US Marshals HUNTED Fugitive Iran Broker 16 Months — Caught in Tampa Bay

A Tampa maritime consultant who built a $160M Iran sanctions evasion network vanished the morning federal agents came for him — and stayed hidden for 16 months. Track how US Marshals unraveled a fugitive operation built by someone who knew exactly how federal tracking worked. Middle District of Florida, 2026. Shell LLCs, encrypted drives, $340K cash, and a Venezuelan passport in a different name. US Marshals and OFAC investigators spent 16 months hunting Cyrus Navid Behrooz across Florida, Georgia, and the Caribbean after he cut his ankle monitor and disappeared from his Coral Gables home. The breakthrough came not from surveillance technology but from a compliance officer's routine FinCEN report and a single analyst who recognized a naming pattern from the original 2024 indictment. What agents found aboard the seized catamaran expanded the case to include two Tampa maritime attorneys and a Cayman Islands trust administrator. The encrypted drives recovered at arrest contained routing instructions for 11 additional tanker transactions — processed while Behrooz was already a federal fugitive. The money recovered represents a fraction of what the network generated. The rest has not been found.