Former DEA Chief: Hezbollah ‘Moving Tons of Cocaine’ Out of Latin America

[Sally]

Well they have to get money somewhere else too. It can't only be Iran.

• Former DEA Chief: Hezbollah ‘Moving Tons of Cocaine’ Out of Latin America

REUTERS/Ali Hashisho

by EDWIN MORA12 Jun 201611


WASHINGTON, D.C. — Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah is generating hundreds of millions from a “cocaine money laundering scheme” in Latin America that “provides a never-ending source of funding” for its terrorist operations, a former DEA operations chief recently told U.S. lawmakers.
The official comments came nearly a week after the U.S. State Department reported that Latin America and the Caribbean “served as areas of financial and ideological support” for the Sunni Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), Shiite Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups from the Middle East and South Asia.

Michael Braun, the former federal law enforcement official, was one of three terror financing experts who told the House Financial Services Committee on June 8 that Hezbollah’s narco-terrorism operations in the Latin American region were flourishing.

“The global drug trade generates hundreds of millions of dollars each year in contraband revenue for Hezbollah and it provides a never-ending source of funding for their war chest,” he testified in his prepared remarks. “Hezbollah uses cocaine, other drugs and other contraband as an alternative form of currency. And they have used drugs as payment for information and to successfully corrupt Israeli Defense Force personnel, as well as soldiers in other militaries.”

A recent DEA investigation revealed that the Lebanese-Canadian Bank alone was “facilitating a [Hezbollah] cocaine money laundering scheme involving as much as $200 million per month,” added Braun, who now serves as the managing partner of the government contractor SGI Global that he co-founded.

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Former DEA Chief: Hezbollah 'Moving Tons of Cocaine'

 

[waltky]

Cocaine cruise...

Instagrammers bragged about cruise to ‘peaceful’ place. Then cops found 95 kilos of cocaine.
1 Sept.`16 - Their first Irish coffee was in Cobh, a seaport town in Ireland. Their first photo bomb was in New York's Times Square.

The first tans the Canadian women showed off during their epic trip came in a photo taken on a Bermuda beach, where one of them wrote in a caption: "Gone to a place very peaceful • leave a message after the tone." Isabelle Lagace, 28, and Melina Roberge, 22, turned their public Instagram feeds into travel journals, filling them with boasts about their intercontinental adventures on the MS Sea Princess, a cruise ship bound for Australia. But their journey came to an abrupt end after the ship berthed in Sydney Harbour: It was there the women were arrested Sunday along with a 63-year-old man named Andre Tamine. Australian Federal Police said in a statement that the three Canadians — who were not named in the statement, but have been identified by local news media — were caught smuggling 95 kilograms of cocaine into the country.

On Monday, the trio appeared in court in Sydney, charged with importing a commercial quantity of cocaine, which carries a maximum penalty of life in prison, authorities said. The street value of the cocaine, which authorities said was found packed in suitcases: about $23 million. Australian Border Force Commander Tim Fitzgerald said it was the largest seizure of narcotics carried by passengers of a cruise ship or airliner into the country, according to the Associated Press. (Commenters have left taunting — and occasionally obscene — messages on the Instagram photos since Australian officials announced the bust.) The three Canadians had boarded the Princess Cruises ship in Dover, England, in July, and then embarked on a 49-day voyage. For seven weeks, Lagace and Roberge documented their travels in photos — meeting exotic animals in Cartagena, Colombia, and local children in Pisco, Peru.

They rode recreational vehicles in the desert. They got tribal tattoos. They made new friends. "Traveling is one thing," Roberge wrote on Instagram. "But traveling with an open mind, ready to taste everything, see everything, learn everything and get yourself out of your comfort zone ... is probably the best therapy and lesson ever. I used to be afraid to get out of my little town and now I feel like I don't want to see that little town anymore cause it's beautiful out there and it's sooo worth it." Princess Cruises, which is based in Southern California, said the passengers aboard the Sea Princess visited 17 ports in 11 countries before they arrived Sunday in Sydney. There, Australian Border Force agents climbed on board the 77,000-ton ship and started searching among its 1,008 guest cabins with help from drug-sniffing dogs, authorities said.

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Deadly Chinese drugs are flooding the U.S., and police can’t stop them
June 22, 2015 - Want to get your hands on a sizable amount of the latest designer street drug? It’s nearly as easy as typing “research chemicals” into Google, exasperated American officials say.

Scroll through an endless list of Chinese Web sites hawking wholesale chemicals at a bargain price, and once you’ve picked your poison — perhaps from a site offering a free sample or touting “big beautiful crystals” — just wire a few thousand dollars to an English-speaking customer service representative on the other side of the world. The entire ordering process, from start to finish, can take as little as 30 minutes — maybe less, authorities tell The Washington Post. “5-10 days can arrive your address,” one site says. This is the new synthetic drug trade, a globalized marketplace in which Chinese chemical companies pump out large volumes of ever-changing substances that are too new to be banned internationally, leaving law enforcement officials in America and elsewhere struggling to slow the influx of the drugs (or their primary chemical components).

