Here’s the scenario:
You’re hiking or biking through a wooded area when the call of nature strikes. Miles away from a restroom, you decide to venture off the path and seek a secluded spot to tend to matters. You eventually settle on a spot beneath an interstate overpass.
After finishing up, you notice a leather satchel lying in the brush. Curious, you pick it up and discover that it is filled with $100 bills. ONE MILLION DOLLARS WORTH!!!!
You look around, but see no one. You deduce that it was thrown from a passing vehicle and that its holder hasn’t yet returned to retrieve it. You conceal the bag as best you can under your jacket and pedal away, unless you’re hiking in which case you shuffle off quickly, perhaps even trotting.
When you make it back to your vehicle, you’re comfortable that no one, not even your fellow recreationalists, saw you make with the loot. You drive home, checking for Anton Chigurh’s truck in the rearview mirror, but you’re not being tailed.
In the safety of your basement you examine the money. It isn’t bundled as you’d expect if it were the bounty of a bank heist. You begin to check serial numbers, but there is no discernible pattern. It must be drug money. Chigurh’s image again flashes in your mind and you frantically search for a homing device. Nothing but cold, hard cash.
You’re fairly certain that the satchel’s owner won’t be able to track you down and you’re not feeling particularly ethical, so you decide to keep the money for yourself. So then, how do you go about spending it to better your life?
I’m fairly certain that there are checks in place where if you deposited $1 million in cash in your bank account, the IRS and other authorities would be notified of this irregularity. Similar warning bells may go off if you attempt to make any large purchases with cash, although drug dealers seem to get their hands on nice cars.
I suppose if I were in this position, I’d be very careful not to draw attention to my ill-gotten booty. Maybe I’d start paying cash at the grocery store on occasion and letting my checking account gradually build up. Then I’d start transferring some of the excess funds to savings or investment accounts, careful to not increase my net worth too dramatically.
Other than that, I’d probably go on more vacations where the cash could be spent inconspicuously. I’d buy more stuff (music, electronics, exercise equipment, etc.), but wouldn’t risk any major purchases like a house or boat.
So what would you do? Is my way too conservative? Would you attempt to launder the money abroad? Or is the whole situation just too risky for you to contemplate?
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I would:
1)Open up a haberdashery – “What size do you wear? Seven and a half? I think we have that.” – I think I could master up.
2)Give it all to the Obama campaign. What is a little more sleeze money going to hurt?
3)Pay for two children to attend SHG……in year 2011.
4)Buy naming rights to Quincy University. Rename it Quincy College.
5)Get bocce ball lessons from Lithuanian master.
6)Turn the money in hoping that it is a test and that the reward is $2 million.
7)Hire Chief Illiniwek to dance his ass off at my next backyard party.
8)Find LaLubu. Take her to a romantic dinner for two.
9)Fund a study of how pretentiousness affects taste in beer.
10)Party like it’s 1999.
M.B. | Oct 14, 2008 | Reply
Anonymous Commie and Shoo were biking recently on some trails, weren’t they? Are you shilling this question for them? Do they have money they need to share to keep the rest of Spfldbloggers quiet?
Gish | Oct 14, 2008 | Reply
before the laundering issue, there’s a storage problem to handle: $1M in hundreds is 10,000 bills. each bill weighs about a gram, so it’s 10 Kg or roughly 22 lbs. that many bills is also going to be bulky, especially if they’re not crisp and bundled. you’re talking about, probably, an unwieldy and fairly heavy duffel bag full of loose bills, so it’s not going to be easy to conceal. the safest thing would be to take only what you can carry with you, and leave the rest. that has the least chance of someone coming back to find you, and a smaller amount is easier to spend quietly. if greed gets the better of you and no one’s around to see you move the bag, the next safest thing would be to move the bag to a discrete, secure location (storage locker, etc), unpack the money, bundle it, and dispose of the bag far away from where you found it. return to the money a little at a time and take from it as needed, or divide it up and store it in several different places.
