This is part of Fruit Loot, which is taking a look at the strange and surprising links between fruit and money.
When Adam Gollner set out to write a book about fruit, he didn’t expect to end up researching the Mob. But when he visited a wholesale produce market in Montreal, a local grocer advised him to take note of the parking lot, which was filled with Bentleys, Hummers, and Ferraris. “It’s like a Mafia convention here,” the grocer said.
Apparently, the exchange of wholesale produce is often tax-free and cash-only, making it a useful endeavor for criminal outfits looking to launder money. At the market, Gollner was stunned to see people walking around in silk suits and driving some of the most expensive cars in the world, given that the profit margin on fruit sales tends to be slim.
“You can’t help but notice it,” he said. “As you start to research the fruit business, you start to find out that there’s a lot of seediness in it.”
Gollner, whose book, The Fruit Hunters, was published in 2008, had stumbled on one of the most aesthetically incongruous pairings in the culinary universe. Fruit—sweet, juicy, symbolic of fertility and beauty, the stuff of countertop displays and baby food and chocolate-dipped Valentine’s Day gifts—is inextricably bound up with organized crime the world over.
In Australia, Italians associated with the ’Ndrangheta (a Mafia-like syndicate that comes from the region of Calabria) settled in Queensland. A century later, Calabrian Australian families are “still synonymous with the fruit and vegetable trade.” In Spain, a prominent gang leader manages a company that imports Ecuadorean bananas to the European Union, a squeaky-clean front for his drug dealings. In Sweden, roadside strawberry vendors are funneling billions of kroner a year to violent criminal outfits better known for drug sales and racketeering. Law enforcement is warning consumers that their berry purchases at road stalls could be funding the likes of crime syndicate head Ismail Abdo—alias Jordgubben, Swedish for “the Strawberry”—through these sellers, who are dodging sales tax to juice their profits. To add insult to injury, these fruit scammers are passing off Belgian berries as Swedish. The horror!
Fruit has been a medium for crime and dire consequences since—if you believe the Abrahamic religious texts—the very dawn of humanity, when Eve’s inability to resist a forbidden apple condemned all future generations to life outside the gates of paradise. Beyond the money-making and -laundering potential, these days, fruit also offers a convenient means of smuggling drugs into the U.S., Canada, and Europe. There are major shipments coming in every day, often from Central and South America, and only a fraction are thoroughly inspected at the border. Cocaine has been sent in banana boxes, marijuana in hollowed-out pineapples, and meth in fake watermelons.
While Gollner was reporting his book, he heard a radio report that police had seized $38 million worth of cocaine at Montreal’s port. He listened closer, wondering if fruit was involved—and sure enough, as if the story were written just for him, the coke had come to Canada hidden in buckets of frozen mango pulp. One fruit industry professional told Gollner that he believes almost all of Montreal’s drugs enter the city mingled in with or sewn up in various fruits.
The connection between fruit and crime was disappointing to Gollner, who had wanted to write about fruits because he thought they represented everything pure and beautiful in the world. “And I was wrong,” he said. “They don’t only represent the good. They also represent the dark, and the difficult, and the evil.”
Indeed, the most notorious criminal network in modern history may owe its very existence to fruit. In 2017, a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Economic History argued that the Sicilian Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, only came together in the 19th century because of a decades-long spike in demand for lemons. In the early decades of the century, doctors across the globe had begun recommending lemons as a cure for scurvy, creating international demand for a fruit that thrived in Sicily but had not yet become one of the island’s top exports. Growing lemons became much more profitable than producing any other crop.
Quickly, enterprising Sicilians began developing lemon farms. At the time, the region was poor and undergoverned—a bit of a Wild West, with little accountability for criminals. Around 1860, it was invaded by the latest in a long line of conquering troops and subsumed into the new Kingdom of Italy. “It was in this post-unification environment, with its toxic mix of weak government institutions and large inflows of cash from the lemon industry, that the organization known as the Mafia first appeared,” wrote Ola Olsson, one of the authors of the 2017 paper.
