How a Quiet Corner of Northern Europe Became a Theatre of Extreme Drug Warfare

Ca.

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
We see a mild form of drug activity locally, (so they say). But here, is where it exceeds, all year-round (as the word, on the street).
And more than likely at every ski resort on this Big Blue Marble. The volumes coming in now into USA, is at a all time HIGH.
Vice News
August 11, 2020, 11:22am
Europe1.PNG

PS: I provided the link's (about 98%), just as a reference. Cause hell, it's massive puzzle, on many platforms and a gate way to 4D-STS, bar none.

When, in early July, detectives discovered a secret torture chamber halfway between the giant ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam, it made a grim kind of sense that the room had been built in an old shipping container. The extreme gang violence that has been unravelling over the past decade in Belgium and the Netherlands is linked inextricably to the high seas, seeping out of the two ports and into the streets of the region’s major cities.

In 2019, the head of America’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) chose to visit Antwerp, alongside Colombia, to state his determination to push back against global drug gangs. A series of shootouts and explosions in the Belgian city – home to the second largest port in Europe – have led to the founding of a special task force to tackle the rising problem of underworld drug gang violence.

Rotterdam and Amsterdam have been hit by similar rises in open gang warfare. In Rotterdam, at least three men were shot dead in separate gangland-style killings this spring, while a building was peppered with bullets and then bombed. Police suspect the violence was related to the interception of 4,200 kilos of cocaine by the authorities in the port of Antwerp the previous month. In Amsterdam, there’s been a steady rise in underworld violence over the last eight years.

In 2014, crime lord Gwenette Martha was mowed down in a hail of more than 80 bullets outside a kebab shop; a severed head was left outside a café in 2016; an anti-tank rocket was fired into the offices of a major newspaper in 2018; and, in December of 2019, Derk Wiersum – the lawyer for a state witness in a major mob trial – was shot dead in front of his wife outside their home.

Insiders say the torture chambers found during the EncroChat busts supposedly belonged to an alliance of local criminals working against the Netherlands’ formerly most wanted man, Ridouan Taghi – a Dutch-Moroccan alleged mob boss arrested in 2019 on suspicion of murder and drug trafficking.

So how has such a modern, otherwise peaceful part of the world – known best for its waffles, flowers and clean streets – become home to a steady stream of gangland assassinations? The answer is cocaine.

A huge chunk of Europe’s coke comes through Rotterdam and Antwerp. In July of 2020, Dutch customs revealed they had seized double the quantity of the drug in the first six months of 2020 as the same time last year, mainly at the port of Rotterdam, while Antwerp is Europe’s main entry point for cocaine smuggled from South America. In 2019, a total of 61.8 tonnes of cocaine was intercepted at the sprawling 120-square-km port, a rise of 660 percent in five years.

“It’s a very fast movement of millions of containers through Antwerp,” says Bob Van den Berghe of the UN’s Container Control Programme. “Ships drop containers off in the port and quickly the ships are gone, which is an advantage for criminal organisations.”

An investigation in 2015 found that, at one point, smugglers had hacked into Antwerp’s security grid, allowing them to better plan smuggled cocaine shipments by tracking containers. There have also been instances of corruption at the port, with dock workers bribed or followed home and coerced by criminals.

As the profits from cocaine smuggling have spiralled, so has the violence. When a 200-kilo shipment was seized by Antwerp customs in 2012, the bust sparked a wave of shootings and retaliations across Belgium and the Netherlands, between an ensemble of mobsters who all suspected one another of ripping each other off.

By 2018, the murders of 30 people were linked to the feud, including that of Gwenette Martha. Two members of a Belgian crew known as the Turtles were kidnapped and filmed being tortured with a soldering iron. The war was later re-enacted in the 2018 Belgian black comedy, Gangsta. The situation was getting so bad that, in 2018, Antwerp authorities decided to beef up security and tackle port-side corruption.

However, they have admitted that they are still only finding, at most, just 10 percent of the cocaine trafficked through the port. From Antwerp, the drug is then taken to the Netherlands to be cut for distribution across Europe. In March, it was Antwerp and Rotterdam that drug smugglers initially flooded with cocaine from Colombia and Brazil in anticipation of a lengthy COVID-19 lockdown.

