Money-Laundering Case Speaks to Border Fears

By JULIÁN AGUILAR

LAREDO — The high walls of Alexander Estates, an affluent development nestled near this border city’s country club and golf course, were supposed to keep the narcotics world at bay. But when federal agents raided the stately home of a downtown perfume salesman in January, it reinforced a notion that is feared by Texas leaders: the drug war spillover from Mexico is much broader than shootouts and kidnappings — it is cloaked in the seemingly routine business transactions of the border economy.Neighbors stood, mouths agape, as federal agents seized loads of cash from the home of Vikram Datta, a polite family man who acquaintances said was so concerned with the quality of Laredo schools that he moved his teenage daughters back to their native New York. Federal agents leveled an accusation that shocked other residents: that Mr. Datta, 51, was a major player in the Black Market Peso Exchange, a decades-old system of laundering drug money and reinvesting it back into the economy.

According to Mr. Datta’s lawyers, who declined to make him or his family available for interviews, their client is a legitimate businessman who was entrapped by other drug-connected defendants to get lesser sentences for their own money-laundering schemes. But prosecutors contended, and a federal jury agreed in September when it convicted him on two counts of money-laundering conspiracy and one count of conspiracy to violate the travel act, that Mr. Datta’s sales of millions of dollars worth of perfume to corrupt buyers in Mexico were fueled by greed. He knew, they said, that the underground drug economy — involving some of the world’s largest suppliers of narcotics to North America — would make him rich.
Getting Inside
The Black Market Peso Exchange has been on the federal government’s radar for years. The system was perfected by Colombian drug lords and later adopted by Mexican drug cartels: When drugs are sold in the United States, the proceeds, in American dollars, are smuggled back into Mexico or Colombia, where they are exchanged for pesos at a discounted rate.
The peso-exchange businesses then use the dollars to buy products in the United States — in Mr. Datta’s case, millions of dollars worth of perfume — and have them shipped to purchasers in Mexico or Colombia.
The Department of Justice created a task force to infiltrate the American businesses cooperating with these money-laundering schemes, initially targeting Colombian drug dealers buying computer parts in New York, according to prosecutors. On wiretaps, investigators learned of a similar market in Mexico, this time involving American perfume wholesalers.
In Laredo, Mr. Datta, an immigrant from India, was basking in financial success. He had come to the United States in 1983 and became a naturalized citizen in 1994, according to his lawyers. On a business trip to Laredo in 2000, he discovered that inland port’s gold mine:  a downtown merchants sector where millions of dollars in goods and cash exchange hands every week.
Just a year after renting his first retail space in Laredo, Mr. Datta had four profitable perfume stores in the city in addition to operations in New York, Arizona and California. He was making $30 million in annual sales, his lawyer said.
Federal prosecutors, however, said that by 2009 Mr. Datta was an experienced money launderer for Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel.
‘All Sinaloa Money’
In 2009, the Justice Department task force focused an investigation on Ajay and Ankur Gupta, father and son perfume vendors in New Jersey who were accused of playing in the black market and, over a decade, netting millions of dollars. Mr. Datta’s lawyers said the Guptas were known for careless transactions like picking up plastic-wrapped bulk cash in parking lots behind fast-food restaurants. When they were arrested, Mr. Datta’s name surfaced in their records, and Mr. Datta’s lawyers said the Guptas agreed to help implicate some of their business partners in order to shorten potential 20-year sentences.
The Guptas’ lawyers refused to comment because their clients clients’ cases have not been closed.
An attorney for Mr. Datta said the Guptas tried repeatedly to draw in Mr. Datta, trying to give him large cash payments, which he refused. Finally, prosecutors said, he accepted. At a 2010 trade show in Las Vegas, the Guptas introduced Mr. Datta to someone they claimed was a perfume vendor from Baja California Sur, Mexico. The man was actually an undercover federal agent.