The washing cycle starts with bundles of hot cash, mostly in US currency, reflecting America’s prodigious appetite for drugs and the criminal penchant for the universally accepted greenback. The weight of cash from street narcotics deals – usually $1, $5, $10 and $20 bills – exceeds the weight of the drugs sold. The US Justice Department says a tonne of cocaine is worth six times its weight in cash. A tonne of heroin weighs 10 tonnes of money. Carrying $1 million around in a suitcase is heavy work. Divided into $100 bills, it weighs 10 kilograms and stands almost two metres tall.
“If a trafficking organisation sells $1 billion worth of illicit drugs on the streets of New York,” says US deputy assistant Attorney-General Mary Lee Warren, “it must contend with more than 256,000 pounds [116,363 kilograms] of illicit currency.” Fifty billion dollars equals nearly six million kilos of cash.
At heart, cleansing cash is a logistics challenge: how to wash tainted money without being caught. This is typically a three-stage affair: “placement”, where dirty dollars are fed into the system; “layering”, where they’re zapped around the planet, stymieing investigators with a complex paper trail that loops through different legal jurisdictions; and “integration”, where washed cash becomes part of the legal economy and is effectively untraceable.
…Jurado’s scheme tweaked the three-tier system – placement, layering and integration – by adding a couple of extra twists. The first stage involved moving the $36 million into a Panamanian bank. Next, the money was wired in amounts under $10,000 to more than 100 accounts, held in the names of Santacruz’s relatives and mistresses in 68 banks in nine European countries. Then the money was fed through accounts with fictitious European names. Next, it was channelled into front companies, registered in offshore tax havens from Antigua to the Isle of Man. The final stage envisaged hiding loot in Santacruz’s “legitimate” Colombian companies. But before that could happen, Jurado was caught by Luxembourg police.
Detailed article link (on the Australian Federal Police website): here