An interesting way to phrase it.

Money laundering has been illegal since basically Roman times, however until it was called out explicitly as a crime it was generally charged and prosecuted as abetting after the fact.

There are lots of ways you could be charged with abetting criminals, from providing shelter and new clothes when they were on the run (harboring a fugitive) to providing false information or failing to cooperate (obstruction of justice) and it has always been a challenge to decide just how far outside the influence ring of a particular crime you can prosecute.

It is an interesting look at market dynamics. And while the 'outer layers' of the criminal enterprise were not being prosecuted it created a weird sort of bubble market where crooks living on the margin could promote suckers to be the 'kingpin' and enrich themselves on things like supplying guns, or laundering profits, or providing transportation, and the kingpin gets caught and sent to jail, these folks need a new kingpin to keep the engine going.

In prosecuting so called 'organized crime' in the late 60's and 70's law enforcement realized that they couldn't just put away the boss. The theory that crime was lead by a small number of people who tricked a much larger number of people into facilitating that crime, turned out to be quite wrong. There were large numbers of people who knew what they were doing to support the criminal enterprise was wrong, they just didn't care because they were earning a living and were unlikely to be prosecuted. So we saw a shift to more systemic prosecution of the entire food chain, and the specific actions which supported criminal activity were called out. The RICO Act is probably the key bit of legislation which reflected that shift. I was living in Las Vegas in the early 70's and that was on the tail end of the authorities trying to 'clean up' that town. Their effort focused on cleaning up the infrastructure (like the mob controlled unions) in addition to the crooks themselves.

But this is something you really need to think hard about:

"I don't know about others, but I find it very difficult to get upset about a crime that's new, that doesn't impact me, and that the world got along just fine with for centuries."

It does effect you, that viagra spam you get? Those Oxycodone and Adderal pills you kids are being offered at school, the insurance rates on your car, the price you pay for things at the store, Etc. We live in a world where some folks take millions of dollars from a wide variety of people. That activity causes your fees to go up which is how the money is transferred from your pocket into the criminals pockets. The carders steal a million dollars from Amazon by using fake credit cards, and Amazon increases their transaction fee for everyone using credit cards to offset that loss, your money goes to the criminals. Sometimes they kill the store/restaurant/company but if the customer base is large enough they just leech off the customers. It is much closer to being a zero sum game than you realize. And when they defraud the federal government they recover that money by getting more tax money.

The key here is that it isn't a "new" crime, its the support of criminal activity which has gone on forever. Making it difficult to profit from crime has been a very potent force in reducing crime in general.