Robert Mazur, the U.S. Customs special agent who led one of the most successful undercover operations in U.S. law enforcement history, gave us some insight into international money laundering and said the Federal Reserve needs to do more to help.
In the 1980s Mazur spent five years infiltrating the highest circles of Colombia's drug cartels as a money launderer, transforming more than $34 million in cocaine cash into traceable, paper-trailed bank transactions under the pseudonym Bob L. Musella.
His book, The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel, explains how "Operation C-Chase" led to the indictment of 85 individuals – including several officials affiliated with the then-seventh largest privately-held bank in the world, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI)—and the conviction of General Manuel Noriega.
Now he is on a mission to "share information with the public about how this money laundering activity has engulfed the will of the financial institutions of the world."
Mazur says that " the international community is today doing the same thing that BCCI and their officers were doing 20 years ago "—citing the HSBC money-laundering scandal and the tax havens of the super-rich—and told BI that the problem is much larger than the estimated $2.1 trillion that crime generates each year.
"What [ the corrupt bankers at BCCI ] did was market flight capital, and they identified it as basically money seeking secrecy from governments," Mazur said. "Yes it does include the items that the $2.1 trillion identifies but it's bigger than that because there are times that you take legal money and use it for an illegal purpose, and that money is as big if not bigger than the illegal money."
He calls the practice "a major moneymaker for the banking world" and cites the Standard Chartered scandal, in which bankers "took $250 billion worth of basically legal money and used techniques to hide from governments the fact that the money was being moved in these otherwise-legal transactions on the behalf of sanctioned nations, including Iran."
He said the HSBC ruling listed six or seven methods "traditionally used by banks in a big way facilitate relationships with people who want to hide money from governments" and explained that bankers provide these services "to entice these people to bank with them" so that the bank is able to increase their deposits.
Mazur said that banking regulators are "not as focused on the issue of criminal conduct as they are on … making sure that the institution itself stays healthy" so investigations take years and result in a lengthy report.