Chapter Two

 

DOING THE WASH

 

 

 

"Money possesses a strange kind of purity."

 

Bernie Cornfeld

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are four factors common to all money laundering operations.

 

First, the ownership and source of the money must be concealed. There's no sense in laundering money if everyone knows who it belonged to and where it originated after it comes out the other end.

 

Next, the form it takes must be changed. No one wants to wash $3 million in $20 bills only to wind up with $3 million in $20 bills. Changing the form also means reducing the bulk. Contrary to popular belief, you cannot stuff $1 million into an attaché case. A stack of $100 bills would stand five feet high and weigh over 22 pounds.

 

Third, the trail left by the process must be obscured. The whole purpose of money laundering is defeated if someone can follow the money from beginning to end.

 

Finally, constant control must be maintained over the process. After all, many of the people who come into the picture while the money is being laundered know that it is dirty money, and if they steal it there's little the original owner can legally do about it.

 

That said, there are three distinct stages to the washing cycle.

 

To begin with, there is immersion, which means consolidation and placement. A drug dealer who amasses $5 million in cash is faced with the Herculean task of introducing as many as a million pieces of paper into the banking system. Unlike the counterfeiter, who only needs to get his forged notes into circulation, the laundryman is forced to rely on bank accounts, postal orders, traveler's checks and other negotiable instruments to funnel the cash into the world’s financial system.

 

The second step, known as layering, might also be called heavy soaping. This is where the laundryman disassociates the money from its illicit source. By moving the money between as many accounts as he can - in and out of dummy companies that he's set up around the world for just this purpose - and by relying on bank secrecy and attorney-client privilege to hide his own identity, he creates a complex web of financial transactions that frustrates any audit.

 

The last stage is the spin dry, sometimes described as repatriation and integration. The washed funds are brought back into circulation, now in the form of clean, and often taxable, income.

 

With small amounts of money, the three-step process can be quick. If all you want to do is wash $20,000, you merely have to walk into ten banks and buy $2000 worth of traveler's checks at each one. Or stop by the same number of post offices and purchase international money orders. Negotiable anywhere in the world, traveler's checks and money orders can be deposited in any foreign bank account, or held onto until you want to spend them. As long as you keep the acquisitions down to realistic sizes - and $2000 in cash isn't going to set off alarm bells the way a single $20,000 cash transaction might - you can manage it with little or no inconvenience.

 

If, say, you find yourself with $400,000 in cash, you might swagger into a Rolls Royce showroom and turn the money into a brand-new Silver Spirit. As cash is not the usual form of payment in places like that, it's fair to assume that the dealer will sit up and take notice when you produce a Bloomingdale’s big brown bag stuffed with banknotes. Legally, the dealer’s obliged to report such a cash transaction. Except, he may not be aware of his obligation to do that. Or, for the sake of a sale, he might not be willing to do that. If he deposits the cash in his bank, the bank will report it. To avoid that, he could keep the cash in his safe. But even if he does deposit it and even if the bank reports it, by the time the Internal Revenue Service spots the transaction, you'd have had plenty of time to sell the Rolls and deposit your cashier's check, made out to a false name, into your offshore bank account.

 

To launder ten times that amount, you might opt for any of several traditional cash business, such as the antiques trade. You begin by purchasing a $100 shell company. Agents selling ready-made companies advertise them every day in the financial section of most newspapers. Now, as an employee of your new company, you drive around the country paying cash for Chinese vases, or Louis XV chairs, or George II candelabras, or fine Persian carpets. Gems, stamps and rare coins are also easily converted into and out of cash.

 

Say you buy 40 Ming vases for $5000 each. You put everything up for sale, dividing the cache between a dozen auction houses, preferably in a dozen different cities. When one of the vases comes up, either you allow it to be sold to the highest bidder or you send your favorite uncle into the saleroom to buy it back. You are paid for every item sold by check, so when your uncle hands the auction house $5500 in cash for one of the vases - that's the $5000 hammer price plus the 10 percent buyer's commission - they give you a check for $4500, which is the hammer price minus the 10 percent seller's commission. The fees are simply written off as the cost of washing the funds. And, in this case, you also have the vase to sell again.

