“Organized crime groups are for-profit business enterprises,” Elvis Secco said. “To combat them, we have to defund them.”
Before being appointed to lead the organized crime division at Brazil’s Federal Police in 2019, Secco gained national recognition for dismantling a money-laundering unit of Brazil’s largest criminal organization, the Primeiro Comando da Capital, or PCC. While authorities were busy looking for drugs, the PCC had been actively laundering money in Londrina, Paraná, a prosperous town of 600,000, for 10 years, unbothered.
Now, Secco is attacking money laundering by criminal organizations at a national level, a strategy that isn’t frequently seen in Latin America. Other organizations, including the UN, are eager to draw lessons from his unit’s work.
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