“The coronavirus did not stop the cocaine tsunami, and this year the maritime smuggling of cocaine is still on a very high level, in line with our record year of 2019,” the Administrator-General of Belgian Customs, Kristian Vanderwaeren, told VICE News. Global crime syndicates – from Belgian and Dutch drug businesses to Italian mafias, British firms and mobs from Africa and eastern Europe have established permanent bases in Belgium and the Netherlands, to keep business running smoothly.

And this mafia invasion, along with the subsequent violence, has sparked very real fears that the region is becoming something of a narco-state. The Netherlands has a long history with cocaine. In the early 1900s, the Dutch East India Company – having exploited and enslaved millions of people – began growing coca in its colonies in Indonesia. There was even a cocaine factory in Amsterdam, which supplied marching powder to all sides in World War One.

When international treaties finally put a halt to the Dutch’s rampant coke dealing, Rotterdam emerged as a key import site for the illicit trade of the drug from South America. And when port authorities started to clamp down on trafficking to Rotterdam, crime gangs began moving coke through Antwerp. Italy’s ‘Ndrangheta crime family has a foothold in both Antwerp and Rotterdam. According to mafia expert Dr Anna Sergi, the ‘Ndrangheta has established itself within communities of Calabrian immigrants from southern Italy, using restaurants and pizzerias to wash their money and maintain a presence without attracting too much attention.

“Normally, the ‘Ndrangheta are very hands-off,” said Sergi. “So you have certain key members who finance the [smuggling] operation, then they call the people they need and use their friends in local mafia groups to do their dirty work for them – and this is definitely the case in Antwerp.”

'Ndrangheta clans have also partnered with Brazil's most powerful crime syndicate, the First Command of the Capital (PCC), to ship cocaine through its coastal ports. Sharing borders with Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, as well as a long Atlantic coast, Brazil is now emerging as a jump-off point for the snowstorm bound for Europe.

But there are many other players in the coke business reaching out from these ports, such as Surinamese and Antillean gangs from the old Dutch colonies in South America and the Caribbean; the Italian Camorra mafia from Naples; the Irish Kinahan gang; Kurdish and Turkish-Assyrian clans; Albanian mafiosi; as well as local Dutch and Belgian operations. Some of the most notorious participants are what local media have labelled the “mocro-maffia”, or Moroccan mafia.

The crew behind Antwerp’s coke war were a Moroccan hash-dealing family known as the Turtles, who were part of a wave of immigrants who’d come to the Netherlands and Belgium in the 1960s and 70s as gastarbeiders (guest workers), with a large contingent from the impoverished Rif mountains of northern Morocco.

Many were treated “like cattle”, and with no attempts to integrate them, they were moved to boarding houses or ghettos. Out of that hardship came a class of entrepreneurs who specialised in importing hashish from their home country.

“The mocro-maffia now are basically the children or grandchildren of those I worked with,” said Steve Brown, a retired hash kingpin, who – with his Rif partners – brought tonnes of weed into Amsterdam in the 1980s. “Back in my time, we were the ones sending cocaine to Morocco. I went there 20 times a year and brought it to dealers there, because they liked it. But 10 or 15 years ago, the [Colombian] cartels began using Africa and Morocco as a go-between to Europe. Several groups were already smuggling hash to Spain and Holland, so it was quite normal for these groups – who had the know-how, logistics and the corrupted port officials – to start moving the coke.”

According to Salima el Musalima, a female imam from the eastern Netherlands, the rise of the mocro-maffia was not just about money. “My dad was one of the early drugs pioneers in hashish smuggling from Morocco,” she told VICE News.

“It wasn’t just the money,
because he was lousy at that. It's more the camaraderie, the dreams of making it big, the excitement, the whores, the rebel pirate lifestyle.” She said the alienation some young Dutch and Belgian-Moroccans feel is, in turn, another factor drawing them to crime.

