Florida’s Money Laundering Suburb
April 5th, 2017Via: USA Today:
In a community known mostly as a getaway from the urban problems of Miami, the flood of drug money has confounded law enforcement agencies.
“We always thought we would get to it at some point,” said Charlie Blau, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the first money laundering sting in Miami. “We knew it would be a bigger problem.”
Federal agents say the criminal organizations use many methods to launder their money, including overseas bank wires and cash smuggling over the border.
They also have turned to other laundering areas, like the garment district in Los Angeles and the jewelry centers in New York City, to clean millions in drug profits.
But the export shops west of Miami remain among the oldest conduits in the country to launder money — and the most difficult to infiltrate and shut down.
Twice, local law enforcement task forces targeted the area, but no business owners were arrested nor were their shops closed.
Internal records of the most recent sting operation, in 2012, show for the first time the stunning amount of money that moved through the businesses and their importance to powerful drug organizations.
Tens of thousands in cash bundles were dropped off at a cellphone outlet tucked inside an aging storage center on the edge of town. Hundreds of thousands were wired into the bank account of a computer store with a glitzy showroom on one of Doral’s busiest thoroughfares.
In just three years, at least $25 million in drug money was funneled through 201 exporters by the police sting — just a fraction of the total number of businesses that were used to launder hundreds of millions in the past decade, according to records and former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents.
Penny Lernoux’s mid-1980s book In Banks We Trust has its 6th chapter devoted to the Miami drugs&guns banking complex.