The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/William von Raab.md

category	tags	summary	relations
Intelligence & Government	Person BCCI Banker CIA	Commissioner of the U.S. Customs Service during the C-Chase investigation of BCCI, whose agents recommended a RICO case against the bank that the Justice Department did not approve.	type with role fn head_of U.S. Customs commissioner 6

William von Raab was the U.S. Customs Commissioner.¹

He was involved in the Hashemi sting operation, which was designed to entrap individuals connected with Israel intelligence arms sales to Iran.²

Von Raab, along with Rudolph Giuliani, gave joint TV interviews on April 22, 1986, announcing the arrest of a "huge ring of terrorists" and "Merchants of Death" who were supposedly about to sell arms worth a billion dollars to Iran. Ari Ben-Menashe claims that von Raab and his associates had created the crime themselves.²

Role in BCCI Scandal

Von Raab headed the agency during the Tampa money-laundering investigations involving the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.¹ He stated that the C-Chase sting operation, which led to the arrest of several BCCI bankers, was the most important money-laundering case in history.³

After BCCI's Tampa conviction, von Raab thought the case was "enormously meaningful" and announced it publicly. He was told by his superiors to dampen his public enthusiasm.⁴ He later testified before the John Kerry subcommittee that the Department of Justice had denied knowledge of the Ali Mirza tapes, which contained crucial information about BCCI's activities.⁵

RICO

The BCCI Kerry-Brown Senate Report recorded that "by March, 1988, high level Customs officials were reporting to Commissioner Von Raab that several BCCI officials were indictable under RICO." A Customs memorandum of April 6, 1988, stated the view of the United States Attorney's office in Tampa, Florida that "probative evidence exists to establish corporate criminality against BCCI as an institution," a recommendation repeated on May 10, 1988. In the fall of 1988, "for reasons that were never explained to the Customs agents," the Justice Department did not approve a RICO prosecution, and the case was brought on narrower money-laundering charges. The report named von Raab among the critics of the department's handling of BCCI.⁶

Footnotes

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1. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 11. ↩︎

2. Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. Sheridan Square Press, 1992 (TrineDay reprint, 2015). ↩︎

3. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 25. ↩︎

4. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 389. ↩︎

5. Beaty, Jonathan and Gwynne, S. C. The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI. New York: Random House, 1993, p. 54. ↩︎

6. Kerry, Senator John, and Senator Hank Brown. The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate. December 1992, ch. 8, "BCCI and Law Enforcement: The Justice Department and the U.S. Customs Service." https://irp.fas.org/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/08just.htm ↩︎