Organized Crime, Intelligence Services, and the Bank of New York Money Laundering Scandal
33 min readDec 6, 2022
This article covers the Eurasian organized crime and global intelligence service connections to the Bank of New York money laundering scandal. It is the fifth article in the series “Vladimir Putin, Global Corruption, and the Road to the 2016 Election.” While it is not necessary to read earlier entries, it is recommended.
The first article provides a brief history of Russia’s intelligence services and a definition of “Disinformation” and “Active Measures.”
The second article describes Vladimir Putin’s early life and his experiences as a KGB Officer in Russia and East Germany.
The third article describes how elements of the KGB laundered billions of dollars of Communist Party money into the West as the USSR collapsed.
The fourth article describes the rise of the post-Soviet oligarchic system and the role Eurasian organized crime played in facilitating it.
The fifth article covers Putin’s tenure as Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg and his enduring relationship with organized crime.
This article is a partial excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available .
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —In the latter days of the Yeltsin presidency, a series of scandals rocked the Kremlin and threatened “The Family,” the group of political insiders and family members closest to Boris Yeltsin, with future prosecution. This set the stage for the ascension of Vladimir Putin.The core secret agreement that ushered Putin into the presidency was a quid pro quo that involved him agreeing not to prosecute Yeltsin or his family after he left office.According to former Russian intelligence officer Felipe Turover, who spoke with the journalist Catherine Belton, one of these scandals, involving a Swiss construction company Mabatex, was partially .Another scandal exploded across the headlines when on August 19th, 1999 The New York Times reported that billions of dollars had been .
Founded in 1784 by a group that included Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, the Bank of New York, now part of BNY Mellon, was one of the oldest financial institutions in the United States.The scandal implicated the highest levels of the Russian government, including members of “The Family,” and was the .Participants in the laundromat included some of the most senior members of Eurasian organized crime, including the infamous Semyon Mogilevich, and in multiple places there are hints at the involvement of global intelligence services.Republic National Bank of New York, Eurasian Organized Crime, and the Suspicious Activity Report that Launched a Scandal
In August of 1998, Republic National Bank of New York issued a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) regarding an account it shared with the BNY’s Eastern European Division. Banks are required by law to file SARs with the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) for transactions that indicate possible money laundering or fraud.While there is nothing unusual about filing SARs, the fact that it was Republic National Bank, which was no stranger to Russian organized crime and corruption itself, made the filing was curious indeed.Republic was owned by the Lebanese-Brazilian banker Edmond Safra. Starting in January 1992, it was licensed by the US government to deliver nearly $10 billion in US hard currency to Russia each year. Every evening, five days a week, for years, a Boeing 767 departed JFK for Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport carrying a Republic National Bank courier and on average $100 million in freshly printed $100 bills.Upon landing in Moscow, a fleet of armored trucks collected the cash and delivered it to Republic’s correspondent Russian banks that had ordered greenbacks on behalf of their clients.According to , given the pervasive infiltration of organized crime into Russia’s young and unruly banking sector, Republic was suspected of at the very least turning a blind eye to money laundering activities, particularly by officials at the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the New York State Banking Department.Republic would receive an order from a Russian bank for American dollars. It would then turn around and purchase the dollars directly from the New York Federal Reserve.The same amount, plus a fee, would then be wired to Republic from the Russian banks clients, normally from an account in London. Republic at one point controlled 95% of US banknote sales to Russia.Anti-money laundering laws in place at the time required only that Republic make sure that it was not doing direct business with criminals or their agents. As long as the banks they did business with were licensed by the Russian Central Bank, they were legally in the clear.
The penetration of organized crime into the highest levels of the Russian banking system was pervasive. Billions worth of American $100 bills undoubtedly made their way into the hands of Russian organized crime syndicates.While Republic’s dollar trade in Russia took place, numerous US government officials suspected that it was knowingly involved in money laundering for Russian organized crime, but all proposed countermeasures were overruled by senior policy makers.Thus it was surprising when Republic issued a SAR for an account it shared with the Bank of New York, an institution that it was competing with to establish correspondent banking relationships in Russia.One account they flagged for unusual activity was a shell company named Benex. Benex had already caught the eyes of investigators at the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), who were .The Brainy Don: Semyon Mogilevich and Sophisticated Financial Crime
His first arrest occurred in 1974 and was related to foreign currency. Mogilevich spent his early life in-and-out of Soviet prison, where he undoubtedly became intimately familiar with the vor v zakone, the Soviet Union’s infamous prison subculture.
