Authors: Matthew Levitt
Kourani was far from the only Lebanese national and Hezbollah member that the Tijuana café proprietor Mucharrafille smuggled across the US-Mexico border. Over a three-year period he successfully smuggled more than 300 Lebanese individuals into the United States, including a reporter for Hezbollah’s al-Manar television station. “If they had the cedar on their passport, you were going to help them,” Mucharrafille explained while imprisoned in Mexico City for his activities. “That’s what my father taught me.”
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In June 2010, North Carolina representative Sue Myrick sent a letter to Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano urging the department “to do more intelligence gathering on Hezbollah’s presence on our border.” Myrick was specifically concerned with Hezbollah’s presence, activities, and connections to gangs and drug cartels. In recent years, the ties between Hezbollah and drug cartels have grown, especially along the US-Mexico border. According to former DEA chief of operations, Michael Braun, “Hezbollah relies on the same criminal weapons smugglers, document traffickers and transportation experts as the drug cartel….
They work together; they rely on the same shadow facilitators. One way or another they are all connected.”
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Braun and other officials have noted that the terrain along the southern US border, especially around San Diego, is similar to that on the Lebanese-Israeli border. Intelligence officials fear drug cartels, in an effort to improve their tunnels, have enlisted the help of Hezbollah, which is notorious for its tunnel construction along the Israeli border. In the relationship, both groups benefit, with the drug cartels receiving Hezbollah’s expertise and Hezbollah making money off its efforts. Relatedly, law enforcement officials across the Southwest are reporting a rise in imprisoned gang members with Farsi tattoos. While prisoners’ tattoos, even in Arabic, are not uncommon, the rise in Farsi and Hezbollah imagery “implies a Persian influence that can likely be traced back to Iran and its proxy army, Hezbollah,” argued Rep. Myrick.
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A Tucson Police Department memo from September 2010 cited similar concerns, stating that the relationship “bares alarming implications due to Hezbollah’s long established capabilities, specifically their expertise in the making of vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED’s).”
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Around the same time, Arizona’s Division of Emergency Management reported that border patrol agents had recovered military-style patches on clothing near the US-Mexico border. One patch contained the Arabic word for martyr, and another depicted a plane flying head-on into skyscrapers.
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The arrest in New York City of Jamal Youssef, a former member of the Syrian military, provides even more insight into Hezbollah’s foothold in Mexico. Youssef, a known international arms dealer, attempted to sell military-grade weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The weapons included automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, M60 machine belt-fed guns, antitank munitions, and C4 explosives—all reportedly stolen from Iraq and stored in Mexico at the home of Youssef’s relative, who he claimed was a Hezbollah member—to be sold in exchange for hundreds of kilograms of cocaine.
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Just over the California-Mexico border, the city of Tijuana hosts San Ysidro, the busiest land-border crossing in the world. It is there in summer 2010 that Mexican authorities reportedly foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to establish a network in Central America. According to press reports, Hezbollah operatives led by Jameel Nasr employed Mexican nationals who had family in Lebanon to set up a network targeting Israeli and Western interests. Nasr, who frequently traveled to Lebanon to meet with Hezbollah commanders, according to these reports, also routinely traveled throughout Latin America. In 2008, Nasr spent two months in Venezuela, a country with close ties to Iran and a well-established Hezbollah presence.
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With so many successful fundraising schemes at the ready, Hezbollah needed effective means of moving the proceeds of its criminal enterprises to Lebanon. Often operatives would send money back with friends, relatives, or others from the Lebanese
community who were traveling to Lebanon. Some were couriers by happenstance, pleased to help a friend transport money home, possibly not even aware the money was intended for Hezbollah. Others were knowing participants who willingly carried funds to Lebanon for Hezbollah, either out of ideological devotion or for a fee. But Hezbollah never put all its eggs in one basket, using
hawala
dealers (informal value transfer systems based on trust), money-service businesses such as Western Union, charities, and various old-fashioned smuggling techniques to move money to Lebanon. In some cases, the means Hezbollah operatives used to move their money effectively laundered the money as well.
