The Infiltrator, page 30
Foreign investors included several Saudis who were close friends and Capcom shareholders. Kamal Adham, a brother-in-law of the late King Faisal, held several key government posts in Saudi Arabia, including the chief of intelligence. His net worth then exceeded $1 billion. A major shareholder of Capcom, Adham had also invested heavily in BCCI and First American. A. R. Khalil also worked for Saudi intelligence, and later research revealed that both Adham and Khalil liaised closely with the CIA. The third key Capcom shareholder, the vastly wealthy Gaith Rashad Pharaon, owned a big piece of BCCI, the U.S. banks that BCCI secretly controlled, and Capcom.
Akbar and Capcom had big plans. They had two offices in London, one in Chicago, and one in Cairo. They intended to open offices in New York, Miami, and Dubai. Longer-range plans included offices in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong.
“Our strength is in the Middle East and the Gulf,” Akbar said. “Now we are trying to double up the relationship on our strength, our contacts in Latin America, in Miami, through Amjad…. We have doubled our relationship in the Middle East…. We are shifting from there through Amjad in Miami through your support, through your cooperation.”
Ziauddin Akbar and his backers were targeting the Colombian drug cartels as sources of funds for a multibillion-dollar empire.
“We don’t want to know how, what the customer is doing, what is his business,” Akbar said of my clients. “I don’t want to know. Our company doesn’t want to know.”
Then he confirmed Bilgrami’s explanation of the system used to launder hundreds of millions through simultaneous purchases and sales of gold futures.
When Akbar heard I could provide him with $10 million per month, he didn’t blink. Instead, he agreed with Bilgrami: The cash was best washed through the heavy dollar markets in Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. My clients’ cash could be shipped there in safes to four different banks, each taking deposits ranging from $100,000 to $400,000 per day.
He knew my clients ran the Medellín cartel — I sensed it every time he assured me he didn’t want to know anything about them. Awan and Bilgrami had surely filled him in. But that wouldn’t hold up in front of a jury. I had to have an explicit conversation with him — but not now. I had pushed enough for one day.
In between reporting to the Tampa and London offices, my phone was burning up with calls. Emir continued to coordinate cash pickups, and Alcaíno’s associates were using me as a clearinghouse either to report or learn about his arrest.
A little after 1 A.M. Greenwich time, I called Casals.
“Roberto is really sick,” he said, meaning Alcaíno had been arrested.
“I know,” I said. “I sent him the prescription” — money.
“I can’t figure out what is wrong.”
“Listen to me. It’s probably best that you not visit him, but if you can get word to him through someone else, let him know he isn’t alone. I’m going to be there for him. On my way back from Europe, I’ll stop in New York, and we can talk.”
Casals happily gave me his new numbers and agreed to meet when I returned.
The next afternoon, I gave Akbar the documents he needed to open accounts for me in the names of Hong Kong and Gibraltar corporations. As he did, I mentioned BCCI’s annual fee of 1.5 percent to disguise the flow of funds, and I argued for no more than half that amount at Capcom. I also wanted him to halve the turnaround from ten days to five.
Given the numbers, the best he could offer was a 1 percent commission. Capcom would incur fees to buy and sell gold, after all, and those fees alone would eat up most of the 1 percent. “We don’t want any dummy deals,” he said. Everything had to look real. And he assured me he could beat the ten-day mark, but nothing less than six. “Mr. Musella … if you want to develop a long-term relationship, you have to feel comfortable with us, and we have to feel comfortable with you.”
That was my opening. In order to close the deal, he had to convince me he was prepared to push the world’s hottest money through his system.
“Why don’t we take a walk,” I said, leaning across the table, and mimed looking for bugs on the ceiling and underneath the table. “Let’s just take a walk and talk about it for a minute, and I’d feel a little bit better if I could.”
“I can assure you one thing,” Akbar said as though I’d smacked him in the face with a cricket bat. “If you’ve got any suspicion of anything here, there’s nothing, nothing tape-recording me. Don’t worry about that, if you are worried about that, anything taping here. Nothing. But I can go out. I’m —”
“Let’s go for a walk,” I said, tilting my head toward the door and rising from the table.
He followed like a wolf after prey.
“Your clients are trusted,” he said nervously on the noisy London street. “We are not the need to know. We don’t want to know what purpose customers care about it. We tell you, because us, out of good customers, we can make them, um, they must trust us…. We are certain our contacts in the Miami, they have recommended you or any customer. So we are depending on them about the genuineness or about the respectability about the clients, everything.”
Time to trot out Iacocca.
“I want you to know,” I added to my canned speech, “that the only reason I asked you to come out here is because I don’t ever want to have a conversation with you about these types of things again.”
No problem. Akbar took what I had said in stride.
One last topic to broach, then: Noriega’s hidden fortune. Awan had stashed his money for years within the maze of BCCI branches, but it was probably now wending its way to Capcom. I told Akbar to avoid him, explaining how my clients became so concerned when their Panamanian accounts froze that they had sent the general a coffin. Akbar nervously laughed, confirming my suspicion.
