The Arranger

The government of Venezuela has a lot of enemies in Washington and Martín Rodil is bringing in more

- Ethan Bronner and Michael Smith

The setting was Idyllic: the Belmond La Samanna resort on the French side of St. Martin. It’s a Caribbean retreat with beach cabanas, tennis courts, and $1,000-a-night rooms. As guests enjoyed alfresco massages and hammock cocktails that February afternoon, inside one room everyone was all business. An engineer from the Venezuelan state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A., set a 12-inch stack of documents on the table, and the questions began from three investigators from the New York County District Attorney’s Office. They’d flown him from Venezuela via Curaçao—first commercial, then charter—to cover his tracks.

The engineer and his documents were central to a case the investigators had been pursuing for five years: the funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars from PDVSA (“peh-deh-VEH-sah”) through US and Swiss banks to Iran, skirting US sanctions on the country. Investigators suspected that PDVSA had laundered the funds via vastly inflated housing construction contracts with Iranian companies. The documents appeared to detail the housing deals and payments to Swiss bank accounts through JPMorgan Chase—a potential violation of US law. The investigation is ongoing; PDVSA hasn’t been charged with illegal activity involving Iran.

An affable man who spoke little English, the engineer knew that if the case succeeded, he could be in line for political asylum in the US, along with a possible whistle-blower reward. He also saw what the Iranians were up to and didn’t like it. So though the questioning took two days, he was patient.