This is how a drug deal works:
Let’s say you want to buy some crack. You drive up to the block where you are going to make your purchase and you pass a member of the team that is running the sale. This member is called the lookout. Let’s call him Mick. He never touches either the drugs or the money and he carries no weapon. Mick’s sole task is to watch for police and send a signal if the cops show up.
You stop your car outside the designated house with your window rolled down and a foot soldier approaches you and accepts your money. Let’s call him Rudy. He then withdraws and takes the money to a secure location, usually the house where the team leader—let’s call this gentleman Donald—is supervising the activity while other one or two other members of the team—just for fun, let’s call them Lev and Igor—package the merchandise.
A third foot soldier then approaches your car and hands you the drugs. Let’s call him Gordon. You drive off. Gordon goes away. Everyone is happy.
This is a carefully choreographed sequence in which Mick the lookout never touches the money, or the drugs, or a weapon. Donald, the team leader, may have a weapon, but never touches either the money or the drugs. The two foot soldiers who handle either side of the exchange—Rudy and Gordon—are siloed so that the guy who handles the money never touches the drugs, and vice versa. Neither of them carries a weapon. And the amount of drugs being held by any individual at any one time is carefully limited to be below various legal thresholds concerning mere possession, possession with intent to distribute, and the higher charges of trafficking, while the disposition of guns is designed to avoid needless exposure to weapons charges.
A drug deal happens this way not because it is the fastest, most efficient process, but because the gangsters who do this for a living have developed a system to try to avoid prosecution in the rare cases when they are caught in the act.
Imagine that you are sitting on a jury listening to a drug-trafficking case being made against this crew. Prosecutors produce witnesses who saw Mick standing on the corner with a phone that had Donald’s number in it. They saw Rudy walking into the house with the money from the car. They saw Gordon leaving the house and approaching the car with the drugs. They saw Donald in the house, watching the whole thing.
And now imagine that the defense team’s argument is that, since no one saw Donald holding the money and the drugs at the same time, he can’t be guilty of dealing drugs.
Would you find that credible? Or would you believe that this was simply the superficial arrangement created by Donald, with forethought, in an attempt to thwart eventual prosecution by the law?
https://thebulwark.com/trumps-clean-hands-defense/
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