The world is losing the fight against international gangs

AS THE WORLD teeters on the brink of what could become the worst trade wars since the 1930s, with international capital flows falling and cross-border trade and investment stagnating, there is one glaring exception to this unravelling of globalisation: international gangsters and organised criminals are on a roll. They are merrily pursuing opportunities around the world, moving goods across borders, establishing country-spanning supply chains and hiring talent internationally.

“I fear the world is losing the fight against gangs and organised crime,” says Jürgen Stock, who on November 7th stepped down after a ten-year stint as the secretary-general of Interpol, an international police organisation. “The growth in the breadth, scale and professionalism of organised crime is unprecedented.”

At first glance, Mr Stock’s alarm seems misplaced. Most parts of the world that are not at war have steadily become less violent and more law-abiding. In the first 20 years of this century the worldwide murder rate fell by around a quarter, from 6.9 per 100,000 people to 5.2 (see chart 1). Even in countries where worries about crime have increased in recent years, such as America, the violent-crime rate has fallen by half since the early 1990s.

Yet there has also been a global surge in organised crime that started around the turn of the century, says Mark Shaw, the director of the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, an NGO. Driving it are three new developments: the spread of technologies such as encrypted apps and cryptocurrencies, which let mobsters link up and move their earnings around the world in ways that would have been unthinkable previously; the spread of synthetic drugs that are cheaper and more powerful than plant-based ones; and the rise of agile, diversified multinational criminal groups.

Start with the new tech. Until roughly a decade ago most emails and phone messages were unencrypted, meaning police and intelligence agencies could easily read them. Now almost everyone has access to secure messaging, allowing gangsters to plot in secret. The dark web allows them to sell contraband and the spread of cryptocurrencies allows them to take payments that are hard to trace for illegal goods or even darker purposes, such as ransoms. Digital technology has also created a new criminal genre: cyber-crime.

“Every advance brings a new threat,” says Ivo de Carvalho Peixinho, the head of Interpol’s cyber-crime unit. “We’re starting to see people using ChatGPT to help them write scam messages.” Chainalysis, a data company, reckons illicit earnings from scams, theft and ransomware attacks added up to $7.6bn for 2023. Not all the money will have gone to criminals. North Korea is said to run a unit employing 10,000 hackers and others who provide it with around half the country’s foreign-currency earnings, mostly from stealing cryptocurrency.

Lockdowns during the covid-19 pandemic pushed unprecedented numbers of people online, many of whom were ignorant of the risks. They also offered new opportunities to the criminally minded. “It had a massive impact in South-East Asia,” says Jeremy Douglas, former regional director for the UN’s Office on Drugs and Crime. The pandemic emptied the mobsters’ casinos in the Golden Triangle, accelerating a move to online gambling. They soon discovered they could craft websites that enabled them to reach punters around the world as well as orchestrate scams and frauds—and launder their ill-gotten gains.

The second factor is a boom in drug use, which is being fuelled in part by the spread of synthetic drugs, which frees gangs from some of the constraints of geography since they are not reliant on plants such as coca trees or poppies that grow best in particular places. Seizures of methamphetamine in East and South-East Asia, for instance, increased fourfold between 2013 and 2022 (see chart 2). Prices have fallen by more than half as criminal gangs have scaled up production, which in turn has increased demand.

Worldwide, the number of people taking drugs increased by a fifth between 2010 and 2020, and the drugs they consume are becoming progressively stronger. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin. But even it is being supplanted by newer drugs, such as etonitazene, which is perhaps 500 times stronger than heroin.

The third development is that gangs are becoming more nimble. Diversification—Interpol officials call it “polycrime”—is increasingly common. Previously, criminal groups tended to stick to what they knew best, making it easier for the police to investigate them. Today the same group could be involved in, say, drugs, pirated software and wildlife trafficking. Some have gone into new lines of business unlocked by migration or increasing numbers of refugees, which has led to an explosion of people trafficking. Venezuela’s powerful Tren de Aragua gang, for instance, makes almost all its money by trafficking humans, not drugs.

