Arms trafficking
The illegal trade of small arms, unlike other organized crime commodities, is more closely associated with exercising power in communities instead of achieving economic gain.
[3][2] Africa, due to a prevalence of corrupt officials and loosely enforced trade regulations, is a region with extensive illicit arms activity.
British merchants and bankers funded the purchase of arms and construction of ships being outfitted as blockade runners which later carried war supplies bound for Southern ports.
The chief figures for these acts were Confederate foreign agents James Dunwoody Bulloch and Charles K. Prioleau and Fraser, Trenholm and Co. based in Liverpool, England[9] and merchants in Glasgow, Scotland.
[13] It was estimated the Confederates received thousands of tons of gunpowder, half a million rifles, and several hundred cannons from British blockade runners.
[14] As a result, due to blockade running operating from Britain, the war was escalated by two years in which 400,000 additional soldiers and civilians on both sides were killed.
[15][16][17][12] Under U.S. law and Article 10 of the 1842 U.S.–UK extradition treaty (Webster-Ashburton Treaty) at the time, President Abraham Lincoln had the power to prosecute gunrunners (Americans and foreigners alike) and request Britain to hand over its arms traffickers engaged in "Piracy", but the British Ambassador to the U.S., Lord Lyons, threatened retaliation if British smugglers were subject to criminal prosecution.
[19]: 31 Despite the arms embargo, there was much gunrunning into Mexico, as one American official complained in 1913: "our border towns are practically their commissary and quartermaster depots".
Aside from internal theft and cross-border smuggling, criminals and insurgents in the Philippines source weapons from unlicensed workshops making firearms ranging from imitations of the 1911 pistol to single-shot .50 BMG long guns.
[24] As oil companies paid rent for their concessions in South Sudan, the government was able to afford to buy arms on a lavish scale.
[24] The American arms dealer and private military contractor, Erik Prince, sold to the government for $43 million three Mi-24 attack helicopters and two L-39 jets together with the services of Hungarian mercenary pilots to operate the aircraft.
[25] Less is known about the very secretive arms dealers supplying the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement-in-Opposition (SPLM-IO) led by Riek Machar other than that the majority of the gunrunners appeared to be European.
[24] A rare exception was with the Franco-Polish arms dealer Pierre Dadak who was arrested on 14 July 2016 at his villa in Ibiza on charges of gunrunning into South Sudan.
[24] At his villa, the Spanish National Police Corps allege that they found documents showing he was negotiating to sell Machar 40,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 30,000 PKM machine guns and 200,000 boxes of ammunition.
[27] The firearms that are imported and passed around are commonly small arms and lighter weapons (SALW) compared to large machinery, such as tanks and aircraft.
[28] Though one of the least profitable illegal trades, arms trafficking made an estimated $1.7-3.5 billion in 2014, making it the 9th largest criminal market, which was valued at $1.6-2.2 trillion.
[31] Comparatively, AK-47s sold on the Dark web in the United States can cost as much as $3,600,[32] as the price of illegal arms is increased greatly by the distance it must travel, due to the induced risk.
This was mainly due to the fact that they were able to get control of the prostitution market and the smuggling of stolen goods such as weapons, motorcycles, and car parts.
[37] According to Jana Arsovska and Panos Kostakos, leading scholars on organized crime, the causes of arms trafficking are not solely based on rational choice theory but rather have been more closely linked to the intimacy of one's personal social networks as well as the "perception of risks, effort and rewards in violating criminal laws.
