Hot Money · Pushkin Industries

Episode 6 - Ties with Tehran

December 19, 2023·32 min·2 clips

At a Brooklyn diner over tequila, a money launderer asked a DEA undercover agent to source 250 sniper rifles and 500 assault rifles — then said the buyer was the Iranian government.

The scene begins in transit. Angel picks up a woman who has flown into New York and drives her from Manhattan to a small Brooklyn restaurant. She settles in fast. What looks like a business lunch is a controlled meeting with people pretending to be South American drug traffickers who need help moving money. Angel is inside the sting, using warmth and trust to get close to Iman Kobayizi, a professional launderer. The case has already spread beyond one deal. Investigators have tracked a Dominican Republic bust involving 1,000 kilos of cocaine meant for Belgium on a private plane. Then another trail opens. As the source explains, money laundering rarely stays tidy. It can lead to drugs, weapons, and other criminal work. Kobayizi becomes the focus. She is Lebanese, in her late forties, expensively dressed, and tied to cocaine traffickers working in Europe. Angel has spent months building the relationship through lunches, dinners, meetings in different countries, and careful conversation. The wider story is heavier. The cold open connects the super cartel, an assassination in the Netherlands, expelled Iranian diplomats, and police access to encrypted organized crime networks. Dubai still sits there as unfinished business. Some targets slipped away, but the New York operation starts to show how the same payment routes can touch several kinds of crime. The ending comes down to mechanics. A prosecutor says fighters were also tools for pushing money through the system.

As heard by us

A measured laundering story that turns a Brooklyn meeting into a wider criminal web.

The episode follows a trail from Manhattan to Brooklyn and then outward into a cocaine and laundering network, with Angel's October 2014 meeting at the Waldorf Astoria giving it a clear hinge.

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Why you'd press play

Follow one Brooklyn lunch as it opens into a multi-country cocaine-laundering sting.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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