Swiss television reported in late May 1998 that police were "investigating the possibility that insurance fraud by a Swiss resident listed among the 230 people killed in the TWA flight 800 explosion might have been behind the disaster."
According to that report, Swiss authorities had been investigating Algerian-born Mohammed Samir Ferrat for 18 months and that French authorities were conducting their own investigation.
The reports said that in September 1997 a chateau rented by Ferrat was searched by police who said they suspected fraud. Ferrat also maintained homes in Paris and the Ivory Coast.
A Geneva lawyer, Gerald Page, alleged in the TV report that Ferrat took out life insurance policies worth several million Swiss franks in the weeks before TWA 800 crashed July 17, 1996.
On August 19, 1996, a Suffolk County medical examiner in whose jurisdiction the TWA 800 disaster occurred declared that Ferrat had been positively identified as one of the passengers killed in the crash.
Page, who said he represents a shipping firm in the Ivory Coast with claims against Ferrat, advised the Swiss insurer Winterthur about his suspicions.
Werner Rast, a spokesman for Winterthur, said in the TV report that his firm had decided to hold up payment of a policy worth 437,500 pounds to Ferrat's family.
The report said French firms had paid out claims on similar policies held by Ferrat.
The report quoted Page as saying: "Ferrat's finance firm SOFINSA (SOFtware INtegrado Sistemas Abiertos), which is based in Switzerland, mainly conducted business in the Ivory Coast. Page said SOFINSA "was deeply indebted and that Ferrat had made transfers of millions into family and offshore accounts in the weeks before the explosion."
The report included an interview with Fairfax, Virginia-based Chadwick International official Djaffar Abdelouahab who said he saw Ferrat off on a flight from Washington that connected with TWA Flight 800 and that Ferrat appeared unusually preoccupied.
Ferrat's Swiss firm SOFINSA was involved at the time in a $92 million contract with Chadwick and the Ivory Coast government.
Swiss authorities, according to the TV report, were initially suspicious of Ferrat when his credit card was charged with purchases in the weeks after the TWA crash, but U.S. investigators, the report said, learned the cards were used by family members.
Ferrat had been in Baltimore to visit his mother who was in Johns Hopkins Hospital with terminal cancer. The Television report showed footage of Ferrat's tombstone on a grave in a Paris Muslim cemetery. He shares the grave site with his mother who died of cancer later in 1996.
Chadwick's Operation And Ferrat/Brown Connection
Chadwick International exports "modular and panelized homes" to developing countries, in the African countries of Algeria, the Ivory Coast, Tunisia and Gabon. The company also pursued contracts in Argentina and Vietnam.
According to reports, Chadwick officials work with different lending institutions including the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank). That bank's insurance covers the failure of a foreign buyer or financial institution (issuing bank) to make payment for U.S. exports due to commercial or political reasons.
George S. Henderson, Jr., Chadwick's president and chief operating officer, said the homes are sold as part of a package to foreign entrepreneurs planning subdivisions in efforts to fill the need for homes in developing countries.
Henderson, who spent 20 years as an Ex-Im official including "a stint as deputy of the claims division," said he formed Chadwick in 1990 "after seeing World Bank figures indicating a world-wide need for housing."
In a November 1995 article, Business Week described Chadwick International's operation: "Tiny Chadwick operates in places that U.S. companies 10 times its size shy away from . . . Financing is the critical element in Chadwick's package. In many developing countries, prospective buyers-typically foreign government agencies, banks, or private syndicates_lack cash and access to commercial markets. Chadwick generally arranges five-year financing from international money-center banks, 85 % of which is often guaranteed by the U.S. Export-Import Bank."
Ronald M. Nocera, Chadwick's co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer, told Newsweek that Chadwick's involvement in Algeria was "more by fluke than design." Nocera, who had never worked abroad prior to the company's formation in 1991, said he was mulling possible overseas ventures when an Algerian acquaintance offered to arrange a meeting with real estate contacts in Algeria.
He said he traveled to Algeria and stayed three weeks. A trip, he said, did not immediately lead to a deal because of Algerian government bureaucracy and the "not-so-subtle" attempts at shakedowns by middlemen.
Within two and a half years, however, Chadwick was granted permission to open an office in Algiers.
