Dirty money is clean money – that’s the most important thing to understand. If money is stained, wrinkled, crumpled, rusted, bent, dyed, burned or soiled it means that it’s good. It means that it’s been in circulation and its serial numbers are valid and untracked. It means that no one is looking for it, or if they are, they won’t find it.
The only problem is that banks and shops and businesses aren’t too keen on handling dirty cash and it’s surprising how often money can get like that. Sometimes quite large amounts of money can end up dirty, and when that happens – and if you want to spend your dirty cash – then you need someone to clean it. That’s where I come in.
I launder money, literally – not figuratively. I’m a literal kind of man.
Laundering money in the sense of hiding it from the taxman or legitimising money that was appropriated in a criminal fashion is illegal, whereas cleaning money literally – not figuratively – isn’t a crime.
I’m no crook, but most of my best customers are. You shouldn’t be too surprised at that. You see most people don’t ever see really dirty money. Most people look after their money quite carefully and keep almost all of it in the bank. If the note in your pocket is a bit dog-eared then the bank will take it out of circulation and replace it with a crisp new one. My customers on the other hand have a slightly different relationship with cash. Their cash tends to move around in bulk. Strange things can happen to it. Often my customers can’t put their cash in a bank. Not straightaway at least – especially not if they’ve just had to make a rapid, and armed, withdrawal of their funds.
One of my better paying jobs is dealing with 1-methylamino-anthraquinone. If you don’t know what that is, then let me tell you.
It’s red.
It’s really really red and if you see it on a bank note it means that at some point in the life of that note someone not very competent stole it.
1-methylamino-anthraquinone is the red dye they use in the dye packs that banks – and anyone else that deals with any quantity of cash – keep in their cash drawers and safes.
If some Charlie Chalk fancies his chances with a sawn-off and a fast pair of Reeboks and swipes a bag from an establishment employing such devices, he might have as long as ten seconds after the dye pack is activated by a radio transmitter mounted in the frame of the doorway before it explodes. As well as releasing an aerosol of 1-methylamino-anthraquinone the dye pack will also normally produce large amounts of red smoke and will burn at a temperature of around 200 degrees Celsius. It’s not uncommon for shotgun Charlie to leave his stash there on the pavement. If he manages to get away with it, his cash will almost certainly be – to put it kindly – in a right state.
I don’t deal with clowns like that directly. What normally happens is that our bottom feeder talks to his slightly wiser associates and they talk to their own criminal mentors and so on all the way up the food chain until somebody who actually knows something gets to find out about the ruined loot and buys it off him for a fraction of what it was once worth. Then they come and see me.
I take five percent of most jobs.
It’s a living.
1-methylamino-anthraquinone is a bugger to get out. There’s no Stain Devil will shift it, it shrugs off bleach and commercial solvents and no acid that won’t also dissolve the paper can touch it either.
Actually, that’s not quite true. Anyone could mix up a few of the chemicals you can buy down near the toilet brushes in Tesco’s and get it out. The problem is that you’d also end up shifting the all-important ink that tells everyone else that this really is a fifty pound note and not just a piece of paper that’s the same size and shape. To mix up something that will get just the red out – and to apply it properly – well that takes a bit of skill, a bit of know-how.
That takes me.
I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve got most stains out of most kinds of money. Blood, ash, mud, ink, excrement, ultra-violet chemical dyes, smart water – you name it. Recently I’ve been experimenting with some of these new Australian notes. It’s interesting really – quite a challenge. Plastic money people call it, but actually they are made of polypropylene polymer. They shrug of most kinds of muck, are very difficult to crease and if they get hot enough to burn they go up pretty fiercely so you don’t often see smoke or fire damaged ones.
The problem is that the old dye from the dye packs didn’t stick too well to them, so the company that makes the packs has come up with something new. Something that sticks to the polymer and that won’t clean off.
It’s doing my head in, I can tell you.
It’s Tuesday and I’m sat at the counter in the shop, working on the Australian problem, surfing a very interesting page at the University of Columbia that has a lot of information about chemical dyes and solvents, when Wladislaw comes in.
Actually, I say shop, but that might give you the wrong impression. It’s not on a high street with little tiny panes of bull’s-eye glass in the window and a fine selection of clean banknotes in the window. It’s more of a workshop really – a little unit on a light industrial estate – handy for the city but still cheap. The sort of place where no one asks too much about what you’re doing as long as you pay the rent on time.
