Hotels, restaurants, cars, jewelry and works of art: the mechanics of money laundering

The Ritzi restaurant in Puerto Portas (Calvià, Mallorca), the BO Hotel Mallorca or “its super-luxury double”: the BO Palazzo, also with its initials, in Porec (Croatia);

or a mansion in Camp de Mar, Andratx, one of the oldest towns in the Balearic Islands, an entire building in Plaça Quadrado de Palma, apart from an extensive network of casinos and brothels in Hamburg (Germany) with franchises in Prague or Moscow.

The many businesses of Bashkim Osmani, 52, and his family have never gone unnoticed by Civil Guard and National Police investigators since he settled on the Spanish island more than twenty years ago.

However, until last February, the Kosovar Albanian was not arrested, accused of laundering large amounts of money (more than 30 million only in intervened properties in Mallorca) presumably from drug trafficking.

"Identifying a bad person who launders money in our country is relatively easy, the complicated thing is to prove that his money comes from illicit activities," warn the agents of the armed institute involved in the so-called Operation Casino, in which Europol, Eurojust, the DEA intervened and the FBI, and that resulted in eight detainees from the Osmani organization in Spain, and another 37 between Belgium, Germany, Italy and Croatia.

A true example of coordinated action on an international scale and of collaboration —police and judicial— in the difficult fight against money laundering.

The Osmani are a saga known throughout the world, the United States and Europe, linked to organized crime and drug trafficking from South America.

They come from Albania, but emigrated to Germany more than 40 years ago, "in the 70s they started with the casino and prostitution business, in a country with greater permissiveness in that area, and later they have been diversifying and creating new companies - hotels and restaurants - in tourist areas”, point out the researchers, who warn that they have been investigated in Belgium, Italy, Croatia, the United States, the United Kingdom or Germany, where Bashkim Osmani was already sentenced to prison by a Hamburg court in 2008 , along with his brother Burim for a bank fraud (of more than 30 million euros in false loans) in which the administrator of the bank itself was involved.

After decades greasing the mechanics of money laundering, the brothers, sentenced to more than three years in prison by a judge in the German city or handcuffed and flanked by Spanish police officers, display their best smile before the cameras.

The same one they rehearsed with famous actors, with whom they took selfies in their restaurants and luxury hotels.

Three phases: “Placement, confusion and integration”

According to the researchers, money laundering has three main phases: “Placement, confusion and integration”.

The first is to put the money in cash within the legal circuit.

"The easiest way is through a previous business, such as a hotel or, better yet, a restaurant, where apparently there is no control because there is not even any record of customers," the agents point out.

"It can also be entered through a contact in a bank, which directly accepts an income in exchange for a commission, for example," they warn.

But, once the money has been placed, it cannot stay there.

The second phase begins, the confusion, which basically consists of moving the money, “it is cut into pieces, it gets into different accounts, in different countries;

It even travels through tax havens or places that are "not very collaborative" with the authorities of third countries and more lax to operate, and when they already consider that it has taken enough turns in that kind of "washing machine" so that the track is difficult to keep going, it comes back, it always comes back, because its owner wants his money,” say the researchers from the Special Central Unit (UCE) 3 of the Civil Guard Information Headquarters, the main people responsible for the Casino operation, which began in 2018 together with the Information Command of the Balearic Islands.

However, the money never returns to a checking account.

It is integrated "always in the form of investments in houses, cars, jewelry, watches...", which are acquired through companies, usually in the name of relatives or acquaintances of the person under investigation, and finally by front men.

It was precisely the purchase of goods by Osmani's relatives and acquaintances in Mallorca, and their previous meetings, that alerted the agents and led to the investigation.

In the 18 searches that were carried out in Spain, one of them in his mansion —but also in his restaurants—, 16 luxury watches, seven high-end vehicles, a yacht, 86 works of art (oil paintings) with a value of estimated to exceed 5 million euros and more than 203,000 in cash and 40,000 in cryptocurrencies.

Bashkim Osmani's wife, father-in-law, personal assistant, and the main people close to Bashkim Osmani were also arrested, although he — imprisoned in a suite at his hotel in Croatia and later extradited to Spain — is the only one who remains preventively in jail today. Majorcan prison without bail, waiting for his trial to be held.

Now, the judge will determine if the multiple pieces of the puzzle of his framework gathered by the investigators over three years of investigations are sufficient to demonstrate that his money and his investments come from illicit activities.

It is about unraveling the perfected money laundering techniques put into practice by this alleged criminal organization, with the difficulty involved in separating the legal business from the illicit one, when the passage of time makes the connections with the crime older and faded.

The key is the “Joint Investigation Teams”

The JITs, Joint Investigation Teams, have proven to be very useful and effective in the police investigation of money laundering.

It is a crime, almost always cross-border when it acquires a relevant importance, and that forces the investigators and the investigating judges to join forces so that their work does not fall on deaf ears. 

The investigation of Bashkim Osmani's heritage is also exemplary in this regard.

"We knew that there were investigations filed in Belgium, Germany and Italy, which had not come to fruition because they had not obtained results in the stipulated time," explain the Spanish Civil Guard investigators.

They requested from each of these countries, through their courts and protected by Eurojust and Europol, everything that they managed to prove and presented before the judge, giving rise to a joint judicial investigation. 

The main advances, in the links with the illicit origin of the money, were made by Italy, "the part of the organization most in contact with drug trafficking," according to the researchers.

In this way, and with close surveillance of those investigated, several drug shipments were intercepted in different European countries, one of 440 kilos of cocaine in Barcelona in January 2020, where four Albanians were arrested, in an operation that with the DEA .

In September of the same year, 2,500 kilos of chemical products to cook cocaine were seized in Belgium, which the agents associate with the same organization.