Munther Ismael Bilheisi

Munther Ismael Bilheisi was an expatriate Jordanian involved in coffee smuggling, arms dealing, customs violations, money laundering, and paying bribes and kickbacks.¹ He maintained lavishly appointed residences in England, Spain, Jordan, and the United States.² Bilheisi's activities were closely tied to the BCCI, which facilitated his illicit operations.

Business Operations

Bilheisi ran a formidable smuggling operation out of Boca Raton from 1982 to 1986, with BCCI acting as a full partner in the fraud. The bank financed his purchases and helped falsify documents to deceive U.S. Customs officials.³ His business was so valuable to BCCI that the bank opened a Boca Raton branch in 1983 specifically to service his account.⁴ BCCI provided $105 million in financing and letters of credit to support his operations.⁵

He was involved in coffee smuggling, buying non-agreement coffee at cheap prices and selling it illegally to agreement countries like the United States, thereby pocketing a huge profit.⁶ BCCI provided services such as financing shipments and doctoring shipping documents for these operations.⁷

Bilbeisi also engaged in illegal arms dealing. In 1974, he brokered British-made Centurion tanks and Tigercat missiles from Jordan to South Africa, defying British national policy.⁸ Other deals included retrofitting Jordanian tanks, selling small arms to Honduras and El Salvador, and selling U.S.-built F-86Safra jet fighters from Yugoslavia to Honduras.⁹

Financial Manipulations and Legal Issues

Bilheisi used BCCI's services to move and hide his wealth. When his wife petitioned for divorce in 1984, BCCI officers helped him transfer funds to secret numbered accounts in Nassau and Panama to conceal them from his wife and her attorneys.¹⁰ He also used phony Panamanian coffee companies to evade U.S. income tax.¹¹

He made two false claims against Lloyd's of London, one for alleged art theft and another for a coffee shipment. These claims led James Dougherty to investigate Bilheisi's business activities, uncovering his connections to BCCI and its illicit operations.¹²

In August 1991, Bilheisi was indicted in the United States for failure to pay $840,000 in taxes, and a warrant was issued for his arrest.¹³ He was also charged with corruption in Guatemala, with a warrant issued for his extradition and arrest.¹⁴

Coffee and Commissions

Time reported in 1991 that Bilbeisi, who owned a 1.8 million dollar house with a Mercedes, a Porsche and a Rolls-Royce and claimed friendship with King Hussein of Jordan, had sold about 35 million dollars' worth of Central American coffee to American buyers during the 1980s, documented as bound for non-tariff countries such as Jordan and Syria and rerouted through Miami or New Orleans; shipping agents told the magazine they had taken 4.5 million dollars in bribes from him to supply false cargo manifests. Company ledgers showed payments of 160,000 dollars to Arthur Berman, president of Chase & Sanborn from 1981 to 1984 and of Chock Full o'Nuts from 1984 to 1985, for pushing sales of the smuggled coffee; in a 1988 deposition Berman denied wrongdoing, describing the payments as loans. Bilbeisi also brokered a sale of Jordanian helicopters and fighter aircraft to Guatemala at inflated prices, with kickbacks to Guatemalan officers and to the brother of President Vinicio Cerezo; BCCI financed the deal for a commission of 400,000 dollars. The Lloyd's of London civil racketeering suit of December 1990 followed his claims of 6 million dollars for an allegedly stolen Song dynasty vase and a coffee shipment.¹⁵

According to the Journal of Commerce, he was indicted on tax charges in Fort Lauderdale in May 1991 and went to Amman; Guatemala's extradition request was addressed to Jordan.¹⁵¹⁶