Global Mafias in the Time of the Pandemic

Introduction

In recent decades, criminal organizations have consolidated their position as powerful economic actors within the global market. Across different analytical approaches, scholars and widely cited analysts (Saviano 2006; Glenny 2008; Varese 2011; Barbagallo 2011) explain how since the late 1980s global Mafias have contributed to multiple processes of capital accumulation in different world regions, investing in and restructuring strategic sectors ranging from real estate to the oil industry. Moreover, in times of recession, global Mafias have been argued to serve as points of reference for the financial system. For instance, at the height of the financial crisis in 2009, “the United Nations estimated that $1.6 trillion was laundered globally, of which about $580 billion was related to drug trafficking and other forms of organized crime” (Saviano 2012). On the basis of such estimates, it has been suggested that Global Mafias helped international banking system alleviate part of the massive losses caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.

Such a link between global Mafias and the capitalist system has become even more evident and significant in the COVID-19 economic context. In this essay, I analyze how global Mafias, such as the Neapolitan Camorra, the Chinese Triads, Latin American drug cartels, and many others, have used the COVID-19 pandemic to experiment with new and aggressive forms of economic exploitation. Drawing on Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation as well as on the notion of extraction developed by Mezzadra and Neilson, I examine the strategies adopted by global Mafias across various sectors over the last five years—notably, cybercrimes, logistics, and finance. In doing so, I show that global Mafias, far from being vestiges of backward societies marked by precapitalist relations of production, are highly differentiated multinational companies embedded within the circuits of global capital. Hence, the structural analysis of such stratified organizations can help us grasp the stakes involved in the ongoing reconfiguration of capitalist modes of production. In this regard, the economic practices of global Mafias seem to suggest that global capitalism is not moving toward an era of “techno-feudalism” defined by “the triumph of rent over profit” (Varoufakis, 18). Rather, we confront an epoch in which the increasingly pervasive command over natural resources and digital space is accompanied by the exploitation of the labor force in different sectors ranging from data mining to logistics.

Interpreting Global Mafias’ Economic Activities in the Pandemic Downturn

At the very beginning of the pandemic, several nations declared a state of emergency to tackle COVID-19, creating the conditions for an increasingly pervasive discipline of social life. Even if lockdown strategies varied from country to country, the main goal of governments in different regions of the world, from Europe to South America and Australia, was to restrict the movement of humans so as to limit the spread of the virus. For instance, in some Western countries, such as France and Italy, between March and May 2020, police forces constantly monitored the roads. In these countries, in addition to the various sanitation policies (social distancing, compulsory wearing of masks, etc.), people were only allowed to move from one place to another under certain circumstances and were required to produce a self-certification explaining why they were on the street. In Ercolano, a town in the province of Naples in southern Italy, residents were permitted to go to the supermarket to buy essential groceries on specific days of the week and according to the alphabetical order of their surnames.

Policies put in place by governments around the world to protect people impacted the economy insofar as they ended up restricting both the production and circulation of goods on a global level, with the result that in the early 2020s the COVID-19 pandemic led to what the Managing Director of the IMF called “the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.” In such a socio-economic conjuncture, characterized by general uncertainty, global Mafias elaborated precise strategies and came to occupy a leading role within the global economic chessboard. In order to grasp what is at stake in the practices they developed throughout the pandemic, it is first necessary to deconstruct the various narratives concerning the role they assumed between early 2020 and mid-2021, with particular attention to media discourses and to research carried out by analysts of diverse disciplinary backgrounds and ideological orientations.

In this respect, it should be observed that at the end of March 2020 newspapers and television stations had begun to spread the news that in different countries global Mafias had taken on the task of helping people who found themselves in dire economic straits. Sky News UK showed how in the first months of the pandemic people linked to the Neapolitan Camorra delivered groceries to disadvantaged families in the working-class districts of Naples and loaned money at zero interest. Journalists and scholars underlined that other global Mafias had also decided to help the social classes most affected by the pandemic. In Mexico, “a daughter of the notorious former cartel boss Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán posted social media videos of ‘Chapo packages’—cupboard essentials distributed to the community, echoing Walmart’s aid campaign, Fight Hunger. Spark Change” (Kennedy and Southern 2020). In Japan, the Yakuza supplied “the population with sanitizers or food, as well as proposing themselves as providers of other forms of economic support” (Aziani et al. 2021, 127). Global Mafias operating in different world regions, in sum, sought to cast themselves as defenders of disadvantaged classes at the outset of the pandemic. Yet this modus operandi does not mark a break with the past.

In fact, the welfare strategy put in place by global Mafias in times of economic crisis has not substantially changed over the last few decades. When unemployment rates go up and desperate people struggle to eat and pay bills, Mafia organizations set up a sort of criminal welfare system in record time thanks to the great amount of money they obtain from various lucrative activities. However, this socio-economic function alone does not explain why the global Mafias have been able to become the main actors of the COVID-19 economy.

