The Miami office that Amj ad Awan joined in August of 1987 was one of the spokes in the growing, hidden empire that Agha Sahib and the Bank of Credit and Commerce was building in the United States. Within the bank, the United States was viewed as the "second leg" of the growing institution, with the first planted firmly in Europe. Despite being outlawed by American regulators, the bank had acquired control over banks with assets in excess of $10 billion in the country. And even bigger plans were afoot. The lure of the world's richest banking market was too much to resist for a man devoted to creating the world's biggest bank.

Abedi made his plans clear a few weeks after Awan's transfer to Miami. It was September 30, 1987, and the occasion was a gathering of executives from BCCI and First American at the bank's office on Park Avenue in New York City. As usual, Abedi's language was florid, but there was no mistaking the meaning, the conviction, the sense that nothing would stand in their way.

"It will be a new creature," Abedi said of the BCCI empire in the United States. "What will be the volume and size of this creature? I am placing you into a situation where you will be. creating assets of $10 billion and profit of $200 million for the group, though this may not be reflected in your books. You will not be sitting in this building. You will have a building with twenty-five floors. You will become an executive in the real sense of the word. You have to have a clear direction and vision to become that.

"How many people will you have? What capability will they have? Row will you develop their qualities? Quality is there. It will take time to bring it out. There should be clarity about the goals and directions."

Little had interfered with Abedi's mission. When Pakistan had nationalized his United Bank, he had created another and structured it to be free of the control of any single government or regulator. When American regulators had blocked his expansion efforts in the seventies, he had gone underground. When the Bank of England tried to limit his growth there, he had directed his efforts to Asia and Africa. When severe losses from the bank's runaway trading operation had threatened to demolish all that he had built, he had overseen a giant financial fraud that propped up the bank with money entrusted to it by hundreds of thousands of depositors. So when Agha Hasan Abedi told his key executives that they would build a new creature in the United States, what was there to stop him?

The plan was ambitious. Abedi wanted to make another run at gaining the approval from U.S. regulators to open a full-service banking operation in the United States. All that he operated legally in the United States were agency offices, second-class banks that could not take domestic deposits. With $20 billion in assets on the books elsewhere, branches in seventy-three countries, and the best lawyers money could buy, Abedi was confident that he could win approval for a full-fledged bank. He would start slowly, receiving approval to acquire a small bank in New York, Florida, Texas, or California. The bank would be an iceberg; beneath the tip would be the immense secret network of banks and branches already under the control of BCCI in the United States.

Portions of the strategy were spelled out in a memo to Abedi dated October 22, 1987, less than a month after his New York speech. The memo, signed by Abdur Sakhia, the bank's North American manager, stated the case for owning a U.S. bank outright and discussed a series of options for doing so. The plan itself contained nothing illegal. Rather, it provided a public strategy that would build on what Abedi and his frontmen had already accomplished in secret. Indeed, Sakhia was either unaware of the earlier rejections of the bank's efforts to acquire U.S. institutions through legal means or chose to ignore them.

"The home of BCC is in U.S. dollars," wrote Sakhia. "The flag of BCC is U.S. dollars. It is therefore quite surprising that BCC does not have a 'real' presence in the home of the dollar-the United States of America. It would make immense sense to have a direct access to U.S. dollar deposits in the largest economy in the world, which is expressed in U.S. dollars. Having a branch/bank will open our doors to a deposit base of 3 trillion dollars in the United States."

Already, the bank had invested heavily in offices and employees in the country. Converting to a full service bank would cost little more. In addition, he said, the bank had a corps of American officers working abroad who could provide executive staff immediately for any institution that BCCI acquired. "United States is the land of immigrants," wrote Sakhia. "Our own experience since the beginning of our operations here confirms that U.S. customers will do business with us if we can meet their standards of service and quality, notwithstanding that we are a foreign bank. We believe that, after the third-world countries where BCC achieved its major successes, the U.S. is the first industrialized country where we will find a high degree of acceptability."

