MIAMI (Reuters) - The U.S. government has seized an Arizona oil company and its wells that it said on Tuesday were bought with illegal money from a convicted drug kingpin who kept assets concealed in an offshore maze for decades.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement took over Shaboom Oil Inc. of Phoenix and its assets -- 43 wells in Pennsylvania's Allegheny National Forest worth about $1 million, plus mineral rights to 1,100 acres of land in the forest and several trusts and bank accounts in Monaco.
The agency, which said the land in question produced 1,100 barrels of oil and gas per month at its peak in the 1990s, valued the assets at $6.5 million.
That brought to $70 million the value of assets seized so far from Paul Edward Hindelang, who ran one of America's largest marijuana smuggling rings in the late 1970s, ICE said.
Hindelang pleaded guilty in 1981 to importing 250 tonnes of marijuana and conspiring to import another 150,000 pounds into Florida, Louisiana and other states.
He served 30 months in prison and agreed to forfeit $640,000 to U.S. authorities, an amount he said was all of his ill-gotten profits.
Federal agents later learned he had hidden away much more than that, and turned over control of the money to a Costa Rican man who acted as his representative in Switzerland, ICE said.
The agents and Florida's Monroe County Sheriff's Office have spent the last dozen years tracking Hindelang's holdings through offshore accounts and corporations in Switzerland, Panama, several Caribbean islands, and the British Channel Islands.
The treasure hunt led them most recently to Shaboom, which was owned by a Panamanian company called Shaboom Investments Inc. A federal judge in Miami signed a forfeiture order last year and agents took over the firm last week.
An ICE agent who tracked the assets, Cindy Keuthan, said the agency would operate the company until it could be appraised and sold at auction.
Shaboom owns the subsurface rights to the forest land but leased them out to an independent drilling company that owns much of the pumping equipment.
Proceeds from the auction would be divided among the law enforcement agencies that conducted the investigation, Keuthan said.
Source: Reuters via Yahoo News
