The Laundrymen : Inside the World's Third Largest Business

by Jeffrey Robinson

This text reveals how money laundering is a massive global industry, with an estimated $100-300 billion worth of illicit funds. It discloses who the participants are, how they make billions disappear and why it is not necessarily in the interests of bankers, lawyers and governments to stop them.

Genres: Nonfiction, Crime, Finance, Economics, Politics, Law, History

436 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1994

Reviews

[José María · Rating 1 out of 5]

There must be good books about money laundering out there. This is not one of them.

[Afrikanus Akosah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great insight into the global network of money laundering.

[Tosin Adeoti · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review of Jeffrey Robinson’s “The Laundrymen: Inside the World’s Third Largest Business”. Jeffrey is an American journalist who is considered one of the world’s leading experts on international financial crime.

In this incredibly well-researched book for the most part, the author led us on the tour de force of global money laundering.

It’s difficult to comprehend the scale of money laundering in our world today until you take time to think about this stat: More money is spent worldwide on illicit drugs than on food. And all those funds need to be laundered!

Some of the stories make you gasp. According to the author, money laundering transcends race and country, even governments. What else do you think when even the CIA engages in money laundering to finance covert operations, with the President in the know? In the name of national security, the CIA is said to be running more businesses than most Fortune 500 conglomerates. Even the Vatican is implicated in this business. Saudi Arabia? Yes. The most credible people you can think of have been implicated and indicted. Clergymen. Pregnant Women. “Officer of the Year” security agents. No one seems immune.

Yet for all its flaws, the United States has been the country at the forefront of fighting global laundering perhaps because it understands its demerits, even when other countries were unwilling to make this commitment. This is quite important because a great deal of funds laundered are from the illegal drug business.

#DoYouKnow that the Know Your Customer (KYC) campaign in the financial system started not because the system sought to improve the banking experience for customers but to fight money laundering? There is also the Know Your Non-Customer concept.

Some of the funds laundered make your head fuzzy. How $9.5 billion went missing under the nose of the Bank of England. How a South American President charged a drug cartel $500,000 per flight, pulling $10 million a month. Drug traffickers washing well in excess of $100 billion a year, a figure that exceeds the gross national product of 90 percent of all the countries currently represented in the United Nations. A woman was once caught at Geneva withdrawing $84 million from a safe deposit box. When asked why she didn’t just take a little bit at a time, she responded, “That’s what I was doing.”

#DoYouKnow that when stuff really hits the fan, there is no really no such thing as the attorney client privilege? If it comes from you, your lawyer can be forced to spill, especially when the state makes sure his life is on the line.

Some of the things that baffled me as I read is how some of the punishments do not tally with the crimes committed. How do you explain that a man who washed $750 million in 15 months get fined just $16 million? Well, it may sound fair considering he got served 660 years in prison. But what happened to the money?

Some of the stunts pulled to take funds across borders beat the imagination. Heard of women stuffing dollars in vaginas and swallowing multiple condoms with money rolled inside? Me neither, until this book.

The author reveals several strategies used by money launderers to wash their funds. The South African Method. Identical suitcases trick. The Sydney Method. Using one of these methods, a renowned money launderer formed 40 different companies and opened 90 different bank accounts in 40 different places around the world. Eli Pinkas who used the “He’s got a big mouth” technique to launder as high as $800 million is one of the most breath taking tales for me.

What about the several countries/territories all over the world which seem set up for the sole purpose of laundering money. Some of these res publicas you may never have heard before. Great banking systems. Good communications. Easy access. And politicians who are ready to look the other way. One of those offshore Islands has been said to have as many as 350 chartered banks when they have just a population of 10,000 people.

In some of these countries you can buy your own private offshore bank for under $10,000. A bank over which there is no oversight. You become your own banker. You can run your own bank and put as much cash through the tills as you want.

And this is why we all should root for the good guys in law enforcement. Sometimes they work so hard for little results. In a particular case, law enforcement agencies across 8 countries worked together for 4 years, pulling 550 interviews, but were able to confiscate only $12 million. It can be a thankless job. I mean, even the US Department of Justice raised their hands up in the air and said, “The crooks keep so far ahead of us, we’ll never completely close the net.” This gap continues to increase with the attention of the world directed towards terrorism these days.