In 1994, Chadwick International signed a $20 million contract with Algeria's largest financial institution, Caisse Nationale d'Epargne et Prevoyance, and shipped 412 ready-made duplexes to that country.
Chadwick's modular homes are built in company-owned plants in Florida and Pennsylvania. The modulars are transported overseas on two chartered ships.
The Jacksonville Business Journal reported in July 1995 that Chadwick was manufacturing modular homes at a company plant in Bartow, about 30 miles east of Tampa, ranging in size from 800 square feet to 1,500 square feet and costs between $42,000 and $95,000.
In early February 1996 U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown led a trade mission to the Ivory Coast during which he was photographed with Ferrat, Henderson and Ivorian
Commerce Minister Angoran Kacou. The deal was made in conjunction with round table discussions between U.S. and West African business executives and government leaders on trade and investment issues.
Chadwick International had signed a $92 million contract with the Ivorian government and Ferrat's Swiss firm SOFINSA to provide 6,000 units of prefabricated modular housing over the following two years.
According to the Swiss television, Chadwick, spent 2.5 million pounds before having to halt the project. The loan was guaranteed by the Im-Ex Bank.
It remains unclear if Ferrat had a past association with Sec. Brown prior to Ferrat being photographed with Brown during the signing. Henderson told the U.S. Veteran Dispatch this month that Ferrat had never met Brown before they were photographed together at the Ivory Coast meeting.
Henderson said "Ferrat was a real marketer. He thought if he got the approval of the U.S. government it would help in his other business transactions. He wanted to be seen in the same room and photographed with Brown for that reason."
Henderson denied that Ferrat was the "Algerian acquaintance" who helped arrange Chadwick's initial real estate contacts in Algeria that led to the multi-million dollar contract.
He said he could not clearly recall the "Algerian acquaintance's" name but said he had since been killed in a car accident in Virginia.
Henderson said that although Ferrat did not know Sec. Brown prior to the Ivory Coast trade mission, Ferrat did contact Sec. Brown's son after Sec. Brown and 34 others died two months later (April 3, 1996) in a U.S. Air Force airplane crash outside Dubrovnik, Croatia. Henderson said Ferrat offered to name Chadwick's Ivory Coast modular project "Ron Brown Village or something like that."
Brown was leading a delegation of U.S. business and banking executives on a threeday economic tour of the Balkans when his plane slammed into a mountain ridge. Killed in that crash were 12 chief executives, 15 U.S. government employees, including one Central Intelligence Agency analyst (CIA), a New York Times reporter, a photographer, an interpreter and six crew members.
Ironically, three months later (July 17), Ferrat was killed when ill fated TWA Flight 800 mysteriously blew up shortly after taking off from Kennedy International Airport.
In late 1996, CNN aired a comment by a reporter who noted that Ferrat, who had initially been scheduled to accompany Sec. Brown on the Croatian trade mission, had been fortunate enough to miss that flight but unfortunate to have taken the TWA Flight 800 three and a half months later.
Henderson said the report was not correct. He said that it was he and not Ferrat who was scheduled for Sec. Brown's Croatian trade mission. He said the company decided not to participate in the trip because it was not an area Chadwick was interested in at that time.
FBI Oddly Withdrew It's Investigation Of Ferrat
After the TWA 800 crash, the FBI treated Ferrat as a suspected terrorist because he was the sole passenger on the flight roster listed only by his last name.
Oddly, however, the FBI, within hours of beginning their investigation of Ferrat, withdrew, telling the New York Times that "Ferrat was not at all the kind of person to take a bomb on a plane. Nor was he a likely target of a bomb plot."
"Ferrat, it turned out," the New York Times said, "was a wealthy and highly respected businessman, money manager and investor with offices and residences in the Ivory Coast, France and Switzerland . . . FBI agents learned all this without questioning Ferrat's family, friends or business associates, many of whom were gathered in their grief at the family hotel in Virginia."
One source, who asked not to be identified, suggested to the U.S. Veteran Dispatch that the FBI cleared Ferrat, a foreign national, without questioning anyone about his background because they either learned of his connection to Sec. Brown or that Ferrat may have been on the payroll of U.S. intelligence, possibly the CIA.
