What does "the churn" mean in this passage?
It may not have the guns, but it certainly has the glamour and the gangsters: football's player-transfer market is the latter-day equivalent of post-war Las Vegas. In the same way that the mobsters' Syndicate used the churn of casino cash to wash its dirty money on the Strip, so has organized crime cottoned on to the possibilities presented by player transfers. No one has ever conducted a consolidated audit of the amount of money spent each year on the acquisition of talent…
I've found this definition in thefreedictionary.com:
the unethical and usually illegal excessive buying and selling of shares of stock for a customer by a stockbroker or sales agent for the purpose of obtaining high sales commissions
But this word is difficult to translate into Russian.
Best Answer
Commentors have noted a financial sense, but I don't think this fits this context. The sense of "making excessive buying and selling of stocks to profit from the commission" may point towards the meaning, but doesn't directly relate Las Vegas.
So we look at the general meanings and find
It is applied literally to liquid, but here it is applied metaphorically to cash. Casinos cause large amounts of cash to move about vigorously, mostly from gamblers to casinos, sometimes the other way too.
The mobsters had "dirty money" that was the proceeds of crime. They can't spend this money because the police will be able to track it. So they need to find a way to make the money clean. This is called "money laundering" The mobsters' syndicate (ie the mafia) used the fact that lots of money was moving about to hide their dirty money in with all this clean money.
I don't know much Russian, but google suggests взбалтывать or взбалтывание.