The Laundry Man (ISBN978-0-241-95417-1,
Penguin/Viking, 2012) is the tale of Ken Rijock, a once high-flying US
lawyer, who found himself as a much needed assistant to the drug traders in
Miami as he had some foolproof methods of laundering their ‘dirty’ drug
money.
Rijock shows himself to be an archetypal risk-taker, with
a live-in lover a female police officer, staying in his house full of drugs.
Mind you, his police-lady paramour was no shrinking violet when it came to
using the white powder herself either, though he gives the impression that
everyone was on a cocaine trip in Miami at that time.
He very quickly makes a name for himself as a trustworthy
professional, traveling to the Caribbean each weekend as an erstwhile
tourist with a suitcase full of dirty money, which was then used to buy
boats and off the shelf businesses.
Finding a suitably ethics-free banker and lawyer made his
weekend’s work even easier, as he moved the cash around, selling the boats,
transferring large lumps of cash, whilst going into St. Kitts and not even
getting a passport stamp.
He attempts to legitimize his actions by saying that his
clients had a problem (cleaning dirty money) and he, Ken Rijock was a
problem solver.
He tries hard to get the reader on side, drawing
attention to the fact that he volunteered for Vietnam, but even that was
done to minimize his chances of being exposed to extreme frontline fighting.
Ken Rijock had always played the odds to his favor.
Eventually his launderette collapses around his ears as
he gets fingered by those further down the chain of command, and this is
where he really pulls in all the favors and instead of getting a 15 year
sentence, comes out with a four year one, which then gets cut down to two as
he spills the beans on the whole laundry system and those who used it.
It was an interesting book, showing the devious nature of
the man, and his profession in the US, where plea-bargaining and behind the
scenes machinations make a mockery of the “justice” system. Rijock tries
hard to get the reader on side, just as he had tried to get the judge and
parole officers on side as well. He does not really succeed, in my opinion,
coming across as an opportunist who was in it for everything he could get.
At least he appears as an ‘honest’ criminal writer, so he cannot be all bad.
However, he does not seem such a likeable ‘baddie’ as opposed to Howard
Marks’, AKA Mr. Nice.
When I first spotted The Laundry Man on the Bookazine
shelves, I thought at first it was a re-issue of Jake Needham’s book called
The Laundry Man, but then I noticed that the author of this one was
Ken Rijock, and whilst there are some similarities in the subject of the
books, Rijock’s is an autobiography, whilst Needham’s is fiction.
