Episode 6 - Ties with Tehran

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Previously on hot Money.

In the Netherlands, the government expelled two Iranian diplomats because of an assassination connected to the super cartel, while high-tech police hacked into the secret world of organized crime.

This time, we're in New York.

So we picked her up in a high-end vehicle.

We were driven to somewhere in Brooklyn.

We stopped by a small restaurant.

It was nice and simple.

Angel's an international businessman.

He arranges deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars and his black book has contacts from all around the world.

He's telling me about a meeting.

It took place in New York in October 2014.

One day around lunchtime, Angel drives over to the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan.

He picks up a woman who's flown him from abroad.

She gets inside Angel's luxury car and they start talking deals.

I remember she just, once she got comfortable, she opened up.

There's something you need to know about Angel.

He isn't your average international businessman.

She already knew we were high-level drug classickers.

Probably multi-ton.

We were drug classickers from South America looking to launder their money.

And the woman, she's a professional money launderer.

Angel's been working with her for a while, figuring out ways to clean his cocaine money through various banks.

All of course, for a fee.

When they arrive at the Brooklyn diner, they order some food.

And as they're sitting at the table, She takes out her phone and removes the battery.

It's the sort of thing that someone does in a spy show to avoid being tracked or recorded.

Yeah, that's very common actually.

They talk for a while about money and drugs.

And then the woman tells Angel she wants to talk about something else.

Today, she's looking to buy something.

High-end military equipment.

Tons of it.

It's a serious shopping list.

She wants rocket-propelled grenades and sniper rifles and automatic weapons.

Angel, well he's clearly a well-connected guy and she's wondering, perhaps he knows someone who can help her out.

Luckily for her, he does.

which I think helped us a lot.

Laundering drug money is one thing, but it's quite another to just jump into an international arms deal.

But Angel doesn't miss a beat, he just smiles.

Because Angel isn't a drug trafficker, he's an undercover agent working for the DEA.

He's wearing a wire, recording everything.

And this woman at the Brooklyn Diner, she's about to tell him who her client is, and it will transform our understanding of how the European drug trade really works.

I'm Mars Johnson, and from the the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

This is Hot Money Season 2, The New Narcos.

Episode 6, Ties with Tehran.

Angel got transferred into the group and

almost immediately became a very productive part of the group.

I said almost.

And to be more candid on that, I think I was.

I took a little time.

No, no, no.

I was having

some issues with

other groups, the group I was in.

I felt that they weren't aggressive enough.

I just took to him because I immediately respected his work ethic.

We shared an outlook on

how to go after our job.

Setting up an interview with a former undercover drug agent isn't that straightforward.

It takes a lot of planning and some convincing, a little bit of cajoling.

Of course, Angel isn't his real name.

During his career, he's infiltrated some of the most dangerous organized crime groups in the world.

And former undercover agents, they have to be very careful about who they speak with.

Because criminals, especially murderous cartel bosses, they can have long memories.

But after quite a few phone calls, Angel agreed to talk to me on tape.

Alongside him is his longtime DEA colleague, John Post.

Like Angel, John worked in the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, for decades, and he's seen it all.

We noticed that

all of your European traffickers like to go hang out in a place called Marbella, Spain.

Marbella?

Marbella?

Marbella?

It's the haven of

European gangsters.

You tell me, Miles, have you ever been there?

I actually lived in Spain for four years.

I was reporting there for the FT, and it turns out I was there at the exact same time as the Kinnahans, who were in Barbea, although I hadn't heard of them back then.

Anyway, I wanted to talk to Angel and John, because I think they can help us figure out the connection between two things I've learned during my reporting.

First, we know the Iranian regime ordered the assassination of Ali Mutamed in the Netherlands in 2015.

And second, the man who arranged the murder, he was found in a flat belonging to the Kinnahans, the Irish family at the center of the Dubai supercartel.

John and Angel now work with a private security company called Albatross Consultants.

But they used to work out of a DEA field office in Newark, New Jersey.

