Mega Banks, ATF True Culprits Behind Mexican Drug and Gun Violence

Πηγή: Old - Thinker News
By Daniel Taylo
May 5 2013

President Obama, during a recent visit to Mexico, pointed the finger at American’s use of illegal drugs and guns for Mexico’s plague of violence. “Much of the root cause for violence that has been happening here in Mexico, for which so many Mexicans have suffered, is the demand for illegal drugs in the United States,” Obama said. He continued, “Most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States.”

The fact is, this story goes much deeper. It is true that there is a demand for drugs in the united states, but we should ask these vital questions: Who has facilitated this situation? Who is supporting the drug lords? Looking into this story, we can reasonably conclude that the American people are scapegoats for the crimes of money laundering banks and the ATF.

As reported by Bloomberg in 2010, mega banks including Wells Fargo (Bailed out with $36 billion in taxpayer money in 2008) and Bank of America (Which began giving credit cards to illegal aliens with no social security numbers in 2007) were caught laundering money to Mexican drug cartels. In total over $300 billion was laundered in operations that were blatantly ignored by Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo. Among other illegal activities, the money bought planes used to deliver narcotics. After paying a measly $160 million in fines – and “promising not to do it again” – Wachovia is officially off the hook for its crimes.

Drug lords would have a hard time exerting their authority without armaments. Fortunately for them, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) kindly supplied weapons in operation Fast and Furious. The operation allowed guns to be sold to suspected Mexican drug dealers to be “tracked.” Not surprisingly, Fast and Furious weapons have been found at crime scenes in Mexico. Can this be chalked up to a “botched operation,” or is there a conscious intent to use it for wider objectives?

CBS news uncovered documents in 2011 that showed the ATF discussing Fast and Furious as a means to justify tighter gun control measures. Now, President Obama is pointing to this violence and proclaiming the same objectives. In his version of reality the American people – in their wanton lust for guns and drugs – are to blame.

It is vitally important that the official narrative on this issue be deconstructed. The establishment will ride on its white horse proclaiming ignorance of any wrongdoing. In fact, it will use the violence it generates to elevate itself over the people even further.

Guns And Gold: The Trading Strategy For Our Times

Πηγή: Seeiking Alpha
Dec 7 2011

“Guns and Gold” has become widely accepted as a wise trading strategy during the current high-volatility markets. Recent interviews with a top Goldman Sachs (GS) gold analyst and the CEO of the Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation (SWHC) document the growth of this new investment strategy.

Analyst Ian M. Preston follows gold and resources for Goldman Sachs, and he observes that gold producers are raising their dividends to attract investors back from gold ETFs like the iShares Gold Trust (IAU), the SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) or the Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF (GDX), making their ROE stronger as gold prices are expected to scratch the $1,900 mark in 2012.

"The competition for major gold companies is not between themselves. They have to give a bit of return than what you can achieve just simply having gold in an ETF," Preston said in an interview published December 6.

"You’ve got to be able to not only grow earnings in an improving gold price, but in our view you’ve also got to give a return to investors."

Preston says Newmont Mining Corp. (NEM) has already implemented a dividend linked to gold's rapid price increases. He also says other major producers are raising their dividends significantly, aiming to provide investors with 2.5% to 3% levels of yield.

"[Newmont Mining has] linked the dividend to where the prevailing gold prices — I mean, I think that’s a clear signal that they want to make it very easy, very transparent for an investor," Preston said. "And the share price response for Newmont post that announcement has actually been very positive."

Other precious metal mining stocks mentioned in this interview include the Barrick Gold Corporation (ABX), Eldorado Gold (EGO), Goldcorp (GG) and Newmont Mining (NEM) traded in the U.S.

The report also includes Kingsgate Consolidated (KCN.AX), Newcrest Mining (NCM.AX), Perseus Mining (PRU.AX) and St.Barbara Limited (SBM.AX), which are traded in Australia, and Toronto Stock Exchange companies Teranga Gold (TGZ.TO) and Alacer Gold (ASR.TO).

Gun consumption is not far behind the growth rate of the price of gold. P. James Debney, the CEO of Smith & Wesson (SWHC), notes that data from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, shows strong year-over-year growth, indicating Americans are buying more firearms than ever before.

Further, NICS data for background checks reached record highs in November 2011, and is 18% greater than 12 months before, according to the latest data available on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s website.


