What does money laundering have to do with cleaning your ill-gotten clothes ? A popular legend allege it ’s less than you may call up . consort to popular lore , when look for places to funnel his unlawfully receive money , American gangster Al Capone gravitate toward launderette . Johnny Cash flowing into the businesses was hard for police force enforcement to keep track of , imply large amounts of money could slip through the system unnoticed .
As intriguing and popular as that theory is , it’smost likely a myth . It ’s truthful that there are reference to money laundering during the former and mid-20th one C . But those largely have-to doe with to money laundering in the most actual sense — as in , washing dirty money . Anyone who ’s ever pull a crumpled bill out of their pocket knows how begrimed Johnny Cash can be .
In the early 1900s , the government realized that a hatful of the money they were being air to be destroyed was n’t worn , it was just marked-up . Giving it a quick wash in aspecially designed machineallowed them to mail it back out in circulation . In 1916 , it was forecast that it cost $ 1.30 to impress 100 notes but only $ 0.30 to clean 100 greenback , so the mental process saved the politics a slew of money .
Those money laundering political machine later fell out of use of goods and services , and the phrase win its more villainous association . Today , money launderingis definedas “ any mental process that ' clean ' lawlessly obtained investment trust of their ' dirty ' criminal origin , allowing them to be used within the legal economy . ” That definition entered the public vocabulary in the seventies , and consult to cash in hand used to bolsterthe Watergate outrage .
Money laundering was going on long before Watergate — and long before Capone ’s crimes . To learn more about the chronicle of money laundering and how exactly it works , check out the video below .
[ h / tBoing Boing ]
A adaptation of this story originally ran in 2017 ; it has been update for 2021 .
