Crime specific event patterns are crucial in detecting potential relationships among suspects in criminal networks. However, current link analysis tools commonly used in detection do not utilize such patterns for detecting various types of crimes. These analysis tools usually provide generic functions for all types of crimes and heavily rely on the user's expertise on the domain knowledge of the crime for successful detection. As a result, they are less effective in detecting patterns in certain crimes. In addition, substantial effort is also required for analyzing vast amount of crime data and visualizing the structural views of the entire criminal network. In order to alleviate these problems, an event-based approach to money laundering data analysis and visualization is proposed in this paper. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on a money laundering case from Taiwan. Copyright © 2010 ACM.