The Bank of the Underworld: Kingpins, Arms Traffickers, Pablo Escobar and Saddam Hussein
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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

It's 1988 and the war on drugs is white hot. A US Senate committee, led by John Kerry, is busting the drug trafficking operations of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega wide open.

Its star witness is a big boned, grey haired Panamanian consul general named Jose Blandon. And Blandon, he's singing. About Noriega's link to producers in South America, his contacts in the States, the whole thing. Remember, this is deep Cold War. Washington is backing all kinds of despots in a bid to keep the Reds out of power all over the world. Better to be in the tent with a guy like Noriega pissing in than outside of the tent with your plantations getting pissed on.

But Kerry and his team have other ideas. They draw up a map of Noriega's empire, a network thought to have filled his coffers to the tune of $300 million alone.

But right beneath his name, among a list of financial institutions, is something called BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a London-based firm with branches in almost every other country on the planet, founded by a ball-busting banker in Karachi and in charge of around 25 billion bucks of assets.

If Blandon's telling the truth, BCCI has laundered millions of cocaine dollars for Noriega. And after a tiny bit of digging, Kerry and his committee find out that that's just the tip of an iceberg of financial mismanagement and way, way worse at BCCI. But when he takes a closer look, he gets stonewalled. First by the Justice Department, then by the CIA. Something stinks.

At the same time, in Tampa, Florida, customs officials are running an operation involving a bunch of Colombian narcos called Sea Chase and BCCI bankers. Alarmingly, the BCCI guys have been so desperate to win undercover agent Robin Mazur's business that they've offered him advice and training on how exactly to launder money.

They've even suggested a clique of, quote, cash customers in Bogota to make Mazur's supposed drug proceeds disappear. By 1990, Mazur and his customs guys have wrapped up sea chase in trapping the bankers by setting up a bogus wedding party. Four of them are arrested, convicted and given prison terms alongside the Colombian narcos. But the bank itself, well, it slips off the hook.

It's ordered to pay a little under $15 million, chump change for the world's fastest growing financial brand. And when prosecutors sniff around the BCCI a little more, they get just the same treatment as Kerry in D.C. Stonewalls, denials, bureaucracy. That year, the Senate committee brings on legendary Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthal to investigate BCCI.

We've had no cooperation from the Justice Department since we first asked for records in March 1990, he says. In fact, they're impeding our investigation and Justice Department representatives are asking witnesses not to cooperate with us.

A year later, though, Morgenthau will sit down with a New York press conference crammed with journalists, having just stung the bank for a huge fine and won indictments for his two most important men, setting the ball rolling on its massive downfall. This indictment spells out the largest bank fraud in world financial history, he tells them.

BCCI was operated as a corrupt criminal organization throughout its entire 19-year history. It systematically falsified its records and knowingly allowed itself to be used by other criminals, and it paid bribes and kickbacks to public officials. BCCI is headed by a messianic Karachi financier named Agha Hassan Abedi, with deep, deep connections all around the world.

Abedi says he's on a mission to create a truly global bank for the third world, a Muslim institution that will help the world's poor and colonized to rise up and realize their true potential. Others fear Abedi's connection to intelligence chiefs and politicians and say he's got officials as far as London and Washington in his pockets.

His client list, say critics, includes the world's most notorious despots and criminal kingpins. Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, Pablo Escobar. They have another name for BCCI. The Bank of Crooks and Criminals. And that is if they even live to tell that tale. But for the CIA, locked in Cold War conflict with its Soviet enemy, a bank for crooks and criminals is exactly what it needs.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of the podcast that shows you how when it comes to finance people never ever learn, not even a bit, not ever, ever. I'm your host Sean Williams, I'm a journalist in Berlin and I'm joined by Danny Gold in New York. I've got the sniffles a little bit so apologies if I'm sounding a bit nasally and gnarly. I've got the sniffles, yeah, I've got the sniffles. But there are no sick days in the world of freelance podcasting so off we go.

Danny, you did a great episode on the Mexican queenpin last week. You been working on anything else this week? Yeah, man, I'm just getting back in the swing of things. You know, we're keeping the Patreon going, patreon.com slash underworldpodcast for more episodes and things like that.