A month later, Sakhia wrote to Abedi about the possibility of implementing the plan with the purchase of The Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. Its Indonesian owners, operating through a series of Hong Kong entities, had recently put the bank up for sale. With assets of $1.6 billion and forty branches in the San Francisco area, the bank offered a strong entry point for BCCI, said Sakhia. Not long after the memo, however, Hibernia was bought by Security Pacific National Bank, at the time the second-largest bank in California behind the Bank of America.

In early December 1987, Sakhia flew to London for a BCCI meeting. While there, he discussed the planned American expansion with Abedi. Soon after returning to New York, Sakhia had good news for Abedi. "In reference to our discussion in London on the subject, we have come across a small bank in San Francisco which is believed to be clean," Sakhia wrote in a letter addressed to "Agha Sahib."

The letter did not identify the bank, but described it as a five-year-old institution with assets of $39.9 million. "Since the bank is so small," wrote Sakhia, "it can be effectively assessed and can be assimilated into our corporate culture."

This deal, too, fell through, but the corporate culture at BCCI made anything seem possible. Indeed, it was that culture, and the friendships it nourished, that had ushered the bank into dozens of other countries around the world. As with everything at the bank, it was something that flowed from the top down.

Over the span of two decades, Abedi had cultivated political leaders and others of influence around the world, persuading them to lend or sell their names and prestige to the Bank of Credit and Commerce. It was not so much that these dignitaries performed favors-some did nothing more than appear at gatherings with Abedi and other BCCI officials, but the association was enough, and on that foundation, Abedi had expanded his bank.

Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi and Clark Clifford of Washington had only been the start. Lord Callaghan, a former prime minister of Britain, was a paid economic adviser to BCCI. While she was prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi presented a $10 million Third World prize established by BCCI. President Zia of Pakistan and countless Arab leaders were supporters of Abedi and his bank. Javier Perez de Cuellar used the bank's customized Boeing 727 on business as secretary-general of the United Nations.

The biggest of these catches was a former president of the United States. As he had promised at their first meeting in 1977, Bert Lance had introduced Abedi to Jimmy Carter, but it was not until 1981, after Carter was defeated in his reelection bid by Ronald Reagan. Without Air Force One but still with a worldwide agenda, Carter had responded happily to Abedi's offer of BC Cl's 727 jetliner as a sometime transport. Abedi also donated $500,000 early on to help establish Carter's presidential library and the Carter Center, a public policy institute at Emory University in Atlanta.

But former presidents are not so easily bought. What cemented the relationship was the apparent shared concern of the two men over the plight of people living in the Third World. There is no doubt that Carter was sincere, for one of the most positive legacies of his presidency had been his commitment to humanitarian goals worldwide. Indeed, while Carter was discredited as a politician in the United States, he remained a respected and influential figure in the developing world. In Abedi, Carter told associates, he believed he had found someone who shared his plans for improving health care and living conditions in the world's poorest countries. Carter's mission did correspond neatly with Abedi's image of BCCI as a Third World bank. It would be a long time before anyone recognized the yawning chasm between rhetoric and reality when it came to Abedi and BCCI. By then, Jimmy Carter had provided Abedi with his most powerful calling cards in places where he wanted to do business.

The primary vehicle for this relationship was Global 2000, an ambitious effort started by Carter in the mid-i 980s to bring modern medicine and health care to beleaguered portions of Africa, Asia, and China. The project was bankrolled by Abedi and Ryoichi Sasakawa, an aging Japanese billionaire and one-time war criminal who earned his fortune as a master of gambling on motorboat races.

Abedi donated at least $2.5 million to Global 2000 as a start-up contribution. Over three years, BCCI and various related entities donated between $6 million and $8 million to Global 2000. In fact, Abedi and Sasakawa were the only two donors to Global 2000, together contributing more than $19 million between 1986 and 1990. In exchange, Abedi became aligned with Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, in numerous countries.

For instance, in late June 1987 the Carters flew to China for a week-long visit as guests of the Chinese government. The former president was well regarded in China. While he was president, the United States and China had reestablished full diplomatic relations. The purpose of the 1987 trip was to examine avenues of cooperation between Global 2000 and various organizations in China. The stay included a dinner hosted by key members of the Chinese National People's Congress in Tibet and meetings and elaborate dinners with Chinese leaders in Beijing.

