The Infiltrator, page 22
Ian Howard welcomed us at the bank but asked to meet with me privately. Chinoy joined us, so I was able to tell both of them that Armbrecht and Uribe were significant members of one of the Colombian groups that used my services. I requested they inform my clients why BCCI was a sound and reliable bank because I hoped these gentlemen would entrust me with substantial amounts of their group’s money that could be placed with BCCI Paris. They wanted me to act as a buffer between them and the bank, and they wanted anonymity. Chinoy promised to put everyone at ease.
At the full meeting, Howard handed Armbrecht and Uribe packets of brochures, financial statements, and other promotional material. He and Chinoy made a polished presentation, stressing the bank’s stability and global presence. When Armbrecht expressed concern about fees, Chinoy instantly reassured him. “We won’t take a short-term view. We’ll take a long-term view. We want a relationship. We want to make — we don’t make on every deal, and we’re quite happy to make smaller amounts and do larger numbers.” It was music to the ears of a man who controlled tens of millions of dollars that needed placement in a safe bank.
Armbrecht agreed that BCCI was the right choice, but he wanted Chinoy and Howard to know how things would work. “We’re going to have a more or less considerable amount of business with your bank. Bob will be in charge of everything, and he will make any contacts and do all the things and that kind of thing.”
That was it — my promotion had just been announced. I was on my way to becoming CFO of the cartel’s expansion into Europe, and Armbrecht gave me high marks for bringing him to BCCI, while signing documents giving him access to the million dollars of Don Chepe’s money I’d placed in a CD. “We’ll observe him from a distance in the future,” Armbrecht said of Ospiña on the walk back. “If his behavior suggests that he may create problems, our group will eliminate the problem.” Then Armbrecht stopped on the street cold: “Do you do business with a man named Fernando Galeano?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “Why do you ask?”
“Galeano is one of los duros, but his business practices are reckless.”
Ospiña worked with Galeano and had mentioned to Armbrecht that he intended to bring me Galeano’s business. Armbrecht proposed not only that I turn down Galeano but that I also refrain from working with any other groups. Don Chepe’s organization, he assured me, would bring more business than I could handle and on my terms.
“I’d have to see that your people are committed to channeling investments to us before I could consider turning everyone else away,” I said. “I’m not saying it’s not possible. First I’d have to see results.”
We later learned that, like Moncada, Fernando Galeano reported directly to Pablo Escobar. The opportunities before us were unimaginable and unprecedented. When the bigwigs in Washington heard what we could accomplish, they would remove the arbitrary takedown date in October — surely.
The next day, Emir and I went to lunch solo, but as we wandered toward the George V we ran into Armbrecht, Uribe, and the three men from Medellín. Two of the men stepped back to avoid contact with us, but Armbrecht introduced the third as Gerardo Moncada. He looked amazingly young for a drug lord — his thirties, I guessed — and, other than a nod, he had nothing to say.
But it was time to visit Howard and Hassan to engage them in conversations confirming that they, too, knew where the money came from.
Howard confirmed that Chinoy had filled him in about my clients’ business, which gave me the perfect opening to say, “Mr. Armbrecht is the type of person that I think … You’re dealing with me. I’m an investment adviser, and the things that can be said as to what it is that — a cover, so to speak, an air of legitimacy to me. That doesn’t exist for Mr. Armbrecht. So therefore it’s probably safest for everyone that a lot of —”
“That we would deal with you,” Howard said.
“We cannot afford for drug investigators to be looking into things from your end of this.”
“We both completely understood,” Howard said, “and we organize things. Anyway, not to worry for that matter; it’s in a bond we uphold…. We’ve recently, on behalf of heads of state in African nations, structured transactions through Monaco to enhance confidentiality. That’s an area you should consider using.”
No wonder Africa’s poor never see a dime of the billions of dollars sent to their governments for relief.
Then Howard put me on the phone with Awan, who was visiting “a dear friend in London,” Asif Baakza, my BCCI contact there.