 

Retail stores, bars, and restaurants are even more cash-intensive, making them all the more attractive in high-density drug trafficking areas. Perhaps that’s why South Florida abounds with restaurants that don’t accept credit cards or checks. Take-out goes out by the front door, dirty money comes in the back door.

 

The video rental business provides another ideal sink. You simply feed cash into the system. Done gradually, it is almost impossible to spot an extra $500 coming in daily through the tills of a storefront stocked with 15,000 videos. Nor would anyone question the accountant who certified that the owner took a legally declared $182,500 bonus every year. Nor would anyone's suspicions necessarily be raised if that same owner ran a chain of 20 video rental stores and, backed up with the appropriate audits, awarded himself an annual bonus of $3.56 million.

 

Laundrymen have long understood that contrary to Gordon Gekko's much-quoted line in the film Wall Street, greed is not good. It's possible, with only little long-term planning, to build a network of small businesses into a money laundering conglomerate.

 

Take the actual case of the Italian American who set his son up in the grocery business. Papa gave Figlio enough cash to open a store and Figlio paid his carpenters, painters, and delivery people with cash, which they were happy to accept because they saw it as non-taxable. Figlio then stocked his grocery through a wholesaler who happened to be Papa's brother. But when Figlio ordered 50 cases of tagliatelle from Uncle Zio, he only received 40. So Papa gave Figlio cash to make up for the shortfall. The same happened when Figlio ordered milk, cheese, and frozen brownies. Uncle Zio shorted the delivery and Papa made up for the missing 20 percent. At the end of the month, Papa also topped up Figlio's accounts with additional cash. Figlio's bookkeepers were happy, the taxman was happy, and before long the business was making enough profit that Figlio open a second grocery. Two became four and four became eight.

 

As his empire expanded, Figlio decided to import olives from the old country. Luckily, Papa had a cousin in Palermo. But Figlio didn’t buy it direct from him. Instead, Papa set up a business in the Bahamas called Mio Cugino, Inc. His cousin sold 100 cases of olives to the Bahamian company for $5 a case. The Bahamian company billed Figlio for 120 cases at $10 each. At the end of every month, Papa was there to make up the difference.

 

Several hundred million dollars got washed that way before anyone noticed.

*****

 

 

No one knows for certain how much dirty money circles the globe looking to get scrubbed clean, but a reasonably authoritative guess in 1996 put the range from $200-$500 billion. By 2009 that figure has probably doubled. After foreign exchange and the oil industry, dirty money is the world's third-largest business.

 

For this alternate economy to function, two things are necessary, and the coffee pot analogy is still the best one: When coffee is poured from a pot into a cup, there must be enough room in the cup to hold the coffee and enough coffee in the pot to fill the cup. Similarly, there has to be enough money available to create an infrastructure and an infrastructure capable of handling so much money.

 

The world's parallel, or underground, banking system was apparently invented by the Chinese, who named it fei ch'ien - literally, "flying money." Known in other parts of the world as chop, hundi or hawalah, the system was born out of political turmoil and a hearty distrust of banks. It is almost always based on family or tribal connections and traditionally reinforced with retributive violence.

 

In its simplest form, chits or tokens are substituted for cash. Money deposited at a Hong Kong gold shop is exchanged for a small card bearing a picture of a dragon, or a $10 bill stamped with a special seal, or a small, innocuous piece of paper, such as a laundry ticket that has been secretly coded. When the object is presented to a money changer in San Francisco's Chinatown, the bearer is given cash.

 

During the days when certain European countries had strict exchange controls, a variation on the fei ch'ien system was facilitated by the tourist trade. For example, a Parisian businessman would stake American friends to whatever money they needed while visiting France. When the Americans got home, they added up what they owed their host and deposited it into his undeclared US bank account.

 

Throughout most of the Vietnam War, for example, a thriving black market propelled the underground economy across Southeast Asia. At least until the Tet Offensive in January 1968, Saigon was alive with all sorts of scams and swindles. The official exchange rate in those days was 118 Vietnamese piastres to the dollar, but the black market rate was closer to 200. A lucrative corner of that trade was controlled by a small group of Indian nationals who'd emigrated to South Vietnam from Madras. They bought dollars at black market rates and smuggled them out of the country to be deposited in Hong Kong and Singapore. From there the money was wired either to Europe or, more often, to the Middle East, where it was used to purchase gold. The gold was smuggled back into Vietnam and sold for piastres, which were in turn sold to the Americans for more dollars, completing the circle.

