Ken Rijock: Confessions of a Money Launderer
Surely you’ve heard of Frank Abagnale Jr., the real-life inspiration behind the movie, Catch Me if You Can, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Abagnale cashed fraudulent checks for $2.5 million and successfully impersonated an airline pilot, an assistant attorney general, a doctor and a college professor all before the age of 21. Abagnale now heads a consulting firm and according to his website
“He lectures extensively at the FBI Academy and for the field offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. More than 14,000 financial institutions, corporations and law enforcement agencies use his fraud prevention programs. In 1998, he was selected as a distinguished member of “Pinnacle 400″ by CNN Financial News.”
If you’re part of the anti-money laundering (AML), then you’re probably aware of Ken Rijock and his similarities to Abagnale. For ten years, until his arrest, Mr. Rijock, “estimates that he helped launder at least $200 million for approximately 30 clients before finally being caught, he told the BBC. Rijock fought in Vietnam and Cambodia, earning the Combat Infantryman’s Badge and Bronze Star Medal, before returning stateside to work as a banking attorney. Then his life took a turn straight out a Miami Vice episode.
“In 1979, Ken Rijock, an American lawyer based in Miami, met ‘a real nice guy’ — a Cuban expatriate. In fact his new friend was a bridge between Colombian drug traffickers and gangs of Cubans who distributed narcotics in America.
“‘All of a sudden, I had all his friends and clients as my clients,’ said Rijock. ‘I would go to a Fort Lauderdale private airport, meet six customers and dress them up in navy business suits. In their briefcases, each of them would carry $1m in cash.’” (From Money Launderers Clean Up.)
After his arrest and and a two year stint in prison, Mr. Rijock began lecturing around the world and his three testimonies before Congress helped shape the USA Patriot Act. Now he serves as a financial crime consultant, for World-Check, whose 2000+ clients employ the company’s real-time database of heightened-risk individuals and businesses to Know Your Customer (KYC).
On the World-Check site, Mr. Rijock authors Confessions of a Money Launderer, a serialized account of his escapades while on the other side of the law and it’s a must-read for bank compliance officers (and for Hollywood types looking for their next project).
Finally, in a June interview with Australian IT, Mr, Rijock said
“Money-launderers work seven days a week to find targets of opportunity. Most people go home and turn on the telly, spend time with the family, but laundrymen don’t do that. They’re on duty day and night.
‘They might get a call at 2am from a client saying they had heard such and such a country was going to switch over to the euro in six months.
“The laundryman is packed up and out the door, and he’s making investments in that country because he knows when the switch takes place they’re not going to ask a whole lot of questions for political reasons.
“Or, in the back of the Financial Times, he might find an item that indicates a government agency has pulled in some criminal using some new tactic or technique.
“He’s going to adopt that tactic the next day, use it once and then quit. The problem is, it’s such a dynamic field that law enforcement is always two steps behind.”
We couldn’t agree more! And it’s for this exact reason that we’ve been advocating an overhaul of the Bank Secrecy Act and faster action from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
Ken Rijock, if you happen to catch this post while doing a vanity search on your name, here’s more recommended reading:
