PROVIDENCE –– It’s been more than 16 years since Stephen Saccoccia was sentenced to 660 years in prison for laundering money for Colombian drug lords. A man with lavish tastes, Saccoccia was a Cranston coin shop owner and precious metals dealer known for his free-spending ways. He wore a Rolex watch, rented apartments in London and New York City and offered Dom Perignon with the cold cuts he served to employees who came to his Christmas parties.

For many years he had a raft of high-priced lawyers representing him. But now, as he sits in a West Virginia federal penitentiary for what amounts to a life sentence, he says he is destitute. Maybe that’s true. But the U.S. government has continued to hunt for his assets to satisfy a $136.3 million forfeiture order.

For nearly two decades, the FBI and federal prosecutors have searched for Saccoccia’s assets across the country and abroad. The search has led them from Cranston to New York, Los Angeles, London, Austria, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has spawned court proceedings in foreign courtrooms as well as the United States.

In early 2008, after years of legal tussling over assets the money-launderer had secreted in London, British authorities turned over $718,324 to the U.S. government.

The case surfaced again in October when Saccoccia, acting as his own attorney, lost an effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to review lower court orders allowing prosecutors to keep about $58,000 in money, firearms and other property that the FBI seized from him before his conviction.

But even as prosecutors continue to collect money here and there, most of the millions Saccoccia has been ordered to pay has not been recouped. The U.S. government has been unable to grab any of the money he wired to the drug lords he served in Colombia or much of what he earned in “commissions” from his illegal activities.

Asst. U.S. Atty. Michael P. Iannotti, one of the lawyers who has worked for years on the case, estimates that to date, federal prosecutors have secured forfeiture orders totaling $13 million in Saccoccia assests –– $5 million from U.S. courts and about $8 million from courts abroad. But the government has been able to collect only about $6 million of the $13 million that it’s been able to trace. That’s because statutes in some countries where Saccoccia stashed his fortune–– Luxembourg, Austria and Switzerland –– allowed those governments to keep money found in their banks as proceeds of criminal activity.

That leaves about $130 million that Saccoccia and his wife, Donna –– a co-defendant in the case –– are still obliged to pay, based on the judgment entered by now-retired U.S. District Court Judge Ernest C. Torres.

But as each year passes, it seems less likely that more assets will be recovered. Some question whether there’s anything left for the government to seize.

Meanwhile, Saccoccia has been anything but cooperative. And while Donna Saccoccia was released from prison in 2004, she isn’t talking either.

THE SACCOCCIA money-laundering case was the first federal criminal-forfeiture case in Rhode Island. The forfeiture order, entered by Torres in 1993, requires Stephen and Donna Saccoccia to pay back the full amount that they were shown to have wired to the drug lords –– not just the amount they actually pocketed in profits.

At the time the case concluded, there was no provision in the law to allow U.S. prosecutors to seize money once it was deposited in many foreign bank accounts unless the governments cooperated. Therefore, Torres gave the government permission to seize “substitute assets” from the Saccoccias –– up to $136.3 million.

Iannotti is skeptical that the couple’s assets ever amounted to that much. But he knows that at one point, they had a lot more money than the government has ever been able to find. “What he was charged with was only a fraction of what we believe he laundered over the years,” he says.

The indictment against the Saccoccias covers just one 15-month period, from January 1, 1990 to April 2, 1991 and only one bank that the couple used to wire $136,344,231.86 to accounts designated by Colombia drug lords. But based on information the government had, “we know,” says Iannotti, that Saccoccia’s operation began much earlier, sometime in the 1980s.

Prosecutors asserted in court that Saccoccia’s cut of the money he laundered over the years could have been as high as 15 percent. Before he was tried in 1993, he bragged to one assistant United States attorney, during a failed attempt to get a plea-deal, that he had $20 million at his disposal. But Saccoccia also went to great lengths to secrete his stash.

THOSE WHO KNOW Stephen Saccoccia from way back say he got his start in business in the 10th grade, operating a tiny coin shop from a storefront on Cranston’s Park Avenue. But by the time he turned 30, the Hassidic Jews he did business with in New York called him Steve “Yerokim,” Hebrew for green or cash.

He’d always been a math whiz at Cranston High School West. When he went on trial in 1993 in U.S. District Court here, he was 35 and prosecutors claimed he was one of the biggest money-launderers in the United States.

Saccoccia had a group of people in Rhode Island working for him, including his wife and a brother-in-law. The men who worked for him met couriers on the road or on street corners. Some vehicles were look-outs; others were tails. The couriers turned over cash –– $50,000 to $500,000 at a time –– in small, well-worn bills concealed in gym bags or luggage. Sometimes they sent it in armored cars. One day, $3 million was dropped off at an apartment that Donna and Stephen Saccoccia rented in Manhattan.