‘S’bloody noisy in here Dave innit?’ says Wladislaw.
Wladislaw is the criminal equivalent of that Polish plumber we hear so much about these days. He’s been in town for a couple of years and is slowly working his way up the criminal career ladder. In a fine example of commerce bringing nations together, Wladislaw seems to have ended up working more or less full time for Dmitri Korsakov, head of one of the Russian syndicates.
I don’t know where Wladislaw lives or spends his time but his English got horribly mangled somewhere along the way. His accent makes him sound like one of those Russian generals off the old James Bond films, but he speaks more like the kids that hang around the precinct and would mug you soon as look at you.
‘Got some coins in. Doing someone a favour,’ I say. Which is sort-of-true. Out the back I’ve got an old top loader washing machine that I use for coins. You don’t often get coins, but when you do there’s normally lots of them. Not worth anyone’s time otherwise. Yesterday an old acquaintance of mine came in with the cash tank from a Space Invaders machine that someone had dug up on a building site. According to him the machine must have been twenty years old, probably robbed and dumped in a hole when whatever it is his pal is now knocking down was going up. Inside the tank was a load of coins all corroded together. Probably half of them are out-of circulation denominations now, but I told him I’d take a look and after soaking them in a weak acid for a bit to break the lump up back into coins, I put them in the top loader with some of Dave’s patented magic coin solution and set them going for an hour or so. Wladislaw is therefore correct to observe that it is quite noisy in the shop this morning.
Continuing in the spirit of pointing out the obvious I say, ‘You’ve got something on your tie.’
Wladislaw smiles his wide smile as he looks down at the baby that he is carrying strapped to his front in one of those harness things.
‘Is Masha innit? She got to work and leave me holding bloody baby!’ he says, trying to sound cross but actually still grinning from ear to ear, thrilled to be showing off his daughter.
Masha is Wladislaw’s girl. I don’t know if she’s Polish or Russian or what but she works for Dmitri too, in one of his nightclubs. It’s not an ideal place to work, but the only time I ever saw Masha she was giving Dmitri a right piece of her mind in a language that he understood, and that I didn’t have to to get the gist of, so I reckon she can look after herself alright.
The baby can’t be more than six months old. She has a wide Slavic face and crazy hair – a genuinely cute baby. She looks a lot like Masha.
‘What’s her name?’ I ask, holding out one of the purple polypropylene notes for her to play with.
‘Yulia,’ says Wladislaw, like he’s saying the best word in the world.
Yulia’s wide brown eyes have a sort of slant to them and she fixes them on the Australian twenty-dollar bill. As she reaches for it she drops a little green doll that is clothed in traditional Russian dress. The doll is clipped to Yulia’s dungarees with a coiled luminous bungee cord. She pulls the note to her with a little pink fist and I pick up the doll.
‘She always dropping,’ says Wladislaw explaining the bungee cord,’present from her babushka. If I lose her, Masha kill me innit!’ he laughs.
I offer him the doll. Wladislaw dumps a cotton cash bag on the counter and takes the doll from me and tucks it into the front pocket of Yulia’s dungarees.
It is Tuesday. The cash bag contains the weekly dregs scraped from the tills and cash registers of Dmitri’s various semi-legitimate enterprises. Dmitri uses these places to launder money figuratively – not literally – and to employ illegal immigrants that have stumped up cash in Russia to get here and to front a number of other activities that the authorities would be interested in knowing about. As such he tries to keep attention away from them and so any funny money that ends up in his tills he sends to me. It’s normally about five hundred quid a week. I spent about one pound fifty on solvents, two hours putting it all through various washes and rinses and pocket fifty quid. It’s not big business, but its regular and it means Dmitri and I have a solid working relationship which is worth a lot more than fifty quid.
I root through the cash bag while Wladislaw teases Yulia with the five dollar bill. Mostly 1-methylamino-anthraquinone staining and also a few fifties that look like they have been bleached beyond repair – I doubt that I can do much with them – it happens sometimes. I’ll tally up what I can for Dmitri when Wladislaw comes to collect them on Thursday.
Incidentally, you shouldn’t get the wrong idea about all these stained notes knocking around. There aren’t that many armed robberies, it’s just that when they do happen it’s a lot of money that gets nicked and if it gets into circulation it can take a lot of getting out again. Most legitimate places don’t take money that’s stained like that, and most illegitimate places don’t either, which all adds up to me seeing a lot of it.
