CHAPTER 17

In Medellin, there was considerable uneasiness about Mazur's operation. Separate incidents in Houston and New York raised the suspicions of the Colombian drug lords. Finally, they dispatched Rudy Armbrecht to Miami to get answers to some very serious questions.

On June 27, 1988, Emir Abreu had flown in the Citation jet to Houston to pick up $1 million of Don Chepe's money. The drop was set for a hotel parking lot. Abreu was waiting inside the hotel when he saw the designated car drive up. When he went out to meet the couriers, he found himself dealing with a nervous woman named Nellie and her twelve-year-old son, Roberto.

Inside were a duffel bag and a shoe box containing $1 million. As Abreu helped drag the bag from the back seat, he noticed an Uzi machine gun stuck under the driver's seat. Nellie was nervous, almost paranoid, as if she were being watched. She and Roberto hurried through the drop off and drove off as fast as they could.

Lugging the duffel bag behind him and cradling the box under one arm, Abreu headed back toward the hotel and watched as Nellie drove away. Behind her were the backups from the Houston office, following so closely it appeared to Abreu to be a caravan.

Two days later, Gonzalo Mora, Jr., telephoned from Colombia to ask how the woman and the boy had behaved.

"The lady was nervous," Abreu replied. "The kid, he was pretty good. But the lady was nervous."

"Look," said Mora, "I just got a call from Don Chepe's office, from one of his secretaries, that Nellie told him that there was some suspicious activity during the time that she gave you the money."

Abreu laughed it off. "Oh, you know, they get nervous. Every time they turn around, it seems like the police are following."

A single incident of botched surveillance might have been overlooked by those in Medell in, but it was followed by another incident two weeks later in New York City.

On July 13, a woman known as Marta delivered $448,000 to Abreu in Manhattan. Marta, too, thought she noticed some suspicious activity as she was leaving the drop site. When she and her husband relayed her anxiety to Medellin four days later, the reaction was swift.

Gonzalo Mora, Jr., was summoned to a meeting with Don Chepe himself. The drug suppliers already were suspicious of Mora because of his incessant boasting. They still viewed him as a small-timer, and they thought he talked too much, a dangerous character trait in his business. Tough questions were fired at him about the security of the American operation. Mora tried to be reassuring. He knew he could fall out of favor in a heartbeat, and that it might be his last if he did. He promised to contact the Americans and find out what was going on.

The following day, he telephoned Abreu and relayed the complaints that had been fired at him. Don Chepe's people were suspicious, he warned. First, it had been Houston. Then something had happened at the drop in New York. He urged Abreu to talk to Mazur and straighten out the situation. Otherwise everything was in danger.

Abreu was dispatched to New York the next day. Calm the Colombians there and get them to smooth it out in Medellin, he was told. When he confronted Marta and her husband, they feigned surprise.

"We don't have any problems," said Marta. "Everything is fine with us. We don't know what the problem is."

There had been close calls before. Everything that could be planned was planned carefully in C-Chase, but some elements cannot be controlled. Coincidence is a factor that often gets less credit than it deserves, as Bob Mazur had found out a few weeks earlier on a trip to New York.

Mazur was meeting Roberto Alcaino, "the Jeweler," in New York's ornate Helmsley Palace Hotel. As they stood in one of the rooms of the elegant mansion that had been converted into the hotel lobby, Mazur heard a familiar voice, chillingly familiar.

"Buon giorno, mi amici," it was saying. "Good day, my friend." He turned and saw the white hair and smiling face of Charles Broun, the Florida investment banker-turned-money-launderer whom he had sent to jail a decade earlier. Broun knew immediately that Mazur was undercover. His clothes were too expensive for a Customs Service employee, and he had grown a beard. For a moment, Mazur's life was in his hands.

But Broun had changed. In jail he had seen close up what drugs were doing to people, and he had found religion. He was genuinely grateful that Mazur had saved him from what he now called a satanic trap. After putting Mazur on the spot, he helped him wriggle free. Instead of calling him by name, he asked for Mazur's business card and played along with his new identity. As Alcaino listened to another confirmation of Mazur's fictious identity, the two banker-launderers discussed the ins and outs of laundering money through hotel chains.

But Mazur wanted to make sure that Broun stayed on his side. So he arranged a private meeting for later that afternoon, and they talked shop of a different kind.

"Do you have any advice?" Mazur asked.

"Before I was arrested," Broun said, "I thought that you looked, acted, and smelled just like the heat. If you hadn't come to me so well recommended, I wouldn't have had anything to do with you."

"What were the signals I was giving?" Mazur asked, growing alarmed. "You were too attentive to the money," Broun replied. "The people who deal with transferring money in that bulk look at it as merchandise. They don't think of it as valuable. You were so solicitous of the money, it attracted my attention."

"I was following Customs regulations," Mazur protested, but he took Broun's advice to heart. As C-Chase drew to a climax, Mazur was going to need all the help he could get.

The blown surveillances in Houston and New York had presented another major risk for C-Chase. Mazur was about to need another bit of luck and all of his guile.

Rudy Armbrecht arrived in Miami on August 4 and immediately summoned Mazur to his room at the La Quinta motel at 2:42 A.M. It was a crucial moment; only Mazur's ability to convince Armbrecht that he was running an untainted operation would keep things intact until the big bust.

Armbrecht had remained distant with Mazur. He told the American that he found him to be intelligent and a quick learner, but what he had never needed to say was that it was Kathy Ertz, the American's fiancee, he really liked. A mildly flirtatious relationship had formed between them. Ertz slipped into the role as a means of allaying Armbrecht's suspicions.

