The Cocaine Cowboy's Trojan Horse: Dirty Real Estate

The United States’ real estate market has suffered a complex issue for decades: money laundering. Money laundering through real estate is commonplace and presents a two-fold issue: one, compromised real estate transactions are extremely difficult to trace; and two, such transactions can, unfortunately, be beneficial to local economies. This economic gain is short-lived, however, as real estate developments funded with “funny money” frequently result in poor construction and a lack of maintenance; they may also artificially inflate the local housing market, effectively pushing out local residents from valuable areas, and, at worst, result in gentrification. Money laundering is particularly harmful in the condominium sphere, where those seeking to hide ill-begotten funds for short-term gain may irreparably harm condominium communities and, in rare circumstances, lead to casualties. This Note first examines the history of Miami as a key location of the real estate money-laundering crisis. This Note then considers how the relative ease with which one can create a shell corporation and avoid detection from the federal government as a “beneficial owner” makes the United States the perfect target when illicitly acquiring real property. Next, this Note examines how the Champlain Towers collapse was, allegedly, a product of a fraudulent funny money scheme from its inception and explains why this tragedy should serve as a cautionary tale to both the federal and Florida governments. This Note concludes by analyzing money laundering as a kind of “virus,” in that there is a period of concealment, encroachment, and duplication. As such, targeting each stage of real estate development through transactional processes using new state and federal reform may serve to prevent funny money from continuing to penetrate the U.S. real estate market. Doing so may be the only way to prevent the next era of “Cocaine Cowboys” from proliferating as they did in Miami in the 1980s.