For drug cartels, hiding the profits of their illicit sales is often as hard as getting the goods to the market in the first place.
To overcome that challenge, US-based members of imprisoned Mexican kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel decided to buy gold, have it melted down and sold, and then use fake invoices to transfer that money back to Mexico, according to court records seen by Bloomberg.
Allegations laid out in a federal-court case in Chicago describe a scheme in which Sinaloa cartel members would have couriers retrieve drug proceeds, and then use that money to buy gold bars and other scrap pieces of the precious metal at Chicago-area jewelry stores.
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