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Money laundering is not a crime  invented during the Prohibition era in the United States, but techniques were developed and refined then. Many methods were devised to disguise the origins of money generated by the sale of illegal alcohol. After Al Capone's 1931 conviction for tax evasion, mobster Meyer Lansky transferred funds from Florida "Carpet Joints" to accounts overseas. After the 1934 Swiss Banking Act, which created the principle of bank secrecy, Lansky bought a Swiss bank into which he could transfer his illegal funds through a complex system of shell companies, holding companies, and offshore bank accounts.

In the post-World War II era, legislators found themselves in a quandary as they were confronted with a growing list of commercial, fiscal, and environmental offenses that did not actually cause direct harm to any one identifiable victim; there was no stinking corpse. They decided that confiscating the proceeds of crime would adequately deter potential criminals. Anxious to avoid confiscation, organized criminals now needed to give these huge sums of money – not easily consumed or invested in the legal economy without raising eyebrows – a patina of legitimacy: they needed to "launder" it. Money laundering has been dubbed the "Achilles’ heel of organized crime", for it compels mobsters to seek out and co-opt established businessmen and women with highly technical know-how and access to legal institutions like banks to launder their plunder.

The term "money laundering" does not derive, as is often said, from Al Capone having used laundromats to hide ill-gotten gains. It is more likely  to mean that dirty money is made clean. At some point in the process there must be a switch between the two; necessarily the art is to keep that switch hidden.

Meyer Lansky perfected a predecessor of money laundering, "capital flight," transferring his funds to Switzerland and other offshore places. The first reference to the term "money laundering" itself actually appears during the Watergate scandal. US President Richard Nixon's "Committee to Re-elect the President" moved dirty campaign contributions to Mexico, then brought the money back through a company in Miami. It was Britain's The Guardian newspaper that coined the term, referring to the process as "laundering." (See Jeffrey Robinson's three books on money laundering, The Laundrymen, The Merger and The Sink.)

Money may be laundered through a complex business network of shell companies and trusts based in tax havens. "Smurfing" is an example of a money laundering technique.