Politicising and Policing Organised Crime

Monique Mann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138067332
• eBook ISBN: 9781351657457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

The concept of 'organised crime' is constructed and mobilised by a milieu of complex factors and discourses including a politics of law and order, and international insecurity, combined with the vested interests and priorities of scholars, politicians, government officials, and policing authorities. This book challenges existing assumptions and accepted understandings of organised crime, and explores the ways in which it is amplified and reconstructed for political purposes.

This book critiques how the constitution of the 'organised crime problem' in academic and political discourse provides the conditions necessary for the development of an extensive and international architecture of law, policing, surveillance and intelligence. It examines emerging challenges and future directions including the impact of technology on new problems, and for transnational policing, such as the ease with which the Internet enables crime to be committed across borders, and for electronic communications to be protected with strong encryption hampering interception. No other text presents an integrated and comprehensive study of both the politicisation and policing of organised crime, while questioning the outcomes for society at large.

Drawing on international fieldwork and interviews with senior national and supranational policing personnel, this book compares and contrasts various narratives on organised crime. It will be of interest to students and researchers engaged in studies of criminology, criminal justice, organised crime, policing, and law.

Part 1
Contexts, constructs, and contestations

1 The origins of organised crime

Introduction

The concept of “organised crime” is constructed and mobilised by a milieu of complex factors and discourses. These are shaped by a politics of law, order, and international (in)security, combined with the vested interests and priorities of politicians, government officials, and policing authorities. Through an examination of the socio-political history of organised crime, this book presents an original study of the social, political, and bureaucratic forces driving the operation of these discourses and their relationship to the creation and workings of institutions of governance. It is argued that what comes to be defined and policed as “organised crime” must be contextualised within contested and competing socio-political contexts. These contexts provide a rich tapestry for exploring the politics and policies that underpin and govern structures of policing. Criminological debates about organised crime have stagnated and stymied around definitional issues, or questions about “what is”. This book critiques and theorises the questions of the “why” and the “how” of policing organised crime, supported by international fieldwork and interviews with senior national and supranational police. These narratives are historicised within transnational policing landscapes and analysed within a global politics of security and insecurity. In doing this, the book explores the ways in which organised crime is amplified and reconstructed for political purposes. It critiques how the constitution of the “organised crime problem” in political discourse provides the conditions necessary for the development of an extensive and international architecture of law and policing.

This first chapter identifies the origins and emergence of organised crime with a review of academic theorising that situates each theory in its socio-historical context. It is shown that understandings of organised crime have been influenced by their social contexts, political winds, and intellectual climate of the time of articulation. Theorising about organised crime has been undertaken through many different lenses, demonstrating the kaleidoscopic nature of this notional concept. There have been multiple “scientific truths” about organised crime, and these “truths” are contingent. Van Duyne and Nelemans (2012) examine the role of the scientific community in creating and legitimating the construction of organised crime. They argue “criminology wholeheartedly embraced the ‘organised crime’ concept … by assuming as true what still had to be proven” (van Duyne and Nelemans, 2012, p. 47). With this in mind, the starting point for this research was to canvass and critically analyse the work that had previously been completed. It is important to note, however, that this examination is necessarily constrained and ordered by the present state of knowledge. This is because, from my own vantage point, I looked back throughout post-World War II criminological thought and reconstructed the different ways in which theorists had thought about organised crime. Of course, this imputes neatness and a degree of continuity that is never achieved in real life. Yet it is the multiplicity and mutability of conceptions of organised crime that is most intriguing.

La Cosa Nostra, syndicates, and The Godfather

Organised crime

Donald R. Cressey is widely credited as the pioneer of the modern criminological study of organised crime, and therefore a detailed examination of the model of organised crime he put forth opens this book.¹ Cressey’s (1969) publication Theft of the Nation was written following the 1967 report of the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration in America, of which he was a lead author and consultant on organised crime (University of California, 1988). Theft of the Nation is an extensive revision and elaboration of this report. Cressey (1969) developed his concept of organised crime around the purported existence of a secret society within American society: the Italian Mafia, or, to use Cressey’s term, the “Cosa Nostra.” According to Cressey, the Cosa Nostra maintained a strategic monopoly over a range of illicit markets and the provision of illicit products and services such as gambling, loan sharking, narcotics, and labour racketeering. These activities created vast profits for the organisation that were used to nullify the sovereignty of the American State, through the corruption of law-enforcement and government officials.

