In my experience, neither regular citizen nor those employed in the financial industry really have a clue about what money laundering is or how investigators can follow the money trail to un-coup many other types of crime.
People commit crimes for many reasons i.e. Love, Hate, Politics, Revenge. But mostly, they do it for the money. Every time a crime is committed and money is generated, a bad guy is faced with a problem. That is, how he can conceal the fruits of his crime. He needs to clean up the proceeds of his crime. He needs to launder the money. He needs to make the transaction looks legitimate. All these need to be done for him to be seen as the good guy.
Money Laundering means taking money derived from an illegal act and then putting it through a number of steps so that ultimately that same money appears to have been derived from something legitimate.
History of Money Laundering
The term “Money Laundering” was first coined in the 1930s by the U.S Treasury Agents who were trying to lock up AL Capone. In those days, very few people had running water, much less a washing machine, so commercial laundries were very common. Capone and his mob owned hundreds of laundries in and around Chicago and they disguised the earnings from their Liquor business as money honestly earned from operating the laundries…
We live at the mercy of organized crime every single day of our lives and most people (Nigerians) never even noticed it. It affects everything that we do. Think about a typical day in your own life. You get up in the morning and get dressed; you put on that new shirt that you just bought and a button pops off as you button up. You paid as much as N25,000 for that choice shirt of yours, because it has a label of one of the famous Italian designers. In fact, you actually paid more for the shirt because of the name and the label. And what you don’t know is that the shirt wasn’t manufactured in Italy but in Aba, in a factory controlled by a politician that manufactures knock offs of everything from shirts to car spare parts.
You get into your car and you drive to work, Traffic is terrible. A car has broken down and is blocking traffic, the engine has stalled because there is dirt in the fuel gas line. The car owner bought fuel at a small fuel station that purchases its product from a company that is controlled by organized crime. And these organized crime guys buy low quality fuel, bribe the authorities whose responsibility it is to check the quality of the fuel imported and smuggle it into the country and sell it at a reduced price to small independent marketers who in turn sell same to you.
A little later on traffic slows again, contractors who were originally awarded the paving contract had mob connections and were able to rig the bid in the tender process so they came in with lowest price. But to make money at that price, they only put down half an inch of asphalt instead of the full inch that were supposed to. When the inspector from the city came to check the quality of the work, whether it tallies with what was agreed on, they gave him some money and he looks the other way.
The whole thing is giving you heartburn you can’t take it anymore after a long hectic day, you head for your favourite bar but it’s closed, out of business. It seems that they just couldn’t compete with the bar across the street, a new place where they don’t seem to be that interested in making a profit, why? Because it’s owned by the organization that imported the pot that your son got caught with, and they are using the bar to launder the proceeds of their drug sales or political loots.
Organized crime touches us all every day in ways that perhaps you never even consider. Keep your eyes open….. (To be continued)
Adu Joshua Onoriode writes from Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. He could be reached via: onosmister@gmail.com
