I’ve always been a bit fascinated by the DB Cooper case.
Mostly that many of the possible suspects had experience in parachuting and/or military intelligence work. But in my opinion skydiving out of an aircraft on a cold, rainy night in late November, over a very heavily wooded area seems very amateurish. Not the planned work of an experienced professional.
But I digress.
What I really wonder is, what would Cooper have done with the money had he survived the jump?
What do other kidnappers and extortionists do with marked bills? As soon as they try to use the money law enforcement will be on it like flies on stink. How do they exchange such bills without getting caught? Buy foreign currency and then exchange it back? Buy drugs and exchange it for clean money? Pass it through casinos? All of that seems risky and time consuming. I assume the entire purpose of marked bills is to make ransom demands pointless. But such things still happen.
How would Copper have used the money had he survived?
He could use it to buy through sources that don’t check whether the money is marked. I’m sure there are plenty of illegal sellers who would have been happy to sell him whatever he wanted.
Laundering the money would require him to find someone with a lot of clean cash, like a drug dealer, and then pay a premium to exchange it for his own. I was thinking he could easily buy a stolen car or two, and nobody would be the wiser. Most illegitimate sellers aren’t going to be too concerned about where the money came from.
He could always go to a foreign country without an extradition treaty with the United States.
Also, I don’t think the intention of marked money is to let the sellers know someone is purchasing with illegitimate cash. Its purpose is to make it easier for authorities to track someone down when they start spending the money.
Assuming he survived and stuffed the 200K in a proverbial mattress, who’s checking bills to see if the serial #s were in the stolen lot? Aside from a bank, I’d say nobody. The bills weren’t visibly marked, the FBI just provided a list of serial #s to banks for them to check against for any cash deposited. So DB pays his rent, buys a car, goes to the store, etc. No seller/vendor/store is going to care or lookup serials #s on cashed used to pay for something by a random guy. When they make their deposits, the bank may eventually check and notice, but that cash is already mixed with cash from a lot of other people by that point. You’d at best get a whiff that DB may have been in that area at some point in time, and that’s it.
I doubt there is any useful mechanism to get the full value of the bills.
There are money circulations that run on cash. The obvious ones are organised crime and third world countries. Maybe he could have sold the cash (at a very substantial discount) to some organised crime outfit. Trouble is that even at a huge discount, the cash is going to attract unwanted attention if spent locally, and may never be worth the trouble.
No matter what, someone is needs to get some value for the cash by getting it into a circulation system that doesn’t touch the US systems. Some third world country where US dollars are the default hard currency. Even that has its risks. Eventually a lonely bill will find its way home, and that will bring attention. So Cooper would need to be long gone. Or if sold to an organised crime outfit, they would want the trail to be basically useless. Bills turning up inside the drug trade of some third world country is not going to be a useful clue to bring anyone, let alone Cooper, to heel. The risks to Cooper of getting into this would not be small. Back when he committed the crime, I would imagine everything was significantly harder.
Cash economies persist for all sorts of reasons. I know of people who sold a car, received a big roll of bills, and then bought another second hand car, and just added more bills to the roll to buy it. I like to think that the roll of bills is still out there, sometimes growing, sometimes shrinking, but still acting like a virtual car. Of course sooner or later, someone will bank it, and it vanishes. Which is the problem Cooper had. Incredibly hard not to attract attention. Even if the transaction was half a dozen cars ago, serious enough crimes will have someone tracing them back. The first time it tracks to Cooper he might have some plausible deniability, second time he appears in any trail, he is cooked.
That works up until the point the car dealer, local stores, etc deposit at their respective banks and the machines start flagging a lot of the bills. The serial numbers on those bills aren’t checked by hand, they’d be scanned and tagged by machines, if not at the bank, then at the Federal Reserve (banks don’t just hold onto those bills indefinitely). Worse, flagging them as all coming from the same place. That doesn’t narrow things down to an individual but once they know they can restrict their search, it becomes a matter of time.
You can get around that to an extent by spreading the spending around but that still leaves a geographic footprint. Maybe you make the occasional big purchase in cash (but not so big they’d remember you) but never remotely in the same place twice. And you don’t make a lot of small payments like rent, groceries, etc.
