Money to burn? Take note — frozen assets are easier to launder than ash

HE sold his car.

That was the start of it. What kind of car?

Not strictly relevant, but, for the petrol-heads, it was a Toyota Supra sports car.

Age of car? Unknown as we go to press.

Price? 15,000 Australian dollars, which equates to just under €13,000, that being the current exchange rate.

The money was headed for his mortgage account, where it would, in due course, make a pleasant dent in the family’s overall debt. But it took a detour, did the cash.

He was careful, you see. Very careful, seeing as how he wouldn’t usually have that amount of readies around the house.

It wouldn’t do to keep it in his briefcase or under the mattress until he got it safely into the bank. Creativity was required. Much better, he figured, to stash it in the cooker. More specifically, in the oven of the cooker. Which he did, this provident married father of children.

Now, this married father of children may have been a bit skint for quite a while before he flogged the car, because he seems to have assumed that his wife, when she got around to feeding their children, would serve their offspring cold food.

No harm in that. Except that when it comes to chicken nuggets, you don’t want to offer the kids mouthfuls of damply uncooked breadcrumb-coated poultry, so his wife, sensibly enough, decided to cook them. The nuggets. However, in the process, she also cooked the money to the point of destruction.

“I struggled to breathe,” she said of the moment when she discovered incinerated banknotes ready to serve as a side-dish. “I said: ‘I burnt the money, I burnt the money.’ I felt like I was going to faint.”

Clearly, the husband who stashed the money in the oven had never seen the movie My Left Foot, where Christy Brown’s mother manages to squirrel away a little fund her husband would otherwise devote to the purchase of alcohol, and stick it up the chimney, thereby causing panic when someone lights the fire and the money has to be rescued, despite the danger to life and limb. In that instance, the husband, memorably played by Ray McAnally, is understandably livid when he realises what she’s been at.

“We’ve been freezin’ cold,” he yells, “Eatin’ porridge for breakfast, dinner, and tea, and you had four pounds seven and threepence up the fuckin’ chimney?”

Apparently, more and more people are keeping whatever cash they have at home, which, given the currently level of break-ins , is not a clever idea. Keeping it hidden in a chimney or an oven seems particularly risky. Risky in flammable terms, rather than risky in the sense of being obvious places to which a burglar would immediately go, which include drawers (desk, dressers, presses), jewellery boxes, and handbags.

According to a garda who visited my home after a break-in, the best place in which to hide money is a bank, but anyone keeping any cash at home should divide it in two, storing the smaller portion in an easily-reached place and going to more trouble to conceal the larger amount. The theory is that burglars want to get into and out of your residence with speed, and so may be distracted and satisfied with the smaller, more accessible amount.

The hot press, where former taoiseach Bertie Ahern is believed to have kept some of his unbanked money, is up there with the freezer as a common hiding place. My hot press is so small, we can’t even get a lagging jacket around the immersion heater, so that’s not an option.

The freezer made some sense back in the day when it was a postage-stamp sized bit of the ordinary fridge, containing a tray of ice cubes and a lonely package of Birds Eye frozen peas.

When freezers grew in size, they should, in theory, have been even more suited to the role of domestic bank, at least to the extent that no burglar worth his or her salt wants to lose the circulation in their thieving hands by rifling through plastic containers of leftover soups and sauces, hamburger patties, and clothes.

OK, maybe most households don’t have clothes in their freezers, but I have more iced-up clothes than I have frozen food. That’s because I read somewhere that if you can’t iron shirts while they’re damp, they may go mildewy if you leave them rolled up in the open, whereas if you shove them in the freezer, they stay fresh and ready for your iron when you get around to using it.

As a result, in among my frozen sliced onions you will always find shirts in rigidly affectionate grip of each other, alongside bricks of frozen hankies. If the gardaí ever arrive with one of those warrants that allows them to search your premises, it may take them a while to get over seeing in the freezer what look like leftovers from Pompeii, all hunched defensively, although commendably clean.

Even with the clothes, there is enough space to secrete money, if I had any to spare, but having once had to empty a freezer that died without me noticing for a couple of weeks, I wouldn’t want to subject bank notes to the experience.

And I’m not sure any bank would accept currency stinking of corruption. Or, if they did, might draw the line at rancid cauliflower corruption.

I did buy one of those clever aerosols which look like a branded fly-spray but in fact have a bottom that unscrews to reveal a hollow interior designed for the hiding of your unworn diamonds and leftover golden guineas. The thing never worked, because the man in my life kept trying to kill blue bottles with it, swearing at its ineffectiveness, and then turfing it out as used up.

Each time he went through that performance, I had to go through the rubbish to retrieve the bloody thing and its pathetic contents. If I ever lose the day job, I’m going to apply to one of those waste management companies where people sort garbage on conveyor belts. I haven’t just served my rubbish-apprenticeship — I pretty much have a doctorate in debris-diving.

MEANWHILE, over in Oz, the Reserve Bank of Australia seems to be willing to help the poor guy whose money went through a baking process. They say that if 80% of any of the bank notes is missing, it’s not worth anything. But if less than 20% has been burned away, then full face value is paid and, “If between 20% and 80% of the banknote is missing, value is paid in proportion with the percentage remaining.”

The Reserve Bank sensibly says that if the notes have been reduced to ashes, they’ll pay nothing for them, but I can’t see that the 20 minutes or so required to heat up chicken nuggets would incinerate a roll of notes that happened to be squatting in the oven. So maybe the unfortunate man can still reduce his mortgage. Just a little.