“If you take the primary indicator, which is NICS, the background checks performed through the FBI when a consumer purchases a firearm, that number has had very strong year-over-year growth that has continued even after the surge period that occurred in late 2008 and into 2009, reflecting strong growth in the firearms industry,” Debney said. “Couple that with trends toward concealed carry, which we believe are driven by the need for self-protection in the current environment, where municipalities have fewer funds available to support the current need. We believe the result is that people are generally taking responsibility for protecting themselves.”

These interviews suggest a profitable investment strategy for 2011. As gold coins and ammunition become the popular stocking stuffers this December, the “Guns and Gold” investment portfolio may become the trade of the year.

Libya warned smugglers are looting Gaddafi's guns

Rebel fighters plunder arms and ammunition from an army base in Ajdabiya, Libya, in March 2011. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Πηγή: The Guardian

By Richard Norton-Taylor and Nick Hopkins

Friday 2 September 2011

West fears heatseeking surface-to-air missiles will fall into terrorists' hands

Libya must urgently secure weapons hoarded by the Gaddafi regime amid growing fears that smugglers are exploiting the chaos there to loot hundreds of portable missiles and other small arms, western officials have warned.

The US and Nato are pressing the National Transitional Council to make the issue a priority because of concerns that the trade has already begun, with reports that some African mercenaries who fought for Colonel Muammar Gaddafi are returning home laden with weapons.

One anxiety is that Gaddafi's remaining stockpile of shoulder-launched missiles could end up in the hands of terrorists.

The UK's National Security Council raised the issue with Libyan rebels in March and the Guardian understands that US officials based in Benghazi are now taking a lead in helping to identify where the caches may be, and how best to protect them. The UK and France have special forces in Libya, but officials would not be drawn on whether the soldiers are now involved in anti-smuggling operations.

In a private meeting with NTC leaders at the Friends of Libya summit in Paris, the US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said the safety of the Gaddafi's weapons was "an urgent security priority facing Libya and the broader region".

A Nato official added: "The risk of seeing weapons reaching members of terrorist organisations is always a concern. We know from experience that extremists and terrorists can take advantage of instability and lawlessness. We should do our utmost to avoid that situation. We expect all sides to maintain accountability of weapons."

A British spokesman said: "The issue of proliferation in Libya has been a priority for the National Security Council since this crisis began."We have raised it with the NTC at regular intervals to ensure that weapons are secured and monitored the situation closely."

The Guardian has spoken to a number of NGOs and independent observers who believe that scores of weapons from the Gaddafi arsenal have already disappeared and that the trade presents a potential threat to the region.

Fred Abrahams of Human Rights Watch, who is in Tripoli, said anti-tank missiles were among weapons looted by Libyans before anti-Gaddafi militias overran western towns. "There are reports of Libyans picking up anti-tank missiles like ants. Every second Libyan has arms. The UN should be thinking of a decommissioning programme, a buy-back programme."

Abrahams said concern was not only about the number of missiles, including Grad truck-mounted rockets, but what he called "standard bullets and bombs" – equipment that could be used to make improvised explosive devices, widely deployed by insurgents in Afghanistan.

Early in the six-month conflict, thousands of 122mm Grad rockets were reportedly found in abandoned bunkers in eastern Libya.

British officials say they are concerned in particular about heatseeking man-portable air defence systems (Manpads), such as SA7 shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, getting into the wrong hands. Though most military aircraft are now equipped with countermeasures, civilian planes are not. Helicopters remain vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenades, officials said.

Referring to reports that anti-Gaddafi rebels have been selling arms, Matt Schroeder, director of the arms sales monitoring group at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, said this was "feasible and plausible … weapons may have been trafficked".

The US has promised $4.5m (£2.8m) to collect and destroy Libya's missiles and other light weapons, according to the congressional research service and state department.

Officials in Mali confirmed last week that a leader of the country's last Tuareg rebellion had been killed on his way back from fighting for Gaddafi. Though the circumstances were confused, Reuters quoted a military official in Mali saying that Ibrahim Ag Bahanga was killed as he smuggled weapons across the border from Libya. "He had got his hands on lots of weapons in Libya … and he hid them on the border with Algeria and Niger," the official said.

US officials were reported as saying that a small number of Soviet-made SA7 missiles from Libya had reached the black market in Mali, where al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb has been active. Other regional governments fear that the region could become even more lawless due to an influx of weapons and fighters from Libya's conflict.

