A big wedding in Hackensack, NJ

Two people were getting married and they invited all of their friends to the wedding. Some 60 to 80 showed up with gifts (the exact number is not known). The wedding was to be held on board the luxury yacht "The Royal Charm". The marriage never happened. What happened was the end result of six years of work by the FBI targeting a ring of criminals.

The Seattle Times has the story:

FBI uses bogus wedding to dismantle smuggling ring
They arrived with gifts of gold Rolex watches and suitcases of clothing, planning to attend a friend's wedding aboard The Royal Charm, a luxury yacht docked in Cape May, N.J.

But The Royal Charm turned out to be an FBI code name and the wedding an elaborate setup.

Guests who traded their cuff links for handcuffs were part of a string of nationwide arrests over the weekend that helped dismantle an international smuggling ring that moved drugs, counterfeit cigarettes and millions of dollars in fake U.S. currency into the country, authorities said.

"For those of the conspirators who thought they'd be celebrating a wedding," U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie said, "the party ended as soon as they arrived in New Jersey.

"This organization had its hands in a slew of global criminal enterprises," Christie added in announcing the arrests in Washington, D.C.

Working in shadowy, loosely linked Asian networks, the 87 defendants named in federal indictments unsealed today smuggled 200 million fake cigarettes, 45,000 Ecstasy pills, hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of methamphetamine and Viagra and more than $3.3 million in Supernotes, a high-quality counterfeit currency, federal authorities said.

It started off with 1 billion Chinese counterfeit cigarettes with Marlboro and Newport brands. The Supernotes brought in another concern as they were virtually impossible to detect from "real" currency. The LA Times has some details on that aspect:

Of particular concern, Secret Service officials said, was the group's apparent ability to generate counterfeit U.S. currency that could fool even the most sophisticated detection devices. A government source said the bills, known as "super notes" because they were virtually identical to real currency, had been made in North Korea. The bills were seized before they entered the U.S. money supply, authorities said.

The group also used factories in China to churn out as many as 1 billion counterfeit cigarettes for sale in the U.S., some under the Marlboro and Newport brands. They also engaged in levels of money laundering and drugs and weapons trafficking that far outpaced the work of traditional Asian and European organized crime groups, top federal law enforcement officials said at a news conference at Justice Department headquarters.

Well, the NoKo's certainly have the ability to print currency-grade notes and it's not that big a stretch to put away their own plates and do some runs with dollar bill plates on the presses. After all, they need hard currency. It will be interesting to see how China wiggles out of this one.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on August 23, 2005 6:12 PM.

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