On December 2, 1986, Gonzalo Mora, Jr., flew to Tampa from Colombia. Uribe picked him up at the airport and took him to the Calibre Chase apartment. There, Uribe introduced Mora to Emiho Dominguez and Bob Musella, the undercover names for Emir Abreu and Robert Mazur. A week of seduction and deceit was under way.

With Abreu translating, Mazur welcomed Mora to Florida and said that he would like Mora to relax for a few days so they could get to kn6w each other and talk a little business. "I've been led to believe that it would be in your interest to expand our business relationship because up until now the types of transactions we have been conducting have been of a smaller nature," said Mazur.

He described himself as a businessman with a lot of different financial interests in the United States and abroad. He confided that some of his clients, although not all, were involved in illegal activities. Mazur, however, never touched drugs. Just money.

Abreu, he explained, worked for him, supervising the cash collections from drug dealers around the country and sometimes making pickups himself. Even his legal clients, Mazur said, sometimes used his money- laundering services to move funds out of the country and evade taxes.

Part of the beauty of his operation, Mazur explained, was that he operated a string of legitimate businesses that generated cash and helped conceal the drug proceeds by mingling dirty money and clean. Among his holdings were stakes in a financial services company, a mortgage broker, an air charter service, and a stock brokerage. It was the bank accounts of these businesses, which conducted lots of legitimate cash transactions, that were used for the ring's deposits in cities across the country.

For his part, Mora seemed eager to expand the volume of cash flowing into his money-laundering operation. He said that he knew a number of Colombian cocaine suppliers whose businesses generated large amounts of cash in a number of American cities. He just needed the right setup to draw more from them. As far as the increased volume of checks used to clean the money in Colombia, Mora said it was no problem. He knew an attorney who was involved with the Colombian stock exchange and would buy huge numbers of checks on the black market.

Mora said that he, too, had clients with both legal and illegal funds and that part of his service involved hiding funds for legitimate businessmen. Some of these clients in both categories had bank accounts in Panama because the exchange rate was better there than in Colombia. The two men agreed that there should be a code to distinguish between the sources of cash coming into the operation. This would help deter mine the level of secrecy required. Clients whose money came from cocaine dealing, they decided, would be referred to as "VIPs."

As the partnership progressed, conversations with the Moras and others would be peppered with a homemade code and jargon from the Colombian drug culture. For instance, Jimmy Mora had a plain-looking sedan in Los Angeles with an unusual feature-a hidden compartment installed for cocaine. The car was called a caletas, Spanish slang for thieves who steal through holes. Cocaine was referred to as merca, from mercancia, or merchandise. Sometimes the money to be moved to Colombia was described as "lentils," since Mora was using his cover as an importer of beans. A communista was not a communist, but a money broker who worked on commission. Matones were hired killers.

From that first night Mora had proven as hungry as Mazur had predicted. Far from showing the caution that the undercover agents had anticipated, Mora was eager to iron out an agreement right away. He proposed a fifty-fifty split on commissions and seemed ready to start immediately. But Mazur did not want to rush things. He injected some caution, telling Mora that he had several days of activities planned to show him his mini-empire.

Mazur's experience had taught him that this was a time for patience. He wanted to make certain the hook was in deep before playing out the line to see where this fish led them.

The following day, Mazur and Abreu took Mora to Sunbird Airlines near St. Petersburg. Mazur handed the Colombian a brochure that Customs had had made up. It listed Mazur as Sunbird's director of international finance and described him as someone who raised capital for the business. Mazur himself explained that Sunbird was a charter service for passengers, mail, and cargo between Florida and the Bahamas. But, he told Mora confidentially, Sunbird really was a front business owned and operated by one of Mazur's clients, a drug dealer.

As had happened with the banks, an executive of the air charter company had agreed to allow Mazur to work his fraud on Mora. Similar activities were planned for the following day, when the men were to fly to New York and Mora would get a glimpse of Mazur's big-time connections there. Similarly, the location of Financial Consulting, Inc., which Mazur had set up in New Port Richey, a few miles northwest of Tampa on the Gulf coast, was in reality the offices of a legitimate company owned by another of Mazur's acquaintances. When Mazur was expecting visitors, a plastic sign with the Financial Consulting logo was placed over the other firm's sign.

Before they could leave Sunbird, a man drove up to the office and walked in carrying a large bag. He handed the bag to Mazur and left. As he opened it nonchalantly, Mazur made sure that Mora got a peek at the stacks of cash inside. "Two hundred K," said Mazur. It was another bit of Customs' stage management.

On the way to lunch, the men stopped by Florida National Bank in St. Petersburg. Asking Mora to wait in the car, Mazur and Abreu deposited the $200,000 in one of their accounts. The message was clear to Mora. There had been no need to divide the cash into packages of less than $10,000 for smurfing. Clearly, Mazur routinely dealt in large amounts of cash. To Mora, who relied on relatively unsophisticated techniques, here was a doorway through which unrestricted amounts of illegal money could be put into the American banking system.

That afternoon, Mazur and Abreu took Mora for a ride on a big Hatteras fishing boat that supposedly belonged to Mazur. Mora had no clue that he was being entertained aboard a Customs Service boat designed to spot and intercept drug shipments. The radar and other sophisticated equipment were locked away in cabinets for the excursion.

