It's no secret some self-designated terrorist groups are in fact transnational organized crime networks. Take a look at the following list:

- FARC ( Colombia )
- AUC ( Colombia )
- Real IRA ( Ireland )
- LTTE ( Sri Lanka - Tamils )
- Shining Path ( Peru - Quechua Amerindians )
- ETA ( Spain - Basque )
- PKK ( Turkey - Kurds )
- Islamic Jihad ( Middle East - Palestinians )
- AQIM ( Algeria - Kabyle Berbers )
- Hezbollah ( Lebanon - Lebanese Shiites )
- Grey Wolves ( Turkey - Turks )
- Abu Sayyaf ( Philippines - Moro Filipinos )
- UWSA ( Myanmar - Va people )
- Iranian Revolutionary Guards ( Iran - Persians )
- Taliban ( Afghanistan - Pashtuns )

At least 15 terrorist groups that can be described as major forces in transnational organized crime. Members of the ethnic groups of those organizations are often known for setting up gangster networks in countries abroad. Almost all of them can be found to be involved in organized criminal activities in North and South American and Europe. Va people are a major force in the underworld of Thailand.
In my opinion it certainly occurs that members of these groups abandon terrorism for organized crime.

what about the chechyans?

Chechen terrorists are likely to be members of Al-Qaeda, but Chechens also have their own organized crime groups that aren't necessary linked to terrorist groups.
Not every Al-Qaeda group has links to organized crime. Berbers from Morocco and Algeria, Chechens, Mirpuris from Pakistan, Palestinians and Filipino Moro Muslims are the ethnic groups that often set-up their own criminal groups that may , but not necessarily do have links to Al-Qaeda. It's also important to note that criminal groups from the ethnics have often turned against the terrorist gangs. For instance, a lot of Pashtun crime bosses loathe the Taliban and have even collaborated with Western forces.

What about Albanians and their terrorist organization(UCK or KLA)?

The Kosovo Liberation Army was involved in drug, weapon and organ trafficking but I think they've disbanded.

You could probably get the ETA off the list too. Their ceasefire has been going on for quite some time know. They once had reputed links with organized crime ( drug smuggling, but especially extortion of local businesses) but their criminal activities aren't nearly as entrenched anymore as they used to be.
One group that also deserves a mention and should be on the list is the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. They reputedly control as much as 70% of the heroin trafficking and sales throughout Central Asia. Weapon trafficking, extortion and protection rackets are also part of their bread and butter. Azerbaijani, Chechen, but also Uzbek crime groups are a major force in the Russian underworld in terms of the heroin business.

the AUC is also npo longer active.the succsessor(s) are the BACRIM. i dont think that its usefull to describe "terrorist" groups as OC when they start extorting,arms trafficking etc.

The IRA, all branches, would be the obvious answer. They engaged in all kinds of crime from heists to smuggling to counterfeiting to taxing drug dealers in their neighborhoods.

I was thinking the same Red. Now the dealers are starting to fight back a little over there.

Here is a audio tape of Santo Scipione(Arrested weeks ago in Colombia) he is 'Ndrangheta member talking to AUC leader Mancuso.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IvoYLfzODA

I also heard that the IRA and the tinkers aren't exactly what you would call best pals.

Maybe they dont operate as terrorists anymore but belive me they r not disbanded,they still operate as an criminal organization with drugs,organs etc. and politics

Human Rights Watch: Extradite ex-paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso so he can testify http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profil...dite-ex-paramilitary-commander-salvatore

I would probably remove the Real IRA from the list. Since merging with other splinter groups a number of years ago they are now called the New IRA, very original...

However they are small scale in the grand scheme of things. They are reputed to tax dealers in only a handful of areas in N Ireland in which they are strong enough. Hell, they tried the same in Dublin and that went terrible.

Other than that they are small time fuel and cigarette smugglers. I imagine their only international contacts and interests revolve around acquiring weapons.

The Provisional IRA are still the major force in Ireland. Even though there have been numerous splits and rival republican groups over the years, the PIRA always have and would still represent 80/90 % of the republican movement in moderns times. They have strength in numbers, and have retained quite a number of side arms, although because of the peace process and the political tightrope Sinn Fein have to tread, they can do very little with the power they have which has lead to an increase in petty crime and drug dealing in traditional republican areas.

The only major transnational crime group operating in Ireland at the minute would be the Kinahan led drug group.

He could also be a very important witness in Italy against the 'Ndrangheta.
He is wanted by the Italian judiciary for his complicity in various international drug trafficking operations, in which the 'Ndrangheta is also involved. In particular he was involved in the Takeoff operation which led to the arrest of 159 people, including Natale Scali (Gioiosa Jonica) and Santo Scipione (San Luca). And through the AUC Mancuso would have sent 8 tons of cocaine to the port of Gioia Tauro .

