Hezbollah: Party of Fraud...

Just a terrorist organization that moonlights as a huge criminal gang...arrest Nasrallah now...

Signs of Hezbollah’s increasing reliance on criminal activity quickly began popping up across the globe. In February of this year, U.S. prosecutors indicted seven U.S. citizens -- one of whom is a known Hezbollah associate -- for allegedly conspiring to aid the Taliban. Drug Enforcement Administration agents recorded meetings in Benin, Ghana, Romania, and Ukraine between the defendants and confidential DEA sources posing as Taliban representatives. According to the tapes, some of the individuals agreed to receive, store, and move tons of Taliban heroin. Others offered to sell substantial quantities of cocaine that the Taliban or their agents could then resell, either themselves or through drug dealers, at a profit in the United States. One of the indicted individuals, Alwar Pouryan, an Iranian national described by one of his co-conspirators as “a weapons trafficker affiliated with Hezbollah,” planned to sell weapons to Taliban representatives, giving DEA agents the details about the proposed deal. According to the indictment against Pouryan and the other six suspects, the list included surface-to-air missiles, antitank missiles, grenade launchers, and AK-47 and M-16 rifles. Hezbollah operatives have demonstrated their willingness to sell drugs and arms -- even for ostensible adversaries such as the Taliban -- to supplement their revenues.

The discovery of this Hezbollah-linked conspiracy to support the Taliban followed the U.S. Treasury Department’s decision in January of this year to blacklist the Lebanese narcotics kingpin Ayman Joumma, along with nine people and 19 businesses involved in his drug trafficking and money laundering. An extensive DEA investigation revealed that Joumma laundered as much as $200 million a month from cocaine sales in Europe and the Middle East to operations located in Colombia, Lebanon, Panama, and West Africa through money exchange houses, bulk cash smuggling, and other schemes. According to U.S. prosecutors, the majority of those drug profits were funneled back to Hezbollah. Two weeks later, the Treasury Department designated the Lebanese Canadian Bank as a “financial institution of primary money-laundering concern” for colluding with Joumma to launder his illicit profits and direct them to Hezbollah. The depth of Hezbollah’s relationship with Joumma and with LCB, Lebanon’s eighth-largest bank, with a reported $5 billion in assets in 2009, suggests just how intricate and ambitious Hezbollah’s criminal activities have become.

The list of Hezbollah-linked criminal projects continues. In Miami last October, a group of businessmen pled guilty to attempting to ship electronics to a shopping center in South America that the U.S. Treasury Department designated as a Hezbollah front. In Philadelphia in 2009, ten individuals were charged with conspiring to provide material support for Hezbollah through trafficking counterfeit goods. The defendants in the case transported stolen laptop computers, passports, Sony PlayStation 2 systems, and automobiles to raise funds for Hezbollah, and attempted to procure weapons for the organization as well. Authorities tracked the shipment of stolen goods to places as disparate as Benin, Venezuela, and the United States. A separate criminal complaint in Philadelphia that same year charged Dani Nemr Tarraf -- a German national who maintained a home in Lebanon -- with spearheading a plot to obtain 10,000 machine guns and a shoulder-fired missile system capable of destroying an F-16 that could be shipped to Iran or Syria.
Despite being discovered in these several cases, Hezbollah operatives continue to run one of the largest and most sophisticated global criminal operations in the world. These criminal activities have strengthened Hezbollah and made it more difficult for Western nations to undermine it. Yet they have also exposed Hezbollah to unprecedented risk. Well trained by Iran in the arts of counterintelligence and operational security, Hezbollah prefers to keep its actions out of the public eye. Its crime network, however, has placed the organization under unprecedented scrutiny from law enforcement agencies worldwide, offering a new opening for international action to weaken it like never before.