Money laundering is alchemy, a sleight of hand whereby illegal money is moved from bank to bank and country to country - the washing cycle as it is known in the trade - so that the original source is impossible to trace. Money from street corner deals flows into the rivers of cash from powerful drug wholesalers. Dirty money goes in one end; clean, spendable, investable and even taxable money comes out at the other end. Currently an estimated $200 to $300 billion dollars are circling the globe needing to be washed. Only the foreign exchange and global oil markets are bigger. How, who, why and where are described for the first time in dangerous but precise detail. Understanding this traffic is the key to the world's black economy.