#1 Research Paper: Human Trafficking

CHAPTER 1

Historical Overview of Transnational Crime

Mitchel P. Roth

It has only been 30 years since the President of the Societe Internationale de Criminologie, Denis Szabo, wrote in the preface to a book of essays by criminologists concerning new trends in transnational crime that “the 30th International Course in Criminology chose an uncommon subject—transnational crime—which is rarely examined within our discipline” (MacNamara & Stead, 1982, p. vii). Anyone who has attended a criminology or criminal justice conference over the past 20 years would be struck at how recently transnational crime was considered peripheral to the study of crime. In the 1990s, increasing focus on the globalization and increasing complexity of criminality has led many criminologists to specialize in the internationalization of crimes. This chapter chronicles the cross-border historical antecedents of modern transnational crimes and the processes that gave rise to them.

Defining Transnational Crime

One of the more challenging tasks for anyone seeking to identify transnational crime has been determining what “transnational crime” actually refers to. What has not helped the dialogue is that “the terminology is highly unstable and at least four terms overlap each other,” including transnational crime, transnational organized crime, international organized crime, and multinational crime (Madsen, 2009, pp. 7–8). Still others refer to this phenomenon as cross-national crime and cross-border or transboundary criminality. However, the issue becomes clearer once international crimes are subtracted from the equation, since the vast majority of definitions of international crime refer to activities that threaten global security, such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Of all the expressions that have been used, transnational has had the most adherents.

For much of human history, criminal activity has been a local or regional concern. Prior to the great strides in transportation and communication technology in the 19th century, the conceptual underpinnings of transnational crime were still years away. By most accounts, the term transnational crime from a criminological perspective emerged sometime in the mid-1970s, following the lead of the United Nations, which was brandishing the term in an attempt to identify types of crimes that transcended national borders. Like terrorism and organized crime, there is no accepted consensus on a definition of transnational crime. The expression was developed by the U.N. Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch in 1974 to guide discussion at a United Nations crime conference. Four years later, Gerhard Mueller—a prominent criminologist and chief of the U.N. Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch from 1974–1982—suggested that

 

it referred to a criminological term, with no claim to providing a juridical concept, and consisted simply of a list of five activities: 1) crime as business, organized crime, white-collar crime, and corruption; 2) offenses involving works of art and other cultural property; 3) criminality associated with alcoholism and drug abuse; 4) violence of transnational and comparative international significance; and 5) criminality associated with migration and flight from natural disaster and hostilities. (Reuter & Petrie, 1999, p. 7)

 

One high-ranking Interpol official contributed an “early informal” definition of transnational crimes, relegating them to crimes “whose resolution necessitates the cooperation between two or more countries” (Bossard, 1990, p. 3). In 1994, one leading authority asserted that “transnational crime is a crime undertaken by an organization based in one state but committed in several host countries, whose market conditions are favorable, and risk apprehension is low” (Williams, 1994, p. 96). Likewise, the authors of one recent study defined transnational crime as “those activities involving the crossing of national borders and violation of at least one country’s criminal laws.” Furthermore, they suggest that most examples of this form of crime are “economically motivated and involve some form of smuggling” (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006, p. 255, n. 3).

In 1995, the United Nations defined transnational crime as “offenses whose inception, proportion and/or direct or indirect effects involve more than one country” (U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime [UNODC], 2002, p. 4). It identified a laundry list of 18 categories of transnational offenses whose inception, perpetration, and direct or indirect efforts involve more than one country. These categories include money laundering, terrorist activities, theft of art and cultural objects, theft of intellectual property, illicit arms trafficking, aircraft hijacking, maritime piracy, insurance fraud, computer crime, environmental crime, trafficking in persons, trade in human body parts, illegal drug trafficking, fraudulent bankruptcy, infiltration of legal business, and the corruption and bribery of public or party officials.

There are legions of transnational criminals operating solo or with a handful of associates. However, the emphasis on transnational crime is heavily predicated on the activities associated with “transnational organized crime.” Over the past decade, it has become increasingly apparent that the notion of “organized” groups of actors in a traditional sense is a vestige of the past. Well into the 1990s, organized crime definitions were heavily based on the hierarchical nature of crime networks and syndicates. This became especially clear in 2000 when the United Nations in its Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNODC, 2000) defined organized crime

 

as a structured group of three or more persons existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more serious crimes or offences in accordance with this Convention in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or material benefit. (UNODC, 2000, Article 2a)

 

A serious crime refers to “conduct constituting a criminal offense punishable by a maximum deprivation of liberty of at least four years or a more serious penalty” (UNODC, Article 2b). Organized crime is regarded as transnational when it

 

(a) is committed in more than one State; (b) is committed in one State but a part of its preparation, planning, direction or control takes place in another State; (c) is committed in one State but involves an organized crime group that engages in criminal activities in more than one State; or (d) is committed in one State but has substantial effects in another State. (UNODC, 2000, Article 3.2)

 

Another way to view transnational crime is crime “that in one of several ways involves two or more sovereign jurisdictions” (Madsen, 2009, p. 8). While the tendency is to focus on violent or high profile crimes such as the drug trade and human trafficking, transnational crime also involves the more mundane, such as the parental dispute over custody of a child involving two countries. Crimes can also be organized and transnational, but do not actually violate international law, such as the smuggling of nontaxed tobacco products from country to another (Madsen, 2009, p. 9).

