A Whole Latte Trouble

As you all know, I'm working on the first draft of Book Two in the DA series. A Whole Latte Trouble is about drugs. Guns. And rock'n'roll. Just kidding. Actually, it's the first two, money laundering...and one of Draven's favorite places. Shhh! Don't tell her. At least, not yet. She's going to be highly ticked when she finds out.

As a writer, one of the many things I love to do is research. Even though I write fiction, there's always a bit of truth in my stories. Well, in all stories for that matter. Dan Poynter has a great e-newsletter called Publishers Marketplace where you can place an ad if you're looking for info. That's where I found the owner of a gun shop...who also knew a little sumpin'-sumpin' about drugs. I don't know if that's a good thing or not, but among other things, he gave me a couple of links to check out. One of which was the DEA website.

But I digress.

The one subject I didn't know a whole lot about was money laundering. I was under the mistaken impression that it was like embezzlement, but it's not. It took a little bit of time, but I found a pretty comprehensive money laundering investigation site that also covers the additional aspect of hidden assets. Basically, money laundering is the criminal practice of filtering funds gained illegally, such as through the sale and distribution of drugs (“dirty” money), through a series of transactions in which the funds are “cleaned” so that they appear to result from legal activities. One of the more common methods is wire transfers (y'know those spammy emails you all get from people in foreign countries?)

So here's the sitch: there's this guy that owns a few businesses who, well, dabbles in other stuff. To hide the extra cash he's making from the stuff he's been dabbling in, he has to do the Greenback Shuffle. Now, more often than not, the employees get screwed. Harsh though it may sound, it seems that employees are always the last to know. It could take years for them to find out what happened, in which they'd have to hire a private investigator to conduct an unsolved crime investigation to get the answers.

That's not going to happen this time. You know why?

It's Assignment #2 and Draven's On The Case.

Labels: Book Stuff, Life in General