Customs had put up Mora at a beachfront condominium that was supposedly Mazur's home. On the morning of December 4, Abreu and Mazur picked up their guest and drove to the airport. They caught a flight to Newark, New Jersey, and made the short drive into Manhattan. They checked into the Vista International Hotel, an expensive but convenient spot favored by business executives with appointments at the World Trade Center next door or on nearby Wall Street.

Later that day, Mora was introduced to a broker at Merrill Lynch's huge corporate headquarters on lower Broadway. The broker was an acquaintance of Mazur's who had agreed to go along with the scheme. Next, the men visited a discount brokerage firm nearby. Mazur said the place was run by his cousin, actually another accommodating friend from an earlier case.

Leaving the brokerage, the group headed for the heart of Wall Street.

Mazur's "cousin" gave them a tour of the tumult and excitement on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. All around them, an army of people shouted and waved their hands in the air. To Mora, it must have seemed completely incomprehensible and incomparably thrilling. Here was the heart of capitalism, with millions of dollars being made and lost on every tick of the clock. And beside him was his ticket to a piece of the pie. The rush of the floor visit was followed by the calm of a real investment seminar put on by the "cousin" for Mora and legitimate investors in one of the rooms at the stock exchange's dinner club.

The point of this elaborate charade was to demonstrate Mazur's extensive connections with the financial community, connections that showed him to be a man of substance, a man with many avenues for cleaning cash. Executing a successful sting demanded constructing a net that reached far beyond minnows like the Moras. The cash delivery at the charter service, the dip into the frenzy of the stock exchange floor, these were stories that Mora would boast about among his associates in Medellin, bait that Customs hoped would attract the sharks and barracudas of the drug world.

That day, as they visited the financial hotspots of Manhattan, Mazur carried a thin leather briefcase. Inside were the usual papers and notebooks. But concealed within the case was a tiny microcassette tape recorder; barely larger than a package of cigarettes, it was model SME-700, manufactured by Sal Mineroff Electronics, and was connected to two microphones concealed on the outside of the briefcase.

After breakfast on December 5, 1986, the three men returned to a room at the Vista International to pound out the details of their arrangement over the course of about two and a half hours. Groundwork for a critical element of the trap had to be laid here.

A provision of the money-laundering statute called for the forfeiture of assets obtained through criminal enterprise or used as part of it. Often in dealing with Colombians, however, these assets were tucked away in foreign bank accounts or Colombia itself, out of reach of U.S. authorities. Mazur and his associates had devised a scheme to try to avoid losing at least some of the proceeds. It also would help them gather evidence about Mora's clients. Customs intelligence agents were still drawing blanks in efforts to learn the identity of Don Chepe.

"It's important for us to develop some investment relationships with your clients in Colombia," Mazur explained to Mora in the hotel room. "That way, if we're, ah, challenged by law enforcement here in the United States, we can hold ourselves out as true investment counselors. Having some legitimate activities is a cover for our other stuff."

He proposed that Mora persuade some of his drug suppliers to leave a portion of the illegal proceeds in the United States. Mazur could invest the money in certificates of deposit or pieces of property. He and Mora, added Mazur, would add to their own profits by splitting the investment fees in these transactions.

The response from Mora was more sophisticated than Mazur might have imagined. The Colombian said that his clients were reluctant to invest in the United States. They were worried about losing their property through U.S. forfeiture laws.

In a risky strategy, Mazur also tried to push Mora to move things along. He said that he could handle more volume and he insisted that the Colombian start bringing in larger amounts of cash within forty-five days or look for a new partner.

Mora proved as willing to escalate as Mazur had predicted. He responded to the demand with new details on his money-laundering operation. He listed several cities in which he anticipated bringing in more business as a result of the new joint system.

In some of those cities, Mazur said, he already had people in place. In others, Abreu or someone else would have to fly out to pick up the cash. Pressing his advantage and trying to enhance his credibility, Mazur said that Mora would have to agree to share the expenses involved in picking up cash in some places. This was hardly the normal strategy of an undercover agent trying to lure someone into a trap, but Mora went for it, too, agreeing to split the pickup costs fifty-fifty.

Shortly after Mora returned to Colombia, Bob Mazur went to the Florida National Bank branch in St. Petersburg where Rita Rozansky helped open a new account in the name of Financial Consulting, Inc., the first of four that Mazur would open at Florida National in this phase of the undercover operation. When he received his printed checks a few days later, he presigned a batch and shipped them via Express Mail to Mora in Medellin. As in the previous scheme, Mora would fill in the amounts and the payee once the money started to flow into the Financial Consulting account.

The wait was short. On January 2, 1987, Gonzalo Mora, Jr., telephoned Abreu in Tampa. He had $200,000 in cash that was going to be picked up from a jewelry store owner in Los Angeles. This was big time, the most money that the undercover agents had handled so far in C-Chase. Clearly they were moving up in the world of drug trafficking and money laundering.

In retrospect, many people had difficulty believing Bob Mazur's explanation of how Operation C-Chase crossed paths with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The element of chance loomed too large for skeptics, but Mazur has stuck to his story and no one has produced anything more than supposition to dispute it.

"Bob Mazur is the most careful person I've ever met," said John Hume, one of the defense attorneys in the later case against BCCI. "He wouldn't go to the bathroom without preplanning it, right down to the time and place. The idea that he just wandered into BCCI is completely implausible."

However, Hume acknowledges that neither he nor anyone else has any evidence that BCCI was brought into C-Chase in any way except the one described by Mazur.

