James Watkins Quotes

The expansion and sophistication of transnational crime represents one of the most dangerous threats we confront in the next millennium.

Transnational organized crime does not recognize any borders.

There is no doubt that cross border crime and illicit trade harm individuals and communities and pose challenges to governments, including the United States. But the panicked discourse and frenzied law enforcement policies that define Washington’s current approach are an alarmist reaction.

I am tired of seeing real criminals, with lots of victims being ignored, while traditional law enforcement is busy going after perpetrators of victimless crimes such as those involved in the Silk Road Marketplace.

Simply that we are mirroring the trends in society, at any given time smuggling was an issue in the seventies, corruption is an issue today, and we faithfully reflect those issues.

White-collar crime has been marketed - billions of dollars have been put in to have us be bored by it.

The 'Ndrangheta is an exceptionally dangerous, sophisticated and insidious criminal organization, with tentacles stretching from Italy to countries around the world.

White-collar crime gets more outrageous by the second in America.

I don't know whether crime is dictating business or business is dictating crime.

A lot of my friends are gangsters. Not like gangsters - well, yeah, all sorts of levels of criminality - but not the types that are preying on innocent people. I have no interest in the type of criminality that has no respect for collateral damage.

A man with a briefcase can steal millions more than any man with a gun.

Every new law enforcement measure in recent years has been met with increasingly sophisticated evasive techniques on the part of organized crime.

One of the chapters outlined in my book talks about the Iranian influence with Venezuela, these terror flights that go back and forth that we don't manifests on, and then nuclear material smuggled across our unsecure southwest border from Mexico into the United States.

A street criminal can steal only what he can carry, but with a stroke of a pen, the dialing of a telephone or the pushing of a computer key, the white collar criminal can and does steal billions.

White collar crime must be taken as seriously as any other crime.

Every European country faces threats which ignore national frontiers: pandemics, climate change, terrorism and organised crime.

The first series of 'McMafia' is very Alex Godman-centric and could continue to be, but we haven't even begun to explore the Middle East or Africa or even South America in detail. One of our ambitions would be to drop into some of these other places and, by doing so, bring the audience into a world that they wouldn't necessarily have been in.

You know, if you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good you’re going to go to jail. If it happens repeatedly, you may go to jail for the rest of your life. But evidently, if you launder nearly a billion dollars for drug cartels and violate our international sanctions, your company pays a fine and you go home and sleep in your own bed at night, every single individual associated with this. I think that’s fundamentally wrong.

Terrorism fuels itself from all kinds of illicit trafficking: drugs, weapons, human beings.

Drug smugglers often use juveniles to carry their shipments into the U.S. because they know the juveniles will not be prosecuted if caught.

Legitimate institutions historically have been defenseless in the face of outright fraud.

I am looking forward to a series of productive meetings in both Austria and Estonia, particularly what role organized crime plays in the Baltic drug trade.

If you steal from the American public, whether you use a gas pump or a gun, you ought to do hard time.

Such a crime as the embezzlement of any of the coins struck at the Mint, or of any of the metals brought to the Mint for coinage, would be punished under the laws of Pennsylvania, by a fine and penitentiary imprisonment at hard labor. The punishment annexed to this crime by the laws of the United States, enacted for the special protection of deposits made at the Mint, is DEATH.

Those involved in organized crime are generally motivated by one thing–profit. Huge sums of money are generated through arms smuggling, trafficking of human beings and narcotic substances, and financial crimes. These monies are laundered so that they have the appearance in our financial system of the proceeds of legitimate business activity.