Global Guerrillas has a fascinating piece on Henry Okah who apparently founded and ran a gun-running empire that also shut down and diverted huge amounts of oil in Nigeria. He ran it from South Africa, often communicating by cell phone text messages, recruiting people as needed on an ad hoc basis.
While liberation movements sometimes turn to crime to finance themselves, the liberation movement he created appears to have been a front for crime all along. Helped along of course by the wretched poverty next to overweening foreign oil company wealth in Nigeria and a notoriously corrupt government. Can’t start a fire without a spark.