THE LAUNDROMAT by Armen Pandola
Let's say you are in a position to make some money that is not quite legal - maybe you are a government official who can be 'reached' or a drug dealer or maybe you just made a lot of money legally and you don't want to give Uncle Sam or your taxman his incredibly huge share.
No matter how you made your money, one of the biggest problems you will have in avoiding the taxman is how to not pay taxes but still enjoy the fruits of your good fortune. Buying that yacht or Fifth Avenue penthouse condo is going to make the taxman wonder how you did that while making $6,500 a year.
Enter the law firm of Mossack Fonseca. For a relative pittance, they will handle all the legal niceties and 'wash' your money. Through corporate structures that are too complicated to explain without a degree in larceny, ah, I mean corporate law, all your ill-gotten gains or pre-tax millions will miraculously become profits made legally. In simpler times, your local godfather would have started an olive oil importing business.
A few years ago, an unknown person sent to the media a treasure trove of documents from the Mossack Fonseca firm. They revealed that a lot of very important people, Prime Ministers and Presidents, were clients who had engaged in these 'tax avoidance' schemes. It was all perfectly legal, like being a billionaire property developer who pays no taxes.
Enter Steven Soderbergh and Scott Z. Burns who directed and wrote The Laundromat, a new Netflix movie based on this tale of how the rich get and stay rich - because make no mistake about it, if you didn't have to pay taxes, the average income owner in the US would retire a millionaire if she prudently invested her tax-free savings. As Harry Lime in The Third Man says, "Tax-free, it's the only way to save money nowadays."
Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas play Mossack and Fonseca with pitch-perfect performances. The chameleon Meryl Streep does her usual magic and brings to life a victim of this new world shell game. There are many other characters as the story flows freely from continent to continent showing how it is done and how the law and the politicians who make the law are co-conspirators.
Don't let any of this put you off - it is a funny, engaging movie that does have a polemical tinge to it, but then it is difficult to speak of these crimes without just a little outrage since, if you haven't figured it out yet, the taxes these modern reverse Robin Hoods are avoiding is your money.
Sadly, the beat goes on. The money that drowns our political system in legal bribery will pay to keep the politicians right where they belong - in a pocket and it ain't yours. The scandals, like this one, will headline the news for a cycle or two and then get made into movies that nobody wants to watch as the victims of this system head to the nearest multiplex to watch Joker, fed on a steady diet of popcorn and marvel-ous circuses.