Until 2018, John was in charge of complex investigations into the nastiest international criminals you can imagine.

And Angel was the guy who was sent in undercover.

to infiltrate these groups and win the confidence of notorious gangsters and then gather the evidence needed to take them down.

He retired a few months ago.

For some reason, ever since I was a kid, I knew I was going to be a DE agent.

I don't really know why.

I think I must have seen it in the movies or something.

I was in junior high school and I remember actually telling a friend of mine that I was going to be a DE agent.

Once he gets the job, it's not long before Angel goes undercover and he quickly learns the tools of the trade.

How to talk, how to dress, how to walk.

One of the things that I learned was actually watching people on the street or people in that environment right if you go into a corporate world you cannot dress like a schmuck right if you're gonna be in the street you cannot show up with a creepy suit it's common sense right so you have to know where you're going into and try to fit the part number one number two the other important thing obviously is that your safety and in worst case scenarios in case something happens it goes tits up you have to have a plan to survive the situation.

The rest is just you being charming, using your personality.

And in those early days, he hones his craft.

He spends hours listening to the tapes of previous operations.

I've made mistakes in the past where I listened to recordings of what I was doing and I just rolled my eyes at myself and I think I learned a lot from it.

And he gets good.

Very good.

Angel becomes a critical part of how John's unit works their major criminal cases.

John starts up an operation by targeting someone in the middle of the hierarchy of a top crime group.

He figures out exactly where to begin by talking to his network of sources.

They're informants he's developed over the years.

The first target needs to be big enough and scary enough to be moving in the right circles.

If you're dealing with some dude that's the best dope deal he ever did in his life was a kilo of Coke, you're not going to be able to do a thousand kilo case with him.

You'll be able to do maybe a five kilo case and that's stretching it.

But as you move up the ladder with higher level targets, you get higher level informants and your higher level informants get you into the top level of the sophisticated organizations i'm talking high credentialed confidential sources who go way back in the drug world and uh their credibility has been well established so

when that person walks through the door with angel that's half of the job once angel's been introduced he has to do more than just look the part he has to withstand any tests that challenge his credibility as a serious criminal.

You want to see the cocaine?

I'll show you the cocaine.

If you want to go see the laboratories, I'll show you the laboratories.

It can be worked out.

And at the same time, Angel needs to gather the evidence that's needed to build a case.

It's the critical skill for any undercover agent.

Every law has different prongs that need to be met for the person to be convicted of it.

Did he have knowledge?

Did he know it was drug money?

Whatever it may be.

As an undercovery, if you have a good relationship with the prosecutor, I know exactly what prongs he needs to have met so he can feel comfortable making a charge.

So you can be glamorous about it and spend your time, wasting your time, really.

You know, you're just shooting the shit with the guy, right?

Clinking or whatever you're doing, but you're not addressing those prongs.

Finally, there's the sting.

And when John sends Angel in, he's always close by with the backup team.

He's always got a danger signal or, you know, a way to let us know if something's going bad and we're ready to react.

And I have been in situations where,

yeah, that signal's giving.

And the one particular one I'm talking about was an undercover in projects in a very tough area.

And they actually said, don't kill me.

I have kids.

And that wasn't the danger signal.

That was letting us know that there was a gun on him.

And like we, within seconds, we were there.

And he had a gun pointed and I'm i'm in the car and we were able to extract him the bad guy target dropped the weapon when he saw four cars converge on him but you know like i said everything else stops when there's a risk to the undercover and boom the priority is getting the safety the undercover getting him out of there and

you know making the arrest I mean, there's situations where I've been in basements.

In retrospect, it was so stupid.

You know, meeting some guys from Yemen

and the basement is dark.

There's nobody there.

I know if I was wearing a transmitter, no one could hear me because I'm deep in a basement.

You know, and I'm like, Jesus, I could easily get chopped up.

Was that over in Brooklyn?

Yeah, I was in Brooklyn.

That was a little hairy.

In retrospect, right?

So, was an undercover assignment worth that risk, right, for that prosecution?