Definitions of complex terminology can be highly problematic. Indeed, it becomes even more so as transnational crime becomes more and more globalized. These problems are exacerbated when it comes to distinguishing virtual borders from geographical ones. Thus, one can hypothetically commit a crime in another country without leaving his or her home country, such as in the case of Nigerian advance fee fraud, better known by its criminal statute number, “419.” Definitions become even more useless when one considers formerly distinct forms of criminality such as organized crime, white-collar crime, and terrorist activities, which increasingly fall under the rubric of transnational crime. More recently, various academics and officials have expanded the definition to include new activities such as terrorism and cybercrime, but not without some debate. In the end, however, one must accept the fact that “computer networks and the Internet do not recognize international boundaries” (Fairchild & Dammer, 2001, p. 327) any more than drugs and human traffickers do.

Any historical examination of modern transnational crime will reveal that there are actually few new examples of transnational crime. The illegal trafficking and smuggling of weapons, migrants, illegal substances, and humans, as well as terrorism, tax evasion, environmental crimes, corruption, and financial fraud, have been taking place for decades if not centuries. What has changed according to several researchers is the scale of these activities and the increasing “deterritorialization” of crime as criminal actors make use of new advances in communication and transportation (Dandurand, Tkachuk, & Castle, 1998, p. 2).

Transnational Crime: An Historical Perspective

The prospective shape of transnational crime can be discerned in numerous crimes and smuggling networks in the premodern world. For example, from a historical perspective, many of the trade routes linking modern transnational criminal networks between countries were established centuries ago, long before national boundaries had been established. In fact, the classical overland trade route linking Byzantium (now Istanbul) to Rome through Greece and the Balkans into Western Europe is still used by modern drugs and weapons traffickers, and the so-called amber route, connecting the Black Sea to the Baltic, plays an integral role in smuggling and human traffic operations from China and other parts of Asia. Meanwhile, the water route across the Adriatic from Albania to Italy continues to bring various forms of contraband into Puglia in the south of Italy, and then north to the rest of Europe, and illegal immigrants and marijuana still follow ancient routes blazed during the Roman Empire into Europe from Africa through Morocco and Spain.

In similar fashion, ancient underground banking systems have operated next to legitimate banking systems for centuries. Different types of these systems have evolved in various parts of the world, including hawala (transfer) and hundi in South Asia and fei-ch’ien (flying money) in China (Passas, 1999). Initially conceived as noncriminal strategies to move money and goods quickly, they have been adapted by transnational criminals to bypass formal state banking systems and regulations, allowing them to move money without a paper trail. The best known of these, hawala, had its origins in early medieval commerce in the Near and Middle East, in an era marked by substantial long-distance trading, and played an essential security role during a time when brigands and pirates were on the prowl for merchants in transit by land or sea. This scheme protected merchants by allowing them to transfer funds based on trusted and Islamic propriety without the physical necessity of shepherding currency through foreign countries.

Sea piracy and the illicit trade in humans, usually in the form of slaves, are among the earliest examples of organized crime on a multinational or global scale; in fact, the slave trade has been described as the “world’s oldest trade” and can be traced back to the 3rd millennium; the trafficking of women, to at least the beginning of the Christian era (Chanda, 2007). Counterfeiting activities have been around as long as there has been a profit in it. In 17th-century England, the government selected Isaac Newton, “the smartest man in England,” as warden of the mint to avert what by the late 1690s had become a national crisis, because it became increasingly difficult to find “legal silver” in circulation (Levenson, 2009, p. 109). This grew into a major concern at the highest levels of power as the criminal underworld melted clipped silver into ingots to be sold on the continent, leading to an investigation by Parliament, which feared lacking sufficient funds to pay its soldiers on the battlefields of Europe. Newton’s solution was to reconfigure silver coins so that they would be much more difficult to clip, a process he was able to see through to completion by 1699.

Illicit arms, drugs, and human trafficking have received most of the focus of transnational crime studies over the past decade. More recently, Gastrow (1998) suggested that the smuggling of a herd of horses across the South African frontier to the German cavalry by a gang led by Australian immigrant Scotty Smith should be considered “one of the first transnational criminal operations in South Africa.” As early as the 17th century, French provocateurs were smuggling illicit weapons to various Native American tribes in the American colonies, as they contested the British for hegemony in the region. But examples can be found in many other fields as well. Not as well chronicled, recent research has focused on obscure topics such as smuggling binder wire into Canada from the United States in the early 20th century (Evans, 2011) and the trafficking of candelilla, a waxlike substance extracted from native Mexican plants used in the manufacture of cosmetics and other commodities. This practice flourished between the 1950s and 1980s, when the Mexican government strictly controlled its sale and production. A Texas entrepreneur stepped in and together with a host of candelilla makers, known as candeleros, created a “system of drop points and independent truckers” (Carey & Marak, 2011, p. 2) to smuggle the product across the border, much like drugs and humans are today. Ironically, it was not ended by law enforcement but by candeleros who discovered they could make even more money by selling their labor in the United States.

Piracy

No form of transnational crime illustrates the continuum of transnational crime past and present better than the ancient crime of piracy. In contrast to their precursors, modern pirates have taken advantage of high technology, bases in failed nation-states, potential alliances with transnational terrorists, and a global economy dependent on secure shipping lanes. Nonetheless, modern powers have proved no more able to fend off pirates, as demonstrated by the April 2009 standoff between an $800 million U.S. Navy destroyer and a handful of pirates in a lifeboat—the first incident in two centuries in which foreign pirates had captured a U.S. vessel for ransom (Gettleman, 2009; Mazzetti, 2009). The last time this took place was when the Barbary pirates of Northern Africa took sailors hostage in the early days of the American Republic.

