They wore gold jewelry, drove sports cars and carried suitcases and cardboard boxes full of cash.
They were underworld figures in Latin American drug trafficking and looked the part. But the key to their illicit enterprise was a well-respected loan officer, Delores Eirin, and other employees at a Plantation branch office of Landmark First National Bank, the government maintains.
In exchange for 0.5 percent to 1 percent of deposits, bank employees funneled the drug proceeds into accounts so that Colombian businessman Hernan Botero could wire the then-laundered money back home, federal agents said.
Agents estimate $55 million passed through accounts at the branch a few years ago.
Art Sumrall, a supervisory agent with the U.S. Customs Service, recalled the story last week while speaking to 100 bankers attending a Miami conference on money laundering.
“He’s on trial today, the first Colombian ever extradited,” Sumrall told participants. “Everbody knows that banker. She’s in jail.”
Sumrall clearly had the attention of his audience, as he strode around the hotel conference room, a semi-automatic pistol stuffed in his belt, joking and preaching in a booming voice.
Greg Baldwin, an assistant U.S. attorney in Miami, spoke next. He told a laundering story to illustrate how a bank itself can be penalized.
In the case of Great American Bank of Dade County, a loan officer, head teller and assistant teller were found guilty in a $37 million laundering scheme dating from 1980 and 1981.
The bank itself pleaded guilty. Great American’s attorney urged U.S. District Judge Eugene Spellman to be lenient in assessing the penalty, noting that the bank already had incurred $1 million in legal expenses.
The judge fined the bank $500,000, suspending payment of $125,000.
“The bank was essentially out somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 million and $1.5 million because of three low-level employees,” Baldwin concluded.
Speakers at the Florida Bankers Association conference also appealed to the audience’s emotions and to their patriotic duty to help stem the wave of illicit drugs sweeping into the United States.
Sumrall estimated marijuana and cocaine dealing was a $100 billion a year retail industry. The wholesale price that key traffickers charge equals about one-fifth the price paid by retail customers, he said.
“It’s in the grade schools,” he said.
“That means that when your bank sells to a launderer a cash check for $5,000, you just allowed him to support enough narcotics to put $25,000 worth back in the mouths of your children,” he said.
“You are essential to the laundering process as the guy who sells it on the street,” he said.
“They’ve got to put it into the bank,” he said. “For all practical purposes it launders it for them. Then, all they have to do is wire it out of the country.”
Without access to U.S. banks, drug dealers must smuggle huge bundles of dollars out of the country much as they sneak drugs in, he said.
“The money weighs more than the drugs,” said Michael McDonald, an agent with the Internal Revenue Service. “This is why they have to have the banks.”
In addition, federal agents said they can watch the nation’s airports a lot easier than they can 144,000 financial institutions.
Over the last few years, South Florida bankers have helped law enforcement officers close in on drug traffickers trying to use banks to launder money, Sumrall said.
“The banks in Dade and Broward, this immediate South Florida area, are leading the country in this assistance effort,” he said. “But we happen to be in an area where there’s more (drug) money than anywhere else.”
No longer do runners for drug dealers blatantly haul cash-filled plastic sacks, luggage and boxes into banks, the agents said.
“They’re getting sophisticated. They are finding other ways to do it,” McDonald said.
Sumrall recalled tailing one money launderer who went to 20 branches in one day, leaving $9,000 at each. “And then on the way home, he put another $9,000 in the overnight depository.”
When customers deposits or buys a cashier’s check for less than $10,000, federal law does not require the bank to file a currency transaction report identifying the source and payee, officials said. But banks are permitted to file currency transaction reports for lesser amounts as well.
Bankers should get a photo identification to be sure they are correctly completing the currency transaction report.
