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 eyes; his counterpart demanded $10,000 for the privilege. After being arm-twisted further, the Ghanaian agreed to the inspection. The next day he picked up the agent at the Golden Tulip and took him to a different walled compound. At a picnic table inside, the agent was shown stacks of what appeared to be American currency “five wide and two across,” the mission report said. They money was wrapped in thick plastic and stored in a small, metal box. When the agent tried touching the currency, he was warned he was not allowed to by one of the Ghanaian’s associates. The associate tried delicately unsealing a packet to show him it was genuine, only to clumsily reveal ordinary paper with the dimensions of U.S. dollars tucked under the real ones.
Realizing his own vulnerability in the midst of a flimsy con, the agent pretended he was satisfied and requested to be driven back to the Golden Tulip by the Ghanaian’s associates. The car took a long, winding path in the dark until the agent determined they were headed in the opposite way of the hotel and maybe to someplace from where he would never return alive. When traffic slowed, the agent jumped out of the car and “evaded” the men, the mission report said, in what might have been a scene out of an espionage flick. From solicitation to dangled loot, the whole setup was a “scam,” the report concluded.
Sholtz estimated she lost more than $125,000 of her own money on the failed excursion. There is no indication RECLAIM credits were involved. Toler said one of the chief reasons he agreed to go, despite suspecting beforehand the $35 million was bogus, was that Sholtz herself was planning to make the trip, and that she likely would have been either kidnapped for ransom or killed by the Africans. (Sholtz acknowledged she had intended to go.) Toler, overall, blamed Keller for whipping up Sholtz, who he described as dishonest and gullible. “Much of this [currency repatriation] is fantasy,” Toler added. But Sholtz “believed there was money in the Philippines and Ghana, even though she had been advised by me it didn’t exist. It was her greed. People made a lot of money off her. I’ve seen over the years folks who think the world revolves around a deal.” Toler said that Keller died in the Bahamas a few years ago; this may explain why the feds have had difficulty saying whether they ever charged him.
In October 1992, about five years before the Ghana operation, a congressional probe into international bank fraud suggested that Toler’s firm, a now defunct Virginia machine-tool company called RD&D, was part of an alleged, clandestine effort quarterbacked by the CIA to arm the Iraqi military and curry favor with Saddam Hussein’s government. A federal prosecutor appearing before a Senate intelligence committee testified that Toler’s company was not a CIA front, but wouldn’t respond when asked if Toler had worked for the U.S. National Security Administration, which conducts global eavesdropping operations. Whatever his background, Sholtz said she was stunned at Toler’s negative comments about her. Sholtz said that Toler in 2002 tried to locate money she contends that Keller had “stolen” from her. “Toler said we were the victims, and now he’s changing his story,” Sholtz said. “I’m speechless.”
Also involved in the Ghana operation, records and interviews show, was the Jedburgh Group, a Lake Mary, Florida-based firm that provides intelligence, security and financial services to industry and governments worldwide. Former U.S. Intelligence and Military Officers work for Jedburgh. By far the best known is retired U.S. Major General John Singlaub, a decorated military officer involved with the CIA’s predecessor agency, the Korean War, and American counterinsurgency efforts. In the late-1980s, he was connected to the Iran-Contra scandal and ultra-right-wing, anti-communist groups in Central America.
Jedburgh executive David Keith Freeman confirmed to the Weekly that his company was a client of Sholtz’s “for a short time a very long time ago,” and said it helped evaluate the mission’s “potential for recovery.” He
