Foutanga Babani Sissoko, the playboy who got away with $242m

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Foutanga Babani Sissoko, the playboy who got away with $242m

Postby cptmarginal » Fri Feb 23, 2018 11:37 pm

Fascinating! Unanswered questions abound. (Birch Bayh, huh? Lots of interesting things to learn about him - certainly not all negative by any means, either.)



http://www.bbc.com/news/stories-42878021

The playboy who got away with $242m – using ‘black magic’

16 February 2018

One day in August 1995 a man called Foutanga Babani Sissoko walked into the head office of the Dubai Islamic Bank and asked for a loan to buy a car. The manager agreed, and Sissoko invited him home for dinner. It was the prelude, writes the BBC's Brigitte Scheffer, to one of the most audacious confidence tricks of all time.

Over dinner, Sissoko made a startling claim. He told the bank manager, Mohammed Ayoub, that he had magic powers. With these powers, he could take a sum of money and double it. He invited his Emirati friend to come again, and to bring some cash.

Black magic is condemned by Islam as blasphemous. Even so, there's still a widespread belief in it, and Ayoub was taken in by the colourful and mysterious businessman from a remote village in Mali.

When he arrived at Sissoko's house the next time, carrying his money, a man burst out of a room saying a spirit - a djinn - had just attacked him. He warned Ayoub not to anger the djinn, for fear his money would not be doubled. So Ayoub left his cash in the magic room, and waited.

He said he saw lights and smoke. He heard the voices of spirits. Then there was silence.

The money had indeed doubled.

Ayoub was delighted - and the heist could begin.

"He believed it was Black Magic - that Mr Sissoko could double the money," says Alan Fine, a Miami attorney the bank later asked to investigate the crime.

"So he would send money to Mr Sissoko - the bank's money - and he expected it to come back in double the amount."

Between 1995 and 1998, Ayoub made 183 transfers into Sissoko's accounts around the world. Sissoko was also running up big credit card bills - in the millions according to Fine - which Ayoub would settle on his behalf.

In 1998 I was living in Dubai, and I heard rumours that the bank was in trouble. When a newspaper reported that the bank was having cashflow problems, crowds of people gathered outside, waiting to withdraw their money.

The Dubai authorities downplayed the crisis. They called it "a little difficulty that did not lead to any financial losses either in the bank's investments or depositors' accounts".

But this wasn't true.

"The people who owned the bank took a huge, huge hit. It was not covered by insurance," says Fine. "The bank was saved because the government stepped in to help. But they gave up a lot of their equity in the bank for that to happen."

And where was Foutanga Babani Sissoko? By this time, he was far away.

One of the beauties of his scheme was that he did not need to be in Dubai to keep receiving the money.

In November 1995, only weeks after putting on the magic display for Mohammed Ayoub, Sissoko visited another bank in New York, and did much more than open an account.

"He walked into Citibank one day, no appointment, met a teller and he ended up marrying her," says Alan Fine. "And there's reason to believe she made his relationship with Citibank more comfortable, and he ended up opening an account there through which, from memory, I'm just going to say more than $100m was wire transferred into the United States."

In fact, according to a case brought by the Dubai Islamic Bank against Citibank, more than $151m "was debited by Citibank from DIB's correspondent account without proper authorisation". The case was later dropped.

Sissoko paid his new wife more than half a million dollars for her help.

"I don't know under what legal regime he married her but he called her a wife and she believed she was a wife," says Fine.

"She understood that there were many other wives. Some from Africa, some from Miami, some from New York."

Image

With the bank's money rolling in, Sissoko could fulfil his dream of opening an airline for West Africa. He bought a used Hawker-Siddeley 125 and a pair of old Boeing 727s. This was the birth of Air Dabia, named after his village in Mali.

But in July 1996, Sissoko made a serious mistake as he tried to buy two Huey helicopters dating from the Vietnam War, for reasons that remain unclear.

"His explanation of why he wanted them was emergency air ambulance. But the helicopters he was looking at were pretty big helicopters, they were not the kind that you see running back and forth to hospitals and trauma centres in the United States, they were much bigger than that," says Fine.

Because they could be refitted as gunships, the helicopters needed a special export licence. Sissoko's men tried to speed things up by offering a $30,000 bribe to a customs officer. Instead, they got themselves arrested. And Interpol issued a warrant for Sissoko's arrest too. He was caught in Geneva, where he'd gone to open another bank account.

Tom Spencer, a Miami lawyer who was asked to represent Sissoko, vividly remembers going to meet him in Geneva's Champ-Dollon prison.

"I talked with the prison warden, who asked me whether or not Sissoko was going to go to the United States," Spencer says.

"I said, 'Well, you know, we'll see.' And he said, 'Well, please delay it as long as possible.' And I said, 'Well why?' And he said, 'Because he's flying in fantastic meals from Paris every night, for us.' And that was my first bizarre encounter with Baba Sissoko."

Sissoko was quickly extradited to the US, where he started to mobilise influential supporters.

The readiness of diplomats to vouch for Sissoko shocked the judge presiding over his bail hearing. And Tom Spencer was stunned when a former US senator, Birch Bayh, announced he was joining Sissoko's defence team.

"Well, you have to ask yourself, why would anyone get involved for a foreign national who has no apparent value to the United States?" says Fine. "I don't know the answer to the question. But it's an interesting one to pose."

The US government wanted Sissoko held in custody, but he was bailed for $20m (£14.5m) - a Florida record at the time.

Then he went on a spending spree.

His defence team was rewarded with Mercedes or Jaguar cars. But that was just the start.

Sissoko spent half a million dollars in one jewellery store alone, Fine recalls, and hundreds of thousands in others. In one men's clothing store he spent more than $150,000.

"He would come in and buy two three four cars at the same time, come back another week and buy two three four cars at the same time. It was just, the money was like wind," says car dealer Ronil Dufrene.

He calculates that he sold Sissoko between 30 and 35 cars in total.

Sissoko became a Miami celebrity. He already had several wives, but that didn't stop him marrying more - and housing them in some of the 23 apartments he rented in the city.

"'Playboy' is the right word to describe him. Because he is very elegant. And handsome. And he dresses with great style. He blew a lot of money in Miami," says Sissoko's cousin, Makan Mousa.

Sissoko was also giving away large sums to good causes. His trial was approaching, and he knew the value of good publicity. In one case witnessed by his cousin, he gave £300,000 ($413,000) to a high-school band that needed money to travel to New York for a Thanksgiving Day parade.

Another of his defence lawyers, Prof H T Smith, remembers that on Thursdays he would drive around giving money to homeless people.

"I was thinking, is this some modern day Robin Hood? Why would you steal money and give it away? It doesn't make any sense," he says.

"The [Miami] Herald did a story just after he left, and I think - I don't want to exaggerate but I think they said they could chronicle like $14m he gave away. He was only here 10 months. That's over a million dollars a month."

Alan Fine took a slightly more cynical view.

"So much of what he did was for image and to perpetuate a belief that he was a very powerful man and fabulously wealthy. He would give away money, but… to my knowledge it was never done in a way that he didn't get publicity for it."

Despite this PR drive, when Sissoko's case came to court he disregarded his lawyers' advice and pleaded guilty.

Maybe he calculated that this would provoke fewer questions about his finances.

The sentence was 43 days in prison and a $250,000 fine - paid, of course, by the Dubai Islamic Bank, though without its knowledge.

After serving only half this sentence, he was given early release in return for a $1m payment to a homeless shelter. The rest he was meant to serve under house arrest in Mali.

Instead he returned home to a hero's welcome.

It was around this time that the Dubai Islamic Bank's auditors began to notice that something was wrong. Ayoub was getting nervous, and Sissoko had stopped answering his calls.

Finally he confessed to a colleague, who asked how much was missing. Too ashamed to say, Ayoub wrote it on a scrap of paper - 890 million dirhams, the equivalent of $242m (£175m).

He was found guilty of fraud and given three years in jail. It's rumoured he was also forced to undergo an exorcism, to cure him of his belief in black magic.

Sissoko has never faced justice. In his absence, a Dubai court sentenced him to three years for fraud and practising magic. Interpol issued an arrest warrant and he remains a wanted man.

I found transcripts from other trials at which Sissoko failed to appear, including one in Paris. His lawyer claimed he was a scapegoat for Ayoub's actions and the bank's money had gone elsewhere, but the court didn't swallow it and convicted him of money-laundering.

For 12 years, between 2002 and 2014, Sissoko was a member of parliament in Mali, which gave him immunity from prosecution. For the last four years, no longer an MP, he has been protected by the fact that Mali has no extradition treaty with any other country.

The Dubai Islamic Bank, nonetheless, is still pursuing him through the courts.

-

I flew to Mali's capital, Bamako, to find people who might tell me about Sissoko.

I tracked down his seamstress, who remembered him fondly.

"The last time I saw him, two or three years ago, I made him a suitcase of clothes. If he didn't give out presents, he wasn't happy. It's his style. He loves to give things to people," she said.

I also found his driver, Lukali Ibrahim.

"The good thing about him is that when things are going well you can expect a lot of presents from him. He likes to help people with their problems," he said. "The bad thing, I can tell you a few. This is someone who always gives people hope but instead of telling you the truth, he's just leading you on."

In the market I found a goldsmith who had only praise for a client who would call and ask him to make presents for his friends.

I also heard that he could be found living near his native village, Dabia, which had given its name to Sissoko's short-lived airline, near Mali's border with Guinea and Senegal.

After a long drive I found a house that fitted the description I'd been given.

Suddenly, surrounded by armed guards, there he was. Babani Sissoko, in person, now perhaps 70 years old.

He agreed to an interview. The atmosphere was edgy and slightly surreal. He began by telling me about his entry into the world.

"My name is Sissoko Foutanga Dit Babani. You know, the day I was born all the villages round here burned down. The villagers went round shouting, 'Marietto has had a boy.' The fire leapt and leapt. There used to be a lot of bush around."

