Early on in my research journey, I developed an interest in the paradigm shift from traditional organised crime (TOC) to ânewâ criminal entrepreneurs that took place between the 1980s and the 1990s. During that period, transnational crimes grew rapidly. Asian criminal entrepreneurs, including ethnic-Chinese ones, were reportedly the driving force behind this phenomenon. The Big Circle Boys (BCB) from Guangzhou, China, were allegedly at the forefront of an entire new generation of Chinese criminal entrepreneurs.
Yet, apart from disparate anecdotes which were thin on substance, few were able to offer a coherent account as to what qualified one as a BCB individual, a collective as a BCB group, or a criminal scheme as a BCB operation.
During the initial phase of this study, I focused on a conglomerate of BCB factionsâthe Flaming Eagles. Known as the âfirst-generationâ BCB, they were organised in the form of a criminal group that operated mainly out of Asia, the Americas, and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Thanks to my former supervisor Professor Federico Vareseâs advice at the time, I chose a topic that was in the distant past and as âdeadâ as possible in order to mitigate risks to my personal safety.
While I showed that the BCB had been, at one point in time, a single, unified organisation with a leader at the top of the hierarchy and a full-fledged membership system, I nonetheless considered the Flaming Eagles an anomaly during the BCBâs history. Unconvinced that they were representative of their Canadian counterparts who were collectively referred to as the âsecond-generationâ BCB, I subsequently decided to validate the claim that they operated as a decentralised cellular network.
In my quest to seek information about the BCB, my research brought me to a number of locations, among other places: In Guangzhou, a 24-hour sauna spa and a game-meat restaurant in the country; in Vancouver, a human smuggling safe house in Chinatown, a mahjong den tucked away in the back of a seafood restaurant, and a karaoke bar frequented by gangsters; in Toronto, a nondescript hotel room with its curtains drawn, a rundown apartment in the heart of downtown Chinatown, and after-hours private establishments; in Ottawa, a house in the suburb with bulletproof floor-to-ceiling windows; in London, a private eye makeshift undercover station and Londonâs Chinatown.
During my fieldwork, I came across mixed views and materials on the BCB. At the time of writing, the statement below found on the website of British Columbiaâs Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, the provincial integrated anti-gang police agency, exemplifies this:
There is a lot to unpack here from a criminology standpoint. Mafia, a type of traditional organised criminal group found worldwide, is equated with the new generation of criminal entrepreneurs known as the BCB, despite being tagged with the âgangâ descriptor. They are also compared to a biker organisation that has never been designated by the Canadian courts as a criminal organisation.While the likes of the Red Scorpions, the Independent Soldiers and the UN are referred to as mid-level players, police consider the Hells Angels a top-echelon criminal organisation, seen in the same light as the Mafia and the Big Circle gang. (CFSEU 2018)
It underscores longstanding questions facing scholars of organised crime: what qualifies a set of people involved in illicit activities as a criminal entity? Equally important, does criminal collectivity necessarily reflect certain requisite characteristics? Also, what is in a name? This study attempts to shed light on these issues in the context of Asian criminal entrepreneurs.
In Chapter 4 of Volume I, for instance, a number of organisational attributes are listed to inform the discussion. It might be argued that if those attributes must be present for a criminal organisation to be considered as such, then by default any form of criminal associations lacking them cannot qualify as a collective entity.
Although the ânewâ breed of Asian criminal entrepreneurs such as the BCB have been heavily implicated in transnational crimes in Western countries since the late 1980s, some noted that law enforcement agencies, on the one hand, tended to still focus on criminal organisations that mirrored the rank structure of hierarchy in policing (Reuter 1986). On the other hand, some were quick to criticise such an outdated law enforcement approach (Zhang and Chin 2003)âall the while claiming that these new Asian criminal entrepreneurs were merely âotherwise ordinary and legitimate individualsâ who only dabbled in crime, despite offering almost no evidence or insight.
This two-volume study challenges this view with first-hand evidence: intelligence from both the police and the criminal communities attest to the presence of a set of career criminals with a common ethnic origin, dialect and language, and cultural ties who have competitively cornered different illicit markets through recurring and continual criminal collaborations. This study also explores the theoretical implications of this evidence from an academic perspective and a law enforcement strategy perspective.
