This is one single example of how mafia or clan-family crime and how it affects Germany.
If you walk around Germany today, especially major urbanized areas, you will notice hookah-bars. Just in the Wiesbaden area, I would guess that we are up to around fourteen hookah bars now. In the Frankfurt area, it probably goes well over thirty.
What is a hookah-bar? It is a regular bar, which allows or encourages smoking (via the water pipes). You order the beer, and an allotment of tobacco (Turkish of course) for your water pipe. A 250 gram 'blend' of tobacco would typically cost you around 11.50 Euro (figure around $13.50 roughly). So you socialize, drink, and smoke your tobacco.
What is hookah itself? It's simple basic tobacco....mixed with molasses, some flavorings.
Out of this 11.50 Euro, it's important to note that taxes consume about 9.15 Euro. So if you just had plain raw tobacco, it'd only cost you 2.35 Euro.
The crime gangs have figured out the simple method here, of bringing in untaxed tobacco...selling the 250 gram blend to you for the 11.50 Euro, but cutting themselves in for the 9.15 Euro. If you figure a small shisha bar or hookah bar operation, and on a Friday night....having sixty customers sitting around and each having a 250 gram twice....using untaxed tobacco....that's a 1,098 Euro profit, with the profit from beer on top of that. You go across a city like Frankfurt, and you could be talking about 200,000 Euro in untaxed tobacco, for just one single night of socializing.
The cops? Well, various effects are underway to counter the untaxed tobacco situation, and it means showing up at 9 PM.....with a minimum of a dozen cops....closing off the entrance and exit, then conducting a full audit of the place while customers are frustrated over the treatment (they are the innocent bunch).
Millions to be made.....off untaxed tobacco.
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