In a typical money laundering scheme, ownership is like a Russian Matryoshka doll. You open one shell company to find another, and that leads to another and another and so on. Whenever you do land on an actual name, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it belongs to an unemployed alcoholic or a peripatetic yoga instructor or some other random person willing to hand over their passport in exchange for a few hundred dollars. Little do they know, they then become nominal owners of shell companies that can launder millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars.
