In court, Zarrab laid out how he paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Turkish government officials and banking executives to win their assistance—and cover—for the money laundering operation. He dropped a bombshell on his second day of testimony, when he implicated Erdogan as part of the scheme, saying he was told Turkey’s president gave orders that two Turkish banks be included in the plot.

The son of a wealthy Iranian steel magnate, Zarrab moved to Turkey as a toddler and started various enterprises in his teens. His main business became money transfers, currency exchange, and gold trading. In 2005, Zarrab became a Turkish citizen. Meanwhile, his father was part of a team assembled by Iran’s newly elected president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to help work around U.S. sanctions, which had ratcheted up in response to Ahmadinejad’s aggressive pursuit of a nuclear program. Iran claimed the program was for peaceful purposes, but in 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it could not rule out a military intent.

That led the U.S., along with the United Nations, to impose even tougher sanctions in 2012 to cut off Iran’s banks from the global financial system and block its access to revenue from oil and gas sales. Iran’s economy fell into recession; inflation spiked into the double digits. Although Iran continued to sell oil, the proceeds began piling up in banks beyond its reach. By 2012, Iran had billions of dollars and euros sitting in banks in Turkey, China, India, Italy, and Japan. As sanctions tightened, Zarrab testified that he’d learned that Iran’s central bank and national oil company were looking for ways to get at their money.

According to prosecutors, beginning in 2012, Zarrab devised an intricate scheme to move Iran’s money in Turkey to his own company accounts there and then export it in the form of physical gold to Dubai. From there, it was diverted into the international financial system and used to make payments to entities designated by Iran, sometimes through accounts at banks in New York. He then developed similar schemes to gain access to Iran’s money in other countries, with varying degrees of success. At the peak of his operation, Zarrab claims he was using as many as 15 couriers a day to move more than 1,000 pounds of gold at a time. Later, when a new round of sanctions cut off gold as an option, Zarrab developed a system portraying the flows as humanitarian food shipments—though no food was sent.

Zarrab said that over four years, he was able to get almost all of Iran’s billions out of Turkey and more out of India, China, and Italy. He testified that he charged $4 to $5 per $1,000 he moved, generating what he claimed was up to $150 million for himself, some of which, he said, went to bribes and bank fees. Officials at the U.S. Department of the Treasury grew suspicious of some of Zarrab’s transactions and in 2012 and 2014 went to Halkbank in Turkey to warn it against doing Iran’s business.

While the scheme worked for the most part, it already had begun to unravel. On a foggy New Year’s Eve in 2012, a plane carrying a Zarrab shipment was unexpectedly forced to land in Istanbul for refueling. Customs officers found more than a ton of undeclared gold in the cargo hold. The subsequent probe produced reams of wiretapped audio recordings, records of text messages, and other materials. Authorities raided the home of Halkbank’s CEO, Suleyman Aslan, and found $4.5 million in cash stuffed into shoe boxes. Turkish police arrested Zarrab in 2013.

But Erdogan soon shut the case down, firing and even jailing police officers and prosecutors handling it. Zarrab was freed, and the scheme resumed, though his role as Iran’s banker to the world had by now drawn the attention of the FBI, which began its own probe. By 2015 federal agents had enough evidence to secure a secret grand jury indictment against Zarrab in New York.

Prosecutors have cited repeated instances in which Zarrab invoked Erdogan’s name in furtherance of the laundering scheme, including recorded conversations in which he told people he’d laid out the entire plan to Erdogan. In one 2013 conversation, Zarrab said: “Even if we do two billion, that is important. Do you understand? It is important for me, in the eye of the prime minister, since I will go straight to him.” (Erdogan was prime minister from 2003 to 2014.) Prosecutors have cited donations Zarrab directed to charities associated with Erdogan’s family.

Despite Zarrab’s efforts, the sanctions had their intended effect. Iran soon came to the negotiating table to discuss modifying its nuclear program. The country struck a deal in July 2015, with the sanctions lifted beginning in January 2016. By then, the course of Zarrab’s odyssey had already been set. On his second day on the witness stand, the Erdogan administration moved to seize his assets in Turkey. And in a speech on Nov. 30, after Zarrab implicated him, Erdogan said: “We have not broken an embargo.”

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