Breaking: U.S. Agents Launder Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels

U.S. Agents Launder Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels

Ginger Thompson
New York Times
December 3, 2011

WASHINGTON — Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington’s expanding role in Mexico’s fight against drug cartels, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.

The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.

They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.

The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency’s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.

Agency officials declined to publicly discuss details of their work, citing concerns about compromising their investigations. But Michael S. Vigil, a former senior agency official who is currently working for a private contracting company called Mission Essential Personnel, said, “We tried to make sure there was always close supervision of these operations so that we were accomplishing our objectives, and agents weren’t laundering money for the sake of laundering money.”

Another former agency official, who asked not to be identified speaking publicly about delicate operations, said, “My rule was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the D.E.A. could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths.”

Those are precisely the kinds of concerns members of Congress have raised about a gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious, in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed people suspected of being low-level smugglers to buy and transport guns across the border in the hope that they would lead to higher-level operatives working for Mexican cartels. After the agency lost track of hundreds of weapons, some later turned up in Mexico; two were found on the United States side of the border where an American Border Patrol agent had been shot to death.

Former D.E.A. officials rejected comparisons between letting guns and money walk away. Money, they said, poses far less of a threat to public safety. And unlike guns, it can lead more directly to the top ranks of criminal organizations.

“These are not the people whose faces are known on the street,” said Robert Mazur, a former D.E.A. agent and the author of a book about his years as an undercover agent inside the Medellín cartel in Colombia. “They are super-insulated. And the only way to get to them is to follow their money.”

Another former drug agency official offered this explanation for the laundering operations: “Building up the evidence to connect the cash to drugs, and connect the first cash pickup to a cartel’s command and control, is a very time consuming process. These people aren’t running a drugstore in downtown L.A. that we can go and lock the doors and place a seizure sticker on the window. These are sophisticated, international operations that practice very tight security. And as far as the Mexican cartels go, they operate in a corrupt country, from cities that the cops can’t even go into.”

The laundering operations that the United States conducts elsewhere — about 50 so-called Attorney General Exempt Operations are under way around the world — had been forbidden in Mexico after American customs agents conducted a cross-border sting without notifying Mexican authorities in 1998, which was how most American undercover work was conducted there up to that point.

But that changed in recent years after President Felipe Calderón declared war against the country’s drug cartels and enlisted the United States to play a leading role in fighting them because of concerns that his security forces had little experience and long histories of corruption.

Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico’s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, “A lot.”

“If you’re going to get into the business of laundering money,” the official added, “then you have to be able to launder money.”

Former counternarcotics officials, who also would speak only on the condition of anonymity about clandestine operations, offered a clearer glimpse of their scale and how they worked. In some cases, the officials said, Mexican agents, posing as smugglers and accompanied by American authorities, pick up traffickers’ cash in Mexico. American agents transport the cash on government flights to the United States, where it is deposited into traffickers’ accounts, and then wired to companies that provide goods and services to the cartel.

In other cases, D.E.A. agents, posing as launderers, pick up drug proceeds in the United States, deposit them in banks in this country and then wire them to the traffickers in Mexico.

The former officials said that the drug agency tried to seize as much money as it laundered — partly in the fees the operatives charged traffickers for their services and another part in carefully choreographed arrests at pickup points identified by their undercover operatives.

And the former officials said that federal law enforcement agencies had to seek Justice Department approval to launder amounts greater than $10 million in any single operation. But they said that the cap was treated more as a guideline than a rule, and that it had been waived on many occasions to attract the interest of high-value targets.

“They tell you they’re bringing you $250,000, and they bring you a million,” one former agent said of the traffickers. “What’s the agent supposed to do then, tell them no, he can’t do it? They’ll kill him.”

It is not clear whether such operations are worth the risks. So far there are few signs that following the money has disrupted the cartels’ operations, and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers are feeling any serious financial pain. Last year, the D.E.A. seized about $1 billion in cash and drug assets, while Mexico seized an estimated $26 million in money laundering investigations, a tiny fraction of the estimated $18 billion to $39 billion in drug money that flows between the countries each year.

Mexico has tightened restrictions on large cash purchases and on bank deposits in dollars in the past five years. But a proposed overhaul of the Mexican attorney general’s office has stalled, its architects said, as have proposed laws that would crack down on money laundered through big corporations and retail chains.

