GOTHAM GIRL GUIDES IMPLICATED IN MOB MONEY SCHEME

Every year, Gotham Girl Guides come to our doors.

Cute as a button, they convince many of us to break our diets and pay out for peanut butter cookies, vanilla wafers, and other goodies.

But according to the GPD, those cookies you bought to help out charity could make you part of a massive criminal conspiracy.

The Gotham Girl Guides are under investigation by the Major Crimes Unit for involvement in a money-laundering scheme.

Non-profit organizations have long been used to funnel money into and out of illegal operations. But few would have ever thought that the much-loved Gotham Girl Guides would ever be implicated in such a plot.

And if the Gotham Girl Guides are unmasked as an arm of the mob, GPD can thank Vanessa DeFoliano. Vanessa's story of selling over $200,000 of GGG cookies made all the papers. But it also sparked suspicion among MCU officers.

"How could one girl sell so many cookies?" said one MCU officer. "We started to think, and then opened an investigation."

GGG rejects the charges.

"These rumors are absurd," Gotham Girl Guide group leader Sarah Alexis Schwimmer told GCN. "The Gotham Girl Guides is in no way connected to the Gotham mob or to the criminal enterprise of money laundering of any kind."

Sources told the GCN that Major Crimes suspects that high-ranking Gotham Girl Guide officials were approached by mob figures that paid them to launder money through the annual cookie sale.

"It would be easy to do this. They sell so many boxes of cookies a year that no one would notice radically increased sales if they didn't report it publically and besides, who would ever suspect them," the source told GCN.

Former Gotham Girl Guide member and one-time group leader Francis Alexander-Higgs agreed to sit down with GCN to discuss the current state of the organization.

"These girls are under tremendous pressure to perform, especially come cookie sale time," Alexander-Higgs said. "I wouldn't be surprised if an unscrupulous parent pushed a child to inflate cookie numbers if he or she was offered some kind of kickback by the mob to launder money through their child's efforts."

The future of the Guides may hinge on this investigation.

Should the group be found guilty of money laundering, they could be stripped of their non-profit status and forced to close down operations, which would end a decades-long Gotham tradition.

But Shwimmer said GGG will be proven innocent. "Scandal and closure is not going to happen under my watch," said Schwimmer. "I cannot stress this enough - that will not be the way the cookie crumbles."