by Roger Stone
The friend added that McKaskle repeated the belief that, “someone was going to kill him” in those last weeks.197
“Shortly before Keith McKaskle was murdered he knew that he was fixin’ to be murdered,” recalled Linda Ives. “He told his family goodbye, he told his friends goodbye.”198
McKaskle was especially spooked by the upcoming 1988 election. If Sheriff Steed did not get reelected, McKaskle knew the information he and others possessed was incendiary.
“On the night of the elections in 1988, he took two pennies out of his pocket and put them on the bar at the Wagon Wheel and said ‘If Sheriff Steed loses this election, my life ain’t worth two cents’ and he was murdered that night,” Linda Ives recollected.199
Many other witnesses, close to the death of Ives and Henry, also met brutal, mysterious ends.
• In January 1989, twenty-six-year-old Greg Collins, who had been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury after a rumor was circulated that he had been with the boys the night they were murdered, was killed by a shotgun blast to the face. His murder remains unsolved. A friend of Collins, Keith Coney, had died in a suspicious highway accident a year earlier, mere weeks after the grand jury had convened. Coney had also been called to testify.
• Only two months after Collins was brutally slain, Daniel “Boonie” Bearden disappeared. Bearden, Collins, and Coney had all been close friends.
• In April 1989, twenty-one-year-old Jeff Rhodes was murdered. Before his death, Rhodes was scared and told family he knew too much about the other murders. “He said he had to get out of Benton, that he knew something about the Keith McKaskle murders,” said Jeff’s father, Eddie Rhodes. Jeff had been shot in the head and his remains set on fire in a dump.
• In July 1989, another grand jury witness, Richard Winters, was gunned down during a robbery, and it has been speculated the robbery was staged to cover his murder. His murder also remains unsolved.
It readily became apparent to Linda Ives and others that Dan Harmon was using the grand jury to dismantle the case of Ives and Henry.
“My personal opinion was that Harmon used that grand jury to find out what he could about who had information on him, and to make it appear like we were suspects, Lonoke Police Chief Ronald Jay Campbell told writer Mara Leveritt. “I believe he called us blatantly, for the sole purpose of trying to discredit us, so that in case he got arrested and charged with drugs as a result of the federal investigation, he could say it was retaliation.”200
Indeed, in 1997 Harmon was found guilty of eleven federal felony charges including federal racketeering, extortion, and drug conspiracy, and was sentenced to eight years in prison. It was found that Harmon had used his office to procure drugs and money.
Sharline Wilson, deep in the Arkansas drug scene with the Clintons and one of the witnesses who testified, had seen Governor Clinton using cocaine with Harmon. Wilson also knew the connection between Harmon and the infamous stretch of railway.
“Every two weeks, for years, I’d go to the tracks, I’d pick up the package, and I’d deliver it to Dan Harmon, either straight to his office, or at my house,” said Wilson. “Sometimes it was flown in by air, sometimes it would be kicked out of the train. A big bundle, two feet by one and a half feet, like a bale of hay, so heavy I’d have trouble lifting it…. Roger the Dodger [Clinton] picked it up a few times.”201
Wilson said she and Harmon were close to the tracks the night Ives and Henry were murdered.
Wilson said that in the summer of 1987, one of the drug drops disappeared. Harmon subsequently brought his men out near midnight on August 22, 1987, to watch over the drug drop, expected to be three to four pounds of cocaine and five pounds of marijuana. While Harmon and his men went to the drug drop site, Wilson stayed back in the car, high as a kite. “It was scary,” Wilson said. “I was high, very high. I was told to sit there and they’d be back. It seemed forever…. I heard two trains. Then I heard screams, loud screams. It … It …” and then Wilson broke into a flood of tears. “When Harmon came back, he jumped in the car and said, ‘Let’s go.’ He was scared. It looked like there was blood all down his legs.”202
When it comes to the boys on the tracks, the Clintons once again kept shady company.
CHAPTER 10
CLINTON, BUSH, BARRY SEAL, AND THE MENA DEAL
“You’ve got millions of people in this country today who just don’t feel connected to the life the rest of us want them to live. You tell them to register and vote, get an education and go to work and they say, ‘I may not have a job, but if I deal drugs I can make money.’”