And yeah, you know, it's summer, man. I think we should be selling out more. If you want to advertise with us, email us. But also, if you have a restaurant with a raw bar, any sort of hotel, we'll run a whole episode about you if you just give us free things. I just want to put that out there for right now. Yeah, definitely. Yacht chartering company. You got a piece from Ukraine, right? Yeah, it came out. It was held for a little bit because they had a similar thing, but it just came out.

this week from like one of the last things I did there a couple of weeks ago for, for Rolling Stone. So yeah, I guess that's, uh, that that's what's going on too. Yeah. I mean, shout out as always to the subscribers, uh, like Danny said, we're back on the Patreon. We've got tons of interviews, mini shows. We've done the Q and a, I think this show, uh,

As this show's coming out, we've got like What on the Giant Scanner in Malawi, something about a mafia-connected parrot smuggler in Berlin. Look, I know you don't want like 15 shows about John Gotti's favorite suit. We've got big stuff, hidden stuff from all over the world. Yeah, am I missing anything? No, just really good, really good interviews coming up. So if you guys want that sort of content, $5 a month is where you'll find it. Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, to the bank of crooks and criminals. It's the dirtiest bank in history. It's got stiff competition, of course. I don't know if many of our listeners are going to know much about this story, but it was certainly headline news about 30 years ago when its inner workings were getting picked apart. And I think above all the other episodes we've done, this is one where it's going to really help to read the

to pile into the reading list that we put up on the Patreon as well, because this thing is massive. It's just tons and tons of shady shit going down in just about every other country on the planet. It's dictators, officials, bankers, drug dealers, armed merchants, intelligence agents, the whole shebang. Yeah, I'd actually never heard of it, I think,

Part of the problem is, right, it's hard to make financial crime sexy and exciting unless you're like Michael Lewis. But this one sounds pretty wild. Don't worry, I'm going to make it sexy as hell. But before I get really hot under the collar, I'll let Foreign Policy do a little intro because there's a really good piece on that.

So they say, quote, one bank above all others highlights the modern realities of transnational corruption and how authoritarian governments abroad can sink their tendrils into Western governments. Overseen by autocratic oligarchs abroad, this bank used everything, including shell companies, fake foundations and anonymous real estate purchases to launder millions or billions and billions of dollars.

And when Western investigators got wind of its financial fraud, this bank immediately began bankrolling white-shoe law firms and shady PR operators, even going so far as to fund leading US presidential campaigns, corrupt the leading voices in at least one American political party, and even grow close to the American president himself.

So it's kind of like some crypto exchanges, except more stable is what I'm hearing. It's exactly like that. Don't worry, I'm not going to go into too much real estate stuff. That's not sexy. That's too corrupt for even us. But yeah, that's a pretty good lead-in right there.

That's not bad, is it? No. And it continues. I mean, I feel like this is exactly the lead-in that would just get scrubbed off one of my drafts. But this continues, quote, "'It's a saga that's largely been forgotten. And that's a shame, because in many ways the unprecedented graft and collapse of BCCI foretold it precisely the kinds of transnational kleptocratic practices that would take root around the globe over the past decade, and how wide open the United States remains when it comes to the infiltration of foreign, dirty money.'"

another idea. If you really want to infiltrate the U S with foreign dirty money, just give it to us. Like invest in the end of the world podcast. Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're more than willing to take foreign dirty money off your hands. Uh, further into the show, we're even going to get into this shadowy organization called the safari club, uh,

The death of a prominent journalist in a West Virginia hotel room. There's black op teams, murders, software theft, nuclear weapons, the Afghan war, the Camp David Accords. I mean, like, seriously, this is starting to sound like an InfoWars special, but I promise you it's not. It is all legit. We are journalists, guys. We know what we're doing. But, okay.

So let's find out who this bank's Messianic founder actually is. So as I mentioned, his name is Agha Hassan Abedi. He's a Muslim born in the city of Lucknow in northern India near Nepal in May 1922.

Abadi is middle class. He's born into a family of courtiers of the rulers of Adab, which is a northern India empire. It took the British until 1856 to annex, long after the Mughals and other parts of the subcontinent. And yeah, it is once again my beloved home ground. Home ground? And yes, it is once again my beloved homeland whose shithousery kicks off this entire thing. You didn't read this in your textbooks about Spitfires and Henry VIII kids, right?

There's got to be at least one self-hating British Empire storyline in every episode that Sean does. Yeah. Bottle of water. Bottle of water.

By his mid-twenties, Abedi is a bona fide high-flying member of Lucknow's money classes. And then, in 1947, Britain leaves the Raj in a hurry and communal violence breaks out, forcing millions of Muslims out of India in what becomes Pakistan.

Abedi finds himself in Karachi, which is the biggest city in the new country and one of the most populated cities on earth. I mean, in 1947, it's home to only half a million people and it doubles in four years. And by 1961, it's 2 million. It's pretty crazy alone. And by the way, today there are over 16 million people there. It's grown by 5% each year. I know you guys came for historical demographics. Like I really know that's going to get us more Patreon subscribers. So,

So Abedi, he is in Karachi. His world is turned upside down and he founds his own bank called United in 1959. So at this point, he's not actually a young man, like 37, a touch older than me, doesn't even have a podcast, pretty pathetic. But he almost makes up for it by being a master negotiator and political mover and shaker. And I mean, this boy is connected. Yeah, I mean, what is the point of being connected if you don't even have a podcast?

