Free Mule by Tony D'Souza

happened up there?"
    "Nothing else happened. We talked, had a cigarette, figured things out."
    "Did he seem dangerous?"
    I thought about the assault rifle. I shook my head and said, "I kind of liked him."
    "What was there to like about him?"
    "He knows what he's doing."
    I called Darren from Siesta Beach.
    Darren picked up, yawned. He said, "You get it squared away with your guy?"
    "He wants to do ten."
    "Did you get the money?"
    "He wouldn't give it to me."
    Darren said, "You can't play if you can't pay. That's the way life works."
    "I do have the money, Darren. It's in this account. I'm going to have to write you a check off it."
    "No checks this time, James."
    "Wire transfer?"
    "Cash, or it doesn't go."
    I thought about it. I said, "How am I supposed to take that much cash out of the bank?"
    "I wish I could come and explain it all to you," Darren said, "but I have to go to Thailand. I'll e-mail you a bunch of phone numbers before I go. Get up on Skype, you'll be able to contact me. My guy Billy will finish up everything on this end and meet you when you get here. Billy's worked for me forever. If you have any questions, he'll sit down and walk you through them. It'll be a lot better when you're here, because then you can just talk, you know?
    "As far as getting cash out of the bank, it's your money, right? You can withdraw as much as you want. But the thing here is planning for the future, laying a good foundation to protect yourself and your business. You have to manage the paper trail, and you have to start now. Like I say, I wish I could come out there and explain it all to you. But you don't want to do anything they can follow up on. You don't want to do anything that will connect you to anyone else. So no checks, no money transfers, even money orders are a hassle. If you buy three grand in money orders at a single place, you cross a threshold and they have to file a report on you. If you buy two grand in a single go, you cross a different kind of threshold and they have to file something else. So don't do money orders, and if you do, keep it under two Gs and drive to different places. You don't want to trigger those thresholds and give the bad guys any reason to look at you."
    I'd Google it all as soon as I got home, learn about money laundering, the Bank Secrecy Act, Monetary Instrument Logs, and everything else.
    Darren said, "Let's say you want to buy a car and the seller wants cash. The bank's going to tell you that you shouldn't deal in cash, that it's probably a scam. You tell them you know the guy, you're not worried about dealing in cash with him. Everybody knows he wants to do it to hide something, but that's his concern, you don't care. But here's the thing. When you deal with a bank, you leave a paper trail, and when you move ten grand or more, you leave behind a special paper trail. They are going to file a Currency Transaction Report on you. They have to: ten thousand is the trigger for the bank. At casinos, it's a smaller amount, five thousand. At money order places, two thousand. You have to remember that. Now, you could take out the money little by little so you'd never reach the ten thousand trigger, but you don't have the time for that. And anyway, you'd need six months or more, because if you kept going to the bank and taking out two grand here, three grand there, it would be even worse, because it's something called structuring. It's a huge trigger, and the bad guys can build a money-laundering case against you. So you have to stay in cash once this is done, find a safe place to keep it. Especially if anyone around you figures out you're in the business, they're going to know you have a lot of cash. That's why there're as many robberies as there are. Don't worry about that for now."
    There were people on the beach around me, teenagers playing volleyball, a guy running along the surf with his black Lab. I was sitting in the sand listening to this.
    "So this one time you're going to take out a big