Hours earlier, gunmen murdered 29-year-old Jamal Samuels in what police described as a retaliatory hit. Two days before that, a car carrying Hubert Baptist and Eric Frazer had been raked with rifle fire on the same highway near Haulover Bridge.

Governor-General Dame Froyla Tzalam responded by placing Belize City and a string of surrounding villages under a state of public emergency. Soldiers and police gained the power to search anyone without a warrant, detain suspects for 30 days without charge, impose a night curfew on minors and shut down businesses. Thirty days later, the emergency expired on schedule, the roughly 30 men detained under it walked out of the Kolbe Foundation prison, and the country moved on.

It was the seventh state of emergency Belize has declared against its own gangs in eight years. They have barely made a dent.

The Belize Bloods and Crips

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The vessel had left Freetown in Sierra Leone nine days earlier, official destination Benghazi in Libya. It was the largest single maritime cocaine seizure in history.

Wwith the Arconian still tied up in the Canary Islands, the revelations about this cargo proves how the trans-Atlantic cocaine pipeline has shifted.

This morning, I read one of the finest pieces of investigative crime work I have read in a long time. This was the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC)’s report on the Arconian here. Please share and support their work widely.

What follows is my takeaways from their conclusions, it is not meant to replace their astounding forensic efforts.

Sierra Leone has stopped concealing its role in the cocaine trade and is now its most reliable Atlantic node, with the president's own family entwined in the network. Cocaine has become abundant enough that traffickers can buy entire cargo ships for a single voyage and treat them as expendable. And European trafficking organisations are evolving at industrial speed, outpacing every framework built to contain them.

1. The size of West African seizures is climbing because trafficker confidence is climbing

In 2025, the average size of a cocaine seizure in West Africa was 5.6 tons. That was more than double the 2.4 ton average seen in 2024, according to the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre – Narcotics (MAOC-N) in Lisbon. The total tonnage Total seized on the route rose seven-fold between 2022 and 2024, reaching 352 tonnes in 2024 alone.

Individual seizures have grown.A record was set in September 2025 when the French Navy seized 9.6 tons off West Africa, this was broken by 10-ton seizure off El Hierro in the Canaries in January 2026. That record lasted four months when the Arconian was found with three times that number on board.

This is not an exact science by seizures can be used to estimate how much law enforcement caught while it was moving. With each new record, this looks like proportionally less.

However, this trajectory also measures something traffickers understand well: the cost of being intercepted, relative to the value of getting through. When that ratio falls, consignment sizes rise, because the marginal cocaine added to a single hull is essentially free once the network has paid for the vessel, the crew, the protection, and the route.

The Arconian carried no cover cargo. Its thirty tonnes of cocaine were stacked behind a hidden metal door in a long gallery, with no rice or cacao or soybean flour to disguise them. Concealment was not deemed necessary.

A network willing to load thirty tons onto one ship in plain view is a network that has, over years of successful runs, priced interception as an acceptable cost.

2. Sierra Leone has been taken over by a Dutch-led drug network

Specific institutions inside Sierra Leone have been individually purchased, one office at a time, by a Dutch-led drug trafficking network.

The network’s anchor is Jos Leijdekkers, a 34-year-old Dutch fugitive from Breda known as Bolle Jos, who arrived in Sierra Leone in 2022 under the alias Omar Sheriff and set up at the Two Seasons resort on the coast south of Freetown. By mid-2024 he had entered the ruling family, in a relationship with Agnes Bio, the daughter of President Julius Maada Bio, with whom he has since fathered a child. Agnes Bio held a diplomatic posting at Sierra Leone’s UN mission in New York during the same period. On 1 January 2025, footage filmed by First Lady Fatima Maada Bio and circulated on social media showed Leijdekkers seated two rows behind the president at a New Year church service in Tihun, the president’s home village.

Leijdekkers is close to many in power. In a reshuffle in August 2023, Alusine Kanneh was appointed Chief Immigration Officer; Andrew Jaiah Kaikai was appointed Executive Director of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency; and Yankuba Bio, a close relative of the president, was made Director of the Ports and Harbours Authority, running Queen Elizabeth II Quay, the very port from which the Arconian sailed. Each of those three men has since been photographed in proximity to Leijdekkers or to vehicles associated with him. Kanneh was filmed receiving a gift at Leijdekkers’s birthday party and dismissed the day the footage went public.

The protective infrastructure is visible too. A private jet with a fake registration and disabled radar landed at Freetown International Airport in September 2024; its Mexican and Dutch crew were released after paying a $100,000 fine. Belgian customs identified Sierra Leone as the second most prominent point of origin for cocaine seizures in Belgium in 2024, according to a GI-TOC report published this month. Sierra Leone retails cocaine at €17.90 per gram, the lowest figure in West Africa, the predictable overspill from stockpiles that are too large to move discreetly. A Dutch journalist was detained outside Leijdekkers's Two Seasons resort in 2025 on suspicion of espionage. Press freedom organisations have reported bribes of up to €5,000 offered to local journalists to stop covering him.

3. Jos Leijdekkers is the prototype for a new generation of traffickers.

The simplified version of the Leijdekkers story is that a violent Dutch kid from Breda got too big for the Netherlands, fled to Sierra Leone, and got even bigger. The accurate version is that almost every cocaine trafficker of his generation took some version of that route, and only Leijdekkers came out the other end controlling a transcontinental logistics operation that the Spanish Civil Guard now estimates is moving cocaine on a scale European law enforcement had never previously documented.

His starting point was ordinary. In 2011, Leijdekkers shot two brothers in a Breda bar fight and was sentenced to six years. He met the Dutch trafficker Piet Wortel inside, and on release entered Wortel’s network, organising multi-tonne cocaine shipments through Antwerp and Rotterdam. By 2019 he was ordering kills, the disappearance of his associate Naima Jillal, photographed under torture and never found, was traced back to him. By 2020, he was instructing his enforcers to shoot an Antwerp port guard in the kneecaps for spotting one of his containers. He fled to Istanbul, then to Sierra Leone, in 2022.

The financial scale matches the operational one. A Rotterdam court ordered him in July 2025 to pay €96 million in confiscated criminal earnings, calculated from 14 cocaine shipments over less than a year. The Dutch Justice Minister told Buitenhof on 1 June 2026 that Leijdekkers earns “hundreds of millions of euros a month”. Dutch police estimate his network turns over up to €2 billion a year. He has been convicted in absentia in the Netherlands, in Antwerp, and at Dendermonde in May 2026 for a separate 11-tonne shipment.

The result is a single individual who has done what no almost no European trafficker before him managed to do: move the centre of his operation out of Europe entirely, embed it inside an African state, and run cocaine logistics at industrial scale from that base.

4. The Leijdekkers network runs across four jurisdictions a

Almost everything publicly known about how the Arconian was assembled, nd how at least two other vessels were assembled before it, comes from a single source: the report by GI-TOC, The Arconian operation. Anatomy of a record Atlantic cocaine shipment - trafficking on cargo vessels from West Africa to Europe, published a few days ago. , authored by Josef Skrdlik, Sarah Fares, and Lucia Bird. The work draws on AIS vessel tracking, ship registry analysis through Equasis, corporate mapping via Sayari and OpenCorporates, witness photographs from inside the network, and more than 190 stakeholder interviews carried out across West Africa in 2025.

The structure runs across Sierra Leone, Germany, Turkey, and the Philippines, with each jurisdiction performing a specific function.

In Sierra Leone, Leijdekkers’s network sets up single-purpose shell companies to acquire the vessels in country. The Arconian was bought in February 2026 by Serenity Shipping SL Ltd, a Freetown-registered firm with no prior shipping history and no other vessels. The ship White Eagle was bought in December 2023 by Imperial Shipping Agency SL, a similar shell. The White Labeille was bought in October 2024 by Diamond Line Shipping Ltd, for a reported US$2 million paid in advance of the ship’s arrival in Freetown.

None of the three companies had ever owned a vessel before. None has owned one since. Each was created to hold one ship for one voyage, and discarded.

In Germany, the pre-Sierra-Leonean paper trail sits at the same Flensburg address: Eckernförder Landstraße 65. The three vessels were sold to the Sierra Leonean shells by three German-registered owners, Firat Shipping Co. Ltd (the Arconian), Toprak Shipping Inc. (the White Eagle), and Zeynep Shipping Co. Ltd (the White Labeille), all sharing that address. All three vessels were managed pre-sale by a fourth company at the same address: Tunaryan Schifffahrts GmbH. GI-TOC’s mapping of Tunaryan and its associated entities found no other significant commercial presence; the cluster manages only a handful of ships in total. The Flensburg layer is what made the vessels available to be bought.

