The Equalizer 3 (2023)
Change in Historical Transactional Behavior of a Winery Raises Suspicion of Illicit Activity
In The Equalizer 3, Robert McCall (Denzel Washington), a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative, is just a guy passing through and drinking tea in a scenic town in Sicily, Italy. McCall finds himself in Italy because he tracked down a cyber attacker that hacked the pension fund of a bricklayer’s union in Boston, MA with a member losing his entire savings of $366,400.
As in all the prior Equalizer movies in the three-part series, it does not take long for McCall to bring the terror. He travels to the Cantina Arriana Vineyard just south of Palermo, which is owned by Lorenzo Vitale (Bruno Bilotta), an alleged Sicilian farmer, who appeared on Interpol’s most wanted list for more than a decade because he ran a cyber hacking empire, to start the body count and retrieve the stolen funds.
After McCall’s visit to the Vineyard, he places an anonymous call to Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning), a CIA agent in the CIA Financial Operations Group responsible for tracking suspect money sources, identifying the Vineyard imported 55 crates of wine from Syria, which he thought was odd that a winery in Sicily would be importing wine from Syria. He informs Collins that he suspects a repackaging operation and suggests the CIA send in a physical access team.
The CIA and local Italian police raid the winery and find dead bodies, bags of phenylephrine hydrochloride tablets, an amphetamine, stuffed inside wine bottles, and $11M USD in cash. Collins refers to the hydrochloride as an ISIS jihad drug for Syrian terrorists. Her boss, Frank Conroy (David Denman), is very concerned about being blind to a terrorist cell and missing an attack, less concerned about the money, which he speculates is related to money laundering or cyber theft, and not their immediate problem.
As a good investigative analyst, Collins proactively reviewed the financials of the Vineyard and identified the crates were the fourth shipment as she noticed an increase in shipments from the Vineyard. Historically and over the past 18 months, the Vineyard shipped 200 cases of wine per month, however, the last four shipments were increased to 500 cases of wine per month. A significant deviation in business activity is a common money laundering red flag.
As noted by Collins, the increase in shipments would impact the Vineyard’s bills of lading, but also their financials by 2.5 times. Oftentimes, traffickers use established clean businesses for trade-based money laundering schemes to limit detection of passing through the illicit activity as an increase in sales. Absent reasonable justification and documentation to support the increase, the financial institution maintaining the accounts of the Vineyard would most likely file a suspicious transaction (or activity) report with the country’s financial intelligence unit (FIU). For example, in Italy, the Unità Di Informazione Finanziaria (UIF) serves as the FIU and is the recipient of electronically filed suspicious transaction reports (STRs) through the Bank of Italy’s dedicated INFOSTAT-UIF portal.
After Collins approaches McCall at a café in town, Collins and McCall play a CIA cat and mouse game on why he was at the Vineyard. Later, McCall informs Collins that the locals have their own agenda as McCall questions why one would smuggle drugs into the most secure port in the entire region inferring something larger is afoot. After witnessing some bloodshed in town against the local townspeople, McCall believes the Camorra, the Italian mafia, are running the operation. McCall sympathizes with the townspeople and decides to publicly show the Camorra how he feels while enjoying his dinner. Concurrently, Collins learns the local police chief is in the pocket of the Camorra when she is denied local assistance talking to certain prisoners with intelligence on the local drug smuggling.
To take back the town, McCall confronts Vincent Quaranta (Andrea Scarduzio), the local Camorra boss, in the town square amongst the townspeople with camera phones recording Quaranta preparing to shoot McCall. Concerned about the filming, the Camorra flee to Quaranta’s mansion only to be finished off by McCall.
In the end, McCall returns peace to the town by eradicating the Camorra and he explains to Collins the reason he wanted to retrieve the $366,400.
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