—Bill Clinton on The Arsenio Hall Show, 1992203
For years there had been talk that the railroad tracks in Alexander, Arkansas, were a drop zone for drugs. Locals had seen small aircraft flying low, with no lights, over the area late at night.
Sure enough, Jean Duffey, former head of the Arkansas Drug Task Force, discovered that not only was Alexander a drop site for drugs, but also that the trafficking operation was spread well beyond the small town. When he made this revelation, ears were perked among many prominent government officials in Arkansas and beyond. Their response was reminiscent of many attacks previous. They lashed out against Duffey.
“I had no idea just how dangerous certain elected officials thought me to be until a brutal media campaign was launched against me,” said Duffey. “For months, there were daily allegations of everything from misspending funds to ordering illegal arrests. Every attempt was made to keep me from running the drug task force. We were even shut down for several weeks during a bogus state police investigation. In spite of crippling disruptions, the task force was making significant discoveries about drug trafficking in central Arkansas, some of which led to the very people who were conducting the massive media crusade against me. We discovered that drug trafficking in Arkansas was linked to government officials in frightening proportions. A great number of people came to me with testimony about astonishing criminal activity of very high level public officials.”204
The drug trafficking in Arkansas can be traced back to CIA drug smuggler Barry Seal, who, a year before the bodies of Kevin Ives and Don Henry were left on the tracks, on February 19, 1986, was murdered outside of a halfway house at The Salvation Army on Airline Highway in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
With a fleet of airplanes smuggling drugs into the country, Seal operated the biggest organized drug operation in U.S. history. Seal’s operations were initially conducted out of Louisiana.
“He was probably one of the biggest drug smugglers ever brought before a court in the history of our country,” Louisiana Attorney General Billy Guste said. “By his own admission, he (Seal) had flown over 100 flights each bringing in between 600 and 1,200 pounds of cocaine. At a wholesale volume of an average of $50,000 a pound, he had smuggled between $3 billion and $5 billion of drugs into the United States.
“His smuggling brought dope to thousands whose lives have been adversely affected by it. He had brought enough cocaine into this country to give a ‘high’ to almost one hundred million users. And he earned between $60 million and $100 million by criminal activity.”205
The planes Seal used were altered to his specifications in order to make covert drops.
“They had special cargo doors installed inside, without FAA permission, so that these doors could be opened in flight, pull ‘em in and slide ‘em back, and cocaine could be dropped out of sight in flight,” said Arkansas State Police Investigator Russell Welch.206
In the 1980s, Seal moved his operations to Arkansas and struck up a personal friendship with Bill Clinton. Seal ran many of his operations out of a covert CIA landing base in Mena, Arkansas. He was protected by his employers at the CIA, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, and Vice President (and former CIA director) Bush. Seal would direct planeloads of cocaine to Mena, which would then be distributed throughout the state and the U.S. The money from the drugs sold would be used to procure guns for the Contras.
“A lot o
f people said the Mena operation stopped in 1986 when Barry Seal was gunned down,” said Saline County Criminal Investigator John Brown. “It’s not true. Covert operations were still going on in Mena, Arkansas. Now if you stop and think when Bill Clinton was governor, he was asked about Mena. He said ‘Well that’s a federal problem, I’m not going to get involved in it.’”
What was Governor Clinton’s involvement in the Arkansas drug trade?
“Every successful drug smuggling organization needs four things,” Miami private eye Gary McDaniel told reporter Daniel Hopsicker, “production, distribution, transportation, and protection.”
Bill Clinton, as governor, provided the protection. In the Ives and Henry case, he controlled the local police, the court system, and the medical examiner.
“One time one of the local DEA agents had told me that Barry had been arrested in Mena, Arkansas,” said James Miller, a close associate of Seal. “And I ran into Barry a week or two later—at a pay telephone—and we were talking, and Barry said, let me show you something. And he showed me a piece of paper, a personal release bond, you know, the piece of paper that somebody has to sign before you can get out of jail, signed by Bill Clinton.”207
Clinton was up to his eyeballs in CIA drug smuggling. Clinton himself has been a CIA asset, recruited at the University of Oxford in 1968 as documented by authors Roger Morris, Cord Meyer, and celebrated writer Christopher Hitchens.
