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Making Criminal Defense A Crime Under 18 U.S.C. Section 1957, Paul G. Wolfteich

Vanderbilt Law Review

In 1984 the President's Commission on Organized Crime concluded that money laundering was the lifeblood of organized crime.'The Commission found that drug traffickers and racketeers exploited weaknesses in the Bank Secrecy Act to launder much of their income,estimated by one source to be 150 billion dollars annually. In response,the Commission recommended legislation to strengthen currency reporting laws, to extend the investigative powers of federal agencies, and to create a new money laundering offense.' This new legislation would hold criminally liable persons who conduct a monetary transaction with knowledge or reason to know that the funds involved were derived from unlawful …