THE HOLLOWAY CONSPIRACY Part 1

A few days ago I was looking at a crime website for one of my investigations. There was a link to an article about the Holloway case. For me this case didn't have much mystery, Joran van der Sloot was guilty and that was about it. But I only knew about the case from the mainstream media.

 Joran van der Sloot

What I found was more than I could bear. What I found was a conspiracy. A conspiracy that goes up to the highest echelons of power. A conspiracy with devastating consequences: two deaths(Paulus van der Sloot and Stephany Flores), one disappeared(Natalee Holloway), an innocent man in prison(Joran van der Sloot) and millions of tax-payer money thrown away.

Natalee Holloway

A conspiracy where the supposed criminals become victims, the victims become the criminals, and in the end, the ones left standing with the bill are the tax-payers.

First let's look at the facts. Natalee Holloway was supposed to be at the hall of the hotel where she was staying at 10:30 am of May 30th 2005. There she was supposed to take a bus to the airport. She was from Clinton AL(USA), and had been for one week on Aruba for a graduation trip. That day she was supposed to go back home, but she didn't show up at the hotel's hall. When her mother Beth Holloway(back the Beth Twitty) hears that she is missing immediately she arranges for a private jet and with seven friends and family members goes to Aruba.

 Beth Holloway

Here start the strange things. Beth Holloway claims that she arrived at Aruba at 10:30 pm, but airport records show that actually she arrived at 19:45. Why would she lie about this? It turns out that the day before Natalee called her mother and told her that she had no intention to go back to the US. That means that Beth Holloway was on her way to Aruba before her daughter was declared missing. But her strange behavior didn't stop there. Once she was already in Aruba, Beth didn't go directly to the police. Instead, she went to the Van der Sloot's family home. Her daughter was last seen in front of the Aruban night club and restaurant Carlos'n'Charlie's in Oranjestad, stepping into a car where three guys were sitting, Joran van der Sloot, Deepak Kalpoe and Satish Kalpoe. 

Once she was there, she asked Joran where her daughter was. When Joran failed in giving her any information about her daughter; she became aggressive and Paulus van der Sloot had to take his son inside the house to protect him.

 Paulus van der Sloot

When Beth Holloway was flying to Aruba she already had with her printed posters to hang around Aruba. But what is really strange is the content of those posters. Those posters weren't saying anything about a disapparition or a kidnapping. It said Natalee please call me! This together with the fact that she didn't go directly to the police, and the fact that Natalee told her mother that she had no intention to go back home means that Beth Holloway knew, or at least thought that Natalee left herself.

 First poster made by Natalee's mother

When it turned out that Natalee was not with Joran, only then did she go to the police. But actually, Beth didn't want the police to investigate the case. She already had her mind made up. She held Joran v/d Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers responsible for the disapparition of her daughter. But did she really think that they were responsible for the kidnapping or the murder of her daughter. Did she know that Natalee left of her own free will and she wanted to let Joran and his friends pay for it? Were she and her husband Jug responsible for the disapparition of Natalee and now they wanted to use the boys as scapegoats?

The second poster she then made was as curious as the first. It said "kidnapped". How did she know that Natalee was kidnapped? Never anyone claimed to have kidnapped her or asked a ransom. Natalee was just missing. She could also have had an accident, have been murdered, or she could have just left. But no! For Beth Holloway Natalee was kidnapped. Did she think that Natalee escaped as she told her she would do and now somebody was hiding her?

 Second poster of Natalee Holloway

As if all that wasn't enough, when Beth in the end did go to the police, she continued behaving even stranger than she was doing already. But she wasn't the only one. When the Aruban police started investigating, immediately the FBI arrived at the island. That's maybe not so strange, since it involved the disapparition of a US citizen and more important, the daughter of a wealthy family. But be patient, in a moment I'll tell you about the bizarre behavior of the feds in Aruba.

From day 1 Beth Holloway and her then husband Jug Twitty interfered with the police investigation. For them, Joran van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were guilty and any other line of investigation was garbage. When the Aruban Police arrested two security guards Beth Holloway went totally nuts, demanding that they would be released and to continue investigating the Van der Sloot's and the Kalpoe's. It didn't matter to her that those security guards appeared on security tapes talking to Natalee, and that they were rumored to sell drugs to kids in Aruba. Anyway, the security guards turned out to be innocent. 

