“Video poker in Vegas (as well as slots) would be a fairly straightforward way to launder a lot of money I’d think. As someone else mentioned, who cares if you lose 2 or 3 percent of your large bankroll when your goal is to have clean money at the end of the process.”
Something eludes me about taking dirty money and changing it into clean money via gambling. I am confused, please explain.
In Louisiana in the past the Mafia owned hotels in New Orleans That is the way they laundered dirty money into clean money. Their hotels were “always full” even though they were not. They used the dirty money as income to the hotels for the rooms that were really not used. They paid taxes on this dirty money and then used it to invest in totally legitimate business investments.
My ex worked for a very legitimate bank in New Orleans circa 1972.. One of their major customers was Carlos Marcello. He had big loans from this bank and all very legitimate. That was his clean and legal money. This was his clean money just doing legitimate business.
So the way it works is if you win a large amount of money (say a $15,000 jackpot on $5 video poker), the casino gives you a tax form and reports the winnings to the IRS.
So a money launder could take $100,000 cash into the casino, gamble for a while, and collect documentation that he “won” $90,000. That gets reported to the IRS as income even though the gambler actually lost $10,000.
I agree with Ann Coulter. There is no way someone made a multi-million dollar annual income on video poker. The tiny number of professional video poker gamblers report incomes of around $80,000 and would love to make more except they can’t because there aren’t enough games/machines with over 100% payout.