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As a public defender, I see the cash/no cash thing a lot. My clients mostly operate on a cash basis. Some of that from illegitimate work (which is why they are in criminal court), but also from their legitimate work. When you are on the fringes, you do things like detail cars for cash, or cut lawns for cash, or buy and sell cars for cash. Maybe 5% of them have bank accounts. It is all cash, and it is all kept in shoeboxes and the like.
One of the things we have to fight is the propensity of the government to "convert" all of the client's cash into "drug proceeds."
"We caught him with some crack and $7,000, so we are going to assume that that $7,000 was all crack derived and consider that as part of his drug weight"
And then we have to show how our client actually had a pretty successful pressure washing business going, so you can't assume that all of that $7,000 was drug money.
But for the middle and upper class lawyers and judges who deal with this stuff, having that amount of cash around just seems so weird. It seems like you must be doing something wrong if you have more than $500 or so and you don't go put it in the bank.
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