I think part of the reason for “why a carwash?” was just that Walt worked at one, Walt knew the owner and the business well enough to feel confident about buying them out, Walt knew a bunch of guys he could employ at a car wash (his co-workers), it was a business he knew something about (as opposed to, say, any other retail or service business) and people wouldn’t be too surprised if he bought out his place of employment.
And, don’t forget, he had a grudge against the owner/boss. I forget what the deal was but a smidge of the decision to buy it as their front was based on revenge.
Casinos do not want to be tied to money laundering or illegal activity. It’s not good business…I suspect they are closely scrutinized by the government.
If he hadn’t known about the inscription, then he wouldn’t have freaked out when the book went missing.
Slightly off topic - I totally regret not donating the money to get a signed copy of “Leaves of Grass” when Bryan Cranston did his charity thing. I love Breaking Bad and I love Walt Whitman. Sadly, Aaron Paul’s charity thingy has prizes that aren’t quite as nifty (IMHO).
I like how the two policemen were asking Jesse how he got the money, and mockingly asking him things like “did you win it gambling?” and “were you lucky at cards?”. They asked those questions mockingly because, as law officers, they’ve probably heard those very obvious and stupid lies many times.
Then we see Hank standing outside the room and we realize: At some point, Hank is going to be asked where he thought all of the money for his therapy came from, and his answer is going to be that he believed that Walt won it gambling. :smack:
It seems a lot of the Sky haters have flipped or at least softened up now that she’s fully on team Walt.
Comments on Lydia’s hotness and/or degree of bad-assery seem to form a substantial amount of the reaction to this episode from the fanbase.
I loved how she didn’t want to see her handiwork while wading through bodies in the middle of the desert in her expensive clothes. Some interpret it like she’s the perfect corporate officer who isn’t interested in the social effects of their activity, as long as they make the targeted profits. She doesn’t sell meth, she sells product. And she didn’t orchestrate the massacre of a gang, she fired her employees for cause.
Because federal anti-money laundering regulations say they have to care.
Casinos fall under the Bank Secrecy Act definition of covered “financial institutions.” And so they have various regulations that require them to track financial transactions and their customers to help identify and prevent money laundering.
ETA - Here’s a list of covered institutions. So if you’re doing large business with any of these be aware that they’re tracking you and making reports to the government.
I still don’t see how they would “catch you” if you did it the way I suggested (note that my way involved putting a bunch of bets on a single number at the roulette wheel until you win one, not the supposedly “easier” way of buying a bunch of chips and only betting a few of them before cashing out–which to me looks more obviously fishy).
The plan was to take a second honeymoon. I don’t think we were supposed to believe it had anything to do with business- not that they would have discussed that in front of Marie.
I wasn’t addressing whether they would catch you, just explaining why the casino would take any interest in trying.
As for your suggestion, I suspect (but while I have had some involvement in AML within banks I’ve not ever had any withing casinos) that this isn’t correct:
If you’re betting large enough amounts to launder a significant portion of their money I suspect the casino will be aware of you. And even if they don’t know who you are they are obligated to report anything they sets off their radar as potential money laundering.
I suspect that someone who suddenly starts coming in, bringing large amounts in cash (most whales don’t show up with a suitcase of c-notes), who plays in a relatively boring fashion, and doesn’t want to tell you who he is or establish a relationship is going to draw attention. Whether it would be enough to spark suspicion and reports, I couldn’t say.
And the more you do to make it harder to detect the slower it will be.
So, let’s say I want to spend an evening laundering money.
I go to a casino with cash and buy in for less than $10,000 to avoid mandatory reporting. So I buy $8,500 so it doesn’t look like I’m trying to just miss the $10,000 limit (that too is supposed to generate a suspicious activity report, you’ll recall that this is how Eliot Spitzer got caught, because he engaged in behavior that looked like avoiding mandatory reporting). Now, how much to play? Small amounts will take longer, large amounts will draw attention. But Wynn on the strip has $500 limit tables right on the floor so play that. Now you have 17 spins to win before you’re out of dirty money (and if you start gambling any clean money you win now you’re just gambling).
