The fundamental problem here is like your question - conflating two completely separate concepts. A shopkeeper, being a person, should care if someone just murdered someone else outside of their shop. A shopkeeper that has just completed a sale, and then found out the customer is a murdering thief, should feel no compunction about considering the cash in the drawer theirs. They should of course help bring the murderer to justice.
Abstractions are only useful if we can rely on them. Under the regime of separate ambient titles (which the concept of money laundering is intertwined with), you can never be sure anything that you have is actually yours! So this creates a whole lot of ambiguity. As I alluded to, this ambiguity erodes the rule of law because it can't not lead to selective enforcement based around the gut feelings of whomever decides if a claim to reverse has merit.
And yes, lack of an ambient title most certainly is the base state of the world - it's modern communications technology that has enabled us to even fathom tracking the history of everything. But you're the one strawmanning this "sinister cabal". I would describe it as power tending to coalesce, and emergently promulgating a paradigm that relies on (and thus further necessitates) said power.