SCAPP

Dear Secretary Bessent @SecScottBessent, My name is Everett Stern. In 2010 I was a compliance officer at @HSBC. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the @FBI, the @CIA, and eventually the @SECGov. The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison. I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at @PFChangs to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return. I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something. Yesterday, your department fined @BankofAmerica $1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act. Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged. Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working. A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats. This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried. There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go. Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him. I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them. This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one. Three things would change the math overnight. Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined. End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one. And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them. Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine. I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it. Respectfully, Everett A. Stern HSBC Whistleblower Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit

Dear Director Patel @FBIDirectorKash, In 2024 I sat in Alon Alexander’s mansion in Miami Beach with the brothers, their father, the rest of the family, and a disbarred attorney who went to federal prison for helping drug traffickers obstruct justice, and I was told it was gang initiation time. My target was Evan Torgan, the attorney representing the women who had come forward against Oren, Tal, and Alon Alexander. The family believed Torgan was being paid to orchestrate the women and extort them. I was asked what my connections were to the FBI and the Department of Justice. Oren told me they had already hired another private intelligence operative to gather information on the women. They could see an indictment coming. The disbarred attorney was Samuel Burstyn. He served 42 months for conspiracy to obstruct justice on behalf of a drug trafficking organization. That is when I stopped thinking of it as an intelligence job and started thinking about what could physically happen to Evan Torgan. I said no. I called Evan Torgan and warned him. Then I contacted the FBI, told your agents what I had seen, and handed over every electronic communication between me, the brothers, and the family. That is part of what I heard in that house. I am leaving out the rest on purpose, because I will not put anything in public that could hurt an investigation. Yesterday the brothers were sentenced to 30 years each. Judge Caproni called what they did monstrous. She was right. But that sentence closes only half of this case. The other half is in the Peacock documentary The Wolves of Real Estate: The Alexander Brothers, and I did not understand its full extent until I watched it. The film reports that a victim was told by an investigator that her children had been mentioned. Victim 4 dropped out. Director Patel, that is not crisis PR. That is not intelligence gathering. That is a woman who reported a rape being told that someone knows where her children are. I believe it was witness intimidation, and I believe it was criminal. I am asking you to open an investigation into the PR firms, the investigation agencies, and the individual investigators who were paid to target, discredit, and intimidate these women and their lawyer, and where the evidence supports it, to charge them. I am also asking you to widen the case. Oren told me about other billionaires. He told me about a victim being held in a dungeon in a billionaire’s house in the Hamptons. I cannot prove what he said. You can. The brothers did not operate alone, and I believe there are more victims who were silenced by exactly this machinery. The people who helped this family, protected it, and hunted its accusers should not get to watch the sentencing on the news and go back to work. These women did their part. They spoke, and they were hunted for it. The brothers who raped them got 30 years. The people who hunted them got paid. Fix that. Respectfully, Everett Stern HSBC Whistleblower Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit