Warlord Economics
Charles Taylor had rubber. Jonas Savimbi had diamonds. Mohamed Farrah Aidid had bananas. A look at how five notorious warlords financed their armies through resources, smuggling and makeshift taxation.
smuggling
The Side Door · Solstice No. 10
Nobody stops the barrels now.
America’s Oldest Private Detective Agency Takes on China’s Fake Products
Nearly all the world’s counterfeits come from China. Pinkerton is on the case.
You Can Run - The Atavist Magazine
The fugitive childhood of a cocaine smuggler's daughters.
Painkiller Pipeline: 300 Million Tapentadol Pills Sent from India to West Africa - bellingcat
Indian companies have sent more than 320 million synthetic opioid pills to West Africa – where they have not been approved by regulators – in three years.
The Story of Harvey Prager, the Last Great Weed Smuggler
Before the cartels took over, Harvey Prager built a life on millions of dollars of drug money. A prosecutor called him “the last of the amateurs."
A Theology of Smuggling
In the early 1980s, in Tucson, activists and religious leaders joined forces to protect refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border. Their collaboration galvanized the Sanctuary Movement.
Russia’s shadow tanker fleet runs into trouble
Every day, millions of barrels of oil are being transported by ships with obscured ownership and origin. But is the game up?
Earth League International Hunts the Hunters | The New Yorker
A conservation N.G.O. infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down.
The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Gold Mines
When the country’s mining industry collapsed, a criminal economy grew in its place, with thousands of men climbing into some of the deepest shafts in the world, searching for leftover gold.
Why Are Border Smugglers Trafficking Bologna?
The tons of contraband lunch meat seized at the U.S.-Mexico border tell us something about the market value of nostalgia.
Inside the Mind-Boggling World of the Antiquities Theft Task Force
You can't make this shit up
‘Every message was copied to the police’: the inside story of the most daring surveillance sting in history
Billed as the most secure phone on the planet, An0m became a viral sensation in the underworld. There was just one problem for anyone using it for criminal means: it was run by the police
The Sky Thief
How a goofy, God-fearing airport worker stole a passenger plane from the Seattle-Tacoma Airport and took flight with no plan to land.
A Border Town Built for Vice
Along the murky border of China and Myanmar is a no-man’s-land where prostitution is unchecked, gambling is rampant, and the tiger bone wine flows freely.
Highway Through Hell
The human-smuggling route across the Sahara may have been the deadliest on Earth. Then the EU paid off Niger’s army to shut it down — and made it even more treacherous.
The Drug Runners
The Tarahumara, of Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains, are the world’s greatest ultramarathoners. But in recent years, their legendary endurance has been put to a sinister use—in service of the narcos.
Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai
A sophisticated new electronic warfare system is being used at the world’s busiest port. But is it sand thieves or the Chinese state behind it?
Inside the Twisted, Worldwide Hunt for a $7 Million Stolen Car
Joe Ford, car detective, searches the world for stolen rare automobiles on the black market. The case he’s on now could set him up for life—if he’s not outsmarted by a skilled network of criminals and cheats.
Arming the Cartels
The inside story of a Texas gun-smuggling ring.
Searching for Keith | Hakai Magazine
A detective’s quest reveals how one idealistic fisheries observer may have collided with criminals and desperate migrants—and paid for it with his life.
The Caviar Con - Longreads
When caviar-crazed Eastern Europeans flocked to Warsaw, Missouri to poach eggs from a vulnerable species of fish, federal agents went undercover and spent two years to build a case against them.
On the Trail of the World's Most Daring Egg Smuggler
For decades Jeffrey Lendrum helicoptered up and rappelled down to aeries on cliff faces from Patagonia to Quebec, snatching unhatched raptors and selling them, investigators believe, to wealthy Middle Eastern falconers. This week in London, one of the most bizarre criminals in…
Meet the Undercover Crime Unit Battling Miami's Black Market of Birds
Multimillion-dollar sales of songbirds heap pressure on species already in decline. We go inside the covert investigation to capture traffickers.
My career as an international blood smuggler
For years, Kathleen McLaughlin smuggled American plasma every time she entered China, home to the world’s largest and deadliest blood debacle. She had no other choice
Coronado High - The Atavist Magazine
How a group of high school kids from a sleepy beach town in California became criminal masterminds.