Stuff You Should Know - How Money Laundering Works

Episode Date: April 14, 2009

Money laundering -- the practice of disguising illegal funds -- can be domestic or international in nature. Join Josh and Chuck as they take a look at the history, practice and future of money laundering in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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only I can see you. What you're doing is larger than yourself, almost like a religion. Like, he was a god. Listen to The Turning Room of Mirrors on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Wake up, Chuck Bryant. What's up, Buttercup? Chuck's fading. He's ready to get out of here. So we're going to... Don't lie, Chuck. These rainy days, you know. Rainy days and Mondays. They always get you down. Caring carpenter. What a waste. Yeah, it's sad. Yeah, so... This is not on anorexia? No, it's not,

actually. It's on money laundering, which we can't, or we can or can't say, I think, is one way to put it, whether or not Caring Carpenter ever engaged in that. God rest your soul. I believe that she did not. You never know, Chuck. I'll go on record. Chuck, you ever see Scarface? He kidding me. So you have seen it? Yeah, many times. Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney. Oh, and I thought you're talking Pacino. I was. I just don't like it when you gloat. I jerk. So you know that one scene when he's sitting there laundering the money with the guy who turns out to be the cop? Yeah. And for some reason, DePaulma made it. So like, it actually simulates the eight hours that they're supposedly sitting there doing it. Right. That was actually a pretty good lesson in what not to do when you

launder money. Right. And I think that the moral to it was never launder money with an undercover police officer. Right. My favorite part of that movie is when he buries his face in the huge mountain of cocaine on his desk at the end. That is a good part. And thousands of bullets, hundreds of bullets, could not even take him down at that point. But they did, eventually. No, no. Yeah, they did. Yeah. No, I couldn't remember if he died in an explosion, but there, because there are grenades in that scene. I know. That is a good, good movie. Anyone who hasn't seen that can sign up to be derided by Chuck and I on our blog, which we'll talk about later. But first, let's talk about money laundering, Chuck. Let's. So you know, like, for the most part, it's a, well, you would

think for the most part, it's the realm of drug dealers. Like, they use cash almost exclusively. They've got to wash it. It's dirty money. They can't account for it. Right. And the tax system, especially in the U.S., is set up in such a way that that's supposed to be obvious. Right. Which is where money laundering comes in. It's a way around this, you know, declaration of, hey, I made a bunch of money by selling heroin, which you can't really do because they bust you for selling heroin. I'm surprised the government wouldn't just say, oh, that's great. We'll take 30% of that and just be a bunch of way. Yeah. I mean, really honestly, what would the IRS contact the DEA or would the IRS just be like, you're an upstanding citizen, you drug dealer?

Well, that's one of the big arguments for legalization of drugs is you can just tax the heck out of it and legitimize it and make a lot of money off of it. And again, remember when we were talking about how moonshine works, during prohibition, it kind of added this forbidden aspect to drinking. And so, of course, drinking increased, right? Yeah. So it makes you wonder if drug use would drop. But that's neither here nor there. It isn't. But what I was saying was is you would think it's mainly drug traffickers engaged in money laundering. It is a lot. Because a million dollars in cocaine estimated at 20 kilos, right? 44 pounds. Or 20 kilos for our metric friends. Sure. Yeah. And a million dollars in cash weighs 256 pounds. So it's kind of tricky, right? The

thing is, though, it turns out it's not just drug dealers who are laundering this heavy, heavy cash. Because the UN estimates, this is a 2005 estimate, the latest I can find, that the global drug trade is valued at about $321 billion annually. That's a lot of dough. It is a lot of dough. But it's estimated that the value of all of the money that's laundered every year globally is somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion. Wow. So clearly, the entirety of the drug trade three times over couldn't account for the high-end estimate of all the money that's being laundered in the world every year. Terrorists. Big money launders. White collar guys. Sure. Basically, anybody who's come across a substantial amount of money that you can't just walk around with in your pockets