I’m not so sure. This was the early 70s. It was not standard procedure or easy for banks to check the serial #s of cash deposits. It was a manual process, the technology for automated high-speed scanning of serial numbers was not widely available or efficient at the time. Those deposits would have gotten mixed up with all the other deposits, redistributed for cash withdrawals, etc. Eventually some of it would have been shipped off to a federal reserve bank, which may have had the tech, but it wasn’t standard procedure to scan bills for serial # at the time, unless that lot of incoming cash was under suspicion comin from a specific area where a crime occurred. Which they couldn’t do in DB’s case because no one knew where he ended up (assuming he survived of course).
The banks having a list of serial #s really was only in the hopes that DB walks into the 5rd National Bank of Omaha and deposits $10,000 of that “marked” cash in an account.
We know that capability exists now, of course, but did it in the 1970s? If so, how widespread was it? Did ordinary banks have it, or only Federal Reserve banks?
It did not (as I pointed out in my previous post). In fact i don’t think the Fed reserve started scanning bills coming in as a matter of procedure until the 90’s.
Also 200K was a lot of money in the 70s but it wasn’t a hugely difficult amount of bills to haul around. it’s 100 banded stacks of 20 dollar bills. No real need to deposit it into a bank in large amounts, especially in the 70s when so much of the economy was cash based. Money laundering even back then was something you’d have to figure out when dealing with millions of dollars in cash, not a couple hundred thou.
Also, bills that come into a bank likely often go back out. I don’t imagine a teller scanning/recording the serial numbers for each deposit from Joe’s Sporting Goods. Unless it was a night deposit, it goes into the drawer and gets handed out at the next withdrawal. So the stuff will be circulating in town, then in the general area, and thanks to travellers, spread like a cloud across the region.
The obvious question is, how badly were the FBI looking for the bills?
I’ve seen conflicting reports that none of the Cooper loot was seen, that a few bills surfaced, and that some was found in river sediment.
Magnetic ink character recognition at least for personal cheques goes back to the late 1950s. Afaik the ink used in US Federal Reserve notes only allows for automated sorting of denominations, but certainly it could have been used to make serial numbers machine sortable.
It occurs to me that with modern technology it would be possible to have every Point Of Sale machine in commercial use scan all received cash, making it possible to link a flagged bill to a specific purchase by date, time and checkout line. Combine that with ubiquitous security cameras and things get Orwellian fast.
I believe @Dorjan has it right. Today’s automation & computing power didn’t exist back then.
He couldn’t knowingly (to the other party) pass it to anyone to trying to launder it because those bills would be toxic to them if they were somehow caught with them. I wouldn’t want to pull a fast one on the Mafia either, but getting a loan from them & then paying them back in cash is a good way to launder those bills & not let anyone be any the wiser. If they then turned around & loansharked those same bills out again some would eventually make it back to the Fed but quite possibly be diluted enough that they can’t trace them back to the source.
Yes, three packets of the bills given to Cooper were found in river sediment in a badly deteriorated state in 1980 by a kid camping on a riverfront beach near Vancouver. It seems the bills were washed down the river and eroded by water action, but it’s unknown how those three packets got separated from the bag containing the rest of the bills. It’s also mysterious that one of the three packets had 10 bills missing.
At places where people pay by checks, like grocery stores, you may have seen them put checks into a scanning machine to make sure it’s valid. It seems like that same machine could also be used to validate large bills. I wonder why they don’t do that already? Rather than use that special pen to detect fakes, just put the bill through the check scanner and it’ll tell you if it’s fake or the #'s are flagged.
My w.a.g., Cooper knew the whole region would be on the lookout for a man carrying a large bag. So he took out some spending money, hid the main stash and planned to retrieve it once the heat died down; only something went wrong.
My WAG: Before jumping from the plane he took some of the money from the money bag and secreted it on his person. His plan being that if the money bag got separated from him on the way down he wasn’t flat broke & empty-handed for all his trouble.
Then he jumped out and two things happened. 1) He and the money bag got separated. 2) He did not survive the jump, or at least not for long after he was on the ground.
The money recovered was a decent fraction of the small amount he’d hidden on his person.