Organized Crime

A Cultural Introduction

Antonio Nicaso, Marcel Danesi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367461263
• eBook ISBN: 9781000374421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book aims to describe and demystify what makes criminal gangs so culturally powerful. It examines their codes of conduct, initiation rites, secret communications methods, origin myths, symbols, and the like that imbue the gangsters with the pride and nonchalance that goes hand in hand with their criminal activities. Mobsters are everywhere in the movies, on television, and on websites. Contemporary societies are clearly fascinated by them. Why is this so? What feature and constituents of organized criminal gangs make them so emotionally powerful—to themselves and others? These are the questions that have guided the writing of this textbook, which is intended as an introduction to organized crime from the angle of cultural analysis. Key topics include:

• An historic overview of organized crime, including the social, economic, and cultural conditions that favour its development;

• A review of the type of people who make up organized gangs and the activities in which they engage;

• The symbols, rituals, codes and languages that characterize criminal institutions;

• The relationship between organized crime and cybercrime;

• The role of women in organized crime;

• Drugs and narco-terrorism;

• Media portrayals of organized crime.

Organized Crime includes case studies and offers an accessible, interdisciplinary approach to the subject of organized crime. It is essential reading for students engaged with organized crime across criminology, sociology, anthropology and psychology.

Chapter 1

What is organized crime?

Introduction

Thanks to Hollywood and television characters like Tony Soprano, the American Mafia (also called Cosa Nostra) is probably the world’s best-known organized crime group, but there are plenty of others, which have also been the subject of movies and TV shows, albeit to a lesser extent. Why the fascination? This question will be broached throughout the subsequent chapters of this book. Here, we will address a different but related one: What is organized crime? All organized criminal groups (henceforward abbreviated to OCs) have a similar kind of organizational structure, even though they may speak different languages and emanate from vastly different cultural environments. They all have codes of conduct and specific symbols, rituals, and modes of in-group communication that they have created to set themselves apart from the mainstream world and to generate a sense of in-group meaning that gives them purpose and identity. OCs are self-styled cultural enclaves from which members draw their inspiration, pride, and sense of belonging based on the very codes and symbols that have been concocted to distinguish the OCs from everyone else.

There are many OCs that fit this characterization, from street gangs such as the Norteños in California to the Mafia in Sicily, from outlaw motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels to drug cartels, such as the Sinaloa one. One way to classify them distinctively is according to whether they have existed for a considerable period of time or have emerged in more recent times. The former can be called traditional, classical, or historical, and the latter neophyte or emergent. There are also gangs that are offshoots of the traditional ones, such as the American Cosa Nostra, which is a derivative of the original Italian Mafia gangs, developing a separate identity in America, as will be discussed subsequently. Cosa Nostra has been a veritable criminal melting pot, bringing together criminals originally descendent from Sicily, Calabria, and other regions, thus breaking with traditional membership based on ethnicity.

The Mafia and Mafia-like criminal organizations are “species of a broader genus” (Varese 2001: 4). The Italian-based criminal organizations, such as the Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta and the Camorra; the Japanese Yakuza; and the Chinese Triads are among the best known of the traditional OCs, while the Vory v Zakone (sometimes called Russian Mafia by the English-language media) and the Hells Angels are examples of neophyte OCs (gangs that emerged in more recent times). All OCs see themselves as different from common delinquents and random street thugs, operating like monopolistic businesses and corporations, albeit in an illicit fashion. They aim to obtain exclusive control over specific criminal marketplaces not only by using violence and intimidation but also by creating networks of trusts outside the gangs – lawyers, chartered accountants, brokers, bankers, bureaucrats, politicians, police officers, judges, and labor union representatives. Without them, these “species of a broader genus” would be like coffee without caffeine; that is, they would be all surface show without any potency. Their ultimate goal is power, not money, and they will do anything to get it, using all kinds of tactics, from violence to bribery and other corruption schemes. In the legitimate corporate world, money also talks, colloquially speaking, constituting the basis for gaining power over their business territory, and in society more generally. In the world of OCs, the aim is also to acquire control or power over crime territories, which constitute the main source of money for the OCs and which then, in turn, can be used to expand the power realm, thus guaranteeing more power in a vicious circle that is of great advantage to the criminal groups. This territory-power-money dynamic can be compressed into a formula that emblemizes the overall objective and operationality of all OCs:

• Territorial control = Power = Money = More power

This opening chapter will provide a historical snapshot of how OCs came into existence and how they are constituted. It will also look initially at how they form self-styled cultures as differentiated from legitimate cultural systems; this aspect allows OCs to perceive and represent themselves as parallel (and superior) cultures.