Piracy was always a problem in the Mediterranean, becoming more endemic in the last century of the Roman Republic as a result of a miscalculation in foreign policy by the Roman senate in 2nd-century BCE. Formerly, the sea power of Rhodes had policed the Eastern Mediterranean until destroyed by the Romans. Rome, with no standing navy of her own to replace what it had destroyed, left the Mediterranean open to organized piracy. Pirates were headquartered in Cilicia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, dominating the Mediterranean with great fleets. No direct action was taken against them until 102 BCE. According to one observer, the reason the Romans had not vigorously suppressed piracy was that pirates had become the chief source of slaves for the ruling classes (Lewis & Reinhold, 1966, p. 325). By 69 BCE, the seas were almost closed to travel and trade, and pirates were able to strike at will along the Italian coast and even make forays into the harbor of Rome at Ostia. Famine and financial disaster beckoned if the pirates were not vanquished. In 67 BCE, the Gabinian Law was passed, granting Pompey some of the most extraordinary powers ever granted to any Roman leader—almost unlimited powers over the entire Mediterranean for dealing with the pirate menace. Within 3 months, the pirate menace and freebooting ceased to plague the empire (Lewis & Reinhold, 1966, pp. 324–325).

So by the Middle Ages, piracy was already an ancient occupation. As trade increased over the centuries, so did the volume of piracy. With the expansion of oceanic trade routes during the commercial expansion of the 16th and 17th centuries, pirates likewise expanded their routes, following the money trail from the Old World to the Americas. As the French, English, Dutch, and Spanish each carved out empires in the New World, competition between these powers to establish trade monopolies often led to war on the high seas (Karraker, 1953). The traditional years of the Golden Age of Piracy lasted between 1650 and 1730. An evaluation of this era offers a number of striking parallels to 21st-century transnational criminal activities. Illegal pirates as well as state-sponsored ones, called privateers, had vast economic incentives to participate in the looting of cargoes of gold, grain, jewels, wine, and even drugs. The import and export of these commodities was heavily controlled, and for a successful smuggling network to flourish it required the willing participation of corrupt officials and merchants, particularly when it came to laundering their ill-gotten treasures.

According to early English common law, piracy committed by English subjects was likened to treason, the highest felony of this period. Statutes were introduced that added trading with known pirates or furnishing them weapons as forms of treason. According to William Blackstone (1771/1962), the crime of piracy, or trading with known pirates, was equivalent to “robbery and depredation upon the high seas” (p. 66). Sir Edward Coke regarded these actors as hostis humani generis, whereby “they renounced all the benefits of society and government” when it came to justice (Blackstone, 1962, p. 66).

Slavery

Numerous historical surveys of transnational crime include slavery as one of the earliest

examples of international criminality. Although slavery can indeed be traced to antiquity, it was not statutorily illegal throughout most of history and, hence, not a crime. Indeed, it was an accepted fact in ancient Greece and Rome that slavery was a natural state for some individuals, leading Aristotle to defend it, noting that “humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves” (Chanda, 2007, p. 215). It is anachronistic to speak of slavery as transnational crime before the 18th century. Much of the problem is the result of confusing human trafficking with the human chattel slavery that characterized the transatlantic slavery, a connection that researchers have concluded “is tenuous at best” (Andreas & Greenhill, 2010, p. 49).

By the 1400s, the slave trade had become a legal global enterprise, and over a period of 400 years, 12 million slaves were forcibly removed from Africa and taken to the Americas (Ashcroft, 2001, p. 70). The very nomenclature of slavery has led to some of this confusion over its inclusion in various historical studies of slavery as transnational crime. For example, in the 18th century, the jurist William Blackstone interpreted forced slavery as a form of piracy, writing, “Taking any of the crew or passengers of a vessel for the purpose of selling them as slaves,” to be tantamount to the offence of piracy at common law; but “this had reference rather to the kidnapping of British subjects than the traffic in natives of Africa” (Blackstone, 1771/1962, pp. 68–69).

The British came early (compared to other Western nations) to the fight against international slavery and was the first to institute a ban on slavery and the slave trade, making it also the “first to criminalize international commerce in a particular commodity” (Andreas & Nadelmann 2006, p. 31). More important, at the same time, it became “the first to evolve into a far more ambitious regime aimed at the criminalization of all activity involving the production, sale, and use of that ‘commodity’ in every country” (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006, p. 31). From a transnational perspective, the strides made against the slave trade by the British provided tactical lessons that would later be adopted by opponents of the white slave trade, being that they also had to contend with the cross-border characteristics of the transnational trade in humans (Andreas & Nadelmann 2006, p. 34).

Global Prohibitions

Various prohibitions have provided some of the greatest stimuli for the development of transnational crime. This is clear as early as the late 17th century, when the English Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, designed to control what commodities could be imported into its North American colonies. By preventing any goods that did not originate in England from being shipped into the colonies, it in effect created a black market by prohibiting numerous luxury goods from other countries. To fill the void, gangs of pirates, smugglers, and black marketers of various nationalities were more than happy to fill the void. Many goods were smuggled in to evade high taxes. It has been estimated that perhaps five sixths of the tea consumed in the colonies had been smuggled in (Williams, 1961). The Navigation Acts passed between 1651 and 1696 did for 17th-century pirates and smugglers what alcohol and drug prohibition did for the development of 20th-century transnational crime. Colonial Americans seethed at the British monopoly on shipping and trade and had no disinclination about doing business with pirates, establishing in effect with them an unrestricted market for cheaper goods, undercutting legitimate markets in the process (Hoffer, 2000). According to Serrano (2002), “Prohibition is at the nub of transnational organized crime,” arguing that “more than any other form of state intervention, it is prohibition that has a particularly destabilizing effect upon the whole sphere of the illegal” (p. 15) by prohibiting certain goods and services and in the process creating illicit markets.

