What links the Italian mafia, the DEA, and Hezbollah? 

In this episode, Mark sits down with investigative journalist Miles Johnson, to discuss his book ‘Chasing Shadows: A True Story of the Mafia, Drugs and Terrorism’.

Miles discovered a DEA investigation into a money laundering network in Europe, which branched out to reveal the truly global nature of organized crime, and how it intersects with the world of terrorism.

Miles’ book reads like a cinematic thriller, a story about the globalization of organized crime. There are three central characters from three different institutions – the ‘Ndrangheta, the Italian mafia from Calabria; the terrorist organization, Hezbollah; and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in the US.

Although the characters never meet, their stories intertwine and reveal how geopolitics shapes organized crime.

Before writing this book, Miles spent a number of years as a foreign correspondent in Italy, and reveals the hundreds if not thousands of documents and legal transcripts he went through to build this fascinating story.  

In this episode, Mark talks to Miles about his book ‘Chasing Shadows: A True Story of the Mafia, Drugs and Terrorism’

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Welcome to underworlds from the global initiative against transnational organized crime.

My name is Mark Shaw, and in today's episode, I'm speaking to Miles Johnson, who's written a book called chasing shadows, which looks at the interlay, or overlays between organized crime, politics and terrorism and looking at the money flows and the individuals involved.

It traces the story of three characters and uses those characters to shine a light on the intersections between these different areas.

And now over to the conversation.

Miles, welcome to Underworld.

Here's a copy of Miles book, which I read while traveling.

And I have to say it was just a real thriller.

Keeps you on the edge of your seat as you move through all the different characters.

Miles, so well done, and it's really a pleasure to be speaking to.

Thank you.

Perhaps a good way to start, Miles is just to ask you to sketch out the big themes of the book because there's a lot of people in the book and there's a lot of movement and there's a lot of action.

But what would you say are the big themes that emerged for you?

Well, firstly, Mark, thanks so much for having me.

It's a real pleasure to be here and really thank you for reading and enjoying the book.

It is a book which, as you say, there's a lot of characters in it, so to speak.

I mean, these are real people, but, you know, they're people whose lives are presented in the book, but they all interact with each other in this sort of thematic way, in the sense of it's a very global book.

It's a book where there are characters based in different locations.

And unlike sort of a, I guess, classic kind of, you know, sort of cinematic, true crime thing where all the characters eventually sort of end up in a room.

These are characters who, their lives are affected by one another, but through the sort of global criminal sort of economy.

And it's really a story, thematically about the globalization of organized crime, but also how geopolitics shapes organized crime and criminal activity across borders.

And so how unexpected events in one country will lead to unexpected events in another and how these are sort of these very powerful forces which can't really be controlled very easily by states or governments.

And often they actually devour the protagonists in the book themselves.

They're too powerful for the criminals themselves to deal with.

I mean, it's really a fascinating story.

I mean, you make the point.

These three guys don't actually meet each other, but they are sort of intersecting in this broader political criminal economy.

Just give us a quick sketch of the three because they're quite interesting set of men, I have to say.

Yeah.

So I would begin with Jack Kelly, who is a USDA agent, and he is drafted into a unit of the DEA called Special Operations Division.

And it's a sort of part of the DEA, which is almost like a sort of processing house for a lot of the information that's coming in from sources around the world.

And he's specifically put on looking at money laundering related to the middle east as Lebanon and Hezbollah, the sort of political party militant organization, designated terrorist organization.

And so this is a guy who his experience is as a street level sort of drug agent.

He's worked in places like New York and other places in the United States, and he's suddenly put into this world, which is completely different, where he has to sort of apply similar strategies to fighting sort of domestic or city level organized crime.

He's applying it to a very, very different sort of target.

He sort of follows money effectively, and then they sort of, with the DA, build.

They pick targets and build up sort of operations against particularly important criminals he comes into.

So basically, that's how he sort of comes into the story.

But the next sort of character that I focus on is someone very, very far away.

