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Fahd bin Abdul Aziz
Sultan Bin Abdul Aziz
Naef Bin Abdul Aziz
Salman Bin Abdul Aziz
Ahmad Bin Abdul Aziz
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CHAPTER 15
-
- The BCCI connection spawned new friends and great
expectations in all directions. Amjad Awan and his associates at the
bank were shoveling money into the bank's deposit system, which made
them popular with their superiors. Don Chepe and his gang of
traffickers were pleased with the smooth efficiency and apparent
security of the operation, so they were funneling more cash into it.
And Mazur and the other federal agents were fairly licking their lips
over the prospects of uncovering dirty bankers in every corner of
BCCI's worldwide operations.
-
- By February 1988, about a year and a half after C-Chase
started by laundering $16,000 for the Moras, here is what a typical
transaction looked like:
-
- On February 8, Emir Abreu picked up $803,890 in cash in
Detroit from two of Don Chepe's gofers. The money was counted by
government agents and deposited in an account at the National Bank of
Detroit. From there, it was wired to Mazur's account at Florida
National Bank. The following day, Abreu was in Houston, where he
picked up $490,110 of Don Chepe's money from another man. The agent
took this money back to Tampa and it was deposited in the Florida
National account on February 10.
-
- These two deposits were combined and, after subtracting
Mazur's commission, a total of $1.26 million was transferred from
Florida National through First American Bank in New York to Banque de
Commerce et de Placements in Geneva, where it was placed in a
ninety-day CD on February 12. Eleven days later, $1.2 million, minus
the bank's fee, was wire-transferred from BCP-Geneva to the Lamont
Maxwell account at BCCI in Panama as a loan credit. The same amount
was then moved into the IDC International account at BCCI on February
23.
-
- The funds were then disbursed through IDC checks that Mora
provided to the representatives of the drug suppliers. For instance,
one of them cashed a check for $23,918, another cashed a check for
$500,000, and a third cashed one for $400,000.
-
- A week later, the whole business started over. This time it
involved $725,749 in drug money.
-
- With each transaction, Mazur would telephone Aftab Hussain
and, speaking in code, let him know that a "shipment" was
coming. He would then provide an invoice number that would correspond
to the amount of cash being transferred.
-
- Mazur also was spending a good deal of time at the BCCI
offices in Miami, working to insinuate himself deeper into the
confidence of Awan and Bilgrami and searching for new avenues of
pursuit. He was getting along fine with Awan, but the relationship
with Bilgrami was more difficult. The younger banker seemed to want to
keep his distance from the American businessman. There was nothing
rude or even impolite about his manner, but Mazur sensed that Bilgrami
harbored some doubts about him.
-
- In February, Awan spent two weeks traveling on business to
Europe and elsewhere in the United States, so Mazur spent more time
alone with Bilgrami. Mazur still had not told Bilgrami that the money
he was moving through the bank was derived from drugs. Without doubt,
Mazur thought, Awan and Hussain had informed him, but that would not
stand up in court. So one day near the middle of the month, Mazur and
Bilgrami sat in the BCCI office discussing Mazur's recent transfer of
funds through BCP-Geneva and Mazur steered the conversation to their
business relationship. First, he tried to reassure Bilgrami.
-
- "The most important thing to me, um, the two most
important things that I would never do anything to jeopardize,"
he said. "One is my client's funds and two is those precious
friends who are involved in helping me with those things."
-
- Next was to come a discourse on the need for that
confidentiality. No doubt it would have been along the lines of the
disclosure to Awan earlier. Mazur seemed to follow scripts for certain
situations, with phrases recurring often. But Bilgrami did not appear
to be receptive to any further disclosures at this point. Mazur sensed
this was not the time to bring up the drug connection, so he decided
to wait before drawing Akbar Bilgrami fully into his trap. The Bank of
Credit and Commerce International was one of several banks mentioned
in newspaper stories that month about the Noriega indictment. Among
the others were Bank of America, Citibank, and Chase Manhattan.
-
- All apparently had been used in one fashion or another to
move some of Noriega's funds around the world. No undue attention was
focused on BCCI and there was no indication of illegality on the part
of any of the banks.
-
- Nonetheless, BCCI executives had raised the issue with Awan
when he was at the bank's headquarters in London. He had assured them
that there was nothing to worry about. He joked that they should be
happy to have been named along with the major American banks. It was a
serious matter, however, as Awan learned when some of the questions
directed at him came from Agha Hasan Abedi, the founder of BCCI.
