Posted on 03/01/2003 12:58:34 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
The money reached Orlando about 2:30 a.m. Jan. 26.
Held in a black duffel bag, the $952,900 weighed just less than 21 pounds.
Armed agents watched as the fortune changed hands outside a 7-Eleven on South Orange Blossom Trail.
Screams of "Policia! Policia! Manos arriba! Ponte en el piso!" ended the transaction.
A startled Colombian national and an accomplice followed the orders in Spanish, raising their hands, then dropping to the ground.
The bogus $100 bills equaled 10 percent of all the counterfeit currency seized last year in the United States. What's more, many were printed on Iraqi bank notes.
Since that night, nearly $20 million of the same counterfeit bills have been seized in Colombia. And the U.S. Secret Service and other intelligence agencies are questioning why a counterfeiting ring protected by Marxist guerrillas had access to bank notes from Iraq.
.......The probe is so secret that the Secret Service routinely declines comment. The agency went as far as persuading the federal Government Accounting Office to delete portions of a 1996 report on counterfeiting that mentioned rumors of a Middle East country printing U.S. dollars to finance terrorism.
Unlike the superdollar case, agents know where the Orlando bills were printed. On Feb. 11, Colombian police raided the printing plant on a farm near Cali.
The $20 million worth of counterfeit bills was the largest seizure in the country's history, according to the Secret Service. Colombia is the world's largest producer of counterfeit U.S. currency, followed by Bulgaria.
The ringleader, Hector Tabarez, told Colombian police that he had regularly paid the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's oldest revolutionary group known by its Spanish acronym as FARC, to protect the printing presses, agents said.
The use of Iraqi bank notes didn't make sense to investigators.
"It seems like an odd place to get their paper when they've got Venezuela right across the border," said Agent Kevin Billings, one of the Orlando supervisors.
Counterfeiters typically use an inexpensive currency and bleach off the old ink before printing the fakes.
Venezuela's currency, the bolivar, is the usual choice of Colombian counterfeiters. It's almost as inexpensive as the Iraqi note -- worth less than a penny each -- and is printed on paper from the same company in Massachusetts that supplies the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Billings said.
Currency-grade paper is essential to pass the touch test. Agents say cheap paper makes counterfeit bills feel slick while real ones are rough and durable.
The printing plant in Colombia was discovered as the result of a tip to the U.S. Customs Service that about $1 million was about to be smuggled into Florida.
The tip was passed to the Secret Service office in Bogota, from whichAgent Rafael Barros followed the ring's courier on a Jan. 25 flight to Miami.
(Excerpt) Read more at orlandosentinel.com ...
Federal Security Service officers in the Siberian city of Omsk, about 2,250 kilometers (1,400 miles) east of Moscow, detained one person with an unspecified amount of osmium-187, said Natalya Grutsina, a spokeswoman for the Omsk branch of the security service, which is known by the Russian acronym FSB. Another person was detained with 158,000 Iraqi dinars (US$53.19) , which a preliminary analysis showed to be fake, she said.
Both people belonged to the same criminal gang, Grutsina said. They have been charged with rare-metals smuggling and counterfeiting.***
Colombian Defense Minister Seeks More U.S. Aid***"All the evidence points to the FARC," Ramirez told reporters. "But we can not say it was exclusively them. They possibly received additional assistance from somebody else." Asked which groups were helping the FARC, she mentioned the Irish Republican Army and the Basque separatist group ETA.
It was not the first time Colombia accused the outlawed IRA and ETA of helping the largely peasant FARC to lead more sophisticated urban attacks. Three alleged IRA members are currently standing trial in Bogota on charges of training FARC rebels to build bombs in a former guerrilla stronghold. ***
FARC is a free-floating Marxist criminal force with its fingers in just about every pie. And all of these groups are developing closer ties with radical Islamics.
The article asks why they didn't get the original banknotes from Venezuela, but the fact is, they probably did. VZ wouldn't have much trouble supplying Iraqi currency, considering how close Chavez' ties with Saddam and radical Islamic countries are getting.
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