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The writer is the author of “Gomorrah” and “Zerozerozero”. For more than 20 years, he has lived under the protection of the police due to the threats received from the Neapolitan mafia
Mafia leaders know that each economic decision which results in higher prices opens up a flourishing smuggling market. The so-called “reciprocal prices” ordered by American president Donald Trump in April will see much more turn to smuggling. Mexican cartels, Italian criminal organizations, the Russian mafia and other groups already capable of tracking illegal articles in the United States will now be able to pass legal smuggles. A huge new market – potentially comparable to bootlegging of the time of prohibition – appears and organized crime is ready to capitalize.
American history shows us what could happen. Take the 1807 embargo law when Thomas Jefferson imposed a total foreign trade on foreign trade to exert pressure on Britain and France. This led to a massive increase in smuggling, especially in border regions such as Vermont and Maine. When the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act increased prices on more than 20,000 imported products, Italian-American mafia organizations started to structure themselves as intermediaries, because many small traders have turned to illegal roads to maintain beneficiary margins.
Each price creates an appetite on the market in which crime occurs to satisfy. While price increases hit everything, from games to French wines to textiles that are already at the heart of smuggling operations, Trump prices will create more opportunities.
And when the smuggling roads are multiplying, we know how the goods will move: for example through the Mexican cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, which is already used to illegal fuel traffic. In UTAH in April, an American family was charged to associate with Mexican criminal organizations to pass nearly 2,900 seated crude oil stolen in the United States. In 2024, an American company guilty The smuggling of Chinese porcelain tiles and originally falsification as “done in Malaysia” to avoid anti -dumping and compensatory rights.
Before Trump's prices, the smuggling market was almost everything about the counterfeit products of Asia. Customs data and American border protection indicate crises of $ 2.8 billion in counterfeit products in 2023 and $ 5.4 billion in 2024, due to the demand for more affordable fashion products. Most goods come from China and Hong Kong, which represents together around 90% of the total seized for violations of intellectual property rights in 2024. These routes will now also be used for legal products and notable goods.
The increase in controls in ports is a solution, but that means slowing customs. Criminal organizations choose the ports not according to the level of corruption but according to speed; The faster a port, the more the goods can be provided without controls. The ports of Savannah, Georgia, Houston, Texas and Long Beach, California, seem likely to be targeted by smugglers precisely because they are very fast in customs. If they were to increase the controls, they would slow the effectiveness of the transit of freight.
And labeling will no longer be enough to prove that the production of an article in clothing takes place in a specific country. It seems likely that China, which already manages around forty ports in Latin America, will use them to bring Chinese products to the United States that seem to be produced in South America.
Is it possible that Trump really does not know that prices will be a golden opportunity for smugglers? It may not concern him, because it is aware that American companies need goods at pre-tariff prices in order to remain competitive. Contraband could also give it reason to maintain political pressure on foreign governments. Although prices are its political decision, smuggling will provide illegal correction.
It would not be Trump's first exhibition to such a thought. His mentor Roy Cohn in the 1970s represented the mafia bosses such as Carmine Galante, Carlo Gambino and Nicholas “Cockeyed Nick” Ratttenni, and advised the family of crime Genovese. Cohn knew that there are legal and illegal means of getting things done. For criminal organizations, there are the laws followed by companies, then there are the “rules” – standard procedures to make a profit. Trump's official prices are the laws. Meanwhile, an informal black market will follow the rules.
Contraband will now become systemic. It will no longer be a strategy for obtaining inexpensive or counterfeit products but a necessary method to remain competitive. And criminal organizations understand that the more smuggling market requirements, the more difficult it will be for customs to fight it. Finally, we will reach a balance where smuggling in America becomes tolerated again.