as for the laundering, spending a little at a time is a monumental task. if you spent a thousand dollars a week, it would take you almost twenty years to spend it all. you can’t just spend it on consumer goods because someone’s going to get suspicious if you come in to the same stores every couple of days and spend hundreds in cash each time. you could road trip to cities a few hours away and spend a lot over the course of a weekend, but that doesn’t solve the problem of where to put all your new stuff. if you take the money on vacation, you can’t take a huge amount without raising eyebrows at customs, and you can’t go on too many vacations without someone at work asking questions.
ultimately i think the best solution is to continue working and living within your previous means, using the cash to bring you slightly more of the good life than you otherwise would have had. basically, let it keep you out of consumer debt until it runs out, while making wise but small purchases that will retain long term value. but that requires an almost inhuman level of patience and discipline. i could never do it.
as an example: when i was younger, my next door neighbor was a drug dealer who tried to pass as a normal guy living in the suburbs. i figured it out within a few months of him moving in because the things his family had were slightly above what they should have been able to afford on the salaries of a car salesman and his substitute teacher wife. new cars every six months or so, (never luxury cars, just upper mid-range sportier cars), in-ground pool, moderately nice tv and stereo, some arcade and pinball machines in his rec room, some minor home improvements like adding a garage and deck. he was barely living above his pay grade, and it was still as plain as day to me at 12 years old. nobody believed me until he got raided by the DEA. the line between normal and suspicious is very small.
jason | Oct 14, 2008 | Reply
Before you consider any of these scenarios, read the book or watch the movie. It might not be Anton Chigurh you have to worry about, but someone in your own family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Simple_Plan_(film)
Unpainted Huffhines | Oct 14, 2008 | Reply
Jason,
Thank you for responding to this post in the spirit in which it was intended, unlike M.B., who used it as an opportunity to poke fun at institutions and predilections that are dear to me.
I agree that it would be difficult to spend the money in a practical manner that wouldn’t draw attention, especially as we evolve further into a cashless society. Still, it would be nice to have an endless supply of “walking around” money.
Nick,
I thought of “Simple Plan” after I wrote this scenario. Fortunately, I don’t have any brothers who are half-wits. I do have some friends who are half-wits, but I wouldn’t tell them about the money, lest they embark on some harebrained plan to buy a university.
Two other movies also came to mind.
Goodfellas: When Jimmy Conway gets paranoid over his co-conspirators conspicuous behavior and starts whacking them.
Say Anything: When the FBI asks Diane Court if her father, whom they suspect of embezzlement, has any peculiar spending patterns.
I suppose the lesson here is to always turn to Hollywood first before making plans to launder or otherwise spend illicit funds.
Gish,
What are you insinuating here? Why, that’s absurd. They didn’t find any money, I just thought it might be, you know it might be fun to pretend they had. I mean, I had. Which I didn’t. And they didn’t either. But what about you? How do we know you didn’t take the money? Yeah.
Thanks for commenting,
Dan
Dan | Oct 15, 2008 | Reply
Dan,
Interesting topic. I used to know a guy who worked for the secret service in Chicago. Although that seems exciting he said 99% of the time his job was pretty boring. Unless a high profile politician or leader were in town, he spent most of his time going after tax evaders/money launderers.
I asked him how to launder money and he said that it was virtually impossible. He said that he could walk into someone’s house and estimate within 10% how much money the guy was making or had access to just by looking around.
If you had too many $1,000 suits in your closet, he would know that you were making more money than you might be claiming. Or if you had too many expensive plasma tv’s or gadgets he could also tell if something wasnt kosher.
He told me the only true way to launder the money is to eat at expensive restaurants and pay cash.
Having said that, I would try to funnel some money through gambling.
RickMonday | Oct 15, 2008 | Reply
Rick,
That’s interesting, but not surprising I guess, that a trained eye could determine someone’s net worth. Jason provided another example of being able to spot unusual spending patterns.
I was curious if it was possible to launder money in a casino. How would one go about doing that? I’ve never been to Vegas and I really don’t like to gamble so I don’t know how or if winnings are recorded.
