Concealing the source, ownership or control of criminal proceeds. These articles look at the particular methods alleged in each case, such as trade-based schemes, layered bank transfers and cash couriers, and at what the documents establish about them.
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.
Operation Titan grew from a Miami laundering inquiry into a Colombian–US case against Chekri Mahmoud Harb, a Bogotá broker accused of moving cocaine and its proceeds. The undercover contacts, the trade-based return routes, the arrests and the narcotics plea, kept distinct from the Hezbollah financing allegation.
Ayman Joumaa was designated by the US Treasury in 2011 and indicted the same year on charges of coordinating cocaine shipments for Mexico’s Los Zetas and laundering the proceeds. This article follows the designation, the indictment and the Lebanese Canadian Bank case built around West African car lots, and separates what officials alleged about Hezbollah from what any court found.
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.