[dropkick]

My father owns a small payment processing company that does electronic processing of checks. One of his employees was busted by a federal task force for laundering a lot of money. The task force initially accused my father of being the ring leader. My father cooperated fully with the investigation, gave the task force emails, documents, etc. He had nothing to hide. They were still threatening him with prosecution so my father hired a very expensive attorney in D.C. and they eventually declined to prosecute. Total cost $20,000.

It's a lot of money but not $1.5 million. A large majority of innocent people don't end up at trial. Even a lot of the guilty people don't end up at trial. My dad's ex-employee became a witness for the government against the money launderers and avoided going to trial.