He's a mafia kind of captain, I guess, in Calabria.

So the calabrian mafia, the Ndrangheta, are sort of a very, very powerful criminal organization and sort of largely sort of replaced the power of the sicilian mafia in the nineties and became very, very wealthy from cocaine trafficking.

And my second character is a man called Salvatore Petito, who he is not a top, top boss.

He is a sort of.

Ndrangheta is organized around families, and he is a member of a sort of lower level family, not one of the top crime families in Calabria, but he is an aspirational criminal.

He is someone who has watched the families around him become vastly rich and powerful and feared through cocaine trafficking.

Because the Ndrangheta has proven extremely adept at forging close relationships with latin american cartels.

He effectively, at the start of our story, he, Salvatore decides to risk everything to pull off a vast transatlantic cocaine deal.

And to do that, he has to interact with money launderers who are based out of the Middle east, who Jack Kelly is investigating.

And that brings us to our last character, so to speak, who is a man called Mustafa Bader Adin.

And he is a sort of legendary and extremely deadly and violent master bomb maker who has worked in the orbit of Hezbollah.

He's eventually recognized as a sort of Hezbollah figure, but who he always works for is unclear of his career, but he has an extremely long career, decades starting out from his early twenties, his teens, where he's pulled off a series of extremely violent and bloody terrorist attacks in Lebanon.

And Mustafa is dispatched there as effectively as commander in Syria.

Now, how does that interact with the other two characters?

That's because there are these money laundering cells that Jack Kelly and the DEA is investigating, who he suspects are laundering cocaine money in Europe and sending it to the Middle east to fund hezbollahs extremely expensive incursion into Syria, where Mustafa is commanding.

So the money is what sort of connects these characters together in that sense.

Mozart is sort of this triangle of three characters.

Can I ask, did you know them separately at different times?

Did you come across one?

When did you make the connection between the three?

Give us some background, how you stumbled on the three, and then you sort of pulled together the story, which is very character driven, makes it very interesting.

Just some background, I think would be really helpful.

Yes.

So I was working.

I work for the Financial Times.

I'm an investigative reporter, but I've also worked as a foreign correspondent.

About three or four years ago, I was working as the Rome correspondent for the FT.

I was covering a lot of stuff like politics and the economy and society, but I was also covering organized crime from a particular angle.

So I was looking at the italian organized criminal groups had become quite financially sophisticated.

They started to sort of intersect the world of high finance and sort of laundering their money through complicated financial products and various scams.

And so that was sort of my way into it.

I started reading a lot of indictments and speaking to a lot of prosecutors and financial police and stuff like that.

And I started to come across various cases, and people were sort of telling me, what you've got to look at is not just where the cases end, because frequently the italian anti mafia police do amazing work, and they prosecute these huge, sprawling indictments involving hundreds of people sometimes.

But there are sometimes elements of those cases when they leave the borders of Italy, where they stop because they just simply can't chase someone into Brazil frequently or figure out where all the money has gone around the whole world.

It's just not really practical with their main focus, obviously, organized criminals in Italy.

And so there was this one case where there was this very interesting figure involved where the money was sort of sent through a figure who was from Lebanon, who was connected into this network, which the DEA had sort of investigated, which was really present across Europe.

So there was this quite important money laundering network in Europe, operating in France, in Spain, in Belgium, in Germany, in Italy.

And I started to sort of look more at that network and sort of follow the trail of money and see get into the indictment in the United States, look at basically different elements of this case.

And that's sort of how I started to got into contact with Jack Kelly.

And then Jack Kelly is this extremely impressive investigator and had really very interesting conversations with him.

And I started to see the whole broader context of why this money laundering operation was in existence in the first place, which was obviously very dependent on the geopolitical situation of the time and the extremely awful and bloody and complex conflict in Syria.

Also, I mean, you started in Italy and sort of then completed the triangle through that route.

Tell us something about Kelly.

I mean, he was clearly open to being interviewed for talking.