Many are also diversifying geographically. To be sure, organised criminals have had transnational links in the past, but that was because they followed diasporas. Triads can be found in many overseas Chinese communities and the ’Ndrangheta, the mafia from Calabria in Italy, has long had branches in Canada, Australia and Western Europe. But in recent years syndicates have begun to migrate to exploit opportunities. Brazil’s pre-eminent mob, the First Capital Command, like a Habsburg empire of the underground world, has grown through alliances and diplomacy. It acts as “a regulatory agency of the criminal market,” says Bruno Paes Manso of the University of São Paulo. It “establishes rules to reduce conflict, creates predictability in the market, and provides a guarantee for the rules of the market to function”. Today it has 40,000 full members and an estimated 60,000 affiliates in 26 countries. The ’Ndrangheta, meanwhile, has spread to 40 countries and has an annual turnover of around $50bn—more than twice the GDP of mineral-rich Botswana, according to Interpol.

Or take the internationalisation of Albania’s gangs. Before the 1990s criminals were bottled up in a Communist dictatorship. As barriers to travel and commerce fell, so did the constraints on crooks. Today Albanian gangsters are key players in the netherworld of Ecuador, which is sandwiched between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two biggest producers of cocaine.

For years the FARC, a Colombian guerrilla group, worked with the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico to control cocaine shipments from Colombia to the giant port of Guayaquil, where they would be sent to Europe and America. But the demobilisation of FARC fighters after a peace deal and the arrest of the Sinaloa Cartel’s leader created “the perfect storm” for other criminal organisations, including the Albanian mafia, to pile in, says Renato Rivera of the Ecuadorian Observatory for Organised Crime.

The result has been dramatic. In 2018 Ecuador was among South America’s more tranquil countries, with a murder rate of less than six per 100,000, similar to America’s. Last year it was the most dangerous country on the continent, with a murder rate of 45 per 100,000.

Though drug-crime generates the most violence, surprisingly the crime with the highest annual turnover may be the trading of counterfeit and pirated goods. Fakes constituted 2.5% of world trade in 2013, according to the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, and the EU’s Intellectual Property Office. If that share is unchanged, it would imply the trade was worth more than $760bn in 2023, putting it higher than most estimates for the production, trafficking and sale of illegal narcotics.

Gangs are not simply expanding into new lines of business and new territories; some aspire to change the course of politics. Last year Colombian hitmen were accused of the assassination in Ecuador of Fernando Villavicencio, an anti-corruption presidential candidate. In 2022 six Dutch nationals were arrested in Belgium, accused of planning to kidnap the Belgian justice minister. And ahead of Mexico’s general election in June, 40 candidates were murdered.

In some places this strategy has been so effective that gangs are, in effect, calling the shots. More than half of people polled in Latin America said that there were organised criminals or gangs in their neighbourhoods and around 14% of the population—almost 80m people—live under some form of gang rule, according to researchers at the University of Chicago. The extreme is Haiti, where for the first time in its history the UN Security Council has authorised a multinational force to restore order to a country that has been taken over by gangsterism.

Law enforcement has had some successes, notably in gaining access to two encrypted communications systems used by gangsters in 2018 and 2020. That has led to several thousand arrests across the world. And Interpol has become better at intercepting the cross-border transfers of some illicit assets.

But policing remains fundamentally national, and suffers from what Stephen Kavanagh, Interpol’s executive director for police services, calls a “perimeter mindset”. Turf, physical or otherwise, is jealously guarded. What is needed is an approach to law enforcement as international as that of the gangs. Yet the political will to craft a new approach has been largely absent.

Before joining Interpol, Mr Kavanagh was the police chief of Essex, an English county with a population of 1.5m. He ruefully notes that his old force’s budget was more than twice that of Interpol’s.■