-
- When Awan returned to the United States, he stopped in New
York and gave officials there a complete rundown on the bank's
transactions with Noriega. At the time, questions also were asked
about the size of the loans to Bob Mazur. Since BCCI did very little
commercial lending for banks of its size, no branch was permitted to
lend more than $3 million to a single customer without approval from
the managing board in London. This was true whether or not the loans
were collateralized with cash.
-
- Upon his return to Miami, Awan described some of these
concerns to Mazur in a meeting on February 24. He said that he and
Bugrami had discussed them, too. The unusual attention stemming from
the unstable situation in Panama and concerns at headquarters, they
had decided, might necessitate a change in the way business was being
done with Mazur.
-
- "As far as we're concerned, this is a legitimate
transaction," he said to Mazur. "And we should carry on this
way. But we thought, or at least Mr. Bilgrami thought, that we might
slow down for the next couple of months. Let the dust die down a
little bit."
-
- Was Bilgrami getting cold feet? Mazur told Awan that he had
tried to explain to Bilgrami that handling his clients' funds
responsibly and the assistance of trusted friends were his top
priorities. "Both of those are the most precious things that I
deal with," he said. "I understand that," said Awan.
"This is, you know, the banking business is based solely on trust
and confidence. If that isn't there, what else is in it for the bank
to offer the customer?"
-
- If the situation worsened in Panama, Awan said he foresaw the
possibility that he or another BCCI executive might wind up being
hauled before Congress or a grand jury to explain the bank's
operations in the Latin American country. In fact, Awan disclosed, the
bank had recently been served with an unrelated subpoena issued by a
federal grand jury in Washington investigating the Iran-Contra arms
smuggling scandal.
-
- The subpoena demanded bank records involving the transfer of
$10 million made by Adnan Khashoggi through his account at BCCI in
Monte Carlo. Once described as the wealthiest man in the world,
Khashoggi had made a fortune brokering arms deals and other
transactions for Westerners in the Arab world. Along the way, he had
worked closely and become friends with Kamal Adham, the fellow Saudi
Arabian who was one of BCC I's largest stockholders and founder of the
Saudi intelligence service. The BCCI transaction under scrutiny by the
grand jury involved a murky deal between Khashoggi and Manucher
Ghorbanifar, who served as the Iranian middleman when the Reagan
administration was trying to trade arms for hostages.
-
- Awan explained that a portion of the transaction, about
$100,000, had passed through the BCCI office in New York and that was
the subject of the subpoena, but he downplayed the problem and said
that Khashoggi was someone the bank had tried to avoid because of his
notoriety. (Eventually, Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor
investigating the Iran-Contra affair, said that BCCI had done nothing
illegal in that scandal.)
-
- Notoriety in Panama was to be avoided, too. Perhaps,
suggested Awan, the solution was to find an alternative route for
Mazur's funds. He said that the European Economic Community and some
other nations were negotiating a treaty that would require the
disclosure of bank data to law enforcement and regulatory authorities.
Switzerland and Britain were among those Awan expected to sign the
eventual agreement.
-
- However, he said neither Luxembourg nor France was expected
to participate.
-
- Mazur said that he was planning a trip to Europe on other
business at the end of March and might check out some new countries.
He mentioned that one of his lawyers had suggested opening accounts in
Liechtenstein or Andorra, two tiny duchies famous as secrecy havens.
-
- Awan said that he would not recommend either of those places,
and he said that he and the bank had no contacts in either country.
- "For the moment what we feel is that, you know, the good
places to do business from our concern are France and
Luxembourg," said Awan, offering to provide Mazur with a list of
BCCI contacts for his upcoming trip to Europe.
-
- Shifting funds from one country to another had been standard
policy within BCCI almost from its inception. The practice fell under
Agha Hasan Abedi's concept of EMP, or external market program. Often,
these transfers involved flight capital from depositors anxious to
avoid an unstable economy, but political conditions also played a role
in EMP.
-
- When the U.S. Department of Justice and the DEA disclosed
Operation Pisces in May 1987, BCCI had been one of eighteen banks in
Panama ordered to freeze certain accounts. In a meeting of the Panama
operation's marketing committee the week after the announcement, bank
officials expressed fears over what they termed "a mini deposit
run" as frightened customers pulled cash out of BCCI and other
Panamanian banks.