The description of his frustrations of the bureaucracy, the wider bureaucracy, the sort of turf battles in the us government.

What kind of individual is he like?

Was he eager to talk?

Was he surprised to be approached?

I think, you know, he is someone who's extremely passionate about his work.

He's now retired, but he was really someone who is a bit of an obsessive.

You know, he really would sometimes spend every waking hour on his work.

And I was so passionate about it.

I think, you know, he, he was, he, he could understand I was coming to him, you know, respectfully to try and better understand, really what happened in a situation which is very complex and hard to explain to a general audience.

And I think.

I think he was in.

Wanted to engage on a.

On a level where we would discuss it in a way which was intelligible to general.

But that said, it's also, you know, it's a complicated story, and it also doesn't always have the elements of a story which you would see in a film.

You know, part of.

Part of really what I was trying to do with the book was trying to give a portrait of how chaotic and sprawling modern transnational criminal organizations and networks are.

They don't neatly fit into.

You know, there's not sort of frequently, there's not just sort of one guy at the top who sort of controls absolutely everything.

And it's like a sort of scarface as character.

There's often interacting networks and different power structures and things which cross borders and get quite messy.

And what Jack's job really was to do was to sort of sit in his office at the DEA and receive this vast amount of information and so trying to make sense of it.

So I thought he was a fantastically interesting character to show the difficulties and sometimes even the futility of trying to make sense of this ocean of illicit activity across borders.

Martin what's so interesting is Kelly clearly has competition in the system.

There are others who have different interpretations.

The DEA has a particular place in the firmament of the security agencies of the US.

So how does he operate?

I mean, he showed clearly his frustrations to you of trying to sell his and their interpretation of what was going on.

Yeah, I mean, I found that really fascinating in the sense that there's a sort of a philosophical.

You know, the DEA is technically part is part of the us intelligence community, but it obviously is a law enforcement agency.

You know, its job is to get convictions.

That's what it does.

Whereas an intelligence agency does not care about criminal convictions in the same way.

So there's a philosophical difference.

It was just really interesting to see where increasingly in the world there is this intersection between national security threats and transnational criminal threats.

We had hybrid actors.

Someone I was writing a lot about last year was Yevgeny Pragosin of the Wagner group, who was designated as a transnational criminal organization by the US, but is also obviously national security, a guy national security interest, you know, running a mass organization, et cetera, in Ukraine.

So there's this sort of weird places where this stuff crosses over, especially in terrorist fundraising.

But there is this big clash of philosophies where if you're an intelligence agency, you want to observe targets, you want to build information, you want to maintain good sources.

You might find and frequently people did an agency like the DEA coming in and arresting people and staging sting operations abroad problematic or annoying?

It can act contrary to your interests.

And so it was very illuminating for me to sort of I spoke to a lot of people in a lot of different sort of organizations and in different countries and sort of tried to build up a pretty good picture of because a lot of these organized, these operations, you know, they would involve police from countries in Europe or, you know, other agencies from around the world.

And there's a lot of sort of there's a lot of characters involved.

Everyone has a slightly different perspective depending on where they sat.

But they definitely agreed on one thing, that there were a lot of clashes.

Well, you mentioned that you conducted a lot of interviews.

You're reaching out to people.

I mean, give us a sense of how you do it.

These are people who don't necessarily want to speak.

Either they're in state security organizations or they're in criminal organizations.

Do you just call them up?

What do you say if you do?

Do you reach out through intermediaries?

All of the above.

I mean, do, are there any tricks you think, that you use to get people, people to talk and then do you build a relationship with them?

Clearly, in the case of Kelly, it appears that you did just give us your.

What did it take to get the sources to write the book?

I know that's within your wider reporting as well, but just in terms of the building, this enormous number of interviews, which then pulls the story together, your approach and perhaps your frustrations around doing some of that.

Yeah.

No, I mean, it was a big challenge.

And I think I'd say what I like as a reporter where I feel comfortable is we go with it's a foundational sort of document trail.

