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.