field, he was alone.
Dean turned the day planner over in his hands. It was a half-size seven-ring executive planner, one day per page, covered in black leather. Pages could be removed or inserted as needed. It was in the seemingly innocuous details of Jones’s daily activities that Dean would find the path leading to hard evidence and, ultimately, a conviction. Everything he had now was circumstantial. Dean needed solid proof.
Jones was meticulous, and judging from how he reacted to agents going through his things, he was likely obsessive-compulsive. He practically had a coronary when Dean moved a vase an inch off-center. Jones strode over to the table and put the vase back dead center, perfectly symmetrical.
Oh, yeah, the guy was anal to the nth degree.
Technically, Dean didn’t have a warrant for the dayplanner, but when he looked through it at the house he noted that Jones listed all his bank account numbers and meetings he had with his accountant. That put the planner under “financial” in Dean’s book, so he seized it.
Jones wouldn’t be so dumb as to write down anything blatantly illegal, but he would have a schedule of his meetings and within the meetings, and the empty spaces, there would be a pattern. Next, he would check the planner against Jones’s known whereabouts and determine if there were any codes in the seemingly innocuous content. In addition, if specific meetings coincided with seemingly
legitimate
bank deposits or withdrawals, Dean could look at those entities to see if he had cause to get a warrant for
their
records.
Criminals had become extremely sophisticated over the last decade, and money laundering increasingly complex. While many bad guys use the tried-and-true methods—such as putting their cash into small, legitimate businesses to clean it—with the sheer amount of illegal money changing hands, criminals had to develop new and innovative ways to wash large amounts of money and get it circulating.
Dean could have delegated this rather mundane task of inputting Jones’s schedule into a database, but he had better luck identifying patterns and anomalies when he was the one typing the information. His mind processed it differently, he supposed, or maybe it was simply that how he wanted the information logged maximized his ability to recognize patterns. His database was easily sorted by date, dollar amount, entity, account number, or any other field, but Dean preferred analyzing the raw data by date. He’d found that while criminals tried torandomize their activities to avoid detection, they usually set meetings or bank deposits on a regular day or time. Dean had taken down Thomas “Smitty” Daniels because he cleaned his money on the first Monday of every month.
Daniels’s scam was good. Dean wouldn’t have figured it out so quickly without the specific time frame. Daniels was a landlord purported to own dozens of rentals. He deposited rent—in cash—on the first Monday of every month. That was a big red flag. How many landlords had all their tenants pay on time? Dean scoured the property records and found that Daniels was claiming to own property that he, in fact, didn’t own, and collecting “rent” from people who didn’t exist. He wouldn’t have been caught if he hadn’t had to increase the deposits, which alerted the FBI to a change in deposit history. By law, all banking transactions over $10,000 were reported to the FBI. Most were legitimate and, in real estate, substantial deposits and withdrawals were common. But Daniels had gone from deposits of between forty and fifty thousand a month to deposits of ninety thousand.
When Dean looked at the records, all deposited at the same time of the month, all cash, he launched the grand jury investigation. He didn’t know how Daniels was making his illegal money—he had wrongly assumed drugs, which accounted for an estimated ninety percent of laundered money in the United States. It didn’t take long to learn that
Dean turned the day planner over in his hands. It was a half-size seven-ring executive planner, one day per page, covered in black leather. Pages could be removed or inserted as needed. It was in the seemingly innocuous details of Jones’s daily activities that Dean would find the path leading to hard evidence and, ultimately, a conviction. Everything he had now was circumstantial. Dean needed solid proof.
Jones was meticulous, and judging from how he reacted to agents going through his things, he was likely obsessive-compulsive. He practically had a coronary when Dean moved a vase an inch off-center. Jones strode over to the table and put the vase back dead center, perfectly symmetrical.
Oh, yeah, the guy was anal to the nth degree.
Technically, Dean didn’t have a warrant for the dayplanner, but when he looked through it at the house he noted that Jones listed all his bank account numbers and meetings he had with his accountant. That put the planner under “financial” in Dean’s book, so he seized it.
Jones wouldn’t be so dumb as to write down anything blatantly illegal, but he would have a schedule of his meetings and within the meetings, and the empty spaces, there would be a pattern. Next, he would check the planner against Jones’s known whereabouts and determine if there were any codes in the seemingly innocuous content. In addition, if specific meetings coincided with seemingly
legitimate
bank deposits or withdrawals, Dean could look at those entities to see if he had cause to get a warrant for
their
records.
Criminals had become extremely sophisticated over the last decade, and money laundering increasingly complex. While many bad guys use the tried-and-true methods—such as putting their cash into small, legitimate businesses to clean it—with the sheer amount of illegal money changing hands, criminals had to develop new and innovative ways to wash large amounts of money and get it circulating.
Dean could have delegated this rather mundane task of inputting Jones’s schedule into a database, but he had better luck identifying patterns and anomalies when he was the one typing the information. His mind processed it differently, he supposed, or maybe it was simply that how he wanted the information logged maximized his ability to recognize patterns. His database was easily sorted by date, dollar amount, entity, account number, or any other field, but Dean preferred analyzing the raw data by date. He’d found that while criminals tried torandomize their activities to avoid detection, they usually set meetings or bank deposits on a regular day or time. Dean had taken down Thomas “Smitty” Daniels because he cleaned his money on the first Monday of every month.
Daniels’s scam was good. Dean wouldn’t have figured it out so quickly without the specific time frame. Daniels was a landlord purported to own dozens of rentals. He deposited rent—in cash—on the first Monday of every month. That was a big red flag. How many landlords had all their tenants pay on time? Dean scoured the property records and found that Daniels was claiming to own property that he, in fact, didn’t own, and collecting “rent” from people who didn’t exist. He wouldn’t have been caught if he hadn’t had to increase the deposits, which alerted the FBI to a change in deposit history. By law, all banking transactions over $10,000 were reported to the FBI. Most were legitimate and, in real estate, substantial deposits and withdrawals were common. But Daniels had gone from deposits of between forty and fifty thousand a month to deposits of ninety thousand.
When Dean looked at the records, all deposited at the same time of the month, all cash, he launched the grand jury investigation. He didn’t know how Daniels was making his illegal money—he had wrongly assumed drugs, which accounted for an estimated ninety percent of laundered money in the United States. It didn’t take long to learn that
Similar Books