Smuggling

Smuggling as a form of criminality dates to antiquity, where the collection of tribute was an established practice. With the minting of coins and the creation of money, commerce and exchange became much easier, as did the collection of taxes or tariffs that enriched the coffers of monarchs. As far back as the Old Testament, customs were recognized as an important source of income and the right to collect them a form of political control as effective as tariffs and taxes in the modern era. In fact, the very word tariff testifies to the internationalization of trade over the centuries past. Almost 1,200 years ago, the Moors founded the town of Tarifa near Gibraltar on the Spanish coast. Here, they pioneered a system that revolutionized commercial trade. As international commerce spread from country to country, a predatory group of pirates made the strategically located town their command post. They stopped merchant vessels, levying tribute according to a fixed scale on all merchandise passing in or out of the straits that it overlooked. Mariners who reluctantly paid tribute at Tarifa soon lent the name “tariff” to this tribute. Over time, the governments of Europe adapted this idea and began making similar levies on imports, and a tariff system was well established in the Old World by the colonial era. From a modern perspective, because of “the substantial lowering of traditional trade barriers, global smuggling is increasingly about evading trade prohibitions and bans rather than tariffs and taxes” (Andreas & Greenhill, 2010, p. 5).

Human smuggling is among the world’s most common transnational crimes. In the United States, human smuggling went transnational in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Until 1916 and World War I (which stifled most transocean smuggling networks), a trans-Pacific smuggling network flourished bringing the first “illegal aliens” into the United States using a route that went through Cuba and then into Mexico. Much of the traffic was controlled by the 6 Companies, an immigrant fraternal society first organized in San Francisco in the mid-19th century. It was directed by representatives of seven major Cantonese families in San Francisco. Their smuggling network evolved into a commercial pipeline that besides the illegal smuggling of immigrants would later include opiates and various exports and imports (Perkins, 1978; Romero, 2011).

Drug Prohibition

Narcotics have been used for medicinal, recreational, and religious purposes for millennia. As early as the 1700s, Spanish authorities were legally taxing and selling the coca leaf to pay for New World expansion, while in comparison there has always existed a “strong bond between opium and criminality” (Booth, 1996, p. 227). Although it is most closely associated with China, the opium poppy actually was first cultivated in the Middle East and then India, not reaching China until sometime in the 17th century, when it was introduced by the Portuguese (Bresler, 1980, p. 10). For much of history except for medical use, opium has been an illegal commodity—even the centuries-long Indo-Chinese opium trade for much of its existence was “nothing more than a smuggling enterprise” (Booth, 1996, p. 227). The Ch’ing Emperor banned its sale in 1729, but failing imperial power left him unable to enforce the ban.

British merchants took over the opium trade in 1773 when the government of British India granted the East India Company an exclusive monopoly over India’s entire poppy crop. Excluding the use of opium for medicinal purposes, reports of opium addiction in China are scarce before 1800. By the early 19th century, British merchants were eager to buy tea, silk, rice, and other goods from China to feed the growing demand for these products in England. As matters stood, the Chinese had little interest in any of the goods offered in exchange by English merchants. But with the British East India Company in control of the Bengal opium fields, which were considered the best in the world at that time, the British devised a scheme in which it would inundate China with opium, creating legions of addicts among Chinese users who had no previous familiarity with the drug.

Chinese historians have pointed out that opium smoking was linked to the development of tobacco smoking, that opium smoking did not become widespread in China until the early 18th century, and that for the most part, it is a modern phenomenon. During this era, the tobacco was mixed with a weak opium concoction, making a substance called madak. Once the East India Company began importing large amounts of opium in 1773, hoping to “rectify the trade imbalance” mentioned previously, the weaker madak product was replaced by one much stronger (Jonnes, 1999, p. 43). The opium problem became serious enough that the Manchu imperial court issued a proclamation banning the opium trade. The British failed to follow this edict, and the Chinese responded by destroying about $11 million worth of opium, igniting the First Opium War (followed by another one in 1860). British victory forced China to reimburse it for the losses and to lift its prohibition on the trade.

The 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission, in many respects, kicked off the transnational crusade against illegal drug trafficking. As the first multinational drug control initiative, it brought together representatives from 13 countries to formulate a plan to curtail the illicit trafficking and consumption of opium. Its limited impact was in no small part because participants had permission only to make recommendations and therefore were not imbued with the power to make treaties. Nonetheless, the commission encouraged participating countries to enact national legislation that would address the problem domestically. Between 1912 and 1914, some of the countries sent emissaries to meetings held at The Hague. In any case, the 1909 meeting stimulated countries to pass statutes regarding domestic drug use and laid the foundation for the adoption of the 1912 Hague Opium Convention.

As early as 1918, a U.S. Treasury Report noted that suppliers were using a national organization to smuggle drugs through the Canadian and Mexican borders. When Great Britain banned the use of cocaine, hashish, and barbiturates for nonmedical purposes in 1920, with the Dangerous Drugs Act, and criminalized the use of cannabis in 1928 (the United States followed in 1937), the opportunities for transnational crime were vastly expanded.

In 1925, the League of Nations attempted to implement a prohibition resolution but had no luck because of the noncooperation of opium-producing companies. Turkey, which had not attended the 1909 conference, had seen its power considerably reduced with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. As a result, the country had become more dependent on the opium trade as the world’s biggest producer and was unwilling to sacrifice this source of income (Bovenkerk & Yesigoz, 2007).

