Wayne Madsen has proposed that Bernie Madoff laundered embezzled money through Israel. (See

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Madsen mentions that longtime Madoff associate and booster Ezra Merkin recently acquired Bank Leumi, the National Bank of Israel.



While a bank is useful in a money-laundering scheme and Israel's general lack of financial transparency is really helpful, you really need businesses, whose profits are not so easily tied to its costs and whose revenue sources are cash or hard to trace.



Historically chains of pizzerias were used by the Sicilian Mafia, and then they found that laundramats were even better. In modern times, hi-tech and especially software firms seem to have been used -- especially startups because as the dirty money becomes clean it can be used to show the profitability necessary for a lucrative IPO.



A criminal conspiracy may actually make more money with a fraudulent IPO than with the original crimes. This type of leveraged money-laundering requires a respectable (we know what that means) (probably US) investment bank.



I am not suggesting that Madsen is wrong, but he needs both to identify a few more elements to the scheme and also to investigate the role of "regulators," for the power of corrupt Jewish networking in securities regulation even astounded me in the case of Madoff because apparently no one ever tried to match even one vapor transaction by Madoff's hedge fund with any real transaction with any bank or brokerage firm.