Just a Drive By

Still sick here, so just pointing out a couple of updates elsewhere, that coincidentally both point, in part, to Florida.

Noreen Gosch has posted an "urgent announcement" identifying one of the other bound boys in the photograph left at her door as David Leonard Johnson, kidnapped from Lynnwood, Washington in 1985 (three years after Johnny's disappearance). She writes that David's mother, Patricia Johnson Holm, had contacted her three weeks ago but had not sought additional publicity. "Since that time she has seen the interview the Florida Detective [Nelson Zalva] did with Fox TV/Greta Show and is shocked that the detective is again trying to discredit the photo and both of our sons. She has now reconsidered and is willing to share her story and the photo."

Maybe I'm going about searching the wrong way, or I'm wrong to presume there would be something online, but I can't find anything on an abduction of a David Leonard Johnson. Still, Noreen has supplied contact information for Patricia Holm - her phone number, even - which is far more than Nelson Zalva has provided to support his sketchy tale.

Also, Daniel Hopsicker has an interesting follow-up on the seizure of Florida flight school owner Wally Hilliard's private plane with 43 lbs of heroin onboard just three weeks after Mohammed Atta's enrollment. It was Central Florida's biggest drug bust, but the Justice Department declined to persecute Hilliard's pilot, Diego Levine-Texar, for "lack of evidence," though he ignored agents demands that he drop his cell phone which had to be pried from his hand at gunpoint. The affidavit of the arresting agent read, "Based on my experience I know that narcotics traffickers maintain frequent contact with one another while transporting narcotics… I believe Levine-Texar attempted to contact other accomplices as to the presence of agents and other law enforcement officials." Information about Levine-Texar, we're told, is considered "sensitive." Hopsicker notes in Welcome to Terrorland that Hilliard himself was feeling so cocksure after the bust that he shouted out to his employees when the DEA visited his mainstenance facility "Make sure all the heroin and cocaine gets hidden!"

A frequent flier on the flight school drug runs - 39 weeks in a row - Edgar Valles-Diaz, was arrested. Each flight originated in Venezuela, stopped over in Fort Lauderdale and continued on to New York City. A member of the jet's flight crew stated that "When we landed in New York Valles-Diaz would be met by his 'boyfriend.' He gets picked up at the airport by an Uzbek named Igor Rabaev, his heroin connection from Central Asia."

Hopsicker writes that Rabaev "is a prominent member of a Russian Mob family which uses the Uzbek capital of Tashkent as a transshipment point for heroin from Afghanistan.... 'Igor Rabaev is a name to be conjured with in certain circles,' a former U.S. covert operative in Central Asia told us."

Sound like Sibel Edmonds' global criminal network? ("You get to a point where it gets very complex, where you have money laundering activities, drug related activities, and terrorist support activities converging at certain points and becoming one.") Read more here.