Balzac, with amused cynicism, said, “The secret of a great fortune without any apparent cause is a crime not yet discovered, because it was carried out so well.” The UK is now hot on the tail of such cases of “unexplained wealth.” Under the new policy, government investigators can demand an explanation for money, generally foreign money, that appears suddenly with origin unknown. Often the money, a great deal of it, is spent on real estate, often real estate that is rarely occupied.

This heightened interest isn’t surprising. As detailed in a recent Washington Post report, a UN study suggests that 2.7% of global GDP annually (or about $2 trillion) is money being laundered through the financial system. Bankers, lawyers, real estate moguls and others are the middlemen and enablers, but the perps tend to be drug traffickers, oil state potentates, Russian oligarchs, ruthless autocrats and their nefarious minions.

The flood of unexplained wealth seeking a safe haven has distorted real estate prices in London, but also New York, Vancouver, Singapore, Miami and other venues in which cash can be safely stashed, often by passing it through real property. The goal of the UK effort is to prevent the perpetrators from benefitting from crime and corruption at home by moving the money to another jurisdiction.

If for no other reason, this laundering of ill-gotten gains is of interest to us because it appears that much of the wealth of the Trump family is the result of real estate sales to Russian oligarchs and third world kleptocrats, making them potentially complicit in an international criminal conspiracy.

Will they, or other middle men who profit from the practice, be brought to justice? The Post notes that the United States is reasonably good at prosecuting the actual villains behind the laundering if they can be identified, but that serious gaps in enforcement remain when it comes to those same enablers in the middle through which the money flows. Lawyers can claim privilege, bankers ignorance, real estate developers cluelessness. In effect, they say, figuring out where their customers got their money is not their job.

The new crackdown in the UK was a long time coming. As far back as David Cameron, when some government bureaucrats and politicians became alarmed at the billions of mystery dollars, pounds, rubles, riyals, renminbi pouring into the realm, attempts were made to better detect such crime and to regulate the market to make such shady transactions more transparent.

The frustrated head of the anti-corruption division of the enforcement apparatus became so concerned about the obliviousness in high places that he began taking journalists and politicians on kleptocracy walking tours through high end London neighborhoods, pointing out one property after another purchased by shady characters with untraceable funds.

Part of the message was surely, there goes the neighborhood. Perhaps it is time for American enforcers to conduct a similar show and tell in posh precincts of our cities. Several Trump properties would surely be included on any such itinerary.