In Turkey, a single firm in Gaziantep, Nisa Uluslararası Deniz, was registered as International Safety Management (ISM) manager on all three vessels within a three-week window in August and September 2022. ISM management is a legally required role under International Maritime Organization rules.

Concentrating it in one small Turkish company across three otherwise unconnected vessels is what allowed those three vessels to be operated as a unit. Leijdekkers’s own ties to Türkiye, including a Turkish brother-in-law and his brother Harry repeatedly being arrested, sit behind that layer.

In the Philippines, a Manila-based recruitment agency, coordinated through a Filipino woman based in Freetown who regularly visited Leijdekkers’s residences, supplied the crews. Filipino sailors crewed the Arconian (17 of them, alongside six armed Dutch and Surinamese guards), the White Eagle (15, abandoned in Nador, Morocco on 1 January 2025), and the White Arrow (16, abandoned in Benghazi the same day, recorded in the ILO/IMO database of abandoned seafarers). One Filipino operations manager, with a prior career at a ship-management company, wired tens of thousands of dollars a month back to his family through Western Union.

The network that loaded the Arconian with cocaine was a deliberately distributed business, with each jurisdiction selected for what it could best provide.

5. Why was the Arconian headed to Libya?

The Arconian‘s declared destination was Benghazi, on the eastern Libyan coast, which sits inside one of the two halves of a divided Libyan state, and which half a cocaine shipment is heading toward tells you something about who was expected to receive it on arrival.

Libya has been governed by two competing administrations since 2014: the internationally recognised Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, headed by Abdelhamid Dabaiba, and a rival authority in the east based in Benghazi, dominated by the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) under the Haftar family.

The two sides control separate territories, separate coastlines, separate port authorities, and separate illicit economies. Benghazi falls under the LAAF.

The political response to the Arconian seizure tracked that divide. Within a week, Prime Minister Dabaiba ordered an investigation into the shipment, framing it as an eastern problem. The eastern authorities responded by denying any link to the shipment threatening to suspend diplomatic relations with Spain.

The Arconian became a domestic Libyan political weapon.

GI-TOC’s vessel tracking found four other ships in the broader dossier, vessels with the same ownership patterns, the same reflagging cadence, and the same Freetown departures, that docked in Libyan ports between 2024 and 2026: Benghazi, Sirte, Misrata, and al-Khoms.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, in its first dedicated report on Libyan drug trafficking dynamics published in January 2026, documented Libya’s expanding role as a trans-shipment hub for cocaine moving toward Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Research for the European Union Drugs Agency had already identified Tobruk and Benghazi as known cocaine landing sites, with onward movement by sea toward southern Italy and the Balkans.

6. Disposable vessels may be the new normal

The Arconian was 41 years old. It had spent most of its working life shuttling cement, rice, and bagged cargo between West African ports under a succession of unremarkable owners. In early February 2026, weeks before its final voyage, it was acquired by Serenity Shipping SL Ltd, a Sierra Leonean company that had never owned a vessel before and has not owned one since. The ship was bought to make one trip.

The economics are straightforward. A 30-tonne cocaine shipment intercepted by the Spanish authorities was valued by the Audiencia Nacional at €812 million. A 40-year-old general cargo vessel in West African coastal trade sells for between US$1-3 million. The ratio between cargo and ship has become absurd. They can buy the ship outright, accept that interception means losing the hull, and still come out ahead by orders of magnitude on a single successful voyage. The Leijdekkers network’s reported turnover of up to €2 billion a year makes a $2 million ship an obvious purchase.

This breaks the maritime interdiction model in two ways.

The first is operational. European law enforcement is structured around tracking known traffickers, known cargo vessels, and known shipping companies over time, the assumption being that vessels and corporate structures are persistent assets whose patterns can be mapped.

The Leijdekkers model dissolves that assumption. Each Sierra Leonean shell is created for one ship. Each ship is sailed once. Each ship’s history under previous owners is irrelevant to its final voyage. By the time a vessel’s behaviour becomes interesting enough to warrant attention, it is already mid-Atlantic with its cargo aboard.

GI-TOC was able to map the Arconian, the White Eagle, and the White Labeille together only retrospectively, once the Arconian had been seized and the wider ownership patterns became visible.

The second is structural. The age and condition of the vessels involved sit outside most modern maritime regulatory frameworks. The Arconian, the White Eagle, and the White Labeille were all built between 1985 and 1989. Each had a documented history of regulatory infractions before being acquired by the Sierra Leonean shells. The White Eagle, under its former name Breadbox Falcon, was on the Black Sea ship watch list in 2020 for repeated detentions. The White Labeille had been detained in Praia, Cape Verde in 2019 carrying 9.5 tonnes of cocaine, then sold by public tender after the investigation concluded. These are vessels the legitimate shipping economy has already discarded — and that is precisely why traffickers can acquire them cheaply enough to throw away.

The maritime interdiction system was designed for a world in which moving 30 tonnes of cocaine required logistical commitments — chartered vessels, persistent shipping companies, repeated voyages — that gave investigators something to follow. That world is gone. The new model assumes the ship will be lost, treats the hull as a one-time logistics token, and absorbs the cost in the price of the cargo. Interdiction can still catch individual vessels. What it cannot yet do is catch the network behind them faster than the network can spin up the next one.

Isaí was under an active US extradition order and described him as a logistical coordinator for Los Chapitos, accused of running synthetic-drug production lines into the United States and Costa Rica. Investigators said that he had brokered the sale of 10,000 fentanyl pills to the US in 2025.

Isaí is not central to the Chapitos, the faction of the Sinaloa Cartel run by El Chapo’s sons. At most, he is mid-tier. But his arrest is a useful occasion to take stock of the Guzmán family more broadly as the dragnet reaches its lower rungs.

El Chapo’s family is not done. The Chapitos remain one of the dominant forces in the Mexican criminal landscape and in the cross-border fentanyl trade. Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar still run the faction from the Sierra Madre. But there’s only two of them left. Ovidio and Joaquín are in present.

El Chapo’s family is not done, but it is dwindling.

Here’s how it happened.

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Dijkman is a household name in Maastricht. He spent the better part of forty years as the city’s archaeologist and conservator, was knighted for his work earlier this year, and had curated past exhibitions on d’Artagnan at the Centre Céramique in the city.

When the floor of the Sint-Petrus-en-Pauluskerk church gave way in February and a skeleton appeared beneath the altar, Dijkman was called in and first claimed it might be d’Artagnan.

So what was the crime?

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He is the most senior Cuban regime figure ever criminally charged by the United States, at a time when the island is in freefall. Cuba is currently enduring rolling blackouts of up to 22 hours, its subsidised oil lifeline severed by the US capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US president who has repeatedly said he may invade the country.

Castro’s indictment is just another turn of the screw. Below are nine takeaways on what this indictment means and what happens next.

Is this actually a murder case?

It’s more than murder.

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Magyar inherited, in the language of Hungary’s own investigative press, a captured state. Under Orbán’s Fidesz party, institutions had been systematically redirected to enrich a narrow circle of loyalists. Intelligence services had been turned against journalists and EU fraud investigators. The machinery of justice had been quietly disabled.

Magyar’s first speech as prime minister showed the scale of the task. One of his first pieces of legislation will be the creation of a National Asset Recovery and Protection Office to uncover and retrieve stolen or embezzled funds. He gave a 31 May 31 deadline to the chief prosecutor, the presidents of the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court, and the heads of the Media Authority and other bodies filled by Fidesz to resign. He committed Hungary to joining the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), the body with the power to investigate fraud against EU funds directly in member states, which Orbán had spent years keeping Hungary out of.

The ten cases below are the largest that must now be investigated from the Orbán years. Some are systemic, such as a decades-long EU funds fraud operation involving billions of euros and dozens of connected firms. Others are specific, such as a street lighting company owned by the prime minister’s son-in-law or a foreign minister who appears to have been briefing the Kremlin during breaks in EU Council meetings.

As of 13 May, none of the principals have been charged. The only active investigation was opened on 28 April “against unknown perpetrators,” after reports that Orbán-era oligarchs had begun moving assets to the Gulf in the weeks following the election.

