Corruption and Organized Crime in Europe

Illegal partnerships

Philip Gounev, Vincenzo Ruggiero

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415693622
• eBook ISBN: 9781136306891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Corruption and Organised Crime in Europe, Gounev and Ruggiero present a discussion of the relation between organized criminals and corruption in the EU's 27 Member States. The book draws on research and scholarly work the editors carried out, respectively, within the Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD) in Bulgaria, and within academic institutions, as well as on behalf of the European Commission and the United Nations.

Combining empirical data and theoretical debates, the book focuses on three main areas of the relationship between corruption and organised crime: public bodies, the private sector and criminal markets. It presents the findings of a recent research project carried out by the CSD on behalf of the European Commission, providing an analysis of the specific national contexts in which corruption and organized crime thrive. The essays also address institutional responses and policies, focusing particularly on how EU Member States attempt to sever the links between the official economy, the political sphere and organized crime.

The second part of the book presents case studies, written by some of the foremost international experts on the subject matter, analysing corrupt exchange and criminal organisations, concentrating on specific European countries – Bulgaria, France, Greece, Italy, Russia, Spain and the UK. As the first comprehensive study of corruption and organised crime in the countries of the European Union, the book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of criminology, sociology, law and international politics, as well policy makers and law-enforcement agencies.

Part I

1
Introduction

The organisation of crime

Vincenzo Ruggiero

There are as many definitions of organised crime as there are analytical perspectives and political backgrounds. Organised crime may be equated to ‘war making and state making’ (Tilly, 1985) as well as to criminal conspiracies formed by individuals whose surname ends with a vowel. The former definition is the result of political and historical analyses of how ruling groups establish their supremacy, how states claim a monopoly in the use of force, and how violence establishes the mystical foundation of authority and the law (Benjamin, 1921; Weber, 1947; Derrida, 1994; 2009). The latter definition derives from North-American enquiries identifying organised crime as one single, wide group of Italian migrants, whose hunger for money and power is alien to, and threatens, the society of the United States (Kefauver Committee, 1951; Cressey, 1969; Fijnaut, 1990). The definition adopted by the editors of this book will become clear after a review of the literature preceding the present work, and of course, will reflect our own analytical perspective and political background.

It has been observed that the definitional problems posed by organised crime may well be due to the concept of organised crime itself, and a sensible question, in this respect, could be why some crimes require particular forms of organisation (Levi, 2007; Edwards and Levi, 2008). This observation sums up the inconclusive debate spanning decades and the unwillingness, or failure, to attempt a classification, if tentative and provisional, of the different forms of organised crime operating in the past and in the present time. Such unwillingness or failure, perhaps, are due to two opposing factors: on the one hand, there may be reluctance to complicate with new definitions an already cloudy and confusing field of enquiry; on the other hand, there may be a sense that definitions are unnecessary, as the obvious need not be defined (Abadinsky, 1990). The problem is compounded by another circumstance which was as valid at the time of Al Capone as it is now, namely that, when dealing with organised crime, social scientists often rely on government pronouncements which are typically state-serving, or work from exceptionally poor, undocumented, secondary sources (Block, 1991; Smith, 1991). For this reason, the criminal justice system ends up playing a crucial role in the evaluation of organised crime, its impact and severity, and ultimately its very definition.

Classifications and variables

A classification scheme proposed by Alach (2011: 56) moves exactly from this premise, that is to say from the observation that official definitions tend to conglomerate criminal groups under labels of convenience which ‘may confuse as much as they inform’. For example, such definitions and classifications display a high degree of eclecticism in that they adopt different variables for different criminal groups, thus in one case the emphasis is placed on structure, while in others on activities, and yet in others on geographic location or subcultural and ethnic background. The resulting conceptual muddle is paradoxically worsened by the tremendous production of academic literature on the subject matter over the last few decades. The taxonomy of organised criminal groups presented by Alach is based on their motivations and goals, and draws on Weberian analysis of the rationales for human action. Therefore, some groups may implement forms of traditional action deriving from long-established patterns of interaction and habit. Others may be guided by emotion, feeling and affect, thus focusing on status and internal cohesion. Some groups, on the other hand, might prioritise value-rational action, in the sense that their motivations are found in the belief in a particular, unquestionable, set of values. Finally, other groups may be solely motivated by material interest, and as a result evolve into instrumentally rational enterprises.