Clinton’s Arkansas state troopers were running some of the drugs. His biggest supporters, Dan Lasater, Jackson Stephens, and chicken king Don Tyson, were involved. Governor Clinton smoothly facilitated the drugs and money between the CIA and the Arkansas Dixie Mafia to bring billions of dollars’ worth of drugs into the U.S.
At one point in the Seal-Mena operations, Governor Clinton attempted to get one of his trusted troopers, L. D. Brown, on the inside. Brown, who had specialized in undercover narcotics at the state police, believed he had a lot to offer the agency. Clinton entrusted Seal as Brown’s CIA handler.
“Barry Seal was a crazy man,” Brown said. “Seal telephoned me and told me he was the man I was told would call me. It was the mid-1980s and with the decadence of that time and the free-flowing cocaine, Cajun’s Wharf was a hangout for the bond daddies such as Lasater and company.”208
Brown recalled that the first words out of Seal’s mouth were “How’s the Guv.” To Brown, “An overweight, jovial, almost slap-happy man as my contact with C.I.A. was not exactly what I expected.”209
Brown had no idea what he was getting into. He had joined the CIA to fight communism and other political injustices in Central America and ended up running massive amounts of drugs into the U.S.
In October of 1984, Barry Seal met Brown at the Mena Airport and took him on a round-trip flight to Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Brown was paid $2,500 just for riding shotgun. Brown was unaware he was flying on a drug run.
Brown figured out what was occurring after a second flight in December 1984:
“Seal reached back to open the duffel bag in the back. He removed a manila envelope identical to the one he had given me after the first trip. I knew what was in the envelope but there was something else. He reached deeper in the bag and gave me the shock of my life.
“Seal’s face had a sly, smirky, almost proud look as he removed a waxed-paper-wrapped taped brick-shaped package from the bag. I immediately recognized it as identical to bricks of cocaine from my days in narcotics. I didn’t know what to think and began demanding to know what was going on. I cursed, ranted and raved and I believe I actually caused Seal to wonder if I might pull a gun and arrest him. Seal threw up his hands and tried to calm me down saying everything was all right and quickly exited my car. He removed the bag from the bag and hustled back toward the plane.”210
Brown found out the hard way why they call the CIA the “Cocaine Import Agency.”
Brown had not seen Governor Clinton since the revelation that he had been an accessory to international drug smuggling. When they next met, Brown was livid:
“[Clinton’s] mouth opened and the words ‘You having fun yet?’ were already forming on his lips when I burst out, ‘Do you know what they are bringing back on those airplanes?’ He immediately threw up his hands in a halting fashion and took a couple of steps back. I know he thought he was in danger of receiving a class A state police ass-whipping. My hopes of an innocent explanation to the whole sordid affair were dashed with the now-famous line, ‘That’s Lasater’s deal! That’s Lasater’s deal!’ he whined as if he had just taken a tongue lashing by Hillary. ‘And your buddy (HW) Bush knows about it!’”211
What shocked Brown is that the Governor didn’t deny it. “And it wasn’t like it was a surprise to him,” Brown would later testify. “It wasn’t like he didn’t try to say, what? He was surprised that I was mad because he thought we were going to have a cordial conversation, but he didn’t try to deny it. He didn’t try to deny that it wasn’t coming back, that I wasn’t telling the truth or that he didn’t know anything about it.”212
The Clinton-Dan Lasater connection was a very important one. Dan Lasater was a young entrepreneur who in 1965 founded Ponderosa Steakhouses.213 Lasater became successful in the restaurant business, and he later branched off into horse racing, where he was immensely successful in the years 1974, 1975, and 1976. He won the racing industry’s prestigious Eclipse Award for outstanding owner.214 “But according to a police statement by one of his employees, Lasater’s success with the horses was achieved by ‘putting in the boot’—fixing the races.”215
Along the way, Dan Lasater did two other things as well: cocaine smuggling and money laundering as one of Bill Clinton’s closest friends and biggest political contributors when Clinton was governor of Arkansas.