Portraying herself as someone who had been taken care of all her life by men, Ertz had told Armbrecht that she wanted a measure of independence. They discussed Armbrecht's idea of importing marble desks together. The C-Chase agents thought that Ertz was fulfilling an important, if not necessarily pleasant, part of an undercover agent's job. However, Customs enforcement chief Bonni Tischler, who had not liked the theatrics of undercover during her days as a street agent, complained that Ertz was flaunting herself.

How much the attentions of an attractive woman did to keep Rudy Armbrecht in the picture was impossible to measure, but any little bit of residual goodwill was vital as Bob Mazur sat in that motel room in Miami with him in the wee hours of August 4.

There was a philosophical streak to Armbrecht. Often he discussed politics and he enjoyed playing chess. This night, however, he wasted little time in getting down to business. His voice was flat. There appeared to be no emotion here. Strictly business. A dangerous business.

His employers in Colombia were very alarmed over recent developments within Mazur's organization. They were reluctant to engage in any further business with the American.

"Little things are adding up," said Armbrecht.

For one thing, the Colombians were more comfortable doing business with their own people, even in the United States, because they had leverage over them. Armbrecht called it "a chain." With Mazur, they had no such leverage. That meant the American could cut a deal with the government if he got squeezed, giving up his associates to save himself.

Mazur allowed that the world was not a big enough place for someone who crossed such friends. Quick to agree, Armbrecht said, "And there, there isn't a hole that's deep enough."

It was not the prospect of losing money that had alarmed his associates in Colombia, the pilot assured the agent. It was that someone outside their control, someone living in the United States, was learning more about their organization than they felt was healthy. Gonzalo Mora, Jr., had talked too much, revealed too much. This made the Colombians paranoid.

"My associates are not worried about losing money because that is no big deal," explained Armbrecht. "It is how much of a knowledge somebody develops of the inside of the mechanism, as to how things work."

There was little doubt about what Armbrecht meant. Mora had made a dangerous mistake in Paris mentioning Gerardo Moncado's name to Mazur and then asking Armbrecht to arrange a meeting between the two men.

Several times in the tense conversation, Armbrecht took pains to reassure Mazur that his honesty was not in doubt. It was just, well, if Mazur got caught, who would he give up? And that was where the recent incidents in Houston and New York came into play. They appeared to the Colombians to be security lapses that put the network at risk. Hence, they were at risk, too, since Mazur knew so much about them.

Mazur tried to assure Armbrecht that his associates were overreacting. When Abreu had confronted Marta in New York, she had claimed there were no problems with the pickup there.

A good sign, said Armbrecht. The Colombians had invested too much time in establishing the relationship with Mazur to break it off completely.

"Not cut it off, but slow it down and cool it off a lot," he said.

Armbrecht said he was trying to be a teacher to Mazur because he liked him and was certain of his personal honesty. Indeed, he had some good news, too.

"I will give you an encouraging notice," he said. "We have started dealing with those guys over there."

"You mean the BCCI branches in Colombia?" asked Mazur.

"On my suggestion, we started to probe and to analyze and to touch and to get a little bit more information of what was happening over there," explained Armbrecht. "And then we opened some accounts. Some big accounts. And that kind of thing. And the people that are working over there are very cooperative. They even offered to give us credits on deposits that we had on the BCCI anywhere in the world. So that was a good thing. Because it makes and gives a positive attitude toward this. And toward this bank."

The two BCCI officers in Miami with whom he worked supervised the operations in South America, said Mazur. He offered to introduce Armbrecht to them. But Mazur had been having some difficulties with BCCI, too-in particular with Akbar Ah Bilgrami, who had always been the suspicious one.

In late July, when the more trusting Awan was in the midst of a six-week business trip and could not protect the agent, Bilgrami had confronted Mazur with an unnerving accusation, and one that may have been Bilgrami's way of camouflaging concerns that were really his own.

According to Bilgrami's story, a colleague had told him that he had reviewed Mazur's accounts and had determined that Mazur was structuring transactions to evade taxes. Bilgrami and the colleague then discussed the transactions in a general way with someone at another bank. The other banker warned the BCCI men that the account holder could be the DEA. The banker cautioned them that the DEA had recently laundered $300 million through three American banks and that each bank had been fined $5 million. Bilgrami said he was nervous. Mazur tried to reassure him by using what had proven to be the most effective technique-discussing his plans to move more money through the bank.

Nonetheless, it was yet another indication that Operation C-Chase was running out of time. By late July, plans had been completed for the wedding of Robert Musella and Kathleen Erickson. It would be on October 9 at the Innisbrook resort outside Tampa. The invitations would be going out soon, but Mazur already had secured promises from Amj ad Awan and Akbar Bilgrami that they would attend. Mazur was pushing for more of his associates to come to the wedding. And he was pushing to involve additional BCCI bankers in the scheme.

Awan had his own troubles, too, and his six-week trip was anything but restful. At Senator Kerry's hearing in February 1988, Jose Blandon had mentioned that General Manuel Noriega had used BCCI to hide his money. One of the general's greatest fears was that the U.S. authorities would use his indictment to seize the millions of dollars he had hidden in bank accounts around the world. The public mention of BCCI had led him to raise with Awan the issue of removing the money from the bank.

