I sometimes wonder about the psychology of people who try this sort of money-making venture, ie smuggling vast quantities of illegal drugs across the ocean.
Do these “entrepreneurs” understand the risk they take, or do they pretend to themselves that there is no risk? Excepting where there is coercion, is it big balls or small brains?
I’d love to hear from a smuggler to hear how they manage psychologically the huge downside risk of being caught. Do you have to be a neurological outlier to undertake this sort of project?
Large-scale smuggling is highly professionalised and hugely lucrative. We're not talking about some guy with a boat, we're talking about an organisation that rivals a multinational corporation by almost any metric.
One of the biggest exporters of cocaine in recent years was FARC, a Columbian rebel group that acted as the de-facto government of large areas of Columbia. Their operation was sufficiently sophisticated that they built their own submarines. If you're part of an armed rebel group engaged in a brutal civil war, being arrested for drug trafficking isn't anywhere near your biggest worry.
At this scale, individual psychology isn't particularly relevant. It's a self-reinforcing culture of drugs, violence and obscene amounts of money that subsumes individuals. You might as well ask about the individual psychology of an infantry sergeant in the second world war - his mindset is a product of the war, not vice-versa.
Just to make clear, makeshift submarine smuggling is not a new phenomenon. One was found abandoned in 1988, first one to be seized was in 2006, and, "by 2009, the U.S.A. detected as many as 60 narco submarine related events".
"The narco-submarines can cost about $2 million USD and take upward of a year to build.[16] Despite the costs, some of the craft are intended for one-time use, being abandoned at sea after a successful delivery. After all, their cargoes carry a street value of up to $400 million. On other seized craft however, officials found zinc bars used as sacrificial anodes, reducing corrosion on metal parts exposed to seawater.[17] As corrosion would not be a concern on a single trip but is a factor influencing long-term durability, this is a clear indication that multiple use was intended. This, in turn, opens up the question of any illicit return cargo, like weapons, that they might carry back to Colombia."
When you grow up in poverty you don't have a lot to lose. A jail bed and food might even be better than your own. Throw in any kind of abuse or trauma in your past, and you'll also tend to have little regard for your own life. Throw in the overconfidence of youth and I'd imagine it begins to seem like a huge upside with a small risk of an inconsequential downside.
Money, fame, reputation, a fast life that isn’t minimum wage and hopelessness. We worship a certain story in the USA and it isn’t 30 years of remedial work so we can retire and garden :)
I'm not a smuggler, but I know one. Let's call him George. He's not currently available to tell his story so let me give you the abridged version.
George ran a (very) successful business here in NL and in Belgium, made a lot of money and was doing just fine. Then in a short period of time his wife died and his business took a hit both from competition, regulation and because he wasn't paying as much attention to it as he did in the past.
One thing leading to another the business failed. George panicked a bit being left behind with a child to take care of and a huge drop in income so he figured what's the harm in taking a boat filled with pills into Australia. That didn't work out too well and George is now on an extended visit to Australia, I don't think we'll meet again in this lifetime, that's how long his sentence was.
Now, before you judge: George was in every sense of the word a start-up type, serial entrepreneur with a lot of hustle and in general doing just fine. All it took was a couple of cards dealt from the bottom of the pack to turn him into a criminal.
So no big balls, no small brains, just plain old desperation and momentary lapse of judgement. If not for that you'd all be proud to swap places with him. The really sad person in that story is the kid, first to lose mom and then dad effectively too.
But you could just suck it up, get a regular job and do 9 to 5 5 days a week. If you lived in those countries, they have a great social network. It's not like he was living in Somalia and this was his only way out.
That’s a very interesting story, thank you. My immediate reaction is that the justice system’s chief unfairness is the punishment of children. Jail a mother or father and you risk destroying a family, with all the life consequences that entails.
As for George, it’s also unfairness that one mistake has such deep ramifications - particularly when drugs are so widely used and accepted in Australia. But also, I feel George may have failed to price in the risk of being caught.
I don't think enquiring about the welfare of the kid is out of line. A simple 'he is living with a relative', 'foster care' would have sufficed and would not be a breach of privacy. You told an interesting story and it's completely natural people are curious how the situation unfolded.
The story is about the father, the fact that he had a child figured into his reasoning (and in the wrong way) which is why I mentioned it.
It's a small world and not all curiosity is good, the basic story does not change and the whereabouts of the child are about as private a piece of information that I possess.
It's also a real issue where the privacy of the affected child in question should supercede the curiosity of random questioners on the internet.
There are better ways to try to publicly discuss such things. If someone actually cares about the welfare of the children, they shouldn't have a problem with being told "this is not a good question to ask." If they have a problem with it, that tends to say something about their actual priorities.
