In March 2026, Earth League International (ELI) published a report: Money Talks: What Criminals Told Us About Corruption. Our study synthesized over a decade of intelligence obtained firsthand by ELI’s undercover investigators from inside criminal networks to examine how corruption facilitates environmental and wildlife crime, as well as how these activities converge with other serious crimes.

Multilingual teams from ELI have spent years in the field collecting information from the criminals whom we investigate. This work offers a unique vantage point that allows us to add significant information and insights to the study of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) that can’t be collected from law enforcement and isn’t in judicial records.

Understanding TCOs’ crimes requires mapping out the complete structure of these organizations and their full range of illicit activities with in-depth network analysis to create a more complete picture of convergence, as well as an understanding of how TCOs collaborate across borders.

Money Talks reveals that the weaknesses that TCOs exploit in governance, border security, and financial systems have clear implications for national security. This knowledge enables more robust actions by law enforcement and other sectors.

Our report identifies key takeaways in this battle. We are convinced that corrupt enablers, both in the public and private sectors, are essential for TCOs to do business. At every stage of illicit supply chains, corruption was what makes it possible to source, move, hide, launder, and sell contraband. Money Talks offers evidence that provides new clarity: without fighting corruption, there is simply no way to effectively combat organized crime.

Bad Apples and Shocking Disclosures

Our report’s focus on the intersection of TCOs’ environmental and wildlife crimes and bribery uncovered numerous case studies of how this relationship works.

Criminals obtaining access to protected areas to poach endangered species, illegally log timber, and run illicit mining sites, and then transport these items, was one clear example. ELI field teams directly witnessed police escorts which protected such contraband in multiple countries. Exporting illegal goods to destination markets required additional assistance, and criminals rely on an army of complicit Customs officials, cargo companies, permitting agencies, sanitary inspectors, and others to ensure that illicit goods were hidden, sent, and received without incident.

ELI also came away with some stunning examples of how one bad apple can, in fact, ruin the entire barrel. A single law enforcement officer, judge, or elected official on the take can destroy months of investigations, prosecutorial efforts, manpower hours, and budgets.

Our work has left the ELI difficult to surprise about the reach of organized crime. But the most shocking example we uncovered was that a single law enforcement leak about anti-wildlife trafficking operations was shared with almost 400 wildlife traffickers in Bolivia in a single group message.

This message was sent shortly after ELI investigations led to the arrests of Bolivia’s top five jaguar poachers in 2021.  Its sender informed “country fellas”—that is, Chinese wildlife traffickers operating in South America—to be extra careful to conceal evidence, wipe their phones, and do away with “the old careless mentality”.

Communications that ELI accessed after the arrests offered another major insight: bribe amounts are highly responsive to market forces, including perceived risk, scarcity, penalties, and the rank of the bribe recipient.

After the Bolivia operations, a source told us that bribes to law enforcement officers for their complicity in wildlife trafficking jumped from $200 to $1000. While this has long been suspected, information on specific dollar amounts and negotiations between criminals and corrupt officials can only be obtained from firsthand access to the criminals involved in the transactions.  

China and the Role of Diplomats in TCOs

That the hundreds of traffickers on that single damaging message were Chinese nationals was unsurprising. Criminal networks from that country play an outsized role in the illegal trade of endangered wildlife, timber, and minerals and metals worldwide.

Yet what ELI’s field work in Latin America, SE Asia, Africa, and Europe also has revealed is the role played by Chinese expats in the diplomatic community, as well as in business and cultural associations and in state-owned companies, in enabling these crimes.

We collected examples of diplomats acting as a bridge between wildlife traffickers and officials back home in multiple countries. A wildlife trader in South America described how embassy officials first recruited him into the trade. They also laid out which “gifts” were preferred by officials in mainland China in lieu of cash payments more likely to be detected by the CCP. This source told us how members of the diplomatic community would hand-carry items such as tiger bone wine back to mainland China.                

Meeting Challenges with Collaboration

Given how TCOs around the world driven by a common profit motive cooperate, those of us working to combat these crimes can hardly afford to be less collaborative. Already we are outmatched when it comes to financial resources. TCOs have a lot of money to splash around on bribes. Markup along illicit supply chains means that a pangolin bought for $30 sells for $1200, and there are similarly daunting profit margins for other commodities ranging from drugs to gold.

What this means is that we must be more strategic, more aligned, and more creative to have an impact. Good intelligence collection rooted in the sort of firsthand access and real-time insights collected by ELI’s field teams is essential. This understanding of networks, activities, and financial flows must lead to the assessments of criminals’ business needs that will pinpoint opportunities for disruption, and which stakeholders are best positioned to act upon them.

Getting buy-in from a broad range of actors will not be easy. Old models which rest on the idea that information sharing alone is sufficient are outdated and ineffective. They blithely assume that everyone else shares our values and priorities.

Rather, we need to incentivize the involvement of a broader array of actors, and tie counter-TOC initiatives to the priorities, goals, and needs of varied sectors. When parties calculate that it is more profitable to enable crime and other harms (such as in recent headlines about certain social media companies), we must deploy legal and other levers to change their risk-benefit calculations.

The scope of this challenge means that fighting it cannot fall on law enforcement alone, especially in countries where corruption is pervasive and rule of law is questionable. The global nature of the illegal wildlife trade, and TOC in general, necessitates borderless solutions involving downstream companies, online platforms, and the transportation logistics industry, as well as broader elements of the financial sector and civil society all must play a role. What the counter-TOC community owes them are clear asks and clear justifications regarding what is at stake in this fight.