The Jordan Harbinger Show - 964: Miles Johnson | The Secret World of International Crime

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

How do globally organized criminals stay two steps ahead of the law? Chasing Shadows author Miles Johnson takes us into the underworld for answers! What We Discuss with Miles Johnson: The global impact of drug trafficking and sanctions busting. How the DEA internationally operates more like the CIA than the FBI. The Syrian conflict: a tangled web of alliances and interests. Innovative low-tech money laundering schemes and the shadow economy. The evolution of criminal networks and the role technology plays in their prosperity. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/964 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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who very quickly rose to the absolute top of the boxing world. Most famous boxers are the whole lot. He was really at the top. However he did that, yes, let's say it definitely coincided with the same time he was running a criminal group. Crime and boxing, which has always had a relationship and dirty money being involved in boxing, but it's in a very different place.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with the variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional economic hitman, gold smuggler, four-star general, or Fortune 500 CEO. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation and cyber warfare, crime and cults, and more.

That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. My guest today is an investigative reporter with the Financial Times in London who has written stories about Russian mercenaries, VIP casino heists, money laundering by the Italian mafia, Vatican financial scandals and covert sanctions busting. our conversation today is likewise all over the place. We talk about undercover DEA busts, Hezbollah, cocaine trafficking,

to money laundering, to sanctions busting, to Iranian hit squads and more. So if you're into this sort of international intrigue type stuff, I think you'll dig this conversation. I'm not sure how much more I really need to sell it. Here we go with Miles Johnson. And no, I know what you're thinking. He's British.

Shouldn't he be known as Kilometers Johnson? No, the Brits use Miles just like the U.S. and Liberia. We're all in good company. Enjoy. You've had such an interesting career seemingly from the outside so far, man. Like investigative reporter with the Financial Times in London, some of the stories you've written about Russian mercenaries, VIP casino heists.

I don't even know what Mayfair is. Is that a brand of casino? What is a Mayfair casino heist? Yeah, so that might not travel so well. Mayfair is a sort of ultra-fancy sort of luxury area in the center of London. It's always historically being the place where sort of money sort of arrives. and it's just a sort of area where you get all these different characters. Got it.

Lots of rich people of all different types, but lots of intrigue. So it's always an interesting place. Yeah, that checks out. I guess that tracks. And money laundering by the Italian mafia, Vatican financial scandals, covert sanctions busting. So there's a lot we can talk about in the book, which will link in the show notes.

And by the way, listeners, if you buy the book using our links, it helps support the show, yada yada. The book focuses initially on how the DEA got its jurisdiction expanded to terrorism and financing, which I know that sounds like super in the weeds, but it was quite interesting. I didn't realize the DEA was sort of a hybrid, from the outside looking in, hybrid law enforcement agency plus intelligence agency kind of feel to it. You know, you think of them as just like, oh, there's a drug FBI.

But it's like, well, they're kind of like the drug CIA in a way. Yeah. So it was sort of a really interesting period of history to look at because although it's not that long ago, it's sort of post-9-11. And the DEA's been around for obviously a while. But obviously everything changed post-9-11. There was a lot of pressure to sort of join up the different US agencies and questions about why things were missed.

And it basically led to this sort of through historical accidents in a way. What is kind of seems now like this kind of completely audacious experiment in law enforcement where they sort of said to the DEA due to various US statute changes, like pretty much you can almost not entirely, almost go after anyone you want in the world. And so you suddenly had these, you know, guys who had grown up as drug cops on streets of big American cities, suddenly going after arms dealers and terror suspects and people all around the world doing these crazy sting operations. And so it was a sort of fascinating way into sort of what then later happened because they got

mixed up in all of these quite interesting investigations. Yeah, they swing pretty hard. I didn't expect drug cops, like we, you know, we're sort of calling them, which is not exactly the story, but I didn't expect drug cops to be chasing, for example, Syrian arms dealers. Can you make that connection for us? Because it's like, well, wait a minute, this is an arms dealer. Why are you chasing an arms dealer? You're supposed to be going after a heroin trafficker in Maryland. What are you doing? Yeah, so there's a sort of technical reason in US law about how links to foreign terror organizations and drugs trafficking, but more sort of generally, it basically was a situation where they had a huge amount of sources.

You know, the difference between the DEA and other sort of agencies is that they have this huge sort of foreign source network of criminals. You know, other agencies also will have that, but they kind of get into places which other people aren't really paying that much attention to. You know, it would be some sort of money launderer in West Africa, who's working with cocaine traffickers, and they have a sort of undercover agent, and he'll say, oh, you know, by the way, I can also sell you some,

missile launches if you want or something like that. Like, oh, how's that? And I know a guy. He's in the Czech Republic and he can hook me up. And it sort of leads through these various stages into higher and higher levels of these sort of international criminal conspiracy. So they get into things like that and they just have this sort of different view of the world, which did lead to a lot of clashes, you know, because people were like,

what are you guys doing? You know, why are you getting involved in this stuff? It has frequently was a question for that. That makes sense. And I get that another agency might be like, hey, what's the deal? worthy arms trafficking people, but at the same time, what are you supposed to do if you're going after three tons of cocaine and someone's like, by the way, you want some RPGs? Are you supposed to be like, well, now that you've brought that up, I have to switch you over to my partner who's definitely not

an undercover agent at a different agency that has jurisdiction around these things. Nice knowing you. He'll be picking it up from here. I mean, it's like, what are you going to do? Right? You have to act like a criminal and you can't just, it would seem foolish not to pick up that thread. Like, we could either put them away for 50 years for arms trafficking, or we can just stick with the original idea that we had and get them for drugs only, or we can like get the whole thing and package it together. So I get where they're coming from. I mean, the point is to get rid of these guys, not to get a trophy for doing it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was also a different philosophy in a way where, you know, an intelligence agency isn't trying to build criminal cases. You know, they're not trying to

build a case that can stand up in front of a judge. And so it's a sort of different approach. And, you know, that means that it was just this particular time and place where post-9-11 there's a lot of money going into the DEA. And they started to do these, you know, now some of them quite famous sting operations like Victor Boot, the Russian arms dealer who recently was swapped for Brittany Griner, if you remember that. I do. You know, he was caught in a big, famous DEA sting operation in a hotel in Thailand. And that did shock people at the time.

You know, when that happened, people were like, what just happened? How did these guys do that? And I think it's sort of definitely built for there. So it's this interesting backdrop to where we are now and the world because, you know, sort of I think people now are more accustomed to the sort of interconnectedness and chaos of the wild as it is right now with, you know, all of these different governments hooking up and, you know, people doing business with each other and, you know, they're kind of interplay between, you know, parts of the shadow economy and governments and, you know, sort of sanctioned

governments and stuff. But back then, I think there was much more a focus on terror. But by getting into those networks, it's sort of a prelude. to kind of the world where we see it now. Why did, how did they get Victor Booth, then? Was he also selling drugs along with it? Because that guy's an arms dealer, right?

I know they call him the merchant of death, but that's like so unoriginal. This guy sells arms sort of famously right to bad guys, like Syria or maybe North Korea, whatever. I don't know. He just doesn't care sort of like African strongmen. I was looking this guy up earlier, and I was like, this is a guy with just no moral compass whatsoever.

He just doesn't care that they're going to slaughter civilians with this stuff. Like it's really, he knows it and just doesn't care. But was he also selling drugs? Is that how they got him? No, he was dealing with people who were connected to selling drugs. And so under the sort of statutes that came in, you know, if you are transacting with someone who is basically getting money from trafficking drugs, for example, a Latin American paramilitary group or something like that,

who might want to buy arms, then that comes under sort of, of US jurisdiction. That sort of opened up a lot of cases. Also, there are these sting operations where they would pose, you know, they're very controversial. They would pose as members of, you know, Fark, for example, the Columbia paramilitary and, you know, go down a whole sort of business arrangement. And that's how they got other people in Monsal Khazar, you know, the sort of Prince of Marbeah, he was called. But yeah, these were sort of these very aggressive law enforcement operations, which really, kind of surprised people. Yeah, I mean, we'll come to how things are now. But, you know, that was definitely a period of time, which I think at the time people didn't realize was it wasn't going to last forever,

put it that way. You mentioned that they use, I think in the book you said criminal impersonators or something, but that's just like an undercover agent posing as FARC or Hezbollah. And yeah, this fascinating stuff, I mean, that's a totally crazy position to be in. I imagine being like, well, I'm DEA, but I'm going to pretend I'm in Hezbollah and like go to a meeting in Syria or Lebanon or whatever, I don't even know, and meet with these people. It's just super high stakes. Tell me about, you mentioned a name earlier that I didn't quite catch,

but there's another guy in the book, Ali Fayad. How did they get this guy? This guy is, this is pretty interesting. Yeah, so he was a pretty fascinating character. He was because of both who he was and who he was working with and also sort of what happened after they got him. But he was a Lebanese-born arms trafficker who was living in Ukraine. So basically, he was actually an advisor.