None, none. Way better to have no friends and a podcast, right? He's got powers in most governments around the developing world, spies, artists, you name it. He first manages to grow United by bringing a Pakistani former PM onto the board, and he's just dishing out backhanders to local officials to smooth bureaucracy, grease the wheels, saying he's going to get a lot more used to.

But at the time, the Indian subcontinent is still roiling with strife and communal violence. In 1971, East Pakistan, which is a vast territory dominated by the Ganges Delta, it rises up against ruling Islamabad and becomes independent Bangladesh. The next year, Pakistan nationalises United Bank.

At this point, Abedi is 50 years old. He's no spring chicken. And he sets up the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, in Karachi. It's a crazy, swelling, tumultuous metropolis.

Abedi wants this bank to be something completely different. He's a man of his time, he's lived through colonialism and its disastrous bloody after-effects, and he's been a business victim, at least a business victim, of his region's independence movements that often, as they do at the time, take on a leftist hue.

Now, what we call today the developing world, then known as the third world, is just a giant chessboard for proxy standoffs between the United States and the Soviet Union. Colonies in Africa and Asia are winning independence, and in the Muslim world, these are often shaped around the religion. The Muslim Brotherhood had begun in Egypt a long time before to fight colonialism, decadence, and inequality. Likewise, movements in Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan itself.

Now, Bailey wants BCCI to be the world's first truly third world bank to lift young Muslim nations out of poverty and compete on the global stage. And he isn't going to do it alone. On December 2nd, 1971, the so-called crucial shakedoms of the Persian coast, they get independence from Britain and call themselves the United Arab Emirates. Just a few years after discovering huge deposits of oil, which is pretty funny.

These shakes are flush AF and they're looking to beef up their political presence. Likewise, the neighboring Saudis who are drowning in petrodollars and forming ever closer ties with the Americans. It's just the kind of business savvy, non-corrupt angel investors who can get a plucky little bank off the ground.

Ah, to be a grifter back then in the Gulf. I mean, it must have been just wide open. What a time. Yeah. No NFTs, just shaky hands and a few beers in the desert. I mean, to be a grifter there right now, you know, still pretty, pretty solid. Yeah. I reckon there's a few kicking around. Probably met a few.

Among all of these guys, the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi gets the closest to a baby. Although he's by a mile, not the golf big wig who makes the most out of him politically. So as a guardian piece from 2012 quote, the Emirate was the bank's largest depositor, largest borrower, and for most of its existence, the largest shareholder. Ultimately a settlement with Abu Dhabi also provided most half the funds recovered for creditors. But yeah,

They're not going to be the biggest winners, I would say, out of this whole thing. So, yeah, you guys have struggled with the banking stuff for a while. It's time to get down to the juicy stuff. Yeah, I mean, we all love learning about interest rates, but time for the coke and guns, you know? Yeah, just first we're going to do half an hour on real estate, but then we're going to get on to it. No, there is a lot of drugs and the stuff that we're here for. And there are tons of great sources for this.

I'm going to give a shout out to two of them. There's first a 1991 Time magazine cover story by Jonathan Beaton's S.C. Gwynn called The Dirtiest Bank of Them All, which I'm in no way ripping off the title for in this episode. And then the second is a 1992 Frontline documentary, which digs into a bunch of like the more politically insane stuff in the United States.

But at this point, Obeidi's BCCI, it's up and running. It's got mad dollar from the Middle East, and it really pushes its charity chops, bankrolling a prize called the Third World Foundation, which is not a podcast platform, by the way, but a charity to, quote, relieve poverty and sickness. Again, nothing to do with podcasts. And this, even as a Nobel-like prize, it awards to Nelson Mandela, Billy Brandt, and tons of other high-ranking officials at the time.

But this bank, the whole thing, it's just a front. It's a Ponzi scheme where money goes to the top of it and it disappears or the lower downs get more clients to develop, to deposit cash on investments that don't exist at all. And when shit hits the fan, like we've heard in the intro, there's this whole cavalcade of American politicians lining up to claim they never knew this thing existed. Likewise, all over Europe, but they definitely a hundred percent did and

So it starts with Richard Nixon. When he resigns in 1974 amid the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford becomes president. And later that year, pardons Nixon. I mean, I don't think we need to get into Watergate too much, but by 1976, Congress is up in arms about the role of the country's intelligence agencies running amok all over the world, deposing governments, spying, kidnapping, even killing US citizens. So Nixon,

Congress passes a bill, restores democracy, reigns in its spymasters, and everyone moves on in a more peaceful, liberal world.

Well, no, of course it doesn't. George Bush Senior has been chief of the CIA for a year in 1976, and he is close to a guy called Kamal Adam, who's a Saudi businessman and director general of its own intelligence agency, the Mukhabarat al-Amar. Ah, that's painful. Yeah, even for us, that's painful. Jesus, that was bad.

This, of course, has nothing to do with Saudi cash flowing into the oil fields of Bush's home state of Texas. No, no, no. But...

