convergence

Shelley
62 The author has seen these unoccupied hotels. They were pointed out by local specialists on corruption.
63 Agarwal and Agarwal, 24.
64 Interview with a member of the staff of the President of the NATO Army Armaments Group (NAAG), Fall
2011; Frances D’Emilio, “Italy’s Mafia Thrives in Global Financial Meltdown,” Associated Press, April 25, 2009,
available at ; Walter Kego, Erik Leijonmarck, and Alexandru
Molcean, eds., Organized Crime and the Financial Crisis: Recent Trends in the Baltic Sea Region (Stockholm: Institute
for Security and Development Policy, 2011), 36, as well as a more general discussion of the problem.
65 Nick Pisa, “Mafia is now Italy’s ‘biggest bank’—and they’re squeezing the life out of small business (quite
literally),” Daily Mail, January 12, 2012, available at .
66 Illustrative of this is the house found in Mexico with $205 million in cash. See Hector Tobar and Carlos
Martinez, “Mexico meth raid yields $205 million in U.S. cash,” The Los Angeles Times, March 17, 2007, available at
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-meth17mar17,0,709967.story>.
67 Interview with individual selling real estate in Europe.
68 Europol, OCTA, 2011, 13.
69 Hill; Kaplan and Dubro and expertise provided by members of the organized crime group of the World
Economic Forum.
70 Report on Romania in OSCE and UNODC, Expert Seminar on Leveraging Anti-Money Laundering Regimes
to Combat Human Trafficking, October 3–4, 2011, Vienna; Shelley.
71 In markets such as Turkey, the actual sale price of the house is never reflected on the deed of sale, allowing
ample opportunities for laundering money.
72 Discussions with a Swiss banking expert, October 2011.
73 In some countries where corrupt officials know there is no capacity to investigate their activity or to recover
assets overseas, they make no effort to disguise their identity in making purchases overseas. The author, around 2000,
did training with the anticorruption commission in Honduras. Through working with the online property registrations
for the city of Miami, it was possible to locate the undeclared homes of many of the country’s top politicians.
There was no attempt to disguise these purchases by themselves or their family members.
74 In 2000, the author toured both rural agricultural and urban properties in Sicily that have been confiscated
and saw how they have been turned into institutions that serve the community.
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