Includes the mafia, gangs, crime syndicates, or any informal/unofficial organized form government.
Organized crime groups have surged in recent decades, aided by the rise of synthetic drugs, encrypted technologies, and multinational operations. For instance, a leading Brazilian mob has 60,000 affiliates spread across 26 countries in addition to its 40,000 members. Moreover, criminal actors are increasingly diversifying their operations, engaging in activities such as human smuggling, drug trafficking, and the exploitation of food supply chains.
The Global Organized Crime Index analyzes 193 countries based on their scale of criminal activity. It includes three main components:
Criminal actor influence and structure: e.g. mafia-style groups, criminal networks, state-embedded actors
Criminal market scale and impact: e.g. arms trafficking, heroin trade, human trafficking
Each country’s resilience to organized crime: e.g. judicial system, government transparency
Overall, countries were scored on a scale of 0 to 10 by the extent to which organized crime groups exert control over their direct economic activities.
Sources:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/size-of-the-shadow-economy-by-country/
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/organized-crime-hot-spots-around-the-world/
Italy/Montenegro
In the United States, the American Mafia (La Cosa Nostra [from Italy]) operates with a completely different strategy than it did during the bloody street wars of the 20th century.The historic Five Families of New York (Gambino, Genovese, Lucchese, Bonanno, and Colombo) along with the Philadelphia and Chicago outfits remain active. The Genovese and Gambino families are considered the most [prominent].
Modern American operations heavily favor low-risk, high-reward financial crimes. These include health care fraud, labor union extortion (particularly in construction and maritime shipping), sophisticated stock pump-and-dump schemes, and extensive illegal online gambling rings utilizing offshore servers.
The Transnational Cocaine Bridge: The American Mafia’s primary intersection with modern Italian crime occurs via the Gambino family’s enduring ties to the ‘Ndrangheta. Landmark FBI and Italian police operations (such as Operation New Bridge) revealed that New York mobsters still collaborate closely with Calabrian clans to coordinate drug trafficking routes running from South America, through US ports, and into Europe.
The Transnational “Zips”: American families frequently utilize “Zips”—sicilian or Calabrian-born mobsters brought over to the US. These operators are highly valued by American bosses because they strictly adhere to the traditional code of omertà (silence) and maintain direct, unmonitored supply chains back to European syndicates.
Brazil-China Connection
Unlike the theatrical street violence of Mexican cartels, the high-profile media footprint of MS-13, or the romanticized history of the Italian Mafia, organized crime in Brazil and China operates predominantly like invisible, highly diversified corporate multinationals. They prioritize logistics, trade routes, and white-collar integration over public terror.
Brazil is home to the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho (CV), which the U.S. government designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Despite this massive designation, the PCC doesn’t have the “household name” status of the Sinaloa Cartel.
The Corporate Structure: The PCC operates less like a gang and more like a franchise or a decentralized trade union. It has a rigid constitution, charges its members “monthly dues”, and provides legal defense and welfare for the families of incarcerated members.
The Global Logistics Powerhouse: The PCC doesn’t waste energy fighting for control of the U.S. border; instead, it dominates the Atlantic Cocaine Pipeline. It buys wholesale cocaine from Bolivia and Colombia, routes it through Brazil’s massive commercial ports (like Santos), and ships it to West Africa and Europe. Because their primary market is European and Asian consumers, they rarely register on the radar of American domestic news.
The Strategy of Calm: While Rio’s CV engages in highly publicized favela shootout videos, the dominant PCC actively suppresses street crime and homicides in its home territories (like São Paulo) to keep federal law enforcement and the military from disrupting their billions in commercial shipping logistics.
Traditional Chinese Triads (like the Sun Yee On or 14K) still exist, but modern Chinese organized crime is rarely about specialized street bosses anymore. Instead, it has evolved into a global, underground service industry providing specialized financial and logistical infrastructure to other cartels.
The Underground Banking Masters: Mexican and South American cartels have increasingly abandoned traditional cash smuggling or Western banks to launder money. Instead, they rely on Chinese underground money laundering networks. Using parallel “mirror” transactions, digital flight of capital, and trade-based money laundering (e.g., using a Chinese electronics front company in Brazil to mask drug profits), billions are moved seamlessly across the globe without a single dollar ever physically crossing a border.
The Precursor Monopoly: China’s massive legal chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing sector is heavily exploited by criminal networks to export the precursor chemicals necessary to create synthetic drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine. [Which was destroyed in Wuhan during COVID – no international fentanyl precursor supply; see the China Report]
The Grey-Market Symbiosis: Chinese networks are elite “grey-market” exploiters, heavily involved in the illicit extraction of Latin American natural resources—smuggling illegal timber out of Central America or illegally harvesting high-value seafood (like shark fins or abalone) to feed domestic Chinese demand.
The Brazil–China Underworld Axis
The reason these two forces are so powerful right now is that they have actively joined forces.