- The strategy adopted by the bank to retain the deposits was a
perfect implementation of Abedi's EMP plan, which utilized BCCI's
worldwide branches to move and conceal money. Customers were persuaded
to shift their funds to other BCCI branches in countries where bank
secrecy was still certain. The countries suggested by the bankers were
Luxembourg and France. Within a matter of months, millions of dollars
in deposits had been moved from Panama to those two countries. By the
start of 1988, the Panama branches had opened 116 accounts at foreign
BCCI branches compared with sixteen before Operation Pisces.
-
- So shifting funds out of Panama, as suggested by Awan, was a
common practice within the bank in response to concerns over security
and stability there. It also offered Mazur a grand opportunity. Taking
advantage of Awan's proposal, he could work himself deeper into the
BCCI organization. France and Luxembourg would wind up being just
fine.
-
- Mazur was not the only undercover agent trying to move money
out of Panama in the aftermath of the Noriega indictment. Drug
Enforcement Administration agents engaged in a similar long-running
investigation out of Atlanta were probing their targets for corrupt
banks in other countries.
- The exodus of money had been precipitated by a freeze on
assets in Panamanian banks the previous March. After Noriega's
indictment, his political opponents fought to have his government
declared illegal. Exiles in the United States persuaded a federal
judge to order a freeze on Panama's assets in the United States. It
effectively blocked American banks from serving as clearinghouses for
financial transactions involving Panama. In response, Noriega had been
forced to close Panama's banks on March 3 and freeze all transfers of
foreign funds.
-
- Later in March, Noriega survived an attempted coup d'6tat by
some of his own officers. The coup attempt followed widespread street
demonstrations and a series of general strikes by workers that started
when the banks were closed.
-
- Among the funds frozen in early March was $725,000 in drug
money that Mazur had transferred to his IDC International account at
BCCI. Since then, Awan and Aftab Hussain had been trying desperately
to get Mazur's funds freed for him. Countless sums of drug money were
sitting in Panama's banks under the same circumstances. Colombia's
drug kingpins now felt it was a necessity to find alternate routes for
their money.
-
- The DEA agents were trying to find new routes, too. And they
were getting some advice from Eduardo Martinez-Romero, a drug
financier in Medellin who was one of the ringleaders of a Colombian
money-laundering operation that handled more than $1 billion.
-
- At a series of meetings with an undercover DEA agent in early
March 1988 on the West Indian island of Aruba, Martinez suggested that
the agent try to open an account with a bank that had operations in
Uruguay as an alternative to Panama. He said it could be done without
even going to Uruguay. By way of example, Martinez said that he had
once opened an account at the Bank of Credit and Commerce
International in Panama City simply by going to the bank's office in
Miami.
-
- The same investigation had earlier uncovered evidence that
another major Colombian money launderer, Juan Francisco Perez-Piedrahita,
had an account at BCCI in Panama. The account number was M/L187-a
special manager's ledger account.
-
- Martinez and Perez popped up in a DEA investigation known as
Operation Polarcap. It was destined to uncover one of the largest
money-laundering operations in history, a ring that relied on jewelry
stores in New York and Los Angeles as fronts for cleaning $1.2 billion
in just eighteen months. The system for moving money out of the United
States was so successful that its participants dubbed it "La
Mina," the gold mine.
-
- One of the drug suppliers who used La Mina to move his cash
was Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez-Gacha, one of the top leaders of the
Medellin cartel. After his death in a shootout with Colombian police,
a raid on one of Rodriguez-Gacha's ranches uncovered a huge cache of
documents outlining how his organization had stashed more than $100
million in banks around the world. Among the documents were the
records of four accounts at the Bank of Credit and Commerce
International in Luxembourg. Six Pakistani employees of BCCI's
Colombian bank were listed in Rodriguez-Gacha's records as
administrators of his accounts at the bank's Luxembourg branch.
-
- BCCI popped up elsewhere in La Mina, too. Investigators
discovered evidence that the laundering operation had used 800
accounts at 215 banks around the world. BCCI was one of them. Other
names that were part of Operation C-Chase surfaced in La Mina. For
instance, in the summer of 1988, two DEA agents interviewed a
confidential informant who told them that one of the big players in La
Mina was a Colombian supplier known as Don Chepe. The informant said
that Don Chepe owned an entire city block in downtown Medellin and
operated his own airline for shipping drugs to the United States.
