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Although the Justice Department announced in September the indictment of six former B.C.C.I. officials in Tampa on racketeering and money-laundering charges, those indictments sprung from investigations started in 1986. Other long-standing grand jury probes of B.C.C.I. in Miami and Washington have languished, some for as long as two years without visible progress.
The frustration has spread to the ranks of federal law enforcement. In October a U.S. Customs officer wrote to Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, ( chairman of the Senate subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations, and complained that "tons of documents were not reviewed . . . and the CIA put a halt to certain investigative leads" in a 1988 Florida inquiry that eventually led to the indictment of five mid-level B.C.C.I. officers. "We had drug traffickers, money launderers, foreign government involvement, Noriega and allegations of payoffs by B.C.C.I. to U.S. government political figures. I will not elaborate on who these U.S. government figures were alleged to be, but I can advise you that you don't have all of the documents. Some were destroyed or misplaced."
Similar reports, coupled with the Justice Department's heavy censoring of B.C.C.I.-related documents subpoenaed by the Senate, have angered Kerry, who claims that the Justice Department is stonewalling his investigation. Kerry, who has held several hearings into the B.C.C.I. affair, is battling a Justice Department decision to prohibit him from taking testimony from former U.S. Customs Service agent Robert Mazur.
Mazur, who led the undercover sting operation that produced the first indictments of B.C.C.I. in 1988, quit the agency to work for the Drug Enforcement Administration. He reportedly was disgusted over the government's failure to pursue leads concerning secret B.C.C.I. ownership of U.S. banks and alleged payoffs to U.S. politicians. Although Kerry has declined to release correspondence from Mazur, sources who have seen Mazur's allegations about a cover-up say they are political dynamite.
"There is a feeling that somebody in Washington is trying to cut a deal on B.C.C.I.," says a senior official, "that they really don't want the U.S. Attorney's offices to actually return indictments because that would muck up their ability to do some kind of an overall package deal, where we cut off the hands of a few Pakistanis and paint it as if they were really all the big folks. They'll get out charts and graphs to absolve the Sheik ((Sheik Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi, who oversees the shuttered B.C.C.I. empire)) and then let the bank reopen overseas" to repay its foreign debts.
There is logic to this complaint: B.C.C.I. losses are put at $12 billion, and officials in this country and Britain have been pleading with Zayed, one of the world's richest men, to make good on the losses. Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi, Zayed has placed under house arrest many of the bank officers wanted for questioning by U.S. officials.