Washing Money

[Ed Rogers]

Not sure this is right place to post this. The time is 1965(no computers) I have drug money I need to wash. Does this sound like it would work, knowing that no one is going to be looking to close?http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/images/icons/icon6.gif

This is how it will work, the State of Texas Banking Board will give us a license to open a State owned bank. It will not be insured by the federal government, so the only auditors will be people I know. From the different cemeteries around the Valley, we pick fifty names and open accounts for them. Each week a deposit of $9,500.00 dollars will be entered in to the fifty accounts, for a total sum of $475,000.00 per week.
Through an investment firm this money will be wired to three Realtor’s escrow accounts in three different States. They’ll purchase land with the money, when the market is right we sell the land. The money will come back to the investment firm, that we own out right, clean as new fallen snow.
"How the hell do you know all this?"
"My father and these guys on the Banking Board, have been doing it for years. The orange and grapefruit harvest is controlled by the banks. To many oranges in Texas, they ship them to their investment firms in Florida or California. Claim a short fall in Texas and the Feds bail them out. In Florida they stamp the Texas oranges as Florida, Sunkised, and double the profit."

[Kate Thornton]

You are assuming no one will be looking too closely at this scheme, but all it takes is one little suspicion...

Where does the initial money come from? Why do you think there were no computers in 1965 (COBOL, FORTRAN & BASIC were all in use at that time - IBM had lots of large comoputers in use in government installations)

It seems like a complex scheme - there would have to be a very large initial outlay to set it up and a lot of payoff to keep it going. Land values could fluctuate.

Why not just use Swiss accounts like everyone else in 1965?

[Ed Rogers]

While there were computers very few banks or State owned banks were using them. The first loan I every got was in 1965. The owner of the bank looked more like a farmer, I told him I needed to borrow $400. to buy a 1959 Ford. He walked over to a cashier and told her to give me $400. never signed a piece of paper and paid the money back $50. a month. I thought about overseas accounts but these guys have never been out of Texas. Thanks for taking the time, and if you come up with anything else let me know. Edhttp://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/images/icons/icon7.gif

[rtilryarms]

All money laundering schemes are flawed in one way or another. So any scheme will work as long as the description is brief and not a majority of the plot for the rest of the book or story.
It is unlikely that this scheme would get past the experts even before computers but the typical reader would buy in to it readily assuming the rest of the story is the main entertainment.
The only red flag I get from yours as a reader, is that it is too consistant. Depositing exact amounts on a predictible and regular basis would grow the suspicion of anyone.

I would also be careful on using the term Money washing or laundering, that phrase was coined during the Watergate scandal.

[Ed Rogers]

Thanks that helped. It's only a small part of the story and used only to take someone out of the drug end of the business. I wonder what they called it before Watergate, business as usual.http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/images/icons/icon7.gif Ed

[Julie Worth]

The need to keep the transactions below $10K is also recent.

[rtilryarms]

The need to keep the transactions below $10K is also recent.

Yes. That is correct. Recent legislation mandates reporting of transactions 10k or more.

I think there were different names depending on the schemes. My friends used to one-off, meaning they would run it through a singular front company. They also two-0ffed etc.

Don't worry, my friends turned out to be CIA or cia consultants.

[soloset]

What if a helpful teller discovered that one of the account holders was deceased and contacted the family about it? Fifty is a lot of chances to have somebody stumble over something.

That said, as a reader, I'd be willing to buy it as you presented it. I think the "my father and his friends have been doing it for years" part is what sold me, although I'm not quite clear on the connection between the scheme outlined and the orange scheme.

Oh, wait. It just occurred to me, but when the money comes back to the investment firm, doesn't quite a bit of it have to be paid back to the supposed (dead) investors? Otherwise your investment firm is embezzling from them. Which doesn't matter because they're dead, but it still looks weird, and means the money isn't exactly free and clear?

[sassandgroove]

And here I was ready to tell you money will go through the washer and dryer just fine. I knew a grandmother who would wash money and iron it before giving it to her grandchildren. :)

[jsh]

FWIW, I think one launders money.

Do I understand correctly that your scheme is to open a bank and then deposit money in your own bank under fraudulent names?

You may have to adjust your amounts. According to the BLS's inflation calculator, $9,500 in '65 is equivalent to about $61,000 today. So, imagine there are 50 accounts, each having $61,000 deposited in each account once a week, with no contact with any tellers or any other bank personnel.

You'd be cycling the equivalent of $3 million a week through these accounts, with what evidence that they even exist? (Yes, you can get documents like birth certificates easily in '65, but I'm talking about evidence of real human beings depositing this amount of money week after week.) Bank employees would talk.

Maybe if the bank was small enough so that the schemers controlled the whole entity; however, could it pump through that kind of bread while still being small?

Sounds sketchy. Sorry I don't know more about high-finance money laundering, I don't have anything constructive to offer. You could try resturaunts (sp?), being large, cash-dominated businesses, or night clubs. "Simply" cook the books to add that cash into the legitimate deposits, thus "laundering" the money. But $3 million/week is going to take some creativity on your part to make that quantity so that it isn't noticed.

I'm the zoning administrator for a township with significant fruit producing, so I might also note that claiming fraudulent crop failures sounds sketchy as well. Everybody around there will know the weather, and not only will competiting growers have a good idea what yields are, the migrant workers who pick the fruit will know first hand. They'll move on after the season, and I'm sure they'll talk. The local farmers will all be chatty with the Ag people, and they're going to have an inkling whether farmer brown is getting paid for crop failures, and they'll know something is up. And based on my experience with fruit growers, if one person gets something, everybody feels entitled. They'll know farmer Brown had a good harvest, and they'll hear about whether he's getting money from the feds.

Caveat lector, of course. I'm no expert...I don't even know how to properly launder money! :D

[Ed Rogers]

I wonder how many people even know Texas grows oranges. I lived down there and the only think I thought they grew were grapefruits. Until one year Florida had a freeze and all the farmers in the Valley made a killing shipping the fruit to Florida. That was when I found out Texas oranges are in fact Florida oranges. That's how they market them.

A lot of good points on the money I had forgot the 10,000 dollar limit was new. By the late seventys the drug runners used mules to deposit and withdraw money from banks. I sat in a bank once and watched men and women move from line to line withdrawing 9,900 dollars out of different accounts. Most people want to keep their jobs and never speak up about something like that. Thanks again. Edhttp://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/images/icons/icon7.gif

[Elektra]

How big is this town? It doesn't seem unlikely that one of the people at the bank would be related to at least one of the dead people in question, and know they were dead.

[Ed Rogers]

I think one problem everbody seems to be having is, they think people in a bank care about these things. The pay is not that much. They want to do their 8 hours and go home. Also this is a fiction story, my goal is to have the reader, read this part and pass on by it. If it's to far out there, then they will stop and think about it, as we have been doing. Thanks Edhttp://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/images/icons/icon7.gif

[Elektra]

But bank employees do care about these things. Do you know just how much trouble an emplyee would get in if they let a huge scam happen right under their nose?