Was that case that important that you're putting your life on the line?

John has had a lot of background with Mexican cartels and Colombian drug traffickers and

some of them are killers.

Once they get to know us, they love us,

but they're killers.

You know, we joke about it.

It's oh, he's such a great guy.

Well, he's a killer.

But that happens quite often.

Over the years, John and Angel forge a formidable partnership, working around the world targeting top gangsters.

Their unit in Newark becomes one of the most decorated in the whole of the DEA for bringing in a slew of major cases.

Angel even wins DEA National Agent of the Year.

One time in 2008, they get a tip out of Panama that an Irish gang is looking to source a huge shipment of cocaine.

Said, hey, these guys want what 3,000 kilos?

I think it was 3,000 kilos, man.

You know, and like, okay, let's go meet them, let them send them down.

What they were asking for was 100% on the money.

3,000 kilo load.

And they were asking us to transport it.

That's 3,000 kilos, three tons, paid for entirely in cash.

At street value, that quantity could sell for hundreds of millions of euros.

Based on the intel we developed later, we're pretty sure it was the Kinnehants that we were introduced to.

And they weren't blowing smoke.

They were for real.

Yeah, they're heavy hitters.

This 2008 run-in with the Kinnehants in Panama, it happened back when Christie was living in Barbea, two years before Operation Shovel.

It's never been reported before, and it just confirms to me how big they were, even back then.

Yeah, but they slipped through our fingers.

We didn't get them.

Yeah, if you got away, we might come back.

Now you tell us they're in Dubai, huh?

But I want to tell you about another one of John and Angel's Sting operations.

It's one that sheds a whole new light on the booming European cocaine trade.

A story that took place in 2014 when they were with that money launderer in a small Brooklyn restaurant and things took an unexpected turn.

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And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

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where you can see the sky.

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You know, when we do a money laundering case, it just splits in different ways, like the trunk of a tree, really.

You could take one branch, you have money laundering.

You take another branch drug trafficking weapons trafficking there's always other criminal activity associated with that one crime so this split into the kobezi case and um by chance he happened to be coming to new york at the time

the kobezi case it's october 2014 and john and angel are deep into a multi-country investigation It started in the Dominican Republic, where they busted a gang trying to ship a thousand kilos of cocaine into Belgium on a private plane.

And after following the leads from that case, a new targets come into view.

Her name's Iman Kabazi, and she's a Lebanese woman in her late 40s.

She has dark black hair and she wears expensive clothes.

And she's a professional money launderer who works with cocaine traffickers in Europe.

Angel, working undercover, has been cultivating her for months.

Well, we got into a source.

We have eventually met her through sources and we were able to have a meeting with her.

During the meeting we stuck up a great relationship.

Myself and another

person

went out to dinner, lunch.

We met in different countries.

We developed a personal relationship as time went on.

Angel gets close enough to Kabezi to feel comfortable planning a sting.

The first thing is to set up a meeting.

One of the DEA's informants tells her that they're expecting a large cocaine shipment to come through Belgium and want to discuss how to launder the proceeds.

And that's no problem for Kabezi.

She's able to move large amounts of cash anywhere in the world for a fee of 20%.

Kabezi travels to New York.

She's staying at a fancy hotel, the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue.

Angel fixes up a lunch meeting so they can discuss business.

So we picked her up in a high-end vehicle.

We were driven to

somewhere in Brooklyn.

We stopped by a small restaurant.

Angel knows John is nearby, listening to the wire and ready to jump in if anything anything gets out of hand.

You're not picking up everything, just to be honest with you.

It's grainy, there's background noise, he's in a restaurant.

You know, you're listening for key safety elements.

At the table, it's clear to Angel that Kabezi's a serious player.

She says, if he wants, she can arrange for planes containing multi-ton shipments of cocaine to land in Africa for him on their way to Europe.

They pause for a moment and order lunch.

It was some sort of American food, like something with fries.

It wasn't anything.

Just from how much he drank.

I drank a lot, though.