I stuff the bag under the counter and catch sight of the closed circuit monitor under the counter. There’s a huge black Mercedes parked right outside.
‘Are those your wheels outside?’ I ask Wladislaw.
‘Oh yeah, Dmitri make me head driver now, not just delivery boy. I drive him. I make meetings. Is very good.’
I nod. I like Wladislaw and I hope he knows what he’s gotten into.
‘Just make sure you keep looking in the mirror,’ I say.
He prises the purple bank note from Yulia and gives it to me.
‘See you Thursday!’ he says and leaves blowing raspberries and talking nonsense to his daughter.
It’s a busy morning. Just a few minutes later – suspiciously soon in fact, almost as if he was waiting for Wladislaw to leave – Arkady drops by. Arkady is a Georgian, and a nasty piece of work. It’s funny, the Georgians that got dragged over with the first wave of Russians seemed to be interested in just getting down to business as quickly as possible. Granted, that meant that sometimes they had to show what was what and things sometimes got a bit ugly, but by and large they’re just in it for the money. In the last few years though there’s been a new wave of them – a nasty bunch who seem to get their jollies by raising the stakes for no reason. It’s something to do with civil wars down that way or terrorists or some such. Anyway, I don’t trust them and Arkady is one of the worst of the bunch. If I had my way I wouldn’t deal with them at all, but saying no to someone like Arkady wouldn’t be the wisest of career moves.
He’s here picking up. One thousand two hundred US dollars in twenty-dollar bills. Sixty pieces of paper in pretty good nick except that most of them have been heavily stained a sort of rust-brown. It’s a familiar colour and only one thing in the world can make money look like that.
How it got on the money I don’t know and I don’t want to know – getting it off is simplicity itself.
If Arkady had any sense at all he wouldn’t even be here chipping me in for my fifty quid. Two tablets of Persil biological, dissolved in two litres of water, ideally warmed to about forty degrees. Leave the notes to soak for about two hours. That gives the enzymes plenty of time to work, then just rinse them off, leave them to stand in clean water for an hour or so and hang them out to dry. Good as new.
Arkady inspects the notes. He’s a big man – fat neck, fat fingers. He counts through the bills, taking one out at random to inspect it more closely. Peers at it, sniffs it, then nods.
‘Is good work,’ he says and slaps down a fifty on the counter. As I take it, I make sure to pass it under the ultraviolet glow of my angle poise lamp. It looks genuine, and I’ve seen enough funny money in my time to be able to tell the difference.
He gives me an odd look and says,’We do more business soon Dave.’ Just like that. Not a promise or a threat, just a statement of fact, and then he’s gone and I don’t care where to.
I got nearly seventy quid out of the Space Invader, but thirty of that was in old five pence pieces that are no good to anyone. When Wladislaw came on Thursday he didn’t come alone, but this time he wasn’t with Yulia, he was with Dmitri and one of Dmitri’s goons.
Dmitri is Old Russian. Old in the sense that he’s been a local fixture since about 1990 when opportunities started to open up for ambitious businessmen like him. They had a tough time of it in the early days some of those Russians. Had to learn the ropes, establish some form and some respect. Things got a bit nasty for a while, everyone trying to be more ruthless than the next man, but it settled down again once everyone understood how things were. I respect Dmitri. He doesn’t do things for show. Doesn’t mess around. Just wants to make some money and keep things civilised and simple. Don’t get me wrong, he’s as big a villain as you’ll find, but he’s the kind that tries to be a businessman rather than a psychopath.
‘Dave, I need you look at something,’ Dmitri says. The goon steps forward, reaches into his inside pocket and pulls out a long slim Ziploc bag with a banknote in it. I recognise it straightaway, it’s a 500-euro note and it looks a lot cleaner than most of the paperwork that comes my way.
The 500-euro note has been something of a boon to some of my international customers. You can get 200 of them in a cigarette packet. That’s one hundred thousand euros, slipped into a jacket pocket, or buried at the bottom of a suitcase. Trafficking funny money has never been so easy.
‘Is real. Looks clean, but microdot,’ says a disgusted Dmitri.
I open the Ziploc bag and slip the note out onto the counter and then switch on my angle poise UV light and shine it on the note.
Dmitri’s telling the truth.
Under the weird blue light a constellation of purple stars twinkles back at me. I turn round to the other counter, switch the UV light on there and slip the note under the microscope. The microscope is attached to a TV monitor and I pan the note around at 10 times magnification until I find one of the spots and then zoom in to 500 times. The little spot has ‘AFGX-1469938-PKHU’ printed on it. Jolly clever the microdots.