Given the lack of detailed empirical research (Aziani et al. 2021), several hypotheses can be put forward. One could speculate that the police engaged for several months in monitoring compliance with the anti-COVID measures and, for this reason, they were not able to focus on the problems related to criminal organizations in general to the same extent as they usually would. However, various police operations showed that law enforcement achieved relevant goals even between the months of April 2020 and September 2021, which were characterized by tremendous chaos and a generalized global panic about the spread of the virus. The journalist Misha Glenny, for instance, underlined that in the UK “the National Crime Agency has scored significant successes in slowing down the traffic in class-A drugs (chiefly cocaine). Since lockdown, it has seized 25 tonnes and £15m in cash, which is notably more than during the first three months of the year” (Glenny 2020).

At the beginning of July 2020, in Italy, where the lockdown was more rigid than in the UK, the Guardia di Finanza confiscated about 82 million Captagon pills (with a market value of 1 billion Euro) allegedly made by ISIS and ready to be sold in several European drug markets (Jack Guy et al. 2020). In September 2021, the Indian police seized a shipment of three tons of Afghani heroin with a street value of 2.7 billion dollars. In sum, the fact that the police were tasked with solving COVID-related problems cannot fully explain such a complicated phenomenon. We must, then, take other factors into consideration.

The writer and journalist Roberto Saviano underlined that already at the beginning of the pandemic global Mafias were thriving through their control of vital sectors—“multi-service businesses (catering, cleaning or disinfection), industrial laundries, transport, funeral homes, waste collection, food distribution, and health”—that they have entered in recent years by laundering large sums of money and diversifying investments in a fruitful way thanks to their “usual business acumen” (Saviano 2020). In other words, according to Saviano, global Mafias have from the very beginning dominated the COVID-19 economy because in the years leading up to the pandemic, they had acquired larger slices of the legal market thanks, among other things, to successful business choices and partnerships.

Such a common interpretation is based on the binary scheme of legal economy versus underground economy, which represents the theoretical cornerstone of recent studies about global Mafias and the COVID-19 economy (Gratteri and Nicaso 2020), as well as the strategic starting point for most investigations carried out by Interpol and national police forces. For example, in September 2021, the Italian DIA (AntiMafia Investigation Directorate) explained that Mafias organizations, such as Camorra and ‘Ndrangheta, were exploiting the pandemic to infiltrate the most disparate economic sectors. In several reports delivered to the Minister of the Interior, the DIA pointed out that the usual strategy of these global Mafias in times of crisis is to look for companies that are either at risk of insolvency or bankruptcy. Yet this lens is insufficient for exploring how global Mafias have evolved in the last decades as well as during the pandemic.

The New Enclosures: Postmodern Primitive Accumulation and Extractive Turn

In order to contextualize the essential economic function global Mafias have performed in the COVID-19 economy, we should start from the assumption that

the only real difference between a legitimate business empire and a major organized crime syndicate is that one looks to maximize its interests as far as feasible within the confines and loopholes of the law, while the other does its utmost to avoid legal oversight altogether. This means that illicit industries are essentially experiments in pure, unregulated, genuinely free-market capitalism. (Kennedy and Southern 2020)

As examples of sophisticated multinational companies aiming to exploit all the opportunities offered by economic liberalization, global Mafias do not limit themselves in times of recession to intensifying their activities—racketeering, loan sharking, drug trafficking, counterfeiting—or consolidating their position within the economic system by taking over companies that need liquidity to avoid bankruptcy. In historical moments marked by profound economic transformations or traumatic events, global Mafias actively participate in the creation of new mechanisms for extracting surplus value.

Moreover, to better understand the nature of the economic operations1 of these complex organizations in exceptional situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, we should consider another important factor. Specifically, we should stress that the crisis caused by the coronavirus is part of a global economic scenario in which various interlocking crises over the last fifty years have laid the groundwork for a significant restructuring of the capitalist mode of production, that is, for the so-called “New Enclosures” and the consequent development of a global “extractivist” trend.

In the autumn of 1990, the journal Midnight Notes devoted its tenth issue to an analysis of this crucial phenomenon, focusing on “the large-scale reorganization of the accumulation process which has been underway since the mid-1970s” (Midnight Notes, 3). The theoretical starting point of the analysis presented by the Midnight Notes Collective was that the development of the enclosures could not be considered simply as a historical event that marked the beginning of capitalist society, but that they should be understood rather as “a regular return on the path of accumulation and a structural component of class struggle” (1). To grasp the novelty of this interpretation, we must highlight some elements of Marx’s analysis of so-called primitive accumulation.

Marx underlines that primitive accumulation has its classical form only in England, where at the end of the fourteenth century most of the population was composed of free peasant proprietors. At the time, the great feudal lords were in open war against the monarchy and started to take over the common lands, pushing the agricultural population off them: “transformation of arable land into sheep-walks was . . . their slogan” (Marx, 879). The new nobility, which believed exclusively in the power of money, produced, in this way, a large proletariat, whose labor force was fundamental for the incredible expansion of wool manufacturers in some regions.

