MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The journalist Jonny Wrate does a particular kind of reporting. He spoke with our co-host Steve Inskeep about it.
STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
What excites you about looking into organized crime?
JONNY WRATE: I guess it's a window into how the world works beyond what we see in front of our eyes.
MARTIN: Wrate has been studying something we might see at any airport, private jets, the kind that moves CEOs, celebrities and, it turns out, drugs from Latin America.
WRATE: U.S. jets are actually extremely popular among drug trafficking groups because U.S. jets are considered less likely to be stopped and searched or shot down.
MARTIN: Wrate wrote for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a nonprofit based in Europe. They analyzed data from the FAA, open source aircraft websites and court records, and they discovered that numerous private planes sold by one American company were repeatedly found to have transported cocaine. Their report names the company owner, Lance Zane Ricotta, one of many players in a little-regulated industry.
WRATE: He is a man from California. He's a pilot, and he's flown various Hollywood celebrities. He's also - you know, leases out his jets to production companies in California. But he also has another side to his career, which is he went to prison for fraud about 20 years ago, involved in forging aircraft documents. I mean, obviously, you know, only he can answer and tell his full story. We did reach out to him, but he didn't answer any detailed questions.
INSKEEP: How many planes has he sold that ended up being discovered as part of drug transactions?
WRATE: So since 2014, we traced around 30 planes that he'd sold. And of those 30, 11 of them had ended up in suspected or known drug trafficking incidents.
INSKEEP: Eleven. So maybe about once a year, he's selling a plane that ends up somewhere - that you know of. And these are the ones that someone caught.
WRATE: Exactly. Actually, what's interesting is most of them have been more recently. There's an uptick from about 2020. We looked at many flights, and, you know, not just him, but many other companies. But these 11 are just the ones that we have enough evidence for to see, yes, there's a pattern here, and there's a prosecutor's document, you know, something concrete.
INSKEEP: From listening to you, I get the impression it's not a very straightforward sale. It's not like the Sinaloa Cartel calls up and says, hi, this is the Sinaloa Cartel. We'd like to buy a plane.
WRATE: No. The funny thing is, is that you're not actually, as a seller, obligated to know your customer. Banks, for example, they are under very strict rules to vet their customers, where their money is coming from. One expert told us it's easier to buy a plane and sell a plane than it is to do the same with a car. It's very unregulated. Obviously, if you're selling to a company that appears to be a shell company, you know, there are certain, you know, red flags that maybe you could look out for, but you're not under legal obligation to vet that.
INSKEEP: It seems that some of the planes he sold were immediately resold. There are multiple layers of people selling and reselling them. And under those circumstances, could he claim genuine ignorance of what's going on?
WRATE: Yes, he can claim that he would be oblivious to that. We spoke to special agents who have spent decades investigating exactly this, and, you know, they say these names - when it's an innocent person, it's just a coincidence. You know, you might see it happen once. But if it comes up repeatedly, it becomes harder to believe that it's chance.
INSKEEP: Who else, besides drug traffickers, is able to take advantage of the weird anonymity in the buying and selling of airplanes?
WRATE: Anybody who wants to have a plane and doesn't want their identity to be revealed can do that. So that could be terrorists. That could be celebrities. But also, you know, the U.S. government has benefited from it. Homeland Security was running their own operation about 20 years ago where they were selling - using shell companies to sell airplanes to drug traffickers in order to gather intelligence. There are many different people who take advantage of this anonymity.
INSKEEP: Jonny Wrate is an investigative reporter with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Thanks so much.
WRATE: Thank you very much.
MARTIN: We'd like to let you know that NPR reached out to Lance Zane Ricotta. He told us by email that the OCCRP article, quote, "is full of incomplete and incorrect information," unquote. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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