The events that Mazur said led to the involvement of the bank were touched off in December. Gonzalo Mora, Jr., had mentioned that some of his Colombian clients liked to use bank accounts in Panama for laundering money. Mazur wanted to be ready, so he decided to make contact with a bank that had a branch in Panama. For convenience, he wanted a bank with a Tampa office.

This task was a pressing one as Mazur drove across the Hillsborough River into Tampa's high-rise financial district one day that winter. Sitting near the bridge in his car during a long red light, he saw a large gold sign with a hexagonal emblem on the street level of an office building. Two words caught his eye: Bank and International. Maybe this was a place that could handle the transfers he needed to make. The full name on the emblem was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

A few days later, on February 11, 1987, Mazur found his way back to that office in the Riverside Plaza Building. Inside, he found that the operation was a representative office, which could not take deposits or perform any routine banking functions. It served solely as a marketing office or contact point for the bank with potential clients. Any business would be referred to an overseas branch or to BCCI's agency office in Miami. The agency office could accept international deposits and perform other limited banking transactions.

Unlike his prearranged relationships with Florida National and Barnett Bank, there would be no wink and nod this time. Mazur's intention was to use BCCI for limited purposes, certainly not as a deposit point for drug cash. So when Mazur walked into BCCI, he introduced himself as Robert Musella to Ricardo Argudo, the young bank officer. Describing himself as a financial consultant with South American clients who had accounts in Panama, Mazur said he was looking for an international bank's services to transfer and receive funds on behalf of these clients.

Of course, Argudo said, BCCI was just the place. He handed Mazur a BCCI promotional brochure: "A local bank, internationally. A bridge between the developing and the developed countries of the world. Branches and offices in 72 countries."

For convenience, Argudo said, Mazur could open an account with BCCI in Panama through the Tampa office. Funds deposited in the account could be transferred to BCCI's Miami office within twenty-four hours and then made available to Mazur.

Argudo was extremely helpful. Asking if Mazur thought he would need to move funds in "the opposite direction," Argudo assured him that the bank had many clients who transfer money confidentially out of the United States to foreign accounts.

In the past, he said, BCCI clients with such a need made deposits directly to a Grand Cayman branch of BCCI, but Argudo was no longer recommending that route because the Cayman Islands had signed a treaty that enabled U.S. law enforcement authorities to obtain bank records there. Most of those clients were now using BCCI in Panama City, he said. Further, suggested Argudo, if any of Mazur's clients needed to transfer their own funds in a secure manner, they should consider opening accounts at one of BCCI's Panama branches.

At Argudo's request, Mazur provided copies of the corporate records of Financial Consulting Inc. and signed a form allowing Florida National Bank to provide BCCI with background information on the new client. He also wrote a check for $10,000 to open his new BCCI account.

The information release was mailed to Florida National Bank. On February 19, Rita Rozansky responded with a letter that said Financial Consulting maintained a good account relationship with the bank and "Robert L. Musella is a very reputable businessman."

Over the course of several conversations and meetings in March and early April of 1987, Mazur learned more about BCCI from Argudo. The hungry spirit of BCCI was certainly alive in this young banker. When Mazur mentioned that he might like Argudo to meet one of his Colombian clients, Argudo said BCCI had about twenty offices in Colombia. Many Tampa residents did direct banking with the South American country through BCCI's Tampa office. In fact, said Argudo, he could open accounts at any BCCI branch around the world. The records of the account opening then could be forwarded to the foreign branch and thus made inaccessible to U.S. authorities.

When Mazur told Argudo that his Colombian client was in the currency exchange business and some of his clients accumulated cash in the United States, Argudo said this was commonly called the "black market" and it was not unusual for it to be used for transferring funds to Panama. The banker cautioned Mazur, however, that cash was an increasingly difficult commodity to move into the banking system. Deposits of $10,000 or more are reported to the IRS, he said, but there were ways around the system.

"It's the dumb people that get caught," Argudo assured Mazur.

Customs agents say the bank was not a target at this point in the investigation, and that the practices described by Argudo (who was never charged with a crime) were common at many banks. Mazur has claimed never to have heard of the bank before, despite a handful of reports in the U.S. press that had raised questions about BCCI and rumors in some law enforcement circles that BCCI was a dirty bank.

The most astute of the American articles was a piece in Forbes magazine in 1986 by Allan Dodds Frank which described the flow of dirty dollars through the international banking system. The article mentioned Panama, Miami, and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The British press, led by the Financial Times and New Statesman, had written extensively about BCCI's tactics and growth, but these were publications that Mazur and the Customs agents were unlikely to have seen. And no one in the press or law enforcement yet understood what the bank was all about.

However, the Bank of Credit and Commerce was not a stranger to everyone in law enforcement. On September 30, 1986, the Central Intelligence Agency had prepared a brief report on BCCI that said in sketchy terms that the bank was involved in money laundering and other illegal acts worldwide. The CIA report also said that the Pakistani-run bank had obtained secret control of Financial General, the predecessor to First American Bankshares.

The five-page September 1986 document was one of several reports that the agency had prepared on the bank since it first began monitoring BCCI activities in the early 1980s. At the same time, the CIA was paying operatives of its own through the bank, using front companies and other concealment devices to hide its activities from the bank.

