The mystery money mover.

• The Sydney Morning Herald

The beauty of the book you hold in your hands is that it offers a unique and perfect insight into the money-laundering world.

• Howard Marks, aka Mr. Nice

What started innocently enough led Bruce Aitken to moving millions of dollars for some of the world’s most notorious and shady characters - including the CIA, government officials, financiers and well-known drug lords.

It was a life of first-class flights and five-star hotels - a lavish, globe-trotting lifestyle, yes, but one always fraught with risk too.

And in the end, it all caught up with him. Aitken was illegally kidnapped by American agents, and suddenly found himself staring down the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Howard Marks, aka ‘Mr. Nice’, writes in his foreword: I first met Bruce in the early 1980s … and we immediately formed a solid rapport. He was a master of his chosen trade and helped me clean up some cash that I had earned through smuggling. Reading about his two decades of laundering vividly brought back to me all the excitement, glamor and sheer fun that an international jet-setting life of crime invariably imparts [as well as] the paranoia and nerve-racking horror of his chosen lifestyle.

Mr. Clean has also been optioned by Hong Kong production company Moonlight Entertainment Ltd for TV series development, with Oscar-winning Producer/Director Malcolm Clarke and Producer Stuart Sender attached.

Aitken’s adventures make for pulsating drama: readers will be gripped by his tales of close shaves and disastrous slip-ups, good times and bad, beautiful friendships and shocking betrayals. Along the way he encounters an incredible cast of characters, from buccaneers and misfits to drug dealers, government agents and sometimes just plain old lunatics, bears witness to corruption, kidnappings, sting operations, acts of moral depravity and moments of shocking violence, and even visits Soviet Russia on unspecified off-balance sheet business for Uncle Sam.

In the mid-80s, Aitken starts to wind down his operations. Too late: America’s alphabet agencies already have him in their sights and are about to start making it known. What follows is a personal and judicial fiasco. Deported to the US from Thailand and denied bail, he is confronted with the possibility of spending the rest of his life behind bars, and has to summon every ounce of his resilience - and his faith in God - to fight what he believes are phony indictments.

For much of the 1970s and 1980s, Bruce Aitken ferried cash around Asia. Some of his clients were marijuana smugglers.

• The New York Times

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