He then talked about his efforts to rebuild the village, which began in 1985, and about the money he made. At one point he had been worth $400m, he said.

Eventually, I asked about the $242m he had received from the Dubai Islamic Bank.

"Madame, this $242m, this is a slightly crazy story. The gentlemen from the bank should explain how they lost all that money. I mean the $242m. Listen, how could that money have left the bank the way it did? That's the problem. It's not this man alone [Ayoub] who authorises the transfers. When the bank transfers money it's not just one person who does it. Several people have to do it."

I pointed out to him that Mohammed Ayoub had claimed at his trial that Sissoko had put him under a spell.

"The gentleman you're talking about, I've seen him and met him," he said.

But the heist, he denied.

"The only contact I had with him was when I went to buy a car. The bank bought it for me and I repaid the loan. It was a Japanese car."

Had he controlled people by means of black magic?

"Madame, if a person had that kind of power, why would he work? If you have that kind of power you can stay where you are and rob all the banks of the world. In the United States, France, Germany, everywhere. Even here in Africa. You could rob all the banks you want."

I asked him if he was still rich.

His answer was blunt.

"No I'm not rich any longer. I'm poor."

Defying Interpol, Sissoko has spent a remarkable 20 years on the run, even if he has squandered all his money and can never leave Mali.

He has never spent a day in jail for the black magic bank heist.


http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/22/us/an ... stody.html

An R.S.V.P to the President: Deep Regrets. I'm in Custody.

By DON VAN NATTA JR. MARCH 22, 1997



With sincere regrets, Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko, a West African multimillionaire philanthropist, was forced to pass up an invitation to dine with President Clinton last September at a tony Washington hotel.

A week before the dinner, Mr. Sissoko had been arrested in Europe on a United States warrant and charged with trying to smuggle two Vietnam-era military helicopters out of Miami to Africa and offering a $30,000 bribe to a United States Customs agent.

On the evening that he was to have had dinner with the President, at the Mayflower Hotel, he was in the process of being extradited from Geneva to Miami.

After his arrival in Florida, Mr. Sissoko tried to use the dinner invitation that he had received as a way of convincing a Federal district judge that he should be released from jail. Unimpressed by Mr. Sissoko's connections, the judge set bail at $20 million, a South Florida record.

Mr. Sissoko quickly met bail, and subsequently pleaded guilty to one, reduced felony count of offering a ''gratuity,'' rather than a ''bribe,'' to a Customs agent; the smuggling charge was dropped. Next month he is to begin serving a four-month sentence at a Federal prison, followed by four months of house arrest in Miami, where he now has several expensive apartments.
Continue reading the main story

Although the 52-year-old Mr. Sissoko had visited the United States on only two occasions before his arrest -- he is a dual citizen of Mali and Gambia, and speaks very little English -- a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee saw him as a prospective donor. The dinner invitation was extended by that fund-raiser, John A. Catsimatidis of New York, last August, at a time when the party's ferocious appetite for cash was leading its finance arm to go to extraordinary lengths.

Mr. Catsimatidis, chief executive of the Red Apple Companies, whose holdings include the Sloan's and Red Apple supermarket chains, explained in an interview that he had been impressed that Mr. Sissoko, in a wire transfer, had earlier paid him $3 million for two airplanes, and said he had hoped that Mr. Sissoko might be persuaded to extend his generosity, for which he was well known, to the Democrats.

Mr. Sissoko owns a majority interest in Negoce International, a New York affiliate of his multinational corporate empire, which, his lawyers say, accumulated a fortune from investments in gold and diamond mines, oil wells, casinos and hotels in Africa and the Middle East. Under Federal law that allows domestic subsidiaries of foreign companies to contribute to American political parties, Negoce International could have donated to the Democrats. But it never did -- much to the relief these days of the party, given his subsequent conviction.

''He never made a contribution,'' Mr. Catsimatidis said. ''But if I had pushed, he might have made one. I'm glad I didn't push it. I don't need the embarrassment, and neither does the President.''

Indeed, the embarrassment has already been substantial enough, given party fund-raisers' wooing of a cocaine smuggler, an arms merchant, an alleged embezzler, a fugitive, a loan deadbeat and a habitual sexual harasser.

Perhaps the most notorious of the donors was Jorge Cabrera, a Miamian who contributed $20,000 and had dinner and his picture taken with Vice President Al Gore at a South Florida fund-raiser in November 1995. Mr. Cabrera also attended a White House Christmas party in 1995 where the host was Hillary Rodham Clinton. This time his picture was taken with the First Lady.

Three weeks after the White House event, Mr. Cabrera, a Cuban-born American citizen, was arrested inside a Dade County cigar warehouse, where 500 pounds of cocaine was stashed above several ceiling panels. He was charged with trying to smuggle three tons of cocaine and 30 cases of Cohiba cigars into the United States, and was sentenced late last year to 19 years in a Federal prison.

''It was just another instance where the Democrats were more concerned about the dollars than where the dollars were coming from,'' said Stephen J. Bronis, Mr. Cabrera's Miami defense lawyer.

Some of the other people invited to fund-raising events by the party were Joseph Douze, a fugitive who was charged in 1995 with conspiracy and 22 counts of mail fraud, and is now believed to be living in Haiti; Henri Claude Douze, Joseph's brother, who failed to repay American taxpayers $74,000 for student loans until he won the Florida Lottery's Fantasy Five jackpot; Larry Hawkins, a former Dade County commissioner who was found by a state investigator to have sexually harassed three female employees while he held public office; Eric Wynn, a twice-convicted felon who attended a White House coffee in December 1995, and Roger Tamraz, the subject of an international warrant charging him with a $200 million embezzlement from a Lebanese investment company.

''We were not doing the proper vetting of guests at our events,'' said Amy Weiss Tobe, the spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee. ''We regret that this happened, but we have a process in place now where the mistakes of the past will not be the mistakes of the future.''

The committee has promised to return more than $3 million in illegal or questionable campaign contributions, and recently instituted a wide range of new screening measures, including extensive background checks on contributors.

Among the lengthening list of questionable prospects courted by the Democrats, Mr. Sissoko, who declined through his lawyers to be interviewed, stands out because his defense team used the invitation to dine with Mr. Clinton in its argument to a Federal judge that he should be released from jail.

Indeed, Mr. Clinton's name was dropped in court papers seeking bond that were filed by one of those lawyers, Thomas R. Spencer, who wrote that Mr. Sissoko was ''the friend and confidant of several dignitaries in various countries, including the United States.''

''He was invited to a private dinner with President Clinton scheduled for September 6, 1996,'' the document said. ''He is a nonviolent, philanthropic individual.''

Judge K. Michael Moore nonetheless set bail at $20 million, an amount that lawyers in Miami say set a record for South Florida. Within hours, Mr. Sissoko had posted bond.

Asked to explain his use of the President's name, Mr. Spencer said in an interview: ''When you are arguing a bail situation, one of the things the court wants to look at is whether there are sufficient contacts with the United States, in order to demonstrate to the court that someone is not going to run. We thought the fact that he was invited to have dinner with the President was significant.''

Mr. Sissoko's troubles began last Aug. 16, when, after a tip from an informer, a Customs agent in Miami caught two Vietnam-era military helicopters being loaded on a plane bound for West Africa. Mr. Sissoko had bought the helicopters but did not have an export license from the State Department.

In the course of the next two weeks, his employees and associates in Miami -- as well as Mr. Sissoko himself, speaking by telephone from West Africa and Geneva -- talked with the Customs agent, Jeffrey Outlaw, through English-speaking interpreters.

After one of the associates suggested a cash payment to expedite the matter, Mr. Outlaw began secretly recording his conversations with Mr. Sissoko and others. In one conversation, an associate of Mr. Sissoko, Moumouni Dieguimde, said his boss had access to ''powerful people in Washington,'' including the President, thanks to his relationship with Mr. Catsimatidis.

Because of the references to the President on tape, and to the dinner in court papers, prosecutors in Miami have referred the matter to the Justice Department task force investigating campaign finance issues, according to several Federal law-enforcement officials, who insisted on anonymity.

After being extradited to the United States, Mr. Sissoko hired lawyers from four Miami law firms. He also hired former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, who lobbied officials at the Justice Department and the State Department in an effort to get the charges dismissed.

Before he pleaded guilty to the reduced charge, Mr. Sissoko's lawyers argued that he had wanted one of the helicopters to be used as an air ambulance and the other to join the fleet of his fledgling airline, Air Dabia, named for the village of his birth, in Mali. They also argued that the language barrier and cultural differences had made it easy for him to misunderstand Mr. Outlaw.

''He doesn't speak the language,'' Mr. Spencer said, ''and he sometimes speaks elliptically.''

Prosecutors, however, argued that the 31-year-old helicopters could still have been used for military operations and that Mr. Sissoko had clearly authorized the $30,000 offer to Mr. Outlaw.

In South Florida these days, Mr. Sissoko has drawn attention as a man of not only fabulous wealth but also humble beginnings and prolific generosity.

He speaks virtually no English, and has only a rudimentary grasp of French; he is fluent only in his native language, Bambara.

Born in the small Mali village of Dabia, he later went to India, worked in his youth as a house servant and became acquainted with Western culture. It was in India that his career as an entrepreneur began, as a textile trader.

In the aftermath of his guilty plea, Mr. Sissoko's largesse has continued in Miami.

He gave each of his three defense lawyers a $65,000 Mercedes-Benz 300SL with a big red bow on the roof, and gave new Jaguars to the lawyers who represented his co-defendants.

Mr. Spencer got his Mercedes on Dec. 7, for his birthday. ''It was a hell of a birthday present,'' he said.

Mr. Sissoko also wrote a $300,000 check to send 300 inner-city children in Miami Central High's marching band to perform in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York next fall.

