Public Intelligence

Tom Raffanello, the former chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Miami office, appeared in handcuffs Friday morning in federal court. Raffanello, who led the agency’s cases against infamous Panama strongman Manuel Noriega and Medellin cartel kingpin Fabio Ochoa, was indicted by a federal grand jury a day earlier for ordering the shredding of records belonging to disgraced banker Allen Stanford.

The former chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Miami office who led the agency’s cases against infamous Panama strongman Manuel Noriega and Medellin cartel kingpin Fabio Ocho, was indicted by a federal grand jury Thursday for ordering the shredding of records once belonging to disgraced banker Allen Stanford.

Stanford Financial Group was a privately held international group of financial services companies controlled by Allen Stanford, until it was seized by United States authorities in early 2009. Headquartered in the Galleria Tower II in Uptown Houston, Texas, U.S. , it had 50 offices in several countries, mainly in the Americas, and said it managed $8.5 billion of assets for more than 30,000 clients in 136 countries on six continents.

Stanford Financial Group (SFG) was the parent company of Stanford International Bank, Ltd. and a web of other affiliated financial services entities, including Stanford Group Company. SFG maintained offices in several locations, including Houston, Texas, Memphis, Tennessee, and Miami, Florida.

For at least a decade, R. Allen Stanford and James M. Davis executed a massive Ponzi scheme through entities under their control, including Stanford International Bank, Ltd. (“SIB”) and its affiliated Houston-based broker-dealers and investment advisers, Stanford Group Company (“SGC”) and Stanford Capital Management (“SCM”). Stanford and Davis, acting in concert with the other defendants, misappropriated billions of dollars of investor funds and falsified SIB’s financial statements in an effort to conceal their fraudulent conduct.

The criminal filing – the first to be brought in the case against the company or its staff – follows on from civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in February. At the time of going to press, the new charges remained sealed by a federal grand jury. However they are understood to be considerably broader than those brought by the SEC, and include charges on fraud and on obstructing the financial regulator in its investigations in recent years.