Suppose to be a lot militant rebels, similar to the Narcos show, don’t know if they are Communists or just government opposition, in Southeast Asia. I don’t know if they are officially terrorist, but they are into the expanding Meth trade.

Salvatore Mancuso , former 'number two' of Colombia's United Self Defense (AUC, paramilitaries), will be expelled from the United States in early September, where he served a long prison sentence for drug trafficking, and transferred to Italy. The newspaper El Tiempo in Bogotà writes it today.

The newspaper, citing sources close to Mancuso's lawyer, Joaquín Pérez, indicates that "a US federal judge accepted the arguments of the defense of the former commander, who is the son of an Italian emigrant, and ordered his deportation to Italy ". During the hearing, adds El Tiempo, “a prosecutor, April Denis Seabrook, was asked if he represented the United States government. You said yes and added that you were committed to transferring Mancuso to Italy before 4 September ».

The lawyer Pérez confirmed his defendant's willingness to be sent to Italy, arguing that his right to freedom has so far been violated after 12 years in prison. At the hearing, the judge asked to be informed of the place where, once free, Mancuso will observe the quarantine linked to the pandemic . Apparently this "will not be in the Salerno region, from where his father emigrated to Colombia".

On Thursday, says El Tiempo, the former leader of the AUC will be transferred to New York from where, according to US federal sources, a Delta flight, operated by Alitalia, leaves for Rome. If effective, the transfer of Mancuso to Italy and not to Colombia would be attributable to procedural errors committed in the past by Bogotà in the extradition request.

But on Sunday the Colombian foreign ministry issued a statement in which it assured that the government has completed all "the formalities required by law for the extradition of the former paramilitary chief", accused of 136 massacres with over 800 deaths. Finally, the government and police recalled that three Interpol 'red code' circulars are active against the former paramilitary commander for existing trials in the homeland.

Ndrangheta: clash between the Italian, Colombian and US governments over the extradition of the boss Mancuso
Monday, 31 August 2020 19:02

New York - After twelve years in an American prison for cocaine trafficking and on the eve of extradition to Italy, the fate of Salvatore Mancuso, 55, boss at the head of a paramilitary organization responsible for thousands of murders, has become a international case. The will of three governments crossed his fate: the Italian one who expected extradition, the Colombian one who asked to have Mancuso to incriminate him and the American one, which will have to decide the fate of the Italian-Colombian boss in the next few hours.

Thousands of relatives of the victims have launched an appeal for the boss to be taken to Bogota. "If it ends up in Italy - they said - it will put an end to the search for truth". Mancuso is the former commander of the AUC, united combat groups of Colombia, a right-wing militia involved in the 1990s in crimes, kidnappings and international drug trafficking. Convicted in Colombia for 1,500 murders and considered the referent of the Calabrian clans in the South American country, the "Italian drug lord" for years was considered the great enemy of the chief prosecutor Nicola Gratteri, who investigated the relations between the 'Ndrangheta and Colombian clans. In April, Italy applied for extradition, given that the boss had served 12 years in prison, but in the meantime the government of Bogota had also moved. Mancuso, according to reports from his lawyers, would be terrified by the idea of ​​being extradited to Colombia because he fears of being tortured or killed, also because the former commander collaborated with the American justice, providing the names and locations of his collaborators, all finished in jail. In the past Mancuso has boasted that he had one third of the representatives of the Colombian Congress elected.

JUSTICE
Colombia: former paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso will return to the country as "peace officer"
August 16, 2023 @ 10:49
The former Italian-Colombian paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso is expected to regain his freedom upon his return to Colombia thanks to his appointment as "peace officer" by President Gustavo Petro, according to statements by Colombian Justice Minister Néstor Osuna.
In the afternoon of August 14, it was actually announced that Petro formalized the decision, already announced, after the former paramilitary leader had offered to collaborate with the Colombian justice system. Minister Osuna clarified that, although Mancuso could be released as a peace agent, this "does not free him from judicial obligations. He has many ongoing trials in Colombia that are still being processed ”, including the sentences that he has not served in the country for the facts of the armed conflict.
Mancuso was head of the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the "historic" Colombian paramilitary formation; detained in the USA since 2007 for crimes related to international drug trafficking, which also involved the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta; in 2020 he had asked President Biden to be extradited to Italy and not to Colombia. At the time there was a strong international pressure campaign for Mancuso to return to Colombia instead, where he was the protagonist of an important and sad season of violence and, consequently, a potentially disruptive witness.