Mr. Catsimatidis, the Democratic fund-raiser, said it would be unfair to lump in Mr. Sissoko with others who have caused the party its share of grief.

''He is a very, very philanthropic guy,'' said Mr. Catsimatidis, who has been an overnight guest at the White House and has attended a White House coffee with the President. ''He just did something stupid, by our standards. I think these people do this kind of thing all the time in Africa and the Middle East.''

Mr. Catsimatidis said he was sure Mr. Sissoko was disappointed that his arrest had prevented him from having dinner with Mr. Clinton.

''Who wouldn't be interested,'' he said, ''in having dinner with the President of the United States?''


http://articles.latimes.com/1998/aug/17/news/mn-13939

Sissoko's Washington friends rallied to his aid in 1996 after he was accused of offering a bribe to a U.S. Customs Service official for help in exporting a pair of military helicopters. Former Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Ind.), now practicing law in Washington, tried to intervene at the Justice Department and the CIA. West African ambassadors to the United Nations attested to Sissoko's character, as did members of the Congressional Black Caucus. After U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown (D-Fla.) wrote letters on Sissoko's behalf to Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, Brown's daughter received a $60,000 Lexus from Sissoko's chief financial officer.

Eventually, Sissoko pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of authorizing payment of a $30,000 "illegal gratuity" to a Customs agent. He served 43 days in a South Florida prison camp and paid a $250,000 fine.

Now facing more serious legal problems, Sissoko has disappeared. He is believed to be somewhere in Africa, where he controls a Gambia-based airline, Air Dabia, and operates hotels, banks and gold mines. But his Miami lawyers haven't been able to reach him in weeks. And they're miffed.

"I have really been blindsided by this," said attorney Thomas R. Spencer. "This is nothing I could ever imagine or suspect."

...

With a penchant for blessing total strangers with cash and cars, Sissoko seemed like something of a beneficent deity to many Americans too. He caused a stir in 1995 when he flew into New York for a whirlwind shopping spree, spending millions on jewelry and cars and handing out $100 bills on the street. He flew three planeloads of wives, family and hangers-on to Atlantic City, N.J., for a night of gambling at a Donald Trump casino.

...

Over the next few months, Sissoko used his vast wealth to buy legal and political clout. In Miami, Spencer and other lawyers worked on an entrapment defense, while Bayh and friendly lawmakers argued in Washington that Sissoko was a special envoy of Gambia and thus enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

But Sissoko did not put all his faith in the American justice system. After tribal potions were brought in from West Africa, he ordered that a special powder be sprinkled around the courthouse. A violet-colored liquid was released into Biscayne Bay.

In January 1997, Sissoko pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of authorizing an illegal gratuity, and two months later was sentenced to serve four months in prison. But his attorneys continued to press for a dismissal of the bribery charge. In a final courthouse hearing in June, Sissoko supporters included the ambassadors of Gambia, Mali, Senegal and Togo; actor Sherman Helmsley, a star of "The Jeffersons" TV show; and several supporters of the South Florida Coalition to Free Babani Sissoko.


http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/the-b ... es-6360429

The Baba Chronicles

Jim DeFede - September 25, 1997


The drive from Brickell Key, in downtown Miami, to the federal prison in South Dade normally takes about 30 minutes. But for Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko the journey took a full year. This past Friday the West African millionaire entered the minimum-security facility, where he will serve 43 days for paying an "illegal gratuity" to a U.S. Customs agent so he could sneak a pair of helicopters from Miami to the tiny African nation of Gambia.

Sissoko spent more than one million dollars trying to avoid Friday afternoon's twenty-mile drive to prison. He retained nearly a dozen defense attorneys to fight the criminal charges, and hired a former United States senator to apply political pressure to Attorney General Janet Reno. In the process, Sissoko's defenders unleashed a vicious smear campaign against the prosecutor and the customs agent responsible for his indictment, accusing them of being unethical, corrupt, and racist.

In a last-minute maneuver, Sissoko's supporters argued he that couldn't be imprisoned because he was protected by diplomatic immunity, a claim struck down two weeks ago by a federal judge who promptly ordered Sissoko to report to prison -- thirteen months after he was arrested, eight months after pleading guilty, and six months after being sentenced.

Most people in Miami know Sissoko through tales of his extravagant generosity and lavish spending sprees. He gave Miami Central High School $300,000 so its marching band could attend the upcoming Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City. He bought three of his attorneys brand-new $60,000 Mercedes, and doled out Jaguars to several others. He tipped a masseuse $10,000 and routinely handed out hundred-dollar bills to homeless people. When he overheard a woman at a car dealership haggling about the price of a Range Rover, Sissoko stepped in and simply bought it for her. Each bit of Sissoko munificence, dutifully chronicled by the local media, has added another brush stroke to the emerging portrait of a legend, a South Florida folk hero whose big heart has been matched by an even bigger bank account, and a man whose criminal case has become a cause celebre in Miami's black community.

Despite his instant renown, Baba Sissoko remains largely a mystery to the public, the source of his vast wealth a subject of conflicting speculation. As for his personal life, only a coterie of insiders has been privileged to glimpse that world. One of them is Ewa Adamek, a 47-year-old Polish immigrant who came to the United States in 1989. Upon first meeting Sissoko, Adamek believed he must be some sort of god.

Soon after her arrival in this county, Adamek found herself in upstate New York, where she met and fell in love with a man named Rene Dubois, a driving-school instructor from the African nation of Zaire (recently rechristened as the Democratic Republic of the Congo). They moved in together and Dubois, a pilot by training, began looking for business opportunities in aviation. Adamek eked out a living cleaning houses and baby-sitting.

Thanks to an African friend, Dubois in 1995 was introduced to Sissoko, who at that time was attempting to launch an ambitious new venture, a commercial airline to be called Air Dabia. Dubois traveled to Africa and met with Sissoko, who not only offered him a job but gave him a gold necklace and other jewelry as presents for Adamek. When Dubois returned to New York with a new job and luxurious gifts, Ewa Adamek thought her prayers had been answered.

In November 1995 Sissoko traveled to New York. Adamek and Dubois went to the airport to greet him. "I was driving an old Nissan, and when I took Baba from the airport to the Four Seasons, I could see that he did not like my car and was not very comfortable," Adamek recalls. "After we got to the hotel, he left for a couple of hours with Rene, and when they came back Baba gave me the keys to a new car. He went out and bought me a car! I couldn't believe it! I thought that God had come down from the sky and blessed me."

A few weeks later, on New Year's Eve, Sissoko chartered three private jets to take Adamek, Dubois, and a growing entourage of hangers-on to Atlantic City, where they spent the night gambling at Donald Trump's Castle casino. Adamek says Sissoko lost several hundred thousand dollars at the roulette table. "It was all very exciting," she recounts. "We'd walk through the casino and there would be security guards surrounding us and clearing a path. Everyone in the place would just stop what they were doing and stare at us, trying to figure out who we were."

It was the same when Sissoko went shopping in Manhattan. "He would only shop in Cartier, Saks Fifth Avenue, Tiffany's," she says. "You could never take him somewhere where he might find the same item for a discount -- that was not the image he wanted people to see."

In Sissoko's roving entourage, which often included his brother, one or two of his four wives, several business agents, musicians, bodyguards, drivers, and a retinue of toadies, everyone seemed to have a role to play, including Adamek, who says she was instructed by one of Sissoko's wives to give up her cleaning and baby-sitting jobs. "Marie Louise told me that it would not be appropriate for the manager of Baba's airline to be with a cleaning lady," she recalls. Instead Adamek would put to use her talent for languages -- she speaks Polish, English, French, and Russian -- and act as an interpreter for Marie Louise, who spoke French. (Sissoko himself speaks a Malian dialect known as Bambara and some English, but reportedly he is more comfortable with French.)

Sissoko spent four months in New York before returning to Africa in March 1996. While at JFK airport, Sissoko handed an airline ticket agent a check for $10,000. "She was shocked, she could not believe it," Adamek recalls, adding that Sissoko then began handing out checks in various amounts to complete strangers while he waited to board his flight. "He finished two checkbooks that way," she marvels.

His spending was no less grand when he arrived in Miami -- in handcuffs -- nearly eight months later. After his August 1996 arrest in Switzerland on the helicopter charge, Sissoko began making plans for his inevitable extradition to South Florida. Adamek and Dubois were among those immediately dispatched to Miami. Hotel suites were booked, automobiles bought, and housing arrangements completed. (According to his attorneys, Sissoko leased ten apartments on the 26th floor of Courvoisier Courts for approximately $50,000 per month; he also purchased five condominiums at Tequesta Point for somewhere between two and three million dollars. Both developments are on Brickell Key.) Following his release on bail, he strolled through an El Dorado furniture showroom, pointing out the pieces he wanted delivered the next day to his condominiums.

Sissoko was not permitted to leave Dade County without approval from the U.S. Attorney's Office, which demanded that his movements be monitored by a private security team hired by his attorneys. Despite these obstacles, Sissoko was determined to continue overseeing his far-flung business empire. He and his staff commonly stayed up most nights in order to maintain telephone contact with subordinates in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

His fondness for expensive jewelry was also unaffected by the pending criminal case, much to the delight of jewelers in Bal Harbour, a favored Sissoko shopping destination. After a while, Adamek says, the jewelry stores came to him, carting their goods by armored car to Brickell Key so he could view merchandise in the convenient privacy of his own home. "Watching it all," Adamek remembers, "was like a fairy tale."

Adamek's fairy-tale world, however, was as flawed as it was fragile. Although initially awed by Sissoko's wealth, she eventually began to understand how he used it to manipulate people. "He doesn't pay the people who work for him; he gives them gifts," she explains, adding that as a result they find it impossible to save money and so are forced to wait anxiously for Sissoko to bestow the next gift upon them. That method of operating, according to Adamek, creates an environment that is part cult, part carnival. "Baba wants everyone to stay with him and do whatever he wants," she says. "He wants you to be dependent on him."

