rollingstone | If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent
even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or
"drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and
longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.
Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with
the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every
ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge.
Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars
for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a
host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading
With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to
pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.
The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA
probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug
dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit
hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single
account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the
teller windows."
This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much
illegal money as possible into the "legitimate" banking institution
HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank's
teller windows. Tony Montana's henchmen marching dufflebags of cash
into the fictional "American City Bank" in Miami was actually more subtle
than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through
one of Britain's most storied financial institutions.
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