On a gray afternoon in November 2021, Metropolitan Police officers pulled over a vehicle on a highway north of London, acting on a tip about a suspected drug deal. In the car, they found 250,000 pounds in cash, according to the investigators involved. A sweep of the driver’s home turned up a dollar-counting machine and another 24,500 pounds.
This was a significant coup for law enforcement, but the story turned out to be much bigger. Further investigation revealed a thread that led British investigators to a building in the heart of Moscow. The money, the machine, and the man driving the car all traced back to a Russian intelligence operation.
Operation Destabilise, as the British National Crime Agency dubbed its investigation, exposed how two shell criminal networks—called Smart and TGR—masterminded a sprawling money-laundering operation to turn hard cash into cryptocurrency. The heads of both groups, Ekaterina Zhdanova and George Rossi, were sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Asset Control last year.
Hundreds of millions of dollars were laundered through the scheme, and more than 80 people were arrested, although several key actors remain out of reach of Western law enforcement. The two networks spanned more than 30 countries in Europe, the Middle East, and South America. Its clients included some of the biggest Russian and non-Russian organized crime groups involved in drug running and people smuggling.
What made this network different is that it seamlessly connected with otherwise competing criminal groups, specialized in multiple illicit markets, and received support from a foreign government. Spies, mafia bosses, cybercriminals, and Russian money launderers combined to create an industry that almost defies comprehension. Rob Jones, the director general of operations at the National Crime Agency, described it as the most significant money-laundering operation that the agency had ever uncovered. “It takes you from McMafia through to Narcos, through to (espionage thriller author John) le Carré,” he said.
Organized crime, one of the world’s oldest professions, is entering a golden age. Whether pursued by tomb robbers in ancient Egypt, assassins in the Middle East, secret societies in China, pirates in the Caribbean, or the Italian Mafia, the criminal underworld is a constant of history. Modern tools of the trade—intimidation, corruption, trafficking, and violence—are much the same as in past millennia. Yet as Jones observed, the sophistication, speed, and scale of today’s organized crime is breathtaking. And the international crime control regime—the legal frameworks, institutions, and cooperative mechanisms established by states and global organizations to prevent, investigate, and prosecute crime—is not remotely prepared.
In the late 20th century, globalization—the deregulation of financial systems and the surge of capital, goods, services, people, and ideas across borders—supercharged licit and illicit economies. Cartels, mafia networks, and freelance gangsters quickly learned the ins and outs of private banks, tax havens, special economic zones, container ports, and online markets. Most national police agencies lacked the mandate, skills, and resources to keep up. Even when they acted, they were often stifled by shadowy political and economic power brokers.
There are several reasons why organized crime is undergoing a renaissance. The first is the adoption of new technologies that are literally rewiring the way crime is conducted. Within criminal organizations, digital natives have started replacing less tech-savvy mafia bosses and operatives. As a result, cybercrime has evolved from lone-wolf attacks to highly skilled criminals hunting in packs. This new generation of gangs operates in structured networks, with members specializing in tasks such as malware writing, social engineering, and money management.
Just like in the regular economy, digital connectivity has dramatically increased the efficiency and lowered the costs of organized crime. Take cybercrime, which is increasingly dominated by automated phishing attacks and ransomware-as-a-service. In fact, virtually every category of criminal activity is leveraging technology to create economies of scale. Russian gangsters are using drones to assassinate rivals, Moroccan crime groups are smuggling narcotics into Spain using under-water drones, and British police are reporting areal drone-deliveries of drugs, phones and weapons into prisons. Home delivery services for drugs are as speedy as those for fast food across Europe and the United States. This new efficiency is the result of internet penetration, the spread of social media, encrypted platforms, ubiquitous GPS, and even enterprise software to manage crime groups’ personnel and finances.
Meanwhile, the supply of and demand for organized crime are also changing. Consider migration, which has become one of the most contested issues in European and U.S. politics. The more governments try to prevent migrants from traveling, the higher the profits derived from people smuggling. What was once a comparatively small business with low margins is now a globalized industry operating 24/7. Paradoxically, profits are up because the world’s poor are less destitute than they were a few decades ago, and many can now invest in smugglers. Few other types of criminal activity attract as much popular attention as people smuggling, even though the activity generates less violence than, say, narcotics.
Organized crime syndicates are also taking advantage of innovations in narcotics manufacturing and changing consumption habits. Synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, methamphetamines, and amphetamines aren’t dependent on coca or poppies produced in Colombia or Afghanistan; the growing appetite for these drugs has accelerated production closer to their end markets. According to the European Union Drugs Agency, hundreds of clandestine drug laboratories have been dismantled across Western Europe in recent years. Meanwhile, captagon production has soared from Syria to Iraq, spreading billions of dollars’ worth of tablets to consumers in the Gulf countries and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The quality of governance is yet another factor in the prevalence of organized crime. Weak governance—whether a result of corruption, social unrest, or armed conflict—is strongly correlated with the influence of criminal networks. Democratic governments tend to have an advantage: According to the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime, “full democracies … exhibit higher levels of resilience to organized crime than authoritarian regimes.”