But as Adamek would learn, Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko was not someone to depend on. Among other things, she blames him for poisoning her relationship with Rene Dubois by corrupting her long-time boyfriend with women and money. And because she refused to acquiesce, she was summarily jettisoned -- thrown out on the street and left penniless.

Nearly eight hours into her flight from Miami to Gambia, Sally Ragsdale heard a loud and ominous noise erupting from the rear of her Air Dabia Boeing 747. As the senior flight attendant onboard, she grabbed another crew member and they frantically raced toward the sound. Peering out a window along the starboard side of the plane, she was stunned to see that a 30-foot section of the wing's metal skin had blown off and apparently collided with the tail. "I'll never forget it," she recalls with a shudder. "A panel had flown off and you could see the honeycomb interior of the wing." Still an hour from the Gambian capital of Banjul, the damaged plane began to shake. Ragsdale tried to remain calm, but she couldn't help feeling both scared and stupid. Why, she asked herself, did she ever agree to work for Baba Sissoko?

A flight attendant for nineteen years, thirteen of them with Braniff, Ragsdale had spent most of the last six years working for private companies aboard their corporate jets. She spent one NBA season ferrying the Utah Jazz from city to city. Other employers included Chase Manhattan Bank, Planet Hollywood, and Rolling Stone magazine. She even worked several weeks aboard the Gulfstream that shuttled former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and motivational guru Tony Robbins around the country for a series of speaking engagements.

This past April she received a call at her New Jersey home from a man who identified himself as a captain for Air Dabia. She had never heard of the airline, but the caller, Mamadou Jaye, told Ragsdale that she had come highly recommended and that he was in desperate need of a senior flight attendant for a five-week assignment carrying Muslims on a religious pilgrimage from Africa to Saudi Arabia. The plane would be departing from Miami for Africa the very next day. Jaye offered her $4700 plus expenses. The money was adequate, Ragsdale acknowledged, but she had another incentive. Her brother was in the U.S. Air Force, stationed in Saudi Arabia. "I thought it would be a great chance to see him," she recalls, "so I said yes."

She quickly packed, flew into Miami that night, managed a few hours of sleep, and was back at the airport the next day. Right away she knew she'd gotten involved with an odd enterprise. Upon arriving, she watched as Air Dabia employees loaded the jumbo jet's passenger compartment with boxes and containers: "Picture a 747 filled -- and I mean filled -- from the coach section back with cartons of china, linen, clothes, household items."

According to Ragsdale, her agreement with Mamadou Jaye called for her to be paid after she had seated the twenty passengers (including one of Sissoko's wives), the doors of the plane had been secured, and the crew had prepared for takeoff. But there was no money for her.

Jaye promised to pay after they landed in Gambia, but Ragsdale became suspicious and began snooping around the plane. She soon realized there were no fire extinguishers onboard -- and no life rafts or oxygen tanks. "The entire aircraft was stripped," she says. "When I asked about the condition of the plane, Mamadou Jaye just kept telling me that there was no FAA in Africa."

By the time the airliner touched down in Banjul, Ragsdale had decided to quit. "We were told they were going to fix the wing using speed tape and that we would be going to Zaire the next morning," she recalls. "There was no way I was ever getting onboard that aircraft again." (She later learned the plane had once been owned by United Airlines and that in 1989 its cargo door blew off over Hawaii, killing nine passengers.)

When she made her complaints known to Jaye and told him she was resigning, he grew incensed. Ragsdale says he called her a bitch and threatened to have her arrested: "He said that if I opened my mouth again I was going to jail.

"I cried all that night," she continues. "I was so sad and scared, I didn't know what was going to happen." Two Air Dabia pilots, both Americans who had been among the passengers from Miami to Gambia, had come to her aid as she argued with Jaye. The pilots, Richard Downs and Dan Polchinski, said they too were ready to desert Air Dabia, so the three of them decided to leave Gambia together.

The next day Air Dabia officials promised to provide them with tickets out of the country, but never issued them. The other airlines operating out of Banjul, such as Air Afrique, would not accept their credit cards. Neither Ragsdale nor the pilots had been paid, and none had sufficient cash for tickets. They were stranded.

Today Ragsdale suspects that the airline officials were hoping the trio would change their minds and return to work. At one point she was given the opportunity to speak by telephone (and through an interpreter) with Sissoko in Miami. He told her to relax and enjoy the free stay at her Banjul hotel; she and Downs and Polchinski would be paid the next day. The money, he added, would be wired from one of his Miami bank accounts. "It never came," she says. "He just kept us there. He knew we couldn't get out, that we were trapped."

Ragsdale complained to the American Embassy in Banjul, but what she heard in response only made her more upset. Complaints such as hers, she learned, were hardly unique: "An embassy official told me that Sissoko hires Americans all the time, rotates them through Africa, but never pays them and leaves them to find their own way home."

After a week Polchinski's wife, from her home in Orlando, arranged for three tickets to Brussels to be waiting for them at the Banjul airport. An embassy staffer escorted them there to ensure their prompt departure.

A U.S. Department of State official confirms Ragsdale's story and acknowledges it was not an isolated event. "On several occasions American citizen employees of Air Dabia have approached the embassy for assistance in situations in which they believed they had been threatened by airline management," according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "On those occasions we have taken the steps necessary to assist and protect them." One of those incidents, the official says, involved another female flight attendant, who claimed that Sissoko himself made several unwelcome advances and repeatedly told her she was going to become one of his wives. She managed to leave Gambia, the official recounts, though she was badly frightened.

Numerous other Americans have complained about not being paid by Air Dabia, according to the official, but in those cases there is little the state department can do. Among those people is Thomas "T.K." Sanders, one of Sissoko's personal pilots responsible for flying the millionaire's private jet. "I don't have anything against the man," Sanders says during a telephone interview from France. "He just doesn't pay his bills. He owes so many people so much money it's just ridiculous. He owes me $60,000. I haven't been paid in more than four months."

Three months ago Sanders and another of Sissoko's pilots were sent to Dinard, in northwestern France, to receive training on a new private jet Sissoko had recently purchased. But two weeks into their program, Sanders says, the classes were suspended because Sissoko had failed to make the necessary payments. "We've been here for 75 days waiting for him to pay the company the money so we can finish our training and get out," Sanders says, frustration rising in his voice. "We're stuck here without any money. He's got us in a hotel but we've got no way to get home. He keeps saying he's going to send some money over, but he never does."

Sanders and others complain that Sissoko had a weird way of conducting business. "If you work for free for him, you're great," notes an Air Dabia employee who asked that his name not be used because he is still hoping to be paid by Sissoko. "But when you try to get paid, then you are seen as a problem. He likes you to come to him like a servant and say, 'Baba, I need to be paid. Please, Baba, I need money.' He wants to humiliate you in front of people. He wants to feel like a prophet or a god."

According to Sanders and two Air Dabia sources who asked not to be identified, one flight crew became so disgusted with Sissoko's refusal to pay them that earlier this year they abandoned their Boeing 727 in London and slipped away with more than $100,000 in cash Sissoko had provided for aircraft repairs and fuel. "I'm not saying what they did was right," says one Air Dabia employee, "but I understood their frustration."

Sanders has been working for Sissoko since January 1996. A lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves, the 43-year-old California resident had been stationed in Italy as an air-traffic controller monitoring military flights over Bosnia. His tour of duty was nearing its end when he heard about a West African millionaire who was creating an airline and looking for pilots. Sanders flew to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, to meet him. "When you meet this guy, it is incredible," he recalls. "You walk into the room and everyone is treating him like a god."

The working arrangement, Sanders says, was fairly straightforward: $5000 per month plus medical benefits and airfare back to the United States several times per year. Sanders says he was drawn to the endeavor by a sense of adventure: "We were going to start a new airline. How often does a person get to do that?"

When reports of Sissoko's legendary expenditures in Miami filtered across the Atlantic, some of his overseas employees reportedly grew angry. "How would you feel if you heard about him spending all of this money on cars and marching bands while you haven't been paid in months?" Sanders asks from his hotel room in France. "You'd probably be a little pissed, wouldn't you?"

In May of last year, Jim Wilbert was sitting in the Banjul airport when a group of soldiers approached him. He had been waiting for a plane to take him to neighboring Senegal, where he could catch a flight home to the United States. A pilot and an executive with a Tennessee company that sells used airplanes, Wilbert had been in Gambia for several weeks overseeing the delivery of two Boeing 727s purchased by the owner of Air Dabia, Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko. The fledgling airline tycoon had begun complaining about the terms of the sale, so Wilbert, hoping to avoid a confrontation, decided it was time to leave.

"As I was waiting," he recalls, "a group of soldiers approached me. One of the men, who was not wearing a uniform, asked me if I was Captain Wilbert, and when I said yes they took me away to a private room in the airport." Wilbert's U.S. passport and other identification were seized, as was his plane ticket to Senegal. "The man said he was a government security officer and he told me that Sissoko did not want me to leave the country."

Wilbert says he protested his detention and asked to see someone from the American Embassy but the request was denied. He was then taken to an oceanfront resort and casino called Amie's Beach, owned by Sissoko. "I was given a room and was placed under guard," he reports. "Later Sissoko came in. He was very angry and was yelling at me that I shouldn't have tried to leave. He then instructed the guards that I wasn't allowed to leave the hotel."

For the next 22 days, Wilbert asserts, he was held against his will while Sissoko renegotiated the price of the airplanes with Wilbert's bosses. "I was held for economic gain by Mr. Sissoko," he says flatly. "I was a tool. Sissoko made it clear he would not allow me to leave the country until the price of the planes was lowered." In order to secure Wilbert's release, his employer, C&S Acquisitions, dropped the sale price by $315,000, according to Wilbert's attorney Brad W. Hornsby. Jokes Wilbert: "I didn't know my body was worth that much."

