But there's a big missing step, in that after the 1980's, the trail of Casolaro's Octopus goes totally cold. The CIA Old Boys' Network types like Ray Cline and E. Howard Hunt get old and retire or die. The slightly younger Enterprise figures like Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines also pass from the scene -- Richard Secord running around Azerbaijan in the early 90's is about as late as that lasts. BCCI falls and no other bank obviously replaces it.

Around the same time, the old-time mobsters die off, generally after being hounded into irrelevance by the Feds -- Lansky in 1982, Trafficante in 1987, Marcello in 1993. Even the Reverend Moon, one of the last survivors of that era, goes all sort of global and starts running high-level seminars for second-tier world leaders instead of setting up Iran-Contra front-groups.

This is why sites like NameBase aren't up to date -- the networks it tracks are very much *then* and not *now."

So I keep sniffing around like an old hound dog trying to find the trail, looking back and forward and trying to figure out who might be whose heirs.

One thing that's clear is that the Russian-Israeli Mafia is doing a lot of what both the CIA and the Mob used to do -- drugs, assorted rackets, money-laundering. I think there was a crucial transition in the late 70s/early 80's when the Israeli spooks and the CIA/Enterprise types were involved together in Latin American drugs-and-arms running, but after Iran-Contra came to its inglorious end, the US people got out of the business while the Israeli end got privatized.

Another is that money-laundering is no longer dependent on having a single major bank, like BCCI or Nugan Hand. Instead, there are all these little island nations, like the Caymans -- or not-quite nations, like Jersey and the Isle of Man -- or non-islands like Liechtenstein -- that have realized money-laundering is a far better way of supplementing the treasury than selling postage stamps to 12-year-olds.

A third is that the GOP seems to have inherited certain pieces, partly by way of all the eager young New Rightists of the 80's who were involved in the Iran-Contra front groups and have since soldiered on as GOP operatives. People like Roger Stone, who links Watergate, the 2000 recount, and Indian casinos.

It still doesn't quite add up, though, because there is no obvious global power center, and yet the black economy grows larger and larger. Last I looked, both drugs and arms were bigger than the planet's #3 money-maker, which is oil, and gambling and other vices made a substantial contribution as well. That's an awful lot of money, and even if much of it goes to the local suppliers and dealers, there's still got to be enough skim to buy a lot of small nations outright and significantly influence the policies of larger ones.

But who's buying what -- and why? The networks of the current black economy have been a-building since the 1930's -- but who controls the networks? Does anyone? Or is it just a kind of water main that's there to be tapped by anyone who's savvy enough to know where the levers are and ruthless enough to use them?

This is what drives me nuts. Watergate taught us to follow the money -- but these days, the money just seems to run in circles, enriching a lot of crooks along the way but not obviously landing anywhere.

There are too damn many mysteries out there -- not least being the spinelessness of the Democrats in Congress -- and a lot of them might be answered if certain people were being bought. But by whom, and to what ends remains as murky as ever.