> It's also a real issue where the privacy of the affected child in question should supercede the curiosity of random questioners on the internet.
(also responding to jacquesm)
I think there are ways to answer the question that don't compromise the privacy of the child. And I mostly disagree with jacquesm's that the outcome of the child is "nobody's business".
This is a touching anecdote that humanizes a drug trafficker. There are lots of valid questions on how the laws around drugs should be structured and enforced. While anecdotal, being told "the father lost legal custody and the child is now a ward of the state living in a foster home" may impact how people think about long-term incarceration as a solution. And if this answer is "the child is living with his loving grandparents and doing well", while still anecdotal, this may have a different but equally valid impact.
But while 'jacquesm' is under no obligation to answer, I don't think it's wrong or necessarily impolite for 'orthoxerox' to ask about the outcome for the child.
I used to deal small amounts of MJ in college, it was a great way to have a side income and honestly was pretty low-risk.
When I graduated and was getting ready to move to CA, I had mentioned to my dealer that I was moving and was obviously pretty broke as I had not started working yet.
He told me he could hook me up with a one time job to drive an escalade towing a boat filled with MJ from CA to the midwest and I would be paid 20k.
I thought long and hard about that and ultimately decided it was a terrible idea. However, if he had made that offer to me a year or two before, I probably would have taken it. For someone like me, 20k at that age is a massive boost.
I was told this about 10 years ago. People used to transport cocaine from Spain to Northern countries in Europe.They'd send 2 cars: empty,large SUV,with as many bells and whistles as possible. And a few miles behind a little Smart car with all the drugs. They always stopped the SUV but the little one was stopped not even once...
Noticed a similar thing earlier this year, while I was crossing the border from a non-Schengen area country into the Schengen territory. The owner of a new Audi Q5 or Q7 just in front of me received all sorts of questions from the customs guards, while me and my gf passed the border in a breeze. We were driving our 12-year old small 1.4 liter hatchback, which has scratches on all its four corners, I said to myself that were we to transport anything illegal nobody would have suspected us.
While it is difficult to catch everyone at a border within the EU I would believe that there is a subset of border cops that can sniff out smugglers. Since you didn't smuggle anything they were correct in not suspecting you.
I know that. But as the OP said, it’s interesting to think about an anti-anti-smuggling technique like the one where you’re using an hipsterish couple to physically carry things for you, instead of some tattooed guys.
I’ve known people who did small time smuggling... nothing approaching millions of dollars. The decision is usually economically rational, i.e. they need money for something and the risk of getting caught is low enough that it’s worthwhile.
Of course I imagine people who are knowingly moving millions of dollars either are reckless risk takers or think they can outsmart the weather, law enforcement, mechanics and whatever else can go wrong.
>>Of course I imagine people who are knowingly moving millions of dollars either are reckless risk takers or think they can outsmart the weather, law enforcement, mechanics and whatever else can go wrong.
Maybe I'll do it once (good luck quitting) and buy a house or whatever. Odds of getting caught in any one event are on the lower side. If you deal for year, then you have DEA and FBI after you.
They are also probably not awkward moving this stuff in a vacuum of support. If there are millions at stake some people are getting paid to look the other way.
It's probably no different than traders who take huge risks in any kind of financial market. They probably feel like they have a better understanding of the risks than most other market participants, but when they fail it always retrospectively appears like an outsized risk to more moderated participants.
I think many traders are likely neurological outliers. Even as an entrepreneur, I can’t take investment until I know I’m on a really sure wicket and investors are as appraised as I am of all the risks involved. I know I could not handle the pressure associated with daily trading others’ money.
I think there's a huge difference between risking bankruptcy and risking your freedom. I mean, even leaving aside the traders who trade other people's money, even if it's your cash, once you were rich, even if you go bankrupt, you are still better off than tha vast majority of Americans, just due to your contacts and education. I mean, the difference between being a rich trader and being a mediocre IT dude are way smaller, say, than the differences between being a mediocre IT dude and being in jail.
(I actually know a few guys who went the failed trader -> IT dude route)
The risks involved in that were well understood. The Count of Monte Cristo is set a little late, but it's got a good treatment of the phenomenon.
Here's an interesting passage from Power and Plenty:
> in 1594 a "Company of Far Lands" was organized by a group of Amsterdam merchants, and a fleet of four ships sent to the eastern seas, returning in 1597 with the loss of one ship and many lives but with enough pepper for the voyage to be regarded as a success. With this encouragement, two fleets with a total of twenty-two ships left in 1598, one of which, commanded by Jacob van Neck, returned with eight ships and sufficient spices to turn a profit of 400%, causing the bells of Amsterdam to peal with joy.
