And people have been laundering money so many interesting ways: casinos, of course, nightclubs....private schools...retail

...small local governments, maybe? https://twitter.com/ericgarland/status/1266957428593221640

Put Mob money, hypothetically, into small governments that keep inaccurate or non-existent records, and you could then maybe pay for bogus economic development, which would need...construction firms...

...and all those private firms could then pay campaign contributions.

This would require, of course, conspiracy between attorneys, accountants, the judiciary, and elected officials. If it were going on for decades, the only way to effectively avoid prosecution would be, like Donald Trump, to turn "CI," or confidential informant.

But...

*What if* somewhere around 2009-2013 the "CI" game that protected co-conspirators (because they helped law enforcement track/prosecute bigger bad guys) changed silently and, well, "bigly," if you will.

CI went from confidential informant...to counterintelligence.

What if, hypothetically of course, after the well-designed, timed "Crash (detonation) of 2008," transnational organized crime money flooded the United States, buying up "distressed assets," infiltrating pension funds and investment vehicles of all kinds?

A novel form of war.

Perhaps then, theoretically, the people who operated the money laundromat for mostly-domestic Mob syndicates (some who regularly assisted the @FBI and @USTreasury) found themselves out of the loop, because they now were part of a giant counterintelligence investigation.

It could be that those same operatives for organized crime/systemic corruption conducting business in plain sight for decades were now part of a covert war against the United States, Canada, the E.U., and democracy in general.

Failing to have understood the nature of capital that flooded their system post-Sept. 11, and thus failing completely to understand the seriousness of the intensification of those capital flows in 2009-2013, they might miss the connection with full-scale espionage Ops after 2014.

Well, if - hypothetically - they missed the change in the decades-old Mob laundromat for those 20 years, then the magnitude of the panic *by the Mob* after the accidental election of Donald Trump would also have flown right by them.

I guess, theoretically, that when suddenly regimes that acted one way suddenly *needed* entirely new legal and accounting structures overnight, they might not connect this to the counterintelligence clusterfail of that Mob money launder getting in the White House.

Then, as last-minute attempts to cover *decades* of illicit conspiracies failed, I imagine such stunned people (not all that sharp to begin with) might also miss the timing of certain sealed guilty pleas, among other massive, permanent shifts.

I would think that the savviest among such hypothetical players would have seen the last four years of FARA registrations, indictments, criminal informations, and tearful guilty pleas not as limited prosecutions, but a subtle map of who had flipped.

They would have flipped, too.

The savviest - who may have found the courage and skill to become the Next-Level Confidential Informant Determined to Not Die in Federal Penitentiary - would have also seen the coverup attempts at all level for what they were: the wheel spinning of the damned.

Hypothetically, law enforcement agencies in *every* major Western nation may have needed only a handful of the most-connected players to turn confidential informant to learn every link between foreign intelligence operatives and domestic crooks.

Normally - you know, hypothetically - one individual or another acting so untouchable might make the other crooks/spies nervous, but given how this phase of law enforcement/counterintelligence has been going on since the mid-1990s, everyone's gotten cocky. It wouldn't stick out.

I mean, this hypothetical dynamic might explain why people from Jared Kushner on down have had zero compunction about sending WhatsApp messages to foreign dictators whereas their ancestors spoke in code, often in a foreign language - and even then nowhere near a phone.

I guess despite all of the investigations edging so close to a brazenly interconnected network of money laundering attached to activities so above-board that they can't *not* be prosecuted, crooks kept criming like usual.

Each hypothetical prosecution helping the next.

ANYHOW, I guess I'm glad I don't have to suddenly invent 10 years of back-dated accounting entries, explain why some trucker paid my city hall $10,000 for a speeding ticket in cash, or how many elected officials got "dark money" through an activity I've kept secret.

*Whew!*

Yet that does appear to be the near-term future of some individuals.

I imagine they're almost ironically pleased their metro areas might be rocked by riots. It pauses the inexorable hurtling toward an uncertain fog that may seem to contain a whole lot of doom.

But that's hypothetical.

In the real world, I'm sure *lots* of local executives are able to explain why local courts where they live have the right to seize yachts and other assets in far away countries.

Which is good. It might be required.

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