The Clintons' War on Women (18 page)

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.
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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.”
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The “Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force concluded in 1986 that Lasaster was a major cocaine trafficker.”
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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.
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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 work 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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).”
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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.

As Victor Thorn points out in his book about the Clintons and drugs, Roger Clinton was completely out of control, constantly getting high on cocaine, boasting in an FBI transcript that he took cocaine twelve times per day, taking girls to have sex parties at the Arkansas governor’s mansion, and bragging that he could buy a quarter pound of cocaine for as cheap as $10,000.
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One of the victims of Bill Clinton and Lasater was a young girl named Patti-Anne Smith (also Patricia Anne Smith). Bill, Roger, and Lasater were corrupting and then partying with teenaged girls. One of these victims was Patricia Anne Smith, who said, ““I was introduced to cocaine by Dan Lasater when I was 16 or 17 years old and a
student at North Little Rock Old Main High School…. I was a virgin until two months after I met Dan Lasater. Lasater plied me with cocaine and gifts for sexual favors.”
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Add then teenaged Smith to the list of those who have confirmed Bill Clinton’s 1980 drug use: “I met Bill Clinton several times, he’d know my name and I thought he was a wonderful person, but I can tell you that he was never acting like a governor when I saw him.”
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Patti-Anne saw him take cocaine two or three times. “He was doing a line. It was just there on a table.”
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Newsmax’s Carl Limbacher did some fine reporting on the depravity of Lasater’s relationship with Patti-Anne Smith and other teenaged girls: “[Patti said] I could get an eight ball [from Lasater] whenever I wanted it. I carried a vial of it around at school. After a visit to a Lasater-supplied gynecologist, who put Patti-Anne on birth control pills, Lasater was making her available for the sexual entertainment of his business colleagues. When investigators tracked her down to gain testimony against Lasater two years later, the terms they used to describe Patti-Anne were drugged-out party girl and basket case.”
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Lasater had turned Patti-Anne Smith into a teenaged prostitute.

“Here’s the police statement of Michele Cochran—nineteen years old when she met Lasater,” wrote Limbacher. “He used drugs and money eventually to seduce me. As a result of the relationship I became addicted to cocaine. Another teenaged Lasater alum told police that after a few months in his orbit, she would sometimes get up and snort cocaine in order to start my day.”
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That is who Bill Clinton was partying with in the 1980s: Dan Lasater and the teenage and even high school girls he was corrupting.

Arkansas state trooper Barry Spivey said he can remember flying Bill Clinton flying multiple times on Lasater’s jet. Spivey flew to the Kentucky Derby with Lasater and Clinton. Spivey also said under oath that Clinton went to Lasater’s residence many times.

While all this was going on, Lasater was using his bond business to launder the cocaine money. “One former broker told me that he never
witnessed enough authentic business to justify the existence of Lasater’s office at 312 Louisiana Street,” said Evans-Pritchard.
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By the mid-1980s, the drug activities of both Roger and Lasater were attracting a lot of attention from those elements in government that were not corrupt. “Roger Clinton was indicted in 1984 by a federal grand jury on five counts of drug trafficking.”
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Roger served only a year in jail. In 2001, as he was leaving the presidency, Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother as if it had never happened.

Lasater, a kingpin who was at the heart of CIA/Dixie Mafia drug running in Arkansas, was also indicted for cocaine possession. The FSLIC also targeted him for insurance fraud. Lasater could have been put away for twenty years or longer, but instead was given a thirty-month sentence. He served part in a halfway house and two more months under “house arrest.” Then, Governor Bill Clinton pardoned him in 1990.

