THE CHILEAN CONNECTION / Carlos Cardoen -- arms dealer to Iraq, former friend of the U.S. government, and now fugitive - still lines his pockets with profits from our appetite for wine

CARDOEN0302Z-C-04FEB03-MG-HO --- Carlos Cardoen stands next to one of his company helicopters (HANDOUT PHOTO) CARDOEN0302Z-C-04FEB03-MG-HO --- Carlos Cardoen stands next to one of his company helicopters (HANDOUT PHOTO) Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close THE CHILEAN CONNECTION / Carlos Cardoen -- arms dealer to Iraq, former friend of the U.S. government, and now fugitive - still lines his pockets with profits from our appetite for wine 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

In a remote province of Chile where air force planes used to bring prisoners to a concentration camp, a hidden winery equipped with a landing strip naturally raises suspicion. But on close inspection, Vina Tarapaca is no disguised death-squad hideout. Tucked within a horseshoe-shaped mountain range in the Maipo Valley, it sprawls across 1,052 acres. Rows of grape-laden vines surge to the foot of a stately century-old manor house, and the cellars are furnished with the latest fermentation equipment. That is to be expected, given that until recently Vina Tarapaca made and sold wine in partnership with one of Napa Valley's largest wineries, Beringer Blass Wine Estates.

On days when the board of directors meets, a helicopter lands near the manor, and a 60-year-old man in a crisp business suit steps out. At 5 feet 9 inches, he has to bend only slightly to avoid the whirring blades, which tousle his neatly combed black and silver hair. He strolls toward the house like someone who owns the place, which, in part, he does. He is Carlos Cardoen,

millionaire entrepreneur-turned-capitalist, Chilean folk hero and wanted fugitive in the United States. His alleged crime: exporting materials from the United States to build bombs for Saddam Hussein.

Just how a Chilean arms dealer got snarled in the U.S.-Iraq conflict - and wound up on the board of a winery with ties to Northern California - is a tale of betrayal and hard-fought redemption. Throughout a bitter 10-year battle with the U.S. government, Cardoen has maintained that American officials knew about and supported his weapons sales to Iraq during its eight-year war with Iran in the 1980s. Only after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 did the United States press charges against him. "They came after me, looking for someone to blame," he says. In 1993, U.S. prosecutors charged him with violating export laws and laundering money from Iraq through an American real estate business.

Cardoen has never stood trial and cannot enter the United States without risking arrest. Since the early '90s, he has struggled to transform himself into a philanthropist and financier of peaceful Chilean industries, especially wine and tourism. The success of his wine ventures owes much to foreign exports, many of them to the United States. In addition to Beringer - which ended a six-year sales agreement with Vina Tarapaca in January, due to an existing import agreement Beringer's new parent company, Foster's, had with another Chilean winery - Cardoen's wineries have sold to Freixenent USA in Sonoma, Galena Cellars in Galena, Ill., and most recently, Paterno Wines International in Chicago. All of the sales are legal, though few American wine consumers realize whose net worth the proceeds ultimately benefit.

To understand the links between wine and Cardoen, it helps to start at the point of sale. During last year's Christmas season, a customer could walk into Haight Fillmore Whole Foods in San Francisco and buy a bottle of Vina Tarapaca's red table wine for $8. The market had ordered that wine from a U.S. distributor, which had bought it from Beringer, which had imported it from Vina Tarapaca, one of several businesses owned by Compania Chilena de Fosforos S.A. (Fosforos for short), a publicly held company of which Cardoen is the chairman and largest shareholder. When Vina Tarapaca's sales increase, so do Fosforos' earnings. Rising earnings usually make stock prices go up. Every dollar added to Fosforos' stock price is a dollar added to Cardoen's net worth.

In the past decade, Cardoen the legend has overshadowed Cardoen the man. But Cardoen the man is no cartoon villain. Though the evidence that he broke export laws is convincing, so is the evidence that he did so while acting as a middleman for the United States. "If I made a mistake, the U.S. government made a bigger mistake," he says. For his alleged crimes, he has never been sentenced, but he has paid with humiliation and lost economic opportunity. Even now, when Napa Valley's recession-battered wine industry might benefit from increased cooperation with Chile, he cannot set foot in an American boardroom. As the Bush administration prepares for a final showdown with Iraq, his story is a reminder of how many lives the 12-year conflict has damaged - and how many questions remain unanswered about the United States' role in arming the regime it now seeks to change.

