The Infiltrator, page 21
“That would be very good,” I said after a measured pause. “I think this gives us the opportunity to see whether we can move forward or not. I have no reason to believe that we can’t. I recognize that you need to know more about me personally and I think you deserve to. I have no hesitancy in discussing whatever it is that needs to be discussed.”
“I didn’t want to ask that, but if you propose it, yes, great. It could be very interesting.”
“I think it could be good for both of us to be a little more familiar with each other. Therefore, as we say in the States, I’m prepared to drop my pants first and tell you about me.”
He laughed. “Bob, you have to understand a little bit my position. I’m very cautious and … certain things, I like to get all the facts.”
“Neither of us would be sitting here, in the business that we are in, if we didn’t have that mindset. And that’s the way we both are.”
“Good.”
Armbrecht explained that the lawyer, Santiago Uribe, would attend our meetings. Los duros also weighed Uribe’s opinions heavily. Then he returned to complaining about Ospiña, which might have caused problems if he didn’t know I knew him.
“I’m very appreciative of having developed, through Gonzalo, a friendship with Mr. Ospiñ —”
“Oh, shit!”
“— but Gonzalo in fact is our representative in Colombia.”
“Good,” he said, relieved.
“Gonzalo is the one with whom we’ve dealt for years,” I continued. “He’s the one in whom I have utmost confidence.”
I briefed Armbrecht on the history I had with BCCI. I explained in detail how I had been persuaded about three years ago to deal with South American clients. I invited Armbrecht to join me in the States, where I could give him the full dog-and-pony tour. I explained how the accounts of the many front businesses enabled us to make cash deposits in the U.S. and how our air charter service smuggled cash out of the U.S. to offshore banks.
Armbrecht worried that I was requiring his group to place a million dollars in a CD as a prerequisite to handling large volumes of their money.
“Why do you characterize it as a requirement,” I countered, “as much as it is ‘You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’?” We couldn’t survive without the help of the banks, so we had to do what made them happy. I gave him a full overview of the system, adding solemnly, “If I accept the responsibility, I accept it not only with my reputation but with my life. If I put it any other way, you wouldn’t do business with me.”
“The problem is cash,” he said, “and we have a lot.” They had cash in many places and wanted as much of that cash in CDs, but they also wanted Occam’s razor. “The best solution to any problem is the simplest of all solutions, so we try to keep this very simple. And that’s why I do so many things personally. I go and buy the airplanes myself. I have them repaired myself. I fly them myself. I do transactions across my accounts over here in Europe…. Never do I pay in fucking cash, never…. Nobody else knows what I do. We try to keep things simple, simple by not getting many people involved.”
“From the standpoint of the streets,” I replied, “Dominguez is responsible. After it leaves the street, it’s on my shoulders.”
“Good,” he said. “Aside from the million we are currently dealing with, which is no big deal, we’re going to have another operation that is a lot of money sitting just for the security of the organization…. We don’t want anybody to take it. We have $30 million sitting now in Louisville, Kentucky, and I don’t have any more because I don’t know any more. But we could have, I don’t know, fifty, a hundred million dollars or more. It’s an immense amount that we want to place simply as insurance money for the organization. If we can develop a good machinery, it could be renewing. I could get many other people interested in this system…. We are big businessmen who don’t like to buy huge homes or buildings. This is an organization and we like to have it more concealable to deal with it, and we like cash. It’s very available.”
“I’ve done a lot of talking about myself,” I said. “I’m eager to know a little bit about you.” His response would reveal whether he was comfortable with me.
He paused. “I’m a professional pilot…. I used to fly for Avianca. For seven years I’ve been flying 707s and 737s…. I studied medicine for a few years. I didn’t like it…. My father is German, and I’ve lived in Europe, the States, and Latin America…. I have a very open mind because I have had the opportunity to appreciate many different cultures. I’m also a compulsive leader; I’m leading all the time, and learning, and learning…. I’m in the middle of all this because you find throughout life you can trust very few people, and I have this problem that people trust me very much…. I’m extremely analytical…. I don’t make big mistakes.”
You’re about to, I thought.
“I would like to have Mr. Ospiña out of all, out of everything,” he continued. “I don’t like him…. I think he handled things so that we could not get together…. His sexual preferences can be whatever, and I don’t care about them. But he tried to get me involved in his experiences. I don’t like it…. I don’t like him knowing anything…. I think he’s a person that’s very subject to pressure, and it’s very easy to get something on him.”
He asked that we return to my hotel, and if Ospiña was present we’d cut our meeting short and resume later without him. If Ospiña wasn’t there, we’d meet at length with Uribe and resolve any unanswered questions.
In the room, Emir, Mora, and Uribe were waiting — all business, no greetings. Armbrecht went right to his biggest concern. He stared into Mora’s eyes and with a driven tone said, “I want to know exactly what role he has played in the transactions.”
Again, he meant Ospiña.
“Right, right, uh,” Mora stammered. “Uh, I met that individual in November. In Medellín, they introduced him to me, um, um. They spoke to me about having potential clients because he was a middleman. He hasn’t been any more than that … and he tried to make those deals without talking about Don Chepe.”
