Sam Cooper, Global News, 14 January 2021
In October 2014, Canadian intelligence leaders were invited to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s headquarters in Chantilly, Va. The DEA had a theory: the upper echelons of global money laundering, terrorism, drug-trafficking and organized crime all bleed together. And only a handful of men in this murky world of extremely powerful criminals had organizations capable of laundering more than $10 billion annually.
The DEA undercover agents had infiltrated one of them, Pakistani national Altaf Khanani. They learned how Khanani used money mules and currency exchanges across six continents to collect cash for drug cartels in cities such as Toronto and Montreal. And many of Khanani’s transactions helped arm and finance terrorist organizations including Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda.