In the beginning it was business

In 1995, a Beringer executive named Maryanne Bautovich struck up a conversation with an airplane pilot sitting beside her on a return flight from Chile. Bautovich was looking for Chilean wines for Beringer to distribute, and the pilot told her about an excellent but little-known winery in the north called Vina Tarapaca. When Bautovich returned to California, she made inquiries. On April 15, 1996, Beringer and Vina Tarapaca signed an import agreement. By December 1996, Vina Tarapaca had shipped 48,000 cases of wine to its new U.S. partner.

From the start, executives at Vina Tarapaca made no secret of Cardoen. "Of course, we mentioned it to [former Beringer CEO] Walt Klenz," says Claudio Cilvetti, Vina Tarapaca's export manager. "Beringer has always been aware of the situation, because there's nothing to hide, and we don't want them to misunderstand anything." Throughout their 6-year partnership, Beringer dealt mostly with Cilvetti and Vina Tarapaca's general manager, Rene Araneda. "I don't think anyone from Beringer ever had any dealings with Cardoen at all," says Mora Cronin, a Beringer spokeswoman.

Vina Tarapaca's parent company, Fosforos, is headquartered in Santiago and occupies two floors of a building that bears an eerie resemblance to one of the fallen World Trade Center towers. Cardoen and two partners control 52 percent of the company.

"Fosforos" is Spanish for matches, which the company manufactures and sells in addition to making wine. With lighters eating into match sales, Fosforos has been expanding into wine for 11 years to keep its earnings healthy. Wine exports are the fastest growing segment of its business. From 1996 to 2001, annual income from Vina Tarapaca's exports quadrupled from $4.5 million to $18 million. The United States accounts for 15 percent of those sales - more than any other country.

Cardoen's outlaw status in America seems to have caused no trouble for Vina Tarapaca's export business. State and federal regulators care only that the label matches what's inside the bottle and that the importer is properly licensed, which Beringer always has been. "Where the U.S. regulators draw the line is at the product itself," says John Hinman, an attorney specializing in wine law at Hinman & Carmichael in San Francisco. "They're not going to question where the revenues from sales of that product are going back to."

That said, federal authorities aren't wild about a suspect they've been chasing for 10 years making hay from American consumers. "Certainly, we would not encourage U.S. companies to conduct business with a fugitive who's wanted on charges of selling millions of dollars of cluster bombs to Saddam Hussein," says Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs Service. "Consumers in the United States who buy wines from this individual have to wonder whether their dollars are going to fund Third World arms races, if not Saddam Hussein himself. It may be a stretch, but it's also a possibility."

Mostly, it's a stretch. For one thing, the dollars don't go straight into Cardoen's pocket, though rising sales of Vina Tarapaca wine ultimately increase the value of his Fosforos stock. In addition, Cardoen sold or shut down most of his arms-making businesses in the '90s. In 1992, his company that used to make weapons for Iraq, Industrias Cardoen, changed its name to Metalnor as part of an image makeover and shifted its focus to nonmilitary engineering. Today, Cardoen describes it as a "sleeping company." "It practically doesn't exist anymore," he says. But it maintains a functional weapons plant in Iquique, Chile, in case of emergency. "We would be very glad to produce if my country ever needs it," he says.

In March 2000, Chile's National Television station gave prime-time coverage to news that the Chilean government had granted Metalnor a license to sell 66 bomb pumps to Zimbabwe. Human rights activists complained that the pumps were ultimately destined for the Democratic Republic of Congo and its military dictator, Laurent Kabila.

"Although Carlos Cardoen always tried to maintain his warlike business in the back room, insisting it was extinguished, the controversial sale of pumps to Zimbabwe gave evidence that he never left the sale of arms," wrote the Chilean magazine Que Pasa. Cardoen downplayed it all, saying the pumps were for minor conventional weapons. In the end, the deal with Zimbabwe fell through.

