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In connect the dots, so long as you know how to count, you can draw the picture. Even a child can drag a crayon from the first little dot numbered one to the next one numbered two and so on and so forth until some jagged picture of a cow or a barn or a house or a dog emerges. No such luck in a real investigation. There's no foolproof guide or order, no guarantee that any of the work that you're doing --- dragging not a crayon across the page but your feet all over town interviewing witnesses, issuing subpoenas, looking into financial documents --- will yield a clear, accurate, actionable picture.
The same with "follow the money," another gross oversimplification. This facile phrase was not ripped from the headlines of Watergate as popularly assumed but coined by the late screenwriter/storyteller William Goldman for the film version of All The President's Men. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein themselves never used the phrase. It was invented by a brilliant Hollywood screenwriter and has become part of the popular lexicon, but is not as easy as it sounds.
Since the dawn of financial crime, investigators have known that you follow the flow of money to whom and from whom, and for what. The problem with phrases like "connect the dots" and "follow the money" is that they dramatically underestimate the difficulty and complexity, and the length of standard criminal investigation, especially one that involves what's in peoples minds.
The difficulty in investigation is not just complexity. Let's take something infinitely more complex than connect the dots. My younger son, Rahm, is obsessed with solving what my generation knew as the Rubik's Cube. I take him to cubing competitions on many weekends. He can solve a three-by-three standard multicolored cube in an average of eleven seconds, which, though not world class, is super impressive. The thing about cubing, though, is this: No matter how much you scramble it, there is a mathematically predictable solution. Depending on how many algorithms you've memorized, you might solve it in more or fewer moves, but the point is that it is always solvable if you have enough resolve, memory, and practice. And there is a preferred, mathematically determined ordering of steps to complete the puzzle. This is not true for criminal investigations. There are guidelines, sure, and best practices of course, but there is no predetermined and universal order of steps to take. More important, not every criminal mystery has a solution.
Back to follow the money. People think you find a check, you see who wrote it, you see who cashed it, and you're done. It's rarely so simple. Sophisticated people trying to hide their tracks use lots of accounts, lots of intermediaries. They favor cash, they falsify documents, they create shell companies and fraudulent paper trails. Often there is no record or trace of incriminating transactions at all. That's the heart of money laundering, which can be especially difficult crime to prove. Many of us have a hard enough time figuring out what's in our own heads, never mind ferreting out what illicit sparks are flaring in someone else's noggin. But that is what exactly the challenge in almost every white-collar or corruption case (pages 1-5 of The Introduction) -- Preet Bharara.
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