 

By the time the South Vietnamese authorities were wise to the Indian laundrymen and began confiscating dollars leaving the country - in contravention of the currency restriction laws - the Indians were already working an improvised version of the hawalah system. They traded GIs' personal checks drawn on American banks for chits. The checks were deposited into accounts held by the Indians in New York. When the checks cleared, the chits were exchanged for piastres and the New York banks wired on the dollars to pay for gold.

 

These days, a staggeringly large but very straightforward hawalah business exists between India, where currency controls are in force, and Great Britain, where a sizable Indian population has a substantial interest in transferring funds from the subcontinent into Europe. You find an even more thriving hawalah market post 9/11 between Pakistan and Dubai. Facilities abound for people at one end of the deal to deposit money with hawalah bankers and within hours to collect their money at the other end, minus a commission of 5 to 15 percent. The system works because there are enough people in both countries with large cash surpluses - legitimate businessmen as well as criminals - willing to pay for the privilege of using a paperless banking system.

 

The British have been particularly concerned for years with hawalah networks linking London with two Indian regions, the Punjab and Kashmir. Laundered money has been known to finance terrorist violence, specifically by Sikh and Kashmiri secessionists, and to finance drug traffickers working out of Pakistan. While the Pakistan-Dubai connection is said to be worth as much as four to five times what the legitimate banking network between those two places is worth.

 

Back in the 1990s, Scotland Yard busted a hawalah banker whom they'd had under surveillance for several months. After watching him work 12 hour shifts, seven nights a week, police officers raided his house and found bags of cash in his livingroom containing more than $1.5 million. His scribbled notes showed he was moving $12 million a week. They later arrested a consortium of six hawalah bankers who admitted to having laundered, annually, $120 million.

*****

 

 

Crooks need money washed because they need to avoid the kind of attention that comes with sudden wealth and to place the proceeds of crime beyond the reach of asset forfeiture laws.

 

In 1986, when the FBI finally arrested him, Dennis Levine was a 33-year-old New York investment banker and a managing director of Drexel, Burnham Lambert's mergers and acquisition department. For eight years, using inside information to deal in the stocks and bonds of 54 different companies, he’d amassed illegal profits of $13 million.

 

Knowing from the outset that he’d have to wash his money before he could spend it, Levine bought a pair of Panamanian-registered companies. Both Diamond Holdings SA and International Gold Inc. came complete with nominee directors, so his name never appeared in any company documents. When he opened accounts for the two companies at Bank Leu International in Nassau, in the Bahamas, he made equally certain that his name was not used on any of the bank's records.

 

Levine’s main contact was the portfolio manager, a Swiss national named Bernhard Meier, who was under strict instructions never to phone or write to him, under any circumstances. Extremely cautious, Levine would always call Meier, and then only from a pay phone so that no one could trace calls back to him. When he wanted to see his money, Levine flew to the Bahamas using an assumed name and never stayed overnight for fear that someone working in a hotel might later identify him.

 

Unfortunately for Levine, he became a victim of his own success. He got his trades right so often that some people, including Meier, decided to follow his lead. They piggy-backed, buying and selling whenever he bought or sold. That, coupled with an abnormally high batting average, eventually attracted too much attention. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which unashamedly monitors big hitters, moved in for a closer look. Discovering that Levine had accomplices in other brokerage houses, they began to put pressure on him. Levine elected to save himself by selling everyone else down the river. When the SEC later managed to intimidate a few Bank Leu officials, Levine's friends returned the compliment and sacrificed him, trading information for immunity.

 

Beno Ghitis-Miller suffered a similar fate. A 32-year-old travel agent from Cali, Colombia, he moved to Florida in early 1980 and set up a currency business called Sonal. He opened a corporate account at the Capital Bank in downtown Miami and during the first seven months of his business deposited large amounts of cash, occasionally as much as $1 million.

 

That spring, a man named Victor Eisenstein, whose business card indicated that he ran a company called American Overseas Enterprises, waltzed into the bank and introduced himself as Beno's agent. Eisenstein told bank officials that he too would be making deposits for Sonal. Within a month, Capital Bank notified Eisenstein that they could no longer accept his money. Someone at the bank was apparently beginning to have some doubts about their clients. Eisenstein objected, but the branch manager said the decision was irreversible. And so it was, at until Beno went over the manager's head and met with the bank's president.