While the 1986 CIA report was a classified document, such reports are often circulated to the intelligence and enforcement arms of other agencies in Washington. Under normal procedure, copies of the report would have gone to the Federal Reserve Board, the State Department, and the Treasury Department, which oversaw Customs and the IRS, but the routing of the September report remains a mystery. Federal Reserve officials later would deny seeing a copy and the other agencies refused to disclose any information about such intelligence matters.

In 1987, the bank that the CIA was using and watching was expanding into every corner of the world. Since its inception, the bank had put growth ahead of all other considerations, but in this period, the demand for new deposits was driven by a desperate need to help cover the massive losses by the bank's treasury department and keep the bank alive. This demand for deposits may have been one of the reasons for what happened to Ghassan Qassem when he discovered the true identity of the biggest customer at BCCI's Sloane Street branch.

By 1987, Qassem had been promoted to manager of the branch and was still pampering his best customer, Shakar Farhan. Then one day, someone showed him a copy of the French newsmagazine L'Express. In it was a photograph of Farhan, only he was identified as Abu Nidal, the most-wanted terrorist in the world. Shocked and frightened, Qassem took the magazine and hurried to the bank's headquarters on Leadenhall Street in the financial district, where he showed the photograph to a manager.

"Look at this," urged Qassem.

"Take this back," said the manager. "Destroy it immediately, and go back to your branch and don't you ever mention it to anyone because the general manager has got enough problems without having to add anymore."

Qassem was shocked once more. He had long been aware of the account's connection with Iraq and later Syria; he could accept that as part of the bank's business and its support of Arab causes. What troubled him deeply was that the bank's favor had been extended to someone as notorious and violent as Abu Nidal.

The banker returned to his branch and, as instructed, destroyed the magazine and did not discuss its contents with any of his colleagues. However, with a friend's assistance, Qassem arranged to meet with agents from MIS, one of Britain's intelligence services. The meeting took place at a large hotel in London's posh Mayfair neighborhood. After explaining that Abu Nidal maintained an account at his branch, Qassem answered dozens of detailed questions about the account and the transactions involving it. In the end, he agreed to pass on information to MIS about the account activities; he even promised to copy documents related to the account and other suspect customers and provide them to the intelligence agents.

Within weeks, information provided secretly by Qassem bore fruit. British intelligence was able to link Syria to an attempted terrorist bombing in 1986 involving an Israeli El Al jetliner at London's Heathrow Airport. Payments from the BCCI account of a Syrian intelligence officer were traced to an Abu Nidal agent who had used his unsuspecting, pregnant girlfriend in an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard the airliner.

The British also shared data from their new source with the CIA. Documents provided by Qassem demonstrated that Abu Nidal's network drew millions of dollars from many sources. Moderate Arab governments made regular payments into the BCCI account, buying peace from terrorist attacks on their diplomats abroad and on potential targets within their borders. The documents also showed that Abu Nidal ran a thriving business selling arms and other goods to the Mideast through a company based in Warsaw, Poland. Shortly after Qassem turned banker- spy, the United States government pressured the Polish government and the company, SAS International Trading and Investments, was shut down.

The reaction when Qassem had raised the alarm at BCCI's headquarters illustrated the basic philosophy of the bank-deposits were accepted from all comers, no questions asked. But the senior manager's reference to "problems" also reflected the struggle in which the bank was engaged at that time to increase its deposits to cover for the massive trading losses discovered the year before.

Another example of this desperation involved the central bank of Peru. In 1986 and 1987, Agha Abedi and Swaleh Naqvi authorized BCCI officials in Peru to pay $3 million in bribes and kickbacks to two officials with the South American country's central bank, according to a later criminal indictment. At the time, Peru's new president, Alan Garcia, had said the country would stop making most payments on its debt, which was held by the world's largest banks. The Garcia administration was worried that the international banks would try to freeze the country's limited supply of hard currency in an attempt to force repayment of the staggering debts. So the Peruvian central bankers were looking for a place to hide the money.

BCCI was the perfect solution. Desperate for cash for its own reasons, the bank also had the ability to move millions of dollars through its branches worldwide as part of Abedi's EMP program. A deal was allegedly struck in March 1986. BCCI would accept the deposits at its Panama branch and guarantee to keep them secret from the creditor banks. According to the later criminal indictment against the bank, Abedi, and Naqvi, BCCI promised in exchange to pay bribes to two top central bank officials based on a percentage of the country's money that was deposited at BCCI.

At first glance, it would seem that Peru would be happy just to find a safe haven for its cash, so why pay bribes? The truth lies in the details of the arrangement, for it was tilted heavily in BCC I's favor. In return for its deposits, the central bank of Peru received a much smaller line of credit; it was only $60 million at first against a deposit of $100 million. The central bank used the credit to set up an import-export fund to help finance its foreign trade.

But BCCI did not keep the upper hand for long. News of its deteriorat mg financial condition began to reach Lima, and mid-level bureaucrats began to get nervous. On July 13, 1987, the chief of the investigations department wrote an internal memo pointing to the sharp decline in BCCI's earnings and warning that the central bank should move out its deposits as quickly as possible. Two weeks after the memo was written, a London-based bank rater, IBCA Bank Analysis, sent a telex to clients warning that BCCI had sustained substantial losses in the options market, that the bank's unusual organization made it impossible to get accurate numbers on its financial condition, and that the bank had no lender of last resort ready to step in on behalf of customers should the bank fail. But the warnings did not prevent one last deal. The head of BCCI's Panama office flew to Lima and offered to increase Peru's line of credit to keep the account. By mid-August, BCCI was granting a draw of $160 million against central bank deposits of $250 million.