A number of other variables, however, are intermingled with motivations and goals, the first of which is structure, determining whether and when a criminal group is to be regarded as organised. Although organised criminal activity is not necessarily organised crime, descriptions range from ‘two or more persons conspiring together to commit crimes for profit on a continuing basis’ to more detailed accounts of what these crimes are: the supplying of illegal goods and services, predatory crime, violent crime, and so on. Crime committed ‘on a continuing basis’ (Hagan, 1983) describes a self-perpetuating criminal conspiracy hinging around ‘families’ or bureaucracies, whose structure is rigidly hierarchical and where formal rules determine specialised and segmented functions.

The second variable to be considered hinges on strictly quantitative aspects: the number of individuals involved in a criminal group is said to determine the organisational degree of that group (Johnson, 1962; Ferracuti, 1988). In this way, organised crime is said to differ from conventional crime for the larger scale of its illegal activity (Moore, 1987). Definitions revolving around a third variable focus mainly on the temporal aspect, that is on the time-span during which illegal activities are conducted. We are back to the notion of ‘continuing basis’, whereby the death or incarceration of a member of organised crime does not stop the activities in which the group is involved. Ianni (1972) seems to rely on both the quantitative and the temporal variable when he describes a complex web of kinships tying families together through alliances and intermarriages, a web strengthened by an equally complex pattern of godparent–godchild relationships. The author depicts crime families as being linked together into a composite clan. ‘Some clans obviously form compact, interlocked regional groups with frequent intermarriages cementing the alliances; all are related by some common interests’ (Ianni, 1972: 172). He concludes that this clan-like organisation makes criminal groups seem very similar to one another, a circumstance that has led observers to maintain that organised crime is a highly structured, national or even international conspiracy.

Criminologists who focus attention on its structural characteristics observe that organised crime operates by means of flexible and diversified groups. Such a structure is faced with peculiar necessities due to its condition of illegality: first, the necessity, while remaining a ‘secret’ organisation, to exert publicly its coercive and dissuasive strength, therefore requiring an equilibrium between publicity and secrecy that only a complex structure is able to acquire; second, the necessity to neutralise law enforcement through omertà (conspiracy of silence), corruption and retaliation; finally, the need to reconcile its internal order, through specific forms of conflict control, with its external legitimacy, through the provision of occupational and social opportunities (Cohen, 1977).

Other definitions of organised crime revolve around the concept of ‘professionalism’: its members, it is suggested, acquire skills and career advancement by virtue of their full-time involvement in illegality. Mannheim (1975) devotes only a dozen pages of his voluminous treatise to organised crime. The reason for this may perhaps be found in his preliminary general statement, where he posits that all economically oriented offences require a degree of organisation, or at least necessitate forms of association, or enterprise, among persons. In this light, the term ‘organised crime’ should be applied to the majority of illegal activities.

The emphasis on enterprise and professionalism seems to allow for an original approach to the subject matter, because such a notion alludes to a plausible parallel to be drawn between organised crime and the organisation of any other industrial activity. However, one crucial aspect which characterises the crime industry is neglected. This is that the crime industry itself cannot limit its recruitment to the individuals who constitute its tertiary sector or middle management. In order for the parallel with the licit industry to be validated, it has to be stressed that organised crime also needs a large number of unskilled criminal employees. This is seen by Ferrajoli (2010) as the result of a paradoxical phenomenon: the exploitation on the part of powerful organised groups of the growing misery and deprivation that they themselves produce. Professionalism and unskilled labour, in other words, seem to cohabit in organised criminal groups, and their simultaneous presence should be regarded as a significant hallmark of organised crime (Ruggiero, 1996).

Other authors prefer to concentrate on the collective clientele of organised crime. This is therefore identified with a structure involved in the public provision of goods and services which are officially deemed illegal (Zincani, 1989). Organised criminal groups, in this perspective, simply fill the inadequacy of institutional agencies, which are unable to provide those goods and services, or perhaps officially deny that demand exists for them. The contribution of McIntosh (1975) is to be located in this perspective. She notes that organised crime is informed by a particular relationship between offenders and victims. For example, even the victims of extortion rackets often fail to report the offenders, less because they are terrified than ‘because they see the extortionist as having more power in their parish than the agents of the state’ (ibid.: 50). It may be added that the victims may also recognise their ‘protector’ as an authority which is more able than its official counterpart to distribute resources and opportunities.