Through this alliance, Bush takes a keen interest in Adam's U.S.-educated son, Prince Turkey, who dropped out of Georgetown when the 1967 Six-Day War broke out between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And I know we're dancing around a bit, but bear with me because this is all going to come together quite spectacularly. Yeah, I got no idea what's going on, but I'm confident you'll bring it home. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure somehow I will.

Bush and Adam, they're grooming Turkey. They're expecting him to rise the Saudi spy ranks, which is exactly what he does, leading the Mukhabarat from 1979 till September 1st, 2001, which is in no way suspicious at all whatsoever.

But in the US, the Watergate scandal has embarrassed the government and the American intelligence community, and it hasn't dulled its commitment to clandestine operations. So several top officials, they tap up Turkey and they arrange to set up a secret spy ring that can go through Riyadh and bypass the US constitution.

Basically, Langley is going to offshore its most egregious stuff to Saudi Arabia, despite the kingdom's deep enmity with Israel, which is one of Washington's closest allies. Got it? Yeah, it's actually interesting to look back at the history back then, considering the relations of Saudi Arabia and Israel now. It's really amazing what the Iranian regime has accomplished with those two. Yeah, I agree. Miracles, you know?

So Prince Turkey, he even admits this himself later on, far later on, at a 2002 Georgetown address speech. And he says, quote, in 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies. It could not write reports and it could not pay money.

In order to compensate that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. Now, that is a cool name. And the Safari Club includes France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Iran.

All cool, freedom-loving places. They're all sharing information and trying to stop the tide of Soviet-based leftism that's sweeping across the developing world. I mean, like in Angola, Mozambique, Djibouti, loads of our places are basically on fire with civil movements at this time.

Their specific activities are hazy, as you'd expect, but there's a good book called The Devil's Chessboard by David Talbot, who's the founder of Salon. That gets into it. And you can read Talbot's book, or there's a great Intercept piece by John Schwarz in 2015 for more information about the Safari Club, because it's so interesting and really unknown outside of a few journo circles and some batshit conspiracy websites.

But this thing was founded by a French guy named Alexandre de Marches, a right-wing aristocrat and his nation's top spymaster, and it was quarterbacked the whole time by the CIA. Here's Schwarz's story on its most explosive aspect. Quote, in 1992, de Marches' biographer testified in a congressional investigation that the French spy told him he had helped arrange an October 1980 meeting in Paris with

between William Casey, Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign manager, and the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The goal of such a meeting, of course, would have been to persuade Iran to keep its American hostages until the next month's election, thus denying Carter any last-minute politically potent triumph. So that's Jimmy Carter, of course.

And yeah, so Iran, newly revolutionized Iran, has American hostages, very high profile. And this is alleging that the Safari Club owner, the Safari Club founder, this French guy,

has worked to put the release of those hostages back, which is a pretty insane thing to help Reagan get elected. This is called the October surprise, by the way. And look, I'm not going to say it's 100% solid, but it has tons of evidence behind it. People have testified. Congress has investigated inconclusively. There are still FOIA requests and investigative stories about it today. It's definitely not some tinfoil hat theory, and it chimes totally with the CIA's activities at the time.

So the Saudis set up a load of accounts to do this at something called Riggs Bank in Washington. Then they channel that money in those accounts to CIA operatives who were at the time hobbled by a pesky democracy. At the same time, the Saudis and Pakistanis want to co-create a Muslim nuclear project to counter the Israelis. Adam then pumps cash into the BCCI, which at that time is just this little podunk merchant bank in Karachi.

And given, of course, that it's illicitly funding top secret operations, the higher ups in the States keep everything to do with BCCI extremely buttoned up and well away from the press. So front for the CIA via Saudi oil money funding a Muslim world nuclear bomb. Check. And criminals. OK, there's tons of them.

In 1979, Pakistan becomes a prime target for Washington's backing of Afghanistan's Musha Deen as they kick off a disastrous war against the Soviet Union that will go on for a decade and claim millions of lives. Well, to do that, D.C. looks the other way in the opium poppy trade out there, as Danny went into in a great two-parter last year, so check that out if you haven't done already.

And it's also pouring weapons and ammo across Pakistan's borders with Afghanistan that is going to go wrong in no way in a few decades time. And to do that, it funnels cash through BCCI into various financial black holes, helping alms money disappear with Abedi's help. But this is where it starts to go nuts. Abedi wants more.

Now he's got all these high-flying friends and politicians relying on his black market bank, and Abedi stops being a middleman, and he starts his own fully functioning criminal empire. According to the Times story I mentioned earlier, quote, its original purpose was to pay bribes, intimidate authorities, and quash investigations. But according to a former operative, sometime in the early 1980s, the black network began running its own drugs, weapons, and currency deals.