“My friend is ready to greet you,” Awan said, “when you arrive in London, and I look forward to seeing you back in Miami when you return.”
Baakza and I spoke briefly and made plans to meet in London.
With Howard’s confession on tape, and a similar confession from Hassan to Emir, BCCI Paris had cracked wide open. But we still had one more meeting in Paris with Armbrecht — a meeting that lasted for more than four hours.
Armbrecht rendered his verdict. “We are talking about the final layout of this…. We have approved the machinery up to this point, which I think is very acceptable. Now we have to give it the purpose of all the machinery. The purpose is to have the money over there [the U.S.] or to have a way to deposit money in different accounts over here that will be very secure.”
Although he intended to direct a lot of the cartel’s money to us, he wasn’t offering a monopoly as their bankers. With the help of his uncle, a senior executive at the Commerzbank in Hanover, he was laundering tens of millions more for los duros. And he had other bank sources as well.
Armbrecht wanted to determine how much money to channel through our system. Not good enough. I wanted a commitment, so he promised to start with between $2 million and $10 million per month. “You’re gonna earn for what you know, not really for what you do,” he said. “Your value, Robert, is the experience you have. That’s like myself. I don’t know a lot but I’m very fast in learning, and I got all my money because I’m very fast in learning, and they pay me for what I know…. I have a deep respect for your knowledge of this…. That’s why I’m so worried if you miss — if you’re absent.”
“No problem, with friends like you I won’t go anywhere,” I joked.
“I think those workers are dealing in both places in two jobs for the organization,” Emir said of the Giraldo brothers’ distributing cocaine and delivering cash in Detroit. “This is risky for me.”
“We will try in the future to differentiate that a little bit,” Armbrecht conceded. “Obviously, the one who handles that shit, well, is of enough trust to handle the other one, too…. We’re not interested in having the money there and the merchandise in the same place. Forget about that bullshit. Since we work more than fifty or a hundred little shits” — kilos of coke — “at the same time … We are distributors everywhere. We never have big falls, and we’re always careful, and we don’t put in [one spot] four tons or five because we think it’s foolish.”
Armbrecht now had no wiggle room about the source of the money. At his request I gave him phone numbers to three of my offices, my home, and my cell. He gave me four numbers at which I could reach him in Medellín, two of which he said were secure. Having the CIA or NSA intercept phone conversations on those lines would provide a road map to the cartel’s fortune.
“I might simply surprise you,” Armbrecht said before leaving the room, “and show up in Tampa next week.”
Nothing would make me happier, I thought.
It wasn’t more than a minute after Armbrecht left that Mora disclosed that Don Chepe and other cartel members maintained offices above the Marandua restaurant in Medellín. The joint was like the Chalmun’s Cantina in Star Wars: drug lords, murderers, moneymen, and smugglers of all kinds gathered there. Hoards of machine gun–packing sentries guarded the fortress of a building. Mora grew pale and uncomfortable as he described it. Don Chepe had twice summoned him to Marandua, and he didn’t want to return. But he would. Greed makes men do strange things.
Armbrecht called twice that night to see if I had done research he had requested that afternoon, which I had. Since it was our last night in Paris, I convinced him that we should all go to the local Regine’s. The Moras and Armbrecht joined us for food, cocktails, and a social setting in which to see us as real people. We also floated the wedding possibility with the Moras. They wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Morning saw us off to London on a train from Paris to Calais, then the ferry past the chalk cliffs to Dover. At a coffee shop we made contact with John Luksic, a Customs agent assigned to the U.S. embassy there. Our designated contact, Luksic appreciated our paranoia about going anywhere near the embassy and let us run around in circles until we were confident no one was tailing us. He knew why we were there, but we reconfirmed the plan and filled him in on the last two weeks in Europe.
