re: This painting from Cy Twombly sold for 41.6 million last year

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Explain to me how this works, in your opinion? If I have 42 million dollars of drug money and I spend it on a painting, that's not laundering it, that's spending it.

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You took money earned through illicit means, then purchased a "clean" asset worth the same $ amount. Sell that asset for the same or more amount of money, and suddenly you possess $42M that has a paper trail of where it came, an art sale. Do this enough times or through enough intermediaries and it gets very hard to track the original source of the cash.

quote:

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Explain to me how this works, in your opinion? If I have 42 million dollars of drug money and I spend it on a painting, that's not laundering it, that's spending it.

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Very little oversight into art dealings (or used to be).

In my understanding, which is limited, you'd buy the art with drug money through a shell/holding company which no one cares about. Anonymous buyers and sellers are very common in the art world. Then transfer asset to another and sell the art a few years later for clean money.

It's more complicated than that though.