Today, sending out 26 ships and getting 11 of them back might not be a cause for celebration in the city that sent them out. This is the industry that gave rise to modern insurance companies.
Not too much difference from tech entrepreneurs or “hackers” (in the HN sense) tbqh. Actually a lot of hackers do much crazier stuff than sell drugs, which is a pretty well established business. Selling boxes of cereal for $40 a pop is a lot more bizarre idea, for instance. Or look at any number of activities in the crypto world, which look like pure lunacy to outsiders, but have made a lot of money. The thing is, you often can’t tell whether it’s “big balls or small brains” until after the fact.
Selling boxes of cereal for $40 a pop might be a more bizarre idea, but the downside risk is that people ask you about that failed business venture for the rest of your life, not the death penalty.
Think the number of people willing to risk their lives helping some foreign smuggling contact they've just met for a couple of weeks' minimum wage income back at home (it's a lot easier to understand the incentive structure for locals in poverty or gangs than Western backpackers...) is rather higher than the number of cereal entrepreneurs though...
I had a friend from university who tried to smuggle cocaine from Las Vegas to Australia. He was coerced by a guy working at Vice and was introduced to the opportunity through a drug dealer / nightlife mutual connection. I remember he bet me $20 he could beat me at 1v1 basketball. He would participate in pyramid schemes and was a club promoter too. I heard he came from a wealthy or at least upper middle class family in the Middle East.
Initially he was supposed to escort someone else doing the smuggling and get paid, but then the job changed. He said no, so they threatened his safety and his younger sisters safety who was also studying in Canada. He got caught and sentenced to years in jail in Australia.
I might be generalizing and basing this on anecdotes but often people that work in the drug trade are users/addicts themselves, including the ones who are drawn to positions where it grants them the illusion of unlimited power & material excess. It's ironic that becoming a drug kingpin is the least efficient way of attaining those things, but when you live in a region where there is little to no economic activity, getting a Netflix drama portraying you is the highest point, even if it means doing consecutive life sentences in a maximum security prison where you can no longer enjoy the very things you've worked hard towards.
The "entrepreneurs" who simply come from the same pedigree but who has access to both capital and network with capital that propels them to force the transfer of wealth through deception, including imitating the attires of those that have successfully convinced us they are the good guys, whose popular products produce so much human misery in another country where people couldn't care less about.
Similarly, that same banality we feel towards another far away country, can be amplified towards anything in life. If you ask a criminal why he did it, the answer you get is very much the same as a consumer--"because the opportunity existed". To you it may mean indifference to the children to adults working in horrid conditions overseas, to a criminal, that same indifference is just far more profound and pervasive. Literally a criminal will describe robberies, scams in full pride-just like you they were indifferent to the suffering and damage caused around them, instead these were "opportunities" that they took advantage of because no other options were desirable.
High risk, high reward. Drug lords offer wealth, rich, or just a job, etc.
Look at people doing lottery, etc. Poor uneducated people tend to do it. If people are more educated, they will tend to avoid unnecessary risks (in part because stable jobs = eventual goal achievement).
> If people are more educated, they will tend to avoid unnecessary risks
I can assure you that education has nothing to do with it. Educated / better off people will take similiar risk/reward decisions just at different point of utility function.
What is different is that having a little more money gives you some breathing space and allows you to optimize risk/reward over longer term which usually is leading to smarter decisons.
I read a brief post by someone why made decent money smuggling drugs in a prop plane across the US. He only did it a couple of times (didn't let greed take over). He didn't go into details, but I imagine some people feel like they can mitigate the risk, or don't have much to lose.
I remember reading that you have 2 years max to make money and get out before your guaranteed to get busted. It was a fun book. Personally I wouldn't recommend the lifestyle choice.
I've never smuggled anything. I did get secretly married at age 19 to another 19 year old thinking it somehow wouldn't matter in the future. We were married for 22 years and we've been divorced a long time. The "Oh, yeah, I married in secret" thing still is a point of discomfort, though I wasn't doing anything illegal nor immoral.
It helped me say "nope" to the opportunity to launder money while I was homeless and being given no legitimate opportunities and generally being pissed all over by a world that wanted me to know I didn't deserve any legitimate opportunities. I got the memo in a rather harmless way that the past never really dies. You can't just do a thing just this one time and pretend "It's in the past! It doesn't matter!" Life just doesn't actually work that way.
A lot of people seem to learn that a much harder way. Until then, some people figure that what you don't know won't hurt them.
