Megiddo

Megiddo is the place to be.

The vast wealth garnered by piracy and smuggling in space rarely finds its way to the surface

A small, lightly populated world, Megiddo lacks both natural resources and a climate amenable to human habitation.  Combine that with the fact that it is close but not directly on several major trade lanes and you would expect that Megiddo would have ended up exactly as it should have been, a marginal fringe world populated by people without the money to get anywhere else.

However, Megiddo had one thing in abundance, a population of rugged individualists and a government willing to accept anyone and everyone at face value.  This has made Megiddo's location and limited strategic value an advantage as it became the home away from home for every pirate, smuggler, and mercenary in the entire region.

So there it is, everyone knows Megiddo is the heart of interstellar crime, but no one is willing to do anything about it because it is too much trouble and it is too profitable to leave things as they are.