North Korea's policies, attempts at propaganda, and even simple children's cartoons are a crash course

in the kind of absurdity that would be hilarious if it wasn't so tragic. Thanks to its impressive madness

(and, you know, all the human rights abuse and stuff), the land of Kim Jong-un enjoys a healthy

reputation as something of a criminal country in the eyes of, well, pretty much everyone else.

But have you ever wondered what kind of criminal a country as inane as North Korea can possibly be?

Because while Kim and his cronies indeed dabble in many dubious activities, they're less of a James

Bond supervillain and more of a small-time crook in an Elmore Leonard novel, pathetically scheming

their way through life in a series of increasingly desperate cons and schemes. Like ...

It depends on whether you have a pork pie hat or a Wookiee.

If you're Walter White, you embark upon a life of crime and start making crystal meth. If you're Kim

Jong-un, you ... do the exact same goddamn thing, actually. Yes, the Dear Leader of the Democratic

People's Republic of North Korea is looking for revenue in the same way desperate fictional chemistry

teachers and countless real-life criminals of the wife-beater-and-missing-teeth variety do. This is one of

the many reasons Kim Jong-un has his trusty Office 39.

No one outside North Korea really knows what Office 39 is. It may be an actual office, or a massive

bureau, or just some random roofless room that is filled with pigeon poop(phân b ồ câu). Even the

number 39 is an educated guess rather than a confirmed code. All we know about Office 39 is that it's a

government sanctioned shadow organization dedicated entirely to one mission: shenanigans(. And

among other things, Office 39 is suspected of manufacturing roughly 600 pounds of crystal

methamphetamine every year and selling the shit out of it.

As one would expect, the North Korean government officially claims absolutely no involvement in the

manufacture and sale of methamphetamine. They would especially like to point out that they know

nothing of the 40 pounds of 99 percent pure crystal meth that were confiscated in a drug bust last

November in Seoul, South Korea. You know, the meth that the dealers explicitly retrieved from a North

Korean warehouse just before selling it to an undercover DEA agent.

If you think that scene from a bad cop movie was just a fluke and North Korea usually handles its drug

dealings with rather more tact, well, clearly you haven't been paying attention to the country's antics.

They're carrying their wannabe drug kingpinship like they're a two-bit biker gang from the 1980s. Their

strategy of drug distribution is throwing giant bags of meth at a bunch of their diplomats and ordering

them to sell $300,000 worth of the stuff "to prove their loyalty and mark the birthday of nation founder

Kim Il-sung." They literally expect their foreign representatives to celebrate a former dictator's birthday

with the joyous task of peddling hard drugs in addition to whatever it is North Korean diplomats

normally do (sulk in the corner at international meetings?). Reports don't state how well the diplomats

generally perform in their task, but we think it's fair to assume they are surprisingly popular at parties.

 

When a country's entire regime turns to crime, there are many fearsome roads it can take. War crimes?

Why, definitely! Large-scale oppression? Totally in the cards. International insurance fraud? Uh ... sure,

North Korea. Whatever floats your boat.

It's no coincidence that North Korea is the world's largest importer of neck braces.

Meet Korea National Insurance Corp., the world's only government-sanctioned agency that specializes in

the kind of crime your grandmother might try when she doesn't quite remember where she parked the

Segway. In 2003 alone, this state-owned monopoly cheated insurance agencies from all over the world

out of millions of dollars with various bogus claims. The $20 million it gained was stuffed into duffel bags

as, yes, a birthday gift to Kim Jong-il, then leader of North Korea. A couple years later, a heavily insured

helicopter conveniently crashed into an even more heavily insured government warehouse in

Pyongyang, resulting in a $58 million payout from Lloyd's of London and several other agencies. Of

course, everyone immediately assumed the "accident" was staged, but what can you do when the entire

bureaucratic system of a goddamn country crosses its heart and swears to die if it didn't happen the way

they say it did?

The way North Korea managed to set up insurance companies is actually pretty clever: To do business

with them, you have to sign a waiver(gi ấ y từ bỏ) agreeing to abide by any and all North Korean laws no

matter the circumstances, even if, as many companies found out way too late, said circumstances

actively enable state-sanctioned insurance fraud. Distracted by their boner(sai l ầm ngớ ng ẩn) to secure

the market of an entire country, many insurance firms accepted these terms -- and as a result, it's

almost impossible to determine how much money North Korea has conned out of them, simply because

the companies are too ashamed to disclose their losses.

"Man, this is embarrassing ... just put it under 'miscellaneous hooker theft.'"

Any smoker who has traveled the world knows the risk of buying cigarettes from a dodgy vendor. If you

don't know what you're buying, those fake cancer sticks could contain anything, even stuff that's not

quite as good at giving you cancer as the real thing. There are any amount of gangs and criminal groups

in the counterfeit-cigarette business, and it's actually pretty lucrative.

You can tell by how North Korea is all up that shit.

Nothing like the smooth taste of Llama Cigarettes.

Yep, the country that may or may not be a nuclear power and that enjoys presenting itself as a

legitimate player on the global stage is actively participating in cigarette counterfeiting and smuggling,

otherwise known as "the pettiest hobo crime this side of aggressive panhandling." Official estimates

place up to 12 counterfeit cigarette factories in the country -- some of them state-owned, others

operated by organized crime syndicates that pay Kim and his cohorts for safe haven. In other news,

North Korea is totally allowing the mob to hang around in their backyard. Apparently, it's getting so bad

that the U.S. State Department and investigators working for major tobacco companies have taken to

 

referring to North Korea as the Soprano state for its lucrative "import/export" business of counterfeit

cigarettes, thus earning it the distinction of being the first country that is so far removed from actual

country-ing that it can accurately be compared to a fictional dysfunctional crime family.