Consequently, a working definition of the BCB based on the data is formulated as follows: Career criminals who emigrated abroad from Guangzhou , China, and who hold or have held illegal immigrant status.
In trying to avoid getting caught in the frenzy of, or to avoid, mindlessly promoting the âconspiratorial fabricationâ of overarching criminal organisation images projected by elusive criminal operators who are hard to pin down, commentators can unwittingly go to the other extreme (Gambetta 1993: 101). One can become overly cynical and fixated on a parochial binary system of viewing criminal entrepreneurs as ultimately either being âexistentâ or ânon-existent,â the latter of which leads to a dismissive stance. Such perceptions of what are often complex systems of criminal networks, associations, and operations can be grossly misleading.
The field of organised crime has come a long way since the days of oversimplifying questions as to the organisational status of criminal agents and their associations by framing them around âyes or noâ tick boxes. Before the results of a series of empirical studies were published in the past 20 years, even the âexistenceâ and âcollectivityâ of mafias were subjected to more than a century of debate as a mystified topic.1
Hashimi et al. (2016: 11â12) rightly highlighted the need for, and importance of, developing new ways of understanding Canadian organised crime. They recommended introducing a new âmid-range crime groupsâ classification in the Canadian legislation along with âpurely non-organised crimeâ and âcriminal organisationsâ categories. The scholars recognised that while the former âmay not be criminal organisations, but they matter considerably because their offences call for more criminal justice resourcesâ in order to âregularly track the network features of organised crime and non-organised crime offenders.â In particular, Hashimi et al. (ibid.) called for âthe incorporation of intelligence and investigative data to describe in finer (and ânetworkedâ) terms the structure and the criminal activities of the small groups and large organisations populating the Canadian crime scene.â
I, too, advocate for a more nuanced approach to understanding organised crime. Instead of posing lousy questions such as âdo they really exist?â better inquisitiveness is needed when researching into criminal âentitiesâ or ânon-entitiesâ that do not fit neatly into the official discourse. One ought to be asking, for example, âdo they exist in an as yet to be identified or classified organisational form or type of network?â Only in this way could one inspire the creation of novel concepts to capture the varied forms of mono-ethnic criminal entrepreneurs that are observed in the grey areas of the organisational spectrumâbased on how they operate rather than what they are called (either by themselves or by others).
Organised crime is a constant global challenge that requires international efforts to tackle. Academics can significantly contribute to this undertaking by providing the much-needed building blocks of theories, frameworks, and concepts which policymakers and practitioners can draw upon and use as evidence. This study endeavours to offer fresh perspectives to advance some of the fundamental issues in these debates.
This research is unique in that it combines five levels of analysis into one single study, two volumes: the country level; the market level (Volume II); the network level; the cellular level; and the individual level. Wrapped within this is an unprecedented attempt in organised crime research to show that the first three levels can, in fact, be treated as being one and the sameâin so far as one is receptive to the arguments and sets of evidence presented here. This study posits that the heroin market was dominated by the BCB competitively, rather than coercively, for at least a decade; the key to their success at all collective levels is mainly attributed to the value of their ethnic sameness and network closure.
In addition to providing a rare glimpse into the underbelly of the drugs trade operated by Asian criminal entrepreneurs, the case studies used in this research, despite being relatively dated, can also provide an alternative lens through which to view ongoing migration issues around the world. The circumstances surrounding the BCBâs criminal community formation phases are not unique to the BCB. Socio-political issues, socio-economic conditions, and socio-cultural challenges that migrants encounter and diasporas experience are still very much alive today as it has been throughout history. Political instability, push and pull factors, genuine and bogus asylum-status seeking, lax immigration law and policy, lack of social mobility, cultural conflict, and resistance to integration are all part and parcel of the wider set of issues facing illegal immigration.
Given the refugee crises in recent years, some commentators have observed an increase in the number of criminal gangs and linked them to newly arrived migrants. Certainly, this in no way implies that the majority of ...