Kiriakou's money-laundering tip
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John Kiriakou describes being offered what seemed like a dream job at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic: chief operating officer of a small boutique investment firm with offices in Washington and Athens, paying well with strong benefits. He came to believe the firm was in fact an international money-laundering operation, and suspected it was backed by a foreign government, possibly Iran. He downloaded 15,000 pages of documents he believed proved the laundering before ultimately trying, unsuccessfully, to interest the FBI.

The FBI's threshold

When Kiriakou and his attorney finally sat down with the bureau at its Washington field office to present the documents, an FBI agent told him upfront: "If this doesn't have Russia, China, terrorism, or January 6th associated with it, we're not interested."

The three remaining channels

Separately, Kiriakou relays an assessment from a friend at the Treasury Department on how much room is left for laundering money successfully. The monitoring systems, per that account, are now good enough that only three channels really work: fine art, real estate, and race horses. Kiriakou's interest in the first of these is not abstract, he ties it to the valuation problem in the art market, where a work is worth whatever someone is willing to pay and a declared value is effectively unfalsifiable, and to the Salvator Mundi sale as the case in which that opacity was most visible.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Kiriakou's Abraham Lincoln collection