He received the nickname “The Brainy Don” due to the fact that he holds an economics degree from the University of Lvov.In the mid-1980s, Mogilevich , offering to buy their possessions in Russia and promising to sell them for better prices on the international market and then send them the profits when the had resettled. Needless to say, their money never arrived.As someone who grew up in the authoritarian Soviet Union and spent time in-and-out of prison, Mogilevich is also adept as the art of interacting with governmental and law enforcement authorities, which includes becoming an informant. A Western official told Catherine Belton that , which allowed him to defraud the émigrés in return for informing on them.Mogilevich has also had complex relationships with Western intelligence agencies. In 1998, it was , Germany’s intelligence agency, to report on the “Russian mafia.” This raises the inevitable question: who is ultimately playing whom?In 2006, Mogilevich to avoid an indictment, though DOJ refused the offer.In the 1980s, Mogilevich set up Arbat International, a petroleum import-export company registered in the British Channel Island tax haven Alderney. 25% of Arbat , a notoriously violent gangster and one of the .
Robert I. Friedman, the investigative reporter who first wrote about Mogilevich for The Village Voice and was subsequently informed by the FBI that a $100,000 price had been placed on his head, was .
The report stated that Mogilevich used his Israeli citizenship to travel freely abroad as well as to develop significant political, business and criminal connections within the country.The report further alleged that Mogilevich owned an Israeli bank with branches in Moscow, Cyprus and Tel Aviv.
In addition to his connections with the Solntsevskaya and the vor Vyacheslav Ivankov, Mogilevich is also an associate of the KGB and .
Mogilevich, the YBM Magnex Stock Swindle, and the Trail to the Bank of New York Laundromat
British authorities unearthed a Mogilevich laundering scheme while investigating the company Arbat International25% of Arbat was owned by Ivankov, another 25% was held by an associated company also registered in the Channel Islands, Arigon, Ltd.NCIS investigators watched with interest as through a series of complex transactions involving multiple shell companies Arigon took control of YBM Magnex International, a company headquartered in Newtown, Pennsylvania.The acquisition was just the first step in Mogilevich’s planned infiltration of North American financial markets.After transferring $30 million from Arigon to YBM Magnex, Mogilevich merged it with Magnex 2000, a Hungarian magnet and military hardware company under his ownership.He then placed his close friend and criminal associate Igor Fisherman as YBM Magnex’s Chief Operating Officer.The Ukraine born Fisherman was a naturalized US citizen as well as an Israeli citizen who the FBI believed .Mogilevich set up dozens of shell companies in the US through which to launder the profits of his global syndicate through YBM, but money laundering was far from the extent of his criminal ambitions.Realizing that the Canadian stock exchange was less regulated and thus a convenient port of entry to North American financial markets, Mogilevich and Fisherman enlisted a Russian professor of metallurgy named Jacob Bogatin, also a naturalized citizen of the US, to prepare a public stock offering on the Alberta Stock Exchange.Bogatin had served on the board of the Mogilevich enterprises Arbat and Magnex 2000. Bogatin travelled to Alberta and registered yet another front company called Pratecs Technologies, Inc, which then purchased YBM Magnex and .In the 1980s, Jacob Bogatin’s brother, David Bogatin, was involved in a remarkably . According to Wayne Barret, Bogatin laundered some of the proceeds of his crimes through all cash purchases of five units at Trump Tower, which .
Benex, Peter Berlin, and Natasha Edwards: the Bank of New York Connection
The corporate shell Benex was established in 1993 under the name of Peter Berlin, a Russian native turned US citizen.Berlin had arrived in the US three years earlier and lived in a modest apartment in New Jersey with his wife Lucy Edwards. Edwards, who was born in Leningrad under the name Lyudmilla Pritzker, had immigrated to the US in 1977 after marrying a 19-year old American merchant seaman she had met at a club in Russia. The couple divorced in 1988 and in 1992 Edwards married Berlin.
