The Search for Dirty Money

By John Miller

How do the billions of organized crimes manage to evade controls? Who are the men in the shadows who help the godfathers of international drug trafficking to launder their fortunes? To dismantle these networks, police captain john miller applied the methods of criminal investigation. Spinning, wiretapping, sound systems... For several years, his team traced the dirty money river. This hunt resulted in spectacular seizures. In 2018, 18 million euros in criminal assets and 100 million euros in tax fraud were confiscated. A record in france. Known as operations virus, retrovirus, or even cedar, these investigations revealed the existence of a key player in money laundering: saraf. A powerful and mysterious character, a link between the world of drug traffickers and that of international high nance. The missing link in the fight against organized crime. From casablanca to dubai, via paris, antwerp and madras, john miller reveals for the first time, from the inside, the methods used by his group. It takes us into the mysteries of money laundering, where are linked, sometimes without even knowing it, drug traffickers, international bankers, gold smugglers and tax evaders. John miller is a police officer specializing in the fight against money laundering. Former dst, police captain at the central office for the suppression of serious financial crime (ocrgdf) from 2005 to 2015, john miller now heads the anti-drug coordination group at europol, the european criminal police agency. . Hélène constanty is an independent investigative journalist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miller
• Release date: Dec 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215636428

Book preview

Prologue

"I traveled in briefcases

In vans, tablets

In jeans or silk

In Jaguar and Matra..."

The lyrics of Bernard Lavilliers' song, The Extraordinary Adventures of a Banknote, run through my head on this sunny morning in May 2012. We have just identified our target, Mustapha. Here he arrives at the wheel of a white Peugeot 106. Thirties. The tanned complexion. He does not attract attention, soberly dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. Without his criminal record and with a gray coat, he would make a very credible grocer.

For two weeks, we have been tapping Mustapha's telephone line. We watch her day and night and follow him wherever he goes, since he collected 100,000 euros from the hands of a drug trafficker.

One hundred thousand euros, one hour in traffic jargon. Mustapha is what is called a collector. And he is not unemployed. In fifteen days, he collected several hundreds of thousands of euros. He reports scrupulously, in coded language, to his principals, which is very useful for us to take stock of what lands in his hands.

We are hiding in front of a McDonald's restaurant in the northern suburbs of Paris. My radio crackles. It's Julien, my colleague who listens to the telephone conversations from our offices in Nanterre.

- It moves. Mustapha says he is coming. The hander is on a scooter. He is already there. In McDonalds.

- Well taken. We film and follow Mustapha.

The meeting is brief. Mustapha parks his 106. He goes into the fast food restaurant and comes out with a wheeled suitcase. The two men barely exchanged a few words. The trafficker gave him the money.

We resume spinning. Mustapha, alone in the vehicle, respects the highway code. A good point for him. At 1 p.m., he parks in a small street in Gennevilliers and enters a shabby building. The device is positioned in the best possible way to monitor the building without being spotted too much. The hours pass. Julien, always listening, is responsible for notifying us as soon as Mustapha makes a phone call or sends an SMS. But nothing.

The wait is endless. I imagine Mustapha, in his apartment, doing the accounts. This is his responsibility. How much did the suitcase contain? One hundred thousand euros ? Two hundred thousand euros? I bet on 200,000 given its size, probably made up of a mix of 20 and 50 euro notes, the most common. And I know from experience that it takes an hour on average to count 100,000 euros.

The answer is listening. An SMS from Mustapha to his brother's Moroccan number:

- OKAY. 324.

I lost. It's 324,000 euros. He counts quickly. He has the habit.

We are still waiting. Mustapha receives new instructions. He comes out, takes a quick look in the street and gets back to his car. Spinning is easy. The collectors are less suspicious than the traffickers who supply them with banknotes. It's paradoxical, because they carry the ultimate benefit that rewards so much effort.

Admittedly, they fear theft more than arrest, and the wrath of their employers terrifies them more than that of justice. Although attentive to their immediate surroundings, they rarely spot police shadowing: the police are at the bottom of their list of concerns.

At 8:30 p.m., Mustapha still recovers 239,000 euros at the Porte d'Asnières. Collection, counting, SMS... Routine. He returns to Gennevilliers for the night. The monitoring device is lifted, we now have our program for tomorrow.

Thanks to tapping, we know that he will have an appointment in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, early in the morning, with another collector who belongs to a second network. We do not yet understand the structure of the latter, but it seems out of the ordinary, and must receive the funds raised today. The man with whom he has an appointment answers to the name of Marco.

My team is there before the time of the meeting. We wait, stashed around. Romain is in our outdated bottle-green Renault Clio, Jean-Jo and John are in a gold Ford. Michaël and I are on foot a little further. As for Julien, he stays in the soum, an unmarked van with one-way windows. Our service cars do their best to blend in with the decor of these working-class neighborhoods. But at the end of May, it is difficult to count on the fogging of the windows to hide us from the eyes of passers-by.

The worried eye, Marco is there. He cranes his feet on the sidewalk in front of a tagged wall. It happened too early. He grows impatient and agitated. He contacts Mustapha by phone. We only see him with his raggedy Charlie Chaplin look. He is sweating in his overheated coat for the season. He turns in all directions and does not see his contact coming a few meters from him. Mustapha taps him on the shoulder. Marco turns around and then laughs loudly. He speaks too loudly and too quickly. Marco is stressed. Mustapha seems uncomfortable and quickly hands him a big plastic bag, in the middle of the street. Marco puts everything in his backpack and the two men part. Three hundred and fifty thousand euros in cash have just changed hands.