The enemy within

The general prosecutor of Palermo, Sicily, Roberto Scarpinato, gave the following first-person assessment of the pernicious effects that Mafia culture has inflicted upon Sicilians and Italians generally in a 2015 article (Scarpinato 2015: 129):

The evil we are fighting out of us is also among us, inside us. Murderers and torturers do not only have the cruel and famous faces of those who got their hands dirty with blood and in popular imagination are considered monsters (from monstrum: the person who is put on display) and on whom the evil of the Mafia can be cathartically projected, and exorcized. They also have the faces of people like us, who attended the same schools, can be met in the best salons and pray to our same God, feeling they are good Christians and at peace with themselves.

The statement is a penetrating one, suggesting that mobsters live among us undetected, making them enormously dangerous. They do not stand out publicly as marauders, like the pirates or brigands of the past, who could be identified easily through the particular type of clothes they wore and the kinds of weapons they bore. The mobsters move about incognito, indistinguishable from everyone else. They are doubly dangerous because they are well connected within legitimate society, having established connections with people in positions of influence and power – an arrangement based on the reciprocal exchange of favors. At one time, this system of collusion was called patronage. Today we call it corruption, a quid-pro-quo system formed between the gangsters and city politicians, members of the police, and other upright citizens. This is why the Mafia constitutes an “evil among us,” as described insightfully by Scarpinato. As Michael Woodiwiss (2001: 62) observes, in a similar vein, corruption has always been of mutual benefit:

Gangsters and the operators of illegal business helped win elections as campaign workers or financial contributors, or they helped to steal elections using fraud or intimidation. In return, politicians used their direct or indirect influence over the police and the courts to provide virtual immunity for favoured criminals, particularly those who ran or protected gambling or prostitution enterprises, and even to eliminate petty potential rivals to established entrepreneurs.

As the late anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone noted in an interview (cited in Nicaso and Danesi 2013), the Mafia is perniciously powerful because “it always lived in perfect symbiosis with a myriad of protectors, accomplices, debtors of all kinds, informers, and peoples from all strata of society who have been intimidated or subjected to blackmail.”

This use of corruption methods to complement and render violent criminal activities more effective is not unique to the Italian Mafia. Organized criminal groups, from the Japanese Yakuza to Russian mobsters, all employ them. As Scarpinato’s article goes on to indicate, Mafia and Mafia-like criminal organizations have always been opportunistic, manipulating political and key social players in a country and even across the globe, allowing them blend into society seamlessly. They have not arisen as a result of a struggle between the rich and the poor or between the strong versus the weak, as the legends the OCs spin about themselves would like us to believe, but rather as opportunism by a small group of wrongdoers and miscreants to benefit themselves. All OCs are opportunistic, clever, and adaptive, revealing an instinct for survival that can be called “criminal Darwinism” (to be discussed in Chapter 17). An OC group, as different from other criminals, is one that has engineered a covert connection to political and socially important players. The ability to manipulate people for self-serving criminal reasons is one of the key features of the historical OCs, but it is becoming more and more a feature of the neophyte or emerging OCs as they discover the importance of corruption for their own survival. As Scarpinato correctly asserted, the evil is indeed within us and among us.

The Mafioso is no longer recognizable as a distinctive role character – someone dressed in a black shirt, white tie, and diamond stickpin, whose activities are commonly believed to affect only a remote underworld circle of people. Today, he moves around in plain clothes – more likely outfitted in a normal business suit, looking more like an industrialist or corporate tycoon than an old-fashioned Mafioso dressed in “black and white.” Lacking any regular confrontation with the gangsters, the average citizen typically fails to see any reason for alarm – Mafiosi fight among themselves, so what is the problem? But as Scarpinato so cogently argued, this is hardly the truth of the matter. The resources accumulated by the gangsters are not limited to the vast illicit profits they gain from such activities as illegal gambling schemes and the trafficking of narcotics but are bolstered considerably by their infiltration into legitimate businesses.

