Hialeah’s go-to “shadow banker” gets 13 years for cashing fraudsters’ checks

Chances are, if you were a crook and needed a check of dubious origin cashed in Miami-Dade, you probably did business with Evelio Suarez over the past decade.

As one of the county’s go-to “shadow bankers,” Suarez operated a trio of check-cashing stores in Hialeah that processed more than $150 million in checks for sketchy customers who couldn’t show their faces in a traditional bank, according to court records. Scofflaws involved in the local healthcare, tax and mortgage rackets turned to him, paying a hefty fee for his services.

“Mr. Suarez was the hub of the network of fraudsters” in Miami-Dade, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Berger told a federal judge Friday at Suarez’s sentencing.

Suarez, 54, who pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy in Miami federal court, was sentenced to 13 years in prison by U.S. District Judge Robert Scola. He also slapped him with a forfeiture judgment of $149 million after highlighting that he “helped huge criminal enterprises.”

Of course, Suarez, who has been in custody since his arrest last year, won’t be able to pay all that money back to the U.S. government.

“A lot of the money [he made] was spent on junk,” his defense attorney, Ana Davide, told the judge. But she noted that he owns eight South Florida properties under corporate entities that he will turn over to the feds. “Anything the government wants,” she said.

Suarez, who was facing a maximum 20-year sentence, was lucky to get 13 years behind bars. Berger, the prosecutor, wanted him to go away for 18 years.

In a statement filed with his plea agreement, Suarez admitted that he cashed more than $100 million worth of fraudulent checks in 2013-15 for criminals who ripped off Medicare, the Internal Revenue Service and mortgage banks.

But that estimate was a smaller figure for the purposes of a plea deal. The FBI, in a criminal affidavit filed with Suarez’s arrest in June 2018, put his fraudulent check-cashing activity at nearly $500 million.

Suarez’s three check-cashing stores charged exorbitant fees that ranged from 10 to 30 percent, depending on the type of illicit activity that “allowed the scammers to conceal their involvement in receiving the proceeds of the fraud,” according to the FBI affidavit.

It was unclear at Friday’s sentencing how much money Suarez personally made in check-cashing fees. “I want to know where the money is?” Scola, the judge, asked at one point. “Has he paid it back?”

Prosecutors could not come up with an easy answer on how much Suarez pocketed himself — just the check-cashing churn by his three companies.

Suarez, a Cuban national who came to South Florida in 1995 and has a pair of prior state and federal convictions, has been held without bond after his arrest last year because he was found to be such a flight risk to Cuba and faced a potentially long prison sentence.

Suarez’s business model was to cash checks — many ranging from $150,000 to $400,000 — for scofflaws in the healthcare and construction sectors of Miami-Dade’s robust black-market economy, Berger said.

They turned to Suarez as their money man because they operated pharmacies in other people’s names while falsely billing Medicare, or they paid undocumented construction workers in cash to avoid paying federal taxes and workers’ compensation insurance, Berger said. Others used stolen identities, Social Security numbers, and dates of birth to file false tax-refund claims with the IRS, which issued checks up to $150,000.

Berger said Suarez paid people to pose as the owners of his three check-cashing stores — Minimalist Solutions, Don Koky Enterprises, and Doger Group — because he had a criminal history and could not put the businesses in his name.

“He took these stores and put them on steroids,” Berger said at a previous court hearing.

Suarez’s customers, like him, had criminal pasts so they paid tens of thousands of dollars to “ghosts” who allowed their names to be used as cover for the actual business owners, Berger said. After playing their roles and getting paid, many would flee back to their native Cuba, he said.

Suarez learned the ropes of shadow banking during the last decade’s real estate boom while working for La Bamba, a chain of check-cashing stores that were once a sponsor of the Miami Heat.

But rather than quit the business after his boss and other employees at La Bamba were sent to prison, Suarez launched his own chain in Hialeah catering to people who couldn’t cash checks at conventional banks.

Suarez’s former boss at La Bamba, Juan Rene Caro, was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2009 for masterminding what a judge described as a “shadow banking industry” that caused “great harm” to American taxpayers by helping local construction companies cash checks without disclosing their real identities. La Bamba’s scheme enabled the companies to evade payroll and corporate taxes.