Welcome back to bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today we're talking about money laundering.

My guest recently wrapped up a 22-year career with the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He's currently

an anti-money laundering consultant with the Department of Justice

and the founding partner of AML Aware, providing AML compliance training programs to the government

and financial and insurance companies. John Madinger, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me.

Okay, John, I've already confessed to you that my core understanding of money laundering comes from that nail salon scene in Breaking Bad, where Saul uses cotton balls and Q-tips to explain to Jesse how to launder his drug money.

With that admission in mind, why don't you explain what money laundering is, and then we'll turn to how companies can protect themselves against it.

Okay, well, the breaking bad scene with Saul, I've seen the episode, and it's really pretty good.

It's very, very accurate.

He breaks it down for the drug dealers and comes up with sort of a standard money laundering scheme,

which he offers to Jesse and, as I recall, Skyler and Walt.

So that was pretty accurate, actually,

and that's a good, it gives you a good sense of what's involved in the money laundering process.

What he did was he broke it up into the three

recognized sort of stages or phases of the money laundering. They call it a cycle. It's not really a

cycle because if cycle you wind up back where you were at the beginning, money lauders definitely don't

want that. But he actually, he does. He actually refers by name to placement, layering, and integration.

How, right?

So those, I guess, are the stages you're talking about.

How do those usually play out?

For the most part, crime is a cash business.

I mean, you do a lot of work with financial crimes,

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