The Coffee Smuggler of Boca Raton

Sometimes coffee smuggling is as simple as transporting some freshly harvested beans over a nearby border where they can fetch a better price. Other times, it involves international intrigue, bribes, and shady underworld connections to despotic world leaders. This story is about the latter.

In August 1991, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted a Jordanian national named Munther Bilbeisi on tax evasion charges. Bilbeisi stood accused of failing to report around $3 million in income to the IRS—money he made from smuggling coffee into the U.S. from Central America during the previous decade.

As Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin wrote in their book “False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World's Most Corrupt Financial Empire”, when asked about his occupation, Bilbeisi “described himself as a coffee merchant. That was technically accurate, but it was only a fraction of his business activities”.

From his lavish mansion in Boca Raton, Bilbeisi allegedly arranged for hundreds of coffee shipments to enter the country under false pretences, paying millions in bribes to ensure customs officials looked the other way. According to authorities, Bilbeisi was also an arms dealer who used his connections with a criminal international bank to sell helicopters and weapons to countries in Latin America throughout the 1980s.

Like many such tales, Bilbeisi’s downfall came when he got too greedy: he tried to file an insurance claim for what he said was a lost coffee shipment. The insurance underwriters investigated, and they eventually uncovered a web of intrigue and corruption that brought down a massive criminal enterprise with connections to a global network of despots and dictators. And it all started with some coffee.