But an architecture of accountability is being built.

1. Systematic EU funds fraud and the capture of public procurement

This is the case that contains all others. Everything else flows from the same central mechanism: the state as a distribution vehicle for a private oligarchy.

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Yermak is a household name in Ukraine. The 54-year-old former entertainment lawyer turned chief of staff was widely described as Ukraine’s second president. He ran President Volodymyr Zelensky’s affairs for six years and was sat next to the president in nearly every wartime foreign meeting until his resignation last November as corruption allegations swirled.

Yesterday, Yermak was notified he is under suspicion of laundering around $10 million through an elite construction project near Kyiv. If this goes to trial and he is convicted, he faces up to 12 years in prison. It carries eight to twelve years and full confiscation of property.

Zelensky has not responded yet, with his office issuing a statement saying only that it was “too early to comment.”

FACTSHEET:

Andriy Yermak was the most powerful unelected official in wartime Ukraine. From February 2020 until November 2025 he ran the Office of the President, picked prime ministers, chose ministers and governors, sidelined the foreign minister and ran his own diplomacy from Bankova. He was in nearly every foreign meeting Zelensky took, shared the bunker with him in the first weeks of the full-scale invasion, and was widely described in Kyiv and abroad as the country’s de facto second president. Time placed him on its 100 most influential people list in 2024. He resigned in disgrace in November 2025.

So what is Yermak alleged to have done?

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He announce that the United States was designating Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A., better known by its Spanish acronym GAESA, as a sanctioned entity. Rubio didn’t mince his words. He called GAESA “the heart of Cuba’s kleptocratic communist system”, that it controlled at least 40 per cent of the Cuban economy and “likely up to USD 20 billion in illicit assets”, much of it “funneled away to hidden overseas bank accounts” while ordinary Cubans endured 22-hour blackouts and bare pharmacies.

Two other names appeared alongside GAESA on the State Department list. The first was Brigadier General Ania Guillermina Lastres Morera, the woman who has run the conglomerate since the sudden death of her predecessor in July 2022. The second was Moa Nickel S.A., the Cuban joint-venture partner of Canadian miner Sherritt International. Within hours, Sherritt suspended its Cuban operations, three of its directors resigned, and its share price fell by thirty per cent. Cuba’s largest mining export collapsed in an afternoon.

But what happened on May 7 was just the opening block of a new Cuban new sanctions architecture. On 1 May 2026, the White House issued an executive order to issue strong new sanctions on Cuba’s energy, defence, mining, financial services and security sectors.

Amid fears of a humanitarian crisis in Cuba or of a US military invasion, going against GAESA was long overdue.

For the Cuban regime, it is an existential threat to the financial spine that had kept the Castro project alive across three decades, two presidents, and the death of its founder.

Much of the research for this explainer is due to the astonishing and brave work of Cuban journalists and researchers, both inside and outside the country, often carried out at great personal risk. Please read and support Cubanet, elTOQUE, Havana Consulting Group, and Diario de Cuba.

1. So what exactly is GAESA?

It is the Cuban army’s holding company, and almost everything that earns dollars on the island runs through it.

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It names fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction, it guts the American hemp industry, it makes oddly specific demands of China, Canada, Mexico, Colombia and India, and it even calls for a greater role for God in addiction recovery.

The document calls itself an “order of battle.” Some of it is genuinely new policy. Some of it is the codification of measures already well underway. Much of it fits President Trump’s worldview and attitude towards the war on drugs.

1. Fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction

Fentanyl is, in the legal language of the United States, a weapon of mass destruction. The strategy describes the drug as “closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic,” and confirms that Executive Order 14367 “formally designates fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction,” requiring a national threat-assessment posture “commensurate with chemical, biological, and radiological dangers.” The Department of War is instructed to update its homeland chemical-incident directives to include fentanyl alongside sarin, VX and chlorine.

What does it mean?

A clandestine fentanyl lab in Sinaloa now sits, in legal terms, in the same threat category as a sarin facility in a sanctioned state.

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In the holds were 2.2 tonnes of cocaine, loaded at a Venezuelan port three weeks earlier.

On 4 July 2025, in the Special Criminal Court on Parkgate Street, Dublin, Justice Melanie Greally handed down 129 combined years of prison time to eight of the men involved.

Six had crewed the Matthew. Two had worked the MV Castlemore, a small Irish trawler bought for approximately €300,000 in cash by a Scottish operator who had flown in from Dubai for the purpose. The Castlemore had been sent out to rendezvous with the Matthew at sea and offload the cocaine for distribution into European markets. It had run aground on a sandbank off the Wexford coast instead.

Jelveh got 17 years and six months. His fellow Iranian crewman Saeid Hassani, 40, got 15. Irish police and Interpol assessed both men as affiliated with Hezbollah.

The heaviest individual sentence, 20 years, went to Cumali Ozgen, a 50-year-old Dutch national whom Greally described in her sentencing remarks as having the closest connection to the Dubai-based criminal organisation that had planned and funded the operation. The man who had actually run the operation from the UAE end, known in the court record as “Captain Noah” and identified by investigators as Mehdi Bordbar, was not in the dock. Neither was the Scottish operator who had delivered the Castlemore cash. Both remain at large.

At the post-sentencing briefing in Haulbowline, Assistant Commissioner Angela Willis confirmed that the Kinahan Organised Crime Group, the Dublin-founded, Dubai-based cartel that has been an OFAC-designated entity since 11 April 2022, was part of the investigation. Reporting by The Journal, citing security service sources, laid out the money. Iranian fundraisers for Hezbollah had put up a €5 million advance in a profit-share arrangement with a South American cartel, with Hezbollah’s cut routed back through Kinahan money-laundering channels to give the Iranians, as one source put it, some distance from the trail.

This is not a terrorism case. It is not a cartel. It is not a terrorist group. It is something else, a third form that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has spent three decades deliberately engineering, and that the 2026 war has now pushed into its most autonomous phase to date.

This is the fourth in a five-part series, The Organized Crimes of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, examining how the IRGC built, operates, and is adapting one of the world’s most complex and profitable criminal enterprises. Parts One through Three examined the oil machine, the drug trafficking, and the money laundering architecture. The final part will cover the IRGC’s seizure of Iran’s domestic economy.

1. The Franchise

Why is the IRGC’s relationship with Hezbollah and the Houthis better understood as a commercial franchise than as a proxy network?

On 17 April 2018, somewhere inside the Islamic Republic of Iran, a man named Muhammad Qasir sat down and wrote a receipt. The document confirmed that he had received, on Hezbollah’s behalf, a transfer of over $63 million. The recipient of the receipt was a senior official at the Central Bank of Iran.

The transaction surfaced four weeks later, in a Treasury designation that identified Qasir as the principal financial conduit between the IRGC-Quds Force and Hezbollah. Hundreds of Treasury documents have named Qasir since 2018. Only this one reproduces an amount, a date, and the detail that makes the whole operation legible: that a member of Hezbollah’s senior financial leadership was confirming receipt of a wire transfer to a counterpart at Iran’s central bank, in writing, as a matter of routine bookkeeping.

Read it again. A paramilitary organisation designated by the United States as a foreign terrorist organisation was receiving institutional transfers from the central bank of a sovereign state, and its financial officer was filing paper on them. This is not how clandestine operations function. This is how a corporate treasury functions. The $63 million was not salary payments or weapons procurement. It was a transfer into an ecosystem (Hezbollah’s Business Affairs Component, the Al-Qard al-Hassan quasi-bank, the diamond networks, the cocaine routes) that would generate multiples of that amount in revenue the Central Bank of Iran had no claim on.

The conventional frame reads this as patron-client finance. Iran pays; Hezbollah receives; the operation continues because the money keeps flowing; cut the flow, starve the client. It is the frame that governs most Western counter-terrorism thinking, and it is what produced the sanctions regime of the last twenty years. The frame is wrong. Iran was not funding Hezbollah’s operations in the sense a government funds a contractor. It was capitalising Hezbollah’s operations in the sense a franchisor capitalises a franchisee. Initial investment, continued support, brand protection, strategic direction. All of it in exchange for a cut of the revenue the franchisee would generate in territory the franchisee controlled.

