Operation C-Chase

Operation C-Chase was an undercover money laundering investigation run from Tampa by the United States Customs Service with the Internal Revenue Service, which from 1987 drew in officers of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Its principal undercover operative, Customs Special Agent Robert Mazur, posed as "Robert Musella," a businessman laundering money for Colombian traffickers. The operation ended on October 8, 1988, with arrests at a staged wedding in Tarpon Springs, and produced the first prosecution of an international bank and its employees under the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986.¹²

Origin

In May 1986 a government informant, Alvaro Uribe, met Gonzalo Mora Jr., the head of a Medellín money laundering ring, and reported the contact to Customs Special Agent Emil Abreu of Tampa. On July 14, 1986, in Miami, Abreu, working undercover as "Emilio Dominguez," met Mora's brother Gabriel Jaime "Jimmy" Mora, and opened accounts in Uribe's name at the Florida National Bank in St. Petersburg and the Barnett Bank of Tampa, into which deposits were structured below the 10,000 dollar reporting threshold. In August 1986 Abreu gave Jimmy Mora a business card reading "Robert Musella," the cover identity of Agent Mazur, "who would become the principal clandestine operative in the case."¹ According to the Kerry-Brown Senate Report, Mazur proposed the operation to his superiors in 1986 after almost two and a half years of undercover work on money laundering in Florida, and the Customs Service notified the Justice Department, which gave "strategic and tactical assistance."² One launderer caught in the operation had gross receipts in the United States of "roughly $200 million per month in currency."²

BCCI

In February 1987 Mazur opened an account at BCCI's Tampa branch "strictly for its convenience, having seen a sign advertising BCCI's international services," and told the Senate subcommittee that he had not been "armed with any particular information that BCCI was involved in that type of activity."¹² A BCCI officer, Ricardo Argudo, recommended that Musella's clients open accounts at BCCI's Panama branch because no treaty allowed American agencies to obtain Panamanian bank records. Syed Aftab Hussain, an operations officer at BCCI Panama, advised him to use false names and loans collateralized by certificates of deposit, and told him not to repeat the mistakes made by the targets of Operation Pisces, a Drug Enforcement Administration sting concluded in May 1987 in which the DEA had seized BCCI Panama accounts that Hussain himself had monitored.¹²

On January 11, 1988, Hussain introduced Mazur to Amjad Awan and Akbar Bilgrami of BCCI's Latin American and Caribbean regional office in Miami. Told that Musella's clients were major Colombian drug dealers, Awan said on January 26: "I'm not concerned... it's not my business about who your customers are... we will provide you all security, all sorts of security and anonymity... I don't want to know." Bilgrami opened an account for Mazur's shelf company, Lamont Maxwell S.A., at the Banque de Commerce et de Placements in Geneva, through which more than 4 million dollars in drug proceeds passed by way of loans at BCCI Panama. On May 20, 1988, Mazur and Abreu, with two agents posing as their fiancées, opened three corporate accounts at BCCI's Paris office, where Mazur told the regional manager, Nazir Chinoy, that his clients were "drug dealers in Colombia." On September 19, 1988, he met Syed Ziauddin Ali Akbar, the president of Capcom, in London.¹ In all, the operation moved about 14 million dollars through BCCI, on which the bank earned more than 250,000 dollars in fees.²

The Awan Recording

At the Grand Bay Hotel in Miami on September 9, 1988, Mazur recorded Awan saying that he had been subpoenaed by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over the accounts of Manuel Noriega, that Robert Altman had advised the bank to transfer him to Paris, and that BCCI secretly owned First American Bank: "We own a bank, uh based in Washington, it's called the First American Bank... the bank belongs to BCCI. Those guys are just nominee shareholders." He called Clark Clifford "the Godfather of the Democratic party." An IRS special agent on the case, David Burris, concluded that seven federal statutes had apparently been violated, including obstruction of a Senate inquiry, and wrote in an affidavit that "Awan said that BCCI has bought and controls First American Bank and National Bank of Georgia through private individuals." The Senate report found that the prosecutors made "no effort to broaden the case against BCCI, or to investigate any of the new allegations raised by the Awan wiretap," with no attempt to interview Clifford or Altman and no subpoenas to First American.²

Takedown

On October 4, 1988, a federal grand jury in Tampa returned a sealed indictment of ten individuals and four corporations. On the night of October 8 Customs Special Agent Kathleen Ertz, posing as Mazur's fiancée "Kathleen Erickson," held a staged wedding at the Innisbrook Resort and Golf Club in Tarpon Springs, and at the bachelor party agents arrested Awan, Bilgrami, Hussain, Mora, and two officers of BCCI Paris, Ian Howard and Sibte Hassan. Arrests and searches in Britain and France were made at the same time.¹² The timing, a month before the presidential election, was questioned before the Senate subcommittee. Mazur, asked by Senator John Kerry whether it was meant to hand the administration "a sort of present on a platter," said that "there certainly was mere speculation that that played a part by people at low levels like mine," and "I was at a loss for understanding why October"; Assistant United States Attorney Mark Jackowski testified that the date had been set in February 1988 for reasons of case management.²

Prosecution

Customs officials told Commissioner William von Raab by March 1988 that several BCCI officers were indictable under RICO, and memoranda of April 6 and May 10, 1988, recorded the Tampa prosecutors' plan to indict BCCI as an institution under the statute, which would have allowed forfeiture of its American assets. In the fall of 1988 the Justice Department did not approve a RICO prosecution, "for reasons that were never explained to the Customs agents." The United States Attorney in Tampa, Robert Genzman, told the subcommittee: "we believed that RICO charges would have added nothing, and would have greatly complicated the case."² Mazur testified that his agents were left with some 1,200 tapes to transcribe, and asked by Senator Harris Wofford whether he had felt outgunned by the bank's defense, answered "tremendously." At one pretrial hearing Jackowski appeared alone against 23 lawyers for BCCI; he told the subcommittee that "it was a fair fight." The Senate report described the government team as "grossly outnumbered by the defense team retained by BCCI, and selected and coordinated by Clark Clifford and Robert Altman."²

A second superseding indictment of May 4, 1989, added five defendants. In January 1990, after negotiations with BCCI's lawyers, the former federal prosecutors Lawrence Wechsler and E. Lawrence Barcella Jr., the bank pleaded guilty to money laundering and forfeited 14 million dollars; Genzman said, "We made that determination in the district... As a courtesy, we advised the Department of Justice of what we were about to do, and received no opposition." Mazur said he had been "of the opinion that we may as well go to trial," and the Senate report concluded that the individual defendants "felt betrayed and abandoned."² The officers were tried from January 26 to July 29, 1990. A juror, Robert "Skip" Spanczak, was excused during deliberations after admitting that he had telephoned Colombia using a number from a defendant's address book. On November 30, 1990, Awan and Bilgrami were sentenced to 144 months, Hussain to 87, Howard to 57, and Hassan to 37. The Eleventh Circuit affirmed on July 27, 1992, except as to Hassan, whose conviction it reversed for insufficient evidence.¹