A subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Management — a shadowy equity firm with political clout — has quietly tapped into the housing market in North St. Louis County, turning a tidy profit by renting homes to low-income tenants with help from the feds. The problem is some of its properties border radioactively-contaminated Coldwater Creek.

When North County resident Bob Terry viewed a KMOV-TV news report earlier this year about a New York-based real estate company buying up homes in his old neighborhood, he immediately noticed one glaring omission — the account failed to mention that the properties border on radioactively-contaminated Coldwater Creek.

The Florissant native alerted others to the flub via Facebook, pointing out that the streets featured in the news segment — Mullanphy Road and Aspen Drive — were next to the stream that is known to have been polluted by nuclear waste dating back to the Manhattan Project, some of which is still being cleaned up by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Every house on those two streets faces or backs on the creek,” wrote Terry, who grew up in the neighborhood. In his Facebook post, Terry questions why the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development would subsidize low-income rental property in an area known to be contaminated with radioactive waste.

“Folks desperate to get in there have no clue,” says Terry. “The new folks are getting taken advantage of. [Whereas,] the longtime, older residents are stranded with declining property value,” he says. “Many got sick and died there.”

The the absentee landlord and long-distance benefactor of this federal largesse is CSMA-BLT LLC, a Delaware-registered corporation and subsidiary of Cerberus Capital Managment, the monstrous equity firm based in New York City that is valued at $30 billion.

The privately-owned conglomerate, co-founded by Stephen Feinberg, began acquiring the properties in 2015 during the Obama administration, when it purchased more than 4,000 residential properties in the Midwest and Florida from BLT Homes, including more than 600 in St. Louis County, according to county assessor records.

It didn’t take long for the acquisition to yield taxpayer dollars. By 2016, the Cerberus subsidiary received more than $480,000 in federal funding for its government-subsidized rental properties in St.

Louis County , according to KMOV. Monthly rents for the residences in Florissant average $1,000 or more. Cerberus’ investors include government and private pension funds, non-profit foundations, major universities and insurance companies.

Besides real estate, Cerberus holds a wide range of other assets, including Dyncorp, a huge defense contractor that supplies mercenaries and covert operatives to the military-intelligence establishment. The investment firm divested itself earlier this year of Remington, the arms manufacturer that mass produced the AR-15 assault rifle used in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre.

Cerberus was founded in 1992 and is named after the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell in Greek mythology. The firm has longstanding ties to the Republican Party. The boss of its international arm, for example, is former Vice-President Dan Quayle, who was implicated in the an Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan-Bush era.

As in all administrations, buying presidential influence comes with a hefty price tag: Cerberus CEO Feinberg contributed nearly $1.5 million to a pro-Trump PAC in 2016. As a result, his generosity has garnered him even more access to the corridors of power inside the White House.

Feinberg, who is said to be unusually secretive in both his personal and business affairs, was quoted in Rolling Stone magazine as telling shareholders in 2007: “If anyone at Cerberus has his picture in the paper, … we will do more than fire that person. We will kill him. The jail sentence will be worth it.”

At this point, he probably could get away with murder.

Last week, President Donald Trump appointed Feinberg to be chairman of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which oversees national security issues and provides advise to the executive branch on matters related to various intelligence agency operations, including those of the CIA.

In 2015, the Russian news service landed in North County to cover the troubles at West Lake Landfill and Coldwater Creek. The question now is whether the CIA mounted a counter-intelligence operation here.

KWMU reporter Vérinique La Capra aims a microphone at Mary Oscko as HBO and RT cameras captured the moment in August 2015 at the Hazelwood Community Center.

This story first appeared June 16, 2017 at Stlreporter.wordpress.com

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely place for an espionage operation to take place than the Hazelwood Civic Center. But recent revelations by the U.S. intelligence community suggest that it may have been one of the locations in North St. Louis County where a secretive propaganda battle quietly played out in August 2015.

Hundreds of people gathered at the civic center for a community meeting that month had no inkling they were bit actors in this Cold War revival. The overflow crowd that jammed the conference room on August 20 attended out of concern for the health of their families and the safety of the community. Radioactive contamination leftover from the Manhattan Project and its aftermath still plagued the St. Louis suburbs and residents wanted answers from government officials about the long-delayed clean ups.

Questions were asked, testimonials were given and frustrations were vented at the event, all captured on video by camerapersons, including at least one with ties to RT America, the Russian foreign news service.

In the heat of the moment, those present were not aware that they were pawns in a larger political struggle between the U.S. and Russia. Evidence of the covert chess game didn’t surface until January of this year, long after the meeting had faded in the community’s collective memory.

That’s when the CIA took the unprecedented step of releasing a classified report on alleged Russian interference in American politics. The unusual act by the agency was spurred by the continuing controversy over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Those allegations remain the focus of congressional investigations, and a probe by an independent counsel appointed by the Justice Department.

Allegations of the hacking of email accounts of Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton and her campaign staff by Russian operatives prompted the CIA’s release of the report. But the majority of the declassified information in the report is unrelated to the furor over whether Donald Trump and his cronies benefited from the alleged Russian intrusion.

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RT honcho Margarita Simonyan briefs Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in October 2012 in Moscow. (photo courtesy of the CIA’s declassified report)

Instead, the CIA released an intelligence assessment put together in 2012 that details how RT America is allegedly used by the Kremlin as a propaganda tool to cast the U.S. government in a bad light.

The obvious question this now raises is whether the CIA mounted a domestic counter espionage campaign to offset the perceived damage being inflicted by the negative image that the Russian news service allegedly broadcast not only in America but to a global audience via the Internet.

The CIA report was compiled in 2012 three years before the Russians showed up in North St. Louis County and four years before the U.S. presidential campaign. Though classified, it can be assumed that its contents were shared with the White House and other federal departments and agencies.

It is therefore reasonable to surmise that the CIA and other government agencies were not simply monitoring Russia’s interference in America — but actively combatting it with their own surreptitious operations.

If this is true, it begs the question as to whether American intelligence assets were present at the Hazelwood Civic Center that sultry, late summer evening back in 2015.

Only The Shadow knows.

Correction: Originally, this story identified the meeting as taking place at the Machinist Union Hall in Bridgeton. Instead, the meeting took place at the Hazelwood Community Center.