BCCI

The bank for spies, cartels, and arms deals — with, the inquiry found, friends in every capital.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International: $20 billion, 78 countries, and — per the 1992 Kerry-Brown Senate report — a criminal enterprise servicing arms dealers, cartels, dictators, and intelligence agencies simultaneously, with the CIA holding accounts it used while reporting on the bank it used. First American Bankshares, Washington's largest, turned out to be secretly BCCI-owned. Regulators shuttered it in 1991 in a coordinated seven-country raid. The archive's lesson entry: the full-service shadow bank of the theories existed, operated for two decades, and was closed only after it had banked everyone worth blackmailing.