CIA Director R. James Woolsey, whose name came up repeatedly last week in a Utah federal courtroom during a series of sentencing hearings connected to a byzantine $511 million scheme run by members of a polygamist Mormon group tied to the Armenian underworld, may have found himself in handcuffs on money laundering charges if “he wasn’t suffering from dementia,” sources tell LA Mag.

Using the codename “Grandpa,” Woolsey was connected to the fundamentalist Utah-based Mormon sect via polygamist engineer Jacob Kingston, who was sentenced last week to 18 years in federal prison for his role in orchestrating the scheme.

Kingston, 38, testified that he laundered roughly $140 million stolen from the U.S. Treasury in Turkey with the help of a reputed CIA asset — Turkish biopharma billionaire Sezgin Baran Korkmaz. Kingston met Korkmaz via his former partner in the scam, L.A. gas station giant Levon Termendzhyan, aka Lev Dermen, a man prosecutors call the boss of the Armenian Mafia and who is better known in underworld circles by his nickname: the Lion.

The Mormon and the mobster, prosecutors say, used Korkmaz to help them purchase the Mardan Palace luxury hotel in Turkey, the airliner Borajet, a waterfront villa in Istanbul, and a superyacht christened the Queen Anne. The overseas spending spree was all paid for by unearned subsidies paid out in a complex international scheme run out of Kingston’s Washakie Renewable Energy, located on a north Utah cattle ranch owned by the Order. The sect, which has been called a racist “blood cult” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, used it to apply for lucrative green energy tax credits.

[That’s NOT a ‘Beege’ headline. Holy smokes, that’s straight off the article page and it’s a humdinger. ~ Beege]