More foreigners in trouble

Benjamin Weiser has an article in The New York Times about an Iranian who went wrong:

In many ways, Mahmoud Reza Banki’s experience in America has been a classic immigrant’s success story: he obtained American citizenship, graduated from Berkeley, and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton. He got a job at McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm. And he spent more than $3 million of his family’s money on an apartment in Manhattan and on securities. His parents had sent the money from Iran, where he was born and they still reside. “I came to America to live the American dream,” Mr. Banki said in January.
But those words were uttered in a bail hearing after his arrest on charges of conspiring to break American sanctions on trading with Iran. His trial, which began on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, is centered on allegations that he moved money back and forth from Iran through a hawala system, an “informal value transfer system” that operates outside normal banking channels. Using that system, federal prosecutors say, Mr. Banki, 33, helped his family get more than $3 million out of Iran and helped dozens of other people and companies around the world send an equivalent amount into Iran. “He knew where that money was going,” a prosecutor, Anirudh Bansal, told the jury. “He knew it was against the law. He just didn’t care.”
Lawyers for Mr. Banki sharply dispute the government’s account. They deny their client sent money into Iran; they say he was only receiving funds from family members there. “Banki believed that it was perfectly okay for him to receive this family money,” a defense lawyer, Baruch Weiss, told the jury. He reported the money he was receiving on his tax returns, Mr. Weiss said, and discussed it with an accountant and a lawyer, as well as with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Nobody said it’s against the law,” Mr. Weiss said. “Nobody told him to stop.”
Mr. Weiss conceded that there was a motivation behind the money transfer, but that it had to do with Mr. Banki’s father’s infidelity. The lawyer told jurors that the family was sending the money to Mr. Banki to keep it away from his father’s mistress.
The Banki trial comes at a time of unrest in Iran and turbulence in its relations with the United States. There are no allegations of terrorism against Mr. Banki, but the case offers sharply differing depictions of the defendant. In announcing Mr. Banki’s arrest in January, Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, said, “Our laws recognize a national emergency based upon the threat Iran poses to the security of the United States.” He said Mr. Banki “paid no heed to the dangers of breaking” those laws.
According to the indictment, Mr. Banki ran a hawala system in which money was sent from one party to another through brokers, known as hawaladars, in the United States and Iran, who collected fees for moving the money.
Mr. Weiss, the defense lawyer, did not dispute that Mr. Banki received the money from Iran through a hawala system, but said that he “participated as a customer,” and not as a facilitator. Hawala remains a widely employed method of moving money around the world, said Nikos Passas, an expert on international criminal law at Northeastern University, who said prosecutors had briefly consulted him on the subject of hawala. “The vast majority of users include migrant workers and expatriates sending honestly earned money back to their families,” he said.
Mr. Banki’s lawyers made clear they believed it was legal for him to receive money from family members in Iran in noncommercial transactions. However, prosecutors indicated that they intended to show that Mr. Banki moved money to Iran as well as receiving it. The indictment charges that more than $3 million was wired into an account held by Mr. Banki at Bank of America in Manhattan. The money came from Iranian expatriates in the United States and from companies in the Middle East, Russia, and elsewhere, the indictment said. Mr. Banki did not know those who were sending the money, but he received the funds “with the understanding” that an equivalent amount would be disbursed to people in Iran, prosecutors charged. He and others were able to “get millions of dollars to Iran without being noticed, without banks or regulators ever being able to see it or to stop it,” Mr. Bansal said. He called the defendant “an underground, an unlicensed version of Western Union.”
Mr. Banki participated, Mr. Bansal said, because he wanted to get his family’s money out of Iran and its unstable investment climate. But Mr. Weiss, the defense lawyer, said his client was receiving money from his family because of his desire to keep their wealth away from his father’s mistress. “Reza was very interested in protecting his mom, both in the marriage but financially as well,” Mr. Weiss said.
Mr. Banki, who has been jailed without bond, seemed engaged, listening to testimony on Wednesday, conversing with his lawyers, and weeping when Mr. Weiss described his family’s troubles. It is not known whether he will testify. But, in January, he told the judge, John F. Keenan: “I do love this country, everything it’s offered me: opportunities, my education, friends, my girlfriend, my career, my professional life and all the experiences that I’ve had. I’m an innocent man, and I intend to prove it,” he added.

Rico says sure, that's what they all say...