False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire

Peter Truell, Larry Gurwin

Houghton Mifflin, 1992 - Bank failures - 522 pages

The deception began with its name, for the Bank of Credit and Commerce International was never truly a bank. BCCI was, from the start, a monstrous fraud: behind a convincing facade, a shadowy group of Pakistani financiers and Arab sheikhs organized a criminal enterprise of unprecedented proportions. Now, in this authoritative book, two award-winning journalists tell the shocking story of how BCCI used an array of schemes to steal billions of dollars and ultimately buy political influence in the United States and around the world. BCCI's charismatic founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, liked to speak about his bank's "moral mission". BCCI would be the first global Third World bank, a financial institution committed to aiding people in developing countries. Instead, Abedi and his allies did exactly the opposite, robbing innocent depositors of their savings, assisting dictators in the looting of their countries' treasuries, and doing a brisk business with terrorists and drug lords. With the help of Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, and other notorious villains, BCCI built an empire that operated in seventy-three countries and controlled $30 billion in deposits. But BCCI also had a political agenda: by secretly taking over the largest banking institution in Washington, D.C., and corrupting a host of powerful politicians, the bank's backers tried to influence U.S. policy in the Middle East. To the men from BCCI, Washington was a city for sale, and here for the first time are full accounts of BCCI's troubling relationships with Clark Clifford, Jimmy Carter, Orrin Hatch, and several members of George Bush's administration and family. The authors also explore the bank's ties to the murky world ofintelligence, and prove that both the CIA and Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency were deeply involved in BCCI - perhaps from the beginning. How did this criminal rampage last for nearly twenty years? Rarely was BCCI hindered by regulators or law enforcement officials; even after the bank was shutdown, investigations by the Federal Reserve and the Justice Department were sluggish at best. The authors explain why, and show that if not for the efforts of a few intrepid investigators BCCI could still be bribing its way through the corridors of power. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin have been on BCCI's trail for over a decade, and their book at last reveals the full scope of this horrific scandal. False Profits is a riveting story, an explosive expose, and a disturbing illustration of the ease with which our country's leaders and political institutions can be corrupted.

Contents

• THE COURTIER AND THE SHEIKH I: 1
• THE NETWORK: 13
• COMING TO AMERICA: 31

Bibliographic information

• Title: False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire
• Authors: Peter Truell, Larry Gurwin
• Contributor: Larry Gurwin
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1992
• ISBN: 0395623391, 9780395623398
• Length: 522 pages