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A common theme you'll hear from U.S. government officials involved in counterterrorism is about “following the money.” However, the sad truth is that most have no idea how to do this. When I, along with five other partners, formed Berg Associates LLC in 1998, we distinguished ourselves as a unique group of experts in money laundering investigations. The star of our team, John Moynihan, is a forensic accountant who spent four years with the DEA running his covert money laundering operations in New York City. I learned a lot from John. He is a proven genius in this field.
We worked on the Bank of New York Russian money laundering case as one of our first jobs. We investigated all major tobacco and alcohol companies for money laundering on behalf of the governors of the European Union and Colombia. We were fortunate to have informants who worked inside major Colombian and Mexican cartels as well as members of a Russian clan. The title photo of this article is from one of the cases we worked on in Panama. The Colombian cartel sent members to Panama with these “bricks” of dollars to buy gold. This money was the income from drug trafficking.
We told a group of intel analysts at Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in 2006 how to track down Mokhtar Belmokhtar by focusing on his cigarette business. They moved a lot of Philip Morris products – Marlboro to be exact. Unfortunately, JSOC did not act on our recommendations. Belmokhtar wasn't stealing Philip Morris Marlboros. He was receiving the product through a Philip Morris distributor. If you have a terrorist organization that is smuggling cigarettes, liquor or Toyota trucks, all you have to do is get your hands on the product and trace it on the back side.
Remember when ISIS was at its strongest in Syria in 2013? They were driving around in brand new Toyota pickup trucks. All that was required was to extract a vehicle's serial number and work backwards. Moynihan and I reported this to a Special Operations Command (SOCOM) officer who was assigned to “follow the money.” To the best of my knowledge, they never followed up on our recommendations on how to find out who was supplying ISIS with those trucks. They didn't steal these from any car lot.
Here's an 11-minute look at Russia's allegation that Burisma was involved in terrorist financing. The big unanswered question is what Cofer Black, the former senior CIA officer who led the Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) in 2001, was doing while on the boards of Burisma and a Latvian bank that was later implicated in potential terrorist financing. ? Was that just a strange coincidence?