The Hutt Cartels

Much of what we know about the underworld of Star Wars is dictated by “The 5 Syndicates”, the largest criminal entities to hold sway throughout the events of the first six Star Wars movies. The largest and most influential of all, of course, were the Hutt cartels: the Grand Council of Nal Hutta’s administrative connective force uniting the disparate Hutt families and their own criminal organizations into a massive trading force. The cartels held sway as a political and economic entity for centuries alongside the Republic, even as sanctions from the latter largely left the Hutt’s influence to expand beyond its borders. In the time of the High Republic, the Grand Council briefly leveraged the cartels to work with the Jedi Order to combat the emergence of the Dregnir in the Outer Rim, but the two entities largely left each other alone for much of their operation, until the Hutts officially joined the Republic war effort during the Clone War.

That relationship lasted into the reign of the Empire, where the cartel was largely given a passing eye to its smuggling operations—and its larger crackdown on crime across the Outer Rim—in exchange for resources and financial backing, but after the Ground Council’s eventual diminishing (a combined effort of proxy wars with the rival faction, the Shadow Collective, and Darth Vader, well, hacking most of them up), Jabba the Hutt remained the cartel’s main influencer until his death, creating a power vacuum that no doubt Boba Fett will have something to do with in his Disney+ show.