Organized Crime

From the Mob to Transnational Organized Crime

Jay Albanese

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317522096
• Edition: 7
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Derecho penal

Organized Crime: From the Mob to Transnational Organized Crime, Seventh Edition, provides readers with a clear understanding of organized crime, including its definition and causes, how it is categorized under the law, models to explain its persistence, and the criminal justice response to organized crime, including investigation, prosecution, defense, and sentencing.

This book offers a comprehensive survey, including an extensive history of the Mafia in the United States; a legal analysis of the offenses that underlie organized crimes; specific attention to modern manifestations of organized crime activity, such as human smuggling, Internet crimes, and other transnational criminal operations; and the application of ethics to the study of organized crime.

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• A new section has been added on threat assessment in organized crime.

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• Chapters are enhanced by updated photos, tables, charts, and critical thinking exercises that help students apply concepts to actual organized crime cases.

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• Every chapter includes two student-friendly special features: Organized Crime Biography and Organized Crime at the Movies.

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• A glossary gives students a quick reference for looking up important definitions of organized crime-related terms, and a Timeline of Organized Crime in the United States highlights important events in the history of organized crime.

CHAPTER 1

What Is Organized Crime?

There’s something inherently more dangerous about crimes committed by two or more people.

Sammy Gravano and his son were sentenced to prison terms on charges they conspired to distribute the drug ecstasy in the New York City area. Gravano was once underboss to John Gotti and later became an informer against him, serving 5 years in prison. He ultimately moved to Arizona in the Witness Protection Program, resuming his criminal career under an assumed name. For most people, Sammy Gravano characterizes the true nature of organized crime. But is organized crime simply groups of career criminals who engage in criminal activity or are the groups and activities more systematically organized? This chapter presents the state of our knowledge regarding the nature, definition, and characteristics of organized crime.

THE FASCINATION WITH ORGANIZED CRIME

Organized crime is perhaps the most interesting form of criminal behavior. Public fascination with the “Mafia,” the “Mob,” the “Syndicate,” and other suggestive descriptions has remained strong for more than a century. The Godfather, a novel, was originally published in 1969 and is the most popular book about crime ever published, and one of the best-selling novels in history.¹ More than 15 million copies have been sold. When a movie version was released in 1972, it grossed more than $200 million, making it one of the most successful movies ever made.²

The HBO television series “The Sopranos” first aired in the late 1990s to huge audiences. The series portrayed a fictional Italian-American organized crime family in New Jersey. The show spawned a market for video and DVD versions of old episodes and a “Sopranos Tour” that takes tourists to locations featured in the series, such as cemeteries, docks, and stores. A sporting goods store, Ramsey Outdoor, was forced into bankruptcy on the television show, but as the tour guide said, “people have trouble distinguishing between reality and fiction,” especially when it comes to organized crime. The real sporting goods store never went out of business, but its business dropped off dramatically after the episode, as viewers apparently believed the television portrayal to be real. The real store had to take out ads reminding customers that it was still open and that “The Sopranos” was just a TV show.³ In a similar way, James Gandolfini, one of the featured actors on the show, reported that people claiming to be mobsters occasionally approached him. He said, “I’d like to think that the smarter mobsters are the ones who don’t come up to TV actors.”⁴

This peculiar fascination with organized crime has often made it difficult to separate fact from fiction, however, and it has discouraged many criminologists from seriously studying the problem. Furthermore, its complexity, mystique, and apparent success have made reliable information difficult to come by. It has only been during the past 50 years that serious efforts to study organized crime objectively have flourished. For example, the President’s Crime Commission established a task force in 1967 to investigate organized crime specifically. Its conclusions about the state of knowledge at that time were quite candid.