In
Clinton Confidential: The Climb to Power,
George Carpozi describes how Hillary got Lasater off the hook. He writes, “Hillary and Vince [Foster] huddled with Dan Lasater in discussions that are nowhere to be found in a public record. When they emerged from the dark, they announced that a deal had been struck with the defendant. He [Lasater] agreed to put up $200,000 in settlement of his $3.3 million obligation. That was paying back less than a thousandth of a cent to each of America’s 250 million potential taxpaying citizens who Lasater cheated through his theft of the $3.3 million.”
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Or one could say Lasater, still fabulously wealthy, settled for six cents on the dollar with the U.S. government. A key factor: the First Lady of Arkansas was representing the U.S. government in a case involving a close family friend, Lasater, who was friends with Bill, Hillary, Roger, and Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, who had met Lasater at the horse racetracks. Conflict of interest, anyone?

Hillary represented the FSLIC and gave her husband’s best friend the deal of a lifetime. That deal was in the best interest of Hillary, Bill, and Lasaster. As for the rest of society? Not so much.

The
story of Dennis Patrick clues us in on how much criminality was involved in the Lasater operations. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard details in his book
The Secret Life of Bill Clinton
that someone tried to assassinate Patrick multiple times. Why would they do that? Perhaps because Patrick had an account at the bond firm owned by Lasater that was used to launder tens of millions in drug money. Patrick’s account was being used without his knowledge to move huge amounts of drug money. When interviewed in 1994 by Evans-Pritchard, Patrick was forty-two years old. In 1985, when many of these drug laundering trades were made, he was thirty-three.

Evans-Pritchard gave a fascinating account of the murder attempts on Patrick:

“Dennis had been warned long before by a disenchanted broker at Lasater & Company called Linda Nesheim that people with ties to the firm were trying to kill him. ‘Linda kept talking about Patsy Thomasson,’ recalled Dennis. ‘She told me that Patsy was the one in charge, that she was the one who could put an end to my whole nightmare.’

“But at the time it didn’t make much sense to him. “I couldn’t figure out why Lasater would do this to me. I didn’t know back then that he’d run $100 million, or $150 million, or whatever it was, through my account.”

Evans-Pritchard directly asked Steve Love, who used to be a bond broker for Lasater, if Lasater & Company was behind all the murder attempts on Patrick.

Love replied, “They certainly didn’t want anybody to blow the whistle.”
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Love also added that Dennis Patrick was completely innocent of any wrong doing, a pure victim in this case.

One would figure that after all of this Bill Clinton would have considered Lasater radioactive. That was not the case at all. State trooper Larry Patterson, in his blockbuster exposé interview with
Newsmax
, “More Than Sex: The Secrets of Bill and Hillary Clinton Revealed,” said that after Lasater got out of jail Bill Clinton asked Larry
Patterson what he thought about making Dan his chief of staff for his governor’s office. That appointment never happened.
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If one were to summarize the Clinton-Lasater relationship, one could say that Bill Clinton provided the official political protection for the cocaine and drug smuggling, while Lasater took care of the nuts and bolts of laundering the hundreds of millions of dirty drug money. And in their spare time it was drugs, parties, and corrupting teenage girls.

In 1985, L. D. Brown received a phone call from a man named Felix Rodriguez, who said he wanted to discuss Barry Seals. Rodriguez identified himself as Seal’s boss. He had traveled to Arkansas and made it clear he did not like what Seal was doing. Rodriguez had an outstanding career with the CIA, including acting as liaison officer with the Bolivian forces who captured and executed Cuban revolutionary Che Guevera. He took Che’s Rolex watch as a keepsake and a transcript of his interrogation, which he liked to reenact on occasion to friends at his home in Miami. Rodriguez was a longtime confidant of George H. W. Bush.

Brown thought that Clinton had tipped off the CIA that his state trooper had gone ballistic when he found out that drugs were on that Seal plane. “Rodriguez made me feel comfortable,” Brown recalled. “He had CIA credentials which he showed me. ‘Don’t worry about him. We’ll take care of him,’ is how he assured me of the ‘problem’ with Seal.” When Brown again answered the call of the agency, he would find he was sadly mistaken.

Charles Hayes, a contract agent for the CIA, was one of the men who ran the Mena operations, and he was interviewed by a drug investigator, Jean Duffey, on July 14, 1992.