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What do hip-hop, Hezbollah and meth have in common? More than you might think…

A dozen people were arrested Tuesday on charges of narcotics trafficking, money laundering and selling counterfeit goods after a two-year counter-terrorism and drug investigation centered in Los Angeles downtown garment district.

The focus of the federal investigation was Ali Khalil Elreda, 32, who was detained at Los Angeles International Airport last year, accused of trying to smuggle $120,000 in money orders and cashiers checks, hidden in a childs toy, to Lebanon, according to an indictment and an affidavit filed in the case.

Authorities also said they recovered 30 kilograms of cocaine and counterfeit clothing worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The U.S. attorney’s office said Elreda’s siblings are charged in one complaint with trafficking in counterfeit goods at a store called Hip Hop Connections.

A second complaint accuses Elreda and seven others of conspiring to distribute cocaine. A third complaint accuses Saleh of trafficking in counterfeit goods through his store, Star City A & H in the city’s garment district. A fourth complaint accuses two others of conspiring to traffic in cocaine.

In 2005, a Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department official showed a Senate committee a picture of a tattooed shop owner who had been arrested the year before on charges of selling counterfeit high-fashion merchandise. The tattoo was a symbol of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed guerrillas operating in Lebanon.

In his testimony, Lt. John Stedman, a top supervisor in the departments emergency operations bureau, did not identify the shop owner. Stedman was not involved in the most recent investigation.

But two law enforcement sources said Tuesday that the merchant was Elreda.

Elreda and Hussein Saleh Saleh, 37, both of Bell, were charged in one of two indictments returned in the case with conspiring to smuggle cash out of the United States.

Five years ago, in an interview with The Times, Asa Hutchinson, then the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said authorities were examining dozens of domestic drug cases with potential links to Islamic terrorists, including a methamphetamine ring allegedly tied to Hezbollah.

Source - Los Angeles Times