Tantoco Cartel

Tantoco Enterprises Logo

Branching out from the criminal enterprise and connected by shadow lines and buffers both human and organizational, the Tantoco Enterprises group of companies operates a variety of legitimate businesses, including holding and service companies which quietly (sometimes silently) invest in or take over unaffiliated businesses, operating them as arms-length sock puppets.

Tantoco Enterprises is the umbrella company, with a locally registered regional headquarters incorporated locally and connected to Tantoco Enterprises through a license/vendor relationship. Tantoco Financial Services Group (TFSG) is headquartered in Manila, South Torbia, and funnels money through the organization via a complex web of cut-outs, service corporations, privately owned funds, and specialist banks.

Tantoco Enterprises Legitimate Business Wire Diagram

Despite the blatant visibility of most Tantoco corporate entities, the group itself is not illegal in South Torbia, and its corporate structure takes advantage of the gaps and complexities of multinational operation to obscure true funding lines and ownership. Additionally, TFSG operates an informal lobbying group which is one of the largest political donors in South Torbia, and it is known that Tantoco members leverage relationships with political leaders to conduct blackmail and compromise operations which keep their various organizations from meaningful law enforcement action.

Organization Narrative

The most prominent transnational criminal organization in South Torbia is the Tantoco Cartel. The Tantoco Cartel is based in Manila, but its tentacles reach throughout the country and into Belesia, Gabal, and Olvana. The Tantoco Cartel may have even have inroads into North Torbia. The Tantoco Cartel is involved in numerous criminal activities: drug and weapons smuggling, extortion, motor vehicle theft, illegal gambling, money laundering, counterfeiting, and murder-for-hire.

The leader of this cartel is Hilmi Tantoco, a 67-year old male who operates a string of businesses under the umbrella company known as Tantoco Enterprises. A native of South Torbia, Hilmi Tantoco got his start as an enforcer with a local gang involved in racketeering—primarily extortion—from small business owners. He worked his way up until, in his mid-30s, he ousted the local gang leader by bombing his boat while he was deep-sea fishing. Hilmi then set up a number of legitimate businesses to serve as a front for his illegal activities. His political and social connections are thought to be extensive, including local police and politicians, as well as the federal police and some cabinet members. These connections allow him to stay one step ahead of most attempts to close down his businesses. There is enough distance between him and his illegal practices that if necessary, a fall guy will be found to prevent any investigation reaching him.

Since most of the Cartel's operations are non-violent, the Cartel is able to maintain its fiction as an apolitical, beneficent, loose business conglomerate. While their methods are often questionable, they do perform charitable acts, such as donating and delivering supplies to homeless victims. These activities make the relationship between organized crime and police a complicated one. Membership itself is not illegal, and Cartel businesses and headquarters are often clearly marked. Police often know member whereabouts and activities without taking any action. Some South Torbians view the criminals as a necessary evil, in light of their chivalrous facade, and see the organizational nature of their crime as a deterrent to impulsive individual street crime. To counteract this romanticized version, the police refer to the group as essentially thugs or scum to reinforce their criminal nature corresponding with the government imposing stricter laws against criminal organizations.

The Cartel has taken advantage of the technological advantages in South Torbia to jump to the forefront of cybercrime. Often hiring bright but financially struggling recent university graduates, the Cartel pays for side work in cyber-theft of both real and virtual assets, as well as "hacking for hire." They also assist in the Cartel's largest and most profitable operation: large-scale bribery and blackmail.

Another major activity is theft and smuggling. According to the International Union of Maritime Insurance, last year the total loss (shrinkage) through the Port of Manila equated to 240,000 twenty-foot equivalent units, with an estimated value of $6.3 billion, with an estimated annual increase of 2.0% by shipping volume and almost 24.98% by value. With over three-fourths of this loss attributed to theft, industry analysts credit criminal organizations with shifting to higher-value items, often of military origin, rather than the more pedestrian civilian black market items. Smugglers avoid paying transaction taxes on gold by using travelling retirees as mules. This crime is appealing since this typically has no victims except state coffers, and does not call for violence or weapons. People see it as an easy way to earn extra cash, almost like a part-time job. Prior to a tax increase a decade ago, police arrested about 10 people on suspicion of gold smuggling-related tax evasion in a typical year, while last year there 294 arrests. Furthermore, organized crime is involved with smuggling MDMA and cannabis from North America into the country, or, in coordination with African drug smuggling cartels, methamphetamines from Latin America, Olvana, and Africa. Contrary to most countries, South Torbia imports the majority of its cannabis rather than local sourcing; this creates unusually high retail prices for the drug. Additionally, South Torbia faces a prescription medication problem, with over 50% of all drug-related treatment in the nation relating to amphetamine-type substance abuse.