Dan
Dan | Oct 15, 2008 | Reply
Dan,
I would take 1000 in cash, buy some chips at the window, walk away or gamble a little bit, then cash the chips back in.
1. You would get new money with different serial numbers
2. You could then claim the winnings on your w-2. Of course you get to offset losses as well, so in the long run you would pay some taxes on the million dollars but it would be a way to fake legitimacy.
RickMonday | Oct 15, 2008 | Reply
The best way in my experience to launder the money is to create a business to ostensibly earn that money. Any business that brings in a good deal of “cash” for services as opposed to inventory will do. You run the business as usual during the day. Then, after closing, you feed in your day’s illicit receipts, pretending that they’d been received by the business. In due course the business pays its taxes and all the tax man can see is that you’re running an unusually profitable business.
The tax man may well take an interest in such a profitable business, so it’s best if it’s hard to prove that you couldn’t be doing the business you’re paying taxes on. A bar, for example, wouldn’t be the best choice, because you wouldn’t have ordered enough booze to pour all the drinks your books will say you’ve sold. Coin operated laundries and car washes are classics, because the only way to prove that you hadn’t actually done all that business would be to have an undercover agent surveil your place for weeks, counting every coin inserted by every customer. (Although agents have been known to subpoena the water bill and try to make the case that way.)
The best money launderers are the ones that make an extra effort to stay under the radar with very little bling. No Mercedes, no $1000 suits.
Larry Washington | Oct 15, 2008 | Reply
Realistically $1,000,000 is too much money for the common man to launder. The assumption is that the serials will be traceable so once they start appearing in circulation you will eventually be caught.
The only way to launder is to utilize cash only transactions away from your home area or with businesses unlikely to deposit the cash and will in turn pass it down the chain obfuscating its original source. You could only do this rarely so as to make it harder for the trace to come back to the business and you.
Foreign travel is reasonable assuming you have the ‘trappings’ to go with it. Airfare, hotel etc. must be booked, requiring resources to secure such amenities. Assuming you are of modest means to begin with then you’ll likely stay in modest accomodations and come bearing modest accoutrements. All of these modest trappings will immediately make ‘big spending’ a suspicious activity and possibly draw not only the attention of the authorities but also unsavory underworld elements. Of course the closer you are to the third world, the closer those to begin to merge into one and the same.
No I do argue that those of modest means (us) cannot in any way safely launder a million dollars without being caught within 5 or 10 years.
Gish | Oct 15, 2008 | Reply
1 million dollars is in no way an easy amount of money to launder but if given the oppertunity I give it my best effort.
First off, keep a low profile. No big purchases. None within the first year for sure. DB Cooper got off this way.
Dont change your lifestyle….all too often knuckleheads live the life of Rifey when they cant afford the life of knucklehead.
Art fairs, county fairs, flee markets are a great way to change out bills. Buys items and ask for change. Great way to sift out and filter questionable or marked bills. food workers dont often question a bill.
Travel-Canada and Mexico are a great oppertunity to share some cheap Amercian dollars. Just dont goat yourself into a siutation and look like a mule……Oh Mary Mother of God….
A million bucks goes a long way and leaving the country is the best way to deal with that…..Check out countries with no extraditions clauses—IE; panama, Honduras..
central american life aint so bad when you can live like a king for $40 a day
Roy | Oct 16, 2008 | Reply
I’d just like the opportunity to have that dilemma.
Johann | Oct 17, 2008 | Reply
Give it all to the Obama campaign? Wow after collecting $150 this month so you think they would take a measley $1 million?
Roy | Oct 19, 2008 | Reply
The title of your next post should be, “Thursday, the day after Wednesday, which follows Tuesday, the day after Monday, the day after the day I usually blog.”
Russ | Oct 23, 2008 | Reply
That was a nice subtle nudge, Russ.
C’mon already!
nancy | Oct 23, 2008 | Reply
I thought that I could avoid such a long title by just waiting until next Sunday.
Dan | Oct 23, 2008 | Reply