From Ukraine to the United States, Tunisia to Turkmenistan, the ICIJ's global investigation details the human toll of trillions laundered.
Emily Spell heard screams outside her parents' red brick home.
She found her brother, 31-year-old Joseph Williams, sprawled on a mattress in the basement. His half-open eyes were yellow. His lips turned blue. His wife, Christina, beat him in the chest.
“Joe, wake up! Joe, wake up! "- shouted Christina.
Spell, a student of a nurse, started artificial respiration. Every time she pressed down on his chest, white foam sprayed from Joe's mouth onto his favorite Batman pajamas.
Jo's mother, who was rushing home from work at Piggly Wiggly, a regional grocery store in Garland, North Carolina, burst into the room. She lay down next to her only son.
“It's okay, baby, you can sleep,” said Susan Williams. “Do you want a cigarette? Are you cold?
“I thought my mom was crazy,” Emily recalls. “Of course he was cold. Because he was dead. "
Joe's family did not know what killed him. They had no idea that he was one of the first of tens of thousands of Americans to be slain by fentanyl, the world's deadliest drug. And even after they saw the autopsy report, it was only much later that they learned of the global forces responsible for Joe's death.
It took a network of drug dealers stretching all the way to China, relying on the easy movement of dirty money through branded financial institutions to ship lab-developed opioids to rural North Carolina and throughout the United States.
New details of how the money that fueled the fentanyl drug trade and more than $ 2 trillion in other suspicious funds spilled around the world are contained in a cache of classified financial reports obtained by BuzzFeed News and handed over to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Known as suspicious activity reports, or SARs, the files are a world tour of crime, corruption and inequality, starring politicians, oligarchs and honey scammers, with bankers playing the decisive role to serve them all. SARs show how the failure of banks and other financial institutions to stop illegal money flows contributes to crime and suffering on a large scale.
In a world plagued by high-profile crises, including the coronavirus pandemic that is devastating lives and economies, the uncontrolled flow of dirty money may not be perceived as an imminent threat. But the consequences are serious: drug dealers and Ponzi scammers are taking profits out of the reach of the authorities. Despots and corrupt industrialists increase ill-gotten wealth and power. Governments deprived of income cannot afford medicines to treat the sick.
These stories are based on real people who have suffered in real life: families who lost their savings due to predatory financial schemes, Olympic athletes deceived by victories by wicked officials, parents mourning sons and daughters who died in battle, a mother crushed at work, and brother taken drugs.
Joe Williams' family and other victims are often unaware that their pain is partly the result of a financial crime or violation of Title 18, Section 1956, “Money Laundering”.
“People may not be aware of issues such as money laundering and offshore companies, but they feel the repercussions every day because they are the ones who are paid for large-scale crimes - from opioids to arms trafficking and theft of unemployment benefits related to COVID-19,” Said Jody Vittori, a corruption expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
But criminal networks and law enforcement officials trying to stop them understand that an unbridled flow of dirty money is the most important requirement for a successful criminal enterprise.
Brandon Hubbard, who was sentenced to life in prison for smuggling fentanyl into the scheme that killed Joe, recalls that the police who arrested him seemed more interested in where the money was going than in the powder known as China White. “This is the first thing they asked me when they walked in the door,” Hubbard said in an interview from the prison. "Where's the money?" - Hubbard denied knowing or doing drugs to Joe Williams.
The leaked documents, known as FinCEN files, include more than 2,100 suspicious activity reports written by banks and other financial players and posted to the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Network.
According to BuzzFeed News, some of the tapes were collected as part of a Congressional committee investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, while others were collected in response to law enforcement requests to FinCEN.