MIAMI — A trucking company owner charged with playing a supporting role in a gold-smuggling scheme spanning South America, the Caribbean and South Florida pleaded guilty this week to submitting false customs documents that concealed the true origins of the gold being imported through Miami International Airport.
Jesus Gabriel Rodriguez Jr., CEO of the Doral-based armored truck company Transvalue Inc., admitted as part of his plea agreement that he helped import thousands of kilos of gold valued at $140 million into the United States from Curacao, knowing that that the customs paperwork falsely represented its origins. The records falsely showed the gold was shipped from the Cayman Islands to make it look like it didn’t come from Curacao, which is known as an illicit trading hub for gold mined in South America, including nearby Venezuela. Disclosing that the gold was actually shipped through Curacao would have violated U.S. anti-money laundering laws.
By pleading guilty to the false statement charge, Rodriguez now faces up to two years in prison instead of 20 years under a previous money laundering conspiracy charge. But Rodriguez, 45, may receive less time at his sentencing April 4 before U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayle because he accepted responsibility and agreed to cooperate with authorities, according to the terms of his deal struck between defense attorney Michael R. Band and prosecutor Walter Norkin.
Rodriguez also agreed to forfeit $267,817 as part of his agreement. The amount represents the increase in value to his cargo-hauling business and his personal earnings from the scheme, according to court records.
U.S. Attorney Tony Gonzalez said that Rodriguez was one of the “key players” in the sprawling money laundering case, which was unveiled nearly five years ago with the arrests of three Miami-area brokers accused of illegally importing $3.6 billion worth of gold from Peru and other South American countries. Rodriguez may be the last defendant to be prosecuted in the case, which put a spotlight on Miami as a major gold-import capital and on mining’s devastation of the rain forest in South America. The case, because of its geographical breadth and financial complexity, involved a joint investigation by Homeland Security Investigations, Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and IRS.
“Corporate executives who facilitate money laundering while purportedly importing lawful goods at the transport and U.S. Customs stages do not get to hide behind their status as otherwise legitimate business owners,” Gonzalez said in a statement. “Like everyone else participating in these illegal schemes, they will be prosecuted.”
After his arrest last June, Rodriguez was accused of participating in a piece of the international smuggling scheme by helping coordinate millions of dollars in gold shipments designed to launder cash with ties to criminal activity, federal prosecutors in Miami said.
According to a criminal complaint affidavit, Rodriguez used his experience and contacts to orchestrate the importation of thousands of kilos of illicitly sourced gold that was flown into the United States from Curaçao between March 2015 and September 2016. Curaçao, a Caribbean island off the coast of Venezuela that is part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, has no gold mines.
Rodriguez was accused of conspiring with gold sellers in the Caribbean, though the gold was “likely being illegally mined and smuggled out of Venezuela,” according to the complaint. Other possible sources included Peru and Colombia, which are rich in gold but rife with corruption in the precious-metal trade, according to U.S. authorities.
Rodriguez’s trucking company hauled the gold loads from Miami International Airport to NTR Metals, a precious-metal import firm based in Doral that was at the center of the huge precious-metal money laundering case.
U.S. authorities say NTR Metals, which had a small refinery in Doral and a major processing facility in Ohio, was not supposed to buy gold from Curaçao as part of its anti-money-laundering policy. The island country is commonly used as a transshipment point for gold illegally mined in, and smuggled out of, South America, authorities said.
Rodriguez, the Transvalue CEO, helped a circle of co-conspirators dodge NTR Metals’ anti-money-laundering policy and get the gold past U.S. Customs by working to conceal the gold’s illegal origins and connections to Curaçao, according to the criminal complaint that was the basis for his arrest.
The complaint accused Rodriguez of routing the gold shipments through different countries before they reached their final destination in Miami. The gold loads would be shipped from Curaçao to Miami, then go to the Cayman Islands and back to Miami. As a result, the gold exporting country falsely appeared to be the Cayman Islands.
The buyers of the gold were co-conspirators based in South Florida and Latin America who earned commissions by procuring gold for NTR Metals. The firm’s three principal brokers were the first defendants charged in the money-laundering conspiracy in 2017. They pleaded guilty and served several years in prison.
NTR Metals’ three principal brokers, who cooperated with authorities, said that Rodriguez “was aware that the gold coming into Miami ... did not originate in the Cayman Islands,” according to the complaint.
NTR Metals was owned by Dallas parent company Elemetal, which pleaded guilty to failing to maintain a strong anti-money-laundering program and paid a $15 million fine to the U.S. government. Most of the gold imported by NTR Metals was illegally mined in Peru and smuggled through that country or diverted through other South American nations, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile, according to court records and authorities.
In addition to NTR Metals and its parent company, authorities also charged a Peruvian gold exporter, three of his associates and a Lima-based customs broker — all accused of falsifying documents and paying bribes to officials to move loads of the precious metal to Miami.
In Latin America, criminals view mining and trading precious metals as a lucrative growth business, carefully hidden from U.S. consumers who have no idea where it comes from or that laws are being broken, the Miami Herald reported in a 2018 series, “Dirty Gold, Clean Cash.” Drug traffickers, who exert control over miners in the Amazon rain forest, have tapped into the gold trade because the precious metal is difficult to trace and therefore ideal for money laundering.
America’s demand for gold is as strong as it is for cocaine. NTR Metals, for instance, was the subsidiary of a major U.S. gold refinery that supplied Apple and 67 other Fortune 500 companies, as well as Tiffany & Co., according to a Herald analysis of corporate disclosures. Those companies argued that they maintained robust anti-money-laundering programs and committed no wrongdoing.
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