While Mahmoud Kourani boasted that his friend employed at Beirut International Airport helped smuggle cash into the country, Hezbollah supporters in the United States had access to an airport employee much closer to home. From 1999—three years after immigrating to the United States from Lebanon—until his arrest in 2007, Riad Skaff worked as a ground services coordinator for Air France at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. With an active airport security badge, Skaff had full access to all secure areas of an international terminal. For a fee, Skaff smuggled bulk cash packages onto airplanes, circumventing security inspections. At one point Skaff told an undercover agent posing as an individual seeking to smuggle $25,000 in cash to Lebanon, “I am in charge of the plane, everything…. It is dangerous, if they catch [me], they take me to jail.” Skaff did smuggle the money onto an Air France flight to Paris, noting to the undercover agent that millions of dollars pass through Paris to Lebanon daily. Skaff later smuggled $100,000 and a cellular jammer on another Paris-bound flight for the undercover agent. A month later he smuggled a package containing four night-vision rifle scopes and two night-vision goggles onto a Paris-bound flight.
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In a government sentencing memorandum filed after Skaff pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, prosecutors put Skaff’s illicit conduct in the context of Hezbollah support activity. Arguing that Skaff’s conduct “in essence was that of a mercenary facilitating the smuggling of large amounts of cash and dangerous defense items for a fee,” prosecutors noted he was fully aware the items were destined for Lebanon, “a war-torn country besieged by the militant organization, Hezbollah.”
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Prosecutors never accused Skaff of being a Hezbollah supporter, just a criminal happy to accommodate the needs of potential Hezbollah supporters for a fee.
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In 2007, proactive investigative techniques exposed another illicit money transfer system that could have benefited Hezbollah, this time in upstate New York. Looking over currency transaction reports (CTRs) filed by financial institutions for transactions of more than $10,000, members of the Intelligence Collection and Analysis team at the Buffalo Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) found approximately 324 reports, representing a total of more than $12 million in transfers over approximately two years, all tied to the Social Security number of one person: Saleh Mohamed Taher Saeed, a Yemeni American. During the same period another batch of CTRs totaling more than $2.5 million was associated with the Social Security number of Yehia Ali Ahmed Alomari, another Yemeni American. The ensuing investigation led to money laundering charges against
Saeed, Alomari, and another Yemeni living in the Rochester area, Mohamed al-Huraibi. The three ran a money laundering conspiracy that transferred abroad large sums of money that they knew were or believed to be the proceeds of criminal activity.
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Based on statements of support for Hezbollah by a couple of Saeed’s associates, ICE agents inserted a Lebanon-born undercover agent into the investigation who posed as a Hezbollah member. Shortly thereafter, in May 2006, the undercover agent and the informant met with the suspects at Saeed’s store, where they discussed Hezbollah and the situation in the Middle East. Three months later they all met again, this time in a hotel room that law enforcement officials wired for audio and video surveillance. The undercover agent and the informant handed over some $60,000 they wanted to send to Lebanon, money they stressed was intended to help their own families and assist Hezbollah’s efforts to rebuild Lebanon. Three months later they provided another $30,000 to be transferred to Lebanon, emphasizing this time that the money was the product of Hezbollah scams selling stolen and counterfeit goods and prescription drugs. Three months later, in February 2007, they were even more specific about the nature of their activities, telling Alomari and al-Huraibi that the $20,000 they now wanted to send “would be utilized by Hezbollah in Lebanon to re-arm and purchase military goods.”
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Lawyers for the defendants ultimately maintained their clients believed the money they were illegally transferring was to help fellow Yemenis, not fund Hezbollah, but nonetheless the three men pleaded guilty to money laundering in August 2009.