“Many of the kids involved in drugs in my town have broken families. I see a lot of frustration: if you are a Moroccan youth, the media is against you,” she explained. “This is why the drugs world and the jihadists get a huge following. It offers the youth a platform where they are not the victim, but the aggressor. At a certain point, they say ‘f-you’ and enter the underworld, which has its own rules. The other alternative is jihad.”

Once reliant on Dutch networks for a piece of the cocaine pie, the importance of Antwerp as a cocaine port has led to the Belgians gaining more control over distribution itself. Their profits are reinvested in local businesses, especially in the poor immigrant quarters of Antwerp’s Borgerhout district. This has sparked a backlash from the far-right in Belgium, as well as the ire of the Flemish nationalist mayor, Bart de Wever, who’s set up a special task force to take on the gangs.

“The old-school rules and codes of conduct among the underworld no longer seem to apply,” says Dutch criminologist Dr Robby Roks, who has studied the underworld’s evolution over the past few decades.

“Gangs used to focus their attacks on those directly tied to organised crime themselves, not lawyers or family members. Some of the shootings have been in broad daylight, in close proximity to schools, and also a few times the wrong people were killed. This seems to have to do with the actual hitmen being younger and much less experienced.”

While this corner of Europe won’t see the kind of narco-bloodbath witnessed in countries like Mexico anytime soon, recent events suggest violence associated with the cocaine trade is only going to get worse.
 
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c.a. I'm more than baffled about the amount of relevant information you managed to present in one short post. :cool2:

As an Amsterdam resident front line observer so to speak I have to categorically state that all of it is true, alas. I think there are only a few people fully aware of the scope this phenomenon has reached recently. So, many thanks for researching and posting it here. :thup:
 
Indeed, that's an interesting article, @c.a.!

Interestingly, last month Dutch police found the 'biggest cocaine laundry ever' in one of the smallest villages of the Netherlands, Nijeveen in one of the Northern provinces.

At least 17 people are in custody in the Netherlands after police raided a former riding stables that had been transformed into the country’s largest ever illicit drugs “laundry” capable of producing up to 200kg of cocaine a day.

Thirteen of those detained were Colombian nationals, police said on Tuesday. Three Dutch citizens – including the 64-year-old owner of the stables, in the northern village of Nijeveen – and one Turkish suspect were also arrested.

Tens of thousands of litres of chemicals were seized, along with equipment such as barrels, jerrycans, plastic tubing and five cement mixers used to extract the cocaine from so-called “carrier material”, such as clothing, that had been impregnated with the drug before being exported to the Netherlands.

“This is the largest cocaine laundry ever found in the Netherlands,” the police chief André van Rijn said in a statement. “Given the number of people who worked there, the size, the layout and the equipment, we estimate the production capacity at 150kg to 200kg of cocaine per day, representing a street value of €4.5m-€6m [£4.04m-£5.39m] uncut.”

Police also found sleeping quarters for workers in the stables, about 75 miles (120km) north-east of Amsterdam, and recovered 100kg of cocaine base. After searches at storage sites in the nearby towns of Apeldoorn and Elshout, about 120 tonnes of carrier material was also seized.

The suspects are due to appear before a judge this week and more arrests remain possible, police said.

According to the Dagblad van het Noorden newspaper, several dozen heavily armed police used a Bearcat armoured personnel carrier and a surveillance helicopter in the operation, which happened early on Friday but was announced only on Tuesday.

The paper said the owner of the former stables and riding school had been registered as a horse dealer and breeder at the chamber of commerce since 2001, although locals said they had thought the company’s business was recycling old computers.

The unnamed man lived in another building on the site with his 92-year-old mother, the paper said, and was frequently seen out and about in the usually sleepy village. He appeared “perfectly normal”, neighbours told the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper.

Neighbours said the owner’s mother was not among those arrested. “She has been shattered by the whole thing,” one man, who did not want to be named, told Dagblad van het Noorden. “But she’s in good hands now. I really can’t say any more; this is hard enough for her already.”