A lawsuit filed by Wilbert against Sissoko this past June is scheduled for trial in Tennessee early next year. To defend himself in court, Sissoko made sure he hired clout -- the law firm of former United States senator Howard Baker. One of Sissoko's Miami attorneys, Thomas Spencer, Jr., is assisting in the case and denies that Sissoko held Wilbert hostage. "This whole scenario is trumped up," Spencer contends. "He was not a prisoner." Spencer does acknowledge that Sissoko complained to Gambian authorities that he believed he had been cheated in a business deal, and that as a result Wilbert's passport and airline ticket had been seized while officials reviewed the matter. According to Spencer, the incident was nothing more than a simple business dispute that was finally resolved.

Hornsby, on the other hand, argues that Sissoko used the Gambian military as if it were his own private police force. "If you have a complaint, you file a lawsuit and you take it to court," he says. "You don't take people hostage. We are a law-abiding society. Mr. Sissoko put himself above the courts."

The criminal case that brought Sissoko to Miami began in late July 1996 with the bumbling misadventures of a pair of Sissoko's employees named Serge Comminges and Moumouni Dieguimde, who had been sent to Miami from New York to buy helicopters. "It was wacky, weird shit," recalls Jim Robinson, whose Opa-locka firm, South Florida Aviation Investments, sold Comminges and Dieguimde (pronounced ko-ming-ess and dah-goom-day) two Vietnam War-era Bell helicopters for $270,000. "They were in an incredible hurry and they wanted the helicopters shipped to Gambia right away. I told them I didn't handle the shipping. They'd have to talk to someone else." For the next several days, Robinson says, he watched with amusement as the pair raced from one shipping company to another trying to find someone who would transport the helicopters to Africa immediately.

Opa-locka is a small airport, so it's not surprising that Comminges's and Dieguimde's frenetic activity quickly caught the attention of U.S. Customs officials, who began monitoring their movements. "The problem was that they were also being smart-mouths and calling attention to themselves," Robinson adds. "In addition to acting strange, they were making jokes about how they were going to overthrow various governments in Africa and shit like that."

The helicopters the two purchased required a special export license from the U.S. Department of State before they could be shipped out of the country. The license was necessary because the aircraft, though converted from military to civilian use, could easily be refitted as gunships.

Comminges and Dieguimde were told they needed the export license before the helicopters could be shipped, but they refused to wait. (The reason for the rush has been variously attributed to urgent humanitarian needs and political opportunism.) Without realizing that customs agents were watching their every move, Comminges and Dieguimde transferred the helicopters to Miami International Airport and had them loaded onto a cargo plane. Just before midnight on August 16, as the plane sat on the tarmac preparing for takeoff, customs agents swooped in and seized the helicopters.

Still more puzzled than anything else, customs officials did not arrest either Comminges or Dieguimde. According to sources familiar with the investigation, the agents had no intention of bringing criminal charges against the men, preferring instead to handle the matter administratively, such as imposing a fine for not obtaining the licenses. That strategy would soon take a dramatic turn.

The night the helicopters were seized, Dieguimde was introduced to the customs officer in charge of the case, Special Agent Jeffrey Outlaw. The next day Dieguimde began leaving telephone messages for Outlaw. When he finally spoke to the agent (a call customs officials secretly tape-recorded), Dieguimde began bragging about how he worked for a very rich and powerful man who had connections to the White House and friends in the U.S. Senate.

Dieguimde told Outlaw that his boss, Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko, would reward him if he could find a way to release the helicopters. He even offered to fly the agent to Sissoko's oceanfront hotel and casino in Gambia, where he would stay as Sissoko's guest. "What I am trying to tell you," Dieguimde explained, "is he will be very grateful toward you."

Within a matter of days, Comminges, Dieguimde, and another Sissoko employee, Miriama Darboe, agreed to pay Outlaw $30,000 if he would quickly release the helicopters. On August 23, in the parking lot of the Miami Airport Hilton hotel, Comminges and Dieguimde handed him $5000 in cash as a down payment.

Like his astonishing largess, Sissoko's personal history has become the stuff of legend. Reportedly he was born 52 years ago in a thatched hut in the tiny Malian village of Dabia, on the edge of the Sahara Desert. He claims to have left Africa as a stowaway on a cargo ship bound for China, where he worked for a man who made him a sideshow attraction, charging people for their first glimpse of a black man. Next stop was India, where he supposedly lived with a holy man near Bombay before returning to Africa as a house servant. He may or may not have sold soup in a train station.

So how did Sissoko make his millions? The New York Times reported that he began his entrepreneurial career in India as a textile trader. His Miami attorneys distributed a biography in which he became wealthy when oil was discovered on land he owned. But Sissoko tripped up that claim by later telling an Associated Press reporter that he has never owned a piece of land that contained oil; rather, he was an oil middleman.

Last year, according to the Miami Herald, he told a French-language magazine that he made his fortune in Gabon -- largely in the wood trade. And earlier this year the Herald reported what it described as "prevalent rumors" that Sissoko's fortune was the result of his having looted archaeological treasures from Mali.

The most fanciful account, promoted by Sissoko himself, has him striking it rich while laboring in the diamond mines of Liberia. Five days a week the miners worked for the company, which provided them a modest salary and room and board, Sissoko recounted in an interview with reporters several months ago. One day a week, however, the miners were allowed to sift through dirt discarded from the mine and keep any diamonds they might come across. According to Sissoko, it took him just six months to collect thirteen stones worth nine million dollars. In fact, he told the Associated Press, he has such a knack for finding diamonds that once, while working as a servant in Senegal, he stumbled across a single diamond worth $4.5 million.

Many people question Sissoko's claims of found wealth. Recent published reports, for instance, cast doubt on the Liberian diamond story. Typically, diamonds from that area are industrial quality and do not command such high prices.

Liberia, however, is considered an agreeable locale for another type of business: arms trafficking. Speculation that Sissoko may be involved in the international arms trade got a boost earlier this year when he was spotted at a Miami hotel meeting with the infamous Sarkis Soghanalian, who went to federal prison for trying to sell 103 U.S. combat helicopters to Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 1983. A Sissoko aide downplayed the meeting, claiming that the two men have mutual friends and that Sissoko wasn't even aware of Soghanalian's history as an arms trafficker.

The newest information regarding the source of Sissoko's money comes from Ewa Adamek, the former entourage member who acted as an interpreter. Adamek says Sissoko often bragged of his close ties to Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. "Baba is a personal friend of Gadhafi," she asserts. "He said if he ever needed money all he needed to do was make one telephone call to Gadhafi."


Officials at the state department and the justice department say they have no idea how Sissoko comes by his wealth. "He's got all sorts of money and nobody knows how it was made," says one senior government source. "There is no trail here -- nothing." (Through his attorneys, Sissoko declined to speak directly to New Times for this article.)

Today Sissoko controls an array of business ventures in the United States, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, including interests in several hotels and casinos. But his most recent entrepreneurial dream seems to have been establishing an airline -- named for his hometown and providing nonstop service between Gambia and New York. In the past few years Sissoko has spent tens of millions of dollars buying planes and courting American officials he believed could help him.

One person who might have been able to provide him access to government officials was John Catsimatidis, CEO of the New York firm Red Apple Companies, which sold Sissoko a pair of jetliners for three million dollars. Catsimatidis is also a major Democratic Party fundraiser, and he told the New York Times he had hopes that Sissoko would help enrich party coffers. Two months before last year's presidential election, Sissoko was invited to attend a dinner party with President Clinton in Washington.

Sissoko accepted, but events conspired to thwart his opportunity for an evening with the president. Just days before the September 6 dinner, he was arrested by Interpol in Geneva, Switzerland.

He may have missed a night of schmoozing with the most powerful man in America, but Sissoko wasted no time making the acquaintance of certain members of South Florida's power elite. Among his local attorneys have been Ted Klein, whose 1995 nomination to the federal bench by Clinton was scuttled amid partisan wrangling; Thomas Spencer, Jr., whose client list includes former Iran-contra figure Gen. Richard Secord, and who successfully argued in federal court that the 1994 Hialeah mayor's race should be set aside because of allegations of vote fraud; and H.T. Smith, one of South Florida's most prominent and influential black attorneys and former president of the National Bar Association. Additional attorneys -- no one seems to know precisely how many -- were retained here, in New York, and in Los Angeles.

To work the corridors of Washington, Sissoko hired former Indiana senator Birch Bayh, who lost his seat to Dan Quayle in 1980. Sissoko also retained a separate team of lawyers to represent Serge Comminges, Moumouni Dieguimde, and Miriama Darboe.


After sitting in a Swiss jail for two months, Sissoko decided not to fight his extradition, and in late October he was flown to Miami to be charged in federal court with bribery and violation of federal export regulations. His bail was set at $20 million, the highest bond ever required of a defendant in the Southern District of Florida. He posted it within hours.

Had the matter gone to trial, the government's case would have succeeded or failed on the strength of a series of secretly recorded telephone conversations in which Sissoko, using Darboe as a interpreter, spoke with Outlaw regarding delivery of the two Bell helicopters. In all likelihood, those taped conversations would have raised serious doubts about the charges against him.

Transcripts of the recordings reveal that Sissoko himself never offered the agent money in exchange for release of the aircraft. In fact, on numerous occasions Sissoko told Special Agent Outlaw he did not want to engage in any illegal activity because of his desire to maintain good relations with the United States. "If it is illegal," he said during one conversation, "I do not want to accept.... It will be bad against me." The transcripts also show that Outlaw pushed and prodded Sissoko to authorize payment of the bribe.