Huge amounts of cash traded hands. Deliveries were arranged by coded messages received by FAX or through telephone conversations with people in Colombia. Saccoccia, after taking a cut, would then wire the money to Colombia and Switzerland, to accounts controlled by the cocaine lords.

Using aliases, he wired cash to foreign bank accounts in fictitious names. He hired a lawyer in Geneva to set up a trust to hold millions of Swiss francs, the government asserted. He hid money and jewelry in safe deposit boxes in Vienna, London, Geneva and Zurich. He hid cash behind a plaster wall in the master bathroom of an apartment he rented in London.

Prosecutors assert that in 1994, long after his incarceration, Saccoccia paid $50,000 to a paralegal from Los Angeles to fetch the money from the bathroom wall so that prosecutors wouldn’t get it. The government still doesn’t know what happened to that cash, says Iannotti. In 2003, the paralegal, an ex-convict, was assassinated by the lawyer who employed him –– one of several attorneys who’d been a member of the Saccoccia defense team. After committing the murder, the lawyer committed suicide.

In 1981, Donna Saccoccia was listed as the owner of the couple’s four-bedroom house at 2 Brimfield Rd. Cranston. But by the time of the Sacciocias’ arrests, ownership had been transferred to Citadel Publishing Co. of Nassau, the Bahamas. (The government later seized the house as a “substitute asset.”)

Then there were the 6,000 Troy ounces of gold that Stephen Saccoccia buried under the lawn and in the basement of his mother’s house in Knightsville. If a relative through marriage hadn’t turned informant, it’s unlikely that the stash would ever have been recovered. At the time of the discovery in 1997, the gold was worth about $2.1 million. But by the time the court approved its sale, it was worth only about $1.5 million.

Prosecutors were so stymied in their efforts to find Saccoccia’s fortune that they subpoenaed members of his defense team to try to track assets. This led to a court battle, lasting more than a decade, in which government lawyers attempted to recoup $1.9 million that the Saccoccias had paid for their defense.

One of the members of the Saccoccia legal team, Washington lawyer Robert Luskin –– who in recent years made news for his representation of Karl Rove –– testified that he’d received $750,000 for his work: He said that he was paid $504,954 in gold bars –– 45 of them –– and that he’d been given an additional $169,000 through Swiss wire transfers.

Another defense lawyer, Jack Hill, of San Francisco, testified that the $504,985 he received was all in cash and from Swiss wire transfers.

Providence lawyer Kenneth O’Donnell testified that he also received payment in cash. On three occasions, a stranger who refused to reveal his identity showed up at his law office and dropped off wads of cash in $100 bills –– a total of $125,000 –– for him and for other members of the defense team.

Florida lawyer Stephen J. Finta, who was representing Stephen Saccoccia in California, testified that while he was staying at the Airport Sheraton Hotel in Warwick in 1993, someone dropped off four cash payments totaling $119,200 in envelopes at the front desk, and that $200,000 was left in the trunk of a rental car there.

Lawrence J. Semenza, of Reno, Nevada, Donna Saccoccia’s lawyer, testified that he received $7,500 in cash delivered by Federal Express, another $50,000 in cash that someone dropped off at a lawyer’s office and $274,000 from a Swiss wire transfer.

“We wanted to find out where Saccoccia’s assets were, never dreaming this type of testimony would come out,” says Iannotti.

But except for an outstanding judgment for $242,000 against Finta and $245,000 that Luskin agreed to turn over to the government to settle its claims against him, prosecutors have come up empty-handed.

IF THE SACCOCCIA CASE were to be prosecuted today, the government would have an easier time tracking and recouping his assets.

“Certainly the ability to track assets [through computer databases] is more sophisticated than it was 18 years ago,” says Iannotti. And prosecutors also have “more legal weapons” at their disposal.

The 2001 USA Patriot Act –– enacted in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks –– allows prosecutors to grab money stashed in foreign bank accounts if those banks have branches or “correspondent accounts” that allow them to do business in the U.S. And the US Attorney’s Office in Providence now has a full-time auditor who spends much of his time pursuing assets subject to criminal forfeitures.

Most of the money that’s been recouped in the Saccoccia case has gone back to law enforcement agencies to be used for crime-fighting and training purposes. But as the law has expanded to allow for criminal forfeitures in a greater variety of cases, says Iannotti, “we grab assets to make restitution to identifiable victims of crime” such as the people who got bilked by Bernard Madoff.

tbreton@projo.com