‘I can’t remove these,’ I say to Dmitri,’only mask them. Good for use on the street, but not over the counter at a bank.’
‘Da,’ Dmitri nods philosophically,’we know this. We have many notes. One thousand, maybe more. We need quick job. One day.’
‘Five percent,’ I say. It’s a big cut for such a large job.
Dmitri looks shocked, it’s part of the game,’Two.’
‘Three.’
Dmitri looks unhappy for a moment and then breaks into a broad smile. He holds out his hand. I take it and he crushes it in his great bear grip,’Dave, you are honest man. Good man. We do business. Tomorrow, early, we bring money.’
Three percent of half a million euros is about ten grand. Not bad for a day’s work.
But the money doesn’t come the next morning. In the afternoon, I have a snooze in the workshop and then sit up late, watching Newsnight and then some daft film. I must have nodded off again. When I wake up there’s some documentary on. It’s in Welsh. It’s got subtitles. I look at the clock. It’s 3AM and there’s a banging sound echoing through the workshop.
I change the channel on the TV so that it’s showing the closed circuit signal. I see Arkady standing outside, holding a black bin bag in one hand and thumping on the shutters with the other.
‘Alright!’ I shout and he stops banging.
I really don’t want to let him in, but as I say, if you don’t deal with people like Arkady, they make sure that you don’t deal with anyone at all. I push the button that starts to roll the shutters up. When it’s gone halfway, Arkady reaches under it, opens the door and ducks through. He swaggers over to the counter. He seems drunk or high, or both, but still in control of himself. He seems confident and relaxed.
He dumps the black plastic bag down on the counter. Whatever is in there is quite heavy, probably a briefcase.
‘Is money. More than hundred thousand. Is dirty, also is microdot tracer. You clean. Remove tracer. Five percent. Tomorrow we collect.’
His eyes look strange. He’s definitely on something. I’m not going to say no to anything at this point.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ I say – he’s not in any condition to argue with. Arkady has a nasty temper at the best of times and it’s three in the morning and he’s as high as a kite. He nods and then leaves without a care in the world as if he has just dropped off a suit at the dry cleaners.
I guess that’s a kind of compliment.
I open the bin liner, and pull it down over the thing inside it. It’s a baby’s car seat. There’s a little door open on the back of it that gives access to a kind of cubbyhole. I can smell talcum powder and baby oil. I turn the seat around on the counter top. The seat cushion is made from a yellow material that has little pictures of safari animals on it.
There are two bullet holes, about six inches apart.
White foam mushrooms out of the cushion where the material has been punctured. A headless giraffe. Just the trunk left of an elephant now blown away.
Big game hunting. They are big holes from big bullets. The material of the cushion is stained rust brown all over.
I turn the seat side of the thing away from me, break the door off the cubbyhole and begin to pull the contents of the chair out quickly, like I’m taking the giblets out of a turkey – an unpleasant job that needs to be done quickly. A punctured bottle of baby oil; the empty husk of an exploded bottle of talcum powder; two disposable nappies that have been torn to pieces; three sealed and wrapped plastic packages of bank notes; one packet of notes that has been punctured and blown open; four great sticky handfuls of notes matted together and everything covered in a foul daub of absorbent nappy filling, baby oil, talcum powder and – yes – blood, that has congealed into its rust form but is so mixed with the oil that it still spreads onto everything and fills the air with the smell of iron.
The notes are euros – 500-euro notes. I take hold of the seat roughly with both hands, as if to punish it and tip it up, shaking it to see if there is anything left inside. Something rattles, rolls around in the cavity and then drops onto the filthy counter between the wraps of notes. A tangle of luminous cord. A little green doll.
I don’t know how long I stand there – looking at the eviscerated car seat, trying to read the future in its bloody entrails. Under the UV light the microdots glimmer.
I tell myself that somewhere out there, things are being put right. I think about the time I saw Masha screaming at Dmitri. Maybe that’s happening right now. The Russians know a thing or two about settling scores. Maybe there are wheels being set in motion, the world being put back into balance – a wrong being righted. I try to tell myself that that’s how it all works – that everything will come out in the wash.
I begin to process the notes. It’s important to try and get things clean. I work blindly, almost mechanically, wiping and rinsing even though I know – even though I’ve always known.
Some stains never come out.