Word: illicitness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...constantly on the lookout for ways to invest its ill-gotten cash in legitimate enterprises, explains Alberto Cisterna, a Rome-based magistrate who has long followed the Calabrian Mob. He says that high-profile urban centers are actually considered the best places for crooks to simultaneously hide their illicit wealth and evade taxes. "These criminal organizations see Rome and Milan as bona fide tax havens," says Cisterna. "Its hard for them to hide their wealth in Calabria, where they're tightly monitored." (Read a TIME cover story on the Mafia...
...says Martin Naville, CEO of the Zurich-based Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce, an organization that helps Swiss companies in the U.S. and U.S. companies in Switzerland expand their businesses. "It's the cleanest system in the world, with strict laws on money laundering, terrorist finances, corruption and other illicit activities." (Read "The Scandal of Secret Swiss Bank Accounts...
Terrorism and the illicit drug trade have flourished in Afghanistan because the lack of a functioning economy has let warlords fill the vacuum. That needs to change. The U.S. recently announced, for example, that it is shifting its antipoppy efforts from destroying the opium-producing flowers to encouraging different crops. But that's quite a challenge: poppies are easy to grow and net four times as much money per acre as wheat. So farmers will need new cash crops to replace the poppies and newly built roads to get such goods to market without paying bribes along...
...long been assumed that the cavalier behavior of teenagers - driving too fast, engaging in unprotected sex, dabbling in illicit drugs - is due in part to their characteristic disregard for mortality. Teens, as any beleaguered parent of one can attest, usually operate under the presumption that they know it all and will live forever...
...Lowdown: "It all started in Shanghai in 1909," the authors note of the dawn of narcotics regulation. And what a century it's been. What began as an opium epidemic in China has since become a global problem that includes heroin, cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines and a host of other illicit substances that compose a $320 billion-a-year industry, making drugs one of the most valuable commodities in the world. But despite arguments that legalizing drugs would destroy the organized-crime rings that currently control the market, the report argues that "mafia coffers are equally nourished by the trafficking...