In retrospect, government officials concede, the criminal case against Sissoko could have been managed better by both the U.S. Attorney's Office and customs, particularly regarding the supervision of conversations between Outlaw and Sissoko. Normally a case involving allegations of bribery would be managed by prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney's public corruption unit. But at the time the Sissoko case was developing, attorneys from that unit were scrambling to obtain indictments in the Operation Greenpalm probe of corruption at Miami City Hall, as well as investigating a group of rogue police officers in Broward. In fact, the Sissoko matter was such a low priority that it was initially assigned to Stephen Binhak, a 31-year-old prosecutor with only a couple of years of experience.

Defense attorneys believed Sissoko had been entrapped and that the tapes would have clearly revealed that. In their view, Comminges and Dieguimde were acting on their own when they offered a bribe to Outlaw. After learning of the scheme, Sissoko may have agreed to allow the bribe to be paid, but only because he felt he had no choice. According to the defense attorneys, Sissoko concluded he was being extorted by the customs agent and was afraid that if he didn't pay the money, he would never get the helicopters. In addition, the attorneys were prepared to make a cultural argument, the outlines of which were provided by H.T. Smith in an essay he wrote for the Miami Herald. From his client's standpoint, Smith argued, paying bureaucrats was not unusual. "In Sissoko's culture, not only is it legal, it is expected of a rich African chief," Smith wrote. "In 1988 Congress recognized these cultural differences at the behest of American businessmen. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was amended to permit businessmen to 'tip' foreign government officials for otherwise legal ministerial duties."

The defense attorneys say they knew they had a good chance of winning an acquittal -- if they could just agree on a strategy. "When you get that many lawyers on a case, you've got colonels and generals running off in their own directions with no leadership," Ted Klein admits.

But rather than concentrating on the merits of their defense, several of Sissoko's attorneys mounted personal attacks on prosecutor Stephen Binhak and customs agent Outlaw. In a motion to dismiss the charges against Sissoko and his co-defendants, for example, the attorneys pointedly accused Binhak and Outlaw of conspiring to frame Sissoko. That combative tone was carried over into the meetings between the defense attorneys and Binhak's superiors, both in Miami and Washington. "I guess it got personal," Klein acknowledges, "and that was unfortunate."

Late last year, as attacks on Binhak's character continued, justice department officials decided to assign an additional prosecutor to the case -- Richard Scruggs, a senior official with twenty years' experience. "I think it was disgraceful," Scruggs says, "how these senior and experienced defense attorneys tried to pick on a young and bright assistant United States attorney to attempt to dismiss this case and destroy his reputation." Scruggs himself would not be immune from attack, however. In what appeared to be a well-orchestrated campaign on Miami's black radio stations, both Scruggs and Binhak were accused of being racist for their determined efforts to prosecute Sissoko.

Simultaneously another campaign was under way in Washington, D.C., where former senator Birch Bayh was feverishly working the halls of Congress. Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Maryland), Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts), Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), Rep. William Jefferson (D-Louisiana), as well as black members of Florida's congressional delegation -- Carrie Meek, Alcee Hastings, and Corrine Brown -- all lobbied the justice department on Sissoko's behalf. Corrine Brown was particularly forceful in promoting her view that Sissoko should not be required to serve his prison sentence and should instead be allowed to leave the country. "I see no good that can come of having Mr. Sissoko spend 41 days [sic] in a federal penitentiary," Brown wrote Attorney General Janet Reno on June 17. That was the second letter the Jacksonville Democrat had sent to Reno in a week, and it came just three days after she had spoken to Reno by telephone regarding Sissoko.

Bayh himself had several meetings with senior justice department officials, including Robert Litt, whom President Clinton had just nominated as assistant attorney general in charge of the entire criminal division; and Paul Fishman, an associate attorney general who worked for Reno's second in command, Jamie Gorelick. "In those meetings," says one knowledgeable source, "Bayh just completely trashed Binhak as someone who was evil and out of control."

In another endeavor, a congressional staff member directly called the prosecutors to question why Sissoko was being prosecuted -- a staggering breach of propriety. Neither Scruggs nor Binhak will comment on the actions of individual members of Congress, but both stress that the efforts of Bayh and others to influence the outcome of the case failed.

Speaking with unusual candor, Assistant U.S. Attorney Scruggs expresses amazement at the intensity of maneuvering on Sissoko's behalf: "Several months ago I said that in my twenty years as a prosecutor, I have never seen such a blatant attempt to exercise political pressure. And since then it has only increased. I have never experienced such direct demands from community leaders and from members of Congress through the attorney general's office to try and get me to dismiss a case."

Birch Bayh did not return telephone calls seeking comment for this article. His colleagues on Sissoko's defense team, though, eventually took pains to distance themselves from his actions. "It was coming only from Bayh's office," says Thomas Spencer, who described the lobbying strategy as "unorthodox" and "a mistake."

"I would not engage in such conduct," adds Ted Klein. "I have never seen where those kinds of things were ever effective." Klein's disdain for Bayh grew over the past year to the point that, in meetings with other attorneys, he began referring to the former senator as "Birch Barf." "I'm not going to deny that I said that," an embarrassed Klein concedes today. "It was an intemperate remark on my part and I am not proud of having said that."


In January Sissoko pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of authorizing an illegal gratuity. The plea bargain marked the only successful compromise between prosecutors and defense attorneys, for whom relations were so strained that simple discourse became nearly impossible.

At the sentencing in March, the courtroom was packed with Sissoko supporters, including ambassadors from four African nations who were there to offer testimonials. But U.S. District Court Judge K. Michael Moore cut short the gathering and quickly sentenced Sissoko to four months in jail -- the minimum possible. With credit for the time he served in Switzerland awaiting extradition, he owes a mere 43 days of jail time. Moore also sentenced him to four months of house arrest and hit him with a $250,000 fine. (Prosecutors had asked for a prison term of fourteen months.)

So why did nearly six months pass between Sissoko's sentencing and his surrender to jailers this past week? "It beats the hell out of me," Ted Klein says. "If I had my way, I would have walked him over to the jail right then, knocked on the door, and let him start serving his 43 days. But I'm not in control. This is just another product of the many people he has around him."

According to Thomas Spencer, even the appeal on the grounds that Sissoko was protected by diplomatic immunity wasn't the defendant's idea. That appeal was filed by attorneys representing Gambia, who claimed that Sissoko, at the time of his arrest, was traveling under a diplomatic passport. "He has to let them play it all out," says Spencer, "because otherwise he wouldn't get the respect of the people who are trying to help him -- the president of Mali, the president of Senegal, the president of Togo, the president of Gambia."

Today Sissoko's principal criminal defense attorney is Mark Schnapp, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice at Greenberg Traurig, one of South Florida's most influential law firms. Schnapp was recently hired to determine if prosecutors might be willing to look at the case again and recommend that Sissoko be deported rather than imprisoned. Spencer and Klein say Schnapp was brought in because of the poisoned relationship between prosecutors and defense attorneys. But even with Schnapp leading the way, a new compromise proved to be impossible.

Sissoko did not leave his fate completely in the hands of attorneys, however. According to former entourage member Ewa Adamek, the millionaire arranged for evil spells to be cast over Binhak, Scruggs, and Judge Moore. Adamek says she was asked by one of Sissoko's aides to carefully spell their names over the phone for a woman in Africa, who then delivered the names to a remote village in Mali, where a prayer service was held. "They prayed that the power of the judge and the prosecutor would be destroyed," she recounts.

That wasn't all. A special mixture of powders and a bottle of violet-colored water were brought to Miami by a courier. Some of the powders were secretly spread around the downtown federal courthouse prior to hearings, Adamek says. Sissoko poured the rest in the bay waters around Brickell Key, along with milk and salt. "He would watch the way the water carried the milk for a sign of what to do," she recalls. As for the violet-colored water, Sissoko was instructed to wash behind his ears with it twice a day to stave off any threats from those trying to imprison him. "In their minds, this was the most powerful thing they could do to the prosecutors and the judge," Adamek explains. "And they were shocked when it didn't work."

It wasn't long before Adamek was in for her own shocking surprises. After initially being swept away with Sissoko's lifestyle and prodigious spending, she increasingly saw its negative side. Sissoko, she came to realize, loved the attention his money inspired -- from the sycophants who hung on his every word to the women eager for a life of leisure. "There is always something going on sexually with Baba," Adamek reports. "This is accepted, this is the power of men. Baba always says woman is nothing, woman is a pleasure."

Sissoko has been fond of noting that he has four wives (as permitted by his Muslim faith) and that there are no other women in his life, an image bolstered by the Miami Herald's report that Sissoko refused a massage from a female masseuse because, as he put it, he can be touched only by his wives. (He gave the woman a $10,000 tip anyway.) Adamek says she was present when that incident occurred and that the only reason Sissoko did not accept the massage was that one of his wives walked into the room.

In court papers she later prepared, Adamek also claims that Sissoko kept numerous mistresses. "Baba knows exactly how to do this so that his wives won't know what is going on," she says, adding that he maintained them in separate apartments on Brickell Key and in hotel suites around the city. One of Sissoko's favorite places to meet women, according to Adamek, was the Brickell Avenue branch of Barnett Bank, where he has an account. Female bank employees were often invited to his condominium for parties, she says, and they almost never refused. It was the same pattern in New York, where he actually married a Citibank teller.

Adamek was able to overlook Sissoko's conduct until it affected her own relationship with her boyfriend Rene Dubois. Tempted by the sudden availability of younger women, Dubois, she says, began having his own affairs. According to Adamek, he was not as discreet (or apparently as experienced) as Sissoko.

She and Dubois began arguing regularly; Adamek says she even complained to Sissoko. "He told me he would take me to Africa and make me rich, make me the manager of one of his hotels," she recalls. But first she had to learn her place and ignore Dubois's dalliances. "He said, 'Close your eyes. Close your eyes.' But I couldn't."

