Breaking Bad bugs me in a lot of ways. One of the biggest is its portrayal of money laundering. Skylar complains that she can’t launder Walter’s multi-million illegal income.
She doesn’t fucking have to. You only have to launder money you intend to spend in the legitimate world. Money you have to explain.
When you run a criminal enterprise, you generally have two sets of books. One of them, call them the black books, is all illegal - illegal income, illegal expenses. You pay for your black market firearms, you pay bribes, you pay your mooks, you pay the people who steal your chemicals for you, all out of the black books. None of that needs laundering. And that’s most of the income accounted for.
Then there’s the white books. That is where you track the legitimate operations of the front business, and where you do the records falsification that launders money - in the case of Breaking Bad, fake car wash sales. Out of the white books you pay your legit employees, buy office supplies, parts, etc, and from which you pay yourself out of the inflated profits, thus granting yourself a legitimate, explainable income funded by illegitimate, unexplainable money. That’s laundering.
The only people who need to launder millions of dollars a year aren’t drug dealers, they’re billionaires in finance or the fucking CIA.
mos_8502 :verified: /
npub1qn…5hzwk
2024-06-12 16:59:52
Author Public Key
npub1qnufz4pycufk27kkeev5g0fgm0w0tqexsly674s2uwy0tynk5ymsk5hzwkPublished at
2024-06-12 16:59:52Event JSON
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