Mora was distancing himself while still offering enough so that Ospiña wouldn’t be killed before he left Paris. He credited Ospiña with introducing him to Don Chepe, but that didn’t matter to Armbrecht and Uribe.
“I don’t want him,” Armbrecht decided.
“No, neither do I,” Uribe said.
Ospiña’s many vices made him vulnerable. He’d been drunk the night before, and he talked too much even when sober. On top of that, he exaggerated his own importance.
“This is a man who is dumb, besides being vulgar and an ass,” Armbrecht said.
Uribe whispered in Armbrecht’s ear.
“Violence doesn’t solve anything,” Armbrecht replied.
Ospiña’s life might soon come to an end, it seemed.
Their frustrations vented, it was time for me to explain the system to Uribe. I laid out how BCCI helped us hide the true sources of funds, and then I reviewed and explained the documents the lawyer had prepared in Zürich for the Gibraltar company, Nicesea Shipping Ltd., a company established to maintain the account holding Don Chepe’s million at BCCI Paris. To reassure Armbrecht and Uribe, I told them I had arranged a meeting for us with Nazir Chinoy.
“I would like to have made a little graphic of how things are functioning so we can all make this graph of what’s happening,” Armbrecht said.
“No problem.” I drew a step-by-step diagram of how our process worked, which impressed him.
At the end of my presentation, I played a card that a cop never would. “You have an open invitation to come to Tampa, to stay with me at my home, to come with me to New York and, in the case of New York, certainly since it’s my cousin, I have no doubt that we’re dealing with a situation where you can be there but not be known in any way, shape, or form. You needn’t even be introduced by name, if you would like. I think sometimes it’s helpful to actually see the operation and maybe spend a few days so that you can satisfy yourself that things are being professionally run. That invitation is open at any time that you should so choose to think it’s advisable.”
“Thank you,” Armbrecht said coolly.
Mora chimed in and supported my arguments. He stressed that I was concerned about jeopardizing the security of our operation, set up originally for our clients in the U.S. Ours was a complete package that didn’t just move money but invested it.
“That’s why we are here,” Armbrecht said, “to be able to examine all this and eventually to be able to establish a complete mechanism that will benefit us for a long time.”
Years of planning were paying off. We were not only becoming one of their primary money-laundering sources but also one of their banks. Then Armbrecht offered a sign of trust. He wanted me to obtain powers of attorney for Nicesea Shipping so someone else could control the account with him.
“Since I’ve messed up names before,” I said, “if one of you would write down the name …”
Armbrecht wrote “Gerardo Moncada.”
Bingo. Another high-ranking member of the organization hit the radar screen. We didn’t know it yet, but Moncada was Don Chepe, the man in charge, Pablo Escobar’s underboss.
Armbrecht stroked his chin. “What happens if you disappear?”
Everyone laughed but me. I knew he was serious. “That’s why you have power of attorney. Everyone knows where I live. Everyone knows where I work.”
My response surprised him a little. “I’m not talking about that,” he said. “I’m talking that if, you know, something, an accident. You know you have to think about it.”
I had issued two powers of attorney on his accounts for just that reason. If Bob Musella died, Armbrecht and his organization could take control.
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s very, very good. Yes. Basically it’s questions and questions and questions. Good, good, good.”
Then a knock on the door. It was Ospiña. Armbrecht lied that we had met by coincidence and that he had just begun to test me on the security of our system. We talked in circles for half an hour. Ospiña couldn’t realize he was being cut out, but he also couldn’t learn any more details.
Dinner and the night’s entertainment were on me, so I picked the centuries-old Le Grand Véfour restaurant on rue de Beaujolais. In the heart of Paris, next to the gardens of the Palais Royal, Véfour formed one of the ideological centers of the French Revolution. Its guests over the years had included Napoleon and Josephine Bonaparte, Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Huge stone columns lining the entrance made a runway for the red carpet that led to the front door. An army of doormen and waiters fell all over themselves to cater to our every wish. The famous interior mirrors made it seem much bigger than it was. An apt metaphor, I thought. We feasted for almost four hours, running up a tab of about $2,000.
Unless you live with high rollers like Armbrecht, you don’t realize that the refined luxury of Le Grand Véfour represents nothing more than a credibility prop to make your job a little easier. You don’t think about whether you’re drinking Dom Perignon or jug wine. You’re so intent on maintaining your cover and getting information that the decadence of Le Grand Véfour is the last thing on your mind. You develop tunnel vision.
As she had with Alcaíno, Kathy lavished her attention on Armbrecht. They discussed French art and philosophy. She read his palm and filled his head with predictions of his greatness and talent. He ate it all.
After midnight, at L’Escalier, an exclusive nightclub, more champagne flowed and everyone, including the stiff professor, Santiago Uribe, danced to the hottest beats Paris had to offer. While they danced, Uribe told Kathy he wasn’t feeling well. She asked if he had a fever and tried to touch his face. He grabbed her wrist and warned her not to touch him again. I was listening to Armbrecht saying that three important people from Medellín were arriving the next day, with whom he planned to travel to Austria and Germany. I never noticed Kathy’s incident with Uribe. Better not to, in any case — I didn’t want to create a scene.