Similar pushes at other BCCI branches around the world helped make the bank a perfect partner for Robert Mazur and Operation C-Chase.

When Bob Mazur first mentioned his BCCI connection to Gonzalo Mora, Jr., he drew a much grander portrait designed to inflate his importance in the eyes of Mora. Mazur boasted that he wanted the Colombian to meet a "very good friend" of his at an international bank that had opened accounts for him around the world. Mora's response was intriguing. He claimed to have conducted his own transactions through BCCI offices in Panama and Colombia in the range of millions of dollars.

The money launderer was still getting the royal treatment from the undercover operatives when he came to Tampa on April 7, 1987, for meetings with Mazur, Abreu, and the BCCI banker. On the morning of April 8, for instance, the two agents took Mora to Mazur's air charter service and gave him an air tour of Tampa. After landing at Tampa International Airport, they got into a waiting car and drove to BCCI downtown. They picked up Rick Argudo and returned to the airport for lunch at a restaurant on top of the Marriott Hotel at the airport.

Argudo and Mora hit it off right away because Argudo spoke Spanish. And, as the lunch went on, the banker proved full of ingratiating suggestions as he described the various services available from BCCI. He proposed that Mora and Mazur create a system of double invoicing business expenses through a Panamanian shell corporation to avoid U.S. taxes. He also suggested that they consider depositing funds at a foreign BCCI branch and allowing Argudo to arrange a loan of an equal amount at another branch in the United States or Colombia. That way, he explained, the money would appear to be a nontaxable loan.

It was what Amjad Awan called a "cash collateralized advance" and Meyer Lansky had known as a "loan back." Using cash as collateral for a loan is not illegal per se; it is a common banking practice. The trouble comes when such transactions are used to conceal income or when the funds involved are derived from criminal enterprises.

It was clear that Mora believed they could get more laundering business with an account in Panama, and Argudo seemed to offer the way. Indeed, the following day Mora told Mazur that he had a "VIP client" who was interested in throwing business their way once they got a Panama account.

But Mazur wanted another piece in place first, so soon after the lunch, he contacted a Panama City lawyer, Miguel Sanchez, and set up a Panamanian company, IDC International. Coupled with the new rela tionship with BCCI, the company would put him in a position to mdve funds offshore directly.

On April 14, Mazur and Abreu flew to Los Angeles. Mora had gone on ahead of them and they were planning to meet up with the Colombian and his brother, Jimmy. Panama and BCCI were still hot topics. Because it was the center for so much legitimate foreign trade and its currency was U.S. dollars, Panama offered the money launderers a better cover for the increasing quantity of checks. With Panamanian accounts, Mora told Mazur and Abreu, they could increase their business even more. Further, the brokers who bought Mora's checks were willing to pay more for checks drawn on Panamanian banks than on U.S. banks because of the extra security provided by Panama's banking laws.

Why not just use the Financial Consulting account now open in Panama? asked Mora. Mazur's checks already had such a good reputa tion on the black market that they commanded a premium. But Mazur said he did not want any FCI checks coming back to the United States bearing the imprint of a Panama account. His operations were too delicate to risk making American authorities suspicious. Instead, he said, he had begun a safer process.

"First, though, I have to see if I can trust the people I know at the Bank of Credit and Commerce," Mazur said to Mora. Then, he would "grease the skids" and open an account in Panama in the name of IDC International, a Panamanian company he claimed to have "had for a while."

Once everything was in place, Mazur spelled out how it would work. Cash pickups deposited into the accounts of his front businesses would be transferred to the Financial Consulting account at Florida National. From there, the funds would go through the FCI account at BCCI to the new IDC International account in Panama. There, checks would be provided to Mora and he could sell them to the brokers.

However, that was not why Mazur and Abreu had come to Los Angeles. They had traveled west because, finally, they were going to meet the man behind the recent increase in their money-laundering business. It was a critical move up the ladder and the agents were excited.

In the drug world, they knew him as "the Jeweler," and indeed he did own a small jewelry store in Los Angeles. He later claimed that he got into the drug business at the urging of Colombians who patronized his shop.

The Jeweler was a Chilean who had come to the United States in the 1960s. He had spent much of the past two decades working with Colombian drug suppliers. At the age of forty-nine, he had worked so long with the men from Medellin and Cali that he spoke Spanish with a Colombian accent.

Here was a man who enjoyed the good life. He and his wife, Gloria, owned a $2 million 4,300-square-foot mansion a few blocks from the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, an enclave for the old money of Los Angeles. Neighbors caught glimpses of his two Rolls-Royces, a pair of Mercedes- Benz sports cars, and a $100,000 Porsche 928 parked in the drive or pulling out of the electronically controlled gates. Had they been invited inside, the neighbors would have marveled at the tasteful furnishings, which were worth close to $2 million-a painting by Marc Chagall, an etching by Joan Mir6, jade carvings large and small.

But neighbors were not invited in. And he was a mysterious figure on Putney Road in staid Pasadena. Some residents gossiped that he might be a drug dealer, rumors fed by the constant comings and goings of swarthy men at all hours of the day and night.

