Originally Posted by MDawg View Post
Originally Posted by Dan Druff View Post
Money laundering = "I'm a bookie, and I just made a shitload of money from Shohei Ohtani's interpreter, who is a complete ploppy and somehow has $16 million to lose. But I can't buy anything with it, or deposit it, or law enforcement will know I obtained the money illegally. But if I go wager it in a casino, any 'winnings' I cash out can simply look like I got lucky at the casino, and I can declare/deposit that."
Somewhat. If the input of the cash is registered via CTRs or SARs, that defeats money laundering because then the person has to explain where it came from in the first place.
Originally Posted by MDawg View Post
Money laundering is basically converting cash to some form of non-cash. The intent of money laundering is to get cash somehow into the stream of commerce without alerting the government to the cash to other than cash conversion.
Within a casino, merely depositing cash doesn't get you anywhere, so for purposes of a casino, money laundering is converting cash directly (without winning) to a casino check or casino outgoing wire.

Depositing cash and withdrawing cash doesn't really help a money launderer because he ends up with the same problem - how to get the cash into the stream of commerce.
Keep in mind too that casinos do not report table game wins to the government. Only machine wins (if high enough) will be reported via the W-2G. Table wins are recorded via WIN/LOSS statements that aren't attested to under penalty of perjury.

Dan the Dandruff Man's scenario also presumes that the player won. If he did not win, all the cash input in the world isn't going to show any kind of register of winning.

Over all, you need have had some kind of experience with this to understand what will and will not work within the context of casinos. I am not a cash player I play with large credit lines, but I do know how it works for table games.

If someone could get all that cash into slot machines without being recorded (no CTRs, no SARs) at least all of the W-2Gs for the larger payouts would seem like wins.
I'm not talking about internal win-loss statements or handpays.

If the player can either dodge CTRs buying in (or get shady casino employees to go along with him dodging these CTRs), he can cash out and make it appear to just be a lucky win, and the money is clean.

Casinos and poker rooms have long been used for money laundering in this fashion.

In poker, it's even easier, as there's no close monitoring of the movement of chips, so it can simply appear that one player cleaned up in a poker session, starting from orders of magnitude less money. This does require cooperation from casino employees to look the other way regarding the buyins, and not filling out the CTR forms.

Various phony high-stakes "heads up" matches took place at the Bicycle Casino for exactly this purpose. After a few busts, and an ownership change, I don't think this is happening anymore.