Illicit Trade: A Complex Web Of Criminals, State Sponsors And Opportunists
October 8, 2019
Suzanne Hayden
lllegal trade (trafficking) taints every country. It weaves countries together unwitting alliances through the efforts of unscrupulous individuals, criminal groups and state sponsors: preying upon weaknesses of infrastructures and legislation, promoting greed and corruption and ultimately affecting financial systems, reputations and economic stability, it is difficult to adequately calculate its harm to the economy, global security, the environment and the human toll. A closer look at the world of human, wildlife, tobacco and weapons trafficking illustrates the changing nature of organized crime and the impact such trafficking has on our stability and security.
Suzanne Hayden spent over 30 years as a US and International prosecutor. She was a senior prosecutor for the Department of Justice and a trial attorney at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia where she started the first UN financial intelligence unit to follow the money of Slobodan Milosevic and supervised one of the earliest global stolen assets investigations against a sitting State’s leader. She was the DOJ legal advisor in Russia and Turkey and drafted anti-money laundering, terrorist finance and asset forfeiture legislation at the request of over 25 countries. Ms. Hayden served as the US Department of Justice’s (DOJ) first national security coordinator and represented the DOJ in the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global standard setter for antimony laundering and terrorist financing and.
During her career, Ms. Hayden served as a senior advisor for the US Intelligence Community, the US Department of Justice, the US Department of the Treasury Office of Technical Assistance, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the International Anti-Corruption Academy in Austria. She is on the Board of Trustees of the UN Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute and sits on two advisory boards for illicit trade and anti-corruption. Ms. Hayden is currently the legal strategist for International Wildlife Trust, an NGO formed to build prosecutable cases against organized crime groups whose wild life criminal activities have thus far remained insulated and untouchable. Ms. Hayden continues to follow her passion for Native American issues and is working on a strategy to address the US tragedy of murdered and missing Native American women and girls through investigation, advocacy and legislation.