to Victor Yanukovych, the Ukrainian president who was deposed. You know, basically, if we're flashing back, you know, back to he was the Russia-aligned president who was sort of deposed to had to flee to Russia during the color revolution there. So he basically just after that ended up getting caught in this DEA sting where he was offering to sell Igla missile launchers to Colombian paramilitaries. And it was in Prague. And so they kind of, in combination with Czech police, they sort of have to set up this

whole deal. They get really nervous about, you know, because, you know, people in the DEA were concerned that, you know, they, Fayyad had access to Interpol somehow. He had someone on the inside. Obviously, interpol information spreads around lots of different countries and they were always paranoid that maybe it might leak that they were doing an operation there. And then he, and they're worried he's going to be up on a no-fly list. And eventually he gets there. It's a sort of like classic thing with a hotel room, which is all wired up with cameras and microphones and stuff. And they arrest him. He's awaiting extradition. So he's in the Czech Republic

awaiting extradition to the United States and then a group of Czech citizens, one of which was his lawyer, another one was the lawyer's translator. They were on a trip to Lebanon and then they get kidnapped. So suddenly there's a situation where these unknown kidnappers

at the time no one knew who they were were basically saying, if you don't give us back fired, these guys aren't coming home. Wow. So it became suddenly a kind of international incident. Frequently, There were a lot of unintended or unknowable consequences from these sorts of dramatic operations.

Gosh, these guys really are sort of fearless if they're going to go ahead and kidnap people in the, I guess, host country and say, yeah, we're just going to kill these journalists or whatever if you don't release this clearly guilty terrorist. I mean, they just don't care. It's sort of shocking, but it also shows you what we're dealing with as a civilization, right? We're just dealing with people who don't care. Also, what's up with arms dealers in the Czech Republic? I feel like either it's a coincidence that those of those guys seem to be there. Is it just because it's sort of between the Eastern Bloc and Western Europe? Is it just geography?

Or is like, does the Czech Republic have something to do? I know they manufacture some weapons there, but you wouldn't think that'd be a requirement here in 2024 to be next to the factory. I think it's, you know, for historical reasons, as you say, you know, sort of an indigenous industry there and, you know, stockpiles potentially of, you know, obviously the sort of, after the fall of the Soviet Union, there were lots of stockpiles of kind of now redundant or unused munitions. So there's that sort of stuff too.

But yeah, it is interesting. You know, there was obviously the famous incident of there was a factory, which sort of mysteriously caught fire that wasn't, which was linked to Russian intelligence. There seems to be like a lot of arms shenanigans going on there. Really? I didn't hear about that. So they just lit the factory at fire? Why?

Were they supplying Ukraine or something like that? I can't remember the exact details. There's been some good work on it by various outlets, I think Bellingat as well. But I think it might be that they were shipping. It was a man who was shipping weapons to Georgia, I think. But don't hold me to that. But yeah. So, you know, it's this sort of weird world where you have these people who are acting, you know, effectively.

No one knows exactly who they're working for. You know, in the case, you know, we mentioned about Fayyad. You know, there was an interesting case where he was clearly important enough for five, people to be kidnapped to get him released. If I get kidnapped, I don't think that's going to happen. It's like the average person doesn't get that sort of insurance policy. So, you know, there is this sort of world, you know, which these sort of DEA operations tapped into of these, they're effectively sort of procurement agents. You know, they're doing lots of different things at the same time. They're working sometimes with governments. They're sometimes they're working under some sort of

diplomatic cover. You know, some of them are sort of honorary councils for countries, you know, And so they have sort of diplomatic passports and, you know, they can facilitate various things. They can move money around for people. They can procure weapons. You know, they're sort of complex and difficult to pin down because they don't really fit into the classic category of, you know, a sort of gangster. They're weird facilitation agents, sort of shadowy figures. I have to say, and I know that this sounds a little bit horrible, but that's just got to be

such an interesting career to have. I know these are bad guys and whatnot, but I just think, man, what a fascinating lifestyle to procure weapons for whoever and have a diplomatic passport and you're like the agricultural attaché for Zambia or in Zambia or whatever. And you're just like, yeah, I'm having meetings all the time and what you're really doing is just doing crazy international intrigue. I mean, it's just, morality aside, it's just got to be such a weird lifestyle. I mean, who are your colleagues?

Who do you talk to about a hard day at work? Nobody, right? No one. No one can, you can't lean on. on anyone for this, it seems like. Yeah, I mean, maybe there's some sort of secret, ultra-encrypted online support group for them or something. Yeah, that's a hell of a Discord server they got going.

Yeah. No, I mean, look, some of these characters are involved in terrible things, but, you know, I've spoken to, you know, sources and friends of mine who've dealt with these people who will say, you know, they're bad guys, but, you know, they are very interesting people. They are very intelligent. They're sort of talented. They've turned their talents.

to a terrible thing, but they're clearly extremely able people, you know, and sort of just organizing pretty complicated things. Yeah. Arranging for shipments to move around the world and without getting caught, it's not easy. Yeah, and also one of your parties speaks French, the other speaks Lebanese, Arabic. This other guy over here only speaks an African dialect of English and some, you know, local stuff. And you just have to sort of be fluent enough in all of those to make sure that nothing gets

lost in the translation and everything runs smoothly, and you got to do it without using a bank, right, or anything. And it's just like unbelievable. You'd think it would be high tech, and we'll get to this in a minute, but it's actually quite low tech, right? You'd think like, oh, it's going to be Bitcoin and this and that. No, it's more like, well, we'll get to it in a minute. I don't want to get ahead of myself here. Tell me how foreign governments and terror organizations, like Hezbollah, who's been in the news recently, how do they use drug trafficking to buy weapons and launder money and stuff like this? First of all, I thought they got funding from Iran.

So why do they need to do this at all anyway? Yeah, so that's a really good point. I mean, if you step back, you know, when you're a sanctioned government or you're a sanctioned sort of non-state actor like a sort of Hesbola is, you obviously just inherently can't just buy stuff. You can't use the banking system. You can't procure the things you need, especially if you're sort of involved in sort of military activity.

you know, let's say you want to buy night vision goggles and, you know, the night vision goggles you can get from China or crap. And so you want to get the night vision goggles from the United States. And you need to figure out a way to get those. So you have to sort of just immediately you have to start engaging in this sort of global shadow economy where you have to find these people like these facilitation agents, you know, who can do stuff for you. You know, they might not be in any way ideologically motivated. It might just be purely business. You just basically you, you just find a guy and you say, look, I will pay you X to get. me why. In terms of the sort of specific financing, it's like, you know, these are complex

organizations where they're often portrayed as being extremely hierarchical and sort of tightly controlled and disciplined. But of course, there are sort of a multitude of people in them and actions and different reasons for why people would start to engage in things connected with drug trafficking. So, you know, a more recent example would be, which has got more attention recently, is the Syrian government's involvement in Capagon trading, you know, which is an amphetamine. and it's like manufactured at absolutely mass, like industrial scale by the Syrian government. And, you know, the whole bunch of people were sanctioned. And it goes up to the very top, you know, like the US and the UK last year sanctioned Bashar al-Assad,

you know, his cousin. So it's really like the inner circle who were involved with this stuff. And it's also connected to Haspola connected figures and that's to be sort of moved. And this stuff ends up, you know, there was a massive seizure in Port Salerno in Naples. It was like a billion pills, you know, in 2020. In that sanctions, though, last year, they said that Syrian Capagon trade, I don't know how they quantify this, but the UK said that it was bigger than all of the Mexican cartels combined. So you have this situation where in that region, you know, you have people financing themselves through drugs because they have to in a way. Because, you know, if you don't have access to the international, that's not to excuse it, by the way, but I'm saying like, you don't have access to the banking system and you can't sort of transfer money around very easily and you need to raise revenues for expensive things, you know, especially in the context of the,

book. It was during the Syrian Civil War when Haspola got involved in a very, very different type of conflict than it was used to, which was extremely expensive. It was very interesting around the time of the Syrian Civil War. A lot of these DEA investigations were picking up these sorts of weird cells of people, you know, who were basically kind of piggybacking off the explosion in the European cocaine trade because they could basically, there's a huge amount of dirty money washing up in Europe and they can kind of launder it through. Middle Eastern Banks and then take a cut and make money that way. And then they were serving various purposes. So, you know, one of these cells, which was in a really big DEA operation in 2016 in Paris,

it was doing the drug money laundering. It was calling in on a daily basis to one of the most top Hezbollah financiers, a guy who's currently got a $10 million reward on his head from the US government. So they're like calling in, reporting in, laundering all this cocaine drug money and also procuring loads of weapons from Russia and Belarus. So there's sort of doing all of these things at the same time. So the reason why would be, you know, simply to raise funds, like, and circumvent sanctions. That's sort of a prime driver for that. But there's also other issues. In any organization, you know, there's corruption, there's people kind of skimming off money or, you know, there are people acting more autonomously. You know, that's always hard to sort of discern from the outside. Yeah, I can imagine.

