When Prohibition ended, the Bay Street Boys started helping Americans avoid another law: income taxes. Island lawyers set up so many sham “personal holding corporations” for American tax dodgers that some office buildings were covered with nameplates from foundation to roof. When the Mafia abandoned Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revolution, the Bay Street Boys helped gangster Meyer Lansky develop casinos in the Bahamas. Lansky paid the island’s finance minister to adopt new rules restricting local firms from sharing financial information, even with criminal investigators, making it a more
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