Few people recognize the crucial role organized crime plays in supporting terrorism, a relationship known as the crime–terror nexus. A few years ago, Financial Times investigative journalist Miles Johnson discovered an investigation into a European money-laundering network, which branched out to reveal the truly global nature of organized crime and how it intersects with the world of terrorism.

In his book Chasing Shadows: A True Story of the Mafia, Drugs and Terrorism, Johnson delves into the lives of three key figures from distinct worlds – the ‘Ndrangheta (the Italian mafia from Calabria), the Islamist militant group and political party Hezbollah, and the US Drug Enforcement Administration. His exploration highlights how geopolitics drives the operations of organized crime. In the fourth episode of our podcast series Underworlds, GI-TOC director Mark Shaw spoke with Johnson about the challenges and approaches involved in writing such a complex and far-reaching story.

Mark Shaw: Miles, welcome to Underworlds. Here’s a copy of Miles’s book [holds up book], which I read while traveling, and I have to say it was just a real thriller. It keeps you on the edge of your seat as you move through all the different characters. So well done and it’s really a pleasure to be speaking to you.

Miles Johnson: Thank you.

MS: Perhaps a good way to start is just to ask you to sketch out the big themes of the book, because there’s a lot of people in the book, and there’s a lot of movement, and there’s a lot of action. But what would you say are the big themes that emerge for you?

MJ: Well, firstly, Mark, thanks so much for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here. And really thank you for reading and enjoying the book. As you say, there are a lot of characters in it – so to speak, these are real people, but they’re people whose lives are presented in the book. But they all interact with each other in this thematic way; it’s a very global book. It’s a book where there are characters based in different locations. And unlike a classic, cinematic true crime thing where all the characters eventually end up in a room, these are characters whose lives are affected by one another, but through the global criminal economy.

It’s really a story thematically about the globalization of organized crime, but also how geopolitics shapes organized crime and criminal activity across borders. How unexpected events in one country will lead to unexpected events in another. And how there are these very powerful forces, which can’t really be controlled very easily by states or governments. And often they actually devour the protagonists in the book. They’re too powerful for the criminals themselves to deal with.

MS: It’s really a fascinating story. You make the point that these three guys don’t actually meet each other, but they are intersecting in this broader political criminal economy. Just give us a quick sketch of the three, because they’re a quite interesting set of men, I have to say.

MJ: I would begin with Jack Kelly, who is a US DEA agent, and he is drafted into a unit of the DEA called Special Operations Division. It’s a part of the DEA, which is almost like a processing house for a lot of the information that’s coming in from sources around the world. And he’s specifically put on looking at money laundering related to the Middle East, Lebanon and Hezbollah – the political party, militant organization, designated terrorist organization. And so this is a guy whose experience is as a street-level drug agent. He’s worked in places like New York and other places in the United States, and he’s suddenly put into this world, which is completely different, where he has to apply similar strategies to fighting domestic or city-level organized crime. He’s applying it to a very different target. He follows money, and with the DEA, they pick targets and build up operations against particularly important criminals. That’s how he comes into the story.

The next character that I focus on is someone very far away. He’s a mafia captain in Calabria. The Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, are a very powerful criminal organization that largely replaced the power of the Sicilian mafia in the 1990s and became very wealthy from cocaine trafficking. My second character is a man called Salvatore Pititto, who is not a top boss. The ‘Ndrangheta is organized around families, and he is a member of a lower-level family, not one of the top crime families in Calabria, but he is an aspirational criminal. He is someone who has watched the families around him become vastly rich and powerful and feared through cocaine trafficking, because the ‘Ndrangheta has proven extremely adept at forging close relationships with Latin American cartels. At the start of our story, Salvatore decides to risk everything to pull off a vast trans-Atlantic cocaine deal. And to do that, he has to interact with money launderers who are based out of the Middle East, who Jack Kelly is investigating.

