Librería Samer Atenea
Kálamo Books
Librería Elías (Asturias)
Librería Kolima (Madrid)
Librería Proteo (Málaga)
Before the first bank was chartered, before the first tax code was written, before any government had a word for what it was trying to stop, people were hiding money. Dirty Money is the story of that hiding - a five-thousand-year history of financial concealment that runs from the silver hoards of classical Athens to the zero-knowledge cryptographic protocols of the Ethereum blockchain.Drawing on forensic accounting, economic history, legal scholarship, and the operational records of the world’s most consequential financial crime investigations, Paulo Galligan traces the mechanics of money laundering across every major civilisation and every major technological era. The trapezitai of Piraeus who held invisible deposits for Athenian merchants. The Tang Dynasty guild houses that invented paperless value transfer. The Swiss bankers who sold statutory secrecy to the world’s dictators, drug lords, and tax evaders. The Colombian cocaine cartels whose industrial-scale cash placement forced the creation of the modern AML compliance industry. The North Korean state operatives who laundered cryptocurrency through an autonomous smart contract that no government could shut down.What emerges is not a series of disconnected crimes but a single continuous story: the permanent tension between the state’s claim over economic value and the human determination to resist it. The technology changes. The calculation does not.
