The Romanian Police

Romania’s national police were first notified about the possible laundering of money from Mexico and the US through their country by the Financial Intelligence Unit of Romania in September 2016. A few weeks later, prosecutors in Craiova, where many of the Riviera Maya gang originate, started investigating the suspect money transfers. More than three years later, prosecutors in the capital, Bucharest, revealed that the criminals behind them were also operating a vast international skimming scheme. In April 2019, Romania’s Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT) and the FBI invited Mexico’s law enforcement agency in Quintana Roo to a week-long meeting in Bucharest to coordinate and plan their investigations into the Riviera Maya gang and its leader, Florian Tudor. DIICOT issued arrest warrants for five members of the gang three months later and then indicted six of them in January 2020 for organized crime, attempted murder, and blackmail. Three are now in custody and two under house arrest in Romania.