Afshon Ostovar, writing in Security Studies in 2019 under the title The Grand Strategy of Militant Clients, noted the pattern without naming it: Hezbollah, he observed, does not solely depend upon resources from Iran, and Tehran does not control the group’s finances. Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute, in Senate testimony on 21 October 2025, put it on a ledger. Hezbollah’s annual operating budget runs to approximately $1 billion. Iran supplies roughly seventy per cent, around $700 million. The remainder comes from illicit activity. Hanin Ghaddar, testifying before a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee the same month, identified the ecosystem that makes the remainder possible: Lebanon’s formal banking system has collapsed, and an $18 billion cash economy has grown up in its place, providing the medium through which the franchise monetises its revenue streams without generating records any regulator can read.

None of them named the architecture. It is a franchise system, and the Houthis in Yemen, coming later, have been onboarded to it. The franchisor provides capital, weapons, training, brand, and ideological cover. The franchisee is granted a territorial monopoly: southern Lebanon and the Shia diaspora in Hezbollah’s case, northwest Yemen and the Red Sea in the Houthis’. The franchisee uses the franchisor’s playbook to generate independent revenue. A portion flows back to Tehran. Most does not. The franchisee’s loyalty is secured not by financial dependence but by the fact that the brand and the weapons pipeline and the diplomatic cover are franchisor property, and can be withdrawn.

The framework is visible in the 6 November 2025 Treasury designation that documented the IRGC-QF having transferred over $1 billion to Hezbollah since January 2025 alone, through the worst year of Hezbollah’s existence, following the October 2024 strikes that killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hashem Safieddine, and most of the organisation’s senior military command. The conventional reading is that the money keeps flowing because Hezbollah depends on it. The franchise reading is the opposite. The money flows harder because Hezbollah’s own revenue streams have been stressed by war, and the franchisor is making up the shortfall to keep the enterprise functional while the franchisee rebuilds. In a patron-client relationship, wartime reveals the patron’s indispensability. In a franchise relationship, wartime reveals the franchisor’s investment in keeping the brand alive.

2. The BAC

What does the succession from Mughniyah to the Qasir cousins reveal about the institutional structure of Hezbollah’s criminal holding company?

On the evening of 12 February 2008, Imad Mughniyah walked out of a building in the Kafr Sousa district of Damascus and got into his Mitsubishi Pajero. A bomb concealed in the spare tyre detonated. The man who had run Hezbollah’s military wing since the 1980s, who had directed the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing that killed 241 American servicemen and a generation of subsequent operations against US, Israeli, and Western targets, was killed instantly. Israeli and American intelligence services never formally claimed the operation. Everyone understood who had done it.

What most people did not understand, and what would not become publicly documented for another eight years, was that Mughniyah had spent part of his career running something other than a terrorist organisation. He had also founded a drug-trafficking company. The DEA named it for the first time in a press release dated 1 February 2016: the Business Affairs Component, sitting inside Hezbollah’s External Security Organisation, responsible for the movement of large quantities of cocaine, coordinating with the IRGC-Quds Force through Unit 108/4400. By the time the DEA wrote that press release, Mughniyah had been dead for eight years. The company he had founded had continued operating without him. It had grown.

That the military wing and the commercial wing had been built by the same man in the same decade tells you how Hezbollah conceptualised the relationship between guns and money from the outset. They were not separate functions. They were the same function, expressed through different instruments. What the DEA’s 2016 release did not say, but what every subsequent Treasury designation has made visible, is that the BAC is the most important single institution in the entire IRGC proxy architecture. It is larger, more diverse, and more globally dispersed than anything the Houthis have built, than anything the Iraqi PMF militias operate, and than any comparable enterprise run by any state-sponsored non-state actor on earth. Hundreds of subsidiaries. Six continents. Run, structurally, as a business.

The succession chain the BAC has run through since Mughniyah’s death reveals the institutional logic. Hashem Safieddine inherited operational leadership of the Hezbollah commercial apparatus inside Lebanon, including the BAC’s flagship domestic revenue operations, until he was killed alongside most of Hezbollah’s senior leadership in the Israeli strike campaign of October 2024. His cousin Abdallah Safieddine was positioned at the other end of the franchise: resident in Tehran, Hezbollah’s dedicated representative to the IRGC-QF and to the Central Bank of Iran, designated by OFAC in May 2018 for working with the central bank to expand banking access between Iran and Lebanon. Two Safieddines. One in Beirut running operations, one in Tehran managing the franchise relationship. When Hashem died, Abdallah kept operating.

The operational boss on the ground was Adham Tabaja, designated 10 June 2015, and his career illustrates how the BAC monetises territorial control better than any other single file. Treasury’s 2015 language is the cleanest public summary available: in 2006, Tabaja used his ties to Hezbollah leadership to create a construction monopoly for Al-Inmaa Engineering and Contracting in the Hezbollah-controlled Dahieh suburb of Beirut. Hezbollah needed buildings. Tabaja built them. Nobody else bid. Al-Inmaa Group for Tourism Works LLC, registered in Lebanon’s commercial registry as entity 8-0788, branched outward from its Dahieh base into oil-services bids in post-2003 Iraq, subsidiaries in Baghdad and Basra, investment vehicles that served simultaneously as construction contractor, commercial enterprise, and Hezbollah treasury. Tabaja was not running a criminal sideline to Hezbollah’s political-military operation. He was building the commercial infrastructure that made the political-military operation financially autonomous.

Which brings us back to Qasir. Muhammad Qasir was the financial artery between the IRGC and Hezbollah for approximately fifteen years. His designation described him in clinical terms as a critical conduit for financial disbursements from the IRGC-QF to Hezbollah. A $10 million Rewards for Justice bounty was issued for his capture in October 2020. He survived both the designation and the bounty. He was killed in Beirut on 1 October 2024, in the same Israeli strike campaign that eliminated Nasrallah and Hashem Safieddine. At his funeral, Iran sent Khamenei’s personal representative, the signal that Tehran regarded Qasir not as a Hezbollah operative but as a member of the IRGC’s own franchise leadership.

What happened after his death is the most important single piece of evidence for the franchise model’s institutional resilience. His role was not inherited by a single successor. It was split. Ja’far Muhammad Qasir, his son, was assigned the revenue portfolio: the money flows, the Lebanese exchange network, the transfers from Iran into Hezbollah’s operational accounts. Ali Qasir, his nephew, was assigned the commercial-logistics brief: oil and gas sales out of Iran, coordination with Syrian businessman Yasar Husayn Ibrahim, and the attempted recovery in mid-2025 of the Iranian tanker Arman 114 (formerly the Adrian Darya 1) that had been seized by Indonesia in 2023. Both men were designated together in the November 2025 Treasury action that documented the $1 billion in transfers since January. The franchise had lost its senior financial officer. The architecture had split his portfolio across two family members and continued to function. This is not what a proxy network looks like. This is what a family business looks like, managed under institutional pressure, with succession planning that long predated the crisis that triggered it.

3. The Global Footprint

How does a Lebanese paramilitary end up moving cocaine through twelve Latin American countries, diamonds across West Africa, and cash into Dublin through a Dubai-based Irish cartel?

The Beqaa Valley, in eastern Lebanon, is the size of a large English county. It has grown hashish and opium since Ottoman times. Since the 1980s it has been, in every meaningful sense, Hezbollah territory. The Lebanese state’s writ does not extend there in any form that matters. And it was from a small operations base in the Beqaa that Ayman Joumaa, a Colombian-Lebanese dual national fluent in Spanish and Arabic, virtually unknown outside counter-narcotics circles, ran what was, at its peak, one of the largest cocaine-laundering operations the DEA has ever mapped.

The scale is the first thing. Joumaa’s network was moving cocaine from Colombia through Central America to Los Zetas in Mexico at a cumulative volume of approximately 85,000 kilograms. It was laundering proceeds at up to $200 million per month, not per year, per month, through the Lebanese Canadian Bank, which FinCEN designated a primary money laundering concern under Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act on 10 February 2011. Joumaa himself was designated by the US Treasury as a narcotics kingpin weeks earlier and indicted by the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in December of the same year. The laundering mechanism was elegantly mundane. LCB processed approximately $329 million in transactions to American used-car dealerships between January 2007 and early 2011. The cars shipped to West Africa, sold for cash, and the proceeds flowed back to Hezbollah as part of a circular trade that Treasury described in the court filings in the plain language of commercial finance. Judge Paul Crotty of the Southern District of New York approved a $102 million forfeiture settlement on 25-26 June 2013. Joumaa has never been apprehended. As of April 2026 he remains at liberty, somewhere in Lebanon, periodically photographed at weddings.

