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21 Crime L. & Soc. Change 1 (1994)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc21 and id is 1 raw text is: Crime, Law and Social Change 21 1-13, 1994. © 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Forfeiture and money laundering laws in the United States Basic features and some critical comments from a European perspective SUSANNE WALTHER Max-Planck-Institute of Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg, Germany Abstract. Today Europe is faced increasingly with the phenomenon of organized crime, creating problems similar to those the United States faced as early as a decade ago. American forfeiture and money laundering laws provide the state with sweeping powers for use in its efforts to combat organized crime. Although study of these instruments might inspire European lawmakers to adopt similar ones, the instruments themselves carry a societal price tag that cannot be ignored. Classical principles limiting the reach of the criminal law (and the powers of its enforcement appa- ratus) and in a broader sense the liberal concept of the fragmentary nature of the criminal law have largely been abandoned by lawmakers in the area of organized crime. Thus, modern American forfeiture and money laundering laws have lowered the standards of protection against state in- trusion into citizens' basic rights despite the lack of sufficient empirical proof that their investiga- tive and punitive powers are efficient in skimming profits and deterring further crime. Introduction The true size of the profits in large scale drug trafficking remains more or less an open question. Recent estimates indicate revenues of over one hundred billion dollars per year in the United States.1 A May 1991 report of the United States General Accounting Office quotes estimates that vary widely as to the amount of money annually laundered.2 According to estimates of February 1990 by the Financial Action Task Force, a multinational group established at the July 1989 Economic Summit, as much as 85 billion dollars could be laundered or invest- ed' from sales of cocaine, heroin, and cannabis in the United States and Europe. Since the mid-eighties, the U.S. government's fight against drugs has escalated into a war against an entire drug trafficking industry. Beginning in 1984, the United States Congress provided law enforcement with increasingly powerful weapons against what is termed organized crime, with drug trafficking today being only one facet of it, but to a large degree providing for the economic basis on which it can thrive.4 In the following, I shall attempt to portray some basic features of the law relating to the forfeiture of crime proceeds in the United States as well as the relatively new criminal provisions relating to money laundering. Both sub- jects have gained increasing importance in criminal prosecutions. I shall then

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