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A trail of dirty money
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A Hezbollah supporter carries a photograph of the military commander Mustafa Badreddine, killed in Damascus in 2016. [Alamy]
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The crucial moment in this vivid exposé of the murky world of transnational crime comes in 2015. Mustafa Badreddine, one of two Lebanese Shia cousins who for three decades had led the deadliest Iranian-linked terrorist network in the Middle East, was finally indicted by a UN special tribunal investigating the assassination of the Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri a decade earlier.

After an extraordinary career of mayhem, Badreddine had spent the previous three years leading an elite Hezbollah militia shoring up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. But the tide had turned, and in July 2015 Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Iranian Quds force in Syria, secretly flew to Moscow to beg for Russian military support. Otherwise, he argued, Assad would fall, mortally damaging the Shia axis between Syria, Iran and Hezbollah that kept the regional balance of power.

At almost exactly the same time Salvatore Pititto, a second-division hoodlum from Mileto in Calabria, southern Italy, was sweating because a huge drugs deal he had set up with a leading cocaine-producing cartel in Colombia was reaching its climax. An advance consignment of cocaine was making its way to Livorno among banana crates on the Liberian-registered container ship TG Nike. Pittito had invested a lot in the operation, which he hoped would catapult him and his family into one of the premier clans in the ’Ndrangheta or local mafia.

Despite fractious negotiations and meticulous organisation, the shipment was apprehended. A Lebanese intermediary called Castro absconded with the advance money to Beirut and Pititto was unable to resuscitate his game-changing deal. Beirut was significant, because of its central position in this book’s underlying theme – the trafficking which allowed the profits from South American drugs to be channelled, with Italian mafia assistance, to the Middle East and on to cash-hungry regimes which then paid extremist groups such as Hezbollah to buy weapons and do their murderous work.

Bolstered by court reports and first-hand sources, Miles Johnson explores his subject from three main angles. Pititto’s seedy world is observed through the gangster’s weirdly acquiescent mistress, Oksana Verman, a young Ukrainian turned police witness. He operates his aspirant mafia clan with his cousin Pasquale and other family members. After his Colombian operation goes wrong, his traumatised younger son, Alex, goes on the rampage and kills his best friend.

The book’s quiet hero, Jack Kelly, pursues the likes of Pititto through his position in the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Command (Socom) which is tasked with reeling in the big international traffickers. Kelly’s contacts in Colombia lead him to a middleman shipping cocaine to Jordan and into Syria where he was an associate of Imad Mughniyeh, one of the super facilitators channelling funds to Hezbollah and masterminding terrorist atrocities (the book’s third strand).

Mughniyeh is the beloved cousin of Badreddine, the instigator of Hariri’s assassination. Together they graduated through the ranks of the PLO’s Fatah in Lebanon. When that group was expelled from the country in 1982, its dominant position in Middle East terrorism was taken by Hezbollah which was fostering links with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a new regional force to be reckoned with following Ayatollah Khomeini’s accession to power.

Johnson records how, with Iranian backing, the cousins were behind many subsequent atrocities in the Arab world, including hijackings, bombings and the murder of William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. Adopting the name Elias Saab, Badreddine moved to Kuwait where he was arrested and sentenced to death. Mughniyeh then turned deadly terrorist in an effort to secure his cousin’s release. But that only happened fortuitously after Saddam Hussein invaded in 1990 and opened the prison gates. After a suitable hiatus Badreddine returned to Beirut where, adopting the new alias of Sami Issa and posing as a rich, womanising jeweller, he coordinated Hariri’s assassination.

Other sophisticated conspiracies back the thesis of narco-terrorist complicity. Kelly identifies the Lebanese middleman with links to Hezbollah and Badreddine as Mohamad Noureddine. But when he travels to Paris to arrest Noureddine, the operation is stymied by the state visit of the Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, who France does not want to offend at a time of delicate negotiations on nuclear proliferation. Similarly, a sting in Prague which leads to the detention of the Lebanese fixer Ali Fayad unravels when the Czech government gets cold feet and releases their prisoner.

Johnson sometimes skates over aspects of his story. The background of Castro, the intermediary in the Pittito drug scam, is ignored. Israeli involvement in Mughniyeh’s assassination is implied, but not the CIA’s. And why is there so little on the banking system which allowed the money laundering? But, with its abundance of burner phones and hoods with names like Babyface, the overall narrative is so compelling and well-presented that such lapses pale to insignificance.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/a-trail-of-dirty-money/

In countries with an established organized crime scene you can see that many of the major organized crime forces are often connected to paramilitary networks.

