Two weeks later on a bright May morning a nondescript tractor-trailer turned into the entrance of a partially hidden, three-story grey brick building at 100 Orchard Street in East Rutherford, New Jersey. The driver stopped at the entrance gate and, after being cleared by the armed security guard, proceeded to the plain structure beyond.
The building was hidden from the view of thousands of daily commuters by large trees and shrubs, but even if they paused to glance at the government building, they would not see the security cameras, infrared and motion sensors, or the patrolling rooftop sentries. They would, however, see one of the state police cars permanently stationed strategically at the front entrance. The building was the home of the East Rutherford Operations Center or more commonly referred to as EROC.
While the Federal Reserve’s heart and brains were located thirteen miles away in Manhattan, the “wallet” was located here in this enormous storage building four times the size of the local Wal-Mart. In the surrounding middle-class neighborhood most people did not give it a second thought as they went about their daily lives. They would be surprised to know that here, just down the street from the neighborhood grocery store was a building more heavily protected than the gold depositary at Fort Knox. The fortress-like facility also had a state-of-the-art automated vault measuring two million cubic feet used for storing over sixty billion dollars of new and used U.S. currency.
The large semi-trailer backed into the shipping bay, and the driver remained in the cab of his truck. Inside the huge building, robotic arms shifted large blue shrink-wrapped “bricks” of cash onto pallets, preparing them for shipment to Iraq.
Each “brick” contained over $400,000 worth of one-hundred-dollar bills. Three supervisors and video cameras monitored the entire operation from above sitting behind bulletproof glass walls as they completed their paperwork. The money was retrieved from nearby money bays by robotic arms. It was then neatly arranged on vault tables before being loaded into automated retrieval vehicles then fed onto conveyors to the waiting tractor-trailer after exiting the shrink-wrapping process. During this entire process, the money was never touched by human hands.
When all of the money was loaded and accounted for, GPS devices were attached to the inside of the trucks doors then they were closed and sealed.
In all, twenty pallets of cash, weighing fifteen tons were loaded that day. Four hours later, the tractor-trailer turned back onto Route 17 and after three miles merged onto a southbound lane of the New Jersey Turnpike, looking like any other big rig on a busy highway before merging onto Interstate I-95 South.
Five hours later, the truck arrived at Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, D.C. There the seals on the truck were broken, and the cash was off-loaded and accounted for by Treasury Department auditors. The money was transferred to an army C-130 Hercules transport plane and ten heavily armed guards were posted throughout the plane. The next day, one billion, two hundred thousand American dollars arrived in Baghdad.
The money was unloaded from the plane by lift trucks and hauled to nearby warehouses for distribution. A portion of the cash made its way to the basement vault of the Central Bank of Iraq for allocation to government agencies. Some boxes of cash went the main office of the Coalition Provisional Authority, otherwise known as the CPA, while other containers of cash were sent to the many new ministries which distributed cash to pensioners, doctors, and other providers of essential services. Contractors were hired and paid to provide security and to maintain order in this rapidly unfolding “Wild West” arena.
When distributions were completed for the day, the bulk of the remaining mountains of cash were transported and stacked into warehouses at the nearby airport. The huge sliding door was then padlocked. One key was placed in the top desk drawer of Army Private First Class William Jones. He left every day at five o’clock and no guards were posted to secure the American-Iraqi cash trove. The other key to the lock was given to Ahmed Koshari, the new liaison between the Iraqi government and the coalition forces.
The trucks would return the following month and every month thereafter, and the whole procedure was replayed over and over again, filling more and more warehouses with an ever-expanding tsunami of cash. More warehouses were built to accommodate the mountains of cash. All of this was under the direct control of Ahmed Koshari. He was about to become a very busy and very, very wealthy man.