The PCC in Brazil has found its premier financial ally in Chinese networks. A prime example was a major police crackdown on a China-linked money laundering ring in Brazil. The syndicate used a seemingly legitimate Chinese e-commerce platform (“Knup Brasil”) to sell legally sourced consumer electronics. In reality, the entire financial apparatus behind the electronics store was a front designed to wash over $190 million in PCC drug proceeds. By marrying Brazil’s unrivaled South American drug supply with China’s unparalleled global financial and trade network, they have built a modern criminal axis that values invisible balance sheets far more than notoriety.
The Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) operates without a single “Boss.” Instead, it is run like a decentralized corporate matrix governed by specialized committees called Sintonias (literally “frequencies” or “tunings”):
- Sintonia dos Gravatas (The Ties): The legal wing. A network of paid lawyers who manage inmate rights, corruption pipelines, and legal defense.
- Sintonia Geral do Sistema: Manages internal prison operations, maintaining strict discipline across hundreds of penitentiaries.
- Sintonia Geral da Rua (The Street): Coordinates logistics, drug routes, and territorial disputes outside prison walls.
- Sintonia Financeira: The treasury. It manages the franchise’s massive bank accounts, collects “monthly dues” from thousands of members, and dictates wholesale purchasing from Bolivian and Colombian cartels.
You mentioned false labeling on shipping containers (Trade-Based Money Laundering), but Mirror Transactions (or Mirror Swaps) are how Chinese Money Laundering Networks (CMLNs) move the underlying cash instantly without any cross-border wire transfers. It exploits a perfect convergence of needs: Mexican/South Central drug crews have excess U.S. Dollars (USD) but need Pesos, while wealthy Chinese citizens want USD in America to buy property or evade strict capital flight limits ($50,000 yearly cap) but only have Chinese Yuan (RMB).
[U.S. Side] Cartel Drug Cash (USD) —> Collected by Chinese Broker —> Given to Wealthy Chinese Buyer (To Buy Real Estate)
|(No Cross-Border Wire)|
[China Side] Cartel / Precursor Supplier <— RMB Bank Transfer <— Paid by Wealthy Chinese Buyer
The Drop: A cartel courier hands $1 million in dirty USD cash to a Chinese broker in a parking lot in Los Angeles.
The Mirror: The broker immediately notifies their counterpart in China. A wealthy Chinese buyer transfers the exact equivalent value in Yuan (RMB) from their mainland bank account directly to a Chinese bank account controlled by the money launderer or a chemical factory supplying fentanyl precursors.
The Payout: The broker then uses the physical USD cash sitting in Los Angeles to pay for luxury real estate or hands it over to Chinese students/mules to deposit in structured amounts into U.S. banks. Zero dollars physically cross the ocean, bypassing both U.S. banking red flags and Chinese capital controls.
The direct connection to real estate is that property serves as the ultimate destination for mirrored cash. Federal advisories note that these networks actively seek out real estate closings to absorb large, anonymous cash injections. By funneling dirty money into residential housing, commercial plazas, and agricultural land (such as commercial marijuana operations across the American West), illicit funds are completely transformed into legitimate, appreciating Western assets—simultaneously laundering the cash and securing safe-haven wealth outside of Beijing’s domestic reach.
El Salvador + Mexico (MS-13)
1980s: El Salvador Civil War Refugee Exodus —> Formed Mara Salvatrucha (MS) in Los Angeles (MacArthur Park)
1990s: Illegal Immigration Reform Act (IIRIRA) —> Mass Deportations back to El Salvador
2000s-2010s: Gang mutates into a prison army —> Migrates BACK to L.A. (Transnational Syndicate)
2020s: Bukele’s Massive “State of Exception” —> Leaders flee EL SALVADOR back to L.A./U.S.
The gang did not start as a transnational syndicate; it started as Mara Salvatrucha (MS) in the 1980s in Los Angeles—primarily as a loose street crew of Salvadoran stoner youth and metalheads banding together for self-defense.
The Prison Merger: The transformation occurred inside California’s penitentiary system. When MS members were locked up, they faced intense conflict with dominant African-American and established Chicano gangs. To survive, MS cut a deal with the Mexican Mafia (La Eme), the powerful prison syndicate that controls nearly all Latino street gangs in Southern California.
The “13” Designation: By aligning under La Eme, MS accepted their supremacy, agreed to pay taxes on street-level rackets, and was granted the number 13 (signifying “M,” the 13th letter of the alphabet). This transformed a loose street crew into MS-13, integrating them into a highly disciplined, multi-generational prison-to-street command structure.
The narrative that law enforcement simply exported the problem via 1990s deportations misses the deliberate exploitation of state infrastructure by the gang:
The 2012 Salvadoran Truce: In 2012, the Salvadoran government secretly brokered a truce between MS-13 and their rivals, the 18th Street Gang, to lower the nation’s soaring homicide rate. In exchange, gang leaders were transferred from maximum-security prisons to lower-security facilities, allowed conjugal visits, and given access to smartphones.
The Mobilization Weapon: This truce was a catastrophic failure for the state but a massive win for the gang. MS-13 used this breathing room not to reform, but to mobilize and institutionalize. Leaders used their newfound freedom inside the prisons to run the organization nationwide, establishing a unified corporate command. Prisons became secure operational headquarters from which they could coordinate international drug lines and extortion.
The 2010s Border Surge: By the mid-2010s, as the truce collapsed and violence in Central America escalated to civil-war levels, MS-13 exploited the mass migration waves. They embedded young, un-indexed operators into the surge of unaccompanied minors crossing the U.S. border. This allowed the prison leadership in El Salvador to seamlessly replenish and expand “cliques” in major U.S. hubs, notably flooding parts of Long Island, New York, Houston, and re-injecting fresh, ruthless enforcement cells back into Los Angeles.
The Civil Rights Backlash: By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Black Americans had fought for and legally secured landmark Civil Rights legislation. However, systemic economic disenfranchisement, redlining, and factory closures left neighborhoods like South Central vulnerable.
The “Drug Parking Lot” Strategy: Major traffickers and intelligence-linked operatives viewed these economically isolated, heavily policed Black neighborhoods as low-resistance, high-turnover consumer markets—essentially using South Central as a giant drug parking lot.
The Intelligence Conspiracies: The U.S. government’s involvement went beyond turning a blind eye to Contra-linked traffickers like Danilo Blandón to fund the anti-communist war in Nicaragua. Federal agencies—fully aware of the incoming influx—actively allowed narcotics and high-powered, black-market military firearms to flood South Central.
The Motive: This influx served a dual purpose: it generated off-the-books cash for covert, illegal foreign wars while simultaneously decimating the political and social cohesion of newly empowered Black communities. By infiltrating these neighborhoods with an engineered addiction epidemic, the state created a pretext for the “War on Drugs.” This justified hyper-militarized policing, mass incarceration, and the systematic dismantling of Black communities under the guise of public safety—ensuring that true systemic freedom and economic mobility were aggressively sabotaged.
MS-13 did not just happen to slide into a migration wave—their hyper-violence, forced recruitment, and systematic slaughter of communities were the primary drivers forcing families to flee El Salvador in the 2010s. At their peak, the gangs wielded more de facto territorial control than the national police, turning entire neighborhoods into war zones and forcing a mass exodus toward the U.S. border.
Nicaragua/Cuban Contra Scandal (“Communist threat”) + South Central LA
During the Cold War, the Reagan Administration sought to overthrow the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. When Congress explicitly banned the CIA and U.S. military from funding the anti-communist rebel fighters (The Contras) via the Boland Amendment, elements within the U.S. government sought alternative, covert funding pipelines.
Journalistic investigations, most notably Gary Webb’s landmark “Dark Alliance” series for the San Jose Mercury News (and subsequent congressional inquiries led by Senator John Kerry), revealed a direct logistical pipeline that flooded the streets of Los Angeles:
- The Inflow: Nicaraguan drug traffickers with close ties to the CIA-backed Contras (such as Oscar Danilo Blandón and Juan Norwin Meneses) smuggled multi-ton shipments of cheap Colombian cocaine into California.
- The Distribution: Blandón became the primary wholesale supplier to “Freeway” Ricky Ross, a brilliant, illiterate street distributor based in South Central Los Angeles.
- The Crack Explosion: Before this pipeline, cocaine was a high-priced, glamorous powder drug. The influx of cheap, massive quantities of wholesale cocaine provided by Contra-linked traffickers allowed Ross and independent operations to process the powder into crack cocaine. This cheap, highly addictive derivative was distributed at an industrial scale across South Central and subsequently to Black neighborhoods nationwide. The Funding Loop: Millions of dollars generated from the crack epidemic in South Central were systematically funneled back by Blandón and Meneses directly into the cash accounts of the Contra armies in Central America to buy weapons. In the urgent push to win a Cold War proxy conflict, federal agencies turned a blind eye to the massive influx of narcotics and accompanying illegal firearms flowing directly into inner-city Los Angeles. This toxic combination of hyper-cheap, highly addictive drugs and a massive influx of black-market firearms permanently altered the landscape of South Central, fueling the devastating gang wars between the Crips and Bloods throughout the late 1980s and 1990s.
Other countries (to be continued)
Central and South America have the highest concentration of organized crime globally, with the most widespread criminal activity in Venezuela and Colombia.
In particular, criminal actors are known for serious extortion practices, human smuggling, and illegal arms trafficking. The economic crisis in Venezuela, which has forced millions to flee, has contributed to the rise in human smuggling and trafficking, with victims being targeted even beyond the Colombian-Venezuelan border.
In Mexico, criminal actors are increasingly targeting the food industry, including avocados, tortillas, potatoes, and limes, among others.
Myanmar also stands as a key hub for human trafficking, with an estimated 120,000 victims being used for forced labor in scam centers. These scam centers, which generate billions of dollars, operate largely along border of China and Myanmar, where victims are lured by significant perks.
Meanwhile, the illicit arms trade in pervasive across Somalia. The jihadist group, al-Shabab, has infiltrated political and economic structures, serving as a key player in illegal arms trafficking. Each year, the group is estimated to make $100 million from its extortion activities alone.
