"From whom?"

"He makes a point not to inquire too closely, but his primary client is a big-time Los Angeles drug dealer, ostensibly doing business in scrap gold. Beck also dry-cleans money for a major pornography mill and a syndicate that runs a network of hookers and whorehouses down in San Diego County. Guys in the sin trades accumulate millions in cash and what can they do with it? Live lavishly and your neighbors will start to wonder about the source of your wealth. So will the IRS, the DEA, and half a dozen other government agencies. There's never a shortage of folks who need to run dirty money through the sluice and have it come up clean. The neat thing from Beck's perspective is that, until recently, what he's doing wasn't illegal in and of itself."

"You're kidding."

"Nope. Last year Congress passed the Money Laundering Control Act. Before that, the same basic transactions might have been the focus of an investigation or subject to prosecution under some other statute, but the laundering itself wasn't a crime. Sorry to be so long-winded. Bear with me on this."

"Don't worry about it. Most of this is news to me."

"Me, too. From what I'm told, the groundwork was laid in 1970 when the Bank Secrecy Act was passed. The BSA established reporting regulations for financial institutions – banks, brokerage houses, currency dealers, anybody issuing traveler's checks, money orders, shit like that. They're required to report certain transactions to the Secretary of the Treasury within fifteen days on a form called the Currency Transaction Report – the CTR – for any transaction over ten thousand dollars. Are you following?"

"More or less. How do you know all this stuff?"

"Most of it I picked up from my IRS pal in the past couple of months. He says in addition to the CTR, there's something called a Currency and Monetary Instrument Report, the CMIR. This is for the people who physically receive or transport cash – carry it, mail it, ship it – again, that's in any amount over ten thousand dollars. There's another form for casinos, but we don't have to worry about that here. Far as we know, Beck doesn't have ties to any of the big gambling operations, though that's another nice way to scrub a load of cash and get it squeaky clean.

"The government relies on financial institutions to track the flow of cash through the system. Obviously, there's nothing illegal about dealing in large sums as long as all the proper forms get filed. Try to bypass that and you're subject to severe penalties – assuming you're caught, of course. Beck made a point of cultivating a bunch of banker pals and for a period, he was bribing one of them to look the other way. The bank officer would prepare the CTR as required and place a copy in the files, only instead of shipping the original to the IRS, he'd run it through a shredder. Problem is, the banks tend to move these executives from branch to branch, and Beck lost his co-conspirator. That's how he came to the attention of Internal Revenue. Some new VP at Santa Teresa Savings and Loan noticed a pattern of small deposits that he was pretty sure were all linked to Beck or Beck's company. He's been breaking the big deposits into a series of smaller transactions, hoping to skirt the ten-thousand-dollar requirement for a government report. This is the fundamental maneuver in any laundering operation. It's called structuring, or 'smurfing.' Beck employed a regular road crew of smurfs, who'd go from bank to bank here in town – sometimes from city to city – buying cashier's checks or money orders in the smaller dollar amounts – two grand, five, sometimes as much as nine, but never over ten. The dribbles and drabs were deposited piecemeal into a single account, and then Beck would use wire transfers to move the whole of it to a couple of offshore banks. After that, he'd funnel it back to his clients in a more respectable form.

"Anyway, while all this was going on, the DEA was following the money from the other end, tracking funds through the system from a cartel importing marijuana and cocaine into Los Angeles. At some point, the two paths intersected and a red flag went up. I'd met the IRS investigator at a conference in B.C. about four years back. Shortly after that, he got assigned to the L.A. office to coordinate the task force. Once Beck's name surfaced, the focus shifted to him. The agent, Vince Turner, asked me to act as the local interface. His guys are keeping a low profile because the feds are trying to build a case without Beck's getting wind of it."

"Oh, good luck. In this town?"

"We're well aware," he said. "So far they've initiated mail and trash covers and they've been running surveillance, covering his movements in and out of the country. What they need now is an informant, which is where Reba Lafferty comes in."