The violent expropriation of the agricultural population, therefore, directly contributed to the overcoming of the feudal relations of production, insofar as free peasants were transformed into mercenaries forced to sell their labor, while their means of labor were converted into capital. It is important to note that primitive accumulation also had a terrible impact on the natural environment, contributing to the destruction of cities and entire peasant communities. Marx cites old chroniclers who in their texts emphasize the social devastation produced by enclosures, due to which “the English working class was precipitated without any transitional stages from its golden age to its iron age” (879). This revolution in the relations of production was seen as the dawn of an age of despair and social misery, which the monarchy, at least in principle, opposed.

Drawing on Marx’s interpretation of this relevant phenomenon that triggered the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the Midnight Notes Collective uses the category of primitive accumulation to explain the main peculiarities of capitalist expropriations started in the mid-1970s. More specifically, the Collective stresses that the New Enclosures, like the Old Enclosures, took over common lands, dispossessing the agricultural population of the means of production, devastating dwellings, and ending the community’s control of natural resources. Another key strategy was the seizure of land for debt. Beginning in the second half of the 1970s, various African countries borrowed money from foreign banks. Following the debt crisis, national and international capital gradually took possession of these lands, simultaneously creating a favorable economic environment for a general restructuring of production relations.

The New Enclosures exacerbated, among other things, the crisis of the Soviet bloc and other socialist countries. The expropriations carried out with great obstinacy around the world paved the way for increasingly unbridled economic competition, which affected the socialist working class. For this reason, “by the 1980s, especially with the collapse of energy prices, socialist wages became too low on an international standard for the socialist working class to tolerate” (Midnight Notes, 4). In addition, due to the relocation of production to lower-cost sites in developing countries, “the value of socialist work on the global market collapsed,” providing a relevant contribution to the end of the so-called Real Socialism.

The last element brought out by the analysis of the Midnight Notes Collective concerns the fact that the New Enclosures represented an unprecedented attack on reproduction. The expropriations of commons, along with the incredible development of biotechnology, turned human beings into mutant creatures: “human proletarians are not alone in this speed-up and shrink-down. Animals, from protozoa to cows, are being engineered and patented to eat oil spills, produce more eggs per hour, secrete more hormones” (4–5). Seen in this light, the global capitalist space, during the last decades of the previous century, began to resemble a dystopian universe, in which disciplinary and biopolitical institutions infiltrated the most specific details of both human and animal life, accelerating the proliferation of social control mechanisms:

those who work with the public are now continually monitored from their urine to their sweat glands to their back brains. Capital now treats us as did the inquisitors of old, looking for the devil’s marks of class struggle on our bodies and demanding that we open it up for alienation. (5)

To grasp what is at stake in these new processes of postmodern primitive accumulation, we should consider at least two interconnected elements. Firstly, it is important to underline how the New Enclosures started to change “the spatial coordinates of contemporary capitalism” (Mezzadra 2018, 115). In fact, the New Enclosures cannot be considered as an economic phenomenon that is limited to some world regions, insofar as “for every acre enclosed by World Bank development project in Africa or Asia a corresponding enclosure must occur in the US and Western Europe” (Midnight Notes 2). In other words, the New Enclosures directly affected the relationship between center and periphery in the world capitalist system. This is true to such an extent that, “while in other phases of capitalist development real and formal subsumption tended to be distributed in different spaces (following the distinction between centre and periphery, first and third world, and the chain of spatial, technological products and financial axes), today they exist in every area of capitalism” (Mezzadra 2018, 115). Furthermore, the New Enclosures provided the foundations for a real “extractive turn,” which has shaped the historical development of diverse economic sectors (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 139–143). Life forms, metals, and rare-earth minerals have been extracted in large quantities from the lands expropriated around the world and then used in several ways, primarily for the construction of technological tools. Aggressive extractive techniques have been applied, over time, not just in agriculture and aquaculture but also in the development of specific biotechnologies, such as ones that extract tissues from the human body.

In light of these processes, from the 1980s onward, the language of mining has begun to change, spreading to myriad economic sectors. Today “extraction” is increasingly used to indicate not only activities directly related to the extraction, in a literal sense, of minerals and life forms but also “any form of economic activity that relies on or benefits from resources or relations external to it” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 134). The mining of bitcoins and data mining, as well as “the practice of gold farming”—“by which young Chinese workers spend hours upon hours in warehouse sweatshops playing games to accumulate points and high scores that can be sold to players in other latitudes who are external to the rounds of play in which the points have been generated” (144)—can be seen, for example, as particular economic operations through which it is possible to extract value from the social wealth accumulated, that is, “social relations, communication systems, information, and affective networks” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 258).

