The Infiltrator, page 10
Afterward, as Alcaíno and I strolled along Fifty-sixth Street, I said to him, “Roberto, I’m looking for an honorable and powerful South American connection. I realize we need to get to know one another, but I also recognize that you’ve done a lot of business without me in the past three months. Why haven’t you brought any of that to me?”
Alcaíno smiled. “Anything good comes slowly. We have the capability and opportunity to do big business together.”
Time to get serious.
“You and I share a lot of traits. We both have power, loyalty, and compassion. We both hold our families in high esteem. We both respect and reward the women in our lives. Roberto, I have nothing more to show you until we resume the business we were doing and supplement it with the investments. I’ve let you get close to my personal life, including my future wife, as a sign of trust. You are one of the few individuals who is sufficiently respected by the Colombians and can realistically convince them of the necessity for them to invest through our companies. The Moras in Colombia are driven by profits and unrealistically think they have no risks because they’re not here in the U.S. I will either align myself with you or forget about your markets and go back to working for my family.”
Alcaíno looked at me like a father. “Bob, this process is necessary, and we will consummate our agreement after I return from Europe. I’ll have about $2 million that I will bring to you, some to transfer and some to invest. My cut from what I have going here with the big ones is 200 kilos per month, so I’ll be earning $5 million a month here alone. I’ll give a good part of that to you to invest, plus I’ll talk the big ones into doing the same. I’ll also make my people available for you. Joe [Casals] can do more than drive. He’s good at other things, too.”
He formed his hand into the shape of a pistol and hammered his thumb down. Casals was also an assassin.
When I played Charlie Broun’s offer of a stay in Vegas, Alcaíno reciprocated by inviting Kathy and me to stay with him and his family at their mansion in Pasadena.
“Bob, believe me,” he said. “We are going to do big business together. Trust me. Your patience will be rewarded in ways you can never imagine.”
And it was.
7
THE MAGIC OF PANAMA
* * *
New Port Richey, Florida
November 1987
BUSINESS WAS BOOMING, but I was being watched.
Tracking money through accounts, examining canceled checks for clues, monitoring tens of thousands of dollars in undercover expenses a month, fielding calls from targets, writing reports, briefing bosses, and strategizing about how to infiltrate the cartel — it was more than a full-time job. Every week I passed reports to agents at out-of-the-way restaurants or safe houses. But no amount of precaution and obfuscation could protect me, as I soon discovered.
The Chicago office reported that telephone records of couriers linked to Alcaíno showed they had been calling pay phones near Financial Consulting in New Port Richey. My car was broken into several times. Someone was tossing it, I suspected, to see if anything in it suggested I was a cop. On the way to my real home, I drove like a doper in fear of being followed by the cops — except I was a cop in fear of being followed by the cartel. I drove down dead-end streets and parked to see if anyone had followed me. I pulled U-turns on highways and ran red lights.
Before leaving the undercover houses, I forwarded calls to a line set up in my home by the phone company’s security department and agents from our office. This line rang to a phone in a closet at home that was hooked up to a recorder. I installed a strobe light in the living room to indicate when the closet phone rang.
For a while, I made it to all my family’s most important events: gymnastics meets, birthdays, and holidays. But even when I was home, I wasn’t really there. Every time my cell or closet phone rang, I dropped whatever I had been doing and answered it. One night, during a holiday dinner with immediate family, as my dad prepared to say grace, the strobe light flashed in our faces and shattered the moment. I shot to the closet. When I returned, ten minutes later, cold silence filled the room. Everyone’s body language confirmed that I had made a big mistake.
Our success was creating problems for Emir, too. He and the other agents were picking up millions of dollars a month from couriers in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Los Angeles. But front-office bureaucrats in Customs kept trying to assign surveillance agents to follow the T-shirts in hopes of catching them with money intended for delivery to other launderers. That tactic risked all the credibility that Emir and I were building with the men in the cartel. But Emir’s uncanny ability to play his role warded off stupidity that could have cost us our lives.
