Fontainebleau under investigation by Gaming for giving $2m credit to a known bookie, Damien "DJ" Leforbes

[MDawg]

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.

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.

So you are stating that there will be no record of the win? No internal win-loss statements, no handpays? How does this cash that is handed to the player at the end of whatever then any different from the cash he put into play at the casino? No record of input, no record of output?

Money laundering is basically converting cash to some form of non-cash.

Unless there is some key ingredient to all this that you are not mentioning or I am missing, your scenarios accomplish nothing and woul appear to stem from a misunderstanding of how any of this works, combined with lack of experience.

If the money launderer has so much cooperation from the casino as to bypass CTRs and SARs why even play at all? Why not just deposit cash at the cage, get a cage check and walk.

I actually have read about casinos looking the other way as to CTRs and SARs for the input of cash, but most of those players were just gamblers who wanted to play with dirty money didn’t care about laundering it. In most of those cases that were publicized the casino just wanted to get their hands on the money (think, Owning Mahowny) they weren’t thinking about facilitating its withdrawal.

Those who went on to play, win and get checks or wires – they accomplished something in the field of money laundering, why go through all that just to walk with cash if the intent is to launder money.

To rinse the cash there has to be some record of win (and no record of entry) to 'splain where the cash came from, or better yet, conversion to a non-cash instrument (casino check).