Cressey’s model structures the relations of individuals of Italian descent organised within at least 24 families. Collectively these families formed the Cosa Nostra. Within each family there was a clear hierarchical structure, rigid division of labour, and role allocation ranging from “boss,” “underboss,” and “lieutenant” to “captain” and “soldier.” There were also positions for “buffer,” “money mover,” “enforcer,” and “executioner” (Cressey, 1969, pp. x–xi). Cressey’s assumption was that this structure means that the organisation is rational, with top-down coordinated command, which was further developed by Cressey’s discussion of “The Commission.” The Commission served as executive oversight for the Cosa Nostra families, linking the families together, and providing a judicial apparatus to resolve disputes. Under the direction of the political division of The Commission, each individual economic division or family profited from a range of criminal endeavours. Cressey believed this formal governmental-bureaucratic structure enabled the organisation to prosper and self-perpetuate. Cressey (1969) described the structure of the Cosa Nostra as being underpinned by “The Code,” the organisation’s equivalent of a rule of law, which serves to protect the organisation and those within it through a strict code of silence, while conferring power to the higher positioned members of the hierarchy. An enforcer acting on the orders of senior members punished Cosa Nostra members who violated The Code. Cressey argued that the role of enforcer provided evidence for the inference that a political division existed within the organisation, in addition to business or economic divisions.

For Cressey, criminal organisations have the ability to interfere with the executive, while maintaining an executive of their own. Cressey’s choice of language, including terms such as “theft of the nation,” “nullify” state sovereignty, and the identification of structural roles according to military positions, evokes links between organised crime and national security. This is interesting as during this point in history the United States lived in fear of another alien “threat”: the potential “theft of the nation” by communist powers. Cressey constructed a model of organised crime that defines organised crime according to hierarchical structure, alien ethnicity, and the price of political influence and corruption of the American State.

In the almost half a century since, Cressey’s pioneering work has been the subject of great debate and robust critique. His conception of organised crime has been criticised for overplaying notions of hierarchy and rationality (Albini, 1988; Levi, 1998; Wright, 2011). It has been found wanting in terms of its US-centric bias, including a stereotypical, overly simplistic understanding of the Italian Mafia in America (Finckenauer, 2005). He has also been criticised for his ahistorical approach to organised crime and for being too close to the government agencies he worked for and the compromised data they produced (Albini, 1988). Nevertheless, Cressey was instrumental in laying the groundwork on organised crime for all who followed. As his colleague (and subsequent critic) Joseph Albini stated, Cressey’s work has proved crucial in providing all ensuing researchers with “a model against which other models can and have been compared” (1988, p. 351).

Syndicated crime

In the first serious critique of Cressey’s model of organised crime, Joseph Albini (1971) proposed an alternative model of patron-client relationships that collectively formed syndicated crime. According to Albini, syndicated crime does not have formal structure and the individuals involved are not members of an organisation. Instead, the system is arranged according to the stratification of power relations between individuals. An individual may serve as a client to a patron who is more powerful, and also as patron of a less powerful client at the same time. Therefore, Albini’s model explains how power is achieved by being a patron or client with the resources necessary to achieve any enterprise activity. Ultimately, the nature and number of patron-client relationships that an individual is party to determine their relative power inside and outside the organisation. Albini described syndicated crime as consisting of various levels of patron-client relationships, which also include family and friendship relationships. As evident from the range of patron-client and various other relationships that shape syndicated crime, there is an array of potential structures that may exist. Albini did not presuppose the structure of power relations. Yet his conception of organised crime is ultimately not so dissimilar to Cressey’s, for which power is also an important theme.

Albini (1971) indicated that each patron and client involved in syndicated crime participates to achieve his or her own ends. Individuals act to benefit themselves rather than an organisation, by using the resources at their immediate disposal. It is for these reasons that syndicated crime consists of “fluid and changing operations whose participants vary in the types of functions they perform” (Albini, 1971, p. 284). The number of different enterprise activities an individual may be involved in is limitless, as is the number of patron-client relationships in which an individual can participate. Individuals involved in syndicated crime are not assigned static roles or one specific function. Rather, there is diversity in the roles of individuals, depending on whether they are acting as patron or client and depending on the particular activity in which they are engaged. Furthermore, the structure, size and function of a syndicate is dependent on the type of activity in which it is involved, whether that be trafficking in narcotics, loan sharking, or gambling.

