Mexican Drug Cartels Laundered Money Through Wachovia, BofA (BAC, WFC)

Wachovia and Bank of America BAC have been helping Mexican drug cartels launder money for years, Bloomberg reports. Wells Fargo WFC, the new owners of Wachovia, admitted in court that Wachovia helped Mexican drug dealers clean drug money, including cash that was used to buy four planes that were used to ship a total of 22 tons of cocaine. Wells Fargo agreed to pay $160 million in penalties after the DoJ charged Wachovia with violating the Back Secrecy Act. Wachovia's anti-money-laundering unit knew this was going on. Martin Woods, an early whistleblower, spotted illegible signatures and other suspicious markings on traveler’s checks from Mexican exchange companies, and sent letters of his findings to the DEA and Treasury Department. This was quickly followed up with a meeting in which his bosses cowed him into keeping quiet and tried to have him fired. Wachovia handled $378.4 billion in Mexican currency exchange from 2004 to 2007, an amount that is one third of Mexico's GDP. One can speculate that a significant amount of that $378.4 billion is drug money. Since 2006, 22,000 have been killed in narco-violence, mostly in provinces along the Mexico-US border. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has deployed 45,000 troops to fight the drug cartels, to little success.