Global Crime Today

The Changing Face of Organised Crime

Mark Galeotti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415366991
• eBook ISBN: 9781317834434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Crime is recognized as a constant factor within human society, but in the twenty-first century organized crime is emerging as one of the distinctive security threats of the new world order. The more complex, organized and interconnected society becomes, its crime becomes too.

This book recognizes that the new century will be defined in part by a struggle between an 'upperworld', defined by increasingly open economic systems and democratic politics, and a transnational, entrepreneurial, dynamic and richly varied underworld, willing and able to use and distort these trends for its own ends. In order to understand this challenge, this book gathers together experts from a variety of fields to understand how organized crime is changing. From the Sicilian Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza, to the new challenges of Russian and East European gangs and the 'virtual mafias' of the cybercriminals, this book offers a clear and concise introduction to many of the key players moving in this global criminal underworld.

This book is a special issue of Global Crime

North American Organised Crime

Jay S. Albanese

The Italian–American mafia is one of the most enduring images of organised crime—and the image often does not distinguish fact from fiction. Consider that the best-selling book about crime in US history is The Godfather, a novel, and the movie version is still one of the top grossing films of all time. Likewise, an HBO television program begun in the late 1990s, The Sopranos, offered another extremely popular depiction of the life of a mafia family. The show spawned a market for video and DVD versions of old episodes, and a ‘Sopranos Tour’ that takes tourists to cemeteries, docks, and stores featured in the series. A sporting goods store, Ramsey Outdoor, was forced into bankruptcy in an episode of the television show, but the real sporting goods store of that name never went out of business. Nonetheless, its business dropped off dramatically after the Sopranos episode, because viewers apparently believed the television portrayal to be real. The store had to advertise to remind customers that it was still open and that The Sopranos was just a TV show[1]. In a similar way James Gandolfini, one of the featured actors on the show, reported that people claiming to be mobsters occasionally approach him. He said, ‘I'd like to think that the smarter mobsters are the ones who don't come up to TV actors’[2].

A Definition of Organised Crime

Separating fictional images of organised crime from the real thing has not been easy. An analysis by criminologist Frank Hagan elicited common elements of the various descriptions of organised crime groups by researchers over time. After discovering that many books failed to provide explicit definitions of organised crime, he found that definitions had been offered by 13 different authors in books and government reports about organised crime written during the previous 15 years[3]. I have updated Hagan's analysis with authors who have attempted to define organised crime in more recent work [4].

Eleven different aspects of organised crime have been included in the definitions of various authors with varying levels of frequency. Table 1 summarises these 11 attributes and how many authors have included them in their definition. As Table 1 indicates, there is great consensus in the literature that organised crime functions as a continuing enterprise that rationally works to make a profit through illicit activities, and that it insures its existence through the use of threats or force and through corruption of public officials to maintain a degree of immunity from law enforcement. There also appears to be some consensus that organised crime tends to be restricted to those illegal goods and services that are in great public demand through monopoly control of an illicit market.

There is considerably less consensus, as Table 1 illustrates, that organised crime has exclusive membership, has ideological or political reasons behind its activities, requires specialisation in planning or carrying out specific activities, or operates under a code of secrecy. As a result, it appears that a definition of organised crime, based on a consensus of writers over the course of the last 35 years, reads as follows: ‘Organised crime is a continuing criminal enterprise that rationally works to profit from illicit activities that are often in great public demand. Its continuing existence is maintained through the use of force, threats, monopoly control, and/or the corruption of public officials.’

Table 1 Definitions of Organised Crime in the Research Literature

Characteristics	Number of Authors
Organised Hierarchy Continuing	16
Rational Profit through Crime	13
Use of Force or Threat	12
Corruption to Maintain Immunity	11
Public Demand for Services	7
Monopoly over Particular Market	6
Restricted Membership	4
Non-Ideological	4
Specialisation	3
Code of Secrecy	3
Extensive Planning	2

Describing Organised Crime in North America

Organised crime can be described either by the activities it engages in or by the groups that are involved. There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. The offences are finite in any given historical period, and they always involve some variation of provision of illicit goods (e.g. stolen property, drugs), provision of illicit services (e.g. prostitution, gambling, loansharking), and/or the infiltration of business (e.g. extortion and protection rackets). This typology is depicted in Table 2. The essential difference between the major categories of organised crime activity lies in whether or not the activity is consensual or non-consensual, which determines whether or not violence or threats are essential to the crimes, as shown in Table 2.