When Noriega first brought up the possibility of moving his money, Awan had gone immediately to London and met with Swaleh Naqvi and Dildar Rizvi, the Pakistani who was then head treasurer of BCCI. At the time, Noriega had $23 million sitting in three accounts in one of BCCI's London branches. According to the later indictment of Naqui, Rizvi, and others, the men decided to transfer the $23 million to a single account at BCCI in Luxembourg. Awan tried to reassure Noriega that this added layer of secrecy was sufficient to protect his money.

Awan was already planning his departure from the bank, and he wanted to take his major clients with him. A month earlier, he had talked to Mazur about the financial services firm he hoped to set up with his friend S.Z.A. Akbat. Noriega's imbroglio came at a good time for Awan; according to a later indictment, he would bring the general along with him to Capcom, but not before he laid a paper trail that would confuse anyone who tried to follow it.

Armed with a withdrawal letter from General Noriega dated July 26 and, the government would later claim, acting under the direct authority of Swaleh Naqvi, the acting BCCI president, and Dildar Rizvi, the treasurer, Awan started his shell game. (The date, probably phony, was crucial. It was two days before the U.S. Senate subpoenaed Noriega's BCCI bank records.) Awan transferred nearly $12 million from BCCILuxembourg to an account at the Bank Deutsch Sudamerikanische in Hamburg, Germany. A like amount went to the Union Bank of Switzerland in Zurich. Although Noriega later claimed fervently that these were his personal funds, the accounts were registered in the name of the Banco Nacional de Panama. The use of Panama's central bank helped screen the funds, to hinder any auditors the U.S. government might set on the trail, but several years later it allowed the new government of Panama to lay its own claim to the money. The accounts were soon emptied, however. In early August, Awan met with S.Z.A. Akbar at the London office of Capcom Financial Services. Syed Akbar allegedly offered a list of accounts that could be used to hold Noriega's money. Awan chose one under the name of Finley International. He then flew to Panama to brief Noriega, taking the long way around through Spain, as Naqvi directed, to avoid going through the United States.

In early September, the $23 million from the two accounts merged again, as the funds were transferred to a Banco Nacional de Panama account at the Middle East Bank in London. A week later, the government claimed, Akbar moved the money to the Finley International Ltd. account, still at Middle East Bank. The funds sat there long enough to attract the attention of Capcom's auditor, Arthur Anderson & Co. The auditors started asking who owned the Finley millions, and Capcom wouldn't tell them. Akbar had to get the money away from this unwanted scrutiny. So, in a breathtaking display of the principle that the best place to hide things is in plain sight, Akbar moved the deposit to the last place American authorities would think to look. He allegedly put it in a Capcom account in New York City. There were no fancy code names. The account was labeled MAN 'Thust, the initials of Manual Antonio Noriega. The bold maneuver succeeded brilliantly. Over the next six months, according to the government indictment, more than $20 million filtered out of the New York account, completely undetected by the international effort to freeze Noriega's assets. The authorities still don't know where the money went.

As soon as Noriega's money was in motion, Awan had flown to Washington, where he met with the bank's lawyers who were fighting the Kerry subcommittee's subpoenas for bank records. It was a frustrating and frightening time for Awan, and he brought it up with Bob Mazur when he returned to Miami.

"I don't know if Akbar mentioned it to you," said Awan as he and Mazur sat in Awan's office on August 17. "We're going through a bit of a problem these days. We think there is another investigation going on. I've been with the lawyers for the last couple of days, trying to sort some things out."

"Why are there grumblings?" asked Mazur.

"Senate committee again," replied Awan.

The banker tried to seem unconcerned about the inquiry. And a few minutes later, Bilgrami too downplayed the investigation. "It doesn't concern you," he assured Mazur. The American agreed that it was no doubt a general inquiry involving many banks and nothing to worry about.

However, the bankers and the agent were concerned that the Senate investigation would disrupt their relationship, but for different reasons. Awan and Bilgrami did not want to spook a lucrative customer. Mazur did not want to spook his key targets.

The overtones were more serious the next time the issue arose. Mazur and Awan were having drinks at the Grand Bay Hotel, their favorite haunt in Coconut Grove, on September 9, a Friday.

"Let me tell you what's happened, Bob," said Awan. "Ah, I'm in a bit of a poop right now."

As Mazur sipped his Scotch and water and Awan seemed to gulp his Corona beer, the banker said that he had been back and forth to Washington and London several times in recent weeks.

"What I've learned is not very pleasant," Awan said. "And, ah, I wanted to talk to you personally and tell you about it. What's happened is that we were served with a subpoena last month. The bank was and Mr. Shafi our general manager was. I was supposed to have been served also, but with their normal efficiency they opened the phone book and there's some poor Awan who works for Rockwell International."

The bank's lawyers in Washington, led by Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, had so far refused to turn over the documents sought by the committee. More important to Awan, the investigators had singled him out as General Noriega's banker and were demanding to talk to him. He described himself as the only person in the bank who knew all about Noriega's accounts and business.

"On a personal level, last Friday I was told that our lawyers, Mr. Altman was there, and he suggested to the bank that I should be immediately transferred from the United States to Paris. So, they duly transferred me Friday to Paris," said Awan. (In sworn testimony before the House Banking Committee, Altman said he had advised the transfer for Awan's safety.)

"Ah," said Mazur.

Awan said that the bank had wanted him out of the country by Monday-four days ago. He was determined not to go, and he was angered at the order.

"I was extremely upset at that," he said. "You know, I'd been planning to leave [the bank] anyway, but that was just the last straw. So I came back Friday and Monday night I flew out to Washington and Thesday morning I met with the counsel to the Foreign Relations Committee who is doing all this."

