Reported by Jay Weaver Miami Herald (TNS)

It’s been an age-old problem for Colombian drug traffickers: Moving mountains of cash from U.S. cocaine profits back to their country.

The cartels’ latest solution: automated teller machines.

But they aren’t withdrawing money from ATMs; they’re depositing tons of it, in stacks of $20, $50 and $100 bills, all across the United States.

Over the past few years, U.S. authorities say, narco-traffickers have recruited a number of Colombians to fly to Miami and set up phony businesses with corporate bank accounts. With a bit of wit, they named one local company “PJ Cleaning.”

The Colombian recruits then traveled to various U.S. cities to pick up duffel bags of bulk cash from cocaine sales, with each depositing hundreds of thousands of dollars at ATMs into the bank accounts of the fake companies. Those businesses, in turn, wired millions through financial networks in the United States and abroad to the Colombian cartels, authorities say.

Federal investigators and prosecutors say they’ve been on to them. This week, at least eight Colombians were charged with money laundering conspiracies, including some who made their first appearances in Miami federal court. Agents with the FBI and Homeland Securities Investigations have had their eyes on them, not only because they’ve been moving huge sums of cash through ATMs but because bank security cameras have captured their images while they’ve make the brazen deposits.

Richard Gregorie, a retired Miami federal prosecutor who took down notorious Colombian kingpins and associates, said that during the era of the cocaine cowboys the Colombian traffickers relied mostly on the “Black Market Peso Exchange” to convert cocaine dollars into pesos, creating paper trails in South Florida by using local businesses as intermediaries to wire their profits back home.

“This is no different than that; they just found another way to move the money,” Gregorie said in an interview Thursday. 

Read full report: https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2024/06/13/florida-bank-atms-cocaine-colombia-drugs/