New York Strip Clubs: Money-Laundering in Jersey? Fuhgeddaboudit!
… But if I try to use my cash to buy something major like a car or a house,” Smith says, “I will be reported to the federal government, which will want to know where all those wadded-up $5 bills came from. I need to sneak this cash into the banking system.”
Cassara says there are three stages of money-laundering: placement, layering and integration.
Placement is getting the money into some electronic form.
“I can’t just deposit it,” Smith says. “The banks have to report anything over $10,000. In the old days, I could have gotten around that by making large numbers of slightly smaller transactions.”
Criminals used to hire busloads of workers to put small sums of money into multiple banks. Those workers were called Smurfs, after the old cartoon featuring the little blue guys.
New banking software is getting better at exposing the smurfing trick. So criminals have to get a shell business to help launder their cash.
“The pizza parlor, the fast-food restaurants,” Cassara says.
“Bars, strip clubs, car washes,” Smith chimes in.
See the full article from “NPR”