Adem Yavuz Arslan*

Once hailed as “the model where Islam and democracy could coexist,” Turkey has been transformed into one of the world’s emerging cocaine corridors. While Turkish students and tourists struggle to obtain Schengen visas, narcotics shipments and mafia networks move across the same borders with ease. What remains is a hybrid order in which crime, repression and political power have merged into a single organism — a narco-authoritarian state.

A political shield for the underworld

Under the alliance between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), mafia bosses once pursued by the Turkish government are now openly protected by it. The political rehabilitation of organized crime has blurred, and in some cases erased, the boundary between government and the underworld. Backed by political patronage, Turkish mafias are living their golden era — no longer just a transit link in the Latin America–Europe cocaine chain, but an active logistical and financial hub.

Rising drug seizures in Turkey do not signal success; they reveal scale. Judicial purges, endemic corruption and citizenship-for-investment programs have turned the country into a refuge for global criminals. Justice has become selective and politicized. From Berlin to Barcelona, London to Sofia, Turkish syndicates now stand at the center of Europe’s gang wars. What began as a domestic crime problem has quietly grown into a continental security threat.

The new mafia: TikTok and the rise of the ‘Dalton nation’

In January 2025 the murder of 14-year-old Mattia Ahmet Minguzzi in İstanbul’s Kadıköy district, a typically middle-class area on the city’s Asian side, shocked Turkey. Investigators soon found that his family had been harassed by a gang known as the Daltons — a group recruiting teenagers through TikTok, where members flaunt motorcycles, guns and money while glorifying gang life in short, stylized videos. With their live-streamed threats and “execution-style” shootings filmed for followers, the Daltons represent a new, media-savvy generation of Turkish organized crime.

Unlike the traditional crime families of the 1980s and 1990s, which operated by codes of loyalty and secrecy, these new gangs thrive on visibility. Their power depends not on silence but on spectacle. The Daltons, along with other groups like the Redkits (named after Red Kit, the title chosen by Turkish publishers for the comic-book hero Lucky Luke, who eternally hunts the Daltons) and the Caspers, have turned crime into a brand — status symbols for disaffected youth in a country where economic collapse, social inequality and politicized law enforcement have eroded public trust.

When Italian police arrested Barış Boyun, leader of the organized crime group that gave birth to the Daltons, in 2024, he was accused of running cocaine routes from Latin America to Turkey and of maintaining links with corrupt law enforcement officers. His name now features in INTERPOL Red Notices and European organized-crime briefings, illustrating how Turkey’s criminal networks have gone global.

The blurred lines between state and underworld became even clearer when Sedat Peker — a notorious mob boss turned whistleblower who has accused senior officials of corruption — sent his own lawyer to support the Minguzzi family. The harassment abruptly stopped. For many observers, that moment captured a disturbing reality: In today’s Turkey, the mafia not only mirrors the state’s decay but sometimes replaces it, dispensing the justice the state no longer can.

From state to mafia and back again

Organized crime has long served as a shadow instrument of the Turkish state. As early as the 1930s, American narcotics agents reported that Turkish officials were shielding drug traffickers. By the 1970s Turkey had become a key link in the Balkan Route, the heroin corridor running from Afghanistan through the Middle East to Europe, with profits laundered through the country’s expanding construction and banking sectors.

By the 1990s these networks had evolved into a system where the lines between state security operations and organized crime began to blur. That convergence burst into public view with the Susurluk scandal of 1996, when a car crash in the small town of Susurluk exposed a shocking alliance between a senior police chief, a sitting lawmaker and a wanted ultranationalist gangster. The discovery confirmed what many Turks had long suspected — that elements of the state were using criminal figures to carry out covert operations, extrajudicial killings and counterinsurgency missions against Kurdish militants and political opponents. The episode introduced the term “deep state” into Turkey’s political vocabulary, describing a clandestine network linking the security apparatus with organized crime and far-right paramilitaries.

The AKP, founded by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, came to power in 2002 promising clean governance and, for a time, curtailed the mafia’s overt influence. But the turning point came in 2013, when prosecutors launched a corruption probe centered on Iranian–Turkish gold trader Reza Zarrab, who was accused of bribing cabinet ministers to evade US sanctions on Iran. Erdoğan’s government quashed the investigation, dismissed the prosecutors and labeled the inquiry a “judicial coup.” From that moment, criminal networks increasingly became extensions of political power — useful intermediaries in money laundering, sanctions evasion and election financing.