At Carter's side during each of these functions, soaking up the reflected glory, was Agha Hasan Abedi. The banker had been courting Chinese officials for years, trying to expand the small representative office that he had been allowed to open in late 1982 in Beijing and another office in the Shenzhen trade zone opened in 1986. Although Abedi was no stranger to top Chinese officials, Carter offered him a higher level of exposure. At a banquet in Beijing on June 29, Chinese Foreign Minister Wu Xueqian praised Carter for his contribution to Sino-American relations and expressed his thanks to Abedi and his wife for their interest in China's economic undertakings.

For his part, the night before the state banquet, the banker had hosted a dinner for the Carters and Chinese officials in Beijing. In Tibet he used the government-sponsored dinner to announce that BCCI was donating $50,000 a year to help build the University of Tibet and would offer scholarships for two outstanding students each year to study in the United States and Britain.

The climax of the visit was a ceremony with Chindse Premier Zhao Ziyang at which Carter and Abedi signed a letter of intent for cooperation between the China Welfare Fund for the Handicapped, Global 2000, and BCCI. The joint project involved technical and financial assistance to help China educate the handicapped and build a factory to produce artificial limbs.

Jimmy Carter maintained an equally high profile in other parts of the world. A similar artificial limbs factory was to be built in Kenya by Global 2000 and BCCI. In Bangladesh, Carter and Prime Minister Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury launched a project in which Global 2000 and the government would try to improve health and agricultural programs in the impoverished country. At Carter's side was Abedi. Indeed, the two men and Rosalynn Carter flew into Bangladesh from the United Arab Emirates aboard BCCI's 727 jet. And when they left together, it was for Pakistan.

Accompanying the Carters and Abedi on the trip to Bangladesh in 1986 was Andrew Young, then mayor of Atlanta and a former United States representative to the United Nations. Like his friend Carter, Young had formed a close business and personal relationship with Abedi during the 1980s.

During his two terms as Atlanta mayor, he was on a $50,000 annual retainer from BCCI that was to be paid into his small trading company through a line of credit that the company opened with Ghaith Pharaon's National Bank of Georgia in 1982, the year that Young became mayor. The loan rose to $175,000 and was transferred to BCCI in about 1985. Eventually, BCCI forgave the loan after Young's business partner informed that bank that he and Young had done enough consulting work to equal the amount of the loan.

Over the years, Andy Young had introduced Abedi to various Third World leaders Young had met while in the UN, serving as a sort of ambassador for BCCI and Abedi in much the same way that Jimmy Carter did.

"I saw them as a Third World bank," Young said later. "They were very free-market oriented, but non-European. Consequently, they had the trust of a lot of people who saw themselves as socialists or as victims of neocolonialist exploitation. Every good idea that Carter and I had, Abedi was willing to finance." He also said that he entered into his relationship with BCCI thinking that he was helping the people it was serving, not necessarily the bank.

After BCCI's troubles surfaced, Carter defended his relationship with Abedi through aides and written statements. The former president said that he had actively sought "international funds to address international problems." Aides said the money was donated with no strings attached.

"We don't have any reason to be embarrassed because we didn't do anything wrong," James Brasher, Carter's fund-raiser, told an Atlanta Constitution reporter in the spring of 1991. "He's not out there as a for-hire commercial influence peddler."

In fact, the value to Abedi of the former president of the United States and others willing to lend their names and prestige to BCCI endeavors was intangible and invaluable. The ambitious banker knew that people are judged by the company they keep.

The former president also had business dealings with Ghaith Pharaon and the National Bank of Georgia, which the Saudi Arabian had bought from Bert Lance in 1978. At one point, the bank was the single largest lender to Carter's family business, peanut farms and warehouses.

Carter and his wife also socialized with Pharaon, who made Georgia his base of operations in the United States after acquiring the bank and buying automaker Henry Ford's former plantation, Richmond Hill, outside Savannah in 1981. The mansion, which was built in 1938, is a reminder of the days when Henry Ford seemed to own the surrounding town of Richmond Hill. Its new owner had similar pretensions when he acquired the estate. He wined and dined numerous blue-chip guests at the colonial-style mansion with its gold-plated fixtures. In 1983, the Carters were among Pharaon's guests at a special screening of the film La Traviata at Savannah's Johnny Mercer Theater. The film was produced by a company owned by Pharaon and the showing was to benefit Savannah cultural organizations.

