Say you just made a cool million dollars. Except, it wasn’t by legal means. Also say you’re the careful sort. You know that buying a big car, or blowing it on $1,000 bottles of Crystal is going to attract attention of the sort you can’t afford.
How can you enjoy your ill-gotten gains without running afoul the authorities? You’ll need to launder it first. That means make your newfound wealth appear to come from perfectly legal sources.
The traditional way, expertly portrayed in the Netflix series Ozark, involves mingling the illegal cash with legal income to hide its provenance. That’s why Marty Byrd is to eager to buy businesses around the Lake of the Ozarks. The marina, the funeral home, and, eventually the casino are all cash based businesses. They provide a perfect way to get the illegal money into legal accounts. But even then, a sudden spike in income would arouse suspicion.
Take the marina. People buy beer, food and gas. Nobody questions the cash transactions. But Marty can’t pretend to sell more beer than he orders from the wholesaler. Fake invoices help, but only so much.
The casino offers much better opportunities. Everybody knows that most people lose money in casinos. So the provenance of the cash isn’t really an issue. As long as you can demonstrate an active operation, a casino is perfect. That’s why Las Vegas was started by the mob. Even if the feds are auditing the casino—as they do in Ozark—you can still beat them by secretly giving gamblers illegal money to lose.
The trouble with commingling legal and illegal cash is that it’s slow. Marty and Wendy in Ozark find that out after the cartel dumps the second load of cash to be laundered on them. And the world is awash with illegal cash. Current illicit transactions around the globe are estimated to range from $3.6 to $11 trillion. The International Chamber of Commerce estimates that the entire global market for counterfeiting and piracy alone amounts to $1 trillion dollars. Most of that money is still taken in as cash.
So how does money laundering scale up to those numbers? Check out the next installment.
