Laundrymen, The

Money laundering has been a major part of the American criminal landscape since the days of its patron saint, Meyer Lansky. Watergate was essentially a money-laundering operation; so was Irangate. It is the one thing that Richard Nixon, the CIA, and Pablo Escobar have in common with Heidi Fleiss, BCCI, and the IRA. Some political action committees (PACs) have used dirty money, if unwittingly, to help elect politicians and then to keep them in office. Even the most sober and upright Wall Street bankers will admit that some of their banking assets derive from laundered money.
And who are the laundrymen? As Jeffrey Robinson proves in this blistering and up-to-the-minute expose, they are not the gun-toting Mafiosi of cliche; they are white-collar accountants, lawyers, and bankers – certified professionals who use sophisticated systems of layering, loopholes in banking laws, and professional privilege to do their dirty work. Gone are the days of briefcases stuffed with cash. Money laundering 1990s style has diversified. Drug traffickers moving the drugs no longer move the money, and their laundrymen don’t need to know about the drugs. Corrupting everyone and everything it touches, the money gradually seeps into the foundations of the world’s financial institutions, ready to fuel an ever-widening cycle of violence. E02