The Vicodin Thieves. Chip Jacobs
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All she needed from her Manila contacts was confirmation, preferably in writing, that everything was synced in the Philippines, she said in a July 22nd memo. “We prefer the [plane’s] tail number not be recorded, but we have been able to alter this as a strict requirement, and we can allow it be recorded… The most important verification is that the diplomatic flight will be able to skip customs and proceed strictly to the hangar” to load the merchandise and related equipment. Air America Holdings, she added, was ready to take off within seventy-two hours of payment.
Asked why she believed Washington would condone such furtive actions when the Air Force could simply dispatch its own C-130 to collect the pallets, Sholtz responded: “I wasn’t looking at the mechanics. We were meeting real people who were supposedly working with the U.S. Government. We needed to help our country. I was starry-eyed, thinking this is going to be fantastic! You don’t think something this big could not be true.” Guy Bailey, a Miami attorney who represented Sholtz on Eagle before a falling out, remembered her recounting the same story as the documents paint. “She said she was in some sort of contractual arrangement with the CIA and the Treasury Department to go retrieve currency, gold, or something from the Philippines,” Bailey told the Weekly. Bailey said that as far as he knew, the 707 arrived in the Philippines, waited a week there to collect the goods and left with an empty cargo hold for unexplained reasons.
Sholtz said she has heard that version and another one where the booty was returned to the U.S., and everybody profited but her because she had been swindled. By mid-summer 1998, Sholtz said Eagle team members would not answer her questions, then her phone calls. It was as if they had vanished. “I don’t know what happened. Sometimes it depends on the day,” she said. “I thought they’d chosen us to do this great work, and it was so flattering and if you have any narcissism, it’s ‘Oh boy.’ Nobody said it was illegal. Now I’m thinking there has to be a conspiracy.”
NO PRESSURE
While it seems likely Eagle was little more than a Nigerian-type scam on Sholtz, the fact that RECLAIM money was alleged to have helped finance it infuses it with relevance in understanding how well authorities have policed cap-and-trades heretofore. There is also the issue of Washington’s awareness of former—or phony—spies and soldiers portraying themselves as agents on government-sanctioned missions. If something like Eagle would deliver gold bars into a U.S. airport un-checked, what else could be brought into the country?
For its part, the CIA denied involvement with Eagle and its participants. “These individuals, to my knowledge, neither have, nor have had any affiliation with the agency,” said Agency Spokesman Paul Gimigliano. “We’re not part of this tale.” State Department Spokeswoman Laura Tischler said diplomatic officials knew nothing about Eagle, either. She did note it is illegal to claim diplomatic immunity if it is not officially conferred. The Treasury Department never answered the Weekly’s inquiries. In New York, the UN Office of Legal Affairs found no evidence after searching its records that the organization was affiliated with Sholtz or Gold Ray. A UN Official said the organization does not typically approve private charities, and says it is illegal to misuse the UN’s name.
Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, the silence over Eagle today is crushing. All three companies allegedly fleeced of their RECLAIM credits to help finance the scheme—Chevron, Mobil, and Aera—
refused comment or never returned calls. Edison Spokesman Steve Conroy would only say the utility was reviewing the matter after the Weekly’s inquiries.
In spite of ample documentation and a four year investigation, the U.S. Attorney’s Office never charged Sholtz, Keller or their associates with a potential array of felonies stemming from alleged misuse of smog credit money or the extraction scheme. One natural question that arises is whether the U.S. Intelligence Community or other federal officials pressed the Justice Department not to prosecute Eagle for unstated reasons, and whether that prompted the record-sealing and prosecutorial silence. Justice Department spokesman Thom Mrozek rejected the notion of external arm-twisting. In fact, his only elaboration on the entire Sholtz matter was that his office “has never been influenced by political pressure” from outside.
For all the Department of Justice’s explanations, EPA officials were disappointed Eagle was not prosecuted or fleshed out by the FBI and others. In a statement to the Weekly, the EPA said: “[We] investigated this fraudulent scheme because companies and individuals must legally and accurately trade air pollution credits if cap-and-trade programs are to succeed and air emissions are to be actually reduced.” The agency had known about the offshore ventures for years. In 2004, Ronald Modjeski, the EPA criminal investigative agent assigned the case, filed an affidavit confirming Sholtz’s deal making for federal reserve notes, currency, gold, and other financial instruments for “large amounts of money.” The EPA refused to allow Modjeski, who spent nearly 4,000 man hours investigating Sholtz, to be interviewed.
HOOKY SPOOKY
In hindsight, Sholtz said that she believes Keller and the others on the Eagle team targeted her all along. They probably knew from research that her maternal grandfather, David Sholtz, had been governor of Florida during the 1930s, and decided to appeal to her public service instinct, she added. Soon after she fired Keller in 2000, Sholtz said the tone of their relationship changed. She claimed that he began placing threatening phone calls describing what she was wearing, her location and how he didn’t plan on serving any jail time to intimidate her from testifying about him. In Pasadena in 2002, Sholtz said another Eagle participant tried frightening her with the warning: “You know people disappear all the time.” She refused to identify him. “I told the U.S. Attorney during my prosecution that there’s this whole world where people are roped into thinking they are working with the CIA and military personnel or [the National Security Agency] and they didn’t seem interested. I got scammed, but so do a lot of people and they’re too embarrassed to talk about it.”
After Eagle fizzled, Sholtz did not lose her appetite for cloak-and-dagger currency repatriation. Just months later, in February 1999, she set her sights on the western coast of Africa, documents and interviews indicate. This time, Sholtz hired Dale Toler, a former combat pilot with an intelligence background who was now CEO of a Virginia electronics-technology company. His assignment: to haul back $35 million in U.S. currency supposedly squirreled away in Ghana. A mission report about the venture, prepared by the squad acting on Sholtz’s behalf, said the U.S. Treasury Department suspected beforehand that the U.S. cash the Africans contended holding was “potentially fraudulent.” Even so, the report said, “preliminary arrangements were also made with United States Customs officials for a prearranged arrival point” should the “recovery” be successful. The millions at the center of it had originally been appropriated for Sierra Leone, a small, mineral-rich, war-torn country west of Ghana.
The trip to extract the $35 million for Sholtz formally kicked off when her squad’s lead agent met a burly, bespectacled doctor who had represented himself as Ghana’s security chief at the Golden Tulip hotel in the capital city of Accra. (Toler, in an interview with the Weekly, confirmed he was there without letting on whether he was the negotiating agent.) Detective work soon confirmed the Ghanaian had lied about the position he supposedly held, but he knew plenty about the $35 million. The agent drove with him in a black Dodge Dakota pickup for about forty-five minutes to a private, walled residential compound topped with shards of glass for a discussion on how the money would be transferred. Security personnel concerned about the agent’s safety tailed the pickup as long as they could.
Inside the property, the Ghanaian told the agent he required $80,000 for his cut to arrange the movement of the U.S. currency to the Accra airport for its repatriation to America. “Not so fast,” the agent said. Under the original agreement, the Ghanaian was to receive his commission after the transfer. The Ghanaian said his terms had changed: he needed early compensation to pay others involved. For an hour, the two men squabbled back and forth over logistics and promises to no avail. Afterwards, the Ghanaian drove Sholtz’s representative back to the Golden Tulip hotel in a circuitous route so the agent would be unable to retrace where he had been.
A few hours later, during a night meeting at the Kata International Hotel, the two tried reviving the negotiations. Sholtz’s agent insisted on seeing the $35 million with his own