and you don't want to pay taxes on. Right. You launder the money, right? So how do you do this? Oh, and also, I should probably say, the vast majority of the cash that's getting washed is the US dollar for two reasons. Number one, it's pretty much the de facto international currency. We learned about that in our audiobook, right? Which we'll get to. I'm sorry, our spoken word album. And also, because the US is some of the strictest banking transparency laws in the world. Right. So if you have some dollars and you want to get it back into the US, you got to wash it first, right? So how do you do that? Let's talk about the three steps, Chuck. Sure. Number one is called placement. Right. Three steps of money laundering. Placement basically means that the

launderer inserts dirty money into a legitimate financial institution, like they'll put their money in a bank. Right. But it's dirty money. It is dirty money at this point. This is the riskiest stage. This is like the water making that tense hollow sound as it's filling up in the drum of the washing machine. Right. And it's risky because cash, large amounts of cash are always a red flag these days. And in fact, in the US, I believe the limit is a $10,000 deposit. It's not just the US that holds that standard, but definitely other folks. Sure. Yeah. The international task force. Well, they're required to report anything, 10,000, or I believe it's anything totaling 10,000 within like a five day period. Is that right? I think one day.

Oh, one day period. Okay. You're right. But yes, still the golden number, if you're laundering money is to stay below 10 grand in a day. Right. In deposits. So once you've got that done and your dirty money is in a bank, lots of it, you move on to step two, which is called layering. And that means you start to send this money out via transactions. Right. We're talking bank to bank transfers, wiring money, investing in some high value items like you could go buy a yacht or something like that. Right. And you're basically just trying to send the money out and spread it around to all different sorts of places. This is what I consider the rent cycle. The rent cycle. Yes. Very nice. Yeah. It's being agitated and yeah. So this is, and it's the most complex

part of laundering money as well, because you're taking one lump sum. Right. And then dividing it into as many things as you possibly can, which makes it hard to trace, which is really essentially the whole point to money laundering. Sure. You want to make it really hard to trace back to you. Right. So then we come, Josh, Joshi, to integration, which is phase three. And this is when the money comes back into the mainstream economy looking like legitimate transactions. Right. You divest from those legitimate businesses you invested in. Yep. You sell that yacht or you transfer money from these kind of shady banks or banks in countries with shady systems, which we'll talk about in a minute, into, you know, U.S. banks again or

something like that. Right. And at that point, as Joe Pesci would say, the money is laundered. Yes. And that was, I call it sad that you know that. I'm ashamed of you right now. Next thing you know, you're going to tell me you watch The Closer. I know. I've never seen that show, but I'm a big Kira Sedgwick fan. All right. So, so good. That's nice. I was at one point till The Closer. Let's get off her. Okay. So, you know, since there's so many different countries out there that have banking secrecy protection, basically, there's so many places where you can go buy a yacht and they're not going to, they don't have to buy a lot. Say, where'd you get this money?

Right. And businesses don't have to say, Hey, where'd you get this money? If you're investing in them, it seems like it would be impossible to catch. It is hard to catch too. It is. Well, Josh is certainly not from a lack of looking because there are a lot of places that try to find money launders like the Department of Justice, State Department, FBI, IRS, DEA. They've all gotten money laundering departments. Sure. Or money laundering. They're not laundering money, obviously. Right. No, they're looking for money launders. Exactly. So, yeah, the IRS can find you. And I imagine if you're a money laundry, they can find you too.

Right. And there's also, since we're talking about those are United States-based organizations. It gets global too because it's, it usually involves global transactions. It's kind of the key to the whole thing. So there's something called the Financial Action Task Force on money laundering, the FATF. That was the other organization I was saying that has that $10,000 reporting required. Oh, okay. Right. Well, that's fantastic. The UN gets involved too. Our buddies at the UN. Yeah, the World Monetary Fund. So that's who's looking out for. The International Monetary Fund. I'm sorry about that one. Right. So do you want to talk about the, some of these methods, Josh, like the Peso Exchange? Yeah, that's pretty cool. Hit it.