"You mean on the other side?" asked Mazur, who was really starting to worry that his prime target was about to bolt.

"The other side, yeah," replied Awan. "Because I'm not too, too happy on what our attorneys are telling us to do. I think that they're doing a very stupid thing."

The undercover agent was in for another shock, when he asked what the Senate lawyers had said to him. Awan replied: "They said, 'We're going to get this bank. We know that this bank is the biggest money launderer in the world. They're doing this and they're doing that.' And I said, 'No, that's not the truth. You know, I've been in Panama. I know exactly what's happened. That's not true.' They said, 'Well, we have a lot of information. So it'll all come out in the hearing.' Ah, they do not have any information. That I know. They may have some circumstantial evidence, which is not going to stand up either. But it seems that there is a distinct disdain against BCC."

Mazur said that he thought the bank's backers in Washington had neutralized the Senate probe.

"Well, our attorneys are, they're heavyweights," said Awan. "I mean, Clark Clifford is sort of the godfather of the Democratic Party. . . . He's been in the White House since the time of Truman. He was Truman's legal counsel. He's like eighty years old, but he's all there. That's a very heavyweight firm."

Awan had his own dark suspicions about what was occurring. He thought that Clifford and Altman might be maneuvering to remove BCCI from ownership of First American Bankshares, the Washington holding company.

"We own a bank based in Washington," he said. "It's called First American Bank. The holding company is in Washington and there are five banks actually. First American of New York, First American of Washington, D.C., First American of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, and Georgia. There's six banks. Six large banks. Bought out by BCCI about eight years ago. . . . And BCCI was acting as adviser to them. But truth of the matter is that the bank belongs to BCCI. Those guys are just nominee shareholders.

"Clark Clifford and his law partner Bob Altman are the chairman and capital holders. I personally feel it would suit them if BCCI withdrew."

Awan added that Altman was very ambitious. "He has political aspirations," Awan said, "apart from being married to Wonder Woman." (Awan referred to Altman's wife, actress Lynda Carter, who had played the character in a television series years before.)

"I wouldn't at all be surprised if, you know, if they're totally screwing BCCI to take over this bank," said Awan, who was angrier than Mazur had ever seen him. Awan said he had cleaned out his files at the bank.

"If it doesn't work out," asked Mazur anxiously, "where would you go? Back to Pakistan or where?"

"It doesn't suit me to do that, Bob," said Awan. "I mean, they really don't have anything on me, and I, I feel I haven't really done anything wrong."

Awan's stubborn side was thoroughly aroused. ("He's a Pathan," Abdur Sakhia, his supervisor, later explained. "They're very stubborn, like your Scots.")

"I'm going to ride it out," Awan went on.

As the waiter brought them another round, Awan's thoughts took a morbid turn.

"I don't fancy going to Panama and spending the rest of my days there," he said, "however long it may be. I don't know how long."

"That would be the last place I'd think I'd want to go, if I were you," said Mazur.

"No, it's a great place," said Awan. "But I mean my protection would be this man. And when he's gone, I'm gone too. And what sort of protection would that be, anyway. I mean, he knows that I know everything. So he might well decide . . ." Awan let the thought trail off.

"He might not want you around," prompted Mazur. "Do you think he would get that rough?"

"Who knows?" replied Awan, who was still in the middle of hiding Noriega's $23 million. "It's a question of money. And I know exactly where he has what."

Awan suggested that Mazur close his accounts at BCCI in the event the bank was forced to turn over information. In the meantime, he promised that Mazur would get maximum protection from any investigation. The agent thanked him politely, and cheered him up by turning the talk to his approaching wedding.

Gifted with hindsight, some in Congress and the press would say that Mazur's supervisors should have relayed the information about BCCI's secret holdings in First American to top-level banking regulators in Washington.

This was the third time the BCCI-First American connection surfaced in one of Awan's conversations with Mazur, and it was far more explicit, but the revelation came at a critical time in Operation C-Chase. The agents were moving at a frantic pace to keep the investigation from coming unglued before they could nab the bad guys. Nonetheless, Mazur took the time to write several memos to his supervisors suggesting that the connections to Clifford and Altman should be examined, but nothing happened.

"As managing supervisor, it just wasn't something that I wanted to pursue," said Bonni Tischler later. "There was nothing there for us to pursue. Our case was complicated enough in trying to sink the bank."

Gregory Kehoe, who became first assistant U.S. attorney in Tampa after the bust, was blunter: "We had to get the guys in our gunsights first."

Indeed, before the investigation was closed down at the wedding in October, Mazur wanted to net another banker or two. And he wanted to make sure that Awan did not flee to some foreign country where he could not be extradited. Even with Awan's worries about Noriega, the possibility that the banker might run to Panama was a substantial threat, given the state of relations between Noriega and the United States government at the time.

One of the other BCCI bankers on the target list was Saad Shafi, the Pakistani who was the country manager in Nassau. Mazur had had a brief telephone discussion with Shafi about moving funds through two corporate shells Mazur had bought in the Bahamas. On August 25, 1988, he and Kathy Ertz took the short flight from Miami to Nassau and the next afternoon they met with Shafi at the bank's offices in the bustling downtown, where tourism and offshore banking were the biggest industries.

Saad Shafi explained that he and Awan were old friends. They had worked together at the Bank of Montreal until Shafi left in 1976 to take a job with BCCI. Awan followed two years later. He said that the Nassau branch had opened in 1986. For two years before that, however, it had been a phantom branch. It was run by a lawyer in Nassau and the books were kept in the Miami office.