I mean, the whole thing is so opaque, hence the title of your book. I actually did. a whole episode on Capagon, episode 864, this woman Caroline Rose, who you may know, she is the one who I think is in part in charge of quantifying a lot of this stuff, because that's like her area of research. And I remember vaguely, and so don't call me on this, but I think I said, how do you do this? And one of the things she did was look at the capacities of the factories is that they kind of know make it. And they just go, well, there's at least that much. And it's just this huge amount because imagine if every Pfizer manufacturing plant in America was making methamphetamine, that adds up fast. And Syria is smaller than America, but like Syria's got their

domestic pharmaceutical trade, which it was, I guess, pretty good at before it all fell apart. And they were just like, instead of making this knockoff Tylenol for babies, let's just make Capdagon and sell it to the Gulf region. And they just did that with every factory that's basically still standing, and then that money goes to Bashar al-Assad's government so that he kill murder his own people, basically. And it's funny you mentioned night vision goggles in Hezbollah, because back in the 90s, I've told the show before, I think, back in the 90s, my daddy worked at Ford in Detroit, and we have a huge, huge, huge Lebanese population in Detroit. And I think we actually, at one point, maybe not still, had the largest population of Arabs

outside the Middle East in Dearborn Michigan. And so we have tons of great Lebanese food, Arabic food, tons of people live in your neighborhood, tons of people work Ford and GM and all its stuff from Lebanon. But one day, my dad was like, oh, what's going on? And the FBI was in his office, taking out this dude's computer that he worked with, asking everybody questions. And he's like, that guy?

Like this nice Lebanese dude? He was, you know, just kind of working here one or two years. They're like, yeah, he's been. buying night vision goggles, like military surplus or whatever night vision, and shipping them to Lebanon. And my dad's like, oh, is that illegal? And they're like, it is when they're being sent to Hezbollah, which is what he was doing. So he was just like working it forward. Wow. But part time, either a procurement guy or a sympathizer at the very least of Hezbollah. And he was spending like thousands and thousands of dollars. And he was using his work computer to do it because he was just not

the brightest bulb in the box, I guess, and using the internet to do it. And then, And they're like, okay, well, we don't really need to ask, we don't need to dig too far to find this because all this network traffic is obviously monitored by Ford's IT department. So here he is talking unencrypted with like, you know, night vision suppliers and mailing it to Lebanon. My dad didn't fully understand why. But now that I'm an adult, I get that he was essentially trying to get around sanctions because Hezbollah can't just order those things to Lebanon themselves. They have to have third parties. And you see this, you know, this is a big thing now, especially post, you know, the invasion of Ukraine, you know, with Russia. Russia is obviously now under, you know, has overtaken Iran as the most sanctioned government

of the world. And, you know, to get the components, Western-made components it needs, it needs to find people to get them. So it needs to get, you know, American-made microchips, you know, to put into precision-guided missiles. And it has to get all of these types of industrial equipment, which are all sanctioned. And so, you know, there's been all these other cases now of sort of these sorts of procurement cells for Russia, trying to procure that stuff.

And it's just sort of a cycle. And eventually, you know, in the case of Iran, they figure out. how to build this stuff themselves. You know, they'll get an example of something and reverse engineer, you know, how an engine worked, you know, this thing with Bell helicopters, you know, I think there was some historical reason dating back to the Shah of Iran where they had a whole bunch of Bell helicopters. Post-the-revolution, they just always used these kind of imitations of Bell helicopters.

But some of these cases involve people, you know, trying to fly a ton of Coke on a private plane from the Dominican Republic to Belgium, whilst also at the same time. same time tried to procure Bell helicopter parts. Yeah, it's a strange world where people are sort of wearing multiple hats. Be like cracking open an Amazon van where you're like, oh, batteries, a spare remote for some sort of controller for a video game system, DVDs, like, it's just so, it's like whatever you whatever you all need. And you can, you must be able to tell when you bust somebody who they're working for because

it's like you get caught with a bunch of cocaine, it's like, oh, he's a drug dealer. But then when he's caught with a bunch of cocaine in like some weird turbine. for a Boeing 747, you're just like, okay, we need to call this up a couple of levels because normal people don't buy $30,000 fans made out of titanium or whatever. That's just not a thing. Yeah, I mean, look, there was a really interesting thing. It's in the podcast that I recently did, the Hot Money, the New Narcos. There's this episode, you know, which, no spoilers, but it involves sort of one of these

kind of procurement agencies really interesting. She's a Lebanese woman who is caught in a sting operation in New York. and the thing which I felt really interesting about looking through that case is that she's doing multiple things. She's saying, okay, you need to launder your cocaine money. You know, the undercover agent is basically, he's a DA undercover who's posing as a big time Latin American trafficker. And she's like, okay, any money you need to launder, I can do that.

But can you do me a favor? I need some weapons. You know, I really need to get hold of some, you know, all these sniper rifles and all this stuff. And, you know, he's like, of course, you know, whatever you need. You know, I can get this and stuff like that. But the really interesting thing about that is that the, the, near the end of the conversation,

she's like, look, the thing we can really, really make money from, if we want to make billions here is we need to get spare Boeing parts. That's the thing that we'll make tons of cash from. More than the drug money,

more than the weapons, you know, if we really want to get rich, Boeing parts. And that's just sort of like insight into, I think, how the economics of this work,

you know, where you have these choke points. You can't, if you're a sanctioning government, it's very difficult to get. You can't just buy a kind of imitation Boeing. part. You know, you have to have the real deal. Yeah, you probably don't want to buy an imitation

part for an airliner that you're going to fly in your own country with your own people. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah, it's just sort of, it definitely, it's exactly, as you say, it's kind of a little bit like some sort of Amazon ban where people are doing. And you have criminals meet criminals. You know, people in weird worlds meet other people. You know, that's frequently how, you know, law enforcement, RBADA were doing these operations that they sort of move up the chain that someone would introduce someone to someone else and eventually before you know it, you're in a situation. where you're talking to, yeah, an arms dealer in Prague or whatever.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Miles Johnson. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it is because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free. I know networking is kind of a dirty word. This is the circle of people that I know like and trust. It is not cringy.

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You can find it once again for free at six minute networking.com. Now, back to Miles Johnson. This gal that you're just talking about, she was quite interesting. And the DEA guy, Angel or whatever's pretend name was. That guy was really interesting. That was such an interesting guy. Yeah, fantastic guy, yeah. Just a talented dude.

And man, it must be pretty damn exciting when you're having a conversation about sniper rifles. And then somebody just drops in, oh, and by the way, and you're like, oh, this person is essentially working for Iran or Hezbole? Like, that's, you just, first you think you're talking to like a medium arms dealer who's going to just, you're like, oh, this is a crime. She's going to get five years for being excited. Oh, wait a minute. Nope. Now we're into the intelligence world. Now we're into.

It must just be hard to hide. the grin that's happening inside your brain when somebody brings up something like this, you know, over dessert and you're just like, oh, this is, this went from five years to 25 years prison sentence for this person. Yeah, I mean, that's what Angel, yeah, Angel says in the podcast. He says, you know, he couldn't help. He knew that there were cameras on him in this restaurant and he couldn't help but sort of smile to the camera, you know, to sort of give a little signal to himself, which I thought was like, is she not going to see that? But, you know, it seems to work out by it. He can just say, I like the sound of getting rich, you know, that's what I would have done.

I love the sound of this. I like getting rich. Yeah. And then she's like, great. You know, cheers. And you're just thinking, oh, you're going to be so mad when you find out who I really am. Yeah, absolutely. And she pled guilty.

She went to prison. And what I don't get, man, and I'm sure you're in the same boat is she gets released later. And then, of course, she vanishes. And I'm like, how do we let these people out? I mean, I know she served time in prison, but it just sucks because what happens is when, if Iran doesn't like us, they arrest some baker who's on vacation in visiting grandma in Iran who hasn't done anything. And we're arresting arms dealers and letting them out after they've served their sentence. And I know that's like democratic values versus authoritarian, crappy, you know,

theocratic regimes. But I don't know. It just, it's unfair, right? It's unfair. That's all there is to it. Well, I mean, adjacent to that is sort of, yeah, I speak to a lot of people in law enforcement, you know, in the U.S. and Europe. and, you know, one of the unifying themes

or what they say, especially more in Europe, is that money laundering can actually be a really good risk reward sort of setup. Yeah. Because if you traffic, I don't know, call it 20 million euros worth of cocaine, and you get caught, you're going to jail for a very long time.

