The Distinguished Gentleman and Political Money Laundering

Money laundering is the oldest crime in politics (with the possible exeception of assassination). Finding creative ways to funnel cash to supporters in exchange for votes or, even worse, funneling it directly into the pockets of powerful politicians, is a crime as old as our country.

Literally… the origins of Tammany Hall and its elaborate and infamous systems of political patronage, bribery and graft go all the way back to 1789… when America itself was still but an infant in its crib.

Most of the time when we think of “Money Laundering” we think of The Mob laundering drug money… Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in a cinderblock room ostentatiously smoking a cigar and pumping money through a cash sorter as the DEA watches through a rather obvious hole in the wall clock. But the truth is that The Mob are pikers compared to Politicians. No one has ever been as clever or innovative when it comes to R&D in the Money Laundering business as our Political Elite. And no one has ever been as shameless about it, either.

Quite often the laundering of political cash happens right out in the open, almost as if our Politicians are daring us to do anything about it. Such is the case with the “book advance” scam that has become de riguer in American Politics. The $5.1 million dollar advance Andrew Cuomo got for his book about his response to COVID is only the lastest link in a long LONG chain of such scams. The scam is so old and so common, that it was a critical joke and plot line in a fantastically underrated Eddie Murphy comedy from the 90’s called THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN.

That was 1992 folks… Since then we’ve had a slew of embarrassingly obvious political book sales scams from the Baltimore Mayor selling $800,000 worth of copies of her children’s book to her own city, to the $2 million advance for Hunter Biden’s book (which has sold 11,000 copies to date), all the way down to the current scandal… $5 million for Andrew Cuomo’s book book about how he so efficiently killed Grandma, which will not even generate half that much in retail sales.

How brazen is this scam? Well, let’s put it this way… at least Tony Montana was selling something people actually wanted to buy.

Let me let you in on a secret… publishing houses are not in the business of losing money on books, and they’re not stupid. If they’re not making their money back on Hunter Biden or Andrew Cuomo’s book advances, then they are getting something else, somewhere, somehow. I’ll leave it up to your imagination to wonder what that might be and how much of it might wind up in the pockets of “The Big Guy.”.

It’s fair to ask, at this point, what in the blue hell the FBI is doing… besides tracking down grandmas who were in D.C. on January 6th, I mean.

And don’t look for any help from the media either… google “huge political book advances that make no sense” and you’ll get a dozen links to articles in outlets like the WaPo, NYT, and The Hill about GOP literary money laundering involving the likes of Dan Crenshaw and Ted Cruz, and exactly zero links covering the much more egregious Cuomo or Biden advances.

And neither Ted Cruz nor Dan Crenshaw was invited on every single TV news outlet to shill, unchallenged, for their books either… as both Cuomo and Biden were.

So weird!