The Value of What Is Not Sold

Selling a confiscated asset allows the state to recover money. Keeping it and returning it to society can mean achieving something far more difficult: reclaiming territory, rebuilding communities, and transforming into public value what was once a source of criminal power.

The Value of What Is Not Sold

On July 21, 1711, at Johann Achamer’s foundry in Vienna, an operation that had begun months earlier is nearing completion. Emperor Joseph I had commissioned the founder to produce a large bell for St. Stephen’s Cathedral using the bronze from cannons captured from the Ottoman army. The weapons are melted down; the barrels, decorations, and inscriptions disappear, and the metal takes the shape of the Pummerin. The bronze from the cannons that had besieged Vienna is thus raised above its rooftops and begins to mark the passage of time, becoming the voice of the city those weapons had helped to conquer.

The story of the Pummerin is not an isolated case. Bronze could also travel in the opposite direction. During the French Revolution, thousands of bells were requisitioned, including those of Notre-Dame, and ended up in foundries to feed artillery production. More than a century later, the First World War imposed the same transformation on thousands of European cities. In 1917, Karl Munzinger, Protestant dean of Kusel, compared the removal of bells from German churches with the reversal of the biblical image of swords being turned into plowshares.

When the conflict ended, the transformation was reversed once again. On October 30, 1924, the cannons of armies that had fought one another were melted down together in Trento, Italy, erasing in bronze the distinction between victors and vanquished. Thus Maria Dolens, the Bell of the Fallen of Rovereto, was born. It still commemorates, with its tolling, those who died in all the countries involved in the war.

For centuries, bells and cannons in Europe shared a remarkably intertwined material history. Bronze could be transformed several times, moving from an instrument of war to an object intended for civilian life, or traveling the reverse path as conflicts and periods of peace succeeded one another. The material remained the same, while its function and the meaning it acquired for society changed radically. The fundamental question was not only who owned that bronze, but what would be decided to do with it.

Similarly, today states must decide what to do with assets that have been taken away from a power. These are no longer cannons used for war, but villas, land, companies, hotels, apartments, and entire real-estate complexes seized and confiscated from mafias, drug-trafficking cartels, and other criminal organizations. In recent decades, the progressive strengthening of tools to attack criminal assets has multiplied the number and value of these properties, making increasingly evident a problem that for a long time remained in the background. Once taken away from the organizations that owned them, what should be done with them?

In a growing number of countries, particularly in Latin America, the answer is to sell them. Public auctions make it possible to quickly turn a difficult and costly asset portfolio into cash and, especially as the number of assets requiring management increases, they may appear to be the simplest and most pragmatic solution.

Recent data show the scale this approach has reached. To cite just two cases in the region, in Brazil, in 2025, the Ministry of Justice held 502 auctions in which more than 10,990 assets were sold. That same year, the sale of 51 properties linked to drug trafficking generated more than 104 million reais. In Mexico, a first electronic auction organized by Institute to Return Stolen Assets to the People generated nearly 41 million pesos in sales, while a subsequent auction sold 7,356 assets for nearly 24 million pesos.

Yet before even determining how much these assets are worth and how much could be obtained from their sale, there is another decision to make. A confiscated villa, plot of land, or company is no longer what it was before: the link with the criminal power that owned and used it has been broken. Like bronze emerging from a foundry, it can take on a new form and a new function. But deciding what that function should be is not merely a matter of asset management.

In many countries, some of the proceeds from the sale of confiscated assets help finance security and justice policies, prevention programs, or social development initiatives. This benefit, however, is not enough to make selling the preferred option. Monetization simplifies asset management and allows the state to quickly reduce the costs of managing these properties, but it can also entail consequences that rarely appear in assessments focused exclusively on the immediate benefits of a sale.

The first limitation is economic. Confiscated assets are not ordinary assets, and their origins can strongly affect the willingness of potential buyers to purchase them, particularly in territories where criminal organizations continue to exert significant influence. If there are few buyers, precisely the competitive mechanism that should allow an auction to approach the asset’s real market value disappears. There is therefore a risk that highly valuable assets will be sold for prices far below market value.

It could be argued that, even in such cases, any income represents a gain for the state, since it did not have to purchase the asset in the first place. But confiscation is not cost-free either. Before an asset definitively passes into state control, it is necessary to conduct financial investigations, judicial proceedings, seizures, and often years of administration. All of this requires the work of investigators, judges, and public officials, as well as the use of substantial public resources. In the case of real estate, selling also means definitively giving up an asset that may preserve or increase its value over time.

There is also a more delicate problem: determining who is actually behind a bid. The formal identity of the buyer does not necessarily correspond to that of the ultimate beneficial owner, and the involvement of nominees, intermediaries, or companies can make it difficult to detect links with the people from whom the asset had been taken. Reconstructing the origin of the money used to purchase it can be equally complex.

The case of Galician drug trafficker Sito Miñanco illustrates how concrete this risk can be. In 2024, during the trial of Operation Mito, a police officer described the contents of several intercepted conversations in which Miñanco instructed his associates to be ready to purchase the O Facho shipyard and other properties linked to his assets at auction.

If an operation of this kind succeeds, a paradox emerges. The state can spend years and substantial resources locating an asset, seizing it, obtaining its definitive confiscation, and administering it, only to risk returning it to the same criminal environment through a perfectly legal transaction. If, in addition, the purchase is financed with funds of illicit origin that the authorities fail to detect, the auction may even provide an opportunity to transform criminal money into an asset accompanied by a fully legitimate title of ownership.

