Money Laundering, New and Improved
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ATIP for last-minute Christmas shoppers: For the best price on Johnnie Walker Black Label, do your buying in Colombia. It’s cheaper there than in Scotland, steps from the distillery. The reason has nothing to do with Latin American drinking habits but everything to do with money laundering. A worldwide squeeze on safe havens for dirty cash has forced drug traffickers, and many others with an interest in moving huge sums of cash around the world without notice, into the liquor business. They now take the proceeds of drug sales in the United States, buy whisky (or General Electric refrigerators, Sony televisions, Microsoft software and in one case last year a Picasso) and ship them back home, where they are sold quickly at below-market prices. The drug cartels lose 20 or 30 percent of their earnings, but in a high-margin, high-risk business that’s not considered a terrible price. That is only one of the latest maneuvers as the science of money laundering — the life-blood of any enterprise that wants to turn illicit profits into palatial houses and fleets of Mercedes — soars to new heights. The days when you could trust a Swiss banker to hold on to your millions and keep his mouth shut are long gone: Just ask Imelda Marcos or, better yet, Paulina Castanon, the sister-in-law of Mexico’s former President, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. She spent several weeks in a Geneva jail recently after showing up to make an $84 million withdrawal from an account that Mexican prosecutors say was filled with the proceeds of drug deals. The assumption is that it was controlled by the Salinas family, but the former President, in self-imposed exile, isn’t saying much. His brother has just been indicted for “inexplicable enrichment.” More : query.nytimes.com |