Illicit Activities Quotes

It takes a crook to catch those crooks.

I’ll use prostitutes to go out and seduce … high campaign officials.

You don't read many positive things about Iran in the press, which is depressing, but when I go back to my grandparents' house in the hills, and I'm sitting by the pool, sipping a bootleg Turkish beer, watching a pirate DVD, eating my grandma's cooking... you realise there is a real bridge between politics and country and people.

The underground economy is not all smugglers. It is hundreds of thousands of otherwise honest people who have withdrawn their consent to be governed.

Mafia states integrate the speed and flexibility of transnational criminal networks with the legal protections and diplomatic privileges enjoyed only by states.

Drug dealers live vicariously through me

For lawless joys a bitter ending waits.

As a teen-ager I played cards, shot craps, played pool, went to the track, hung around social clubs. I knew that some card and crap games were run by the mob, and some social clubs were mob social clubs. Even as a kid I knew guys that were here today, gone tomorrow, never seen again, and I knew what had happened.

Now as through this world I ramble, I see lots of funny men, Some rob you with a six gun, And some with a fountain pen.

I think it's a mistake to view North Korea as a government. It really is more like a criminal syndicate.

John Jacob Astor, the first American multimillionaire and the richest man in the country at the time of his death in 1848, was an accomplished smuggler. Astor engaged in a variety of illicit trading ventures, smuggling opium …, trading with the enemy during the war of 1812, and clandestinely exchanging banned alcohol with Native Americans for furs.

You accuse me of black marketing, but which of you has not slept with me?

What I like about Layer Cake is its intelligent through-line. First of all, I think it's very close to the truth; I think this is what successful drug dealers are like. They don't drive around in flashy cars, they don't show off, they behave very quietly, they get on with their job and they earn lots of money. And it goes up and up and up and up the scale. Secondly - and selfishly - I like the moral aspect of the movie, which is that violence has consequences, and you feel emotionally involved with the violence.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.

I'm in this business because I despise honest labor.

Little by little, the pimps have taken over the world. They don't do anything, they don't make anything - they just stand there and take their cut.

I never met a North Korean who didn’t like pornography. Supplying porn to North Korean officials to entice them to spy for America, along with money or whatever else it might take—yes I was willing to do that.

i wanted to try things, everything, especially things that are illegal and have a faint whiff of glamour.

I'll bet right now most of the youngsters and hot club fans who hear the name Storyville hasn't the least idea that it consisted of some of the biggest prostitutes in the world ... Standing in their doorways nightly in their fine and beautiful negligees -- faintly calling to the boys as they passed their cribs.

The criminal element now calculates that crime really does pay.

Port Royal, Jamaica, was built for pirates. The town had a well-protected harbor, corrupt politicians and townsfolk, and a set of ethics that seemed passed down from Sodom and Gomorrah.

I always needed money when I was younger. I had different ways of getting it. A lot of the ways I don't like to talk about.

The Unites States used to use law enforcement to aggressively target North Korea illicit activities - counterfeiting U.S. currency, drug-running, counterfeit cigarettes and pharmaceuticals - until diplomacy gutted those efforts. The effort should be reinvigorated.

If one looks into the genealogies of many 'old families,' one discovers episodes of slave trafficking, bootlegging, gun running, opium trading, falsified land claims, violent acquisition of water and mineral rights, the extermination of indigenous peoples, sales of shoddy and unsafe goods, public funds used for private speculations, crooked deals in government bonds and vouchers, and payoffs for political favors.