THANKS TO ARTIST DENIS BEAUBOIS, we know what $20,000 in clean hundreds looks like. But it’s thanks to a crime story like this one, involving a drug trafficker, a real estate agent, and $40,000 in dirty notes, that we’ve had a bit more about Sydney’s political economy illustrated.

Honestly, if I wanted to explain to a foreigner exactly how Sydney’s system of class and social mobility worked, I’d point him or her straight to that case. A social climbing cocaine smuggler wants a future for his son, so he naturally thinks to Cranbrook, where he’ll fit in with a class of men training to move nameless commodities around for money. The school, I’m assuming, would have been happy to educate the heirs of any kind of distasteful fortune, as long as they paid by cheque, credit card or EFTPOS—not the coke-stained dirty fifties in a briefcase I can luridly imagine.

And what’s more natural in Sydney, when two people want to sanctify an economic transaction involving mutual wilful blindness, than to approach someone who turns blind eyes for a living: a real estate agent? The punchline of course is that all three parties involved are far more concerned about the attention of the Tax Office than the Federal Police. Let’s not even talk about the totally crooked and aptly named Crime Commission, which seems to have turned negotiation about confiscated assets into a broad church of criminal profiteering.

I love Sydney. Where our elites aren’t very elite, our drug dealers are the B- or C-team of international crime, all you have to do to be a “model citizen” is fling wads of money at local football clubs, our private schools are unashamed of their role as mere instruments of privilege formation, real estate agents refuse to accept cash from their tenants but happily launder for criminals, and everybody—but everybody—is unashamed.

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