What brand did you drink?

You shouldn't do tequila, but the high-end tequila on ice.

Don Julio.

Don Julio or bad.

Don Julio.

John's kidding.

Angel wasn't drinking on the job.

And it's a good thing he wasn't, because suddenly, Kabezi throws him a curveball.

So she, after we had established a relationship through the money laundering side, then she requested our assistance in getting weapons.

She wants them to help her source military-grade arms and blueprints for heavy weaponry.

She needs a lot of them.

In fact, she says her clients looking to buy as much as possible.

They need everything.

And she suggests a code word for the deal, fireworks.

It's not the most subtle choice, I know.

Now, this isn't entirely out of the ordinary for Angel.

Drug traffickers, or they like big guns.

So, I mean, we didn't miss a beat, you know.

I think that's another thing with the people that were there doing the meeting, the experience level that we had.

We were, we jumped right on board, right?

We quickly pulled our military connections in South America.

Usually, drug traffickers, like many other places in Latin America,

they have high connections to the military.

In many countries, it's actually the military that's unloading the drugs from the drug shipments coming in from the drug traffickers.

An angel knows that if needed, his confidential sources can make it look authentic.

She stops the conversation.

Look, she says, I'll be very transparent.

Angel's playing it cool and nodding his head.

He tells her, now is the time to be straight with one another, before they jump into an international weapons conspiracy together.

And then, she drops a bomb.

The people she wants to buy the arms for, it's the Iranian government.

I remember my jaw dropped.

I actually remember looking at a camera that I had.

I looked at a camera

that was looking at me.

I'm like,

just making a face.

Just for myself, you know, sometimes you put that you on TV or something, but you can't believe what you're hearing.

In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at an OOCLA speed test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite to mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, Supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the US where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCHLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

There's more to San Francisco with the Chronicle.

More to experience and to explore.

Knowing San Francisco is our passion.

Discover more at sfchronicle.com.

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Your business is on your mind 24-7.

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First, post your job.

LinkedIn's new feature can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights.

Second, either post your job for free or pay to promote it.

Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants.

Then, get qualified candidates.

At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of the candidates you attract.

And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best.

Then, data.

Based on LinkedIn data, 72% of SMBs using LinkedIn say that LinkedIn helps them find high-quality candidates.

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So here's where we are.

Angel's in a Brooklyn restaurant sitting opposite a woman who wants him to help her smuggle weapons for Iran.

He has to try and stay cool, but this is a huge deal.

What started out as a money laundering case has turned into something much bigger.

That was a great moment, actually.

Just surprised, surprised, extreme surprised, you know, that I didn't know right from the beginning we were going to hit a home run.

And there's a reason why someone like Khabezi would be trying to buy guns on behalf of Iran.

Until Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Iran was the most sanctioned country in the world.

It's been under US sanctions for more than 40 years, since the 1979 revolution, when over 50 Americans were taken hostage at the embassy in Tehran.

Since then, there's been wave after wave.

They're a response to things like Iran's involvement in terrorist attacks around the world and its nuclear enrichment program.

Sanctions are a way for Western governments to punish the regime by cutting the country off from the global financial system.

It means that mostly, it's illegal for American companies to do business with critical sectors of the Iranian economy, things like banking and shipping and oil.

So it's inflicted a major cost, starving the country of foreign investment and blocking imports of Western technology.

They can't just go and buy things on the open market like other countries.

All of this means they have to come up with elaborate schemes to circumvent the sanctions to get the things they want.

It also means that doing business with Iran, it can land you in extremely hot water.

But that's exactly what Khabezi is hoping Angel might be willing to do.

She says they're looking for some serious kit.

They want 250 Chaitak M200 sniper rifles, which are capable of killing a target from 2km away.

They want 500 M4 assault rifles, and they want blueprints for what she calls heavy weaponry.

She starts telling Angel about her high-level contacts in the Iranian government and that he can meet with them to discuss specifications.

They can meet in Cyprus or the UAE.

They're already planning on how to get the weapons into Iran.