The sectors in which such an extractivist trend is clearly manifested are, in addition to the mining sector itself, logistics and finance.2 These economic fields, interconnected with each other, allow us to understand how capital manages to create and appropriate new “multiple outsides” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 141), new types of colonization. Extraction, logistics, and finance, taken together, can be considered, in sum, as the lens through which to explore the latest development of the capitalist system, including how global Mafias have operated in the COVID-19 economy.

Global Mafias and the COVID-19 Economy

Since the beginning of the pandemic, global Mafias have intensified operations that represent peculiar forms of mining and extraction. Think for example of the so-called cybercrimes through which global Mafias mine data from the Infosphere: personal information, social security numbers, login credentials, credit card numbers, results of scientific research and experiments. According to the COVID-19 Cybercrime Analysis Report, since the early months of 2020 cybercriminals have profited from the transformations of the working conditions generated by the pandemic by carrying out constant attacks on digital platforms. The report, in fact, emphasizes that following “the sudden, and necessary, global shift to teleworking, organizations have had to rapidly deploy remote systems, networks and applications” (Interpol 4). Consequently, criminals have taken “advantage of the increased security vulnerabilities arising from remote working to steal data, generate profits and cause disruption” (4). Also, during the first year of the pandemic cybercriminals from different world regions targeted social media platforms “for the illicit sale of pharmaceutical and para-pharmaceutical products related to the coronavirus” (7), exploiting in this way the global fear due to the spread of the virus.3

The sudden surge in cybercrimes in several countries around the world over the last five years merits reflection. First of all, global Mafias based in different continents have made substantial profits through cybercrimes. In fact, several investigative operations have directly connected cybercriminal networks to global Mafias. In addition to the dismantling of a network of cybercriminals linked to the Camorra and Cosa Nostra,4 other global Mafias have taken part in this business. The Chinese Triads, for example, have set up a sophisticated organization in Cambodia based on human trafficking and cybercrimes. More specifically, the Triads lured a significant number of people to Cambodia with false promises of legal jobs. Approximately 5,000 people (the number of victims may be much higher, according to the police) were, in this way, lured into a trap and “forced to work in offices running illegal phone and online scams” (Davidson and Hui Lin 2022).

Secondly, the extraction technique employed by global Mafias represents a form of invasive exploitation that impacts individuals insofar as it influences the mind and the body and, at the same time, transforms both into a source of material and virtual wealth. Affective life, biological life, economic resources, the bodies of exploited children and minors, scientific knowledge: all this and much more became the object of constant extraction by bio-capitalist criminal mechanisms whose violence is equal, if not superior, to that produced by the classic mining industry.

Thirdly, the borders between the legal economy and the underground economy blur, insofar as global Mafias can either use an incredible amount of data to steal money or sell it to multinational companies. The latter seem ever more interested in analyzing and exploiting the so-called “behavioral data,”5 through which it is possible to explore and predict the trend of some strategic economic sectors. Moreover, through the extraction and the accumulation of data, global Mafias are progressively laying the foundations for both extending the territory they govern and developing more invasive strategies of control. By acquiring essential information regarding the most disparate aspects of millions of individuals’ lives, they can, indeed, potentially redefine the space over which to exercise a strong economic hegemony.

With regard to the spatial dimension of global Mafias’ economic power, we should not forget that over the last decades they have not limited themselves to governing the geographical space in which they were born and raised. Since the end of the 1970s, they have started to expand their economic and social area of influence, exploiting—and in some situations, contributing to—structural transformations that have characterized the historical development of capitalist modes of production. In other words, global Mafias have seized upon the opportunities offered by multiple processes of economic liberalization, profiting from—and taking to its logical consequence—the opening of the borders and the progressive withering of the nation-state. Global criminal organizations, in sum, took an active role in the construction of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have called Empire, that is, a planetary apparatus characterized by the conflicting interaction between two spheres: the “inner sphere,” which represents “the planetary domain of social production and reproduction;” and a second sphere, “composed of intertwined political and legal systems at different levels: national governments, international legal agreements, supranational institutions, corporate networks, special economic zones and more” (Hardt and Negri 2019, 68).6

In the spatial dimension of the global market, the criminal manipulation of the borderless cyberspace, which clearly emerged in the COVID-19 economic scenario, allows global Mafias to intensify the process of trans-nationalization and expansion of their own criminal activities. It is not by chance, indeed, that

the drug trade is moving from the streets and onto the darknet. The statistics show something else, as well: Europe’s and America’s drug consumers are moving away from organic products originating in Bolivia or Afghanistan and increasingly enjoy synthetic drugs, manufactured not in the developing world, but in Holland, Canada, Bulgaria, or Israel. (Glenny 2018)

Payments are also happening online more frequently. As demonstrated by a variety of investigative operations carried out by the DEA, Mexican cartels, e.g., the Sinaloa cartel, use cryptocurrencies to pay Chinese companies and thereby receive the precursor chemical they need to produce fentanyl (Department of Justice 2023).