The Tajideens were a different kind of operation. Not cocaine logistics but commercial empire, a Lebanese trading family with operations across Sierra Leone, Guinea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Belgium, and Lebanon, designated as a Hezbollah-controlled network since 9 December 2010. The family’s public face was Kassim Tajideen, who was arrested at Casablanca airport in March 2017, extradited to the United States, and pleaded guilty before Judge Reggie Walton of the DC district court on 6 December 2018 to conspiracy to launder financial instruments in violation of IEEPA. Five years, $50 million forfeiture. The scale of the operation exposed in the DOJ filings was what made the case instructive. In the period following his original 2009 designation, Tajideen had cleared approximately $1 billion through the US financial system. Roughly $30 million of it had been wired to American vendors who had no idea they were supplying a Hezbollah financier: producers of poultry, producers of grains, and, in a detail that captures the absurdity of sanctions enforcement at scale, a California manufacturer of home safes. Tajideen was released on COVID compassionate grounds on 28 May 2020, reportedly tied to a prisoner swap for US citizen Amer Fakhoury, and returned to Beirut to a hero’s welcome. Most of the companies, including Tajco, Kairaba Supermarket in Banjul, Congo Futur in the DRC, and Grupo Arosfran in Angola, continue operating.

And then there is Nazem Said Ahmad, who is the single most creative money launderer in the BAC’s recent history. Ahmad is a Lebanese-Belgian diamond dealer, designated in a $440 million action on 18 April 2023, who figured out something the art market did not want anyone to figure out. The art market has no correspondent banking. It has no suspicious-activity reporting regime. It has no equivalent of Know Your Customer in any form the financial sector would recognise. So Ahmad, operating through a Beirut gallery and his son Firas’s South African company Mega Gems PTY LTD, simply converted Hezbollah money into canvases. More than $54 million in fine art since 2012. Picassos. Warhols. A concurrent Eastern District of New York criminal indictment named 52 individuals and entities across nine countries. The $10 million Rewards for Justice bounty for Ahmad’s capture remains open. A Warhol purchased in Beirut in 2017 for $4 million and sold at a New York auction house in 2022 for $6 million is a laundering transaction that has no counterparty any regulator can identify.

In Europe, the BAC’s most consequential recent operation is the one that opened this investigation. The MV Matthew joint venture with the Kinahan Organised Crime Group was not an improvisation. It was the mature product of a working relationship. The Kinahans, including Christy Kinahan Sr., Daniel Kinahan, and Christopher Kinahan Jr., together with the Dubai-based front companies Ducashew General Trading and Hoopoe Sports, were designated by the US Treasury on 11 April 2022, with a combined $15 million Rewards for Justice bounty. Dublin origin. Dubai base since approximately 2010. Cocaine from Iberia to the Middle East, arms brokerage, Gulf property laundering. What the MV Matthew case revealed, and what Ed Caesar documented in the New Yorker on 27 October 2025, is that the Kinahans have been acting as one of Hezbollah’s European laundering outlets for years. Iranian Hezbollah fundraisers co-financed a cocaine shipment with a Venezuelan cartel. The Kinahans provided the logistics and the back-channel that allowed Hezbollah’s cut to be repatriated to Lebanon without leaving a fingerprint on any Iranian account. Franchise to franchise. Two OFAC-designated transnational criminal structures pooling capital on a single operation.

The generalisation came later, and from an unexpected direction. Rawa Majid is a Swedish-Kurdish narcotrafficker operating between Stockholm, Istanbul, and Tehran. His Foxtrot Network is primarily a drug-importation operation serving the Scandinavian retail market. He is not a Hezbollah asset. He is not even Shia. And yet his organisation was recruited directly by the IRGC and the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence for a series of attacks on Israeli diplomatic facilities in Europe: grenades thrown at the Stockholm embassy on 31 January 2024, two Swedish teenagers sent to attack the Copenhagen embassy in October 2024, 12-year terrorism sentences handed down in February 2025. Treasury designated the network on 12 March 2025. The Foxtrot case established, for the first time publicly and at the level of US financial sanctions, that the franchise model is not limited to Shia militias with decades-old ideological alignment. It is a generalised operational architecture that the IRGC will extend to any criminal organisation capable of delivering violence or logistics on demand. MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum, speaking in October 2024, stated the conclusion plainly: “Iranian state actors make extensive use of criminals as proxies.” The proxies are the criminals. The criminals are the proxies. The category distinction that most Western counter-terrorism policy depends upon has dissolved.

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Four close-support helicopters, two transport helicopters, four fixed-wing aircraft, and some 400 additional naval personnel sealed the perimeter.

The security ring scattered on contact, a deliberate distraction manoeuvre designed to buy the principal time to vanish. It had worked before.

This time, aerial and ground tracking followed their target to a sewage drainage conduit near the cabin. Marines pulled him out without firing a shot.

The man in the pipe was Flores Silva, the man that the US Treasury, the DEA, and the State Department had labelled the most important operational commander in the CJNG. He was 45 years old and had been running for close to two years.

Flores Silva was an expert at building escape routes. A military intelligence profile credited him with personally designing the rings of protection that kept his former boss, El Mencho, a fugitive. But this expertise didn’t help hhim escape capture yesterday.

His capture is the second major coup suffered by the CJNG this year, following the killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias “El Mencho,” in February. Flores Silva had been ranked by Mexican intelligence as one of four men capable of inheriting the cartel.

World of Crime’s book, CJNG - A Quick Guide to Mexico’s Deadliest Cartel is on sale here.

Hours later, in a separate operation in Zapopan, Jalisco, Army Special Forces and the National Guard arrested César Alejandro “N,” alias “El Güero Conta,” Flores Silva’s principal financial operator, a man who had moved cartel proceeds through shell companies, prestanombres, aircraft, vessels, ranches, and tequila producers.

The simultaneous loss of an operational chief and his financier on a single day is a heavy blow for the CJNG. Within hours, armed men set fire to businesses in Tecuala, Ahuacatlán, and Santa María del Oro in Nayarit.

Flores Silva was flown to Mexico City, and Mexican have confirmed an active US extradition request.

But to understand who was actually captured in that drainage pipe, we need to go back more than two decades and 2,500 kilometres, to a federal courtroom in Charlotte, North Carolina.

From Michoacán to Charlotte to the CJNG

Flores Silva was born on November 19, 1980, in Huetamo, Michoacán, in the eastern Tierra Caliente on the Guerrero border. The date and place are confirmed across OFAC, State Department, and DEA records. He maintained a parallel false identity under the name Gabriel Raigosa Plascencia, and his documented aliases read like a catalogue of the roles he filled: “El Jardinero,” “El Comandante,” “El Bravo 2,” “Audi,” and “Mata Jefes” — the Boss-Killer.

Huetamo in the 1980s and 1990s was shaped by the Valencia family, the avocado-growing clan rooted in Aguililla. Traditional marijuana and poppy cultivation was giving way to something larger, and the region was deep into the cycle of armed competition, weak-state terrain, and recruitment of teenage males into trafficking networks that would define Michoacán’s criminal ecology for the next three decades. Investigative reporting places Flores Silva’s entry into crime in the mid-1990s as a teenager, though his precise path into organised crime and his first patrón remain undocumented.

One common misconception requires correction. Flores Silva and El Mencho are often described as though they rose together from the same soil. They did not. Mencho was born in Naranjo de Chila, Aguililla, in southwestern Michoacán. Flores Silva was from Huetamo, in the east. They were 14 years apart in age. There is noe evidence, at least made public, that they were childhood friends or relatives.

The first hard institutional trace of his criminal life came in the US. In 2002, at the age of 21, Flores Silva was indicted in the US District Court for the Western District of North Carolina on federal narcotics trafficking charges. He was convicted and served a five-year federal prison sentence before being released and deported to Mexico, likely around 2007 or 2008. The Charlotte venue is confirmed in near-identical language by ICE, Treasury, State, and DEA.

Charlotte was a plausible destination. The metropolitan area had become a major “new destination” for Mexican migration in the 1990s and early 2000s, creating exactly the kind of labour, kinship, transport, and remittance corridors that trafficking networks had historically exploited. The Western District of North Carolina prosecuted repeated cocaine-trafficking conspiracies routing drugs from Mexico through Texas and Atlanta into the Carolinas during this period.

