CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

88 CAPITALISM’S ACHILLES HEEL
THE CRIMINAL COMPONENT:
DRUGS, THUGS, AND TERRORISTS
Global crime is surging exponentially. Mechanisms for shifting illicit proceeds
across borders are the key enabling factor.
Taking advantage of available techniques, hundreds of billions of drug
dollars have been conveyed into U.S. and European deposits since the
1960s. Despite setbacks for the Cali and Medellín cartels in recent years and
crop destruction at the behest of the United States, coca cultivation in Latin
America appears to be holding steady. Colombia, with anti-government revolutionaries
and pro-government paramilitaries both raking in revenues
from trafficking, has been destabilized for decades. Other criminal cells specialize
in transportation or money laundering, aiding the smuggling of cocaine
and heroin northward through Central America, Mexico, Caribbean
islands, and Cuba to North America and Europe. Mexican cartels easily get
their money into California and Texas banks, while tax havens in the
Caribbean continue to welcome illicit deposits. On the opposite side of the
world, drugs coming out of North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other
Asian countries are similarly transported by cooperating syndicates smuggling
their goods across the “stans,” Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Eastern Europe
into Western Europe and the British Isles.
The ease with which drug kingpins washed their profits whetted the appetites
of other thugs, furthering the worldwide reach of crime in the 1980s
and 1990s. Regional and international syndicates honed their skills in protection
rackets, extortion, loan sharking, kidnapping, murder for hire, prostitution,
alien smuggling, advance-fee fraud, art theft, counterfeiting of
currencies and consumer products, trafficking in human and animal parts,
and assorted villainies. Globalization has brought unprecedented opportunities
to criminal syndicates, and they have responded more quickly than law
enforcement agencies can begin to match.
Seeing how simple it was for others to do it, terrorists hopped onto the
money-laundering bandwagon in the 1990s. With U.S. leadership and
broad international cooperation, the network of bank accounts that provided
wherewithal for the plots leading to September 11 was, to a reasonable
extent, quickly rolled up; however, the ability of the next group to employ
the same devices again has hardly been affected.
Drug kingpins, racketeers, and terrorists all draw from the bag of dirty-