How did the task force come about? What is its mission?
A. It traces its origins back, probably almost a year and a half or so ago, to the springtime of 2002. We had received some information from our office in Panama — we’ve got attaché offices throughout the world and Panama covers certain parts of Central America. And back then they had some information from Nicaraguan officials that the wife of an individual named Byron Jerez, who at that time really wasn’t as [well-known] as he has become now, was traveling to the United States. They felt she might have some currency that had been taken from the Nicaraguan government. So we dispatched some of our agents, together with inspectors, just to examine her, a routine inbound examination. Didn’t find any currency, but we did find a variety of documents, financial statements and other documents, that seemed to be rather suspicious in nature. Long story short, that’s kind of the genesis of it. We started looking into the doings of Byron Jerez based on that phone call. And with that, the investi
