Behind the risks normally associated with war and political violence–the wounds to bodies and the body politic- -are a much less visible series of actions with risks that are seldom assessed, actions capable of shaping global economic and political grids. Wars and, indeed, most politics and economics, rest upon a foundation made up of both legal and extra-legal activities. Hundreds of billions of dollars are made on unrecorded (extra-legal) weapons sales and hundreds of billions more are earned through the sale of resources to gain the hard currency needed to buy those weapons and to purchase all of the other supplies that a country at war requires, from medicines and food to industrial equipment and communications technology. If we were simply addressing illegal arms sales, assessing risk would be relatively straightforward. But the fact that countries at war depend upon the extra-legal as well as the legal to acquire the basic developmental infrastructure essential to their populations’ survival means that exploring the qualities and dangers of risk is much more complex and multifaceted: for example, how do we calculate the stakes of wide-scale profiteering from selling extra-legal pharmaceuticals to war-afflicted populations that do not have access to legal medicines? The sheer magnitude of the power and profits that accrue to the extra-legal (and the fact that analytical attention generally focuses upon illegal arms and drugs sales, while common commodities make up the bulk of the extra-legal—and represent unrecorded profits for legal enterprises) suggests that the systematic investigative invisibility surrounding these topics is purposeful–a form of political and economic prestidigitation or sleight of hand. This article investigates the dynamics of the extra-legal as it shapes political and economic processes in the world today.