“I can assure you,” Akbar said at the end of our meeting, “whatever we can, we’ll help you to the possible extent. It is in our mutual interest, and you are interested in our interest…. We will do our best. I’m sure we will not let you down.”
How would the Capcom revelations sit with Washington? Perhaps they’d reconsider terminating the operation. We had two multibillion-dollar financial institutions run by some of the wealthiest people in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia under our thumb. Both institutions had strong ties to government officials and intelligence communities in the States and the Middle East. Both were hunting drug profits from the underworld. They didn’t care whether I was representing drug dealers, arms dealers, or terrorists. They only wanted the power they could glean from my money.
In Paris — before I firmed up Nazir Chinoy’s knowledge of the money’s source and pressured him to attend the wedding — I threw Akbar the only bone I could in the time remaining.
“Given what we discussed,” I said on the phone, “I’d like to do a small one to test the system. This will give me something to discuss when I meet with my clients…. Should I route it from Panama to your Chicago office, the same way we routed the last money?”
“That’s exactly the way to send it,” he said.
Done.
The red carpet had rolled out for a hundred of Paris’s rich and famous at Chinoy’s home. Limos lined the street. BCCI bankers from around the world circled like vultures, pecking at businessmen, diplomats, and their wives. Tuxedoed waiters strolled the apartment with a symphony of champagne flutes and hors d’oeuvres while cello and violin players drowned out the low chant of BCCI’s mantra: Give me your deposits.
Chinoy brought managers of BCCI branches from around the world to my side throughout the night. Each whispered that he’d oversee my affairs personally if I opened accounts at his branch, doing everything possible to serve me. Chinoy asked that Kathy and I stay behind when the party broke. As the night wore on, a chorus of people whom Chinoy had handpicked for the after party threw endless questions at us. A gracious offer on Chinoy’s part, perhaps, but more likely an orchestrated test.
The next day, while discussing with Chinoy the purpose of my visit — attending to matters for my “family” and finalizing the mechanism for investing funds in Colombia — I brandished uncertainty about Awan. “It is troubling to see that he was leaving, and then I figured, Well, if he’s leaving, maybe there’s some type of problem…. I got the impression that maybe there was some unhappiness in the BCCI family.”
Chinoy assured me that Awan merely had a personality conflict with the head of the Latin American division stationed in Miami. The bank’s president, Swaleh Naqvi, had smoothed everything, postponing Awan’s transfer to Paris for as long as six months, at which point he would manage a new division within that branch to serve clients in Latin America. It looked like Awan had fed them a line so they wouldn’t put him under a microscope while he was shuttling secretly back and forth to Washington, trying to con Blum into giving him a pass based on half-truths.
Customs still needed the $5 million flash roll back, so I told Chinoy that a close friend needed help pumping up his balance sheet. I needed to borrow against all of my deposits in Paris for three or four days. It was the only ploy that wouldn’t raise alarm. I’d done it for them in the past, so they should understand doing it for me now. Still, I cringed inside as I fed him the story.
“Sure,” he said. “We all depend on this area.”
When asked how much money he could disguise and pass to Colombia, he said, “Twenty million a month…. Paris is large enough for ten million to go through without anybody noticing anything…. In my system, I would put a little bit through Monte Carlo.”
When I told him that our Colombian clients had $15 million in U.S. currency each month in Europe they would like to deposit, he wanted in. He didn’t have an immediate plan, but felt he could spin a cover.
Now it was Chinoy’s turn to petition me. “Will you be — before December, you said there’s some key dates — able to give me a little more funds?” He reminded me that December thirty-first was the date on which the bank’s year-end balance sheet needed pumping up.
“You can rely on it,” I said, forecasting that by the end of December we’d increase our deposits by another two million and place funds with corresponding loans to transfer another $30 million to Colombia.
“Thanks a lot,” he said, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Thank you very much. That will help us a lot. Thank you.”
Then I asked to see the records of my Paris accounts to confirm transactions since my last visit. Chinoy summoned Sibte Hassan, who led me to the files. I thumbed through the stack, and —
There it was. A letter from Armbrecht on July twenty-second, the day after he warned me that Don Chepe’s people had detected the surveillance in New York. He directed BCCI to remove my name from the account and had the funds sent to BCCI Colón in Panama. My skin went cold as I stared at the paper, Armbrecht’s unease — just one day before he’d written the letter — ringing in my ears: We are concerned about friends present during the transaction, bad guys in the Towers where all the little beauties are delivered, all the little jewelry. They think foreign investors want to get their hands on the business, and they are worried.
Everything Armbrecht and Don Chepe had to offer dissolved the day they spotted surveillance in Midtown. The cartel’s plan to let me hide a $100 million nest egg for them in Europe had surely fallen off the table. They weren’t certain I was a narc — if they had been, Emir and I would already have died. But they knew that business with us came with too many problems.
A fog of dejection followed me down the Champs-Elysées. New York hadn’t believed enough in our operation to think outside the box. Business as usual had killed part of our case. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
Before we left Paris, Chinoy and his family took me and Kathy to Le Chalet des Iles, a restaurant in a garden on an island in a lake in the Bois de Boulogne. Only a small ferry offered access to this restaurant originally built as a hunting lodge under Napoleon. At dinner, Chinoy informed me that, regretfully, he wouldn’t be able to attend the wedding because he had an important BCCI board meeting in London that day.