-
- These were the sort of crisscrossing investigations that, if
mishandled, could bring down C-Chase or Polarcap, or both for that
matter. It was a different dilemma than the one prosecutor Mark
Jackowski had warned about back in February at the Clearwater meeting,
but it was dangerous, nonetheless.
- The C-Chase team was generally aware that the DEA was running
a long-term investigation called Polarcap. Within the Tampa offices,
it was known as "Polarcrap." Similarly, the DEA agents and
prosecutors working with them knew something was being run out of
Tampa, but security considerations, gilded by interagency rivalries,
kept the two sets of agents operating independently. And that
translated into greater risks to the men and women who were
undercover.
-
- BCCI's connection to Jose Rodriguez-Gacha was only part of
its growing business in Latin America, a business that seemed geared
toward serving the heavy-dollar demands of the drug cartels and other
criminals.
-
- For instance, among the bank's thirty branches in Colombia,
the fifth-richest was in Envigado, a city of only 90,000 that happened
to be the hometown of drug lord Pablo Escobar. In a 1990 book, La Coca
Nostra, Colombian journalist Fabio Castillo said that government
investigators found that money used to pay for the January 1988
assassination of a crusading official, Carlos Mauro-Hoyos, came from
the BCCI branch in Envigado.
-
- During the same period, the bank was financing such
activities as an elaborate coffee-smuggling and arms-selling business
allegedly operated by a Jordanian businessman named Munther Bilbeisi.
His brother happened to be manager of the bank's branch in Amman,
Jordan, but the scheme was run out of a BCCI office set up in Boca
Raton, Florida, apparently for the almost exclusive use of Bilbeisi.
-
- Dozens of letters of credit from BCCI were used to finance
what authorities charged later in a criminal indictment were illegal
shipments of millions of dollars worth of Central American coffee into
the United States in violation of international quotas. The coffee
involved was sold on the black market to major coffee companies in the
United States, and Bilbeisi reaped huge profits, according to the
charges.
-
- Bilbeisi was a full-service merchant. While shipping coffee
to the United States, he also was said to be shipping helicopters from
the Mideast to Guatemala. He reportedly brokered the $5.1 million sale
of three American-made helicopters to Guatemala from Jordan in a
transaction financed by BCCI. Bilbeisi's day-to-day transactions with
the bank were overseen by Hassan Parvez, the stepson of Swaleh Naqvi,
the bank's number two officer.
- Another letter of credit provided by the bank was related to
an arms transaction of a far greater magnitude. In 1987, a
Pakistani-born Canadian named Arshad Pervez tried to buy twenty-five
tons of superstrong steel from an American manufacturer and a small
amount of a material called beryllium from another U.S. company. Both
the steel and beryllium are restricted exports because they are used
to make nuclear weapons.
-
- The transaction was to be financed with a letter of credit
from BCCI arranged by a retired Pakistani general, Inam ul-Haq, who
was identified in U.S. intelligence reports as a buyer for Pakistan's
nuclear weapons program. But before either material could be shipped
to Pakistan, Pervez was arrested in Philadelphia. Pervez was convicted
and sent to prison in December 1987, but Pakistani officials said that
ul-Haq had disappeared.
-
- That was not BCCI's only connection to Pakistan's long-secret
efforts to build what some called the "Islamic bomb." From
the middle to the late 1980s, the bank donated $10 million to finance
a secret science and technology center in Pakistan run by A. Qadir
Khan, the scientist regarded as the leader of Pakistan's efforts to
develop nuclear weapons. The money came from a tax-free foundation
established in Pakistan by BCCI and headed by the country's former
finance minister and future president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan. While
finance minister, Ishaq Khan had played a key role in allocating
government funds for Qadir Khan's nuclear project. Both men maintained
the development was for peaceful purposes, an assertion disputed by
numerous international organizations and the U.S. government.
-
- All of this is not to say that BCCI engaged only in nefarious
dealings. On the contrary, the bulk of its business was devoted to
gathering deposits from honest customers and financing legitimate
international trade, but it was the widespread willingness of the bank
to ignore all sorts of laws in its quest for more and more business
that propelled it and its employees into almost any transaction where
there was a dollar to be made. BCCI was the bank that asked no
questions.