“Mexico still thinks the best way to seize dirty money is to arrest a trafficker, then turn him upside down to see how much change falls out of his pockets,” said Sergio Ferragut, a professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and the author of a book on money laundering, which he said was “still a sensitive subject for Mexican authorities.”

Mr. Calderón boasts that his government’s efforts — deploying the military across the country — have fractured many of the country’s powerful cartels and led to the arrests of about two dozen high-level and midlevel traffickers.

But there has been no significant dip in the volume of drugs moving across the country. Reports of human rights violations by police officers and soldiers have soared. And drug-related violence has left more than 40,000 people dead since Mr. Calderón took office in December 2006.

The death toll is greater than in any period since Mexico’s revolution a century ago, and the policy of close cooperation with Washington may not survive.

“We need to concentrate all our efforts on combating violence and crime that affects people, instead of concentrating on the drug issue,” said a former foreign minister, Jorge G. Castañeda, at a conference hosted last month by the Cato Institute in Washington. “It makes absolutely no sense for us to put up 50,000 body bags to stop drugs from entering the United States.”

Eric Holder Gets Furious Fast

Doug Giles
Townhall.com
Dec. 4, 2011

You know what makes me angry? Guys who use more than three words when ordering Starbucks coffee, lizards that steal quail eggs and speed walkers. That’s what makes me mad. You know what gets Eric Holder heated? Probing questions from young reporters.

Yep, apparently young charges from conservative news sites aren’t supposed to ask Attorney General Eric Holder any itchy questions.

Hope and change.

This past Tuesday the Daily Caller got duly damned by the big dog of the DOJ for asking him what he thinks about the 52 members of Congress, three presidential candidates and two sitting Governors calling for him to hang up his hat over the Fast & Furious fiasco.

Hope and change, plebeians.

For the uninitiated, i.e. those who only watch Rachel Maddow’s show, Fast & Furious was the brain fart that the ATF and the DOJ hatched that purposefully put thousands of semi-automatic U.S. weapons into the hands of fully automatic murderous Mexican drug cartels. Doh. This act of wizardry by the ATF/DOJ has led to the deaths of hundreds of Mexicans and at least one U.S. Border Agent, Brian Terry.

This just in (sorta): The Obama Administration has now abruptly sealed the court docs containing the staggering details of how Mexicans murdered Brian Terry via the weapons Obama’s gents provided. But I digress …

Hope and change.

Now, in a normal world one would expect investigations into the nuts and bolts of the nuts and dolts who spawned this egregious crap; however, in the weird world that is Obamaland, where up is down and down is up, any attempt to connect the dots and affix some blame by the not-so-free-press to BHO’s buddies is met with stern rebuke by our nation’s chief lawkeeper.

Hope and change, monkeys. Hope and change.

Mi amigo Matthew Boyle of Daily Caller fame, his senior colleague Neil Munro and Townhall.com’s femme fatale Katie Pavlich have been on this scandal like stink on a monkey from day one just trying to figure out the WTFs of this foul caper in which hundreds of people have died and of which hundreds of thousands of people would like to know exactly who ordered this retarded scheme. And that, my friend, is verboten in this current misnamed Department of Justice—which is strange because BHO promised all the young ‘uns that he was going to sport the most transparent administration ever, ever, ever. Yes, mister and miss twentysomething, the admin that promised you the moon is now … mooning you.

Which leads me to my Jerry Springer summation for this week’s musings: This goes out to all the young dudes in light of Holder’s finger wag this week. Please, do not—I repeat—do not cease to pursue truth and speak truth to power. Our grand country needs good cats like you who will hold our elected officials accountable to all the laws we commoners are expected to keep. So, my heat-seeking missiles: Please stay your course. You’re greatly appreciated. Don’t let their threats grind you down.

Hope and change.

Fast & Furious Cover-up Grows Bigger

Bob Beauprez
Dec. 4, 2011

The Fast & Furious scandal pot may be reaching the boiling point. Attorney General Eric Holder has maintained he knew nothing about the “gun walking” operation on the southern border that put thousands of high powered weapons into the hands of the Mexican gun cartel and led to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and increased the mayhem on both sides of the border.

