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Keeping an Eye on the Federal Civil Money Laundering Statute
After the adoption in 1986 of the Money Laundering Control Act (MLCA), 18 U.S.C. ” 1956-1957, money laundering quickly became, to borrow Judge Learned Hand's phrase, another darling of the modern federal prosecutor's nursery. Every year, federal prosecutors file many hundreds of criminal money laundering cases. The charge can appear in a dizzyingly wide array of contexts, as the MLCA's definition of the necessary underlying “specified unlawful activity,” or SUA, extends to literally hundreds of different crimes.
Given the intense focus on money laundering over the past 25 years, it is perhaps surprising that one enforcement tool handed to the Department of Justice (DOJ) by the original MLCA has lain virtually dormant. Under 18 U.S.C. ' 1956(b), the United States is empowered to seek civil penalties for violations of the federal money laundering laws. Those penalties can be quite considerable. Yet, outside a few well-publicized settlements in the 1990s with financial institutions for allegedly laundering Mexican drug trafficking money, the DOJ historically has made little use of the MLCA's civil penalty provisions.
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