-
- Awan's house was in Coral Gables, a suburb of Miami a few
minutes south of downtown. The 5,500-square-foot home was on an acre
of land in the exclusive Cocoplum neighborhood, where Awan's neighbors
included Miami's wealthiest businessmen and lawyers as well as some
celebrities, such as baseball superstar Jose Canseco of the Oakland
A's. Awan and his wife Sheereen had seen the house back in the summer
of 1987 when they were moving to Miami from Washington. It was still
under construction at the time. There were five bedrooms, five
bathrooms, a separate guest suite, an indoor sauna, and a heated pool
in the backyard. There was also a tennis court, which Awan had gotten
at a bargain price.
-
- When he and his wife first saw the house, the tennis court
was half finished. Since he didn't play the game, Awan had persuaded
the builder to complete the court for $10,000 less than it would have
cost otherwise. Awan figured he would have a good resale point when it
came time to transfer again. The Awans had paid $725,000 for the new
house, a substantial stretch for an $80,000-a-year banker. They had
moved in the middle of August 1987. Since then, their son and daughter
had begun to play tennis and the court was a welcome addition to the
comfortable home.
-
- One night in early March 1988, after eating dinner at Awan's
house with his family, Mazur and the banker had resumed their
discussions on an alternative to Panama. Awan feared that if Noriega
was toppled or brought to the United States to stand trial, the United
States would install a new leader who would abandon the bank secrecy
laws. Of the hundred and forty banks in Panama, he predicted that a
hundred of them would leave the country, including BCCI. Awan did not
advise shutting down Mazur's business in Panama yet, but planning was
in order.
-
- "So, the intelligent thing would be to consider
alternatives," said Awan. "Now it all depends on what will
be more suitable for you and manageable for you."
-
- Mazur said some of his Colombian clients were finding Panama
too hot for their money. They were considering other South American
countries as alternate spots, such as Uruguay and Paraguay. They had
even suggested flying money to Colombia, with some of it going on to
Bolivia to pay for new cocaine processing laboratories under
construction to replace those the cartel expected to lose in Panama.
-
- "Tell me something," said Awan. "Where is the
cash?"
-
- "The cash is here in the States," said Mazur.
-
- "In the U.S.? Okay."
-
- "Detroit, Houston, New York."
-
- "Can it be transported?" asked Awan.
-
- "That's part of what I offer," replied Mazur,
reminding the banker that one of his businesses was an air charter
service.
-
- "What I was just contemplating was that if cash be
delivered, say, to Uruguay, then you have the ultimate disposal of it
in other locations," said Awan.
- Mazur said he would like to make some decisions soon. He had
a meeting with four of his major clients from Medellin coming up soon
in San Jose', Costa Rica. Awan was reassuring. Something could be
worked out-either in Europe or elsewhere in Latin America.
-
- Two days later, the men met for a drink in the two-story
lobby of the ornate Grand Bay Hotel in Coconut Grove. They were
surrounded by large potted palm trees and ficuses. Mazur said his trip
to Europe had been delayed until the middle of April. In the meantime,
he had to go to Los Angeles and San Jose', Costa Rica, to meet with
clients. As a matter of fact, he said, his client in Los Angeles might
be able to use some help from BCCI.
-
- "We're constructing a small apartment complex in Los
Angeles, a twelve-unit complex," he explained. "And what I'd
like to do is just structure that through you folks." "We
could work that out," said Awan. "We have a branch in Los
Angeles. And, you know, we could structure something pretty good on
that."
-
- "Because we could easily put the funds on deposit and
then just use the project as collateral," said Mazur.
-
- "Uh-huh. Right."
-
- A few days later, Awan telephoned Mazur and said it would be
okay to talk openly about the apartment transaction with Iqbal Ashraf,
manager of the bank's office in downtown Los Angeles.
-
- Arriving in Los Angeles, the first person Mazur met with was
Roberto Alcaino. It was the Jeweler who was building the apartment
complex. He wanted to take Mazur up on the proposal he had made months
earlier to launder some of his drug cash through the project. Alcaino
said that he was paying $12,000 a week in cash to the contractor's
payroll and had spent $62,000 in cash on the land. He was worried
because he did not report enough income to the IRS to cover the money
he was putting into the project.
