Each year over three hundred billion narco-dollars were generated around the world. That was about the same as petro-dollars, calculated at twenty dollars a barrel. The difference was that oil was a normal, legitimate, internationally traded commodity. The narco-industry was an ignoble criminal activity, an international trade in drugs that ended in depravity and death for certain, condemned by every law-abiding nation on earth.
Oil sheikhs could freely deposit their legally gained dollars at any bank and buy whatever pleased them, palaces, jets, Rolls Royce’s, or, even tanks and guns.
The narco-industry as an illegal activity was necessarily clandestine. The revenues could not be deposited in the local bank, or, at any other respectable bank, without having been first suitably laundered - that was to say made clean - legalised.
Each kilo of cocaine generated three kilos of dollar bills, a huge material problem for criminals to store and transport.
The United States had become the headquarters of the world narcotics industry and its leading customer. According to analyses made by the Federal Drug Agency, every dollar bill printed by the US Treasury bore traces of drugs within one year of it being issued.
Laundering or legalising the money became a vast industry. It consisted in the purchase of objets d’art, planes, boats, cars, luxury goods, real estate and businesses, but that was far from absorbing the vast quantities of money that flowed into the markets every day.
It was necessary to bring the money into the financial system, through either moneychangers or offshore banks created uniquely for that purpose. Their object was to change the dollars into local currencies, to issue bankers cheques, which could be deposited into major banks, to transfer the money from small accounts, centralising it in large accounts in foreign countries by bank transfer to major banks, such as the Chase Manhattan Bank in the USA, the BNP in France and HSBC in the UK, in sums of one to twenty million dollars. The laundered monies could then be invested in the financial markets, businesses and government bonds.
Some launderers set up street front shops in main shopping districts of big cities. They then spent money in the shops to buy goods and services, which they did or did not consume according to their plan. The principal was that the money entered the business chain and arrived into a legal bank account. Certain cities were literally invaded by the launderers, who brazenly went as far as setting up dozens of their high street retail outlets in the city centre, trading at a loss but all handling large sums of cash.
Through another method, in countries outside of the USA, honest businessmen bought dollars at discount rates from traffickers against local currencies to effect purchases of imported goods on the international market, such as motor vehicles, computers, televisions, and industrial equipment.
The system was operated by organised crime, mainly the Russian Mafiya who co-operated with the Colombian drug cartels and traditional Mafia organisations such as the Cosa Nostra.
The Russian Mafiya had acquired their working capital by stealing it from their country with the complicity of government members, high-level party officials, the military and above all the KGB, who had known that the Soviet system was on the point of collapse, well before it officially happened. During the period leading up to the collapse they stole everything that was movable as well as fixed business assets, government reserves, savings, bank deposits, raw materials as well as ships, aircraft and vehicles, both civil and military, swindling the Russian people of everything they had collectively owned.
The Russians Mafiya in the USA operated out of Brooklyn and Miami. Miami had become the financial capital of the Caribbean, South and Central America, with an uncommon number of South American banks established in the city.
With their money they bought condominiums in the smart districts of Miami and sumptuous mansions on Fisher Island. South Miami had become the centre of a ruthless and sophisticated underworld operation.
They were building a criminal empire that had already spread through the Caribbean and had fixed as the next victim for their rape; Cuba.
In the Miami area over fifty percent of all properties were owned by offshore companies. Even boats, planes, cars, offices and office equipment were owned by such companies. Ortega, as his associates, owned nothing personally in the USA and the US government had no jurisdiction over such foreign-based companies and banks.
Those who controlled those businesses jetted around the world, on Paraguayan, Fijian or Jamaican diplomatic passports, out of reach of investigators, all expenses paid, evidently without questions being asked by the offshore companies and banks that they clandestinely owned. Globalisation and international trade with relaxed travel restrictions enabled criminals to operate worldwide.
Their offshore banks and companies were located in places such as Anguilla, or Barbuda and Antigua, which had one bank for every fifty-six persons.
Curiously eighty five percent of these tax havens were controlled by the USA or Europe. Some of the most important such tax havens in Europe were Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Isle of Mann and Channel Islands.
Law-abiding citizens, businesses and governments condoned these tax havens. Why? To enable certain citizens, Castlemain amongst them, to avoid taxes and to carry out the dirty work that made business run.
The laws which governed the deposit or transit of funds in these banks were covered by what was called in US legal jargon, ‘plausible denigration’, which meant that providing that the banks had no reason to suspect that they were doing business directly with criminals or their agents, or, that the immediate source of the funds being moved was an illegal organisation, then there was no crime or participation in a criminal act, since the person or company dealing directly with the bank was beyond suspicion. The law did not require them to suspect or investigate anything further down the line than their immediate customer.
Twenty percent of all bank deposits in the world were located in offshore banks. Whilst Switzerland, in the heart of law abiding Western Europe, accounted for one third.
Money laundering was an immensely profitable business with between fifteen and thirty percent skimmed off by the launderers for transforming the money in legal funds.
Every single day of each year, the equivalent of 1,400,000,000,000 US dollars were transferred or exchanged through the world’s money markets, making it impossible for law enforcement agencies to sift the good from the bad.
From this one percent, or fourteen billion dollars daily, was generated exclusively from criminal activities such as drugs trafficking, illegal arms deals, racketeering, prostitution, gambling and corruption. The French authorities in a conservative estimate admitted that in France alone the equivalent of six billion dollars of dirty money entered into the country every year, the reality was certainly much greater.
There lay the interest of Ortega and his associates for gaining control over Cuba’s future. It was simply a virgin territory about to be invaded by criminal forces, who planned transform it into a huge industrial laundry business, compared to the launderettes, which operated in the Caribbean.
To say the world was slowly being taken over by criminal forces was not an exaggeration; the US government had been warned of the threat by all of its administrative branches and law enforcement agencies including the CIA, the FBI, the IRS and the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency.
Chapter 50
A Finnish Sauna
Offshore Islands Page 49