And that brings us to our last character, who is a man called Mustafa Badreddine. He is a legendary and extremely deadly and violent master bomb maker who has worked in the orbit of Hezbollah. He’s eventually recognized as a Hezbollah figure, but who he always works for is unclear over his career. He has an extremely long career, starting out from his early 20s or teens, where he’s pulled off a series of extremely violent and bloody terrorist attacks in Lebanon. And in 2016, he is now middle-aged, almost at retirement, has been dispatched to Syria because Hezbollah has become involved in the Syrian Civil War, defending the Assad regime. And Mustafa is dispatched there as commander in Syria.

How does he interact with the other two characters? There are these money-laundering cells that Jack Kelly and the DEA are investigating who [they] suspect are laundering cocaine money in Europe and sending it to the Middle East to fund Hezbollah’s extremely expensive incursion into Syria, where Mustafa is commanding. The money is what connects these characters together.

MS: It’s this triangle of three characters. Did you know them separately at different times? Did you come across one? When did you make the connection between the three? Give us some background on how you stumbled on the three and then you pulled together the story, which is very character-driven. Just some background would be really helpful.

MJ: I work for the Financial Times, I’m an investigative reporter, but I’ve also worked as a foreign correspondent. About three or four years ago, I was working as the Rome correspondent for the Financial Times. I was covering a lot of stuff like politics and the economy and society, but I was also covering organized crime from a particular angle: I was looking at the Italian organized criminal groups who had become financially sophisticated. They started to intersect with the world of high finance, and laundering their money through complicated financial products and various scams. So that was my way into it.

I started reading a lot of indictments and speaking to a lot of prosecutors and financial police and stuff like that. And I started to come across various cases, and people were telling me, ‘What you’ve got to look at is not just where the cases end’, because the Italian anti-mafia police do amazing work, and they prosecute these huge, sprawling indictments involving hundreds of people. But there are sometimes elements of those cases, when they leave the borders of Italy, where they stop, because they just simply can’t chase someone into Brazil frequently or try to figure out where all the money has gone around the whole world. It’s just not really practical. Their main focus is obviously organized criminals in Italy.

And there was this one case where the money was sent through a figure who was from Lebanon, who was connected into this network that the DEA had investigated, which was really present across Europe. There was this quite important money-laundering network in Europe operating in France, in Spain, in Belgium, in Germany, in Italy. And I started to look more at that network and follow the trail of money, got into the indictment in the United States, looked at basically different elements of this case. And that’s how I got into contact with Jack Kelly. And Jack Kelly is an extremely impressive investigator and I had really very interesting conversations with him. And I started to see the whole broader context of why this money-laundering operation was in existence in the first place, which was very dependent on the geopolitical situation of the time and the extremely awful and bloody and complex conflict in Syria.

MS: You started in Italy and then completed the triangle through that route. Tell us something about Kelly. He was clearly open to being interviewed, [to talk about] his frustrations of the bureaucracy, the wider bureaucracy, the sort of turf battles in the US government. What kind of individual is he like? Was he eager to talk? Was he surprised to be approached?

MJ: He is someone who’s extremely passionate about his work. He’s now retired, but he was someone who is a bit of an obsessive. He would sometimes spend every waking hour on his work and was so passionate about it. He could understand that I was coming to him respectfully to try and better understand what happened in a situation that is very complex and hard to explain to a general audience. He wanted to engage on a level where we would discuss it in a way that was intelligible to a general audience. But that said, it’s also a complicated story. And it also doesn’t always have the elements of a story that you would see in a film. Part of what I was trying to do with the book was to give a portrait of how chaotic and sprawling modern transnational criminal organizations and networks are. Frequently, there’s not just one guy at the top who controls absolutely everything and is like a Scarface character. There’s often interacting networks and different power structures and things that cross borders and get quite messy.

What Jack’s job really was, was to sit in his office in the DEA and receive this vast amount of information and try to make sense of it. So I thought he was a fantastically interesting character to show the difficulties and sometimes even the futility of trying to make sense of this ocean of illicit activity across borders.

