The Silent Empire That Feeds Off Crime

We love to imagine organized crime as something distant, something that happens in other people’s countries, but what if the mafia isn’t knocking on Europe’s door anymore because it’s already sitting at the table?

I have to admit something: every time one of these Europol reports came out, I used to skim the numbers, feel that little shiver we all feel, and go back to my life as if it were somebody else's problem, happening somewhere far from me. Not this time. The more I read into this one, the more I realized how close all of this actually sits to us.

The latest report, published by Europol this past June, counts 731 “highly threatening” criminal networks currently active across the European Union, bringing together more than 400,000 people from 118 different nationalities. Four hundred thousand. Let that number sit for a second, my dear reader, because two years ago, when Europol did the same exercise for the first time, the number of networks was 821. On paper, that looks like progress: fewer groups, tighter control, law enforcement winning. Except 76% of those 821 networks from 2024 are already gone, dismantled, yes, but also dissolved, restructured, reborn, and 533 completely new networks have taken their place. So who is actually winning here?

Drug trafficking is still, by far, the main business: more than a third of all these networks live off it, and Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain remain the favourite addresses, with the ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam doing for cocaine what airports do for tourists, arrivals, every single day. And this isn’t an abstract statistic dressed up for a report nobody reads. Just this week, while I was finishing this article, Italian, German, Spanish, Belgian, French and Portuguese police carried out “Operation Eureka,” a three-year investigation that ended with more than 130 people arrested, all connected to the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia that, according to Europol, keeps its membership almost exclusively Italian even as it does business in more than 45 countries. Authorities say this one network alone moved roughly 25 tonnes of cocaine from South America into Antwerp, Rotterdam and Gioia Tauro between 2019 and 2022, laundering more than 22 million euros through something as ordinary, as invisible, as a restaurant, a pizzeria, a café. The coffee you had this morning, are you sure you know where the money behind the counter really goes?

What's almost surreal is how these networks manage to be everything at once. Europol describes today's most persistent structures with an acronym I can't get out of my head, “ABCD”: agile, borderless, controlling, destructive. Some, like the loose alliances working the Antwerp–Rotterdam corridor, bring together people holding up to ten different passports, Moroccan, Turkish, Italian, all handling the same shipment. And yet others do the exact opposite: the ’Ndrangheta, for instance, still keeps its membership almost exclusively Italian, a strange kind of mafia-style nationalism, while at the same time running operations in more than 45 countries, from Colombia to Switzerland to the United States. Multinational and tribal, global and closed, all at once, and, somehow, both models keep working.

Because that is the real trick, isn’t it? Eighty-five percent of these networks, Europol says, have already infiltrated the legal economy; construction, real estate, hospitality, logistics, the same sectors we trust, the same sectors that build our cities and host our holidays. Lawyers and financial advisors sometimes handle this dirty money “without even knowing,” the report says. Sometimes. I would like to believe that.

And here is the part that should really keep us up at night: Europol now says that around 6% of these networks are actively recruiting children, some as young as eight years old, to deal drugs or carry out violence on their behalf, because a child, unlike an adult, is harder to prosecute and easier to control. We talk so much about protecting the next generation from screens, from junk food, from bad influences online, and meanwhile there are entire criminal structures quietly building their next workforce out of our children.

Faced with all of this, Europol’s answer is, predictably, to ask for more: the agency wants its budget nearly doubled, to around 3 billion euros for the 2028–2034 EU framework. Maybe that is exactly what is needed. Or maybe, as history has taught us more than once, a crisis is simply somebody else’s opportunity, and organized crime, like the banks, like the politicians, has learned exactly how the system rewards those who know how to use it. “While competences remain national, solutions can only be European,” said EU Commissioner Magnus Brunner when the report came out. It’s a lovely sentence. I only wonder whether solutions, once they become European, ever really reach the people at the bottom, or whether, like so much else in this union of ours, they simply stay at the top, in the hands of those already prepared to receive them.