No book is complete for me without the Nigerian angle and you have some in this book. I was shocked that in the military era, a 25-ounce unit of heroin imported from Southeast Asia for $6000 were resold to distributors in Lagos for $120,000. 40% of all heroin going into the United States was brought in by Nigerians. Whether substantiated or exaggerated, the author mentioned the case of a Nigerian caught at the Lagos airport trying to launder $800 million in cash abroad. And of course, he was one of the first to document the Nigerian ‘419’ scam. As an aside, it’s occurred to me that when people say Nigeria has a better mobile banking system than the West, it may just mean that it’s way easier for money laundering to take place.

The book is so good that it has been the push some needed to start careers — both good and bad. A criminal once testified under oath, “I got the idea from Jeffrey Robinson’s book on money laundering.” On the plus side, according to the author it has encouraged good guys to join the law enforcement and has been instrumental in anti-money laundering legislations in many jurisdictions.

It is the kind of book that changes the way you see politics and business after reading it.

What a terrific book!

[Erick · Rating 4 out of 5]

great book about money Laundering,

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is an interesting book, though it reads as a collection of essays rather than a single narrative. Very thorough in its anecdotes, the author's commentary is pithy, though often apt. While the connection to the drug trade is prominent, I feel that the author hasn't taken into consideration other reasons for laundering money. In his last chapter, he really tries to bite off more than he can chew in talking about solutions to the 'drug war.'

Reading about people dealing in marijuana and hashish, at a time when many US states are legalizing some narcotics, is a bit quaint, as are his dire predictions about what it would take to 'win' the war on drugs. So that last chapter was by far the weakest of the lot, though I also think he could've spent a bit more time with the likes of Saddam in describing the extent of their networks, and also of he Afghanistan connections.

Because the book appears to be largely a collection of news stories, the author presumes some knowledge of events which are now a bit dated (e.g., the Barings Bank scandal). Still a worthwhile read, and I'm keen to check out one of his later books after having read this one.

[Bala Aramvalarthaan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though it is late 1990s book, it gives a lot about the way Black Money works and how does it move around the world!!!

[Alexander Debelov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Never fully understood how this process worked and this book more than described it in full. Crazy to think that $1 trillion annually is shady funds being moved around.

[Charles Temitope · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eye-opening book into the underbelly of world trade.

[WallyT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great insight into the laundry of money

[Sandeep Tripathi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was okay but little outdated. You cannot go into estabishing your Laundromat just with this book in modern times.

[Arvydas · Rating 4 out of 5]

How Dirty Money, Shadow Rails, and the City of London’s Plumbing Really Work

Jeffrey Robinson’s The Laundrymen is one of those rare investigative classics that becomes more relevant as global finance grows darker and more complex. Long before the term “shadow banking” entered the mainstream, Robinson was already dissecting the hidden machinery that allows illicit capital to move seamlessly through the world’s most respected financial institutions. His central message is blunt and deeply unsettling: crime, corruption, and modern banking are not rivals — they’re business partners sharing the same bloodstream.

Robinson proves this with relentless case studies. He doesn’t waste time on cartoonish mafia tropes. Instead, he focuses on the real actors who make laundering possible: banks desperate for new deposits, law firms crafting shell structures, fiduciaries stitching together multi-jurisdictional vehicles, and money-movement companies quietly shifting billions for governments, corporations, cartels and cash-heavy economies.

He maps the laundering cycle with almost surgical clarity. Dirty money is broken into fragments, buried inside legitimate flows, washed through correspondent banks, cleared through global settlement systems, and finally reintroduced as clean liquidity into the arteries of global finance. Robinson offers no moralism, no political sermons — just the hard architecture of how the world really works.

Yet the book hints at something even more potentially interesting : a missing chapter that would be unavoidable today. Robinson wrote before spin-offs of First Data Corporation like global remittance market major players- Western Union and MoneyGram encompassing evolved into massive global liquidity infrastructures, but the logic of his investigation fits them perfectly. If The Laundrymen were updated now, it would undoubtedly include a chapter titled “Shadow Liquidity Providers: The “almost” Unregulated Arteries Linking the Real World to the City.”