U.S. government investigators have yet to determine whether missile, bomb or mechanical failure brought TWA 800 down, killing all 230 passengers and crew.
The U.S. Veteran Dispatch published a story in January 1997 in which Ferrat was connected to Sec. Brown and repeated the account of how Ferrat missed the Croatian flight with Sec. Brown only to be killed on the TWA 800 flight.
Sec. Brown Was Under Investigation For Corruption
At the time of Sec. Brown's death in Croatia, he was under investigation by independent council Daniel Pearson for allegedly engaging in fraudulent financial transactions and for funneling massive illegal donations from the Lippo Group and the government of Red China to the Democratic Party. China was suspected of an intelligence penetration into the highest levels of the U.S. government and America's financial institutions
Intelligence Coup By Red China
London's Sunday Times reported November 10, 1996, that the fund raising scandal "appears to have been a stunning intelligence coup by China."
The Sunday Times said Chinese agents were able to "take advantage of lax security procedures and a pattern of corruption in the Clinton administration" to gain "advanced knowledge of America's negotiating positions in trade and economic talks as well as access trade deals subsidized by America."
Chinese born John Huang, who became a naturalized American citizen after coming to the U.S. in 1969, was given a July 1994 appointment to a U.S. Commerce Department post with direct access to President Bill Clinton and a "Top Secret" clearance.
The Sunday Times reported that on the personal instructions of Sec. Brown, "Huang was given topsecret security clearance without background checks by the FBI or the state department's Office of Security a strict requirement for somebody born in a foreign country."
Sixteen months later, Huang left Commerce to become the Democratic National Committee's fundraising vice chairman.
A Family Conglomerate Of "Overseas Chinese"
In 1984, Huang worked as an officer of the Hong Kong Chinese Bank, which had been purchased by Mochtar Riady, the head of an Indonesian corporation called the Lippo Group.
Lippo is an "empire" with billions in assets. It is a family controlled conglomerate of "overseas Chinese" built on banking, real estate, securities, insurance, the financing of infrastructure projects and oil exploration.
The group was started in the 1960s in Jakarta by Mochtar Riady. His parents had immigrated from China's Fujian Province to Indonesia.
Lippo, shrewdly constructed of hundreds of subsidiaries in dozens of countries, aggressively pursues business in the Pacific Rim and the United States. It has a partnership with the Charlotte, North Carolina based First Union Corp., one of the biggest banks in the United States and owns Worthen Bank, in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Riady used the Worthen Bank, purchased in 1984, as a vehicle to later that year purchase the Hong Kong Chinese Bank.
A Timely Chinese Loan To Clinton
President Bill Clinton has a history with Riady and his son James, a key Lippo official and Worthen director. Riady's Worthen Bank (now Boatman's Bank of Little Rock) made itself of great help to Clinton by approving a timely $3.5 million loan to Clinton's cashstrapped 1992 presidential campaign.
After Clinton was elected in November 1992, China Resources Holding Company (Hua Ren Jituan), owned by the Chinese Communist Party, bought control of Riady's Hong Kong Chinese Bank, putting the Riady's Lippo Group in business with the Red Chinese.
A Bribe From The Communist Vietnamese?
Brown was also accused of corruption for the alleged acceptance of a $700,000 bribe from Communist Vietnam.
In July 1993, a Washington, D.C. newspaper had published details of the alleged "$700,000" bribe from the government of Vietnam to Sec. Brown. The bribe was supposedly in exchange for the Clinton administration to drop U.S. opposition to Vietnam receiving International Monetary Fund loans and to lift the trade embargo.
According to Binh T. Ly, a Vietnamese businessman who was initially a participant in the scheme, $700,000 was to be deposited to a fictitious name in a Singapore bank account at Banque Indosuez.
After initially lying to the press, Sec. Brown admitted meeting three times with Vietnamese agent Nguyen Van Hao, who according to Ly, organized the alleged bribe. Sec. Brown denied ever doing business with Hao.
The investigation of Sec. Brown was terminated when he died in Croatia.
Was Sec. Brown Killed By A Bullet?
In December last year, Air Force Lt. Col. Steve Cogswell, a deputy medical examiner broke his silence and told Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reporter Christopher Ruddy that Sec. Brown had suffered an "apparent gunshot wound" and that his death may have been caused by a .45-caliber gun.
