Connecting the Dots (Seriously) Between Iran-Contra and Peyton Manning

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

02 January 16

Six degrees of alleged doping.

e few, we happy few, we Iran-Contra obsessives, we can have fun linking that mother of all scandals to practically everything that's gone sideways in this country since the 1980 presidential election. (That, of course, if you connect the Reagan campaign's jacking around with the release of the American hostages in Iran to the eventual missile shipments, which you can do through master crook Bill Casey.) The key is to see Iran-Contra as the central pivot to a decade of really bad foreign policy initiatives that really didn't peter out until the following decade. One of those was the shady process by which this country helped arm Saddam Hussein through some shenanigans involving an Atlanta bank called the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro. (The BNL scandal, in the argot of the obsessives.) Now, watch as I play Six Degrees Of Manucher Ghorbanifar and put Iran-Contra together with the recent kerfuffle involving Peyton Manning and human-growth hormones.

OK, it all starts with an oddball Indianapolis millionaire named Beurt SerVass. His company, SerVass Equipment, got a contract in 1989 to build a $40 million smelting plant in Iraq that would be financed by BNL. Congressional investigators discovered that Iraq planned to use the plant to make ammunition. (The plant was never built because Hussein invaded Kuwait.) At the trial of a BNL official accused of using the bank as an off-the-books money pit for Iraqi arms purchases, SerVass testified that he had no idea that the smelting plant might be used for anything except civilian purposes.

We move along now to 2012. An Indianapolis Ponzi schemer named Tim Durham gets sentenced to 50 years in prison for defrauding more that $200 million from the Fair Finance company of Ohio. Durham's second wife, Joan, was Beurt SerVass's daughter, and she and her pops posted Durham's $1 million bond while he was awaiting trial. Now, thanks to The Indianapolis Star, we discover that one of the beneficiaries of Durham's ill-gotten largesse is none other than Dr. Dale Guyer and his Advance Medical Center, P.C., the anti-aging clinic that is the center of the Al Jazeera America report about human-growth hormone peddling that has ensnared Manning and the NFL.

So, thus do we get from Bill Casey to Peyton Manning through a daisy-chain of separate—but oddly interrelated in the spirit of their respective venalities—exercises in fraud and bunco. This was fun. Let's all meet in the cocktail lounge of the Mena Airport and do it again sometime.