Who can forget the evil Calderon of Miami Vice?

Or Tony Montana played by Al Pacino in Scarface?

And remember the drug lord in the James Bond thriller License to Kill, who pointed to a blood-soaked pile of cash and told his minion: ``Launder it.''

OK, so we know from Hollywood that laundering exists. But how much actually goes on?

No one knows. And even experts concede a margin of error of 100 percent or more.

Let's start with the obvious. Very few launderers are going to identify bank deposits as having come from, say, drug smuggling.

Nevertheless, in 2002 Sen. Carl Levin, the Democrat known for expertise on financial crimes, estimated between $500 billion and $1 trillion was laundered worldwide annually, about half through the U.S. banking system.

The International Monetary Fund has concluded that somewhere around 2 percent to 2.5 percent of the world Gross Domestic Product comes from criminal activities, or $600 billion to $1.5 trillion.

Of course, there's no universal definition of laundered money. Affluent Americans who set up offshore corporations to evade taxes can be prosecuted. But tax havens in the Caribbean have historically been more forgiving.

The bottom line: ''The estimates are extremely imprecise, but they do establish that the money-laundering phenomenon is large,'' Edwin M. Truman, a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury, and author of Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering, said earlier this year.