Margaret Sankey - Blood Money: How Criminals Militias Rebels and Warlords Finance Violence

BLOOD MONEY

How Criminals, Militias, Rebels, and Warlords Finance Violence

MARGARET D. SANKEY

Naval Institute Press

Annapolis, Maryland

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

2022 by Margaret Sankey

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-68247-437-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-68247-751-9 (eBook)

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When the U.S. Air Force Air War College hired me in 2015, it was not because of my historical expertise in eighteenth-century Scotland but because I could wrangle their computer systems and coax good research out of O-5 and O-6 students as their director of research and electives. Quickly, however, Uncle Sam and my dean, Dr. Chris Hemmer, offered generous support and opportunities for transforming what I knew about determined Jacobite efforts to hide money, lie to the courts, fund their exiles, and generate subsequent waves of insurgency in the British Isles into something of more twenty-first-century interest. Thanks to a Minerva grant (and prodding from my colleague Dr. Paul Springer), I began work on a new elective course, Dirty Money, and on the research that has turned into this book, starting with visits to the Interdisciplinary Art Crimes Conference and the Carabinieri of Italys Il Comando Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale.

Along the way, I discovered that not much had changed since the eighteenth century. Illicit actors were not plying their trades in dark corners but out in the open, entwined with everyday activities and tolerated to various degrees by the local authorities (it just takes a lot less time these days to hide money in the Cayman Islands). Violent nonstate actors reach into every sector of the mainstream financial system, from charities to car lots to real estate, not to mention innovative spaces like internet commerce and synthetic drug manufacturing.

Another substantial chunk of money and leave from my new boss, Dr. Mehmed Ali, at Air Universitys Academic Services allowed me to attend a Marshall Center seminar on Countering Trans-National Crime, an opportunity that put me in rooms with Ukrainian anticorruption auditors, Seychelles tax fraud prosecutors, and Senegalese customs inspectors. Their experiences and insights, as well as those of the four years of Air Command and Staff College students in Dirty Money, have added immeasurably to this project.

Most of my research before this book has involved sitting quietly in temperature- and humidity-controlled archives, puzzling out eighteenth-century handwriting, so it has been a professional upheaval to be out talking to Border Patrol agents in Arizona and seeing a demonstration of a confiscated marijuana-bale canon, sitting in on online art auctions, and getting a crash course in Bitcoin. Much of the scholarship on twenty-first-century illicit finance sits not in manuscript archives but online, in the form of blogs, caches of documents like the Panama Papers and Wikileaks, and the brave and relentless work of reporters who, in the absence of local print journalism, go to meetings, blow whistles, and cover things that sometimes risk their lives. Many thanks to the people who shared their expertise and continue to do the hard work.

The buckle down and write it portion of this project took place in the very strange year 2020, necessitating the extremely efficient and inventive efforts of the Air University Library, director Alisha Miles, and her outstanding staff to get me an eccentric roster of interlibrary loans and collection requests under challenging circumstances. That this was completed without throwing my laptop into the yard is due to my amazing in-house computer wizard, steady household manager, and human/genius, Ian.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this research are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or positions of the U.S. government, Department of Defense, or the Air University.