Dope Runs, the Pope's Mom and Soloflex Machines
Part 4 in my series on Dr. Elias Ghanem: Dr. Feelgood, physician to the stars
Previous posts in this series:
Colombian Gold
On June 14, 1977, Chris Karamanos' phone rang. It was Jimmy Chagra, the brother of his friend, Lee. Jimmy sounded frantic. A couple days earlier, Jerry Lee Wilson had been in a car wreck in Santa Marta, Colombia. It was a bad accident - Jerry had first degree burns over 70% of his body. Jimmy was organizing a mercy mission. Could Karamanos loan him a jet and crew, including a couple of paramedics, so that they could collect Wilson and bring him back to the US for urgent medical care?
Karamanos, then president of the executive charter (and sometimes air ambulance) company Jet Avia, didn’t hesitate. He barely knew Chris, but Lee was a good friend and until recently Jerry had been one of the company’s pilots so he felt a responsibility to help. “Of course”, Karamanos replied, “where am I sending the jet?” Jimmy explained that he needed the jet to first pick up his passport in El Paso and then come collect him in Atlanta. They would overnight in Miami and continue on to Columbia the next morning. It was agreed that Chris would help to clear the flight with the FAA and the State Department and ensure the burn treatment center in San Antonio was ready to receive the patient.
By the time the Jet Avia plane landed in Columbia the next day, it had become clear Jimmy had lied to Karamanos about what had happened. Jerry Wilson had not been in a car crash but had instead been flying Jimmy’s DC-6 which had crashed on take-off. The burn victim was actually the co-pilot, Bruce Allen, who, unlike Wilson, had been unable to exit the plane before it exploded in flames. They had been on a dope run so they needed the car wreck and mercy mission cover story to get Wilson back to the United States. Allen was beyond rescue, his burns so severe that he died just a couple days later.
That is story Karamanos told over the ensuing weeks and months, though others claim he knew the truth about the situation much earlier. Regardless of this, accounts of the next set of events are pretty consistent.
Things went downhill quickly from when they landed in Columbia. As the Jet Avia paramedics did what they could for Bruce Allen on the tarmac, Columbian officials swooped in and arrested the entire group of six men on drug related charges, setting off a media and diplomatic frenzy. Using his Columbian contacts, Jimmy managed to free himself and Wilson for $10,000 and returned to the US. Karamanos ended up having to pay someone over $150,000 to free the two Jet Avia pilots and two paramedics a couple weeks later.
It was almost two years before the Jet Avia plane was returned to the US by Columbian officials. It wasn’t for lack of effort: Nevada Senators Howard Cannon and Paul Laxalt as well as Representative James Santini and Governor Nick O’Callaghan lobbied President Carter heavily to intervene in the matter. Given the plan had been leased to Jet Avia by Little Rock businessmen, even Arkansas politicians got involved, but to little avail. Karamanos was also never reimbursed for the more than $250,000 spent on pay-outs and lawyer fees. Neither Jimmy’s DC-6 or the dope on board was ever located.
The Colombia fiasco was the nail in the coffin for Jet Avia. Less than six months earlier, on January 6, 1977, another of the company’s planes had crashed into the side of a mountain, killing everyone instantly. Frank Sinatra’s mother Natalie and friend Anna Carbone (widow of recently deceased Dr. James F. Carbone - New Jersey dentist and ex Flying Tigers pilot) had been on board.
Just four minutes after that, another Jet Avia plane crashed and exploded as it came in to land outside of Flint Michigan. It had been flying freight for one of the car manufacturers. There were no passengers on board but both crew perished, including Donald Treu, a veteran 56 year-old pilot. Treu had for years been the pilot for President Gerald Ford, ferrying Ford back and forth to Michigan during his time as senator as well as president.
Despite the obvious question around the chances of two planes from the same company crashing within four minutes of each other, official NTSB investigations ruled both crashes to be a result of pilot error (it was suggested they were unfamiliar flying a new aircraft type) and poor communication with traffic controllers. A few comments were made in the Sinatra crash report around needing to improve standard operating procedures, but otherwise both cases were closed with the final blame being placed on the flight crews. The Michigan crash appears to not have even warranted a full write-up by the NTSB. Conveniently for the government, all flight crew were dead so no criminal charges could be filed.
Despite the federal agency’s assignation of blame on the pilots, the civil courts saw things differently. The widow of one of the pilots sued the FAA for the role the traffic controllers had played in the accident and settled in 1981 for $270,000. Frank Sinatra sued on behalf of both his mother and her friend and settled with the agency in 1980 for an undisclosed sum. The estates of the Michigan pilots were awarded more than $1m in damages in 1984 .