Our knowledge of the structure which makes “organized crime” organized is somewhat comparable to the knowledge of Standard Oil which could be gleaned from interviews with gasoline station attendants. Detailed knowledge of the formal and informal structure of the confederation of Sicilian-ltalian “families” in the United States would represent one of the greatest criminological advances ever made, even if it were universally recognized that this knowledge was not synonymous with knowledge about all organized crime in America.⁵

Investigators attempting to analyze the structure and functioning of particular organized criminal groups have pointed to the need for additional case studies, which would help confirm or deny their findings in individual circumstances.⁶ Researcher Annelise Anderson has argued that there is a need for information, “about organized criminal activity itself, by which the government’s new legislation and its expanding level of effort can be evaluated.”⁷ The U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress (formerly named the General Accounting Office), concluded that the absence of a consensus in the Justice Department about the fundamental definition of organized crime has hampered the potential success of crime control programs designed to combat it.⁸ The President’s Commission on Organized Crime, appointed by Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, also did not offer any clear definition of organized crime. Rather, it described a series of characteristics of “criminal groups,” “protectors,” and “specialist support” necessary for organized crime.⁹

This apparent confusion over what constitutes organized crime is puzzling, given the long history of interest in the subject. Key words such as “Mafia,” “mob,” “syndicate,” “gang,” and “outfit” are often used to characterize it, but the precise meaning of these terms is often lost in discussions of the “appearances” and “earmarks” of organized crime. Nevertheless, there’s something inherently more dangerous about crimes committed by two or more people, in terms of the organization involved and potential for harm, so the fact that some crimes are “organized” makes them worthy of careful analysis.

DEFINING ORGANIZED CRIME

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said he did not know precisely what it is, but “I know it when I see it.”¹⁰ He was talking about obscenity, but he may as well have been speaking of organized crime. By synthesizing all the research of the past 50 years, however, it is possible to arrive at a consensus definition of organized crime.

An analysis by criminologist Frank Hagan attempted to elicit common elements of the various descriptions of organized crime. After discovering that many books failed to provide explicit definitions of organized crime, he found that definitions had been offered by 13 different authors in books and government reports about organized crime written during the previous 15 years.¹¹ I have updated Hagan’s analysis with authors who have attempted to define organized crime more recently.¹²

The good news is that there is an emerging consensus about what actually constitutes organized crime. The bad news is that 11 different aspects of organized crime have been included in the definitions of various authors with varying levels of frequency. Table 1.1 summarizes these 11 attributes and how many authors have included them in their definition.

Table 1.1 Definitions of Organized Crime in the Literature

Characteristics	Number of Authors
Organized hierarchy continuing	16
Rational profit through crime	13
Use of force or threat	12
Corruption of public officials to maintain immunity	11
Public demand for services	7
Monopoly over particular market	6
Restricted membership	4
Nonideological	4
Specialization	3
Code of secrecy	3
Extensive planning	2

As Table 1.1 indicates, there is great consensus in the literature that organized crime functions as a continuing enterprise that rationally works to make a profit through illicit activities and that it ensures 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 organized 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 1.1 illustrates, that organized crime has exclusive membership, has ideological or political reasons behind its activities, requires specialization in planning or carrying out specific activities, or operates under a code of secrecy. As a result, it appears that a definition of organized crime, based on a consensus of writers over the course of the past 50 years, reads as follows:

Organized 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.

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ORGANIZED CRIME AND WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

There are, of course, some confounding factors to be addressed. For example, how does an otherwise legitimate corporation that collects toxic waste, but dumps some of it illegally, fit into this definition? Is a motorcycle gang that sells drugs as a sideline part of organized crime? What about a licensed massage parlor that also offers sex for money to some customers? As many investigators have recognized, perhaps organized crime does not exist as an ideal type, but rather as a “degree” of criminal activity or as a point on the “spectrum of legitimacy.”¹³ Given that the product is the same, isn’t the primary difference between loansharking and a legitimate loan the interest rate charged? Is not the primary difference between criminal and noncriminal distribution of a controlled substance (narcotics) whether or not the distributor is licensed (i.e., doctor or pharmacist), or unlicensed, by the state? The point to keep in mind is that organized crime is actually one type of several categories of organized criminal behavior, which are called “organizational,” “corporate,” “political,” and “white-collar” crimes.

Crimes by corporations during the course of business, ...