In December 1972, International Bank (IB) bought a two thirds stake in the Mercantile Bank &amp; Trust Company which had a bank in Freeport, Bahamas, the Mercantile Bank of Freeport, and another bank in the Cayman Islands of a similar name. These banks had been established by I. Gordon Mosvold of the . In September 1976, when Mosvold resigned from Mercantile's board, he had $4.55 million in loans with Mercantile. Henry N. Conway, Jr., senior vice president of IB, stated that several loans on greatly overvalued property in Bimini and Freeport had been made by Mercatile but no terms had been established. According to an audit by Price Waterhouse, Mercantile had transferred about $2 million in assets and liabilities just prior to IB's takeover of its $26 million to Castle Bank &amp; Trust of Nassau, Bahamas which Paul Helliwell founded through a Panamanian shell company through his Miami based law firm in 1962. Castle Bank fell under investigation during "Operation Tradewinds" which was begun by the IRS in 1965 due to suspected drug trafficking involving Castle Bank. However, following the death of Helliwell on December 24, 1976, the banks Castle, Mercantile (Nassau) and Mercantile (Cayman) collapsed in the middle of May 1977. Castle had been under the IRS's "Project Haven" investigation due to over three hundred Castle clients supposedly involved in a tax evasion scheme. In 1980, Helliwell's Castle Bank was revealed to be a CIA account for the Helliwell law firm. In addition to Helliwell supposedly being one of the pay masters for the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, Castle had been one of the CIA's financing channels for operations in Latin America and against Cuba between 1964 and 1975 which included CIA operatives located on Andros Island, Bahamas.