2-line headline with not a single grain of truth  It was as if Madonna were being given a Life-Time Achievement Award from Focus on the Family.
The press release began: “Donald T. Sterling and friends honored Ramy El-Batrawi as the humanitarian of the year for his support of the homeless people of Los Angeles.”
A casual perusal of the headline turns up nothing that bears the faintest resemblance to the truth:
“Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center Honors Ramy El-Batrawi With Humanitarian of the Year Award for His Support of the Homeless People of Los Angeles.”
 There was no “Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center,” back then, just for starters. Nor is there one today. No institution. No employees. No Board of Directors to mull over who to choose for next year’s award.
The “Donald T. Sterling Homeless and Medical Center” is just a lie someone invented, and then delivered—not verbally, where it could later be denied—but in a press release, a form explicitly designed for maximum visibility.
Sterling must have been acting with the sure knowledge that no one would ever call him on it; and with a rock-solid confident expectation that he was operating with total impunity.
Donald Sterling, Adnan Khashoggi, and Ramy El Batrawi Ramy El Batrawi is a Saudi national who has been Saudi arms merchant and CIA fixer Adnan Khashoggi’s chief lieutenant in America from more than 30 years. More than once in the past decade, the two men have gone “on the lam” and become fugitives from justice at the same time to avoid arrest.
 Back in the days of Iran Contra, El-Batrawi fronted for Khashoggi and posed as the owner and president of an airline in Miami, Jetborne, that flew Oliver North’s TOW missiles to the mullahs in Iran. Court testimony revealed that Jetborne was a CIA proprietary airline, helping to explain how Khashoggi and El Batrawi manage to repeatedly commit financial crimes with impunity.
Khashoggi and El Batrawi also have well-documented links—El Batrawi, for example, “owned” SkyWay’s second DC-9—to the drug trafficking ring operating in St. Petersburg Florida that DEA officials say was being protected by federal agents in the Tampa ICE Office.
Just as the drug trafficking operation out of St Petersburg got underway, in July 2003, ownership of the operation’s second DC-9 (N12ONE) was transferred to El Batrawi.
The airliner came via Finova Corp., which, as was discovered while researching “Barry & ‘the boys,’” is a CIA finance company that was the true owner of Southern Air Transport, Richard Secord’s re-supply cargo airline supplying the Contras with weapons… and the U.S. with cocaine, a fact revealed only much later, when no one was looking, during Southern Air Transport’s bankruptcy proceedings.
 El Batrawi and Khashoggi were the lead actors in massive financial fraud which accompanied the drug trafficking. They engineered and ran what came to be called the Stockwalk scandal, which cost investors and U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. It led to what was, at the time, the largest brokerage failure in American history, a record that has been eclipsed many times since.
“Just three months after the company’s Initial Public Offering (IPO), the nearly $17 million raised in the offering was gone,” read one wire service story.
“The creative dealings of defendant El-Batrawi partly explains how this money disappeared so quickly,” reported the AP.
 He’s no one’s idea of a prototypical Mobster. He doesn’t sound like he comes from Brooklyn. Nor does he have a colorful nickname. But, like Mobsters of old, Ramy El Batrawi operates with his boss Adnan Khashoggi’s carefully-purchased impunity. In that, he probably something of a poster boy for transnational organized crime in the 21st Century.
So, why was Donald Sterling honoring him as “Humanitarian of the Year?”
The answer was surprisingly simple. El-Batrawi and Khashoggi had just been charged by the SEC with massive financial fraud, and accused of basically stealing more than $100 million. (The figure would later double.)
And Donald Sterling was using his considerable public relations clout—he regularly bought full-page and double-truck spreads in the Los Angeles Times—to stem the tide of bad publicity swamping Khashoggi and El Batrawi’s efforts to move on to the next scam.
 Asking if Sterling was doing it as a favor for an unnamed organization to which both he and the two Saudi men belonged is just speculation.
But what isn’t speculation is that Sterling clearly thought no one would notice. And until his recent difficulties thrust him into the harsh glare of a media spotlight, no one did.
The “Humanitarian of the Year Award” headline was a complete misnomer. It implied that the non-existent “Homeless and Medical Center” has given out “Humanitarian of the Year Awards” previously. They had not.
