Wanta was evidently a resident of Wisconsin, and was convicted of tax-fraud there. Two very interesting articles from the Madison Capital Times from 1995 describe Wanta as a "delusional con-man", who was tested by the court for sanity. The articles disclose that Wanta was later convicted of non-payment of taxes for the years 1988-89, and sentenced to eight years in prison. The Wisconsin Assistant Attorney General claimed for the State that Wanta made $500,000 in a scam where people got to invest in a currency-exchange deal, but did not declare these earnings, or paid tax on them.

He further said that Wanta is an international con man, who was arrested in Switzerland in 1993 for attempting an $81 million bank fraud, was deported to the US, where he was arrested on the Wisconsin tax charge. (The two Capital Times articles are reprinted verbatim on a forum thread at www.quatloos.com. For the serious Wanta researcher, this page also has reprints of several revealing court decisions involving Wanta. ) (UPDATE: Unfortunately, that entire thread with invaluable information about Wanta and reprints of all the court documents, has been removed from the Quatloos Forums.)

Comparing the above information with Sarah McClendon's articles, we see that the latter are inaccurate at least in their date - because we're led to believe by their accompanying date that they were written in 1997, while the Wisconsin tax court-case to which they refer had already ended in November 1995. One wonders therefore whether the rest of what is attributed to McClendon in this case is likewise "inaccurate".

Wanta's name is afforded mention by political-conspiracy journalist Tom Flocco. In an article from September 2004 on Financial Terrorism, whose subtitle is "Documents point to attack on America by White House crime families" (www.tomflocco.com) Flocco says that "According to an internal memo sent to Vice President Richard Cheney from former U.S. Ambassador to Somalia Leo Wanta, an FBI special agent-in-charge and a CIA intelligence contractor met with an associate of Osama bin Laden (OBL) in Manila, Philippines 30 days after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center." (Now available at www.tomflocco.com).

These allegations seem to firmly link Wanta with the US Government and its various shady deals, and they have been reproduced as proof of such complicity on several other websites - yet aside form a memorandum with all the names are blanked-out, Flocco does not provide a serious substantiation of this claim, and we are left with little choice but to take his word for it.

In the past couple of months, the publications covering this affair report Wanta himself moving into the background, while all of the information is now reaching Story and others only through his spokesman and associate, Michael C. Cottrel. This man is apparently a relative newcomer on the international money-scam scene, an entirely unknown name until it started to appear in Story's and Szymanski's articles.

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