Earlier this week, Algeria's foreign minister said his government was certain that al-Qaida's north African affiliate had obtained weapons on the black market that flourished during the Libyan civil war.

Mourad Medelci said countries across North Africa had seen proof "on the ground" that al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb had taken advantage of instability in Libya to procure weapons with which to expand its campaign of terrorism.

"It's not just a worry or a feeling, it's a certainty," Medelci told French radio.

He said that Libya was vulnerable to terrorists taking refuge within its borders and using the country as a springboard for terrorism throughout the region, AFP, the French news agency, reported.

Pieter Wezeman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Sipri, which monitors the arms trade, said Gaddafi imported hundreds of French-made Milan guided missiles and Russian SA 24 missile launchers adding to an arsenal which included some 20,000 older short-range surface-to-air missiles.

"Many of those, we know, are now not accounted for, and that's going to be a concern for some period of time," General Carter Ham, head of the US military's Africa Command, told the Senate armed services committee in April.

The British government approved the sale to Libya of equipment including guns and small-arms ammunition valued at more than £200m over the first nine months of last year, according to the latest figures compiled for the Foreign Office. In 2007–2008 Ukraine supplied more than 100,000 rifles to Libya.

Mexican Roulette

A deadly gun-running gamble just cost America's ATF chief his job. But the gun lobby gave him little choice but to try.

Πηγή: Foreign Policy
By James Verini

August 30, 2011

Until this year, the worst episode in the history of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives came in 1993, when the ATF raided cult leader David Koresh's Branch Davidian compound. That raid led to a 50-day standoff that ended with the deaths of 83 Davidians and provided endless fodder for anti-government types (Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh among them), the gun lobby, and Republican lawmakers, who overtook Congress the next year on a wave of anti-Washington resentment. Although it was the FBI that oversaw the final siege of the compound, and although four of its agents were killed in the shootout, the ATF took most of the blame. A board member of the National Rifle Association (NRA) wrote, in a letter to then Attorney General Janet Reno, "If you send your jack-booted baby-burning bushwhackers to confiscate my guns, pack them a lunch; it will be a damned long day. The Branch Davidians were amateurs; I'm a professional." By jackbooted, baby-burning bushwhackers he meant, of course, ATF agents.

Bad as 1993 was politically for the ATF, 2011 has been worse. In January, it came out that a U.S. Border Patrol agent, Brian Terry, killed in Arizona in December, was shot with an AK-47 purchased at a gun store near Phoenix by someone under ATF surveillance. Since this spring, Congress has been looking into the investigation that monitored that sale and others like it. Operation Fast and Furious, as it was infelicitously known, was aimed at dismantling a gunrunning ring smuggling weapons from the United States to the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico. It was an interagency investigation involving not just the ATF, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI, the Arizona U.S. attorney's office, and the Justice Department. It was carried out with the knowledge of the National Security Council.

But the ATF is, once again, taking the heat. On Tuesday, Aug. 30, ATF acting director Kenneth E. Melson and Arizona U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke were forced out over the scandal, according to the New York Times. All other major newspapers and networks have covered the controversy, mostly breathlessly and with a marked lack of context. Fox News and its Internet echo chambers would have you believe they're on the trail of a major coverup. And the NRA is, to no one's surprise, having a ball. As recently as February, NRA Director Wayne LaPierre blasted "the phony claim that armed violence committed by Mexican drug cartels on Mexican soil is fueled by guns obtained from federally licensed retailers in border states." Now, amazingly, LaPierre tells news organizations that cross-border gun-trafficking does exist -- only, it's the government that's responsible for it.

"The largest gunrunning operation in history into the hands of the Mexican drug cartels has been conducted by the Obama administration's Justice Department," he said.

Only slightly less shameful than his self-serving cant were hearings held in late July, in which House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa dragged ATF agents over the coals -- or attempted to. Even by the farcical standards of congressional hearings, these were useless. Not that it mattered. The point, after all, was not to figure out how Fast and Furious went wrong (if indeed it did, a contention not necessarily proved by Terry's death), but to embarrass the ATF. How else to explain why no officials from its partner agencies were called to testify? And how else to justify calling no fewer than three members of the Terry family, whose testimony, while heart-breaking, had no bearing on the details of the investigation?

It does the Terrys no more a service than it does Washington to skirt a substantive debate of Fast and Furious. Whatever its flaws, the program marked a major and welcome shift in the federal government's attempts to combat border gun-trafficking -- a fact not even its creators are willing to admit to now.

