Banks profiting from crime? "Don't ask, don't tell"

The article linked below should get your blood both boiling and running cold as ice. There are billions of criminal dollars flowing through our biggest financial institutions. Of course, in this day and age of "profits uber alles", the system just looks away. Our financial, corporate and governmental institutions are rotten to the core. (Criminal Justice today; put the drug addict in jail, but give the bank directors a tax cut on the money they make off the drug dealers):mad:

http://www.dailyherald.com/business/business_story.asp?intid=3799012

Bank regulation criticized
By David Evans Bloomberg News
Posted January 04, 2004

NEW YORK - Armed with a search warrant, a team of investigators for Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau raided a three-room office on East 54th Street on Feb. 4. The raid was part of a money-laundering probe that led to an indictment against Beacon Hill Service Corp., a company with 12 employees. Beacon Hill had made wire transfers totaling more than $9 billion through its three-dozen accounts at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., the second-largest U.S. bank, Morgenthau said. J.P. Morgan Chase wasn't charged with any crimes.

No big U.S. bank has ever been prosecuted for money laundering. If convicted of laundering, a bank could be shut down under the Annunzio-Wylie Anti-Money Laundering Act of 1992. "The money center banks are beyond regulation," said attorney Jack Blum, formerly a U.S. Senate investigator and a money-laundering consultant to the United Nations. "There's no capacity to regulate or punish them because they're too big to be threatened with failure."

(snip)

In September, Celent Communications LLC, a Boston-based financial research company, released a study that found money laundering through banks has increased in each of the past four years and is projected to reach $424 billion in 2004.

(snip)

Banks are willing to launder money or turn a blind eye to customers who do because money laundering brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, said Raymond Baker, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington. Baker, 68, who has spent seven years researching money laundering in 23 nations, said banks aren't concerned about being prosecuted. "'Don't ask, don't tell' is the prevailing norm in the banking community," Baker said.

But it is always good to have more info and hope a few more eyes are opened

I thought that they were supposed to be trustworthy.

It's amazing. Meanwhile casinos spend millions of dollars to comply with money laundering regulations -- and lose god knows how many billions each year because of the intrusiveness of compliance which causes gamblers to walk away. Banks can comply invisibly because you have to present identification to open your account -- most folks aren't even aware that when they deposit or withdraw certain amounts of cash then the bank is sending in a CTR (currency transaction report -- all over $10,000) or a STR (suspicious transaction report -- any amount but if it's over $3,000 and you're a little guy, yeah, you've been reported).

The issue isn't a casino or a bank being closed down. It is individual employeers like bank tellers and casino cashiers going to prison for misfiling paperwork. Apparently it happened quite a bit in the casino industry because the casino employees are VERY leery. If I was a bank teller, I would not be willing to go to prison so my employer (a bank) could make a bit more money.

Guess I just don't have the big picture. It seems to me that individual bank employees would be very vulnerable if the fibbies felt the need to make an example of someone.

When they clamped down on the money laundering in New England, the banks went under and so did everything else. A lot of the S&L mess was tied up with this also. Unfortunately the only people really making big money in the US are (1) organized crime (2) corporations (3) entertainers and (4) some politicians. And for the most part the line between these groups is really blurred.