 

Sonal had been paying Capital one-eighth of one percent for sorting and counting each deposit. Now, to stay friends, Capital offered to maintain the account, but only if Sonal upped the commission to one-half of one percent. Beno agreed.

 

Over the next several months, as the cash deposits fast approached $2 million each, the local manager again expressed his concern. This time, though, it had nothing to do with the quality of Capital’s clients. He was simply wondering whether Beno and Eisenstein would move their account to a better-equipped branch. They happily switched to Capital's North Bay Village office. And when Beno was told that the bank had commercial space for rent upstairs, he moved Sonal to North Bay Village, too.

 

Before long, Beno and Eisenstein were depositing several million dollars per visit to the bank, three and four times a week.

 

Claiming that he didn't know the true nature of Beno's business because he was only acting as Sonal's agent, Eisenstein decided it might be prudent to ask where all this cash was coming from. Beno explained, in a friendly and straightforward letter, that the money was connected with exchange transactions involving the importing and exporting of agricultural products, and with sales commissions earned by Colombian businessmen. He insisted everything was perfectly kosher. He added, although they were handling a lot of cash, none of it was derived from illegal operations.

 

Apparently no one spotted the humor in Beno's reference to agricultural products and sales commissions. More to the point, no one at the bank bothered to walk upstairs and look at Sonal's new offices. If they had, they might have asked themselves why a company dealing in cash, especially the sums that Sonal was, had no security. There was no armored door. There were no video cameras. There was hardly had any furniture. There wasn't even a safe.

 

But then, the folks at Capital liked Sonal's business. Beno and Eisenstein were reasonably friendly. They dealt in big numbers, amounts that substantially increased the branch's "cash in" figure, making the manager look like an aggressive young banker on the way up. In fact, the folks at Capital liked Sonal's business enough to negotiate a flat fee for sorting and counting Beno’s cash - $300,000 per month.

 

Between January 1 and August 20, 1981, Beno and Eisenstein and Sonal's so-called "staff" - 37 Spanish-speaking guys who had only nicknames - deposited $240 million at Capital. That included the $7 million they dropped off in the final two days of their operation. Until the US authorities said enough was enough and shut them down, Sonal’s deposits averaged $1.5 million per day.

 

The greedier they are the cockier they become and, given enough time, greed and cockiness undo them. The converse is also true. The French father and son team, Henri and Charles Borodiansky, were slightly less greedy and slightly less cocky than Beno and Eisenstein and subsequently fared slightly better.

 

But only just.

 

Their act was maritime fraud in general and phantom cargoes in particular. In early 1990, the Borodianskys claimed to have 14 shipping containers of Hennessy VSOP Scotch whiskey for sale. The price was right so a department store in Tokyo took the bait. It forwarded a letter of credit for $3.3 million to a shell company called Mozambico Inc. Ltd, whose registered office was a convenience address in central London.

 

When the cargo failed to arrive, the Japanese store officials asked the police to find out why. An inquiry was conducted by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) in London, the Interpol of the shipping business. It revealed that Charles Borodiansky, using the alias Manuel Martins Casimiro, had negotiated the letter of credit in June through the Banque Bruxelles Lambert in Brussels. He'd then moved the funds to Liechtenstein's V&P Bank, straight into an account opened by his father under the alias Jose Costa Da Santos. Over the next few weeks, half a million dollars was wired from Liechtenstein to a bank in Luxembourg. The rest of it, the IMB learned, had been sent to an account at the Commerzbank in Cologne, Germany.

 

The Borodianskys had been at this for several years. Using names such as Deck, Borod and Da Silva, in addition to the ones they chose for the Hennessy scam, they'd set up shell companies across Europe. There were at least four in Belgium, one in the Netherlands, one in Spain, five in Britain, two in Luxembourg, one in Hong Kong, and four in Germany. They are known to have sold 2000 tons of non-existent maize bound for Dakar, $2.6 million worth of non-existent commercial fertilizer bound for China, 6000 tons of non-existent steel bound for Vietnam, and 2000 tons of non-existent cement bound for Aqaba.

