Crime School: Money Laundering: True Crime Meets the World of Business and Finance

Mathers, an internationally recognized forensic expert, has really brought a useful book to the table for those interested in how exactly money laundering or big-money crime affects them. A former undercover RCMP officer, Mathers laundered money himself for many years; out of the trunks of cars, in the backrooms of seedy bars… and at banks and brokerage offices on Bay Street in Toronto, on Wall Street in New York, and, get this, in lawyer’s offices, and sometimes in judge’s chambers. By describing the problem, Mathers makes the connection for us between $100 million cocaine deals and why and how the drug dealer can be a client at the same bank as you. Bankers- please read the chapter on “Domestic Banking and Securities”; it is NOT the boring cont-ed you’ve read at industry conferences. It IS a highly readable and instructive description of what bankers *should* be doing, and how they can understand the purposes of the legislation they struggle with. Countless first hand descriptions and case studies of how he did the crimes as an operative for the RCMP, FBI, DEA etc.- and Mathers turns it into useable information for us. I recommend CRIME SCHOOL to financial professionals because it warrants their time: this book should be required reading. I do not recommend this book to natives of Dominican Republic or Quebec… But I do recommend the book to all others because it is hilarious, informative and telling. A great book! -MW

Contents:
*Intro by Norm Inkster, former Commissioner of the RCMP and Former President of Interpol
*Review by Jim Richards, Director of Global AML for Bank of America (and Fleet)
*Review by Reid Morden, former Director of Canadian Security Intelligence Service

*What is Money Laundering?
*Organized Crime
*Getting Money into Banks
*Terrorists
*Domestic Banking and Securities
*Offshore Banking (includes Correspondent Banking, fei-chein, hawalla, black market peso)
*The “Pen” with the Lifetime Guarantee (the manual on how best to enjoy your prison term)
*Cops, Cash and Corruption
*Economic Subversion and the Gray Market Economy
Rating: 5 / 5

Compelling, riveting and hilarious! An enlightening insight into shocking realities. Recommended for any (adult) reader. The book is a great read, immensely entertaining; and, crucially, it’s a source of clarity on how the criminal world penetrates our daily lives in often subtle, potentially invisible, but highly damaging ways.

It’s a textbook on life for us all.

For financial services professionals specifically, this book is a primary resource on the reality application of compliance, anti-money laundering and terrorist financing. It will, without doubt, help equip you in your aim to keep your professional reputation intact, and, further, help you to avoid becoming unwittingly involved at the more difficult end of a criminal prosecution. Personal bodyguards for compliance officers, “honey traps” on bankers, these and countless other lessons will be learned along with an improved understanding of criminal operations that could draw you in, naively, to a nightmare situation.

As an added benefit for altruistically inclined readers, the insights provided by this book can assist in preventing the ruin of lives that can happen simply through ignorance.

Read it, and you will be glad you did.
Rating: 5 / 5

An excellent discussion of crime, organized crime, and how it affects daily life. Money, and its mysterious movements, are at the center of the book, of course. But it digresses into drugs, gambling, prostitution, gambling, and other ways in which illegal income is generated
Rating: 4 / 5

I was very excited to get and read this book. But after I started reading, it became a never ending disappointment. I kept thinking, “maybe it will pick up in a couple of chapters and will have some actual information.” However I got to the end and I still hadn’t learned anything. In my opinion this was a terrible book for these reasons:

There was hardly any actual information. Mostly the book was full of stories from the author’s experiences or just made up stories to try to illustrate the evils of money laundering. Even when the author would talk about something interesting, he would cut off, nearly mid-sentence, and basically say that he can’t tell you about that. I understand not wanting to educate the world about the most current forms of money laundering, but being introduced to something and then denied (repeatedly) was very annoying. The author could have wrote about money laundering of the 1960’s to 1990’s where those techniques don’t work anymore, but he just didn’t really talk about anything at all. Since he wrote a book titled: “Crime School: Money Laundering: True Crime Meets the World of Business and Finance” I expected him to actually say something about money laundering. He might as well have titled it, “Crime School: How to grow carrots, skydive, and become an astrophysicist” and the title would have been almost as accurate.

The book was poorly written. The table of contents doesn’t even match up with the pages in the book. Also, the chapter titles had absolutely nothing to do with what was in those chapters. The best example is in “Bankruptcy of Murder Inc.” This chapter doesn’t talk about “bankruptcy” or of the infamous “Murder Inc” that contracted out assassinations for the mob.

Five minutes on the internet with your favorite search engine yields more information than reading the entire book! Throughout the entire book the author doesn’t even talk about the three stages of money laundering: Placement, Layering, and Integration. Some have praised this book, saying that it is a must read for people in the banking industry to keep from unknowingly helping in money laundering. I also disagree with this because all the author really ever says in the book about this topic is to hire someone else to check your bank to see if you are laundering money. So overall this book was worthless to everyone on every level. I bought this book used for just a couple bucks and I still wish I could get my money back.
Rating: 1 / 5

The book is aimed at those who legitimately handle large amounts of money. It doesn’t have to be ‘their’ money, any supervision of cash will do. This includes bank tellers, small business owners, and corporate executives. Since they all ‘handle’ money, they all risk ‘being nice’ and going to jail for their troubles.

Mathers tries to shares some street smarts. The book doesn’t try to ‘explain’ money laundering as much as put you ‘inside’ the process. The look and feel is given first priority. Thus, the author spends a lot of time toying with the lingo. You will learn about ‘backstops’ (a false history), ‘beards’ (intermediaries), ‘bottoms’ (what you owe), ‘busting a cap’ (discharge a bullet), ‘Diming out’ (informing), ‘Dry conspiracy’ (cop talk for an arrest with no contraband), ‘juice’ (interest rate), ‘pooch’ (fellow with no respect) and ‘playing for shape’ (willing to kill to curry favor). Mathers constantly belittles the intelligence of the crooks. Crime is easy, but getting away with it for long is difficult.

Along these lines, Mathers works hard to debunk popular perceptions. First, Hollywood doesn’t do a good job of familiarizing us with ‘real’ crooks. Crooks don’t look like Hollywood gangsters, they look like Joe average. Second, the crooks don’t need high tech tricks to pull off their capers. All they need is a little, apparently harmless cooperation. For example, Mather describes the ‘muffin man’ method. The muffin man simply offers his bank teller a muffin every time he visits the bank. After giving away $5 worth of muffins, the recipient bank teller is likely to bend a rule. That bent rule may launder $100,000 in cash ($10,000+ profit to the crook). Additionally, it is all that is needed to put the teller in jail.

Mather makes his points by relentlessly bringing the reader down to the gutter level. Half the message is just the lingo and description of the terrain. Learn how to talk prison lingo, how to survive standing in line with a bunch of crooks, and most important, how a silly, everyday mistake can put you behind bars.

This is a book about avoiding the mistakes that have put many an otherwise innocent person in jail. Read and learn!
Rating: 5 / 5