from the New York Post, 9/8/95 not to be used for commercial purposes TRUCK DRIVER MAY HOLD KEY FOR STARR by John Crudele SOME parts of Dennis Patrick's life have been ordinary. He works construction, for instance. And he's been a truck driver. But other parts of Patrick's life are, to say the least, different. For one thing, Patrick says there have been three attempts on his life. And for another, Patrick can produce documents that prove there were many millions of dollars in a brokerage account in his name at one time in the mid-1980s. A truck driver with millions of dollars in assets? Patrick's explanation is simple. He claims he was a dupe in a scheme to launder massive amounts of drug money in Arkansas. "I was never sat down and told that we were going to enter into something illegal," says Patrick in a telephone interview recently from his hideaway. Patrick says he merely opened a brokerage account at Lasater & Co., which was run by Dan Lasater - friend of the Clintons and a convicted felon - and things started to happen. What things? Well, there was the time in October of 1985 when $2- million worth of U.S. Treasury bonds were purchased through his account. The interest alone on the bonds was $28,294.34. The delivery instructions on the bonds read, "Wire to 1st American National Bank NLR/cr 1st American LR." This sort of thing happened over and over again. Patrick has provided me with dozens of brokerage account confirmation slips of million- dollar trades. One of the biggest, was the purchase of $11,625,000 worth of Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. bonds in August of 1985. Patrick says he has already met with FBI gents about his claims. And his documents have been turned over to numerous other authorities, including Manhatten District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who has spent years looking into the money laundering shenanigans of BCCI. And Patrick has already spoken with other members of the press, and his tale of woe has been repeated on the floor of Congress. Patrick says he has also spoken to investigators for Robert Fiske, the representatives of the former Whitewater Prosecutor who preceded the current Whitewater special prosecutor. But the significance of Patrick's documents have so far been missed. The documents may be the key that unlocks the mystery in the drug running that seems to have been going on at the Mena, Ark., airport in the mid-1980s. The most significant information on the trading slips, I'm told, could be the delivery instructions, like those mentioned above on the $2-million transaction of October 1985. As I've said in past columns, current Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr would like nothing more than to widen the scope of his investigation to include whatever is going on at Mena. As my readers know by now, there have been allegations - which seem to be proving true - that the tiny airport in southwestern Arkansas was a depot through which guns were smuggled to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua and cocaine smuggled back into the United States. The most active investigation of Arkansas financial affairs at the moment is Starr's. But the connection between the narrowly-focused wrongdoing at Whitewater Development and much broader issues like Mena hasn't yet been made. So Starr, while poking around the fringes of Mena, hasn't been able to officially add the topic to his charter. The Patrick documents obtained by The Post may provide that connection. Because bond money was sent to banks in Arkansas. Patrick's documents make a convincing case that Mena corrupted the banking system of Arkansas. And because the banking system is within Starr's jurisdiction, the prosecutor can probably get his jurisdiction extended. While copies of the confirmation statements have been provided by Patrick to numerous authorities, none have yet made their way through official channels to Starr. But Patrick would like to provide the information to Starr, and I suspect the connection will be made in the weeks ahead. By keeping his distance from Mena, Starr is trying to avoid the sort of problem he encountered this week when one of his indictments against Arkansas governor Jim Guy Tucker was thrown out because a federal judge (and FOB) contended that Starr went outside his mandate. The dismissal of the indictment is being appealed by Starr, and legal experts expect the prosecutor to win on some level of appeal. Working in Starr's favor is the fact that he did receive permission from the Justice Department to expand his jurisdiction in the Tucker matter. And Judge Henry Woods, who dismissed the indictments, is a friend of the Clintons. Incidents like that one keep Starr on the straight-and-narrow. But the prosecutor's desire to enter the Mena investigation will probably become greater because of an investigation now being conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration in New Orleans. Sources in Arkansas and Louisiana tell me that DEA agents from New Orleans have recently been interviewing people with knowledge of the Mena operation because the government has located two bank accounts in the Cayman Islands that belonged to Barry Seal. Before he was killed in a government sting operation, Seal was alleged to have been one of the ringleaders at Mena. The DEA wouldn't officially comment. But one source in New Orleans did blurt out that "a couple" of accounts were located in the Caymans but that there was no money in them. The people of Arkansas have been told that the accounts, which are said to have once contained hundreds of millions of dollars, were actively used even after Seal was killed. With Patrick's documents, Ken Starr could soon steer his investigation into Mena, the Caymans or any other place that pleases him. The probe could start to get interesting and embarrassing to politicians of different persuasions. END OF ARTICLE BY JOHN CRUDELE FOR NY POST - 9/8/95