The Dutch customs service said last month it had seized twice as much cocaine in the first six months of 2020 as in the same period last year, with more than 25,000kg of the drug confiscated between January and June. Rotterdam, Europe’s largest port, and nearby Antwerp in Belgium are the two main hubs for the continent’s drug trade.

Some background information to show how deep the rabbit-hole goes (and I don't even know half of it):
Drug baron Klaas Bruinsma who was executed in the nineties had ties to Mabel Wisse-Smit who was to wed one of the Dutch princes in 2004. If I remember it correctly she also worked for Dutch secret service. That is probably the reason why they didn't 'clear' her or not enough before she became a member of the Royal Family. She also has intimate ties to George Soros.
 
CALIFORNIE, merci pour votre excellent reportage qui donne la chair de poule... Et non, je ne m'en doutais pas... Dans quel monde vivons nous ?...

CALIFORNIE, thank you for your excellent report which gives goose bumps... And no, I had no idea... What kind of world do we live in ?...
 
Source: 'The Netherlands is the ideal environment for the international drugs trade' - DutchNews.nl
(five illustrations omitted)

‘The Netherlands is the ideal environment for the international drugs trade’

October 26, 2020 - By Louis Gore Langton

Talk of the Netherlands becoming a ‘narco state’ has been rife in some parts of the Dutch media for some time. A new book claims to unveil the real scale of the problem and suggests a new way forward.

National policy toward illicit drug use is infamously tolerant and seen by many foreign observers as an example for the world. However, the rise of high-profile murders, kidnappings and bombings has revealed a darker side to the country’s approach.

Pieter Tops, a professor at the Dutch Police Academy, has been investigating the criminal underworld for several years along with journalist Jan Tromp. Their research, detailed in a new book Nederland, Drugsland, claims the problem is even more severe than people imagine.

In the absence of any serious international treatment on drugs policy, the Dutch must find a new way to deal with their increasingly dangerous predicament, they argue.

DutchNews.nl spoke to Tops about the book and their ideas for a ‘third way’ approach in the Netherlands.

How did you get into writing this book?

I’m not a criminologist by background. I am a student of public administration and about seven years ago was confronted with research showing the criminal cannabis industry to be turning over €800m a year in my small town alone. Something must have gone wrong in the research, I thought, but it was correct.

We got information from a man involved in the industry, who was afraid of being killed and therefore wanted to leave the criminal world, so he sought police protection.

I started researching and then three years ago I met Jan Tromp, a journalist, who recently moved to the same province Noord-Brabant. We started investigating together and wrote our first book Achterkant van Nederland [The backside/flip-side of the Netherlands].

It was a journey of discovery in a world we didn’t know, it was fascinating and very frightening, and what we found got a lot of public attention.

Why is this problem specific to the Netherlands?

People often wonder why such a small and prosperous country like the Netherlands has become a center of the criminal trade and production of drugs. It’s the center for Europe and in some ways the world.

We have three main explanations:

First, all the characteristics and features of our country that make it attractive for legal economic investment also make it attractive for illegal investment. We have strong infrastructure, not just our roads and ports, but our financial and digital infrastructure too.

Second, our penal system. It is meant to counter criminals but, in this country, it attracts them. A 2018 study showed the Netherlands to have the lowest sentences for drugs offences. Some criminals we’ve spoken to say this is a major attraction, often without us asking.

Third, the tolerance built up towards drugs after the 1960s has had a big impact on our policies – the polarizing gedoogbeleid [policy of tolerance] that allows consumption but not production, for example. We had pressure from other countries to change this; Sweden in 1970s, France in the 1990s, America more recently. But this has always fallen away.

These features, when seen together, create an ideal environment for the drugs trade.

And how big has the trade become?

I’ll give you some numbers. Research I conducted with colleagues at the Police Academy into synthetic drugs production in the Netherlands showed a turnover (worldwide, street prices) of around €19bn in 2017. Research in 2019 found around the same amount to have been laundered.

Look at the harbors of Rotterdam and Antwerp (by which many goods come into Holland) – both very connected to cocaine gangs. Last year nearly 34,000 kilos of cocaine were seized in Rotterdam. Each kilo is worth €50,000. This is coming through our country all the time, and the figures are impressive, I think.