MS: And what’s so interesting is that Kelly clearly has competition in the system. There are others who have different interpretations. The DEA is a particular place in the firmament of the security agencies of the US. How does he operate? He clearly showed his frustrations to you of trying to sell his and their interpretation of what was going on.

MJ: I found that really fascinating. The DEA is part of the US intelligence community, but it obviously is a law enforcement agency. Its job is to get convictions. That’s what it does. Whereas an intelligence agency does not care about criminal convictions in the same way. So there’s a philosophical difference. It was just really interesting to see where increasingly in the world there is this intersection between national security threats and transnational criminal threats. We had hybrid actors.

Someone I was writing a lot about last year was Yevgeny Prigozhin of the Wagner Group, which was designated as a transnational criminal organization by the US, but [Prigozhin] is also obviously a guy of national security interest running a mercenary organization in Ukraine. So there’s these weird places where this stuff crosses over, especially in terrorist fundraising. But there is this big clash of philosophies where if you’re an intelligence agency, you want to observe targets, you want to build information, you want to maintain sources. You might find, and frequently people did, an agency like the DEA coming in and arresting people and staging sting operations abroad – [which is] problematic or annoying. It can act contrary to your interest.

And so I spoke to a lot of people in a lot of different organizations and in different countries and tried to build up a pretty good picture of… Because a lot of these operations, they would involve police from countries in Europe or other agencies from around the world. There are a lot of characters involved. Everyone had a slightly different perspective depending on where they sat, but they definitely agreed on one thing, that there were a lot of clashes.

MS: You mentioned that you conducted a lot of interviews, you’re reaching out to people. Give us a sense of how you do it. These are people who don’t necessarily want to speak. Either they’re in state security organizations or they’re in criminal organizations. Do you just call them up? What do you say if you do? Do you reach out through intermediaries? All of the above? Are there any tricks that you use to get people to talk? And then do you build a relationship with them? Clearly, in the case of Kelly, it appears that you did. What would it take to get the sources to write the book? I know that’s in your wider reporting as well. But just in terms of building this enormous number of interviews, which then pull the story together, your approach and perhaps your frustrations around doing some of that.

MJ: It was a big challenge. What I like as a reporter, where I feel comfortable, is a foundational document trail for whatever I’m doing, which I can use as architecture to build, to identify who I should be approaching to talk to. Frequently, in this book, there were a lot of different criminal cases, dating over 30 years. There was UN tribunal evidence and different documents from different agencies, documents from Colombian agencies or Czech agencies. There were so many. That gives you a firm footing to then think like, ‘Okay, well, who was working there at the time?’ Or in an indictment, these people were named. In the case of criminals, often they’re in prison, or dead, or fugitives, so they’re difficult to contact. We want to give people the right to reply, and we make an effort to contact them. And that could be through their lawyers or sometimes people do actually want to talk. Sometimes people surprisingly want to talk. There are contentious issues, and sometimes people feel like they haven’t been heard or portrayed fairly. It’s a process of exploration where you map out your universe and you try to get in contact with people who are impossible to get in contact with, sometimes those you think are impossible, but actually somehow you find them, and you are just trying to be straightforward and honest, and explain what you’re doing and what you want to talk about.

MS: In that process, was there a moment of extreme frustration for you? Somebody not replying, some key part of the story not coming together? Was there that kind of time period in which you thought, ‘My goodness, I need to get this or this document or this person’? Or was it fitting together over time?

MJ: There are always some complicated issues relating to the status of criminal cases when you’re in different jurisdictions. It’s a quite technical thing, but just sometimes things can be under appeal for many, many years, and it can complicate the process of reporting on them. But you have to get lucky as well. Sometimes there were documents that I didn’t think I was going to be able to get a hold of, [but] I did. And then those led me to being able to contact people who I didn’t think I was ever going to be able to reach.

