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Illicit Markets, Organized Crime, and Global Security pp 41–61Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Illicit Superstructures: Banking, Middlemen, and Transport

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Abstract

In our complicated world, we must begin to dissect the manner in which illicit goods make their way around the world. We must also try to understand how these groups manage to hide/wash their money from law enforcement and the government. It is important to understand why, after more than 40 years since Nixon declared the war on drugs, drugs still manage to find their way into the United States not to mention other consumer-countries around the world. This chapter will discuss features of the international system that allow for the proliferation of illicit goods around the globe.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hanna Samir Kassab Prioritization Theory and Defensive Foreign Policy: Systemic Vulnerabilities in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, NY, 2017).

  2. 2.

    “Illicit Drugs” in CIA World Factbook, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2086.html, accessed June 17, 2017.

  3. 3.

    Gautam Basu, “Concealment, corruption, and evasion: a transaction cost and case analysis of illicit supply chain activity,” Logistics, Information, and Service Economy 7 3 (2014): p. 210.

  4. 4.

    Avner Greif and Christopher Kingston, “Institutions: Rules and Equilibrium,” in Political Economy of Institutions, Democracy and Voting, ed. Norman Schofield and Gonzalo Caballero (Springer, New York: New York, NY, 2011), p. 17.

  5. 5.

    Gautman Basu “Concealment, corruption, and evasion: a transaction cost and case analysis of illicit supply chain activity,” p. 215.

  6. 6.

    World Customs Organization (2009a) Customs and Drugs Report, Brussels, BE.

  7. 7.

    Gautman Basu, “Concealment, corruption, and evasion: a transaction cost and case analysis of illicit supply chain activity,” p. 218.

  8. 8.

    Eleanor Goldberg, “Here’s How Easy it is for Human Traffickers to Transport Victims into the US,” Huffington Post, October 23, 2014.

  9. 9.

    Denis Campbell and Nicola Davison, “Illegal kidney trade booms as new organ is ‘sold every hour,’” The Guardian, May 27, 2012.

  10. 10.

    Gautman Basu, “Concealment, corruption, and evasion: a transaction cost and case analysis of illicit supply chain activity,” p. 219.

  11. 11.

    Cocaine Cowboys 2006 http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=cocaine-cowboys.

  12. 12.

    Richard Kuklinski, “The Iceman Mafia Hitman HBO interview,” (2001).

  13. 13.

    Cocaine Cowboys 2006 http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?movie=cocaine-cowboys.

  14. 14.

    Taran Volckhausen, “Colombia recognizes responsibility for Palace of Justice massacre,” Colombia Reports, November 12, 2013.

  15. 15.

    Peter Lupsha, “Trasnational organized crime versus the nation-state,” Transnational organized crime, Vol. 2. No. 1, (Spring 1996): p. 31.

  16. 16.

    L. Giommoni, A Aziani and G. Berlusconi “How Do Illicit Drugs Move Across Countries? A Network Analysis of the Heroin Supply to Europe” Journal of Drug Issues, (47, 2, 2017), 230.

  17. 17.

    “Corruption Perceptions Index 2014: Results,” Transparency International, http://www.transparency.org/cpi2014/results, accessed September 2016.

  18. 18.

    Jonathan D. Rosen and Roberto Zepeda Organized Crime, Drug Trafficking and Violence in Mexico (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), p. 34.

  19. 19.

    Roberto Zepeda and Jonathan D. Rosen “An Ominous Future: Narco-Violence in Mexico from 2006–2016,” Fragile States in the Americas eds. Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna S. Kassab, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), pp. 21–23.

  20. 20.

    Jesus Murillo Karam quoted in Patrick Corcoran, “Mexico Has 80 Drug Cartels: Attorney General,” InSight Crime, December 20, 2012. http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/mexico-has-80-drug-cartels-attorney-general, accessed September 2016, 1.

  21. 21.

    OECD International Drivers of Corruption, OECD, 2012, 10.

  22. 22.

    Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty (Crown Publishers: New York, NY, 2012), p. 51.

  23. 23.

    Ibid.

  24. 24.

    Mark A. R. Kleiman, Jonathan P. Caulkins, and Angela Hawken, Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 2011), p. 16.

  25. 25.

    Hanna Samir Kassab, Weak States in International Relations Theory: The Cases of Armenia, St. Kitts and Nevis, Lebanon and Cambodia (Palgrave: New York, 2015), 12.

  26. 26.

    Christopher Easter, “Small States Development: A Commonwealth Vulnerability Index,” Round Table 88 no. 351 (1999): p. 403.

  27. 27.

    Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna Samir Kassab, “Introduction,” in Fragile States in the Americas, eds. Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna S. Kassab (Lexington Books: Lanham, MD, 2016), p. xiii.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    “IISS-US Adelphi Book Launch: Drugs, Insecurity and Failed States: The Problems of Prohibition,” International Institute for Security Studies, May 15, 2012, 06:37.

  30. 30.

    Paul Krugman, “In Praise of Cheap Labor: Bad Jobs at Bad Wages are Better than no Jobs at all” in Debates in International Political Economy ed. Thomas Oatley (Pearson Education Inc.: New York, NY, 2010) p. 126.

  31. 31.

    Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge University Press: New York, NY, 1996), p. 4.

  32. 32.

    Gregory B. Weeks, US and Latin American Relations (Pearson Longman: New York, NY, 2008), p. 251.

  33. 33.

    Edwin Mora, “Napolitano: Terrorist Enter US from Mexico ‘From time to time,’” cnsnews.com, July 30, 2012.

  34. 34.

    Willem van Schendel, “Spaces of Engagement: How Borderlands, Illicit Flows and Territorial States Interlock,” Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders and the Other Side of Globalization, eds. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, IN 2005), p. 48.

  35. 35.

    Willem van Schendel, “Spaces of Engagement,” p. 51.

  36. 36.

    Kendra L. Koivu, “In the Shadow of the State: Mafias and Illicit Markets,” Comparative Political Studies 49, no. 2 (2016): pp. 155–183.

  37. 37.

    US Department of Justice “Drug Movements Into and Within the United States” National Drug Intelligence Center, 2010, https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs38/38661/movement.htm, accessed July 11, 2017.

  38. 38.

    US Department of Justice “Drug Movements Into and Within the United States,” 2010.

  39. 39.

    Ibid.

  40. 40.

    CIA World Fact Book “Illicit Drugs,” https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2086.html, accessed July 11, 2017.

  41. 41.

    Gautman Basu, “The role of transnational smuggling operations in illicit supply chains,” Journal of Transportation Security 6, no. 4 (2013): p. 323.

  42. 42.

    Jonathan HC Kelman, “States can play too: constructing a typology of state participation in illicit flows,” Criminal Law and Social Change 64, no. 1 (2015): p. 42.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., p. 43.

  44. 44.

    Simon Tomlinson, “Inside the illegal hospitals performing thousands of black market organ transplants every year for $200,000 a time,” Daily Mail, April 9, 2015.

  45. 45.

    Jonathan HC Kelman, “States can play too: constructing a typology of state participation in illicit flows,” p. 42.

  46. 46.

    Ibid., p. 44.

  47. 47.

    Ibid.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., p. 46.

  49. 49.

    Gautman Basu, “The role of transnational smuggling operations in illicit supply chains,” p. 321.

  50. 50.

    Pancho Nagel and Christopher Weiman, “Money laundering,” American Criminal Law Review 52 (Fall 2015): p. 1357.

  51. 51.

    Ibid.

  52. 52.

    Peter Reuter and Edwin W. Truman, Chasing Dirty Money: The Fight Against Money Laundering (Peterson Institute for International Economics: Washington, DC, 2004), pp. 27–30.

  53. 53.

    Quoted from US Department of State “Money Laundering Methods, Trends and Typologies” 2003, https://www.state.gov/j/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2003/vol2/html/29910.htm, accessed July 7, 2017.

  54. 54.

    Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (Double Day: New York, NY 2005), pp. 134–135.

  55. 55.

    Ken Silverstein, “I Set Up a Shell Corporation, and So Can You!” VICE, December 15. 2015.

  56. 56.

    Ibid.

  57. 57.

    Moises Naim, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, p. 140.

  58. 58.

    The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, “Giant Leak of Offshore Financial Records Exposes Global Array of Crime and Corruption,” Panama Papers, August 3, 2016 https://panamapapers.icij.org/20160403-panama-papers-global-overview.html, accessed July 2017.

  59. 59.

    Panama Papers, August 3, 2016.

  60. 60.

    Ibid.

  61. 61.

    Eric Hellenier, “State Power and the Regulation of Illicit Activity in Global Finance,” in The Illicit Global Economy and State Power, eds. H. Richard Friman and Peter Andreas (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), p. 64.

  62. 62.

    United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/treaties/illicit-trafficking.html, accessed July 7, 2017.

  63. 63.

    “Objectives of the Global Programme against Money-Laundering, Proceeds of Crime and the Financing of Terrorism,” UNODC.org, https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/money-laundering/programme-objectives.html?ref=menuside, accessed July 7, 2017.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, USA

    Hanna Samir Kassab

  2. Holy Family University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Jonathan D. Rosen

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Kassab, H.S., Rosen, J.D. (2019). Illicit Superstructures: Banking, Middlemen, and Transport. In: Illicit Markets, Organized Crime, and Global Security. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90635-5_3

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