I spent much of early 2008 investigating arms-trafficking across the border for an article forConde Nast Portfolio. I passed many hours with ATF agents in Arizona and Texas, interviewing them and attending gun shows with them. I also spent time at the smuggling routes on the border and in northern Mexico. What I found would have been more frightening had it not been so galling: on the one hand a huge gunrunning market that led directly to the deaths of thousands of Mexicans, and not a few Americans; and on the other a law enforcement agency trying to stop it with one hand tied behind its back. The problem was not that ATF agents weren't dedicated and smart -- many were -- but that they were prey to absurd congressional stipulations urged, most vociferously, by the NRA.

Let's start with the obscenely irresponsible laws that cover gun sales in America. For instance, anyone without a criminal record can legally purchase as many rifles and other long guns as they want in the United States. You read that correctly. If you have no criminal record, you can walk into a gun dealer and buy 100 AR-15 rifles, 200 AK-47s, the store's entire inventory of shotguns, or a .50-caliber sniper rifle that can take down a low-flying aircraft -- as long as you have the cash. Not only can the dealer sell them to you, but he doesn't even have to notify anyone unless you buy multiple handguns as well. One of the buyers being surveilled under Fast and Furious, an Arizona man named Uriel Patino, bought about 720 guns -- legally.

There are roughly 100,000 licensed gun dealers in the United States. Most of them are gun stores, pawn shops, sporting-goods stores, and the like, but many are so-called "kitchen table" dealers who sell secondhand guns out of their businesses, homes, or even cars. While reporting, I took a look at a pair of assault rifles in the office of a plumbing-supply salesman near Dallas who peddles guns on the side. I also learned of a Mexican drug trafficker who'd opened a series of gun stores in Texas to cut out the middleman. That's how easy it is to legally sell guns. If you have a criminal record and want to avoid scrutiny, you can go to one of these kitchen-table dealers or to one of the thousands of gun shows that take place around the country each year, where you can find people who claim to be selling out of their private collection. They don't need a license to do so, and you don't have to submit to a background check. All you need is money and identification showing you're over 18 years old.

This is what the ATF faces as it tries to head off gun-trafficking across the 2,000-mile border with Mexico with only a few hundred agents. Lawmakers -- by no means all of them Republicans -- have seen to it that the agency is as understaffed and underfunded as possible. Between 1973, when the ATF was founded, and 1998, the number of field agents increased by nine. Nine agents. It has half the budget and half the manpower of the DEA, and it has been laboring under a series of acting directors since 2006, when the NRA successfully lobbied Congress to require Senate confirmation for the job.

Still, William Newell, the ATF special agent who oversaw Fast and Furious, and his agents in Phoenix did what they could. A devoted, articulate lifetime civil servant who spent part of his childhood in Latin America and then cut his teeth as an agent in Colombia during the drug wars of the 1990s, Newell was under no illusions about his agency's beleaguered standing in Washington. He didn't let it stop him, however. When I interviewed him in 2008, he showed me "the vault," a large room with racks and bins full of guns his agents had caught before they could cross the border. They were the fruits of Operation Gunrunner, a Bush administration initiative. (The ATF's policy is to destroy the guns it seizes, though many police departments around the country resell them on the secondary market, appallingly enough.) Newell had been implementing Operation Gunrunner so effectively that he was seen as a possible future head of the ATF.

It was remarkable he'd seized even those guns, however, given how needlessly hobbled his agency is by Washington. Congress prohibits the ATF from employing many basic tools of modern law enforcement. For instance, it is forbidden from creating a national registry of guns or gun owners. The U.S. government keeps track of everyone who owns a car or a house, but not a gun (nor even hundreds of guns or caches of military-grade weaponry). Gun buyers are required to fill out ATF sales forms, but the agency can't systemize or even collect them; they're kept by dealers. The number of dealers who knowingly aid in trafficking is miniscule, and the ATF knows who many of them are. But in most cases it's not allowed to inspect a dealer unannounced more than once a year.

Meanwhile, the ATF's National Tracing Center, which would be the hub of any serious attempt to combat gun-trafficking, houses hundreds of millions of documents, but thanks to Congress it can't make them searchable by name. And, preposterously, there is no federal law explicitly forbidding international gun-trafficking. For years lawmakers have proposed such laws, and for years they've been defeated, including by Democrat-controlled Congresses. In 1997, President Bill Clinton signed the Convention on Illicit Firearms Trafficking. Congress has refused to ratify it ever since, under pressure from the gun lobby.