The roster of Jet Avia’s investors, debtors and partners was an interesting group. Original 1973 incorporation papers showed Dr. Elias Ghanem, Dr. Harold Feikes and Allen Glick as major shareholders, though by 1974, Glick had disappeared from the roster of investors. Given the allegations swirling at the time about Glick being a front for mafioso Tony Spilotro via his company, Argent Corp, this was probably for the best.
The Jet Avia planes were not outright owned by the company but were instead leased to it by such personalities as Adnan Khashoggi (introduced in my last post as a good friend of Elias Ghanem’s) and Marvin Kratter. Kratter had reportedly been the owner of the jet involved in Natalie Sinatra’s death and ended up as a co-defendant in the lawsuit Frank Sinatra brought against Jet Avia (more on Kratter and Dr. Harold Feikes in a future post).
Sinatra’s lawsuit against Jet Avia shows up in the FBI files on Sinatra. Interestingly, according to their investigations, the jet involved in his mother’s crash (tail N12MK) may have in fact been owned by Frank Sinatra and leased back to Jet Avia. That same FBI file lists three names on whom the government wanted to do further investigation on, but the names have been redacted. It is worth noting that there is a portion of the report which mentions that there were unsubstantiated but noteworthy allegations regarding one of the three people. The details of those allegations were redacted with the reasons given for the redaction being privacy (67b) and the need to protect a confidential source (67c), so we will probably never know what they were.
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Once assured he would be protected by the statute of limitations, Jerry Lee Wilson gleefully published his tell-all memoirs in 2009. Its a very irreverent read, I highly recommend it.
In his book, Wilson confirmed the poorly kept secret that he had indeed been a flagrant drug runner and that Lee and Jimmy Chagra were the main players behind his operation. He also wrote about Jet Avia, saying “the company was partly owned by the Central State Teamsters Pension Fund, so I read about some of my passengers monthly in the Reader’s Digest. They may have been mafia connected but they were all real gentlemen, always magnanimous, solicitous, and careful to pay respect to everyone they met. Hey, when you can’t resolve disputes in court, elaborate courtesy is the best defense. Poor Alan (sp) Dorfman, shot in a parking lot. I really liked him.”
In his book Wilson also acknowledged Sinatra’s mother’s crash and how it set up for Jet Avia’s inevitable end, saying “we may as well have killed the Pope’s mom”.
Like I said before, this guy is irreverent.
Incidentally, Wilson ended up being the guy who made and distributed the 1980s exercise machine phenomenon, Soloflex, and was the source of all of the bare-chested men advertisements. This man was basically the pioneer of the “call 1-800” infomercials. According to Wilson, lawyer Lee Chagra, casino owner Benny Binion and poker player Amarillo Slim were the ones who put up the capital for his idea.
This will probably tell my age, but I remember cutting these ads out of magazines and taping them to my wall as a girl.
The Epicurean Icarus
Things didn’t go very well for the El Paso-based Chagra brothers after the Colombia incident. Throughout 1978 Lee Chagra, a defense lawyer, was put under intense pressure by state and federal agencies, with a major grand jury investigation around his role as a potential drug “kingpin” and for the role he may have played in the attempted assassination of US Attorney James Kerr.
Lee was murdered in late December 1978, apparently by a distant relative seeking to steal money and drugs Lee had stashed in his office. Soon after that, brother Jimmy Chagra was arrested and convicted for drug offences and determined to have played a role in the 1979 assassination of United States District Judge John “Maximum John” Wood. The assassin Jimmy allegedly employed to kill the judge? Actor Woody Harrelson’s dad, Charles Harrelson.
Harrelson also claimed to have played a role in the JFK assassination. But that is a story for another day.
Karamanos, on the other hand, survived the Jet Avia bankruptcy, landing gracefully on his feet and moving on to meatier things. It only takes a bit of digging into Karamanos’s background to hazard a guess on how that could happen.
Karamanos came from a hospitality family. When he was ten, the family moved to California from Akron, Ohio and opened a chain of popular restaurants in Surfside and Newport Beach. After returning from a stint in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot attached to the criminal division, Karamanos studied criminology at university and had a very short interlude as a police officer in Newport Beach, California.
