[alephnerd]

Yep! Pretty much this! Even I've leveraged old world clan networks professionally (helps to get introduced to VCs, Execs, and Politicians in US, Canada, Australia, and the UK). For some reason, Western Europeans, Canadians, and Americans don't have these kinds of tightly knit networks anymore, but hey, us immigrants and children of immigrants need some kind of upper hand when trying to eck out a new life.

A similar story is happening in Netherlands+Belgium with the Mocro Maffia - a big reason they were able to be successful in the XTC game was because Moroccan Jews are a big player in XTC manufacturing in Israel and there was a diaspora of both Muslim and Jewish Moroccans in Belgium, Netherlands, and France that organized crime groups were able to leverage.

And like you said about the Lebanese, same story with a subset of the Shia Lebanese diaspora in South America (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Colombia) helping enable Hezbollah.