Right. You know, in any jurisdiction. If you launder the proceeds of 20 million euros worth of cocaine, you might do three years, four years. Typically, you could be taking anything up to 20% a 20% cut of that to launder the money, to transfer the money from one place to another. So it means that some of the people involved in these worlds, especially if they're called

money laundering charges, actually get very low sentences in relation to the sort of stuff they're actually involved in. And that's just this sort of, I don't know why exactly that is. I think it must relate to a sort of typically a view of money laundering is not a victimless crime, but very different to sort of drugs trafficking. Right. It kind of looks like tax evasion as opposed to like, Well, this is a violent criminal. And it's like, well, okay, but the money they're laundering goes to people who are using it to buy bombs and blow up people at shopping malls in another place.

So that's not really the case anymore. Yeah, it's crazy to think about if you laundered $20 million and you get 20% and you get a short sentence, you could be making a million dollars a year sitting in prison reading. And then you get out and you're just like, it's like you just did four years of a job other people would kill to have that salary, right? and you've spent your time just catching up on books and Netflix or whatever in your Belgian prison. It's, again, back to the unfair thing. Hezbollah in Syria, you mentioned that they were in a very expensive conflict.

So Hezbollah is in Syria, and this is going on now, I think, protecting Bashar al-Assad, so the dictator of Syria. So Hezbollah is in Lebanon. They're a proxy of Iran, and they're protecting a dictator in Syria. Why? What's happening there? In the simplest sense, I mean, obviously that Bashar Assad is an al-A-A-Way. you know, it's a Shiite. But most importantly, if Syria were to fall and to be replaced, you know,

the Assad regime was to be replaced by some new government, which was potentially allied with the West or was hostile to Iran, you're sort of cutting off the bridge between Iran and Lebanon and Hezbollah. So that's like really, really strategically important. That's a sort of existential issue effectively. So that's really the driving factor that. I mean, of course, you know, that's not the stated aim. You know, there would be other reasons, you know, for it was very much state as you,

they were fighting Sunni extremists or, you know, Salafis, you know, people like ISIS, you know, and they were basically protecting Shiites in Syria. You know, at the end of the day, Syria is really, you know, strategically important for a number of countries. You know, that's why that civil war was just so, obviously, the human cost was horrific and it was just an extremely complex sort of multipolar conflict with all of these different countries having a sort of stake in it. It sort of sounds like Bosnia in complexity, right? There's all these different sub-malicious fighting,

and then everyone around them is like, well, we kind of want this side to win, so we're going to arm these dudes. And then external forces come in and arm other people and set up, and then every neighbor is like, well, I don't want this spilling over my border, so I'm going to start striking the side that's getting close to me or has it out for me,

like Turkey, Russia, you've got different Iranian militias in there, you got ISIS in there, the Syrian governments in there, the U.S. has some troops nearby there, training other troops and forces. It's just, it's a huge mess. I know that that's not over, over, but is it essentially sort of a win for al-Assad at this point? Yeah, very much so. I mean, he is in place. He is, you know, there's all pockets of the country which under his control, but that conflict is effectively over in that sense. You know, that's why, you know, in the current, situation we're in now. Iran, it wasn't always a sure thing by any means. I spoke to a lot of experts and academics about the conflict, which is unbelievably complex. And I think it's interesting

to look at the way the historiography has developed in terms of seeing how there was a narrative at some point where it was almost like, he's going to fall and it's inevitable. And now there are some scholars who saw that said that he wasn't ever really that much in risk. Depends on your interpretation. But now, yeah, he is very much there. He's sort of, to a certain extent, been rehabilitated in some quarters, you know, sort of been re-accepted into the Arab League, and it's awful. But, yeah, people's attention has moved to elsewhere. Yeah, wow.

I want to point out that it is very interesting that Hezbollah loves to argue that they are very principled and they're defending Islam and Arabs against Israel, but they were more than happy to go kill Muslim children in Syria to protect a dictator that is also murdering his own population. They didn't have any qualms throwing all of their resources. at that particular cause. Well, that was a super, that was controversial, to say the least. Really?

Yeah, but critics, I mean, you know, there were some people who were very vocal in their criticism who had even, I mean, yeah, it's a much more difficult expedition to justify than, you know, fighting Israel, for example. So, but every organization, wherever it is, you know, these sorts of, you know, paramilitary-style organizations, terrorist groups, they sort of, you know, they evolve, they change. They get involved in things which, you know, just like the, you know, just like the, militants themselves. You know, people, you know, I think there's always, we have a tendency to view people as sort of static in their lives. And I think people's reasons for doing things change.

They might be doing the same thing, but the reason for them doing it changes over their life and both of the lifetime of organization and also the lifetime of someone in that organization. You know, people might do things when they're 20 with sort of ideological further. And then for when they're 40, just kind of still be involved, but doing it for a very different reason. It might be for partial enrichment or just self-protection or just raw politics. And yeah, I think that evolution of these types of organizations is always difficult to capture and easy to overlook. We have a tendency to view them as sort of static entities. Yeah, that is a good point. I mean, if you look at dictators like Fidel Castro, right, so like this revolutionary and then you look at it and you're like,

now this guy is just an oligarch or chief oligarch of Cuba at this point. But he wasn't always like that. I'm sure if you caught him when he was 19 years old, he would have talked your ear off about communist revolution and making everybody equal, and then it's just like, eh, that's not going to work. But I can have a Rolls Royce. Tell me about the super facilitators and this car scheme, about how they were kind of laundering money, moving cars around. This is, I think, Hezbollah drug finance in Europe. I know I'm skipping around, but I warned you. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just another example of one of these schemes. As you sort of, you touched on earlier, there is this sort of assumption, I think, amongst a lot of people. And I also had this

assumption, and before I started looking at this in more detail, that money laundering is high-tech in some way. And actually, a lot of the money laundering schemes involve sort of fairly kind of complex in their logistics, but effectively simple mechanisms of transferring value from one place to another in the world. And usually by transforming your one technique is transforming cash into something else, shipping it somewhere, and then transfer it back into cash. And so a really good way to do that. And this was a scheme that the DEA got very involved in sort of investigating back around. I think it was sort of around 2008, 2009, eventually actually led to like a pretty big settlement with a Lebanese bank.

But it was, yeah, it was buying up cars in cash in the United States, shipping them to West Africa, and then selling them in West Africa. So you'd have these car lots. You have like satellite images of these car lots, which are just empty spaces. And then within sort of a couple of years, there are just millions. I mean, maybe not millions, but really thousands and thousands of cards as far as I can see. And that was a way of transferring this value. You know, it's a very effective way to move large amounts of money in a way which you just could not do if you were trying to sort of send that through the banking system. At the moment you were trying to put that into an account, it would be flagged.

So it was a pretty simple but effective scheme. You think, though, man, it's got to sting a little bit because you lose so much. value if you're buying a bunch of new cars and then you're just parking it. I mean, immediately, like the cliché is you drive it off the lot and it loses some double digit percentage of its value. And if you're doing that times tens of thousands and then you don't necessarily have anywhere to put the car to sell the car to turn it back into cash, it's like, oh man. But I guess if you're selling drugs, you just, the markup is fine and you don't care and the margins are huge. And it's leakage. You know, I think you accept when you're trying to

launder money, you accept you're going to have to, it's going to cost you 10%, 20%, sometimes even more, depending on the jurisdiction. I found, like, diving into this stuff, you know, one of the things I found interesting was you look at these money launderers and they have different rates for different countries. You know, so in Europe, they'll say like, oh, in Germany, yeah, sure, I'll charge you whatever, 5%, because it's easy to work in Germany. You know, Germany is a lot of use of cash still. But in France, France is difficult.

France, I'm going to charge you 15 or 20%. You know, there's various different, so it's a market, a criminal market rate, sort of which is set by the market just on sort of basically general perceptions amongst this group of people who are engaged in that of how risky and how difficult it is. And I found that really interesting. But I mean, one of the things which, so we learned, for example, during the podcast was that, you know, the price is going, the rate which is being charged is going down. Really? Yeah, in Europe as in. Why? That's a really, yeah.

Why would that be? It's a really interesting question. And, you know, these people who work in law enforcement, when they say, because, you know, now there's so much drugs money in Europe. They're basically, there's so much demand. You know, basically people are laundering a lot more. The capacity of these laundering networks has gone up and there's sort of new entrants into the market and they sort of buy market share. It's like any other service. You know, they're sort of like introductory offer. I'll launder your money to, you know, Dubai for 1% this time instead of the normal 5 or something like that. And so it sort of

shows something else about what's going on to the sort of criminal economy through just like the rate which is being charged. But the cars, you know, that was a, that was an important scheme, but there's sort of since it has this sort of nature of it where people are extremely innovative. You know, they come up with new ruses and new schemes to sort of launder money all the time. There's always some new things. There's a constantly evolving marketplace. It's just sort of, it's not something which is traditionally viewed through the lens of

business school studies or something in terms of the way in people running these operations. But again, it's not to celebrate it, but it's just an interesting parallel sort of economy where people are trying to innovate just like anywhere else. Yeah, shadow economy. I did an episode several years ago, episode 67 with this journalist Sam Cooper, who talks about Chinese buying real estate and Canada and moving money around and stuff like that. And he mentioned often that the cash doesn't have to move because you'll have somebody in one country who essentially says, okay, let me call my cousin who owns a laundromat over in Vancouver.

