"Follow the Dirty Money" (prosecuting illegal laundering by banks)

[JHB]

Robert Mazur, a former federal agent, on getting meaningful prosecution of illegal laundering activities by major mainstream banks. As a federal agent, he posed undercover as a launderer, and help collect evidence used to bring down BCCI.

NY Times:
Follow the Dirty Money
By ROBERT MAZUR
Published: September 12, 2010

The Barclays deal was just one in a long line of wrist slaps that big banks have recently received from the United States. Last May, when ABN Amro Bank (now largely part of the Royal Bank of Scotland) was caught funneling money for the benefit of Iran, Libya and Sudan, it was fined $500 million, and no one went to jail. Last December, Credit Suisse Group agreed to pay a $536 million fine for doing the same. In recent years, Union Bank of California, American Express Bank International, BankAtlantic and Wachovia have all been caught moving huge sums of drug money, but no one went to jail. The banks just admitted to criminal conduct and paid the government a cut of their profits.

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They readily gave me access to all the tools of their trade, starting with lawyers who knew how to create offshore corporations for crooks in places like Panama, Hong Kong, the British Virgin Islands and Gibraltar. The bankers also provided secret safe deposit boxes abroad, and arranged for currency to be shipped in safes to places like Dubai and Abu Dhabi, where large cash deposits are not recorded. My money could then be repatriated to the United States disguised as offshore loans. Account details were whispered in secret meetings so that paper never crossed borders. And any records sought by any government could simply be destroyed.

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Tracking and confiscating the fortunes of terrorist organizations, drug cartels and organized criminals is important for national security, and yet no single federal law enforcement agency systematically investigates the international bankers and businessmen who launder this money. What’s needed is a small but elite multi-agency task force, including representatives of the intelligence community and accomplished members of law enforcement agencies from other nations, that could identify the institutions and businesses that handle the bulk of the dirty money flowing around the globe. A task force numbering 100 people or less, at least initially, could compile a database containing detailed information about bad banks and money launderers.

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It would be important for this task force to have access to records of the Federal Reserve and the central banks of cooperating nations to find out which financial institutions are depositing large amounts of American dollars. (If investigators had had such access years ago, it would have been easy for them to see the billions in currency that Wachovia was shipping from Mexico.) By getting access to wire systems operated by the Fed and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, investigators could also identify and track the accounts for which banks convert cash into wire transfers. Here again, the information should be added to the database. Eventually, all this collected data could reveal a pattern of activity that would point to dirty bankers and businessmen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/opinion/13mazur.html