Shaun Gindi brought a duffel bag stuffed with 1,000 twenty-dollar bills to open a checking account at his local Chase branch. He was successful. Until the branch closed the account a week later.
“I’ve gone through at least eight banks,” said Gindi, 38.
As the owner of two marijuana shops and a weed warehouse in Colorado, where the drug is legal, Gindi is a pariah tobanks, which face expensive compliance hurdles and uncertain legal consequences because ganja still violates federal law. Of the more than 7,600 banks and credit unions in the U.S., only 220 accept cannabis cash, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.
Anthony Rivera says he has a solution: an American Indian banking system.
