Cash isn't quite anonymous, it's anonymous-ish.

To illustrate this, a few years ago I wrote about the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping case. The ransom was paid in gold certificates, not Federal Reserve notes. By coincidence, the U.S. went off thegold standard the next year, and all gold certificates were called in. So when the kidnapper spent some of his gold certificates in 1934 to buy gas, his purchase was odd enough to out him to theauthorities.

I recently stumbled on a more recent example of cash de-anonymization. Most people know the gist of the Watergate scandal, but to recap five burglars were caught breaking into Democraticheadquarters at the Watergate building on June 17, 1972.

Who were they and what were they doing there? At first, no one had a clue. But the police did find around $3,600 in cash on them, much of it in sequentially-numbered $100 banknotes. See the serialnumbers below:

A series of sequential banknotes meant that the cash had come fresh from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the agency that produces banknotes on behalf of the Federal Reserve. The newnotes would have been sent to a bank which in turn distributed the notes in their original sequential order to customers.

The serial numbers of the Watergate notes also gave a geographical sense of where they had been issued. There are 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks. Notes beginning with F are issued intocirculation by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, those beginning with C by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

Two days after the break-in, FBI agents contacted these two district banks for more information. It turns out, Federal Reserve Banks do keep track of banknote serial numbers. The Philadelphia Fedinformed agents that the notes in question had been shipped to a private bank, the Girard Bank & Trust in Philadelphia, while the Atlanta Fed had shipped theirs to the Republic NationalBank in Miami.

Unfortunately, the two commercial banks did not record the serial numbers of the bills that they had distributed to the public. However, one of the burglars--Bernard Barker--happened to have anaccount at the Republic National Bank in Miami. (The trail to the Girard Bank & Trust turned cold).

Scanning through Barker's bank information, investigators discovered that several months before five large deposits had been made into his account. This included four checks totaling $80,000drawn on a Mexico City bank and one for $25,000 from a Miami bank. These funds were eventually traced back to the the Committee to Re-Elect the President, an organization created to help raisefunds for Nixon's upcoming election campaign.

And there was a smoking gun. A money trail from the pockets of the Watergate burglars to the President's administration. The burglars, it was further discovered, had been hired by Committee toRe-Elect the President to wire-tap Democrat party phones and photograph documents. So the President was spying on his political enemies.

To read the complete article, see:
The Watergate banknotes (http://jpkoning.blogspot.com/2019/12/the-watergate-banknotes.html)