Now, however, Shafi was getting good business for the Nassau branch and he was anxious to work out an arrangement with Mazur. He had made a reservation for dinner at the Cafe Martinique, one of the city's best restaurants. It would be, he told Mazur and Ertz, at the bank's expense. They agreed to meet forty-five minutes before dinner to discuss business at Mazur's hotel, the Britannia Towers on Paradise Island.

The pitch was rote by now, down to the comparison to Lee lacocca. When Shafi arrived in his room, it was almost like turning on a tape recorder. Describing his web of front companies and cash pickups, his need for security and professionalism, Mazur said: "Lee lacocca sells cars in the United States. My clients, for their own reasons, sell cocaine in the United States and what they do is their business. What I do is my business and I'm a wall between them."

"Sure, sure," replied Shafi, who seemed nervous at the mention of drugs and tried to steer the conversation in other directions.

For instance, the banker praised Bahamian Prime Minister Lynden Pindling for resisting U.S. efforts to break down the bank secrecy laws that had turned the island into an offshore tax and banking haven.

Shafi suggested that Mazur gradually increase the volume of money he moved through the Bahamas to avoid attracting attention. But he also said that big deposits in December would make Shafi look good at the end of the bank's business year.

The discussion closed with plans to wire $382,000 to Mazur's account at BCCI-Nassau from Credit Suisse bank in Zurich.

The coke bust in Detroit, the blown surveillances in Houston and New York, Armbrecht's suspicions, and the drying up of the drug cash-all had contributed to the decision to close down Operation C-Chase.

It was a decision that seemed prescient on August 30. Wiretaps placed on the telephones of Roberto Baez Alcaino had revealed that a shipment of cocaine was bound for Philadelphia from Argentina. The conversations indicated that it was a major shipment, possibly several tons, hidden in a shipment of canned anchovies.

There was never a question about what would happen once it arrived. Customs agents would board the ship and seize the cocaine. This was a record haul. No chance of this one slipping through, C-Chase or not.

When the freighter Colombus Olivious arrived in port on August 30, Customs agents swarmed over it. A containerized shipment of anchovies was hauled off the ship and taken to the U.S. Customs House at the port. There agents began to search through the 1,000 cartons of anchovies. And they found anchovies.

Then a sharp-eyed agent noticed that some cartons were heavier than others. The cans inside the heavy cartons contained cocaine. Additional inspection revealed that each cocaine carton had a pin-sized hole punched just above the importer's trademark. By the time they finished scrutinizing every carton and the remainder of the ship, it was September 7. The Customs agents had discovered more than twelve tons of cocaine, with a wholesale value of nearly $30 million.

Customs officials kept the bust secret for another week. Then, on September 15, an indictment was returned against Alcaino. At a press conference in Philadelphia, Customs and DEA officials said that Alcaino appeared to be a high-level narcotics dealer.

Suddenly the clock was ticking faster. The undercover agents needed to nail down the last of the targets and keep their fingers crossed until October 9, the date set for the phony wedding.

One of the eleventh-hour targets was Syed Ziauddin Ah Akbar, the former BCCI treasury head who had formed Capcom. At the suggestion of Awan and Bugrami, an account had been opened by Mazur with Akbar's trading firm. Mazur and Erickson flew to London and met with him on September 19, 1988.

The trip began with an embarrassment. Mazur had been traveling for more than two years on a passport that listed him as Robert Musella as part of the total security that he tried to maintain while undercover.

However, this time something in the passport raised an alarm when he arrived at Heathrow Airport. The FBI had forged a visa using an outmoded stamper. British immigration took Mazur into custody and hustled him off to an interrogation room. Mazur maintained his cover, protesting that he was an innocent businessman while the British authorities wondered if they had nabbed a drug trafficker or even a terrorist. They searched Mazur down to his underwear and took him into London, where he was jailed. He took the risk of telephoning his U.S. Customs Service contact in London for help. The next day, Mazur's jailers received unexplained orders to release their mysterious catch. Mazur, unflappable, had spent the night playing charades with his cellmate, an Australian aborigine.

Mazur and the C-Chase agents knew little about Syed Akbar. An interesting character who looked far younger than his mid-forties, he had left BCCI in 1986 after the dispute with the London management over massive losses in the bank's trading portfolio. When he left, he took with him computer disks containing thousands of pages of internal documents that described what was essentially a bank within the bank. The material described how BCCI had used cash from deposits worldwide to cover up holes in its balance sheet created by trading losses as well as by suspicious and just plain lousy loans. Accountants would later claim that some of the customer deposits had gone to conceal nearly $1 billion in losses that the bank had sustained while Akbar was head of its trading unit. Nonetheless, he remained on friendly terms with BCCI, and only the month before he had helped the bank by taking $23 million in Noriega's money.

Mazur and the Customs Service were unaware of his potential importance to their investigation. When he picked up the two undercover agents at the Dorchester Hotel in London for dinner, they figured he was just another medium-sized fish, a friend of Awan and Bilgrami.

Over dinner and in meetings over the following two days, Akbar described his trading operation and the ways that Mazur could launder cash through his account with Capcom. When Mazur launched into his Lee lacocca speech, the financial trader was skittish. He did not want to hear about the source of cash.

"We are not the need to know," he stammered in poor English. As soon as Mazur left, Akbar telephoned Akbar Bilgrami in Miami and complained about the American's bluntness.