A lot of them die in their 20-30's. But then the capos live like Kings, albeit in fear, and leave their families set for life. Once in the game I'm sure human nature takes over, ambition, competition and grudges.So for a lot of them it's easy....live in poverty all their life or take a chance.
I remember reading that the DEA seized 40 tones of cocaine one year. Sounds pretty good until they estimated nearly 10,000 tons made it into the US every year.
I would assume they’d tell you the chances were low enough to take a risk.
The point they catch you in the supply chain is not the ocean part, it's what you do with it when you arrive or intel from picking it up.
> huge downside risk of being caught
People climb cliffs all the time and handle the risk of the rope breaking and dying.
What if you have a fit in a car and crash (Or someone coming the other way does), is that hard to handle? Death is way worse than being caught with drugs.
I'm under the impression that the vast majority of smuggling by individual sailors is successful and highly lucrative.
It probably doesn't take many problem-free ocean crossings before a solo sailor starts considering the possibility of carrying illicit cargo while doing what they've already been doing largely unnoticed.
The bigger organizations have made ties with the law enforcement on an individual cop bribing level, and sometimes even collaborating with higher-ups of the law enforcement organizations. Police ordering customs to let a particular shipment through, et cetera.
Lots of money gives you influence to reduce the risks.
>Do you have to be a neurological outlier to undertake this sort of project?
Yes.
>I’d love to hear from a smuggler to hear how they manage psychologically the huge downside risk of being caught.
I would recommend the first seven or so Jay-Z albums.
"I had to hustle, my back to the wall, ashy knuckles
Pockets filled with a lot of lint, not a cent
Gotta vent, lot of innocent of lives lost on the project bench
Whatchu hollerin? Gotta pay rent, bring dollars in
By the bodega, iron under my coat, feelin braver
Doo-rag wrappin my waves up, pockets full of hope
Do not step to me - I'm awkward, I box leftier often
My pops left me an orphan, my momma wasn't home
Could not stress to me I wasn't grown; 'specially on nights
I brought somethin home to quiet the stomach rumblings
My demeanor - thirty years my senior
My childhood didn't mean much, only raisin green up
Raisin my fingers to critics; raisin my head to the sky
Big I did it - multi before I die (nigga)
No lie, just know I chose my own fate
I drove by the fork in the road and went straight"
"Now all the teachers couldn't reach me
And my momma couldn't beat me
Hard enough to match the pain of my pops not seeing me, SO
With that distain in my membrain
Got on my pimp game
Fuck the world my defense came
Then Dahaven introuced me to the game
Spanish Jose introduced me to cane
I'm a hustler now
My gear is in and i'm in the in crowd
And all the wavey light skinned girls is lovin me now
My self esteem went through the roof man i got my swag
Got a volvo from this girl when her man got bagged
Plus i hit my momma with cash from a show that i had
Supposedly knowin nobody paid Jaz wack ass
I'm geting ahead of myself, by the way, i could rap
That came second to me movin this crack
Gimme a second i swear
I will say about my rap career
Til 96 came niggas i'm here
Good-bye...
Good-bye to the game all the spoils, the adreneline rush
Your blood boils you in a spot knowing cops could rush
And you in a drop your so easy to touch
No two days are alike
Except the first and fifteenth pretty much
And "trust" is a word you seldom hear from us
Hustlers we don't sleep we rest one eye up
And the drought to find a man when the well dries up
You learn to work the water without workin thirst til die YUP
And niggas get tied up for product
And little brothers ring fingers get cut up
To show mothers they really got em
And this was the stress i live with til i decided
To try this rap shit for a livin
I Pray i'm forgiven
For every bad decision i made
Every sister i played
Cause i'm still paranoid to this day
And it's nobody fault i made the decisions i made
This is the life i chose or rather the life that chose me"
Great answer. Thank you. I’ve never read any Jay-Z lyrics and had always - I see wrongly - assumed they had little to tell. I see a night spent reading hip hop lyrics ahead of me!
Listening to Illmatic also describes this experience really well. I hate commenting on the "authenticity" of gangster rap music, as my life is so incredibly far away from the things they discuss, but Nas gives some of the grittiest descriptions of a life spent in crime.
I think Freddie Gibbs and Vince Staples have played against type here and really engage in metacommentary rather than glorification. It's a heartening trend in rap.
Make a quadrant chart of ways to make money with assets. The X-axis is margins and the Y-axis is overhead costs. You could even add a Z-axis for weight as you need the ability to transport a lot for scale. There are very few assets with comparatively low overhead costs, high margins, and low weight.
You pretty much just have only drugs, share dilution and - as of this decade - cryptographic tokens. They all pretty much invoke the same highs.
