After Raids, Police Charge 27 With Laundering Drug Money
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Twenty-seven owners and employees of wire transfer stores have been charged with laundering approximately $2 million in drug money to Colombia.
The arrests and the closures of 10 of the 24 stores in Queens, on Long Island and in Westchester County are part of Operation Pinpoint, the latest phase in an effort to drive drug money out of the wire transfer industry, U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf said yesterday.
Previous investigations revealed that the wire transfer or money remitting industry in New York had been largely transformed by narcotics traffickers into a vehicle for sending drug proceeds to drug source countries, primarily Colombia.
“The sale of narcotics generates huge amounts of bulk cash that the traffickers must launder,” Ms. Mauskopf said.
The defendants made the money transfer industry a tool of the drug trade to accomplish that end, she said. The industry is designed partly to serve recent immigrants in the United States who do not have bank accounts and need to send money home to relatives.
The 27 people were arrested early yesterday in a series of raids in which law enforcement agents seized about $300,000 in cash, some of which was hidden in ceilings and wall safes.
The agents said they also found instructions on where in Colombia to wire the money.
The two-year undercover investigation was conducted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau and the New York Police Department as part of a task force created in 1992 to investigate financial crimes.
Under Operation Pinpoint, confidential informants directed by ICE agents took large sums of money and lists of names of wire transfer recipients to targeted wire transfer stores, according to ICE agent Salvatore Dalessandro.
