Editorial: Dark money in dank places

Managing ill-gotten money is no mean task. Ask any corrupt officer: Laundering money makes you go to such ridiculous lengths you might as well have worked for it. In fact, if there’s one thing grifters and philosophers agree on, it is that the thief is cursed to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life. Graft ain’t worth the git.

That thought must be weighing on the mind of the Group I officer who was caught last Friday (Oct. 7) doing his damnedest to put distance between himself and his bribe money. Bang, in the midst of a raid by DVAC sleuths at the Agricultural Marketing Board office at Guindy, asked to go to the loo. As everyone who’s seen Godfather Part 1 knows, that’s a red flag right there. After a polite interval, the detectives barged in and found him flushing currency notes down the toilet.

Recovering from their bewilderment, the sleuths summoned “external manpower” to dive in and retrieve the money. It turned out to be a piddly Rs 39,000. The DVAC detectives now have the noisome task of presenting the notes before a magistrate, who should be excused for not wanting to examine them too closely.

But what had the officer been thinking? How had he planned to recover his hard-earned, ill-gotten gains? Or had he decided, in the hurly burly, that it was water under the bridge? Such are the tribulations of grifters. Fast money is hard to keep. It has a way of making an orphan of you.

Bribes are easy money, but dirty. They need washing, which is a high craft known only to well-oiled consultants. Not everybody has access to such expertise. Not everyone has an elder brother in Mauritius who will receive and round-trip the money. For bribe-takers low on the food chain, the only recourse is to do one’s own laundry. The Enforcement Directorate recently busted one such DIY launderer in Delhi who took his task a bit literally and hid Rs 2.5 crore of his loot in his washing machine.

That’s not as daft as it sounds. This particular grifter was being true to the first principle of money-laundering: Keep the stash in the most obvious place, where sleuths are least likely to look. India’s annals of bribe-taking are rich with a bewildering array of hiding places: In copper pots buried in the backyard; in the false bottoms of suitcases; above false ceilings, inside hollow walls; dammit, in one’s rectum.

With bribes getting darker, hiding places are getting danker. In August 2024, an Odisha forest officer hid his stash in the flush tank of his toilet. That same year, a Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation officer flushed his furtive cash down the toilet and Anti-Corruption Bureau personnel had to break down the building's septic tank to get at it. Then there was the PWD junior engineer in Karnataka who hid his cash and gold inside the water pipelines of his building.

It’s such a colourful history that it lends itself to the movies. In 2020, Anurag Kashyap made one with the alluring plot line of a woman stumbling upon a corrupt officer’s stash concealed in the plumbing of her building. Why, what else was Alibaba and 40 thieves but such delicious serendipity?