several attempts on his life, Maok has continued to launch scathing attacks on corruption from afar, using his popular website as a platform. And he makes no secret of his fierce antipathy to former Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, who remains one of the country’s most powerful politicians. (The headline on Maok's version of the story is a hashtag, #ElFinalDeUribe, the end of Uribe.)
A few weeks ago, Maok says, he was contacted by a man we’ll call Señor Pista who provided evidence that in the 2000s he had worked as the security director for a Colombian air cargo company—and that he had bombshell accusations to disclose.
So, in early January, the whistle blew. Names were named. And a blow-by-blow description of an audacious drug trafficking scheme began to emerge, all of it catalogued in meticulous detail on Maok’s website.
The most sensational accusation brought by Maok’s informant was that former president Uribe had been involved in the scam during his time in office.
But perhaps that shouldn’t come as a surprise. As Maok notes, "Uribe and his family have been accused of links to trafficking and organized crime for years."
…At the time, Uribe was governor of Antioquia department, which has Medellín as its capital.
Despite these allegations in official Pentagon communications, when Uribe was president of Colombia from 2002 to 2010 he was able to position himself as a staunch U.S. ally in both the War on Drugs and the fight against Marxist guerrillas. Those postures made him something of a darling in D.C., and that fact granted him a certain amount of political immunity back home in Colombia.
In the trenches of the War on Drugs, it’s sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys. Often, it’s more like “our” bad guys against other, maybe worse, bad guys. But the distinctions can get pretty subjective.
…Uribe has dismissed accounts of his ties to Escobar as “fake news,” but former U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette, who served from 1994 to 1997, gave an interview in 2015 for a book on his tenure in Bogotá in which he said Uribe had "no interest in being honest with me or other people. That's who Álvaro Uribe is." Frechette, a career diplomat, also called Uribe's use of U.S. funds to arm drug-trafficking right-wing militias a "setup that Washington swallowed."
At the moment, ex-President Uribe is also under investigation by Colombia’s supreme court for attempting to bribe and manipulate witnesses who have linked him to widespread extrajudicial killings, including the massacre of 15 villagers in 1997, while he was still a governor. Nonprofit organizations from at least four countries, including the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Lawyers Without Borders, have sent observers to monitor Uribe’s trial.
According to the Colombian newspaper Vanguardia, Uribe is also the subject of 276 additional pending investigations by the country’s Congressional Accusation Commission—from wrongful contract infractions to violations of international humanitarian law—although he declares himself innocent of all charges.
Uribe, now a senator, remains one of the most influential—and widely feared—men in Colombia. Current President Iván Duque is often described as Uribe’s protégé, or his puppet, depending on who you ask.
…On January 24, during an interview with the magazine La Semana, Colombian senator and former mayor of Bogota Gustavo Petro also accused Uribe of having ties to the Sinaloa Cartel and specifically mentioned the El Dorado cocaine scandal."Doesn't this merit an investigation?" he said. "[Isn't it] terrible what this could mean?"
Gonzalo Guillén, a Colombian journalist and director of the magazine La Nueva Prensa, also finds Maok’s reporting credible.
“The relation between Chapo and Uribe is unmistakable,” Guillén says, and cites his own research to back up the connection. “I had already interviewed a pilot for Chapo Guzmán, who had all the information…. So this was no shock to me.”
In that interview, Chapo's pilot claimed that the DEA had managed to catch at least one of the Sinaloa Cartel's flights into Bogotá. A Boeing 707 had been sent from Mexico full of cash and expected to return with "several tons" of cocaine, but ended up being sold for scrap after it was seized. Interestingly, that could imply the cartel was using other airlines, as Maok's whistleblower makes no mention of a Boeing jet being involved in the Air Cargo Lines scheme.
Guillén also points out family ties between Uribe and Chapo, notably the fact that Uribe’s brother was married to the sister of a man named Alex Cifuentes, who just happened to be Chapo’s head of operations in Colombia. Both Cifuentes and his sister have since been extradited to the United States on charges of narcotics trafficking. Another of Uribe’s brothers has been charged by the Prosecutor General’s Office in Colombia with leading death squads to carry out “social cleansing” in the 1990s.
These allegations about Colombia follow on the heels of several similar and possibly related disclosures about drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America.
In December, Genaro García Luna—Mexico’s former national security secretary and the architect of the nation’s long-running drug war—was arrested in the U.S. on charges of taking bribes from Chapo’s Sinaloa outfit. In Honduras, the sitting president has been named an unindicted co-conspirator in a drug-trafficking case by U.S. prosecutors, as was a former president of that country.