After a few calls to targets — to check on paperwork or transactions or to have them return my calls at a five-star hotel abroad — it was time to meet Asif Baakza, manager of the Corporate Unit at BCCI London. Awan, a close friend and colleague, had handpicked Baakza for the inner team. I introduced him to Emir, Kathy, and Linda but arranged for Kathy and Linda to leave shortly after his arrival. Baakza needed to meet Kathy because, in the event of my demise, she would have power of attorney.
“What we need to accomplish,” I said to him, “has to do with the placement and transfer of funds in a very, very confidential and secure fashion.” He learned that I’d been banking with BCCI for years and knew the bank had the experience to help me reach my goal. Awan had sent me because I needed to avoid the instability of Panama.
“Good,” he said, and he had a plan. To aid in the secrecy of my transactions, he planned to open a manager’s ledger account, an account that has no name. The police had access to the information he had, provided they also had a search warrant — not issued easily. Foreigners often placed huge sums of money in manager’s ledger accounts, which bolstered the bottom line of investments in the country. Other than Baakza and the assistant manager, no one would know the name linked to the numbered ledger account assigned to me.
Perfect.
Baakza whipped out all the forms needed to establish accounts. He pointed — I signed. I told him that many of my clients were Colombians who sold currency to buy large U.S. dollar checks in amounts of roughly $250,000 at a time. Baakza said his branch transported checks for clients to Panama. In turn, the Panama branch cleared each check and credited it to London. Money moved around the world, and the client didn’t even have to leave Colombia.
“There’s one or two little short things I need to mention to wrap it up,” I said to Emir, using a code for him to leave the room. “While I’m doing that, will you be able to give John a call?”
“The thing I wanted to mention,” I continued after Emir had gone. “As trusted as Emilio and I are, we recognize the importance of diversifying communications.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Baakza said.
“It’s extremely important to me that I am in a position of knowing everything and that, for the security of the funds, not everything is known in other areas. When I’m dealing with the bank, I consider Amjad to be the major person. There may — there isn’t anything that I think he could ask of that I wouldn’t give him full authority to know about. With regard to other managers within the system, although I have an equal amount of confidence, sometimes it’s best not to know what all the parts to the puzzle are.”
“I agree,” Baazka said. “I don’t want to know anything that I have no need to know.”
Then I played my necessary song about Lee Iacocca. If the president and CEO of Chrysler only knew.
“That’s right! That’s right!” Baakza said.
“Iacocca sells cars, and they sell coke, and that’s the only difference. They’re executives about this entire thing.”
We’d done it. We’d finished two weeks of intense meetings, dozens of hours of recorded conversation, and collected a stack of paper that traced the boomeranging of drug money around the world. We had six BCCI officers on tape, selling their services to move dirty cash. We also had our first million-dollar investment from Moncada, and we had two new players in the cartel convinced that we offered some of the best money-laundering services on the planet.
But while I continued to build the trap for them, Armbrecht planned his own surprise for me.
15
REVELATIONS
* * *
Bayou Village Apartments, Tampa, Florida
May 31, 1988
THEY NEEDED TO KNOW every name, number, and fact we’d collected in Europe.
Tischler, Jackowski, Cook, Sherman, and half a dozen other agents were sitting in the living room of a safe house at the Bayou Village Apartments near Tampa International. Emir, Kathy, and I reviewed everything that had happened, submitted a report, turned over the dozen or so recordings, and presented a half-foot stack of bank records and corporate papers.
“You aren’t getting a minute past the first week of October,” Tischler said.
“October,” I said numbly as she stared right through me. “Even though we’re meeting new players every day who are at the top of the drug and money-laundering world, it has to be October?”
“You heard me, Mazur.” She glared. “Don’t give me any of your shit.”
Anything more from me would only make matters worse. No one said a word.
Two days later, Armbrecht called. I’d grown used to Latin timing — one week often meant two or three — but Armbrecht was part German, and he obviously had his father’s sense of punctuality when he called just days after I landed. He was in Miami, eager to meet, wanting documents, and anxious to see our operations.
