Not to even mention that before the dollar floated and the inflation of the 1970s, cash could go a lot further. When watching YouTube videos of the film “Heat”, one thing that struck me was that the bank robbers had difficulty carrying away enough cash to make the heist worth the risk. And although rare, higher denomination bills existed back in the day. Imagine if one had the opportunity in1951 to carry away five million dollars. Enough money at the time to live in a mansion waited on by servants for the rest of one’s life; in a suitcase.
I think so. I don’t know when the reporting for cash transactions was implemented or became enforced more.
Back in the early 2000s, I read an article in the New Yorker about a couple of bank robbers.
After they did a string of robberies, they just settled down into quiet lives.
They got busted because, following a dispute, a contractor reported one of them for the large cash transactions.
My WAG is that if a criminal led a quiet, modest lifestyle they could have gotten by.
With stolen or other I’ll gotten money maybe.
But not with cash that’s been marked or recorded. That’s like putting a time bomb in your future. Eventually it’s going to blow up in your face.
Which is why I wonder what someone like Cooper would have done with the money and get away with it.
Move them out of the country to a non- US friendly nation. Or someplace chaotic in Africa.
It is known to be quite effective.
Back in the 1970s? Not much, unless the casino goons catch you and break your kneecaps. Today, they have systems in place. I Consulted with a casino and the systems were pretty robust for any significant figures.
The pertinent question appears to come down to how good detection of the notes was. Detection of even one note would be enough to trigger more careful checks in a region. Then the investigation turns up the intensity. If Cooper was around, the trail of transactions will close.
No matter what Cooper’s spending pattern, if he is using the money, the trail will become tighter the more he spends. A lot of small transactions or a few big ones will all have the same effect. Buying a used car for cash will almost certainly leave him with a car that is trivially traced. So he needs to get rid of it again soon. But he can only pull that trick a few times before it becomes noticed, and the paper trail harder to avoid. Every time leaves a marker of where he was, and better clues to his identity.
The interesting question becomes one of how easy it was for a bill to be checked. In 1971, giving banks a list of 10,000 serial numbers seems near useless. But according to the Wikipedia page on DB Cooper, this is exactly what happened. The bills were not a pre-canned stash, but simply withdrawn from a bank and photographed before being used for the ransom. The only thing that improved detection was being from the one mint, so a common letter, distinguishing it from 11 other sources.
One would imagine about 20 sheets with about 500 numbers in columns. Paste to a wall. Checking a single note could be done in maybe 10 plus seconds, and pre-sorting to only check notes from the correct mint would help. Who pays for checking is not clear. Maybe a bank could check every note, but the impost isn’t trivial. Spot checks could be useful as a background activity.
I assume bank protocols separate money flows, so tellers don’t just have a float. Rather money in and money out streams. So they could tie a note to a transaction and probably a customer sometime later.
Someone selling a car and depositing a stack of 20’s the next day is going to get picked up.
Most incoming money would be businesses doing end of day drops. Which has the useful effect of tying a note to a business and a day. So Cooper really can’t spend easily. He would be forever on the move whilst trying to convert the cash. Eventually he would slip up or get complacent, or both. The problem is that people tend to think that if they got away with something a little while ago, it fades away, and they can do it again with impunity. But law enforcement has a very long memory. The records of transactions don’t die, and things come to light years later.
If Cooper had survived, and stayed in the USA, it is near impossible he would have evaded the law forever. As smart as he might have thought he was. $200,000 in 1971 was a lot of money. But it wasn’t “set up for an easy rest of life” money. (aka TTJASI money). So he would be back with another try at extracting easy money. And that cycle doesn’t tend to end well.
Trying to lay low and live a good life in a third world country funded entirely by 20 dollar bills will bring unwanted attention from the local low life. Very hard to negotiate a lifetime of peace. And one suspects Cooper was after something grander in life than that.
I think this suggests my answer to the OP question is that they don’t. At least not successfully. Organised criminal groups might. But not random people. Maybe Cooper was going to sell the money to the Mob at perhaps 30%. That isn’t a useful long term plan either.
I’m not sure how it would be possible but one method of laundering money would be if you could somehow switch the hot bills with cash from another source. Whereas outright theft would swiftly be noticed and raise an alarm, who would notice if thousands of dollars in twenties was switched out for the exact same amount in different twenties? If there was any practical way to do this of course.
Apparently there have been criminals willing to exchange “hot” bills for clean ones at a discount, planning to distribute the marked ones in places where no one is looking out for them, possibly abroad. If Cooper had the right contacts and was figuring on doing this, he might also have had a plan for living in Mexico, Costa Rica or some locale where he could live on his stake for a long time and/or finance other skulduggery.
Didn’t work so well for Bruno Hauptmann, though in his case the passed bill was suspicious because it was a gold certificate and the gas station guy it was given to worried that the bank might reject it, so he took down the license plate number of Hauptmann’s car.