So when she starts talking about details of

Iran, Kish Island, etc., and what her plan is, then

it was a surprise.

Let's put it that way.

Kish Island is a free trade zone on an island off the south coast of Iran.

It's a regional tourism hub, but Western governments say it's overflowing with smugglers and organized crime.

Khabezi tells Angel that she can get him diplomatic clearance to land a plane full of weapons there.

I don't know if she actually mentioned the Quds Force, but the military or government personnel will actually unload the weapons.

The Quds Force is the wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard that's responsible for overseas operations.

It's sort of an Iranian equivalent of the CIA combined with special forces.

It's all quite a lot to process, but Angel, he's just nodding along.

He tells her, he lands planes on secret airfields all the time.

This is already pretty big.

But then, she brings up yet another business opportunity.

The drugs and the weapons, she tells Angel.

They're good, but if they really want to make some serious cash, they need to source spare commercial airline parts from Boeing.

Now that might sound a little odd, but plane parts, they're unbelievably difficult to source for a country that's been under Western sanctions for decades.

And parts for Boeing planes, you can't just swap them out for some other brand.

Kabezi tells Angel that her Iranian contacts are saying they have 15 planes that need new parts, and they're willing to pay top dollar.

Too much money, she says.

Billions.

Obviously, she was in this world.

She was hooked up with with the military.

We happen to get lucky I guess.

After the meeting, Angel and John track Kabezi for several more months.

When they hear she's due to fly into Atlanta, Georgia, they decide the time's come to bring her in.

She's arrested.

So let's pause it for a minute and go back over exactly what's going on.

We have a money launderer who moves cash for cocaine traffickers through Europe, and she says she works for the Iranian government.

She's offering top diplomatic clearance from Tehran to land weapon shipments on islands, and she's also trying to find a way around Western sanctions on things like plane parts.

There are lots of people in the murky world of drugs and weapons who claim they have high-level connections in governments.

It makes them seem more credible.

So what I want to know is just how serious she really was about the arms deal.

Just how connected she really is in the regime.

In the court files for her case, US government prosecutors say that her actions are, quote, hallmarks of a person who's a professional arms trafficker, not a first-time neophyte.

But that doesn't really answer my questions.

I tried calling her American defense attorney from the time, but they said they couldn't contact her for me.

According to multiple sources I've spoken to, in the face of all the evidence Angel and John had gathered, Kabezi pled guilty to charges of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization, conspiracy to launder drug money, and conspiracy to provide illegal weapons.

But then I discovered something.

It was something that completely changed my understanding of who Aman Khabazi is.

It shows that she wasn't exaggerating about her top-level contacts in Iran.

What I didn't know, and what's never been reported before, is that US authorities believed Khabazi was a close associate of a man called Abdullah Safi al-Din.

And he's a very big deal in Iran.

In fact, US intelligence believe Khabazi was previously married to Safi al-Din.

I've confirmed it with five former officials from several different countries.

She even told investigators herself about the marriage.

Safi al-Din, he's the Tehran-based representative of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Lebanese political party and militant group.

It's designated as a terrorist organisation by the US, UK, Germany and many other Western governments.

Hezbollah is Iran's most important proxy military force.

That's a way for a country to fight armed conflicts against its rivals through a third party or a militia that it sponsors, but without getting directly involved itself.

And that makes Safi al-Din one of the most influential people in Iran.

And he's still in Tehran today and regularly appears on state television, meeting with people like the country's foreign minister.

I was first told about Kabezi's connection to Safi al-Din by a source off the record, so I spoke with several more people who had direct knowledge of the case in different countries.

It's not easy to find people who are willing to talk about this sort of sensitive stuff on the record, but I did find one person.

His name's Udi Levi, and he's a retired Israeli spy.

Udi is the former head of the Mossad's Economic Warfare Division, a unit that tracked money secretly being moved around the world by Iran, Hezbollah and others.

He spent 35 years in Israeli intelligence and worked on the country's National Security Council.