Mazur didn't know it, but he was becoming notorious throughout BCCI. During his visit, a somewhat naive senior bank officer called an assistant manager in the Panama branch to warn that Mazur was moving drug money. His account should be closed, the senior officer said. "If you do that," replied the local manager, "BCCI might as well shut down the entire Panama branch."

Again Mazur had pressed Awan to set up a meeting with Naqvi. Again the agent had been frustrated in his attempts to move higher into the bank. And time was running out.

From London, Mazur and Erickson hopped across the English Channel to visit with Nazir Chinoy, Ian Howard, and Sibte Hassan. Most of this trip was social, including a cocktail party at Chinoy's apartment on Thursday, September 22.

There were a hundred people at the party in the elegant apartment on the Right Bank. Among them were BCCI officers, businessmen, and diplomats. During the party, Chinoy informed the BCCI contingent that he had just been told that Amjad Awan would soon be joining the Paris office.

The bankers in Paris were pleased to see their American friend. Chinoy told him that arrangements had been made to handle $20 million a month for him through BCCI-Paris and the other branches in France.

Mazur said that he and Ertz were being married in two weeks and he invited all three bankers to attend the wedding. Howard and Hassan accepted eagerly, but Chinoy was uncertain about whether he would be able to attend.

It turned out that he couldn't. Around October 3, Naqvi himself vetoed the trip. BCCI general managers, he said, should not become too visible with these types of accounts.

The trip's only sour note came on September 23. Sibte Hassan showed Mazur new documents for the Nicesea Shipping account that had been opened back in May. On Rudy Armbrecht's instruction, Mazur had been removed as a signatory on the account and it had been transferred to a BCCI branch in Colombia.

The change shocked Mazur. Armbrecht had been drifting away. There had been no more pickups of drug money from Don Chepe's distributors, but Mazur had not been prepared for being secretly cut out of the Nicesea account. Now, he thought, they would be lucky to get Rudy to the wedding.

In Washington, Customs Commissioner William von Raab was eager to bring down his agency's longest-running undercover operation. The timing looked perfect to him.

Von Raab had been Customs boss throughout the eight years Ronald Reagan was president, but with a new administration coming into office, advancement of women in federal law enforcement, had taken Kathy Ertz under her wing when the younger woman was brought into the operation. She had even encouraged her to transfer to Tampa from Miami. But Ertz's flirting with Rudy Armbrecht, vital as it had seemed in keeping the Colombian's suspicions at bay, had grated on Tischler's tough-talking persona. In the same way, Tischler had been irritated by the submissive role that Ertz assumed with the Pakistani bankers, though that was clearly what the Muslim culture dictated for women. By this time, the two women were barely speaking.

For his part, Mazur was having problems with both women. Ertz played her role as his girlfriend too enthusiastically. It was a joke on her part, but one that Mazur did not find amusing, particularly given the inevitable strains on his marriage created by the months of minimal contact with his wife. As for Tischler, Mazur viewed her as too political, someone who had pushed from the start to close down the investigation. By this point, Tischler regarded Mazur with a high degree of skepticism, too. Her view, forged during her brief stint undercover in Operation Greenback years earlier, was that undercover agents had to be kept on a tight leash by supervisors who had a broader view of the case. On top of that, she simply thought Bob Mazur had become a prima donna. C-Chase was shutting down none too soon, as far as Tischler was concerned.

Amjad Awan stepped onto the thick beige carpet of the suite's living room. In front of him were sliding glass doors leading to a porch that overlooked a winding path bordered by lush hibiscus, azaleas, and oleanders. Towering above were cypresses and pines.

It was almost five o'clock on the afternoon of October 8, 1988, another sunny Saturday in Florida. The Awans had arrived at Tampa International Airport an hour earlier, after a short flight up from Miami. They had been met by a limousine for the thirty-five minute drive to the Innisbrook Resort, a thousand acres of golf courses, swimming pools, and luxurious suites northwest of Tampa. Now Awan and his wife Sheereen needed to hurry. Checking into their suite, they found an invitation waiting: Please join the other guests beside the swimming pool for a cocktail party to kick off a weekend of festivities surrounding Sunday's wedding of Bob Musella and Kathy Erickson.

At the pool, the trim Pakistani banker eyed the crowd of guests. A few faces were familiar, colleagues from various branches of BCCI. There was Akbar Bilgrami, his partner in Miami who had come up with his wife on an earlier flight. Syed Hussain, round-faced and friendly, had flown up from Panama. Sibte Hassan had come all the way from Paris. So had Ian Keith Howard. The bankers exchanged greetings.

Slowly, Awan met some of the other guests. They seemed to fall into two distinct categories, both a world apart from the realm of international banking where Awan and his colleagues dwelled. Some of them were conversing loudly in Spanish. Among them was a man Awan vaguely remembered. It was Gonzalo Mora, Jr., who had barged into his office months before to see Mazur. In the other group were hale and hearty Americans, who kept insisting that Awan's plastic glass always be brimming with Scotch. One of them, who said his name was Mike Miller, seemed particularly keen on befriending Awan. On balance, the Latinos and the Americans seemed to be men of action, rather than of finance.

Amj ad Awan was looking for some relief this weekend. Pressure was still coming from the bank to leave the country, and he was resisting. At the same time, he had provided a sworn statement to Senator Kerry's investigators and he feared that General Noriega might order him killed if he learned of the betrayal. His best shot, Awan believed, was remaining in the United States and hoping that the investigation would blow over.