 Jug Twitty

What the police investigation DID uncover is that the saintly image that Beth Holloway sold to the press about her daughter was false. When her daughter just disappeared Beth Holloway told to the press that her daughter was a virgin that led a saintly life that graduated with honors at High School  and that she got a scholarship to study medicine at a college. Later it turned out that she didn't graduate with honors, she didn't get any scholarship, she was sexually active, she smoked, she drunk, she used drugs, and that it wasn't the first time that she escaped from her home. After the Aruban police uncovered this lie; they found it necessary to investigate the family more thoroughly. But that wasn't going to be possible. The FBI wouldn't allow that. But why did the Aruban law enforcement let themselves being commanded by a foreign institution on their own territory? At that point; the investigation wasn't about Natalee anymore, it was about not endangering the Aruban economy and about the relation of The Netherlands with the United States. The Aruban police got trapped. Trapped between the imperial might of the US on the one side, the imperial might of their colonial masters on the other side, and the pressure of their own government above them. It is said by the Aruban police that there were even calls being made from The White House to the office of the Aruban Prime Minister. Aruba is part of the Kingdom of The Netherlands, which always have been a loyal lapdog of the USA. Because they didn't want problems with the Americans, the Dutch put pressure on the Aruban government to not upset the Americans. Out of that, 75% of the Aruban national income comes from tourism, especially from the USA, that's why it wasn't also in the interest of the Arubans to clash with the Americans. Some went even further, and they think that Natalee Holloway was murdered by American intelligence services to have an excuse to station American and Dutch security services and military on the island to use it as a base to attack Venezuela. The enmity between the Bush administration and the government of Hugo Chavez is good known. The US already tried to overthrow Chavez in 2002.  I doubt this theory for two reasons. We are now in 2013. Most of the Dutch and American security services that went to Aruba to supposedly look for Natalee Holloway have left already, and Venezuela has never been attacked. And the second reason is that if the Americans want to attack Venezuela they can do that easily from Colombia, where they have a strong presence, as the Chavist government always has feared.

Hugo Chavez

But why were the Americans so opposed to the fact that the Aruban Law Enforcement would investigate the Holloway-Twitty family? You would say, that there were reasons enough to investigate them, and actually in the US that's a routine procedure, to investigate the family in any disapparition or murder case. So what made this family so special? Let's look then at who they are. 

Natalee Holloway enjoying the good life...

It turns out that Jug Twitty is a money launderer for the international mafia and is also an arms dealer for the US government. He went to school together with Jossy Mansur. Who is Jossy Mansur? I'll tell you in a moment, but first the family. It turns also out that Natalee's former boyfriend was on the island at the time she disappeared, but that was never investigated, or probably the Americans also wouldn't allow it.

Jossy Mansur

Whoever says Aruba says Jossy Mansur. His family owns around 60% of the island. In 1999 Jossy Mansur and his brother Luis Mansur sued the Netherlands government before the United Nations Human Rights Committee for disseminating what the Aruban government termed a top secret report that claimed that the Mansurs were involved in organized crime. The report by the Dutch Internal Security Service draws a picture of security in Aruba and mentions that foreign services fighting crime in the region are almost unanimous in their opinion that the predominant image of the Aruban business community is one of joint services towards (laundering specialists of) regional drug cartels.

The report mentions the Mansurs by name and portrays them as criminals who were associated with criminal organizations involved in drugs trafficking, gun trafficking and laundering money obtained from criminal activities. Despite the fact that the report was classified as top secret it was leaked to the press and its contents became public. The suit was dismissed on procedural grounds for failure to exhaust Mansur's civil remedies in the Netherlands courts.

Paulus Van Der Sloot, father of Joran Van Der Sloot, was a prominent Aruban lawyer (studying to become a judge) involved in the “top secret report”. His level of participation or position in the report is not known. 

Of course, Mansur wanted revenge with van der Sloot. If Mansur had some involvement in the disappearance on Natalee is unclear, but from a very early stage in the investigation, Mansur started appearing together with Beth and her husband and started to appear also on American television, which presented him as highly reliable, but the Aruban people knew the truth about him. Mansur put together his own team of investigation, and published supposed leads in his newspaper Diario, leads that always lead to van der Sloot of course.

According to Dan Young and Kelly Castillo, two mediums that worked together with Beth Holloway in the first week of Natalee's disappearance, claim that Natalee did already escape from home a few times before, and this time she planned her escape in advance for not having to go back home. And that the reason for her escapes is that Jug Twitty was raping her repeatedly. They also claim that Natalee was pregnant when she disappeared, and that Jug Twitty was the father of the baby.