There were interesting elements to this because, for example, in the mafia strand of the story, in the Salvatore story, the ‘Ndrangheta are family-based units, it’s not a top-down structure. It’s different families who operate in this constellation of crime families. And they’re very hard for law enforcement to penetrate because organized crime groups based on blood and marriage are less likely to betray each other. And so, historically, it’s been hard to have what in Italian are called pentiti – people who become state witnesses and stuff like that. But in the case of Salvatore’s family, there are actually a relatively large number of people who had become state witnesses over time.

And that meant that they gave a vast amount of testimony. They sit down with a prosecutor and they do interviews going on for hours and hours, and I got hold of those interviews. And so that gives you a very different way in to understanding a world and personalities and motivations than an indictment, for example, because you have people talking about the small details, the banalities of what they do. And in the case of Salvatore, he had a girlfriend. He was having an affair with a Ukrainian woman called Oksana, who is an important character in the book.

And she became a state witness. And her perspective is extremely fascinating, not only because she’s a woman in an extremely chauvinistic and male-dominated environment, but she was not directly involved in crime. She was aware of what was going on, because Salvatore would come back home after a day’s work, he would sit in her kitchen, and he would unload about his day, as maybe everyone would. He’d start talking about, ‘Oh, this guy who owes me money, hasn’t paid me any money. He’s an idiot.’ Or ‘This person just screwed up this deal with this guy.’ So he’s just telling her all of the frustrations of his life. But in the kitchen, the Italian financial police had put a listening device. So you’re just getting all of this stuff where they’re watching TV. They’ll be watching an action film with people running around with Kalashnikovs, and he just turns around to his girlfriend and says, ‘I’ve got two Kalashnikovs’. And she goes, ‘Oh, that’s really interesting.’ It’s just these strange moments that add texture. They’re not legally important, but they paint the universe that these people live in. The fact of the normality of that sort of thing, which would be quite shocking to anyone else. It’s always been a process of building this picture through a mix of documents and human sources. Luckily, over time, with a lot of effort, I got what I needed.

MS: Thanks, Miles, fascinating stuff. The other area that I was really taken by, and I sensed this was quite difficult, is that you have these three characters who don’t know each other, who are at different time phases, and you’ve got to integrate them for the reader and bring linkages between them. The chapters are moving to different parts of the world, to different incidents. Tell us something about structuring that. And I sense in your acknowledgments, I think you don’t say it directly, but some of the frustrations of writing that come out, and I can imagine what they are. It’s really challenging. Tell us what you were doing, what you were thinking and how difficult was it?

MJ: It was a real challenge. There were certainly times when I would sit surrounded by massive amounts of Post-it notes and scrawled notes and stuff and be rather intimidated by the task I’d taken on. This is a true story. No detail is invented. Every piece of dialogue, every detail. If there’s any description, the colour of a car… if it’s red, that is the colour of the car. The time someone did something. That is an integral part of the work. But it means that you then also have a lot of details that you have to get rid of because in certain instances, there is this strange thing where you actually have too much material. Because if you have 5 000 pages of wiretap transcripts or something, a lot of what people do in their daily lives is quite tedious. It’s just boring stuff. You go downstairs and put on the kettle and make a cup of tea and say hello to somebody. You have to be very selective in what you’re including in each chapter. But then you’re also having to be very mindful of not distorting what has actually happened.

But then also just trying to be careful about how you present the information. But structurally, maybe it’s a somewhat strange way to put it, but it’s a little bit like if you were editing an episode of reality TV. Each part has been put together in a different way. As you said, the Jack Kelly section is much more about interviews, with him and also other people, and documents as well. But in the Italian side of the story, you have this massive amount of material, including surveillance, photographs, phone location data, text messages, everything. And so you’re editing this livestream of a day in a criminal’s life. That was a real challenge structurally. I have a vast amount of respect for law enforcement and the work they do, but I think it’s a complex job. And I didn’t want to just make it a story about ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ and then make it a very Hollywood-style thing where the ‘goodies’ triumph in the end.

