the.com/launder
Where dirty money goes to take a bath and come out respectable.
means To wash and finish clothes or linens, or — figuratively — to disguise the illegal origins of money by passing it through legitimate-seeming transactions.
from From Latin 'lavandaria,' things to be washed, from 'lavare,' to wash — the same root that gives us 'lavatory' and 'lavish.' Old French softened it into 'lavandier,' a washer of linen, which English clipped down to 'launder.' The word meant only soap and water for centuries; the money-cleaning sense is a 20th-century metaphor, popularly tied to mobsters who funneled cash through laundromats and other cash businesses, though the figurative 'washing' of ill-gotten gains drew naturally on the long-standing image of dirt scrubbed clean.
- word root
- From Latin lavare, the same source as lavatory
- the three steps
- Placement, layering, integration: crime's spin cycle
- scale
- Up to 5 percent of global GDP cleaned yearly
- origin myth
- Linked to Capone's literal cash-only laundromats
- clean again
- Money mules unknowingly do the rinsing for cartels
fyre festival — billy mcfarland used $26 million in fraudulent wire transfers and vendor invoices to create a fake luxury event in 2017
danske bank estonia — estonian branch processed $236 billion in suspicious transactions between 2007-2015, including russian and iranian money
wachovia bank — processed $378.4 billion in suspicious transfers, pleaded guilty in 2010 to failing to monitor drug cartels