With his mansion, his bank, an insurance company, a plastics factory, and a fleet of Mercedes-Benzes and corporate jets, Pharaon cut a wide swath through Georgia society. Even after he suffered his financial setbacks in 1985, the news was slow to reach the American South. In the spring of 1987, the Atlanta Business Chronicle wrote a lengthy cover article about Pharaon under the headline "The Richest Man in Georgia." The occasion was Pharaon's pending sale of the National Bank of Georgia to First American Bankshares of Washington, D.C.

Back in June 1986, First American told the Federal Reserve Board that it wanted to buy the Georgia bank. The problem was a state law that prohibited out-of-state financial institutions from buying Georgia banks unless Georgia banks had the right to buy institutions in the home state of the acquirer. In this case, First American was based in Washington, which did not allow outside financial institutions to buy its banks.

So the National Bank of Georgia launched an aggressive lobbying campaign in the Georgia legislature that resulted in a change in the law. The law was changed in the space of a single session of the part-time legislature, a remarkable accomplishment. The effort had another, quieter partner: Agha Abedi and BCCI paid some of the bills for wining and dining Georgia's legislators.

In reality, Abedi had been involved in the negotiations for the sale from the outset. The chief negotiators for First American were its top executives, Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. They also had remained the top lawyers for Abedi and BCCI in the United States, bringing millions of dollars in legal fees into their law firm in Washington. National Bank of Georgia's side was led by Roy Carlson, the bank president recommended by Abedi to Pharaon nearly a decade earlier. And Abedi sat in on the most critical talks himself.

Other banks had been interested in the National Bank of Georgia, which had quadrupled in size to $1.7 billion in assets since being taken over by Pharaon. Among them was NCNB, the powerhouse regional bank from Charlotte, North Carolina. NCNB was anxious to expand in the rich Atlanta area. However, it was unwilling to offer more than $200 million, and some of the money would come from NCNB stock.

First American made an all-cash offer valued at $220 million. In the Atlanta Business Chronicle article, Pharaon explained that First American's offer was better than that of NC NB. He also said that he was more comfortable with the investors in First American's holding company, Credit and Commerce American Holdings. Among them were two of his longtime business partners, Kamal Adham and Faisal al-kilaij. They had been partners in various enterprises, explained Pharaon, such as BCCI and Attock Oil. But he defended the price as fair, claiming: "I'm dealing with people with whom I have other dealings and I can't afford to pass on to them something that they wouldn't be totally happy with."

In explaining the other side's motivation for the transaction to a reporter for the American Banker, a trade publication, Clark Clifford said: "Our investors encouraged us to consider the purchase. They had known of the ownership being in the hands of Pharaon. They encouraged us to do it."

The Federal Reserve Board in Washington later provided yet another version of the transaction: First American was actually buying the Georgia bank from itself Through the loans and side agreements with the Arab investors in First American's parent company, Abedi and BCCI held a controlling interest in the Washington banking company. In similar arrangements with Pharaon, the Fed said, BCCI controlled the National Bank of Georgia, too.

Evidence of BCCI's control was demonstrated through its role in hiring top officers at National Bank of Georgia, which was the same as its role with First American. For instance, Abedi had recommended Ca4son for the top spot at NBG in 1979. Two years later, Swaleh Naqvi recommended that a BCCI executive named Tariq Jamil be hired at NBG as a senior vice president. Ostensibly, Jamil was to handle international matters, but the bank was a consumer-oriented institution that did little overseas business. Two other former BCCI employees, Mehdi Reza and Asif Mujtaba, also were hired by NBG during the 1980s. Mujtaba was the office manager in Panama who had so annoyed Colonel Noriega.

Under the Fed's scenario, the hidden control over the Georgia bank dated at least to 1981, when BCCI controlled fifty percent of the shares of the company set up by Pharaon as owner of National Bank of Georgia. When Pharaon's empire teetered on the edge of collapse in 1985, BCCI was afraid that his creditors would seize the Georgia bank and BCCI would lose its hidden investment. So in December 1985, Pharaon arranged to sell his remaining fifty percent of the bank's holding company to an entity controlled by BCCI. According to the Fed, the complicated set of secret transactions left the banned bank with total ownership control over the Georgia bank.

