Mysterious Deaths & Murders with Connections to the Clintons: Ron Brown

Here’s just one of dozens ~~

Ron Brown: The Commerce Secretary died on  April 3, 1996, in an Air Force jet carrying Brown and 34 others, including 14 business executives on a trade mission to Croatia, crashed into a mountainside.

The Air Force, in a 22-volume report issued in June of 1996, confirmed its initial judgment that the crash resulted from pilot errors and faulty navigation equipment At the time of Brown’s death, Independent Counsel Daniel Pearson was seeking to determine whether Brown had engaged in several sham financial transactions with longtime business partner Nolanda Hill shortly before he became secretary of commerce.

From the Wayback Machine web archival site, these photos from Brown’s death go back to NewsMax:

Ron Brown Photos

#	Description
1	Wide Shot of Crash
2	From The Mountain Top
3	Rear of Plane
4	Inside Rear Cabin
5	The Wound
6	Close-up of Wound
7	Lateral X-Ray
8	Frontal X-Ray

Chris Ruddy’s articles on Ron Brown and others are archived here

RON BROWN’S SECRETS

by Peter J. Boyer June 9, 1997

A REPORTER AT LARGE about Texas businesswoman Nolanda Hill, fifty-two, and her relationship with the late Sec. Ron Brown… Describes the scandals surrounding Brown and Hill when he died in an aircrash, April 3, 1996… Dealing with Hill was a familiar task for Brown’s staff, and even for the White House. For almost ten years. 

Nolanda Hill

Hill was Ron Brown’s business partner and his closest political adviser, and, for the last seven years of his life, she was his lover. The political mistress is a stock Washington character, yet the relationship between Ron Brown and Nolanda Hill was a distinct nineteen-nineties variation of that timeless arrangement by which powerful men acquire and maintain paramours; they were both resourceful, charismatic operators who loved to make deals… During her long relationship with Brown, Hill lost her business, her marriage, her only child, and, briefly, her sanity.

In May, 1995, she also became the target, with Brown, of a federal independent counsel’s investigation into a series of dubious transactions that she had contrived for their mutual benefit, the remnants of which remain unresolved… At his death, Ron Brown was a beleaguered figure in an Administration beset by controversy, and it is unlikely that he would have been a member of Clinton’s second-term Cabinet…. 

By the time Nolanda Hill met it with exquisitely profitable timing. Describes how she met Brown in 1983, at the high-powered firm of Patton. Boggs & Blow, where he was then a forty-two-year-old partner at the firm… She spent a great deal of time at the firm, acquiring and starting up Channel 50. a Washington UHF television station… “I think that if she wasn’t his best friend, she was close to it.” one member of Brown’s circle said. “She was honest with him. She was one of the few people that could put him in his place when he needed to be.” 

Tells how Brown ran the 1988 Democratic Convention… Brown campaigned hard for the job, especially in the South, and on February 10, 1989, he was chosen as the first black leader of a national political party–the climax of his career… On the night Clinton won the votes that he needed to clinch the nomination. Brown was watching the returns at Hill’s apartment, and said, according to Hill, “If there had been forty-four candidates, that motherfucker would have been my forty-fifth choice.” 

One of the reasons Clinton won the election in 1992 was that Jesse Jackson did not run in the primaries and grudgingly granted his support to the Clinton campaign. Hill describes how Brown visited Jackson with a doctor’s bag filled with cash. Describes Brown’s various supplemental income schemes, most of which were vetted by Hill… Tells how Hill’s business, Corridor Broadcasting, and her personal life both came apart… A.G. Janet Reno asked a federal appeals court to investigate Brown’s statements on his financial disclosures, as well as his “acceptance of things of value” from Hill. 

Her marriage, unsurprisingly, was also failing… Describes Brown’s relationship with Gene and Nora Lum, who had met Brown in 1991 and donated heavily to the Party through the 1992 Presidential Campaign, as well as put Michael Brown. Ron’s son, on the board of their company… She had lost control of her television stations, and, once her legal problems mounted, was fired as manager. She had a nervous breakdown, and, after a period of intense psychotherapy, realized that her impending criminal prosecution meant she would have to betray Brown… Brown was uncertain about his future in politics: he had not been given a role in the Clinton-Gore reelection effort, and he talked of stepping down as Commerce Secretary… 

Looking back now, Hill says that she has come to see Brown’s death as a deliverance for him. “It spared him a great deaf of humiliation. He might have gone to jail, and he knew that.” 

Today, there is no life for Hill in Washington, and her connection with scandal has severed many of her business contacts elsewhere… While Hill’s business opportunities are limited, the entrepreneurial urge persists. She is looking into a proposal to privatize a state-owned hemp factory in the Yucatan Peninsula (“they’re finding all kinds of new uses for hemp”). And she speaks excitedly about plans to establish a home shopping channel in Mexico City. “I think there are real bright prospects,” she says of this possibility. “I have an inside track with somebody.” (Source)