As the party around the pool progressed, word began to circulate that there was going to be a bachelor party at a restaurant in Tampa. It was the Americans who murmured tantalizing suggestions about the blowout. Men only, of course.

The sun was beginning to drop by the time a line of black Cadillac and Lincoln limousines pulled up the drive at Innisbrook to pick up the would-be revelers. It was shortly after seven o'clock. As he crawled into a limo, Gonzalo Mora, Jr., joked in Spanish to Emir Abreu.

"We're going to get fucked tonight," laughed Mora.

"You better believe it," replied Abreu.

Awan was less eager, but he had been assured by Mike Miller that they would be back in time for a late dinner with their wives. As Awan and Akbar Bilgrami started to get into the same car, Miller stepped between them and said there was another car assigned to Bilgrami. Miller then crawled in with Awan.

As the limousine started to pull away, Miller asked the driver to stop outside one of the clusters of rooms. Apologizing to Awan, he said that he had to get the gag gift he had left in his room. Miller ran back to his suite and grabbed a gift-wrapped box. Inside were a gun, badge, and handcuffs. They belonged to Bob Mazur. Taped to the box and sealed in an envelope was a card. On it, Miller had scrawled, "The jig is up!"

The party was planned for MacBeth's, a restaurant on top of the NCNB Tower in downtown Tampa. The first seven stories of the building were a parking garage. As the limousines drove onto the second floor of the garage, a man was waiting with a smile and a clipboard. The cars would pull up, a few minutes apart, and he would stick his head inside each one.

"This is the Musella party?" he would ask, scanning the faces of the passengers and asking for their names.

Checking the names off his list, the attendant would open the door and ask the guests to take the elevator to the seventh floor. There, he said, they would switch to another bank of elevators and go to the top floor for the party.

It was a party they never attended. When the elevator doors glided open on the seventh floor, the guests were greeted by a bevy of mostly middle-aged men wearing dark blue Windbreakers. On the back of the jackets, in white capital letters, were the words CUSTOMS, DEA, IRS, and FBI.

"Welcome to Tampa. You are under arrest," the federal agents told the stunned arrivals as they snapped handcuffs around their wrists and read them their Miranda rights. The limousines had been driven up to the seventh floor and the men were put back in the same cars and whisked a few blocks away to the Federal Building on Zack Street. There, they were photographed, fingerprinted, and interrogated.

The reactions to the arrests were as varied as the men. Akbar Bilgrami shook his head and thought to himself that he had seen signs that the cops might be after Mazur. He protested to the arresting agents, saying he had never done anything illegal. He claimed that Mazur must have done something, but he said he had no idea what it could have been.

Sibte Hassan had been to a fabulously ribald bachelor's party in Paris not long before where prostitutes dressed as police had handcuffed the guests and stripped them as part of the fun. His initial thought was that this was a replay of that elaborate hoax, particularly when he spotted a petite, blond woman among the crowd of men with guns.

"All right, let's party," shouted the handcuffed Hassan.

It took the agents several minutes to persuade the banker that this was not a repeat of Paris and that the blond woman was the chief enforcement officer for Customs in Tampa, Bonni Tischler.

Amjad Awan was shocked when he saw the armed men. "Don't do anything stupid like trying to run," Mike Miller ordered as he pulled Awan's hands behind him and put on the cuffs. Slightly tipsy from the Scotch and the shock, Awan was taken to an office inside the Federal Building where he signed a statement acknowledging that he had been read his rights and waived them. Then he was allowed to read the indictment against him and his colleagues, which had been returned secretly by a federal grand jury in Tampa a few days before.

Scanning the document, Awan realized that he had not been close to the truth about Mazur. Awan had thought that Mazur was a money launderer posing as a legitimate businessman, but inside that secret was another secret: Mazur was a federal agent posing as a money launderer pretending to be a businessman.

In another room, Operation C-Chase had set up a command center to orchestrate the climax of the largest and most successful undercover investigation ever conducted by the Customs Service.

As the Tampa suspects were booked and jailed, orders went out around the world to grab those who had skipped the wedding or had not been invited. Nazir Chinoy was arrested in London, where he was attending a BCCI board meeting. Also arrested in London were Syed Akbar of Capcom and Asif Baakza, one of the bank's mid-level officers there. Rudolf Armbrecht was arrested in Miami; he had decided to skip the wedding, but not the country. Simultaneously, authorities in the United States and Europe executed search warrants and began to scour the offices of the Bank of Credit and Commerce for documents about the worldwide money-laundering scheme.

The wedding ruse did not give the Americans the corner on ingenuity. In Paris, an inspector with French customs had wanted to get an advance layout of the bank's office on the Champs Elysees, so that his men would know where to search for documents before they could be destroyed by employees. So, on October 4, he had gone to the office and told a security guard that there had been a bomb threat. A floor plan of the office was necessary, he explained, so that police could search for the bomb. When the inspector returned a few days later with the search warrant, the guard recognized him.

"Another bomb threat?" asked the guard.

"Not this time," said the inspector. With a theatrical flourish, he added, "I am zee bomb."

A real bomb turned up a short time later in connection with C-Chase, but it was a continent away from the Champs Elys6es.

