“Our thing is money. » The man who utters these words is not the president of a hedge fund, but an official of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), the biggest mafia in Brazil. Organization, finance, human resources management, public relations, logistics, marketing…: seated at the back of a bar in the center from Sao Paulo, this boss is a good description of a multinational, between two rails of coke snorted on the back of his hand. The parallel between the functioning of his organization and that of a large company is clearly revealed as the discussion progresses, until he shows on his iPhone the images of the horrors committed by his employees against a competitor of the CCP: amputations , severed heads and hearts torn out with machetes.
This article is taken from “Special Edition Le Monde: Mafias, how organized crime threatens the world” 2022. This special issue is on sale in kiosks or on the Internet by visiting the site of our shop.
Savage violence and sophisticated organization, medieval codes of conduct and constant adaptation to the latest technologies…: deciphering the reality of a mafia can seem complex. Except to observe its deep nature, to understand that a mafia is, above all, a criminal enterprise which imports into illegal business the practices deployed by legal companies to create wealth.
The trafficking-predation diptych
“It’s all about supply and demand: if someone on the moon asks me for cocaine, I buy a rocket to get there!” », laughs the man who is in charge of sales in Europe for the Sinaloa cartel [un Etat du Mexique]in the living room of a house in Culiacan, the capital of one of the most powerful mafias in the world.
Like any business, a mafia has an economic model: a strategy and resources aimed at making it earn as much money as possible. Like many legal conglomerates, for example Bouygues, which earns money through various activities in construction, telephony and television, a mafia is a diversified company. His business model is simple: monetize crime through a trafficking-predation diptych.
The first activity that a mafia develops is to sell the forbidden to as many customers as possible, through multiple traffics. When Amazon or Carrefour sell immediate access to millions of food or technological products to consumers around the world, the Camorra, the yakuzas or the Mexican cartels sell them the satisfaction of various vices: drug consumption, sex with prostitutes of all genders and ages, clandestine games, possession of counterfeit products…
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