The Coin Store

Pablo Escobar was the King of Cocaine, the wealthiest and most violent criminal in the world. By the 1980s his Medellin Drug Cartel was responsible for smuggling several tons of cocaine into America each and every day, killing thousands of people along the way. The end result was hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, cash profits. In response, and as part of President Reagan's War on Drugs, Congress created the Money Laundering Act of 1986. The goal was to take the profit out of Escobar's business. And the plan was working. Drug Money seizures went up. But as U.S. Agents became more and more efficient at finding the dirty cash, stashed inside ship bellies and truck beds at America's ports and land borders, Pablo and other Cartel leaders sought a more efficient method to get their money back to Colombia. They found the solution in an unlikely place, a dusty back room of a tiny, rare coin shop in the small town of Cranston, Rhode Island. The shop owner was a young, local mobster who had already been laundering much of the Mob's stolen gold. With a few minor adjustments, his coin shop evolved into a springboard for a new venture, a billion-dollar money laundering scheme. The Italian Mafia's stolen gold was then used to dispose of the Colombian Cartel's dirty cash. It was the perfect scheme. And as the dirty cash flow increased, the young mobster, known as Fat Man, a.k.a. Mr. Cash, set up a string of phony gold shops crisscrossing America to accommodate it all. The end result was one of the world's largest, most efficient money laundering networks. By some accounts, Fat Man laundered more than a billion dollars of drug profits for Pablo Escobar and the other Cartel leaders. This is the true story of how it all happened. It is a step-by-step view of how the scheme worked and how it was ultimately uncovered. This story reveals conventional and at times unconventional tactics used by the government in its three-year, worldwide investigation. It is also a behind-the-scenes look at Fat Man himself and his crew, as well as the agents and cops who pursued them. It was unlikely that Fat Man, a small town gangster, would ever become an international money launderer for the Colombian Drug Lords. But what was more unlikely was the fact that it took a rookie agent to finally uncover the scheme. And more unlikely than that was the fact that the rookie agent was Fat Man's neighbor. Both were born within just a few days from each other. They grew up just a few miles from each other. They lived in similar blue-collar neighborhoods and in all but identical homes. And both were influenced, in very different ways, by the New England Mob, which was headquartered nearby on Federal Hill in Providence, RI. While Fat Man relished a life of crime, I dreamed of becoming an agent.In 1987, while his scheme originally went undetected, I was at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Academy in southern Georgia. One year after the new Money Laundering Law...