But the problem is not the drugs themselves – that’s a matter of public health.

What’s the problem?

That’s the topic of our new book, Nederland Drugsland. The main problem is the enormous flow of money and its rippling effect throughout our society. With criminality comes money laundering and violence. It brings in other forms of crime like arms smuggling and human trafficking, it funds terrorism, and it sucks in normal people.

It attracts people who do not belong to the criminal underworld. We often speak to secondary school students who are approached by gangs and offered €500 or €600 just for transporting a package from city to city. As I’ve said, this is nothing in the drugs world but to a teenage boy it’s a lot of money.

The same is true of the many farmers being lured into letting out their land for drug production. This problem exists throughout the country.

One of the most frightening stories we heard was just before publishing so it’s not in the book. We spoke with the head of a port company in Rotterdam which ships fruit. He got concerned that some of his employees were involved in drugs smuggling and warned them there would be checks to ensure this wasn’t happening. Then 28 out of 30 of them resigned immediately.

We have to say that from start to finish, the conclusion was that the criminal drugs world in the Netherlands has grown and become far more violent; the murder of the lawyer in Amsterdam recently was a wake-up call for many people.

There is policy in the Netherlands at local and national level to combat this, but it hasn’t been effective for a long time. And it needs to change.

Legal and well operating businesses everywhere are becoming involved in the trade because of the money.

How does it get laundered?

The banks are supposed to be the gate keepers of integrity in our financial systems, and they’re obliged by law to flag suspicious activity. There are 6,000 to 7,000 people working for banks in this country to do exactly that. But there is so much suspicious activity the system is breaking down. The government simply doesn’t have the capacity to deal with it.

What about police corruption?

This has been another very interesting development recently. The police have been to some extent successful in catching high level players in the drugs world, the arrest of Ridouan Taghi (a king pin in the ‘Mocro Mafia’) being a major example.

However, recently they were able to intercept telephone communications between criminals that resulted in hundreds of arrests. This inadvertently revealed levels of police corruption far higher than anyone expected, and we still don’t know the full extent of it yet. Another very frightening finding.

What’s the solution then?

It has to be multi-faceted. We need more Investment in law enforcement, we need to recognize the trade’s social impact, and we need far more resources for the finance industry to prevent laundering.

There has never really been a war on drugs in this country and we need to acknowledge that legalization will not help to just do away with the criminal drugs world.

So, we try to sketch a solution between prohibition and legalization, which is very difficult and very complicated and needs to find common ground
between people.

It is a combination of supply reduction, use reduction (of which we’ve had none in the Netherland so far) and harm reduction.

Ultimately, it’s a ‘third way’ solution that slowly liberalizes drug distribution in a very controlled manner for those that really want them, whilst fighting criminality. We call it ‘regulation’.

Why isn’t legalization the answer?

Legalization is not the answer because most of the drugs produced here are not consumed here and it would require an international agreement.

We really would support international agreement, but it is an absolute condition – it cannot be done in isolation. This will take time.

Moreover, criminal organizations will also benefit from legalization in many ways. They can compete effectively with new legal markets; even with cannabis, for example. The government caps the THC levels and the black market immediately has the upper hand as it can produce stronger products.

In order to create ‘regulation’, as we call our third way solution, we really need to protect a legal and regulated system.

People say the Netherlands is becoming a ‘narco state’, what do you make of this?

We don’t use this term; it has differing definitions, but it would compare the Netherlands to countries like Mexico, where the state has lost autonomy over its own land. This is not the case in the Netherlands, our problems are different, and we need to be careful when discussing it.

That’s why we call the Netherlands a drugsland.

Related: A real nightmare. Organization preparing snuffs movies
 
It is all sort of true. My guess is the M0**ad does the xtc and the cia the coke. Maybe they are saving up to finance an attack on Venezuela? Lately there is no more hasj available in the coffeeshops, only local grass.
 
