Leo Wanta

[J. Orlin Grabbe]

Sarah McClendon
on or about 8-24-97 Sarah McClendon

SARAH McCLENDON'S WASHINTON REPORT

3133 Connecticut Avenue
Suite 215
Washington, D.C. 20008

By Sarah McClendon

Washington, D.C. --- Leo Wanta, whose purchase of huge sums in Russian
rubles is credited with bringing down the Soviet Union in the Cold
War, will be put through a third party lunacy test in Madison,
Wisconsin circuit court on Tuesday. He has successfully been declared
of sound mind in two previous lunacy tests under the Wisconsin state
attorney general's office. His own attorney, James Shellow of Madison,
Wis., is instituting this test. Shellow says that under the rules for
attorneys in Wisconsin he has to notify the court that he thinks the
lunacy test should be given. Shellow admits to being a former attorney
for a deceased Mafia chief in Wisconsin named Belistiari. Shellow
thinks Wanta will be declared sane in the upcoming hearing on Tuesday,
but Shellow claims to know nothing as to how Wisconsin was able to
extradite Wanta in chains and shackles from Switzerland, where he was
doing business with Swiss banks after having given up his citizenship
in Wisconsin. Wanta claims that he had just been made ambassador to
Switzerland and Canada when Wisconsin state officials seized him
bodily in Switzerland. Wanta claims that they took his briefcase from
him at that time which contained billions in Treasury bills and
Promise software technical equipment which the U.S. was using to get
inside information about foreign treasuries.

Although the briefcase was taken by Wisconsin authorities in 1993, it
has never been returned to Wanta nor has he any knowledge of what
happened to its contents.

The charge is that he owed Wisconsin originally approximately $14,000.
He claims to have paid back that amount in 1992. The state attorney
general's office seized his house worth $120,000 and sold it for
$60,000, but there is no record of this in the Department of Revenue
in Wisconsin nor is there any trace of the proceeds from the sale.

Wanta was buying rubles from Russia at the request of the President,
Ronald Reagan. Wanta had worked at the White House, the National
Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and six other
govenment agencies during his career.

He and President George Bush set up the Ameritrust account in the
Credite Suisse bank for the U.S. government to use in case it needed
to counter terrorists from overseas, according to Pat Cameron, Los
Angeles attorney for Wanta. Wanta says that when former president
George Bush sought to withdraw funds from the $210 billion on deposit
that Wanta, a co-signer of the account, refused to give his signature
for the withdrawal because the funds, he said, belonged to the U.S.
government, not to an individual.