The Commercial Bank of San Francisco’s Involvement in the Wider Bank of New York Laundromat
A separate grouping of offshore companies that ultimately led back the Bank of New York were registered in the obscure Island secrecy jurisdiction of Nauru, a remote island located 1,200 miles off New Guinea in the heart of the Pacific Ocean.Nauru’s specialty is in the establishment of “shell banks,” in other words, a bank that exists only on paper and is not required to keep any records.In 1998 alone, the Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Central Bank estimated that Russian criminals laundered $70 billion through hundreds of companies .Two years earlier, Aleksey Volkov was placed on the board of the newly created, Nauru-registered Sinex Bank. Its correspondent bank .The privately held , a Latvian mathematician and immigrant who sat on its board and headed its international department.During Goldstein’s tenure, Commercial’s asset base went from $81 million to $167 million, with a third of the bank’s new depositors coming from Russia.Goldstein purchased his stake in Commercial Bank in 1994 with a partner named Peter Nenkov, a now-deceased Bulgarian banker who, according to FBI and CIA intelligence, was an associate of organized criminals in his home country.Prior to moving to the United States, Goldstein had founded Dalderis Bank in Latvia. In 1991, Dalderis was subsumed by Sakaru Bank, making Goldstein an 18% shareholder of Sakaru’s stock.The business manager at Sakaru Bank, Edmund Johanson, was the final chairman of the Latvian KGB before it was disbanded. US intelligence later alleged that Goldstein hired five former members of the Latvian KGB across his various firms.Other shareholders in Sakaru, which folded in 1996, included the Swiss engineering firm Mabatex, which, as mentioned above, was involved in a KGB plot to entrap Russian President Boris Yeltsin in a bribery scandal.Another Sakaru shareholder was a Swedish-registered firm called Pattyranie & Co. Pattyranie was half-owned by Michail Saifullin, a close business partner of the Latvian crime lord Vladimir Ivanovich Leskov.Both Saifullin and Leskov controlled Olimpija Bank in Riga, known to US intelligence as “the most mobbed up bank in Latvia,” before it collapsed .Money from DKB would at times be funneled through the Sinex web of shell companies and Naura-registered shell bank before making its way to Benex’s account at the Bank of New York.Commercial Bank also dealt with Benex directly, handling nearly $8 million in wire transfers. It was just one cog in a vast and growing laundromat with Benex and BNY in the middle.While the BNY laundromat was used to launder the proceeds to Russian organized crime, the majority of the money that flowed through Benex came from hundreds of Russian import-export traders who were seeking to pay foreign suppliers without paying Russian taxes or customs duties.In other words, in addition to being the largest money laundering scandal in American history, it was quite possibly the largest tax evasion scandal in Russian history. Some estimate that as much as 80% of Russian importers used the BNY laundromat while it was in operation.“Russian businessmen are very inventive, Vyacheslav Soltaganov, the head of Russia’s tax police, . After estimating that 99% percent of Russian companies didn’t pay taxes in full, he added, “I leave out 1% just in case… Maybe there is someone who pays everything.”In 1996, Lucy Edwards was moved to BNY’s London office and Peter Berlin relocated with her, but this didn’t cause their money laundering activities to slow down at all.They paid a BNY employee at the New York office named Svetlana Kudryavtsev $500 a month to make sure the status of the Benex accounts was always up-to-date and continued their activities from the British capital.By 1998, by money flowing through the Benex often exceeded $200 million a month, earning BNY $400,000 in annual commissions. Berlin and Edwards were themselves growing wealthy, and .Higher Up The BNY Totem Pole: Irving Trust and the Kagalovsky’s
BNY leadership would later claim that the bank failed to follow-up on Benex because of Lucy Edwards’ respected position at the company. Yet she was hardly the only employee at the bank with links to Russia.Edwards’ boss Natasha Kagalovsky was one of the best connected Russian-American bankers in Moscow.Born Natasha Topler, she grew up in Leningrad and immigrated to the United States in 1979 with the wave of Russian immigrants that left the USSR for the United States and Israel following the passage of the Jackson Vanik Amendment.In 1986, she was hired by the American financial institution Irving Trust to manage their trade with Soviet banks. Irving Trust had done business with Soviet banking institutions since 1922, when it opened an account with Vnesheconombank, which at the time was the bank for Soviet foreign economic affairs.Irving Trust has also had correspondent banking relationships with two banks with strong links to US intelligence that were suspected of extensive criminal activity including the