US Daily Beast
profiled APC leader Bola Tinubu in an article titled 'Nigeria's Next
Leader's Ties to a Heroin Ring' where they described Tinubu as a 'heroin
kingpin'.
Tinubu will not like this. Read below
General Muhammed Buhari’s
political partner is a former bagman for two heroin traffickers. But
that’s just business as usual in Nigeria. Nigeria’s
election last month was celebrated as an unlikely victory for democracy
in an African country with a tenuous record of free and fair
representation. But the man most responsible for midwifing General
Muhammed Buhari’s ballot triumph over current President
Jonathan has a spotty CV.
Former Lagos provincial governor Bola Tinubu,
affectionately nicknamed the Jagaban, is today seen as a shrewd if not “deeply Machiavellian”
Svengali in Nigeria’s politics as well as the architect of a hugely
successful anti-corruption platform. But 20 years ago he had to forfeit
nearly half a million dollars to the U.S. Treasury Department after
being named as an accomplice in a white heroin-trafficking and
money-laundering ring that stretched from West Africa to the U.S.
Midwest. Although his case has been bandied about the Nigerian press for
years, Tinubu’s involvement in a federal drug and racketeering
investigation waged jointly by the DEA, FBI, and IRS has gone unreported
elsewhere, even after his ascendance to Karl Rove-like status last
month.
A recent gauzy Financial Times profile
of him, for instance, neglected to mention that two decades ago Tinubu
was identified as a bagman for two Nigerian heroin movers who operated
out of Chicago and Hammond, Indiana. They were Adegboyega Mueez Akande
and Abiodun Agbele, Akande’s nephew, who was exposed to law enforcement
after selling white heroin first to Lee Andrew Edwards, another dealer
later jailed for trying to murder a federal agent, and then to an
undercover cop. In a 1993 court docket from the U.S. District Court in the Northern
District of Illinois, which The Daily Beast obtained from Sahara
Reporters, a Nigeria-focused news outlet, IRS Special Agent Kevin Moss
said that Akande had run the white heroin ring in the late 1980s until
1990, when he handed off the U.S arm of the business to his nephew, who
had arrived in 1988.
Akande then returned to Nigeria but continued to
oversee the operation from abroad with the help of others at home and in
the United States, including his relatives. One of the individuals
identified in his cartel by Moss was Tinubu, then a Chicago State
University-educated accountant working as a treasurer for Mobil Oil
Nigeria Ltd, a subsidiary of energy giant Mobil Oil, which was still a
few years shy of its famous merger with Exxon in 1999. In the biography section of his official website, Tinubu is described
as having emigrated to the United States in 1975 “in search of the
proverbial Golden Fleece with a heart brimming with unrelenting
determination to achieve his visions.” This is certainly one way to
describe his tenure stateside.
In 1989, Moss said in an affidavit,
Tinubu established an individual money market account, into which he
deposited $1,000 in traveler’s checks, and a negotiable order of
withdrawal account (NOW) at First Heritage Bank in Country Club Hills,
Illinois. The address Tinubu gave the bank was the same as the listed
headquarters of Globe-Link International, the front company owned by
Akande and his relatives. Bank employees told Moss that Akande had personally introduced them
to Tinubu in December 1989 when who also opened a joint checking account
with his wife, Oluremi Tinubu, who already kept a joint account with
Akande’s wife at First Heritage. Five days after the NOW account was
opened, $80,000 was wired into it from a bank in Houston maintained by
one of Akande’s relatives. Tinubu would later use the NOW account to buy
a $10,000 Certificate of Deposit for an $8,000 car loan, listing Akande
as his cousin on the application.
At the time, Tinubu’s take home
as a Mobil Oil Nigeria executive was a mere $2,400 a month and he
claimed not to have any other revenue streams. Yet he still managed to
deposit $661,000 into his individual money market account in 1990 and
then another $1,216,500 a year later. He also opened more accounts with
Citibank in its worldwide personal banking unit, transferring over half a
million dollars from his First Heritage money market account into one
of them in early 1991. Mobil Oil Nigeria told Moss that Tinubu’s role at the company never
involved transferring large sums of money between banks and that it
didn’t keep deposits in any institutions in the south suburbs of
Chicago, where First Heritage was based. Moreover, although Tinubu moved
back to Nigeria in 1983, he neglected to file U.S. income tax returns
after 1984 despite having sizable, interest-generating deposits in
American banks.
All of this was enough to persuade a magistrate judge of
the Northern District to issue seizure warrants for Tinubu’s First
Heritage and Citibank accounts. Collectively, more than $1.4 million
belonging to the Nigerian was confiscated. Tinubu gave differing accounts for his wealth to Moss. In one phone
call from Nigeria, shortly after the U.S. Treasury seized his money, he
admitted to wiring $100,000 to Akande’s Houston bank account and to
receiving the $80,000 from Akande into his First Heritage account.
