In a world beset by headline-grabbing crises, including a coronavirus pandemic that is destroying lives and economies, the unchecked movement of dirty money may not register as an immediate threat.

But the consequences are profound. (THREAD)

New details about money that powered a fentanyl drug ring and nearly $2 trillion in other suspect funds sloshing around the globe are contained in a cache of secret financial records obtained by @BuzzFeedNews and shared with @ICIJorg and @MiamiHerald. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article245744245.html

The leaked documents, known as the #FinCENFiles, include more than 2,100 suspicious activity reports written by banks and other financial players and submitted to the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network

The reports — dense, technical information bulletins — are the most detailed U.S. Treasury records ever leaked. They disclose payments processed by major banks, including HSBC, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase and Barclays.

Four hundred journalists from almost 90 countries burrowed into the leaked records, often emerging with a thin thread of just one name or one address.

They spent 16 months prying additional documents from sources, reading through voluminous court and archival records, interviewing crime fighters and crime victims and reviewing data on millions of transactions that took place between 1999 and 2017.

Narcotraffickers and Ponzi schemers shift profits beyond the reach of authorities. Despots and corrupt captains of industry swell ill-gotten fortunes and consolidate power. Governments, starved of revenue, can’t afford medicine to treat the sick.

Criminal networks and the law enforcement officials trying to stop them understand that an untamed tide of dirty cash is the single most important requirement of a successful criminal enterprise.

At the heart of these stories are real people hurt in real ways: families lost savings to predatory financial schemes, Olympic athletes cheated of wins by crooked officials, parents mourning sons and daughters fallen in battle, a mother crushed at work, a brother taken by drugs.

Families and other victims often don’t know that their pain is, in part, the product of financial crime, or a violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1956, “laundering of monetary instruments.”

It took a network of traffickers stretching back to China, relying on the easy movement of dirty money through brand-name financial institutions, to deliver lab-designed opioids across the U.S.

“Anyone can be a trafficker now because of smartphones,” said Donald Im, an assistant special agent in charge with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. “If anyone can be an Uber driver, anyone can be a drug trafficker.”

Sparked by the secret files, reporters traced a Rhode Island drug dealer’s dollars to a chemist’s lab in Wuhan, China; explored scandals that crippled economies in Africa and Eastern Europe; tracked tomb raiders who looted ancient artifacts that were sold to New York galleries.

They surveyed Venezuelan tycoons who siphoned money from public housing and hospitals; and scrutinized the Middle East’s largest gold refinery, the subject of a sprawling, never-revealed, U.S. money laundering probe.

“People may not be aware of issues like money laundering and offshore companies,” said Jodi Vittori, a corruption expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“But they feel the effects every day,” continued Vittori, “because these are what make large-scale crime pay — from opioids to arms trafficking to stealing COVID-19- related unemployment benefits.”

More than 31,000 Americans died from synthetic opioids in 2018. Fentanyl and other laboratory-made drugs, some 10,000 times more potent than morphine, now kill more Americans than any other opioid.

The U.S. Treasury Department says that financial crime makes it all possible.

@WillFitzgibbon of @ICIJorg, along with the @miamiherald's @jayhweaver, @elnuevoherald's Antonio Maria Delgado, @mcclatchy's @KevinGHall and @ShirshoD, spent months examining and reporting on the #FinCENFiles with help from visual journalists @pportalphoto and @MartaOCraviotto.

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