At L’Escalier, Armbrecht apologized for Ospiña’s conduct. “He’s a big liability. He drinks too much, has a big mouth. He’s rude, and he’s disruptive in meetings. His sexual escapades draw attention. His coming on to me was a big mistake; that will never happen again. He will not be in our meetings anymore. Santiago and I are bullshitting him that he needs to go back to Medellín to brief one of the bosses about the status of our negotiations. It’s best that we compensate him fairly, but he needs to be disassociated from Don Chepe’s financial transactions. We’ll keep an eye on him, and, if it appears that he is not being loyal, we’ll do what we have to do.”
“Your call,” I nodded. “However you see fit to handle this I support you one hundred percent.”
“Emilio, I would like your help,” Uribe said. “We’d like you to do Ospiña, take him out, while we’re here.”
“Are you crazy?” Emir said. “Here in Paris? No, man, that’s too risky. If this needs to be done, it should be done someplace safe. Ship his ass back to Colombia. Your people control everything there.”
“So be it,” Uribe said. “You won’t see him again.”
Through the blaring music, Emir shared what Uribe had just said. Armbrecht and Uribe were looking right at us. I nodded as a sign that I understood.
We never saw Ospiña again.
We returned to the hotel at 4 A.M. to find that Kathy had contracted food poisoning, which put her out of commission for the next few days while Emir and I continued negotiations with the Colombians and work with the bankers.
The next day, Mora marched into our room, full of energy. We needed to pump him before our meeting with Armbrecht and Uribe. Two of the three men from Medellín arriving tonight worked with Armbrecht, and one of those two was Gerardo Moncada. The third was the younger brother of a board member of the cartel who worked with Uribe. Armbrecht and his two buddies belonged to the same organization that sent tons of cocaine to the people in Detroit who gave us suitcases full of cash. We had gone deep. This was management.
Uribe, impressed with what we had to offer, wanted to introduce the younger brother, but Armbrecht killed the idea. If we handled major money for another group, that group’s mistakes could taint me and my companies, creating collateral damage for Armbrecht and his bosses if they were tied to us. Armbrecht had big plans — but a knock on the door cut short our discussion. It was Armbrecht and Uribe.
“I told him,” Armbrecht said of Ospiña, “that I didn’t want him near these things. That he had been very kind and a very good person and that it had been nice of him to introduce us to Gonzalo and to Robert and to Emilio. That basically his task in relation to us had finished, and that as far as I knew we didn’t have any obligation to him. That anything —”
The telephone rang. Emir answered and turned to Armbrecht.
“He is asking me,” Emir said of Ospiña, “what instructions are you giving him, if you want him to go there to wait for those people at the airport.”
Ospiña was seeking permission to make another move. Armbrecht issued his order. Ospiña would pick up the three men from Medellín and bring them to the Trémoille.
Dammit. They were staying at our hotel. Three of Armbrecht’s people, none of whom we could recognize, staying under our noses and possibly in the next room.
Armbrecht pulled out a pad full of questions, which we covered one at a time. He had done his homework — and thoroughly. We had been out late the night before, but he had studied all the documents I had given him.
One of his sticking points involved establishing a means by which, at any time he chose, he could take total control of the corporations and bank accounts we established on behalf of his group. To be in total control, he had to be sole director of the company. To protect him from people who would try to claim that he was the owner of the funds — that is, U.S. authorities — we could draft a contract between my investment company and him claiming that we requested him to assume that role. If anyone asked, he could refer them to us. We in turn would tell them — that is, the authorities — that our lawyers in Lichtenstein managing the Lichtenstein trust that owned the company had asked us to hire someone with his talents to manage the company’s affairs.
Hell would freeze over before the U.S. could force answers out of attorneys in Lichtenstein. Our system would lead the government to a dead end. Guaranteed.
Armbrecht squinted and digested the suggestion. He liked what he heard. “Basically the whole purpose of this, Robert, is to establish a mechanism to have the monies in a very secure and very discreet way, okay? And not to expose the different persons that could be exposed, who are the owners of most of the money…. Obviously we will have you arrange more companies. We don’t want to have one company with $100 million in it.”
Armbrecht, the man with the power to direct a river of money from the cartel, planned to use us to hide $100 million or more. Astounding — but I had to play cool.
During the meeting, Howard called and left word that Chinoy was prepared to meet with Armbrecht, Uribe, and me in less than an hour. We adjourned our meeting, and agreed that Armbrecht and Uribe would meet me in the lobby of their hotel in forty-five minutes, during which I made a quick call to the Zürich lawyer.
As Armbrecht, Uribe, and I walked to the Champs-Elysées, I explained the background of the BCCI officers they were about to meet. And I told them the truth: I’d only recently met these gentlemen through longtime BCCI contacts in Florida and Panama. Our relationship grew from the urgency of finding an alternative to Panama. Embellishment at this stage could only backfire. Thanks to the call to the lawyer, by the time we arrived at BCCI Paris, I had also provided Armbrecht with answers to each of the questions he had raised at the hotel.
