In 2021 investigators in South Africa received a tip that a Vietnamese organized crime ring was operating out of a local farm. When they raided the property, they found more than 800 pounds of lion "cake" - a traditional medicine product made by boiling lion bones to remove the gelatin from joints. The investigators also found 13 gallons of opium that the suspects had been adding to their lion cake. Illegal wildlife trade is a multibillion-dollar industry carried out by organized criminal gangs with operations spanning continents. Now new research in the Journal of Economic Criminology confirms that those same gangs are also frequently involved in other forms of criminal activity, including trafficking in drugs, arms, people, stolen vehicles, mined resources, counterfeit goods and human body parts. "We're seeing criminal networks around the world being more adaptable and interconnected and almost commodity agnostic," says study lead author Michelle Anagnostou, a University of Oxford researcher of illegal wildlife trade who conducted the research while a PhD student at the University of Waterloo in Canada. This points to the need for "a comprehensive organized crime approach to trafficking activities as a whole, with less focus on the commodity being trafficked," she says.