South Florida CEO charged in massive money-laundering case targeting illicit gold trade
The owner of a transportation company that hauls gold around the country has been charged in a massive money-laundering case extending from Latin America to South Florida that is still shaking up the precious-metals industry four years after the initial indictment was filed in Miami.
Jesus Gabriel Rodriguez Jr., CEO of the Doral-based armored truck company Transvalue Inc., is the latest defendant to be charged in the multibillion-dollar conspiracy in which authorities say gold shipments were “likely” smuggled out of Venezuela through Curacao and the Cayman Islands with falsified paperwork to dupe U.S. Customs officials at Miami International Airport into thinking they were legitimate.
Rodriguez, 45, is accused of participating in a piece of the international smuggling scheme by helping coordinate more than $140 million worth of gold shipments designed to launder cash with alleged ties to criminal activity, federal prosecutors in Miami said. Rodriguez could not be reached for comment at his business on Wednesday. His defense attorney, Michael Band, declined to comment.
Rodriguez surrendered to authorities and had his first appearance in Miami federal court on Thursday. He was granted a $150,000 personal surety bond and released from custody in the afternoon.
According to a criminal complaint affidavit unsealed late Tuesday, Rodriguez used his experience and contacts to orchestrate the importation of thousands of kilos of illicitly sourced gold that was flown into the United States from Curaçao between March 2015 and September 2016. Curaçao, a Caribbean island off the coast of Venezuela that is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has no gold mines.
Rodriguez is accused of conspiring with gold sellers in the Caribbean, though the yellow metal was “likely being illegally mined and smuggled out of Venezuela,” according to the complaint. Other possible sources include Peru and Colombia, which are rich in gold but rife with corruption in the precious-metal trade, according to U.S. authorities.
The buyers of the gold were co-conspirators based in South Florida and Latin America who earned commissions by procuring gold for NTR Metals, a Doral-based company whose three principal brokers were charged in a $3.6 billion money-laundering conspiracy in 2017, pleaded guilty and served prison time.
NTR Metals was owned by Dallas parent company Elemetal, which pleaded guilty to failing to maintain a strong anti-money-laundering program and paid a $15 million fine to the U.S. government. Most of the gold imported by NTR Metals was illegally mined in Peru and smuggled through that country or diverted through other South American nations, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, according to the probe led by Homeland Security Investigations along with the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration.
In addition to NTR Metals and its parent company, authorities also charged a Peruvian gold exporter, three of his associates and a Lima-based customs broker — all accused of falsifying documents and paying bribes to officials to move loads of the precious metal to Miami.
In Latin America, criminals view mining and trading precious metals as a lucrative growth business, carefully hidden from U.S. consumers who flaunt gold around their necks and fingers but have no idea where it comes from — or who gets hurt, the Miami Herald reported in a 2018 series, “Dirty Gold, Clean Cash.” Drug traffickers, who exert control over miners in the Amazon rain forest, have tapped into the gold trade because the precious metal is difficult to trace and therefore ideal for money laundering.
Equally significant, America’s demand for gold is as strong as it is for cocaine. NTR Metals, for instance, was the subsidiary of a major U.S. gold refinery that supplied Apple and 67 other Fortune 500 companies, as well as Tiffany & Co., according to a Herald analysis of corporate disclosures. Those companies argued that they maintained robust anti-money-laundering programs and committed no wrongdoing.
U.S. authorities say NTR Metals, which had a small refinery in Doral and a major processing facility in Ohio, was not supposed to buy gold from Curaçao as part of its anti-money-laundering policy. The island country is commonly used as a transshipment point for gold illegally mined in, and smuggled out of, South America, authorities said.
Rodriguez, the Transvalue CEO, helped a circle of co-conspirators dodge NTR Metals’ anti-money-laundering policy and get the gold past U.S. Customs by working to conceal the gold’s illegal origins and connections to Curaçao, according to the criminal complaint filed by prosecutor Walter Norkin.
The complaint accuses Rodriguez of routing the gold shipments through different countries before they reached their final destination in Miami. The gold loads would be shipped from Curaçao to Miami, then go to the Cayman Islands and back to Miami. As a result, the gold exporting country appeared to be the Cayman Islands, which was false and at the root of the alleged money-laundering scheme.
NTR Metals three brokers, who cooperated with authorities after pleading guilty to the money laundering conspiracy, said that Rodriguez “was aware that the gold coming into Miami ... did not originate in the Cayman Islands,” according to the complaint.
Rodriguez allegedly hired brokers to clear the gold through U.S. Customs at Miami International Airport, where documentation falsely identified the gold as having originated in the Cayman Islands, not Curaçao. Then, Rodriguez used his company’s armored trucks to transport the smuggled gold from MIA to NTR Metals’ refinery in Doral, the complaint said.
To pay for the dirty gold, clean money was wired to companies owned by Rodriguez’s co-conspirators, said Norkin, the prosecutor.
He noted in the complaint that some of the gold loads imported to Miami as part of the alleged smuggling scheme also originated in Africa, a continent that has been generally off limits for U.S. precious-metals buyers such as NTR and Elemetal.
The money laundering case against Rodriguez was built on customs and Transvalue documents along with emails and text messages.
Transvalue, which was founded in the early 1990s, was thrust into the spotlight of another gold caper decades later when one of its armored trucks was held up by three armed robbers on a North Carolina highway. One of the company’s trucks was hauling 10 26-pound gold bars that belonged to Republic Metals in Opa-locka and were being shipped to another refinery in Massachusetts in 2015.
Neither Transvalue nor Rodriguez was implicated in that $5 million gold heist. Only one of the gold bars was ever recovered by the FBI, after a pawnbroker tried to fence it at, of all places, NTR Metals in Doral. The highway robbers and some of their associates were charged, but nine of the gold bars were melted down and resold through a jeweler in Miami’s Seybold Building.
This story was originally published June 23, 2021 at 9:29 AM.