Even the timing of the sale to First American appeared to have been motivated by BCCI's internal demands. In 1987, Price Waterhouse raised concerns about the bank's extensive loans to Pharaon. At the time, the loans totaled nearly $300 million. Selling NBG offered a way to pay down those loans and get the accountants off the back of BCCI. As a result, when First American bought the National Bank of Georgia for $220 million, Pharaon collected only a small amount of the money, $14.3 million, according to the Fed's figures. The rest allegedly went to BCCI, which used the money to pay down Pharaon's loans and improve its own balance sheet.

Along with the glowing profile of Pharaon, the Atlanta Business Chronicle article had contained an intriguing report from an anonymous source, most likely the press-savvy Pharaon himself. It said that the Saudi investor was considering investing in one of Florida's largest savings and loans.

The Great American Savings and Loan Disaster was just beginning at this time. One of its early victims was very nearly a high-flying Miami institution called CenTrust Savings Bank. But Pharaon and BCCI rode to the rescue and kept the institution alive long enough to add a few hundred million dollars to the eventual rescue cost paid by the American taxpayers.

In August 1987, four months after the Atlanta Business Chronicle article appeared and days after the completion of the National Bank of Georgia sale, Cen'Thust announced that Ghaith Pharaon had acquired nearly seventeen percent of the institution's stock. The disclosure said it was a friendly investment and Pharaon had expressed no intention to take over the institution. By early 1988, Pharaon had upped his stake to 24.9 percent and brought his total investment to $22 million.

Here again were the familiar fingerprints of BCCI. Pharaon had borrowed the $22 million from the bank and used his shares of CenTrust as collateral for the loan.

At the time, CenTrust had the outward appearance of a healthy, even robust institution. Its chairman, entrepreneur David Paul, maintained opulent offices in one of the most glittering new buildings on the Miami skyline, with a $3 million marble staircase and a gold-plated bathroom sink. In his home, he maintained a collection of paintings by old masters, bought with funds from the savings and loan. A liberal Democrat, Paul donated heavily to politicians and entertained them lavishly. Pharaon, too, was a high liver who entertained politicians and others who could be useful to him. So it was natural that he and Paul became fast friends, taking vacations together on their yachts in the Caribbean and Mediterranean and flying around on each other's private jets.

The situation was not so pleasant at Cen~ust. By the spring of 1988, regulators were pressuring Paul to raise more capital for his institution, which was suffering heavy losses. The regulators even threatened to shut down CenTrust unless more cash was pumped in. Paul and Pharaon both met with federal regulators in Washington, who eventually agreed to relax the stiff rules being applied to CenTrust and allow the institution to raise new capital and stay open. To raise the money, Paul turned to the New York securities firm of Drexel Burnham Lambert, then still the home of the infamous junk bond king Michael Milken. Drexel agreed to underwrite an issue of new bonds aimed at raising $150 million from the public to inject into CenTrust. Unfortunately for Paul, nobody was too high on S&L investments by 1988 and the bonds went begging. None sold.

In May, Ghaith Pharaon arranged for BCCI to buy $25 million of the bonds. The deal was done through a brokerage firm owned by Pharaon. A Drexel subsidiary bought another $10 million worth about the same time. The two purchases soothed the savage market, allowing Paul and Drexel Burnham to sell the remaining bonds and fend off the regulators for the time being. 'Iwo months later, on July 27, 1988, CenTrust repurchased the bonds from BCCI at the exact price the bank had paid for them.

The secret deal would not be uncovered until an auditor's examination of CenTrust a year later. By that time, the institution had been declared insolvent and taken over by the regulators. Its failure was expected to cost the American taxpayers more than $2 billion, one of the biggest bills of any thrift failure. Shortly after the takeover, the federal Office of Thrift Supervision described the CenTrust-BCCI deal this way: "It is highly likely that this transaction was consummated only to preserve investor perception of CenTrust's ability to sell the entire $150 million issue."