Keeping the asset in public ownership reduces this risk and allows the state to retain control over its future use. The issue becomes even more important in territories where criminal organizations retain significant capacity for intimidation. A private individual who purchases a property may be subjected to pressure to surrender or return it. An asset that remains in state hands and is assigned to a public entity, community, or social organization, by contrast, benefits from much stronger institutional protection.

But what is lost through a sale is not limited to the economic value of the asset or the state’s ability to retain control over it. What is also lost is the possibility of using what was taken from criminal organizations as a tool to repair, at least in part, the damage caused by that same criminality.

Organized crime does not produce only direct victims. Its presence impoverishes territories, distorts economies, restricts people’s freedom, influences institutions, and deprives communities of resources and opportunities. It is diffuse damage, difficult to measure and even more difficult to repair, but it cannot be excluded from the responsibilities of the state.

Putting a confiscated asset to social and collective use offers a concrete tool for addressing that damage. Properties that helped build and make visible the power of a criminal organization can continue to generate value for the communities harmed by that power. They can become places of education and culture, public services, social centers, cooperatives, community spaces, or activities capable of creating jobs and local development.

Naturally, money obtained through a sale can also finance social policies and contribute to prevention. But there is a substantial difference between using those proceeds to fund a prevention policy and turning the confiscated asset itself into an instrument of prevention.

In the first case, the asset is transformed into income that is exhausted as it is spent. In the second, it remains in the territory and can continue generating services, jobs, participation, and opportunities. Social reuse, therefore, does not merely finance a strategy against organized crime: it becomes part of that strategy itself, with an impact that can become stronger and grow over time.

This difference becomes even more important when proceeds from sales are directed toward predominantly repressive crime-fighting policies. Repression may be necessary, but by itself it does not alter the social and territorial conditions that allow organized crime to take root.

For a community that knows the history of a confiscated property, seeing that property continue to exist but serve a function opposite to the one it once had under criminal control makes tangible the ability of the state and society to transform what was taken from them.

This transformation is what gives social reuse political, symbolic, and educational value. Confiscation demonstrates that a criminal organization can lose the wealth it accumulated and the control it exercised through it. Social reuse shows that those same resources can be placed at the service of the people and territories that power had impoverished or constrained.

Ownership remains public, the asset retains its economic value, and the state maintains the ability to oversee its future use. In this way, what had been taken from the community once again generates value for it, in a form of restitution that does not erase the history of the asset but transforms its meaning.

Italy has built an experience around this idea over the past thirty years that is difficult to compare, in terms of scale and duration, with those developed so far in other countries. In 1995, a campaign promoted by the Libera association gathered more than one million signatures calling for assets taken from the mafias to be returned to society. The following year, Law 109 made the public and social reuse of confiscated assets possible. Three decades later, 1,332 social organizations manage confiscated assets in 448 municipalities and 19 Italian regions.

The Italian experience shows that the fate of confiscated assets can be much more than the final stage of an asset-forfeiture proceeding. It can become part of the strategy against organized crime itself, adding prevention, reparation, and territorial reconstruction to repression.

Ultimately, it is the same idea illustrated by the story of bronze told at the beginning. It is not only about taking away from a power the instruments it once used, but about deciding what new function to give them.

However, socially reusing an asset is not the easiest path. Preserving and restoring a property requires more time and greater administrative capacity than selling it. Properties may reach the confiscation stage in poor condition, have zoning or planning irregularities, be occupied, or require considerable investment before they can be put to use. The organizations that receive them may not always have the financial and technical resources they need. And in territories where a particularly large number of confiscated properties are concentrated, finding an appropriate purpose for each one can be difficult.

These difficulties explain why selling may appear attractive. It quickly converts a complex asset to administer into cash, frees the state from part of the costs of managing it, and makes it possible to immediately record the proceeds. Social reuse, by contrast, requires public policies capable of accompanying the asset from confiscation to its new purpose, supporting the entities that receive it, and providing the resources needed to restore and maintain it over time.

The choice between selling and reusing should not, however, be presented as a choice between efficiency and inefficiency. Selling may be necessary for certain categories of assets and in circumstances where no realistic alternative exists. The Italian system also allows for sales, although as a residual option, when a property cannot be assigned to public or social purposes or when it is necessary to protect rights recognized to bona fide third parties.

The problem arises when what should be one of the available tools becomes the predominant response to the growth of confiscated assets. If the increase in the number of properties is addressed primarily by accelerating their sale, the state loses public assets, reduces its ability to control their future use, and gives up the possibility of using them directly to repair some of the damage caused by organized crime in those territories.

The challenge, therefore, should not be to find the fastest way to dispose of confiscated assets, but to build institutions capable of managing them, restoring them, and returning them to the community. The fate of an asset is not the final problem to be solved after confiscation. It is part of the strategy through which the state confronts criminal power and seeks to rebuild what that power has damaged.

Three centuries ago, in the foundry in Vienna, the bronze from the Ottoman cannons did not lose its value when it ceased to be a weapon. More than two centuries later, in Trento, the artillery pieces of the First World War did not have to be sold in order to become useful again. In both cases, someone decided that the material could continue to exist, but with a different function and a different meaning.

We should ask ourselves the same question today about assets taken from organized crime. Not only how much they are worth or how much we can obtain by selling them, but what they can become.