The Infiltrator, page 1
About the Book
THE TRUE STORY OF HOW ONE MAN RISKED HIS LIFE TO BRING DOWN THE BAD GUYS
Bob Musella was a mob-connected big shot whose friends included the great and the good of the international underworld – corrupt bankers, tax cheats and drug barons. Together they partied in expensive hotels, drank the world’s finest champagnes, drove Rolls-Royce convertibles and flew in private jets.
In reality, Musella was Robert Mazur, a U.S. federal agent fronting an undercover operation inside global dirty banks and drug-trafficking empires stretching back to Pablo Escobar.
Full of near misses and harrowing escapes, The Infiltrator is the true story of how, in one of the most dramatic stings in history, Mazur helped to bring them all down.
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CONTENTS
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Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Preface: The Day of Reckoning
1. In the Beginning
2. The Birth of Robert Musella
3. Setting the Stage for the Colombians
4. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International
5. The Jeweler
6. The Golden Hook
7. The Magic of Panama
8. Pushing Buttons
9. Politics
10. Los Duros and Los Angeles
11. Luring Them In
12. The Fight Before Europe
13. The European Plan
14. Medellín Invades Paris
15. Revelations
16. The Enemy Within
17. The First Big Catch
18. The Confessional
19. Loose Ends
20. The Takedown
21. Battles
22. The Trials
Epilogue: The Aftermath
Glossary of Names
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Copyright
To Evelyn, my wife, whose love and support
are more than I deserve
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Preface
THE DAY OF RECKONING
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U.S. District Court, Tampa, Florida
March 26, 1990
ARMED GUARDS LED ME into a tiny, windowless room in Tampa’s U.S. District Courthouse. Through the glossy mahogany walls came the muffled voices of lawyers arguing and the response of an unruly crowd. On the other side of the door, I was about to do battle with some of the best defense attorneys money could buy. For the first time since the unmasking of Bob Musella — my cover as an international money launderer — half a dozen men who had come to realize that I wasn’t really one of them were about to lay eyes on me.
As the minutes dragged, I gathered strength for the fight ahead by thinking of my wife and children, who had spent years enduring the hardships of my career. With the operation over, we all looked forward to returning to life as it had been, only to learn that some of the eighty-five men charged in the first wave of indictments had put a $500,000 contract on my head. My family and I had relocated and were living under an assumed name, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if my role in taking down cartels and their bankers brought any harm to those I loved. The hard work and anguish of the last four years would have meant nothing. I needed every ounce of strength and determination I could muster to get through the next three months on the witness stand.
“They’re ready for you now,” said a deputy U.S. marshal, opening the door and breaking my reverie. He led me into a courtroom jammed with hundreds of reporters and spectators — and also the wives and children of the defendants with whom I had spent so much time. They said nothing, but their faces all screamed, How could you? On the courtroom floor, the six defendants huddled among a constellation of lawyers.
Rudy Armbrecht, a major organizer for the Medellín cartel, had worked with the entire cartel commission to arrange some of their most sensitive operations in the U.S. If they needed to buy fleets of aircraft or assess the feasibility of global laundering schemes, they called on Rudy. He looked like a crazed Jack Nicholson, but he had the extraordinary intelligence and philosophical bent of Hannibal Lecter. Pablo Escobar had hand-picked Armbrecht’s boss, Gerardo Moncada — also known as Don Chepe — to control a large part of his cocaine empire. Armbrecht had acted as a conduit between me, Don Chepe, and Escobar. As I glanced toward him from the stand, Armbrecht grabbed his tie and, with a demented look on his face, waved it at me to say hello.
Near Armbrecht sat Amjad Awan, a smooth-as-silk senior executive of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) who laundered money for some of the most notorious criminals in the world. His clients included President Muhammad Zia of Pakistan, General Manuel Noriega of Panama, and high-ranking drug dealers in the U.S. The son of the former head of the ISI — Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA — Awan supported a group then known as the Afghan Freedom Fighters, known now as the Taliban. Awan held himself above stunts like waving his tie. In his impeccably tailored suit, he tilted his head forward and looked down his nose as though he were royalty annoyed by my presence.
Sitting beside Awan was his best friend and co-marketer at BCCI, Akbar Bilgrami, who shared responsibility with Awan to develop business for BCCI in all of Latin America, where they openly sought relationships with the owners of any dirty money they could find. Born and raised in Islamabad, Bilgrami spoke fluent Spanish and had spent long stretches of his career in Colombia, where he met his third wife. Bilgrami stared me down, fidgeting in his seat and rubbing his hands together. Even when I was undercover, I had trouble putting him at ease. No doubt he knew this day would come.
Ian Howard, a BCCI officer born in India, ran the Paris branch of the bank, doing the dirty work for his boss, Nazir Chinoy. The third-highest-ranking executive in a 19,000-employee bank, Chinoy directed all European and North African branches. After I won Chinoy’s confidence in Paris, he brought Howard into our schemes. Chinoy would have been sitting in the courtroom, too, had he not been fighting extradition in London, where authorities there had arrested him and were holding him without bond. The old London jail in which he was languishing made most U.S. prisons look like four-star hotels. His minion Howard glared at me, but neither his face nor his body moved.
