Smuggling

Roberto Saviano writes famously in Gomorrah about the Camorra mafia but also gives insights on smuggling of goods into Europe:

"The port of Naples is an open wound. The end point for the interminable voyage that merchanise makes. Ships enter the gulf and come to the dock like babies to the breast, except they are here to be milked, not fed...

These days the merchandise unloaded in Naples is almost exclusively Chinese - 1.6 million tons annually. Registered merchandise that is. At least another million tons pass through without leaving a trace. According to the Italian Customs Agency, 60% of the goods arriving in Naples escape customs inspection, 20% of the bills of entry go unchecked, and fifty thousand shipments are contraband, 99% of them from China - all for an estimated 200 million euros in evaded taxes each semester. The containers that need to disappear before being inspected are in the first row. Every container is duly numbered, but on many the numbers are identical. So one inspected container baptizes all the illegal ones with the same number".

The book Economic Gangsters give further insight in how smugglers paid less duty on chicken exports to China from Hong Kong...by declaring the chickens as turkeys which qualify for lower tariffs and banking on the inspectors not noticing the difference.