The IRGC does just fine with the "crippling sanctions"

Newsweek story, via WPR's Media Roundup, on Iran's $12B-a-year smuggling market, virtually all of which is controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Analysts say the organization has the structure of a mafia network, with dozens of seemingly legitimate front businesses that mask illicit enterprises or serve as money laundries. “[They’re] extremely creative [with] front organizations, which they’ll open and shut regularly,” says Levitt. The IRGC’s business operations began more than 20 years ago, at the end of the Iran-Iraq War. Fearful of potential unrest among newly unemployed young men flooding back from the front lines, then president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani approved a plan for the IRGC to open companies and bid on government contracts.

The IRGC’s involvement in smuggling began about the same time, when Rafsanjani established free-trade areas in Kish and Qeshm, two islands across the Gulf from Dubai. On paper, the islands’ duty-free goods were tightly controlled; to thwart profiteers, a national ID was required for each purchase. But the IRGC gamed the system using a list of its members’ ID numbers to import scarce household appliances and resell them on the black market. The IRGC had its own private jetties, recalls Mohsen Sazegara, one of the group’s founders, who now lives in exile in Virginia: “I saw the Qeshm one personally. The Customs officer wouldn’t dare go near them. All the years [when] importing household goods—like radios, TVs, refrigerators—was prohibited, the shops in [Tehran’s] Jomhouri Street were stocked full. [Shop owners] would say that travelers had brought the items in from duty-free, but in reality the Revolutionary Guards were bringing it all in from Qeshm.”

Traffic only expanded from there. 

This truly reminds me of Brezhnevian Russia: where officially everything was banned and unofficially everything could be had, so long as the officials got their cut.

Iran's legit businesses hate the smuggling, which gets around all the sanctions while their stuff does not.

The usual outcome with sanctions is thus achieved:  the elite rich get richer and the ordinary businesses lose out and atrophy--the opposite of a connectivity strategy.