Money makes the world go around, said the Cabaret song; and in matters of major crime – especially drug trafficking and state corruption – it’s the ways in which money can be moved quietly around the world that make the wrongdoing worth the effort. What good is loot if you can’t hide it, clean it and spend it wherever you choose on the lifestyle of every villain’s dream?
Welcome to the multi-trillion-dollar milieu of money laundering, estimated to account for between 2 and 5 per cent of global economic activity.
And welcome back Oliver Bullough, an author who is single-mindedly devoted to the cause of exposing the dark side of international finance and the inadequacies of inter-governmental efforts to prosecute it. His previous books in this field, Moneyland (2018) and Butler to the World (2022), offered colourful travelogues of kleptocracy and London’s role in its facilitation, borne along with some added momentum from Bullough’s righteous anger. Has he sustained that performance in Everybody Loves Our Dollars?
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Perhaps not quite, though he has certainly assembled another vivid collage. Among many memorable images, there are two that stand out, though the first may sound harmlessly quotidian. It is Bicester Village, an Oxfordshire shopping destination that is famously popular with Chinese tourists, who leave laden with up to £6 million worth per day of expensive designer goods (many of which have been manufactured in China). But what looks like a triumph of British retail ingenuity is, in Bullough’s account, also an elaborate façade for large-scale money-laundering.
He quotes a police officer: ‘Factories in China ship drugs to British gangsters, who then give payments in cash to Chinese students studying at UK universities. The students either take cash to Bicester Village or first pay it into their bank accounts… then they buy Gucci handbags or whatever and ship them back to China, where the criminals sell them to fashion victims… all coordinated by WeChat.’
If South America’s drug cartels and Albania’s criminal gangs are also in on the action somewhere, it is China that has emerged as the world leader in the business of moving cash through the hands of multiple accomplices, stooges and gamblers. Bullough’s second striking image is the River Rock Casino in suburban Vancouver, where Chinese tourists habitually converted large cash sums of alleged drug money, lent to them by money launderers, into gambling chips. If they lost at the tables, which they usually did, the debt to the launderers would be settled in clean money by legitimate bank transfers. Meanwhile nearby, Bullough observed ‘downtown streets where the sidewalks are full of tents in which homeless people spend their nights. Between them, addicts sat on the ground, openly injecting or smoking drugs. It was a miserable and hope-free scene of squalor and distress and disease.’
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That is the other end of the laundry line: the degradation of drug users and the poverty of citizens whose national treasuries have been emptied by corrupt politicians and officials, while the intermittent successes of law enforcement agencies in impeding the flows of dirty money amount to little more than temporary inconvenience for the perpetrators.
Will AI make a difference? Maybe, says Bullough, but only if giant databases know exactly which needles to look for in shape-shifting haystacks of financial activity. Has the growth of cryptocurrencies made hiding money easier? Of course it has, and all the more so in the United States because President Donald Trump (whose election campaign for his second term was ‘generously funded by leading figures in the crypto industry’) has dismissed attempts to police the crypto arena as the work of ‘left-wing fascists’.
No wonder Bullough sounds even angrier – and perhaps a bit more obsessive – in Everybody Loves Our Dollars than he did in Moneyland. There’s an undertone of ‘Why won’t the authorities listen to me?’ which sometimes gets in the way of the narrative. Some readers may find themselves flagging by the time they reach the penultimate chapter on ‘carousel’ cross-border VAT fraud.
But it’s worth persevering to reach his punchy conclusions, optimistically headed ‘We can do better’. Here he makes the valid point that there’s little to be gained in trying to interdict the banking systems of small criminal-friendly nations (‘There is, unless you like trinkets featuring cowrie shells, nothing to buy in the Marshall Islands’) if the bad guys’ ultimate aim is to spend or invest their ill-gotten gains in the US, the UK and mainland Europe. Poor countries may ‘suspend their morals when they haven’t got enough to eat’, but large and wealthy countries have no such excuse and should sweep out their own stables first.
In the US, that would mean clamping down on the registration of ‘opaque shell companies’ in states such as Nevada and Delaware. As a practical measure, it would also mean no longer printing the high-denomination banknotes – $100, €200 or £50 – that are so handy for cash movement on a vast scale. Western governments should also be careful whom they exclude from mainstream financial systems: wholesale exclusion of Muslim charities and organisations merely forces that community to fall back on informal money-transfer systems that are outside oversight.
One Bullough proposal that may fall on stonier ground is drawn from the example of the Chicago gangster Al Capone, who evaded justice for years until he was finally convicted of tax evasion in 1931. Far from offering a parable of ‘follow the money and you’ll get your guy’, the author argues, the episode merely highlights the folly of the liquor prohibition which Capone and his ilk had so profitably exploited.
The logic is that we should consider legalising some drugs that are currently supplied by criminals, if keeping them illegal means driving illicit profits into parallel financial channels that also makes it easier to be a kleptocrat, a terrorist or a people trafficker.
A controversial idea, perhaps; but even if this book is not his best, we’re lucky to have Oliver Bullough to make us think about how our money systems have been perverted to serve the criminal world.
This article appeared in issue 98 of the Spear’s Magazine. Click here to subscribe
