Oct. 24, 2005 issue - Last week a British sting operation code-named Bluesky busted a Pan-European ring that, according to Scotland Yard, was allegedly responsible for smuggling as many as 200,000 people into the United Kingdom during the last few years. In August U.S. officials dismantled a gang they accused of trafficking everything from drugs to forged postal stamps to millions of "supernotes"—almost-perfect fake currency—as well as rocket launchers and counterfeit cigarettes into the United States. Two weeks ago a diverse group of CEOs of major multinationals including Nestle, Microsoft and GlaxoSmithKline announced that they were pooling efforts to combat the illegal trade in counterfeit goods, which costs the world economy an estimated $630 billion per year.
Yet what each bust or high-profile initiative really speaks to is the exponential growth in illicit trade across the world. While governments have spent billions since 9/11 to fortify their borders against everything from potential terrorists to illegal drugs and nuclear materials, the size and sophistication of those trafficking operations that have been rolled up has continued to increase. A study released earlier this year by the Washington-based Institute for International Economics found that despite the cumbersome laws that many governments enacted after September 11, money launderers face only a 5 percent chance of being convicted in any given year. (Asked recently how much harder it was to move $50 million secretly now than 10 years ago, a Swiss banker smiled and replied: "The main difference is that now I charge more.") A report last month from the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that the number of illegal immigrants entering the United States since 9/11 has stayed roughly the same since the 1990s—about half a million per year. The trade in small arms has grown into a $4 billion-a-year industry, fueling insurgencies and guerrilla wars from Iraq to Congo