South Florida Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog
Money laundering for most of us is finding a $10 bill in the clothes dryer.
Forgetting to check your pockets when you put your jeans in the laundry is the precursor to clothes dryer joy.
Forgetting to check your pockets for the $10,000.00 in pocket-change you carry when you walk onto an airplane bound for the US can be the precursor to a federal prison term.
Go not lightly into this sad goodnight. Read this money laundering site from the US government.
Not knowing what federal crimes are contained in the Patriot Act and the Bank Secrecy Act is a quick one-two punch that lands many people in jail and then in prison.
If you are a stock broker, financial advisor, banker, businessman with overseas ventures or even purchasing gifts while abroad, you need to have more than a casual awareness of money laundering and money structuring statutes.
Fort Lauderdale and Miami, like New York and Los Angeles are what the Feds call Gateway ports. Florida criminal defense lawyers see more heightened surveillance and prosecutions coming from Fort Lauderdale, Miami, and South Florida than in years past.
The South Florida federal task force focusing on domestic security casts a dragnet that snares many innocents.
If you handle sums of money in excess of $10,000 for yourself, for others, family members or business associates get a mini education on money-laundering. Any criminal defense attorney who does federal court criminal defense can give you a quick overview in less than 10 minutes.
Understanding money laundering and white collar crimes, structuring and cash transaction reports and the alphabet soup of anti-money-laundering statutes is an education best undertaken with a few hours spent googling or consulting with a good criminal defense lawyer.
You don’t want to learn about money-laundering statutes in a holding cell at a federal detention center near an airport. Better to learn about it in a criminal defense lawyer’s office. There’s no excuse for not knowing the law, information is inoculation.