Cardoen has kept a hand in the weapons trade if for no other reason than to maintain his legacy as the grandfather of Chilean defense. Last year, he was spotted making the rounds in a smart suit and tie at FIDAE 2002, a sprawling aircraft exposition that draws thousands of military types to Santiago every other year. Pride runs deep among senior members of Chile's defense community, who credit themselves with having helped save the country in the 1970s.

Chileans often joke that their defense industry was founded by Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts. In 1976, Kennedy succeeded in passing a law that banned the U.S. from selling weapons to human rights violators, including Chile, which in 1973 was taken over in a bloody military coup by General Augusto Pinochet. Without access to the world's largest arms supermarket, Chile was vulnerable in the '70s to attacks from two unfriendly neighbors, Argentina and Peru. Therefore, the Chilean army went looking for domestic suppliers, including Cardoen, who at the time was running a small mining- explosives company in Iquique.

Cardoen was no diplomat's son. His father was a prune farmer who invented agricultural machinery and wrote a book of poetry. Young Carlos grew up in the Colchagua Valley, where Chilean cowboys, called huasos, originated. After attending public school and state college, he won a scholarship to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, where he earned his doctorate in engineering. Afterward, he returned to Chile to make mining explosives. When the Chilean army asked him to build bombs instead, he obliged, considering it his duty. If it wound up making him very wealthy, so much the better.

By 1980, Cardoen's company, Industrias Cardoen, was one of the largest Chilean defense companies, mostly due to Chilean military contracts. Some Chileans revered Cardoen as a patriot for having strengthened the country's defense and for having broken its dependency on foreign arms producers like the United States. In the early '80s, Industrias Cardoen was eyeing international expansion, and the Iran-Iraq war offered opportunity. The Pinochet regime allowed Chilean arms makers to export to most countries that were not neighbors and not communist. Iraq was neither, and Iran's mullahs rubbed Pinochet's generals the wrong way. Thus it was open season for Chilean companies that wanted to sell arms to Iraq.

By 1984, Industrias Cardoen had developed a cheap yet devastating weapon that would become its all-time best-seller. The Cardoen cluster bomb weighed 500 pounds and was shaped like a long canister. After dropping from a plane, it opened, clamshell-like, in midair and scattered 240 soda-can-sized bomblets over an area the size of several football fields, pulverizing anything within the zone. It was ideal for countering Iran's famous "human wave" attacks, in which they would try to overwhelm the Iraqis by sending in waves upon waves of soldiers. From 1984 to 1988, Industrias Cardoen sold more than $200 million dollars' worth of the weapons to Iraq.

Daniel Prieto, a former marketing executive at Industrias Cardoen, remembers traveling to Washington, D.C., with Cardoen several times in the '80s to attend the annual Association of the United States Army trade show, a glitzy defense-industry confab where generals and defense executives backslap each other over scotch and cigars. Amid hundreds of noisy exhibitors inside the 17-acre Washington Convention Center, the Industrias Cardoen booth stood out because of all the U.S. military officers and diplomats it attracted. "We talked to senior people in the State Department and Department of Defense," Prieto says. When the topic of Cardoen's sales to Iraq came up, none of the Americans objected. "On the contrary," Prieto says, "they were very supportive. "

Like Chile, the United States had no love for Iran in the '80s. Many Americans were still angry over Iranians having taken Americans hostage in Tehran at the American Embassy in 1979. Though the U.S. was officially neutral in the Iran-Iraq war, Washington clearly had a favorite. "Because of the war, every day that passed, the Americans were closer to Saddam Hussein," Prieto says.

A few months after Iraq invaded Iran in 1982, the United States removed Iraq from its list of states that sponsor terrorism, clearing the way for an embarrassment of U.S. goods to flow into Saddam's country. "It was motivated by a desire to build Saddam up as a bulwark against the Iranians," says Gary Mulhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, D.C. From 1985 to 1990, the U.S. Commerce Department approved $1.5 billion worth of equipment and technology for export to Iraq. Among the wares was $140,000 worth of radar components from Hewlett Packard.

In 1985, Marshall Wiley, former U.S. ambassador to Oman, formed the United States-Iraq Business Forum, a nonprofit group devoted to cracking open the Iraqi market for U.S. businesses. With a board made up of executives from corporations such as Amoco, Mobil and Westinghouse, the forum lobbied the federal government and the Pentagon to ease restrictions on exports to Iraq.

