The only issue for an illegal operation would be paying dividends, where they need to get their illicit cash to the shareholders.

This is solved by obtaining cryptocurrency and issuing that to shareholders whose record of ownership is tied to a cryptographic tradable share such as using the erc20 standard or erc1404 standard (for programmers that haven't really had an opportunity to see whats going on, these are just classes you can inherit, for design patterns that lead to fungible tradable assets), but obtaining enough cryptocurrency has been a challenge for an organization operating at this scale, as the electronic payment system generally isn't an option even when HSBC is helping, and the physical cash system for crypto system still isn't large enough.

These issues are solved by purchasing computational hardware instead to mine the equivalent amount of cryptocurrency. Mining is not very profitable because there are many people that don't mine for a profit, are the hints obvious enough. It can be at a huge loss as long the haircut on conversion to money is still better than the 20-30% haircut people tolerate in reintegrating illicit money to licit money without the advent of crypto. Regardless, it uses energy and a cartel is in a position to create energy. Either way, mining is extremely profitable for people with low energy costs, the idea of someone mining in their residential unit has been a misnomer for most of the decade.

Mining doesn't need to report your location. This is as simple as using a VPN to reach the mining pool. And if you have enough hardware not to need a mining pool then in many networks your IP address is not reported to the cryptocurrency network, but a VPN can still be a practical privacy measure for this, as you typically don't want cryptocurrency communities to know that you control much of the network.

The energy use itself will be the main giveaway, but only if someone finds an issue with the energy use.

"Mining or not" is still a red herring, its "can cartel obtain enough crypto or not to pay shareholders"

Regardless, in this model the newly minted cryptocurrency is paid out shareholders on record, the record being a share asset minted via the erc20 standard or erc1404 standard. Anybody would be able to buy a cartel share, and it wouldn't necessarily be flag worthy that some cryptocurrency was sent to an address that happened to have a cartel share. Either way it is down to the shareholder to further clean that crypto if they feel like they need to.

If something about this doesn't seem viable I think you also need to understand that not everyone needs fiat currency. These same shareholders don't necessarily ever need to go to a bank, as there are many investment opportunities in the parallel crypto economy, and enough people willing to exchange physical goods for cryptocurrency. The physical economy always being a tiny fraction of the investment economy. Not all shareholders need to worry about banks.

In the meantime, we get a clearer view of the universe of investible assets, and the drug market. Its only been one century of trying to draw a distinction between publicly traded companies as a higher standard of business processes and validation we respect, and marginalizing all others. Before, the East India Companies were the hottest things to trade, and were taking over countries specifically to sell them drugs. So people looking for yield won't draw a distinction, and the technology supports not needing to ask for permission.