Word: mena
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...anyone who will listen. In March he asserted that "it's scandal-of-the-week time." Nichols on both tapes charges that Governor Clinton, through a state agency, provided money-laundering services for a cocaine-smuggling ring that operated out of an airstrip in the little town of Mena, Arkansas...
TIME in 1992 investigated these allegations about Clinton and concluded that they were simply untrue. Even Nichols was unsure then; he told TIME in an interview the same year, "I have no knowledge about Mena." On the videotapes, however, he asserts that he went to Mena to look around and saw drugs being loaded and unloaded openly -- at a time that he does not specify, but that must have been earlier than his "no knowledge" statement to this magazine...
...with most smears, Reed's allegations are built on a slim foundation of truth. Before being gunned down in Louisiana by a squad of Colombian hit men in 1986, a convicted drug smuggler and dea informant named Barry Seal was involved in something fishy at the airport in Mena, a heavily wooded town 130 miles west of Little Rock. In 1984 Seal played a part in Oliver North's campaign to prove that the Sandinista government was in league with Colombia's Medellin cocaine cartel. In exchange for a reduced sentence on drug-smuggling charges, Seal flew...
What does this have to do with Reed, a 43-year-old pilot and machine-tool salesman who now lives in Moorpark, Calif.? He claims that in 1983 North recruited him to go to Mena to work with Seal and help train contra pilots. He also says North asked him to donate a Piper airplane to the contras and then report the plane as stolen so that insurance would cover his loss. Later that year, Reed and his wife Janis received a $33,000 insurance payment for the Piper. He says he quit the contra effort in August 1987 after...
Given Reed's track record, why does anyone take him seriously? In part because there are so many unanswered questions about what was going on at Mena. In 1988 a federal grand jury that had investigated the affair for three years failed to return indictments, leading some state law-enforcement officers to grumble that the case had been scuttled by higher-ups in Washington. Clinton says the state has done everything it can to solve the mystery. But Charles Black, a deputy state prosecuting attorney, says when he asked the Governor to provide financial assistance so the state could conduct...