They’re also coping with the considerable fallout of this new flood of dangerous chemicals; in Florida, for instance, the highly addictive synthetic drug “flakka” is now wreaking havoc in some parts of the state — including giant Broward County, where one major hospital system has reported seeing up to 20 flakka-related emergencies in one day, and where at least 16 deaths have been attributed to the cheap drug since September. “You’ll see some pretty sophisticated Web sites with everyone in white lab coats, but these are still clandestine operations,” Jim Hall, a drug abuse epidemiologist at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, told The Post. “They’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, we got the best product on the market.’ There’s even blue flakka and red flakka available just so they can distinguish their brand.”

And, Hall added: “If your shipment is seized, some companies will guarantee you another package.” Packages that aren’t seized will arrive in your mailbox of your choosing a few days later, typically via an express delivery service. To elude U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents, they may be affixed with an ambiguous label, such as “shampoo,” “industrial solvent,” or “cleaner,” officials say. Hence the daunting challenge facing U.S. authorities struggling to slow a deepening current of synthetic drugs that’s flowing into American cities, where the payoff is immediate and immense. A kilogram of alpha-PVP — the main ingredient in flakka — can be purchased for $1,500 online and sold for $50,000 on American streets, Hall said. Recently, he noted, authorities have intercepted shipments more than 10 times that size. Complicating the fight against flakka, authorities say, is the fact that the drug is not illegal in China, where labs employ “classically trained chemists” and categorize the drug as a “research chemical,” according to the DEA.

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Why the Coast Guard calls narco-submarines the ‘white buffalo’ of the seas
August 10, 2015 | In mid-July, a U.S. Navy aircraft that was patrolling the eastern Pacific Ocean reported a 40-foot vessel hundreds of miles from the shore.

Eventually, U.S. Coast Guard personnel boarded that vessel, known as a semi-submersible. A blog post detailing the operation describes the Coast Guard cutter Stratton moving through the “inky darkness of night,” and a quick search for the sea-green vessel. After taking control of the semi-submersible, the crew detained four people — and found more than 200 bales of cocaine. “This is pretty big,” Chief Warrant Officer Allyson Conroy told The Post. The drugs were valued at more than $181 million. So, yeah, that’s a lot of cocaine.

In fact, this was the “largest recorded semi-submersible interdiction in Coast Guard history,” according to a news release on the operation. And here’s what makes it even more interesting: The July effort marked the second time that the Stratton had stopped this type of narco-submarine in a two-month span. In June, the Stratton crew also stopped a submersible carrying 5,460 pounds of cocaine.

Since November 2006, just 25 “known” interdictions of these kinds of subs have occurred in the eastern Pacific, according to the Coast Guard. “Semi-submersibles are our ‘white buffalo,’ ” Capt. Nathan Moore, Stratton’s commanding officer, said in the blog post. “They’re extremely rare, seldom seen, but they exist.”

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[RoshanNair]

Nasrallah is the new Escobar. I demand that he be featured on the 3rd season of Narcos.

 

[waltky]

Hezbollah in Florida...

Hezbollah Cell Charged With Laundering Colombian Drug Money In Miami
October 15, 2016 • Three men linked to the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah were accused of laundering drug money on behalf of the Colombian cartel after authorities said they illegally moved $500,000 into Miami banks, the Miami Herald reported Tuesday.

The apparent ringleader of the money laundering scheme, 31-year-old Mohammad Ahmad Ammar from Medellin, Colombia, “was quietly booked into a Miami-Dade jail last week to face state felony money laundering charges,” the Herald wrote. Ammar’s arrest “underscores increased law-enforcement scrutiny on the role of Middle Eastern terror groups who use financial networks in Latin America to earn untold millions off drug profits,” the paper added. Another Hezbollah operative who was charged in the case is Hassan Mohsen Mansour, a dual Lebanese and Canadian citizen. He is currently detained in Paris and facing similar but separate prosecution in South Florida.

A third member of the cell, Ghassan Diab, is believed to be on the run either in Nigeria or Lebanon. According to court papers, he is a relative of a “high-ranking member of Hezbollah who has access to numerous international bank accounts.” The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) first set sights on Ammar in early 2014, introducing him to an informant who covertly recorded their meetings. Ammar was asked by the informant to launder $250,000 worth of Australian dollars, which was actually DEA cash, into Miami bank accounts that were set up by the feds. Through encrypted communications with Mansour in Paris, Ammar arranged for the money to be transferred to Dubai, “where the anything-goes banking system remains out of reach of U.S. authorities,” the Herald reported.