She had seen for herself how Sissoko's affairs had hurt his wives, and she vowed that she would not allow herself to end up in a similar situation. That vow prompted her to action this past April. She had received a phone call in her room at the Occidental Plaza Hotel from a woman asking to speak with Dubois. The woman identified herself as his girlfriend.

Adamek was furious.
After she hung up, she went looking for Dubois, whom she found in the hotel lobby. "I said to him, 'Your lady just called you!'" she remembers. The two began an argument that allegedly culminated in Dubois slapping her across the face.

Embarrassed, she started back to her room, but Dubois followed and, Adamek says, punched and kicked her in the back and arm. A hotel security guard witnessed the commotion and called police. When an officer arrived at the hotel a few minutes later, Adamek was in tears. Dubois was arrested for assault and taken to jail. Sissoko covered his bail.

Dubois's arrest was viewed as a betrayal, and Adamek was immediately cut off from Sissoko and the rest of the entourage. "Nobody would talk to me," she says. "I called Baba many times but he would not speak to me." She found herself alone and frightened, with no one to turn to in Miami.

Several days later attorney Kevin Spencer, son of Thomas Spencer, visited her and said he was representing Dubois. Adamek claims Spencer told her that if she didn't recant the account she provided police, Dubois would be sent to prison for two years. "I didn't want him to go to jail," she says. "I was really in love." So she penned a note asking the judge to dismiss the case against Dubois. "I'm completely alone, locked in my room," she wrote. "I don't eat, sleep -- I'm in such depression that I lost the will of living. For eight years this man is my love, life, and my everything." (Kevin Spencer acknowledges meeting with Adamek; he denies pressuring her to write the letter to the judge. "That's absurd," he says.)

Even though the charges against Dubois were dropped, Adamek remained an outcast from Sissoko's world. Then in May the Occidental manager received a letter from Spencer notifying him that all future bills for Adamek's hotel room would be her responsibility; Sissoko would no longer cover the charges. "They knew I didn't have any money, that I don't even have a bank account in my name," she says. "They left me with nothing."

Adamek is now suing Dubois, alleging that she is owed compensation for the eight years she lived with and supported him. Also named as a defendant in the lawsuit is Sissoko, whose broken promises, she claims, have damaged her. Thomas Spencer calls the complaint ridiculous. "She was never an employee of Mr. Sissoko," he argues. "She had no employment status whatsoever and so she is owed nothing. This is a case of a spurned lover." Spencer also says that Dubois denies ever striking Adamek. (Dubois did not respond to a request for an interview, conveyed through his attorney.) As for Adamek's claim that Sissoko is a womanizer, which she included in her lawsuit, it too is false. "He is extremely respectful of all women," Spencer insists.

Adds the younger Spencer: "In my opinion, she's only after money. She doesn't remember all the expensive jewelry she was given by Mr. Sissoko. She thinks she is entitled to millions and millions of dollars. She was just the girlfriend of Rene Dubois."

In August Adamek moved to Connecticut, where she has enrolled in a computer class with the hope of finding a job before too long. Time and distance have allowed her some perspective on her experiences with Sissoko. "I don't regret that I met these people," she says. "It was one of the most exciting times of my life. But I understand Baba better now. At first I thought he was like a god, but he is not. Now I see that this is a regular person who just knows how to operate people, work on their greed, and keep control of his power. He trusts too much in his mystique. When I realized this, I lost respect for him. I could have stayed like the others if I had been willing to play the game, but I couldn't. And I have a little bit more respect for myself now."

Others whose lives have been touched by Foutanga Dit Babani Sissoko are less conciliatory. Sally Ragsdale has hired an attorney and is considering a lawsuit to collect the money she says she is owed. Four weeks ago Jim Wilbert flew to Miami from Tennessee to meet with Sissoko in an unsuccessful effort to negotiate a settlement. His lawsuit is proceeding. "This is going to be fun when it goes to court," Wilbert says. T.K. Sanders, the pilot stranded in France, was fired last week after Sissoko learned he had cooperated in the preparation of this article. "They wanted to know how I could possibly say anything bad about Mr. Sissoko," Sanders laughs. "Shit, he has no one to blame for that but himself.


Opa-locka, again :sun:
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Re: Foutanga Babani Sissoko, the playboy who got away with $

Postby cptmarginal » Sat Feb 24, 2018 5:59 am

Regarding Dubai Islamic Bank: it was essentially created by Agha Hasan Abedi... (Also, as an aside: "As a consequence of its willingness to do things that most westerns banks were not, BCCI soon became the largest foreign bank operating in Africa.")

https://fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/03hist.htm

Abedi needed five things to create BCCI. First, a bank secrecy and confidentiality haven, which he found first in Luxembourg, and then in Grand Caymans. Second, a source of capital, $2.5 million, which Abedi ultimately obtained from Bank of America, supplemented by another $500,000 from Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi. Third, a source of initial assets, $100 million, of which at least half were provided as deposits by Sheikh Zayed. Fourth, a group of like-minded Pakistanis to operate the bank. These were now widely available as a result of Bhutto's nationalization of their banks. Lastly, credibility in the international community, through a relationship with an established Western financial institution which would provide prestige to BCCI, but not interfere with its unique approach to banking. This too was provided by Bank of America during BCCI's formative years.(14)

The most critical of these five elements was the relationship between BCCI and Abu Dhabi.

Abedi and Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi

Abu Dhabi is the largest and wealthiest member of the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich federation of sheikhdoms with a combined population of under 1.5 million, bordering on Saudi Arabia and Oman, with one of the world's highest standards of living as a result of oil wealth. Like all of the Gulf sheikdoms, Abu Dhabi is unusual among modern states in that its ruler, and the ruling family, owns all the land and natural resources of the country in fee simple absolute, with no distinctions being made among the wealth of the ruler, his family, and the nation itself. As lawyers for Abu Dhabi have described it:

By tradition and historical background of the Trucial States, the ruler of an Emirate owns all of the land of his State. However, he allots land to his subjects individually for their use. Similarly, all the natural resources of the States are also regarded as the personal property of the ruler and his heirs who enjoy complete authority to utilize them as they consdier fit.(15)

As early as 1967 Abedi's high net worth customers included the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and his family. The illiterate Sheikh, a formerly impoverished desert Bedouin, was the recently installed head of a newly wealthy oil state who owed his power to a British coup against his brother in 1966. The brother had been deposed for having been unwilling to spend Abu Dhabi oil revenues for any purpose, including easing conditions for members of the British foreign service posted there.

After installing Sheikh Zayed, British officialdom had failed to pay attention to his desire to be taken seriously as an important world political leader. By contrast, Abedi viewed Sheikh Zayed to be a potentially important resource. By one account, the relationship began when Abedi made the decision to fly to Abu Dhabi in 1966 to solicit the right of the United Bank to take deposits from the thousands of Pakistani workers assisting in its modernization. Travelling with one assistant and bringing an oriental rug as a gesture of goodwill, Abedi secured Sheikh Zayed's permission for the United Bank to open a branch in Abu Dhabi.(16) By a second account, Abedi beat out the Habib Bank for taking care of arrangements for Sheikh Zayed's first bustard hunting and falconry vacation in Pakistan, personally waiting patiently outside the Pakistani government guest house while the Sheikh napped, and securing the right to handle the Sheikh's logistics when he awoke.(17)

By 1967, what had begun with Abedi handling the Sheikh's falconry and bustard-hunting trips in Pakistan, and the finances of Pakistani workers in Abu Dhabi, wound up with Abedi running the Sheikh's financial life. As far as Pakistani bankers observing the relationship were concerned, Abedi coordinated everything for Sheikh Zayed, from the building of the Sheikh's palaces in Pakistan, the furnishing of his villas in Morocco and Spain, his medical appointments, to the digging of wells for his homes in the desert.(18) As BCCI officer Abdur Sakhia put it,

Digging a well or two was a minor cost of doing business. Abedi's philosophy was to appeal to every sector. If you were religious people he would help you pray.(19)

From the point of view of BCCI, Sheikh Zayed and his family were ill-equipped to handle the demands of the modern world, and in the early days, dependent on Abedi and Abedi's bank for their every need. Even in the late 1970's, Sheikh Zayed, whose personal tastes were quite simple, would on trips abroad routinely write checks for $100,000 or $200,000 at a time for members of his retinue to spend as they liked, written on the back of a matchbook or a piece of toilet paper. This practice continued until BCCI officers provided the Sheikh with a gold checkbook and insisted that drafts be written on it.(20) As Akbar Bilgrami described his experiences with Zayed:

He would pray or listen to the news. He had a court jester-type person who made him laugh and told him poetry. He was a simple man, simple but shrewd. On a trip to spain which lasted two weeks, his retinue spent $20 million, but he only spend $400 on himself the entire trip for two dogs whose price he negotiated down from $1,000.

He was a simple man who did not spend a lot of money on himself. It is part of Arab culture. The Sheikh is a sort of farther figure. It is hard for him to say no to people, especially because he knows that everybody knows that he has the money. He would carry about a briefcase filled with expensive watches, Cartiers, Rolexes.(21)

Among BCCI officers it was believed that the United Arab Emirates itself owed its creation to Abedi, who came up with the idea as a means of reducing instability among the gulf emirates and increasing the stature of Sheikh Zayed.(22) As Sakhia recalled:

Abedi created the UAE. He planted the idea of the UAE as a federation to Sheikh Zayed. These people had no standing anywhere in the world. They were smugglers and tribesmen. When Sheik Zayed would come for months in Pakistan, not even a policeman would give him any attention. Yet two months after meeting Abedi, Sheikh Zayed finally gets a state visit to Islamabad and meets the President of Pakistan which then became the first country to give him any status. The first embassy of UAE was opened in Pakistan and the second in London, and both were staffed by Abedi's appointments.(23)


Much more on Abedi and Zayed: https://fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/b ... udhabi.htm

-

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/08/06 ... 681451200/

Islamic banks helped BCCI

Aug. 6, 1991

NEW YORK -- Bank of Credit and Commerce International did not record substantial deposits that Islamic banks made to help the Luxembourg-based bank holding company cover its losses, the Wall Street Journal said Tuesday.