These networks function exactly like the entities Robinson describes. They operate pre-funded global liquidity pools across thousands of jurisdictions. They deliver instant finality, maintain low visibility, offer unmatched geographic reach, and provide rails into cash economies that the City of London cannot access directly. Western Union and MoneyGram do not merely serve underserved migrants; they highly probably serve the plumbing needs of global capital — legal, semi-legal, and everything in between. Robinson’s thesis makes the conclusion inescapable: wherever banks cannot go, money-movers step in, and the system politely looks away.

These companies - catering to “underserved markets”—have treasury operations that are surprisingly old-school. Many still run on relics like IBM AS/400 mainframes, which hum along with dinosaur-era interfaces that no one outside the bank fully understands. That “opaque” layer makes it trivially easy to shuffle funds internally, obscure transactions, and structure liquidity without triggering modern audit alarms. Essentially, the tech itself becomes a sort of smoke screen for moving money efficiently while staying just opaque enough to avoid prying eyes.

This brings us to the City of London — the part of the book Robinson never explicitly names but absolutely implies. His logic leads straight to the Square Mile. The City is the ultimate clearing vat where everything converges: derivatives, FX, private equity flows, offshore wealth, oligarch capital, sovereign funds and trust money. To feed its vast clearing and settlement machines, it depends on a ring of external liquidity tentacles: correspondent banks, offshore centres, remittance networks, payment processors and non-bank liquidity providers like Western Union and MoneyGram.

These remittance giants operate at the “edges of empire.” They move value through unstable jurisdictions, under-banked regions, cash economies, politically sensitive corridors and off-grid markets that major banks refuse to touch. They provide the flexibility, deniability and reach that the core financial system needs but cannot openly acknowledge.

Robinson reveals a world where the banking system is not corrupted from the outside — it is built with corruption embedded in its design. The Laundrymen exposes the logic of illicit money flows, but today the global laundry machine includes vast cash-movement networks like Western Union and MoneyGram. These networks act as distributed liquidity reservoirs feeding into — and bleeding out of — the City of London’s central clearing infrastructure.

If Robinson wrote this book today, he would point directly at the City as a sovereign financial enclave that quietly uses global remittance networks as off-balance-sheet liquidity channels. They provide the reach, flexibility and opacity needed to stabilize, conceal and route capital in ways traditional banks cannot. And honestly, … that would make the book twice as explosive.

[Sami Naik · Rating 3 out of 5]

I work all night, I work all day, to pay the bills I have to pay – Ain’t it sad
And still there never seems to be a single penny left for me – That’s too bad
In my dreams I have a plan
If I got me a wealthy man
I wouldn’t have to work at all, I’d fool around and have a ball…

Money, money, money.. Must be funny
In the rich man’s world
Money, money, money.. Always sunny
In the rich man’s world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It’s a rich man’s world

Yes Yes you were so true in your wisdom Frida!! Money is indeed so funny in rich man’s world. Whereas for poor, it is a gateway to coronate all evils as Mark Twain once said: “The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

Anyway, it took me almost 11 non-serious months to seriously squander my thrustful desire of reading a thought-provoking book “The Laundrymen”. It is written by international bestselling American author, Jeffery Robinson, who famously wrote acclaimed biography of former Saudi Oil Minister, Yamani.

Written in 1995, the 16-Chapters and 300-Pages book is the inside story of the dirty world of ‘Money Laundering’. It reveals many a secret and undresses various politicians, lawyers, bankers, bureaucrats and tycoons who chessed the money transaction and accoladed their efforts. Robinson also pens how underworld under-whirls the money and hides the true nature of money.

The book starts with Watergate Scandal and ends with Agha Hasan Abedi’s BCCI. Between the two unfairy tales lie many controversial moments when money was washed and business was done peculiarly. There are Borodianskys, there are Shakarchis, there are Schaffers. The games were played in 20th century and laws were made/changed by the peacekeepers. The book also deals with the bloodiest of drug trafficking organized ravishly in South America specially Columbia. So when I say black money of Columbia, then expect the stories of crime daddies like Pablo Escobar and the Orejuelas.