So whatever I'm doing, which I can use as a sort of architecture to build, to identify who I should be approaching to talk to.

So frequently in this book, there were a lot of different criminal cases, dating, overdose, you know, 30 years.

There were also all sorts of other sorts of, you know, there was a un tribunal evidence, you know, and, you know, different documents from different agencies, you know, documents from colombian agencies or czech agencies.

And, you know, there were so many.

And it gives you, you know, that gives you a sort of firm footing to then think like, okay, well, who was working there at the time?

Or, you know, in an indictment?

You know, you know, these people were named.

You know, frequently, you know, you begin by sort of in the case of criminals, often they're in prison in many, many instances or dead or fugitives.

So they're difficult to contact, for sure.

And, you know, we, we obviously have to be sort of, we want to give people the right, the most basic level, just the right to reply and to make an effort to contact them.

And so that could be through their lawyers or that sometimes people do actually want to talk.

Sometimes people surprisingly want to talk.

And there's obviously a lot of, there are contentious issues, and sometimes people feel like they haven't been heard or portrayed fairly.

But, yeah, so it's sort of, it was a process of exploration where you sort of map out your universe and you try and get in contact with people sometimes who are impossible to get in contact with, sometimes who you think are impossible, but actually somehow you find them and you are just trying to be straightforward and honest and explain what youre, what you're doing and what you want to talk about.

Oswald in that process.

Was there a moment of, like, extreme frustration for you?

Somebody not replying, some sort of key part of the story not coming together?

Was there that kind of time period in which you thought, you know, my goodness, I need to get this or this document or this person?

Or was it sort of fitting together over time?

There are some, always some complicated issues relating to the status of criminal cases.

You know, when you're in different jurisdictions and when you're, it's a kind of quite technical thing, but just, you know, we, sometimes things can be under appeal for many, many years, and it can complicate the process of reporting on them.

But, I mean, it's, you have to sort of get lucky as well.

You know, sometimes there were, there were documents, and I didn't think I was going to be able to get hold of, which I, which I did.

And then those led me to being able to contact people who I didn't think I was ever going to be able to reach.

But, no, I mean, there was interesting elements to this because, especially, for example, in the mafia strand of the story.

So in the Salvatore story, the Ndrangheta are quite, because they are family based units.

It's not a sort of top down structure.

It's different kind of families who operate in a sort of constellation of crime families, and they're very hard for law enforcement to penetrate because frequent, you know, organized crime groups are based on sort of blood and marriage are sort of less likely to betray each other, basically.

And so historically, it's been hard to have, you know, what in Italy called pentiti, like sort of people who become state witnesses and stuff like that.

But in the case of Salvatore's family, there are actually a relatively large number of people who had become state witnesses over time.

And some of them.

So there were sort of, I was using two, and that meant that they gave a vast amount of testimony.

You know, they sit down with a prosecutor and they do interviews going on for hours and hours and hours, which I got hold of those interviews.

And so that gives you sort of a very different way into understanding a world and personalities and motivations than an indictment, for example, because you have people sort of talking about often the sort of quite small details, the banalities of what they do, and it's.

And in the case of Salvatore, he had a girlfriend.

He was having an affair with a ukrainian woman called Ogthana, who is an important character in the book.

And she became a state witness.

And her perspective is extremely fascinating.

Nothing, only because she's a woman in an extremely kind of chauvinistic and male dominated environment.

But she was not directly involved in crime.

She's someone who.

She was aware of what was going on because Salvatore would come back home after a day's work, so to speak, and he would sort of sit in her kitchen and he would unload about his day about as maybe everyone would.

You start talking about this guy who owes me money, hasn't paid me any money, he's an idiot.

Or this person hasn't screwed up this deal with this guy.

So he's just sort of telling all of his.

Just frustrations of his life.

But in the kitchen, the italian financial police had put a sort of ambient or listening device.

So you're just getting all of this stuff where they're watching tv.

They'll be watching a show with, you know, an action film with people running around with kalashnikovs.

