Quillions: How Money Laundering Won
lrb.co.uk> 'If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property and ahead of pensions. How did we end up knowing so little about something so big?...Money laundering is a little like drug cheating in sport, where the current state of legal enforcement always lags behind the current state of malfeasance. We don’t know what successful money launderers are doing in the present moment. All we do know is what unsuccessful ones have been caught doing in the past. We are drunks looking for our keys in a big empty space with a single torch, and all we can find is evidence of the rare occasions when other people lost their keys.'
This is the UK. The US punishes money laundering pretty severely and is much more dogged about at tracing and prosecuting it, with long sentences regularly handed out or threats of long sentences leading to guilty pleas.