At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing before the Congressional recess, Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) explored how transnational criminal organizations utilize supply chain and retail theft to fuel other criminal activities.
00:00Thank you, Chairman Grassley, for convening today's hearing, and thank you to all the witnesses for taking time to be here.
00:07I'm proud to be a co-sponsor of the Chairman's Bill, and I agree that both deterrence and a coordinated response are essential to addressing the issue.
00:16We know organized retail crime and supply chain crime have been a growing problem in recent years.
00:21So as my time before I came to the U.S. Senate, I was president and CEO of the Business Council of Alabama.
00:26This is something we dealt with with our members across the state.
00:30And we learned that it's a multifaceted problem, and it poses law enforcement, economic, and national security challenges.
00:38While these activities involve theft, and which of itself is a crime that must be addressed,
00:43one of my concerns is to the extent in which organized crime in the retail and supply chain area are carried out in furtherance of additional illicit crimes.
00:52And so to the extent in which that often involves a sophisticated criminal network, my first questions are for Mr. Gowey and Ms. Steffen.
01:03Based on your experience, what are some of the downstream illicit activities that are tied to or furthered by the retail and supply chain theft?
01:13Thank you, Senator, for that question.
01:20What we do know is when, for example, our ORCA, our organized theft task force, does these investigations, hundreds of search warrants,
01:30it's not uncommon to find the retail theft goods along with guns and drugs.
01:37So we see that interconnection right there.
01:41We don't have the federal tools currently to be able to then tie those to specific activity and to what cartels,
01:52what organized crime is involved in this particular shipment that we have right there.
01:58And that's where the bill that you're supporting really can come into play and help us.
02:04We also know, just from our experience, that the intersection of crime, we know that cartels in Mexico,
02:12they work with our Mexican mafia, which is our MA, and they then issue orders to our local gangs,
02:21which then control the human trafficking activity.
02:25It's very hard to separate.
02:26These criminal organizations are there based on greed and profit.
02:32And wherever they can do that, that's what they're doing.
02:36They are not always specialists, just specialists in retail theft.
02:42In a recent case that we did that had the South American theft groups that were linked to hundreds of residential burglaries,
02:52especially targeting our Asian communities, where they would watch as they're in their business,
02:58and they would attack their homes while they were away.
03:02They would survey.
03:04In those cases, you know, they had pictures on social media, that same group, with guns and with inviting escort services,
03:13which is really human trafficking and other things.
03:16So the intersections abound, and I think that having those connecting the dots at a federal level will allow us to see the whole framework
03:27and be able to then attack that monster in a better, more precise, strategic way.
03:34Thank you so much, Ms. Stephan.
03:35And, Mr. Gulley, before you answer, not only the downstream illicit effect,
03:41but also how does this fit into the larger picture of these transnational criminal organizations
03:47and kind of speak directly to that as well?
03:49Yeah, thank you for the question.
03:50And actually working on the transnational organized crime strategy under two administrations,
03:55I can speak specifically how important it is to have centers so the intelligence
04:00and the operation coordinating can be put together.
04:03The national security threats and transnational criminal organizations cannot be stated more emphatically
04:09that we need these centers to be able to run this information against classified databases
04:14to understand if these are being sponsored by nation states, being in North Karida, Iran, China, Russia,
04:20or these are by terrorist organizations.
04:22We know all too well this committee had oversight on the Lebanese Hezbollah bulk cast smuggling involving vehicles in 2010-2015 era.
04:30So there's historical cases that show the model works, but you have to have a center.
04:35Oversight is appropriate where you can run classified and unclassified data together
04:39that bring state, local law enforcement, federal, and the private sector together
04:42to identify those criminal networks that are associated with the highest threats to the homeland.
04:46And let me ask you in my few remaining seconds, you obviously mentioned the center.
04:50Can you speak to any gaps in information, Sherry, that may need to be addressed
04:55and how we actually, through the coordination and creation of this center, can work to actually fill those gaps?
05:01So every center from the Organized Drug Enforcement Task Force to the Counterterrorism Center
05:06that we know well, the models work, it will take time for the policies and the strategies to get in place
05:12and, of course, to correct oversight and the legal parameters that go with it.
05:15But the public-private sector partnership is critical, but also bringing together disparate law enforcement organizations
05:21from the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Homeland Security Investigations, to CBP,
05:25and our national security partners to identify the threats that are the biggest to the United States is critical,
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