The Infiltrator, page 23
“We can do that right away!” he said, his head popping up like a cobra ready to strike. Slot-machine dials were spinning in his eyes.
“Akbar, you sure like to get your hands on my money,” I joked, explaining that I had to leave.
“You just sign me here,” he persisted, shoving another document under my nose. “Sign away.”
But the pen he gave me went dry. He ran around the room like a newly headless chicken looking for a writing implement. If he had to barricade the boardroom to keep me there long enough to sign, he would have.
After I had signed and as I prepared to leave, I let him know that, because I was visiting clients in the Northeast, he might have a little difficulty reaching me in a few days, but I’d do my best to stay in touch. A lie of course. I’d promised Ev and the kids that I’d join them on a sorely needed two-week vacation. The case was heating up, Armbrecht was in town, and Alcaíno wanted to meet — but I absolutely couldn’t let my family down again. Only four months of sand remained in the hourglass before the takedown.
As soon as I slipped from Bilgrami’s grasp, I called Armbrecht and met him at Miami International. Happy to see me and full of questions, he eagerly awaited the paperwork I owed him, the last pieces of the puzzle needed to satisfy him that it was safe to reopen the floodgates of Don Chepe’s dirty money. As we relaxed in the leather of our first-class seats to Tampa, I noticed that he seemed at ease to volunteer new information. But if I pushed, he grew wary. Best to play hard to get with him, then, instead of hardball.
He mentioned that he was going to be traveling to Nashville the following week to pick up another Rockwell Commander 1000, a twin-engine turboprop aircraft worth well over a million dollars. He was installing a new navigation system that was setting him back another $150,000. And he’d been buying as many of the Commander 1000s as he could find. A premier tool of the drug trade, the Commander 1000 can handle the short dirt and gravel airstrips common in the jungles of South America, and its turboprop power enables it to ascend quickly from short runways. Removing the seats would turn it into a cargo plane, able to carry a larger load, and auxiliary fuel tanks would give it more than excellent range. Armbrecht was building a flying armada — and tracking devices on those planes would provide a world of intelligence.
In Tampa, Dominic, playing the role of my driver and bodyguard, put on an Oscar-worthy performance as he drove us to a couple of his clubs still under construction, supposedly because he wanted me, the boss, to see how matters were coming along. I emptily begged Armbrecht’s forgiveness for the slight detour — which of course was no problem.
Behind closed doors at Financial Consulting, Armbrecht graded our system. “It’s like a merry-go-round. We get the money over here. We reroute it, we clean it, we do everything with it. Okay. Then we have it legally and totally in nice accounts with everything over here…. It’s a good concept.”
But I wanted to throw Armbrecht a curveball that would hook him into giving me new information. I had some concerns, I told him. It troubled me that he asked a lot of questions but did little business lately. I didn’t mind if we did no business, but I didn’t want to show him more until I was satisfied about his goal. Could he have a hidden motive? That is, was he working with the feds? Nothing like a little transference to cover my tracks.
“If you’re not comfortable, then tell me,” he said.
“It’s not that I’m not comfortable,” I replied. “It’s just that it raised a little curiosity…. If we really build a strong relationship, there shouldn’t be anything I shouldn’t feel free to be able to say with you…. I mean, if they don’t want to do business, they don’t want to do business.”
Armbrecht leaned back, took a deep breath, and exhaled loudly through his nose. “Now comes the part of establishing a more — a long-term relationship. It’s not that we do little business and then, ‘Bye-bye. Forget it.’ No. Why I’m investigating everything and why I’m over here, this is because the interest is to establish a more long-term relationship. But, the fears that you have, they have.”
Then he reviewed all the latest corporate documents from Zürich and the contracts covering for his role as managing director of the Gibraltar corporation that would hold tens of millions of dollars. With his strict German attention to detail, he ensured that each new piece of the puzzle fit perfectly into the overall scheme, throwing question after question at me.