And he just turns around his girlfriend and says, oh, you know, I've got two kalashnikovs.

And she goes, oh, that's really interesting.

You know, it's just this sort of these strange moments which add a sort of texture to.

They're not sort of legally important, but they paint the sort of universe that these people live in where, you know, the sort of the.

The fact of the normality of that sort of thing, which would be quite shocking to anyone else.

So, yeah, it was always been a process of sort of building this picture through a mixture of documents and human sources that luckily, over time, with a lot of effort, I got what I needed.

Thanks, Miles.

Fascinating stuff.

The other area which, reading it, I was really taken by, and I sense this was quite difficult, is that you have these three characters who don't know each other, who are at different time phases, and you've got to integrate them for the reader and bring linkages between them.

So the chapters are moving very to different parts of the world, to different incidents.

I mean, tell us something about structuring that.

And I say so in your acknowledgments.

I think you don't say it directly, but some of the frustrations of writing that come out, and I can imagine what they are.

It's really challenging.

Tell us what you were doing and what you were thinking and how difficult was it?

Yeah, I mean, it was.

It was a real challenge.

There were certainly times when I would sort of sit surrounded by massive amounts of post it notes and sort of scrawled notes and stuff and be rather intimidated by the task I'd taken on the.

Yeah, I mean, I think it was this extremely delicate balance between telling, you know, this is a true story.

No detail is invented.

You know, every piece of dialogue, every detail, every.

If there's any description if the, you know, the color of a car, if it's red, that is the color of the car.

There is a.

If you know, the time someone did something, it is.

It is.

That is a sort of an integral part of the work.

But it means that you then also have a lot of details that you have to get rid of because there's almost a sort of, in certain instances, this sort of strange thing where you actually have too much material.

It's just boring stuff.

You know, you like, go downstairs and put on the kettle and make a cup of tea and, you know, say hello to somebody.

This is not stuff.

You have to be very selective in what you're including in each chapter but then you're also having to be very mindful of not distorting what has actually happened.

But then also just trying to be sort of, you know, careful about how you present the information.

But instructionally, you're sort of thinking it's a little bit.

This is maybe a somewhat strange way to put it but it's a little bit like if you were sort of editing an episode of reality tv in certain instances in the book, they're different things.

Each part has been put together in a different way.

As you said, the Jack Kelly session is much more about interviews and with him and also other people and documents as well.

But in the sort of the italian side of the story, you have this massive amount of material including sort of surveillance photographs phone like, sort of location data, text messages, everything.

And so you're sort of editing this live stream of a day in a criminal's life.

And so that was a real, a real challenge structurally.

But it's also a sort of nature.

I was very determined to not make this a story where, look, I have a vast amount of respect for law enforcement and the work they do but I think it's a complex job.

And I didn't want to just make it a story about, you know, just goodies and baddies and just these great, you know, and it make it a sort of very sort of, you know, Hollywood style thing where, you know, the goodies triumph in the end.

Like, this is a messy world where, you know, as Jack's story shows, you know, people are fighting.

You know, they're doing something right.

They're trying to fight for, but it's difficult.

You come up against just bureaucratic obstacles or difficulties in your.

It's not just this simple process of just heroes coming in and, yeah, kicking, kicking ass, as they say.

So it was a.

I was quite determined that I would show the complexity of that.

And also in terms of the ending of the story, that's an important year because this is not a world where anyone really walks away happily.

This is not a place where everything is just perfectly resolved and it's all over.

Crime has been solved and the world is just a perfect place.

This is a world where there's just this.

People might be arrested, people will come and replace them.

This is a world where the geopolitical forces which are encouraging or fueling this activity, it will remain in place or change into something else.

So in terms of the structure, I wanted to make it book which was readable and relatable, but also something which accurately portrayed that world.

And so that's why there's also a lot of focus on the, you know, the incompetence of some of the characters as well.

It's amazing, actually, Maaz, you the degree to which geopolitics intervenes as a scene in the book.

