Chapter 48
Crime & Corruption
The Caribbean 2000
His territory of predilection, as a Latin-American, were the countries of the Caribbean basin, and, as a life long friend of international socialism, the countries of the ex-Soviet block. Ortega laundered money coming from a variety of sources of organised crime.
As a businessman he provided his services to crime and corruption, by a system organised mainly on a case-by-case basis for enterprising white-collar criminals of various backgrounds. He put them into five classes; politicians, military, police, government officials and businessmen.
Though he avoided using criminal organisations to carry out his own business activities, he did not refuse to provide them with his services by investing the considerable quantities of money they derived from their crimes, be they narcotics or racketeering. Small time crooks and cheap swindlers he avoided like the plague, they were unbusinesslike and above all unreliable.
The great advantage of his system was that not all of his clients were professional criminals, though criminals they were, they needed his services mostly for specific operations. When the profits of their crimes were safely hidden away they then got on with their everyday business, until another need arose for his services.
He cultivated his relations in all the right spheres, treating his customers and potential customers as friends, lavishing them with gifts and invitations, as would certain top level but discrete international businessmen. He was known publicly as a fixer of deals, a commission agent, a trader in commodities and also a successful property investor.
Politicians mostly earned their dirty money from favours to the other four classes. The military earned their dirty money from arms purchases and sales, but also organised their own criminal activities in protection and racketeering, prostitution, and drug running. Police and law enforcement organisations were mostly involved in corruption, aiding and abetting the other classes.
Government officials had a wide range of opportunities to earn their dirty money, from the sale and purchase of the states needs, approval of import and export licences, construction and infrastructure projects, licences for hotels, restaurants and drinking establishments, documents such as passports and driving licences and a long list of other opportunities to earn bribes of all kinds.
Businessmen, both national and foreign, provided the market to the all of other categories, paying for the services required, at the same time skimming off the cream from their extravagant profits, to be hidden away from jealous rivals and their home country’s tax authorities.
It was a vicious symbiosis that was fed by the gains from all the diverse forms of criminal activity and corruption.
Ortega dealt directly with the top men, but used middlemen when dealing with the more sordid activities such as those involving the police.
He channelled the flow of money to offshore banking establishments and investment funds, from which he could launder the gains transforming them into respectable investments, preferably in any business where cash transactions were favoured, where in turn the profits could be recycled to finance his multiple other operations.
Ortega catered to a very select group in the top echelons of the five classes and pocketed up to thirty percent of the money that flowed through his system.
Kennedy had been chosen by Ortega, as his unsuspecting agent, once Ortega had learned of the existence of the Ciscap project. It would provide him with a cover to build a legitimate financial base that could be extended across the island under the political protection of Cienfuegos. In Cuba he could finally achieve the position of power and authority that had eluded him since the fall of Allende almost thirty years before.
To cultivate Kennedy he decided invite him to Miami and have him visit the chain of tourist hotels and clubs which he controlled through his network in the USA, Mexico and Colombia.
The objective was to use Caribtrade as a means of gaining a foothold in the coming open economy of Cuba, which he knew was surely near, exactly as he had done in Russia. His holding in Caribtrade with its emanations was designed to infiltrate the key economic sectors of the Cuban economy, through projects such as Ciscap, building up his interests and broadening his activities into the most profitable sectors of the country’s economy.
He was in a hurry, time was passing by quickly, he was keenly aware that the greatest attention to detail was needed to succeed in his plans. His first attempt to build a power base in Cuba had ended in near disaster for him in the ‘Ochoa Affair’ when in 1989 a group of senior army officers, led by the General Arnaldo Ochoa, were found guilty of corruption and drug trafficking with Colombian drug smugglers and were executed by a firing squad. Ortega had narrowly escaped detection thanks to his relations with the KGB who successfully covered up his involvement.
Ortega and his kind were nevertheless aided by politicians, both by men having good intentions and fools. Amongst them was a Caribbean nation’s Prime Minister who had declared that he was against any interference by the OCDE in local affairs, saying that many small states of the Caribbean needed that type of investment, which was ‘legal’, in spite of the fact that the Cariforum, composed of the French Dom-Tom’s in the Caribbean with the ACP states in the Caribbean, which were parties to the Lomé convention, were faced with a major political problem of drug trafficking and money laundering.
Chapter 49
The Laundry Business
Offshore Islands Page 48
