[GauntletWizard]

Small businesses regularly make $20-30k deposits in cash. That represents the weekly cash revenue of a successful McDonald's franchise. You can slip an extra $1-5k in there, weekly - If you do your accounting "right", it looks like you're moving a little more product than you actually are, and is virtually indistinguishable from real business. See Walter White buying a Car Wash in Breaking Bad. You need a bit of scale: 5 or 10 locations to make it really work, but it does work.

[moralestapia]

I know, but that's still far from making a $1M+-or-so operation with a bunch of cash.

That's the whole point, you just can't drop that much gray money on something at once.