The US have been cooperating with the French, and then they're going to have a party to celebrate and then suddenly the party's called off because, of course, politics has intervened.

And I don't know, it's a very real story that full of greys and real people.

I think that comes across really, really well.

Thank you.

I mean, you've given this fascinating overview of the amount of work that goes into a book like this.

I'm very interested in this idea of nonfiction, true crime.

Actually, the term true crime is sometimes a little bit frustrating, actually, because it fits into a specific part of the library or the bookshop or whatever.

And in fact, I, perhaps the.

I at least would want to make the argument that these books are more important for another reason.

They're about the wider political economy of how the world works, how politics is influenced.

I mean, do you have those kinds of frustrations?

Why do you work and write in this area?

What do you want to achieve?

Yeah, I think, you know, as you say, true crime can be a problematic label, and it can kind of encompass a vast amount of different things.

And what I sort of always wanted to do as a journalist and an author is to try and illuminate a little bit the sort of strange elements of the world, how they work and things which often are very surprising.

The world is a very strange place.

It's a sort of huge cliche, but, you know, sometimes the truth can be stranger than fiction.

You know, people are absolutely stunned by some of these stories in that space.

But I think it really interacts more also with things that people would consider kind of traditional non fiction areas like sort of geopolitics and history.

These are understanding the way events in the world shape.

Shape our surroundings.

And I think in the case of this book, I was also very, um, very focused on trying to give an accurate depiction of this phenomenon to the point where it confounds certain expectations.

So, you know, in the sort of world of sort of narrativized crime, you know, there are these expectations, especially in organized crime, of, you know, these all seeing all powerful bosses overseeing sort of very tightly run, centralized organizations, you know, and everyone being actually really competent, you know, the police being really competent, the criminals being really competent.

And it all sort of working really quite well.

And actually, the reality is much more chaotic than that.

And, you know, in the book, there's a lot of scenes of criminals being just quite, you know, incompetent and doing things for quite stupid reasons.

And also just showing the sort of one thing which really unifies all of these characters is that they, you know, my editor made a joke which I think is very accurate.

He was sort of joking that this is also a book about middle management.

This is a book about people who are in institutions who are just dealing with the sort of bureaucratic difficulties of being an institution, being frustrated by the institution they're in, and people who've also devoted their lives in some way to the values and ideas of different institutions, be that, you know, us law enforcement or the italian mafia or Hezbollah, you know, and ultimately, those institutions portray them.

This is not a book where everyone ends up super, you know, happily living their life and vindicated.

You know, these are.

These are people who are often frustrated by the world they're in, and that applies across those institutions.

So you see, you know, a lot of the time, it's sort of the forces that these people are dealing with are bigger than them, and they're trying, like any human to sort of somehow try and shape their own destiny and faith, you know, in this sort of extremely sort of, like, chaotic world they live in, and they come up against things which are too big and too powerful for them to really control.

So in the simplest sense, you're just trying to organize from scratch a very audacious transatlantic cocaine shipment of.

You're trying to sort of rest control of your own destiny and eventually fail it.

And so that was sort of what I was trying to capture rather than the expectations of sort of everything just being extremely slick and perfectly run and.

Masterful, as you've alluded to this because I think what you're saying, some of this comes across in the conclusion because it can't end neatly because there are a lot of, I don't want to say loose ends, but in the greys of the world in which you are writing about, there aren't always happy stories or a clear resolution as you would have in a script written movie, so to speak.

I mean, tell us something about this.

Kelly doesn't go to his retirement party or he misses it or they hold it without him.

Sort of a weird detail which I thought said a lot about how a bureaucracy thanks you for working.

I mean, the other cases, it also has these very unsatisfying endings but illustrative of reality life, I suppose.

Yeah, I mean no one really wins.

I mean, I think Jack is ultimately vindicated by, I think consensus moves closer towards what he had been, been arguing.

But it's.