He would have us believe that the operation was simply a misguided adventure involving a couple of rouge officers behaving badly way out west. Holder contends that even after Agent Terry’s murder in December, 2010, the subsequent extensive press coverage, and formal inquiries for information to DOJ by Members of Congress that Fast & Furious simply didn’t register high enough on priority meter to merit any
attention from the Attorney General himself, and that F&F was a minor subplot at the Department of Justice.

However, 1364 pages of documents just released to Congressional investigators tell a very different story. It’s a story of “robust internal deliberations” at the highest levels of the Justice Department to craft denials and falsify the facts of the gun running operation leading up to a formal response sent to Senator Charles Grassley on
February 4, 2011. Based on the release of these new documents, the Justice Department has withdrawn the February 2011, and is now going through a tortured effort to cover their considerably messy tracks.

In a letter sent to Congress on Friday, December 2, 2012 Deputy Attorney General James Cole said, “Facts have come to light during the course of this investigation that indicate the February 4 letter contains inaccuracies.” That would be DOJ-speak for “we lied.”

“Department personnel…relied on information provided by supervisors from the components in the best position to know the relevant facts: ATF and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Arizona…Information provided by those supervisors was inaccurate. We understand that, in transcribed interviews with congressional investigators, the supervisors have said that they did not know at the time the letter was drafted that information they provided was inaccurate.”

According to a lengthy expose in Politico.com, “A selection of documents the Justice Department released to reporters on Friday demonstrates that U.S. Attorney for Arizona Dennis Burke, ATF Acting Director Ken Melson and ATF Deputy Director William Hoover vigorously urged the department to issue a forceful and broad denial of the allegations.”

Burke, who was also a former chief-of-staff to Janet Napolitano, resigned in August. Melson was “reassigned.” But, the head-rolling from this scandal is likely far from done. Politico explains that the huge volume of newly released documents “shed little light on precisely where in the federal bureaucracy the erroneous denials originated and whether the misstatements were deliberate or the product of some confusion.” Resolving those questions remains a major focus of the ongoing investigation.

One of Holder’s key deputies, Lanny Breuer, must be particularly nervous over the newly released documents. Breuer, who heads the Criminal Division at DOJ, told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 1 that “I cannot say for sure whether I saw a draft of the letter that was sent to you.” The “letter” referred to was the February 4, 2011 letter that DOJ now admits was “inaccurate.” In written testimony sent to Senator Grassley, Breuer also said he had “no recollection” of seeing the letter before it was sent.

However, as the Friday dump of documents indicates, Breuer forwarded versions of the letter from his official email to his personal gmail account on three occasions: once before it was sent and twice after.

Further, Breuer’s aid Jason Weinstein was deeply involved in the drafting and redrafting of the Feb. 4 letter. On Feb. 2 expressing frustration and how difficult it was to satisfy all concerned, Weinstein sent an email to both Breuer and Burke, “The Magna Carta was easier to get done than this was.” In another email addressed to both Breuer and Weinstein as the final draft was near completion Burke wrote, “Great job by you.” Breuer replied, “Thanks, Jason, as usual great work.”

James Cole, the Deputy AG who drew the short straw and sent the letter to Congress Friday retracting the Feb. 4, 2011 Letter-of-Lies is going to have some explaining to do, as well. The documents show that his chief deputy, Lisa Monaco, expressed serious reservations about the “categorically false” claims in the Feb. 4 letter that F&F guns were used to kill Agent Terry.

“Obviously we want to be 300% sure we can make such ‘categorical’ statement” she warned, but apparently to no avail.

To some degree, these new documents are just further confirmation of what was already known. That the Fast and Furious operation, and most particularly the cover-up following Agent Terry’s assassination, involved some of the most highly placed officials at the Department of Justice. While there has been no disclosure as of yet that the new 1364 pages implicate Eric Holder himself, we reaffirm our earlier conclusion that on May 3, 2011 the Attorney General perjured himself when he testified to Congress that he had only just learned of F&F “over the last few weeks.”

