I know this will be hard to believe but I have a friend. Yes, it’s true. And he has years of experience in the world’s top ten banks and international finance. He likes Lance Bear Wolf and pointed me to Dubai.
Will this end up in a book – likely.
Will it end soon – unlikely. Their bring your money and behave motto makes that clear.
Remember – money talks. As does weak extradition laws.
Here is a sample I got from a simple web search.
From the French newspaper Le Monde
"Dubai is a paradise for us!" In the heart of Business Bay, the emirate's business district, Eduardo, a Mexican "narco," interrupts his selfie session in front of the Burj Khalifa tower, the world's tallest skyscraper, to explain to me how the various clans of the Sinaloa cartel come to launder tens of millions of dollars here. He works for one of them in a dual capacity: He exports tons of drugs, whether cocaine or fentanyl, an opioid 30 times more potent than heroin, and he then launders the profits from this idiosyncratic line of business.
From Rolling Stone
Arms Dealers and Drug Lords Are Scooping Up Property in Dubai
There are many shady characters hanging out in Dubai. The leaked data, which comes from the Dubai Land Department, as well as publicly-owned utility companies, was reviewed by Rolling Stone’s partner on this project, the nonprofit Government Accountability Project.
The data shows Asadullah Khalid, a former Afghan government official and accused war criminal, has apparently made a home in Dubai. Khalid served in a variety of roles in the American-backed Afghan government, including as head of the National Directorate of Security, the country’s intelligence service.
Khalid was “known to have had a dungeon in Ghazni,” Richard Colvin, a Canadian diplomat, told a Canadian parliamentary commission in 2009. “He was known to be running a narcotics operation. He had a criminal gang. He had people killed who got in his way.”
Down the road from Khalid, on Palm Jumeirah, an artificial island made in the shape of a palm tree off the Emirate’s coast, are several properties connected to Rami Makhlouf and his brother Ihab, the cousins of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad. The Makhloufs, who are some of the richest and most powerful men in Syria, were sanctioned by the United States, European Union, and United Kingdom for public corruption and enabling regime abuses. (Ihab was sanctioned for helping his brother.)
Syrian media reported that Rami Makhlouf was put under a travel ban by the Syrian regime in 2020, but rental data shows that he has made millions from renting out his properties.
The Makhloufs’ neighbors on Palm Jumeirah include the Uruguayan cartel leader Sebastian Marset, who is wanted by authorities across South America for narcotrafficking. Marset was accused by the president of Colombia of arranging the assassination of Marcelo Pecci, a Paraguayan prosecutor, while Pecci was on his honeymoon in Colombia.
Dubai also counts as residents Jafar Dhia Jafar, who was Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons chief during the 1980s; Naing Htut Aung, a sanctioned businessman whom the U.S. Treasury Department accuses of supplying weapons to the Myanmar junta’s military; and Lanfranco Cirillo, Putin’s architect, who is wanted in Italy for alleged money laundering and tax evasion.
From Gateway/Whale Hunting
A huge raid in November conducted last year in Dubai resulted in the arrest of six European cocaine kingpins. Now, two of them — Bosinian narco-boss Edin Gačanin “Tito” and Dutch-Moroccan Zohair Belkhair — are missing. The Dutch said they have no idea where they are. Both were then reported to have been freed after the official extradition offer was rejected.
This has happened before. Eldi Dizdari, a powerful Albanian cocaine boss, was arrested in Dubai in September 2020. But the UAE originally decided not to extradite him and he escaped from jail. The same year another criminal Plarent Dervishaj was arrested, but he was freed two days later because Albania and Dubai hadn’t reached an extradition agreement.