Then he reviewed paperwork outlining the history of our front businesses, but I cautioned, “If you would, when you’re done with it, if you decide that you’re finished with it and you don’t need it anymore, destroy it.”
He picked Eric Wellman’s brain about his banking career, and then he and I headed back to the undercover house where Kathy wined him, dined him, and plied him with long discussions about philosophy and faraway places I’d never seen. When they returned from an hour-and-a-half-long walk through the neighborhood’s waterfront lots on the Gulf of Mexico, we three played a four-hour marathon chess tournament, in which neither Kathy nor I was much of a match for him. After I hit the sack, Kathy and he played on, which was great. I needed all the help I could get establishing rapport. After all, his opinion determined our fate with Don Chepe.
The next afternoon, after lunch on the beach, talking business, I should have played it cooler, but I got greedy. As I was promoting the upcoming New York tour, Armbrecht reacted badly. “Why do I feel, Robert, that you think it’s very important for me to get that knowledge?”
“Because,” I said calmly as my mind raced for an answer, “I know that nothing has happened in the last couple of months, and I think we need to either move on —”
“Move on or move back,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Okay, good.”
“I want a forecast, a reliable forecast,” I nudged.
“You will have one when it’s time” — he glared — “when I’m ready, and when I make a decision. Then I will tell you yes. I’ll tell you yes,” he said, promising a decision within ten days, and then adding that it was more or less a done deal.
Lesson learned. No more pushing his buttons. If I pressed any more, he would buck. Like it or not, we had to wait.
The next day I went home to my family. Our two-week trip included a family wedding in Connecticut, but, unlike Bob Musella, Bob Mazur didn’t have the cash to fly everyone to Hartford. We had to drive in the family station wagon. By midmorning Ev, the kids, and I were heading north, but my mind remained on Armbrecht, Emir, and how everything was going in New York. I tortured my family with call after call on my cell phone to Alcaíno, Armbrecht, Bilgrami, Cook, Emir, Howard, Sherman, and others. Pickups continued, too, and so there were calls to move money around the world and back into the cartel’s maw.
Ev crossed her arms and stared out the window, her body language screaming her unhappiness. The kids, almost teens and in their own world, knew they couldn’t make a sound when I was on the phone.
As Armbrecht had promised, exactly ten days from our discussion in the undercover house, word came to Emir from Mora that Don Chepe’s organization had made their decision. Emir called immediately.
“Gonzalo just called,” he said. “He met with Don Chepe and was informed that their organization has given us their routes in New York and Houston. That is now our territory. We did it!”
“You deserve the credit, man. Without you, Gonzalo wouldn’t be putting his neck on the line, and we wouldn’t have a face in Medellín. That’s the key. This is fantastic news. Now let’s just hope we can convince New York and Houston that they need to play it cool. They can’t get pushy and try to rip this money off or do a lot of surveillance. Armbrecht will let us put a lot of this money in accounts at BCCI. Everyone needs to sit back and let them fill the coffers.”
I sat silently and soaked in the moment. It was almost too huge to imagine. A handful of agents, despite all odds, had become not only money movers but money managers for the biggest drug organization in the world. There was no telling where the next four months would take us.
Back in Tampa, after my much-needed vacation, in the comfort of the undercover house, I questioned Armbrecht on what had happened while I was away. Two days prior we received half a million in New York, and that day we were supposed to receive another half in Chicago.
“A little” — Armbrecht smiled — “just to keep you happy … You will eventually learn how to cope with the Latin American way of doing things, which is very effective. I can tell you that…. Very non-traceable.”
I told him I thought our system, too, was non-traceable.
“Oh yes, I know,” he agreed. “That’s why I like it.”
As he settled down and had a couple glasses of wine I couldn’t resist asking him why he had so much influence in Don Chepe’s organization. He pegged it to his intelligence, international experience, honesty, and lack of greed.
He seemed at ease, so I took a shot at learning just how close he was to Escobar. “Will you have your discussion [about our services] directly with the top person, or will you be dealing with others?”