“I’ve got almost everything ready for you,” I lied, “but I still haven’t received a few documents our lawyers in Zürich had to request from a law firm in Gibraltar. I should receive this stuff in a few days. By then I’ll be in Miami. I’ll call you when I’m there, and we can come back to Tampa together.”
“My main business here is you,” he said, disappointed.
Then Alcaíno called with a list of requests. He was promoting a rematch between Rojas and Roman in Medellín. He needed more phony loan documents to cover his financing of the fight, and he wanted me to join him and los duros to watch it. He also had completed his transportation line and was preparing to buy a big load of coke to ride the route. He needed investors and made an unbeatable offer. If I put up $250,000, he’d pay me back $375,000 in forty-five days.
I told him I’d think about it. I had to buy time to formulate an excuse. Seizing dope was one thing, but there was no way the U.S. government was going to invest in it.
When I called Alcaíno back a day or so later with the bad news, Casals answered and provided a clue to the puzzle of Alcaíno’s transportation line. “Roberto’s not here. He went to New York to take care of getting some anchovies through Customs.”
Casals was talking openly — it wasn’t code. He really meant anchovies, but I still needed more intel before we could pinpoint the operation.
In Miami, in Awan’s unexpected absence, I brought an elated Bilgrami up to speed on the new companies and the $4 million in CDs deposited in the Paris branch, handing over an armful of documents on the new corporations formed in Liberia, Hong Kong, and Gibraltar. Bilgrami opened accounts for me at BCCI Luxembourg, London, Geneva, Montevideo, Nassau, and Miami. As he churned out forms, the conference room phone rang. Although he spoke mostly in Urdu, the phrase “U.S. Customs” peppered his conversation — and it occurred to me that I had never had a blatant conversation with Bilgrami about the source of my clients’ funds. No time like the present.
“I heard you mention my clients’ adversary there,” I said, as he put the receiver down. “You do business with the U.S. government?”
“No, no,” he blurted nervously. “Eastern Airlines have had a plane confiscated. They found some cocaine in this plane, so they’ve asked us to issue a guarantee in favor of U.S. Customs. Why should they be ‘adversary’? They should be your friends.”
Time to get blatant.
“You know, on that issue, we need to resolve it,” I said impatiently. “We’re alone, and I have gone through the painstakes of meeting those people within the bank who I know I can rely on. I have a tremendous amount of confidence in everyone I’ve met. I have to satisfy myself, and I have, that there is not a situation where I should have to fear that anyone within the system might otherwise alert authorities here.”
“No, no.” Bilgrami was fidgeting. “I was just, like, saying, uh …”
He explained how the bank posted bonds for clients whose assets had been seized, based on what was then Customs’ zero-tolerance program: if an ounce of cocaine was found on a yacht, Customs seized the whole yacht. Good, but not good enough. He had to admit that he knew he was laundering drug money.
“You know,” I continued, “if you were to — and you wouldn’t ever — but if you were to meet my clients, you would —”
“No, no,” he cut me off, squirming. “I’m not interested in meeting your clients. I’m only interested in their —”
“If they were in a room with Lee Iacocca,” I persisted, “they would mix in quite well with him. He sells cars, and they sell cocaine, and that’s the end of it. Never to be brought up again.”
“I don’t want to know what they sell,” Bilgrami said laughing.
“Never to be discussed,” I reassured. “I have a lot of responsibilities here in receiving cash, and I do what I need to do, and I have a situation with you where you deal with me and I’m an investment adviser, and I don’t care to go into anything more than that.”
“I’m not interested in what they do,” he repeated. “In dealing with you, we know your business, and, uh, we keep all client relations confidential.”
“Okay, Akbar, that’s fine.”
Gotcha.
Relaxing back into business, I told him that, in addition to the $4 million deposited in Paris, I was prepared to place another $2 million in Miami.
