Banking A Trail of Coffee and Cash

When times were golden for Florida coffee importer Munther Ismael Bilbeisi, he would tell friends his business was so important that the Bank of Credit & Commerce International set up a special branch in Boca Raton just to handle his accounts and those of a few other high rollers. His boast was not unfounded. During the 1980s his Coffee Inc. sold millions of pounds of Central American beans to American buyers. A Mercedes, a Porsche and a Rolls-Royce sat in the driveway of the expatriate Jordanian's $1.8 million home.

Today Bilbeisi's relationship with the shadowy $30 billion bank is no longer a source of pride but a vivid page from a worldwide scandal that began with B.C.C.I.'s indictment in 1988 for money laundering. Investigators now view B.C.C.I. as the largest criminal corporate enterprise in modern history, a secret banking network that served drug smugglers, tax evaders, arms dealers and rapacious tyrants, including Panama's Manuel Noriega. Four grand juries are probing the bank, while investigators from the New York district attorney's office, Congress and the Department of Justice are grappling with mountains of seized records. Most prominent among those embroiled in the scandal is former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. He is chairman of the largest bank in Washington, which was secretly owned by B.C.C.I.

A grand jury is investigating Bilbeisi, and last month a Florida court issued a warrant for his arrest on income tax evasion charges. The eroding fortunes of Bilbeisi and the bank are not coincidental: he was precisely the kind of customer B.C.C.I. sought in its quest to build a global empire. Bilbeisi, who claimed friendship with Jordan's King Hussein, presented a respectable front.

Bilbeisi is also an arms dealer who has peddled used Jordanian and new East European weaponry to South Africa and Latin America under dubious terms. The $35 million worth of coffee he sold to American companies was contraband smuggled into the U.S. Financing for those deals, including letters of credit and falsified documents, is the sort of business no legitimate bank would touch, so Bilbeisi needed B.C.C.I. He was happy to kick back cash to his bankers for such services, including the laundering of his gains.

His mistake was to cross swords with Lloyd's of London. When coffee prices plunged in 1986, leaving him exposed, he handed the insurers $6 million in claims for the alleged theft of a Song dynasty vase and commercial losses on an undocumented coffee shipment. Underwriters refused to pay, so Bilbeisi sued them for punitive damages, prompting Lloyd's to launch a deeper investigation. Result: last December Lloyd's filed a civil racketeering suit against Bilbeisi and B.C.C.I., charging the two with a long list of illegal acts, including coffee smuggling, arms dealing, customs violations, money laundering and paying bribes and kickbacks. That suit was followed by the grand jury investigation into charges by the IRS that Bilbeisi cheated on his taxes as well.