Reply #182: William Achenbaum confirmed as owner until Aug 30, 2007 from at least 2002 onwards

[DrDebug]

From the follow up report:

Drugs on crashed plane belonged to Mexico's biggest dealer
By Jay Root and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Friday, September 28, 2007

(...)

Malago and his business partner, Eduardo Dias Guimaraes, had owned the plane only since August, when their Florida-based Donna Blue Aircraft, an aviation sales company, bought the plane from a holding company owned by New York real estate developer and thoroughbred horse owner William Achenbaum.

Adding to the plane's mystery are allegations that it made trips in 2003, 2004 and 2005 between the United States and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the U.S. detention center for suspected terrorists is located.

Employees of Achenbaum wouldn't discuss how the plane was used while he owned it. They referred calls to William Cripe, who runs Air Rutter International in Long Beach, Calif. Cripe said he leased the plane for a year until it was sold, using it in his charter service. He said the plane didn't fly to Cuba or to the Caribbean while his company operated it.

(...)

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/20104.html

A typical diversion, because Air Rutter wasn't doing the rentals during the rendition flights, it was Richmore who was renting the plane at the time.

Cannonfire is on the story as well and also discovered that William Achenbaum (and his son Michael and partner Donald Stein) were the last owners of the drug plane before it was sold to non-existing non-legit entities (see N900SA ownership cover up last year)

Who owned the jet at the time of the alleged rendition flights?

Here, the trail gets m urk.y

Before the sale to Malago, the jet was leased to (some accounts say owned by) Air Rutter International, a charter airline service operating out of Long Beach, California and Farmingale, New York. Their present fleet includes four Gulfstreams and two Bombadier Challengers.

I have seen no indications that this company, run by a man named William Cripe, is anything other than a reputable and honest charter airline service. Cripe insists that the jet did not make any trips to Guantanamo or other "rendition" sites during the time when his firm used the craft. As noted earlier, those flights are said to have occurred during the 2003-2005 period; Cripe seems to have leased the jet after this time.

The man he leased it from -- the actual owner of the jet -- is a rather interesting figure: New York landowner, developer and race horse enthusiast William Achenbaum.

Achenbaum and his son Michael are best-known as the owners of the Gansevoort Hotel in New York City. They were the key figures in a heated (and rather amusing) local controversy over a billboard which critics considered an eyesore. In 2004, Achenbaum ran into difficulties when he attempted to purchase another hotel (1) in Miami for $54 million.

A quick Google search has uncovered no allegation of illegal activity involving Achembaum -- except for this story (2), which claims that a broker for Achenbaum tried to bribe a city official back in 1976.

According to this (3) German-language article (the reliability of which I cannot yet determine), the actual operator of the craft during the 2003-05 time frame was Richmor Aviation "which offers airplanes for subletting, some of which were used for the conspiratorial operations of the CIA." The Richmor home page is here; they also have a flight school.

Note the pattern: A New York businessman buys a Gulfstream which is operated by Richmor, which uses the jet for "spoo ky" activity.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/

Links:
1. http://www.hotel-online.com/News/PR2004_3rd/Aug04_PalmCrowneMortgage.html
2. http://www.sevenstories.com/closeup/index.cfm?page=hess_new.htm
3. http://oraclesyndicate.twoday.net/stories/4296112/

The Stein / Achenbaum real estate group is very interesting, because they were very irrelevant until about 2000 when their fortune changed and bought the 80 John Street condo near Wall Street from Tamir Sapir another rags-to-riches person who started as a taxi driver and is now a multi million dollar real estate owner as well. ( http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4943&page=3 )

And then they started to branch up by building uptown luxury hotels like Hotel Gansevoort and a couple of other hotels which are either still under construction or have been sold on to their new found friends like Blackstone Group and Chetrit Group (Sears Tower, Chicago)

So what triggered their rags-to-riches story? Was it financed from those $5,600/hour plane rentals for intelligence?