I stated pulling out the cash and had to give him a check to cover total cost but i got it! Bobby
Rule number one of gun show chewing-the-price-down is use cash as a club. But now there's a catch: It used to be that a trip to the bank for $10,000-plus
in cash triggered paperwork of the money laundering kind. But now at the $3,000 mark you get reported to Homeland Security as a suspected money source for terrorism.
Could it be any worse after January 20th? We'll see.
But the story is this: My wife Nancy and I headed north to Alaska last June in the Road Trek (10,700 miles overall). I thought it would be a good idea to start with $4,000 cash as most of our driving would be in Canada, diesel was $5.25 per gallon and up to $6.70 north of Fairbanks, &c. I went to my friendly teller at the bank where I have been doing business since 1973, and where everyone knows my voice over the phone (Davis IL, population 550). The teller apologized and said she had to have my driver's license to photocopy for Homeland Security paperwork; I had asked for $4,000, but she said everything $3,000 and up had to be reported.
With this creeping up upon us during the current administration, can the next be any worse?
I spoke to my friend the president of the bank and got his take on the situation: The federal banking authorities passed a new regulation that put the burden on the banks to "report suspicious cash transactions," but didn't outline what was suspicious, leaving it to the banks to separate ("profile") the Islamists with Bin Laden T-shirts from the grandmothers in wheelchairs. Anyone who has not been asleep for the last umpteen years knows that this would surely lead to lawsuits. So the banks stuck it to the feds: They agreed among themselves that anything $3,000 and upwards was
prima facia "suspicious," and they started bombarding Homeland Security with an avalanche of specious paperwork. Our government at work!
As an addendum, the recently resigned Governor of New York (Spizer) got caught up in this $3,000 threshold reporting. He had patronized a high $$$ prostitute and wire transferred $4,000 to her pimp. After the feds evaluated the bank's report and determined that the Gov's transaction had no impact on national security, they exceeded their mandate in an effort to have a little fun at Spizer's expense (he was a former prosecutor and not very well liked by many powerful people). So they leaked the report, the media had a feeding frenzy, and Spizer resigned in disgrace. And there's some lessons here:
(1) Don't get more than $____ in cash all at once;
(2) Pay for your _______ in cash.
(3) And for $4,000 Spizer could have had a nice double gun and would still be Governor of New York...in a position to appoint the successor to HRC's senate seat.
C'est la vie! EDM