MURDER OF MONEY LAUNDERING ATTORNEY WHO STOLE FROM DRUG TRAFFICKERS COVERED UP BY AUTHORITIES AS ACCIDENT

                                                         

The late Allison Lovell and her deceased children

Lawyers who launder the proceeds of narcotics traffickers rightly fear being killed by their clients, should anything happen to the money they are handling. Even if it is not their fault, they are generally held strictly liable, should anything untoward occur with the millions of drug profits they move through the global financial system. I know this from personal experience as a decade of being a professional money launderer during the so-called Miami Vice era, when lucrative cocaine profits were cleaned by a small army of lawyers, accountants and financial professionals in the United States.

There are many examples of this hard and fast rule about laundrymen losing money. Regular readers of this blog are familiar with the violent death of  Caribbean attorney WILLIAM HERBERT, the Foreign Minister of St. Kitts & Nevis, when IRA money he was moving was seized by MI-6 in the UK. I was once advised, at a chance conference meeting with a DEA agent, that WILLIAM NORIEGA, a prominent Miami attorney found floating in Biscayne Bay,who specialized in representing South American clients, allegedly met his end for that reason, a fact unknown to even his closest lawyer friends. I once worked with Mr. Noriega, and never suspected him of criminal conduct. The prospect of death is a daily companion when you move dirty cash for drug traffickers, irrespective of the reason why something goes wrong with the funds entrusted to you. Caveat avocat.

It has been a year since Barbados attorney ALLISON  LOVELL died in a fiery explosion and fire, occurring in the middle of the night at her home, and which took her life as well as that of her husband, and two small children. Law enforcement authorities there were quick to categorize the grisly incident as an accident, although in truth and in fact it appears to have occurred due to a professional assassination, perpetrated on behalf of a colombian drug cartel, on behalf of whom she was allegedly laundering narcoprofits, which seemed to have never made it to Panamanian banks, as promised.

Whether Ms. Lovell, whose law license was, at the time of her death, under an eighteen month suspension in Barbados for stealing six figures from a client, was a professional money launderer or just dabbling in the dark act, we cannot say, but she was playing in deep waters in which there is zero margin for error. She may have been able to divert client money to her personal use with impunity, which many Bajan lawyers do each day in a system that allows such unethical and illegal activity, but when it comes to drug kingpins, such greed usually results in a swift and brutal ending to their existence. What is tragic is that her avarice, or negligence, resulted in the deaths of her two small children, as well as her husband.   

  

As one of the drug traffickers advised the Texas lawyer in the violent film The Counselor, stay out of the criminal business, for it often does not end well. In that movie, which included multiple deaths of just about every major character, including the beheading of the lawyer's fiance'
, you see that money laundering carries risks that a normal professional wisely avoids. Ask Ms. Lovells' grieving parents if you are still not convinced it's not worth it.