Dan Young and Kelly Castillo

As if her behavior wasn't strange enough already, after she divorced Jug in 2007, she started dating with John Ramsey, the father of Jon Benet Ramsey. The child beauty queen that appeared dead in 1996. The murder was never solved, but in conspiracy circles they suspect that she was murdered by her parents in a satanic ritual. It is also known that John Ramsey was involved in the Iran contra's affair and has ties with the Bush family. It is also suspected that he pimped out his daughter as a prostitute for the recreation of high officials in the American regime.

John Ramsey and his deceased daughter Jon Bennet Ramsey

So, after all this bizarre and preoccupying facts being exposed one question still remains. Where is Natalee Holloway? Did she escape fearing for her life? Was she murdered by her stepfather and her mother in some kind of ritual sacrifice? Did Jossy Mansur have something to do with it? Probably we'll never know.

But wait, don't go yet. The story isn't over yet. On Juni 2nd 2010 Stephany Flores was found dead in an hotel room, and Joran van der Sloot was suspected to be the murderer. 

But about that I'll tell you on the next post. Greetings!!

WHERE IS JIMMY HOFFA?

Today I wanted to talk to you about a subject which is little known outside the US; but not for this less important. I'm talking to you about the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. This year in February it was the 100th anniversary of  his birth. That's why I wanted to talk to you about it. There are many theories about his disappearance. Some of them make little sense. But one theory in special calls the attention, and is that Jimmy Hoffa was involved or at least knew about the murder of JFK. According to this theory he was murdered to stop him from declaring at the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Hoffa would have been killed by a conjunction of the Mafia and US intelligence services. The Mafia may have had other reasons to murder him also, but this may have been the must important one.
In this article we'll also give some attention to the other theories, but we'll center mostly on the connection of the Hoffa disappearance with the JFK assassination, which I consider to be the most likely one and is also the most interesting one.

1. Hoffa in Brazil: Much like Elvis and Jesus, some conspiracy theorists believe Jimmy Hoffa didn’t die. Instead, rumor has it that Hoffa escaped the clutches of the law and rival mob factions by running off to Brazil with a go-go  dancer. If he was still alive, Hoffa would be 100 years old, so the odds of him being alive to this date are slim; however, it’s plausible that he lived for years after 1975.

Oddly enough, Hoffa was born in Brazil, Indiana, which could be evidence of conspiracy theorists confusing their geography and the cruel sense of irony that goes into picking the names of towns in Indiana.

2. Hoffa abducted by aliens: In 1977, Tom Dawson, a retired resident of Georgia, claimed he was abducted by aliens. During their requisite probing and prodding of Dawson, he claims he saw a bright light and a voice that called out “I am Jimmy Hoffa!” three times before being cut off. No further prove have ever been found about this theory.

3. Hoffa killed Robert Kennedy: Robert Kennedy, the attorney general who successfully sent Hoffa to jail, was assassinated in 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan the night after he defeated Senator McCarthy in the California primary. Conspiracy theorists speculate that Hoffa ordered the hit on Kennedy after working out a deal with Richard Nixon. Nixon later pardoned Hoffa and Hoffa allegedly donated half a million dollars to Nixon’s campaign.

Some theories even posit that Sirhan Sirhan had mob connections.  Despite the rumors, no complicity between Hoffa and Sirhan Sirhan has ever been found and, despite the rumor cropping up every year when the Hoffa disappearance rumors begin, no one has suggested a connection between this story and Hoffa’s demise.

4, Hoffa was in witness protection: Hoffa’s sudden disappearance in 1975 has led to numerous theories about his whereabouts, but none so enduring as the theory that he is holed away in federal witness protection, providing the FBI with a wealth of information about the Mafia.  If this is even remotely true, the FBI is staging an elaborate cover-up by constantly digging up Detroit looking for him.

Until here the minor conspiracy theories about Hoffa. Or at least the ones for which there is not a lot of proof. And now we come to the most interesting, fascinating and also the most likely theory. 

Was Hoffa involved in the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy? Here the theories run wild. But before looking at how Hoffa was murdered, and must important of all, why he was murdered, we should look at who was Hoffa.