laundering drug money, Castle Bank in the Bahamas and Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. The former was co-founded by OSS and CIA veteran Paul Helliwell and the latter involving former CIA director William ColbyIn 1987, a year after Natasha Kagalovsky was hired by Irving Trust, it was seized in a hostile takeover by BNY. The move was influenced by BNY chairman J. Carter Bacot to take control of Irving’s technologically advanced securities processing software “Cash Register System,” which following the takeover was .Following the merger much of what would become BNY’s Eastern European Division had migrated over from Irving, with Natasha as its lead executive.BNY’s point man for Soviet banks had been Vladimir Galitzine, a descendent of Russia’s high aristocracy whose family had fled following the Revolution and had settled in New York in 1951. Galitzine’s aristocratic affectations and time away from his homeland made him a less effective ambassador for the bank and Natasha quickly took over as BNY’s chief representative in Russia.By all accounts, she excelled in this role.In one illustrative example, she at one point in 1989 and noticed that he was surrounded by Americans who were attempting to speak with him. Yeltsin, who didn’t speak a word of English, was rescued by Natasha when she offered to translate for him. Yeltsin was so impressed that he offered to carry her bag to the plane for her.As they waited to board their flight to Vienna, Yeltsin asked her, “How come you don’t have a bank office in Moscow?”Yeltsin wouldn’t have to wait long. In the chaotic years of Russia’s chaotic transition to capitalism, BNY emerged as the undisputed leader among American banks in Russia, forging over 300 correspondent banking relationships and securing ties with the country’s most powerful financial institutions.One of the early accounts Natasha helped win was with the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange, where her subordinate Lucy Edwards met Kiril Gusev and established the relationship that eventually led to Depozitarno-Kliringovy Bank’s utilization of Benex.On March 12th, 1992, Russia’s Inkombank established a U.S. dollar account with BNY in a deal brokered by Kagalovsky. Inkombank, which would later be mired and controversy and have its charter revoked, became one of BNY’s most profitable customers.Semyon Mogilevich is alleged to have .The bank had plans to “establish front companies and US bank accounts to run an unlicensed banking operation in New York.”In 1994 Inkombank used money from U.S. investors to set up two accounts with Citibank, one for a Liechtenstein-based shell company Tetra Finance Establishment and another for a shell company called Avalon Capital.Shortly thereafter, Inkombank’s Cyprus Offshore Banking Unit issued Kagalovsky with a “General Mandate,” roughly equivalent to the power of attorney, over its subsidiary accounts including Tetra and Avalon.Tetra and Avalon set up an office in midtown Manhattan and listed a woman named Janna Boulakh as its American representative.Boulakh was a former Belorussian prostitute who had immigrated to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. At some point she connected with individuals associated with Inkombank and ended up being used as a front person in the bank’s US shell game shenanigans.Using the name of her deceased Belorussiun aunt on legal documents, Boulakh was listed as the owner of Avalon Capital. At the time Boulakh was married to an American computer programmer who, , was hired by Inkombank to “design a system which would control a network of secret bank accounts of offshore companies belonging to bank management.”The network was meant to handle “hundreds of millions of dollars through a complex network of offshore companies and multiple bank accounts to numbered accounts” linked to Inkombank’s wealthiest clients.While most Russian investigations into capital flight and money laundering issues came to naught, there were a few dedicated individuals in the Russian bureaucracy attempting to make progress. The head of the Russian Ministry of Justice’s Institute of Legal Policy and Implementation contacted BNY chairman J. Carter Bacot and told him that Inkombank was the target of an investigation by the Russian Central Bank.In a later sworn deposition, a Russian government attorney claimed that Inkombank officials had been illegally moving between $140–165 million a year out of Russia with the help of assistance of high BNY officials. He further testified that all of his attempts to contact or exchange information with BNY officials were rebuffed.The Federal Reserve eventually denied Inkombank’s application, and after the bank was crushed in the 1998 Russian financial crisis the Russian Central Bank revoked its banking license.In 1994, Natasha had married Konstantin Kagalovsky, a 37-year old high level banker who had served as Russia’s representative to the IMF from 1992–1994. The power couple . After their wedding in New York, they moved into a Moscow hotel room with a view overlooking the Kremlin.