Several times in the first weeks of the new partnership with Mazur and Abreu, Gonzalo Mora, Jr., had boasted about the Jeweler. The Jeweler once laundered $24 million in two months. The Jeweler handled cash collections for the Medellin cartel in New York, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. With each story, Mazur and Abreu grew more anxious to meet the Jeweler, to put a face and a name to this major player. Other than the Jeweler, the only name they knew him by was Roberto.

But the Jeweler had grown rich and lasted long in a dangerous trade by being careful. Even at the urging of Mora, Jr., he had resisted meeting the Colombian's new partners. He would not even allow his money to be handed over directly to the new boys. Instead, the cash that his organization was channeling through Mazur and Mora was picked up by Mora's flunkies or by the Moras themselves. They would then hand it over to Abreu or his people.

The first major cash from the Jeweler's organization was $160,000, not the $200,000 that had been promised in early January 1987. On February 17, the Jeweler himself had taken the money to a store on West Seventh Street, near downtown Los Angeles. It was called Casa Musical Sonora and it was owned by the Mora family. He handed the money over to Gonzalo Mora, Sr. Not until the man left did Mora, Sr., notify Abreu that the drop had been made. Then Abreu telephoned the Customs office in Los Angeles and two Spanish-speaking undercover men were sent out to get the cash from the elder Mora.

When the Customs agents returned with the money, it was put in front of a dog trained to sniff out the cocaine residue often found on money used in drug payoffs. The dog "alerted," as they say, to the presence of cocaine residue on the money. The money was then counted and deposited in a bank and transferred to Mazur's account at Florida National Bank.

A week later, the process was repeated: the two undercover agents picked up the cash at Casa Musical. The pattern continued for a month and a half, with all of the pickups running between $90,000 and $200,000. The Jeweler was doing what any smart businessman does with a new system. He was testing it, with more than $2 million in drug proceeds in the first two months. Were the men running it honest with him? Did the system get the cash where it promised and on time? Were there any signs of cops? The Moras had done the same thing a few months earlier, although their tests had been conducted with far less cash.

For their part, the Moras were anxious to land a bigger share of the Jeweler's business. So far, the pickups had been restricted to Los Angeles, but the Jeweler's confidence had risen with each deal. More over, he wanted to move some of his laundering business out of Los Angeles. So when the Moras proposed that he meet their partners in the middle of April to discuss expanding their business relationship, the Jeweler agreed.

On the afternoon of April 15, Jimmy Mora and Gonzalo Mora, Jr., drove Mazur and Abreu to the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, an ungainly collection of silo-like glass towers in downtown Los Angeles. There, they were introduced to the Jeweler, a smiling man who spoke good English. His name was Roberto Baez Alcaino. He would turn out to be one of the main cash collectors used by the Medellin cartel in the United States.

That day, Alcaino listened thoughtfully as Mazur and Abreu described the network they had established to handle the cash the Jeweler was collecting. The pattern being used in Los Angeles could be repeated in other cities. Abreu would telephone his contacts and send them for the money, or he would fly to the city himself and pick up the money. Then it would be deposited in one of the operation's bank accounts in the United States and come out clean on the other end when Mora wrote a check in Colombia to the drug suppliers. Along the way, Mora, Mazur, and Alcaino would all get their cuts.

In cities where Customs had Spanish-speaking agents, Abreu would simply do as he had done in Los Angeles: Call the local office and arrange for a couple of undercovers to get the money. For other places, Operation C-Chase had its own jet, a swift and comfortable twin-engine Citation. From Mora's boasts and their brief conversation, it was clear the Jeweler was a man with serious money. So, along with the drug pickups, Mazur made his pitch for a whole line of investment advice. He described the front businesses that he ran, suggesting they could help invest funds in the United States in ways that would conceal the money's ownership and source. Here, too, they found a receptive audience in the once-shy Alcaino. He said that he was planning to build an apartment building in Los Angeles. The catch was he wanted to finance it with drug cash.

No problem, Mazur assured him. They could launder the money for Alcaino and come up with a clean-looking mortgage out of the proceeds. The Jeweler could even deduct the interest payments from his tax returns.

The scheme appealed to Alcaino so strongly that he would later ask Mazur to structure a transaction that would create a $500,000 home improvement loan. He wanted an elevated tennis court, underground parking, and a 4,200-square-foot addition for his house in Pasadena.

Such opportunities were a potential bonanza for C-Chase. They would know where to go when it came time to freeze Alcaino's assets. And, with the apartment loan in the near future, they could test the cash-collateralized loan scheme that Rick Argudo had described at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Three weeks later, Operation C-Chase collided with another govern ment sting, Operation Pisces.

On May 6, 1987, U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese held a press conference in Los Angeles to announce the conclusion of a mammoth undercover investigation called Operation Pisces. Over the course of three years, it had led to the arrests of more than 400 drug traffickers and the seizure of nine tons of cocaine and $47 million in cash. Drug Enforcement Administration officials at his side described Pisces as "nothing less than the largest and most successful undercover investiga tion in federal drug law enforcement history."

Also standing alongside Meese at the press conference was Carlos Villalaz, the attorney general of Panama. Meese praised the Panamani ans for their assistance in freezing seventy-seven accounts at eighteen Panamanian banks. The loss of funds was inconsequential to the drug traffickers but what it signified was not: The Panamanian government would not stay bought.

Since 1982 at least, the leaders of the Medellin cartel and other traffickers had been paying large sums of cash to General Manuel Noriega. In return, Noriega had turned his country into a way station for the white powder trade. He allowed the traffickers to ship American- bound cocaine through Panamanian ports and airstrips, protected their drug-processing laboratories, provided safe haven for the kingpins, and helped launder narco dollars.

