Illicit Flows And Trafficking Southern Europe-Maghreb
As you can see , there is an immense network of territories , routes , transnational networks , “ troubled areas ,” etc . And at its heart , a constant and lasting criminal presence of Russian organized crime ( Black Sea ) mafias from southern Italy and Albania , Balkan criminal circles on the southern shore of the Mediterranean , armed Islamist militias , and criminal gangs .
The Criminological Conception of Illicit Trade
Better than geographers , sociologists , and ethnologists , criminologists know
— and can establish the following crucial elements for such a study , especially in its predictive dimension for future threats :
• Criminals do not have a “ profession ” like honest people do .
• They are used by predatory and opportunistic individuals ( or gangs or mafia entities ). Their only activity is to spot illicit enrichment opportunities and pounce on them like a wild beast jumps on a weakened gazelle or leaves the herd .
• A great Corsican commissioner of the French police once said , “ criminals renounce everything except the booty ,” a sentence that has become a famous criminological proverb . Thus , bandits create pipelines or criminal networks and then pass through them everything that can enrich them : tobacco , drugs , sex workers , counterfeit spare parts , etc .
• Thus , all of our research tends to show that there are no professionals in the criminal world considered for this study in a single field , such as trafficking in human beings or tobacco products , but rather criminal entities that move from one illicit source of profit to another , according to the following basic cost-benefit calculations :
How much will I get out of this ( profit instinct )? How much do I risk if I am stopped ( self-preservation instinct )?
• In the same way , criminal ways and routes that they conceive and use are all provisional , temporary , reversible , and subject to constant arbitration and revision . Every conscious bandit knows that time , the durable , the fixed , and the stable are the best allies and friends of states and the police . Doing the same illicit thing in the same place for a long time will result in the certainty of being arrested ( if civil peace ) or bombed ( if civil war ).
There is no eternal road , no continuous alliance : for the criminal traffic to continue ( uninterrupted ), everything else , underneath and behind , must change all the time .
In order to take a good look at this gigantic system , to see where it comes 51