-
- Alcaino said he expected to put a total of $825,000 into the
complex and then sell it. The proceeds from the sale would be clean
money. Until then, the Jeweler said he wanted to create dummy loans
that would appear to be the source of the funds.
-
- Mazur said he could come up with documents that would
indicate a foreign investor had bought the project from Alcaino and
backdate them to January 1988. The ownership would appear to belong to
a Delaware corporation that is owned by a Hong Kong corporation. The
transaction would pass through one of Mazur's companies, Dynamic
Mortgage Corporation, and BCC I. Alcaino would be shown as the project
manager. Nothing more. On the side, Mazur would draw up correspondence
covering Alcaino's true ownership.
-
- Before his plane left for Tampa on March 21, Mazur had a
brief meeting at Los Angeles International Airport with Iqbal Ashraf.
The young Pakistani banker, trim and handsome like Awan, was polite
and quiet as Mazur described his desire to finance an apartment
complex in Los Angeles owned by one of his clients through a cash
deposit and counterbalancing loan at BCCI.
-
- Four days later, Mazur and Abreu flew to San Jos6, Costa
Rica, where they met with Mora and Javier Ospina, Don Chepe's
lieutenant. Ospina said that his organization had $12 million to $20
million a month available for delivery to the laundering operation in
seven American cities. He was agreeable when Mazur suggested
alternatives to Panama, such as Europe.
-
- Mazur was pushing to get more business from the drug
suppliers connected with Ospina. He urged the Colombian to introduce
him to someone who could make decisions on where big chunks of money
were placed. Ospina responded that he would do just that. He promised
to arrange for Mazur to meet with Rudolf Armbrecht, who would turn out
to be a major step up the drug ladder.
-
- Amjad Awan had always been ambitious. Just how high his
sights were set became clear to the undercover agents near the end of
March 1988. Or maybe he was only trying to impress an attractive
woman.
-
- Kathy Ertz, the Customs agent from Miami who was posing as
Mazur's girlfriend Kathy Erickson, had been introduced to Awan and
some of the other targets a few weeks earlier. She had attended a few
social functions with Mazur as a way of slowly acclimating the young
woman to her first major undercover role.
-
- Ertz had one advantage that her supervisor did not know about
when he plucked her from a routine job in the Customs fraud division
in Miami for this undercover assignment. As a child, she had traveled
widely with her father, a government employee who worked in U.S.
embassies around the world for an unspecified agency. She spent time
in India and Pakistan, and her knowledge of their culture delighted
the BCCI officers. Her new colleagues in C-Chase were impressed, too,
by her wide range of interests. "She reads books," one of
the agents marveled. On March 28, Ertz had arranged to fly from Miami
to Tampa with Awan. In Tampa, they would hook up with Mazur and they
were scheduled to fly to New York City, where Mazur was going to give
Awan a tour of the securities firm with which he was affiliated.
-
- En route to Tampa, Awan told Ertz how he had been recruited
to come to the bank nearly a decade earlier by its founder, Agha Hasan
Abedi. A month ago, he said, Abedi had suffered a severe heart attack
at his home in London. At first, there had been fears that he would
not live. In the first hours after the initial attack, Abedi's aides
had reached out for help to his good friend Jimmy Carter.
-
- The former president had personally telephoned Dr. Norman
Shumway, a cardiologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto,
California, and asked him to fly to London to examine a personal
friend of Carter's who had suffered a massive heart attack. Carter had
to telephone Shumway twice because the surgeon does not like to fly.
-
- At the same time, Dr. Charles Rackley, chief of cardiology at
Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, received a telephone
call from Dr. Walter Somerville, a well-known London heart specialist.
"I'd like for you to come to London tonight and examine a patient
of mine, and bring along your top neurologist," said Somerville.
When Rackley asked the name of the patient requiring such immediate
attention, Somerville refused to identify the patient, revealing only:
"It is an individual of some economic influence whose illness, if
widely publicized, might have an impact on the world banking
system."
-
- That evening, one of the three limousines owned by BCCI's
representative office in Washington picked up Rackley and a
neurologist and took them to Dulles International Airport outside
Washington. From there, they flew first-class to Heathrow Airport in
London, where they were met by another BCCI limousine and whisked to
Cromwell Hospital in London.