Furthermore, the Internet is revolutionizing the international arena from the point of view of criminal alliances. In the past, global Mafias, such as the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta, worked in synergy with the drug cartels of South and Central America. However, in recent years they have started to look with greater interest to the Asian and African continents, where important cybercriminal groups have their own operational bases. It is no coincidence that INTERPOL has carried out a number of significant operations over the past few years, resulting primarily in the arrest of people based in Asian and African countries.7

The fact that during the pandemic the alliances between criminal networks started to become increasingly fluid is remarkable from different standpoints. In particular, in the mid- to long-term there is the risk of either a transnational war between various global Mafias or some sort of global criminal governance that may trouble the economic and political stability in several world regions. It is interesting to note in this regard the business alliance between Russian Mafia and North Korean cybercriminal organizations that over the past two years worked in synergy to hack several institutions around the world. After decades during which North Korean agents have sold drugs to global Mafias, such as the Japanese Yakuza and the Chinese Triads, this cyber-partnership with the Russian Mafia could lead other countries to replicate similar practices (Young 2022).

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, global Mafias also restructured logistics, a key economic sector for different reasons. As emphasized by Marx himself, logistics blur the line separating production and circulation time. In other words, “more than a matter of cost reduction, or the mere transportation to consumers of goods to which surplus value has already been added, logistical modes of coordination are integral to production itself” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 150). Like data mining, logistics can be connected in various respects to extraction conceived of as an economic activity relying on exploitation, assimilation, and valorization of external resources. In fact, it favors that form of expropriation called “land grabbing.” The construction of infrastructures that seek to subsume diverse geographical zones under logistics formations is made possible by large-scale aggressive acquisitions of land. Seen in this light, “logistical labor can be understood not only as the production and circulation of commodities, whether material or immaterial, but also as various forms of hustling, tapping into flows, or distributive labor that spring up, and in many cases dominate, in situations where capital has done its work of dispossession” (153).

Global Mafias understood the enormous potential of logistics a long time ago. In the COVID-19 economic context, they still controlled strategic ports in Europe (the ports of Gioia Tauro and Naples in Southern Italy, the port of Antwerp in Belgium, the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands) and in other continents. Following the decision of President Joe Biden to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan, the Taliban, along with brokers and drug cartels, started to open new routes in Africa—notably in Kenya, South Africa, and Namibia—to deliver heroin to Europe and to the US. On the other hand, having to face the radical transformations of millions of people’s lives around the world over the last five years, global Mafias also accelerated the use of alternative drug-delivery services—such as home delivery and Dial-a-Dealer—already used in the past.

The synergy between logistics and digital platforms, in turn, represents a rare opportunity for criminal organizations. First, the gap between production time and circulation time tends to disappear completely, since the production itself depends on precise logistical conditions. Second, the commodity, as well as the delivery service, offered to an ever-expanding clientele, is available twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Third, the chances of linking heterogeneous geographic areas with each other increase. Even small urban centers, more or less distant from large cities, can be easily absorbed within the area of influence of certain criminal groups.

Another logistical element to be considered is that global Mafias used the pandemic to “speed up the use of drones, submarines, and unmanned platforms to deliver drugs, both wholesale and retail” (Felbab-Brown 2020). In addition to the search for alternative methods of transportation, the need for new logistical bases during the pandemic has generated particularly violent conflicts between criminal organizations of various kinds, including global Mafias, and police forces in some regions of the world. Such is the case in Ecuador, which over the last three years has become an essential logistical pawn in the international cocaine trade. As demonstrated in 2010 by Hernán Moreano’s article, “Entre santos y ‘traquetos’. El narcotráfico en la frontera colomboecuatoriana,” more than a decade ago Ecuador had already attracted the attention of Colombian cartels in search of new ports from which to ship large quantities of cocaine to Europe. Moreano, in fact, underlined how in 2010 the border between Ecuador and Colombia was a real war zone due to the massive presence of armed groups linked to Colombian criminal organizations engaged in cocaine trafficking.

In recent years, journalistic investigations, as well as reports by international organizations and supranational political bodies,8 repeatedly pointed out that a powerful Mexican global Mafia, the Sinaloa cartel,9 worked in conjunction with Colombian cocaine producers to gain control of the port of Guayaquil in Ecuador. Guayaquil represents an essential logistics base, currently among the most important cocaine hubs in South America, so much so that between 2022 and August 2023, tons of cocaine, in most cases hidden in bananas and tea, have been seized by local police.

Ecuador’s gradual transformation into a logistical crossroads for international cocaine trafficking has generated conflict in the country. Gangs, in synergy with the Sinaloa cartel, sought to eliminate any form of political opposition to their criminal project. From this perspective, the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio on August 9, 2023, was nothing but the culmination of the violent tension that has plagued the country for years. The case of Ecuador, in short, shows how global Mafias, such as the Sinaloa Cartel, go in search of new logistical facilities (such as the port of Guayaquil), exploiting a nation’s structural political weakness and increasing its level of social and criminal disorder.

