Feds break up Brazilian ring accused of using Miami banks to move drug profits
Latin American drug traffickers are increasingly recruiting U.S.-based couriers to use banks from Miami to Seattle to deposit millions of dollars in illicit cash that is sent back to cocaine suppliers, authorities say.
Case in point: This past week federal agents arrested five suspects — including four Brazilian nationals — in Miami and Orlando on a charge of conspiring to launder more than $30 million in drug proceeds through banks in multiple American cities for a Mexican cocaine supplier.
Those arrested were: Ygor Fokin Saviolli, 35, Gabriel Cezar Menezes, 29, Joao Andrade De Mello, 29, and Leandro De Avila Goncalves, 42, all Brazilian nationals. Omar Aliperti De Mello Correa, 34, was also arrested. A few have pleaded not guilty and been granted bonds, while others await hearings in Miami federal court.
The FBI case, prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Monique Botero, has also charged four defendants who are at large, including Manuel Garcia-Urrea. He’s identified as a Mexican drug trafficker in the money laundering indictment filed in Miami federal court. The remaining three defendants, Lucca Perez Costa, Leonardo Meira Gomes and Tadeu Sebastiane Rabelo Alves Barbosa, are described as couriers.
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The indictment alleges that between late 2022 and early 2025, Saviolli and Menezes “worked closely as U.S.-based facilitators ... in a scheme to deposit illicit cash proceeds, including drug proceeds, in various bank accounts across the United States in order to conceal and return those profits to” Garcia-Urrea and other drug suppliers in Latin America.
The facilitators are accused of collaborating with the network of couriers to conceal tens of millions of dollars in the U.S. banking system from cocaine sales in Miami, Pensacola, Rochester, Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Houston and Kansas City.
The trend of traffickers exploiting banks to transfer their drug proceeds to Mexico, Colombia and other Latin American countries has been increasing since 2020, federal authorities say.
While it’s unclear in the latest indictment whether the couriers were depositing cocaine profits through automatic teller machines, that has been a common practice in prior cases.
Narcotraffickers have recruited a number of couriers to fly to Miami and other cities to set up phony businesses with corporate bank accounts, authorities say. The recruits then travel to pick up duffel bags of bulk cash from cocaine sales, with each depositing hundreds of thousands of dollars at ATMs into the bank accounts of the fake companies. Those businesses, in turn, wire millions through financial networks in the United States and abroad to cartels in Mexico, Colombia and other countries, authorities say.
In 2024, for example, federal prosecutors in Miami charged eight Colombians with money laundering conspiracies. Agents with the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations had their eyes on them: They were not only moving huge sums of cash through ATMs in stacks of $20, $50 and $100 bills, but bank security cameras captured their images while they were making the brazen deposits.
This story was originally published January 28, 2026 at 11:41 AM.