I really just don't understand that move. You know, it's usually you start the crime empire and then you try to go into banking. And this is like the opposite. You know, it's like a real estate developer getting into cocaine trafficking. It's just supposed to work the other way around. It reminds me of Paul LaRue as well. That South African guy that started off selling drugs on the dark web and ended up like

mining illegally and setting up a war operation in Somalia and cocaine trafficking guys. Nah, nah, that's not the way to do it. Okay. Anyway, we are off to the races with BCCI guys. This is the sharpest end of what the time article calls a quote planetary Ponzi scheme.

Adding, quote, never has a single scandal involved so much money, so many nations or so many prominent people. Superlatives are quickly exhausted. It is the largest corporate criminal enterprise ever. The biggest Ponzi scheme, the most pervasive money laundering operation and financial supermarket ever created for the likes of Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcus. Well, all right, I'll do a little record scratch. You know, these guys, guys.

Obviously, all of the worst stuff isn't just carried out on the shop floor in London or Karachi, where BCCI is headquartered. There's a clandestine operation within the bank called the Black Unit that in the early 80s turns into a kind of dirty bank organized crime paramilitary style thing with all kinds of crazy stuff being carried out. Here's time again, quote,

The black unit operates a lucrative arms trade business and transports drugs and gold. According to investigators and participants in those operations, it often works with Western and Middle Eastern intelligence agencies. The strange and still murky ties between BCCI and the intelligence agencies of several companies are so pervasive that even the White House has become entangled.

I'm a little lost on how this all took off, but you know, I'm sure, I'm sure it'll all make sense. Well, basically this guy has set up a bank that's like happy to do all of the worst shit that governments want to do during the cold war and don't want their people to find out and don't want their enemies to find out. So very quickly, it just builds this web of interconnected high flyers who can't really say anything or do anything about the bank. If it wants to get into, I don't know, trafficking cocaine, because it's,

It's covering their backs. Like it's basically got shit on everyone in the world very quickly. And then he starts doing it all himself. He starts, yeah, he starts getting high on his own supply. He's got this black unit and this so-called bank within a bank. It's got a whole end-to-end solutions package for armed dealers, terrorists, drug traffickers. It sets up bribes. It's hooking people up politically. And it's even getting, quote, young beauties from Lahore,

And yeah, Abedi would even pimp out kids for his high-profile customers. According to a British lawyer in a 2004 case, quote, Abedi was about as corrupt as they come. He was a mad monk, a Rasputin. If he told anyone that there's little girls, you got little girls. Ditto little boys.

A former black unit operative calling himself Mustafa, an Arab guy with ties to a ruling Middle East family, testifies to U.S. authorities in 1991 when everything is collapsing. He says, quote, they came to me while I was in school in the U.S. They spoke my language, knew all of my friends and gave me money. They told me they wanted me to join the organization and described its wealth and political power. But at first they never said exactly what the organization did.

And then Mustafa undergoes a year of training, including education in psychology and spycraft, the principles of leadership. And that leads into surveillance, breaking and entering, interrogation. I mean, it's not your usual Bank of America onboarding process. Quote, then the nature of our advisors changed. The pleasantness was gone and we moved to Pakistan where we trained with firearms.

Mustafa's first operational assignment takes him to London. Quote, they gave us passports and identification and we moved the shipment of goods. He doesn't say what the goods are. In England, they have more ID waiting for us because customs and immigration are strict. But when we moved many places into India or China or Latin America, matters were taken care of and we just slipped through borders. We would be met. It was always arranged.

And a time story describes one of the typical operations that Mustafa might have been on. And that's in April 1989 when a Colombian container ship docks in Karachi. Black unit guys bribe the Pakistani port officials to the tune of 100 grand, that's in US dollars, before they unload heavy wooden crates onto trucks, then onto a nearby 707 jet while CIA operatives keep watch.

Then this plane flies to Czechoslovakia, terrible carbon footprint guys, come on, in the place of a Pakistani cargo flight, then onwards to the US. Says Mustafa, quote, it could have been gold, could have been drugs, it could have been guns. We dealt in those commodities. So again,

Anywhere you've got a need for cash, you've got drugs. Look at your Noriegas and your Marcos's and your cartels. And then for cash or drugs, you can buy guns, which help fight clandestine wars in the Cold War. So it's feeding this giant black market that's just bubbling around the world.

And so you have deals with the Contras funding stuff in the Middle East, Chinese silkworm missiles getting sent to Saudi Arabia. So BCCI is the backdoor. It's going past sanctions. It can bribe the right people. It can get the politicians paid off and all kinds of proxy conflicts to keep the world at war and line the pockets of the rich, not least Abedi himself.

