--- alias: - Tampa category: City created: 2026-09-23 location: Tampa, Florida, United States summary: Gulf coast city in Florida where the 1988 Operation C-Chase indictment of BCCI was brought, and whose federal prosecutors the Senate found had missed the bank's wider crimes. tags: - City - Florida - UnitedStates - BCCI - MoneyLaundering - USCustoms updated: 2026-09-23 --- Tampa is a city on Tampa Bay in Hillsborough County, [Florida](/places/florida/). Its federal prosecutors brought the October 1988 indictment that followed [Operation C-Chase](/events/operation-c-chase/), the [U.S. Customs](/organizations/us-customs/) undercover money laundering operation against officers of the [Bank of Credit and Commerce International](/organizations/bank-of-credit-and-commerce-international/) (BCCI), and in January 1990 accepted the bank's guilty plea. The Senate report of [John Kerry](/people/john-kerry/) and [Hank Brown](/people/hank-brown/) later found that the prosecutors in Tampa had failed to recognize evidence of BCCI's other crimes.[^1][^2] ### Early History A local account published in *The Florida Review* in 1911 by W. B. Powell recorded that the first permanent white families in Tampa were soldiers and their families brought by the Indian wars, and that in 1843 a town site a mile square, "known as the Fort Brooke Reservation," was laid off and Congress asked to designate it. Saw mills were built in 1845 and 1847. Tampa was incorporated in 1857 and Capt. James McKay was elected mayor; Powell wrote that ninety-seven votes were cast although "there were not ninety-seven voters in Tampa at that time," and that there were "charges of fraud and ballot-box-stuffing." After the Civil War, according to the same account, only three new houses were built in Tampa between 1873 and 1876. During the Spanish-American War of 1898 Tampa was the point of embarkation of the army for [Cuba](/places/cuba/), and 30,000 men passed through the city. Powell put its population in 1911 at 51,000.[^3] ### Operation C-Chase and the BCCI Prosecution Customs Special Agent [Robert Mazur](/people/robert-mazur/), working undercover as "Robert Musella," testified that he opened an account at BCCI because it was the only bank with which he was familiar that had international branches. The Senate report recorded that "After Mazur checked with local prosecutors in Tampa and discovered that the bank showed up in another drug-related investigation, his suspicions were heightened." On April 6, 1988, a Customs memorandum stated that it was the opinion of the United States Attorney's office in Tampa that "probative evidence exists to establish corporate criminality against BCCI as an institution," and that current plans were "to indict BCCI as an institution under the provisions of the RICO statutes"; a second memorandum repeated the recommendation on May 10, 1988. The [Justice Department](/organizations/department-of-justice/) did not approve a racketeering prosecution. The United States Attorney for Tampa, [Robert Genzman](/people/robert-genzman/), told the Senate subcommittee: "we believed that RICO charges would have added nothing, and would have greatly complicated the case ... There was simply insufficient evidence to support such a sweeping international forfeiture."[^1] The Senate report concluded that "it is clear now, and should have been clear as of the date of the C-Chase indictment against BCCI in October 1988, that BCCI represented much more than a drug money laundering case," and that the office in Tampa "then made its second strategic mistake as it allowed the bank to plead out while prosecuting the individual bankers." BCCI "mounted a $20 million defense in Florida and provided for the legal costs and living expenses of its former employees throughout their trials," a strategy the report described as designed to prevent the government from getting defendants to "flip." At one pretrial hearing Assistant United States Attorney Mark Jackowski appeared alone for the government against 23 lawyers for BCCI. In January 1990 the bank pleaded guilty and paid "what was then the largest fine ever imposed on a financial institution in a money-laundering case," 14 million dollars.[^1] The report found that the plea agreement "kept BCCI alive, and had the effect of discouraging BCCI's officials from telling the U.S. what they knew about BCCI's larger criminality, including its ownership of First American," and that in 1988 and 1989 the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton ran a campaign for BCCI designed "to put the best face possible on the Tampa drug money laundering indictments."[^2] After the plea, several members of Congress criticized it as too lenient; the Senate report recorded that the BCCI lawyer Lawrence Barcella met Senator [Dennis DeConcini](/people/dennis-deconcini/), one of the critics, to persuade him that BCCI was not a corrupt institution.[^4] Mazur told the subcommittee that after the arrests records had been "seized from BCCI in Miami, from the homes of several officers in Miami, from the BCCI offices in London and Paris, from the homes of traffickers," but that "very little resources of those that were available could be used to deal with those matters because of the tremendous resources that were needed just to attend to pretrial motions and the upcoming trial in Tampa." Jackowski told the subcommittee that the grand jury investigation of BCCI had been suspended "due to a lack of available leads and the press of the upcoming trial." In April 1991 Mazur resigned from the Customs Service in a letter to Commissioner Carol Hallett that referred to "the deplorable conditions in Tampa"; a memorandum by Jackowski attached to the letter, expressing his own unhappiness with the handling of the case, was withheld from the subcommittee by the Justice Department.[^1] *[Time](/organizations/time/)* reported on July 29, 1991, that the Justice Department's main probe of BCCI was "being handled by a sole Assistant U.S. Attorney in Tampa, who has recently been assigned another major case."[^5] Among its findings, the Senate report stated:[^1] - "Federal prosecutors in Tampa handling the 1988 drug money laundering indictment of BCCI failed to recognize the importance of information they received concerning BCCI's other crimes, including its apparent secret ownership of First American." - "Justice Department personnel in Washington, Miami, and Tampa actively obstructed and impeded Congressional attempts to investigate BCCI in 1990, and this practice continued to some extent until William P. Barr became Attorney General in late October, 1991." - "Justice Department personnel in Washington, Miami and Tampa obstructed and impeded attempts by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to obtain critical information concerning BCCI in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and in one case, a federal prosecutor lied to Morgenthau's office concerning the existence of such material." In the House of Commons debate on the [Bingham Report](/events/bingham-report/) on November 6, 1992, Alistair Darling said that "Alarm bells should also have rung in respect of the Tampa indictment," and quoted Bingham's finding that involvement in drug money "could scarcely have eluded a competent and diligent banker ... particularly if he had branches in Panama and agencies in Florida."[^6] [^1]: Kerry, Senator John, and Senator Hank Brown. *The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate.* December 1992, ch. 8, "BCCI and Law Enforcement: The Justice Department and the US Customs Service." https://irp.fas.org/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/08just.htm [^2]: Kerry and Brown, *The BCCI Affair,* ch. 1, "Executive Summary." https://irp.fas.org/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/01exec.htm [^3]: Powell, W. B. "Tampa: 'Split Wood for Quick Fires,'" *The Florida Review,* 1911, excerpted in "Tampa, Florida," *Exploring Florida,* Florida Center for Instructional Technology, University of South Florida. https://fcit.usf.edu/florida/docs/t/tampa.htm [^4]: Kerry and Brown, *The BCCI Affair,* ch. 17, "BCCI's Lawyers and Lobbyists." https://irp.fas.org/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/17law.htm [^5]: Beaty, Jonathan, and S. C. Gwynne. "B.C.C.I.: The Dirtiest Bank of All," *Time,* July 29, 1991, p. 8 of the online edition. https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,973481-8,00.html [^6]: House of Commons, "BCCI (Bingham Report)," *Hansard,* November 6, 1992, vol. 213, cc. 523-594. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1992/nov/06/bcci-bingham-report