The United States wasn't the only country grabbing for the Iraqi market. France, Germany and the United Kingdom., too, were selling Iraqis everything from nuclear reactors to missiles. Naturally, Cardoen wanted to protect his share, and as the decade progressed, he grew ever cozier with Hussein, whom he once, according to an article in the British newspaper the Guardian, referred to as his "cousin." So close was their relationship, in fact, that the Iraqis permitted Industrias Cardoen to open a plant in Baghdad to make weapons parts.

Court records show that the money Iraq was paying Cardoen for cluster bombs was passing through Geneva, Switzerland, and ending up in several accounts in Miami, Fla. There, a Cardoen-owned company called Swissco would invest the money in Florida real estate. At the time, Cardoen and his Swissco associates were friendly with at least one prominent southern Floridian. In August 1986, Cardoen helped organize a fund-raiser for U.S. Sen. Robert Graham, a Democrat from Florida, at the Miami home of Swissco executive Anthony Mijares. The event raised about $50,000 for Graham's 1986 campaign and got Cardoen added to the Friends of Bob Graham, a group of top supporters.

Part of Iraq's payments to Swissco came through sales of oil. As Forbes magazine first reported in 1995, Cardoen's main arms-for-oil broker in the late '80s was an American named David Chalmers Jr., who came from a family of wealthy New York oilmen. John Pastis, a former trader for Attock Oil, remembers encountering Cardoen during a meeting with Chalmers at an OPEC summit in Vienna in November 1988. Pastis and Chalmers were negotiating a sale in the bedroom of Chalmers' plush hotel suite when Cardoen walked in, looking agitated. Chalmers asked Pastis to step into the living room, and from behind a closed door, Pastis overheard a heated discussion in which Chalmers tried to explain why he hadn't yet sold an allotment of Iraqi crude to pay for Cardoen's bombs. "Carlos was very angry because he was expecting his money," Pastis says. "He had already started building the bombs."

The game Cardoen was playing grew more dangerous as his business with Iraq increased. In early 1990, Industrias Cardoen was on the verge of closing a deal to supply Iraq with kits for converting American-made Bell helicopters into gunships. Jonathan Moyle, a 28-year-old British journalist at Defence Helicopter World, got wind of the deal and flew to Chile to investigate. His visit is recounted in Wensley Clarkson's excellent book "The Valkyrie Operation" (Blake, 1998). On the afternoon of March 1, 1990, a maid entered Moyle's hotel room in Santiago and noticed the closet door was slightly ajar. Inside, she found Moyle's naked body hanging from a shirt tied round his neck, his head covered in a pillowcase and his underpants dangling round his ankles. Chilean police initially said Moyle had killed himself in a sexual ritual, but an autopsy later found a needle hole on his shin and enough tranquilizers in his stomach to knock him unconscious.

In his book, Clarkson writes that Cardoen's former public-relations chief, Raul Montecinos, confessed on his deathbed in 1995 to having ordered Moyle's murder. Moyle, who also allegedly was an informant for the British Secret Service, was spooking the Iraqis with his questions about Cardoen's helicopter sales. Clarkson quotes Montecino saying, "I talked to the Iraqis. They told me who to get to do it, but said I had to organize it myself. I had no choice." Moyle's killers were never discovered.

In August 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and Cardoen's world began to turn upside down. The United Nations immediately ordered a trade boycott against Iraq, triggering a tightening of American export policy that threatened to cut off Cardoen's supplies. When American and British planes began bombing Iraq in January 1991, Cardoen found himself on the wrong side of the conflict. His weapons plants in Iraq were among the targets, and his cluster bombs were used by the Iraqis against the NATO coalition. Arms-proliferation experts began to ask how Iraq had ever obtained such lethal weapons.

Cardoen had already begun to diversify his holdings by investing in nonmilitary businesses. In 1990, before the invasion of Kuwait, he and a group of Chilean investors had acquired Fosforos from the Swedish Match Company. But after the Gulf War ended in February 1991, even his new business interests could not deflect the mounting questions about his arms sales to Iraq. By the summer of 1991, the U.S., U.K. and German governments had begun investigating whether companies in their respective countries had used illegally obtained export licenses to ship weapons-related goods to Iraq before the war. "It was come-to-Jesus time for the United States in terms of disclosures," says Scott Jones, a research associate at the University of Georgia's Center for International Trade and Security. One investigation led by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Customs Service was focusing on Cardoen's network.

