I worked in a 7-11 and across the street was a small restaurant-looking building. No sign, no nothing. Every few weeks, about 10 or 11pm, a bunch of Cadillac and Lincoln sized cars would show up and stay for a few hours. The rest of the time, people came and went, but clearly along the lines of dishwashing staff and kitchen staff. One night, one of the guys invited me to come get dinner there, which was pretty awesome. He met me at the back door and passed me a styrofoam box of the best spaghetti I have ever had. I never went near the front door, but every so often, the same guy would stop by and invite me over. This went on for about another year and then one night, the place burned to the ground.
I should note that the city was a well known location for retired Columbo family guys.
Why even set up a business where you actually have to buy and sell tangible goods. Seems like the best way to launder money would be to run a fake life coaching business or something where you don’t need to be licensed nor do you have to buy crap and pretend to (or actually) sell it.
My grandmother ran a saloon in Covington, Kentucky (just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati) back in the 60’s. The back half of the building was a bookie and numbers place. The brother of the city’s Chief of Police owned the building. Sometimes they’d get a phone call and the bookie would pack up quick. I remember blankets with little pockets so that they just picked them up and the money and tickets would stay in them. Also buckets of water and sponges near the chalk boards. Every once in a while they’d get a phone call and move out most, but not all the stuff. They’d get busted for a tiny bit and pay a small fine. I guess it was to keep the Chief looking OK.
Because those kinds of businesses don’t get the kind of traffic that newstands, fruit stands, restaurants ,bars, etc do. Not only do they not get as much traffic, it’s a different kind of traffic.It’s not unusual for a person to go to the same newstand, fruitstand, bar or even restaurant every day, and in the case of a newstand or fruit stand at least , even multiple times a day.
I knew a guy who had an antique shop that was basically a money-laundering front for his drug operations. He did really sell the antiques, though. He was turned in by a disgruntled employee (he used, which could be perceived as extremely moody by someone who didn’t know what was going on, so I guess he could be pretty hard to work for), but he had lots of money so beat the rap.
Years ago I had a friend who lived in a neighborhood that was, I’ll guess, 60% black, 30% hispanic, and 10% really old white people who had lived there forever. The trend was Vietnamese immigrants moving in. One day leaving her house it hit me that there were two tanning salons on the block–two! Who went to that neighborhood for a tan? Nobody. Who needed a tanning salon who lived in that neighborhood? Nobody! At least not the black people, Vietnamese immigrants, or old white people. Suspicious.
Another friend used to work for a state tax office. She said restaurants were, at the time at least, a really great way to launder money, and things to look for were reporting more income than they had customers or (conversely) reporting less income than they had customers. One of her jobs was to sit in the parking lot for a determined period of time and count people going in and out. (It was surveillance, but of a non-sneaky sort as she wasn’t undercover, and was on a couple of occasions asked to leave.) Then they sat around the office and analyzed the menu to see if the amounts turned in matched some “average” for the number of customers. If the amount the restaurant reported was low, they went after them for more taxes, but if it was higher than they felt it should be, they turned the info over to vice. (Yes, a lot of room for error there.)
For several years there was a European Waffle restaurant right next to my work. I passed by the place hundreds of times and never, I mean never once saw so much as a single person in there. So one day, a co-worker and I had some time to kill, and it was around breakfast time, so I decided we were going to try the place out for fun. We go in and there is, of course, no one else there besides a single waitress. We order waffles and - here’s the important part - a poached egg.
Why is that important? Cause the waitress takes our order, goes back to the kitchen for a couple minutes, then comes back and says they can’t do a poached egg, because they don’t have a stove. The menu, mind you, was filled with items that one would need to, you know, cook. But it turns out that the only thing they can actually make are waffles, in the two waffle makers sitting on a counter outside the kitchen.
That place simply HAD to be a front for something. Had to. It’s gone now, but it lasted for at least 5 years.
Stories like this make me even more confused. Why have a fake retail front that anyone, including the authorities, will realize is fake. A store with a few dusty candy bars isn’t going to fool the IRS into thinking it’s doing $1M/yr. A restaurant without a stove (or customers) is not really a restaurant.
So why not make some sort of non-retail business? Instead of Soprano’s Pizza, have Soprano’s Life Coaching and the coaching fee is $200/hr, cash-only. Then all you need is a boring office that no one would think twice about, much less post about it on a message board.