This tradition of analysis, focused on specific forms of organised groups as service-providing organisations, returns in the 1990s, when among the key analytical variables trust and protection are singled out as paramount (Gambetta, 1992). These, which should be supplied by the state, may under certain circumstances become the preserve of private entrepreneurs, namely organised crime. This type of crime is therefore an industry for the supply of private protection and the distribution of trust to economic actors who would otherwise be unable to interact safely. In the case of the Sicilian Mafia, for example, its strength as an industry for the supply of protection and trust is deemed a consequence of traditional popular distrust of the official agencies, and foreign domination before them. It should be noted that this definition alludes to aspects concerning the causation of organised crime, which is therefore regarded as a counter-power replacing the authority gap left by an ineffective state. This line of analysis is also endorsed by Varese (2010), who proposes to consider the organised crime phenomenon as part of the broader category of governance. His suggestion is that a crucial distinction should be drawn ‘between producers of goods and services, and suppliers of forms of regulation, protection and governance’. The form of governance alluded to here is one that usurps the functions of the state in societies where sovereign rule is experienced as inadequate, a form of governance from below which extends power ‘beyond the state and into the realms of civil society that do not simply resist sovereign law but actively pursue their self-governance’ (Edwards and Levi, 2008: 379).

A distinction suggested by von Lampe (2009) leads to the three-fold typology of economic, social and quasi-governmental groups, while a subsequent study based on the content analysis of 115 definitions used in the period 1915–2009 in a variety of academic and official documents brings the following results (Varese, 2010).

Issues related to the structure of organised crime are discussed in this study, and the features addressed include ‘specialization’, ‘hierarchy’ and ‘illegal enterprise’. ‘In the decade up to 1949, one out of three definitions in the data set mentions specialization, as does one out of four in the subsequent decade’ (ibid.: 3). The 1950s see the variable ‘hierarchy’ prevail in academic and institutional definitions, while later the notion of illegal enterprise takes shape, suggesting that criminal groups operate in extremely uncertain environments where regulations and, indeed, organisation itself are problematic (Smith, 1975). Hence the phrase ‘disorganised crime’, which depicts criminal groups as unable to control illegal markets, crowded as they are by small enterprises, ephemeral coalitions and short-lived partnerships (Reuter, 1983). In this perspective, hierarchical control of members is hard to achieve and choice of partners is mainly limited to highly reliable individuals. When partnerships are formed, these take the form of temporary alliances among independent operators who are far from being incorporated in structured, monopolising organisations (Haller, 1990).

This preliminary definitional map may be completed with a supplementary element. We have, on the one hand, ‘crime in association’ and, on the other, ‘crime in organisation’. The former is characterised by a horizontal structure in which agents operate as peers, planning schemes together, executing them and sharing the proceeds. Here, the division of labour within the groups is technical, based as it is on the specific skills possessed by participants. By contrast, ‘crime in organisation’ implies a distinction between planning and execution, a wage relationship between a patron and an agent, and a degree of invisibility: agents may ignore the motivations and the very identity of those recruiting them. In classical terms, the division of labour is in this case of a social nature (Ruggiero and South, 1995). The definition of organised crime we adopt in this volume hinges, first of all, on the concept of ‘crime in organisation’.

The legal–illegal nexus

The definitions examined so far mainly account for the illegal activities carried out by organised crime, leaving its involvement in the official arena unexplored. Perhaps this is due to the difficulties we meet when powerful organised groups gain access to the legitimate economy and to the realm of institutional politics. In such cases definitions have to be modified or expanded, so that aspects of white-collar or corporate crime are included in them. It has been suggested, in this respect, that some variants of organised crime undergo an evolution which brings them to a number of successive stages: a predatory, a parasitic, and finally a symbiotic stage (Peterson, 1993). While some groups may fail to undergo a similar evolution, thus stagnating in conventional criminal markets, others may instead succeed, therefore straddling legality and illegality.

The legal–illegal nexus may be captured if organised crime is regarded as social organisation, which refers to a network of two different types of relational networks. First, social organisation can be viewed as an association, a network of individuals who form some sort of culturally homogenous group. Second, social organisation can be seen as a series of transactions, a network of individuals involved in a common activity, whether or not they belong to the same association, in other words, whether or not they are socially and culturally homogenous. Transactions range from brief encounters to elaborate, rigid, and highly coordinated undertakings. If we view social organisation in terms of association, we emphasise the structure and internal cohesiveness of groups. On the contrary, if we view social organisation in terms of transactions we emphasise the structure and modality of joint activities.

Some scholars, but also investigators, choose the first route, thus describing the criminal groups as separate entities constituted by cohesi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I
• PART II Case studies
• Bibliography
• Index