 

After IMB agents discovered that the Borodianskys had paid cash for at least one vessel, they were able to locate the ship and impound it. But they needed to prove that the men calling themselves Casimiro and Da Santos and Da Silva were in fact the Borodianskys. So they published a photo in a Norwegian shipping trade magazine and asked if anyone knew the whereabouts of these two men. A ship broker in London identified them immediately and provided enough information for the German police to find them.

 

For some reason, it took the Germans six days to arrest Charles Borodiansky. By then, Henri was gone. And three safe deposit boxes in which they'd supposedly hidden $3 million in freshly washed cash, were empty.

*****

 

 

Crooks aren't the only ones who launder money.

 

Corporations do it to avoid or evade taxes, to defraud their shareholders, to get around currency control regulations, to bribe prospective clients. That's what Enron was all about. But Enron was the only one, or even the first one. Long before Enron and its chairman Ken Lay formed several thousand shell companies in the Cayman Islands to wash money, Gulf Oil moved $4 million through the Bahamas to bribe Korean and Bolivian politicians, and the Lockheed Corporation laundered $25.5 million through a Liechtenstein trust to pay off Italian politicians. Lockheed also subscribed to the laundry facilities of Deak-Perera, then an important American foreign exchange dealer, to bribe Japanese politicians. At Lockheed's behest, Deak put $8.3 million into the washing cycle then brought it out as 15 untraceable payments to a Spanish priest in Hong Kong, who hand-carried the cash in flight bags and orange crates to Lockheed's customers in Tokyo.

 

Individuals do it to hide money from a divorcing spouse, or if they need to halt erosion of their assets by inventing a business deal that moves those assets through a shell company and into a less taxed jurisdiction. Italian designer Aldo Gucci washed more than $11 million through shell companies, stashing it in Hong Kong to keep it out of the hands of the IRS.

 

Governments have been known to do it as well, whether to subvert terrorists or to arm "freedom fighters." That's what Iran-Contra was all about.

 

In November 1986, Ronald Reagan confirmed the much-circulated rumor that the United States had surreptitiously sold arms to Iran. His initial version of the events was that this had been done to improve relations with Iran, not to obtain the release of American citizens held in the Middle East by terrorists. But that soon got changed to an embarrassed admission that indeed this had been an arms-for-hostages swap.

 

Although some elements of the scandal still remain clouded in mystery, it appears that the United States, with the help of Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, furnished the Iranians with weapons in exchange for payments that were then diverted to the Contra rebels to aid them in their fight against the Marxist regime in Nicaragua. All of this in direct violation of a Congressional prohibition on any such aid.

 

CIA Director William Casey wanted to find a way to open a dialogue with the Iranians, the direct route having been closed off by the arms embargo that followed the 1979 seizure of American hostages in Teheran. He turned to his old pal King Fahd, who had no trouble securing the services of Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Once touted as the richest man in the world - he never was, but for obvious reasons didn't spend a lot of time correcting that misconception - Khashoggi was a professional middleman, a globe-trotting broker who knew how to get a deal going and cut himself in on the action. Through him, two other players came on stage: Manucher Ghorbanifar, a Iranian middleman who, while having gone into exile at the same time as the Shah, still maintained high-level contacts with the Revolutionary Government; and Yaaccov Nimrodi, an Israeli with intelligence experience and considerable contacts in Teheran.

 

Enter Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, US Marine Corps, and deputy director of political affairs at the National Security Council. Beginning in late August or early September 1984 - working initially under the President's National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, and later in partnership with McFarlane's successor, Vice Admiral John Poindexter - North formulated, then executed the plan. Within a year, he'd convinced the Israelis to sell 500 U.S.-made TOW anti-tank missiles to Iran.

 

Because the contracts were guaranteed by Khashoggi, the Iranians paid him. He took his share, then passed the rest along to the Israelis. They paid North, who diverted the funds through Swiss banks, and on to the Contras. North recruited Richard Secord, a retired Air Force general, and Secord's business partner, Albert Hakim, an Iranian-American. The three were so successful that by early 1986 they'd managed to buy some 2000 TOW missiles from the CIA for $12 million and, again with the intervention of Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar, to sell them to the Iranians for $30 million.

