Oscar L. Sánchez, a Cuban immigrant with little education, helped revolutionize Miami’s Medicare rackets through a storefront check-cashing business that enabled various criminals to launder $63 million from the United States through a web of overseas accounts into Cuba’s national bank, authorities say.
Sánchez allegedly plotted with Medicare fraud offenders and other criminals to divert the dirty money through more than a dozen shell companies’ bank accounts in Canada and Trinidad. The laundered money was ultimately funneled in transfers of $100,000 or more from a Trinidad bank’s Havana branch into the Banco Nacional de Cuba, according to federal authorities.
FBI agents and prosecutors are trying to figure out who received the money in Cuba — Medicare fraud fugitives, other criminals, government officials or all of the above? Or was the money moved offshore again to other countries? As authorities try to trace the money, they’re putting the squeeze on Sánchez to flip on other possible co-conspirators who collaborated with him in South Florida, Canada, Trinidad and Cuba.