Cogswell, a pathologist who had been dispatched to Croatia by the Air Force to investigate the crash in which Sec. Brown died, told the Tribune that a proper autopsy should have been performed on Sec. Brown's body.
"Even if you safely assume accidental plane crash, when you've got something that appears to be a homicide, that should bring everything to a screeching halt," Cogswell said.
Secretary of the Air Force F. Whitten Peters disagreed with Cogswell's theory. He said the alleged "bullet fragments" mentioned by Cogswell were actually caused by a defect in reusable x-ray film cassettes.
The Air Force explanation of the wound is that it was probably caused by a rivet, rod or bolt from the airplane wreckage.
Sec. Peters said that since the wound was not determined to be caused by gunshot there was no need for exhumation of Sec. Brown's body for an autopsy.
Soon after the Tribune's story appeared, Cogswell received an administrative letter informing him that he was under internal investigation and could not leave his office without permission and that he should not speak to the press. The military police soon showed up and escorted Cogswell to his home where they retrieved all slides and photos in his possession relating to Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) cases.
Soon however, Cogswell's account was backed by another AFIP pathologist, Army Lt. Col. David House who said he personally observed the apparent bullet hole.
According to House, the wound caused quite a sensation among the staff at AFIP Dover, Delaware examination facility after the crash victims' bodies were flown there.
House was joined by several other pathologists, all who agreed the hole in Brown's skull appeared to have been caused by a gunshot. He said that "by any professional standard," an autopsy should have been conducted on Brown's body.
A Trail Of Dead Commerce Employees
Melinda Yee, a top aide to Sec. Brown before his death, acknowledged in a sworn deposition Dec. 4, 1996 that she destroyed handwritten notes and other records of U.S. trade missions which had been subpoenaed by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lambret.
A Justice Department lawyer representing the Commerce Department later told Lambret that Commerce officials had sought documents from Yee's co-worker, but had neglected to ask Yee for any documents. Yee's coworker, the lawyer told Lambret, had recently died.
Yee, according to The Washington Times, played "a key planning and logistics role in trade missions to China, India and Indonesia."
Washington news sources reported Nov. 30 that Barbara Alice Wise, 48, who had worked as a secretary for 14 years at the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration, was found dead Nov. 29, five days before Yee's deposition, in Wise's fourth floor office at the agency's Washington office.
She had been seen alive at the Commerce Department in late afternoon, Nov. 27, before the agency closed for Thanksgiving holiday.
The press reported an unidentified police source saying bruises were found on Wise's body and that the office where her body was found was "locked and the body was partially nude."
Sgt. Michael Farish, a homicide investigator with the District of Columbia police, said officers found no signs of foul play and believe Wise died of natural causes.
It is unclear whether Wise was Yee's co-worker to whom the Justice Department lawyer referred.
In addition to the death of Wise, thirteen other Commerce Department employees who worked for Sec. Brown on international trade issues died in the same crash that killed Sec. Brown.
Of the 12 corporate executives who died with Brown, a majority represented powerful U.S. companies holding multimilliondollar contracts with China, Africa, Vietnam or Indonesia.
Obvious Questions
Why did Ferrat "transfer millions into family and offshore accounts" in the weeks before the explosion?
Was Ferrat unusually preoccupied prior to boarding TWA Flight 800 as Chadwick International official Djaffar Abdelouahab said? If so, Why?
What motivated Ferrat to take out million dollar life insurance policies in Switzerland and France in the weeks prior to boarding Flight TWA 800?
Was Ferrat planning suicide or was he afraid?
Why did the FBI, within hours of beginning their investigation of Ferrat, withdraw?
If FBI agents did not question Ferrat's "family, friends or business associates" then how did they conclude that Ferrat "was not at all the kind of person to take a bomb on a plane. Nor was he a likely target of a bomb plot" and that he "was a wealthy and highly respected businessman, money manager and investor with offices and residences in the Ivory Coast, France and Switzerland?
U.S. Department of Commerce officials did not respond to inquires made by the U.S. Veteran Dispatch pertaining to the possible connections between Sec. Brown and Ferrat.