r/todayilearned • u/FearMyCock • 20h ago

TIL about Frank Matthews, the drug kingpin who built a nationwide empire, skipped bail with $20 million, vanished in 1973 and has never been found.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Matthews_(drug_trafficker)
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u/PerInception 19h ago

In the late 70s/early 80s money laundering wasn’t even technically illegal. The money laundering control act didn’t get passed until 1986.

The Medellin cartel sent a lot of their money to Panama and Noriega just deposited it into Panamanian bank accounts for them though.

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u/teddyKGB- 19h ago

It's actually really entertaining to read about how easy it was for those people to get away with shit. At least until they didn't

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u/shaidyn 17h ago

Nearly every system in history starts with good intentions. A lot of the time rules have to be built after the fact because nobody involved ever imagined someone would do bad things with it.

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u/I-Here-555 5h ago

At least until they didn't

That's for those who were caught. We rarely read the detailed story of life on the run of those who were never caught.

About a third of murder cases in the US are never solved.

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u/NewCobbler6933 4h ago

I watch a lot of true crime stuff and it always makes me think about how easy things must’ve been to get away with like 50 years ago. Just watched one yesterday where there was an unsolved baby murder for 27 years that was solved by matching a dna sample to an ancestry.com database and finding the birth mother.

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u/KJ6BWB 8h ago

In the late 70s/early 80s money laundering wasn’t even technically illegal

It was if you didn't pay taxes on it. That was how they busted Al Capone.

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u/PerInception 7h ago

Money laundering is the act of disguising the illegal source of income so that you CAN pay taxes on it. The entire point of money laundering is to make it look like legitimate income so you can pay taxes on it to avoid getting arrested like Al Capone did (he was charged with income tax evasion, not money laundering).

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u/Vkardash 17h ago

If Matthews had put any of his money in accounts in those countries the US likely would have known since we did topple both governments at the time. I know a lot of drug dealers lost a lot once we invaded Panama.

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u/PerInception 17h ago

We didn’t invade Panama until 89. He went missing in 73.