[from]

“Money laundering” became a crime in 1986. The bank secrecy act originally just introduced the $10000 threshold ($80000 now) and record keeping requirements. It was later amended in the 90s to add suspicious activity reporting. Nearly all of the major mafia cases predate this. There are many reasons for this decline (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/706895) but mostly it has to do with RICO, wiretap evidence becoming admissible, the witness protection program, changing demographics, and more federal prosecutions where the people involved were smarter, less corruptible and where the sentences were greater. I am incredibly skeptical that it had anything to do with the decline of organized crime in this country.

[wpietri]

So you're saying the improved tracking of criminal proceeds, which started during the peak of the mafia's prominence and improved further as the mafia declined, had nothing to do with that decline? And further, has nothing to do with other criminal organizations not rising to prominence to fill the same role? I agree other things played a role, of course. You get to believe what you want, obviously, but I'm sure not persuaded.

[from]

> So you're saying the improved tracking of criminal proceeds, which started during the peak of the mafia's prominence and improved further as the mafia declined, had nothing to do with that decline?

Very few transactions hit the CTR threshold at the time it was instituted. It was nearly $80000 in today's dollars. Computerization was also very new so doing anything useful at scale with the records was difficult for the government.

I'm not a lawyer but I read RECAP and have read the appeals from a lot of these cases and very rarely were financial records mentioned as investigative leads. They almost always relied on informants who were a part of the scheme and electronic surveillance to figure out how the crime worked. Even now, how many criminal investigations do you think start from SARs? Obviously we'll never know because they don't release that, but I don't think there's any reason to think it is a substantial fraction. Money laundering in most cases nowadays is just tacked on after they discover that someone used money from the crime they already knew about.