The Amazing Saga of Foutanga Babani Sissoko (Part 2)
Okay, imagine this scenario: You are a bank manager, and one day a customer walks into your bank seeking a car loan. He's a charismatic guy, handsome, outgoing. So, you enjoy chatting with him while you're doing the paperwork. And at one point he happens to mention that he has magical powers to call on spirits and djinn - and specifically that he can take any amount of physical cash and magically double it, just like that. How do you react to that?
Now we can't truly know how we would respond in a given situation until we face it. But I'd like to think that my first question would be something like, "Why, that being the case, do you need to come to me for a car loan?"
But in 1995, the reaction of Dubai Islamic Bank manager Mohammad Ayoub was more like, "That is fascinating, and I would love to hear more."
The customer here was, of course, Foutanga Babani Sissoko, the larger-than-life hero of our story. (See Part 1 here.) He invited Ayoub the bank manager to come around for dinner one night, bring some money, and he could see for himself.
So Ayoub showed up at Sissoko's place with some cash, at which point a man came bursting out of a room shouting that a djinn had attacked him. He'd somehow made it angry, and Ayoub shouldn't go in there lest it refuse to double his money... or worse. So Sissoko took Ayoub's money into the room while he waited outside. From inside came strange lights, loud noises, smoke, and voices. But when it was over, sure enough, Sissoko returned with double the money!
Ayoub was delighted and began regularly funneling money from the bank to Sissoko to be doubled. Over the next three years, these transfers would add up to somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a billion dollars.
Not long afterwards, Sissoko turned up in New York, where he put his ability to get away with unbelievable things in a bank office to good use. He walked into Citibank in Manhattan, found a teller named Mona Searles, and married her. (It's not clear that this marriage was legal. There appear to have been quite a few others.) He gave $500,000 to his new bride, and she helped him route more than $150 million through the international banking network into the United States.
Sissoko now had enough money to indulge himself. Among those indulgences was his own airline, Air Dabia, which you'll recall was my initial entry point into this saga. The company started buying aircraft to build its fleet. These included the unlucky 747 we met in Part 1 and some other used passenger jets.
But Sissoko's people ran into trouble when they bought a couple of Vietnam-era Huey helicopters. These were supposedly intended to operate as air ambulances, and who knows, maybe that's true. But since all it would take was refitting their weapons to turn the Hueys back into gunships, they needed special export licenses to get out of the country.
This involved a lot of paperwork, a lot of delays - and probably a lot of questions Air Dabia didn't want to answer. And so Sissoko's people tried to speed things up with a $30,000 bribe to a U.S. Customs official in Miami.
This proved to be a mistake. They were arrested, and a warrant was issued for Sissoko himself. He was picked up by Interpol in Geneva and jailed pending extradition to the U.S. to face charges.
But was this the end for our hero? Oh no. No, no, no. Foutanga Babani Sissoko wasn't done, not by a long shot.
Yet more to come in Part 3!
til next time,
-- MP
Spy My Stuff
You can find me at MarkParragh.com and my books here at Amazon. The John Crane series is currently in Kindle Unlimited, and so exclusive to Amazon. Rumrunners can also be found at other fine ebook retailers.
Reading: With a Mind to Kill by Anthony Horowitz. New Bond novel! His Forever and a Day might be my favorite non-Fleming Bond of them all, so I’m excited about this.
Watching: Moon Dog, an adorable short about maybe not always going with your first instinct.
Listening To: Crystal. By 80s synth band New Order, believe it or not.