Mafias & Banks

It was in New York, the temple of finance, that the mafia invented its own banking system. During the Great Depression, the underworld took up usury and laundered its money through gambling, while the wealthy built the new architecture of tax havens. In the 1950s, global finance was governed by the Bretton Woods system. But criminals and financiers were about to find the cracks in this framework. The New York mafia invested in the Caribbean. The bankers, for their part, invented new tools for the hidden circulation of money. It was the birth of white-collar crime, of which the Italian tax expert Michele Sindona, banker to Cosa Nostra and the Vatican, was one of the most terrifying models.

The 1980s were the decade of the Wall Street wolves and the meteoric rise of cocaine and heroin trafficking. For criminal organizations, cartels, mafias and the Yakuza, the need for money laundering was immense, and some banks opened their arms to them. To combat this scourge, an Italian magistrate, Giovanni Falcone, invented a method: follow the money. But the irresistible liberalization of finance shattered all banking regulations. A race against time begins.

The end of the Cold War raised hopes of a new world. But in the face of the new world order, the great nations are making the docile choice of globalization. Russia and China, intent on preserving their spheres of influence to counter the all-powerful United States, will have to develop unprecedented alliance strategies. For the mafias, new territories and new markets are opening up. With so many financial transactions taking place every millisecond, dirty money is more untraceable than ever. Banks, the arteries of money circulation, are becoming the butlers of occult finance. From Moscow to Vancouver, from Beijing to Beirut, it's time for organised white-collar crime.