Okay. So that is the Black Market Columbian Peso Exchange system. And this is like the world standard. And actually it is centered in Columbia. What happens is, is like say you are a drug trafficker and you have a bunch of dirty money, Chuck. Right. Say it. I am a drug trafficker and I have a load of dirty money. Well, I just happened friend to be a Peso broker and I can clean that money for you and you want to hear how I'm going to do it? Well, what do you mean by clean, Josh? No, I'm going to make it so that it's legitimate again. Okay. Okay. So what's going to happen is you're going to give me your dirty money. Okay. I'm going to give it to a Columbian importer who's going to buy a bunch of American-made goods. Okay. And we're going to buy them on the

Black Market because we don't want to pay any taxes on any of this. Oh, no, no, no. Right. So the importer goes and orders a bunch of stuff, gets it under the radar, imported to Columbia, sells it for pesos, takes the pesos, the Columbian importer is going to give me the pesos, take a little bit for himself, any profit he can make off of it. Well, he's going to pay me back the equivalent of the U.S. dollars I gave him in pesos. I'm going to skim a little off the top and by the boom, by the being my friend, you have just converted your dirty U.S. dollars to clean Columbian pesos. Thanks. Thanks. Go forth. Do whatever you like. We've got a deal. Thank you. Thank you. It's basically that easy. It is. And actually, sadly, it is very easy and it was fine

under the radar, like we said, for many, many years. And apparently, the Columbian government and the American government were trying to figure out what was going on with all of these illegal U.S. imports and came to figure out also, oh, yeah, well, Columbia also has a huge money laundering problem. And they're known for some drugs. Now we understand it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So that's the old black market Columbia peso exchange two-step shuffle. Very nice. And apparently, that's just a one-stop shopping deal if you want to launder your money. That's the place to go. Yeah. But there's also another one. And I know this one's your favorite because of the name, right? Smurfing. Yeah. Structuring deposits is the formal name, but they call it smurfing. And basically, this

entails when you break up large amounts of money into smaller, less suspicious amounts. So in the U.S., it's got to be below $10,000 because, like we said, that's when banks have to report you. Right. And the money is deposited, the smaller amounts are deposited into one or more banks by people called smurfs. That's what they call them. Yeah. For no apparent reason. So smurf that. Unless pay-oh, the creator of the smurf was caught doing this. Maybe that's where it was. Maybe that's where it originated. Right. Sounds like a smurfing good idea to me. Have you ever seen the Smurf carpet bomb ad? No. I think it was for UNICEF. It was a UNICEF ad. And they played it in Belgium. And basically, it was an anti-war public service announcement.

And they used the Smurfs. And the Smurfs village is just carpet bombed. And they're all like killed. And they show the aftermath and burning Smurfs or walking around. It's really something. You should look it up. Jeez. So that's disturbing. On to overseas banks, which is always big. You always hear about offshore accounts. And growing up, you hear this from watching chips and stuff like that in my era. And you hear about offshore accounts. And I always picture something like bank floating in the ocean. Yeah. I know what you mean. That's not what's going on there. No. But they're basically countries that have really lax, or not lax, but they have secrecy laws and allow anonymous banking to take place. Yeah. Like Bahrain is one that's not in the Caribbean.

Bahamas. The Caimans. I always think of Caimans. Hong Kong, sure. There's a place called Macau off the coast of China. Underground alternative banking, which kind of cracks me up. I don't know that I would invest in an alternative bank. This seems kind of like tribal in nature. Yeah, exactly. Like it's existed long before any banking regulations. Right. Very popular in Asia. I know then Pakistan, the Hawala system in Pakistan and India, and the Fai Chen system in China. Yeah. So basically it's a trust system. There's no paper trail. No paper. Which is key because you want a lot of money. You don't want paper. That's all point. It's very much like the offshore accounts. Like these are secret accounts. They won't reveal your identity.

There's no paper trail that's public in any way, shape, or form. Right. So these are really good places to use if you plan on laundering any money. Right. Not that we would encourage that because it's illegal. You get busted. You get a jail. No. Although if you look at, if you put together some of these seemingly random podcasts we've done, you could make moonshine, sell it. Launder money. Launder money. And invest that into a Ponzi scheme. Exactly. Early on. And then get out. So there you go. And here we are just a couple of loves. Yeah. Not making too many. We take our own advice. Right. In 1968, five black girls dressed in oversized military fatigues were picked up by the police in Montgomery, Alabama. I was tired and just didn't want to

