The Coin Store: A True Story of Drug Cartels, Mobsters, Cops and Agents, Paperback/Special Agent (Ret ). Patrick Burns

Descriere

Description Pablo Escobar was the King of Cocaine, the wealthiest and most violent criminal in the world. By the 1980s his Medellin Drug Cartel was responsible for smuggling several tons of cocaine into America each and every day, killing thousands of people along the way. The end result was hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, cash profits. In response, and as part of President Reagan's War on Drugs, Congress created the Money Laundering Act of 1986. The goal was to take the profit out of Escobar's business. And the plan was working. Drug Money seizures went up. But as U. S. Agents became more and more efficient at finding the dirty cash, stashed inside ship bellies and truck beds at America's ports and land borders, Pablo and other Cartel leaders sought a more efficient method to get their money back to Colombia. They found the solution in an unlikely place, a dusty back room of a tiny, rare coin shop in the small town of Cranston, Rhode Island. The shop owner was a young, local mobster who had already been laundering much of the Mob's stolen gold. With a few minor adjustments, his coin shop evolved into a springboard for a new venture, a billion-dollar money laundering scheme. The Italian Mafia's stolen gold was then used to dispose of the Colombian Cartel's dirty cash. It was the perfect scheme. And as the dirty cash flow increased, the young mobster, known as Fat Man, a. k.a. Mr. Cash, set up a string of phony gold shops crisscrossing America to accommodate it all. The end result was one of the world's largest, most efficient money laundering networks. By some accounts, Fat Man laundered more than a billion dollars of drug profits for Pablo Escobar and the other Cartel leaders. This is the true story of how it all happened. It is a step-by-step view of how the scheme worked and how it was ultimately uncovered. This story reveals conventional and at times unconventional tactics used by the government in its three-year, worldwide investigation. It is also a b