Mustapha is relieved: his tour for the day is over. He will receive his share for this operation. Marco, still on foot, stops at his sister's. She lives nearby and works in a local school. It is at her home that the safe is in which Marco will deposit some of the money. Besides, she would like a second, the first is full. She even thought of giving one to Marco for his birthday. Once his case is over, Marco leaves in a taxi, we follow him. He is dropped off in the most chic district of Paris, avenue Montaigne, an artery with sidewalks lined with luxury boutiques and fashion designers.

Our surveillance system is complete, with our three vehicles in pursuit. To be honest, it's an unnecessary precaution, Marco won't notice us. His mind is elsewhere. His lips move, he speaks to himself, moving his hands, and it is deep in conversation with himself that he walks through the door of an opulent building. No need to follow him to try to identify an apartment. We know where he is going: to a tax lawyer.

An hour and a half later, Marco emerges, his empty backpack flattened on his shoulder blades. We stay in hiding, at the foot of the building. It is almost 5 p.m. when the cash comes out in turn, in a splendid black crocodile leather briefcase , the handle of which is clinging to the lawyer.

That's bleaching. Respect the dress code and know how to change clothes so as not to be seen. From Seine-Saint-Denis to Avenue Montaigne, from MacDo to the law firm, it took twenty-four hours for dirty money to gentrify.

Organized crime produces cash. However, cash has magical properties. Cheeky, he laughs in the face of those who claim to follow his trail, discipline him, even suppress him. Cash is exchanged and transformed. It glides silently from one hand to the other, unhindered by banks. It is stored. He travels. It does not ring airport gates. It is invested and transmuted into gold. He can disappear and reappear instantly, in any place and in any form, without even moving. It is compensated and it is sold, redeemed and converted. He is of all religions and all causes.

Cash has no past. We don't know where he comes from, where he goes, his destination remains a mystery. Without this spinning and these plays, he would have lost his memory on the sidewalks of the 8th arrondissement of Paris and denied his origins in favor of a complex filiation, made up of exotic societies and disconcerting montages. It would have been justified, tax-exempt, optimized. He might even have considered, to sober up, to declare himself to the taxman.

This money, born under x, is looking for a birth certificate. And we scramble to adopt it. Essentially, nobody cares. Not us. Tracking down dirty money, money from trafficking, the fruits of corruption or the profits from fraud, that is the mission of my unit, the anti-money laundering operational group no . financial crime.

Chapter 1

Follow -_ this MONEY!

In February 2012, our colleagues from the Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drug Trafficking, otherwise known as the Stups, were working on a network which organized the importation of tons of cannabis. The drug, grown in the Moroccan Rif region, is transported to the Paris region, via Spain, by land. Spinning and phone tapping begin.

On the French side, the group of traffickers is organized around Sofiane, twenty-nine, born in Yvelines to Moroccan parents. His Franco-Algerian principal, Rachid, known as the Great, navigates between Morocco and Algeria, without ever setting foot in Europe where he is under conviction for drug trafficking. If he crosses the border and is arrested, he will immediately be taken to prison.

Our Narcotics colleagues observe that once the merchandise is sold, the dealers turn over their proceeds to a group of fundraisers. These collectors do not participate in the actual trafficking and do not touch drugs. Their role seems to be to pick up the banknotes, count them and give them to others. Yes, but to whom? How ? Where ?

Commissioner Stéphanie Cherbonnier, my head at the Central Office for the Suppression of Serious Financial Crime (OCRGDF), also called the financial in the jargon, smells potential in this case and asks me to answer these questions.

The initial idea is to complete the narcotics investigations with a heritage approach. To put it another way, our service works to identify the wealth of suspects, including held through nominees, in order to compare it to their official income and see if there is reason to seize bank accounts, apartments or vehicles belonging to the traffickers identified by the narcotics. In a nutshell, it is a question of verifying whether we can hook them to the financier, that is to say, build a solid case of money laundering or non-justification of resources.

Very quickly, before we even start working on the case, the Narcotics discover a collector of trafficking money who maintains suspicious contacts with mysterious interlocutors in Switzerland... The survey could then take on an additional dimension, both nationally and internationally. The public prosecutor therefore extends the scope of the judicial investigation to drug money laundering, then relinquishes control, due to the foreseeable scale of the case, in favor of judge Baudoin Thouvenot, who specializes in organized crime within the specialized interregional jurisdiction (JIRS) of Paris.

It is from that moment that we really get into the game. My group is officially seized by the judge, in order to work on the money laundering aspect. We pick up on some phone tapping where a lot of money is being talked about. This all sounds promising. Moreover, the file already has an evocative name, chosen by a colleague of Stups:

— Welcome to Operation Virus.

— Viruses?

- Yeah. We are facing a lot of unidentified guys. They are called Male 1 (H1) Unidentified 1 (N1), etc. It's H1N1, you see, to find your way around...

This case will mobilize us for six months. A very short time for an investigation that takes place on three continents and concerns hundreds of millions of euros. The Virus dossier will take us from Aubervilliers to Antwerp via Casablanca, Dubai and Madras. From Chinatowns from 93 to cozy offices of Swiss banks. This is the biggest narcotics laundering case to date, led by a small group of passionate investigators, like many in the police.

The Club

My team, Task Force Anti-Money Laundering No. ³ – GOAB 3 – consists of only six people, myself included. Of course, during the current investigation, we have not stopped working in parallel on other high-stakes cases such as Parisian gambling circles infiltrated by serious Corsican crime, money laundering cases linked to drug trafficking. weapons, extortion or, again and again, drugs. Our group is a club. And the entrance fee is paid for in hours of hard work.

At the time, we were between twenty-five and thirty-nine years old and had all started our careers as public safety cops, the uniformed police. We come from the everyday police, that of the police on the corner of the street. That of calls 17 and urban violence: the