After Erdoğan forged a political alliance in 2018 with the ultranationalist MHP, whose leaders glorified state-linked strongmen, mafia figures were no longer hidden in the shadows but celebrated as patriots. The underworld stopped existing outside the state; it became the state.

How the narco-state operates

By definition organized crime dominates illegal markets through violence and corruption. In Turkey those markets have become embedded in state institutions. UN data show that cocaine seizures in Turkey rose sevenfold between 2014 and 2021, turning the country into a key bridge connecting Latin American cartels with European buyers. Turkish networks work with Colombian and Mexican cartels, while domestic production of Captagon and methamphetamine continues to grow.

According to the Global Organized Crime Index 2023, Turkey ranks seventh worldwide in state-linked criminal actors and ninth in mafia influence. In anti-corruption measures, it ranks 177th. The conclusion is stark: Organized crime in Turkey is not a parallel system but a state function.

When the police and judiciary become criminal enterprises

After a coup attempt in Turkey in 2016, thousands of judges and police officers were purged and replaced with partisan loyalists, creating a legal vacuum that criminals quickly filled.

During the tenure of former interior minister Süleyman Soylu, notorious gang leader Ayhan Bora Kaplan, who faced more than 50 investigations, operated with virtual impunity. Mafia bosses such as Sedat Peker and Alaattin Çakıcı even served as unofficial campaign enforcers during elections. In Erdoğan’s Turkey crime no longer merely generates money; it generates political capital.

The global drug network: Turkey at the core

The evidence is overwhelming. In 2017 authorities seized 294 kilograms of cocaine in İzmit. Four years later, 1.3 tons were found in Mersin, and in 2023 another 51 kilograms were intercepted in İskenderun. These are only fragments of a much larger picture.

Most cocaine linked to Turkey is stopped in Latin American ports such as Cartagena, Guayaquil and Colón long before reaching Turkish shores. European police agencies now describe an ongoing “Turkish mafia civil war,” with shootings in Barcelona restaurants, bombings in London streets and assassinations in Eastern Europe all tracing back to clans connected to İstanbul.

Money laundering and the passport economy

Turkey’s transformation into a mafia haven is not merely a failure of law enforcement but an economic design.

Wealth amnesties between 2016 and 2023 allowed billions in unverified funds to flow into the economy. Citizenship-for-investment schemes turned $250,000 real estate purchases into passports, a dream come true for fugitives and traffickers. Weak financial oversight kept Turkey on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) “grey list” while enforcement quietly loosened.

The result is that Swedish-Kurdish drug lord Rawa Majid, Dutch baron Bolle Jos and Iranian trafficker Naji Sharifi Zindashti all have Turkish passports. These are not anomalies but architecture.

A warning for Europe

The EU continues to treat Ankara as a partner on migration and energy while ignoring its deepening criminalization. Authoritarianism and organized crime feed one another; overlooking one legitimizes the other.

If Europe hopes to contain the spread of Turkey’s narco-politics, it must act in three areas: end political control over courts, ban amnesties that launder illicit wealth and strengthen cooperation between the law enforcement agency Europol and the judicial cooperation agency Eurojust to track routes between Latin America and Turkey.

Turkey today is not merely a domestic authoritarian regime but the nerve center of an international crime economy.

The mafia is no longer outside the state; it is the state.

The once-celebrated “Turkish model” symbolized coexistence between Islam and democracy. Today, it stands for the fusion of authoritarianism and organized crime. Erdoğan’s era has institutionalized the mafia. Turkey has become a nation that no longer rules over the mafia but by it. That transformation will shape not only Turkey’s destiny but Europe’s as well.

*Adem Yavuz Arslan is a journalist with over two decades of experience in political reporting, investigative journalism and international conflict coverage. His work has focused on Turkey’s political landscape, including detailed reporting on the 2016 coup attempt and its aftermath, as well as broader issues related to media freedom and human rights. He has reported from conflict zones such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, and has conducted in-depth research on high-profile cases, including the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. Arslan is the author of four books and has received journalism awards for his investigative work. Currently living in exile in Washington, D.C., he continues his journalism through digital media platforms, including his YouTube channel, Turkish Minute, TR724 and X.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Turkish Minute.