WASHINGTON — Fairfax County police have helped crack a multimillion-dollar organized crime ring that stretched from Richmond to New York City.
Police say more than a dozen have been charged in Fairfax and that 43 were charged in Henrico County.
They were accused of taking part in a smuggling operation that ran cigarettes from Richmond to New York.
“The price of cigarettes in Richmond is extremely low, the price of cigarettes up in the northeast is extremely high … if a carton of cigarettes in Virginia is $50 or so … up in the northeast it’s $110 to $120 per carton, so they’re doubling their money,” said 2nd Lt. Tom Harrington of Fairfax County police.
The gang is accused of using Northern Virginia banks and rental car companies.
Nine banks in Fairfax County estimate $620,000 in losses to the gang’s bank fraud activities.
Police say the activities include kiting checks — writing checks from accounts with no available funds — for rental cars.
The two-year, multi-agency investigation began in 2015 when a local bank investigator contacted a Fairfax County Police detective to report a group of people involved in kite checking.
The detective confirmed the fraud, and also found that the suspects were fraudulently building up banking credit, according to a Fairfax County Police Department news release.
A local investigation revealed the suspects were using addresses in the Northern Virginia and Richmond areas, from which they were operating cigarette smuggling.
Federal investigators are taking a close look at the cigarette smuggling operation.
“The majority of these subjects are all foreign nationals, I believe from Northern Africa. That is why the FBI, State Department and Homeland Security are involved in the investigation,” Harrington said.
The cigarette trafficking is believed to have netted the criminal enterprise millions of dollars.
“We do not know where all the money has gone. The source of where the money is going is still under investigation,” said Harrington, who could not rule out the possibility that the smuggling operation may have funded international terrorism.
WTOP’s Hanna Choi contributed to this report.
