September 15, 2005

return of the smurf

some of you may remember an entry from long ago (see january 21 here), one from my blog infancy, in which i discussed my great love for and my adamant belief in the utility of the word "smurf" and all its derivations.

you might've thought smurf had faded into obsolescence since then... i was beginning to think that myself. until yesterday...

so i'm in criminal law class, and we're discussing the criminal prosecution of an individual who had "structured" his monetary transactions... basically, he had a $100,000 debt to pay at a casino, but if he paid cash directly to them, they'd have to report it, and if he got a money order from a bank for more than $10,000 at a time, they'd have to report it. so, he made a series of deposits for less than $10,000 at various banks, and then turned all the money orders into the casino at once. pretty clever, but he got caught and prosecuted anyway.

all of this is seeming pretty run of the mill until, in the course of the class discussion, my professor says, "by the way, for those of you who don't know, this is known to those in the business as 'smurfing.'"

wha?!?! illegally structuring transacations is smurfing?!

"yes," he proceeds, "the image is one of all these little blue guys going around to different banks with small sums of money... and they all seem like harmless little things, but the overall effect is pretty sneaky, and you can prosecute it. so that's what the cognizanti call it--smurfing."

beautiful. just beautiful.

Posted by naseem at September 15, 2005 10:38 PM
Comments

i love it! but why is having a debt at a casino against the law?

Posted by: meisa at September 16, 2005 09:23 AM

Amazing! What I like most is that it implies sneakiness. Muhaha.

Posted by: lacey at September 16, 2005 11:08 AM

Smurfs are good at laundry

Posted by: greg at September 16, 2005 12:34 PM

that is the coolest thing evah! seriously.

Posted by: delara at September 16, 2005 05:59 PM

Maybe I should hire a smurf to eherm...launder our laundry.

Posted by: lacey at September 19, 2005 12:30 PM

And when I say, "launder," I mean "legally use a washing machine to clean garments."

Posted by: lacey at September 19, 2005 12:31 PM

is there any way to play this into the smurfs are communists discussion?

Posted by: Stephen A. Fuqua at September 20, 2005 09:11 PM

oh stephen, of course it can. in fact, you can weave almost anything into the discussion of smurfs as communists. :)

and meis, it's not having a debt at a casino that's illegal. it's breaking up a transaction to evade a financial institution's reporting requirement -- apparently, that's a provision of the federal money laundering suppression act of 1994. now you know.

Posted by: nas at September 22, 2005 09:14 PM