Secret Service tracks mystery of fake fortune
www.orlandosentinel.com By Henry Pierson Curtis | Sentinel Staff Writer Posted March 1, 2003
The money reached Orlando about 2:30 a.m. Jan. 26.
Held in a black duffel bag, the $952,900 weighed just less than 21 pounds.
Armed agents watched as the fortune changed hands outside a 7-Eleven on South Orange Blossom Trail.
Screams of "Policia! Policia! Manos arriba! Ponte en el piso!" ended the transaction.
A startled Colombian national and an accomplice followed the orders in Spanish, raising their hands, then dropping to the ground.
The bogus $100 bills equaled 10 percent of all the counterfeit currency seized last year in the United States. What's more, many were printed on Iraqi bank notes.
Since that night, nearly $20 million of the same counterfeit bills have been seized in Colombia. And the U.S. Secret Service and other intelligence agencies are questioning why a counterfeiting ring protected by Marxist guerrillas had access to bank notes from Iraq.
"It's very important to the Secret Service to see what we can find out," Agent Gerald A. Cavis, head of the Secret Service in Orlando, said Friday of the Iraq connection. "We'll look at it in particular with other intelligence agencies to see if it is state-sponsored."
The possible link between Iraq and counterfeit U.S. currency has prompted the Secret Service to send similar bills to Washington for inspection. Agents say they don't know where the investigation will lead.
"We don't find that a significant amount of counterfeit currency is related to terrorism, but it has an increased significance to us since 9-11," Cavis said.
Counterfeit currency has been a persistent problem in Orlando since Central Florida became an international destination in the 1970s. Most local cases involve $5,000 to $10,000 passed at area tourist attractions and stores along International Drive and U.S. Highway 192, according to federal court records.
Counterfeiters sell bills for as little as 20 cents on the dollar to people who pass them at banks and stores. The profit comes from pocketing the change.
Nationally, counterfeiting cost banks, businesses and residents $43 million in 2002. By law, anyone duped with a counterfeit bill bears the loss.
Large-scale investigations involve international gangs, suspects suited to spy novels and questions of national security.
One such case, unsolved since the early 1990s, focuses on what is known as a "superdollar," a nearly flawless $100 bill that has been seized in the United States, Asia, Europe and the former Soviet Union.
The probe is so secret that the Secret Service routinely declines comment. The agency went as far as persuading the federal Government Accounting Office to delete portions of a 1996 report on counterfeiting that mentioned rumors of a Middle East country printing U.S. dollars to finance terrorism.
Unlike the superdollar case, agents know where the Orlando bills were printed. On Feb. 11, Colombian police raided the printing plant on a farm near Cali.
The $20 million worth of counterfeit bills was the largest seizure in the country's history, according to the Secret Service. Colombia is the world's largest producer of counterfeit U.S. currency, followed by Bulgaria.
The ringleader, Hector Tabarez, told Colombian police that he had regularly paid the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Latin America's oldest revolutionary group known by its Spanish acronym as FARC, to protect the printing presses, agents said.
The use of Iraqi bank notes didn't make sense to investigators.
"It seems like an odd place to get their paper when they've got Venezuela right across the border," said Agent Kevin Billings, one of the Orlando supervisors.
Counterfeiters typically use an inexpensive currency and bleach off the old ink before printing the fakes.
Venezuela's currency, the bolivar, is the usual choice of Colombian counterfeiters. It's almost as inexpensive as the Iraqi note -- worth less than a penny each -- and is printed on paper from the same company in Massachusetts that supplies the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Billings said.
Currency-grade paper is essential to pass the touch test. Agents say cheap paper makes counterfeit bills feel slick while real ones are rough and durable.
The printing plant in Colombia was discovered as the result of a tip to the U.S. Customs Service that about $1 million was about to be smuggled into Florida.
The tip was passed to the Secret Service office in Bogota, from whichAgent Rafael Barros followed the ring's courier on a Jan. 25 flight to Miami.
"This was on the fly, and decisions were being made quickly between offices, and for federal agencies that's somewhat unique," Billings said.
In South Florida, Secret Service agents arrested Oscar Beltran, a Miami resident, after the courier gave him the money. Beltran agreed to deliver the bills as planned to a Colombian living in Orlando, according to records.
Early the next morning, Alejandro Ballen drove into the 7-Eleven parking lot and was arrested after accepting the bag of counterfeit bills, according to court records.
Ballen, 37, is a university-educated engineer who fled to the United States in the 1990s after FARC guerrillas killed his father for failing to pay protection on the family's farm near Cali. He was in the process of selling the land to the counterfeiting ring for enough money to continue living in the United States, agents said.
Ballen agreed to help the Secret Service and made a series of monitored telephone calls to ring members in Colombia and New York City.
On Feb. 14, Ballen delivered the money to an area of Queens, known as "Little Bogota," where agents arrested two more Colombian nationals. All are charged with conspiring to distribute counterfeit money.
"This was a significant case not only for Orlando but for the Secret Service at large," Cavis said. "Wherever the case went, be it Tampa, Bogota, Miami, New York or back to Orlando, we moved quickly and effectively."
Your money: Is it real or counterfeit? (DAVID WERSINGER/ORLANDO SENTINEL) Mar 1, 2003 www.orlandosentinel.com
Editorial researcher Norman Duarte contributed to this report. Henry Pierson Curtis can be reached at 407-420-5257 or hcurtis@orlandosentinel.com.