The book is too good in sketching Swiss Secrecy Laws and nexus of Swiss accounts to criminology. Few of historic scandals like Iran-Contra affair in Reagan’s era and de-functioning of Roberto Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano are worth reading.

Robinson wrote it in 1995 but the truth is that history has no age or period. This remarkable masterpiece insists the fate of illness to prolong a vanquished desire in money making. The blood circulation of dirty money will abide you to gimmick the filth under a subtle way whereas the trojan game of “Catch Me If You Can” will limit to those who will graduate as ‘Laundryman’.

[Mark McTague · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although this was published twenty years ago in 1996, it is by no means outdated. It agrees with a lot of what I've read elsewhere and what I've learned about the world in the past 65 years. The message comes through clearly - crime (mostly illegal drugs) pays and the amounts are staggering. Also clear but more between the lines is the fact that the criminal money launderers, as well as the drug traffickers, are enabled by industrial and financial segments of the advanced economies that are struggling with this scourge. In fact, a far more interesting story, mostly untold here, would be the extent of involvement of major banks in money laundering, the reasons thereof, and the punishments if caught. One is reminded of the scene in Casablanca when Capt. Renault closes Rick's Cafe Americain because of gambling, just seconds before the croupier brings him his winnings. The one objection I have, and it's not fair since it's outside the scope of the book, is the author's dismissal of decriminalization as unworkable and leading to worse trouble where it has been tried. That may have been true in 1996 or in the areas where it was decriminalized then. However, although alcohol still leads to traffic fatalities, ruined lives and families, and increased medical costs, the degree seems no more than it was during Prohibition. The recent legalizing of marijuana may prove instructive. Addiction is a disease, a public health problem. Somehow the money has to be taken out of illegal drugs the way it was with alcohol. Until then, the staggering profits will continue to poison our politics and societies.

[Kurt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I guess I should look at the 1998 version of this book, but I'd really like an update; it's more than 10 years out of date.

The book is well written, and easy to read. It is a collection of short accounts of people and organizations that laundered money, how they did it and how they got caught. As a textbook for money laundering, it fails miserably; everyone they write about got caught though some lasted a good long time. And not all of the money was recovered.

I have never found accounting or taxes to be fascinating subjects, and this book is pretty light on any preaching about the wrongness of hiding money from taxing entities. The author just describes the struggles on both sides, and the outcomes. I feel there is an implicit assumption that paying taxes is good and hiding money is bad, but it's never stated that clearly.

[Bob Petrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

too many trees, not enough forest

Jeffrey Robinson is amazing.

The breadth and depth of the content of this book is astounding.

The level of corruption exposed before our very eyes is astounding.

The delivery of all of the above was challenging. It seemed like I was in the middle of a huge single narrative of endless stories , endless people and endless details.

It would have been a 5 star review if there were fewer trees and more forest.

[Adebayo Oyagbola · Rating 5 out of 5]

A world in which the banks are washing machines and false enterprise the detergent and what do you get? Squeeky clean money. The trouble is that the soiling agents are deadly and the effluence of laundry are truly noisome. This book explains the inner workings of the world of drugs and financial crime.

[Gregory · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terrific inside stories, but the book gets long. By chapter 7 or 8 I felt like I was just reading the same thing over and over with different names, countries, and shell companies inserted. It finally just got too repetitive and I couldn't make myself finish the last few chapters.

[Hossein]

study about world money laundry

[Sandeep · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overlong and repetitive.. Fascinating in the initial sections nonetheless..

[Ryan Bacek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Follow the money and you will understand reality

[Hossein]

read and smile to world economy and bad governer

[Mark McTague]

Though most of what I know about money laundering comes from this book, I wouldn't say it's dated simply because it was published twenty years ago in 1996. The message comes through clearly - crime (mostly illegal drugs) pays and the amounts are staggering. Also clear but more between the lines is the fact that the criminal money launderers, as well as the drug traffickers, are enabled by industrial and financial segments of the advanced economies that are struggling with this scourge. In fact, a far more interesting story, mostly untold here, would be the extent of involvement of major banks in money laundering, the reasons thereof, and the punishments if caught. One is reminded of the scene in Casablanca when Capt. Renault closes Rick's Cafe Americain because of gambling, just seconds before the croupier brings him his winnings.