In Colombia the Urabeños - currently arguably the major drug trafficking organization active in South America - in Uraba are former AUC members. The same goes for the remnants of the NDVC and Rastrojos in the Cali area. Oficina de Envigado (which are the Medellin cartel remnants) are traditionally also very much connected to AUC.

In Turkey largely in the Black Sea region the major crime families like Saral and Sahin are connected to the Grey Wolves. Another notorious Black Sea crime figure Alaattin Cakici has also traditionally been connected to the Grey Wolves.
The main notorious crime families in the Southeast Anatolia (Turkish Kurdistan) region - of which the Baybasin are traditionally the biggest and most well known - have long been linked to the PKK.

A few Lebanese crime families with a Shi'ite background that are also active in for instance Germany have established Hezbollah connections; like for instance Chahrour, Balhas or Berjawi.

In Ireland the Hutch group has well known IRA relations while it's said that the Kinahan group has INLA associations.

Corsican criminal organizations like Brise De Mer in Bastia and Petit Bar in Ajaccio have long been connected to the FLNC.

In Kosovo criminal organizations like those of Kelmendi or the Osmani brothers were often linked to KLA.

Sometimes it's different though;

For instance in Israel the three major Arab crime families - the Jarushi (Bedouin origin clan from Ramla), the Abu Latif (Druze clan from Rameh) and the Hariri (Palestinian clan based in Umm al-Fahd) - seem to be pro-state, have relatives serving in the Israeli army, don't seem to have any relations with Palestinian militant groups and have strong ties to major Jewish criminal organizations. The Jarushi for instance have business relations with the Abergil and Domrani crime families (that are both of Moroccan Jewish descent).

In France the well known Algerian crime families like the Tir-Berrebouh group in Marseille or the Bouchibi group in Paris don't have any established connections whatsoever to the AQIM. Which probably shows that the current role of North African terror groups in organized crime is negligible and the Moroccan and Algerian criminal organizations in Western Europe are distinct organized crime groups.

The role of the United Wa State Army (which has strong Chinese ties) in Myanmar these days is mostly limited to the production of synthetic drugs in favor of Triad organizations operating out of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Triad groups seem to have overtaken the major drug trafficking routes into Southeast Asian countries like Thailand or the Philippines.

There are a lot of Pakistani organized crime rings active in the UK (largely in cities like Bradford, Luton and Birmingham), but they're mostly traced back to the Mirpur region or the Attock region (which is some sort of Pashtun enclave in Punjab). None of them have established Taliban connections and they're more operation in the same kind of way like the North African groups in the Netherlands, France and Belgium are - which means they're local OC groups and not based in the country where they have distant family ties.
I'm sure the Taliban has muscled in on the heroin production in Afghanistan though, but this is largely a production business and the transnational heroin trafficking and distribution is largely perpetrated by other established criminal organizations.

Other mentioned paramilitary organizations have seen their day;

ETA are probably done.

LTTE used to get a lot of many from extorting Tamil shopkeepers abroad, but those activities seem to have cooled down and nowadays there are no noticeably major high level criminal organizations operating in Tamil communities.

Shining Path's influence in organized crime in Peru these days is negligible. Colombian and Mexican criminal organizations wield the most direct power over the drug production in that county.

Great post TKJ hope you are doing well.

In Chechnya all things come together gangsters, agents, state, terrorists.


Under the rule of Ramzan Kadyrov, the criminalisation of Chechnya has taken a somewhat different turn to the wartime chaos that preceded it. Government officials have been accused of embezzling billions in state funds from Moscow, turning Chechnya into something of a financial "black hole", as well as demanding kickbacks for construction projects.[7][8] The Kadyrovtsy are also believed to be responsible for a number of murders and attempted murders, some of them political as in the case of the Yamadayev brothers, and some business-related, such as the attempted hit on banker German Gorbuntsov in London in 2012.[9]

Chechnya is a bit of an unusual case. In terms of who's in power it still very much is a tribal society. That's why in order to end the Russian-Chechen bloodshed the Kremlin struck a deal with one of the biggest tribes/clans in the country - and the Kadyrov clan are definitely one of the bigger clans, especially at that time - to keep Chechnya under control. And whatever you may think of Kadyrov, thus far he definitely has been successful in terms of keeping Chechnya stable as a region within the Russian Federation. Chechen organized crime used to be the major non-Russian force in organized crime in Moscow and they had a huge stranglehold over certain sectors. These days Chechen organized crime is very much under the radar. Russia however funneled a ton of money into Chechnya, just in order to keep Kadyrov in steady power and to keep the region prosperous enough not to spiral out of control again. I guess only time will tell how long the Kremlin will deem Chechnya important enough to keep spending the amount of money on they've been spending on it for the past 14 years.