Source (Dutch only): Nederlands vaardocument gebruikt bij grootschalige drugssmokkel
(four illustrations and one video omitted)

NewsHour - Interior - Abroad - Today, 17:36 - Modified today, 19:12

Dutch shipping document used in large-scale drug smuggling

Luuk Mulder en Siebe Sietsma


International drug gangs abuse a Dutch certificate at sea. With that document, issued by order of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, it seems as if international criminals are sailing under Dutch flag. In doing so, the Netherlands inadvertently facilitates large-scale drug transports.

It's all about the International Certificate for Pleasure Cruisers, or ICP for short. It is a kind of registration certificate, but for pleasure yachts. Southern European countries and a European police organization are now sounding the alarm about abuse of the document. The document is easy to obtain and only costs a few tenners. The control on applying for it, is limited. Legally, the document is hardly of any value.

Last month, the Spanish authorities seized thirty-five tons of hashish, the largest Spanish drug catch at sea ever. This happened during Operación Goleta-Gratil. The Spanish authorities entered several luxury sailing yachts in spectacular fashion.

NewsHour got confirmation that at least two of the five boarded ships were sailing under a Dutch ICP. The bales of hash were piled up in the hold as if they were bags of rice.

MAOC, a European anti-drug unit that focuses on drug smuggling by sea, has observed that the ICP is increasingly being used in large-scale drug smuggling. Smugglers pretend to be pleasure sailors sailing under Dutch flag.

Michael O'Sullivan, director of MAOC, knows that it is easy to get a Dutch ICP. "Police work would become easier if registering a boat was made as difficult as possible".

"Why do criminals choose the Dutch ICP? Because they choose the path of least resistance," he says. There are no exact figures on abuse of the ICP, but according to O'Sullivan they amount to "significant numbers".

Major blows

The CDA and the PvdA, who already reacted critically [in Dutch] to yesterday's report, consider the news of drug smuggling very worrying. "I think that the Netherlands should be one of the countries that shows internationally that we are cracking down on drug trafficking. And that we are also taking the lead in this. And now we are making smuggling possible by means of a certificate that is not even legally valid. Absolutely undesirable," says PvdA member Gijs van Dijk.

CDA member Pieter Omtzigt calls it very "detrimental". "Because we want to tackle this fight against drugs in Europe. There are major blows to be made. Both in the Netherlands, and then I think of Customs in the port of Rotterdam, which worries me a lot. But also of this. If the ICP can easily be used for drug smuggling elsewhere in Europe, there is also a task for the Netherlands to ensure that this is no longer possible".

Both political parties want to get rid of the ICP as soon as possible. Van Dijk: "The supervision and issuing of property rights belongs in public hands". The Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, which is responsible for issuing the ICP, says it is working on tightening up the issuance in order to prevent abuse.


Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Other coverage (all Dutch):
Nederlandse schepen aan ketting in Italië door omstreden 'bootpaspoort'
'Nederland is lachertje van Europa', zeggen partijen over omstreden bootpaspoort
Deze stukken gebruikten we in onze verhalen over het ICP

‘Nederland faciliteert onbedoeld grootschalige drugstransporten’
ad.nl/binnenland/drugssmokkelaars-op-zee-maken-misbruik-van-nederlands-vaardocument~ae588a1c/?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fmyprivacy.dpgmedia.nl%2F
 
Since the old days, the sea is free. So, you can still get a small sail boat and push off, just like that. Freedom.
Yachts over 24 meters and commercial traffic need a lot of paperwork, insurance, a burnmark and an identifying gps transmitter.
The refugee smugglers abused the old freedom for their 36 meter commercial vessel, and the Dutch authorities should have taken responsibility for the ship, but they are lame. The owners of the small pleasure yachts are going to pay the price for this.
 
Latest Narco News in Europe and the US.

Snip: October 5, 2020
A patrol ship in the Dutch Caribbean has caught over three tons of cocaine in a rapid series of seizures, displaying how regularly drug shipments traverse the area on their way to Europe and the United States.