This is a messy world where, as Jack’s story shows, people are fighting. They’re doing something right. But it’s difficult, you come up against bureaucratic obstacles or difficulties. It’s not just this simple process of heroes coming in and kicking ass. I was quite determined that I would show the complexity of that. And also in terms of the ending of the story, because this is not a world where anyone really walks away happily. This is not a place where everything is just perfectly resolved and it’s all over, crime has been solved, and the world is just a perfect place. People might be arrested; people will come and replace them. This is a world where the geopolitical forces that are encouraging or fuelling this activity will remain in place or change into something else. In terms of the structure, I wanted to make it a book that was readable and relatable, but also something that accurately portrayed that world. And so that’s why there’s also a lot of focus on the incompetence of some of the characters.

MS: It’s amazing, Miles, the degree to which geopolitics intervenes. There is this scene in the book, where the US have been cooperating with the French and then they’re going to have a party to celebrate. And then suddenly the party is called off because, of course, politics has intervened. It’s a very real story that’s full of greys and real people. That comes across really well.

MJ: Thank you.

MS: You’ve given this fascinating overview of the amount of work that goes into a book like this. I’m very interested in this idea of non-fiction true crime. The term ‘true crime’ is sometimes a little bit frustrating, because it fits into a specific part of the library or the bookshop or whatever. I would like to make the argument that these books are more important for another reason. They’re about the wider political economy of how the world works, how politics is influenced. Do you have those kinds of frustrations? Why do you work and write in this area? What do you want to achieve?

MJ: As you say, ‘true crime’ can be a problematic label, and it can encompass a vast amount of different things. What I always wanted to do as a journalist and author is to try to illuminate the strange elements of the world, how they work, and things that often are very surprising. The world is a very strange place. It’s a huge cliché, but sometimes the truth can be stranger than fiction. People are absolutely stunned by some of these stories in that space. But it really interacts more with things that people would consider traditional non-fiction areas, like geopolitics and history. These are understanding the way events in the world shape our surroundings. In the case of this book, I was also very focused on trying to give an accurate depiction of this phenomenon to the point where it confounds certain expectations. In the world of narrativized crime, there are these expectations, especially in organized crime, of these all-seeing, all-powerful bosses, overseeing very tightly run centralized organizations, and everyone being really competent. The police being really competent, the criminals being really competent, and it all working really well.

Actually, the reality is much more chaotic than that. And in the book, there’s a lot of scenes of criminals being quite incompetent and doing things for stupid reasons. My editor made a joke, which I think is very accurate. He was joking that this is also a book about middle management. This is a book about people who are in institutions, who are just dealing with the bureaucratic difficulties of being in an institution, of being frustrated by the institution they’re in. And people who’ve also devoted their lives in some way to the values and ideas of different institutions, be that US law enforcement or the Italian mafia or Hezbollah. And ultimately, those institutions betray them. This is not a book where everyone ends up happily living their life and vindicated. These are people who are often frustrated by the world they’re in. And that applies across institutions. You see a lot of the time that the forces that these people are dealing with are bigger than them. And they’re trying, like any human, to somehow try and shape their own destiny and fate in this extremely chaotic world they live in.

And they come up against things that are too big and powerful for them to really control. So in the simplest sense, just trying to organize from scratch a very audacious transatlantic cocaine shipment. You’re trying to wrest control of your own destiny and eventually fail at it. And so that was what I was trying to capture rather than the expectations of everything being extremely slick and perfectly run and masterful.

MS: I think some of what you’re saying comes across in the conclusion. Because it can’t end neatly, because there are a lot of – I don’t want to say loose ends – but in the greys of the world that you are writing about, there aren’t always happy stories or a clear resolution, as you would have in a scripted movie, so to speak. Tell us something about this. Kelly doesn’t go to his retirement party, or he misses it, or they hold it without him. A weird detail, which I thought said a lot about how a bureaucracy thanks you for working. The other cases also have very unsatisfying endings, but illustrative of reality. Life, I suppose.

