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JUST BECAUSE IT'S DES MOINES DOESN'T MAKE IT IOWA

May 03, 2007

A challenge for our readers: what's wrong with this story from a New York-based website:

In a civil complaint filed in U.S. District Court, an Iowa man has been accused of taking at least $28 million from people around the country to conceal their assets and help them evade taxes.

The court froze the assets of Robert Arant’s bank, Olympic Business Systems LLC, and federal agents seized computers from Arant’s Seattle-area home last month. Arant has refused to turn over information about his customers.

Here's a hint: notice the "Iowa man" has a "Seattle-area home."

Yes, this "Iowa man" is actually from Des Moines, Washington.

It is an interesting story, though. Mr. Arant is accused of running a "Warehouse Bank." Such outfits exist to help their customers launder money. A warehouse bank opens an account in a real bank, and then runs its customer deposits and withdrawals through that account anonymously to make it difficult to track the transactions to an individual customer. You can read the Justice Department press release and see a copy of the restraining order here.

I will give the New York-based website credit for knowing that there is a Des Moines, Iowa, and not mixing it up with Ohio or Idaho. It can be funny to encounter East-coast geography. Once on a vacation in Cape Cod, when I told someone I was from Des Moines, I was asked if that was close to Boise. Another vacationer chimed in saying he hadn't been to Iowa, but he had been nearby once, when he visited Texas.

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