TRADECRAFT 101 PART FOURTEEN: MONEY LAUNDERING THROUGH LOTTTERIES AND OTHER CASH PRIZE GAMES

Money launderers, the good ones that is, stay up nights and weekends just to beat compliance officers. I know that because I did the same thing for ten years. It was a mental challenge to keep coming up with different ways to reinvent the wheel, meaning new money laundering typologies that mask your illicit goals, while submerging your illegal activities within the legitimate business world, always moving into new territory. It's all about tradecraft, keeping ahead of both law enforcement agents dedicated to taking me down, asn well as sharp compliance officers who I did not want to spot my activities.

Sometimes, I found, the most effective method is the easiest. Two of my career criminal clients, whose associates were always coming to them for laundering ideas, set up a clever network that monitored all the major government-run lottery operations. Whenever the prize to be awarded to the winner was significant, they got the word out on the street that they would not only buy the winning ticket for the lucky holder, they would pay a premium for it, as well as the seller's silence. As these were cash purchases, made in crowded convenience stores, with large payday buyers , on long lines, investigating the bona fides of anyone who claimed to be the winner, would prove fruitless.

Word that someone was paying cash for winning tickets, no questions asked, spread like wildfire wherever the clients sought those precious shortcuts to laundering the proceeds of crime,  and they were often successful in securing them. After acquiring the winning document they would arrange to sell it to those of their associates who was most desperate to launder his drug profits that month, at you guessed it, an even larger premium. The associate would claim the prize, take the one-time ( and not annual) payout, upon which taxes had already been withheld, and thereby clean a serious amount of drug profits. 

In theory, one might be able to launder millions of drug dollars in that manner, publicly retire from whatever job one had as a public front, and invest the now cleaned assets, all the while keeping as low a profile as possible. Letting the Statute of Limitations run out, years later, your drug profits cleaned, you run for public office as a local boy who made good. Is that a frightening prospect, drug trafficker-turned politician?