On September 8, the Dutch navy ship Zr.Ms. Groningen intercepted a speedboat to the west of Aruba carrying half a ton of cocaine, according to the Dutch Ministry of Defence. Within a month, four more seizures had followed: on September 11 (when another half ton of cocaine was interdicted from a speedboat), on September 22 (80 kilograms), on September 26 (284 kilograms) and on September 28, when a record 1.9 tons of cocaine were captured off a single vessel.

While this represents a significant boost for Dutch counter-narcotic operations, particularly since the latest seizure surpasses the Groningen’s previous seizure record of 1.7 tons of cocaine in May 2019 and constitutes the most maritime seizures in one month since records began in 1974, the combined volume of seized cocaine is not atypical. 2019 was a record-year for Dutch Caribbean drug seizures that saw over 10 tons of cocaine captured (just under 6 tons between January and August and 3.2 tons from October to December).





Published: 1:48pm, 16 Oct, 2020
Three foreigners from Israel, Britain and Canada detained during operation in Chai Wan
Officers believe drugs arrived in city from Vietnam and were destined for city’s nightclubs and bars

Snip:
Hong Kong police have arrested three men and seized more than HK$33 million (US$4.3 million) worth of cocaine believed to be destined for the city’s bars and nightclubs.

The trio, an Israeli merchant, 45, a British man, 25, and a Canadian, 31, were detained at a flat in Cornell Centre on Wing Tai Road in Chai Wan, at about 2am on Thursday.

Superintendent Alan Chung said he believed the three suspects were key members of a transnational drug-trafficking syndicate that smuggled cocaine into the city.

The Israeli man arrived in Hong Kong about a year ago and then had his travel visa extended to remain in the city, while the other two suspects, who were reportedly unemployed, had Hong Kong ID cards.
 
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Very strange that suddenly they arrest a lot of traficants, here in Spain also and in the Canarian Islands also. The governments need money, surely, the money from the traffic why not. Maybe governments wanted to take all the profits from the traffic. What we were talking the other day Hesperides and me it is about the number of little stores that open, stores without future. They open and then few months later they close. Surely also here we can smell money laundering.

And now with this covidinian situation more drug addicts, more people who need to do money so become camels. It is a spirale with huge implications.
 
Very strange that suddenly they arrest a lot of traficants, here in Spain also and in the Canarian Islands also. The governments need money, surely, the money from the traffic why not. Maybe governments wanted to take all the profits from the traffic. What we were talking the other day Hesperides and me it is about the number of little stores that open, stores without future. They open and then few months later they close. Surely also here we can smell money laundering.

And now with this covidinian situation more drug addicts, more people who need to do money so become camels. It is a spirale with huge implications.
Definitely, they need money. And they will grab for whatever they can, in particular, from the average citizens.

In my country, there is a "comedy," because they start to create not the new taxes, but the fees ;-) And they do not up the amount of the taxes/fees, but they make the new ones, but less in costs ;-D

But what about these traffickers. I think that what gives them pain is the lack of total control over the people's movement, also the criminals, traffickers.
 


“We are scared to death”: residents of Seine-Saint-Denis come to a physical confrontation with dealers: They want to have access to our parking lot ” hooded individuals attempt to move into private condominium
No colts or horses, but the news story told by Le Parisien this week looks like a western synopsis: in Sevran, in Seine-Saint-Denis, the inhabitants of the “Westing Plaza”, in the Freinville district, oppose drug traffickers so as not to see their building become a point of sale
On Monday, December 7, hooded individuals tried again to move into the private condominium, completed two years ago. There, about thirty fathers of families are at their feet. The blows rained down and the brawl ended. Until the return of the first, who brought hammers and knives. This time, two suspects are arrested by the police and placed in police custody.

"We are scared to death," members of the syndetic tell the Parisian. They sum up the situation: "A group of people are trying to intimidate us to get access to our parking lot." Several men have already detailed to them the objective of their maneuvers, with a great deal of intimidation: “They clearly explained to us that they wanted to have access to our parking lot and to have all the accesses, including those to the common areas in order to be able to set up their traffic and escape if necessary ”. "We have been alerting the municipality for two years"

The owners have only deposited a handrail so far. On the other hand, “for two years we have alerted the municipality to the fact that the police resources are totally insufficient in our sector. We have no full-service police station, ”they say. The mayor of the city did not respond to the requests of the Ile-de-France newspaper.

