Shocking that foreign nationals would even think to use a restaurant to launder money.
That is the domain of the Italians, at least in Boston. The cops probably got an anonymous tip somewhere along the line.
In most parts of Texas the Albanians own the “Italian” restaurants, and based on what I know of Albanian culture, I suspect that they don’t report their cash tips ... and then some.
There was an excellent noodle house in Southlake Texas that was closed when one of the owners was found to be laundering income from a massage parlor in Dallas.
While the noodles were really good, I never experienced THAT kind of a happy ending.
This is from the article I posted above:
“One of the biggest busts in the case came in March when agents seized more than $250,000 of suspected marijuana proceeds being transported from New York to China Gourmet, according to officials. FBI agents said the cash was found stashed under piles of frozen meat product.”
This sounds similar to a scene out of the TV show “Breaking Bad”. Substitute “frozen meat product” for chicken and it is straight out of Breaking Bad.
We had another incident regarding the local Chinese restaurant here in Nashua about twenty years back. The guy who owned the restaurant came to work that day at 11am. Nobody was there. He went down the street to the house where all his workers lived.
He owned this house that all his employees lived in.
He found them tied up.
Apparently, non of these Chinese immigrants believed in banks. They literally kept their money in cash under the mattress so to speak. An Asian gang came up from the Chinatown section in Boston and had robbed them during the middle of the night.
Supposedly, they had taken well over $20K in cash.