History has shown that things in Chechnya can escalate quickly and even now you never now who's on who's side. Whether you talk about the military, the general public or organized crime groups...some may be loyal to Kadyrov, others only "seem" loyal to Kadyrov but in reality they're just biding their time until the time is right to strike and take over and then there are others that are known to be opposed to Kadyrov. Under the surface of stability it's still a hornet's nest and it really doesn't take much to stir it up again.

Anyway the Chechen organized crime traditionally known to operate out of Moscow - such as the Tsentralnaya clan and the Ostankinskaya clan (both named after the area in Moscow out of which they operated) - did have ties to the Chechen militant movements during the second Chechen war. Usually though these were movements that strived for Ichkerian independence, but were opposed to the influence of Wahhabism the was creeping into certain parts of Chechen society.

Another well known current example of ties between organized crime and militant movements are the Punjabi Jat Sikh origin crime families in British Columbia and Greater Toronto and their established connections with the Khalistan separatist movement in Punjab. The Dosanjh clan were probably the originators of this, but many of the current organized crime clans like Dhaliwal, Sanghera, Kang...all have known links with the Khalistan movement.

I know that many Chechen jihadis condemned Kadyrov and his soldiers who participated in the invasion of Ukraine as infidel apostates who departed from the religion of Islam.

“The Chechens fighting with the Russian army are apostates. They have departed from the religion of Islam, even if they claim to be Muslims who fast and perform the five daily prayers. They are siding with an enemy who openly shows enmity against Islam. Volunteering in the Russian army is blasphemy and apostasy, let alone participating in a destructive war against Ukraine.”

I am currently reading a book written by an Irish-American man who was a soldier in the US Marines and then joined the IRA. He was in charge, on the IRA side, of the arms shipment the Boston Irish Mob sent to the IRA in 1985. He dealt directly with Whitey Bulger and his crew.

Interestingly, he mentions that Whitey Bulger wanted the IRA to send an explosive expert to Boston to train his crew in car-bombs. Bulger also wanted the IRA to send to him a few guys on the run so he would protect them and they would work for him. The IRA knew he would use these guys as his private army so it never eeally materialized although the IRA always had a few guys hiding in Boston.

This is very interesting. Bulger was an informant at the time, which makes me wonder if he was going to use the IRA, then set them up to be arrested. I wonder if the FBI knew about it? Does the author give any opinions on Bulger as an informer ( I realize no one knew it at the time) and does he say anything about it?

Patrick Nee wrote in his book that Bulger had met one of the founders of the Provisional IRA, Joe Cahill, when the Belfast man came to Boston to rally US support.

He wrote that Bulger "loved being associated with the IRA and the cause of Irish freedom". He said that Bulger felt his association with the "struggle" gave him legitimacy.

I don't think Bulger was trying to set them up. I believe he was genuinely interested in the possibility of having an explosive expert and various IRA killers around him. As an Irish mob boss, it would be the equivalent for a Mafia boss to recruit zips in your Borgata witrh the objective of having capable guys loyal to you and only you. Bulger never mentioned his IRA gun running activities to the FBI like many other illegal stuff he never reported. We know that he was mostly using his FBI connection to push his own agenda and he mostly gave information on the Boston Italian Mafia.

The author talked a lot about Bulger and he mentions that Bulger assured him that the FBI was not doing surveillance on IRA activities in New England.






I've read Pat Nee's book and this new book by John Crawley ("The Yank") confirms and complete many informations in Nee's book. The two books give you the Boston Irish Mob side and the IRA side of the story.

The author confirm that Bulger had a good knowledge of the Irish troubles and that he was genuinely willing to help the IRA cause. However, he understood that this help was to a certain extent and that Bulger was expecting the IRA to help him too. At the time, the author reported directly to Martin McGuiness, an IRA commander who later became a very prominent politician in Northern Ireland (Bill Clinton gave his eulogy when he died) so you could see the IRA - Bulger gun running operation was overviewed at the highest level.

I think this is the main reason why the book was published only last year while Nee's book was written some time ago. The author probably didn't want to publish the Book while McGuiness was alive as it detailed his involvement in the IRA violence. it was well-known that McGuiness was an IRA commander, he even admitted it himself but he always said that it was only for a short period of time in the 70's. He became deputy first minister of Northern Ireland in the 2010's and it would have not looked good for him if the book was published then, showing him as the organizer of a big-gun running operation with then FBI most wanted Whitey Bulger and the Boston Irish mob.