Reported by BEN WIEDER and DEVON MILLEY

The eight story Courthouse Place office building in downtown Fort Lauderdale is a couple blocks from the Broward County courthouse, which makes it an attractive home for the dozens of lawyers and legal services companies that rent space in the building.

It even houses a few offices for prosecutors in Broward’s Drug Trafficking and Economic Crimes units.

That would seem to make it an unlikely destination for money launderers to invest drug trafficking proceeds, but federal prosecutors say it was purchased as part of a real estate buying spree fueled by drug proceeds.

Sefira Capital, a Miami-based real estate investment firm, was accused by federal prosecutors in a 2021 civil forfeiture complaint of accepting millions of dollars worth of drug trafficking proceeds to fund its investments in commercial real estate in Florida and several other states between 2016 and 2019. It bought Courthouse Place in April 2017.

While pricey waterfront mansions in Miami and luxury Manhattan apartments have attracted greater scrutiny as money laundering targets, the example of Sefira Capital underscores how the opaque world of commercial real estate and pedestrian properties like Courthouse Place provide a similarly attractive vehicle for those looking to clean tainted cash. The fact that the company didn’t face any criminal consequences shows how the current legal framework, which doesn’t require firms like Sefira to vet the source of their funds, limits the penalties for those who enable these money laundering transactions.

What’s more, the Miami Herald’s review of leaked financial records shows that one of Sefira’s co-founders filed paperwork establishing his family as the primary beneficiaries of an offshore account in the British Virgin Islands holding millions of dollars during the time when his company was allegedly accepting those drug proceeds. Sefira appears to have also registered at least two companies in the British Virgin Islands in 2016, as well. None of these entities were listed in the federal complaint brought against the company, making it unclear whether prosecutors were aware of them.

Read full report: https://amp.miamiherald.com/news/local/crime/article288639645.html