American Petroleum Institute

Finance allah shmoop what is money laundering Whoa whoa whoa

This guy needs to be taxed and legitimized And after

taxing he gets out of the wash and has shrunk

to a ten dollar bill But at least he can

go out in public now Ok Ok So that's not

sort of money laundering The government's worried about money laundering

means trying to hide money you make illegally by setting

up fake businesses running the money through those businesses as

if while they're actually legitimate riel things real sales happen

And then to continue the money laundering story you show

some profits on those businesses for which yes you then

get taxed But then the money is quote legitimized unquote

in the eyes of the government so that you can

freely spend it on clothes and jewelry And you know

maserati's that go one eighty five The idea is that

you create fake companies when you launder money fake accounts

fake customers So it looks like the money is coming

from a legal normal business when it's really coming from

shady deals like a drug dealing and stuff like that

for better or worse the movie theater business was a

key tool in laundering money for the mob in the

early twentieth century and that a movie could be licensed

from a studio for a fixed fee of say a

hundred bucks a night and then magically even though the

movie was eight years old and in black and white

that movie theater sold out three shows a night every

night for a month generating tens of thousands of dollars

in revenues which would then launder bootlegging alcohol e kind

of money back into the normal system so that the

theater owner could pay for you know private school and

orthodontia and all that stuff for his kids and leave

a substantial tip for their surprisingly well dressed garbage collector

And if you've seen breaking bad while you know that

walter white mastered money laundering that carwash magically had huh

Hundreds of cars go through it every day even though

in reality it only had a few dozen but the

government wasn't counting cars It had no idea how bigger

little the carwash was and frankly it well didn't really

care as long as it was able to tax the

money coming in from walter's high octane blue meth so

the lesson Money laundering is bad Walter white isn't a

good role model and always remember to separate your lights 00:02:25.775 --> [endTime] and darks when washing a load