taxing the value of land would wreck this international crime ring

The rich are different from you and me. Their money is everywhere.

Real estate is a stable investment that often appreciates in value. By purchasing property through a shell company, buyers can secure tax breaks and shield their identities from law enforcement authorities and creditors. Secrecy also empowers criminals, including money launderers and drug cartels. Their trade in real estate through offshore companies moves millions of dollars while avoiding scrutiny.
In the United Kingdom, a director of the National Crime Agency said he believed that dirty money had “skewed” London’s property market [just London’s? — ed]. The combination of asset security and secrecy has also made offshore holdings a haven for money and other assets from less stable economies. A growing body of evidence suggests that offshore purchases at the high end of the real estate market have a ripple effect, pricing out people lower down the property ladder.

I don’t see any way to undo the private ownership of land but we would get most of what we want — public recapture of the value and real wealth tax that can’t be gamed — by taxing it.

I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.