No international crime illustrates the transnational nature of crime like the links required by the global drug trade, a relationship that has been active for more than a century. America was already one of the leading consumers of legal narcotics when the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed in 1914, in one fell swoop criminalizing the nonmedical use of opium, morphine, and coca leaf derivatives. It has been well documented how criminals stepped into the void to provide addicts with illegal narcotics. Among the first to see the opportunities in the transnational trafficking of illegal drugs were Jewish gangsters who organized a smuggling network with the leading supplier of the day, China; this was followed by the building of laboratories to dilute and package narcotics for market and forming distribution networks to get product to addicts. In 1923, a kilo (2.2 lbs) of pure heroin could be purchased from its Chinese source for $3,000. Diluted and divided into 15,500 multigrain capsules, by some accounts it could turn a profit of $300,000 (Volkman, 1998). In the late 1920s, the formidable American gangster Arnold Rothstein moved into the transnational narcotics trade (his final criminal enterprise) and was soon sending emissaries to Europe and Asia to purchase opium for transport into the United States. Since heroin, cocaine, and morphine were still available from legitimate pharmaceutical companies in Europe, he was able to purchase large quantities of the drugs for the American market. But he would not live to see the success of the global narcotics trade.

During Japanese expansion into China in the 1930s, one of the Rising Sun’s strategies for conquest was to flood China with opiates. Indeed, the estimated 8 million Chinese opium addicts seemed a much more alluring market to international drug traffickers than the mere 100,000 addicts thought to reside in the United States (Jonnes, 1999, p. 95). Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger went as far as describing the Japanese invasion strategy to undermine the Chinese people “morally and physically” with opiates as “chemical” warfare (Jonnes, 1999).

During the years between the world wars, Turkey and Yugoslavia monopolized much of the opium market, and since opium products were prohibited for consumer use throughout a number of Western countries, a lucrative black market developed and trading became the domain of multinational gangs. Paris was originally the distribution center, but this changed in the 1920s when factories were shut down by police and the epicenter moved to Marseilles, establishing the foundation for the so-called French Connection.

In the mid-1930s, a number of the global opium-trafficking networks were run by Jewish and Greek smugglers, insular networks that were difficult for outsiders to penetrate and well connected internationally due to their participation in various legitimate trading markets. Many of the traffickers came from countries carved out of the Ottoman Empire as well, including Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria. According to a 1933 Federal Bureau of Narcotics report, 40% of the drug smugglers identified in China either were of Greek origin or were Eastern European Jews, Serbians, or Armenians (Bovenkerk & Yesigoz, 2007, p. 39). In this same decade, Corsican smugglers established the French Connection.

In the years leading up to World War II and the subsequent Chinese Civil War, American gangsters purchased heroin from Shanghai. But the world conflict made this untenable. After the Maoist Revolution eradicated the opium scourge after 1949, many drug networks moved their bases of operations to Hong Kong. But the war and its revolutionary aftermath shattered the Far Eastern heroin market, until it reemerged in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s.

The lack of Asian narcotics in this era “reinvigorated” Middle Eastern and Mediterranean drug operations. Most of the heroin business was concentrated in the hands of independent operators in France and operating in conjunction with French Corsican gangs in Marseilles. The French Connection served as the epicenter of the international heroin trade for years. Corsican criminals, long interested in what was then French Indochina, had remained in the region after the French left in 1954, in an unsuccessful attempt to control drug routes through Saigon to Hong Kong and Malaya (Booth, 1990). Between the 1940s and 1960s, Hong Kong and Marseilles were considered the heroin refining capitals of the world. But in later years, this activity became more dispersed as opium/heroin-trafficking networks were reestablished in Europe and Southeast Asia.

By the 1960s, there was a tremendous increase in transnational narcotics trafficking. However, in 1972, the opium trade was thrown into turmoil when Turkey proclaimed a poppy ban. Until then, crime groups in Corsica had purchased opium base in Turkey to be shipped to Marseilles, where it was refined prior to smuggling into the United States (the French Connection); the opium base was then shipped from Turkey through Lebanon, where it was refined in Beirut.

By contrast, the Peruvian crude-cocaine industry expanded during WW II to meet medical demands in the United States. Following the war, with few legal markets after 1945, several manufacturers turned to making their product available to the underworld. Following the war the rise in drug addiction increased the demand for illicit cocaine (Gagliano, 1994, p. 148). By 1947, Peru was the primary source for illicit cocaine traffic in Western Hemisphere with the United States as the main outlet. Cocaine was often trafficked into the United States through Cuba, where American mobsters had established a base of operations in Havana for narcotics and gambling activities. But until 1973, the South American cocaine trade remained small and based in Chile until General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. Subsequently, Pinochet would play a role in destroying the drug trade by arresting or deporting dealers and allowing the Colombians to step in and take over. Whether cocaine, opium, marijuana, or purpose-made synthetic drugs, transnational traffickers have consistently played a role in bringing these illicit drugs from regions where cultivation is legal or less restricted to markets in countries where the restrictions were more onerous.

Alcohol Prohibition in the United States

The Mexican border has long been a sanctuary for outlaws and a staging ground for border smuggling networks. One authority observed that “Contraband was a central fact in colonial New Spain as in independent Mexico, where up to half of all silver left the region bound for the Philippines without passing through a customs house” (Carey & Marak, 2011, p. 33). During the first decades of the 20th century, opiates were smuggled across the border from Mexico (where it was still legal) in response to the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. As one observer put it, “Prohibition on one side of the U.S.-Mexico border and legal commerce on the other created the conditions for drug trafficking” (quoted in Owen, 2007, p. 147). During the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920, a flourishing weapons traffic brought ammunition and rifles south across the border, much in the way guns are trafficked to narcotics smugglers today. It was not much of a stretch for bootleggers and affiliates to smuggle tequila across the border using many of the same trails as the drugs and weapons smugglers that preceded them. It has often been asserted that modern transnational organized crime came of age during the American Prohibition era between 1920 and 1933, when Mexican and American smugglers took advantage of the black-market demand for market needs.

