Con Air: Convicted Drug Kingpin, Arms Smugglers Keep Licenses to Fly in the U.S.

A notorious drug kingpin, a convicted arms trafficker and several other individuals linked to aviation-connected crimes continue to hold FAA pilots licenses, according to an analysis of the FAA data base made available to ABCNews.com.

Fernando Zevallos Gonzalez, called the "Al Capone of Peru" by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency....

Fernando Zevallos Gonzalez, called the "Al Capone of Peru" by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Gonzalez, who founded the largest airline in Peru, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami on drug related charges in 2007 and is currently in prison in Peru following his conviction on drug trafficking and money laundering charges in that country.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

The cases call into question the ability of the FAA and the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) to detect and purge high risk individuals from the list of approved pilots. After 9/11, the TSA was charged with alerting the FAA of individuals posing a threat to "transportation and national security."

"Evidently from the results we found, I don't think they are doing an adequate job," said David Schiffer of Safe Banking Systems (SBS), a New York computer security firm run by Schiffer and his son Mark. They say they uncovered the cases by cross-checking the FAA's public data base with information on suspect individuals.

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'Al Capone of Peru'

Among the cases that SBS discovered was that of a well-known drug kingpin, Fernando Zevallos Gonzalez, called the "Al Capone of Peru" by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Gonzalez, who founded the largest airline in Peru, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Miami on drug related charges in 2007 and is currently in prison in Peru following his conviction on drug trafficking and money laundering charges in that country.

Zevallos' airline was stripped of its license to fly in the U.S. in 2004. Yet somehow Zevallos was able to keep his own individual aviation license, issued in 1992, even though FAA regulations specifically list "drug kingpin activity" as grounds for emergency revocation of a license.

The government apparently failed to cross-check the FAA's list of approved pilots with other federal watch lists. Zevallos has been on a black list of foreign drug kingpins since 2004 and his associates and network of aviation companies are also on a special watch list setup by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).