When Wachovia attempted to fend off Hank Paulson, the FDIC and Tim Geithner’s forced marriage to CitiGroup, and they flew into the arms of Wells-Fargo to escape – I sort of wondered when the U.S. Government would bring out the sledge hammers in retaliation for resisting the will of the Fed and the US Treasury.
Bloomberg has a quiet little story about Wachovia’s role in laundering drug money for Mexican drug gangs
Story
While the focus of this investigation is the purchase of 4 airplanes using laundered money, the article and the DOJ complaint mention that Wachovia had transferred $373 BILLION through CDCs (Mexican currency exchanges) and $4 billion in cash. Not all of that activity is drug related – but Wachovia was generating so many suspicious wire transfers that the Wachovia’s investigators couldn’t possibly keep up with investigating them all. Once approached by the government, they produced 8 million pages of documentation of the transactions.
