CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

60 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
payments as they were called in congressional committee hearings, of less
than say $1,000, were not bribes at all. They were just a normal part of what
we have to do from time to time to stay in business. In other words, the U.S.
Congress came riding to the rescue of my conscience. Thank God! Here I’d
been thinking for years that my corruption-fighting credentials were compromised.
But, no, I never was a briber in the first place; I was merely a
greaser! What a relief!
The most brutal of Nigeria’s military dictators was Sani Abacha, in
power from 1993–1998. When Abacha graduated from Sandhurst, the military
training college in England, his British instructors, recognizing that he
hardly possessed the qualities of an officer and a gentleman, noted on his
confidential personnel file that he should never be permitted to rise above
the rank of colonel. Three decades later as a general, he became possibly the
richest unelected person ever to take over a country. Amassing his initial fortune
allegedly through drug trafficking and arms purchasing, he was by
some estimates a dollar billionaire while still number two in the political hierarchy,
below Ibrahim Babangida.
Nigeria’s position as a transit point for drugs emerged a little more than
a year after the notorious BCCI opened for business in the country in 1981
and began facilitating linkages with South Asian and Latin American
sources of heroin and cocaine. Nigerian generals competed to provide security
for shipments arriving at urban airports and military bases, arranging
temporary storage and perhaps movement to another landing strip, and then
overseeing reloading and onward flights to markets in North America and
Europe. Members of Abacha’s family formed an air service and contracted
with American Trans Air based in Indianapolis, Indiana, for equipment and
services. This secured his hold on the Lagos-to-New York smuggling route,
though American Trans Air officials may not have known of his nefarious intent
even after he lost his U.S. landing rights.
Abacha had already developed a reputation for brashness in the business
of corruption. When he was head of the defense establishment he had government
checks for tens of millions of dollars written to his own name, supposedly
enabling him to go abroad and purchase arms for his forces. For
example, one check, said to have been for $75 million, was intended to fund
weapons procurement for Nigerian troops stationed in Liberia, with little or
nothing ever arriving.