Albini (1971) discussed the use of violence within syndicated crime as a function to exercise control. Again, implicit in the notion of control is the importance of power relations. Albini assumed the main reason for the use of violence is because syndicated crime occurs outside the law, and therefore individuals are unable to pursue legal avenues of reparation. Therefore, violence as a tool of enforcement is the consequence of illegality. However, according to Albini, participants in syndicated crime also employ non-violent techniques of control such as debt repayment through employment schemes or demanding part ownership of legitimate businesses (i.e. blackmail). Strategies such as these enable criminal syndicates to enter, exploit, and corrupt legitimate business.

Syndicated crime is therefore exemplified by fluid relationships structured according to the power relations relevant to the activity that participants are involved in at any point in time. For this reason, Albini believed the syndicate system frustrates law enforcement intervention. The flexible nature of the system enables it to extend into legitimate spheres where “virtually every syndicate participant is a potential ‘corrupter’ ” (Albini, 1971, p. 300). Unlike Cressey, for whom available financial resources enable the corruption of authority, Albini attributes corruption to the flexible and changing nature of power relations. Nevertheless, although the means of corruption differ, the same end goal is evident in both theories, with both emphasising the corruption of authority and interference of the state as central features of organised crime.

Family business

Francis Ianni’s (1972) aim was to study the social organisation of secret societies, and like Cressey, Italian-American crime families. Ianni spent two years as a participant-observer within the Lupollo family, conducted interviews with each of the central members of the family, and presented a detailed case study in his book A family business: kinship and social control in organized crime. In it he traces the Lupollo family’s origins in Sicily, arguing that the cultural importance of “the kinship-based clan organization of the Lupollo family business has enabled family members to preserve” (Ianni, 1972, p. 106). Therefore, his object of analysis is the kinship relation between individual members of a family. However, unlike Cressey, Ianni uses the term “family” in the literal sense. Between Cressey’s and Ianni’s models, the status of relations within the families differ, yet the fundamental structure for both is founded in the same notions of ethnicity and culture; that is, identity. Ianni describes the four lineages of the Lupollo family (Lupollo; Salemis; Tuccis; Alcamos) and charts the family tree over five generations. He sees that “these four lineages as a kinship group [and] their alliance as a business enterprise are one and inseparable” (Ianni, 1972, p. 63). The elements of family and business are intertwined, with business bonded by blood.

Ianni describes both the legitimate and illegitimate business enterprises the Lupollo family is involved in. The family participates in more than 20 legitimate business operations, and a range of illegitimate business operations, including gambling and loan sharking. The legitimate and illegitimate enterprises are integrated in a complementary manner, with illegitimate operations running parallel to the legitimate operations, profits being converted into legitimate income and reinvested into illegitimate activities. Collectively, the legitimate and illegitimate arms of the Lupollo family business operate as a single unit. Like Cressey’s and Albini’s models, the ability to extend into legitimate spheres through corruption or legitimate business opportunities is an overarching theme for Ianni’s model.

Authority roles are assigned according to generational status. Members of the older generations hold leadership and authority positions, with ultimate power conferred to the head of the family. The organisation is structured and operates as a patriarchal hierarchy. Again, the concepts of power, control, and structure are emphasised, although for Ianni (1972) the basis of these are founded in familial relations where male members rule supreme. In this sense social-familial and business relationships are merged. In addition to the relation provided by birth and marriage, the godparent-child relationship serves to cement the power relations. This is an important element of Italian family custom, as it creates closer familial links when blood ties are absent. Ianni’s study of the Lupollo family coincided with the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1972 film The Godfather, based on the 1969 Mario Puzo novel of the same title.² As Larke (2003) points out, film does not operate in isolation from the broader culture. He tells of how Puzo’s original conception, while fictional, nonetheless drew heavily from post-war US Senate Committee hearings on the Mafia and organised crime (Larke, 2003). In this way, the “reality” fed into the myth and the myth fed into the reality. Not surprisingly, Ianni’s concept of kinship and social control in organised crime comes closest to contemporary popular cultural depictions of organised crime in America, for which Coppola’s film – along with...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of acronyms
• Part 1 Contexts, constructs, and contestations
• Part 2 Metaphors, monsters, and moral entrepreneurs
• Part 3 Infrastructures, empires, and enterprises