MJ: No one really wins. I think Jack is ultimately vindicated; consensus moves closer towards what he had been arguing. But it’s a situation where, at the end – maybe this is true of us all –when you retire, the screen doesn’t fade to black and you walk off triumphantly to a soundtrack, whether you’re a criminal or in law enforcement or anything. There are also just elements of age. It’s another thing I find interesting in the book in comparison of the characters. The way we are as human beings when we’re 20 is going to be different to when we’re 50. And in the case of, for example, Mustafa Badreddine, who has been operating in this shadowy existence, this ghost-like figure, since he was 17–18 or something, he’s now in his 50s and does he still believe the same things that he did when he was 20? Is he still doing it for the same reasons? Is he happy with the direction that his organization has gone in?
The same as the DEA agents who were doing these big international meaningful sting operations, generating a lot of attention and bringing in big targets. I’ve spoken to a lot of them who were very disillusioned by the way the organization went after 2016–2017. It’s people who change over time. That was another part of the book. We tend to view people’s motivations as quite static sometimes, especially in the more ideological ‘isms’ like terrorism and terrorist financing, why someone does something. They might do the same thing, but their reasons for doing it might change over time and over their life. I found that quite interesting. These are people who are never going to have a happy ending, the perfect ending. No one ever comes in at the end and says, ‘You were completely right. You are amazing.’ Maybe that happens once in a while, but for most people, that’s not how it works. And that was certainly the case for these guys.

MS: What has been the reaction to the book? You’ve been presenting it and talking about it. What did people say? And has any of that surprised you?

MJ: I’ve been really encouraged by the reaction in the sense that I’ve had a lot of general readers. I’ve had people contact me who do not have a huge interest in this area, who have related to the book on its own terms, which has been very encouraging. I’ve had some interesting people contact me. I had one person who was a relative of a quite well-known organized crime figure, who had left the family and contacted me to say that they related very strongly to the depiction of the family dynamics in the book, in the mafia side of the story. That was very surprising and very interesting to hear.

MS: Interesting. And Miles, I think you know that at the Global Initiative we’re doing multiple research projects on organized crime, illicit economies, trying to push forward a discussion precisely on what you are doing, to understand the underworld, the illicit. What can we do better? What does the book illustrate? Are there areas that deserve more attention? This connection of organized crime–terror financing that you’ve uncovered. Are there areas in the broader research community, from where you sit, where things could be better, where much more work is required?

MJ: I think the work you guys do is absolutely fantastic, and the people who collaborate with you, too. I think it’s just a challenge for anyone who’s looking at this area. It becomes more and more complicated. The world is becoming an ever more complicated place, which sounds like a little bit of a trite thing to say, but in terms of the nature of the actors who we would be counting as ‘of interest’ and who they’re interacting with.

One thing I’ve become really interested in, which is connected to this book, is the interaction between states, regimes, governments that are hostile to the West and organized criminal groups. You’ve had these fascinating interactions between rogue states, sanctioned regimes, whatever you want to call them, and organized crime groups, and people have done interesting research, and I think that will become a more interesting area of research in the context we’re in.

In a way, you have these massive economies that have been sanctioned and cut off from the Western financial system, and how sanctions effectively create a need for people to turn to the international black market. If you can’t buy something on the open market anymore, you need to find someone to get it for you. The nature of these bizarre collaborations between unlikely characters. There was this fascinating case in the United States earlier this year, involving Canadian Hells Angels being hired by the Iranian foreign intelligence service to assassinate dissidents in the United States. People you just never would think would be in the same room together. And I think that would be a really interesting continuing area of research for us all.

MS: What you’re saying is there’s plenty more material for you, Miles, to bring together these interesting characters. Really a pleasure to speak with you and thanks for taking the time.

MJ: The pleasure is mine. Thank you so much for having me.