After dinner, we strolled through the immaculate grounds. It was my last meeting with Chinoy, so I took advantage and played the only hand I had. I told him his change in plans had put me in a bind. Senior members of my family wanted to speak privately with him in Tampa. The wedding would have been the perfect setting because, with high security, they would be at ease to speak freely.
Chinoy promised to call the president of BCCI that afternoon to seek permission to join the board meeting late so he could meet my bosses at the wedding. Since that would never happen, I went a step further and advised that it was important to arrange a meeting between the senior members of my group and the bank’s directors.
“This will be arranged to calm any uneasiness that might exist with your people,” Chinoy said, agreeing completely. “This is only fair that you see with whom you deal.”
A shame that meeting won’t ever happen, I thought as we walked through the exquisite gardens. October stood fast. There could be no evidence more powerful than Swaleh Naqvi, president of BCCI, soliciting dirty money on tape. Hopefully, Chinoy — third in command — and eight other key officers would cut it.
I handed Chinoy an article from the Times of London, which underscored why he and other BCCI officials should prioritize a meeting with my bosses, all of whom had concerns. The article announced that a joint FBI and Scotland Yard undercover operation had exposed money-laundering activities by several banks, including one characterized as having Pakistani origins. The banks involved participated in the hawala system, an ancient Islamic method of moving money.
In hawala, a customer in one location gives money to a hawaladar, or broker, to transfer through a second hawaladar in another location to the intended recipient. In addition to taking commissions smaller than banks would charge, hawaladars often circumvent market rates for currency exchange. There is no governmental regulation or paper trail of any kind — it all takes place by word of mouth — and the system also allows for the transfer of debt.
“That scared the hell out of me,” I told Chinoy.
“It’s not us,” he said, staring at the article. “I think I know who it is. We don’t use the hawala system. It’s too risky.” But he understood why I felt it was important to put my people at ease. “I will remind you that there’s no problem here. On that side, we’re really relaxed.” He promised to do his best to make it to Tampa, but if that wasn’t possible, I could count on a meeting between my people and the president and other directors of the bank soon thereafter.
If only.
Our first stop back took us to Manhattan’s Omni Berkshire Place, a five-star hotel at Fifty-second and Madison. With Alcaíno behind bars, Casals didn’t know where to turn, and he wanted to work for me. He was a good man, I told him, but I really didn’t know much about him. Honesty and loyalty were what I needed, so he needed to tell me everything.
Casals rattled off every crime he’d ever committed. He’d worked for Alcaíno for about three years. Eight months earlier, Alcaíno had established his pipeline from the anchovy packing plant in Buenos Aires. They’d already run one successful load through Philadelphia — 1,200 pounds of pure cocaine. Zabala distributed some of the coke, along with Alvaro and Gladys Perez in New Jersey. Casals gave me their numbers. Carlos Díaz fronted as the plant’s owner in Buenos Aires, and then there were the New York men of Alcaíno’s partner, Fabio Ochoa, pressuring Casals to give them any of Alcaíno’s money he could find. Alcaíno had the freight forwarder in New York — who arranged the shipment of anchovies from Argentina to Philadelphia — on payroll, in order to get wind of any unusual interest the feds might have in imported anchovies.
Casals knew that Alcaíno had accounts in Switzerland in a fake name, along with a matching fake passport — the Jeweler’s lifeline if he had to flee the States. He also had safe-deposit boxes all over the U.S., filled with cash that only he and one of his girlfriends could access. Cecilia in New York distributed coke for him, as did Patricia in Ecuador and Sonja in Colombia.
“You have a lot of experience,” I said. “My man who runs our operations in New York will be at my wedding in Tampa. I’d like to extend an invitation for you and a guest to join us there. That will be the perfect time for you to meet privately with him. I’ll see that he puts you to work. Welcome to our family.”
“Thanks, Bob. I can’t thank you enough, and thank you for the invitation. My girlfriend and I will be there for sure.”
Back in Miami, Tobón and Zabala needed to tell me about Alcaíno’s money still on the street, which I could use as bait to lure one of his suppliers to Tampa just before the wedding.
With Tobón’s help, Kathy made arrangements for flowers. The more she invested our targets and their friends in the ceremony, the more likely they were to show up. While I had Tobón on the phone confirming details about the flowers, I told him, “I have that stuff I told you about before. They got the stuff in from L.A.” — copies of the indictments filed against Alcaíno in New York and Philly, which I had promised him. “I’ll have both of those with me. Tuto says he knows the person mentioned in the document. We’ll talk when you come by.”
With BCCI back in the Senate’s crosshairs, the lounge of the Grand Bay Hotel became the meeting place of choice with my banker friends. Over tumblers of Johnnie Walker Black and ice, Bilgrami buried his head in Capcom paperwork.
“How were your meetings at Capcom?” he mumbled, not looking up.
