More than a dozen photos of the Treasury Department's top leaders
stare down at you from a wall in the main lobby of the department's
Washington, D.C., headquarters. Notre Dame law professor Jimmy
Gurule is not hard to pick out.
The 50-year-old Gurule, Treasury's undersecretary for enforcement,
is the one who is only half smiling. His intense dark brown eyes
seem prepared to drill through yet another deep stack of the currency
transaction reports, corporate filings and other paperwork that
comprise terrorism's money trail. Gurule is in charge of all federal
efforts to track the money that finances terrorists.
Gurule's fourth-floor corner office, with a view of the White
House next door, completes the image of a hard-bitten white-collar
warrior: law books, bust of Churchill, a four-foot-square government
issue desk with neatly arranged papers, an easel-mounted flow
chart of three- and four-letter acronyms connected by hand-drawn
arrows.
But there's another piece to the Jimmy Gurule story, and it's
lurking on the dedication page of a weighty tome on the undersecretary's
bookshelf. In what must surely be a first in legal publishing,
co-author Gurule has dedicated The Law of Asset Forfeiture
not to a colleague or a legal mentor but to Frances "Pancha" Yanez-Gonzalez,
the Mexican-American grandmother who helped raise him in Salt
Lake City, Utah.
"She was a saint, one of the wisest people I ever met, wiser
certainly than the vast majority of judges I've appeared before,"
says the highest-ranking Hispanic in law enforcement. "But she's
in there because she's the most upbeat person I've ever known,
someone who had very little material wealth but who was determined
to always, always leave you feeling upbeat and positive whenever
you went for a visit."
These days, Gurule finds uses both for his asset forfeiture
book and for his grandmother's hopeful message.
Nearly a year spent in the war on terrorism's back shop has
left Gurule feeling better about the federal government's ability
to defend against an enemy whose financial sophistication nearly
matches its ruthlessness. Border security, including efforts by
the Customs Service that Gurule oversees, has been enhanced. Interagency
rivalry -- Gurule calls it "stovepipe thinking" -- has been curtailed,
leading to an unprecedented sharing of information between Treasury,
the FBI and CIA. And more than $112 million in suspected terrorist
assets have been frozen by Gurule's department and its allies
worldwide.
But Gurule's work also has brought him face to face, or at least
computer-screen to computer-screen, with Islamic terror's economic
brain trust. Al Qaeda, he notes, used the world's consumer-oriented
banking system to raise and launder money and to move it from
Asia to Europe to America. Wire transfers and ATMs kept the September
11 hijackers flush with cash, like well-heeled college students.
That, he says, is a continuing source of unease.
"There are Al Qaeda cells in up to 60 countries around the world,"
he notes during an interview in his office. "And the other part
is, how do you deter an enemy that is willing to give his life
for the cause? Where's the deterrent value, from a law enforcement
perspective?"
Gurule took his current job in August 2001, when the greatest
challenge seemed to be coordinating Treasury's disparate enforcement
agencies. In addition to the Customs Service, the agencies Gurule
oversees include the Secret Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms; and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Center. The
center attempts to catch criminals and now terrorists by monitoring
literally millions of currency transfers and suspicious activities
reports that financial institutions file annually.
Gurule's background made him a likely fit. As a federal prosecutor
in Los Angeles in the 1980s, he handled several narcotics prosecutions
and headed up the team that won a conviction of Mexican drug smugglers
who had killed an American undercover agent. During the presidency
of the first George Bush, Gurule led the Office of Justice Programs,
which is the research, development and social services arm of
the Justice Department. At Notre Dame Law School, where he became
a full professor in 1996, Gurule taught complex criminal litigation
and the law of scientific evidence. He also developed a specialty
in money-laundering law, which has turned out to be particularly
useful.