What the Charlotte chapter proves, even in outline, is that Flores Silva was embedded in a US narcotics distribution network years before CJNG itself existed. He entered American federal custody as a 21-year-old from Tierra Caliente. He left it, five years later, with an understanding of American law enforcement tactics and distribution logistics.

After his deportation, Flores Silva entered a seven-year documentary silence. No public source places him with a specific cell, boss, or operation between roughly 2008 and 2015.

But around that time, the Valencia family and their Milenio Cartel was disintegrating. They were battered by a war against the Zetas and fled Michoacán, successive Valencia leaders were captured in 2003, and their Sinaloa Cartel patrom, Nacho Coronel, was killed in 2010.

Out of these collapses, CJNG was founded in 2011 by Mencho. Flores Silva is not listed among the founding members by any institutional history of the organisation. Whatever role he later occupied, he was not there at the creation.

He emerged from that silence on April 6, 2015, with one of the deadliest attacks on Mexican police in modern history.

On the Mascota–Las Palmas highway near the village of Soyatlán in San Sebastián del Oeste, Jalisco, a CJNG group of over 80 gunmen ambushed a convoy of 20 Fuerza Única Jalisco officers returning from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara. Gunmen set a flatbed truck on fire to block the road in a zone without phone signal, then opened fire from elevated hillside positions with high-calibre rifles and fragmentation grenades. Fifteen officers were killed and five more wounded.

Investigations by the Fiscalía de Jalisco identified Flores Silva as the man who planned the attack.

The motive was allegedly revenge. On March 23, Fuerza Única had killed CJNG plaza chief Heriberto Acevedo Cárdenas, alias “El Gringo,” at Zacoalco de Torres. The ambush was part of a 20-day CJNG offensive that killed 21 officers and triggered a backlash from the government, during which the CJNG would shoot down a military helicopter.

Before Soyatlán, Flores Silva was essentially invisible in the public record. After it, he was a name.

Mexican Federal Police first captured him on July 26, 2016, near a hotel in Bucerías, Bahía de Banderas, Nayarit, carrying false identification as Gabriel Raigosa Plascencia and facing six outstanding warrants. He was publicly identified as CJNG’s plaza chief in Nayarit: production, transport, sale of drugs, plus huachicol. The state charges included aggravated homicide, attempted aggravated homicide, and organised-crime participation, all linked to Soyatlán. He was held at CEFERESO No. 2 “Puente Grande” for approximately three years.

Then, in 2019, a Jalisco state court of first instance absolved him, and he walked out of Puente Grande free. Mexican reporting universally links the release to rumours of a multi-million-peso bribe. h

On May 11, 2024, Jalisco’s Supreme Court revoked the absolution and sentenced him, in absentia, to 45 years of prison.

The Architect of the Pacific Corridor

There has been widespread reporting that Flores Silva was El Mencho’s “right-hand man” but this misses the nature of the relationship.

A federal witness statement, cited by Infobae in March 2026, states bluntly that Jardinero and Mencho were not close friends, and identifies another lieutenant, Hugo Gonzalo Mendoza Gaytán, alias “El Sapo,” as the founder’s actually closer confidant. But Flores Silva was evidently a skilled lieutenant who was intimately trusted with crucial operations.

A military intelligence profile reviewed by Milenio described the specifics: he supervised the construction of a clandestine private hospital where the kidney-diseased Mencho could receive discreet medical care, he purchased heavy weaponry from suppliers in the United States and Europe, and he designed escape routes through the natural geography of the Jalisco highlands.

The US Treasury’s 2025 OFAC designation added the harder institutional framing: he was a regional commander controlling clandestine methamphetamine and fentanyl laboratories across central Jalisco and southern Zacatecas, supervising clandestine airstrips and light aircraft, coordinating tractor-trailers moving cocaine from Central America, and managing passenger vehicles feeding US distribution cells in California, Texas, Illinois, Georgia, Washington, and Virginia. His portfolio stretched across at least six Mexican states: Jalisco, Nayarit, Zacatecas, Michoacán, Guerrero, and Colima, including the corridor to the port of Manzanillo.

Puerto Vallarta became, under his tenure, simultaneously a tourism-based money-laundering node and a strategic headquarters. His consolidation in Nayarit was inseparable from the corrupt political-security order that shaped that state in the 2010s.

But what made Jardinero more than just a conventional, if important, plaza boss was the sophistication of his financial architecture. The Treasury’s February 2026 OFAC action exposed the Kovay Gardens / Vallarta Gardens timeshare fraud network: a 17-company scheme operating out of Bahía de Banderas that had defrauded American and Canadian retirees of millions of dollars over 14 years. Named lieutenants collected payments from cartel-linked boiler rooms on his behalf.

A separate Treasury action in 2023 identified Mary Cruz Rodríguez Aguirre as his money-laundering broker, moving more than $6 million in US drug proceeds to Mexico through currency exchange houses and US-based businesses between 2020 and 2022. His empire fused drug manufacture, transport, extortionary governance, and white-collar fraud aimed at foreign victims.

The arrest of El Güero Conta exposed the other side of that ledger: shell companies, prestanombres, aircraft, ranches, and tequila producers, alongside accusations from residents of Los Naranjos, Tequila, that he had displaced 40 families since January 2024 to secure a strategic CJNG corridor.

Envoy to the Chapitos

After Joaquín Guzmán López’s July 2024 betrayal of “El Mayo” Zambada and the subsequent Sinaloa civil war, Flores Silva reportedly personally brokered an alliance between CJNG and Los Chapitos. The opening contact came through a CJNG emissary at a ranch in Huajicori, Nayarit, treated as neutral territory, according to Milenio. A subsequent meeting in Guadalajara paired Flores Silva with Abdiel Guzmán Araujo, son of “El Guano.”

The deal: Los Chapitos shared trafficking routes for drugs, weapons, and migrants; CJNG provided protection in Sinaloa, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Nayarit, and Chiapas; and Flores Silva personally kept close ties with Chapitos leader, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar.

This would represent a level of cross-cartel trust previously unimaginable in the Mexican drug trade. His capture now puts that alliance, and CJNG’s strategic depth against the Mayiza, in immediate doubt. Without the guarantor, the friction points between mid-level commanders of both organisations are likely to surface.

In November 2023, Flores Silva demonstrated why he had been so difficult to capture. Marine commandos descended on the Cima Park luxury complex in Zapopan’s Valle Real and secured two luxury apartments. They found a firearm, undisclosed cash, paintings and sculptures dedicated to CJNG leaders, and a rescued kidnap victim. Flores Silva had been operating under cover as a businessman and art collector, but mamaged to escape jus tin time.

During those years, the narcocorrido industry had already crowned him. Gerardo Díaz y su Gerarquía released “El Sucesor” in June 2022, naming the geography, the bounty, the succession claim: “para todos el jardinero.” Los Farmerz released “El Jardinero” in January 2025, which soon rocketed to over 1 million views.

On the day of the capture, Milenio observed acidly that the corridos had got it wrong: they crowned him before he could be crowned.

What Happens Next?

He will most likely be extradited to the US, as many top narcos have been under President Claudia Sheinbaum.

He faces an indictment in the US District Court for the District of Columbia for conspiracy to distribute cocaine and heroin. But the case is handled by the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division rather than the local US Attorney’s Office. Treasury designated him under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act in April 2021. The State Department posted a $5 million reward. In June 2025, he was designated a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

The intelligence value of Flores Silva in US custody is potentially enormous. As the former security chief, the architect of the Chapitos alliance, the manager of Pacific corridor logistics, and the controlling figure behind the Kovay Gardens fraud network, he is a living repository of CJNG’s financial architecture, its corrupt government contacts, its laboratory and airstrip locations, and the operational terms of the most significant cross-cartel alliance in recent Mexican history.

Flores Silva’s capture caps a 70-day stretch in which the CJNG has lost its founder, its number-two operator, and one of its principal financiers. The cartel’s unparalleled ability to remain united will now be tested more than ever.

Juan Carlos Valencia González, alias “El 03,” El Mencho’s stepson, is reported to be the new top leader, though analysts caution he lacks influence among older, battle-hardened regional commanders who viewed Flores Silva as their peer.

The most consequential reframing the evidence supports is this: Flores Silva’s power came from his skill. Reading across his entire career, his multi-faceted skill as a criminal operative shines fort. He could plan ambushes, run significant drug trafficking pipelines, protect his boss, organize a timeshare fraud ring, ensure weapons procurement, and broker a peace deal with Sinaloa.