There are bankers at BCCI who know all about this, but obviously if there's a cold corner office of guys cutting people's hands off or whatever, you should probably avoid taking it to HR. One of the bankers reportedly does report the black unit and then the black unit kill his brother, then send guys to rape his wife. Then he flees to the States. I mean, it's unbelievable stuff. Yeah. They really go from zero to a hundred real quick. Yeah. This is a pretty crazy operation. Um,

And at this point, there are billions and billions of dollars disappearing down the black units, black hole. There are dozens of shell companies, offshore banks. There are subsidiaries in more than 70 countries. Even its own auditors are twisted in so many knots over the amounts of stuff going on there. Bank officials leave paper trails only in Urdu, and they employ a series of secretive Cayman Islands accounts to hide its criminal proceeds.

BCCI can move money from anyone, anywhere at a moment's notice. And this stuff, it just goes on and on throughout that decade. Panama, Iraq, Guatemala, Nigeria, anywhere there's some Cold War shenanigans going on, BCCI is there. Bribing, trafficking, killing, the whole thing. I'd actually like to know if some of our older listeners have heard of this, guys, because

I struggle to believe it wasn't the biggest news story ever. I mean, prosecutors estimate that it had over 3,500 corrupt companies or shell companies on the books at the height of its criminal activity. I'm always kind of curious about situations like this, like how they work in that sort of stuff in terms of just like the paperwork.

you know is there one genius guy who does it all shawshank redemption style and then has like other people doing stuff that don't know about all the interconnected networks is it's the mess of international legalese that's just so confusing it doesn't matter uh yeah really because there's got to be one i mean there's got to be at least one guy who really knows where everything is and like who is that guy where does he come from maybe it was this the main character here abedi but i have no idea and i'd love to know it's like it's

it's like it's operating on so many different levels. It's almost impossible to know who knows exactly what at this point, right? There's the,

abatey going around like crowning people the winner of some charity contest i mean his friends are like the highest of the high of the entire world and there's like a whole other level of people going around bribing officials and cutting off fingers and killing people it's such a crazy giant operation i mean this is like the whole thing lasts less than 20 years it's mad

Here's the Time article again, talking about these Cayman Island accounts that the highest people at the BCCI were using. It says, quote, these accounts constitute a hidden bank within BCCI, known only to founder Abedi and a few others. From those accounts, BCCI would lend massive amounts to curry favour with government. So those top level, top level bribes, that is from this account.

secret Cayman Islands headquartered accounts that only Abedi and his mates know about. I mean, yeah, it's pretty dense. But BCCI then goes about using these huge wads of cash to take clandestine control of three American banks, two of which, which are the National Bank of Georgia and the Independence Bank of Encino, California, are purchased by Abedi's front man, and that's a Saudi tycoon named Gaith Parayon.

What this means is that BCCI now has a big fat toehold in the American economy itself with legit banks through which you can bypass unwanted legal attention. So I guess one of our rules is if you're going to do any crime, don't do it in the US. But if you are going to do it, buy a bank. Yes. Yes. Yeah, that is solid.

Basically, BCCI is now operating under the cover of darkness in the heart of the States. And there is even a BCCI slush fund right in D.C., which is presumably meant to cover bribes and kickbacks of politicians and officials if anything starts getting out. And all of this is happening while the CIA is using the baby to push its anti-Soviet ops around the world. And so this whole time, everyone is turning a blind eye. They're thankful for him.

And you can see why. By this point, BCCI Cash and Abadie's Connections, like I said, they're funding everything from Colombian high grade. It even gets Egypt to the table at the Camp David Peace Accords of Israel. It's got US leaders in its pocket. Pretty much all of the Middle East's spy chiefs either on the payroll or doing its work. Abu Nidal, the quote, patriot turned psychopath, founder of Palestinian Fatah offshoot the ANO,

He's widely regarded as the most ruthless of Palestine's terror groups. He also banks with BCCI. He's got 50 mil in a London account with them. So it's crazy. By the late 1980s, there is over $20 billion in BCCI accounts in 78 countries.

So it's got the banks in the US. It's got links to George Bush, Henry Kissinger, the Safari Club, the Iranian Revolution, arms dealers. So basically like every side of every conflict going on at the time, they're all connected to this bank. But $20 billion actually seems low for that, even in 1980s money, you know? Yeah, I saw $25 billion, Bill, but it's kind of like shady. I thought I'd go with a lower amount. And...

I guess a lot of it was coming in and out, so maybe it was just under management at any time. But obviously I'm a writer, so I know absolutely shit all about international finance. So anyone down the ladder at BCCI or in this huge network of contacts, if they speak out, the black unit will come along and murder them and quite possibly their families.

Anyone further up the food chain talks association with BCCI and someone like Abu Nidal, for example, is going to be enough to end their career at the very least. And then there are these charities that the bank set up. And these things are kind of like the creme de la creme. They get it closer to some of the world's most powerful and previously for unimpeachable leaders.

In 1985, the BCCI funds a research unit by a senior advisor to Margaret Thatcher. And in 1987, Abedi is photographed at a Bangkok hotel alongside former president Jimmy Carter, an event for the rehabilitation of prostitutes. Ironically, it's running underage prostitutes at exactly the same time. And in Mumbai, India, it endows a $10 million charity prize to then PM Indira Gandhi.