He flew to L.A. on a cold fall day to meet Sonja, a courier. To please the L.A. office, Emir lured her to a hotel so agents in an adjoining suite could tape the meet. “Sonja, it’s best that we meet privately in my room because I don’t want to talk in public about our future business together.”
Her antenna went up. “It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just that I feel very uncomfortable.” She was pissing herself at the thought of delivering hundreds of thousands of dollars of drug money to a total stranger in the confinement of a hotel room. Such close quarters offer nowhere to hide and few easy escape routes. Smart couriers like Sonja prefer to drive a beat-up old car no one would want to steal to a fast-food restaurant. They put the keys under the floor mat and join the likes of Emir inside, within sight of the car, and tell him that what he was looking for was inside a duffel bag in the trunk. They tell him where to find the keys and ask that he return the car to where he found it after he finishes his business. They wait in the restaurant until he returns and speak in riddles rather than openly give details. Not much needs to be said anyway, and playing this game keeps couriers away from the money and reduces the possibility of getting caught on tape saying things that offer no defense.
When she balked, Emir convinced Sonja to meet him outside the hotel. She arrived in a beat-up Toyota Corolla driven by her chubby eighteen-year-old son, who looked like he was playing hooky from high school.
“I’m not doing this in the street,” Emir said, as the car slowed to a halt under the hotel canopy. “I don’t know who is watching. Let’s go to my room.” When she resisted, he said, “Listen, you’re the one who is going to look bad when your people get the word that I wouldn’t take this shit because you were unreasonable. You know they’re not going to be happy.”
She didn’t know what to say. Emir opened the rear passenger door and picked up one of the two black gym bags lying on the floor of the backseat. Beneath it lay an Uzi machine gun that she no doubt knew how to use.
“Let’s go,” Emir barked.
Sonja got out. Her son parked, then grabbed the other gym bag.
In the room, Emir tried to make them comfortable, but Sonja’s son paced the place like a caged lion. Emir ignored him. But out of the corner of his eye Emir spotted a fatal flaw: on the doorjamb, agents had taped a wired microphone. But the tape had loosened, and the wire was leaning into Emir’s hotel suite, about six inches from the top of the door. Emir had to take command of their attention or they might notice the wire.
“Sonja,” he almost shouted, “you can tell your people that the money will be in Colombia in a couple of days. Do you know Gonzalo Mora?” She looked puzzled and shook her head. “Well, he’ll be in contact with your people in Colombia and will tell your bosses when the money arrives. I hope we will be doing a lot of business together.”
Mother and son bolted back to their car as Emir reported the Uzi to the listening agents. When he walked out onto the balcony, Emir watched as the old Corolla crept from its parking space — and six painfully obvious unmarked police cars fell in line behind it.
“These fuckers are going to get us killed!” he said as he shook his head in disbelief. But he knew no one from Tampa could stop the L.A. agents from taking reckless risks. The commissioners in both regions operated their own fiefdoms and let agents make selfish decisions for local results. Which, of course, didn’t bode well for an international case that required large-scale selflessness.
It wasn’t long before Mora frantically called Emir. “What the hell is going on? The client’s people in L.A. say you guys are cops. They claim that los feos followed them from your hotel.”
Emir knew this was coming. He took a deep breath. “You know, Gonzalo, this woman has a problem. If, in your mind, you think that you’re nervous and that everybody watching you is a police officer, you know what, we won’t be able to walk half a block because every time that we look there might be a person. That person might be cleaning his car, and we’ll think — Oh, he has to be a DEA agent.”
Mora bought the paranoia pitch and calmed down.
Then Emir called me. “Bob, we have to be thankful to God if we don’t get hurt during this operation. The mighty angels better look over us because I have never seen people like this” — meaning L.A. Customs agents. “They just don’t give a shit about us.”
