Wall Street: The Laundry of Drug Trafficking and Fentanyl

Published at: 13/02/2026 06:09 PM

There is very little talk about this, but there are data to confirm that Wall Street, the financial center that controls money in the world, is based on drug laundering.

The director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio María Costa, stated that there is evidence that profits from organized crime were the only liquid investment capital available to some banks on the brink of collapse in 2008 and, as a result, at least 352 billion dollars from drug trafficking was absorbed into the economic system.

Costa , in an interview with the Observer news portal, stated that “drug money kept the financial system afloat during the height of the global crisis and in many cases, money from drug trafficking was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and, therefore, liquid capital became an important factor.”

According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, money laundering is “the way in which someone or some organization cleans illegally obtained profits, or dirty money. It usually involves three steps: placement, stratification and integration, so that illegitimate funds can become part of the financial system.”

Anti-money laundering (ALD) regulations were born as part of the Monetary and Foreign Transactions Registration Act (more commonly known as the Bank Secrecy Act ), passed by Congress in 1970 to track the millions of dollars that were laundered through U.S. banks. Specifically, it required financial institutions to keep records of any cash transaction exceeding $10,000 and to report suspicious financial activity. Anti-money laundering regulations became even more important after September 11, 2001, as money laundering generally funds terrorism .

But this practice is not new, money laundering in the United States dates back to the early 1920s, when members of the mafia and organized crime earned enormous sums of money through illegal gambling, alcohol smuggling and other clandestine activities. They needed a way to legitimately justify these funds, and they came up with the idea of buying laundries. Laundromats were a business that only accepted cash, but over time, even laundromats couldn't explain how they were so profitable.

Meyer Lansky , a contemporary of the famous gangster Al Capone, became the father of money laundering. He was determined to avoid the fate of this mobster (a conviction for tax evasion in 1931) and was responsible for discovering how to use the Swiss banking system to hide his growing cash reserves. Lansky developed the first real money laundering technique, which consisted of depositing money received illegally in a Swiss bank and then lending it to other foreign banks to legitimate it.

In any country, the laundering of money derived from drug trafficking is considered a criminal activity that has structurally permeated the country's banking and financial system. However, U.S. authorities tend to deny the country 's link to this phenomenon and outsource responsibility to foreign actors such as the cartels, accused of exploiting the U.S. financial system to launder their profits.

Despite this, entities such as the Department of Justice or the Department of the Treasury have been forced to recognize that the banking business of that country offers multiple advantages and facilities for money laundering and drug trafficking, since it has regulatory and technological aspects that are highly beneficial to this criminal activity.

This implies admitting, by conscience or omission, that the United States is a country favorable to laundering drug trafficking profits, whose transactional facilities make this place a global money launder, with no competitors.

Systemic complicity of US banks in drug trafficking

A recent report from the Financial Crime Control Network (FINCEN), an office under the U.S. Department of the Treasury, entitled “Analysis of financial trends. Illicit financing related to fentanyl: threat patterns and trends for 2024” exposes the structural links between money laundering and the U.S. banking system, in relation to fentanyl.

The report revealed that, according to the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), 57% of financial transactions carried out by money service companies , including traditional banks and platforms for exchanging American currencies and remittances, are related to fentanyl.

Thanks to the BSA, suspicious incidents of money laundering or financial crimes are detected and reported. The data suggests that money laundering operations linked to fentanyl profits occur primarily in this segment of the financial system.

Following the premises of the report, the technological flexibility and multiple payment mechanisms of these banking services facilitate the laundering of money from drug traffickers, guarantee secure connectivity with foreign countries and provide money laundering through the use of various currencies and transactional options. In other words , this operational and transactional efficiency maximizes the money-laundering possibilities of drug trafficking.

Later, the FINCEN report highlights that densely populated states such as California, Florida and New York record the highest number of incidents related to money-laundering activities involving fentanyl and The National Treasury Office finds it logical in this finding that stable fentanyl trafficking networks operate in these cities, so carrying out the money laundering activity in banks in these states represents an incentive to reduce risks.

It was also added in that report that “other states with large urban areas that have established drug distribution networks and can serve as collection points for the laundering of illicit profits, such as Texas, Massachusetts, Georgia , Washington and Illinois, also figured prominently in the BSA reports.”

The report also showed that money laundering operations in the US have expanded with the use of cryptocurrencies, mainly Bitcoin, P2P payment mechanisms and the use of cash, which is the formula that continues to be the most relevant for money laundering operations. According to FINCEN, these are new trends that are raising the level of sophistication of drug traffickers.

Another publication, in 2024, by the U.S. Sentencing Commission , an official body of the Federal Government, revealed interesting facts about the characteristics of the crime of money laundering, over a period from 2020 to 2024. It addressed the phenomenon based on statistics of judicial cases, a useful record for understanding the wide plot that links the United States to this crime.

Even the Department of the Treasury, according to the 2024 “National Money-Laundering Risk Assessment” report, admitted that around 300 billion dollars of dirty money are laundered in that country annually, and at least a third of this laundering is related to drug trafficking.

Given this, it is difficult to believe that there is a real fight against drug trafficking in that country; since it is clear that a large part of its financial structure is supported by this market, in addition to not presenting any economic policy that goes according to applying serious regulations to avoid such dependence.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team