One of the seminal events in the internationalization of crime was the inauguration of alcohol prohibition in America in 1920, signaling an almost 13-year period of opportunity for criminal cooperation between foreign nationals and Americans, linking their countries in an illicit network that brought alcoholic beverages and related commodities into the United States from a number of countries and continents. During the 1920s, the majority of imbibers made do with a variety of homemade but dangerous alcoholic concoctions. However, society’s upper milieu was unwilling to risk their lives with homemade liquor and was willing to pay more for liquors properly distilled and blended. This in turn led to an international trade that offered higher profits but was logistically more complex and expensive.

Often lost in the historical discussion of interethnic cross-border crime prior to the 1960s is the relationship between Mexican and American smugglers on the Texas border, where “smuggling had existed as long as there had been an international border, the only change being the commodities smuggled” (Harris & Sadler, 2004, p. 421). According to one study of the Texas Rangers during this period, the suppression of the liquor traffic from Mexico remained one of the mounted law enforcers’ “highest priorities” (p. 499). The low price of Mexican mescal made it an attractive source of illegal liquor to bootleggers on both sides of the border. Costing only $2 to $3 a gallon in Mexico, it could then be sold for $10 a quart in Texas (Harris & Sadler, 2004). Mexican liquor smugglers, called Tequileros, smuggled Mexican tequila, often on horseback as they cooperated with bootleggers in their automobiles. But the U.S. government saw these forays in a very different light than the intrusions of bootleggers from Canada; the government regarded them as “transgressions to American sovereignty” and often responded with deadly force, making the first two decades of the 20th century among the most violent up that point (Diaz, 2011, p. 59).

Placing more emphasis on the Mexican Tequileros, federal law enforcement and the Texas Rangers teamed up to successfully suppress their smuggling, only to be confronted by “more sophisticated and more violent gangs” who took their place (Diaz, 2011, p. 75). In fact, during the Prohibition era, Anglo bootleggers killed more law enforcement personnel than the horseback Tequileros. According to one authority, since most of the American bootleggers drove cars, their hands were typically concealed as officers approached their cars, allowing them to get out their guns and get the drop on police officers. In addition, since they drove the myriad roads and highways of south Texas, bootleggers typically had a clearer shot at anyone following them, in contrast to horseback smugglers who were often traipsing through the scrub brush with their hands impossible to conceal (Diaz, 2011, p. 75).

Transnational alcohol smuggling networks flourished along the Eastern seaboard and the Canadian border during Prohibition as well. Lucky Luciano and his stalwarts recognized that to obtain the best liquor they needed to set up huge smuggling operations that required purchasing the genuine article in Great Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean. This entailed the purchase of large ships to transport the beverages to the 3-mile limit (which before the 1980s referred to the limits of a nation’s sovereignty over territorial waters). A “Rum Row” was established off the coasts of many American coastal cities, where ships lined up beyond the 3-mile territorial limit as they waited for swift boats to pick up cargoes coming from Great Britain and the Caribbean to transport illicit booze to shore, where they were met by an army of trucks responsible for delivering it to the warehouses of wholesale bootleggers. Others established liquor smuggling bases outside the country’s borders in such far-flung locales as the Bahamas, British Honduras, Mexico, and even Papeete, Tahiti.

Human/Sex Trafficking

By some accounts, the number of people illegally crossing borders in the 21st century, often under coercion, has no precedent in human history. Officials and academics tend to treat human trafficking as a plague of recent globalization. Although the nomenclature describing it has changed, in fact it is probably as old as history. In 1933, one investigator wrote,

 

There are now just as many, if not more souteneurs [French idiom for pimps] and traffickers exploiting women and children, whether of the white or Asiatic race . . . It seems that since the time of my own investigations, the extent of the traffic in singing girls [Mutsai], sold, pawned, or voluntary prostitutes, has not abated one iota” (De Leeuw, 1933/1943, p. 10).

 

Human trafficking has been criminalized only since the mid-19th century, while international cooperation against human trafficking received its greatest stimulus in the early 20th century during the crusade against the so-called white slavery. The term, first introduced in the mid-19th century, initially referred to “the entire system of licensed prostitution.” During the last decades of the 19th century, white slavery became analogous to all prostitution for many observers, while a more accepted definition included “recruitment to prostitution by force or fraud” (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006, p. 33). Foreign governments have been cooperating against international sex trafficking since at least the turn of the 20th century, when the International Conference for the Suppression of Traffic in Women met in England. Five years later, representatives of 13 countries agreed to coordinate their activities by signing the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic in 1904. In 1910, the Second International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic agreed to punish any person who facilitated the entry of females under the age of the 20 into the sex trade or procured an adult by force or fraud (Winick & Kinsie, 1971, p. 269). From 1930 to 1933, the League of Nations ran a Commission of Enquiry into the trafficking of women and children in Far Eastern countries. Several resolutions were considered for further regulating this trade before World War II intervened (Winick, & Kinsie 1971).

