The International Monetary Fund (IMF) to indicate that almost $1 trillion of criminal activities circulate daily in the financial markets.
The UN also suggests a world market for illicit drugs greater than the entire oil industry, moving more than 400 billion dollars a year.
This high volume of financial resources generated by organized crime allowed them to be hidden, disguised, and integrated into economic activity.
It is possible to affirm that the mafias cease to be a matter for the police to become a financial and geopolitical problem of the first magnitude. A bustling underground world, not bound by any kind of law or democratic rules, employs hundreds of thousands of people.
The ‘business’ includes the trade in drugs, weapons (possibly even nuclear), sophisticated technologies obtained through industrial espionage or secret purchase of slaves and white children, human organs used in transplants, transportation, forged passports and entry visas for illegal immigrants, in addition to the practice of ‘traditional’ authorities and bribery of politicians, extortion, exploitation of prostitution and control of children and adults of cities or entire regions based on force and terror imposed by well-armed and organized gangs according to a paramilitary structure.
Another important factor to consider is that transnational criminal organizations tripled the area of coca cultivation in Colombia, due to new agricultural techniques despite fumigations under the sponsorship of America.
Organized crime looked further afield, to attempt coca plantations in Georgia, on the island of Samoa and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire). But even so, dirty money is laundered in large coasts, such as Miami and New York.
The model is increasingly sprayed, characterized by little knowledge among its members, at which time the crime operators stopped business. Ability to articulate world, which drew from the new world order of organized crime after the fall of the Soviet “empire” in the early 1990s: International organized crime, an imagined threat to many in 1990, was already a global emergency in 1993.
The main guilds of the East and the West gather services and personnel as soon as they colonize Western Europe and the United States, increase the drug trade by half a billion dollars a year through laundering and reinvest in legal companies an estimated quarter of a billion dollars a year. .
Much of the phenomenal growth stemmed from the fact that they had free access to a territory covering half the continent of Europe and much of Asia, a sixth of the land mass, afloat and essentially defenseless.
According to Italian police released in Sicily in 2001, a survey conducted by Russian General Vitor Cheborachev confirms: “Eighty percent of the Moscow banking system is in the hands of the Russian mafia.
It happened that the structures were dismantled, the state disappeared completely and a different structure (the Russian mafia) entered to replace it. The movement of cartels and mafias in the world, however, still does not constitute a kind of world federation of organized crime.
Since 1980, the Cosa Nostra has become a large structure.
A direct way of achieving mafia globalization has been the practice of introducing clandestine and illegal immigrants into the core countries of Europe and the United States. This was the procedure, for example, the Chinese Triads and the Yakuza.
The Triads smuggled 8,000 illegal immigrants into Italy in just two years, nearly half of the entire Chinese community in the country. (…) The tens of thousands of Chinese who illegally entered the “snake head” of the triad were not only more profitable than heroin, but also a practical necessity. Hong Kong, a showcase for the Triads to the world for more than a century, reverted to communist China in 1997.
The Triads could return to the land from which they had fled after the communists – in fact many were returned – but it would never be their homeland. More discreet and operative economically, the Japanese Yakuza “was investing heavily in all the states of the European Union. Japanese police authorities confirmed that it laundered money everywhere, in all kinds of financial and industrial institutions, legal or illegal”. like the Sicilian mafia, they combined a visit to Italy.
Mafia groups that had a tradition of activities limited to their own regions began to come together, probably in the late 1980s, to extend their influence to the most remote regions of the planet. Included in that table are the old Italian and American mafias, the Japanese Yakuza, the Triads based in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, as well as the rapidly expanding new mafia groups in West Africa and the newer Russian mafias (emerging from the dismantling of the soviet state).
These episodic deals between mafias are indicating with certainty that these criminal organizations will gradually adjust to the process of economic globalization, whose main characteristic is the relatively free flow of capital with highly computerized support systems.
In other words, the dimensions and forms of organization of crime in the contemporary world have nothing to do with what existed two or three decades ago. Compared to today’s crime bosses, Al Capone, for example, is a backyard mugger. It is estimated that Capone’s fortune does not exceed 40 million dollars, which is a lot of money, but nothing comparable to the billions currently moved by the mafias.