Then you've got black money from BCCI used to push for Pakistan's nuclear program. And that's helping the Muslim world get a bomb, like we said, which is actually right in Abedi's visions of grandeur and possibly apocalypse. But it won't last. And the bank's operations start to get shaky around the end of the 1980s. It's just too big and it's doing too much stuff for the media not to grab a hold of it.

In 1998, Abedi, now 66, suffers a heart attack and he steps down as leader of BCCI and he appoints Swali Nakhvi as his successor.

In 1989, Israeli arms traffickers in Miami ship over 500 Israeli machine guns through the island of Antigua to the Medellin cartel with the backing of Israeli intelligence and BCCI launderers and brokers. So that's actually, that's called the Guns for Antigua scandal. And it's not, it wasn't backed by Israeli intelligence. It was this like a

rogue reservist. I think he was Lieutenant Colonel or Colonel, but this guy, yeah, your client, who's just like a fascinating scumbag. He was doing stuff with like Caribbean mercenaries and all that, but he actually, he got arrested, I think, and convicted in Israel and served time in prison there for that scandal. He also, I think was arrested in Russia and was like in a Russian prison and in Sierra Leone and a Sierra Leone in prison. And,

and the Colombians wanted to extradite him at various times, but I don't think they were able to. But yeah, he's like this fascinating rogue. Well, fascinating. I mean, he's just a scumbag. But

but just like he went like rogue and, uh, just did all these shady deals all over. It's, it's pretty, pretty wild guy. Okay. That's good. I had the fact checker there. Cause I thought he was like operating under military sort of cover, but no, no, no. Cause it was like, uh, he was working with, I think one of these prominent families in Antigua who I think also had to resign or, you know, one of these like oligarchical political families. And,

And they were just kind of, at first it was supposed to be guns for, for the Antiguan military. And then they were, they were routing them through to the Medellin cartel. I think, uh, just wild shit. It's, it's, it's, it's insane. So this story, it's like, it's huge back then. And that is one of the first times that the, the, the general public kind of like, you know, the ears prick up and they hear BCCI in such a massive scandal, uh,

And then in April 1990, a PricewaterhouseCoopers report slams, quote, false and deceitful transactions at BCCI.

Abu Dhabi, which is the company's biggest shareholder, of course, it pumps in 600 million bucks and it raises its own stake to over 75%. So just kind of papers over the issue with petrodollars. But that October, PwC says that BCCI has, quote, concluded with major customers to misstate or disguise real purpose of significant transactions. And I mean, that is...

banker speak for this place absolutely stinks and it's embedded with a roll call of super bad guys inside the bank as this is all going down remember the black unit is still operating with these paramilitary thugs like mustafa that guy who spoke to time magazine they're still on the books

Anybody law enforcement might be lining up as a witness is intimidated, says the bank's lead in Latin America, Abdur Sakhia, quote, When I left the bank in April 1990, we left as a group, about 12 of us. Each one was told, you go quietly. If you make any noise, they're going to fix you. I got the word from NACV's secretary that if I made any noise, Altman's firm, that is this image laundering outfit the company uses, said,

will get me involved in a drug case. So PR guys sticking their nose in now. In 1991, the deaths of two reporters are linked to BCCI. In July, Anson Wen Yong, a Malaysian-born British journalist with the Financial Times, is found dead in his Guatemala City apartment with a single gunshot wound to the head. He told associates he was working on a big piece about BCCI helping Guatemalan military traffic arms.

A Democratic senator says at a subsequent hearing that the death has, quote, the appearances of a professional killing. Yeah, I mean, he shot him once in the head. That's great. Great deduction. Then just a month later, in August, an American reporter named Danny Casolaro is found dead in a bathtub in room 517 of the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, with his wrist slashed 10 to 12 times.

He's a longtime investigative reporter. He's been working on a bunch of stuff about U.S. government officials stealing software, money laundering, terrorism. And at the time of his death, he's putting it all into a book entitled The Octopus, which is basically a giant version of all of the CIA and criminal stuff that we've spoken about in this episode.

And Casolaro is in West Virginia to meet a source he tells friends will, quote, bury the Justice Department. Says another friend and publisher, quote, he told me he thought BCCI was the conduit for all of these money transactions.

There's a whole movie about Casolaro's death and his daughter's fight to find justice for him. It's fascinating. It could be a whole other episode in its own right. What was it called? I feel like I remember this coming out a few years ago. Yeah. I think it was called Danny Casolaro Died For You. And I think his daughter was estranged. I don't think she knew him growing up. And then she found out.

about him online and then discovered this whole crazy murder conspiracy. And she picks up the baton and, and digs into his death. Um, yeah, we should do a show about that. Like maybe in 10 years when, but yeah, I mean, two journalists dead within a month investigating the same bank killed in mysterious circumstances. I mean, this could be coincidence of course, but,

It could be coincidence, of course, or it could be the spluttering fits of this giant dying criminal bank. So now we're back to 1991 and the investigation of John Kerry in D.C. And he is getting stonewalled. But then it is the Federal Reserve that steps in. That's led by Manhattan D.A. Robert Morgenthau.