In the summer of 1990, Commerce Department agents in Dallas had received a tip that a modified Bell 206 Long Ranger helicopter was about to be exported from Texas to Industrias Cardoen in Chile. Industrias Cardoen's history with Saddam was widely known, and the U.N. trade embargo against Iraq had just gone into effect. The agents discovered that the helicopter belonged to Cardoen's Miami company, Swissco. Export records showed that in the past five years, Swissco and a company in Albany, Ore., called Teledyne had shipped more than 130 tons of zirconium to Industrias Cardoen in Chile.

Zirconium, a silvery-white metal, usually sets off alarms with customs inspectors because it is commonly used in nuclear reactors. Industrias Cardoen had discovered that it made an excellent incendiary additive in cluster bombs. But the export license applications that Swissco and Teledyne had submitted to the Commerce Department said that Industrias Cardoen would use the material for "mining operations."

On March 27, 1991, customs agents seized Swissco's helicopter at the Dallas airport. While their investigation continued, separate allegations surfaced regarding Cardoen's connections to Robert Gates, whom President George H.W. Bush had nominated for CIA director. In July 1991, a former CIA operative told ABC's "Nightline" that in 1986 Gates, who was then a CIA deputy director, had met with Cardoen in Florida. A "Nightline" source said Gates had personally supervised a shipment of materials from the United States to Industrias Cardoen in Chile to make cluster bombs for Iraq. The White House promptly denied the report, as did Gates two months later during his confirmation hearings.

On April 6, 1992, the Commerce Department and Customs Service held a press conference in Miami to announce it had filed a civil lawsuit in federal district court against Swissco. Customs Commissioner Carol Hallett read from a statement worthy of Fox TV's "America's Most Wanted": "Like a black widow spider, Cardoen controlled a tangled but intricate web that circled the globe. His dark empire was spun from the profits of destruction. I am thankful that today we have finally dropped the bomb on him." Hallett explained how Cardoen had set up a "sophisticated organization" of shell companies and trust accounts to conceal more than $200 million that Iraq had paid for cluster bombs that were made from illegally exported materials. Through its suit, the government aimed to seize $30 million worth of real estate Swissco had purchased with the proceeds.

From Santiago, Cardoen spoke out through the media, saying the U.S. government was waging "business terrorism" against him. The Bush administration had known all about his sales to Iraq before the Gulf War and was making him a scapegoat, he said. On May 26, 1993, Cardoen, Swissco, Teledyne and employees from both companies were indicted on criminal charges in federal district court in Miami for illegally exporting zirconium. The charges included violation of the Arms Export Control Act, which prohibited sales of arms to Chile under Pinochet, who ruled until 1990. Maximum penalties for the various charges ranged from five to 10 years in prison and fines as much as $1 million per offense.

A warrant was issued for Cardoen's arrest, but he was 4,120 miles south, in Chile. Because he had committed no crime there, chances that Chilean authorities would charge him with anything were slim. Even if they did, the United States had little hope of extraditing him. "We examined the prospects of doing that and found the extradition treaty we have with Chile doesn't cover export violations," says Frank Tamen, a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's office in Miami. "It was negotiated during Theodore Roosevelt's administration."

In Chile, Cardoen continued to speak publicly, saying that he had told the American government about his sales to Iraq and had received its blessing. "We gave him every opportunity to provide us with the name of the American official to whom he had provided that information and any evidence to show he had any approval to do what he was doing, and he failed to do so," Tamen says.

In January 1995, a former member of the National Security Council during the Reagan administration named Howard Teicher entered a sworn affidavit in U. S. v. Cardoen that threatened to upend the government's case. The document gave a detailed description of how President Reagan and former CIA director William Casey carried out a policy during the '80s to ensure that Iraq was equipped to win the war against Iran. "My NSC files will contain documents that show or tend to show the CIA's authorization, approval and assistance of Cardoen's manufacture and sale of cluster bombs and other munitions to Iraq," Teicher's affidavit said.