Areas of Operation

The Tantoco Cartel operates in South Torbia, Olvana, Gabal, and Belesia. It also has a service corporation with a head office in Donovia, as well as being suspected of sanction running into North Torbia, which is believed to be facilitated by relationships still existing between founding members north and south of the border since before the Torbian war. Tantoco businesses are in a period of wide and rapid expansion, believed to be in part facilitated by Olvanan criminal syndicates. Legitimate Tantoco companies are branching out into multiple, complex structures in an attempt to funnel money and assets further and further afield under the cover of global transnational trade.

Membership and Demographics

The Tantoco Cartel is a multi-generational, multi-layered organization. Its core leadership is exclusively male and between the ages of forty-five and seventy. The upper echelons are those survivors of the Torbian war who founded the nation’s first and largest criminal organizations and who have been fighting for market share and territorial dominance for over half a century. This group is mixed with newer leaders who have worked their way through the ranks into senior positions. The political turmoil of the late twentieth century formed their childhood years, and their ‘apprenticeships’ were marked by the savage gang violence of the nineties and early millennium.

Mirroring this group are the legitimate operators who staff Tantoco’s multiple overt businesses.

These are generally educated middle-class corporates, most of whom sincerely believe that the cartel is a largely benevolent and necessary informal institution. These men and women cross a multiplicity of disciplines, with a preponderance of financial services and legal expertise.

The Cartel’s feeder organizations are a rag-tag of street gangs, low-level syndicates, drug distribution networks, and so on. As with the majority of far eastern criminal organizations, petty criminals in their middle teens operate under the control of Fagin-like ’big brothers’. Those who are most financially successful, or with a proven capacity for controlled violence, are gradually introduced into leadership roles, becoming ‘big brothers’ themselves. Those who survive a career in this perilous occupation stand a strong chance of entering the Cartel’s top management ranks.

Owing to its complex hybrid nature, there are a host of entirely innocent wage workers of all ages and types working in the Cartel’s various businesses, many of whom may be unaware of the true nature of their employment. The Cartel also operates a large number of stringers, mostly impoverished South Torbian students, paid piecework rates for the cyber hacking and social media skills, and retirees who are used as mules for smuggled gold and drugs.

Operational Profile

Kinetic

The Tantoco Cartel operates in a multitude of ways and via a multitude of means. Owing to the peculiar nature of far eastern organized crime, the Cartel is in the process of evolving into a more or less legitimate set of entities, preserving at the same time its criminal core. At street and neighbourhood level the Cartel remains, and is likely to remain, indistinguishable from any other street gang. At corporate level, however, there has been a deliberate drift from kinetic and high-risk activities into influence peddling, money laundering, and legitimate corporate enterprise.

The Tantoco Cartel’s kinetic activities include:

Reprisal murders and assaults
Intimidation and extortion related murders, maimings, and assaults
Murder, maiming and assault for hire
Arson and other property damage
Sabotage, especially of competitor businesses
Armed Robbery
Targeted rape (sex trafficking related)

Non-Kinetic

Aside from its various rackets, the Tantoco Cartel increasingly conducts information and finance related operations. The highly developed cyber-infrastructure and skill base extant in South Torbia has been astutely exploited by the Cartel, and the explosion of social media has prompted to Cartel to broadcast its traditional narrative of being a kind of high end ‘neighbourhood watch’ across multiple new platforms, enabling cross-generational, multi-national reach. Additionally, like many criminal organizations, the Cartel maintains strong relationships not only with political leaders, but also with the film and television industry. Filmmakers throughout the region unintentionally further the Cartel’s narrative through crime genre films, which are wildly popular worldwide.

The Tantoco Cartel’s principle non-kinetic activities are:

Influence activities, including lobbying, blackmail, compromise
Financial services, including money laundering, caching, exfiltration
High profile charitable giving, especially in underprivileged areas
Smuggling of drugs, gold, cash, and weapons
Human Trafficking, including both sex and labour trafficking
Sanction and blockade running, especially into North Torbia
Extortion and neighbourhood level protection rackets
Racketeering
Illegal gambling
Sex industry services
Illicit and prescription drug distribution
Criminal finance and management services

Recruitment

The Tantoco Cartel runs a classical model for recruitment of its core criminal membership. This involves the cultivation of a multitude of low-level ‘big brothers’, essentially men in their late teens to early twenties, operating under the control of local underbosses. These lower levels are used as feeder organizations, with those who survive into adulthood being selected for promotion into the core organization and then up through the ranks.

High visibility street gangs, charitable donations of food and small amounts of cash, block parties, and other typical neighbourhood level organized crime recruitment activities are the main source of core Cartel members. The recruitment of mules and stringers is ordinarily done through extended family and friendship networks, both physically and through social media. There is also limited recruitment of employees and executives from their legitimate businesses, but current policy appears to display a preference for maintaining the separation between these two sides of the operation.

In more recent times, deep and dark web message boards are being used to lure indigent students into cyber operations on a contract basis, with some of these eventually becoming more permanent, arms-length members.