Armbrecht stared at me with a slight smile, but my silence drew him out.
“They are people that are in the background, that very few people know about … and basically manage or control most of it or almost all of it…. And those persons will only have very few persons near them. Very intelligent guys.”
He had endorsed us — not unconditionally, but to the point that he didn’t want to risk losing me because of a lack of business. It was more important than ever, then, that everything go smoothly. We were hovering on the brink of total acceptance.
The trail of exhaust from the jet that took Armbrecht back to Miami had barely faded from the Tampa sky when the first catastrophe crashed in our laps.
At the Bayou Village safe house, Sherman and other Tampa agents forwarded important information from the Miami office. Miami had been watching the trailer that unloaded cocaine in Detroit earlier that year. Men had hooked the trailer to a tractor, and it looked like it would be leaving Miami soon. We couldn’t let that semi out of Florida.
Tischler had the plan I wrote for the truck to be inspected at a weigh station where the dope would be found accidentally. Everyone agreed it was the best way to get the dope off the street without compromising our operation. Problem solved.
Sherman announced that Tischler wanted a plan to get as many of the dealers and bankers in Tampa at the time of the takedown, but no one had any ideas. Time to launch the plan Kathy and I had been discussing.
“Most of these people either truly like us or see me as an important business contact,” I said. “In some instances, on their own, they’ve asked when we intend to get married, and some of the wives have offered to help in the planning. We both think most of them would come to Tampa to attend a wedding.”
Everyone but Kathy chuckled and smirked. Sherman doubted the dopers and bankers would take the time to attend. No one else had the courage to explain his or her doubts.
“I think they’ll show,” Kathy added, “but with their families involved in the planning and the ceremony, the probability will be even greater. They’ll feel obligated to show. I’d rather keep their families out of this, but they seem to want in.”
A lukewarm reaction at best.
“Well,” Sherman said, “if that’s all you guys can come up with, then I guess that’s the plan. I’ll tell Bonni.”
Before I left the apartment I gave the briefcase I had been using to one of the agents in our squad. “I’ve had a problem with this case that luckily happened when I was alone. The Velcro strips that hold the cover to the hidden compartment are starting to wear. When I opened the case, the compartment flopped open, exposing the recorder and wires. I’ll use one of the other briefcases for a while, but I like this one because it has the Nagra recorder that produces the best possible audio of my meetings.”
“No problem, Bob, we’ll take care of it.”
Fortune magazine’s cover story on June 20, 1988, examined the Medellín cartel. I was reading it in the lobby of BCCI Miami as Awan approached. I threw down the magazine like a teenager caught reading his father’s Playboy, and, as I hoped, Awan noticed.
At the couches, Bilgrami joined us. I’d brought them $1.4 million that needed bouncing, but I had ten days before the money had to be back in the cartel’s hands. It was June 28, just two days from the witching hour for BCCI’s inflated balance sheet. I threw Awan and Bilgrami a bone. I told them I would hold off borrowing against these funds and transferring the loan proceeds until after June 30, thereby bringing my total contribution of deposits to $7.4 million.
While Bilgrami worked out details, I noticed that Awan was preoccupied. “You seem intent. Are you …?”
“We have to do all sorts of window dressing for our books,” Awan explained. “Our half-yearly balance sheet comes out on the thirtieth of June, so we have to pad our figures as much as we can with short-term business and deposits and stuff.”
The pressure on him was showing.
When Bilgrami left the room I prodded Awan for more detail.
“We’re sort of breathing down the necks of everybody out in the field,” he said, “to improve their figures. They’re not very happy with that. They’re not returning calls. Since our balance sheet is audited every six months, we’re always under a lot of pressure at the end of the period, you know, to … show window dressing.”
Awan had no doubt about Musella, and Bilgrami wasn’t far behind.
