The Red Syndrome Read Online Free PDF Page B

month." I could almost see him
grinning in self-satisfaction.
    I called David from a different airport pay phone; my cell phone could easily have been picked up by a sophisticated listening device. After my
encounter with the state-of-the-art bug, I didn't want to take any further
chances.

    "There have been some positive developments," I said.
    "Igor changed his mind?"
    "No, something else. I'll send in my report and we can discuss it after
you read it. I'm on my way back." I decided not to mention the attack.
There were too many people around me waiting to find an available pay
phone, or maybe to eavesdrop on me. I couldn't be sure.
    Back in my New York office, I forwarded to David in DC my summary
of the facts I had gathered from Oksana's trash.
    On December 1, 2002, Igor Razov opened a bank account at the
Global Kredit Privatbankiers in Frankfurt am Mein. On the
same day, he deposited into that account sixteen cashier's checks
totaling approximately $60 million. Four days later, that money
was wire-transferred to Barclays Bank in Nevis, the federation of
Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, into an account owned
by Bright Metalwork, Ltd., a Nevis company. A week later, the
money continued its route through Panama City to Caracas until
it resurfaced as a deposit made by Sling & Dewey Goods and
Services, PLC, registered in Australia. Then the money was sent,
probably by mail or by courier, to Eagle Bank of New York.
Additionally, several checks were drawn on a bank in the
Seychelles Islands. The source of the money is still unknown.
    I called David two hours later waiting for his litany of praise. Nothing.
It had taken a full week of my life to unravel the whirlwind tour of the
laundered money around the world. I'd rummaged through garbage,
taken a beating, and endured a ringing ear, and this was the thanks I got?
Granted, it took me only twenty minutes to actually write my report.
    "Good progress," he finally said. "But we need to know why the money traveled as it did. Usually money launderers take one or two interim steps,
not five or six. Why so many? And where did Igor get this kind of money,
anyway? It's way out of his league."

    "No clue. I have no doubt that the money isn't his. Maybe it's
Zhukov's."
    "We looked into that possibility, too. The whirlwind is also very much
unlike Zhukov."
    "Maybe this one is different; Zhukov's or not, somebody worked very
hard to obscure this money's source. But there could be any number of
other possibilities," I said.
    "Keep going, then. Sort them out," said David.

     

    n the beginning it seemed like any other case. A routine audit by
FDIC examiners had discovered movements of more than sixty million dollars between the Seychelles Islands and Eagle Bank of New
York, all in connection with Sling & Dewey Goods and Services, PLC -
private limited company.
    But instead of the expected Currency Transaction Reports that the
bank should have filed under the Bank Secrecy Act, there were only
insignificant reports filed by Eagle Bank regarding smaller amounts and
concerning different account holders, not Sling & Dewey. The FDIC
report had attracted the attention of a Treasury agent, who had then
ordered a report from FinCEN - the Financial Crimes Enforcement
Network in Vienna, Virginia, an obscure intelligence agency of the
Treasury Department. FinCEN in turn issued Positive Database
Extracts, which shed further light on the unusual money transfers and
deposits coming into Eagle Bank without any visible, legitimate business
purpose. Under normal circumstances, the bank would have had to file a
Suspicious Activity Report with its regulatory agency if it suspected it
might have been used as a conduit for criminal funds. But no such reports
had come in. So the bank itself became the target of an investigation. A
phone call by the Treasury agent and a memo to DC had followed. The
scope of attention widened.
    Now the Department of Justice showed