"I'd like four thousand five hundred dollars in soiled tens and twenties

http://www.newsweek.com/id/123489
#begin quote
When Congress passed the Patriot Act in the aftermath of the 9/11
attacks, law-enforcement agencies hailed it as a powerful tool to
help track down the confederates of Osama bin Laden. No one
expected it would end up helping to snag the likes of Eliot
Spitzer. The odd connection between the antiterror law and
Spitzer's trysts with call girls illustrates how laws enacted for
one purpose often end up being used very differently once they're
on the books.

The Patriot Act gave the FBI new powers to snoop on suspected
terrorists. In the fine print were provisions that gave the
Treasury Department authority to demand more information from banks
about their customers' financial transactions. Congress wanted to
help the Feds identify terrorist money launderers. But Treasury
went further. It issued stringent new regulations that required
banks themselves to look for unusual transactions (such as odd
patterns of cash withdrawals or wire transfers) and submit
SARs—Suspicious Activity Re****ts—to the government. Facing
potentially stiff penalties if they didn't comply, banks and other
financial institutions installed sophisticated software to detect
anomalies among millions of daily transactions. They began ranking
the risk levels of their customers—on a scale of zero to 100—based
on complex formulas that included the credit rating, assets and
profession of the account holder.

Another element of the formulas: whether an account holder was a
"politically exposed person." At first focused on potentially
crooked foreign officials, the PEP lists expanded to include many
U.S. politicians and public officials who were conceivably
vulnerable to corruption.

The new scrutiny resulted in an explosion of SARs, from 204,915 in
2001 to 1.23 million last year. The data, stored in an IRS computer
in Detroit, are accessible by law-enforcement agencies nationwide.
"Terrorism has virtually nothing to do with it," says Peter Djinis,
a former top Treasury lawyer. "The vast majority of SARs filed
today involve garden-variety forms of white-collar crime." Federal
prosecutors around the country routinely scour the SARs for
potential leads.

One of those leads led to Spitzer. Last summer New York's North
Fork Bank, where Spitzer had an account, filed a SAR about unusual
money transfers he had made, say law-enforcement and industry
sources who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity
of the probe. One of the sources tells NEWSWEEK that Spitzer wasn't
flagged because of his public position. Instead, the governor
called attention to himself by asking the bank to transfer money in
someone else's name. (A North Fork spokesperson says the bank does
not discuss its customers.) The SAR was not itself evidence that
Spitzer had committed a crime. But it made the Feds curious enough
to follow the money.
#end quote