Dark Wire by Joseph Cox

Author:Joseph Cox [Cox, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Dubai’s hive of traffickers made it an attractive market for phone sellers. All around the globe, foot soldiers guarded drug safe houses, cooks spun up batches of methamphetamine, and smugglers carefully packed blocks of white powder into fruit or other items. Many of their bosses sat in Dubai.

With so many expat criminals based there, Dubai was a playground, a safe haven, and a business opportunity all rolled into one. Some top gangsters in Dubai banded together to make so-called super cartels. These cartels crossed ethnic and cultural divides. Balkan mobsters worked with Dutch-Moroccan cocaine traffickers. Italian mafiosos teamed up with Irish gangsters. Then all of them came together as one.

What cemented all of the audacious behavior was the Dubai culture of wasta, an Arabic term that loosely translates to authority or power. On the surface Dubai is a highly authoritarian place to live, and for the vast majority of people, especially women, it is. But in the underbelly of Dubai, the more money you had the more wasta you could throw around and be allowed to live and act with impunity. And, obviously, the drug traffickers who fled to Dubai had lots and lots of money. They lived in complete opulence. They bought sports cars, beachfront villas, and penthouse apartments, luxuries that might have already been seized back home. Life in Dubai might even beat living in whatever country they ran away from.

Dubai was where money got you nearly anything and the police traditionally left foreign organized criminals alone. The city asked for no personal income tax, and Dubai’s real estate market was a perfect parking spot for the dirty money of drug traffickers and Russian oligarchs.

From those glass skyscrapers and fancy resorts, the gangsters used encrypted phones to remotely control their trafficking operations. No longer did they have to arrange face-to-face meetings. That took time and could lead to their capture. With the phones, the bosses’ empires grew securely and uninterrupted. They often juggled devices to handle different pillars of their organization—packaging of the drugs on one phone, and laundering of the proceeds on another.

Anom had a shot at converting some of those criminal executives over to its platform. In turn, those high rollers would need phones for their underlings to send commands to. Anom could target the top players and then let the phones trickle down the totem pole. The FBI, conveniently, could piggyback off Anom sellers’ aspirations and tap into this vibrant community of organized criminals.

By 2020, cracks had started to appear in Dubai’s reputation as a safe haven for crooks. In July that year on behalf of law enforcement, Dubai authorities arrested two Australian kingpins who had fled the country. The Dubai police boasted about this bust by producing a slick, action-movie-style trailer of the arrest. Drone footage purportedly of a car chase was interspliced with flashy graphics and the targets’ mug shots. If Dubai was finally going to shake its image of being a criminal safe haven, the government was going to be brash about it.

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