ummm....where's the Gold in Fort Knox??? (psssst! GONE! so 'they'
say) who knows?
here's an interesting post from another thread (edited for your
convenience to make more sense; read 'better')
In response to Stone Cold Sober:
WORLDS DRUGLORDS say NO to DOLLAR but YES to GOLD?
http://hv.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002QFW
U.S. News and World Report.
The golden age of crime Why international drug traffickers are
invading the global gold trade
BY DAVID E. KAPLAN (abstracted version)
"Speed Co." is reputed to be Latin America's largest gold trader,
with $25 million in sales a month. U.S. drug enforcement agents are
examining the firm's movement of millions of dollars of gold and cash
around the world. U.S. experts say the investigation cases currently
underway show that gold now plays a central role in the >billion-
dollar< business of washing dirty money.
[Of course Cold, you know this is all being done with NO help from
the banks run by "straight" people, don't you? I mean, you know how
EASY it is to "hide" a billion dollars moving through the financial
banking system - when they "hot flag" an individual who deposits more
that $3,000 cash - "know your customer program"...right? Naaaah...a
crummy Billion Dollars moving? No prob dude.] GOOD AS GOLD - The gold
trade has become "the money laundering mechanism of choice,"
according to internal law enforcement reports, and is being used to
wash "staggering amounts" of dirty cash. The way it works is
*complex* and varied: Basically, drug profits are used to purchase
gold, whether as jewelry, ingots, or even scrap, then shipped across
borders and resold. The resulting profits are "clean," the drug
trafficker who bought the gold in the first place free to do with his
money as he pleases.
So pervasive is it's criminal use that gold is joining the U.S.
dollar as the standard currency of the drug trade.
Among the evidence:
1) Nearly every major U.S. money laundering case in recent years has
involved gold. Authorities have traced the movement of tons of gold
and billions of dollars to deals by Latin American drug cartels.
2) U.S. gold imports from Latin American drug havens have
skyrocketed. Imports of gold from Colombiaa minor producer ballooned
from virtually nothing in 1993 to nearly $200 million in 1996.
3) In the past 10 years, nearly $2.5 billion in foreign gold flowed
into Miami despite Florida's lack of a jewelry-making industry.
Authorities say much of the gold is tied to money laundering and tax
scams.
Narcotics traffickers are taking over the Latin American gold trade,
industry officials say. Colombian drug dealers are paying exorbitant
prices for gold and buying up small dealers across the region.
For drug traffickers, the gold market is like a magnet. So much of
the international gold trade operates "off the books" that it is an
easy target for organized crime, officials say. While many gold
companies operate legitimately, interviews with traders, refiners,
and law enforcement officials depict an industry riddled with money
laundering, tax fraud, smuggling, and dubious bookkeeping.
But the impact of an illicit gold trade goes beyond the corruption of
one industry. Having refined methods to detect money laundering in
financial institutions, investigators are stymied by the trade in
gold. Officials also worry that corruption in Latin America's gold
trade will spread to the United States, where refiners are importing
record amounts of gold from Colombia and Peru. "There's nothing else
out there like gold," says U.S. customs agent John Casarra. Posted to
Rome in the early 1990s to investigate the Mafia, Casarra found to
his surprise that gold figured again and again as the key to
laundering cases.
[FRANK - READ MY LIPS]: "Money launderers are foremost businessmen,
and businessmen want certainty," he says. "Gold gives that to them.
They can exchange it anywhere in the world."
Take the case of Gustavo Upegui Delgado. Casarra and his Italian
colleagues were stunned in 1994, when they found Delgado, a top money
launderer for Colombia's Cali cartel, was buying over *a ton of gold
a month* with his colleagues, using drug money to purchase the stuff,
then shipping it to Panama. The launderers moved so much of the
metal, officials say, that it depressed the price of gold between the
two countries.
[Naaah! That's baloney! eeping drugs illegal couldn't possibly be
corrupting legitimate "straight" people. They don't do that...do
they?? No. They are 'sane'.]
The industry is largely made up of individual dealers and companies
that prefer to deal in cash. High tariffs on gold have attracted
smugglers for years. "There's a dual economic system in the jewelry
industry," concedes Richard Rubin, the owner of Republic Metals in
Miami, a gold refiner. "There's on the books and there's off the
books."
Customs officials got an unsettling hint a few years ago. Analysts
discovered large movements of gold between the United States and
various Caribbean islands places known not for their gold industry
but for laundering dirty money. U.S. gold imports from the
Netherlands Antilles, for example, jumped from $68,000 in 1993 to $29
million just four years later.
Equally impressive spikes soon emerged from Colombia and Peru, the
centers of cocaine production. Between 1994 and 1997, U.S. imports of
Peruvian gold grew more than ninefold, from $19 million to $177
million. Imports of gold from Colombia ballooned from a mere $120,000
in 1993 to nearly $200 million in 1996.
