Kim Jong-il, who began training to run the country in the 1970s and inherited it after his father’s death, came up with an unconventional solution: state-sponsored organized crime. Counterfeit cigarettes and medicine, drugs, insurance fraud, fake money, trafficking people and endangered species — for decades, the Kim regime has done it all. Its operations became so extensive and well coordinated that American officials nicknamed it the “Soprano state,” after the hit HBO television series.

In the 1970s, after the default, North Korea used diplomats as drug mules to keep embassies running. When that got them kicked out of multiple countries and the economy tanked in the 1990s, Kim Jong-il began producing drugs at home, thereby avoiding a major cost plaguing drug lords elsewhere: law enforcement.

He managed these operations through Bureau 39, a mysterious office under the Central Committee of the Korean Workers’ Party. But to create plausible deniability, he outsourced distribution to Russian mafia, Japanese yakuza and Chinese triad gangs, who met North Korean military forces for drug drops at sea…

Despite the seemingly stable transition so far, Kim Jong-un is under pressure. Elite party members who supported his father will be skeptical of his untested ability to fulfill his side of their cash-for-support bargain. And North Korea needs more money than usual this year to celebrate the anniversaries of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. (In the ’70s, one of the first things Kim Jong-il used foreign currency for was a campaign to glorify his father.) Any sign that Kim Jong-un can’t satisfy supporters could crack the facade of elite solidarity.

What’s an aspiring kingpin to do?