The Mafia started on the side of the lemon farmers. To safeguard the fruits of their investment from the hands of the bandits that plagued the island, the owners of Sicilian lemon groves hired local groups of armed guards. The demand for protection provided funding and structure to a loose network of tough guys, who then began extorting the people who’d hired them. In 1872, in the first recorded incident of Mafia behavior in the lemon industry, a lemon landowner learned that the man he’d hired as a caretaker had stolen fruit and skimmed off a large portion of lemon profits. When the landlord fired the man and hired someone else, the new caretaker was shot, and letters to the landowner demanded the reinstatement of the previous one. Eventually, the nascent Mafia infiltrated all parts of the Sicilian lemon industry and supply chain, allowing it to control prices and profit from the citrus boom.
Some historians have cast doubt on the idea that the lemon boom gave rise to the Mafia, suggesting instead that it merely multiplied opportunities for an organization that already existed. But there is no doubt that the Mafia took advantage of the citrus craze, then found its way into the rest of the fruit and vegetable market—and stayed there. In 2016, the Mafia’s agricultural endeavors in Italy did some $23 billion in business.
The rise of the Mafia alongside the lemon trade mirrors the ongoing situation in the Mexican state of Michoacán, which produces the vast majority of avocados destined for the U.S. Two of the country’s most powerful cartels got their start in the 1990s with money gleaned by kidnapping and extorting rich avocado farmers. In recent decades, the explosion in global demand for avocado toast and guacamole encouraged other drug cartels to boost their revenues by inserting themselves into the avocado business. “This pattern underscores how organized crime in Mexico has been fueled by U.S. demand for products other than illicit drugs,” one cartel reporter concluded.
Limes are another one of those products. In much of agriculture-rich Michoacán, government institutions are weak and criminal impunity is high, allowing the cartels that were already cultivating drug-related crops to begin demanding payouts or cuts of lime sales in exchange for “protecting” lime farms. “At some point this was in a relatively peaceful equilibrium,” said Omar García-Ponce, a political science professor at George Washington University who studies Mexican organized crime. “But it started falling apart when they went from just being in the business of extortion and drug trafficking to actually trying to exert control of the farms.”
Starting around 2010, cartels began to diversify their income streams by taking over the lime production itself. They forced landowners to sell their farms—cartel members are often recruited locally, so they knew how to grow limes—then started closing some packing plants and limiting the days on which people could pick limes. Once they controlled the supply, the price of limes rose.
Some Michoacán residents have tried to fight back. In 2013, 13 lime growers and pickers asked the government to beef up security measures in lime-heavy areas, but they were promptly killed. Vigilante groups have sprung up to defend against organized criminal activities—but some of them have been infiltrated by cartel members, too. This past August, lime producers went on strike to protest cartel extortion and demand safety measures from their government, causing prices to soar.
Though most organized fruit crime is perpetrated by secretive syndicates that operate outside the law, plenty of putatively upstanding fruit corporations engage in their own brands of criminal behavior. One of Kenya’s largest employers is Del Monte, whose pineapple farms are guarded by security forces that have allegedly tortured, beaten, and killed people suspected of theft. Red dates, including those sold in D.C.-area supermarkets in 2022, are often produced with forced Uyghur labor in Xinjiang. Dole continued to use a pesticide at its South American plantations after it was banned in the U.S., leading workers to become sterile.
Entire books have been written on banana crime alone, which has been abetted by major corporations. The term banana republic originates from the moment at the turn of the 19th century when a growing U.S. craze for bananas, championed by the Boston Fruit Company, led companies to expand Central American production by aligning with corrupt, authoritarian leaders. The Boston Fruit Company became the United Fruit Company, which successfully lobbied President Dwight Eisenhower to launch a CIA-led coup that toppled Guatemala’s democratic government in 1954. Now, the former United Fruit Company is known as Chiquita, which earlier this year was found liable by a U.S. court for the deaths of victims killed by a Colombian paramilitary group the banana company had financed.
To Gollner, the long-standing association between fruit and crime suggests a dark side to human nature, in how we’ve turned nature’s most glorious bounty into a vehicle for violence and greed. But the same is true of any commodity. Whether it’s gang leaders or corporate executives, if there’s money to be made, people will always find an unlawful angle for getting their hands on it. Thanks to its global supply chain, simple production, cash-only exchanges, and reliable public demand, fruit just so happens to be the perfect conduit.
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