DEA drug money laundering operation

waltky

Wise ol' monkey
Feb 6, 2011
26,211
2,590
275
Okolona, KY
Uncle Ferd says dey need to look into dem cartels buyin' up mobile home parks an' movin' their drug gangs up here...
:eusa_eh:
DEA launders millions in Mexican drug cartel profits
NYT: The operations, intended to track traffickers' cash, raise the same concerns as Fast and Furious.
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.”

Fast and Furious concerns

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.”

Moving into Mexico
 
The DEA is fighting a war that they know will go on forever.

And they LOVE that it can never be won, too.

That unwinnability factor insures their continued employment.
 
Granny says dey launderin' their money by buyin' up mobile home parks an' movin' their gang-bangers up here...
:eek:
Issa expands Fast and Furious probe to include alleged money laundering
12/05/11 - Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has requested a briefing with the Justice Department over a news report that U.S. law enforcement officials helped Mexican drug cartels launder millions of dollars into the country.
The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee made the request in a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, in which he questioned DOJ head’s ability to lead the agency. Issa has been investigating the DOJ’s authorization of a botched gun-tracking operation for most of the year and has increasingly criticized Holder, who is set to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday.

“The existence of such a program again calls your leadership into question,” said Issa in his letter. “The managerial structure you have implemented lacks appropriate operational safeguards to prevent the implementation of such dangerous schemes. The consequences have been disastrous.” According to an article published in the New York Times on Sunday, undercover agents with the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) helped transport millions of dollars in cash across the U.S.-Mexico border in an effort to study and dismantle the trafficking routes of drug cartels.

The article said the DEA allowed the drug cartels to continue functioning as they tracked their money moving methods. A spokesperson for the DEA said the agency was not planning to reveal the details of particular operations to the public, but declined to state whether it would do so for members of Congress. "We have been working collaboratively with the Mexican government to fight money laundering for years," said Dawn Dearden, a spokesperson for the DEA, in a e-mail. "As a result of this cooperation, we have seized illicit transnational criminal organization money all around the world through our partnership with law enforcement. We do not discuss the operational aspects of law enforcement activities."

The tactics are similar to those employed under Operation Fast and Furious, in which agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) monitored the sale of thousands of firearms in the Southwest region to known and suspected straw buyers for Mexican drug cartels in an attempt to study and dismantle their trafficking patterns. But, agents have testified before Issa, the operation didn’t provide adequate surveillance of the weapons, allowing them to “walk,” only to be discovered later at crime scenes. Two guns solde under Fast and Furious were found last year at the murder scene of Border Patrol Brian Terry.

MORE
 
Yet another example of why we need to completely end the stupid and asinine 'war' of drugs. We are not saving people from themselves, we are killing them.
 

Forum List

Back
Top