The corridos treated him as a successor to Mencho, but he seemed to be the CJNG’s . chief operating officer.

For the better part of a decade, Kinahan was the most wanted drug trafficker in Europe. He is accused of leading a drug organisation from a Dubai penthouse, which moved cocaine from South America to the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam on an industrial scale. The Garda (Irish police) estimates it is worth €1 billion.

Kinahan once anchored a “super cartel” that Europol assessed controlled roughly one-third of Europe’s cocaine trade. The US State Department had a $5 million bounty on his head. He is alleged to have laundered narcotics profits through more than 200 shell companies in 20 countries.

Finally, he infiltrated professional boxing at its highest level.

Yet, when Dubai Police arrested him on 15 April, none of all this was in the arrest warrant. Kinahan was detained on an Irish High Court Order for directing a criminal organisation and the murder of one man, Eddie Hutch, shot dead three days after a gangland attack in a Dublin hotel in 2016.

Al Capone had his tax returns. Daniel Kinahan has Eddie Hutch.

There has been so much written about the Kinahan gang it’s difficult to know what I can add to it. But what I wanted to retrace here are seven turning points in the career of Daniel Kinahan, from a Dublin flat to a Dubai penthouse, which rewrote Europe’s criminal playbook.

And first, to understand Kinahan’s methodology, we have to understand his family.

Daniel Joseph Kinahan was born in Dublin on 25 June 1977 and grew up between Tallaght and the Oliver Bond flats in the Liberties, “the ultimate nepo baby” of Irish gangland, according to the Irish Times. His inheritance came from his father, Christopher “Christy” Kinahan Sr, born 23 March 1957, whose first convictions in the late 1970s were for house, breaking, car theft and forgery.

The father’s trajectory is unusual. Caught with heroin worth 117,000 pounds in Clontarf in 1986, he was jailed for six years in March 1987. While in prison, he took a degree and learned Spanish and Dutch. He reportedly refused early release to finish it. Moving to Amsterdam, he rode the 1990s ecstasy boom while Daniel and his brother Christopher Jr istributed drugs in Dublin’s south inner city. Together, they formed the backbone of what would come to be called the Kinahan Organised Crime Group (KOCG).

By the mid-2000s, Christy Sr had relocated to a €6 million villa in Estepona on the Costa del Sol, directing an international supply operation from southern Spain.

As the years passed, Christy Sr stepped back from the narcotics side and let his sons take over. By the time OFAC formalised the picture in 2022, the succession was complete: "Christopher Sr.'s sons, Daniel Kinahan and Christopher Jr., now manage his drug trafficking operations while Christopher Sr. oversees the property portions of the enterprise."

Daniel sourced cocaine from South America and ran day-to-day operations. Christopher Jr, Treasury said, "regularly contributes to a fund that is used to pay KOCG members" and was involved in transporting narcotics in the United Kingdom; he was also caught travelling on a false identity document in Germany. The Irish High Court concluded the KOCG was "a murderous organisation involved in the international trafficking of drugs and firearms." An EU-funded Transcrime study found the cartel had built more than 200 companies across 20 countries.

As of Daniel's arrest on 15 April 2026, neither his father nor his brother has been detained. Both remain subject to $5 million US bounties. Bellingcat footage from an MMA event in Dubai in June 2025 confirmed all three were still in the city as recently as last summer.

1. How a cartel survives a 750 officer raid

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And yet on April 10, 2026, Albanian President Bajram Begaj signed a decree making him a citizen of the Republic of Albania. Within days, Adams had registered as a resident of Tirana and applied for a passport.

He tweeted that the citizenship was “honorary.” It isn’t.

This is a real citizenship, obtained through Article 9 of Albania’s citizenship law, which allows the president to naturalise a foreigner who meets none of the standard requirements, provided the country has a “scientific, economic, cultural or national interest” in doing so.

It is the same pathway used to grant citizenship to Dua Lipa in 2022. The difference is that Dua Lipa has Albanian-Kosovar heritage and is one of the most famous people on the planet.

Eric Adams is a former mayor who left office in December 2025 earlier under a cloud of federal corruption charges, a sexual assault lawsuit, millions of dollars in unpaid legal bills, and a circle of associates who are either indicted, convicted, or under investigation.

Albania has offered no public explanation of what national interest Adams serves. Albanian media have noticed.

To understand how a Brooklyn-born ex-cop ended up as a proud son of Skanderbeg you have to follow two threads at once: Adams’ deepening relationship with Albania, and his accelerating legal troubles.

The Courtship

Adams’ Albanian connections began during his mayoralty, modestly at first. In November 2022, he hosted the first Albanian flag-raising ceremony at Bowling Green, declaring Albania’s 110th anniversary day.

Eric Adams makes the sign of the double-headed eagle, a symbol of Albania, at a flag-raising ceremony in New York. Source: Forbes.

New York is home to one of the largest Albanian-American communities in the United States, and for a mayor who branded himself the “international mayor,” the Albanian community was one of many constituencies he courted. His son Jordan Coleman competed on Albania’s version of American Idol that same year, giving Adams a personal anecdote he would deploy repeatedly.

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The report’s writers report were careful to note what it did not capture. The $9 billion was the portion of the system that left traces. The portion that did not: the hawala transfers settled in cash, the cryptocurrency transactions routed through specific exchanges, the commodity trades invoiced at fictitious prices, the construction contracts paid in kind rather than currency, was not quantified.

The $9 billion figure does not reveal the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) financial operation. It reveals the size of its shadow.

The full system, built over thirty years, refined by every round of pressure applied to it, currently sustaining a regime at, moves somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion annually

It moves through Dubai’s exchange houses and Hong Kong shell companies, through Iraqi banks controlled by militia figures, through a Turkish gold-trading system that laundered $20 billion, and increasingly through a cryptocurrency infrastructure that no sanction can reach.

What the IRGC has built is a norm, a parallel financial system, institutionally embedded and deliberately designed, that converts criminal income from oil, drugs, arms, and construction into usable economic and political power. The sanctions regime that was supposed to strangle it has, at every turn, made it more sophisticated.

Understanding why requires going back to the beginning, to an institution that decided, in 2007, that financial compliance was not in its interests.

This is the third in a five-part series, The Organized Crimes of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, examining how the IRGC built, operates, and is adapting one of the world's most complex and profitable criminal enterprises. Part One examined the IRGC's seizure of Iran's oil sector and how it weaponized it. Part Two traced the IRGC's narco empire from Afghan heroin to captagon.

1. The FATF Problem

If Iran has been on the financial crime blacklist since 2007, why does the money keep moving?

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The language was careful but the charge was extraordinary. Baghbani, the Treasury stated, had used his position as a senior military commander to allow Afghan drug traffickers to move heroin and opiates through Iranian territory. He had also supplied those traffickers with precursor chemicals for producing drugs inside Iran.

In exchange, he had arranged for the smugglers to deliver weapons to the Taliban, then actively fighting and killing American soldiers in Afghanistan. His direct superior in this arrangement was Qasem Soleimani, the Quds Force commander who would become, in the years before his 2020 assassination, perhaps the most powerful military figure in the Middle East.

“Today’s action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking narcotics,” said Under-Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David Cohen, “made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of a broader scheme to support terrorism.”

Baghbani was not an ordinary drug trafficker. He did not sell drugs and did not move drugs. Instead, he controlled a border through which vast quantities of the world’s heroin had to pass, and monetized it.

He ran the world’s most consequential drug corridor the same way the IRGC now runs the Strait of Hormuz: not as a trafficker but as a toll collector.

The IRGC is not a drug trafficking organisation in any conventional sense. It does not own laboratories, distribute product, or employ street dealers. What it owns is are borders, the ports, the checkpoints, and the authority to decide who passes and who dies.

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Ships approaching the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow corridor through which one in every five barrels of oil on earth must pass, were ordered to halt. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) declared the strait closed. Any vessel attempting passage without authorisation risked being be set ablaze.

Within 72 hours, vessel traffic through Hormuz collapsed by 95 percent. War-risk insurance was withdrawn. Brent crude surged toward $120 a barrel. The International Energy Agency called it worse than the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks combined.

But the IRGC did not just blockade the strait. It is monetising it.

Ships seeking transit have been instructed to submit their ownership details, cargo manifests, and crew nationalities to IRGC-connected intermediaries. If approved, they received a clearance code and a mandatory escort through a specially designated corridor north of Larak Island: the Qeshm-Larak passage, a route controlled entirely by the Guards.