And the cousin's like, yeah, I've got $3 million laying on the floor of my laundromat right now that somebody brought over in like several duffel bags, you know, or a van or whatever. And then the cousin's like, okay, great, I'll release this $3 million to you, your family here in China, less 5% for our fee. Because I was like, how are they moving vans and truckloads literally of $100 bills from China to the US or from Syria to Canada. I mean, who knows? And the answer is they just don't have to. They have these sort of really low-tech trust-based systems. There's one called Hawala. Do you know anything about this? It's like an Arabic sort of thing. Yeah. That's a really, really important

Hawala or Hawala kind of like systems, exactly as you describe, where the cash doesn't actually have to physically move. Really critical part of how this all sort of functions. And for me, I found that really hard to get my head rounder first. Just as you're saying, as you're like, how does that work? What do you mean you're saying? The money doesn't move.

That's a critical part of drug money laundering around the world, you know, because it's a face with, it's like this sort of informal banking system where there are corresponding trades, you know, in the same way in sort of a clearinghouse, like a financial clearinghouse,

you would net off trades. You know, it's like someone wants to sort of do one thing on one side of the network, and then that corresponds with a customer on the other side of the network wants to do the opposite, thing. And so they can kind of deposit money or take out money and it means that, you know, it doesn't actually have to move. And that makes it really, really, really difficult to trace the money. Yeah. There's no transaction records. Like you can't, you know, there'll be a ledger probably somewhere. But, you know, it's extremely difficult for law enforcement. Once the money goes

into that system, it's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It's gone. It is so interesting. Because again, I know, like, money laundering, all right, we're going to use this cryptocurrency. We're going to use Monaro, it's untraceable, it's encrypted, yada, yada, and then we're going to move it to these, no, we're going to use something that existed before banks existed, before HACH, well before electronic transfer, before there was any sort of bank that we used by anybody but the King of England or whatever, we were transferring money for centuries by scratching it into, I don't know, papyrus with a reed, and that means that this guy has like three shekels on account here, and he can spend him however he wants. But you can do that now with probably tens of millions of

relatively safely and reliably, which just, yeah, it's like mind-blowing. I would never trust that. So I send your cousin this money and I'm never going to see it again, and you just promise me that it's all good and you're in another country? I mean, that's it. They have various sort of trust-based, even just dropping off the money, because really there'll be a network of couriers, you know, so it's like the guy who's really running the network isn't touching the money so much.

Yeah, there'll be a sort of people who go to collect the money. So, you know, someone will call up. And frequently, you know, in the European cocaine trade, for example, a cartel will have their money launderer in place in Europe. And their buyer will then just be say, I call this number. Then they'll be like, hi, you know, they'll give a fake name. And I say, look, meet me here. And you have to drop, you know, a pretty large amount of cash with that. And so just to trust in that situation, they frequently have systems of, you know, they'll have a bank note.

And they'll have the serial number of the banknote. And they'll give that at advance. and you have to basically provide that serial number to show you're the actual person. Oh, wow. That's a really frequently used system as some sort of guarantee. But it's just interesting sort of paradox where these networks are sort of facilitated by technology in a way where like now in the modern age you can do stuff as a crime boss, which you definitely couldn't do 30 years ago.

You know, traditionally criminal organizations are rooted in like a territory, like a home turf. Yeah, Sicily or whatever. And that's all what gives them their strength. But you know, you now have these more modern types of networks, which are much more rootless and stateless and can be based in different parts of the world. And you can, because of like encrypted communications and smartphones and stuff, you can run stuff with this technology. But paradoxically, the stuff which enables them to get really big and do stuff which they can

do before is a huge weakness. Because obviously, you know, you had in these cases in Europe where they crack into these networks and suddenly see absolutely everything that these guys are doing. So keeping it simple, just moving cash physically. or writing notes on a piece of paper and handing them to someone, the lowest tech option becomes the sort of lowest risk way of running these organizations. You mentioned the technology, the encrypted phone system, I think it was called Encroachette. Law enforcement ends up breaking this.

Honestly, though, it seems like the name gives it away because it let law enforcement encroach on all the criminals' business. And I'm thinking, like, you should have seen that coming, guys. Come on, Encrochat. Am I missing the cleverness here? Or was it just like this was doomed to fix? These were companies that were advertising to their client base, which obviously were serious, organized criminals. And they were very much sort of signaling the only reason why you'd want to use this service if you are a serious organized criminal.

You know, so they're basically like telegraphing to the world, like we are providing a service for these guys. And there's still unpicking these cases. There's, you know, there were other platforms. There was one called Sky ECC, which was a huge platform in Europe. from just last week, there was this crazy case in the United States relating to this attempted, I don't know if you saw this, there was this Iranian drugs trafficker used one of these encrypted platforms to order Hell's Angel in Canada to go and murder some dissidents, Iranian dissidents living in the United States. Wow.

This was all just done on these encrypted networks. And it was done on behest, according to the indictment by the US Department of Justice. who's done on the behest of Iran's intelligence services. So they're sort of using a top drug trafficker in Iran to try to kill people abroad through Hell's Angels using encrypted messaging platforms. That's the sort of stuff which wasn't happening 20 years ago, if you know what I mean.

Yeah, of course. That guy just went from murder for hire to terrorists and is probably going to have a tougher time defending that in court, I'm guessing. I don't think you can say my client didn't know that his clients who'd paid him to murder somebody were, foreign agents. I don't think that flies too well in court. I don't know. TPD. I don't know. Yeah, it's actually TVD. But it's sort of very bizarre, you get these very bizarre connections now, you know, between, yeah, for example, House Angels and Iranian spies. Like, why are they

talking to each other? It's surreal. It is disturbing that these crime bosses and terrorist organizations can hire an assassin basically like they order a pizza. You mentioned in the, I think it was the book of the podcast where it's just like a couple of text messages. and somebody's like, who needs to go to sleep? And it's like, here's the guy, we don't know why, we don't care why. Here's what his address is and here's what you're going to get. And the guy's like, all right, I'll just go kill this person and that I know nothing about. That's really disturbing.

It is really disturbing. And I mean, it's something which, you know, I think it got a lot of attention. You know, there were things in the past, recent past where, you know, there were sort of online, you know, forums or like the dark web or something where people could try and, yeah, Silk Road, for example, where people could try and order contract killings or something like that. But as far as I'm aware, that never, nothing ever really happened. And, you know, whereas in these instances, I mean, this isn't like a public forum where it can be done. But yeah, there really were cases where people were just ordering, as you say, murders like you would order a pizza, you know, and from anywhere at the world. And it's sort of, I always thought, you know, potentially that was somewhat of the explanation between this, behind this kind of jump in these sorts of murders in Europe, drug-related murders.

Because maybe if you're just ordering something on a smartphone, you're not really paying as much attention to it as you. you normally would or understand the severity of what you're, I'm not in any way, excusing them again, but maybe they just, it's almost gamified or something. They're just sort of sending messages to people, ordering people to do stuff from thousands of miles away. They feel much more invulnerable. I think so. And also, if you're an old school mafia guy and you want to kill somebody, you have to send like your cousin to go and do it. And they're connected to you. And if something happens to them, it's bad. And then people are going to be sad and upset and angry and question

you. But now, if you're sending some random biker who you've never, met who can't be traced back to you very easily unless, you know, the CIA is watching or the FBI. Who cares, right? Oh, he got shot trying to kill that guy. Fine, whatever. We sent him like 50 grand. That's no skin off our nose, or whatever it was. That's no skin off our nose. Just find another idiot who's going to say yes to the same contract and try again. I don't care. What's for lunch, right? So the calculus of like, we might get caught doing this. Tommy might get injured doing this. Mom's going to cry if he gets shot. All that is gone. All that's out the window. Absolutely. I think that's a really important point. I think it basically, it creates

plausible deniability in a way which you wouldn't have traditionally. You know, you just wouldn't be able to. And that's for anyone who's using his services. You know, the case of that Hells Angel thing, you know, the Iranian state allegedly, or if it's like just other crime bosses, you can, you can do stuff where the downside for you is much lower, clearly, as you're saying, you know, if it can't be traced back to you very easily and if you don't even know the person who's doing is you don't care about them, then the cost goes down. And I think, yeah, that's played a big, big role. So it's just sort of, yeah, there's definitely a sort of technological factor in there,

which is sort of accelerated some of these things. You always hear about the Netherlands being one of the richest and most stable countries in Western Europe or in the world, really. But now, and this isn't, I guess, just the Netherlands, but it sort of focused on the Rotterdam cocaine trade. Now it seems like there's more and more drugs and there's more and more violent crime. There's more and more murders and assassinations as drug kingpins basically try to tighten their control of Europe's cocaine market, which again principally

flows through the port at Rotterdam. It seems like European law enforcement, and I'm wondering what your take is, it seems like European law enforcement with like their unarmed cops in many places. Are they ill-equipped to handle this level of violence and this threat to stability or are they adapting well? Because it's like they're just not used to this. It's a good question. I mean, I think in an international context, the number of murder in Europe is super low still. Even in like Holland and stuff, you know,

it's more that the style of violence has been very shocking and some of the things that have happened, for example, the murders of journalists and lawyers and it's sort of much more of an attack on like civil society. And that's really, really shocking.

