Terrorist/Narco Money Laundering Operations Shut Down in NY, DC

Since we were just speaking of money laundering, this item is some good news:

The indictment of 39 defendants in an international money laundering case sends a message to potential terrorists and drug dealers that their financial pipelines are being monitored, a federal prosecutor said yesterday.

Cooperating witnesses posed as drug smugglers, cigarette smugglers and, in one case, as a terrorist who wanted to send money to al Qaeda, and asked the defendants to help transfer money. The four-year undercover investigation targeted defendants in the U.S., Belgium, Canada and Spain, U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein said.

These are so called "hawala brokers"--which the AP article describes as sort of a low-tech Western Union. It had long been a semi-legit means of transfering wealth in the Middle East and India, but I've also been hearing for more than a decade about how hawala has been used by drug dealers to remit payment securely back to the Golden Crescent. And it was only a matter of time before terrorists took advantage as well.

The defendant who accepted money from a witness posing as a terrorist was identified as Saifulla Ranjha, who operated a money-transfer business in the District called Hamza Inc., prosecutors said. Mr. Ranjha conspired with five other defendants to launder more than $2.2 million received from the cooperating witness, they said.

Mr. Ranjha relied primarily on a Canadian, Mazhar Chughtai, to arrange bank deposits, and provided the unidentified witness with coded contact information for associates in Canada, England, Spain, Pakistan and Australia, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

Federal prosecutors are seeking $5.1 million in criminal forfeitures and ownership interest in two convenience stores in Snow Hill, Md., where raids were conducted yesterday. A home in the Eastern Shore town also was raided.

There's also an attempt to bribe immigration officials to alter a visa, but I need to save something to make it worth clicking on.

It's good work (props to FBI, ICE, and *gasp* the IRS), but also worrying that the implication here is that there's no way the feds can get all these guys, and they were just "sending a message" with these arrests.

Much more in the DOJ press release here.