Mike Malloy

[greg]

Source: Bloomberg

Just before sunset on April 10, 2006, a DC-9 jet landed at the international airport in the port city of Ciudad del Carmen, 500 miles east of Mexico City. As soldiers on the ground approached the plane, the crew tried to shoo them away, saying there was a dangerous oil leak. So the troops grew suspicious and searched the jet.

They found 128 black suitcases, packed with 5.7 tons of cocaine, valued at $100 million. The stash was supposed to have been delivered from Caracas to drug traffickers in Toluca, near Mexico City, Mexican prosecutors later found. Law enforcement officials also discovered something else.

The smugglers had bought the DC-9 with laundered funds they transferred through two of the biggest banks in the U.S.: Wachovia Corp. and Bank of America Corp., Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its August 2010 issue.

This was no isolated incident. Wachovia, it turns out, had made a habit of helping move money for Mexican drug smugglers. Wells Fargo & Co., which bought Wachovia in 2008, has admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report suspected money laundering by narcotics traffickers -- including the cash used to buy four planes that shipped a total of 22 tons of cocaine.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-06-29/banks-financin...
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"I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing" Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826

[Don Smith]

Too tired to search this out just now, however-
I remember a study a few years back which made the case that if the drug money in the banks were seized there would be a collapse of financial institutions world wide.
I don't doubt it.
Ramsey Clark in his book, Crime in America shows that organised crime cannot prosper without the support of the courts, the government and law enforcement agencies.
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" A bayonet is a tool with a worker at both ends."- Lenin
Patriotism is a manifestation of the Stockholm Syndrome.
"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it."
-Thoreau
"Information is the currency of Democracy." Jefferson