Cash collections in Spain and elsewhere, European investigations, and the arrests that followed them. Europe appears in these cases as both a drug market and a place where proceeds were gathered.
An undercover DEA operation tested Lebanese lawyer Joseph Asmar and facilitator Iman Kobeissi with cash presented as cocaine proceeds, from a Paris café handover to offers of protection, weapons and aircraft parts. The stings in Paris, Brooklyn, Belgium and Atlanta, and Asmar’s guilty plea.
A DEA sting led Czech police to arrest Ali Fayad and two associates in 2014. While Czech courts weighed extradition, five Czechs were abducted in Lebanon; they came home the day Fayad was freed. The sting, the captivity, the exchange and what became of each defendant.
In 2019 the US Treasury sanctioned Kassem Chams and his licensed exchange house in Chtaura, Lebanon, alleging drug-proceeds laundering and transfers for Hezbollah; Chams denied it. The designation, the European trial before it, how exchange houses settle value, and Lebanon’s banking collapse.
A civil forfeiture action in Manhattan traced at least $329 million in transfers from Lebanese exchange houses to American used-car dealers, linking car lots in Cotonou, the Lebanese Canadian Bank and cash couriers moving toward Beirut. The complaint, the bank’s sale, the escrow seizure and the $102 million settlement, and what each established.