Also from Paris, Howard’s right-hand man Sibte Hassan found himself tangled in the web of our undercover operation. Hassan’s was the hand that pushed money around the globe wherever Chinoy directed. Younger and less experienced than his colleagues, Hassan had never set foot in the U.S. before his arrest. His dependence on his superiors carried through even to the courtroom. He kept glancing at the other defendants, looking to see how he should act.
Last in the line-up came Syed Hussain, a BCCI account executive in the Panama branch. Hussain saw in me an easy means of meeting the bank’s pressure to bring in any kind of money, as long as it increased the bottom line of the balance sheet. When agents arrested Hussain, he was on his way to what he thought was my bachelor party. As the cuffs clicked around his wrists, he laughed. Surprised, the arresting agents asked him what was so funny. “I’ve been to bachelor parties like this when women dress up like cops and act like they are arresting you,” he said, laughing. “Where are the women?” The agents shook their heads, and said, “Pal, you need to wake up and smell the coffee. This isn’t make-believe. Your ass is under arrest.”
I spent years undercover as a money launderer to the international underworld, infiltrating the apex of a criminal hierarchy safeguarded by a circle of dirty bankers and businessmen who quietly shape power across the globe. They knew me as Bob Musella, a wealthy, mob-connected American businessman also living the good life. We partied in $1,000-per-night hotel suites, lived in lavish homes, drove Rolls-Royce convertibles, and flew on the Concorde and in private jets. Bob Musella was their kind of guy. Bob Musella ran a successful investment company, had an interest in a Wall Street brokerage firm, operated a chain of jewelry stores — he had it all. What they didn’t know was that I wasn’t really Bob Musella. That name and lifestyle were a lie I lived solely to gain access to their secret lives in the criminal underworld.
Under my Armani suits or in my Renwick briefcase, mini recorders captured the damning evidence of our partnerships in crime, which I then passed to my government handlers. After a dramatic takedown staged at a fake wedding (mine), more than forty men and women were arrested, found guilty, and sent to prison. In the year and a half between the end of the operation and the start of the first trial, a handful of dedicated agents and I put in eighteen-hour days feverishly transcribing more than 1,400 clandestine recordings. Those microcassettes became knockout punches in the trials ahead, and Operation C-Chase became one of the most successful undercover operations in the history of U.S. law enforcement.
The story of my role in the sting fed magazine covers and front pages for years: “Breaking the Underworld Bank” (New York Times); “BCCI Officials Charged with Money Laundering” (Wall Street Journal); “Fed’s Playboy Cover Topples Drug Moguls” (New York Post); “Narco Bankers — Inside the Secret World of International Drug Money Laundering” (San Francisco Examiner). But the value of that exposure paled in comparison to the amount of money pumped into the pockets of the lawyers defending the men I saw from the witness stand. Government officials later calculated that tens of millions of dollars flowed from the shareholders of BCCI — wealthy Saudi oil barons — into the defense’s coffers in an attempt to prevent the conviction of bank officers who had catered to my every mon
And that figure in turn pales in comparison to the $400 to $500 billion in revenue generated from the drug trade each year, according to U.S. and U.N. estimates. A vast sum, and yet the U.S. government can’t track even one percent of that wealth. Banks in Switzerland, Panama, Lichtenstein, and other traditional havens continue to harbor dirty money, but my undercover work gathered intelligence showing that other, less traditional outlets were in ascendance. The cartels were starting to move their money to places like Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Dubai, and Oman. These banks conduct their business in Arabic, resist investigations by Western law enforcement, and thrive in a dollar-based cash trade.
The dirty bankers in all these places help control multibillion-dollar drug-trafficking empires, running their organizations like public companies. Accountants, attorneys, and financial advisers, their roots run deep in their communities, and they are laundering billions of dollars a year, manipulating complex international finance systems to serve drug lords, corrupt politicians, tax cheats, and terrorists. Subtle and sophisticated, they thrive in anonymity, offering discreet, first-class services no matter how much dirt or blood coats the money they protect. And they are getting away with it every day.
This is the story of how I helped bring some of them down. It is also the story of how undercover agents rise through the ranks, how billions of dollars flow through shell corporations and move across borders, how informants are cultivated and safe houses are made. It is, at its broadest, a shocking look inside the secret world of international drug-money laundering. At its narrowest and most intimate, it is a story of harrowing escapes, near misses, and justice served as my fellow agents and I built our case one piece of evidence at a time.
How it happened is a story I’ve never shared — until now. It all started with a glass of champagne.
1
IN THE BEGINNING
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Staten Island, New York
1950s
WHEN I WAS A BOY, my mother revealed — almost as a cautionary tale — that my great-grandfather, Ralph Cefaro, ran a sham moving company on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in order to transport bootleg whiskey during Prohibition for Charles “Lucky” Luciano, one of the most notorious gangsters in America.