The prosecution investigated his claims. "We sent about four people out to look through the records of the NSC and found not one piece of paper for what he had said," Tamen says. "When confronted with the fact, Teicher signed an affidavit saying he was mistaken and retracted everything he had said." He did so under threat of a grand jury indictment for possibly violating his national security oath.

In January 1995, Teledyne pleaded guilty to illegal exports of zirconium and paid $13 million in fines. On Aug. 7, 1995, a federal district judge sentenced Edward Johnson, a 55-year-old Teledyne employee who had sold zirconium to Cardoen, to three years and five months in prison and fined him $25,000. Described as a "small fish" by defense lawyers, he was the only person convicted in the case.

A key witness who helped win the conviction was Nasser Beydoun, a 52-year- old businessman who had been a close associate of Cardoen until the two men had a falling-out. During the trial, Beydoun had testified for the government about how he had helped Cardoen sell cluster bombs to the Iraqis. Later, in June 1995, Beydoun was found shot to death in his home in Rio de Janeiro. Police said three men in black ski masks had burst into Beydoun's apartment and herded Beydoun, a bodyguard and three women into a bathroom. After an hour,

the men had removed Beydoun to a bedroom and shot him once in the neck. The killers were never found.

By the time the U.S. government had won its conviction against Teledyne, Cardoen had already begun a new life in Chile as a purveyor of wine, tourism and culture. In 1992, Fosforos had acquired Vina Tarapaca and invested $50 million to upgrade its winemaking facilities. Two years later, shipments were growing at an average annual rate of 50 percent. In 1995, Cardoen's charitable foundation opened the Museum of Cochagua in Santa Cruz, Chile, to showcase the art and history of the Colchagua Valley region.

But the U.S. government didn't take its eye off Cardoen. In 1997, the Customs Service posted his photo on its Web site and offered a $500,000 reward for information about his whereabouts, mentioning that he frequently traveled outside Chile. If he were arrested in a country with which the United States has a favorable extradition treaty, federal agents might have a chance at capturing him.

The Chilean government has supported Cardoen's freedom in Chile while staying out of his conflict with the United States. In 2001, Chilean president Ricardo Lagos, whose election campaign Cardoen helped finance, confirmed publicly that Cardoen does not have any charges pending against him in Chile. He added that the United States had not sought Cardoen's extradition though legal mechanisms exist for it to do so.

The U.S. "persecution" of Cardoen, as he calls it, continues to this day. "Citibank receives instructions not to do business with me from the Department of State," Cardoen says. To Cardoen, such slights are part of a larger U.S. policy to prevent Chile from gaining political independence by developing its own defense industry. "When a small country finds independence on an important matter like the production of defense products, then the U.S. Department of State loses the ability to control the political will of that country," he says. And American defense companies gain competitors.

"That has been a charge leveled against the U.S. export policy for years, that its secondary interest is to promote U.S. business interests to freeze out competition," says Scott Jones, a research associate at the University of Georgia's Center for International Trade and Security. "That would be extremely difficult to validate."

For all his vitriol toward the U.S. government, Cardoen is optimistic about the wine industries in Chile and Napa Valley working together. "As soon as we have grown to a level where we can seriously combine our offers with the ones of Napa, there will be strategic partnerships that would certainly help each other," he says. Tourism is especially promising. In 2000, Cardoen opened the Hotel Santa Cruz to draw international visitors to Santa Cruz, Chile. His foundation has refurbished historic houses in the region. In September, he will launch a steam-train railway that runs through the Colchagua Valley, based on the Napa Valley Wine Train.

"Has Napa Valley been an inspiration?" he says. "By all means. I think you have done a great job there, and we would like to do something similar here." But to forge partnerships with businesses in Napa, Cardoen must be able to travel, a possibility for which he doesn't hold out much hope. "I have spent millions of dollars on very scrupulous lawyers who have taxi meters, and I think I've had enough of that," he says. "I don't see any interest from the Department of Justice. They just want to use the politics of the stick. When you have a chance at justice, I think it's worth looking for it. But when you don't, it's a waste of time."

Cardoen will turn 61 in May, and with each passing year, he likes to stay closer to his children and grandchildren. His adult children manage some of his businesses now, and eventually they will take over completely. Cardoen is content to run his museum. As far as he's concerned, the situation with the United States is behind him. "It's a big shame," he says. "A big, big shame."