A behind-the-scenes look at the news of Claremont, CA. We focus on city hall, city staff, and the so-called "Claremont 400" or "Preserve Claremonters" or "Claremonsters", those goofy, too-serious, power types that run most of the town's service organizations, charities, and city commissions. Claremont is indeed a unique place, and we'll try to bring a flavor of that absurd "uniqueness" to the outside world, as well as spotlighting some of the finer things about our city and region.
Claremont resident and former City Council candidate Joe O'Toole pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to move planeloads of AK-47 to Somalia. Politico has all the news available right now.
We covered aspects of this story here, and here, over the summer.
Until recently, O'Toole resided north of Baseline near Mountain Avenue. More recently--and perhaps for the next five years--he has been the guest of the Feds in Florida. At 79 years of age, there may be tactical and practical reasons O'Toole chose not to contest the charges. Who knows?--maybe he is actually guilty. We understand he had a public defender at least until a month or so ago when a private attorney was brought on.
Things started to take a serious turn last week when the judge and prosecutor said there would be no more delays, and no plea bargain offered, and the trial would proceed as scheduled on October 5. That's gotta clear one's mind.
[Update: Apparently there was a plea agreement; see below]
Sentencing is scheduled for December 14.
We'll have more as this develops...
UPDATE - 9:55pm
We tracked down the O'Toole plea agreement, signed yesterday by the prosecuting U.S. attorney and the defendant.
O'Toole pleaded guilty to count 1 of his indictment, and the government dismissed counts 2, 3, 4, and 5 of the original indictment. In addition to dropping the remaining charges, the government tentatively agreed to go easy on O'Toole, giving him a sentence towards the lower range of whatever advisory sentence the court arrives at after its probation office conducts a Pre-Sentence Investigation.
Judging from the language of the plea, it sounds as if the feds are mainly miffed at O'Toole's arm dealing without a proper license or permission. Uncle Sam apparently owns the American arms sales rights to Somalia. So no gun shows in Mogadishu, unless you get the official thumbs up:
We were curious what had happened with the the trial of Claremont resident Joseph O'Toole, who was arrested in June for his alleged involvement in what was described as an illegal international arms trafficking case.
O'Toole's trial was supposed to commence this past Monday in a federal court in Ft. Lauderdale, FL. We checked in with the court and learned that the start of the trial had been continued to October 5 at the request of O'Toole's attorney Stuart Adelstein, who had a conflict and who needed more time to prepare for the trial.
Court records show that O'Toole also appears to have had some health problems since his incarceration, and he has been moved from the place he was originally being held (presumably in or near Ft. Lauderdale), to a federal detention center in Miami for emergency medical treatment.
You may remember that arms trafficking case involving retired U.S. Air Force colonel and Claremont resident Joseph O'Toole. It's been several weeks since the news of his arrest broke on June 28, but we haven't heard anything else since then.
We checked back in with the federal court in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, and found that an August 16 date has been set for the trial in Courtroom 203E with judge James I. Cohn presiding. Make no mistake, the feds sure do take that speedy trial stuff seriously.
If O'Toole's name sounds familiar, it's probably because he was active in Citizens for the American Dream, the group that supported the soon-to-be-built affordable housing project on College Ave. over the failed Claremonster-backed project at Base Line Rd. and Towne Ave.
When he was arrested, the news media reported that this was the second arms deal to land O'Toole in hot water. A website called intelNews.org noted on July 6 that:
In 1989, he [O'Toole] was charged of working with fellow-American Richard St. Francis and Israeli alleged ex-Mossad operative Ari Ben-Menashe, to sell several US C-130 cargo airplanes to the Iranian government. Remarkably, the US government dropped all charges against O’Toole in 1991. But the former US Air Force colonel appears to have failed to learn from that experience.
This time O'Toole and an Israeli man named Chanoch (or Hanoch) Miller were caught after O'Toole allegedly contacted a government informant in April to see about chartering a Soviet-era Antonov transport plane to move a couple thousand AK-47 assault rifles from Bosnia to Bandera (in the indictment seen below, "Banderal") in Somalilland, an autonomous separatist region of Somalia on the Gulf of Aden.
Insider Surveillance Pic Part of the evidence against O'Toole (pixilated, left) and Miller are emails from Miller to the government's informant discussing the proposed transaction. As Claremont Courier reporter Tony Krickl noted, this makes O'Toole the second Claremonter in 2010 to be arrested by federal officials. Recall that Pixie Donut owner Moun Chau was arrested in January and later pleaded guilty after he illegally purchased elephant ivory on eBay. Both arrests were based at least in part on Internet usage.
A few days after O'Toole's arrest, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz had an opinion piece by journalist Yossi Melman, who bemoaned the frequency with which Israelis seem to get arrested for illegal sales of arms. Of even more interest to us was the seemingly false information Melman found in the feds' indictment:
European sources - security and insurance personnel working in Somalia, who are well acquainted with the area - told Haaretz that this story does not make sense, and that the official version put out by the U.S. authorities may conceal a different story. For instance, the indictment stated that the arms were to have been sent to a city called Bandera in northern Somalia. But a look at a map of Somalia reveals that this name is fictitious: No such place exists in Somalia.
Moreover, the shipping documents stated that the cargo was for "the Ministry of Defense of the Somali Republic." But the government of the separatist area known as Somaliland does not refer to itself as the "Somali Republic." Ever since the military coup in 1969 that sent the country down the sewer, its official name has been the Democratic Republic of Somalia.
And above all, there is the question of why the government of Somaliland would need to hire the services of Hanoch Miller, an Israeli arms dealer, when it could easily obtain the arms it needs from the United States or Ethiopia, which both support it. There are several possible answers.
Melman speculates that one explanation for the incongruities is that the actual destination of the AK-47s was not Somaliland but Somalia itself, which Israel and the U.S. would have objected to because of the presence there of jihadi training camps. Melman also intimates that arms sale might have been a cover story and that another possible purpose of the chartered flights could have been to fly contraband to Europe. He doesn't say what exactly that contraband might be.
On the other hand, rather than providing a smoke screen, it's also possible that some of the information in the indictment is simply incorrect. If we've learned anything in watching our local City Hall, it's that government entities are quite fallible and that fallibility applies at every level. So, by the transitive property of institutional incompetence, the federal courts can err just as much as our own City Hall.
Click to Enlarge Image
EXHIBIT A:
The version of the O'Toole-Miller indictment we obtained (thanks, frequent-flying Insider Copy Service) had O'Toole's name redacted and was filed on June 17. The redactions were needed because Defendant Miller was arrested about 10 days before O'Toole, and the U.S. Justice Department probably didn't want to tip O'Toole to the fact that he was a target of the investigation and otherwise risk his avoiding arrest.
Yet check out paragraph 11, page 8, of said indictment. The federal redactor in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of Florida, missed one "O'Toole." Good thing he wasn't a hardened criminal and apparently didn't have access to the public court records. They might still be looking for O'Toole today.
In any event, we submit the following for your reading pleasure:
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