But I knew something she didn’t. G. Harmon Consultancy was billing her firm, but it was also billing four other entities I had traced—two in the Caymans, one in Luxembourg, one in a small private bank in Malta I’d only ever seen used in one other case, a fraud that had ended in a federal conviction. Gary wasn’t just consulting. He was layering.
Layering is money laundering. It is the process of moving money through multiple entities to obscure its origin, like folding a piece of paper so many times that the original crease disappears. Gary had built himself a very elegant origami. It had taken me four weeks to start unfolding it. I still couldn’t see the original shape. But I was getting closer.