SWITCHING SIDES: FORMER CROOK ADVISES POLICE

'SEND a maniac to catch a maniac' was the premise of the film Demolition Man.

Send a money launderer to catch a money launderer describes the
career of Kenneth Rijock who was in Cyprus last week to advice
bankers, lawyers and police on the tricks he employed during his
former career.

Decorated Vietnam vet, former banker, lawyer and ex criminal,
Rijock, now 59, looks just like your typical clean-cut American
suited-businessman or government employee.

Then again that's probably just how he looked when he was money
laundering because appearance plays a large part in what he calls
"the tradecraft".

"Money launderers do lead, for the most part, normal, though
stressful, professional lives. In fact, they strive to blend in with
the mainstream, routine flow of the business world, often performing
far more legitimate work than illicit criminal acts," said Rijock.

"It is their legitimate persona that allays suspicion, and allows
them to successfully manipulate bankers, bureaucrats, public
functionaries and naive businessmen."

In his online account of his ten years as a money launderer in the
eighties called Confessions of a Money Launderer, Rijock says sharp
money launderers want to appear to be "inconspicuous, somewhat
boring, not overly bright or threatening, and neither excessively
ambitious nor controversial just another typical professional".

In fact during his criminal career, Rijock once lived with a woman
police detective and two children.

"Typical American family, you say, lawyer and police officer, we
barbecued on weekends, children in religious schools; who would
believe that some of the occasional visitors were drug kingpins and
that I was involved in major money laundering?"

Miami-based Rijock never thought he would end up where he did, in
prison. He never had criminal tendencies or just 'decided' one day
to become a criminal. It was more of a natural progression.

Falling in with the 'wrong people' due to his
personal circumstances, he spoke of Miami in the late seventies as
"awash in a cocaine-driven economic frenzy".

"It was a never-ending story for me of nightclubs, disco, drugs, and
copious consumption of alcoholic beverages," he said. "I didn't know
it yet, but I was soon to run headfirst into Miami's newest growth
industry, the cocaine cowboys."

It was a turning point. He moved with Bill, another Vietnam vet he
met who was the same age, and whose friends were a mixed bag of
Americans, Cubans and Colombians.

Rijock said Bill was a broker, a point of contact between
international smugglers and domestic distributors of cocaine and
marijuana, something he says he was not aware of when he moved in.

"The picture began to emerge from what I was able to piece together.
But it didn't bother me," he said. This was because at the time
Rijock himself opposed the draconian US laws on casual marijuana use.

"Whilst money launderers today are, by and large, looking for easy
money through high-risk criminal conduct, I was on a mission: to do
my part to enlarge the drug trafficking structure through moving the
proceeds of crime to safe harbours offshore," he said.

The second reason was his discontent with and distrust of the
government, which was sending young men off to kill or be killed in
endless wars.

As the people around him began to seek out his general services as a
lawyer, Rijock became more and more involved with them on a small
scale until the day he was first asked to 'launder' some $8 million.

"If it had happened any earlier in my life I would have thrown him
out the door but at that point I really believed in the legalisation
of drugs," Rijock said.

"While I knew I was breaking the law, I thought I was making my own
statement. I really thought I was on the right team at that time. I
don't think that any more."

Rijock laundered the money through an offshore bank in Anguilla in
the Caribbean. It was followed by a lunch of lobster and champagne,
'officially' launching his career, until the 'day of reckoning'
finally came some ten years later in 1989 when several 'associates'
were arrested and he feared the trail would ultimately include him.

"You never sleep as soundly as you'd like whilst at risk of arrest.
One knows that those law enforcement adversaries are out there
somewhere, unseen, close enough that you can sense their presence,
or at least think you can. It is not an experience that I
recommend to anyone," Rijock said.

He was forced to curtail his money laundering trips somewhat for
while, not knowing which one would be his last, but he continued
because for Rijock it was all about 'beating the system' for as long
as possible by moving "all that cash into the darkness of the
Caribbean tax havens".

The proverbial knock on the door came at his office on a day that
began much like any other day.

"For anyone who has not experienced the shock of being arrested for
what you know are surely to be serious charges, it is an event that
I hope you never have to experience," he said.

"Arriving in court as a criminal defendant, in handcuffs, and
chained to a bunch of street-level drug dealers, was a rude awakening."

After pleading guilty to charges of conspiracy to engage in
racketeering, a 20-year felony, and conspiracy to defraud the
Internal Revenue Service, he was sentenced to four years but
released in 1992 after serving 19 months.

Opportunity eventually knocked in 1994 when he received a call from
the intelligence division of a police department in Florida. He
asked Rijock to lecture on the subject of money laundering
tradecraft in front of agents.

"At first, the idea sounded ominous. How could I possibly stand up
before a room full of law enforcement officers who knew full well
that I had been convicted of, and did prison time for, the serious
crime of racketeering," he said.

Rijock did, and has never looked back. Now he travels the world and
is a prolific writer on money laundering techniques, focusing
especially on emerging threats and new methods.

Did Rijock every launder money through Cyprus? The answer was 'no'.

"But I knew people in the old days who were going to Cyprus that's
what they were doing," he said.

"The old preconceived notion that people would go to Cyprus and
launder their money, that's the old days...that's 20 years in the
past. Now Cyprus is part of the EU. It's on the same level as the
rest of Europe."