Feds Investigate Florida Police Money Laundering

Tuesday, October 27, 2015
By Paul Martin

By Michael Sallah
Governing.com
OCTOBER 26, 2015

After years of rampant abuses by undercover Bal Harbour police, the U.S. Justice Department is investigating the millions taken in by the officers who turned a money-laundering sting into a major cash enterprise, spending lavishly on travel and luxury hotels without making a single arrest.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago and the Internal Revenue Service carted away hundreds of confidential files last week of the Tri-County Task Force, including records that show the officers regularly withdrew large amounts of cash from the bank with no receipts to show where it went, according to people familiar with the investigation.

The Chicago office requested all the records of the laundering deals struck by the Bal Harbour cops with criminal groups across the country — 84 deals in Chicago alone — in what appears to be a sweeping examination of the millions laundered by the police through banks and storefront businesses in Miami, records show.

The ongoing probe follows a Miami Herald series, License to Launder, which showed the task force officers from Bal Harbour and the Glades County Sheriff’s Office posed as money launderers while they jetted into a dozen cities to pick up drug cash in a sting operation to clean money for cartels and other groups with the stated goal of arresting suspects.

Ultimately, they kept at least $2.4 million for themselves for arranging the deals — returning the rest of the money to the same criminal groups — but never made any arrests of their own.

During one trip to Chicago, two Bal Harbour cops picked up $198,000 stuffed in a torn tortilla box, stayed long enough to dine at Morton’s of Chicago, and then flew back to Bal Harbour to wire half the drug money to a bank in China.

One source familiar with the probe said the case was part of a larger inquiry that expanded to Bal Harbour police, who frequently picked up drug cash with the help of a federal-state task force that included the Cook County Sheriff’s Office. Joseph Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s Chicago office, declined to comment.

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