Konstantin Kagalovsky and the Bank Menatep Connection to the BNY Laundromat
Konstantin Kagalovsky was .
An article in the Washington Times, supposedly based upon CIA analysis, claimed that Menatep was “.”
In 1999, was told by “Russian intelligence sources” that $500 million worth of Menatep assets had passed through BNY accounts connected to Semyon Mogilevich, presumably referring to the Berlin-Edwards operation.In addition to establishing a correspondent banking relationship with Menatep, BNY sponsored Menatep’s American depository receipts program, which allowed it to trade shares in the United States.This was part of a coordinated campaign by Khodorkovsky to promote Menatep in the West. In 1994, he spent $1 million on full page ads in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times promoting the bank.
Khodorkovsky . A few short years later, Arthur Andersen would become embroiled in the Enron scandal and was driven out of business.Investigators looking into the Bank of New York laundromat would later zero in on Menatep’s relationship with Valmet, a Swiss financial advisory firm based out of Geneva with affiliates in Britain, Gibraltar and the Isle of Man, the latter a notorious hub for international money laundering.In 1989, 51% of the Valmet was purchased by the Washington, DC based Riggs Bank. Riggs was unique among US banks in that it primarily catered to the diplomatic community.Riggs , with current and former top executives at the bank receiving high level government security clearances and foreign clients including the Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.In 1994, Riggs sold back its stake to Valmet, which then turned around and sold the stake to Bank Menatep.Despite having left its partnership with Valmet, Riggs remained closely affiliated with Menatep, serving alongside BNY as a correspondent bank.Riggs was in Antigua. Mentioned in a previous article, EUB was owned by Alexandr Konanykhine and Khodorkovsky.
Of particular focus to investigators was a Valmet subsidiary established on the Isle of Man and headed by Peter M. Bond.According to private detectives speaking with The Wall Street Journal, Valmet Isle of Man’s corresponding office in Moscow was situated in an apartment owned by Russian foreign intelligence officer.
Under Bond, Valmet was accused of establishing offshore entities that allowed Khodorkovsky’s Menatep group to obscure the ownership of its vast Russian assets and .The link between Valmet (Isle of Man) and BNY, heavily obscured beneath a veritable blizzard of offshore vehicles, involved cash transactions between the offshore vehicle Runicom and the Cayman Islands based BNY accounts of Boris Yelstin’s son-in-law Leonid Dyachenko.While Runicom was technically owned by two Valmet subsidiaries, the actual owners were affiliated with the Siberian oil company Sibneft, which was dominated by the oligarchs Boris Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich. Hundreds of thousands of dollars passed between Dyachenko’s BNY accounts and Runicom, which raised serious questions about .As one peels back the seemingly endless layers of corruption of the BNY laundromat, one finds that illicit activities and shadowy personalities reach still higher up the banks corporate ladder than even Natasha Kagalovsky, who headed its Eastern European Division.One of BNY’s largest shareholders was the Swiss-Israeli banker Baruch “Bruce” Rappaport. Rappaport played a key role in establishing a beachhead for BNY in Russia.Bruce Rappaport, US and Israeli Intelligence, and the Bank of New York’s Introduction to Russia
According and Weaver, “Casey and Rappaport visited during the various Pertimina disturbances and it is exceedingly likely that there was significant intelligence value to their friendship from the beginning. Because there was an evolving subculture of intelligence that traced its roots back to the isolationist years of World Wars I and II, no one could actually control the networks spinning from this subculture that were articulated by the exceptionally wealthy and well connected and were not an intrinsic formal part of any government agency.”