This means that when gun-trafficking cases are brought at all, they are brought under weak catchall anti-smuggling laws. U.S. attorneys in Arizona for years refused to help the ATF build gun cases, knowing prosecutions would likely result in, at best, minor sentences for straw purchasers who buy guns for criminal organizations but have no impact beyond that. And so the ATF, though an investigative agency, was relegated for years to interdiction. Agents arrested small fry and seized small caches, knowing that they were dipping a bucket into the ocean. For every gun they got, hundreds more made it over the border. Had they wanted to, Issa and his committee could have learned much of this from their very own Congressional Research Service's 2009 report on border gun-trafficking, or a larger study by the Government Accountability Office.

Operation Fast and Furious was part of a plan to change the situation. In 2009, Barack Obama's administration made combating gun-trafficking on the border a priority, and Burke, who was then the new Arizona U.S. Attorney, agreed to help. The goal was to investigate and build a serious case against a gunrunning network connected with the Sinaloa cartel, one of the biggest drug-trafficking organizations in Mexico. Building off the successes of Operation Gunrunner, Burke's office, along with the ATF, DEA, ICE, and the FBI, created a new Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Its operational name was Fast and Furious.

The aim of Fast and Furious was to investigate, and not, as the ATF had grown accustomed to, interdict. Instead of arresting the so-called "straw purchasers" who buy the guns and pass them on (again, legally, provided they pass a background check), Fast and Furious called for agents to surveil them and try to follow the flow of guns, to move beyond the pawns to the larger players. Of course, this is what investigators and detectives who don't work at agencies hobbled by their elected overseers do every day: allow things to be bought and sold and moved so that they can map out criminal organizations and get to their highest levels.

If their testimony is to be believed, a number of agents newly posted to Phoenix and Fast and Furious were nonetheless shocked when they were instructed to "let guns walk," as it's known. According to ATF personnel I spoke with, these agents had no idea of the scale of the gun-trafficking problem when they arrived in Arizona. They were used to interdiction and apparently were not properly read into the larger aims of Fast and Furious. A number of these agents delivered impassioned pleas at the hearings in July, expressing their unshakable opposition to the very idea of letting guns walk. (Issa and Sen. Charles Grassley, always happy to impugn his fellow federal employees, cherry-picked their best lines for a pair of mostly useless and histrionic reports.)

The agents' indignation was duly righteous, but none felt it worth mentioning, apparently, that letting guns walk was precisely the point of Fast and Furious. None of them dared mention what is common knowledge on the border -- that scores of American guns walk every day, regardless of surveillance, because buying and moving them is so easy and the ATF too hampered to stop them.

Nor, sadly, did Newell, the most enduring target of Issa's ire, mention that. During his testimony, Newell mostly stared down at a prepared statement, offering evasive and feckless answers. He offered no explanation of Fast and Furious or of the colossal problem of the border's illicit gun market, and he certainly didn't mention -- out of good manners or professional restraint, one assumes -- the hoops that these same congressmen have made him jump through merely in order to do his job.

Smuggling of migrants and other traffics

Πηγή: Bright
by Matteo Tacconi

April 1st, 2011

Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine: turbulent, restless lands, where conflicts and revolutions take place continuously. Lands where there seems to be no future, harassed by poverty and misery. People tend to leave these lands. Sometimes they leave on their own will, in order to find and build a new, better life for themselves. Sometimes, they are forced to leave because of political reasons.

You go West, where else? You escape throughout Turkey, because between the East and the West there is Anatolia. A real boon for Turkish Mafia. These criminals carefully follow the trends of criminal markets and have happily rushed headlong into this promising business.

Figures show that the trafficking of migrants generates sky-rocketing profits for criminal gangs operating in this sector. Researcher Koulani Vasiliki wrote in her paper (Human Smuggling and Trafficking in Turkey), published in July 2009 by the Research Institute for European and American Studies of Athens) that over 200 thousand migrants enter Turkey illegally each year and one out of four relies on the help of the criminal network to enter the country and exit it, making their way to Europe, paying on average 1500-2000 dollars.

If these figures prove true, it turns out that smuggling generates from 75 to 100 million dollars every twelve months. Probably even a little more if you consider that these figures were provided by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in 2003, and definitely need to be updated.