During the second half of the 19th century, thousands of destitute young Jewish women from Eastern Europe were coerced into prostitution, an endeavor that took them from small Jewish villages, commonly referred to as shtetls, to frontier colonies in Latin America, South Africa, India, and parts of the United States by a criminal gang of Jewish mobsters led by Zvi Migdal (Vincent, 2006, p. 29). Prior to this, women were typically procured for brothels in closer proximity to major European cities, the Middle East, and Constantinople (p. 29). However, by the late 19th century, a “vice circuit” had been set up that was of global proportions, as pimps trafficked women from Asia and Europe to ever-expanding markets, taking advantage of improvements in transportation and communication to fill markets in America and the Far East “where there was a chronic shortage of women” (p. 29).

During the 19th century, procurers went as far as Japan to find poor girls in small villages and shipped them to brothels in Australia, India, and Singapore. Likewise, thousands of Chinese girls were kidnapped from their homes during the mid-19th century and shipped to California brothels and were forced to service Chinese workers in the gold camps or railroad camps where they were building the transcontinental railroad. Unlike their counterparts, Jewish pimps in Eastern Europe “confined their dealings [for women] to the Jewish community” (Vincent, 2006, p. 30). While Japanese pimps kidnapped victims, and French procurers recruited in French cities, Jewish pimps recruited for prostitution through false promises of marriage and used local matchmakers. This ruse became so common after World War I that the League of Nations issued warnings about it. By the end of the Great War, sex trafficking had become such a serious transnational problem that when the Treaty of Versailles was convened in 1919, it affirmed this crime as an international offense. Although Article 282 did urge members to punish this crime to the full extent of the law, it was more bark than bite, and ultimately “in vain” (p. 11).

In 1914, an American government report asserted that the “majority of men exploiters of prostitution in New York City are foreigners by birth” (Kneeland, 1913 p. 79). It also confirmed the aforementioned research that most of the brothel owners “did not come directly to America,” with many traveling through Europe to recruit young women before taking them to numerous destinations. During the Boer War, Johannesburg in South Africa proved a favorite destination until authorities chased them out. They then set their sights first to South America and then to North America, leaving a “trail of seduction and corruption” that could be traced through Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Canada, Alaska, and American urban centers (Kneeland, 1913, p. 80).

According to one League of Nations Report on the Traffic in Women and Children, the push-and-pull factors of human trafficking were as discernible in the 1930s as they are today, noting that “the demand for foreign women governs both the extent and direction of the International traffic” (quoted in De Leeuw, 1933/1943, p. 245). In the 1930s, these conditions included “a large surplus of men over women,” “temporary markets for prostitution arising from occasional or seasonal movements of population” (such as in the case of soldiers and sailors), the “arrival of a body of troops in a community” (creating a demand for foreign women), and spurious offers of employment (pp. 245–249). While many of these methods of recruitment seem familiar, modern human traffickers have an even greater arsenal of techniques, thanks to the Internet and globalization. In 2005, the 3rd Summit of Heads of State and Government—the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings—developed a definition of sex trafficking that would have been just as applicable to the challenges faced by the League of Nations, defining it as

 

the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, or the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another for the purpose of exploitation. (Council of Europe, 2005, p. 32)

 

However, this definition is much more inclusive than any definitions from the earlier 20th century, because not only does it target sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, and practices similar to slavery, but it also includes one of the newer transnational crimes, “the removal of organs,” a crime made possible today only because of the great advances in medicine and technology.

New Shape of Transnational Organized Crime

During the Cold War, military security trumped all other worries when it came to competing superpowers and their allies. Following the demise of the Soviet Union, attention was shifted to transnational criminals, which seems to have supplanted the Communists as the international bogeymen threatening global security. Indeed, there has been a rush to judgment by international law enforcement and government officials to proclaim highly developed transnational organized criminal organizations a direct threat to political sovereignty and the very notion of the state. However, this ignores the fact that most illicit activity is accomplished in a clandestine manner that precludes the collection of data to support these fears. Much of the hysteria is derived from inflated estimates of various transnational criminal activities, leading some critics to suggest “Official numbers from government agencies and international organizations are highly problematic yet go largely unchallenged” and that many “measurement claims” do not hold up to careful scrutiny (Andreas & Greenhill, 2010, p. 5). Indeed, Andreas and Greenhill are among those who argue that the inflated crime statistics and profit estimates of transnational criminals lack credibility and have contributed “to the construction of a dominant narrative about transnational crime as an enormous growing global threat” (p. 5).

Countries around the world continued to shift much of their national crime-fighting agendas and sources toward counterterrorism activity during the decade after 9/11. The end result, particularly in countries such as America, Great Britain, and other Western nations was that this allowed transnational criminal networks to continue to operate under the radar, much as they have always done. What one expert lamented in 1994 (Williams) still holds true nearly 20 years later; that is, “The very nature of transnational crime presents unique problems,” challenges that continue to hamper an understanding of the complex nature of transnational crime as well as the ability to develop effective crime prevention strategies.

Transnational drug trafficking continues as it has for almost a century. The development of new “purpose-made” drugs and their requisite precursor chemicals have created new markets for transnational crime. Globalization has changed the face of source and transit cities, and in some cases transportation routes, but the markets remain the same—affluent America and Western Europe. Meanwhile, many of the source cities have shifted to Africa and Asia. The Nigerian, or African, connection has become increasingly entwined in the transnational drug trade as Nigeria, once the hub of the 19th-century West African slave trade, emerged as a major transshipment point for Southeast Asian heroin bound for Europe and America. In 2000, an International Crime Threat Assessment published by the U.S. government characterized Africa as ripe for transnational crime, noting that sub-Sahara Africa’s lack of effective border security combined with the corruption within the police and security services made the region an “inviting operational environment for international criminals, drug traffickers and terrorists.” Moreover, it stated that “Major Sub-Saharan cities with extensive commercial, financial, and sea and air transportation links to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia are hubs for international criminal activity” (quoted in Berry & Curtis, 2003, p. 2).