Lasater also started a bond company and in 1985, Clinton’s Arkansas government awarded Lasater an exclusive $750,000 contract to sell bonds to finance a new state police radio system.216 At this same time there was a tremendous amount of drugs being run through Arkansas. Bill Clinton and his half-brother Roger Clinton were both cocaine addicts.
Betsey Wright told Larry Nichols that Bill Clinton had had to be sent to a drug rehab multiple times. Roger Clinton had been famously rumored to say he needed to buy some cocaine because his half-brother Bill had a nose like a vacuum cleaner. It was also during the early 1980s when Roger Clinton owed some other drug dealers some big money and Lasater gave him some money to pay off the drug debt and also put Roger Clinton on his payroll to help him survive that frightening crisis.
In a nutshell, Dan Lasaster was a successful businessman, a very tight friend of Bill Clinton, and a man deep in the underworld of drug trafficking and criminal activities. “U.S. attorneys in Arkansas and Nevada as well as the Kentucky State Police suspected Lasaster had ties to organized crime; that he dealt cocaine in Arkansas and would be probed by federal undercover agents for major drug trafficking in New Mexico; that his bond brokerage was disciplined repeatedly for shady dealings with subsequent suspicions of money laundering and was nonetheless the beneficiary of millions in state commissions under the Clinton regime.”217
The “Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force concluded in 1986 that Lasaster was a major cocaine trafficker.”218
A 1988 FBI bulletin noted that Lasater was the top supplier of cocaine to the bond and investment banking community in Little Rock. Lasater by the mid-1970s had become a key figure in Dixie Mafia cocaine trafficking. The DEA had opened a file on Lasater in 1983 and had given him the tracking number of 141475. Not only that, but one of Arkansas’s top businessmen, Jackson Stephens, who later became a key Clinton donor, helped Lasater get into the bond business.219
In New Mexico, the authorities investigated Lasater for drug smuggling relating to planes coming in and out of his Angel Fire Resort, which has an 8,900-foot runway. At that time Angel Fire was managed by a woman named Patsy Thomasson who later got a key position in the Clinton White House in the Office of Administration. Thomasson, who used to wor
k for Lasater, then for the Clintons, is now working as the chief of staff (Washington, DC, office) for the lobbying firm of Texas Democratic fixer Ben Barnes. Not surprisingly, Thomasson does not include her work for drug dealer Lasater in the 1980s on her resume, which is posted on the Internet.220 She was his right-hand woman.
“New Mexico sheriffs and district attorneys were hearing reports from Angel Fire reminiscent of Mena—strange nighttime traffic, sightings of parachute drops, even hikers’ accounts of a ‘big military-type cargo plane’ seeming to come out of nowhere and swooping low and almost silently over a deserted mountain meadow near the remote ski area.”221
That sounds a lot like what Barry Seal was doing in Arkansas as he coordinated drug and money drops from the air.
Lasater, like Governor Bill Clinton, had a close working relationship with Seal. Lasater had bought a “horse farm,” called the Carver Ranch, which drug smugglers would use to refuel the planes for their drug mule runs to Colombia. Arkansas Drug Investigator Russell Welch said, “Seal used this ranch frequently.” Evans-Pritchard: “So, apparently this ranch was no horse farm. It was part of the Medellin trafficking empire.”222
Terry Reed, who later wrote a book about the Clinton-Bush-CIA-Oliver North drug smuggling said, “The first day I met Barry Seal he was in the company of Dan Lasater and Roger Clinton. Roger was the driver for Dan Lasater at the time.”223
With Dan Lasater and Bill Clinton it was about drugs, parties, cocaine, women, and drug money laundering. Arkansas was wide open for the drug trade: It was a diseased narco state being run by a cocaine-addled Governor Bill Clinton.
L. J. Davis wrote in the New Republic that “Lasater served ashtrays full of cocaine at parties in his mansion [and] stocked cocaine in his corporate jet (a plane used by the Clintons on more than one occasion).”224 One year Lasaster flew the Clintons and friends to watch the Kentucky Derby. As for Roger Clinton, he was the lead singer in a band called Dealer’s Choice.