The Journal, quoting from a report the accounting firm of Price Waterhouse completed for the Bank of England, said BCCI held as much as $300 million in unreported funds from Islamic banks at the end of June, a week before the largest banking fraud in history was revealed.

'Altogether BCCI Holdings (Luxembourg) S.A. had as much as $589 million of unrecorded deposits,' the newspaper said, quoting from the Price Waterhouse report released to the bank's creditors last week.

BCCI Holdings is the main business entity in the banking group, 77 percent of which is owned by the ruler of Abu Dhabi and other emirate officials.

Islamic banks, which operate under Moslem laws barring the payment of interests on loans, must invest in areas regarded as 'productive,' such as commodity trading.

'The major part of the unrecorded Islamic banking deposits -- $245 million -- were taken from an entity identified in the report as 'Tumbleweed,' which former BCCI officials identify as Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt, an Islamic banking business based in Egypt,' the Journal said.

According to the Price Waterhouse report, BCCI's use of unrecorded deposits was 'part of the massive fraud at the bank' and helped 'conceal past losses and avoid making provisions for bad loans.' The report also said that to conceal its loan losses, BCCI drew funds 'on bogus loan accounts in the name of prominent Middle Eastern investors.'

The newspaper said 'the Price Waterhouse findings suggest that the depositors in Faisal Islamic Bank, many of them poor Egyptians, are at risk from the seizure of BCCI,' the Journal said.

'Their money, in large part, has been used to help prop up BCCI to the benefit of its Pakistani managers and the Mideast sheiks who own it, ' the Journal said.

The Egyptian government owns 51 percent of Faisal Islamic Bank, formed in 1977, while Saudi Arabian and other Middle Eastern investors own the remaining 49 percent.

'Its relationship with BCCI dates back to the late 1970s,' the Journal said. It described Faisal Islamic Bank as a 'sister institution of Dar al-Maal al-Islami, an international banking institution based in Geneva. Both are headed by Prince Mohammed bin-Faisal al-Saud of the Saudi ruling family.'


https://www.upi.com/Archives/1996/05/19 ... 2478400/ph

BCCI payout, Islamic Bank dividend tied

By THOMAS HUSSAIN | May 19, 1996

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, May 19 -- Share and account holders of Dubai Islamic Bank will be paid inflated dividends for 1996 if the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI, compensation package exceeds 35 percent of money owed, a senior official said Sunday. 'Anything above 35 percent will be transferred to our profit and loss account, which will be reflected in profits paid to shareholders and account holder,' Hussein al-Refai, head of accounts at Dubai Islamic Bank, told United Press International. 'We hope the percentage will not be less than 40 percent,' he said. Al-Refai was speaking in the context of an agreement reached last Tuesday between the Abu Dhabi majority shareholders of the BCCI and its global liquidators, Touche Ross, which cleared the way for an initial payment of $1.55 billion to the bank's 250,000 creditors worldwide. They will, during this summer, receive initial compensation equivalent to 20 percent of the deposits they lost when the bank was closed by international regulators on July 5, 1991, on charges of fraud and mismanagement. A further payment of between 10 and 20 percent will come later from an escrow account of $250 million established by BCCI's Abu Dhabi shareholders, who owned 77.4 of the bank. Abu Dhabi and Dubai are two of the seven emirates which make up the United Arab Emirates. The others are Ajman, Fujairah, Ras al-Khamah, Sharjah and Umm al-Qaiwain. Dubai Islamic Bank, DIB, had 315.91 million dirhams ($86 million) invested in international 'murahabat' with BCCI when it was closed down.

Murahabat is an Islamic banking tool of buying goods at customer request and selling them on deferred terms at cost plus agreed profit. Al-Refai said DIB had calculated 65 percent, or 205.34 million dirhams ($56 million), of its murahabat with BCCI as provisional losses, adjusting these against profits between 1991 and 1994. DIB would make a further loss provision in the event of the compensation package being less than the expected 35 percent, he said. DIB aims to become the world's largest Islamic financial institution, and will increase its share capital through a 30 million dirhams ($8.2 million) bonus share issue to 450 million dirhams ($122.52 million) by the end of 1996, al-Refai said. It has stakes in Bahrain Islamic Bank, Sudan's Faisal Islamic Bank and Kuwait Finance House.


http://visar.csustan.edu/aaba/BCCISandstormRelease.html

The UK government has clearly been engaged in a massive cover-up. and used taxpayers' monies to fight the case and continue with its cover-up. Just look at the names of the individuals and organizations - these include well known domestic and foreign banks from home and abroad, rulers from Middle-East, business advisers and sundry. Some of the people have already been convicted of criminal activity but even 20 years later the UK government was protecting their identity. Even worse, the UK government has been protecting individuals who died long ago. For example, BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi died in 1995 but his name was being concealed. Some individuals have a colourful past and possible links with leading US politicians and Islamist fundamentalists. Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, a billionaire Saudi banker paid $225 million to settle charges of bank fraud in 1993 and died in August 2009, but his name was still being shielded by the UK Treasury.

Some of the names concealed by the UK government include:

Sheikh Khalifa, son of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahayan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi
Sheikh Sultan bin Zayed
Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed
Sheikh AA Ibrahim
Sheik Hamad bin Mohammed al-Sharqi, the Emir of Fujaira
Wabel Pharoan, prominent Saudi businessman and financier
Ghaith Pharaon, one time, the No. 2 Saudi investor in the United States
Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, Saudi businessman and financier and head of the largest commercial bank in Saudi Arabia
Mahfouz Family
Faisal Fulaij, former institution-affiliated party of Credit and Commerce American Holdings, N.V., formerly the parent bank holding company over the First American banking organization.
Prince Turki
The Ruling family of Abu Dhabi gets a few mentions
The Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi is mentioned
A Darwish

Agha Hasan Abedi. BCCI founder
Sheikh Kamal Adham, Director of both BCCI. and First American (also head of Saudi Arabian intelligence)
S.M. Akbar, BCCI Grand Cayman, helped Swaleh Naqvi
Ziauddin Akbar, BCCI Treasury official,
M Azmatullah, BCCI accounts officer for major customer accounts, helped Swaleh Naqvi
Zafar Iqbal, BCCI chief executive, Head of Treasury and General Manager of Grand Cayman to 1986.
Imran Imam, accounts officer for an entiry identified as WXYZ and Dr. Pharaon.
H.M. Kazmi, BCCI officer
Abdul Raouf Khalil, a shareholder in both BCCI. and First American
Swaleh Naqvi, BCCI executive and deputy to Abedi
Ajmand Naqvi, accounts officer for an entiry identified as Tumbleweed, helped Swaleh Naqvi
N Habib-Ullah, helped Swaleh Naqvi
J. Khan, Accounts officer for Adham and Jawhary, left the bank before 1991, received $0.3 million; helped Swaleh Naqvi
D. Rizvi, BCCI executive responsible for relationship with the Virano Group - left BCCI in 1990, helped Swaleh Naqvi
H Sheikh, accounts officer of Gulf Group util 1988; paid $1.7 mllion by Swaleh Naqvi
A. Abbas, General Manager of Baharian until 1990 helped Swaleh Naqvi
Bashir Tahir, General Manager BCC Emirates
Qazar Raza, Joint Executive for Asia/Middle East, formerley General Manager for NBO
A Chaudhary, General Manager Europe
B. Chowdry, General Manager, UK Region
MM Haque, Executive for UK Region
S. Doha, Manager IBU UK Region (later with Al Rahi in London)
T Jamil, General Manager Hong Kong
S. Siddiki, Central Executive
H. Motta, Legal Department, UK Region
Jawahry

Abu Dhabi Investment Authority (ADIA)
Al-Rahji Bankng and Investment Corporation
Robert Altman, US lawyer, acquitted of UAA charges but settled a civil lawsuit with US Feds
Arab Livestock Company ALSCO)
Attock Oil
BCP
Bear Steans
Burford
CAPCOM, brokers used by BCCI Treasury
Brenchase Limited, a subsiairy of Capcom, a company subsequenlty controlled by Z Akbar.
Capital Commodity Dealers (Capcom)
Clark Clifford, US lawyer and Presidential adviser
Dubai Islamic Bank
The Gulf Group
Gulf Investment Real Estate Co.
ATB (a UK bank)
Credit Suisse
Dubai Crescent
FIIL
French American
Gokal Brothers
Habib Bank
Government of Cameroon
Independence Bank Inc
Maram Trading Co.
National Bank of Georgia
National Commercial Bank of Saudi arabia (NCB)
Qatar Islamic Bank
Razat Associates Inc.
Refco
Royal Bank of Scotland, Singapore
Saudi Arabian Fertiliser Company (SAFCO)
Saudi Cairo Bank
Saudi National Commercial Bank (SNCB)
Security Pacific
State Bank of India (SBI)
The Virani Group
Rudolf Wolff

Crescent
Shorafa
Stock


Image

Image

So what I am saying is: don't believe the hype. 242 million dollars because of hypnosis? A solid "maybe." The Florida connection here seems somewhat pertinent, and reminds me of several things.

Image
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Re: Foutanga Babani Sissoko, the playboy who got away with $

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 24, 2018 8:52 am

What an intriguing story. Thanks so much for sharing your research.
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Re: Foutanga Babani Sissoko, the playboy who got away with $

Postby cptmarginal » Tue Feb 27, 2018 10:27 am

No problem; just wanted to supplement and rectify the totally context-free BBC report on this.

I'd say that about half of the time I start digging through the forum looking for information, the search result ends up being a post by either you or seemslikeadream :)
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