Today, one would be hard-pressed to identify a new form of transnational crime. The illegal trafficking of weapons, migrants, illegal substances, and human beings, as well as terrorism, tax evasion, crimes against the environment, financial fraud, and corruption of public officials has been going on in one form or another for decades, if not centuries. What has changed is the scale of these activities, thanks in no small part to deregulation procedures in transnational exchanges as well as the free movement of goods, information, and people, all requirements for free-trade initiatives and the demands of globalization (Dandurand et al., 1998).

By most accounts, the emergence of new technologies and other factors related to globalization “have lowered the barriers to entry in some criminal activities, and have as a result diversified the nature and types of activities that criminal groups are involved in” (UNODC, September, 2002, p. 6). Transnational crime remains a growth industry, with future opportunities emerging with each new breakthrough in technology, communication, and transportation. Among the more alarming threats are the opportunities that will accompany the increasing aging population of the Western world. According to Madsen (2009), one potential area of expansion is in the realm of supplying “replacement organs from willing or unwilling organ donors.” By most accounts, the first documented case of coerced organ donors was reported in India on January 28, 2008, when officials exposed a case in which hundreds of organ donors had been duped by false promises of work, or coerced by threat, to donate kidneys for payments of $2,250 (Madsen, 2009, p. 124). The benefactors were rich clients, who paid 10 times that amount for the organs. But at least the donors reportedly all made it out alive, in contrast to undocumented reports coming out of South America where “donors” are kidnapped off the streets and killed in order to harvest kidneys and other organs. Nonetheless, globally, there remains a huge gap between supply and demand for organs (“The Gap Between Supply and Demand,” 2008). But most evidence still remains anecdotal, due in no small part to the fact that the increasing numbers of poor people in the world often remain complicit actors and donors in the lucrative trade. What’s more, organ trafficking is not just a problem in developing nations, as evidenced by a recent case in the United States, where poor donors were selling organs to wealthy recipients through middlemen in New Jersey and Brooklyn (Sherman & Margolin, 2012).

As noted previously, international prohibition regimes have provided a plethora of money-making opportunities for transnational criminals. According to Madsen (2009), the

 

increased use of trade embargoes and trade sanctions under international law will supply organized crime with ample opportunities for revenue because they will invest their commercial and organizational skills in providing the goods and services which cannot be supplied by legitimate trade. (p. 124)

 

International treaties focusing on the illicit traffic in ivory and weapons have stimulated related efforts by criminals to smuggle these items for profit. One criminal network was recently spotlighted for harvesting ivory in Africa, before smuggling it through Kenya and Tanzania bound for China and Thailand. In an unrelated case, two Manhattan jewelers pled guilty in June 2012 to marketing more than $2 million worth of illicit ivory carvings. In 2011 alone, 24 tons of ivory were seized by authorities around the world, making it “the worst year for elephant poaching” since an international ban on commercial ivory trading went into effect in 1989 (Halbfinger, 2012, p. A17).

One arena where progress is being made is in the smuggling of antiquities; countries have begun cooperating to curb the trade in looted artifacts, making it more difficult to sell them in certain markets. American and British museums are among those that are now unwilling to purchase cultural treasures unless they can identify a chain of ownership past 1970. As one expert put it, “Looting is driven by the art market, by supply and demand” (Blumenthal & Mashberg, 2012, p. 19). However, while this prohibition has driven up the value of these types of objects for individual collectors, it prohibits many major museums from buying them. Auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s have tightened their policies as well. In another case, in Pakistan in July 2012, police seized a large number of ancient Buddhist sculptures that would have sold for millions on the international antiquities market.

Regional conflicts, civil wars, and failed states have stifled the creation of mechanisms for fighting transnational crime from Mexico to Somalia and from Central Asia into Eastern Europe and a number of other far corners of the world. These conflicts and lack of able leadership continue to hinder the creation of any meaningful treaties or embargoes. However, the shrill rhetoric and “apocalyptic tone” (Edwards & Gill, 2006) of officials and the media have created a mind-set that transnational criminal groups are threatening world security. A more thoughtful examination of the history of transnational crime would take issue with what passes for “conventional wisdom.” One recent analysis of this issue argues that not only are these fears of “illicit globalization” and the “loss of state control” overtly alarmist, they are “misleading and suffer from historical amnesia” (Andreas, 2011, p. 3).

This chapter demonstrates that the process of globalization is not just a recent phenomenon and that it has been going on for many centuries, albeit on a much smaller scale. The reality of a shrinking world dates back at least to 1519 when the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan became the first person to circumnavigate the world and establish the first global linkages, initiating trade on a global scale. Following his voyage, other innovations followed that cut sailing times even further. But not until the steamships of the 1780s was there a noticeable reduction in time and increased speed after almost 2,000 years of maritime travel (Chanda, 2007). Until the 20th century, transnational crime was mostly based on the same activities of the previous centuries. But when it came to global communication and transportation, few significant innovations before the 20th century were capable of stimulating new opportunities for international crime networks outside of simple cross-border smuggling operations. What set the stage for global innovation was the passage of various prohibitions that created markets for criminalized commodities, such as in the case of narcotics, alcohol, and other goods. The connections between criminal actors in different regions and territories predate the modern state, but what distinguishes each era’s transnational crimes are each era’s advances in technological innovation and the opportunities it creates.