Mueller's Dire Warnings

The idea of iron triangles, where organized crime, corrupt officials, and corrupt businesses converge, was introduced by Robert S. Mohler III in a speech about the evolving organized crime threat. Factors such as international communication systems and terrorism have supercharged this convergence. Terrorism started using the same channels as business people to move money and found common ground with organized crime. The collapse of the Soviet Union led to alliances between corrupt officials and organized crime, resulting in large sums of money being moved into banking systems. The main culprit for moving the money was Mogilevich. Mueller was concerned that criminal elements would take over and gave a dire warning about this threat. Now let me tell you how this idea came to be. On January 27, 2011, Robert S. Mohler III, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gave a very brief speech to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York and New York City, New York, naturally. Mr. Mohler's speech was entitled, The Evolving Organized Crime Threat. This is where he came up with his theory of iron triangles, that there was a convergence of the interests of three big groups that were corrupt to some extent. First among equals was organized crime. New York was the home of the mafia, so that was on his mind. The second was corrupt officials. New York had had its fair share of corrupt officials, starting with Tammany Hall and probably even before that. And then finally, corrupt businesses. New York has plenty of corrupt businesses. It's the home of the stock market. The speech talked about those three interest groups coming together and working when their interests meshed. And as a result, they were becoming supercharged. But there were a couple of other factors that caused this to happen. We'd had transnational crime before, and these other entities also existed. But there were a few things that were happening that was causing it to be supercharged. One was we'd become more international. Our communications systems with computers and such made it easy to communicate over long distances. It also made it easier to transfer money. The financial system was allowing many ways to move money that avoided being screened or investigated. It hid the accounts so that you had a hard time following the proceeds of crime. There was a factor of terrorism, too. What you had originally were businessmen that were trying to avoid taxes. They came up with tax havens and secret accounts where you could hide your money from your spouse or the tax authorities in your home country, where you could put money overseas so you could leave if you were threatened with arrest and incarceration. Or if you were a corporation, just so that you could keep your main assets from being taxed in a jurisdiction that charged more than the bank where you had your assets held. Some of these were legal, but over time, organized crime found out about it. You had Mayor Lansky, who was famous for making a quote of, ìIt's better than the Bahamas.î He'd started out with Swiss banks because he'd heard about them. But then he found out that the British had been doing banking longer than the Swiss and had an empire. It was much easier to move money around through the British banking system. It still is to a large extent today. Anyway, one of the things that had supercharged these events was terrorism because they also used the system of moving money around. It's called hot money when you move money from banks to banks in other countries to avoid being observed or being taxed. They used the same channels as the business people. They found out that sometimes they needed to raise money for arms. They found that crime was a good way to do it. They could rob banks or they could sell drugs. Then they discovered that they had a lot in common with organized crime. They found that organized crimes could do services for them. They could help them launder their money. They could provide them logistics. They could sell them weapons. Then, at the end of the ë80s and the ë90s, the Soviet Union started to collapse. The apparatchiks, the fixers that ran government, the low-level officials that had power in Russia, started looting the funds of the entities that they ran, making it clear that they were in their services, and putting it into foreign accounts so they could get at them. To do this, they formed alliances with their own organized crime people. As a result, you had a lot of money moving into the banking systems from both corrupt officials and organized crime that were working together. The terrorists found out that the one thing that Russia had that was valuable were weapons. They started buying stockpiles out of East Germany. That really infused the criminal world with a lot of money. That was one of the causes for bringing together Muellerís problem with the advent of iron triangles. It had supercharged things to the point where you couldnít ignore it. It was hard to ignore the World Trade Center going down, but it was also hard to really figure out how all these people worked together and where the money went. But Mueller figured out exactly what was going on, because he figured out who was the main culprit for moving the money, and that was a man named Mogilevich. Iíll get to him later on, but Iím going to play a tape for you so you can hear Mr. Mueller explain the dire warning that he wanted to give to the world, that there were criminal elements that were coming together and that they were working with other elements of society, corrupt officials and corrupt businessmen, and that he feared that in the quest for dominance among these groups, that the criminal element would take over. Hence the title of his speech, which was called ìThe Evolving Organized Crime Threat.î He was mostly worried about Mogilevich and the Russian criminals and the mobs taking over government in the Western world. Thereís going to be a brief excerpt from his speech, so you can hear it in his own words. Weíve used AI to broadcast the Voice for Podcast. Weíd like you to know that artificial intelligence uses pattern recognitions to create their synthesized voice, and thank Levin Labs for allowing us to use their voice synthesizer to make that excerpt audible so you could hear it on this podcast. Now, without further ado, hereís the excerpt from Muellerís speech, so you can hear it from the horseís mouth, the dire warning that he gave out. The thing I was telling you about pattern recognition, where when you see the pattern, it might be something you donít really want to see or have to deal with, but itís there.