Yeah, it's a sort of situation where at the end maybe this is true of us all, you know, at the end when you, when you retire, you know, it's not sort of like, you know, the screen doesn't fade to black and you walk off triumphantly to sort of a soundtrack, you know, whether you're a criminal in law enforcement or anything.

I think there are, you know, there's also just elements of age I think is another thing I find interesting in the book in comparison of the characters.

You know, where we, the way we are as human beings when we're 20 is going to be different to when we're 50.

He's in his fifties.

And does he still believe the same things that he did when he was 20?

Is he still doing it for the same reasons?

Is he happy with the direction which his organization has gone in the same as the DEA agents who were doing these big international meaningful sting operations, generating a lot of attention and bringing in big targets?

And so, yeah, it's people who, they change over time.

I think that was another sort of part of the book.

Is just we tend to view people's motivations as quite static sometimes, especially in the sort of more ideological prisms of sort of like, you know, some things like terrorism and terrorist financing.

Why someone does something, they might do the same thing, but their reasons for doing it might change over time and over their life.

And so I found that quite interesting.

But, yeah, really, these are people who, there is never going to be, as you say, it's never going to be a happy ending, a perfect ending.

No one ever comes into the end and says, you were completely right.

You're amazing.

You know that maybe that happens once, once in a while, but for most people, that's not how it works.

And that was certainly the case for these guys.

Miles, what is the, what has been the reaction to the book?

I mean, you've been presenting it and talking about it.

What do people say?

And has any of that surprised you?

Yeah, I've been really encouraged by the reaction in the sense of I've had a lot of general readers.

So basically I've had people contact me who are not people who are of a huge sort of interest in this area, who have related to the book on its own terms, which has been very encouraging.

I mean, I've had some interesting people contact me.

I had one person who was a relative of a quite well known organized crime figure who had left the family and contacted me to say that they related very strongly to the depiction of the family dynamics in the book, in the mafia side of the story.

So that was very surprising and very interesting to hear.

Interesting, miles, I think, you know, the global initiative, we're doing multiple research projects on organized crime, illicit economies, trying to push forward a discussion precisely on what you are doing to understand the underworld, if you like, or the illicit better.

You know, what can we do better?

You know, what does the book illustrate?

Are there areas that deserve more attention, this connection, organized crime, terra financing that you've uncovered?

You know, is there, is there areas in the broader research community from where you sit, where things could just be better, where much more work is required?

I would say.

I think the work you guys do is absolutely fantastic.

And the people who collaborate with you, too, I mean, I think.

I wouldn't say errors.

I think it's just.

I think it's just a challenge for anyone who's looking at this area.

It becomes more and more complicated.

It feels, especially the world is becoming an ever more complicated place, which sounds like a little bit of a trite thing to say, but in terms of the nature of the actors who we would be counting as of interest and who they're interacting with.

I think one thing I've become really interested in, which is connected to this book, is the interaction between states and, you know, regimes, governments which are hostile to the west, and organized criminal groups.

You know, you've had these fascinating sort of interactions between, you know, effectively kind of.

Yeah, like rogue states, sanctioned regimes, whatever you want to call them, and organized crime groups and how.

I think that will probably that will become a very interesting.

People have done interesting research, and if, I think that will become a more interesting area of research in the context were in where you have these massive economies which have been sanctioned and cut off from the western financial system, and how sanctions effectively create a need for people to turn into the international black market.

If you cant buy something on the open market anymore, you need to find someone to get it for you.

I think the nature of these bizarre collaborations between unlikely characters.

So there was this fascinating case in the United States recently, earlier this year, involving Canadian Hells angels being hired by the Iranian Foreign intelligence service to assassinate dissidents in the United States.

Bizarre people you just never would think would be in the same room, so to speak, together.

And I think that will be a really interesting continuing our soul.

What you're saying is there's plenty more material for you, Miles, to bring together these interesting characters.

Really, really a pleasure to speak with you, and thanks for taking the time.

Oh, the pleasure is mine.

Thank you so much for having me, really.