A Brazilian national who helped finance and manage a ring that laundered drug cash through American banks was sentenced Friday to 12 years in prison, the Justice Department announced. Ygor Fokin Saviolli, 35, was the last of six defendants to be sentenced in a case the department says involved more than $30 million in illicit proceeds, including money from drug trafficking.
According to court documents cited by the department, couriers in the United States picked up bulk cash from drug sales and deposited it at banks around the country, hiding its origin and returning the profits to, among others, drug suppliers operating outside the United States. Facilitators and couriers set up dozens of pickups through WhatsApp message chains. Saviolli put up money in advance to keep the operation going and oversaw the receipt and laundering of the cash, the department said.
His five co-defendants were sentenced on Sept. 24. Gabriel Cezar Menezes, 29, who prosecutors said directed couriers and picked up cash himself on multiple occasions, received 94 months. Omar Aliperti De Mello Correa, 34, a U.S. citizen, received 30 months, and Leandro De Avila Goncalves, 43, received 24 months. Joao Andrade De Mello, 29, and Tadeu Sebastiane Rabelo Alves Barbosa, 30, were each sentenced to a year and a day. Correa, Goncalves, De Mello and Barbosa worked as couriers, collecting cash in Atlanta, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Rochester and Tampa, among other cities. The department said the Brazilian defendants were living in the United States illegally when they were arrested.
All six pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering. When Saviolli became the last of them to admit his role this summer, the Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported that the charge carried a maximum of 20 years and that the six lived in the Orlando area.
The Justice Department's announcement did not name any criminal organization behind the money. The Treasury Department did in July, when it sanctioned two Brazilians and four companies over their links to Primeiro Comando da Capital, the Brazil-based gang known as the PCC, which Treasury called Latin America's largest. Treasury said the laundering network it targeted operated from Florida and São Paulo and that the FBI had arrested six members of the Florida group in January; they were indicted on money laundering charges in federal court in the Southern District of Florida. The São Paulo end of the operation, Treasury said, was a key link between PCC operatives in Florida and foreign drug traffickers and had laundered more than $30 million generated in several American cities, using cryptocurrency to move the money back to Brazil for the gang.
O Globo reported that the guilty pleas strengthened the investigation centered on one of the Brazilians sanctioned by the United States, a man Treasury identifies as a link to the PCC and as one of the people coordinating the scheme from afar.
Treasury said its sanctions were the culmination of a Homeland Security Task Force investigation involving the FBI's Miami field office and the Justice Department's Money Laundering, Narcotics and Forfeiture Section. Two trial attorneys from that section and an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of Florida prosecuted the Florida case. The FBI investigated it with help from the Drug Enforcement Administration's Rochester resident office and Homeland Security Investigations' offices in Brasília and Miami, according to the Justice Department.
Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Criminal Division announced the sentence with U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones and Brett Skiles, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Miami field office. The announcement did not include a statement from Saviolli or his lawyer.