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The crime, in the case of Talal Chahine, owner of the famous La Shish restaurant chain in metropolitan Detroit, was one of massive tax evasion, with some $20 million secreted to Lebanon over a five-year period. Millions more were laundered through Lebanon and sent back to the United States. Chahine fled the United States in September 2005 and remains a fugitive, but his wife pleaded guilty to her role in the scheme in December 2006.
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Federal prosecutors indicated they suspect a Hezbollah connection, noting that Chahine and his wife were guests of honor at an August 2002 fundraising event in Lebanon at which Chahine and Sheikh Mohammad Fadlallah were the keynote speakers. FBI agents seized a letter from the Chahine home thanking him for sponsoring forty Lebanese orphans, which prosecutors alleged was a “euphemism used by Hezbollah to refer to the orphans of martyrs.” Agents also seized photographs of Chahine and his family posing in and around a Hezbollah outpost in Lebanon. Chahine, the government explained, had “connections at the highest levels” of Hezbollah.
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In 2006, Chahine denied all charges in an emailed statement from his company’s public relations firm, conceding he contributed to Fadlallah’s al-Mabarrat Charity Association but noting the charity openly ran a branch in the Detroit area.
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Al-Mabarrat’s Dearborn office was raided, but not ultimately shut down, by the FBI in July 2007.
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The June 3, 2010, arrest of Hor and Amera Akl—dual US-Lebanese citizens living in Ohio—reflected more explicit attempts to transfer funds to Hezbollah. During recorded meetings with an FBI informant, Amera stated that she “dreamed of dressing like Hezbollah, carrying a gun and dying as a martyr,” while Hor was
recorded boasting that Hezbollah stored “artillery, firearms, and rockets” in his family home in Lebanon. The couple revealed that they had previously delivered money to Hezbollah representatives in Lebanon by hiding cash in magazines and on their person. With the informant, they discussed ways of clandestinely taking money out of the United States, as well as the requirements for Western Union money transfers. The June 2010 arrest of the couple occurred after they were observed by authorities concealing $200,000 in a Chevy Trailblazer they planned to ship to Lebanon.
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Court documents indicate the couple was planning to send somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million to Lebanon and to charge about a 30 percent commission fee for the service.
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The two pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in May 2011.
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A year later, the FBI would foil another scheme, this time in Virginia, to send money to Hezbollah hidden in the tires of used cars to be shipped to Lebanon. In 2010, Mufid Kamal “Mark” Mrad told an FBI source he had previously sent money and other contraband to Lebanon through a contact at the Lebanese embassy who gave him access to a diplomatic pouch and would return hashish from Lebanon through the same diplomatic pouch. As for sending money to Hezbollah? “What’s a hundred thousand [dollars]? It’s nothing.” Sending money in cars was nothing new, but the higher ups had to be paid their cut, Mrad explained. The “Shiites are all sending [money] the same way…. How do you think the money from Africa is getting to Beirut?”
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Still more imaginative methods of transferring criminally obtained money have been uncovered by US investigators, such as the case of Ayman Joumma and the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB; see
chapter 9
). Authorities charged that as part of a money laundering scheme, funds were sent from Lebanon to the United States to purchase used cars. Subsequently, the used cars were shipped to and sold in West Africa, where the proceeds were mixed with proceeds from narcotics trafficking and transferred back to Lebanon.
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From 2008 to 2010, the Cybamar Swiss Family of Companies—a Michigan-based firm with several offices worldwide—reportedly shipped used cars worth more than $1 billion along with “hundreds of millions’ worth of used cars purchased with funds from the Lebanese Banks” from the United States to the tiny West African nation of Benin.
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In 2011, two Dallas-area car dealers were charged in a similar scheme to launder drug money through the purchase of used cars in the United States.
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The cases were not entirely shocking: An earlier Hezbollah case on the East Coast involved shipping stolen cars from the United States to Benin and, in a few cases, receiving payment for other stolen property by wire transfer from Africa.
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What did surprise was the explosive growth of the illicit used-car industry, with Google Earth images showing a tremendous increase in the size of car parks in Benin from 2003 to 2011.
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