In terms of absolute numbers, you know, it's way lower than, you know, like for example, just a large American city for obvious reasons, things like availability of firearms and stuff like that. In terms of the response,

you know, I think, yeah, European law enforcement has had to really, really, really catch up because there were things happening sort of four or five years ago, which shocked everyone. You know, I think, you know, stuff your listeners might have heard of, you know, like, for example, the Irish Kinnahann cartel, the feud they got engaged in in Dublin after there was an attempt on the son, Daniel Kinnahann's life. And, you know, this was a sort of feud which went on for years. There were 18 people, I think, were murdered.

There were sort of 40 attempts on people's lives, stuff which had never been seen. on the streets of a European city where hitmen were being contracted and flown in from abroad to sort of like take our rivals. That was stuff which meant that yes, there were elements of the approach that had to change for European law enforcement

and they did make, you know, it has been complex, it's been really difficult because, you know, one of the things, which is a big factor on this, is that a lot of these European crime bosses were not in Europe. So they were in Dubai, for example, and there was not an extradition agreement with Dubai.

So you could be ordering your murders on your phone, and then it would take a very long time to sort of solve what actually happened there, especially before they cracked these networks, and you're also in a country where you can't be extradited from. There was a huge challenge and hurdle for European law enforcement. But I mean, more, they have made progress. You know, they have got some big people, but there are still people who are big who are out there. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Miles Johnson. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors.

All the deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show are all clickable and searchable at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And if you can't remember the name of a sponsor or you're wondering if we have a certain sponsor, shoot me an email, Jordan at Jordan Harbinger.com. I am more than happy to surface that for you. Yes, it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Miles Johnson. Yeah, I did an episode about this, episode 860 with Mitchell Prothero, who talked about the cocaine trade in Europe. And he mentioned there was one guy, I think he's Albanian or something like that, and he's in a prison. And essentially they have like missiles mounted on top of the prison

because he was like, yeah, I'm going to have, I'm going to get a helicopter rescue and they're going to RPG the roof. And it was normally if a prisoner says that, it's like, hey, shut up and eat your breakfast. But they're like, oh, this guy actually is kind of credible. Like he could pull off having a helicopter come in with a guy with an RPG that blows a hole in the roof and then like gets him out of here. So we need to be ready to show. shoot down helicopter. It's just like, where are we? This sounds like an active war zone.

Yeah. I mean, it's, I think that might have been Riduantaghi. Yes, that's who it was. That is really unbelievably shocking stuff. You know, and he is, you know, as Mitch Prothero said, in a high security compound, you know, because he's seen as so dangerous. But, you know, that's something which I think leads to this adjustment. You know, people, I think anyone who thought it wasn't a problem before these things

like to happen, I think probably realizes that, uh, You can't deal with these complex organized criminal networks in the same way you would deal with like a local gag. Right. But yeah, people, people were definitely completely shocked by the brazenness. It's really the brazenness of it all. You know, it's just in the podcast, you know, we speak to a lot of law enforcement people who, you know, they point out. They're just like, it's not smart if you're a criminal to murder people. It's extremely bad for business.

You know, the moment you start killing people and, you know, hiring hit men and having shootouts and stuff like that, law enforcement, the state has to focus. on you. There's no excuse for the government to not go after you then. All of these guys in different contexts, be it in Ireland or in the Netherlands or in other countries, they have sort of effectively made a decision where they're like, we don't care. You know, we're not going to get caught. We can do this and we can be, you know, we're kind of far away. You know, and that was just, that was the brazenness of that was pretty shocking. Anyone before would have, who had a sort of business to protect would have not made those same decisions. And that's a sort of generational shift. Yeah, you would think. And it's a scary one, right? Because it's no longer like, oh, we got to

keep things quiet. We don't want to get civilians cut up in this. Now it's just like, go blow up the whole thing that that guy's in. And then who cares? Because we're not going to get caught and we don't give a crap. Right. So it's almost like become terrorism in many ways or like adjacent to terrorism. They might not have political goals, but the reckless disregard for everything around them is kind of scary. And it seems like you can't really clamp down on this with local police resources. You really need like an FBI or a DEA to be like, okay, we're dismantling this. And we've got, you need like the, what was that task force that took down Al Capone, right? The untouchables. You kind of need like untouchables to take these guys down because the reason they came up with that group back in whatever the

Al Capone days is because the cops are like, what do you want us to do? They're threatening our families, the threatening the judges. And so they were like, all right, we need cops who just don't care. and are just going to go after these guys, even if they're going to get killed doing it. And I think that was kind of the story behind that. And you really need some, but you need a task force like that, except it's got to be a hell of a lot larger

because you're not just going after Al Capone. You're going after like Taggi and 18 of his closest competitors in one area. Yeah. It's crazy. Absolutely. Yeah, it needs to be international. You know, you need to get, you know, that's what they did. They basically got the Americans involved.

They got the DEA involved. You know, there were multiple different law enforcement agencies. across Europe sort of working together, increasingly sharing intelligence. And they did manage to get some of these guys. But yeah, that said, some of them are still at large. Sure. That's with the combined sort of might of all of these governments. You know, like, I'm like loath to criticize, you know, these, yeah, I think the law

enforcement effort has been, they've done a very good job in very, very difficult circumstances. It's a very, very, very difficult thing to do. But it is fascinating for me that in this modern age, that you can be a sort of fugitive or you can have you sanctioned and you can, you know, and have all of the attention from all of these governments and the U.S., treasury and stuff, and you can still be out there. You know, somehow you have, for a year or so, you've evaded capture. I find that kind of mind-boggling.

I feel like you need nation-state resources to do that, though. Again, I'm no expert. But if you're connected to Iran and you're Jordan Harbinger one day, but then tomorrow I'm Mike Johnson, it's going to be hard to catch me because I've got a totally legit passport with a fake backstory, a mailing address, property, a bunch of money and other resources at my disposal, right? So it probably gets a lot easier if you're not just some, like, fugitive who's got a pocket full of cash who's trying to avoid getting caught.

I think facial recognition may change some of this because change your identity all you want, man, but if you don't have a brand new chin and cheeks and nose and lips and forehead and whatever else and eyes, you know, that stuff's getting harder to fool, you can walk through an airport and you think you're safe. and they're like, oh, our new firmware update makes it so we know that that guy is that drug trafficker who looks totally different, but it's definitely him, according to the computer. Let's arrest him and take a blood sample.

Oh, look, we got this guy who's been on the run for 20 years. Like, that's going to happen at some point. Yeah, but then I guess also the other thing is if you've got the backing of a state who's protecting you, you need to ensure that you are still useful to that state. Right. You know, because there'll be a point perhaps when they're just like, do we really care about this guy anymore? especially if you're on the run, you can't run your criminal operation anymore, you're extremely hot, so you can't talk to people, you can't move money around, you might be extremely rich,

but you can't get access to any of that money. You will eventually run out of money to pay people off or pay your friends in your host country, and then what happens? Yeah, I agree. I can't imagine living like this. You talk about this guy, Sammy Issa, and he has all these quirks. Like, he never leaves the same door he went in. And I'm like, imagine every day you have to walk in the front of the time.

or you go out the back door. You got to change clothes when you're in there. So you've got to bring the clothes with it. It's like you're just light. Your whole life is just stress. You're just worried about getting shot or arrested every second of the day. Oh, unbelievably so. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I just must, I can't even imagine the amount of discipline it must take and how exhausting that must be. And eventually how I think anyone would just eventually just get tired and just be like, yeah. I just can't do this anymore. No. Or they would be captured or killed. Yeah. I mean, that's why, you know, I find these stories when there's these cases and you can get really good insight into the lives of these people are living. You know, frequently, you know, a lot of the evidence and stuff I was working with was wiretap and environmental intercept evidence and stuff, which was mixed with, like, surveillance photos and, like, phone messages.