And he finds the BCCI for breaking the law and its ownership of those three American banks. It also wins indictments for Abedi and NACVI for, quote, the largest bank fraud in world financial history.

By that August in 1991, incredibly, the CIA admits that it's used BCCI as, quote, a way to move money. And now the gloves are off and BCCI is collapsing all around the world. People's money is disappearing. The Ponzi scheme is collapsing and there's rioting on the streets of several countries as regular customers try and get out their cash.

But incredibly, Abedi's legacy itself isn't crushed. He's still in Pakistan, he's in poor health, and when the New York Times sends a reporter out there in 1991, people defend him to the hilt. This is not a criminal bank, says Mohammed Salim, a garment exporter. This is a great bank, a Muslim bank that's been so successful that it's provoked the jealousy of the West.

One Karachi newspaper says in an op-ed, quote, BCCI was fast becoming a source of strength in the third world. Which American and British bank has not laundered money? Why single out the BCCI? Which, yes, what about ism? And they've got a point at the same time. Others opinions take on an anti-Semitic tone, complaining about Zionist controlled banking lobbies and the like. Nothing surprising there.

But the point is that for many people, Abedi is the champion of the people he's been claiming to be, not the murderous gangster he actually is. He normally gives up control of BCCI in 1994, dodges extradition and dies a year later in Pakistan, having never faced trial for any of BCCI's activities.

Kaith Faon, the Saudi guy who'd helped BCCI get its illegal foothold in the American banks, he swerves justice too. He skips around Asia and Europe as a fugitive, and he dies in 2017. I mean, his life is pretty nuts as well. At one point he buys a villa that's next to Viktor Orban's in Hungary. Over the following years, there are loads of legal cases, especially against the Bank of England, which somehow, or...

depending on who you're speaking to completely and utterly predictably, that allow BCCI to open 22 UK branches. But basically the entire operation implodes. Some folks get their cash back, but inflation wipes out its value and many, many thousands go broke.

And did anything change? Well, I guess in many ways, Abadi actually got what he wanted. The Muslim world became richer, more powerful on the world stage. Tons of political moves bolstered Pakistan's position, and he died an unbelievably rich man. The Americans won the Cold War. Nobody really went down with the ship apart from the investors, and they're all regular people, so no one cares about them.

George Bush had already served two terms when the scandal broke in the early 90s, and that didn't stop his son getting into the power. So this broke in the 90s, but it seems like there's a lot of renewed interest, I guess, or a lot of stuff that came out five or six years ago. Why was that just like from FOIAs being filed? Like what really? Why did this jump into the news again five years ago?

There was a series of legal cases about the more sort of like dense financial stuff that came out. So like I said, the bank of England was on the hook for losing people's money and signing up with the BCCI. Similar kind of cases were popping up around the world. So, you know, you give prosecutors and journalists the chance to get their teeth back into the story and you get even more details and sort of juicy bits and pieces coming out. So yeah, that that's kind of,

the renewed part of this. Um, and, and we'll, we'll close out with a foreign policy from 2020. It says, if anything, the story of BCCI is now more relevant than it's ever been in the 30 years since the banks collapse. The BCCI affair set the example for everything that came since in the world of modern kleptocracy and the still corrupts the United States today.

From setting up anonymous shell companies, to purchasing American real estate, to targeting American auditors that are willing to look the other way, from biking billions via banking Ponzi schemes, to even hiring prestigious law firms that provide everything from legal counsel to media relations to lobbying and political collections, the playbook that BCCI helped create is still alive and well, all in the service of laundering foreign, dirty money.

So yeah, that is the tale. Well, that's about half the tale of the bank of crooks and criminals, the BCCI. It's pretty insane stuff. I know that there was a lot of like pretty dense information. I hope you followed it guys.

Now I'm off to smoke a joint and watch YouTube videos about the Rothschilds. You want to join me, Danny? Of course. Of course you are. No, but no one should join you. And everyone, thanks for listening. Again, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. It's where you can put in money like for less than the price of a coffee. You can hear probably like two hours, three hours of bonus content, a month of interviews, many episodes that we're doing.

And it also just helps support us and keeps us going because, you know, hard to lock yourself inside and do this on a summer day sometimes. But thank you guys again. And, oh, yeah, I was on...

By the time you guys hear this, I should be on an episode of Popular Front. I don't know if you guys know Jake Henderhan's podcast that I've been on before, but this one's about Ukraine, and it's always fun to talk to Jake. I think a lot of you have actually probably found out about this podcast from Jake's podcast before. But yeah, I think that's it. And until next week.