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Despite the Tampa convictions, which required B.C.C.I. to forfeit $15 million of its money-laundering profits, Blum and former customs commissioner William von Raab elaborated on their earlier descriptions of the Justice Department's Florida case as a law-enforcement debacle. "I was personally | infuriated," Blum said. He argued that the plea bargain gave B.C.C.I. immunity from future prosecutions based on evidence in the case -- a charge that Justice disputes. Von Raab, sporting a yellow handkerchief that drooped flower-like from his breast pocket, called the settlement "a shameless agreement" and "a disaster in terms of the punishment that should...
...Von Raab charged that the Bush Administration had taken a "lackadaisical" approach to prosecuting B.C.C.I. in part because the bank used Beltway insiders such as Clifford and Altman to lobby federal regulators. "If you were to look at the Rolodexes at B.C.C.I.," he said, they would show "the blue chips of Washington influence peddlers." As a result, he said, "senior U.S. policy-level officials were constantly under the impression that B.C.C.I. was probably not that bad because these good guys who they play golf with all the time were representing them...
...charges and countercharges flew, U.S. law-enforcement sources quietly acknowledged what the Gates report to Von Raab clearly indicated: that at least some government officials have known since the late 1980s of the secret black network within the bank whose existence TIME disclosed in articles in July. The network used bribery, extortion, kidnapping and possibly murder to further the bank's aims. Last week sources told TIME that the black network surfaced briefly in the U.S. during a sting operation that forced B.C.C.I. to plead guilty in Tampa last year to laundering drug money. Members of the group came forward...
...reports in TIME and other media that the agency had kept secret accounts at B.C.C.I. to finance covert aid to U.S.-backed insurgents in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. The scandal may further jeopardize President Bush's nomination of Robert Gates to head the CIA. Last week former Customs commissioner William von Raab named Gates, then deputy director of the CIA, as the source of a five- or six-page 1988 agency report on B.C.C.I., which Gates labeled "the bank of crooks and criminals." That raised potentially embarrassing questions about just how much Gates may have known about the rogue bank...
...Gates is reported to have told a colleague that B.C.C.I. was "the bank of crooks and criminals." Yet when customs agents investigated the bank in 1988, they found "numerous CIA accounts in B.C.C.I.," says former U.S. Commissioner of Customs William von Raab. Those, he says, were being used to pay agents and "apparently to support covert activities...