We should also not forget that the construction of new logistical infrastructures is usually one of the main peculiarities of what Ada Becchi defined as “political economy of catastrophe” (Barbagallo 201, 144). Following disasters like earthquakes, floods, wars, large-scale economic and political crises, public institutions usually finance the construction of logistics infrastructures to boost the economy. Criminal organizations, thanks to both their strong kinship with politics and their available liquidity, can take advantage of the post-catastrophe economic context.10

What happened in Campania, in Southern Italy, after the Irpinia earthquake in the 1980s is emblematic of the political economy of catastrophe. The various Camorra clans got their hands on public contracts and, through an alliance with private companies, rebuilt entire cities, taking part in important renovation works. Additionally, the Camorra designed and built highways and freeways, which, since the late ’80s, have been useful to the economic and criminal development of certain areas of Naples. The case of the Asse Mediano is well-known. This freeway, built after the earthquake, connects several cities in the northern area of Naples. Over time, the Asse Mediano itself has become one of the strengths of the Camorra clans operating in northern Naples (above all, the so-called Alleanza di Secondigliano and clan Di Lauro). In fact, the freeway was so essential that the largest European open-air drug market began to develop around the same time in that area, which grew exponentially in industrial and logistical terms.

This modus operandi of the Camorra clans is an example of how global Mafias can benefit from the construction of public infrastructures in the wake of catastrophes. Unsurprisingly, an Italian police force investigation (DIA Report 2020) showed that Camorra clans are, as much now as then, ready to take over public contracts and recovery funds established by the European Union to promote economic growth. However, Italy is not an exception, insofar as the post-crisis construction of logistics infrastructures also interests many other countries in Europe and around the world.

In the post-COVID-19 economic context, criminal organizations could also be the main actors of massive financial speculation. Their availability of capital gives them the opportunity both to invest in stock markets and become a fundamental point of reference for important financial institutions and banks. This already happened during the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, which was “a blessing for organized crime.” At that time, global financial institutions took advantage “from money laundering by Latin American drug cartels” (Saviano 2012).

Now more than ever, global Mafias can play a pivotal role in the financial sector, which has a strong impact on production and “becomes completely enmeshed within the ‘real economy’ and social life” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 158). Finance, indeed, can be seen as a form of surplus extraction through which different and incomparable realities are formally and materially subsumed under the domain of global Capital. Consider the example of derivatives, used by global Mafias “to cloud the original derivation of criminal funds” (Schneider and Windischbauer 2010, 8). They are financial instruments that represent, as emphasized by Fredric Jameson, “the very paradigm of heterogeneity, even the heterogeneity at the heart of that homogeneous process we call capitalism” (Jameson, 119). More specifically, derivatives create connections between “different dimensions—dimensions not only quantitatively distinct but qualitatively incommensurable: different spaces, different populations, different production processes (manual, intellectual or immaterial), different technologies, different histories” (119). Jameson also points out that these financial instruments are characterized by a particular temporality. In fact, each derivative cannot be seen as a “new beginning,” but rather as a “new present,” insofar as “it produces no future out of itself, only another and a different present. The world of finance capital is that perpetual present—but it is not a continuity; it is a series of singularity-events” (122).

Trading in derivatives and/or investing in bonds and other financial products, global Mafias, therefore, can present themselves as an integral part of late capitalism in which the subsumption of incommensurable realities under the command of capital goes hand in hand with

the historically strange and unique phenomenon of a volatilization of temporality, a dissolution of past and future alike, a kind of contemporary imprisonment in the present—reduction to the body as I call it elsewhere—an existential but also collective loss of historicity in such a way that the future fades away as unthinkable or unimaginable, while the past itself turns into dusty images and Hollywood-type pictures of actors in wigs and the like. (Jameson, 120)

Global Mafias could use notorious banks and offshore financial institutions to launder the proceeds of international drug trafficking and invest in strategic sectors such as the real estate market. From this standpoint, the so-called Vancouver model is worth exploring. In recent years, Vancouver has drawn attention from the general attorney of British Columbia and police forces because the Chinese Triads have been using the city port as their main operative base in North America. The mechanism is well known. Chemicals used to make fentanyl arrive from China and are sold on the streets of Vancouver. The money obtained from the selling of these substances is laundered in the Vancouver casinos and then goes straight into the coffers of the Triads. After a long and virtual trip through offshore banks and financial institutions, the money is invested in the Vancouver real estate market to buy luxury homes.11

The Vancouver Model allows us to analyze some aspects of global Mafias’ economic operations. A port located in a strategic zone, in this case the port of Vancouver, is controlled by a powerful global Mafia, which brings either drugs or chemicals used to manufacture drugs into a foreign country. The control of the port takes place in several steps. First, it is necessary to bribe the police. Secondly, control over the people working at the port is essential. Not surprisingly, in the port of Vancouver, the Triads over time have infiltrated the dock workers’ unions. Third, the logistical control of the port, including the workforce, represents the starting point of the progressive subsumption of the urban space under the command of criminal organizations. Finally, the money made by selling drugs on the streets is laundered with the help of banks and reinvested by both buying luxury apartments and constructing buildings in the city center or in the suburbs: in other words, by the expropriation of land.