The majority of migrants, mostly Iranians, Iraqis and Afghans but also many Turkish citizens decide to leave with the help of criminal networks, are trafficked, like heroin, mainly on the Turkish-Iranian border; it is from this border that the bulk of migrants arrive in Anatolia. This is due both to the characteristics of this border, which has traditionally been devoted to smuggling (heroin, weapons, gasoline and even livestock) and to the fact that other limes, especially the Turkish-Iraqi border, are more heavily militarized.

Immigrants are first gathered in the border town of Van. From there, traffickers lead them to Istanbul, making some intermediate stops along the route in various places; from Istanbul, migrants are then taken to Edirne, near the border with Europe. However, unlike the heroin trade, smugglers accompany their "freight" (this is what migrants are for traffickers) usually to Greece, less often to Bulgaria.

As estimated by Migreurop, a French association monitoring large migration flows, 150 thousand people a year try to make it into the Community territory from the Turkish-Greek border. How?

Traffickers make migrants wade across River Evros, marking the border between the two states. This can be done by foot, especially in the summer months, during which some stretches of the river are dry. Usually, however, the river is crossed aboard small and crumbling boats crammed with men and women.

You enter from Iran; you exit from Greece. But how does this whole "machine" for the smuggling of migrants work? Professor Ahmet İçduygu, a demography and migration expert who teaches at Koç University in Istanbul, outlined the profile of this “migration-machine” in a 2004 piece of research on migrant trafficking between Turkey and Greece published in the journal “Southeast European and Black Sea Studies,” under the title “Transborder Crime Between Turkey and Greece: human smuggling and its regional consequences.”

Professor İçduygu maintains that the trafficking of people to Europe via Turkey is based on a Ford-type assembly line, involving small groups of traffickers (the so-called kaçakçılar), each of which ensures the passage of migrants from one border to the other, from one city to another city. Traffickers’ groups in Van are in contact with Iranian groups, with whom they manage border crossing.

Later on, they bring the migrants into some other cities of Anatolia, hand them over to some other group which, in turn, takes care of transportation and hands them over to İstanbul criminal cells, which in the same way carry out the transfer of migrants to Edirne or elsewhere along the Turkish-Greek border, where local traffickers are in charge of organizing the border crossing. Once this border is crossed, if everything goes off smoothly, it is up to the Greek smugglers to play their part and so on, all along the Balkans or across the Mediterranean, with Europe as the final destination.

Just as in heroin smuggling, in the European territory the Turkish Mafia can rely on alliances with foreign criminal groups and with local branches of Turkish criminal groups rooted within the Turkish communities in EU countries.

There are two types of migrant smugglers’ cells in Turkey. Sometimes they are linked to a well-structured and specialized organization, a subsidiary of one of the large cupolas of the Turkish Mafia. Sometimes the cell is independent, acting only on its own behalf and placing itself in the international trafficking of migrants spontaneously, and just as spontaneously, the cell might leave the migrant trafficking market once it has achieved its goals. In this case, it might be replaced by another small organization taking the stage.

Each group of traffickers also has a clear division of labor. There are those in charge of forging false identity papers and visas, those who provide apartments and buildings where migrants are temporarily sheltered, those in charge of finding vehicles or vessels for the transport, the cashiers, those providing cellular phones and guaranteeing contacts with the organization in charge of taking over the migrants at the next step... The organization, in other words, is perfect. The machine is well-oiled and tested and generates amazing income.

Among major Turkish groups operating in this sector of the economy, the Mafia of Aksaray, a district in the European neighborhood of Istanbul, stands out. Until the late 1990s and the beginning of the next decade, Aksaray traffickers directly organized the travel of migrants by sea toward the Italian coasts, especially Puglia and Calabria. Now, as coastal patrolling grew more intense and the risks grew higher, traffickers prefer to carry migrants to Edirne, and from there to Greece. However, as Paola Monzon stated in her 2008 working paper “The smuggling of migrants by sea to Italy” for the Centre for International Political Studies (CESP), the route carrying migrants from Turkey to Calabria is being used again, although not as intensely as in old times, when Muammer Küçük ruled over the whole Mediterranean basin and organized regular huge landings of refugees and illegal immigrants on Italy’s Southern coasts.

