Organized crime is such a rewarding industry in the Balkans because ordinary West Europeans spend an ever-burgeoning amount of their spare time and money sleeping with prostitutes; smoking untaxed cigarettes; snorting coke through fifty-euro notes up their noses; employing illegal untaxed immigrant labor on subsistence wages; stuffing their gullets with caviar; admiring ivory and sitting on teak; and purchasing the liver and kidneys of the desperately poor in the developing world.
There are more than 300 ethnic groups in Nigeria, but broadly speaking the country is divided into three main language groups: the Yoruba in the west, including Lagos; the Hausa in the north; and the Igbo in the east. It is too crude to identify these as three separate peoples, as the differentiation within each language group is vast, rather like calling Russians and Poles part of the same tribe.
After almost a century of colonial rule, the three groups embraced independence in 1960 with very different roles in the new state. By 1966, the Muslim Hausa had come to dominate the army; the Christian Yoruba provided much of the civil service and the intellectual elite of the country; and the Igbo in the east continued their role as some of the most effective traders in the world. When oil was discovered, it was mostly in the Niger delta to the east. Igbo leaders felt disinclined to share their wealth either with the north and its unproductive, almost feudal system, or with the Yoruba in the west, whom the Igbo perceived as insufferably arrogant. In 1967, the Igbo announced their secession from the country and the declaration of a new state, Biafra. Not surprisingly, the Hausa and the Yoruba were in no mood to let this precious part of the country slip through their hands. Civil war devastated the east until 1970, when Biafra—broken, battered, and famished—surrendered.
Coltan’s desirability resides in its properties as an efficient conductor that can resist very high temperatures, and it is an essential component in laptops, mobile phones, and video-game console
With a commodity such as fissile material (for which police forces have a fighting chance of tracking regions of production and constituencies of demand), prohibition has a real chance of achieving its stated goals. But with narcotics, for which demand is immense and relentless, prohibition drives the market toward the only place capable of satisfying that demand and regulating the industry—organized crime.
Slowly the American people may be realizing that after almost four decades of the war on drugs, dependency levels and usage are higher than ever before; that the prices of all major recreational drugs have been declining resolutely over that period; and that the state has wasted hundreds of billions of dollars in a criminal justice system that delivers a lot of crime but very little justice.
Rodríguez-Orejuela clan, a.k.a. the Cali cartel
Ochoa brothers, erstwhile partners of the late Pablo Escobar in the Medellín cartel.
Cartel del Norte, successors to the even more infamous Cali cartel.
The Cartel del Norte had lost its leader, Fernando Henao,
the ’ndrangheta, the Camorra, and the Sacra Corona Unità.
Masahisa Takenaka, the fourth-generation oyabun (godfather) of the Yamaguchi-gumi, the Kobe-based yakuza group
Consolidation of yakuza power into just three families—the Yamaguchi-gumi and two Tokyo-based groups, the Sumiyoshi-kai and the Inagawa-kai.
There is nothing the Chinese will not copy. Whether it is Harry Potter involved in entirely new adventures such as Harry Potter and the Crystal Turtle; Swedish bathroom fittings; spare parts for aircraft; furniture; nontoxic paints (the fakes made, of course, with highly toxic materials); foodstuffs; clothes—anything that is produced is fair game for the Chinese counterfeiters. The European Union Commission estimates that fake goods around the world are worth between $250 and $500 billion a year. Of these about 60 percent originate in the People’s Republic of China—between 20 and 25 percent of exports from China are counterfeits, while between 85 and 90 percent of products sold in the domestic Chinese market are fake.