Wells Fargo, Wachovia Involved in Numerous Mexican Drug Laundering Schemes

If you or I was involved in drug laundering of as little as 2 dollars and fifty cents we would be in prison.

Wachovia bank, now part of Wells Fargo via a merger, has laundered countless sums of Mexican cartel drug money and will get off with a slap of the wrist. The reason ...Wells Fargo is too big to fail.

Please consider Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal

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.

Wachovia admitted it didn?t do enough to spot illicit funds in handling $378.4 billion for Mexican-currency-exchange houses from 2004 to 2007. That?s the largest violation of the Bank Secrecy Act, an anti-money-laundering law, in U.S. history -- a sum equal to one-third of Mexico?s current gross domestic product.

?Wachovia?s blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations,? says Jeffrey Sloman, the federal prosecutor who handled the case.

No bank has been more closely connected with Mexican money laundering than Wachovia. Founded in 1879, Wachovia became the largest bank by assets in the southeastern U.S. by 1900. After the Great Depression, some people in North Carolina called the bank ?Walk-Over-Ya? because it had foreclosed on farms in the region.

Wells Fargo regrets that some of Wachovia?s former anti- money-laundering efforts fell short, spokeswoman Mary Eshet says. Wells Fargo has invested $42 million in the past three years to improve its anti-money-laundering program and has been working with regulators, she says.

The bank declined to answer specific questions, including how much it made by handling $378.4 billion -- including $4 billion of cash-from Mexican exchange companies.

The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to report all cash transactions above $10,000 to regulators and to tell the government about other suspected money-laundering activity. Big banks employ hundreds of investigators and spend millions of dollars on software programs to scour accounts.

No big U.S. bank -- Wells Fargo included -- has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.

?No Capacity to Regulate?

Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.

Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering.

The theory is like a get-out-of-jail-free card for big banks, Blum says.

?There?s no capacity to regulate or punish them because they?re too big to be threatened with failure,? Blum says. ?They seem to be willing to do anything that improves their bottom line, until they?re caught.?

That's a large snip but I assure you there is much more to see including charges against bank of America, Western Union, American Express, murders in Mexico and more.

The most galling thing is how a director at Wells Fargo reported this was happening and was ignored. Here is one more clip for the road.

Twenty million people in the U.S. regularly use illegal drugs, spurring street crime and wrecking families. Narcotics cost the U.S. economy $215 billion a year -- enough to cover health care for 30.9 million Americans -- in overburdened courts, prisons and hospitals and lost productivity, the department says.

?It?s the banks laundering money for the cartels that finances the tragedy,? says Martin Woods, director of Wachovia?s anti-money-laundering unit in London from 2006 to 2009. Woods says he quit the bank in disgust after executives ignored his documentation that drug dealers were funneling money through Wachovia?s branch network.

?If you don?t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you?re missing the point,? Woods says.

Wachovia and Wells Fargo will both get off the hook on grounds of being too big to fail.

The whole war on drugs is insanity in and of itself of course, but the blatant hypocrisy and favoritism certainly beats all.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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