When Küçük was arrested in Izmir in 2002, while he was preparing one of his “wrecks of the sea” carrying 200 people on board, each one of whom had been stripped of $2500, he was the almighty Turkish boss of migrant trafficking. Officially the owner of a phone shop in Istanbul, Küçük had gradually gained a leading role in this criminal sector: everyone had to pass through him sooner or later, everyone had to come to terms with him. Küçük accumulated a huge capital, estimated at eight million Euros. He could have collected an immense capital if the Turkish police, after lengthy investigations carried out with the help of police branches of Crotone and Reggio Calabria, had not caught him with his hands in the cookie jar in Izmir.

Smashing Muammer Küçük’s group was a big success. But not the only one. In recent years, authorities have achieved good results in the fight against migrant traffickers, thanks to tighter border controls and more intense judicial activity. But the traffic always goes on and generates significant profits for those who control it. It seems that lately Kurdish groups, counting on a large basin of immigration inside Kurdistan and, like the Turkish Mafia, on the help of criminal cells nested within the Kurdish Diaspora in Europe, have gained an increasingly important role on this front, achieving a dominant position and challenging the primacy of the Aksaray Mafia.

The Aksaray groups, however, remain powerful and have imposed a near-monopoly in another sector: prostitution. It is estimated that thousands of women are enslaved by the baba and forced to suffer the cynical logic of the sex industry. Many of these women are from former Soviet republics: mostly from Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and Moldova. Other women come from Iran and the Middle East. They are recruited in their home countries by local Mafia and sold to criminal organizations in Turkey, where they become the exclusive property of Turkish criminal groups. Therefore, not only migrants are smuggled.

In Turkey there is also trafficking of human beings. That is, there are migrants who remain in the country and end up in the tangle of Mafias. Among these unfortunate human beings, apart from women, there are also many irregular migrants, employed as seasonal workers in fields or as low-cost workers in factories. They live in precarious, sometimes sub-human, conditions. They live as slaves.

Other kinds of trafficking

Not only heroin. Even if the so-called ”brown sugar” is the most trafficked drug, other kinds of drugs are also trafficked in the Turkish territory. Allegedly, the newest trend in drug smuggling is cocaine. Recently, the police have seized increasing amounts of this kind of drug. According to some experts’ opinions, Turkish criminal groups have begun to carry cocaine to the markets of the Middle East, where demand is increasing, especially in cities like Beirut. However, internal consumption too absorbs a certain amount of the cocaine flow. Sometimes, traffickers may even trade a haul of cocaine in exchange for a certain amount of heroin.

The alliance between Turkish and Balkan drug lords plays a vital role in cocaine trafficking. Indeed, the Balkan drug lords are carving out a niche in this increasingly important market. Bulgarian and Romanian traffickers stand out, due to the fact that Bulgarian and Romanian ports (according to the Octa report by Europol, with Constanţa playing an increasingly important role) are cocaine "storage facilities:" cocaine is crammed into the holds of commercial vessels and transported by sea to Istanbul. From Istanbul, cocaine is then channeled on the roads of Anatolia, toward the border with Syria, the main transport corridor of drugs destined to the Middle East.

Turkey is also a transit country for ecstasy (391 thousand tablets seized in 2009) and synthetic drugs produced in Europe, especially in the Eastern segment of the continent. According to the 2009 Tadoc dossier, these drugs are also traded for heroin on their way to the final destination. In this case too, the primary target market is the Middle East rather than domestic consumers.

The same can be said about amphetamine, trafficked on an even larger scale (nearly three million tablets seized in 2009). From Eastern Europe, amphetamine is carried to Turkey, where the bulk of the flow is then channeled via Syria to the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula, where demand is steadily growing, except a small portion of drugs that remains in Turkey.

Of course, among the drugs smuggled in Turkey there is cannabis, the most produced, trafficked, seized, and used drug in the world. In Turkey, especially in the South-East Anatolia area, cannabis is widely raised and the harvest, in exponential growth, is sufficient to meet the internal market’s demand; therefore, there is no need for import anymore. There are no more seizures at the border. According to the latest Tadoc report, however, a steadily increasing number of internal seizures have been made in the Turkish territory: 6 tons of cannabis were seized in 2005, 9.7 in 2006, 13.4 in 2007, 20.5 in 2008, and 25.7 in 2009.

Public opinion was amazed by a piece of news reported last summer on the discovery of a giant cannabis plantation in the village of Hasanbey (in the province of Van), where more than two billion plants were raised. It was the largest anti-marijuana operation ever undertaken in Turkey: the eradication operations required the work of hundreds of military for five consecutive days.