Every time you do this, for a $8,500 buy in of dirty money you can expect to leave with an average of $7,824 of clean money. And it’ll have been done so in a way that is a pattern relatively easy to spot (never playing with won money, betting only the initial buy in, and then leaving).
All for a paltry (on the scale of money involved) $7,824. Play busy tables to try and get lost in the crowd and it’ll take half an hour to get those 17 spins in, then you spend an hour cashing out, moving to another casino and restarting.
And everything you do to make it harder to spot eats into that $7,824. Lower limit tables, more frequent movement among tables, playing with won money, varying play style. Paying a crew to do it for you. Travel and other expenses to move around constantly.
I’m not saying he would get caught (and the specifics here may be wrong, but I don’t think the gist is), just that even if done safely it wouldn’t be that efficient a laundering option and the longer it goes on the more likely the pattern is to be seen. And then at the end of the year when you report your clean gambling income, if anybody gets curious you’ll be caught because nobody makes steady income from roulette.
So how do you go about laundering a bazillion dollars? I used to work for a guy who embezzled millions from his own company and just deposited it in banks in the Bahamas. When he needed some, he simply had it wired to him. Why can’t Walt just do something as straightforward as that?
You have to get the money out of the US first. Walt’s problem is that he has a big pile of physical cash in the US.
Which leads to the question, why does Walt only have cash and why did he bring the money from the Czech deal INTO the US? In reality Saul would have advised him to keep all the money from Lydia’s Czech deals outside the US and get his share from that paid into bank accounts in the Isle of Man or Hong Kong or Turks and Caicos islands where they don’t ask questions and where its beyond the reach of the DEA or the IRS. For good measure scatter 2-3 million in each account in as many overseas tax havens as possible. Even if half of them get found and seized you’re still golden.
Of course that would have made for less dramatic TV than the giant pile of cash.
Driving under the influence? He was using drugs earlier that day, and then drove his car into a ditch.
And I’d think driving around with unexplicable piles of cash is enough to get a search warrant for his house, which is presumably full of drugs, paraphernalia, guns and god knows what else.
I don’t really interpret what I was suggesting as “business”, exactly. The point is that you have more money than you can spend without attracting the IRS at least. If you want to enjoy the money, one way to do it is by spending it in cash on fancy vacation excursions like five star restaurants, good tickets to concerts or sporting events, etc. I would call figuring out ways to do more of that kind of thing with their stockpile of money “play” rather than work, although it does require more care than it does for someone with already laundered money, or money that does not need to be laundered.
Fair point. Maybe poker would be a better choice.
Sounds like your former boss got caught though, right?
I would imagine that living beyond your apparent means (fancy vacations, five-star restaurants, bringing thousands of dollars to casinos and then placing bets at the $500 tables) is going to attract the wrong sort of attention.
But my point was that if you do it on vacation and not with your credit cards or anything, and keep moving, you can go through a lot of cash this way without it being traced back to you.
Yes, but only after he deliberately bankrupted the company and then tried his hand at the medical marijuana business. It seems that even if you own a legitimate dispensary you’re still not allowed to have 10,000 plants growing on your property, even in California. And he was laundering the proceeds from that too, which is what eventually led to his downfall. The cops found about a quarter million stuffed inside a vacuum cleaner in his condo. Still, he only got four years in a barely pound-me-in-the-ass facility outside of Bakersfield. As near as we can all figure, the Feds never found the offshore accounts from his first (quasi-legitimate) business, but we’re not entirely sure. Feds and lawyers can be a tight-lipped bunch. We can attest that the FBI and IRS guys who came to our houses to talk to us about it after the fact were a bunch of retards, though. We had to explain the whole scam to them over and over and over again, and they still couldn’t figure out what we were talking about.