When the corrupt infiltration is into some manufacturing enterprise, the Mafioso’s cut is paid for by higher prices for the products. When the mobsters bribe local officials and secure immunity from police arrests or investigations, an incalculable economic and moral price is paid, again, by the public. In short, organized crime affects everyone. Therefore, it cannot be the concern only of law enforcement officers. The objectives, methods, and operations of organized criminal gangs need to be understood and addressed by everyone, since they constitute an “enemy within.” Only with such broad awareness can an effective plan of defeating OCs be contemplated in the first place.

Scarpinato’s characterization of organized crime was prefigured by the late Senator Robert Kennedy, who referred to La Cosa Nostra as “the enemy within.” In 1963, Kennedy warned a congressional committee about the risk of La Cosa Nostra’s infiltration into business, labor, politics, and government. He was determined to stop the drain of political power in America by obscure criminal forces that were beyond moral and legal accountability. As attorney general a little later, under his brother John F. Kennedy, he challenged the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by dismissing the operations against the so-called “Red menace” (of Soviet Russia), cherished by Hoover as his pet project, asking him to crack down on the enemy within rather than the enemy without, which Hoover had ignored for over forty years. Kennedy was ultimately unsuccessful in eradicating the Mafia, being assassinated in 1968. The lesson to be learned from the Kennedy episode in American history is that the government alone cannot confront organized crime; it will require the cooperation of many others, as will be discussed in later chapters.

Definition

In 2000, the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime defined organized crime as a group of three or more people who undertake serious criminal activities in concert and in some coordinated manner for the purpose of obtaining financial or other benefits. Moreover, the group must have some internal organization and have existed for some time. This definition excludes individual delinquents or groups constituted randomly and ephemerally for the transient commission of offences. A key aspect of this definition is that of historicity (perpetuity) – that is, of the criminal group existing for a period of time. Many street gangs are often born overnight and disappear almost as quickly, as the gang members move away from the streets where they congregated and operated. OCs, on the other hand, continue to exist beyond the locales in which they emerged and the first generation of members that founded them, who pass on their traditions and operations, virtually unchanged, to subsequent generations. The main methods of transmission are the self-styled cultural systems that OCs have created for themselves and which they adapt to changing conditions, like any normal cultural system. In other words, the perpetuity of the gang rests on its ability to pass on the torch to subsequent generations. Along with the ability to adapt to significant social changes, such as those based on technology, OCs are able to constantly renew themselves internally, figuring out new ways to conduct their illegal activities that are in step with the times (as we shall see). All this enhances the esprit de corps of the group, keeping the bonds of fellowship strong no matter what.

A comprehensive definition of organized crime involves several main features and aspects, which can be delineated as follows:

• OCs embed themselves into a society, forging alliances with those in positions of authority, from politicians to the police.
• The previous feature is missing from random and ephemeral street gangs. Street gangs are sometimes co-opted by the OCs to carry out some of their unpleasant activities, from intimidating people to committing actual murders. They are seen as convenient “guns for hire,” which can be easily dispensed with, if need be. An example is how the classic Mafias, like the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, are delegating their activities in the domain of narco-trafficking to Albanian gangs – so much so that the latter are becoming in Italy an operative branch of the ’Ndrangheta.
• An OC has its own culture, complete with a particular mode of communication, a code of behavior, secrecy pledges, rituals, rites of initiation, symbols, and a specified lifestyle. Without a cultural structure, the gang would simply be a group of thugs.
• Gang-based values emerge from the internal cultural artifacts, which cohere into a worldview that extols conformity and allegiance to the group from each member. All organized crime groups are distinctive because of the particular cultural systems they carve out for themselves. They are “mini-nations” with their own laws, languages, and even “commandments.” Random street gangs may also develop a kind of sui generis culture, with the adoption of a particular slang and set of distinctive symbols (such as tattoos), but these are short lived and not passed on to subsequent generations, with some exceptions such as the Crips and the Bloods. Both started as stand-alo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 What is organized crime?
• 2 The Italian Mafias
• 3 Other criminal organizations
• 4 Organization
• 5 The players
• 6 Codes
• 7 The made man
• 8 The Women
• 9 Resources
• 10 The business agenda
• 11 Strategic violence
• 12 Symbols and myths
• 13 Secret communication
• 14 Popular culture
• 15 Cyberspace
• 16 Theories
• 17 Tribalism and adaptability
• 18 Epilogue
• Index