Jimmy Hoffa was born on February 14th 1913, in Brazil(Indiana). He was the child of a poor working family. His father was a Dutch mine-worker who died when he was only seven years old. His mother was a housewife. When his father died, he was old enough to understand that the cause of his dad's death had been caused by the bad working conditions in the mine. That is, that his father had been worked to death. That produced in him an aversion against the bosses and a determination not to end up like his father. In 1924 he moves with his family to Detroit. There he took a job loading and unloading trucks. A very hard job. Where he only got paid when he loaded or unloaded trucks. A job not much better than the one his father had at the mine. There the young Jimmy became an active trade-unionist. He rose to prominence when he led a strike in 1932. By 1940 he was chairman of the Central States Drivers Council, and two years later he was president of  the Michigan Conference of Teamsters, the most powerful transport trade-union in Michigan. There started his first mafia ties. 

In 1952 Hoffa became vice president of the Teamsters Union under Dave Beck, the president. Allegations were made in 1956 that the leadership of the union was involved in illegal activities. The Select Committee on Labor, that included Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, Karl Mundt and John F. Kennedy, decided that these charges needed to be investigated.

Robert Kennedy, chief counsel of the committee, was instructed to collect information and discovered several financial irregularities. This included taking $85,119 between 1949 and 1953 from union funds to pay his own personal bill. The investigation also revealled that a Seattle builder had received $196,516 out of union funds to pay for work done on Beck's home. The investigations were televised and Kennedy's questioning turned him into a national political figure.

Beck was eventually imprisoned for five years and Hoffa became the new president of the Teamsters Union. Now Hoffa was effectively one of the most powerful men in the United States. One word from his mouth to call a strike could paralyze the US economy. At the age of 43, he had risen from a simple truck loader to one of the most powerful men in the US. That earned him the aversion of many rich and powerful people, who didn't like upstarts. Especially his mutual antipathy for the Kennedy's was good known.

Hoffa has been much criticized because of his mafia ties. But let's situate that in it's proper historical context. In the years that Hoffa became a prominent trade-unionist(during the Great Depression), security forces were literally shooting and murdering demonstrating and striking trade-unionists. What Hoffa needed was muscle to fight back, and the workers themselves alone didn't have that. Hoffa made a deal with the mob in which in exchange for the gangsters protecting the unions against the police and the hit-men of the bosses; Hoffa would give them loans from the truck drivers pension funds. 

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

If JFK was killed by the mafia, as the movie "JFK" suggests, and he probably was, then the mob didn't do it alone. It is very possible that they did it in collusion  with the CIA. The presence of Lee Harvey Oswald, a man who had trained in CIA camps very much indicates that. But Oswald was only a patsy set there to mislead. 

Lee Harvey Oswald

The mafia was fed up with Kennedy. After they helped him to become president, he launched a crackdown against the mob which was unprecedented in the history of the US. 

The mafia shared an objective with the CIA: to kill Fidel Castro. Early in 1961 the CIA convinced the young and inexperienced president that Castro could be overthrown through an invasion which would start at the Bay of Pigs.

Fidel Castro

 Of course the invasion failed. Kennedy was infuriated and said that he would break the CIA in a thousand pieces and blow it to the wind. Since then the relations of the president with the Agency weren't good. But, why would the CIA be interested  in killing the president? That's difficult to say. The Agency always had it's own agenda. There are also intelligence services in the US that are even more secretive than  the CIA and not even the president knows about what they are doing, or if they even exist. Some say that Kennedy wanted to make public the UFO files. Others say that he wanted to make peace with the Soviet Union. I don't know, but the question is that they killed him, or at least they ordered his murder or they killed him together with the mafia. 

Anyway, that's not what this article is about. I was going to talk to you about Hoffa's disappearance. I know that this month is the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's murder, but I promise you that I'll talk to you about Kennedy's murder some other time.

But Hoffa's disappearance has a lot to do with Kennedy's murder. Hoffa wasn't part of the mafia, but he had close ties with it. He also had good reasons to kill Kennedy. His enmity with the Kennedy brothers goes all the way back to 1956. When he was questioned in a really hard-handed manner by them. In the presidential election debate of 1960, John Kennedy said that he wasn't amused to see men as Hoffa at the head of national trade unions. When JFK became president, he named his brother Robert attorney general, who is said to have started an investigation unit with the sole purpose to get Hoffa behind bars. If that's true, it would mean that RFK suffered from tunnel vision. An attorney general should investigate facts, not people. 

 Robert Francis Kennedy

What is clear is that the mob was deeply involved in Kennedy's murder. There is no doubt that the mafia had the capacity to organize a hit like that. But they must have needed some covering for it, otherwise the consequences of it could have been enough as to destroy the mob for ever. And this covering was given to them by the Central Intelligence Agency.

