Tag Archive for: transnational crime

Understanding ’ndrangheta operations in Australia

The ’ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, plays a significant role in the global cocaine trade and is deeply entrenched in Australia, influencing the cocaine trade and engaging in a variety of illicit activities.

A range of ethno-geographic criminal groups facilitate the production, supply and distribution of cocaine to Australia’s highly lucrative consumer market. ASPI’s recent report highlighted the emerging threat posed by Brazilian crime groups. But such new players must be considered alongside the threat posed by multi-generational groups that have become well entrenched in Australia.

The ’ndrangheta operates through two organisational models in Australia, one local and one transnational.

The first is the Australian (rather than Calabrian or Italian) ’ndrangheta, which has been entrenched in the country for about a century, its founders having arrived in 1922. This group of criminal families, commonly known as clans, has adeptly manipulated the cultural values brought by the Calabrian diaspora, the second largest Italian group in Australia, just behind the Sicilian community.

The Australian ’ndrangheta is entrepreneurial and operates through complex formal and cultural structures. It has built its operations on local partnerships, engaging in the cocaine trade while maintaining a facade of legitimacy through fully and semi-legal businesses. These businesses cultivate community support and consensus, essential for any mafia group seeking power and influence.

The second organisational model is that of the transnational ’ndrangheta, which retains strong connections to clans based in Calabria and elsewhere in Italy. This group of clans operates across Europe—particularly in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands—and extends its reach into Canada, the United States and parts of Latin America. These groups are based on transnational families and associates who can use a range of connections and brokers to secure a foothold in the lucrative cocaine trade.

The two organisational models of the ’ndrangheta raise significant concerns and amplify the reach of both homegrown clans and transnational networks.

While the Australian ’ndrangheta has historically engaged in drug trafficking alongside local partners, they strategically separate their illegal ventures from their legitimate enterprises. Intergenerational changes favour diversification of their business structures as families and their activities evolve. Diversification not only facilitates money laundering; it also fortifies a clan’s standing within the community, making it more challenging for authorities to dismantle its operations. This increases clans’ resilience, allowing them to maintain prominence in the criminal landscape, even as authorities attempt to target specific activities, most notably drug trafficking.

Money laundering and business integration are crucial aspects of the Australian ’ndrangheta’s activities. By integrating illicit profits into legitimate businesses, clans mask the origins of their funds, facilitating continued operations and growth. The use of fully and semi-legal enterprises serves as a cover for these activities.

This not only poses a challenge for law enforcement but also risks undermining the integrity of Australia’s financial systems. If left unchecked, money laundering can have broader economic consequences, including destabilisation of legitimate markets and erosion of public trust in financial institutions.

Additionally, political proximity poses a risk as it fosters an environment where organised crime can thrive. Australian ’ndrangheta clans have a history of cultivating relationships with local politicians and influential figures, potentially allowing them to operate unchallenged by law enforcement. The ’ndrangheta can use such connections to influence local economies and communities, making it difficult for authorities to understand their operations as they may not look criminal. Political entanglement thus hinders efforts to address the challenges posed by the transnational clans of the ’ndrangheta still engaged in drug trafficking in Australia.

On one hand, a coordinated and comprehensive transnational approach is essential to effectively counter the threat posed by Italian crime syndicates investing in the drug trade. However, the existence of pockets of ’ndrangheta power in Australia gives the transnational clans an edge in business diversification.

To tighten money laundering regulations, Australia needs to criminalise certain behaviours associated with criminal groups, not solely respond to individual crimes.  Australia also needs a better understanding of upperworld-underworld interconnectivity. Australia has used this kind of anti-consorting approach to address outlaw motorcycle gangs.

Australia’s cocaine trafficking issue is complex and requires a nuanced understanding of the various organised crime groups involved but also of what happens alongside the drug trade. The ’ndrangheta’s dual operational models emphasise the need for a response that not only addresses immediate threats but also strengthens long-term defences against transnational organised crime. By addressing the enablers of criminal resilience, closing gaps in law enforcement and mitigating the risks associated with money laundering and political connections, Australia can better protect itself from the evolving landscape of drug trafficking.

Lessons from the swamps: turtle and orchid seizures inform hunt for smugglers

Wildlife criminologists celebrated a rare success in December. A global interagency investigation resulted in money-laundering charges being brought against a Chinese man who allegedly ran a US$2.2 million international illegal trade in endangered turtles from the US to Asia using PayPal, Facebook Messenger and US bank accounts.

Significantly, Kang Juntao was not just the poacher and shipper but also the organiser and financier. He ran the network from China, which made the investigation complex since the US and China don’t have an extradition agreement. In the end, he was extradited from Malaysia to the US and is now in federal custody in New Jersey.

It is a success story for the US government’s fight against global wildlife crimes, says Meredith Gore, wildlife trafficking researcher at the University of Maryland. Law enforcement agencies investigated social media and bank transfers that Kang made. US court documents show Kang used the digital monetary platform PayPal to transfer money between his network and across currencies in 2017 and 2018.