This kind of surplus extraction, which is based on the interaction between global Mafias, real estate developers, and financial institutions, could be the next step that global Mafias themselves will take in the post-pandemic economic scenario. At the same time, we must emphasize that such an economic model is not completely new. As an example, the connection between global Mafias, banks, and the real estate market is one of the keys to understanding the economic development of New York in the 1980s and the real estate bubble in Spain at the beginning of the 2000s. Global Mafias seem to have understood that especially in late capitalism “all politics is about real estate” (Jameson, 130). Their huge investments in the real estate market are not a side effect of their economic expansion, but rather they underscore that in late capitalism, as well as at the dawn of capitalism, land grabbing is, and was, a fundamental economic phenomenon. In this sense,

Capitalism began with enclosure and with the occupation of the Aztec and Inca empires, and it is ending with foreclosure and dispossession, with homelessness at the individual as well as the collective level, and with unemployment dictated by austerity and outsourcing, the abandonment of factories and rustbelts (Jameson, 130).

Conclusion

Global Mafias, far from being the remnants of feudalism at the core of postmodernity, participate, in multiple ways, in the processes of surplus extraction and land expropriation, not differently from corporations that represent the legal economy. Their significant presence in the COVID-19 economy underscores their fundamental role in the capitalist mode of production, whose historical evolution they can reveal and, in some situations, anticipate. The exploration of the economic operations carried out by different global Mafias during the COVID-19 pandemic thus affords three interconnected insights. First, it provides interesting indications of how global Mafias operate in times of economic recession. In historical moments marked by economic and geopolitical crises, they, as highly developed multinational companies, lay the foundations for new fruitful businesses and more aggressive forms of extraction of surplus value.

Second, the investigation of the historical link between global Mafias and capitalist modes of production during the pandemic offers significant clues about how global Mafias operate in normal times. In fact, even when they are not committed to profiting from exceptional situations, global Mafias invest in multiple economic activities, such as cybercrimes and logistics, starting from a precise analysis of the global economic situation. Their objective, therefore, is not simply to launder illegal proceeds by investing them at random. Rather, they increase their profits insofar as they aim for both innovation and the creation of products that are attractive to the global market. One could speculate that the global Mafias’ conquest and corruption of cyberspace can be seen as the starting point for new strategies of capital accumulation based on what we could call “digital enclosures.” In this regard, a structural analysis of their economic operations in recent years discloses a complex configuration of contemporary capitalism, where the systematic appropriation of both physical and virtual terrains unfolds alongside the intensified exploitation of labor power across various sectors. This configuration appears more stratified than the framework advanced by theories that maintain capitalism is now ceding ground to a mode of techno-feudalism, in which so-called feudal overlords enrich themselves primarily “through the extraction of cloud capital from digital trading platforms in the form of rent” (Gane 2024, 2).

Third, the demonstration that global Mafias are capitalist enterprises could be the starting point for a general reconsideration of the economic history of diverse world regions. In other words, it would allow for a deeper analysis of crucial events that have characterized different continents at least since the end of the nineteenth century: from the role played by the Italian Mafias in the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 and in the most important transformations of Italian society over the last century, up to the incredible economic development of some Mexican states (at least since the beginning of the 1990s) that were and still are under the control of highly structured criminal networks that have Italian Mafias themselves as their model.

Ciro Incoronato is Assistant Professor of Italian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has published several articles and book chapters on Italian culture, French philosophy, metaphysics, and ecological thought. He is completing a book manuscript on the biopower of the oldest Italian Mafia, the Camorra criminal organization.

Notes

• 1. By economic operations I mean an operation that “always refers to specific capitalist actors and material circumstances while also being embedded in a wider network of operations and relations that involve other actors, processes, and structures. This perspective gives us two analytical avenues through which to examine the work done by an operation. The first, with its reference to specific capitalist actors, reveals the workings of capital in particular material configurations, shedding light on processes of valorization, as well as on the frictions and tensions crisscrossing them in lived and grounded circumstances. Studying operations in this optic involves careful empirical work to understand how they interact with different experiences of embodiment and social life, not least those involving dynamics of race and gender. The second focuses on the articulation of operations into larger and changing formations that make up capitalism as a whole” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 70–71).

• 2. As emphasized by Hardt and Negri, “today’s extractivist practices present something like a historical archive that contains all the pasts of capital, from the oldest to the newest forms of producing and accumulating value, ancient and postmodern methods of exploitation and control, with wide geographical and cultural differences” (Hardt and Negri 2017, 178).