He was right, but we both knew that we were traveling a road no undercover agents had ever gone before. We had to see it through.
As pickups increased, Mora continued to pay the cartel in checks drawn on BCCI Panama. Cartel money brokers like Juan Guillermo Vargas, Augusto Salazar, and Bernardo Correa handed our checks to their drug-dealing clients. In turn, some of these thugs were cashing our checks at BCCI Panama City, which raised our profile in the eyes of the bank’s officers. Then an innocent mistake turned into one of the luckiest breaks for the operation.
On a crisp winter morning, a receptionist at Financial Consulting buzzed my line to tell me that I had just missed a call from a Mr. Hussain at BCCI Panama — but I didn’t know a Mr. Hussain at BCCI, just Rick Argudo and his replacement, Dayne Miller, both in Tampa. What did this Hussain want?
Hussain got right to the point. “Mr. Musella, I am Syed Aftab Hussain, and I oversee the checking account of IDC International, your account with us. There is a problem with two of your checks that have been brought to us by one of your customers. On one check, the payee has been left blank. On the other, the written amount notes ‘one hundred ten thousand three hundred thirty dollars,’ but the numbers for the amount on the same check note only ‘$110,000.’ Which of these two amounts should I pay to your customer?”
He couldn’t know that I had signed blank checks that were smuggled into Colombia. I had to buy time. “I can’t answer your question without reviewing some files. I’ll do that and call you back with an answer.”
“Well,” he replied, “I have a suggestion that will avoid these types of problems in the future. When you authorize a check, if you call me and let me know the details you want honored, I’ll make sure that any mistakes made on the check are corrected.”
The gears in my head spun out of control. Hussain knew I wasn’t writing the amounts. As hoped, letting the checks flow through the bank sent a signal to officials there that I was a player in the laundering trade. Rather than closing my accounts, they wanted to help me run my business more efficiently!
I called Emir, who called Mora, who clarified the numbers and agreed to provide advance information about each check issued.
After hearing my answers, Hussain almost whispered into the phone, “We are a full-service bank, and I would like to discuss with you how I and BCCI can work with your company to make our business better. We should meet personally so I can explain our capabilities, which will be to everyone’s advantage. Let me give you my number in Miami, and let’s meet there in early December.”
A few days before that meeting, I flew with Frankie to Miami in the undercover jet. Frankie introduced me to two Cubans there who built go-fast boats sold to drug smugglers running cocaine from the Bahamas to Florida. The Cubans were looking for financing to expand their business.
When I walked into the lobby of the Brickell Key Condominiums in Miami on a Saturday morning, Hussain, a portly, unassuming young man from Karachi, was waiting with open arms to greet me. His family had dabbled in banking and insurance there, but a thick Pakistani accent clouded his English — and he wasn’t wearing a custom-made Italian suit. We nestled into a remote sitting area on the ground floor, and, as the microcassette recorder in the lid of my briefcase captured every word, he jumped straight to business. He and the bank wanted to protect my clients, and he had a number of suggestions about how we could reach that goal.
He cautioned that people caught by Operation Pisces issued checks to clients like mine, encouraging me to close my checking account at BCCI Panama immediately. It had been very active; too many checks had been issued. He recommended that I place my clients’ funds in numbered certificates of deposit that he could establish at BCCI Luxembourg. He also asked for documents on properties to serve as dummy collateral for loans issued by BCCI Panama. Though Luxembourg would collateralize the loans, BCCI would falsify its own records to suggest the Luxembourg accounts didn’t exist and the properties were collateralizing the loans in Panama. Loan proceeds, granted in an amount equal to my CD in Luxembourg, could then be transferred to a checking account in Panama maintained in the name of another company. From there, the funds would disburse to clients based on my verbal instructions to him. An officer of one of the world’s largest privately held banks was teaching me how best to launder drug money!