Tinubu also said that apart from one other account in Fairfax, Virginia,
he had no other money stashed in U.S. banks.
Except that there were other accounts. Citibank has a
worldwide banking division known as Citibank International where Tinubu
stashed an additional $550,000. He also controlled an entity called
Compass Finance and Investments Company Ltd., of which Akande and Agbele
were directors. Still another nexus of money transfers was uncovered by
federal investigators, with cash moving from First Heritage to Citibank
to Citibank International, where it wound up in Tinubu’s personal
accounts and in those belonging to Compass Finance and Investments. In a
follow-up exchange with law enforcement officers, Tinubu changed his
story. Just days after conceding that he’d sent and received money to
and from Akande, he insisted that he had no financial or business
dealings with Akande or Agbele.
There’s no evidence that Tinubu was ever indicted for any crime. He
eventually settled with the district court, turning over $460,000 of the
seized $1.4 million, with the remainder released back to him. The Beast
tried repeatedly to contact Marsha McClellan, the U.S. attorney who
prosecuted the case, but was unsuccessful. “I’m not surprised at all,” said Virginia Comolli, a specialist on Nigeria and author of Boko Haram: Nigeria’s Islamist Insurgency. “There’s
a trend of various Nigerian politicians at the highest levels involved
in dodgy business deals around the world, in property and cash. Even
ones who seem fairly clean turn out to have some dark histories.” The
perfect case in point is Tinubu’s political project and new
president-elect of Nigeria, General Muhammed Buhari, who in 1983 helped
overthrow a democratically elected government in a military coup d’etat on
the grounds that the government was undisciplined and corrupt.
“He
resorted to brutal methods, beating up people for not queuing properly
and imposing limitations on the media,” Comolli said. “I think a lot of
the votes Buhari got were anti-Jonathan rather than pro-Buhari.” But no doubt, many also came from a savvy fusion of political
factions. In February 2013, Tinubu successfully merged his own
influential Action Congress party with Buhari’s Congress for Progressive
Change, resulting in the All Progressives Congress. The marriage united
Nigeria’s most populous northwest and southwest regions and the ensuing
campaign was billed by Tinubu as a “commonsense revolution” against a
corrupt and venal incumbency which, in its five years in power, had seen
the terrorist group and newly-minted ISIS affiliate Boko Haram thrive.
Buhari swept the election with 2.7 million more votes than Jonathan.
Even
before that trouncing, however, Tinubu had a relatively positive
reputation in Nigeria, according to former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria
John Campbell. “He is widely regarded as having been a highly successful
governor of Lagos state,” he said. “Together with Tinubu’s handpicked
successor, Babatunde Fashola, Lagos has seen dramatic improvements in
everything from practical stuff like garbage collection to the
collection of taxes and the provision of public services,” Campbell told
The Beast. Though even here, the ex-diplomat admits, Tinubu’s good
governance has been clouded by controversy. “He established a company to
do the tax collecting in return for a cut and, at one point, Tinubu and
Fashola appeared to be splitting over the percentage of Tinubu’s cut.” Drug charges do indeed appear to be the sine qua non for
Nigerian high office. The year 1993, when Tinubu’s assets were seized,
was a turbulent period for Nigeria following the cancellation of a
national election and the establishment of a military dictatorship.
Moshood Abiola, the rightful winner of that election, was accused of
narcotics trafficking. So too is “Prince” Buruji Kashamu from the
People’s Democratic Party, who has faced extradition back to the United
States since 1998. Kashamu was indicted by a federal grand jury in
Chicago for being the elusive “Alaji,” a globetrotting drug kingpin who
smuggled heroin into O’Hare International Airport from Europe and Asia.
Piper Kerman, the memoirist who inspired the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, famously worked for Alaji. Kashamu denies
the charges and insists that he was purportedly a counterterrorism
informant to the U.S. government before and after 9/11, and that the
real trafficker was his now-deceased brother.
Despite his party’s general loss to the All Progressives Congress,
Kashumu was elected in March as senator of the southwest Ogun state. In
what appeared to be a magnanimous gesture to the winner, he took out an
advertisement praising Tinubu as a role model. The Jagaban was
distinctly unimpressed. He trashed the comparison in a statement signed
by his media adviser, claiming
that for Kashamu “to liken himself to Bola Tinubu is for a small rut to
call itself a mountain.” Tinubu instructed the “false praise singer” to
go face the music in the Windy City before deigning to talk to him.
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