Yep. And the affiliates might be government agents. Both ringleaders and affiliates need to take anonymity measures, so they seem equally vulnerable to me.
Problem is this isn't exactly like a street meeting between mafia thugs in New York in the 60's. There's no face to face contact for cops to monitor. There's no wires to record voices and tie into identities. Sure, there's meetings, but they're online and can be anonymized. Of course, it's not 100%, but it's a higher chance of success than say, wiretapping a phone.
All of those apply to both the affiliates and the ringleaders.
Also, wiretapping a phone only captures future calls. A warrant against a website, or the website's hosting provider can provide message history, assuming it's not E2E encrypted. And it could even get the message history of every single user in one go if the site is e.g. hacked, or if there's a broad warrant against a crime website's hosting provider.
We can see from this article that tons of these criminal websites get hacked, and then people like Brian Krebs can investigate the leaked databases to see info about the criminals' accounts.
