Ozark is the latest crime thriller drama, about a Chicago-based financial advisor.  The real nature of his work is revealed when we learn his client is a notorious Mexican drug cartel and he has been their top money launderer.

The plot evolves and Marty, the financial advisor, has to launder $8 million for the drug lord after saving his skin by claiming that he can do that by relocating to the Ozarks in Missouri – a back water, under-the-radar of the IRS location with miles of un-watched coastline. 

The Byrdes, husband and wife Marty and Wendy  and their teenage kids, who are for all intents and purposes an ordinary family are now on a mission to save themselves from the ire of the drug cartel and wash the money by a short dead-line. 

The task begins to prove more difficult than he thought it would and after various other attempts, he buys out a strip-club, calling it a Gentleman’s club, and uses it to wash the cash.

The strip club is a cash business, meaning that the majority of their revenue is cash money, very few card transactions. So if the strip club made $10000 in one evening, it is very easy to say that it made $20000 in one evening since it is very difficult for anyone to actually track how much money was actually made at the club in that evening. So $20000 is put on the books and deposited at the bank and $10000 of dirty money has just been cleaned.

All this creative thinking is contrasted by ordinary family issues and the new environment in which the Byrdes find themselves, far from the comfort of Chicago and the life style they were used to there.

To make matters worse, the Feds are also following Marty, after his partner, who had been a secret informer to the FBI, was found dead.

What had, up to then, appeared almost as a nine to five job for Marty is now a life and death endeavour, where, nevertheless, the same principals of money laundering apply.  Funnily enough, money laundering does in fact include actually washing the cash in the washing machine.  That way it comes out looking crimpled and mixes with the other cash taken from the strip club.  So there he is at home, in the laundry room, washing thousands of dollars, as though he is washing his socks and jeans and then going upstairs for supper.

Ordinary lives, ordinary jobs meeting underworld and crime and profiting from the legitimate business to make illegitimate businesses able to spend their cash without the IRS swooping down on them.

Ultimately, the deposits go to off-shore accounts in Panama, Jersey or the British Virgin Islands and other similar paradise locations and the money is untraceable.

Untraceable, that is, in every way except for the document of the bearer bonds.  That document that says that the money is yours.  You keep this document very well hidden.  It is rumoured too, that some bearers even forget about it and where it lies buried in the false bottom of a case in a safe, at the back of a strip-club or a staff kitchen. 

Sounds familiar?  That’s because it is.  But what is extraordinary in the local scenario, is that the characteristics of the financial advisor have been assumed by the client, the politician or the street-wise lawyer. Someone who would normally be reported to the bank and the police for depositing large sums of money, without even having the source revealed, has found the same sympathy as the family bloke, trying to protect his assets and his loved ones. 

How stupid and naïve can we be?  Another time, Marty also tries to build a church for the congregation, so that he can inflate the costs of the construction.  Makes you think, doesn’t  it, how much money may be laundered in our new high-rise complexes.  Many organisations have queried how much the market can actually sustain all these luxury apartments.  Could it be that the invoices are worth more than the building itself and ultimately, sold or not sold, those empty apartments have served their purpose long before they are occupied?

In other words, they could very well be the vehicle for laundering of dirty money.  Add to that, the fictitious occupants of IPP clients and stone and mortar are the new bank of Ejja ha’ mmorru.

Recent finds of garages stacked with all kinds of drugs, other places in Floriana with their floor covered in piles of used needles, tip offs coming off the ferry from Sicily, drug overdoses and freaky behaviour involving streaking butt naked down Paceville, have left no doubt as to the huge extent of drug use in Malta or its business here.  Who is to say, too, that Malta has not become a depot of sorts?  A hub for the distribution to Europe?  That hub in the Mediterranean we hear so much about.  Nice investments to keep the family secure and comfortable and pay for the overseas education of the kids.

Appearances deceive.  Either as a spin-off from social media, or from social engineering, the image of what today is considered a modern family, is a melee of telenovelas and roof-top pool parties.

That long-standing politician, who secretly built up an organisation and having made it undetected, is now ready to wear the wreath of victory and make a name for himself and his family way beyond the mundane job of kissing babies and back-slapping thugs.  It’s the real power, the full control that makes the difference.  The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world.

The network, the effusive and charming leader placed as a front, to sow division and incite anger and revolt.  The mission and the cause become the rallying cry.  A church is created and the leader is anointed. 

When indeed the dirty business of money-laundering is uncovered, it is not the picture of a clean stack of money that you find but the pits of greed and immoral earnings, if they can even be called earnings because no real work is generally involved by the reapers.  Theft 101.  Immoral earnings, unpaid taxes and a fraudulent life. 

That it seems, is what people look for these days.  Someone like “that” guy.  All ordinary, all normal.  The new way.