Joseph F. King

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Joseph F. King (born c. 1948 [1] ) is a former senior US Customs agent and criminal justice academic. He served for 33 years as a Special Agent in the United States Customs Service's New York office. He is an associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (since September 2003).

United States Customs Service former customs service of the United States

The United States Customs Service was an agency of the U.S. federal government that collected import tariffs and performed other selected border security duties.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice College of the City University of New York

The John Jay College of Criminal Justice is a senior college of the City University of New York in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. John Jay was founded as the only liberal arts college with a criminal justice and forensic focus in the United States. The college is known for its criminal justice, forensic science, forensic psychology, and public affairs programs.

Contents

Background and education

King graduated in history from St. Francis College, Brooklyn, in 1968, and gained an MA from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 1975. He later gained an MPhil and PhD from the City University of New York CUNY Graduate Center (1990 and 1999). [2]

St. Francis College college in Brooklyn, New York City

St. Francis College, often referred to as St. Francis of Brooklyn or SFC, is a private, coeducational college located in Brooklyn Heights, New York. It was founded in 1859 by the Franciscan Brothers of Brooklyn, a Franciscan order, as the St. Francis Academy and was the first private school in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn. St. Francis College began as a parochial all-boys academy in the City of Brooklyn and has become a small liberal arts college that has 19 academic departments which offer 72 majors and minors.

City University of New York Public university system in New York City

The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City. It is the largest urban university system in the United States. CUNY was founded in 1961 and comprises 24 campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges, one undergraduate honors college, and seven post-graduate institutions. The university enrolls more than 275,000 students, and counts thirteen Nobel Prize winners and twenty-four MacArthur Fellows among its alumni.

Career

King was a Special Agent in the United States Customs Service's New York office from 1968 to 1985, acting as a lead agent for undercover operations regarding Middle Eastern and Irish groups. [2] From 1985 to 2003 he was Supervisory Special Agent in the Strategic Investigations Division in the United States Customs Service's New York office. In this capacity, and due to his specialist knowledge, he was a member of the White House Legal Task Force on the Iran-Contra affair, [2] and in 1992 briefly assigned to the House October Surprise Task Force. [3]

The House October Surprise Task Force was a task force instituted by the United States House of Representatives in 1992 to examine the October Surprise allegations: that during the 1980 United States presidential election the Reagan campaign had sought to negotiate a solution to the Iran hostage crisis in competition to the US government of Jimmy Carter, in order to prevent the successful resolution of the crisis giving Carter an electoral boost. Following the publication of the report in January 1993, Task Force chairman Rep. Lee H. Hamilton published an editorial in The New York Times summarising the Task Force conclusion that "there was virtually no credible evidence to support the accusations."

King's undercover work included a role in a 1980 case involving arms smuggling to South Africa, [4] a role in the 1984 case against Cyrus Hashemi and his brothers, [5] and playing what he described as a "corrupt former C.I.A.-type" in a 1986 arms deal which became known as the Brokers of Death arms case. [1] [6] Later he played an Irish arms dealer named Joe Kennedy, foiling a 1993 plot to smuggle zirconium to Iraq. [1]

Cyrus Hashemi was an Iranian arms dealer linked to the Iran-Contra affair and October Surprise conspiracy theory. Hashemi was named by Robert Dreyfuss as a CIA and Mossad agent; Hashemi sued Dreyfuss and Lyndon LaRouche, whose Executive Intelligence Review had linked Hashemi to funding of Iranian terrorism, with the case dismissed in June 1983 due to Hashemi's failure to respond to legal documents. Hashemi died in 1986 in London in mysterious circumstances; the official cause of death was "a rare and virulent form of leukemia that was diagnosed only two days before Hashemi died."

The 'Brokers of Death' arms case was a US trial in the 1980s relating to the attempted shipment of $2.5bn worth of US-made arms to Iran; it was described by the Los Angeles Times in 1986 as "the largest arms conspiracy prosecution ever brought by the Justice Department". The case was dropped in January 1989 after the prosecution said it could not prove the defendants did not believe their dealings were officially sanctioned. The planned deals were being arranged at the same time as the White House was secretly seeking to arrange arms sales to Iran, in what became known as the Iran-Contra affair; some evidence indicated that defendants were aware of these efforts.

Zirconium Chemical element with atomic number 40

Zirconium is a chemical element with the symbol Zr and atomic number 40. The name zirconium is taken from the name of the mineral zircon, the most important source of zirconium. It is a lustrous, grey-white, strong transition metal that closely resembles hafnium and, to a lesser extent, titanium. Zirconium is mainly used as a refractory and opacifier, although small amounts are used as an alloying agent for its strong resistance to corrosion. Zirconium forms a variety of inorganic and organometallic compounds such as zirconium dioxide and zirconocene dichloride, respectively. Five isotopes occur naturally, three of which are stable. Zirconium compounds have no known biological role.

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