You get really, like, kind of granular insight into the day to day of some of these characters. And, you know, you see the paranoia. You see the only time, you know, in the case of the mafia guy in the book, chasing shadows, you know, he he doesn't have anyone really to talk to him apart from his girlfriend. The only place he talks to her is in her kitchen. So he comes home. She lives in his apartment. He comes home from work, you know, his work, quote unquote, you know, which is drugs trafficking. You know, sort of, he comes back and says, are this guy such an idiot. He's screwed up this thing with his payment or he hasn't, you know, booked the right thing for the guy from the cartel. He's going to, in that, um, he comes back. Um, Rome, you know, there's an environmental intercept that's just capturing all of these conversations. And so you kind of get a little bit of insight into the paranoia and eventual desperation, you know, when things go wrong,

how just how claustrophobic that world must be, you know, where you just, you can't do anything. It would be hard to live well, even in a place like Dubai, which does an extradite, because now anybody who does business with you, if you're sanctioned, also becomes a criminal. So it's not like you can just find,

oh, I'm going to just use a cutout for this. It's like, no, anybody, you're just radioactive. You can't use a branch of a bank that is in another country because that branch is a subsidiary of another bank that has a location in New York, and they're like, we're not going to get our shit frozen for this, yutz. No way. So you're just untouchable unless you have like two or three

really, really good cutouts that are very deniable. That's got to get expensive. I mean, you've got to have people who are like, I'm taking a lot of risk dealing with you. Everything is 50% more expensive. and that means everything is more expensive because somebody's going to get in real trouble. I mean, also, I mean, I think is people,

you used to have a lot of, let's say, you know, you're a crime boss, you had a lot of money stashed away in various different things. You know, it could be in art in Singapore, it could be in crypto, it could be properties in Turkey or whatever. The moment you're on the run and the moment you're longer there to sort of run the day-to-day operations, people will start to steal from you.

Sure. I'll be like, oh, yeah, he's not going to mind if I just take this thing. supposed to be looking after for him, you know. No one's ever going to know. It's by its nature, hidden wealth. You know, it can't be, it's meant to be obscured. It's not going to be in their name.

It's might be movable property, you know. So there's a lot of risks at that point when you become sanctioned. You become so hot. You can't do anything anymore. You can't run your organization anymore. Perhaps, you know, people also stop fearing you as much. Because these people can't retire frequently, you know, one of the things we're talking about the brazeness and the brutality of some of the things that they were doing,

It sort of reflects the sort of mentality, I think, of there's no exit plan seemingly for these people. Because if they were rationally planning an exit, they would not be doing horrific things like ordering murders all across Europe or whatever. It kind of reflects a mentality of almost like they just have to ride it through to the end. Yeah. Because once they stop, you know, I think they're multiple, you know, they become vulnerable. That's a good point. I guess it's all just like, I'm going to die in this game. So I got to do whatever I can to survive until then.

And it's just like, as a normie, I can't get behind that, right? Like, I can't, I would never, nobody in their right mind would ever do that. And I guess that's why the dream for most organized criminals, right, is to get into legitimate business and then maybe have your kids run that because you're always going to be a piece of crap who's going to go to jail or die. But like, maybe your son can be a guy who owns a manufacturing plant or an import, export business that isn't just going to end up splattered all over the pavement for no good reason. The dying wish would be to just like maybe have a generational exit, but it's not going to be for you.

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, that's in the work I've done on the Calabrian Mafia, the Andrangata, you know, it's relatively well known in Italy and amongst the sort of the police in Italy and experts on that stuff that they're the younger generation who've gone to do MBAs. Their fathers are crime bosses. They've been sent to do MBAs and some of them in pretty prestigious universities. But then the question is, is that to go legit? or is it to bring those skills into the family business or transform the family business? But then, you know, there's also that interesting, sort of like classic tale of, you know,

in the case of the Kinnahann cartel, which I'm sure your listeners will know about, you know, the Irish crime family who were sort of very prominent figures in the European cocaine market. That was a case of a father who built a criminal empire and his son, you know,

plausibly could have gone legit. There was something where he had, had this sort of, you know, clearly he continued in crime and is now sanctioned, but he then at the same time became a boxing promoter and he was promoting Tyson Fury and became a sort of celebrity almost. And there's this sort of duality, this tension there in a character where you want to be accepted as a public figure and a legitimate person. You know, this is a guy who hired lawyers to, you know, threatened journalists to sue them if they had connected him with crime. He would have PR.

consultants and all this stuff but at the same time he's running a criminal empire right so yeah and those two things are not going to be able to be compatible for forever so i think you know there's there's a sort of interesting psychological aspect of that of like why why someone maybe it's just part of their identity but why if someone had the option of going legitimate why they wouldn't take that yeah this is an interesting sort of aside right because boxing has always been it's always got this little underbelly of like dirty fights, dirty money, underground this, unsanctioned stuff. And they're always trying to move away from that. So when you have an organized criminal who's becoming a big time boxing promoter

and getting a lot of attention because essentially he's overpaying for fighters because he's using criminal proceeds allegedly to do that, that makes everybody kind of be like, oh, we work so hard to get away from this crap. And here's this mafia guy, essentially money laundering. What was he doing? He's like paying his fighters more money than they were actually winning from the fights. So he was essentially going to lose money on every fighter, but it doesn't matter because if you're using that to wash dirty money, you don't care if you lose 10 or 20% on the fighter,

right? On the fight or the fighter, because you can afford to do that. It's the cost of doing business. And I guess this got uncovered in a lawsuit because the litigator was a former prosecutor. So he was like, wait a minute, just doing the math here. This looks like money laundering. And that was kind of the beginning of the end for this kid, this kid. Yeah. I mean, that's the allegations. I mean, at least, you know, what can be said is that, you know, this is a guy was a major criminal figure who very quickly rose to the absolute top of the boxing world, you know, like to the very pinnacle. He was hanging out with people like Bob Aram, you know, who, you know, is a boxing hall of fame member promoted Muhammad Ali. You know, he was promoting

Tyson Fury, one of the most famous boxers and the whole lot. He was really at the top. You know, so it kind of shows like however he did that, yes, let's say it definitely coincided with the same time he was running a criminal group. He's an interesting spin, as you say, on an old story. It's a 21st century kind of version of that story of, you know, sort of crime and boxing, which has always had a relationship and dirty money being involved in boxing. But it's at a very different place that, you know, Dubai. Yeah.

People are probably wondering why we keep mentioning Dubai. But it does seem like a lot of these weird characters congregate in Dubai. And it's like one of the guys on your podcast was saying, oh, it's like a mix of Manhattan, Beverly Hills and Miami. What does he mean by that? Yeah, so Dubai, he says it's like that because, you know, Dubai is a place. You know, for people who, I'm sure your list is no, but for people who don't know, you know, it's part of the United Arab Emirates, it doesn't have, unlike its neighbors, natural resources wealth. And so the kind of entire economy has been based on attracting kind of finance and real estate and sort of creating a tourist destination. So it has this huge skyscrapers,

which make it a bit like Manhattan in that sense. In terms of its model, you know, it's become in 1980s, it was a very different place, but, you know, it's sort of grown up into this metropolis, I guess, where, you know, there's a lot of luxury, everything is a very, sort of this bling aspect to it where they have these islands which are shaped, you know, like, you know, one in the shape of a palm, and they have these sort of, you know, luxury real estate developments on there. They attract a lot of money from around the world.

it's well known for not having particularly stringent anti-money laundering concerns. So people bring in money, unexplained wealth from all around the world, and kind of park it in Dubai. And because it has this sort of luxury element to where it has, you know, salt bay is a restaurant or whatever. And it has, you know, it's like what's called a seven-star hotel, which doesn't even exist. Or so. All of these things, people will come from around the world to be there. And that creates this weird, you know, the way I describe in the podcast,

sort of the Star Wars canteener of sort of strange characters in the Middle East, where you'll have like a soccer player, you'll have a hedge fund manager, you'll have an arms dealer, you'll have a drugs trafficker, you'll have an Instagram influencer, and they're all sort of sitting in the same restaurant taking selfies or whatever. And it's this very bizarre melting pot of the sort of like collision of multiple things, like international and like financial forces. I've got some friends who work in Dubai in various industries. And my own group of friends who work in Dubai are also kind of like the Star Wars canteen. It'll be like a hairdresser who went there because the money's better. I'm a sous who went there because the money's better. And another person's like, yeah, I'm former CIA and that's all I'm going

to tell you. And you're like, okay. And then there's another person who's like a personal protection specialist. And he's like, yeah, my clients are also members of what you would call the Star Wars canteen, right? Like a Pakistani scam call center owner or somebody investigating Chinese gangsters running crypto fraud scams or Indian mafia guys or people who can't go back to Afghanistan because of the Taliban. Absolutely. But they're somehow really rich. And I'm like, okay, that doesn't seem legit at all.