When I lived in NYC, there was a store on my street with two big windows in front, with shelves. The items on the shelves were things like: an old teddy bear; an incomplete chess set; a pair of gloves; some ramen noodles; a baton; a men’s hat; a typewriter; a child’s piano, etc., etc. Everything was used and dusty. Occasionally, an item disappeared and was replaced, but most of them remained for years.
Pizza place in my ex-wife’s neighborhood. Never advertised. Never saw any traffic, no delivery vehicles ever coming or going. Stopped there one day just out of curiosity. Half a dozen gangbangers hanging about. No evidence of pizzas being made.
My old neighborhood. Small off-street building labeled CHEESE in big letters. No evidence of any actual business. No advertisements, no traffic other than the usual half-dozen or so young men hanging about.
I swear, when I had a subscription to New York Magazine, there would be a photo and descriptive paragraph about a place just like that, once a week! “Rumplestiltskin’s Gold. On 54th and 125th streets. We found an excellent old school wicker handbasket ($58), these swell rubber bouncy balls in four colors ($14), and this interesting assortment of bakelite buttons from the 40’s ($5 and up). Monday-Thursday, call for hours.”
I will offer up my oft-told tale of a “restaurant” in my home town, old brick, two tiny dark windows, in between a shoe repair shop and a mysterious storefront shop with a dead plant in the window. This place never advertised. We never knew anyone who ate there. Never heard a thing about it for years. No one was even sure who owned it. One day we heard they sold great pizza, so we called and ordered one, and I was driven down and sent in to pay and pick it up. On a Friday night, I observed a dark bar with a few dark suited men giving me the stinkeye, and a scattering of empty tables. I was only 12, but I was convinced this was a den of thieves of some sort. (Was proved right a couple of years later. Money laundering.) The pizza was disgusting, maybe deliberately :dubious:
I used to live across the street from a little hole-in-the-wall store. It had stuff, all dusty. But the main thing was that the guy who owned & ran it was a real asshole. For example one day my next-door neighbor bought a newspaper and paid with pennies and he yelled at her and chased her out of the store. You would go in to buy cigarettes and he’d say, “They’ll give you cancer.” You would go in to buy Windex and he’d say, “You don’t want to wash windows today, it’s sunny. You want to wash windows on a cloudy day. You’ll get streaks.” I mean, he’d sell you the Windex, but it really seemed like he’d have preferred not to.
He had a pretty sparse selection, and some of the stuff was obviously really, really old. Like, he had ink in bottles. (I use a fountain pen so I bought some. “Fountain pens are no good. Ballpoint, that’s the way to go.”)
Needless to say, he didn’t get a lot of business. I have a hard time believing he was a front for anything though, because who’d want to deal with him? Obviously it’s a lot easier to get your Windex, cigarettes, newspapers, candy bars, etc. by walking across the street, or he would have had no business at all. And I don’t think he would have cared.
I lived for a while in a town with a big coal mine and a booming oil industry. Lots of young guys making huge amounts of money, and the attendant drug business that generates.
There were 10,000 people in that town, and five scrapbooking shops.
The rational side of me points out that there were a lot of millionaires around who could easily subsidize a hobby business for a family member, but it’s having a hard time winning the argument.
Oh, c’mon, you know their wives and girlfriends bought all those scrapbooking supplies because they needed something to do while he worked all those long hours out on the oil field.
Bumping this thread: I regularly walk at a nearby shopping mall, and there’s a store (not a kiosk; he rented one of the spots) that sells fairly expensive purses and sunglasses. It’s run by a guy who looks like he’s from India or Pakistan, and I have never seen anyone in there. It’s been there quite a while, too.
There was a hair salon on our main drag maybe a half mile from me that was raided within the last year. It was one of a group of fronts for drug trafficking in the region. The salon had been there for decades, and never once did I see anyone having their hair done there. A relative of the owner (I don’t remember if it was male or female) was arrested. S/he managed the day-to-day operations there.
The salon closed down not too long ago. It was empty for awhile. Now there’s another salon there with a more “hip” vibe. They leave the front door propped open when it’s warm outside, so I’m figuring maybe it’s legitimate…?
“Rumplestiltskin’s Gold. On 54th and 125th streets. We found an excellent old school wicker handbasket ($58), these swell rubber bouncy balls in four colors ($14), and this interesting assortment of bakelite buttons from the 40’s ($5 and up). Monday-Thursday, call for hours.”