Thomson Reuters in conjunction with The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has looked at the interrelationship between illicit activity in economic and political arenas and issued a report titled:

Risky Business: The Global Threat Network and the Politics of Contraband

See the report here –RiskyBusiness_The Global Threat Network

The report utilizes Thomson Reuters Accelus World-Check data and examines the relationships of those who produce and profit from illicit activity for financial or political purposes.

This study is one of the first comprehensive, open-source, data-driven assessments of the global transnational illicit network, leveraging a unique data source originally developed for financial institutions to mitigate regulatory and reputation risks.

The Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) worked with World-Check, a Thomson Reuters business, which gathered the data that the CTC then structured and used for this research study. “……For example,

“Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) has worked with Dawood Ibrahim’s criminal enterprise known as D-Company, Slobodan Milosevic cultivated an organized crime syndicate to subvert oil sanctions and many of Russia’s primary political clans each have criminal wings with ties to the security service.

The same security and intelligence agencies that build, sustain and liaise with sub-state terrorist groups for political purposes often have parallel relationships with criminal groups.
Since these groups have similar origins and handlers in the security and intelligence worlds, these deep connections are perhaps not surprising…..”

Read about Dawood Ibrahim’s at http://bit.ly/1uzIYec