Bank of Credit and Commerce International

Bank of Credit and Commerce International
As tales of its global predations were spattered across headlines all over the world, its apparent influence reached almost absurd proportions. This was a bank that had taken the popular notion of a "global electronic village" and made a mockery of it, a bank that was at once everywhere and nowhere, whose dirtiest secrets were hidden deep in the impossible tangles of its offshore networks.

BCCI suddenly bloomed as sort of supermetaphor for the 1980s, the decade that celebrated the likes of Robert Maxwell, Ivan Boesky, and Michael Milken and unleashed upon the United States a horde of freebooters in the banking and thrift business. But nothing in the history of financial scandals even approaches the $20-billion-plus heist at BCCI, which sixty-two countries shuttered forever in July 1991 in a paroxysm of regulatory vengeance. No single scandal had ever involved such vast amounts of money.

Superlatives were quickly exhausted. BCCI was the largest criminal corporate enterprise ever, the biggest Ponzi scheme, the most pervasive money-laundering operation in history, the only bank - so far as anyone knows - that ran a brisk sideline business in both conventional and nuclear weapons, gold, drugs, turnkey mercenary armies, intelligence and counterintelligence, shipping, and commodities from cement in the Middle East to Honduran coffee to Vietnamese beans.

Though it was fundamentally a financial fraud, BCCI itself was not a bank in any conventional sense. Or, more precisely, banking was only a part of the global organism, the ingeniously constructed platform from which its other lines of business were launched....

This "bank" possessed its very own diplomatic corps, intelligence network, and private army, its own shipping and commodities trading companies. And BCCI itself was so thoroughly enmeshed in the official affairs of Pakistan that it was often impossible to separate the two.