By 1968, a young Karamanos had made his way to Las Vegas. Starting in security at the International Hotel (later the Las Vegas Hilton), he quickly rose through the ranks and became the go-to manager for a number of casino properties such Circus Circus and King’s Castle. In 1973, after he had readied King’s Castle to be sold to Allen Glick’s company, Argent, he left to start his company Jet Avia.
Karamanos was a very busy entrepreneur. During the early 1970s, he opened a number of restaurants and ran a movie distribution business. He opened the pub Cohen’s and Kelly’s, a favorite downtown haunt of Vegas’s most influential politicians and businessmen. The restaurant along with a few others, was rolled up under an umbrella organization named Kyle Corp, in which Dr. Ghanem and Dr. Feikes were owners and which held the ownership of Jet Avia.
Karamanos secured an appointment in 1976 from Governor Mike O’Callaghan (remember him?) as the chair of the Nevada Board of Regents. Karamanos presided over the Board during the 1978 UNLV Jerry Tarkanian investigations and two-year NCAA suspension tied to player recruiting improprieties. The Nevada Regents supported their beloved basketball coach’s challenge of the suspension, with the case being appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court. Tarkanian lost the appeal but later sued the NCAA and secured a $2.5m out of court settlement.
After closing down the bankrupt Jet Avia, Karamanos founded his company The Caterers Inc. and managed to secure a very lucrative contract with the Culinary Union, providing all of its catering needs. Perhaps you will recall the Culinary Union from my last post and the lucrative health provider contract Dr. Elias Ghanem had negotiated with them in 1984. Incidentally, union was rumored to have had ties to mafioso Tony Spilotro until his murder in 1986, and was confirmed as being under the influence of organized crime until at least 1987.
The Caterers and, in turn, Karamanos, thrived throughout the late 1970s and 80s. In fact business was so good that the company had an effective monopoly on the catering business, extending even to the motion pictures that were filmed in Las Vegas and around Palm Springs. If you look up Chris Karamanos in IMDB, you will see his name in the billings under caterer, including Burt Reynolds’ movie The Cannonball Run.
Things started going downhill for Karamanos around mid 1988. He was seeking licensing to run his new hotel and casino, the Thunderbird. He was initially rejected given he had been dogged by rumors of organized crime connections as well as corrupt land deals involving his role as a Nevada regent and the Paradise Development Company (remember Irv Molasky?), the landlord of his restaurants.
Karamanos was also the subject of an FBI investigation (led by Special Agent in Charge James Weller) regarding his company’s catering contracts with the Bureau of Land Management and US Forest Service in California and Oregon. He was a witness in the grand jury investigation around the attempted assassination of US Attorney James Kerr and subsequent murder of Lee Chagra.
Some of the old luck returned however and two weeks later Karamanos received his license on July 31, 1988.
Less than one year later, on June 9, 1989, Karamanos was discovered dead from a Xanax overdose in a dingy motel room in Las Vegas. His death was quickly ruled a suicide as it was reported that Karamanos had recently found himself more than $1m in debt to banks and suppliers. In fact, on the day of his death, state Department of Taxation seals had been affixed to the doors of The Caterers.
Some 300 people attended his funeral, including Jerry Tarkanian. It’s not clear if his old business partners Dr. Elias Ghanem, or Dr. Harold Feikes were there but it was a full house.
After that, people quickly moved on. The vacant role of regent was filled within days by Governor Bob Miller who appointed his long-time friend and adverting and marketing giant, Sig Rogich to the role. By early July the Thunderbird hotel had been put into bankruptcy proceeding by its main financiers, the Mississippi First Guaranty Bank and the Hot Springs, Arkansas Landmark Savings Bank. The hotel was later purchased in 1991 by Karamanos’ friend and casino owner, Bob Stupak.
I think its fair to say that Karamanos, the Epicurean Icarus, flew too close to the sun.
So just to recap where we are in the Ghanem series, we now have Ghanem’s:
possible role in Elvis’s death through the over-prescription of drugs;
role in the unfair suspension of boxer Tommy Morrison based on unfounded HIV rumors;
friendship with billionaire arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi;
involvement in questionable contracts with Teamster controlled Culinary Union;
ownership and directorship in a bank that was likely tied up in illegal land deals where the lead FBI investigator looking into the allegations was subsequently murdered;
ownership in an executive jet company that was involved in two questionable plane crashes, funded by mafia and Teamster money, and closely linked to a drug-running ring whose leaders allegedly arranged the assassination of a US Judge; and
broader partnership with Chris Karamanos, a man with links to Tony Spilotro and other organized crime figures in California and Texas.
And we are not done, there’s more to come. Stay tuned for the next installment.