Word: karachi
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...criminal bank. From interviews with sources close to B.C.C.I., TIME has pieced together a portrait of a clandestine division of the bank called the "black network," which functions as a global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad. Operating primarily out of the bank's offices in Karachi, Pakistan, the 1,500-employee black network has used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping and even, by some accounts, murder. The black network -- so named by its own members -- stops at almost nothing to further the bank's aims the world over...
...becoming the Muslim world's first banking powerhouse. Though it was incorporated in Luxembourg and headquartered in London, had more than 400 branches and subsidiaries around the world and was nominally owned by Arab shareholders from the gulf countries, B.C.C.I. was always a Pakistani bank, with its heart in Karachi. Agha Hasan Abedi, the bank's founder and leader until his ouster last year, is a Pakistani, as are most of the bank's former middle managers. And it was in Pakistan that the bank's most prodigiously corrupt division was spawned...
...typical operation took place in April 1989, when a container ship from Colombia docked during the night at Karachi, Pakistan. Black-unit operatives met the ship after paying $100,000 in bribes to Pakistani customs officials. The band unloaded large wooden crates from several containers. "They were so heavy we had to use a crane rather than a forklift," says a participant. The crates were trucked to a "secure airport" and loaded aboard an unmarked 707 jet, where an American, believed by the black-unit members to be a CIA agent, supervised the frantic activity...
...wealthy Arabs, and Madras, a center for patients from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Renal patients in India and Pakistan who cannot find a relative to donate a kidney are permitted to buy newspaper advertisements offering living donors up to $4,300 for the organ. Mohammad Aqeel, a poor Karachi tailor who recently sold one of his kidneys for $2,600, said he needed the money "for the marriage of two daughters and paying off of debts...
...trouble from too rapid expansion, and dependent on constantly increasing deposits to keep the cooked books from revealing the growing problems, B.C.C.I. could not hold together without Abedi -- as the audit released last year revealed. He resigned officially from the bank last year, and is living in semiretirement in Karachi. Authorities in several countries would surely like to get their hands on him. His connections with Pakistan's political and military leaders make it unlikely, however, that he will ever be tried or extradited...