Illicit Trade
The magnificent "Tobacco Underground" by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists proves that great things can happen when reporters cooperate across borders. The consortium, which is affiliated with the Center for Public Integrity, brought together reporters from more than a dozen countries in Asia, Europe and North America to work on this investigation. Together they exposed the vast blackmarket trade in smuggled cigarettes that costs governments more than $40 billion in lost tax revenues a year. Here they introduce the smuggling network:
Indeed, with profits rivaling those of narcotics, and relatively light penalties, the business is fast reinventing itself. Once dominated by Western multinational companies, cigarette smuggling has expanded with new players, new routes, and new techniques. Today, this underground industry ranges from Chinese counterfeiters that mimic Marlboro holograms to perfection, to Russian-owned factories that mass produce brands made exclusively to be smuggled into Western Europe. In Canada, the involvement of an array of criminal gangs and Indian tribes pushed seizures of contraband tobacco up 16-fold between 2001 and 2006.
In addition to compelling stories, the project comes with videos, an interactive map, audio interviews, links to resources and a glossary of terms. The stories were reported by Stefan Candea (Romania), Duncan Campbell (United Kingdom), Te-Ping Chen (United States), Gong Jing (China), Alain Lallemand (Belgium), Vlad Lavrov (Ukraine), William Marsden (Canada), Paul Christian Radu (Romania), Roman Shleynov (Russia), Leo Sisti (Italy), Drew Sullivan (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Kate Willson (United States). David E. Kaplan, Marina Walker Guevara, Andrew Green, Ariel Olson Surowidjojo, Sarah Laskow, Peter Newbatt Smith, Sara Bularzik, Tom Stites and Gordon Witkin edited the project. www.publicintegrity.org/investigations/tobacco/