This question is inspired by “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” but I think it’s more about illegal money than the shows themselves. Do (as the programs show it) the upper tiers of organized crime and, especially, the illegal drug trade, transfer funds in heaps of crisp new $100 bills wrapped in those colored paper bands with totals like “$10,000”? Where do they come from? I’m asking in particular about those payments going up the pyramid to the creators of drugs and the leaders of criminal organizations.
I’d think the base of the pyramid is $20 and, often, smaller denominations, from end users, or for example from the cash registers of small businesses paying the protection racket. I’d think the challenge is to launder the money somehow so it could pass through banks. Crisp new $100 bills all come from banks, right?
High denominations are preferred because they take up less space and are easier to keep hidden while transported out of the country. There are also far less questions about the source of $US overseas.
In BCS there’s a scene where Nacho is collecting rolls of hundreds secured with rubber bands from his street crews. Later Hector is shown delivering a bunch of these rolls in a gym bag to Don Eladio. Gus then shows up with a shrink-wrapped brick of money in labeled $10000 bundles, humiliating Hector with both the amount of money and the professionalism of its delivery. At no time is it implied that these are crisp new bills.
Those wrappers are not specific to banks nor to newly printed bills. You can get the wrappers on Amazon:
Well all money originally comes from the Mint and is distributed by banks. One hundred dollar bills outstanding by far make up the largest share of currency outstanding. Apparently they are popular abroad.
Some time in the '90s we had a visitor from Russia who wanted to take back with him US$5000 in hundred dollar bills. I asked my Canadian bank to arrange it. They wanted to know why, but were satisfied with my explanation and in a week or so had 50 crisp new bills. With one exception, their serial numbers were in order. Of course, this was perfectly legal (as far as US and Canadian law) were concerned.
This was the same man that I mentioned elsewhere on STD that found $1000 (presunably is smaller bills) vintage around 1900 in his grandmother’s mattress when she died.
I’ve read a few books about cocaine smugglers in the 1980s. They’d use small planes to transport 100+ kilos of cocaine per trip into the US. Then they would fill the plane with money and transport the money back to Colombia.
I have no idea what currencies they were using. I also have no idea if they were exchanging the bills at a bank or what. I know banks in Panama were a big part of the cocaine trade back in the 1980s.I’m sure they had a lot of banks in South Florida that were happily involved in the money laundering business.
FWIW, I’ve read that something like 10-20% of the money the Columbian drug lords got ended up being eaten by rats, destroyed by water, buried improperly, etc.
Also they would have counting houses in the US, where they would stash millions of dollars in US currency in storage until it could be transported back to Columbia. The movie Blow has some scenes about this.
I helped a colleague take $200k to South America (to buy an apartment). They had to be $100s (since that is the largest denomination available for withdrawal) and yes, they explicitly had to be crisp or the buyer would reject them.
When a drug lord’s mansion is raided, they often show pictures of piles of guns and cash they find on site. The bundles of cash are typically old bills wrapped with rubber bands. If the police have processed the money through counting machines, then the money is wrapped with currency bands. When the police are having the press conference about how they confiscated $X million, they have a pallet of money behind them in bundles that have been through their counting machines. The crisp, wrapped bundles shown in movies are probably for the audience’s benefit rather than being accurate.
Is prop money available as worn out bills wrapped with rubber bands rather than crisp bundles? The crisp bundles might be what’s used in movies because that might be the only money prop they can get.
Also, AIUI, the treasury department allegedly has had a program for decades to track $100 bills. (Scanned whenever they hit a bank?) I presume if some raid shows bundles of sequentially marked bills, the feds will have a good idea which banks are facilitating converting small to large bills for the convenience of drug lords. It’s not clear if overseas banks cooperate, but tracing the path of $100 bills produces some iinteresting insights.
We’ve had threads over the process of laundering money, but the big problem is converting large wads of cash into things like real estate or fancy cars without attracting attention. I suppose the last thing you’d want in that situation is a wad of cash that can be traced to a specific shipment to a particular bank branch, date and time…
Half a century ago I knew a marijuana dealer. He was neither small-time nor big-time (medium-time?). He told me that $1000’s were the denomination of choice in his business! I assume these were mostly just passed back and forth among dealers. To bank them would attract attention AND squander the convenience of this hard-to-get denomination.
He and his gang were “interesting” characters; and I can’t rule out that he was just spinning a fiction.
That is movie money, and you can buy it like that.
Right on both.
Money laundering consists of three phases- Placement- deposit cash into a Financial institution, banks, check cashers, etc. Sometimes it is just buying Gift Cards. Layering- moving the non-cash money around- example- take the Money order you bought at the check cashers, and depositing them into a bank account. Integration The final step is now getting that clean money where you can spend it.
USD of course.
Yep, several banks have been shut down or heavily fined for drug money laundering, and bank officers went to prison.
You need to declare cash over $10000 at any airport. Of course a CTR was prepared, and perhaps a SAR. You could have gotten into trouble doing so.
You can get both but the new looking money is easily available.
Coinage is produced by the US Mint, paper currency notes are produced by the Bureau of Engraving & Printing.
I thought I could remember handling some $500s out in the wild in the 90s but it seems they’re even less common than $1000s, at least in 2009.
As of May 30, 2009, only 336 $10,000 bills were known to exist, along with 342 $5,000 bills, 165,372 $1,000 bills and fewer than 75,000 $500 bills (of over 900,000 printed).
I have to assume all the relevant forms were correctly filed, because there were feds at the airport asking what the money was for. Nobody got in trouble, though, because cash is not illegal. [This is an anecdote about cash, but, to be explicitly clear, not drug or criminal money. I do not know anything about the person selling the apartment, but the payment was completely legitimate and from what I understand not unusual in that country.]
At the time I did (just for fun, because the answer was obvious) ask about $1000s, and not only did the bank not have them available for withdrawal, they had instructions to take them out of circulation.
Yes, it’s available aged and wrapped with rubber bands. This site has all kinds of prop money available (new, aged, bundled, money bags, money from different eras, etc).
Yes, unlikely to succeed since the 1980s at least. A cool teller who might have hooked you up would have probably (equally-cooly) advised the customer originally depositing the requested note note not to do so. “Neat, we’re supposed to seize those for shredding! How about you take that to the coin shop at the mall; they’ll give you better than $1000 for it”. Or a crooked teller would want more than face if it did get into the drawer and had to be greenbacked out, definitely crossing some lines, IMO.
Beginning in July 1969, the Federal Reserve began removing high-denomination currency from circulation and destroying any large bills returned by banks.
We’ve had threads and threads on the topic of whether it’s ethical for money handlers like tellers and cashiers to scan through the cash they handle in the course of their workday and remove any items with collector value and replace them with identical face value of non-collector cash.
A few folks considered it a legit perk of the job. Pretty much anyone who worked for a corporation, not a Mom’n’Pop, said it was a firing offense.
Outside of a some banking or govenement roles in positions of trust, I don’t have a particular problem with this myself, though it can be messy in practice. But once it crosses the desk and is accepted for deposit, a public bank teller does, IMO, have a duty to withold notes they believe ordered to be removed from circulation. But a cashier at a casino or bartender? I don’t mind.
Edit: naturally, a stated policy from an employer should be respected, too. But I’ve never worked anywhere that mentioned cash trades like this.