| Welcome to Bw Reads, our weekend newsletter featuring one great magazine story from Bloomberg Businessweek. Today we present a cross-border collaboration from Bloomberg News reporters Christine Dobby and Ari Altstedter in Toronto, David Voreacos in New York and Tom Schoenberg in Washington. It's about how rapid expansion made TD Bank a household name but left it vulnerable to crooks. You can find the whole story online here. You can also listen to it. If you like what you see, tell your friends! Sign up here. On an overcast spring day in 2021, Da Ying "David" Sze walked out of a four-story concrete warehouse in Queens, New York, carrying several bags full of money. Sze, a father of two in his 40s and the owner of a garment company operating out of the warehouse, placed the bags in a Lexus SUV, then drove with two associates to a bank, where they made several large cash deposits. Unbeknownst to Sze, he was being watched the whole time. Federal agents had been surveilling him for months. They suspected him of leading a gang of money launderers whose clients included Chinese fentanyl dealers. The agents had watched Sze and his associates pick up bags of cash at the warehouse and Sze's home, then drive to bank branches throughout New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. There, they'd make deposits and often immediately use the money to purchase bank checks, according to court documents and people familiar with the investigation. By the time law enforcement stepped in to arrest Sze and five members of his crew weeks later, in May 2021, they'd sneaked more than half a billion dollars of illicit cash into the financial system. Most of that business had been conducted at one institution: TD Bank. When investigators looked closer at the bank, they realized Sze wasn't the only criminal who'd made TD their depository of choice. There was the group from Manhattan's Diamond District using bogus gold sales to launder money. The Colombian drug traffickers using TD debit cards to bring their US profits back home. And the human trafficking ring that claimed to be an HVAC company when it opened an account. The more investigators looked at TD, the more money laundering they found.  The TD Terrace building in Toronto. Photographer: Chloe Ellingson/Bloomberg These surely weren't the kind of clients TD Bank Group was looking for when it acquired New Jersey-based Commerce Bancorp in 2008 and adopted its tagline: "America's Most Convenient Bank." Known as Toronto-Dominion in Canada, where it's one of the country's Big Five banks, TD was expanding furiously in the US, buying up more than half a dozen retail institutions in less than a decade. It was a bet on the competitive advantages of having branches everywhere, long hours of operation and easy account sign-ups, and it seemed to work. TD went from being almost nonexistent in the US at the turn of the century to the country's 10th-largest bank today. But the size and pace of its acquisition spree left it a favorite of America's underworld, too. Last year, TD's American subsidiary became the first US bank ever to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit money laundering. The company agreed to pay $3.1 billion in fines to various parts of the federal government, a sum that included the biggest penalty ever levied by the Department of Justice under the Bank Secrecy Act, the main US anti-money-laundering law. More than two dozen people, including three bank employees, have already been charged. Prosecutors will be busy with investigations arising out of the TD case for years to come, according to a person familiar with the matter.  This account of how TD made itself vulnerable to criminals is drawn from dozens of documents filed in US court cases so far, including the consent order it agreed to in order to resolve an investigation by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the statement of facts it confirmed with the Justice Department as part of its guilty plea. Bloomberg Businessweek also spoke with investigators and bank insiders, who were all granted anonymity to discuss confidential information. TD said in a statement it has "taken full responsibility" for the failures of its anti-money-laundering program and is "making significant investments and enhancements to meet the terms of the resolution, and help protect the financial system," adding, "This is our most important priority." The bank didn't respond to questions about most of the details in this article. A lawyer for Sze, who's awaiting sentencing after he pleaded guilty to various money laundering offenses in February 2022, declined to comment. For TD, the story is one of breathtaking corporate hubris—of breakneck expansion followed by budget-cutting that left its branches open to exploitation by organized crime. For the rest of the industry, it's a cautionary tale that could have a lasting impact on American banking. In messages investigators uncovered between two TD employees, one asked, "why [do] all the really awful ones bank here?" "Because … ," the other responded, "we are convenient." Keep reading: How TD Became America's Most Convenient Bank for Money Launderers | 
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