ShmoopTube

00:00

Finance allah shmoop what is money laundering Whoa whoa whoa

00:08

This guy needs to be taxed and legitimized And after

00:12

taxing he gets out of the wash and has shrunk

00:15

to a ten dollar bill But at least he can

00:17

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

00:20

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

00:23

means trying to hide money you make illegally by setting

00:27

up fake businesses running the money through those businesses as

00:31

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

00:36

And then to continue the money laundering story you show

00:39

some profits on those businesses for which yes you then

00:43

get taxed But then the money is quote legitimized unquote

00:47

in the eyes of the government so that you can

00:49

freely spend it on clothes and jewelry And you know

00:53

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

00:56

you create fake companies when you launder money fake accounts

01:01

fake customers So it looks like the money is coming

01:04

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

01:07

shady deals like a drug dealing and stuff like that

01:11

for better or worse the movie theater business was a

01:14

key tool in laundering money for the mob in the

01:17

early twentieth century and that a movie could be licensed

01:20

from a studio for a fixed fee of say a

01:23

hundred bucks a night and then magically even though the

01:25

movie was eight years old and in black and white

01:28

that movie theater sold out three shows a night every

01:32

night for a month generating tens of thousands of dollars

01:36

in revenues which would then launder bootlegging alcohol e kind

01:40

of money back into the normal system so that the

01:43

theater owner could pay for you know private school and

01:47

orthodontia and all that stuff for his kids and leave

01:49

a substantial tip for their surprisingly well dressed garbage collector

01:54

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

01:56

walter white mastered money laundering that carwash magically had huh

02:00

Hundreds of cars go through it every day even though

02:03

in reality it only had a few dozen but the

02:06

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

02:09

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

02:12

care as long as it was able to tax the

02:14

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

02:18

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

02:22

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

Full Transcript