During Chapo’s New York trial last year, Mexico’s most recent commander in chief, Enrique Peña Nieto, also was accused by a witness of being on Chapo’s payroll. That same witness also alleged Chapo’s criminal organization had bribed the Colombian air force for information on aircraft flight routes and strategic installations, and bought off General Oscar Naranjo, the national police commissioner under Uribe. Those charges were denied. But the witness in question? None other than Uribe’s brother-in-law Cifuentes.
…From 2006 to 2007, some 10 metric tons of cocaine were shipped from El Dorado airport to Sinaloa, using Air Cargo Lines as a shell company, according to Maok’s informant. Uribe, who allegedly was known to the traffickers by the alias “Gobierno” (Government), is supposed to have arranged for a special hangar to be built at El Dorado solely for the purpose of handling contraband for Chapo and his partners.
“Uribe authorized the Aerocivil, or civil aviation authority, to build a cold storage facility close to the tarmac,” Maok says. “That’s where they kept the cocaine.” Most of it came from the Antioquia region, and allegedly was supplied by the same far-right paramilitaries Maok had exposed in 2002.
From the cold-storage unit it was flown to Mexico in a DC-8 four-engine cargo plane. In return, Uribe is supposed to have received jewelry and cash from the Sinaloa Cartel, including an emerald presented to him in the presidential palace, and at least a million dollars in U.S. currency, which Maok’s informant claims he delivered personally.
Uribe’s chief paramilitary ally, who is alleged by Maok’s informant to have delivered the cocaine to Bogotá, in turn is supposed to have received a shipment of high-powered 5.7 mm pistols, called “cop killers” because the rounds they fire can penetrate police body armor.
The whistleblower named other major players, such as Chapo’s son, Jesús Guzmán, who allegedly entered Colombia without passing through customs in order to speed up Air Cargo’s delivery efforts. And Sinaloa Cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who allegedly sent his own people to assist with logistics.
All told, the operation involved scores of people, including airline officials, Air Cargo Lines personnel, and various paramilitaries and sicarios. Due to restrictions on flight manifests, and runway scheduling, “If top officials hadn’t been involved,” says journalist Guillén, “they couldn’t have shipped out a single gram.”
One of the most eye-popping names on Señor Pista’s list of alleged conspirators is an American special agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) who was serving in Colombia at the time Pista was working as security director for the airline and as an ICE asset.
Pista says his handler went by the alias “Abastos” (Supplies).
“By 2006 I was [working with] Abastos, an ICE official for Colombia, who received me at the American embassy,” the whistlerblower says in Maok’s published report. “There I told him about all the illegal activities of Mr. Raúl Jiménez Villamil.” Villamil was president of Air Cargo Lines at the time, and is now in prison in Spain after he was caught using the airline to ship some two tons of cocaine into that country.
But to the informant’s dismay, he found that his handler at the embassy already knew all about the cargo runs out of El Dorado.
“After several meetings with [Abastos], he confirmed that there was no problem with Raúl Jiménez Villamil and that I could work for both of them,” that is, for Abastos and Jiménez Villamil, the source says.
The U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, ICE, and the DEA did not respond to interview requests for this article.
“Sometimes special agents work undercover out of the embassy, pretending to aid cartel operations so as to capture an entire criminal network,” Maok says. “The curious thing about [Abastos] of ICE is that it appears he knew what was going on, yet didn’t bust anybody, even while tons of cocaine were being flown into Mexico.”
FURTHER LINKS/RESOURCES ON THIS TOPIC.
First link is a key one as it discusses 2007 leaks from a whistleblower on this topic. Many stories mention the 2004 release of the 1991 DIA intel report, fewer bother to mention this 2007 leak, but it is important. There were efforts by the CIA-compliant elements of the media to debunk the 2004 leak, but this one received less attention, positive or negative.
Colombia army chief linked to outlaw militias
The allegations come as Congress reviews aid to the U.S. ally. The CIA says the intelligence hasn't been fully vetted.
Ex-Colombian president's family face US extradition over drugs charges
Álvaro Uribe's niece and her mother are accused of having ties to Sinaloa cartel drug lord, Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán
Ex Colombian President Uribe Campaigned on Cartel Money: Report
Ex-president, Alvaro Uribe Velez's campaign was allegedly financed by a Colombia drug cartel, a report said Friday.
(Yeah, this is the Daily Mail, but the pictures are interesting and all the material is based on credible info from non-tabloids.)
El Chapo 'flew 10,000 kilos of cocaine on cargo planes to Mexico'
A former Colombia treasury officials says his country's ex president Álvaro Uribe set up an airport hangar that allowed El Chapo to traffic 10,000 kilos of cocaine to Mexico from 2006 to 2007.