He warned that when I spoke to him by telephone I shouldn’t speak openly. “We talk to the client on telephone only on confidential matters. Only secret language. When we talk, client understand what we are talking.” He guaranteed the scheme would prevent U.S. authorities from tracing my transfers. Most importantly, though, he wanted to introduce me to BCCI Miami executives. As he put it, “They know how to talk and when to talk. They don’t talk loose.”
For maximum confidentiality, he urged me to write a letter of authorization to my client rather than a check. The client would deliver the letter to him, and Hussain would carry out the transfer. That way, authorities had no check they could acquire later and link to my signature. He had every angle figured out.
I told Hussain, “I realize you’re just assisting the bank in regard to my interests, but I also feel that it’s an unusual luxury to have a person like yourself take the time to look at my affairs.” I asked if there was anything he’d like me to do for him personally. If he asked for payments under the table, he was a rogue employee looking to pad his pockets. If he didn’t, this was a bank-wide strategy.
“No, thank you,” he replied without hesitation. “The only thing I would like you to do is to make a placement of funds by December. It’s good for the bank, and then bank can help the clients.”
Bingo — bank-wide.
We met again at BCCI Miami four days later. What ensued required two full days of meetings with Hussain.
A tall black glass building on Brickell Avenue — a road lined with huge palm trees and giant office buildings containing hundreds of international banks — housed BCCI Miami. These international banks hold the secrets to the stories of tens of thousands of Alcaínos and have quietly kept hold of drug fortunes for decades.
Huge gold letters on a rose-colored granite wall announced the BANK OF CREDIT AND COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL. On the other side of large clear-glass doors, behind an oversized granite desk, an attractive receptionist greeted me and asked me to wait while she notified Hussain of my arrival. The bank was thrumming with activity. Dozens of rows of identical fine wood desks lined the floor, and phones were buzzing like a beehive.
Hussain escorted me into a gigantic conference room with a central table that looked more like a runway for a small plane. It easily could have seated fifty people around its rich cherrywood expanse. At the side of the conference room was a lounge area with plush chairs and a serving table. This corner of the boardroom became the place of choice where the bank’s brass entertained me. It was here that I planned transactions that circled the globe. It was here that I drank imported espresso in fine china while meeting with the bank’s inner circle. It was here that the bank’s inner circle wove paper webs of confusion to hide the true source of my money.
As I sat in the luxury of one of the plush couches, Hussain whipped up paperwork that hid $1,185,000 in a numbered CD secretly used to collateralize a loan, the proceeds of which went into a Panamanian checking account. He assured me that the “CD will be kept somewhere else, and only the bank and you know.” If U.S. authorities ever inquired about the transaction, the bank wouldn’t turn over any records of the CD. “They will come and ask, ‘Do you have a CD for this?’ We’ll say, ‘No.’”
Hussain brimmed with instructions. He warned me never to use my real name when I called him in Panama, suggesting I simply use the name John. If confusion arose, I should give his last name as my own — John Hussain. When I called him in Panama, we were to talk in general terms to confuse anyone listening. No need to speak the full name of a company or account.
As the papers flew, it became clear that the time was right to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hussain knew my funds came from drug running in the U.S. I knew he knew, but a good defense attorney can twist a steel rod into a knot for a jury in order to create doubt. It was out of character, but I had to do it — and I had to do it in a way that didn’t scream federal agent!
“There is much more at stake than money,” I said solemnly. I gave him a copy of the article about the gangland killing of Rafael (Ráfico) Cardona Salazar, Alcaíno’s former partner. “This money comes from some of the largest drug dealers in South America.”
“But I think we should keep this money in Luxembourg,” Hussain replied without blinking an eye. Then he mentioned introducing me to the manager of BCCI Panama, adding, “but you don’t have to mention all this, that the money is involved in drugs and everything. Normally, if you keep the money in Panama, there’s only two reasons. Either it’s drug-related or it is, uh, taxes. There’s no other … any, uh … Panama receives thirteen billion in U.S. dollar deposits a year!”
