Guest:

John Moscow, Deputy Chief, Investigations Division, New York County District Attorney’s Office (retired)

Overview:

John Moscow, the legendary Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, described the decades-defunct-but-still-notorious Bank of Credit and Commercial International to me this way: “It was a full service bank that would do anything its customers wanted.” (Emphasis mine.) Money laundering. Tax evasion. Drug trafficking. Terrorist financing.

Moscow’s and, more precisely, D.A. Robert M. Morgenthau’s prosecution of BCCI reverberated globally as the bank pled guilty and was then liquidated in 1991. Vanity Fair magazine wrote a feature, How They Broke the Bank, the following spring that still holds up as an enthralling account of D.A.N.Y.’s dismantling of one of the then-largest banks in the world.

Aside from lawmakers, regulators and educators, the world of pop culture noticed. The Infiltrator, former U.S. Customs’ Agent Robert Mazur’s book on the early role he played, became a movie by the same name in 2015. Bryan Cranston played the lead. American Made came out two years later detailing the improbable tale of former TWA pilot Barry Seal’s drug smuggling for the Medellin Cartel, side work for the CIA and turning informant for the DEA.

In this episode, Zila and Paul discuss BCCI before Paul and John revisit the investigation, the oddity of the media attention that followed, how AML efforts have fared since then and, of course, “that photo”.

Time:

35 minutes