In recent years, however, liberal democracies have been on the back foot. The 2008 financial crisis, increased migration in the 2010s, and the far-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have strengthened populist movements across Europe and North America. Populist leaders often circumvent democratic checks and balances, with direct and indirect benefits for organized crime. One of the first acts of the new U.S. attorney general, for example, was to eliminate anti-corruption units targeting kleptocrats. In Europe, Brexit delivered a serious blow to coordination among European law enforcement agencies. Some police forces no longer share information with Hungary, an EU member, for fear that the information is being passed on to Russia.
The fewer democratic checks and balances, the greater the temptation for politicians, judges, police, customs agents, and tax officials to collude with organized crime. Consider U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent decision to pardon Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road, a website that trafficked in drugs, laundered money, and engaged in hacking. . Trump also ordered the U.S. Justice Department to halt the enforcement of a U.S. anti-corruption law that bars Americans from bribing foreign officials, ostensibly to promote U.S. competitiveness. Though the pardon was hailed by crypto fans, these actions came as a shock to investigators and transparency advocates.
Most law enforcement agencies know that they are lagging far behind organized crime groups. Struggling with their own challenges at home, the enforcers have few incentives to cooperate internationally. And although agencies such as Interpol and Europol periodically disrupt transnational criminal networks, powerful crime syndicates are running circles around police, immigration, customs, and coast guards—and not just in lower- and middle-income countries. Even in the most functional democracies, organized crime exerts influence over governments and launders funds into legitimate businesses with few checks. Emboldened gangs are also taking the fight to the police: In 2024, Europol suffered a data breach by IntelBroker, a cybercriminal gang that posted stolen data online.
There are good reasons to believe that organized crime will intensify in the coming years. Deepening geopolitical tensions are already disrupting collective action to fight criminal groups. Worsening relations between the United States and its traditional allies and partners under the second Trump administration undermine trust and obstruct cross-border cooperation. All the while, criminal groups, including some backed by nation-states, are moving quickly to exploit power vacuums—for example, by selling arms retrieved from the world’s battlefields to online scam farms in Southeast Asia.
The threats of metastasizing crime are particularly high when wars come to an end because there are often plenty of armed groups and leftover military kit that can easily cross borders. Polish President Andrzej Duda recently warned that Europe should brace itself for a crime wave when the Russia-Ukraine war ends, with intelligence agencies’ main concern being a possible flood of weapons westward. Similar spillovers occurred in the past, including after wars in the Balkans and Central America.
Emerging technologies threaten to further boost organized crime in the coming years. AI-powered hacking operations and untraceable cryptocurrencies are now a staple of money laundering and ransomware schemes. Financial companies and health care providers around the world are growing increasingly concerned about deepfakes enabling identity fraud on an industrial scale, rendering traditional verification systems obsolete. The transition to a digital-first economy is a gift to criminals.
In this environment, the lines between organized crime and state intelligence services are blurring. Long tolerated by the Kremlin, Russian cybercriminal gangs have now become the de facto arm of state-sponsored hacking and sabotage campaigns across the West. Hacker entities with links to the Russian Federal Security Service and Main Intelligence Directorate, such as APT28 (a.k.a., Fancy Bear), have been accused of launching cyberattacks against Western political targets, including most famously against the U.S. Democratic National Committee in 2016 and more recently against Germany, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Sweden. To a growing number of hostile governments, criminal networks are assets to be sheltered rather than elements to be fought.
In the past two decades, the threat from transnational organized crime has climbed steadily up most countries’ risk rankings, while the rise of hacking and ransomware has brought home to corporations that this issue is not going away anytime soon. Governments are taking steps by means of tougher laws, more financial sanctions, and expanded police operations.
Some of these have yielded important results. In 2016, the United States expanded the Magnitsky sanctions to target corrupt officials linked to criminal networks, while Britain has tightened anti-money laundering regulations and launched a new organized crime strategy. Many countries also now compel offshore companies to reveal who their real beneficial owner is—a seemingly small development but one that makes it much harder to hide and launder money.
On the law enforcement side, Italy’s anti-mafia task force has made significant progress in dismantling the operations of Cosa Nostra and ‘Ndrangheta, two of the biggest crime groups. Canada and Australia have cracked down on foreign crime syndicates laundering money through real estate markets. Some police forces and private companies are exploring new technologies to fight back, including quantum computing and post-quantum cryptographic methods.
Overall, however, law enforcement agencies engaged in the battle against organized crime are still woefully under-resourced. Most of their efforts are domestically focused, with consistent information sharing and cross-border operations still rare. There is much scope for more oversight of digital financial systems. Concerted investment in the police and justice capacities of countries with governance challenges—including states recovering from conflict—is essential but less likely with a new U.S. administration that is hostile to foreign aid and has begun to dismantle crucial crime-fighting legislation.
The sober truth is that as long as corruption and the underlying conditions fueling organized crime are not addressed, law enforcement will fall short.
