Gurule was an adviser in the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, where
he served on a criminal justice advisory group headed by a friend,
former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith. In November 2000,
Gurule drew the notice of Bush's transition team with an understated
op-ed piece in USA Today arguing that Bush should win
the Supreme Court case challenging the Florida vote count.
At Treasury, Gurule collided head-on with a problem he had first
taken on in academia. The nation's money-laundering laws focus
on criminals trying to make illegal income appear legitimate --
the "drug paradigm," Gurule calls it.
But the emergence of Al Qaeda had turned the world of money-laundering
upside down. The task now was finding private businesses and charities
that generated cash legitimately then converted it to terrorist
purposes.
The process is laborious, Gurule says, and often entails tracking
money as it flows through shell corporations, offshore banks,
phony and real foundations and a welter of suspect and legitimate
payees. The key, he says, is getting federal law enforcement agencies
to share tips and sources. And to get financial institutions,
especially foreign banks, to share information usually kept private,
such as the identity of account holders.
"Clean money is harder to find than, for instance, drug money,"
Gurule says. "You use all the information you can get your hands
on -- from the CIA and FBI and Customs, even what we call 'open
source,' which is newspapers, magazines, public records. . . .
The job is to separate the legitimate money from the terrorist
money, and it is designed [by Al Qaeda] to be tough."
The effort Gurule is leading has scored some signal successes.
By late August, 210 terrorist organizations and their supporters
had been publicly "listed," and a record $112 million had been
frozen in accounts in 166 countries. Dozens of local offices of
Al Barakaat and Al Taqwa, financial and telecommunications networks
believed to be helping Al Qaeda raise and move funds, were shut
down in the United States, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.
In Chicago, Gurule and company moved quickly to shut down the
Benevolence International Foundation, a Muslim charity suspected
of raising money for Al Qaeda. The federal government used expanded
enforcement powers that Gurule helped push through Congress to
shutter the charity and freeze its assets just weeks after the
legislation passed.
Gurule receives generally high marks from lawyers and public
interest advocates who follow the once-arcane area of Treasury
enforcement. Brad Jansen, a financial transactions and privacy
specialist with the Free Congress Foundation, says Gurule has
taken a "system designed to catch offenders after the fact" and
made it "proactive." Janis Meyer, an international banking lawyer
at Dewey Ballantine in New York City, says Gurule has become an
expert at treading softly when dealing with nations whose banking
secrecy laws to conflict with his goal of international information
sharing.
"The bottom line is that the banking community has sovereignty
issues [but] doesn't want to seem to be on the side of terrorism,"
she says. Gurule, she adds, is "focusing on that."
Gurule's leave of absence from Notre Dame Law School extends
through at least next year. With his wife, Julia, and the couple's
15-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter, he has resettled temporarily
in the D.C. suburbs. An older son, Santiago, is a senior at Notre
Dame.
In the near term, Gurule is keeping a busy schedule. He travels
abroad frequently, lobbying other nations' enforcement officers
to adopt America's. approach to disrupting terrorism's financial
networks. At home, he is focusing on getting U.S. banks to whittle
down the 12-million plus reports they file each year on currency
transactions of $10,000 or more and other "suspicious activity."
Gurule is urging banks to use more "initiative and judgment" to
report only truly suspicious activity, saving investigators valuable
time.
Asked if a year on the Al Qaeda trail has made him feel safer
personally, Gurule says "yes and no."
"Federal law enforcement is doing a better job. I can see it
and am part of it," he answers. "On the other hand, I am still
very uneasy and concerned that there may be more terrorist attacks.
I have an appreciation for the enemy and his resources. . . .
I've seen the way he keeps his books."
* * *
Richard Willing is a reporter for USA Today.