Along the way, Noriega collected millions of dollars in bribes. Much of the bribe money found its way into Noriega's secret account at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, as did some of the drug funds. Indeed, when the DEA persuaded the Panamanians to freeze suspected drug accounts at eighteen banks as part of Pisces, fully one third of the accounts were at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in Panama.

In exchange for Noriega's help, DEA administrator John Lawn sent him a letter that praised the general for his personal assistance and said, "Drug traffickers around the world are now on notice that the proceeds and profits of their illegal ventures are not welcome in Panama."

The disclosure of Panama's cooperation touched off deep concern among the drug dealers and the banks doing business there, including BCCI. It also troubled Bob Mazur and his cohorts in C-Chase.

Their first concern was strategic. Would Panama really be shut down for money laundering? If so, they would have lost months of planning with the Moras and the entree with BCCI. New tactics might have to be adopted, new countries scouted for laundering.

The second worry was more immediate. Mazur knew from his contacts that the DEA undercover operation was very similar to his. DEA agents and local police had posed as money launderers, picking up cash from the collectors and passing it through friendly bank accounts. Cocaine suppliers had been alerted to the possibility of long-term, large-scale undercover penetration. Worse, Operation Pisces had fo cused on Miami and Los Angeles and one of those named, but not charged, in the indictment was Jimmy Mora. According to the indict-

ment, Mora and another man had been seen delivering a large amount of cash.

This was the more immediate problem, and the C-Chase agents mulled it over in countless discussions in and out of their Tampa office. Mazur, who slipped over to the Customs office during the undercover operation when he thought it was safe, liked to go jogging with the desk-bound deputy special agent in charge of the office, Paul O'Brien. As O'Brien huffed and puffed beside him one day, Mazur tried to convince O'Brien that his scenario was the best one. Put the Colombians on the defensive. Don't wait for them to raise questions or doubts about Mazur and Abreu. When the brainstorming sessions ended, the other agents had agreed to Mazur's plan.

So on May 20, when Jimmy Mora came to Tampa to meet with Mazur, it was Mora who was on the receiving end of hostile questions. Mazur, his voice menacing, complained about the lack of security on Mora's end of the operation. Then he pulled out copies of the Pisces indictments. He said he had had his lawyer get them so he could check out the names. As he read the names aloud, he asked Mora if he recognized any of them. Shaking his head, Mora replied, "No," to each one. Until Mazur came to Gabriel Jaime Mora.

Mora was obviously disturbed. He was hearing his own name in connection with Pisces for the first time. Mora then explained that he had been stopped two years before at Los Angeles International Airport, but, Mora protested, his operation was secure.

"The best thing for us to do is just stop and take a look and do a damage assessment," Mazur said. "It wouldn't be wise for us to go forward."

The C-Chase agents had calculated this move carefully. They figured that the Colombians would expect a government undercover operation to want to hurry business, not slow it down. "It seemed to us that that would be something that would throw them off balance," Mazur later explained.

The slowdown also reflected a basic Customs Service principle. The Service simply didn't want to move too much drug money. It suspected that some launderers would deal through a government sting even after they "made" it because the risk of the eventual bust was more than balanced by the efficiency and security that the undercover operation provided while it ran. Mazur and his colleagues were aiming for the maximum penetration they could achieve while moving the smallest practical volume of dirty money. They succeeded at both counts, largely thanks to Mazur's psychological manipulation.

When Mora said he was returning to Los Angeles to assess the damage to his organization, Mazur cautioned him to go to another city first, such as San Francisco. From there, he could call and check out the damage before flying on to Los Angeles.

Mazur wanted to appear extremely cautious. He knew that Operation C-Chase was going to be buffeted by another storm in a month. The FBI had been running an undercover sting called Operation Cashweb Expressway since 1984, which was going to be brought down with a series of arrests and seizures in thirty days.

In Expressway, FBI agent Robert Paquette had done almost exactly the same thing as Mazur in C-Chase. Paquette had set up a financial services company in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was near an exit on the Connecticut Thrnpike, hence the code name Expressway. Through his company, Paquette had been moving money for drug rings in New York and New Jersey. A total of $200 million had been tracked, $14 million of it to Panama.

Expressway would reach high into the Medellin cartel, targeting two of Pablo Escobar's closest associates and top money launderers. It also would reach close to Gonzalo Mora, Jr. Later, Mora would tell Mazur that FBI agents had lured one of his close friends to Aruba, the Caribbean island, along with two other money washers, and then kidnapped him on the high seas and taken him to Puerto Rico to be arrested.

Even before this second jolt, Gonzalo Mora, Jr., sent word from Coldmbia. He needed a letter from Mazur listing his business contacts and the fronts used in moving Mora's money. People were suspicious. With those suspicions, the money pickups slowed down. Small amounts were picked up a couple of times in June and July, but the pace was not nearly what it had been before Pisces went down.

When Mora next met Mazur face to face at the end of August of 1987, he was apologetic. His clients were indeed highly suspicious and the letter had been necessary to try to calm their fears. Mazur said he understood, adding that the Panamanian account of IDC International was "operational" and had been in use for a month and a half for other business.

"I have had the complete assurance of the people with the Bank of Credit and Commerce here that they will do everything to help me as long as I will be careful not to do anything to jeopardize them," Mazur explained.