While national states seek a solution through international strategic cooperation, which is more effective in preventing, combating and prosecuting organized crime, through multilateral organizations such as the UN, criminal organizations go through tax havens and new routes, leaving behind -finally- the Metaphor of the times of Al Capone: laundry, bakery corner, gambling houses… are things of the past.
Today, narco-capital terms “fat” with the greatest naturalness in the live and electronic sessions of the daily financial markets. After almost two decades of hegemony of the thesis of the minimum, economic science is immersed in the search for new paths. The so-called “market fundamentalism” -which suggests the end of the story- already suggests “greater state intervention in the lives of citizens, now emphasizing the need to fight the Keynesian-style recession, now investing in national security” .
The cul-de-sac gaining new contours in the 21st century is as follows, where drawing the line between pure private sector activities and those that require public participation through ownership or regulation is a question.
How to manage the services of the holders of public or private regulations that involve social externalities is another. We certainly cannot answer them. The lesson may well have been that some externalities are too large for the private sector to deal with and always require government financing through tax collection to provide the necessary services and infrastructure.
Attempts to blockade the capital, attributed to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network, were unsuccessful. In fact, the determination of the United States and Great Britain to block the accounts of 27 suspicious entities did not achieve the objectives in question. In Britain, where the freeze reached $88 million – with $6 million in the US and another $6 million in other countries – this number is a footprint compared to the $5.9 billion that moved through the exchange office, since the Thatcher era freely operating funds of criminal origin.
Following the logic of time zones, there are dozens of so-called “tax havens” that make up the main area of organized crime. A huge -and intense- global laundry, operating in real time and mounted on a technological device that works with the logic of digitally masking and erasing all tracks – a simple click is enough and the “dirty” money becomes the ” productive capital”. “
Obviously, tax havens are connected like artificial satellites, around the three major financial centers worldwide: the United States, the European Union and Japan, that is, the link with the mafia Cosa Nostra of the American, Italian, Russian, Chinese type. , triads and Yakuza is direct and immediate. . The figures on the amount of resources coming from organized crime are discrepancies, but “Newsweek magazine estimates that the capital accumulated each year by all the mafias in the world is 3 trillion dollars. Also in the field of estimates, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that the global money laundering business moves NTA between $500 billion and $1.5 trillion dollars per year, an amount equivalent to 5% of the world production, more than a quarter of UK GDP international trade.
Of course, this figure includes drug trafficking, other forms of organized crime, political corruption and tax evasion. There are the types of nonsense: “Alone, the island of Jersey targeted applications with a total value of $600 billion.
The World Wide Web (Internet), the so-called internal networks of organizations (Intranets) and others like the world are also made up to support the transactions of organized crime. The largest network in the world is the SWIFT laundering network: In 1973, the 250 largest financial institutions in Europe and the United States created a cooperative under the name of Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications. Or just fast.
The network covers the entire territory of the United States, Japan and Western Europe, and Latin America, including Brazil. It is enough to ask for a Swift and a password to leave the money in an offshore area (Bahamas, for example) and between banks in Vienna, Frankfurt and Miami.
The SWIFT network has two characteristics that are very similar to criminal organizations: a) the possibility of multiple operations and in a short space of time – facilitating the life of a current interest in clean money, b) the fact that the network is not monitored.
In other words, no intelligent monitoring system is capable of detecting suspicious transactions.
The technology worked very well for the interests of international organized crime. The Swift obeys no boundaries. It is the network through which traffickers and terrorists move a large part of their fortune today. That is where the product of political corruption is sold.
In the late 1990s, during the UN summit meetings on organized crime, held in Naples (1994), Cairo (1995) and Vienna (March 2003), reports on money laundering exchanged by the police representatives of dozens of countries represented point to new strategies for the “purification of dirty money” adopted by mafias and cartels, worldwide. In the new geopolitics of organized crime, the markets are landed in new laundering networks of the international scheme.
Criminal organizations adjust to the process of economic globalization, which implies a relatively free flow of capital through the systems. In other words, the dimensions and forms of organization of crime in the contemporary world have nothing to do with what existed two or three decades ago.
In the Middle East, terrorists and criminals still use the primitive system known as Hawala, which allows resources to be transferred without the need to identify the owner and destination. Transfer confirmations are made by fax (the page is destroyed after this OK. The schemes would be well exploited by bin Laden and the followers of Alspalan Tuerkes, one of the leaders of the Turkish mafia, which controls heroin and arms trafficking. in Eastern Europe.