The Laundrymen - Inside Money Laundering, The World's Third Largest Business by Jeffrey Robinson

Author:Jeffrey Robinson [Robinson, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Kindle Edition
Published: 2008-12-28T08:00:00+00:00

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Chapter Twelve

ISLANDS IN THE SUN

"We have no natural resources and we have to survive."

--- Aruba's prime minister, Nelson Oduber

The fact that there is no Meyer Lansky Street running through the middle of downtown Nassau, Grand Bahamas, or for that matter, through the heart of any capital on any other island in the Caribbean, has got to be one of the most arrogant oversights in history. Lansky not only built the financial skeleton for postwar organized crime, he opened Caribbean eyes, wallets, safe deposit boxes and secret bank accounts to the delights of tax havens. He helped show the island nations how to become the world's biggest collection of sinks. Whether or not they'd ever openly admit to it, a huge debt of gratitude is outstanding.

The Caribbean is home to 31 million people, nearly two-thirds of whom natively speak Spanish. Another 20 percent are French or Creole speaking. Separated by water, culture, history and politics, the region is anything but homogeneous. It is easier to reach Barbados from New York than it is from Curacao. The most convenient schedule from Kingston, Jamaica, to Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic is through Miami. One of the few characteristics most of the islands share is that they are generally considered to be in America's backyard. At the end of World War II, sugar was the region's main crop and the United States was the region's primary market. Since then, sugar exports to the US have steadily declined and so have earnings for oil and bauxite. But the islands are still America's backyard. The US remains the primary market. Except now the main product is narcotics.

It's no coincidence that a powerful Sicilian family, the Caruana-Cuntrera clan, who control organized crime in Venezuela bought sizable tracts of real estate in the Caribbean. When Pasquale, Paolo and Gaspare Cuntrera were arrested at home in Caracas in September 1992 on heroin trafficking charges that dated back ten years, they were deported to Italy. Known to have commanded a major international money laundering ring and believed to have been behind the 1992 assassinations of a Sicilian judge and prosecutor, they left behind an organization that is said to own two-thirds of all the land and two-thirds of all the businesses on Aruba, a resort island 45 miles west of Curacao, just off the coast of Venezuela.

Aruba is also home to the La Costa cocaine cartel who came to prominence when 16 of their ilk were charged in Miami with racketeering, drug conspiracy and money laundering. They'd reputedly brought 80 tons of cocaine and 250,000 pounds of marijuana into the United States since 1980, generating an estimated $800 million in profits until 1993 and the indictment against their chieftain, Randolph Habibe. He was been charged with a failed attempt to free a fellow cartel member Jose Rafael "El Mono" Abello, currently serving a 30-year sentence for drug smuggling in Oklahoma. To emphasize the amount of money available to these groups, the escape plot as engineered by Habibe was budgeted at $20 million.

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