CAPITALISM'S ACHILLES HEEL Dirty Money and How to

Burma, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Belarus, Serbia, Sudan, Libya, Liberia, Peru,
Mexico, Panama, many of the Caribbean and south Pacific islands, and others.
Not at any former time have so many state actors crossed the line into
criminal pursuits. In many more nations, police and security officials have
been easily bribed to look the other way as criminals ply their trade.
But governments and officials are the smaller part of the problem. The
larger part are the triads, yakuzas, mafias, cartels, posses, gangs, and assorted
collections of hoodlums that have gained control of global crime. The extent
of their activities underlines the damage done by global dirty money. Whittling
away their hold will be a long and difficult effort.
A selective listing of major criminal groups and brief notes on their size
and reach can begin to illuminate the threat from organized syndicates. (See
Table 3.9.) Mafia and Japanese yakuza groups are typically hierarchical. Chinese
triads are looser confederations of gangs.
Cross-border cooperation and easy money laundering have produced
the fastest change in crime that has ever been witnessed. Yet it is a change
that has registered only modestly on public consciousness. Drugs, once
thought to be the principal global “bad,” have been overtaken by a combination
of other criminal activities that draw upon the experience of drug cartels
but expand into everything else imaginable, ranging from sexual slavery
to nuclear materials. One country, North Korea, and one criminal syndicate,
the yakuza, only begin to illustrate the damage done.
North Korea
Dirty Money at Work 105
Take the worst that I write about in this chapter—money laundering, drugs,
trafficking, racketeering, counterfeiting, arms trading, and terrorism—add
the claim of nuclear weapons, wrap it all up in a package of political repression,
gulags, executions, and starvation, and you get North Korea today.
This is a country that “essentially functions as a state-level crime syndicate,”
according to U.S. Senator Peter Fitzgerald. 109
Twenty-three million people on 46,000 square miles, poor soils, devastating
floods, dependence on grain imports, and an insularity stretching back
hundreds of years earning for this land the name Hermit Kingdom combine
to produce what may be the most lethal brew in the nation-state system.
Place on top a paranoid and unstable dictator, Kim Jong Il, the country’s
“Dear Leader,” who likes alcohol, gambling, and Scandinavian women,