Subtitles section Play video
-
These look suspicious. There are several large packages in the bow.
-
In October 2021, customs officials in Hong Kong announced a series of record anti-smuggling seizures when a group of shady looking men were spotted shifting containers from a truck to a speedboat.
-
When law enforcement gave chase, the men fled, leaving behind contraband with an estimated street value of $210 million.
-
It proved an eclectic haul—fake luxury handbags, high-end watches, cigars, food, even exotic animal parts, including endangered shark fin.
-
The origin of the suspected smuggling goods is still under our investigation.
-
In the same month, police apprehended an air cargo consignment arriving from Mexico.
-
As well as the stated solar panels, the crates included 180 kilos of carefully packed methamphetamine.
-
Three local men were arrested and bailed pending further inquiries.
-
Neither represented the first case of its kind in Hong Kong, even if the scale of the busts set them apart.
-
Smuggling is a major revenue driver for organized crime across the globe, with Hong Kong a major hub in one of the most truly globalized of illicit trades.
-
This is The Business of Crime.
-
In this episode, we’ll be taking a look at the global smuggling trade—the factors that drive it, and why business is booming just as much as ever.
-
Nearly all transnational criminal syndicates are going to be involved in this in some way, shape, or form.
-
Smuggling has a long and complex history.
-
It's been around for at least as long as the first taxes and regulations on trade.
-
In 18th-century England, it meant tea, opium, silk, and spices.
-
In the 21st, it means illegal drugs and human trafficking gangs.
-
There’s billions of dollars to be made from narco trafficking.
-
Where there’s a will, there’s almost always a way.
-
Things have a knack of getting where the market needs them to be, illicit or otherwise.
-
Contemporary smugglers across the world might traffic anything from tobacco to art, food, exotic animals, narcotics, guns, and even people.
-
Do you really care what you’re smuggling, what you’re trafficking?
-
It’s about making money quickly.
-
In essence, it’s whatever sells, however unconscionable.
-
In 2019, it was reported that Interpol estimated migrant smuggling one of the most widespread and profitable activities for organized crime in the EU, worth hundreds of billions.
-
Human trafficking is hugely profitable. It's essentially pure profit.
-
Human trafficking victims are generating hundreds or thousands of dollars, and when they’re no longer useful, they're let go.
-
The means differ. Transport might range from sea and air cargo to lorry freight, or maybe just an individual drugs mule loaded with contraband
-
and dropped off at an airport with nothing more than a boarding pass and a pat on the back.
-
Drug traffickers would get people that are called mules, people who would put stuff like cocaine in condoms and swallow the condoms, and then cross the border that way.
-
Some destinations are more popular than others.
-
Ports are naturally favorable—the bigger, the better.
-
It’s easier to sneak through a few illegal containers when hundreds of tons of perfectly legitimate cargo is being processed on a daily basis.
-
Even a global pandemic couldn’t slow down the mass importation of Latin American cocaine shipments into Antwerp, Belgium—numbers there were even thought to have risen over 2020.
-
So there's a whole kind of industry of people who are devising new ways to get this stuff from production to the actual ports.
-
Every month, kilos of hashish pass through the Strait of Gibraltar, a 13-kilometer stretch of water that separates the very southern tip of Spain from Morocco.
-
Here, smuggling has a long lineage.
-
On the Spanish side sits La Linea, a small, post-industrial city, where youth unemployment sits above 60 percent.
-
The last decade or so has seen a spike of news reports and documentaries declaring it "Costa Del Narcos."
-
Hash, cocaine, tobacco from next door Gibraltar—these are the bedrocks of a black economy with far more opportunities than its legal counterpart.
-
For others, there isn’t even the fig leaf of necessity to point to as justification.
-
In November, reports broke detailing a massive investigation into Portuguese UN peacekeeping troops stationed in the Central African Republic.
-
It’s been alleged that soldiers had been using official military planes to smuggle gold, diamonds, and drugs out of one of the world’s most impoverished but resource rich nations.
-
Portuguese authorities have detained ten suspects. Operation Myriad, as it is known, is the result of a denunciation made at the end of 2019.
-
It was, as Portugal’s foreign minister declared, a very regrettable affair, even if it shouldn’t muddy the nation’s sterling contributions to international security.
-
Uncovered smuggling plots often oscillate between the relentlessly grim to surreal.
-
In 2021, a prominent Spanish art collector narrowly avoided prison time after being found guilty of attempting to smuggle a priceless Picasso out of the country.
-
Jaime Botín claimed he’d merely been transporting it to a Geneva storage facility,
-
an excuse that landed him with a multimillion-euro fine and a jail sentence only overturned on appeal due to ill health.
-
Despite vague cultural notions of romance and adventure, smuggling is anything but a victimless crime.
-
Like any other illicit market with huge potential rewards, it has a huge capacity for violence and exploitation.
-
In recent years, you’ve seen an increase in the traffic of human beings, of sex workers.
-
That’s, you know, something that’s very profitable for those criminal organizations.
-
Vulnerable migrants forking out huge sums to be trafficked in hope of safety,
-
expendable drug mules paid a pittance to carry narcotics across borders,
-
corrupt soldiers stripping a country of its natural wealth—
-
these are some of the real-world scenarios likely unfolding in the time it’s taken you to watch this video.
-
Smuggling is and always has been big business.
-
For the three men arrested in conjunction with the Hong Kong raids, the potential rewards were enormous.
-
The risks, however, were just as great.
-
If found guilty, they could be set to face a lifetime behind bars.