Turning To The Mafia For Money During The Recession

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Apr 28, 8:48AM EDT · Published May 27, 8:30AM EDT

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The Treasury has probably made a horrible mistake by not turning to the Mafia for cash during the current financial crisis. The Mob has billions of dollars looking for a legitimate home. Even the if the yield is close to zero, it is better than storing $1,000 bills in mattresses.

In Italy, money laundering is allegedly a source of cash for many banks. According to Bloomberg, “On May 6, the Bank of Italy, which regulates lenders, cautioned that banks have lowered their guard against money laundering.”

In Sicily, the local prosecutor has seized $3.8 billion of organized crime money since the beginning of 2008.

The American government is aware that the Mafia has huge sums of cash that could be used for legitimate loans to businesses, states, and municipalities. The Attorney General and Treasury would have to ask Congress to grant the Mafia a sort of amnesty for investing the money. Forcing it to stay “underground” does not do the country or the Mob any good.

Tough times require novel solutions.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.