The money was then broken up and transferred to Al Haitham Exhibition and Conference Organizers, which is believed to be a front company for money laundering. According to the 42-page arrest warrant, the money then disappeared. Soon afterwards, the accounts in Miami began receiving funds from obscure companies accompanied by bogus invoices for ill-defined products and services. After the first schemed succeeded, Ammar told the DEA informant that he worked with La Oficina de Envigado, the chief cartel in Medellin, and struck a second deal to launder $250,000 in September 2014. The money was again transferred to Dubai and the event planning company, with a note explaining that it was for the purchase of a four-carat diamond ring. Payments were then made to the Miami banks through more bogus transactions, including one claiming to be for 50-kilogram bags of rice.

Over the course of the investigation, Ammar boasted of his ties to Hezbollah and mentioned his contacts at a Colombian airline who could smuggle drugs to Miami, according to the warrant. The DEA announced in February that it arrested several individuals after investigating a “massive” international drug trafficking and money laundering operation run by Hezbollah. The agency said that Hezbollah worked with La Oficina and other cartels to supply cocaine to the United States and Europe, then laundered the proceeds in a scheme that helped “provide a revenue and weapons stream for an international terrorist organization responsible for devastating terror attacks around the world.”

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[waltky]

Coast Guard seizes 5,600 pounds of coke — valued at $73 million...

Coast Guard Delivers Tons of Seized Cocaine to San Diego
Oct 28, 2016 — The U.S. Coast Guard has delivered more than 39,000 pounds of cocaine to San Diego — including some seized from a virtual mini-submarine.

A Coast Guard cutter on Thursday off-loaded narcotics that were confiscated in 25 separate busts that took place off the coasts of Central and South America over the past fiscal year.

At Naval Base San Diego, cocaine seized by the Coast Guard Cutter Waesche during its current deployment, waits to be offloaded​

That includes 5,600 pounds of coke — valued at $73 million — that were seized from a semi-submersible in September. The vessel had a mostly submerged hull with only a cockpit and exhaust pipe above the water.

Altogether, the Coast Guard and its partners seized 416,600 pounds of cocaine between October of 2015 and the end of September. The agency also captured a record 585 suspected drug smugglers.

Coast Guard Delivers Tons of Seized Cocaine to San Diego | Military.com

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Coast Guard Seizes Sub Filled With Cocaine
October 28, 2016 - The U.S. Coast Guard stopped a a "self-propelled semi-submersible" vessel and seized 2.8 tons of cocaine, worth $73 million, before the boat sank.

She’d been hunting the smugglers for the entire morning, a helicopter wheeling above her pilot house as she steered the cutter Waesche through choppy waves and into the face of near-gale winds. And then U.S. Coast Guard Seaman Spencer Lewis, 25, saw in the green churn of the Pacific Ocean the cockpit and exhaust pipe of what counter-narcotics agents call a “self-propelled semi-submersible” vessel, the sneakiest way to ship large cargoes of contraband cocaine. “You do things with a purpose and then you get to see the results of all your hard training come to fruition,” said Lewis, recalling the Sept. 6 seizure of a narco-sub carrying cocaine toward the United States.

The Waesche crew went to battle stations while boarding parties on small raid boats raced across the waves toward the narco-sub. Scrambling aboard, they found a hold eight feet deep stuffed with cocaine — and five suspected smugglers scuttling the vessel, the seawater gurgling in, according to the Coast Guard. Pumping out the water, the Waesche team managed to unload 2.8 tons of cocaine — worth $73 million to narcotics wholesalers — before the boat sank. It was only a third of what officials estimate was in the hold. It was the sixth sub seized by the Coast Guard during the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30.

The U.S. Coast Guard stopped a a "self-propelled semi-submersible" vessel and seized 2.8 tons of cocaine, worth $73 million, before the boat sank.​

Trucks and federal drug agents stood by the San Diego Naval Base pier early Thursday, waiting for the Waesche to transfer the 19.5 tons of cocaine seized during a narcotics interdiction patrol that stretched from California to the Caribbean. The drugs taken in by the Waesche helped the Coast Guard confiscate a record 208 tons of cocaine on the high seas last year, a haul worth about $5.6 billion. The Coast Guard estimates that it interdicts about 20 percent of all drugs flowing by boat toward the United States. Its cutters seize about one out of every four tons of cocaine departing from South America — about three times what law-enforcement agencies confiscate each year inside America and along its land borders, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The Coast Guard’s 260 drug interdictions also set a record last year, spotlighting an operational tempo that has doubled since 2008. For the record haul of cocaine last year, Coast Guard commanders credit better federal counter-narcotics intelligence, what they call a “surge” in personnel and the arrival of new high-tech cutters to replace vessels that were up to a half-century old. Although the Coast Guard bears the primary duty of finding and confiscating narcotics shipments on the open seas, other agencies help out, including Navy warships and the pilot of the U.S. Customs Service plane that first spotted the sub on Sept. 6 and radioed its coordinates to the Waesche.

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