As party of this shadowy milieu, Rappaport later was deeply involved in the Iran Contra scandal, which of course took place during the time that William Casey served as Ronald Reagan’s CIA director.Authors Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, who were writing about the criminal and intelligence-linked Bank of Credit Commerce International (BCCI), state that Rappaport was a member of what they called the “Hardy Boys,” a group of individuals .Casey and Rappaport golfed together at Long Island’s Deep Dale Golf Club. Rappaport’s , allegedly an associate of New York’s organized crime families.Rappaport hired former US intelligence alums, including Robert Townsend, who worked for the CIA in the Middle East and the Soviet Union.At one point, Abbas Gokal, the single largest borrower from the organized crime and intelligence linked Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), owned 20% of Rappaport’s Inter-Maritime Bank.Perhaps the most mysterious shareholder of Inter-Maritime Bank was E.P. Barry, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II-era precursor to the CIA. Barry was the head OSS’s highly secretive X2 Counterintelligence unit in Vienna. Like Rappaport, Barry was also a “longtime associate” of William Casey’s, who also served in OSS.E.P. Barry was also a significant shareholder in a company that owned the Bank of Perrine and the Bank of Cutler Ridge. Both of these latter banks were closely related to the aforementioned Castle Bank, which was co-founded by the former OSS and CIA veteran Paul Helliwell and a Chicago-based attorney with ties to American organized crime named Burton Kanter.While Helliwell had served in the OSS in China, established numerous CIA proprietaries, and later served as paymaster during the Bay of Pigs debacle, Burton Kanter was an attorney of the wealthy and secretive Pritzker family, which had established the Hyatt Hotel chain with loans from the organized crime-linked Teamsters pension fund.While Helliwell died in 1976, Bruce Rappaport had a close and ongoing business relationship with Burton Kanter and was in contact with him while pursuing correspondent banking relationships for the BNY in Russia.As mentioned earlier, Helliwell and Kanter’s Castle Bank’s correspondent bank in the United States was Irving Trust. Irving was later purchased by the Bank of New York and it was Irving’s Eastern European section, led by Natasha Kagalovsky, that was the most heavily engaged in Russian money laundering activities.According to authors Jonathan Beatty and S.C. Gwynne, Rappaport played a critical part in the secret program established by William Casey to fund the Afghan Mujahideens war against the Soviet military. The funding was facilitated in party by BCCI and the Bank of Oman, both of which were closely linked to Rappaport.By 1990, Rappaport played a critical early role in establishing the Bank of New York as the preeminent American bank operating first in the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation.Rappaport met with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzkov which ultimately led to the establishment of three major joint ventures in shipbuilding, cruise ship tourism and shipping port refurbishment and maintenance.How Rappaport went from facilitating the funding of secret wars against the Soviet Union to becoming one of the first foreigners to conduct business in the country remains something of a mystery. Was Russian intelligence aware of Rappaports previous activities? It is unclear.One of these new joint ventures included building a container port in that came to be known as the Leningrad International Terminal. According to Philip Short, Rappaport later , where Vladimir Putin worked as the Deputy Mayor, out of millions of dollars that were meant to refurbish the port.The port was later seized by Putin-associates with links to the Tambovskaya Bratva, the most powerful criminal syndicate operating in St. Petersburg.Both Rappaport and Burton Kanter (of Castle Bank infamy) promoted a service called Moneyfacts, first in the Soviet Union and later in newly independent Russia. Moneyfacts provided its subscribers with insights into the offshore financial secrecy world, including information related to offshore trusts, investment funds, and banks. In short, the kind of information necessary to launder money out of Russia and into the Western financial System.Rappaport also helped establish BNY’s earliest correspondent banking relationships in Russia. The very first Russian bank that BNY established a correspondent relationship with was DialogueBank, one of Russia’s earliest private banking institutions.Despite the fact that it was the largest money laundering scandal in the history of the United States at the time, nobody in higher levels of the Bank of New York was ever prosecuted.After a six year investigation, the Bank of New York was fined $38 million for a scandal in which they may have laundered upwards of $15 billion.Svetlana Kudryavtsev, the low level employee who was paid $500 a month by Lucy Edwards after she moved to London to keep tabs on the Benex account, was sentenced to two weeks in prison after pleading guilty to “accepting illegal payments.”Peter Berlin and Lucy Edwards were sentenced to six months of home confinement and fined $750,000.A Congressional committee investigating the Bank of New York scandal requested Bruce Rappaport’s testimony. He refused.In Congressional testimony, Thomas A. Renyi, chairman and chief executive officer of BNY, .