• 3. Just to provide a sense of the scope of this phenomenon, we should highlight that “907,000 spam messages, 737 incidents related to malware and 48,000 malicious URLs—all related to COVID-19 were detected between January and 24 April, 2020” (Interpol 2020, 4). Cybercrimes continued to increase in 2021. In fact, “the number of encrypted threats spiked by 167% (10.4 million attacks), ransomware rose by 105% to 623.3 million attacks, cryptojacking rose by 19% (97.1 million attacks), intrusion attempts by 11% (a whopping 5.3 trillion) and IoT malware rose by 6% to 60.1 million attacks” (Vigliarolo 2022).

• 4. In December 2021, the Spanish Policía Nacional arrested a gang of cybercriminals based in Tenerife. The individuals arrested were directly connected to Italian criminal organizations, especially to the Neapolitan Camorra. According to Beatriz Gómez Hermosilla, the head of the Spanish Cybercrime Unit, global Mafias “are transforming toward the digital world. They are using hackers within their organization” (qtd. in Franceschi-Bicchierai 2021).

• 5. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff underlines that “searches, e-mails, photos, songs, messages, videos, locations, communication patterns, attitudes, preferences, interests, faces, emotions, illnesses, social networks, purchases, and so on. A new continent of behavioral surplus is spun each moment from the many virtual threads of our everyday lives as they collide with Google, Facebook, and more generally, every aspect of the internet’s computer-mediated architecture” (Zuboff, 128). Global Mafias have progressively put their hand on terabytes of such data, thanks to which they can operate like digital platforms, subsuming lives and social behaviors of users/workers under the command of criminal capital.

• 6. More specifically, Hardt and Negri underline that the domain of social production and reproduction, “composed of proliferating borders and hierarchies at various scales—within each metropolis, nation-state, region, continent—” is characterized “by ever-more complex and densely interconnected networks of communication, material and immaterial infrastructures, air, water and land transportation lines, transoceanic cables and satellite systems, social and financial networks, and multiple overlapping interactions among ecosystems, humans and other species. Traditional forms of localized economic production, such as agriculture and mining, persist within this planetary sphere; but they are progressively absorbed, dynamized and, in many cases, threatened by these intercontinental circuits. Labour, too, is drawn into and constrained by the planetary web of markets, infrastructures, laws and border regimes. The processes of valorization and create are ruled by a highly variegated, but nonetheless integrated, global assembly line. Finally, institutions of social reproduction and circuits of ecological metabolism may remain local, but they too depend upon—and are often menaced by—increasingly large dynamic systems” (Hardt and Negri 2019, 68)

• 7. Consider, in this light, Operation HAECHI III in November 2022, through which INTERPOL seized $120 million and arrested 975 people, many of them traced to cybercriminal organizations based in South Korea, India, Laos, Indonesia, and Cambodia. Another major operation, “Africa Cyber Surge,” was conducted between April and August 2023 by INTERPOL in cooperation with AFRIPOL to dismantle several cybercriminal organizations based in African countries such as Cameroon, Nigeria, Gambia, and Kenya (INTERPOL 2023). According to INTERPOL’s findings, these cybercriminal groups carry out financial activities on behalf of the same global Mafias, laundering illicit proceeds from various activities, including international drug trafficking.

• 8. Several articles, published over the last year in newspapers such as The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais, Le Monde, and many others, focused especially on how Ecuador turned into one of the most relevant Latin American cocaine hubs. The European Union has also spoken on this issue. Indeed, Joseph Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy / Vice-President of the European Commission, highlighted how democracy in Ecuador has been violently attacked by the infiltration of the Sinaloa Cartel. He pointed out that European criminal organizations, such as Albanian criminal organizations that have long since begun to invest directly in cocaine production through alliances with Colombian cartels, are, whether directly or indirectly, involved in diverse criminal events in Ecuador (2023).

• 9. An extensive bibliography exists on the Sinaloa cartel. Here, I would want to mention two recent articles published in the British Journal of Criminology: “Illegal Market Governance and Organized Crime Groups’ Resilience: A Study of the Sinaloa Cartel” (Pereda and Décary-Hetu, 2023), and “Is the Sinaloa Cartel a Mafia” (Paoli et al., 2023).

• 10. In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein explores how catastrophic events have been used as the starting point of economic experiments aiming at developing and imposing pure forms of unregulated capitalism. As stressed by Michael Hardt, “In a bold conceptual move, she links together here disasters created by military violence, such as the ‘war on terror’ and the occupation of Iraq, and those resulting from ‘natural’ causes, including the tragic aftermaths of Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. To a certain extent, the argument goes, it does not matter to disaster capital what generates the disaster—only that such crises continually arrive, allowing capital to exploit the devastation and temporary disorientation that they bring in order to accomplish the principal goals of the neoliberal agenda: privatize public wealth, deregulate economic activity and reduce social-welfare spending” (Hardt 2007, 154).

• 11. See Natalie Obiko Pearson, “How Vancouver became the world’s laundromat for foreign organized crime,” Financial Post, 10 May 2019.

Works Cited