When Bilgrami suggested getting together the next day for drinks, it was time to play the Fortune article card. “I was reading the magazine in your lobby area there,” I said. “Did you see that? Interesting cover story. It had a very interesting cover story about the trade, drug trade anyway. I was thumbing through the pictures and saw a client of mine.”
Awan and Bilgrami laughed.
“Is that why you put it back so quickly?” Awan said.
More solid proof that they knew the source of the funds, so I poured it on. “Yes, I picked it up and said — I couldn’t believe it. He’s right on the cover. I always expected to have a client on the cover of Fortune, but not quite that way…. He must have seen the article by now, but I’ll definitely need to pick up a copy of this recent issue. It’s quite a detailed article about the drug trade.”
When I came back to the bank the next day, Awan floored me.
“Akbar and I have been thinking over many things, and we want to talk to you about this,” he said. “We’ll probably be leaving the bank in due course and possibly setting up on our own. So maybe we can work together in that situation…. I have an old colleague in London who used to head our treasury department [at BCCI], very good in his line of work, and a few years ago he left and set up his own investment company in London, capitalized with about $25 million. He’s had some pretty good backing, pretty good shareholders, and that was three years ago. He did quite well then. He’s basically into all sorts of investment banking, currencies, stock market.”
Ziauddin Akbar had opened a subsidiary of London-based Capcom Futures in Chicago, and Awan and Bilgrami had accepted an offer to open another subsidiary in Miami. They wouldn’t completely cut ties with BCCI, hoping that BCCI would act as their correspondent bank and work with them. Either way, they would see to it that an officer who knew the “sensitivity” of my accounts handled my affairs at BCCI. All of this would happen in about six months.
It was the best of both worlds. I would continue with BCCI, but — another door opened — Awan and Bilgrami would take their most important clients to a smaller company. When our operation ended, we’d know exactly where to execute search warrants to find Noriega’s fortune. I couldn’t wait to hear more.
I explained that my number one problem was getting currency deposited into the banking system. What, I asked them, could Capcom do for me?
“I wouldn’t deposit it in London,” Awan said. “I’d send it out somewhere, deposit it, and wire transfer it … Middle East probably. You know, because we have huge sums of money coming in from there in cash. It’s still rather primitive. A society where nobody believes in checks, let alone plastic. Everybody deals in cash.”
Apparently depositing huge sums of cash in the Middle East was an everyday affair. This was news.
“What type of cash do they deal with there?”
Awan had all the answers. “U.S. currency wouldn’t be unusual there. U.S., sterling, deutschmarks, Swiss francs, these are the four popular currencies. The most popular are the sterling and U.S. dollar.”
When I asked him to name the best places to deposit, he quickly ran down the list: “Saudi Arabia is the biggest source of cash, but I wouldn’t go to Saudi Arabia simply because it’s so difficult to get in and out…. I would say Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, these are the three main centers.”
Awan estimated that he could arrange deposits there at a pace of $10 million to $20 million per month. All very interesting. I surely wasn’t the first client to whom they made this proposal, and what Awan was suggesting lay totally outside traditional government thinking.
That night, at the Miami undercover house, Awan and Bilgrami indicated that the following day would be better for them to explain their new proposal. I countered with the October takedown bait.
“This will be a three-day event,” I said. “Our families will be there on Friday, and you’re welcome to join us, but if you’d prefer to wait until Saturday, that’s fine. On Saturday, we’ll party, and on Sunday the wedding will occur.”
They wouldn’t think of missing it, they said. More to do with dollar signs than friendship, but that didn’t matter. Trap laid.
The next day back at BCCI, Bilgrami handled the paperwork and eventually delivered the real message, “You want to go somewhere? We can go to the Grand Bay … Café Royale.”
I was all ears.
On the drive to the hotel, they couldn’t resist coaching me on how to make the scam companies look real. They suggested I have stationery printed for each of the many paper companies our attorneys in Zürich had formed. Which would enable Awan and Bilgrami to prepare more formal documents.
