Robert Mazur

Robert Mazur was a special agent of the United States Customs Service who, under the cover name "Robert Musella," was the principal undercover operative of Operation C-Chase, the money laundering sting run from Tampa that in October 1988 led to the arrest of officers of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and to the bank's guilty plea in January 1990.¹²

Musella

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 international money laundering in Florida, posing as a businessman whose investment and mortgage companies laundered drug money.² His cover card as "Robert Musella" was passed to the Medellín money launderer Gabriel Jaime Mora in August 1986. In February 1987 he opened an account at BCCI's Tampa branch, which he chose, the Eleventh Circuit later recorded, "strictly for its convenience, having seen a sign advertising BCCI's international services."¹ Over the following twenty months he met BCCI officers in Tampa, Miami, Paris and London, among them Amjad Awan, Akbar Bilgrami, Nazir Chinoy, and Syed Ziauddin Ali Akbar of Capcom, and told several of them that his clients were Colombian drug traffickers. On September 9, 1988, at the Grand Bay Hotel in Miami, he recorded Awan describing BCCI's secret ownership of First American Bank.¹² The operation ended on October 8, 1988, at a staged wedding between Mazur and another Customs agent, Kathleen Ertz, posing as his fiancée "Kathleen Erickson," at which the BCCI officers were arrested.¹

Testimony

Mazur testified at length before Senator John Kerry's subcommittee. He described BCCI's Panama and Luxembourg branches and "several locations in the Middle East" as offered to him for confidential handling of cash, and said the bank cared more about large deposits that made "their balance sheets to look very strong" than about the more than 250,000 dollars it earned in fees. Asked about the timing of the takedown a month before the 1988 presidential election, he said: "There certainly was mere speculation that that played a part by people at low levels like mine. But beyond that I cannot say more... I was at a loss for understanding why October." He testified that he and a few agents were left with some 1,200 tapes to transcribe, that he had felt "tremendously" outgunned by BCCI's defense, and that he had disagreed with the plea agreement: "I was, in the long run, of the opinion that we may as well go to trial." Customs agents had supported a RICO prosecution of the bank, which the Justice Department did not approve.² He also testified to the "mirror-image trading" by which Akbar moved money through commodity accounts, quoting Akbar's remark that such transactions "would take forever for anyone to ever find it."³

The Senate report found that the Customs Service and the Treasury Department had "failed to provide adequate support and assistance to investigators and prosecutors working on the case against BCCI in 1988 and 1989, contributing to conditions that ultimately caused the chief undercover agent who handled the sting against BCCI to quit Customs entirely."²