My decade as a career money launderer, while it resulted in a period of time as a guest of the Bureau of Prisons, it also left me with a skillset regarding money laundering tradecraft that I have subsequently applied as a consultant to media outlets seeking to use that dark knowledge for investigative purposes, in order to expose financial crime. If you ever saw the groundbreaking series that Al Jazeera's Washington DC office did on corruption in the Citizenship by Investment program in Dominica, I was the technical adviser on that program. Those journalists went on to examine the economic citizenship scandal in Cyprus; their story ended up causing that government to terminate the program altogether.
Not long after 9/11, I was engaged by one of America's three major networks to expose the ongoing money laundering industry in Saint Kitts, being operated by local attorneys there. If you read my autobiography THE LAUNDRY MAN, you know that I spent a substantial amount of time there, moving and cleaning the proceeds of narcotics crime for American clients working in Miami, and engaged in trafficking. My goal was now, however, to implicate Kittitian lawyers on camera, while actively engaged in advising them on laundering money for foreign clients. You may remember someone later did the same thing in New York City, showing that some American lawyers weren't themselves above doing the same thing.
I had a client from the old days, long since reformed, who looked a lot like Bin Ladin; he also had a prominent scar on his neck from a bullet wound, when he was once left for dead in a drug transaction gone bad. That was my choice for "customer" who would be seeking money laundering advice. We paired him up with a young lady from a New York company that specialized in covert surveillance. She was to be his current romantic partner, and she was discreetly wired up for video and audio, on her purse and hat.
So as not to alert our targets, the production team and yours truly stayed at the Four Seasons in Nevis, coming over each morning to hit our targets in downtown Basseterre. Our recording equipment was secreted in a nondescript van which was close enough to various lawyers' offices to pick up the signals. as our duo visited several attorneys, delivering intentionally transparent stories about how they needed to hide money offshore from prying eyes.
We stung several lawyers, as well as a sitting magistrate, all of whom implicated themselves in short order. The footage was outstanding, but after we returned, network counsel killed any chance of airing the story, fearing lawsuits from the lawyers, and possible blowback from the government of St. Kitts & Nevis, so the program never was broadcast. That's the last time I had a reason to visit Nevis.




