What changes by region are the kinds of groups that engage in these activities. The history of criminality in a region, its economic standing, geographic location, national and ethnic customs and beliefs, and political climate are all important factors in shaping the kinds of organised criminal groups that develop in a country or region [5].

North American History of Organised Crime

North America includes the countries of Canada, the United States, and Mexico—all geographically large countries with long land borders on the north and south, and massive coastlines providing access to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Therefore, the countries of North America are accessible to each other by land and also from many locations around the world into multiple cities and border crossings by sea and air. Mexico is strategically positioned, linking South and Central America to the United States. The long Mexican land and water borders make a desirable launching point for smuggling people and products to the United States and Canada, which have large consumer populations that enjoy a high standard of living and income. As a result, North America's geographic location, land and water border access, links to Central and South America, and high standard of living combine to form a desirable location for organised crime activity.

Table 2 A Typology of Organised Crime

Type of Activity	Nature of Activity	Harm
Provision of illicit goods and services	Gambling, lending, sex, narcotics, stolen property	Consensual activities No inherent violence Economic harm
Infiltration of legitimate business	Coercive use of legal businesses for purposes of exploitation	Non-consensual activities Threats, violence, extortion Economic harm

Organised crime in North America has always been comprised of a variety of groups, both large and small, that emerged to exploit particular criminal opportunities. If the terminology had been in use 200 years ago, early European settlers in North America might have been accused of involvement in organised crime activity for avoiding European taxes, engaging in planned thefts from trains and stagecoaches, and bribing government officials to secure favours. Organised crime, therefore, is characterised by planned illegal acts involving multiple offenders that are ongoing or recurrent, rather than isolated incidents.

Organised Crime in the United States

Public and government attention to organised crime in the US have been dominated by the Italian-American groups since the late 1800s. This attention corresponded to a large immigration wave from Italy during the late nineteenth century, and Italians were blamed for the crime problem a century ago in the US, in much the same way as the newest immigrants are blamed today in many countries for a variety of social and criminal problems. This phenomenon is called the ethnicity trap, in which organised crime is explained in terms of the ethnicity of its members, rather than by the organised criminal conduct itself. This narrow view leads to unwarranted stereotypes of ethnic groups, ignores the fact that organised crime is committed by groups of many different ethnicities, and that the public demand for illicit goods and services drives most organised crime activity regardless of time and place—accounting for the rich variety of groups and conspiracies involved in organised crime over the course of history. Thus, ethnicity does not help explain the presence or absence of organised crime.

A small number of significant events served to reinforce the connection between ‘mafia’ and organised crime in the United States. In 1890, the police chief of the City of New Orleans was shot, and he implicated Italians in his shooting. No evidence was produced, however, and the Italian immigrants arrested for the shooting were acquitted. A group of citizens stormed the jail, and publicly hanged many of the Italian defendants, illustrating the intense hatred and blame placed on the US's newest immigrants at that time. It was widely believed then that the US somehow imported a mafia from Italy and that many immigrants were criminals.

After the Hennessey incident, however, the term ‘mafia’ dropped from public view. The term rarely appears again in American newspapers until after World War II. During the ‘gangster era’ of the early 1900s, which featured such notable figures as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, the term ‘mafia’ was not used. These notorious figures, and their contemporaries, were considered city-based gangsters, but the connections among them were not a major concern. America's prohibition of alcoholic beverages during this period was the single most important event during the early 1900s to cause organised crime groups to become more organised and competitive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction Global Crime Today
• 1 North American Organised Crime
• 2 Italian Organised Crime: Mafia Associations and Criminal Enterprises
• 3 Globalisation and Latin American and Caribbean Organised Crime
• 4 The Russian ‘Mafiya’: Consolidation and Globalisation
• 5 Organised Crime in East Central Europe: The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland
• 6 Chinese Organised Crime
• 7 The Changing Face of the Yakuza
• 8 State Crime: The North Korean Drug Trade
• 9 The Crime–Terror Continuum: Tracing the Interplay between Transnational Organised Crime and Terrorism
• 10 The Global Dimension of Cybercrime
• Index