The $2.8 million mansion, tucked at the end of a private drive, boasts a climate-controlled wine cellar, sauna and four fireplaces — features not uncommon to this wealthy part of the Washington suburbs.
But the man who bought the place a couple of years ago did not stick around to enjoy them, neighbors said. He introduced himself, then disappeared, leaving some wondering what was happening behind his nine-foot-tall carved-wood front doors.
The mansions in leafy McLean, Virginia, like mansions everywhere, tend to hold interesting characters with money. Here along a quiet street in a neighborhood called The Ridings, there’s a noted plastic surgeon, a high-powered corporate lawyer and the CEO of a defense consulting firm, among others, property records show.
But court filings in Nigeria, as well as those from an insurance claim surrounding a jewelry theft from another mansion near Beverly Hills, California, suggest the owner of the McLean residence has a different type of story.
The way Nigerian authorities tell it, their country’s former national security adviser misappropriated more than $2 billion from his own government, routing some of it to a family friend — the man who bought the mansion in McLean. In the United States, according to Nigerian authorities, the man sought to launder the money in part by purchasing homes.
The allegations against him, experts say, underscore a significant global issue: The U.S. real estate market has become a money-laundering haven for corrupt officials and criminals across the world, a place to hide their cash behind opaque shell companies.
Next year, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network will begin receiving reports under a new rule requiring title companies and others to collect information about certain real estate sales — particularly transactions where the buyer is a trust or some other legal entity and pays with cash.
“At a time when many American neighborhoods are experiencing affordable housing crises, it’s more important than ever to stop dirty money from being laundered and stored in our residential real estate market,” the Treasury Department’s acting undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, Bradley T. Smith, said in a statement to The Washington Post.
For this story, a Paris-based anticorruption group, the Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa, provided court documents, property records and analyses of them to The Post, as well as to the Premium Times, a Nigerian news organization, as part of a broader investigation into money laundering in real estate. The Post verified facts and obtained additional information independently.
A visitor to the quiet cul-de-sac in McLean would have no reason to suspect something amiss, even were they to venture along the private drive past two other high-end homes and knock on the mansion’s imposing front doors. The secluded lawn is freshly cut, the rosebushes neatly trimmed.
But behind its drawn curtains, Nigerian law enforcement officials allege, lies a tale of embezzlement, corruption and money laundered across the globe.
The Oshodins
On a sweltering night in 2014 in a town in northeastern Nigeria, men carrying AK-47s stormed into a boarding school and kidnapped 276 schoolgirls. The missing children became an international cause célèbre, sparking the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls that was used by, among others, Reese Witherspoon, Michelle Obama and Pope Francis.
The kidnapping brought global attention to the brutal tactics of Boko Haram, an insurgency that had tormented Nigerian society for years with a campaign to impose strict Islamic law. But the Nigerian government could not manage to find the girls. The country’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, was swept from power in the following year’s election and replaced by former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari, who pledged to defeat Boko Haram, as well as government corruption.
Under Buhari’s administration, Nigerian authorities turned their attention to the previous president’s national security adviser, Sambo Dasuki, accusing him of diverting large sums of money earmarked to fight Boko Haram. The new president ordered the arrests of Dasuki and others.
The money, Nigerian law enforcement officials said, trickled out to destinations around the world. One of the recipients, the officials alleged, was the man whose shell company bought the McLean mansion a couple of years ago. His name is Robert John Oshodin Sr.
Oshodin, 83, learned carpentry as a youth in Nigeria, according to his bio on an archived version of a website for a furniture manufacturing company he later founded, Bob Oshodin Organization Limited. Oshodin and Dasuki, who both lived in the United States for long stretches, became close friends after meeting decades ago, said Oshodin’s wife, Mimie Oshodin, during testimony in a civil case.
The families were close enough that the Oshodins agreed to look after two of Dasuki’s children, then teenagers, who were attending school in the United States while Dasuki served as Nigeria’s national security adviser. It was also during this time, Nigerian officials alleged, that Dasuki illegally transferred tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Nigerian and U.S. currency from state funds to the Oshodins’ furniture company.
Dasuki was released on bail in 2019, re-arraigned in 2022 and has pleaded not guilty. A lawyer for Dasuki in Nigeria, Ahmed Raji, said he could not comment while his client’s case is pending.
Born into Nigerian royalty as the son of the sultan of Sokoto, Dasuki obtained degrees from American University and George Washington University in D.C. before ascending the ranks of the Nigerian military. After his 2015 arrest, Dasuki said in a statement that he was “not a thief or treasury looter as being portrayed” and that he’d acted “in the interest of the nation and with utmost fear of God,” the Premium Times of Nigeria reported. He also said he had “a lot to tell Nigerians,” a comment perceived by many as a threat to implicate other powerful Nigerian officials.
Robert Oshodin, reached by The Post at a phone number with a Los Angeles County area code, disconnected as a reporter described this article. He did not return a subsequent message.
Mimie Oshodin, 61, did not respond to an email requesting comment. A lawyer for her reached by phone in Nigeria, Osahon Idemudia, said he was bound by client confidentiality rules and could not comment.
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