 

In Switzerland, that money was washed through a dummy Panamanian company called Lake Resources. The chairman of Lake Resources was a Swiss accountant named Suzanne Hefti, who worked for Auditing and Fiduciary Services in Fribourg. Her firm was directly tied in to Stanford Technology Trading Group International, a California company controlled by Albert Hakim. In turn, Stanford Technology's Swiss affiliate was headed up by a man named Jean de Senarclens, who also happened to run an accounting firm in Geneva called CSF.

 

First, North moved money from Lake Resources’ Swiss account to a CSF account in the Cayman Islands. Next, a CSF subsidiary in Bermuda wired the money to Alban Values, a Panamanian corporation in which CSF owned an interest. Alban Values then sent it to Amalgamated Commercial Enterprises, a shell company registered in Panama but owned by a Miami freight carrier called Southern Air Transport. And they were the ones who actually supplied the Contras.

 

It's believed that in just two years, from 1984 to 1986, as much as $50 million might have gone this route. But the Contras claim they never got anywhere near that amount. Despite 250 hours of testimony before the Senate Select Committee on the Iran-Contra scandal, including sworn statements from 29 witnesses and some 250,000 pages of documents, it is unlikely that anyone will ever know the full extent to which the government joined the laundrymen in making a fortune evaporate.

 

One prominent variation on the government-as-laundryman theme is political insurance. Despots of all shapes and sizes insure against unexpected retirement by shifting money from their own national banking system into less hostile environments. Most of the more visible political heads of state throughout the Middle East and Africa have set up financial arrangements in Switzerland. Apparently, having them goes with the turf. The Shah of Iran hid a king's ransom in secret bank accounts as an emergency pension fund.

 

So did Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines. Hardly able to manage on a presidential salary of $4700, the couple reputedly stashed $5 to $10 billion in various parts of the world, much of it laundered through Hong Kong. According to the Philippine government commission originally assigned with tracking down the Marcos money, Ferdinand and Imelda used at least ten dummy corporations registered in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Panama, and the Dutch Antilles to get half the assets into the United States, a third into Switzerland, and the rest into France, England, Italy, Panama, and Australia. Recently, a stash of Marcos money was uncovered in the Cook Islands, although the bulk of it was lost when the local branch of BCCI went out of business.

 

Obsessed with secrecy, Ferdinand Marcos was committed to weaving an impenetrable web of deceit around his looted fortune. For instance, to purchase three buildings in Manhattan, he used three different bearer share companies registered in the Dutch Antilles, each of which was owned by a separate Panamanian bearer share company. In other words, whoever physically held the stock certificates owned the dummy company that owned the other dummy company and ultimately, the property. By making each and every transaction so complicated that no one could trace anything back to him, Marcos lost track of which name went on which account and which company controlled which property.

 

The Marcoses have since been accused of using the same dummy corporation formula to help friends finance property deals, among them, George Hamilton who purchased Charlie Chaplin's former home in Beverly Hills. Hamilton denied those allegations when they were lodged in a lawsuit against him and has since sold the house to a company registered in the Cayman Islands, rumored to be controlled by the Khashoggi family.

 

The Marcos' finances became such an international embarrassment that even the otherwise unblushable Swiss decided to give up on him. They froze nearly $1.5 billion in bank accounts he'd used, many of them ascribed to aliases, including 14 he'd set up in the names of various foundations.

 

Needless to say, Ferdinand and Imelda are not the only ones known to have gotten carried away with preparing their nest egg. The Ceausescus of Romania harbored stolen assets in Switzerland, as did most of Latin America's tin-pot dictators. The same goes for literally hundreds of former Communist officials, many of who raked in fortunes from drug trafficking. One of the most flagrant offenders was East Germany's Erich Honecker. It's no coincidence that a company registered in East Berlin, Novum Handelsgesellschaft, and controlled by an Austrian communist named Rudolfine Steindling, moved $260 million out of East Germany within hours of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The money was washed through the Z-Laenderbank - known as Bank Austria - and its subsidiary in Zurich, which was then called Bankfinanz. While $150 million was eventually transferred back to Communist party accounts in Vienna, at least $3 million was later withdrawn in cash.

 

It was standard procedure for Communist leaders to salt something away, hedging their bets, as it were, on the remote possibility that Marx and Lenin were wrong.

 

 

 

*****