take it anymore. The girls had run away from a reform school called the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children. And they were determined to tell someone about the abuse they'd suffered there. Picture the worst environment for children that you possibly can. I believe Mount Megs was patterned after slavery. I didn't understand why I had to go through what I was going through and for what. I'm writer and reporter Josie Duffy Rice. And in a new podcast, I investigate how this reform school went from being a safe haven for black kids to a nightmare. And how those five black girls changed everything. All that on unreformed. Listen to unreformed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In 1980, cocaine was captivating

and corrupting Miami. Miami had become the murder capital of the United States. They were making millions of dollars. I would categorize it as the Wild Wild West. Unleashing a wave of violence. My God, talk about walking into the devil's den. The car sales. They just killed everybody that was home. They start pulling out pictures of Clay Williams body taken out in the Everglades. A world orbiting around a mysterious man with a controversial claim. This drug pilot by the name of Lamar Chester. He never ran anything but grass until I turned over that load of Coke to him on the island. Chester would claim he did it all for the CIA. Pulling many into a sprawling federal investigation. So Clay wasn't the only person who was murdered? Oh no, not by a long shot.

I'm Lauren Bright Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Listen to murder in Miami on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And then Josh, there are shell companies. Of course, when you have like a fake company, you'll set up that really doesn't sell or manufacture anything. What's the difference between a shell company and a front company? Is there a difference? There is a difference. You want to know? Well, then why don't you tell me? I was just trying to set you up. But I don't know the difference. A shell company is set up. It doesn't really do anything. It's only, it only really exists on paper. Oh, okay. Yeah, sure. And it's expressed purpose is to launder money. A front company is a real company. Right. But it's

meant to launder money too. But you could say it's a store. You could actually go into the store and buy something. But it really the purpose is to to launder money. Right. And that actually leads us to one of the problems with money laundering. I mean, you ask, why, why would I care if people are laundering money? You know, aside, aside from the obvious one, like I hate drug dealers, you know, and, and I don't want them wondering the money or I hate terrorists. Clearly, everybody hates terrorists. There's a lot of um, yeah, but, but for this reason, the last part with the front company, it affects local economies in that small businesses can't compete with a front company because they're not trying to turn a profit off their product. So they can sell it like

at or below cost if they want and drive other companies out of business. Well, it seems a little flashy to me if you're a front company. Sure. I would think you just kind of want to stay even keel the whole time. Right. Yeah. But greed, brother. It's true. Same with the Ponzi. It's a greed takes a hold and then you're screwed. Same with the what? It's a Ponzi scheme. That's right. But on a much, a much larger level, there's other bigger problems like it can affect whole financial sectors or economies. If enough money is laundered through. Well, one of the reasons why is a lot of these countries that these things are running through are small countries and they don't have like the big huge economy United States does. So someone's laundering,

you know, 75 million dollars through a tiny little country. It's all faults, you know, that's going to affect the economy of that country. Plus no one pays taxes on it. So you and I end up making up. Well, not you because apparently you don't pay taxes, but I do now, pal. Okay. I just didn't in the mid early decade. Oh, sure. Yeah. So yeah, we end up making up for that taxpayers do by having to pay higher taxes. But I think ultimately, the reason why the DOJ, the FBI, the IRS and the DEA are all involved in trying to catch money launders because the government ain't making any money off of it. Exactly. You know what I mean? I mean, we're talking if it's a trillion dollars, you know, what's 30% of that 300 billion?

I got to tell you, the U.S. could use that 300 billion right now. If you could get that much of a chunk of it, right? Yeah, totally. And we'd go give it to some institution that's collapsing. Exactly. Exactly. It's a good use. Yeah. That's robbing Peter or pay Paul. Yep. Oh, wait, that was from the Ponzi scheme. When wasn't it? Yeah, but that's still a nice term. Okay. Thanks a lot. So Chuck, you want to talk about a couple of famous money laundering busts? I would love to talk about Crazy Eddie. Okay, good. Because I want to talk about Franklin Gerardo. Isn't that great when it works out like that? I knew it would. Crazy Eddie. And I remember this guy when I lived in New Jersey, seeing the Crazy Eddie's TV commercials. Oh, really? Oh, yeah.