-
- Cromwell, the largest private hospital in Britain, was owned
at the time by the royal family of Abu Dhabi and a foundation financed
by BCCI. Within medical circles and the bank, the facility was known
as "BCCI's hospital." Signs at the modern 360-bed facility
are printed in English and Arabic, and the bank maintained a small
branch inside the hospital's main lobby.
-
- When Rackley entered the room to examine the mystery patient,
he was surprised to find ten or twelve other specialists assembled to
evaluate him. Among them was his friend Norman Shumway, and Rackley
discovered that Shumway, too, was in the dark about the patient's
identity.
-
- The physicians gathered in the room quickly reached the
conclusion that the patient had sustained massive cardiac and
neurological damage. They determined that the heart was too damaged
for bypass surgery and recommended an immediate transplant. Several of
the doctors went to a nearby room and outlined the recommendations to
an attractive young woman introduced to them as the patient's wife.
-
- The prospect of a heart transplant created a religious
problem for Abedi, a Muslim. Organ transplants are viewed with
uncertainty under Islamic law, which tells followers that all details
of their lives must have a rule. "An issue like that, something
you take into your body, is going to give rise to questions for the
very religious Muslims," Frank Vogel, an Islamic law expert at
Harvard University, explained later. In this case, however, doctors
found that Islamic scholars had issued rules approving organ
transplants. Within twenty-four hours, Abedi had a new heart.
-
- The transplant surgery was performed by Dr. Magdi Yacoub, an
Egyptian-born surgeon regarded as one of Britain's leading transplant
specialists. Because of the dangers involved in moving the critically
ill patient, the surgery was performed at Cromwell Hospital, even
though the facility was not one of Britain's five designated
transplant centers.
-
- At the time of the surgery, there was a waiting list for
heart transplants under Britain's National Health Service program.
However, as a private, paying patient, Abedi was able to undergo
surgery immediately.
-
- While the operation was under way, Rackley and his
neurologist companion were taken back to Heathrow for a flight home.
Not until nearly a year later would the Washington surgeon discover
the identity of the patient: at Christmas of 1988, Rackley received a
card, signed by Agha Hasan Abedi, thanking him for the care he had
provided when Abedi was ill.
-
- The heart transplant in February 1988, which signaled Abedi's
removal from virtually all bank operations, was a stunning blow to the
14,000 employees, many of whom regarded Abedi as a godlike figure and
the head of their family. As in any organization built around the cult
of a single person, the vacuum created by Abedi's absence ignited a
gigantic power struggle for succession. The obvious pick was Swaleh
Naqvi, and he quickly assumed Abedi's duties on an acting basis, but
Naqvi's grasp on power was tenuous and cliques and cabals were forming
throughout the vast bank. Even Amjad Awan saw potential personal gain
in the demise of Agha Sahib.
-
- "I think that I have a better than average chance of
attaining the position of president within the next two to five
years," he boasted to Ertz after telling her of the president's
heart attack.
-
- Mazur was waiting with a limousine when the pair arrived. On
the drive to the offices of Financial Consulting, Awan said that new
pressures were being applied to the bank as a result of its extensive
operations in Panama. BCCI and five other banks were being scrutinized
by a U.S. Senate subcommittee headed by Senator John Kerry because of
their involvement with Manuel Noriega, he explained. Awan said he
expected Kerry's inquiry to cover some of his activities in Panama
because he was the manager of the main branch when an American
marijuana smuggler opened an account there. Awan said he did not
remember the customer, who had been identified as Steven Kalish.
-
- In testimony in January 1988 before the U.S. Senate Permanent
Subcommittee on Investigations, Kalish had indeed described how he
moved millions of dollars in suitcases and boxes through Panama. When
he landed at Omar Torrijos Airport, he would taxi his custom Learjet
to the Panamanian air force terminal and armored cars would help
transport the cash to banks in Panama City. One of the banks was BCCI,
and Kalish showed the senators a debit slip for half a million dollars
drawn on his personal account there, M/L18, another manager's ledger
account.
-
- At the time, Kalish's story had attracted little attention in
the press, but it had been recirculated the following month as part of
the coverage of Noriega's drug indictment.