The fee for this service: $2 million per vessel, payable in Chinese yuan or stablecoins on the Tron blockchain, settling outside every Western financial system simultaneously.

By late March, Iran’s parliament had a bill in committee to codify the arrangement permanently into law. On April 7, the international acceptance of that fee became a key demand for any negotiation with the US.

This should surprise no one. For three decades, quietly and then loudly, the IRGC has been building a highly sophisticated state-backed oil smuggling operation.

Prior to the war, it controlled approximately half of Iran’s total petroleum exports, some 1.5 million barrels per day, through a ghost fleet of hundreds of tankers, a labyrinthine network of shell companies spanning dozens of jurisdictions, and a payment infrastructure that has migrated, piece by piece, entirely beyond the reach of Western sanctions.

The Hormuz toll booth is not a departure from this system. It is its logical culmination: the moment a criminal enterprise built on smuggling oil past the world’s attention decided to charge the world for looking.

The conflict has cost the IRGC dearly, however. The wartime crackdown in the UAE, long part of its central washing machine, has seen IRGC-linked money changers arrested, front companies shuttered, and the trust-based sarafi networks that moved billions disrupted in ways that analysts describe as potentially the most damaging single blow to IRGC finances in a decade.

The Venezuela channel, worth billions in stranded investments, collapsed with the capture of Nicolás Maduro. Key commanders who built and operated this architecture are dead.

Yet the oil flows on. Since the conflict began, United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) has documented 27 Iranian oil loadings from Kharg Island, moving approximately 38 million barrels worth more than $3 billion at elevated wartime prices. The ghost fleet sails in part. The Chinese buyers are buying.

And as Iran’s conventional military is degraded, its criminal oil economy has become not a secondary revenue stream but the primary mechanism keeping the regime alive.

Even with the temporary two-week ceasefire reached on April 7 between the US and Iran, and its almost inevitable collapse. the monetization of the Strait and the oil going through it was a key negotiation demand.

Understanding how we got here requires going back to the beginning.

This is the first in a five-part series, The Criminal Empire of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, examining how the IRGC built, operates, and is adapting one of the world’s most complex and profitable criminal enterprises. Subsequent parts will examine the IRGC’s narcotics trafficking network, its global financial architecture, its proxy criminal franchises from Hezbollah to the Houthis, and the seizure of Iran’s domestic economy. Together, they constitute the most comprehensive account in English of the IRGC as a criminal organisation rather than merely a military-political actor.

1. The paramilitary force

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was established on May 5, 1979, by decree of Ayatollah Khomeini, purpose-built as an ideological counterweight to the regular army. Its mission was to protect the revolution from enemies foreign and domestic. For its first decade, that mission was defined by the Iran-Iraq War — eight years of grinding attrition that consumed an estimated one million Iranian lives and left the country’s infrastructure in ruins.

The war’s end in 1988 created a problem. The IRGC had emerged from the conflict as Iran’s most powerful institution, commanding hundreds of thousands of battle-hardened soldiers, a formidable intelligence apparatus, and deep loyalty from the Supreme Leader. But it also had a demobilisation crisis: what do you do with a revolutionary army in peacetime?

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The entire vehicle and its cargo have not been recovered. No suspects have been identified.

Nestlé confirmed the theft publicly on 28 March, deploying a batch-code tracing system so retailers and consumers can flag any bars from the stolen shipment that surface through unofficial sales channels.

Their response was decently funny as such statements go. “We've always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat. But it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 tons of our chocolate,” it read.

However, the heist is worthy of note. The haul was worth an estimated €870,000 at retail and targets KitKat's new F1 chocolate range, a moulded chocolate shaped like a Formula 1 car, launched in January 2026 as part of a multi-year deal making KitKat the Official Chocolate Bar of Formula 1.

It is another example in a rapidly escalating criminal trend: organised cargo theft across Europe now costs businesses an estimated €8.2 billion every year.

So there is a chocolate theft problem?

An extensive one.

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1 - The Son of the Sierra

The boy sat at the edge of the field and watched the road.

He had been born into a Mexico that had promised to fix places like this. The Tepalcatepec Commission had poured money and engineers into the lowland valleys, building dams and irrigation channels, dragging the Tierra Caliente into the modern era. None of it reached Culotitlán. Perched in the folds of the Sierra Madre del Sur, the village where Rubén Oseguera Cervantes came into the world in 1966 was accessible only by a dirt track that turned to mud four months of the year.

There was no electricity. No running water. The houses were adobe — earth packed with grass and agave fibre — and the only buildings made of anything else were the church and the municipal office down in Aguililla.

This article was written by Chris Dalby and first published in Spanish by Perpetuo Magazine on March 24, 2026. It has published by World of Crime, in its English form, with their kind permission.

He grew up in that adobe house with five brothers, Juan, Miguel, Antonio, Marín and Abraham. The older brothers worked. The younger ones watched the older ones and understood what was expected. Their father worked the Valencia orchards, which meant the family’s survival was tied, as it was for most of Aguililla, to one clan’s goodwill.

Into the absence left by the Mexican state, the Valencia family had grown like the avocado trees themselves: deep,rooted, pervasive, entirely in charge of what the soil produced. In the 1960s the patriarch was José Valencia, already a reliable supplier of marijuana and opium poppy to larger trafficking groups further north in Sinaloa.

By the time Rubén was entering adolescence, a younger generation was consolidating that power. Armando Valencia Cornelio, who would become known by the alias “Maradona”, was formalising the family’s operation into something more structured, more ambitious, and considerably more dangerous.

The Valencias were not criminals in the way that word implies disorder. They were order. They employed half the municipality in their orchards and packing plants. When a farmer needed seed money and the bank said no, the Valencias often said yes. When a dispute needed settling, the Valencias settled it.

The state visited Aguililla the way weather visits a drought: sporadically, without warning, and without staying. The Valencias never left.

Nemesio left school in the fifth grade and went to work in the orchards. There was nothing unusual about this. The harvest was grinding work. The picker’s tool was a gancho, a long bamboo pole with a metal hook and a small cloth basket at the tip. The avocado trees bled a milky sap when the fruit was pulled away and the sap turned black in the air, a viscous resin that stained everything it touched. The children of Aguililla walked home each evening with blackened hands and blackened clothes, the mark of the field class ground into their skin.

What schooled him instead was the palenque. The cockfighting pit was where the real curriculum of Aguililla played out on Saturday afternoons: who had money and who did not, who commanded silence when they walked in and who made way for them. The Valencias held court there. A boy who paid attention could learn the entire social architecture of the narcopueblo from a single afternoon in the palenque’s dust and noise. Nemesio paid attention.

By 1980, the Valencias needed something more than pickers. The Mexican Army had begun running search and destroy missions through the Sierra, looking for the marijuana plantations that had been growing quietly alongside the avocado groves.

The solution was simple and ancient: put the sons of trusted workers in the hills above the crops and have them watch the roads.

The elevation, when it came to Ruben, was not offered as a choice. It was a promotion: from the laboring class to something with a different kind of status and a different kind of danger. He was given a weapon and shown where to sit. The marijuana grew in clearings below, hidden under the avocado canopy.

On the road beneath all of it, nothing moved.

He watched anyway.

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Outside the Asunción parliament, government officials called it a historic moment. Independent congressman Raúl Benítez had a different take. "The security of a country," he told deputies, "is not built by importing troops or shielding foreign agents with diplomatic immunities."

He was comprehensively ignored.

Why did Paraguay grant complete impunity to US soldiers?

It began with a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed on December 15, 2025 by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Paraguayan Foreign Minister Rubén Ramírez Lezcano in Washington.

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Faced with a referendum that would have allowed foreign military bases to return to their country, more than 60 percent of voters rejected the proposal outright. Ecuador did not want foreign boots on its soil.

Less than four months later, US military forces are operating on Ecuadorian soil anyway.

On March 3, US Southern Command announced that American forces had launched operations against "designated terrorist organizations" alongside their Ecuadorian counterparts.

The Pentagon did not say what the operations would entail, and a short video posted to social media showed figures boarding a helicopter.

That same day, in a separate action, the US, Ecuador and Europol dismantled a major trafficking network linking Los Lobos, one of Ecuador's most violent cartels, to criminal organizations in Belgium and the Netherlands.

So why has Trump made this Ecuador his next target, after Venezuela and Mexico, in his war on drugs?

World of Crime explains.

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