Lutley finds the data for Colombia hard to explain. "That's a totally
incredible number," he says. The flood of Colombian gold has made at
least some American refiners wary. "We do no business out of
Colombia, for the pure and simple reason that we can't establish the
identity of the owner of the gold," says Michel Berleson, marketing
manager for top refiner Handy & Harman.
Latin American gold enters the United States largely through Miami.
From 1989 to 1998, annual gold imports through Miami International
Airport jumped >>from $18 million to $465 million<< a 26-fold
increase. Gold analysts remain wary, given the absence of a jewelry-
making industry in Florida.
Indeed, U.S. money laundering experts believe these odd statistics
reflect a myriad of schemes for laundering drug money.
[SEE COLD!!? I told you you were "off base". Why don't you get some
facts man, and start answering the questions...OK?]
HOW IT'S DONE:
One typical scheme works like this: Top refiners in Switzerland sell
their gold to jewelry makers in Italy, the world's largest supplier
of fine gold jewelry. The Italian jewelry is sold to U.S. buyers most
of this trade is thought to be legitimate and to their second top
market, Panama, which imported $300 million worth of Italian gold
last year 5 to 30 tons according to Gold Fields Mineral Services, a
London-based research firm.
In Panama, nearly all the gold arrives at the Colsn Free Zone, a
bustling market perched on the edge of the Panama Canal. Home to
Speed Joyeros and 1,600 other companies, the zona libre is the
world's second-largest free port, after Hong Kong. Bound by an
imposing gray wall topped by barbed wire, the 1.5-square-mile zone is
home to a dizzying potpourri of global traders: Arabs, Chinese,
Indians, Jews. More than $6 billion of merchandise passes through the
district each year as much as a quarter of it, investigators say,
financed by drug money.
In the money. Once in Colsn, much of the Italian gold is sold to
Colombian front men for the cocaine industry. It is Colsn where the
Cali cartel's Delgado sent his gold each month. The gold is then
smuggled back to Colombia, where some dealers sell it for pesos and
use the money for living expenses and to fund more drug production.
But others melt down the jewelry, recast it into ingots, and sell the
gold to refiners in the United States or Switzerland, producing a
stream of income that looks legitimate.
Investigators have found that in some cases, the launderers even buy
back the same gold they've just sold for refining in the United
States, paying for it with yet more drug money. The scheme apparently
is also a good deal for tax cheats.
A recent crackdown in Peru found that 40 percent of that nation's
gold companies were bogus, set up largely to take advantage of an
export-tax rebate. Smugglers shipped gold to American refiners,
pocketed the tax rebate, smuggled the gold back to Peru, then shipped
it out again, grabbing yet another rebate. "I may have handled gold
coming in that was gold I sent down there to begin with," says
Richard Rubin, whose Republic Metals made large shipments to and from
Peru.
Gold traders say the influence of narcotraffickers is so pervasive
that they are taking over Latin America's gold trade, co-opting
legitimate firms and buying up traders in country after
country. "They're squeezing out the legitimate dealers," says one
prominent trader who insisted on anonymity.
ANOTHER WAY:
Drug dealers playing the gold card are doing it in increasingly
sophisticated ways. In 1989, federal agents stopped a billion-dollar
money laundry that exported so much gold from Uruguay that that
country became America's largest gold supplier.
The fact that Uruguay had no gold industry mattered little to the
launderers what mattered was creating a credible cover for their flow
of narcodollars. Today, some criminals are importing gold-plated
bronze into the United States, others are shipping out just the
opposite: gold disguised as other metals. Having taken payment in
gold, the traffickers simply want to move their assets back home. In
one case, a woman flying to Colombia from New York was stopped with
two tractor-trailer hitches, seemingly made of steel. Under the
paint, inspectors say they found solid gold.
The gold trade poses other challenges for law enforcement. The
industry's bookkeeping practices can be nightmarish, and gold traders
often are shielded by ethnic and family bonds.
Law enforcement's gold bugs also face obstacles within their own
camp. Casarra and a handful of colleagues have fought a sometimes
frustrating battle within the U.S. government to focus more attention
on the gold trade.
[Oh no. :( They wouldn't do THAT...would they Frank?
Naaaah....BALONEY! These people are "straight"...right Frank?]
Washington, meanwhile, has taken its campaign against money
laundering overseas, prompting governments worldwide to put new laws
on the books.
[Gee, does that surprise you? DON'T look here in the US (National
Security)...but DO go after the 'foreign dealers'. Put THEM out of
business because they are "nosing in on the Big Boss's
Territory"...right Frank? We are pure, and they are the "terrorists
drug dealers" that associate with "POTHEADS". They are all the
same...I say, arrest them all and throw away the key. "If we fix the
parts that will FIX the whole fallacy" If we just get rid of the pot
smokers, these international money laundering bankers will clean-up
their act."
Original Article: By Philip P. Willan and Eleni Dimmler in Rome,
Carol Salguero in Lima, and Mark Madden
Who knows why the Ruskies are buying more gold...strange things
happening these days. Verrrryyy strange Mr. Wizard!!!
-- steve (WhoCares@nymore.Right?.com), January 31, 2000.
