“Transnational Crime”

Europe’s most dangerous gangs have dramatically expanded their ranks with hundreds of thousands of members running “corporations of crime” in plain sight, an intelligence report has found.

A 54-page dossier from Europol, the police agency, has laid bare the scale of drug trafficking, cyber crime and migrant-smuggling operations across the Continent.

An estimated 400,000 gangsters work for criminal syndicates, a five-fold increase in only two years.

VANCOUVER — The container arrived carrying twenty industrial rolls of paper, and concealed inside ten of them was 520.6 kilograms of opium — the raw material of the Big Circle Boys’ heroin trade that drove Vancouver’s overdose deaths for decades, before fentanyl exploded in the Downtown Eastside around 2012.

h/t handy n handsome

When police approached a stolen SUV near the funeral of a suspected gang member in Vaughan, Ont., in April 2024, they couldn’t have expected it would help the FBI bring down a violent, transnational cocaine empire tied to the Sinaloa cartel.

Inside the 2023 Ford Explorer with heavily tinted windows, officers found Malik Damion Cunningham, an alleged rival gang member and hitman who U.S. prosecutors say had been hired, armed and trained by Ryan Wedding’s sprawling criminal enterprise.

They were wanted men in India. They reached the United States and Canada on student visas and asylum claims, and from quiet addresses in California and British Columbia they rebuilt the criminal empires they had left behind. American and Canadian police are only now catching up.

In December 2023, a businessman in India picked up a video call and found himself looking at one of the most feared crime bosses in the country. The caller did something strange for a man who had spent years avoiding the law. He let his face be seen. Pay, he told the businessman, or die

PHNOM PENH — A new undercover investigation that set out to map Cambodia’s illegal wildlife trade has instead opened a window onto a far larger criminal ecosystem — one in which industrial scam compounds linked to Chinese transnational criminal networks, China-to-Mexico fentanyl and precursor-linked routes, elite Cambodian corruption, global money laundering and the sale of purported vitality products like “tiger penis wine” to Chinese officials converge inside the same casino, port and special-economic-zone corridors.

OTTAWA — When Winnipeg police laid out the largest drug seizure in Manitoba history last week — more than 525 kilograms of cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl, 14 firearms, and $825,000 in cash — the bricks of narcotics and the row of guns drew the cameras. A quieter item in the evidence locker did not: 1.35 million contraband cigarettes.

WINNIPEG – More than 500 kilograms of illicit drugs, including meth and cocaine, have been seized in what investigators are calling the largest drug bust in Manitoba’s history.

Dubbed “Project Puma,” the two-year, multi-province investigation led to the arrest of 33 people and the seizure of drugs with an estimated street value exceeding $37 million.

Among those arrested are suspects allegedly connected to international criminal organizations, raising alarms for law enforcement experts about the growing convergence of organized crime networks in Canada.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — In a case kept largely under seal to protect an active investigation and the safety of witnesses, two alleged senior figures in Chinese transnational criminal networks — each carrying the “Big Brother” honorific that signals high-ranking leadership — have been charged in a United States federal court with laundering fentanyl proceeds for the Sinaloa Cartel and the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, according to court documents obtained by The Bureau.