Raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the jihad. “Feds Say Men Funded Terror With Playstations: Here’s betting ICE agents said, ‘Game over,'” by Janie Campbell for NBCMIami.com, February 20 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Cue the sad noise when Mario dies by mushroom: federal agents have charged three Miami businessmen with conspiring to smuggle videogame consoles to a shopping center in Paraguay that funds political terrorist group Hezbollah.
Khaled T. Safadi, Ulises Talavera, and Emilio Gonzalez-Neira were arrested Thursday following a nearly three-year investigation of their Miami-based export and freight-forwarding businesses. ICE agents working with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force say the three falsified invoices and export paperwork and used a network of fake addresses to mask the true destination of thousands of Sony cameras and Playstations: the Galeria Page Mall in Cuidad del Este.
The U.S. Treasury has identified Galeria Page as the headquarters for Lebanon-based Hezbollah in the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay; they say the manager pays a regular quota to Hezbollah based on the center’s sales.
Federal prosecutors say wire transfer payments to the Miami shippers from their contact at Galeria Page, Paraguayan national Samer Mehdi, were routed through various other business to conceal their origin. Mehdi has also been charged but remains at large.
A source said the alleged smuggling ring made “hundreds of millions” of dollars for Hezbollah….