Here clearly was an appeal to Mora's greed. Someone had been persuaded that the Americans could be trusted after all. By the fall of 1987, C-Chase was picking up more cash than ever. The Jeweler was using the ring for pickups in New York and Philadelphia as well as Los Angeles. And Gonzalo Mora, Jr., was handling a considerable amount of business in southern Michigan from the mysterious Don Chepe. Abreu had now added Detroit to his list of cities as he flew around the country picking up cash.

Every time Emir Abreu flew in the twin-engine Citation jet, he liked to remember how the operation had come to own it.

Budgets of undercover operations are not bottomless, so agents often use confiscated automobiles and other goods as part of their cover. The green Mercedes-Benz 300E that Bob Mazur drove as his personal car during the undercover operation had been seized from a drug dealer. The Citation jet, too, was seized from a drug smuggler and the C-Chase agents immediately wanted to use it for their operation, but Mazur was a stickler for security. The fewer people who knew what was going on, the better, even those at other government agencies. For this reason, the agents did not want to register the jet with the Federal Aviation Administration as a government aircraft and risk disclosure.

"The likelihood of betrayal is almost nil," said Steve Cook, who took over as one of two C-Chase case agents after Mazur went undercover. "But the key is, and Bob is an expert at this, that you don't make any disclosures that aren't a hundred percent necessary. So in a case like this, you do as much as you can for yourself."

By now, the agents were adept at concealment. They simply took a page out of the crooks' book and used a front. The plane was going to be sold at auction, with the proceeds going to the Customs Service. A major Miami law firm was hired through Financial Consulting Inc. to bid on the plane. The firm was instructed to go as high as necessary at the auction.

The sales price wound up a cool $1 million, and the plane was registered clean in the name of FCI. The lawyers never knew who had really hired them. Had they, the little hitch might never have occurred.

FCI never paid the Florida state sales tax due on the $1 million purchase price. It never paid the purchase price either. The transaction was simply a transfer of assets on the books of the Customs Service, which would have gotten the money anyway. They could use the plane and sell it later.

But the State of Florida had no idea what was going on, so it sent the law firm a letter demanding payment of $50,000 in sales tax from its clients. Mazur told the lawyers that the plane would not be kept in Florida, and the law firm helped negotiate a release from the sales tax, all without the lawyers ever learning the true identity of their client.

As the ring flourished, the private jet carried Abreu to cities across the United States, where he picked up suitcases filled with cash from dangerous, sometimes nervous strangers. Just like legitimate money couriers, Abreu often arrived with nothing more than the number of a telephone beeper. Beepers were the communication instrument of choice for drug dealers because they could be registered in fake names and disposed of easily and cheaply.

The pickups were fraught with risks to Abreu's safety and to the security of the operation itself. Abreu always arranged for backup from local Customs agents, but if things went wrong and they had to show themselves it could blow Operation C-Chase to hell. Or they could be too late in responding and find Emir Abreu blown to hell.

Sometimes the connections were not only dangerous, they were bizarre. In one instance, as Abreu waited to pick up cash outside a supermarket in New York City, a van wheeled around the corner and two kids hopped out. Right in the middle of the street they unloaded four heavy boxes that Abreu had to hurry over and haul away. It took a team of ten agents several hours to count the contents of the boxes-$2 million in cash.

A credit card was the source of a close call. Because Detroit did not have a Spanish-speaking Customs agent, Abreu and the case agent, Steve Cook, flew up there regularly for pickups once drug money started flowing their way from Mora's new clients.

One snowy night they picked up four suitcases of cash and brought them back to the airplane, which was sitting at a small commercial airport outside the city. They had an attendant fuel the plane and deice the wings. The attendant then came over with a bill for $1,100. Abreu gave the young man a credit card, but the gny handed it back and said, "I'm sorry, sir. Your card has expired."

Without batting an eye, the agent stepped back into the plane. The attendant, fearing that he was about to see $1,100 fly away, stuck his head into the plane and looked around. What he saw was Abreu opening a suitcase filled with cash and pulling out a stack of hundred-dollar bills. Abreu counted out the money and handed it over. The attendant smiled and waved good-bye.

A few days after they returned to Tampa, the agents telephoned Customs in Detroit. No, there had been no report of suspicious activity at the airport. On the next trip to Detroit, the C-Chase agents used the same airport. This time they got the red carpet treatment literally. The attendant ran out to the plane and, unrolling a strip of carpet, greeted them enthusiastically and politely. It was another telltale sign of what the agents knew all too well-everyone likes cash and too few people ask questions about it.

Usually, Abreu would bring the cash back to Tampa.. Customs agents would count the money and deposit it in the FCI account at Florida National Bank. From the start, the agents could not get their cash counts to match the Colombians. The agents usually found themselves coming up short of the tally provided by Mora's people, which could create trust problems in the long run. They hit upon the idea of selling money- counting machines to the Colombians, just like the ones used in banks and more sophisticated drug operations.

During a demonstration for a skeptical Colombian housewife in a Chicago hotel room, an agent was trying to explain the machine's operation as he fed bills into the whirling cylinder. When he leaned over the machine, his dangling tie fell into the counter and the cylinder snatched it and dragged the red-faced agent to his knees. As the agent struggled to shut off the machine, the woman shouted gleefully: "Eat you tie. Eat you tie."