It may be a white collar crime, but money laundering can be hazardous to your health if you are the laundryman, when something goes horribly wrong with your operation, and funds either disappear, or are seized by an alert law enforcement agency. Several years ago, I was leaving the stage after speaking about my experiences as a laundryman, when a DEA agent came up to me, and asked me if I knew a certain Miami attorney who had recently passed away.
When I answered in the affirmative, he advised me that his watery death was no accident, but that it was a homicide. From that fact, and given his participation in laundering the proceeds of crime, it was easy to figure out the reason for his untoward demise. A sad story, but when you realize who the clients are, you wonder why anyone not addicted to risk-taking would get involved in the first place. As you can guess, I foolishly relished taking such chances at that point in my life, a pathology I acquired due to my Vietnam War experience.
Sometimes, the laundryman is terminated with prejudice in error, when he was actually innocent of the loss of client funds. Regular readers of my blog have read about the late William Herbert, the first Foreign Minister of St. Kitts & Nevis, who was laundering funds for the IRA. When money went missing, he and his entire group of guests on board his yacht one day, disappeared forever. US law enforcement has unofficially advised that they are all buried underneath a swimming pool in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts. The sad part of the story; it was MI-6 that seized the money; Herbert was innocent of the theft allegations.
Clients can also intentionally incriminate their laundryman in a number of ways which can expose them. One of my clients, unhappy with check clearance times on laundered funds, inserted my name as owner of an aircraft engaged in drug smuggling. When the plane was burned in Jamaica by a mob, with the pilot inside, the records with my name caused me a bit of a problem later on.
Bottom line, money laundering is not for those willing to accept that there may be an unhappy ending for you down the road. I wonder how many laundrymen actually consider this when they start moving money for narcotics traffickers.
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