The Los Angeles Times reported this weekend on a robbery that occurred in the Los Angeles region. The puppies in the window looked secure enough. The pricey pooches were protected by metal bars, two locked doors, alarm sensors and video surveillance cameras. But for the second time in about two weeks, a pet dealer reported that a [...]

The Economist has an article highlighting the various methods currency traders are using to evade controls placed on the yuan in China. SINCE a police raid on her firm was broadcast on Chinese state television, To Ling has emerged as one of China’s more intriguing financiers. The 43-year-old Hong Kong resident operated a black-market foreign-exchange business [...]

The Washington Post is reporting that insurgents in Iraq are becoming more interested in profit making than in political ideology. U.S. military commanders say that insurgents across the country are increasingly motivated more by money than ideology and that a growing number of insurgent cells, struggling to pay recruits, are turning to gangster-style racketeering operations. U.S. military [...]

The Economist has an article on the continued growth of the tunnels in the Gaza strip. Once a secretive and dangerous industry, smuggling has become open, even respectable. As recently as last year, Israeli jets would destroy any sites suspected of housing tunnels, but now the smugglers are working in clear view of Egyptian border [...]

In Federal Court last week, five South Koreans were convicted of running a sex-trafficking ring to  staff their brothels across the Northeast.  The case again demonstrates the interconnectedness of the illicit market once again. According to prosecutors, the trafficking ring found women in South Korea who wanted to move to the United States and either smuggled [...]

YaleGlobal has an article up on their website highlighting the connection between Globalization, Corruption, and the illicit market. The author, Branko Milanovic of the World Bank, writes about how organized crime, wealthy from the gains of the illicit market, “lobbies” the government as any other industry would do. Once organized crime and its supporters become the largest [...]

The Daily NK has an interesting article on a smuggler of South Korean dramas into North Korea. Despite the North Korean authorities’ strict control, foreign films and South Korean drama Video Compact Disks (VCDs) circulating around North Korea reportedly amount to over 1 million copies since 2000. Defector Choi Young Bum (pseudonym, 38), who has circulated [...]

From the AP: In dozens of interviews with Sri Lankan officials, Western diplomats and former rebels, The Associated Press found that the Tigers raise US$200 million (€139 million) to US$300 million (€208 million) a year, mostly through extortion and fraud. They then use front companies or middlemen to buy arms from legitimate weapons makers in [...]

The Associated Press has an article out today highlighting the difficulties facing the organized crime families in the Untied States. At the mob’s peak in the late 1950s, more than two dozen families operated nationwide. Disputes were settled by the Commission, a sort of gangland Supreme Court. Corporate change came in a spray of gunfire. This [...]

Jim Landers of The Dallas Morning News has a column on the bizarre situation concerning gas in Iraq and Iran.  Although both countries as located on oil fields, the ability to get gas to consumers in their own country has proven difficult due to the practice of subsidizing fuel prices. How a country rich in oil [...]