Kang allegedly arranged for 1,500 turtles to be trapped and captured in the US and shipped to his associates in Hong Kong and China. He used Facebook Messenger to recruit people in five US states, mostly college students from China, to work for him. The animals were then sold to collectors in Asia for thousands of dollars each. The investigation traced the path of turtles from US swamps to Asian markets and included undercover work by agents of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

The routes used in organised wildlife crime can be informative, as they often show how serious crimes converge. The Global Initiative on Transnational Organized Crime in Geneva is analysing the overlap in routes and convergence of serious crimes and wildlife crime. According to the US-based non-profit organisation C4ADS, wildlife traffickers tend to exploit the same vulnerabilities in airports that other traffickers do, giving enforcement authorities an opportunity to address their weak points. Traffickers often ‘nest their activities within licit systems of trade and commerce’, C4ADS noted.

C4ADS’s data analysis found that traffickers often use established routes for trade, such as supply lines for hospital and pharmaceutical products. For example, pangolin scales labelled as ‘for scientific purposes’ have been seized in freight in Singapore destined for the UK. The most common paths generally follow popular air traffic routes from supply markets in the southern hemisphere to markets of demand in the northern hemisphere. Trafficking is increasing as the demand for live wildlife and illegal plant and animal products increases among the growing middle class in Asia, as well as in Europe and North America.

The Global Initiative on Transnational Organized Crime is looking into the boom in online wildlife trade during Covid-19 lockdowns. In May, Google reported removing several million advertisements relating to China’s illegal wildlife trade that ranged from e-commerce platforms to specialised social networks on the dark web that used cryptocurrencies such as Hot Dollars.

Just how wildlife and plant traffickers organise themselves and what motivates people to get involved in these crimes is being studied by the Oxford Martin Programme on the Illegal Wildlife Trade in the UK. Illegal trading of reptiles and orchids is being investigated as part of this work, and trends in Australia and Oceania are being studied.

Although Australia has relatively low levels of illegal wildlife trafficking, with supply and demand muted, the illegal trade is growing and there are lessons to be learned about people’s motivations to become involved. Recent seizures have been linked to some Australian National Rugby League players using animal sales, mainly of reptiles, to pay for legal fees relating to doping allegations.

Australian reptiles seized by the Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment in the past few years include softshell turtles, alligator snapping turtles, chameleons, sugar gliders, stingrays and snakehead fish. Ex-rugby league player Martin Kennedy was one of the professional sportsmen found guilty of importing and exporting native animals. Pythons and various prohibited substances were found in his freezer, along with tens of thousands of dollars. Such cases highlight the interplay between drugs and animal trafficking crimes in Australia.

Researcher Tanya Wyatt from Northumbria University in the UK has shown that wildlife smuggling is often a white-collar crime, but she is cautious about the idea of it being labelled organised crime. Often, it’s more ‘dis-organised’ or ‘corporate crime’ and not traditionally policed as a result. She believes much greater collaboration with regulatory agencies like fraud units, as well as insurance companies and banks, as was done in the Kang case in the US, is needed globally.

Researchers are also looking into orchid smuggling to identify overlooked trade routes. More than 1 billion orchid plants are traded each year, including for food and medicine, despite the listing of all species of orchid on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Orchids make up over 70% of all species listed on the convention. The Oxford Martin Programme has found that Latin America is a region much overlooked by law enforcers when trying to understand the global illegal trade in plants and animals. Other researchers are calling for better risk management systems for global e-documentation and for more information-sharing between countries.

Methods of investigating the illegal trade of plants and animals need to constantly evolve to keep up with the techniques used to traffic them, but some of the oldest methods of detection haven’t changed. Detector dogs are still some of the most effective investigators, the US Fish and Wildlife Service has found. Its sniffer dogs have been very useful at airports and ports for detecting turtle shipments, for example. Dogs are also highly effective at Kenya’s main airport in Nairobi in catching wildlife and plant shipments. The nose of a detector dog remains one of the most important tools in combating crimes involving wild animals and precious plants.

Transnational crime: a mammoth problem

A couple of weeks ago my colleague Toby Feakin, wrote on The Strategist about the recently released United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s assessment on Transnational Organized Crime in East Asia and the Pacific, pointing out how international crime is a dynamic and complex phenomenon that ‘remains a threat to security and prosperity across the region’.

Toby highlighted how the groups that perpetrate these criminal acts

… have benefited from the globalisation process, and the technologies it provides, to operate across borders, creating new linkages between groups to maximise financial profit, while minimising the risks of being caught. They’re often formed like agile businesses, have no desire to become involved in the use of physical force just for the sake of it, and are highly adept at reshaping themselves to fit the illicit economies that they’re servicing. The groups are highly mobile, flexible and operate in multiple jurisdictions and criminal sectors, exploiting legislative loopholes where they exist, and are aided by the illicit use of the internet.

The UNODC report sends a clear message that transnational crime isn’t a homogeneous phenomenon, but rather a very diverse set of activities. A ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach won’t work: each aspect will need carefully crafted policy and operational responses. Read more