But it wasn't until six months ago, with the Turkish border closed, smuggling growing more expensive and his hometown entirely besieged, that he finally decided to leave Syria.
Those that are close to smuggling routes into Turkey and Lebanon are better armed, though they all grumble that foreign promises of weapons and cash have rarely been fulfilled; most equipment has been bought from local arms dealers, often purloined from army stocks, with donations from wealthy Syrians.
Illegal distilleries have been closed; smuggling has slowed, and a bottle of vodka now typically costs 30 roubles ($1.25), five times as much as a bottle of beer.
But even if the Liberian conduit is closed, smuggling will continue to cripple Sierra Leone unless it is snuffed out in this town.
That government was also headed to financial ruin after Egypt closed smuggling tunnels under its shared border, cutting off a crucial source of the Hamas administration's revenue.
Responding in part to that – and more widely to an intensification of the blockade in Gaza following Egyptian efforts to close the smuggling tunnels into the coastal enclave – Israel and the militant factions in Gaza slipped into a familiar escalation of rocket fire out of Gaza and Israeli strikes that lead quickly to the third Gaza conflict since 2008 – dubbed by Israel Operation Protective Edge.
Cattle-raising and agriculture are the leading occupations in Andorra, with smuggling a close third.
He was smuggled close to South Korea on a fishing boat and then, he said, whisked to shore by the type of hand-held propeller made famous in spy movies.
Iraqi fuel oil, acquired by smuggling operations with close connections to political leaders at extremely low prices with the help of government subsidies, is being smuggled from Iraq through Kurdistan and into Iran.
At the beginning of this century, illegal trade in endangered species had become the third in the world regarding to profit, close behind drugs and arms smuggling.
