This Week
Cover Story
ON THE TRAIL OF
\\\\
Early Mentors
ERIC L. ROZENMAN
Jewish Renaissance Media
Washington
obb M. LaKritz likes to climb challeng-
ing mountains, like Switzerland's Mt.
Eiger, Tanzania's Kilimanjaro, even
Nepal's Mt. Everest. But, for someone
whose job changed as radically as his did on Sept.
11, spelunking might have been better preparation.
The 29-year-old Detroit native got a new and vir-
tually all-consuming assignment after the terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon: help track down and stop the money that
supports exiled Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden and
his Al Qaida network.
On Sept. 11, LaKritz was barely beginning his
work as a special assistant to
Deputy Treasury Secretary
Kenneth W. Dam. He recalls
stepping off a flight from
London to New Delhi and
learning how much the world
had changed. At the airport in
India, LaKritz was told "the
World Trade Center is gone."
"I didn't comprehend," he said.
The aftermath of the attacks "increased the profile
of my job and made it incredibly intense," said the
1994 University of Michigan graduate and 1997
graduate of Emory University Law School in
Atlanta.
The first few months were spent developing a plan
to fight terrorism financially. "The first salvo of that
war," he said, was President George W. Bush's Sept.
24 statement that "we were going to bankrupt the
terrorists."
Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and Dam, the
latter LaKritz's boss and Treasury's new point man
for unraveling terrorist finances, then asked LaKritz
to write a speech detailing the battle.
"I spent three weeks really getting the language
down," he said. "It was less a speech than a policy
outline. We called it 'the financial front.'
"The military can bomb Afghanistan, but we can't
just bomb a bank. We had to come up with a strate-
gy we didn't have" and immediately assemble a
multinational effort first to disrupt, then dry up the
cash flow of bin Laden and his allies.
How did the son of Berry and Cheryl LaKritz of
West Bloomfield come so far, so fast? The answer,
in part, was his innate "whiz kid" tendencies.
Another part he attributes to Shabbat dinners with
his late grandfather, Hy Weinstein.
"He was incredibly wise to politics and he loved
it," LaKritz recalled. "I was 6 or 7 and would stay
up late watching Nightline with him."
LaKritz also remembers seeing tapes of the
Watergate hearings that featured an inquisitorial
Republican senator from Tennessee.
"Howard Baker was the star," LaKritz said, recall-
ing the senator's consistent question: "What did the
president [Nixon] know, and when did he know it?"
Years later, fresh out of Emory law, LaKritz
sought out Baker, then a partner in the
On The Money Trail
But since the destruction of the World Trade Center
in New York City and attack on the Pentagon in
Arlington, 90 percent of LaKritz's workday relates
broadly to the financial fight against terrorism,
according to Rob Nichols, deputy assistant secretary
for public affairs.
Deputy Secretary Dam gave "the speech," which
other senior Treasury Department officials began
using as a reference point. LaKritz says he had the
assistance of 10 people in the drafting process. "We
wrote it as a team," he said. "I relied heavily on the
international affairs folks."
Quickly, the United States won commitments
from 120 nations to help it follow and obstruct the
terrorists' cash trail.
"The flow of money always occurs," LaKritz
observed. "That's what the global economy is all
about."
The U.S. government had been working to con-
trol practices such as money laundering for years,
but "with this crisis our efforts are being stepped up.
I think the consequences will be profound ... There
will be no place for terrorist money to hide. That's
the long-term goal."
In the short run, the new American campaign is
intended to force terrorists' funds "out of normal
channels of international commerce, making it easier
for our investigators and allies _to track and find,"
LaKritz said. Governments, national central banks
and large, private financial institutions all have been
helpful, Nichols added.
The Treasury Department first had to determine
where the money came from. Officials believe that bin
Laden and his brothers inherited between $300 mil-
Detroit's Robb LaKritz helps steer Treasury
efforts to cut Al Qaida funds.
12/21
2001
16
Washington, D.C., law office of Baker, Donelson,
Bearman and Caldwell.
"My first job in politics was working in Baker's
firm," LaKritz said. He started in the international
policy practice, headed by Baker and former U.S.
Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger.
He stayed for two years, then answered the call
of the late Heinz Prechter — whom LaKritz
regards as one of his political mentors — and of
Gov. John Engler. They wanted him to return to
Michigan to work on the budding Bush presiden-
tial campaign.
LaKritz worked in leadership roles in national
fund-raising and ethnic and minority outreach,
then in the Florida recount.
"I helped make sure we had the necessary
resources to wage that fight," he said, "and did
additional fund-raising around the country," focus-
ing on Florida, Michigan and D.C.
Returning to Washington, he joined the adminis-
tration's international economic policy team and
zeroed in on things like the political implications
of trade policy with Japan.
lion and $500 million. But because his father had 52
children by four wives, bin Laden's share is believed to
have been only $25 million to $30 million.
"You can't fund 10 years or more of terrorist activ-
ity on that," Nichols said. "It demonstrates what a
good job he did in fund-raising."
Bin Laden's fund-raising drew on five basic
sources, according to Treasury officials: international
money transfers, Islamic charities, skimming legiti-
mate businesses, illegal businesses including drug
smuggling, and contributions from both rogue states
and wealthy individuals — primarily in the Middle
East — who either detested the United States or
found themselves squeezed by those who did.
For example, hundreds of Islamic charities channel
billions of dollars across the globe, including plenty
from the United States. Just one Al Qaida operative
in one charity could siphon large sums to bin
Laden. The informal hawala network of money
transfers, including emigrant remittances from the
United States to cash-strapped and bank-sparse
Somalia, apparently provided Al Qaida another rev-
enue stream.