Briefing memos from Holder’s closest aides including Lanny Breuer indicate Holder knew – or had an obligation to have known - of F&F as early as July, 2010, five months before Brian Terry was gunned down. Holder’s top aides have now been implicated in a cover-up plot to deny Congress, the American people, and Agent Terry’s family from knowing the truth of an ill-conceived, shameful operation that extended to the highest levels of government. And, yet, to date all Barack Obama has said of the scandal is, “I have complete confidence in Attorney General Holder.” And, for the record, the “I was not aware” defense invoked by Holder and Breuer is also the defense of choice by the President, too.

Time will tell.

Bob Beauprez is a former Member of Congress and is currently the editor-in-chief of A Line of Sight, an online policy resource. Prior to serving in Congress, Mr. Beauprez was a dairy farmer and community banker.

Of course, the evening network news have been pretty much silent on this whole thing. But, oh! If this were Bush and Gonzalez, this shit would be leading the evening broadcasts.

98% of Americans have no idea what this is all about either. I've been quietly watching this unfold despite the media's blatant ignorance of this whole crock of shit. Bastards.

Honestly, the complete absence of ANY coverage of these latest developments in F&F by the MSM are absolute PROOF that they are in the pockets of the Democrats!

If this were happening under the aegis of a Republican administration it would be a story bigger than Watergate! It would lead all evening network news broadcasts and be front-page above-the-fold stories non-stop for weeks.

The MSM are purposely burying this story for as long as they possibly can.

We can only hope that the alternative media pressure on this story finally makes it impossible for the MSM to sit on it.

But I'm not holding my breath what with this being such a critical election year.

TexasBlue wrote:Of course, the evening network news have been pretty much silent on this whole thing. But, oh! If this were Bush and Gonzalez, this shit would be leading the evening broadcasts.

98% of Americans have no idea what this is all about either. I've been quietly watching this unfold despite the media's blatant ignorance of this whole crock of shit. Bastards.

Ah, but it BEGAN with Bush...

Code:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/10/new-documents-reveal-previous-problems-with-atf-phoenix-cases/

And there was NO Mention of that on the corporate media at all.

We have unemployment, a budget bursting at the seams because we keep DROPPING our revenue for the rich, our standard of living fall down further on the scale when compared with other modern nations and you guys are worried about ATF efforts to stop drug cartels in Mexico? Trust me, Bush did it too. It's SOP for the drug wars which are futile and have gone on since I can remember.

dblboggie wrote:Honestly, the complete absence of ANY coverage of these latest developments in F&F by the MSM are absolute PROOF that they are in the pockets of the Democrats!

If this were happening under the aegis of a Republican administration it would be a story bigger than Watergate! It would lead all evening network news broadcasts and be front-page above-the-fold stories non-stop for weeks.

The MSM are purposely burying this story for as long as they possibly can.

We can only hope that the alternative media pressure on this story finally makes it impossible for the MSM to sit on it.

But I'm not holding my breath what with this being such a critical election year.

Bush let guns walk and there was NO corporate media coverage. NONE...NADA,.....so when you talk about whose side the 5 corporations are that OWN The media, it's not the democratic side of the aisle..and hasn't been since 2000

Fast & Furious did not begin until 2009, months after the end of the Bush administration. Fast & Furious involved uncontrolled deliveries of thousands of weapons. The purchasers were not followed by close physical surveillance. They were freely permitted to transfer the guns to Mexican drug gangs and other criminal with no agents on hand to swoop in, make arrests, and grab the firearms.

Is Blaming Bush Really Holder’s Strategy to Get Out of ‘Fast and Furious’ Mess?

John Lott
Nov. 9, 2011

Blame Bush. It has been almost three years since President Obama took office, yet he still blames Bush for the bad economy. Now the Obama administration is following the same strategy to get out of the “Fast and Furious” mess.

“Fast and Furious,” also called the “Gunwalker” case, involves the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF) agents ordering American gun dealers to sell guns to obvious Mexican drug gang members during 2009 and 2010. This was done over the objections of the gun dealers.

Both Fox News and the Washington Post started covering this scandal in early February this year. It may be excusable that Attorney General Eric Holder did not read the press reports, but, if we are to believe his congressional testimony Tuesday, he and his staff also neglected to pay attention to the 100 or so page “weekly reports” summarizing activity in the Justice Department.

Those reports began mentioning the operation as long ago as July 2010. When Holder testified before the House Judiciary Committee in May this year he claimed: “I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.” Holder reiterated again Tuesday that he simply didn’t have the time to read even the summaries. Neither did his staff.

