The Washing Machine

From Al Capone to Osama Bin Laden

The world’s most ambitious crooks and killers, from Al Capone to Osama Bin Laden, have learned to game the international monetary system. From diamonds and drugs to cigarettes and weapons, criminals have found myriad ways to earn dirty money and then wash it. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks raised money laundering’s place on law enforcement’s priority list. Yet mobsters and terrorists have stayed one step ahead of financial regulators and keep oiling the shadowy financial machine that makes their crimes possible.

The roots of modern money laundering can be traced to Capone. The Chicago mobster invested in Cuban casinos and kept his money in banks in the Bahamas, where local officials could be counted on not to make trouble. Capone sidekick Meyer Lansky continued the tradition by making stooges of the governments in Haiti and the Bahamas, and exploiting the secrecy of Swiss banks. Now Capone and Lansky are quaint, even romantic, names, yet their schemes laid the groundwork for today’s vicious terrorists.

From Russia with Cash

Launderers thrive amid chaos, so unsurprisingly Russia in the 1990s became a hotbed of financial ...