Troy Stoltz has exposed the issue of Gambling and Money laundering in clubs. She is emblematic of a much larger problem in which criminal cash from drug sales and human trafficking is laundered through neighbourhood poker machines as the powerful clubs lobby courts politicians and resists reform. In the past five years, this single woman has gambled at least $38 million, the proceeds of crime, at pokie venues and casinos in NSW, Canberra and Victoria. In a nation which, according to estimates by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Agency has a dirty money problem measured in the billions of dollars, this woman, who we will call “the cleaner”, might have gone unnoticed if not for one key aspect of her operation: she was using poker machines to ply her illicit trade. Rather, she was in the business of cleaning dirty money.
Gambling was not the Vietnamese-born woman’s primary business, nor was it her hobby. In August last year, amid a cacophony of flashing, whirring poker machines in a NSW club, a 33-year-old Sydney woman got to work.
