Racketeering

If you go to jail for tax evasion, you will ironically be living off of tax dollars.  This would be sardonic, but not really racketeering – unless that was your incongruous, mixed up plan all along.  Money laundering, however, would be an example of racketeering.  Paradoxically, this is not literally cleaning off banknotes, even though most banknotes have micrograms’ worth of cocaine or other similar paraphernalia imbedded in their fibers, most having passed through cartels’ hands, but means pushing ‘dirty’ money – or money acquired through illegitimate and/or criminal means – into more legitimate flows to hide their method of acquisition.  Some larger companies do this in a ‘smart’ fashion, ‘round-tripping’ their money into offshore shell organizations, usually in tax exempt havens and then send the money straightaway back to themselves as a “foreign investment” and dodge taxation on their profits.  In a way, pyramid schemes would fall into this category, and, dear friend, if you have fallen prey to organizations such as “Amway” or “Women Empowering Women” who promised big and returned little, you just now eating an ‘appetizer’ while the progenitors are feasting on multiple ‘desserts’, I plead with you to reconsider your investment and that you have been duped.  Some racketeers take their maliciously obtained funds into casinos, taken their wheelbarrow of poker chips and play two or three chips, then cash in the rest into a check from the casino and then look over their shoulders a few less times.  Han Solo may have been a fictional character, but his business was not, as smuggling goods and cash is quite real and alive today – if someone is good at mental math dealing with weight conversions and up to date on currency exchange rates, they may very well be in the same business as Han Solo.  All this to say, there truly is nothing new under the sun, and “when the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, people's hearts are filled with schemes to do wrong.”  (Eccl. 8:11)