A drug-running cousin of the former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was convicted last week in a federal court in Virginia of plotting to trade military-grade weapons for a shipping container’s worth of Colombian cocaine — all under the guise of fruit sales.
The trial of the cousin, Antoine Kassis, 59, further exposed how the Assad regime, racked by international sanctions and a yearslong civil war, padded its coffers with criminal schemes and lined the pockets of family members, before its overthrow in 2024.
His plan, exposed in a U.S. sting operation, sought to trade Syria’s Russian- and Iranian-made weapons to a Latin American militia, confirming widespread fears that the Assad-era arsenal could fall into criminal hands.
Mr. Kassis played a key role, the court was told, in connecting criminal and terrorist groups in the Middle East with those in Latin America.
Prosecutors said he had worked in an Assad family business out of Lebanon, where he helped fund his cousin’s brutal regime by trafficking drugs and weapons and had ties with Hezbollah. From there, he also partnered with General Maher al-Assad, a brother of Bashar al-Assad and the former head of Syria’s Fourth Armored Division, which turned illegal amphetamine production into Syria’s top export.
Long before Mr. Assad was ousted, Mr. Kassis was in talks with money launderers with ties to Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel and the South American guerrilla group the National Liberation Army, known by the Spanish acronym E.L.N. The group, which operates out of Colombia and Venezuela and seeks the overthrow of the Colombian government, has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States.
Mr. Kassis and his E.L.N. contacts set in motion a plan to send cocaine from Colombia to Syria in a shipping container ostensibly filled with fruit, according to court documents.
The goal, prosecutors said, was to exchange the drugs in the Middle East for weapons for the E.L.N. The plotters met in Turkey in the fall of 2024, and Mr. Kassis kept negotiating the deal in the following weeks even after rebel forces closed in on Damascus and Mr. Assad fled to Russia.
Mr. Kassis was unaware that he was being set up in a sting operation by American law enforcement agents.
An undercover confidential source for the Drug Enforcement Administration, who testified at trial and identified herself only as Selma, said she had infiltrated Mr. Kassis’s network through money launderers working for the E.L.N.
The D.E.A. did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Justice declined to comment.
Selma testified that after the Assad regime fell, Mr. Kassis grew impatient. She said he assured his E.L.N. contacts that he had “all the toys and quantities you need” and that he had not “run away” like others.
Last year, Mr. Kassis traveled to Kenya to finalize aspects of the deal. While there, he signed a contract to import a shipping container, ostensibly full of fruit, from Colombia to Syria’s Port of Latakia. It would contain 500 kilograms of cocaine, according to prosecutors. In exchange, they said, he offered assault rifles, machine guns, missiles, mortars, grenades, drones and more.
The bricks of cocaine would be marked with a dragon symbol matching a bracelet Mr. Kassis wore so that he could identify his shipment at the Syrian port. But before any of that could happen, Mr. Kassis was arrested by the police in Nairobi and extradited to the United States. There, he was charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy and conspiring to provide material support for a foreign terrorist organization.
Evidence at trial demonstrated that his co-conspirators had moved nearly $100 million in less than 18 months on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel, Hamas, and others. The E.L.N. co-conspirators are awaiting extradition from Colombia.
At trial, Mr. Kassis’s attorney argued that his client did not know what was being planned, given that many of the conversations between the alleged conspirators were in Spanish. Jurors rejected the claim, finding him guilty after several hours of deliberation.
Mr. Kassis is set to be sentenced in July and faces a sentence of 20 years to life, according to prosecutors. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
“For someone that senior to have been arrested and put on trial is a huge deal,” said Mouaz Moustafa, who heads the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a Washington-based nonprofit.
“This is an active guy, well entrenched with Assad remnants and Hezbollah,” Mr. Moustafa said. The conviction represents a small measure of accountability for some of the crimes perpetrated by the Assad regime, he said, and helped to expose the ties binding global crime rings.
Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering breaking news around the world. She is based in Washington.
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