-
- Just four days after the indictment, two other witnesses had
mentioned BCCI in testimony before another panel, Kerry's Senate
Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and
International Operations. Leigh Ritch, who was Kalish's smuggling
partner, said that they had laundered money through BCCI. And Jose
Blandon, a former Panamanian diplomat and Noriega confidant who had
turned against the general, also mentioned the bank. Blandon, however,
had reversed the letters, referring to it as ICCB.
-
- Kerry, a freshman Democrat from Massachusetts, had been
engaged in a series of hearings on the effects of drugs and money
laundering on U.S. foreign policy. Of particular interest to him was
the government's relationship with Manuel Noriega. A former
prosecutor, Kerry was accustomed to pursuing clues or pushing his
investigators to do so. As a result, when the BCCI-Noriega connection
popped up at his hearing and before the investigations subcommittee,
he instructed his staff to dig into the bank's dealings in Panama. A
subpoena was approved in March 1988 by the Senate for BCCI records.
But it had not yet been served.
-
- In a conversation in late March with Mazur, Awan said the
bank had learned about the investigation from some "friends"
close to the Senate committee overseeing the probe. BCCI, he said, had
lots of friends in Washington because it had bought and controlled the
First American Bank in Washington as well as the National Bank of
Georgia in Atlanta. The bank itself was prohibited by law from owning
and running the institutions, said Awan, so Clark Clifford was one of
the people working on behalf of BCCI to gain control of the banks.
-
- This was the second time that Awan had mentioned BCCI's
secret control over First American, but at this juncture in Operation
C-Chase, nobody on the team cared about what seemed to be a civil
banking violation at worst. Nor did they care that power broker Clark
Clifford may have helped the bank in its scheme. Aside from some of
Mazur's laundered funds being transferred through First American in
New York en route to Geneva and Luxembourg, there appeared to be no
connection with the C-Chase investigation. These allegations by Awan
sounded like civil banking matters, no more than technical
transgressions.
-
- However, the matter did not go unreported. Prosecutors in the
Tampa office wrote a memo describing details of the two tape
recordings in which Awan had mentioned the bank's connection to First
American. The memo, dated March 30, 1988, was addressed to William
Weld, the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal
division. It arrived in Washington the very day that Weld announced
his resignation from the Justice Department, accusing Attorney General
Edwin Meese of playing politics with the agency. The Weld resignation
threw the criminal division into chaos, and there is no record that
the memo was ever acted on. It was not passed on to the Federal
Reserve, and it did not touch off a flurry of new investigations
within the Justice Department.
-
- Awan's disclosure also came in the midst of a delicate
transition in C-Chase itself. Paul O'Brien, the assistant agent in
charge of enforcement and a veteran on whom Mazur and the others
relied, was leaving. He had gotten a plum transfer to a Customs post
in Ireland. The way was clear for Customs Commissioner William von
Raab to realize one of his main administrative ambitions. He could
appoint the first female special agent in charge of enforcement.
-
- His candidate was the Operation Greenback veteran Bonni
Tischler, who had spent the last five years in Washington learning how
to deal with the bureaucracy at headquarters and with Congress. During
that time, she had developed into one of the commissioner's favorites.
Von Raab had already offered to send his prote'g6 to the Los Angeles
office, but she had refused in the hopes of returning to her native
Florida. So she jumped at the chance to take over the Tampa office.
-
- Tischler was no political innocent. She had once worked as a
secretary for the Republican National Committee in Washington, and she
p05sessed the bureaucratic instinct not to go looking for political
trouble. Stick to the facts and ignore the politicians. So she, too,
showed no interest in pursuing allegations about Clark Clifford, one
of the most powerful men in Washington, regardless of political party.
-
- In fact, Tischler was already kicking around the idea of
closing down Operation C-Chase. Soon after she arrived in Tampa in
February 1988, Tischler had had discussions with Mazur, case agent
Steve Cook, and others about making plans to roll up the operation in
the fall. Later there would be speculation that Tischler was timing
the shutdown to coincide with the November 1988 presidential election.
It would look good for George Bush and her mentor, William von Raab,
to have a major drug bust close to the election. But no date was set
and the talk would continue for weeks.
-
- Of more immediate concern to Mazur and other Customs agents
in late March was the investigation by a Senate subcommittee. The last
thing that the undercover operation needed was bumbling congressional
investigators poking around BCCI and scaring people. Soon, however,
the Customs Service and the prosecutors would get the chance to put a
lid on the Senate inquiry, at least for a time.
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