Holder had few options Tuesday.

Even President Obama gave an interview in March where he indicated that at that time Holder knew about the operation. With the president on record saying that he knew about the operation before April, Holder conceded Tuesday that probably knew about the operation at least a month earlier than he had previously testified.

The Obama administration has also tried to show the practice originated in the Bush administration during 2006 and 2007 under operation “Wide Receiver.” After all, it is what Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer argued just last week. When Breuer testified last week, he confessed that he had learned about “gun walking” tactics as far back as April 2010, but it wasn’t the Obama administration’s “gun walking” that he confessed to learning about, it was a program run briefly during the Bush administration.

And on Monday, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vermont) pushed this further by asking the Justice Department’s inspector general to include the Bush-era operation in his investigation of “Fast and Furious.”

But trying to shift blame to President Bush doesn’t hold water, as the two programs were very different.

Obama’s “Fast and Furious” was a gun-tracing program that didn’t even try to trace guns.

In sharp contrast, Bush’s “Wider Receiver” program gave direct notice to the Mexican authorities so that they could try to track the guns as they crossed the border. Bush officials might have learned that Mexican police weren’t up to tracing the guns, but at least they had a plan to try to have the guns followed.

“Fast and Furious” made no such attempt to notify the Mexican authorities in any way. Worse, the Obama officials knew that they had a problem. “Fast and Furious” gave out the guns, but agents and middle level people complained to administrators that the guns weren’t being traced.

Thanks for clearing up that "it's Bush's fault" revisionist history by the left Tex.

dblboggie wrote:Thanks for clearing up that "it's Bush's fault" revisionist history by the left Tex.

Honestly, at some point the Obama administration (and their followers) have to own up to something in the near future.

I get tired of this baloney of "it's his fault, not mine" ploy. I don't blame many past administrations for a variation of things. I like to focus on the here and now.

TexasBlue wrote:Fast & Furious did not begin until 2009, months after the end of the Bush administration. Fast & Furious involved uncontrolled deliveries of thousands of weapons. The purchasers were not followed by close physical surveillance. They were freely permitted to transfer the guns to Mexican drug gangs and other criminal with no agents on hand to swoop in, make arrests, and grab the firearms.

Exchanging firearms and letting them walk into Mexico DID happen under Bush.

The guns have registrations on them.

Code:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/04/fast-and-furious-bush-administration_n_1076148.html

A briefing paper prepared for Attorney General Michael Mukasey during the Bush administration in 2007 outlined failed attempts by federal agents to track illicitly purchased guns across the border into Mexico and stressed the need for U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials to work together on such efforts using a tactic that now is generating controversy.

The information contained in one paragraph of a lengthy Nov. 16, 2007, document marks the first known instance of an attorney general being given information about the tactic known as "gun-walking." It since has become controversial amid a probe by congressional Republicans criticizing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for using it during the Obama administration in an arms-trafficking investigation called Operation Fast and Furious that focused on several Phoenix-area gun shops.

Though the briefing paper for Mukasey does not use the term "gun-walking," ATF officials at the time referred to the failed attempts in that way. The tactic – following suspected low-level "straw" buyers of guns instead of arresting them right after purchase – is aimed at identifying and bringing charges against gun-trafficking ringleaders, who have long escaped federal prosecution. Justice Department policy long has required that illicit arms shipments be intercepted whenever possible.

There's nothing Obama is doing now that Bush didn't implement. It's one of the MANY frustrations the democrats have with him.

TexasBlue wrote:

dblboggie wrote:Thanks for clearing up that "it's Bush's fault" revisionist history by the left Tex.

Honestly, at some point the Obama administration (and their followers) have to own up to something in the near future.

I get tired of this baloney of "it's his fault, not mine" ploy. I don't blame many past administrations for a variation of things. I like to focus on the here and now.

You may get tired of it, but it's traceable and goes back to Bush.

You know, I don't believe we should let you skate on this one Cookie.

There was a major difference between Wide Reciever under Bush and Fast and Furious under Obama - Bush's ATF notified Mexican authorties so the weapons could be traced. Obama's ATF DID NOT notify anyone on the other side of the border.

They were not the same things! So it is completely USLESS to even try and say "Bush started it" - he didn't!