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Businessmen who pursued shady deals with B.C.C.I. are just as frightened. "Look," says an arms dealer, "these people work hand in hand with the drug cartels; they can have anybody killed. I personally know one fellow who got crossed up with B.C.C.I., and he is a cripple now. A bunch of thugs beat him nearly to death, and he knows who ordered it and why. He's not about to talk." Currently the black units have focused their scrutiny and intimidation on investigators. "Our own people have been staked out or followed, and we suspect tapped telephones," says a New York law-enforcement officer.
The black unit's mission eventually became the pursuit of power and influence for its own sake, but its primary purpose was to foster a global looting operation that bilked depositors of billions of dollars. Price Waterhouse, the accounting firm whose audit triggered the worldwide seizure of B.C.C.I. assets earlier this month, says the disarray is so extreme that the firm cannot even put together a coherent financial statement. But investigators believe $10 billion or more is missing, fully half of B.C.C.I.'s worldwide assets.
How did it happen? B.C.C.I.'s corporate structure allowed the bank to operate virtually without regulation all over the world. The bank's organizational web consisted of dozens of shell companies, offshore banks, branches and subsidiaries in 70 countries. It was incomprehensible even to its own financial officers and auditors. The bank's extensive use of unregulated Cayman Islands accounts enabled it to hide almost anything. The bank's complex organization and unique method of accounting -- longhand in paper ledgers, written in Pakistan's Urdu language -- make it unlikely that most of the missing money will be traced. Nor is it likely that anyone will ever know just how much Abedi, who has incorporated a new bank, called the Progressive Bank, in Karachi, stole from the rest of the world.
B.C.C.I.'s downfall was inevitable because it was essentially a planetary Ponzi scheme, a rip-off technique pioneered by American flimflam man Charles Ponzi in 1920. B.C.C.I. gathered deposits, looted most of them, but kept enough new deposits flowing in so that there was always sufficient cash on hand to pay anyone who asked for his money. During the years of its most explosive growth in the late 1970s and mid-1980s, B.C.C.I. became a magnet for drug money, capital-flight money, tax-evading money and money from corrupt government officials. B.C.C.I. quickly gained a reputation as a bank that could move money anywhere and hide it without a trace. It was the bank that knew how to get around foreign-exchange rules and falsify letters of credit in support of smuggling. Among its alleged services:
-- In Panama, according to a little-known racketeering suit that the country brought against B.C.C.I., the bank systematically helped Noriega loot the national treasury. B.C.C.I. allowed the leader to open secret offshore accounts under the names of the Panamanian National Guard, the Panamanian Defense Forces and the Panamanian Treasury, to transfer national funds into those accounts and then to tap the funds himself.