December 9, 2020 1:45PM By Jeffrey A. Singer
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a report by European correspondent Valentina Pop, entitled “Mexico Cartels Set Up Shop in Europe,” that illustrates how drug prohibition continues to be a money machine for black market drug dealers, particularly the Mexican drug cartels.

Congress passed the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act in 2005, a year when roughly 2,400 people died of meth‐related overdoses, which made the very effective decongestant pseudoephedrine “behind the counter,” while restricting the amount that patients can buy, hoping to cut off the supply of this ingredient to local meth labs throughout the country. Mississippi and Oregon went even further, designating the decongestant “prescription‐only.”

That, in conjunction with stepped up S.W.A.T. team raids on local labs, chased the domestic illegal meth industry south of the border and into the arms of Mexican drug cartels. While American allergy sufferers had to settle for less effective decongestants, the cartels soon learned there are more efficient ways to produce meth (anyone who watched the TV series “Breaking Bad” learned this as well).

The Journal article reports that the cartels’ organization and efficiency have led to a saturation of the U.S. market. (Reflecting that, the latest provisional overdose death statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveal methamphetamines were involved in more than 18,000 of the 76,000 drug overdose deaths for the year ending April 2020, second only to fentanyl as the principal drug involved in overdose deaths.) So now the cartels are breaking into the European market and see the Netherlands as a potential meth‐making hub. The cartels provide Chinese chemicals and experienced Mexican “cooks” to their Dutch partners and use Dutch equipment to make and distribute the meth.

While meth use is on the rise in much of Europe, Portugal appears to be bucking the trend. In fact, ever since Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001, nonmedical drug use and substance use disorders have dropped relative to the rest of Europe.

There is a lesson in all of this: rather than continue the never‐ending game of “whack‐a‐mole” that describes the war on drugs, policymakers at home and abroad should deny the cartels the market opportunities that only exist because of drug prohibition by bringing prohibition to an end.

Collision of the COVID-19 and Addiction Epidemics

The fallout:

 
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The Santa Marta Port Control Antinarcotics Company seized 18 kilos of cocaine; the alkaloid was found in a fruit container destined for Antwerp (Belgium).#TodosContraElNarcotráfico



December 14, 2020 6:14 PM - Snip:
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In this case, the three-person crew were arrested. And with them, around 4,806 pounds (2,810kg) of cocaine was seized. The cocaine comes in kilogram bricks which are then wrapped in plastic sacks to make bales. The value of this payload is over $100 million.

This time the payload, which equals 2.4 tons of cocaine, was much larger than has been typical for this type of narco submarine, according to recent reported seizure. This may be part of a wider trend where narco subs are entrusted with greater loads per trip. The one discovered by the Colombian Navy last month, on Nov. 5, could carry six metric tons. That design was more sophisticated, using 10 tons of batteries to propel it silently.

Possible reasons for the increasing payloads may include the impact of COVID-19 on other trafficking routes, such as commercial flights and shipping as well as the increased law enforcement efforts of SOUTHCOM, according to analysts. Since the beginning of April, SOUTHCOM has been carrying out enhanced counter-narcotics operations in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean. This has seen more warships, like Gabrielle Giffords, actively tasked with counter-narcotics missions with U.S. Coast Guard detachments embarked.

InSight Crime - A Decade of Covering Organized Crime in the Americas
Nov 12, 2020
 
Incoming diverted from the Netherlands.


By The Maritime Executive 12-21-2020 10:39:00

Organs from trade, from drug money, brought to Turkey, zero tax! Sweat in the factory, get a minimum wage, taxable ... Look at that party that calls itself conservative!



September 16, 2020· 4 min read

Mexico:
VIDEO: “We don't want to ruin your Christmas”, the threatening message from Grupo Sombra to the population of Veracruz
El Blog del Narco @mundonarcocom · Dec 17
 
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