Organised crime is becoming the next super power.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime has released a report calculating that organized crime worldwide is a $130 billion a year business. Organized crime includes trafficking of persons, smuggling migrants, cocaine, heroin, trafficking of firearms, trafficking of natural resources like tiger parts and elephant ivory, product counterfeiting, piracy, and cyber crime which includes identity theft and child pornography. The report shows that the criminal market spans the planet: illicit goods are sourced from one continent. Then they are trafficked across another, and marketed in a third.
The second-biggest sector in international organised crime is people-trafficking. The trade in women for sexual exploitation is now worth a staggering $3 billion a year. Much of the trade involves trafficking people from Africa and the Balkans to other parts of Europe, where about 140,000 women are being manipulated by gangs at any one time. The report says illegal smuggling of economic migrants is worth about $6.6 billion a year.
The report also shows how organized crime in effect can becomes like another state. "There are a number of areas around the world where criminals have become so powerful that, rather than seeking to evade the government, they begin to directly confront it. In these cases, a pattern of symptoms is typically manifest. Investigators, prosecutors and judges who pursue organized criminals are threatened and killed. Journalists and activists may also be targeted. Corruption is detected at the highest levels of government, and law enforcement can become paralysed by mistrust. Portions of the country may effectively drift beyond state control."
Raymond Baker, executive director of the Washington, DC-based organization Global Financial Integrity (GFI), says organized crime works in closely with bribery of companies, representing about 30 to 35% of capital flows in this area. And it's all done through a shadow financial system that is actually legal, allowing falsified invoices, sham transactions, and tax-evading deposits in secrecy jurisdictions.
And therein lies the problem with organized crime. It morphs into legitimate business activity. That makes it next to impossible to wipe out.
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