The Legendary Raw Deal  After Sterling announced his “homeless initiative” in a press release in full-page newspaper ads in the L.A. Times, it received widespread and skeptical coverage in the media in Los Angeles.
At the City Planning Department, no one had filed plans for the property. The Building and Safety Department said there were no demolition requests or building permits requested in conjunction with the project.
“Aside from these ads, no one has seen anything,” said Estela Lopez, the head of the Central City East Assn., a business advocacy group representing an area of downtown that includes skid row. “What’s the plan? Where’s the proposal?”
The real estate agent for the project said the Sterling family trust was in escrow on the property, purchasing it for a “significant discount” from the $12-million asking price. He would not elaborate.
 Sterling’s strategy for real estate investment was to buy properties, hold on to them until the market moves into a hot cycle, then refinance and pour the equity into new acquisitions. Some downtown watchers wondered whether he wasn’t doing the same with the skid row property, waiting out a surge in property prices as downtown gentrifies.
Donald Sterling was exploiting homeless people—who do exist—to aggrandize himself and a select few of his cronies. The homeless got nothing. Not even a reach-around. It was the legendary raw deal.
Thoughts of the Humanitarian of the Year  Apparently no one was more surprised than Ramy El-Batrawi himself to have been chosen Humanitarian of the Year.
The Times dutifully sent out a reporter to ask some questions of the newly-minted Humanitarian of the Year. How had he demonstrated support for the homeless?
El Batrawi freely admitted he’d made no contribution of money or time to helping the homeless.
Another celebrity who seemed more than a little vague about the deal was singer Natalie Cole . She appeared with Ramy El Batrawi in one of Sterling’s full-page ads, where she was identified as a “leader” providing support for the homeless, and as a “special guest” at the dinner.
The event’s producer, Tami Bennett, said Cole was a big supporter of Sterling’s project, in part because she herself was once homeless. The next day, Cole’s publicist, sounding miffed, contacted the Times to say the singer was never homeless, was only “a recent acquaintance” of Sterling’s, and had merely told him she would attend his event.
The next day, the publicist phoned the Times reporter again, saying the singer was on “voice rest” and would not be attending the event at all.
A $270 million dollar blemish  The Times also coolly noted the current blemish on El-Batrawi’s record. “El-Batrawi was sued earlier this year by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which alleged that he and a partner, Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, orchestrated a $130-million scheme to manipulate the stock of a Van Nuys-based company,” reported the story.
“The manipulation, the SEC alleges, resulted in the largest bailout in the history of the Securities Investor Protection Corp.”
“In an interview with the Times, El-Batrawi said the federal charges were untrue and have nothing to do with his interest in helping Sterling launch his homeless center. The businessman said he has not donated money to the cause but has introduced Sterling to other potential donors.”
 “I’m devoting a lot of my time, my efforts, in being available,” El Batrawi said. “I’m making introductions … trying to figure out the things he needs.”
It all sounded more than a little vague. What wasn’t vague, not at all, was the massive financial wreckage caused by the swindling Saudi financial fraudsters Khashoggi and El Batrawi, as a news account announcing the huge settlement one of the companies involved signed with the SEC in lieu of going to trial made clear.
“Deutsche Bank, the German financial services giant, will pay as much as $270 million to settle charges stemming in part from the fraud-induced failure of a Twin Cities brokerage subsidiary in 2001.”
“The complicated case involves a trade-clearing subsidiary of Minneapolis-based Stockwalk Group, and several other brokerages that became ensnarled in one of the securities industry’s biggest swindles in history, by a group that included fugitive Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.”
Paying $270 million to settle charges is a rough indication of how much real pain and human suffering the scam caused real people.
 Whatever Ramy El Batrawi found to say in his acceptance speech at the semi-star-studded dinner at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in West Hollywood is now lost to history, which is some consolation.
But there’s no consolation at all in the discovery of a tweet Ramy El Batrawi sent just two weeks ago to homegrown American financial pirate Carl Icahn,an icon of 1980’s greed as well as one of the original “barbarians at the gate.”
Tweeted El Batrawi @Carl_C_Icahn “hi Carl how are you its been a long time.”
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