He was one of those guys that is exactly how you would think. Crazy Eddie's. This was in the 1980s. Eddie Antar. Crazy Eddie's electronics. He skimmed millions of dollars from his own company to hide it from the IRS. So he was doing this. He had some co-conspirators and eventually he thought, you know what? I should send this money back into my own company disguised as revenue. Right. Because he was going to launch an initial public offering. Yeah. So I'll inflate my soon to be stock quote. And he did substantially, right? Like 30 million bucks or something? Yeah. But that's false money. So it was overinflated and the end result for him was bad news. He laundered more than 8 million bucks and was busted and flew to Israel and they found him in 1992.

They extradited him back to us to stand trial and he went to the Husqa for eight years. Yeah. Which isn't that bad. I imagine he probably had a lot of money stashed away waiting for him. I know. I was kind of surprised. Most of these prison sentences in here like six to eight years. I think it would be a little more than that. That's why I think the Bernard Madoff sentence is going to be so huge. It's going to get like a hundred plus years. Yeah. Yeah. So can I talk about my guy now? Oh yeah. Franklin Gerardo. Yeah. And you want to put an R toward the end of it, but it's not. It's Gerardo. Gerardo. So he was actually an economist and apparently economists are really good people to get to to launder money for you because they know exactly what they're

doing. Yeah. Sure. You just need to get a crooked economist. Pretty much. And from what I understand, this guy was it. Yeah. There was a Colombian drug kingpin named Jose Santa Cruz Londono and he had Gerardo basically placed the drug money into Colombian banked, right? Which we've already seen. Colombia, not that big on the banking regulation laws, right? Right. And then from there, he started making wire transfers and deposits to a hundred different accounts that have been set up, some and made up names, some and family members' names in 68 banks in nine European countries, right? Right. And he was doing this really well for a while. I think he managed to launder 36 million bucks, but he was smurfing actually. Do you mean something else there or

you mean smurfing? He was smurfing as far as money laundering goes. How about you just using smurf like they did on the smurf? Get your mind out of the getter there. He was probably doing that too because, you know, he's laundering millions of dollars. So all the smurf he wanted. Getting a smurf on? Well, he just threw me off there, Chuck. So, but he was smurfing in that, like none of his deposits, top $10,000, right? So imagine how active this guy was. Right. And he had a lot of money to deal with. He got busted basically in two ways. A red flag was raised when a bank in Monaco collapsed. Right. And an audit revealed that he had a bunch of accounts that didn't have his name on it, but could be traced back to him, which is fairly unusual. Sure.

And then really, when he was actually arrested, his neighbor called the cops to file a noise complaint because Gerardo was running his money counting machine all night. Right. The cops show up and this guy's surrounded by millions of dollars in cash. I love those machines. You see them in the movies? Yeah. So cool. Right. Yeah. They are pretty cool. I've never had enough money to put them. Mine would go, yeah, it would be over. Yeah. $15. You have $15. Lucky. I know. So yeah, that's how Gerardo got busted. And he got seven and a half years. And he's in Harvard, man. We should note. Yeah. So it's not all just untoward. That's why I purposely left off the Harvard educated economists because I mean, I think

it's like it made off. He's an intelligent guy. Nice crooked as they come. Sure. It's called white collar, dude. It surely is for a reason. So I guess do you want to just quickly go over Operation Juno? Yeah. Do you know what I'm talking about? Because you know what happened right here in Atlanta. This is the headquarters for it. That was a part of it. Were you really? No, of course not. Okay. But this was in Atlanta and the DEA pulled this one off and it was not a sting operation for pregnant teens like the movie Juno. Nice one. This is pre pre that. This is 1999 is when it ended. And basically it was a sting operation. They set up drug traffickers, gave them resources to turn their drug money in from dollars into pesos using the original

