Griselda archives: Dirty money affords brutal killers luxury in Miami

MIAMI – Luis Garcia-Blanco, a Cuban who had arrived in Miami on the Mariel boatlift, was accused of shooting his ex-girlfriend Maricel Gutierrez in the head with a machine gun in 1980, in Miami-Dade. He had allegedly also cut off her finger and kept it in a Bible.

In 1981, Garcia-Blanco was working as a bodyguard for Rafael Leon Rodriguez, who police knew as the Venezuelan son of a cop who was a marksman-turned-hitman and a cocaine distributor for Colombian traffickers. A law-enforcement task force pounced on them.

Julie Hawkins, a former Metro-Dade detective, told Netflix Tudum that day she was holding a phone with one hand and a police radio with the other to help catch Rodriguez — who was better known as “Amilcar” — and was a murder suspect in several cases.

“It was crazy! Everybody’s talking — trying to advise where he is — and at one point, one of our detectives even rammed the car that Amilcar and this other guy were driving,” Hawkins told Tudum.

There weren’t cell phones when detectives arrested Rodriguez. Since he used payphones, Hawkins said they used a “trap and trace device,” which identified the phone number of the payphone he was using. With the number, the phone company provided the location, and she shared it with operatives in the field.

There was a shooting when police officers tried to arrest Rodriguez and Garcia-Blanco. While Garcia-Blanco fired at police officers and was arrested, Rodriguez ran away. A man nearby told police Rodriguez took off his Rolex and gave it to him in exchange for his car and sped away.

Hawkins told Tulum that she found Rodriguez hiding behind a washing machine and described him as “soft-spoken” and “very calm.” When he was in handcuffs, he was wearing a brown velvet blazer, a white long-sleeve collared shirt, a brown leather belt, and brown aviator sunglasses.

DIRTY MONEY TRAIL

Federal agents already knew that Rodriguez’s lavish lifestyle included living in posh apartments in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood and Miami-Dade’s city of Aventura. Foreign money has helped fuel Miami-Dade’s boom in high-end real estate, according to the National Association of Realtors.

William P. Rosenblatt, a U.S. Army veteran who worked in federal law enforcement, was dedicated to targeting the way dirty money was flowing from cocaine users in the U.S. to a supply chain of dealers, distributors, and foreign traffickers.

“You can take a large corporation, take the top executive away, the financial structure is still there,” Rosenblatt told Local 10 News Reporter Mark Potter in 1982. “You take the financial structure away from a legitimate or legal organization, it crumbles.”

Rosenblatt had worked for the U.S. Customs Service in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco before meeting Potter as the Special Agent-in-Charge in Miami. He was part of Operation Greenback, which focused on the cartel’s money laundering strategy to make “dirty money” appear “clean.”

Rosenblatt said the operation was meant to bring “pressure to bear on the financial side of these narcotics organizations.” They relied on the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which established a program with reporting requirements and recordkeeping to prevent money laundering.

In 1982, the operation also resulted in a case against The Great American National Bank of Dade County on four counts of failure to file currency transaction reports with the Internal Revenue Service. In 1984, a group was arrested for buying cashier’s checks and money orders in amounts less than $10,000 to avoid transaction reports and deposit them in banks in Miami.

At a crime scene in 1982, Metro-Dade Sgt. Skip Pearson, who focused on narcotics, told Potter the violence in Miami-Dade was a sign of trouble to come.

“You are going to see South Florida not only the base for drug distribution and cocaine distribution for the Colombians,” Pearson said. “You are going to see it for every South American country that has the capability of either manufacturing cocaine or the coca paste.”

Over four decades later, the new challenge for authorities is money laundering through cryptocurrencies — untraceable by design — and new synthetic drugs. U.S. authorities have identified Venezuela as “a major” money laundering country. Other countries of concern include Haiti and Panama.

TIMELINE OF FEDERAL LAWS

Federal anti-money laundering laws evolved slowly during the 80s and 90s, and so has the technology used for recordkeeping, financial management, and auditing.

• In 1986, the Money Laundering Control Act introduced civil and criminal forfeiture for BSA violations. In 1988, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act expanded the definition of financial institution to include car dealers and real estate closings and required the verification of identity for monetary instruments over $3,000.

• In 1992, The Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act strengthened the sanctions for BSA violations, it required suspicious activity reports and verification for wire transfers. In 1994, the Money Laundering Suppression Act required banks to enhance procedures for referring cases to law enforcement.

• In 1998, The Money Laundering and Financial Crimes Strategy Act required banking agencies to develop anti-money laundering training for examiners and created specialized task forces. The 911 attack also revealed a need to strengthen laws and law enforcement.

• The 2001 PATRIOT Act criminalized the financing of terrorism, prohibited financial institutions from engaging in business with foreign shell banks, required due diligence procedures, and improved information sharing between financial institutions and the U.S. government.

• The Intelligence Reform & Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 required the Secretary of the Treasury to regulate cross-border electronic transmittals of funds.

Source: U.S. Treasury