According to Charles Crimaldi, a former mafia hit-man who was a Government informant, Hoffa was the go-between man between the mafia and the CIA.

The mafia had many businesses in Cuba before the revolution, mostly in the gambling industry. So they had the same interest in seeing Castro dead as the CIA.

There were different plots during the 60's of the mafia together with the CIA to kill him, but not one of them gave result. Some say that they did actually kill Castro and that the Cuban government put a double in his place, but I won't go into this now. Even if he was indeed killed, that doesn't change anything in our story. 

Jack Ruby, the murderer of Oswald, had ties with organized crime and with the CIA.

Jack Ruby

How could Ruby walk with a gun into security zone and shoot Oswald? Was there somebody that wasn't interested that Oswald would declare? If Oswald said that he was only a patsy, of who was he a patsy? Of the CIA? Of the mafia? Or of both?

In February 1964, a memo of the Warren Commission, related  Ruby to Barney Baker, a thug who was  working for Hoffa. The same memo listed the Teamsters on top of a list of organizations that may have been interested in killing Kennedy.

Of course, Hoffa knew that if John Kennedy died; his brother Robert would quit as attorney general. Two days after JFK was shot Hoffa told a reporter: "Bobby Kennedy is just another reporter now". 

Many conspiracy-theorists suggest that LBJ was also involved in Kennedy's murder. But I'll talk to you about this theory some other time.

 Lyndon Baines Johnson

  

In 1964 Jimmy Hoffa was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for jury tampering. Frank Fitzsimmons became president of the Teamsters. Initially the understanding was that Hoffa would continue leading the Teamsters from the jail and that Fitzsimmons would only be a figure-head, but soon after Hoffa was jailed, a power struggle ensued. Fitzsimmons was more malleable to mafia interests. Under Hoffa the mafia had access to Teamsters funds, but Hoffa continued being the boss. With Fitzsimmons the Teamsters were totally controlled by the mafia. Under these conditions, it isn't surprising that the mafia didn't want Hoffa back in power. And so the Teamsters divided in two factions a Hoffa faction and a Fitzsimmons faction. In the presidential election of 1968, the Hoffa faction supported the republican candidate Richard Nixon, meanwhile the Fitzsimmons faction supported the democrat Hubert Humphrey with the rest of the labor movement.

 Frank Fitzsimmons

The Hoffa camp made a contribution to the Nixon campaign, so it isn't surprising that Nixon freed Hoffa in 1971, but with the condition that he would not lead any trade-union until 1980.

From the time he was freed, until he disappeared, Hoffa was fighting to return to the leadership of the Teamsters.

 Richard Nixon

Three weeks before Hoffa disappeared, Richard Fitzsimmons was victim of a terrorist attack. Fitzsimmons was not hurt. Allegedly the attack was carried out by Hoffa supporters. Immediately Fitzsimmons cracked down on Hoffa's followers. Or maybe Fitzsimmons planned the attack himself to have an excuse to crush dissent inside the Teamsters. Or even better, his mafia manipulators did it to set up the stage for Hoffa's disappearance.

As for the disappearance of Hoffa itself we know who ordered the hit: Russell Bufalino, a Pennsylvanian mobster. Hoffa had an appointment  with a still unknown mobster at a restaurant called the Red Fox. 

 The Red Fox restaurant, the place where Hoffa was seen for the last time.

Supposedly, Charles O'Brien, a man who Hoffa trusted, picked him up at the restaurant and took him to the house where O'Brien was staying. Hoffa would never get out of that house alive. Some time later Ralph Picardo, a government informer told investigators that after Hoffa was killed, he was stuffed into a 55-gallon oil drum and was taken on a Gateway Transportation truck to an unknown destination. But about the location of Hoffa's body, there are as many conspiracy theories than about his murder. From being buried under the Giants Stadium in New Jersey to being made into hot dogs. To this day the feds are still looking for his body.

But OK, why was Hoffa killed? Was it the result of a power struggle inside the Teamsters? Not very likely. When he disappeared he had very little chances left to get back the leadership of the Teamsters. Probably he was murdered to stop him from testifying in front of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. And that makes a lot of sense. In 1982 he was officially declared dead. 

But one thing is sure. Almost forty years after he disappeared, James Riddle Hoffa continues being just what his name says: a riddle.