And I asked him, what did he know about the Iman Kabezi case?

What they didn't publish, and if you ask me, it was most of the sensitive issue in the first time, is the real connection between the highest level in Iran

to that case.

From that point of view,

it was a very sensitive

and the European country afraid to blame directly the highest level in Iran and Hezbollah in their involvement in that case.

Iran and Hezbollah are sworn enemies of Israel and the Mossad spends a lot of effort tracking the activity of their senior officials.

And Abdallah Safi al-Din, he's been a person of interest to people like Udi for a very long time.

He was

Hezbollah attaché, if we can call it like that, in Iran, and the main connector between

Iran and Hezbollah.

Very, very senior, a lot of influence involved directly in the decision making in Hezbollah, well, well connected to the Iranian directly.

I think it was the highest level in that system that dealing with drug trafficking with the full knowledge of the other leaders of the Iranian Hezbollah.

Basically, Safi al-Din is one of the most well-connected men in the Iranian regime, But for John and Angel, his connection to Kerbezi was just another detail in a case that took an unexpected turn.

Yeah, it didn't mean much to us.

It meant more to our headquarters people.

We're field investigators.

We're out in the street

going after targets, gathering evidence.

We didn't know she was married to or hooked up that well until she brought it up.

It was her idea to bring up this weapons trafficking thing and trying to court us to supply weapons.

Was she significant?

Yeah, she was significant.

She pled guilty to material support of terrorism.

And that's that you don't get a charge like that every day in a week.

But there's something else that seems to me even more significant about this case.

Safi al-Din is accused by the US government of being a mastermind behind various sanction busting schemes.

According to the US Treasury, he's the person who acts as an advisor to Iran on financial matters.

They say he worked with Iran's central bank to move hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid American sanctions.

And we know that Khabezi, she wasn't just laundering money through Europe's cocaine trade, she was trying to circumvent US sanctions too.

She was trying to source weapons and vital industrial components.

I've tried to track down Khabazi to ask her about all of this, but she's disappeared.

She served several years in a US prison, and then she vanished.

I spoke with other people involved in the case, and they couldn't tell me where she is now either.

Some told me they thought she was back in the Middle East, but I haven't been able to find her.

But now, I've found an indirect connection between one of the most powerful officials in Iran and drug traffickers in Europe.

And this brings us right back to where we started this investigation, the long arm of Iran.

So here's what we know.

According to the Dutch government, the Iranian regime ordered the murder of Ali Muthamid in the Netherlands in 2015.

It was the targeted assassination of a man living under a false identity, a man who was near the top of Iran's list for revenge after he carried out a huge terrorist attack in the early 1980s.

Finding him and then assassinating him in the heart of Europe, it would have required high-level intelligence and authorization, someone at the top of the Iranian government.

And we know that the man who arranged the murder, he was being protected in a Dublin flat belonging to the Kinahans, the Irish family at the center of the Dubai supercartel.

John and Angel, they discovered that money laundering connects cocaine traffickers in Europe with officials in Iran.

So could that explain what connects the Kinahans to the assassination of Ali Mutomet?

That's what we're going to find out next time.

And we'll meet a U.S.

attorney who's digging deeper into the Kinahan money machine.

It became clear to me as a prosecutor that what they were doing is they were using the fighters as a way to move money through the system.

Hot Money is a production of the Financial Times and Pushkin Industries.

It was written and reported by me, Miles Johnson.

And if you've got any leads or information about this story, you can email me at newnarcos atft.com.

The series producer is Peggy Sutton.

Edith Russillo is the associate producer.

Fact-Checking is by Arthur Gompertz.

Engineering by Sarah Bruguer.

Sound design from Jake Gorski.

Jeremy Wormsley wrote the original music.

Our editor is Sarah Nix.

And the executive producers are Jacob Goldstein and Cheryl Brumley.

Special thanks to Laura Clark, Alastair Mackey, Breen Turner, Raya Jalabi, and David Fuchs.

This is Justin Richmond, host of Broken Record.

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