peso scam. And they busted, you know, 40 people, 10 million bucks they seized. And what substantial is the amount of cocaine that they seized? Yeah, 36 kilograms of cocaine. No, buddy. 3,600 kilograms of cocaine. Oh, what did I say? 36? Yeah. Yeah, two zeros. 3,600 kilograms of cocaine. Yeah, that puts Scarface even to shame. It really does. You can't stick your face in that mound and walk away from it. No. No. So that was Operation Juno. That was the DEA. That's about as successful as it comes from what I understand. Yeah, I always have mixed feelings about sting operations, though, to be honest. Sure. It's shifty. It's deceptive. It is. Nobody likes deception. Well, at the same time, though, that you're getting, you've busted these people. So the end

result is nice, but, you know, Machiavellian. It justifies the means. Sure. Yeah. In some cases. I think that's a definite motto for a lot of law enforcement. I just think it's interesting that a cop can go up and say, Hey, man, you want to launder this money and we'll make it happen. And then we'll arrest you for it. And clearly the Colombians who were busted never saw Scarface. Right. Yeah. So that's a money laundering. If you want to try your hand at it, you know pretty much everything you need to know right now. Yes, but you should not do that. And we want to thank JR from Portland, Oregon. JR was who suggested this. Yeah. Thanks, JR. That was a good idea. Right out of the suggestion box. We wonder why JR, but whatever. He actually said in his email,

I don't want to try this. I'm just curious. So if he did, didn't he? Yeah. If he follows up with counterfeiting, he'd like to hear that one then or Ponzi or digging your way out of prison. Right. Yeah. Well, if you want to know a little more, this is actually a great article by our colleague, Julia Layton, excellent writer. You can type in money laundering in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com. Don't go anywhere because we're about to blast your ears with our spoken word plug. Right. Josh and I and Jerry, I'm sorry, Josh and me. Please don't write in and correct me again. Cramer police. We've been getting that a lot. I know. Yeah. It's called the stuff you should know super stuff guide to the economy and we get to go out and interview folks and go on location

and we really break down economics and the economy into a way that everyone can understand. It was a lot of fun to do. Yes, it was. We recommend it highly for $3.99 on iTunes. Just type in super stuff in the iTunes search bar. It should be the first thing that comes up. And what's most amazing to me is it doesn't suck. No, it's good. We're very proud of it. And we appreciate your support thus far. And if you guys could support us with this, we might get to record another one. Yeah. Something more interesting than the economy because, you know, Chuck blog me. Yes, blog. We also need to give a quick shout out to our blog called stuff you should know on the website, how stuff works.com. We post once a day. Me in the morning, Chuck at night. You should visit

twice just to see him. And we do a podcast recap on Fridays. So that's where we can all sit around and chat about what we do here. Yeah. And you said you can find it on the right rail of the homepage. Yes, sir. Okay. And that means thank you for bearing with us. We tried to do a little shorter than usual because it's listener mail time. So this comes to us from Meg. And I'm just going to call this exceptional listener mail. Only one today. I don't know which one this is. It's good. Epilepsy? Yes. So in our deja vu podcast, we talked a little bit about epilepsy and that it's tied to deja vu many times as is smelling lavender before you have a seizure. Yes. So Meg writes in and she wanted to thank us for talking some about epilepsy as she is an epileptic. She has temporal lobe epilepsy.

And she said she does suffer from deja vu on a fairly regular basis, but it doesn't necessarily mean wait for a seizure, which is what you said. It is a seizure, basically. Oh, really? That's how she describes it. Deja vu is a simple partial seizure. It can give way to a complex partial or generalized seizure, but it doesn't always have to. And she is pretty amazed by her own epilepsy. She called it amazing, wasn't it? She said the brain does crazy things when it's working normally. Just imagine what it can do when it's not. Some of the simple partial seizures I've included, smelling lavender, deja vu, tunnel vision, sparkly lights, and they sometimes but not always give way to complex partial seizures that can leave me drained for quite a while. So there's obviously a downside.

It's not all cool. Flashing lights and lavender. So we just want to thank Meg for writing in and she said one day maybe we can do something on epilepsy, but I know eventually we're going to have a health podcast here, so we're probably not allowed to touch it. We should probably leave that to Clanberger. But thank you, Meg, for that. And good luck with your epilepsy. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for sharing, Meg. That's pretty cool. Exceptional listener mail indeed. If you have anything exceptional to say or you just want to say hi or you want to tell us that we say we interchange I or me too much, actually not that last one. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,

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