Criminal organisations control unlawful markets such as drugs, prostitution, illegal immigration, arms trafficking, document forgery, the trafficking of protected species or human organs for transplant.

Over the years, the best known of these organisations are the American Mafia, the ´Ndragheta and the Italian Camorra, the Colombian cartels, the Russian Organizatsiya, the Japanese Yakuzas and the Chinese Triads. According to international organisms, these gangs turn over more than a hundred million dollars each year.

 

 

Paradoxically, governments fight against these criminal organisations as they see them as a rival authority or an enemy to be destroyed although these gangs can only prosper under the wing of the same governments who, by outlawing certain activities hand the gangs a monopoly over them.

It’s clear that, given today’s surveillance methods, these gangs can only endure and spread thanks to the existence of accomplices within government bodies.

 

 

These organisations are the perfect tools for undertaking political or military action of a secret nature.

One example would be the collaboration of the US with the Cosa Nostra prior to the Allied landings on Sicily or with the Yakuza clans to prepare Japan for peace.

The US government also armed the Colombian cartels to combat South American guerrilla groups and used the Organizatsiya to accelerate the fall of the USSR. More recently it armed and paid criminal organisations in Iraq to weaken resistance inside the country.

Mafias are also used to implement narco politics. During the Opium Wars (1839 – 1842) the UK organised poppy production in India for the Chinese market.

France, the USA and Russia adopted similar policies in order to guarantee their own colonial expansion.

 

 

Things are no different today.

Anglo Saxon governments continue with the same model for economic domination, exploiting the cultivation of poppies in Central Asia, the coca plant in the Andes always under the cover of puppet governments and using the Vienna Treaty to justify the suppression of rival producers and rural insurrection.