My grandfather Joe and his brothers worked for the moving company with other guys who belonged to one of Lucky’s crews. When Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Dewey went after Lucky and his entire organization, one of the guys in the crew with a record got collared — not for bootlegging — and faced stiff time as a repeat offender. My grandfather, truly a stand-up guy, took the rap. After serving his time, he relocated the family from East Eleventh Street to a tiny second-story apartment near the dry docks on Staten Island. Like a lot of guys in the neighborhood back then, he had a nickname — Two Beers — which he earned because, after the yard whistle blew and his shift ended, he went straight to the Friendly Club, a local hangout, and immediately ordered two beers.
My family agrees that I was his favorite, which explains why, when I was only five years old, he started taking me to the Friendly Club to show me off to his friends. Like every good little Italian boy in those days, I played the accordion, and my grandfather couldn’t wait to sit me up on the bar so his buddies could see me playing without looking at sheet music. Surrounded by beer taps and billowing clouds of cigarette smoke, he would glance around the club and say with a look, Hey, shut up. We’re going to listen to little Bobby play now. All the guys in the club snapped to attention and listened while I squeezed out a song. It was awful, but no one dared kid Two Beers Cefaro about how his grandson played.
More than a decade after his death, I landed a summer job at Brewer Dry Dock as a carpenter, painter, and rigger. On my first day, one of the guys who had worked the yard for twenty years asked me, “Hey, kid, how da hell did ya get this job?”
“Well, my grandfather worked here years ago, and he had a lot of friends,” I said sheepishly. “One of the guys who knew him helped me out.”
“Oh, yeah, kid, who’s your grandpa?” he asked, tilting his head.
“Well, he’s been dead for a while, but everyone knew him as Two Beers Cefaro.”
“You’re kidding,” the guy replied, shocked. “Everybody knew Two Beers! He was a great guy.”
After word got around that I was Two Beers’s grandson, my AFL-CIO union shop steward, Steve, approached me. “Hey, kid, we need your help today,” he said. “After you shape up, come see me at the shitter.” Shaping up, in dock speak, meant going in the morning to the guy who ran your skill — carpentry, in my case — and finding out what job you had for the day. The shitter was just that: the bathroom building in the center of the yard.
When I showed, Steve explained that I had to hang around outside and bang on the wall if I saw anyone coming who didn’t work in the yard. My assignment coincided with visits from the local bookie, who was taking bets inside the shitter on numbers, horses, and games. Steve rotated this lookout job among a chosen few. But before he could ask me to do it again, another union replaced the AFL-CIO, and Steve lost his power. It was an important — and painless — lesson about loyalty and respect.
A couple of years later, at Wagner College on Staten Island, I stumbled across a job announcement for a co-op position at the Intelligence Division of the IRS. I had no idea what that meant, but it offered full-time summer employment, part-time school-year employment, and a shot at a full-time job after graduation.
Gathering information about the job gave me a chance to speak with a special agent with the division. As he described it, they didn’t audit and harass the average Joe. They carried guns and badges and worked shoulder to shoulder with other agencies, including the FBI, on joint task forces. They applied their accounting expertise to criminal tax cases against drug traffickers, mobsters, and big-time tax cheats. He often cited that old saw about the pen being mightier than the sword, ending with, “You know, Al Capone went to prison for income-tax evasion. If it hadn’t been for us putting that case together, he never would have seen the inside of Alcatraz.”
I was already taking accounting and business courses, and this sounded a lot more fun than becoming a bean-counting CPA. In earlier years, Chase Manhattan Bank and Montgomery Scott, a brokerage firm in downtown Manhattan, had hired me as a paper pusher — and I hated it. I wanted a career that I could be proud of, that kept my interest, that didn’t box me into the same boring routine every day. It was no doubt my mind-numbing experience at Chase and Montgomery Scott that drove me to the IRS gig.
That first day on the job at 120 Church Street electrified me with anticipation about what mobster or kingpin we were going to topple by day’s end. However, I was in for quite a shock. After I had settled in, Special Agent Morris Skolnick, who didn’t look a day under seventy, shuffled over to me and said, “Hey, kid, I’m going to show you the ropes.” He grabbed a handful of No. 2 pencils from his desk and slowly made his way to a hand-cranked pencil sharpener. As he struggled to sharpen each pencil, he looked at me with a sigh and mumbled about how important it was to start the day with sharp pencils.
Then he dragged me over to the photocopy machine, placed a schedule on the glass, and pushed START. As the top of the machine slid back and forth, he explained the importance of making “true” copies and always comparing the original to the copier output. My mind spun. What happened to the intrigue and adventure of putting bad guys in jail? This wasn’t the super cop job in the ad. It felt like I had been sold a bill of goods.
Later that day, Tony Carpinello rescued me. A young supervisor in the division, he explained that the office had two factions: desk jockeys like Skolnick and guys like himself who got things done. Tony was running what was then called the Strike Force Group, one of a collection of squads that Bobby Kennedy, as attorney general, had established. The agents assigned to Strike Force were working cases on most of the mobsters, drug dealers, and dirty politicians in the city. Tony introduced me to some of the guys, including Tommy Egan, who, along with agents from the DEA and detectives from the NYPD narcotics squad at the 34th Precinct, built the case against the bank that laundered millions for Frank Lucas, one of the biggest heroin traffickers in the state.