So you see that. And the expert you had on, man, he had such a good explanation. He said something like, Dubai is the brackish inlet where the salty waters of criminality meet with the freshwater of legitimate business, which sounds like a great recipe for money laundering and pretty much everything else that you normally don't want in your country. Yeah, I mean, that was a fantastic. His name's Matthew Page. He's worked at the Carnegie Endowment, and he's a very interesting guy.

He used to weather the US government and now sort of writes about kleptocracy. And so did this fantastic report on Dubai where, yeah, and his description, as you said, is perfect. You know, it's a sort of place where dirty money and clean money can kind of come together and just sort of like merge. And no one really, you know, no really asked any questions. And it's a very modern. It's a very modern phenomenon. something where he said to me something really interesting, I thought, which was like so about, like what he called global elite formation, you know, where historically, if you were someone

who was sort of wanted to could be a crime boss, you know, or whatever, but someone who had a lot of money and wanted their kids to sort of join the global elite somehow. In the past, maybe, you know, a hundred years ago, you might send them to, you know, Yale or Oxford or something, and they would have got a degree. And, you know, now there's a sort of weird new style of elite formation where people go to Dubai and places like that and take Instagram selfies of themselves and restaurants. You know, but it's a sort of status is conferred by wealth in a different way in that environment. It is sort of changing the way which sort of like status elites, global elite status sort of functions.

I know a couple of people who track, for example, Iranian Ayatollah's families' Instagrams. I know this is very niche, but it'll be like, which is ironic because some of the photos that they share, it's like two girls dressed in basically something that looks like dental floss and they're at a club. And it's like, who's that? Oh, those are the grand Iatollah's great granddaughters or granddaughters. And you're like the ones that look literally like show girls and are just doing kissy face to the camera with a bottle of champagne, their grandpa is this super conservative, theocratic authoritarian in Iran. It's like, yeah, really shocking. And of course, they're in Dubai. I haven't seen that. Is that, are they in Dubai? Sometimes London, when they're

partying, but sometimes Dubai. And a lot of the Russian oligarchs kids are in Dubai as well. There was one sort of famous gaff. I don't remember whose daughter this was, but she posted something that was like, no war. And it was like, hey, do you know how daddy pays for your villa in the French Alps when you go skiing with your friends? Dumbass? He starts wars and sells weapons to countries. So maybe take that post down. She took it down. But people, you know, her photos are all just her partying all over the world. And it's like, yeah, your daddy's a bad man. It sounds like an interesting niche. Yeah.

I wrote a piece last year about Ifgeny Progozin, the Wagner guy's family, where we kind of did a bunch of digging on it. It was interesting because we basically saw that they, although he had been sanctioned for quite a long time before the Russia's invasion of Ukraine, his family had basically just been living this life of luxury in Europe. His daughters were like show jumping.

They had this stable of horses, show ponies or whatever, and they were competing in all these competitions in the Mediterranean and stuff like. that. Like, you know, his youngest daughter competed in an event in Spain on the eve of the evasion and then obviously like rushed back out, rushed to Russia. But yeah, it was an interesting insight into how, you know, that's an important point in terms of these sorts of people we're talking about, you know, in terms of like law enforcement action against them or sanctions or whatever, you know, it gets quite complicated with families. You know, there are people who argue

that if someone will say, okay, I might go to jail, but my kids will have millions of dollars, that's a trade I'm worth making. You know, you would say then if you don't seize that wealth somehow, you know, is that just an incentive to kind of commit crime or do whatever? Yeah. And there are the people who'd say, you know, the families are distinct. You know, there are these legal battles which are going on. Progosen's mom, who I think is last time I checked 86 or maybe 87,

she attempted to overturn the European Union sanctions against her. You know, so she was sanctioned by the European Union. She said, look, he's my son, but I don't have anything to do. with him. My son may be the most famous warlord in the whole world. I don't have anything to do with him. And she did succeed, I think. It's a tricky legal issue and there's a tricky moral issue about what you do about that. I do feel bad for somebody like that if she's really like, yo, I disown that guy because he's a terrible person and now I can't like go grocery shopping. That sucks. But if she's just lying, then, well, screw her too, I guess. Yeah, I mean,

in that same piece, we linked to that. I mean, she did not appear to have disowned him by any Me? Oh, okay. Well, then she's just a piece of crap apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Well, I hope she, you know, all those people get theirs at some point. Maybe not all, but many. I mean, he got blown up in a plane crash. I'm sure she had a bad day at that point, and now she can't do anything about it either. So, who knows? Man, this conversation was all over the place. Super interesting discussion of a lot of complex problems, Miles. Thank you for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Desmond Schum,

a Chinese billionaire who did business in the highest circles of the Chinese Communist Party. A red arrow to pussy and red atrestal crats. They are by bloodline. So when you're born, you're born in a different session of hospital from the rest of the country. No money can buy you into their session. So they'll go to a different private school, kindergarten, different primary school, different secondary school. They have farms dedicated only grow for them. And then the car they ride in have a separate license plate.

We drive in the bike lane, we drive in the bus lane. It's the royalty and the aristocrats of the medieval times. Your wife, she gets an exit ban from China. And then she disappears. And this is the part that is just Twilight Zone bizarre. You've been calling her for four years. Her mom's been calling her every day for four years. You write this book.

Suddenly, she calls you on the phone from the number that had been dead for four years. What the hell is going on? About a year and a half after her disappearance, I was in London talking to this friend. We were having coffee together. He looked me in the eyes. He said, you know, they will never let her out. And then he said, like a matter of family, if they let her out, they're going to give her a shutdown, a spy. She will come out as a zombie.

Really? The state can do something like that, and they will do something like that. You were friendly with many people in Xi Jinping's inner circle. How do you assess his character? He sees himself. as an emperor to rejuvenate the dynasty. That's what he wants to do. That is the, I think for everybody, including Chinese in China,

that's the most dangerous thing, because he is re-engineering the entire country in every dimension where he's going to end. That's the most dangerous thing. To hear how it all came crashing down, how his wife vanished, and how he escaped abroad, check out episode 684 of the Jordan Harbinger. show. I found it interesting. He said that money laundering is always connected to another crime.

I mean, now it sort of seems obvious, right? Because what are you laundering the money from if it's not another crime? But it's always connected to human trafficking, weapons trafficking, drugs trafficking. It never happens in a vacuum. So if you track the money, you start to really find out where the real, quote unquote, real crime is happening. As far as the DEA and cocaine and the money in Europe and the Middle East, man, Europe now, as you know from my episode 860 with Mitch Pertharo, the European cocaine market, more of a market than the United States, and not policed as much, and not enforced as much, and shorter sentences for drug offenders because they're not really on this whole war on drugs tip.

So they are really getting hit with it, and it'll be interesting to see how Europe deals with this cocaine flood that's coming in. And by the way, I was wondering about the terrorism angle. This stuff is just not ideological. Drug dealers, they don't care about Iran's fundamentalist Islamal fascist nonsense. They don't care about the Ayatollahs. this is just business, but having nation-state banking and money laundering, money-transfer resources, it means you can move billions of dollars instead of merely millions or hundreds of

thousands, and it smooths out the bottleneck of a key part of the business. So that's what makes for strange bedfellows, right? You get these like super conservative ISIS level or at least Hezbollah-al-al-Qaeda-level terrorist operatives, and they are, right, not even eating certain times. They won't eat pork, but they will happily transfer a bunch of people. of weapons and or drugs because they just don't care. It's just business. Has nothing to do with religion. That takes a backseat. We in the West, unfortunately, we'll catch these killers, some of these hit squads or some of these other people that try and murder dissidents abroad. So we'll grab these guys, throw them in jail, and then some Belgian aid worker gets arrested

in Iran on BS charges, and we got to trade them out. So I don't really know how this is going to end up being a win for us ever. Can we ever really win against crooked regimes that engage in hostage diplomacy. I don't know if we can. And it sucks because, of course, the other choices we stop sending aid workers to places under the control of terrible regimes. And it's not the Ayatollahs who can't get medical care, right? It's the people in Iran or rural Iran that don't have any power in the situation that can't get food or medical care. So it's really just such a loss for the people under these regimes. But hey, one caveat that I always give, Iran is an amazing place. The people are amazing. They're talented. And they are always, always, always the biggest

victims of the regime. There's a reason these hit squads mostly kill Iranians. They're going after their own people because their own people are the biggest threat to their crazy, kooky regime that they got over there in the first place. And once the people of Iran end up freeing themselves, which is what it's going to look like has to happen, I am excited for the potential of that country and that region. It's just, well, don't get me started. I'll be the first one on a plane over to visit Iran when the a it were either being hoisted on light posts or being lowered into the ground in a All things Miles Johnson will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. The AIA chat bot on the website can help you as well.

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