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The Washing Machine
Book

The Washing Machine

How Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Soils Us

Nick Kochan
Thomson South-Western, 2005

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

Recommendation

With huge swaths of the world’s economy taking place in the black market, money laundering has turned into an intractable problem with wide-ranging consequences. British journalist Nick Kochan offers an intriguing study of this shadowy world. He argues that laundering was an overlooked problem in the U.S. before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks pushed the issue to the fore. Indeed, he says, Americans were oblivious to the effects of dirty money. Kochan details the sordid sagas of Russian gangsters, Colombian kingpins and corrupt Mexican bankers. At times, his broad approach hinders his prose, and his examples aren’t always as compelling as they should be. Still, getAbstract recommends this eye-opening study to anyone who deals with the global movement of money.

Take-Aways

  • From Al Capone to Osama Bin Laden, shadowy financial shenanigans are synonymous with drug running and terror.
  • Laissez-faire regulatory policies in the 1980s helped enable today’s laundering.
  • Criminals use money laundering to hide their ill-gotten gains and terrorists use it to fund their covert activities.

About the Author

Nick Kochan is a writer, journalist and researcher who covers bank fraud and white-collar crime. He writes for a number of publications, including Financial Times and The Economist.

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