This analysis totally appeals to my economist brain. However, you would have to look at the risk-adjusted return on your capital investment.
Reading the above does make me wonder whether smugglers like in the Guardian story have access to some sort of dark web insurance policy which pays out if they are caught. My guess is probably yes because the market abhors a vacuum.
Easy for you to say sitting in your first-world, comfortable house with a job that pays you $250,000 USD a year. Try visiting a third (or even second) world country.
This is how a poor person imagines riches happen to befall any of us. They just happen, one lucky day, you dig and you find a pot of gold, or a ton of pot.
Its a reaction based worldview, where you do not control your own destiny, and wealth is something drained from you, that comes in large quantities by chance.
You do not manage what you got, slouch through a horrible existence to slowly improve yourself. Because that is what the others do, the chancers feed upon. The people who lead that life, are the customers of the drug dealers, those who have the chance to get ahead at the cost of others.
Riches are taken in large quantities by others, with stick up like scenarios- your landlord squeezes you for everything you got, the repair shop rips your wallet open, any accident makes you a indentured slave to the insurance company.
So in a hopeless life, daring to hope, when you get a risky chance, seems actually reasonable.
It went from a poor fishermen's village to the poorest village for decades. It really destroyed the economy and lives of the place, there are no jobs there whatsoever and you are advised against going there without protection (which is unheard off in the rest of Portugal).
That's fair. It's unfortunate that The Guardian's editorial has been slipping. The TLDR is that half a ton of cocaine is 453 kilos, which at a conservative estimate of 20k/kilo is (according to Quora wholesale values so take w a grain of salt) $11M street value of product if not more. So you take that and put it side by side by the economic day to day flow of the Azores. What do you get? For a 20k gdp/capita across a 250k population well...it's a lot. I dunno if it would result in narcocapital, and i dunno enough to comment but that's a gigantic shipment with an equally gigantic potential outcome.
but the effect wasn't primarily economical! After reading the headline I also assumed that the story would be about the economic changes resulting from the infusion of such a 'valuable' resource i.e. I assumed the islanders would become smugglers/distributors themselves with the accompanying violence and risk such an occupation usually carries. The police quickly found and isolated the gang that lost the cocaine so there wasn't the usual violence from the owners coming to reclaim their product. Also the article says the islanders sold the found cocaine locally AND the street value plummeted:
> Before Quinci’s cocaine had washed up on shore... the flow of drugs was usually small and predictable. Often when the police made a seizure, they would make such a dent in the drug supply that local prices would skyrocket. But now police faced an unprecedented situation. As well as the 500kg of cocaine they had seized in the previous two weeks, Lopes thought that at least another 200kg were still unaccounted for... that summer, [the village] became a hub for the sale of the missing cocaine. “People from all over the island came here to buy drugs,”... A product so valuable in the rest of the world was rendered almost worthless through abundance. “They had gold, but they didn’t know how to work with it,”... Other Azoreans “were selling beer glasses full of pure cocaine”... Each one of these “copos”, which were about a third of a pint, contained about 150g and cost €20 (£17) – many hundreds of times cheaper than what it would cost in London today... [a] man had apparently paid a friend 300g of cocaine just to charge his phone...
The effects were mostly cultural and affected mostly public health. There were some economic capital accumulated (used to "build coffee shops") but I thought the article did a good job with the subverted expectations and providing an overview of some long term effects
"The stories they told of how the drugs changed the island were by turns bizarre, thrilling and tragic. No one expected in early June 2001 that they would still be talking about the effects of the cocaine nearly two decades later."
Reminds me of when a copy of the New Testament reached the Inuits on Belcher Island...
"The hunting was poor in Canada's Belcher Islands in the winter of 1941, and a meteor shower led some Inuits to suspect the world was coming to an end. It was around this time that a 27-year-old tribal shaman named Charlie Ouyerack proclaimed himself Jesus Christ, and anointed his pal Peter Sala—the tallest man on the island who also happened to be the best hunter and ice navigator—as God..."
> “The paradox of the Azores is that you are always wanting to leave when you’re here, and always wanting return when you’re not,” Tiago Melo Bento, a local film-maker, told me.
I felt that while spending time in the Azores but I can feel it anywhere. Now I think it's quite lucky if a person never wants to leave and feels content.
Do these “entrepreneurs” understand the risk they take, or do they pretend to themselves that there is no risk? Excepting where there is coercion, is it big balls or small brains?
I’d love to hear from a smuggler to hear how they manage psychologically the huge downside risk of being caught. Do you have to be a neurological outlier to undertake this sort of project?