IRS agent David Burns had drawn the assignment of searching BCCI's offices in Miami on October 8. He drew up a forty-four-page summary of the evidence in the investigation and used it to obtain a search warrant from a federal judge in Tampa. After the arrests in downtown Tampa, Burns led a team of agents who gathered boxes of documents from the offices in Miami. (When they arrived at 6:30 A.M. on Sunday, they were astonished to find a local television camera crew staking out the building.) After several days of searching, Burns loaded the cardboard boxes on a U-Haul truck and returned to Tampa. The IRS investigations division was located several floors below Customs Enforcement in the North Lois Avenue office building. Burns had arranged for new office space for the documents, but no one had remembered to put locks on the door. Burns and his supervisor, George Scott, decided to stay in the room and guard their haul until the locks were installed.

They were sitting there a few days after the arrests when someone decided to strike back at C-Chase. On October 13, the Customs office received an anonymous call saying a bomb had been planted in the building. A quick search found a device in the stairwell between the sixth and seventh floors. It looked like a professionally made bomb but the explosive charge had been left out. The building was evacuated and a bomb squad was called to remove the device. No one thought to notify the IRS agents guarding the documents. Burns and a fellow agent did not learn about the danger until Burns left the room to get some coffee.

A few days later there was a threat against Bonni Tischler. Intelligence agents had picked up on the street that someone had put a contract out on her. Tischler maintained that she was unconcerned by the threat, but she was nonetheless saddled with what she dubbed "Bonni-guards" for six weeks.

The indictments behind the bachelor party bust had been returned on October 4, 1988, by a federal grand jury in Tampa under the direction of Mark Jackowski. They had remained sealed until the arrests occurred to avoid tipping off any of the targets.

Awan was the first defendant named in the main indictment. He was one of eleven BCCI employees named. The others were, in the order they appeared, Syed Aftab Hussain, Akbar A. Bilgrami, Nazir Chinoy, Sibte Hassan, Ian Howard, Saad Shafi, Iqbal Ashraf, and two employees in the bank's Panama offices, Surjeet Singh and Haroon Qazi, who were charged with assisting in money laundering there. Rudolf Armbrecht and Gonzalo Mora, Jr., also were charged in the main indictment, as was Syed Z. A. Akbar of Capcom Financial Services.

The corporate defendants were the parent BCCI Holdings in Luxembourg, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in Luxembourg, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in the Cayman Islands, the Banco de Credito y Comercio de Colombia in Bogota, and Akbar's Capcom Financial Services.

The bank and its employees were among the first defendants charged under the 1986 money-laundering act that made it a crime to transfer money known to have been derived from illegal activities. Since BCCI had not accepted cash from the drug pickups and the bankers never saw any drugs, it is highly unlikely that they would have been accused of violating the law under the old statutes.

In all, there had been 102 bank deposits of drug cash over a two-year period. They totaled $33,033,103. Of that total, $19,294,822 had been laundered by transfers through various branches of BCCI, from Panama to Geneva, Paris to London and Nassau.

A second Tampa indictment focused on the drug traffickers. Charged in it were Mora, Jr., his father, his brother Jimmy, Armbrecht, Javier Ospina, Santiago Uribe, and seven others. Among the others was a defendant identified as "John Doe, also known as Don Chepe." The agents were fairly certain that Don Chepe was Gerardo Moncado, but since the chances of extraditing him from Colombia were slim, they decided not to take the chance they were wrong.

Indictments also were handed down in Detroit, Houston, and New York. Those charges involved the money couriers and other people related to the drops. They brought the total number of individual defendants in Operation C-Chase to eighty-four.

In Washington, D.C., Customs Commissioner William von Raab had kept in touch with Bonni Tischler in the days leading up to the bust. Widely regarded as one of the premier publicity seekers in a town where few were shy about the press, he wanted maximum exposure on this case. He planned a nationally televised press conference to announce the charges.

As the weekend of the takedown approached, Von Raab had grown slightly anxious about the types of questions that might come up at the press conference concerning the bank, so he telephoned the CIA to see what they could tell him about the organization. Eventually he got connected with Robert Gates, the deputy director. What did Gates know about BCCI?

"Oh," replied the man who would one day be chosen by President George Bush to head the CIA, "you mean the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International."

Gates sent over the brief classified report that the agency had prepared on the bank in September 1986. The report described BCCI's role in money-laundering operations and said: "Many of BCCI's illicit banking activities, particularly those related to narco-finance in the Western Hemisphere, are believed to be concentrated in the Cayman Islands facility." It also confirmed and elaborated on what Amjad Awan had said in the C-Chase tapes: "In late 1981, BCCI made an unsuccessful attempt to acquire or gain control of Financial General Bankshares, a Washington, D.C.-based multi-state bank holding company; BCCI achieved its goal half a year later, although the exact nature of its control is not clear."

According to the distribution list on the report, it had been routed soon after it was written to the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department, the State Department, and several intelligence agencies within the U.S. government. But somehow it apparently had not gotten to the Federal Reserve, the independent agency that regulates banking companies.

 From Von Raab's viewpoint, the CIA report merely confirmed his conviction that this was a dirty bank.

On Thesday, October 11, Von Raab made the evening news with the announcement that eighty-four people and one of the world's largest private banks had been indicted on drug conspiracy and money-laundering charges. Curiously, at the press conference no mention was made of General Manuel Noriega, probably the most notorious drug criminal in the world in the eyes of the American public at the time, no mention that BCCI had handled millions of dollars for the dictator, or that the sting had snared Noriega's personal banker. That would have been even bigger news.

Later, Von Raab would explain that he did not want to take away from the hard work and long hours of his Customs agents by muddying the water with Noriega's name. He denied it when asked if he had wanted to avoid mentioning Noriega because of the potential embarrassment to George Bush.