Mafias and Banks

Episode 1 - The Era of Pioneers

It was in New York, the temple of finance, that the mafia invented its own banking system. During the Great Depression, the underworld embarked on usury and money laundering through gambling, while the wealthy built the new architecture of tax havens. In the 1950s, world finance was living in the regulated world of the Bretton Woods system. Within this framework, criminals and financiers were to find the cracks. The New York mafia invested in the Caribbean. Bankers invented new tools for the hidden circulation of money. It was the birth of white-collar crime, of which Italian tax expert Michele Sindona, banker to Cosa Nostra and the Vatican, was one of the most terrifying models.

Episode 2 - Follow the money

The 1980s were the decade of the Wall Street wolves and the explosive growth of cocaine and heroin trafficking. For criminal organizations, cartels, mafias, and yakuza, the need for money laundering was immense, and some banks welcomed them with open arms. To combat this scourge, Italian magistrate Giovanni Falcone invented a method: follow the money. But the financial sector, caught up in an irresistible wave of liberalization, shattered all banking regulations. A race against time began.

Episode 3 - The Criminals Global Network

The end of the Cold War brought hope for a new world. But faced with the new world order, the major nations meekly chose globalization. Russia and China, seeking to preserve their spheres of influence to counter American supremacy, will have to develop unprecedented alliance strategies. For the mafia, new territories and new markets are opening up. In the mass of financial transactions that take place in milliseconds, dirty money is more untraceable than ever. Banks, the arteries of money circulation, are turning into butlers of the occult finance. From Moscow to Vancouver, from Beijing to Beirut, the time of white-collar organized crime has come.