Trax Tube Cartel

The Trax Tube Cartel was a trade company and criminal organization based in the Trax sector and centered at Deysum III.

The organization legally dealt with the trade of medicine, foodstuffs, and psychoactive herbs such as tobacco, though secretly involved itself in the smuggling of narcotics and illegal weapons, and was also responsible for contracting pirates and bounty hunters to attack the assets of its rivals as an ally of the Hutt Cartel.

History
The Trax Tube Cartel was founded around 500 BBY that originally sold medicine and maintained a steady supply of merchants that traveled up and down the Trax Tube hyperlane. It eventually turned its attention away from medicine and began establishing greenhouses on Deysum III that produced food for the locals and their main export: tobacco. Within only decades of their involvement in the tobacco industry, the Trax Tube Cartel became regarded by tobacco corporations as one of the galaxy's premier tobacco producers and traders.

At some point in its history, the Trax Tube Cartel began involving itself in the criminal underworld, and soon several reports began surfacing of pirates, smugglers, and gangsters claiming affiliation with the organization. The Trax Tube Cartel's administrators managed to cover up their criminal dealings, and thorough investigations made by both Galactic Republic law enforcement and the Trax Sector Authority wound up with no evidence of their misdeeds. Evidence that was uncovered concluded that the Trax Tube Cartel may have been associated with the Hutt Cartel, as several notorious pirates suspected of working for the organization were also contracted by the Hutts. A terrorist attack on a rival corporation's headquarters in another part of the Trax sector that coincided with a string of pirate raids on the same corporation's asset vaults, coupled by a Trax Tube Cartel administrator faking his own death, confirmed the Trax Sector Authority's theory that the Trax Tube Cartel had devolved into a crime syndicate bent on extending the Hutt Cartel's interests into the Trax sector. Raids by the Trax Sector Authority's lawmen were carried out on the organization's hundreds of greenhouses, though new tobacco greenhouses turned up when others were shut down. The Galactic Senate refused to deploy the Republic Judicial Forces to wage war against the Trax Tube Cartel, and as such the corrupt corporation would remain active until the Imperial era.

Eventually, the corporation's dealings would catch up with them after a brutal terrorist attack on their headquarters, resulting in the death of the chief executive officer and his entourage. Subsequent raids on greenhouses by Imperial Army personnel led to the organization's legal disbandment, though the Trax Tube Cartel remained active as a small network of smugglers and pirates.