The goal of money laundering is to take cash and turn it into valid-seeming bank deposits. So for example, they ran a motel, claimed to be taking in a lot of money and instead of having many paying customers, took money out of the bag and deposited it as receipts. You buy a 50-AC order from the mob-fronted business, but that business only has to purchase 5, send him real units (which require spending actual cash) and Marty sends them money for 50. Now that business has 45 AC’s worth of money in the bank, allegedly from purchases, so seeming legit. The mob boss gets a cut as profits etc.
When cash volume got bigger, the perfect fake money source was the casino. The casino takes in, say, $1M a week, they say they took in $5M, deposit $5M in cash, and now there is $5M of money that’s perfectly legit, sitting in the bank, to pay the shareholders (presumably Marty and the mob).
If you saw Breaking Bad the car wash was another source of cash deposits, and in one scene Walter’s wife is punching in deluxe car washes into the cash register as fas as she can - still not making much of a dent in the pallet of bills.
The problem is a careful audit will show - there’s no way you ha that many gamblers/motel guests/ car wash customers. The AC company would obviously not have bought 50 AC units from the manufacturer. Etc. The trick, then, is to not attract attention from the auhorities.
The rule of thumb with a lot of money laundering - allegedly, from stuff I’ve read - is that you can get about 50% out of the process, and the rest is “expense”; like those 5 real AC units, or the cost of operating a casino, paying staff in a motel, … and bribes etc.
They had a strip club too, cash business. You just inflate the number of dances or drinks you sold and deposit the illicit money.
IIRC the volume of money being too much for the businesses they were running was a plot point? Like you need the casino because your smaller business draws attention if it’s selling 5,000 bottles of champagne a night.
Marty initially had no cut. He owed that $8 million, which is why the first season they were always hard up for cash of their own. All of it was earmarked for the cartel as proof of concept. The later cut for the casino plan was 3% I believe and I think at one point they offered part of that to their allied political fixer (I forget how that panned out - I really liked the first few seasons, but kinda checked out thereafter).
It’s been a while since I saw Ozark but I vaguely recall they had a group of people who were handed money and told to lose it at the casino, so the daily take appeared legit to the auditors.
Interesting is that money laundering can happen on both ends at a Casino. As a patron you wager N dollars, leave with 80% of N and don’t report your losses, you just got lucky! As an owner you have people just dump cash there.
Just make sure to do it overseas. US casinos have to give you a W-2G form for winnings. If you “get lucky” and the casino didn’t supply the money, you’re still stuck explaining the money.
The casino doesn’t even have to be in on it. Someone shows up with $1,000 cash, wagers a few bets, then cashes in their chips, presumably with a receipt saying the money came from the casino. IIRC there was an article quite a few years ago about the casinos in British Columbia being too lax (willfully blind?) in tracking this process.
The obvious flaw in the system is that casinos don’t have to vet the source of money for people providing moeny to gamble (I assume, if it’s not over $10,000).
Since I haven’t spent a lot of time in Casinos (walked through a few for curiosity on vacation) and most of my info comes from movies - do most still use chips, or keep a running tab? The local video machines in bars, from what I’ve seen, print a running tab and you take your winnings print-out to the bar to get paid. I could see where the problem with cashing in chips would be distinguishing winnings from unused chips. (Or if you are like Fred Trump Sr., buying chips and never cashing them in).
Are you sure it works like that? Under that system, I could go in, buy $10k of chips, walk around a while and then cash the chips out as “winnings.” That seems too easy to work. I don’t know how the W-2G form (or the casino, for that matter) tracks your winnings, but surely they would not just call all of your cashed-in chips winnings.
That’s why I wonder how the Casinos track winnings. Or is there a threshhold, like if the payout at one table or slot is over, say, $1,000? Not my field of expertise.
I do recall stories of IRS agents roving casinos in the good old days, listening for the jackpot bells and cornering the person trying to collect all the quarters pouring out of the machines. I would be surprised if the process is not automated now, along with the chip-cashing process. For Canada, AFAIK there is no tax on gambling winnings, so the process is a bit simpler; get the casino to give your your cashing out as a cheque or electronic money transfer, and now your have legitimate bank deposits.