Robert Genzman

Robert W. Genzman was the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Florida, based in Tampa, from September 1988 to June 1993. His office prosecuted the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and its officers in the money-laundering case that grew out of the Customs undercover operation Operation C-Chase, and in January 1990 accepted the bank's plea of guilty.¹²

Career

Genzman held degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics and a 1977 law degree from Cornell University. After college he was a staff counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, which investigated the killing of President John F. Kennedy. He worked as a congressional aide and was a prosecutor in the United States Attorney's office in Orlando from 1980 to 1983. He was in private practice when Representative Bill McCollum chose him in 1987 as a Republican minority counsel on the House committee that investigated the Iran-Contra Affair.¹

He succeeded Robert Merkle as United States Attorney in September 1988, after Merkle resigned to run for the Senate. Under Genzman the office doubled in size. He stepped down in June 1993, when President Bill Clinton replaced Republican appointees, and joined the Orlando law firm of Akerman, Senterfitt & Eidson.¹

RICO

In 1988 the Tampa office told the Customs Service that "probative evidence exists to establish corporate criminality against BCCI as an institution" and that "current plans for prosecution are to indict BCCI as an institution under the provisions of the RICO statutes." The Department of Justice did not approve a racketeering prosecution in the fall of 1988, and the case was brought as a narrower money-laundering indictment in October 1988. Genzman told the Senate subcommittee of Senator John Kerry: "Put simply, we believed that RICO charges would have added nothing, and would have greatly complicated the case. It is absolutely, untrue, as has been suggested, that the entire bank could have somehow been forfeited out the U.S. government had RICO charges been brought in Tampa. There was simply insufficient evidence to support such a sweeping international forfeiture."²

The subcommittee's report replied that his "position also fails to take into account the obvious potential, if Justice had indeed decided to make a RICO case, of seeking plea agreements with the individual officers as a means of securing a broader RICO case against the bank itself in a superseding indictment."²

Resources and Follow-Up

Genzman testified that the prosecution had not been substantially impeded by a lack of resources, since BCCI had pleaded guilty, its officers had been convicted and the bank had paid a 14 million dollar forfeiture, then the largest imposed on a financial institution in a money-laundering case. He acknowledged that his office had been stretched by the complexity of the sting, by the "scorched earth" strategy of BCCI's lawyers, who "filed hundreds of motions and briefs on every imaginable subject," and by the transcription of some 2,000 taped conversations.²

He told the subcommittee that "[I]t was never our intention to simply stop investigating BCCI after the first indictment." His assistant, Mark Jackowski, told it that the grand jury investigation had been suspended "due to a lack of available leads and the press of the upcoming trial," a pause Jackowski calculated at thirteen months. The Customs undercover agent Robert Mazur testified that leads went unpursued, officers went uninterviewed and superseding indictments were not issued.²

The Plea Agreement

In mid-December 1989 BCCI's lawyers, the former federal prosecutors Lawrence H. Wechsler and E. Lawrence Barcella, Jr., met the Tampa prosecutors and offered a guilty plea by the bank to money laundering, with its cooperation, in return for an end to its criminal exposure for all offenses then known to the government. The bank agreed to a 14 million dollar forfeiture. Genzman testified: "We made that determination in the district ...[a]s a courtesy, we advised the Department of Justice of what we were about to do, and received no opposition." He listed his reasons, among them: "First, the Government secured the conviction of the bank, one of its principle objectives. Second, eliminating the corporation from the trial prevented a recurrence of a problem confronted in the 1986 case against the Bank of New England, where the corporation was convicted, but all the individual defendants were acquitted."²

The report found that "Genzman's rationale, while understandable from a technical point of view, missed the underlying point. Long before the trial, the Tampa prosecutors had before them information that BCCI secretly owned First American, that BCCI's lawyers, Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, might well have committed crimes, and that BCCI itself might well be a host for criminality activity on a global basis." It named Amjad Awan, Akbar Bilgrami and Nazir Chinoy among the Tampa defendants who could have supplied that information. Genzman testified that BCCI had cooperated during the seven-month trial of the individual defendants in 1990; the report stated that he "may not have been aware that while the bank was allegedly cooperating, it was also paying the astronomical lawyer's fees" of the defendants, which reached upwards of 20 million dollars, "providing for their housing, and working to insure that they could continue to stay silent about what they knew concerning the bank."²

Of the 200 million dollar assessment later levied by the Federal Reserve, he testified that those who used it as a measure of what the Justice Department should have obtained were "confusing apples with oranges."²

Double Jeopardy

Genzman testified that the agreement contained "relatively standard language, committing the US Attorney's office for our district not to prosecute BCCI for any other Federal criminal offense then known to the government. . . It does not prevent the US Attorney in Tampa, or any other prosecutor, state or federal, from prosecuting any individual from the President of BCCI on down." His first assistant, Greg Kehoe, said the question had been discussed at length within the Department. The United States Attorney in Miami, Dexter Lehtinen, testified that in September 1991, when he was ready to indict BCCI on tax fraud charges, the Department told his office each week that it was "blocked from bringing the indictment because of the Tampa plea and the Tampa double jeopardy."²

The Florida License

Lehtinen had advised that BCCI's Florida license should be in jeopardy after a successful prosecution. Genzman took a neutral position, and on January 31, 1990, the Tampa prosecutors wrote to the state regulators that the office had no position on whether BCCI should be closed or stay open. BCCI's lawyers, principally Wechsler, Barcella and Raymond Banoun, then approached the Criminal Division in Washington, and on February 13, 1990, Charles Saphos wrote to Florida's comptroller, Gerald Lewis, asking that BCCI be permitted to operate. Kehoe testified that "[O]bviously the attorneys for BCCI were talking to Mr. Saphos" and "[they] tried to go behind my back." Genzman told the subcommittee that "... in this case we told the Comptroller's office that we were taking no position."²

Morgenthau

Answering criticism from the Manhattan District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, that the Justice Department had refused to share information, Genzman testified that "all sorts of problems crop up" in joint efforts and that "because of the differing systems of immunity, giving up information [to a county DA] might taint the Federal investigation." The federal indictment of BCCI in September 1991 closely followed Morgenthau's and came nearly six weeks after it.²

Death

Genzman died of kidney cancer at his home in Orlando in May 1998, at 46. He was survived by his wife, Martha, and twin children.¹