Which raises a second issue with the “Live modestly while slowly depleting your cash stash.” plan. The design of currency changes over time.
US currency had very little change between 1928 & 1995. Then in 1996 the first bills with the large off-center portrait came out. Starting with the $20. By 2000 the old small center-portrait bills were looking decidedly unusual. I don’t think I’ve seen a center portrait bill of any denomination other than $1 in a decade. Admittedly I handle rather little cash these days.
Someone trying to pass center-portrait notes now would get the side-eye from anyone who knows their currency. Which is to say many cashiers and every bank teller.
It happens that Cooper would have had ~25 years to spend his horde before US currency started changing. And probably 35 years before his stash would look suspiciously antique to whoever he tried to pass a bill to. But that timing was luck, not a plan.
The other flaw is inflation. Cooper needs to get the money into a negotiable form within a few years and get that invested into something. Even if he survived, Cooper would have most likely passed of natural causes by now. But only just. Trying to keep alive with a dwindling stash of old $20 bills would have failed a few decades decades ago.
All manner of things might have been his intent with the money. If he was smart enough he would have had a plan to launder it reasonably quickly and turn it into useful long term money. (The difficultly of such a plan being his first hurdle.) Avoiding attracting attention with lots of money, even if it isn’t in hot cash isn’t trivial. Having a legitimate business, one that deals mostly with cash, into which the laundered money can be injected over a few years would probably work. Especially in the 70’s where much more commerce was done with cash. But it would require a steely eyed discipline. Anyone with both a legitimate business, the smarts and discipline to manage such a cash drip feed, and do so without becoming dependant on the cash feed, probably would be making proper money legitimately.
Which is probably the main failing of such criminals. They generally don’t have the smarts or discipline, and things don’t ever work out quite how they might like. Easy money generally isn’t.
In a sense all the various plans about taking the hot money (then or now) to some random less advanced country is really a form of time travel.
IOW, the controls and checks in effect today on the USD currency flows in e.g. Costa Rica, are about the same as they were in the USA in the 1970s. You can crank the surveillance clock back 50 years if you get the money moved intact to someplace like that.
I just had an idea: get a regular job as cashier in a supermarket.
Every day, take ten or twenty 20-dollar bills hidden in your pocket, and quietly switch them with legal bills from customers. Say, 400 dollars a day, and after about 2 years all your cash is clean.
Would this work? Back in the 70’s I dont think they had cameras on the registers.
IANA cashier, but I imagine even back then various management types looked over their shoulder, often from the catwalk behind the one-way glass.
Any movement that has money coming in and out of your pocket while you’re standing at a register is highly suspicious. Even if your register balances to the penny at the end of every shift.
Cooper ended up with 10,000 hot bills. At 20 per day he needs to make the dual switcheroo five hundred times without being seen once. Tall order. Even back then.
So my assertion stands then. You cant equate a random $20 bill with a gold certificate, come on.
I don’t think some of you appreciate what’s going to happen when any of that money is detected. As soon as it surfaces there’s going to be investigations, interviews, and eventually a capture.
This is why Cooper needed to exchange it all at once. Eventually someone is going to be left high and dry. I just can’t figure out how criminals dispose of marked/recorded bills all at once. I’m thinking they don’t think that far ahead.
By what mechanism and when will that money be detected? With 1971 procedures and tech, mind you. Also remember only banks have a list of the serial #s of these bills.
Find yourself some drug dealers. Granted, that’s a lof of drug money, but if you exchange your cash for drugs, the person who ends up high and dry is a criminal. Of course, this now obligates you to sell off the drugs if you want to regain cash, and that has its own problems, but this way you offload the problem cash to somebody who won’t likely track back to you.
This is not accurate. The treasury does not record the serial numbers of bills that are withdrawn from circulation and destroyed.
Phase 1: Collect ransom of marked/recorded bills
Phase 2: ?
Phase 3: Profit
After watching thousands of real life crime dramas, one thing I’ve learned is that criminals are most often short-sighted. I honestly doubt Cooper would have thought that far ahead. And criminals as a rule don’t want to lead quiet lifestyles.
Most escaped criminals, for example, get caught because they go right back to a life of crime.
I’m sure there’s the one-off story of the exception, but most criminals steal money to spend it.
ETA: A joke I wrote,
Q: What is D B Cooper’s least favorite season?
A: Autumn, he died in the fall.
I’m reminded of a TTRPG where I had elected to be a thief character, and at one point in the story I got a single high-level magic wish. So–
ME: "I want to be the world’s greatest expert at getting away with crimes.
GM: “At committing crimes?”
ME: “No, anyone can commit crimes, that’s the easy part. I want to be the world’s greatest expert at getting away with them.”