American Organized Crime

11 Key excerpts on "American Organized Crime"

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  Organized Crime

  From Trafficking to Terrorism [2 volumes]

  • Frank Shanty, Patit Paban Mishra, Frank Shanty, Patit Paban Mishra(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Organized Crime: Definitions, Theories, Concepts, Structure, and Function The Activities of Transnational Organized Crime 30 Causation Theories and Concepts of Organized Criminal Behavior 35 Characteristics and Operational Tactics of Organized Crime 39 Concept of Transnational Organized Crime 42 Defining Organized Crime: Economic, Legal, and Social Factors 43 Difficulties in Applying Generic Conceptualizations of Organized Crime to Specific National Circumstances 47 Structure and Functional Organization of Criminal Groups 51 Traditional and Nontraditional Organized Crime Groups 53 C. Global, Regional, and National National and International Threats: Regional Profiles 56 Organized Crime in Africa 60 Organized Crime in Asia 66 Triads and Tongs: Asian Organized Crime in America 71 Organized Crime in Australia: Drug Trafficking and Human Smuggling 74 Organized Crime in the Balkans and Implications for Regional Security 78 Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Political-Criminal Nexus 84 The Jogo do Bicho: Brazil’s Illicit Lottery 88 Transnational Crime in the Caribbean Region 93 Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean 96 Acknowledgments ix Preface xi Introduction xiii Organized Crime: From Trafficking to Terrorism The Central Asian Republics 102 Child Sex Trafficking in Cambodia 107 Organized Crime in Eastern Europe 110 Europe: Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, the Baltic States, and the European Union 113 Gang Crimes: Latino Gangs in America 120 International Organized Crime and Its Impact on U.S.

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  Critical Reflections on Transnational Organized Crime, Money Laundering, and Corruption

  • Margaret E. Beare(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • University of Toronto Press

    (Publisher)

  CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME, MONEY LAUNDERING, AND CORRUPTION This page intentionally left blank 1 Transnational Organized Crime: The Strange Career of an American Concept Michael Woodiwiss Defined literally, 'organized crime' is systematic illegal activity for power or profit. As such, organized crime is as old as government and law and as international as trade. Smuggling, piracy, fraud, extortion, and trading in illegal goods and services all have ancient antecedents and modern manifestations. A history of organized crime in a literal sense would have to acknowledge the participation of all levels of society in systematic criminal activity and, in particular, the persistent and active participation of the powerful in society throughout ancient and modern civilizations. Organized crime, understood in a literal sense, is a problem to which there is no simple solution; combating it would require governments to effect major legislative and administra-tive changes at local, state/provincial, and international levels. However, largely as a result of the process outlined in this chapter, most people today understand 'organized crime' in a way that is much more acceptable to governmental and commercial interests in virtually every country. Most policy makers, commentators, and media outlets around the world now use 'organized crime' as a term that is virtually synonymous with gangsters in general, or the Mafia (or Mafia-type organizations) in particular. Histories of organized crime in this limited sense tend to rely on assertion, speculation, and exaggeration about groups of career criminals. It is also usually implied or stated by those using the term that gangster organizations have gained an unaccept-able level of power in many countries today through violence and the ability to corrupt weak, greedy, and therefore passive public officials, private professionals, and business interests.

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  Organized Crime

  • Howard Abadinsky(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. DEFINING “ ORGANIZED CRIME ” The criminal organizations examined in this book have historical origins that date back many decades, if not centuries. In contrast, as far as we know, the gang headed by Jesse James was devoid of global connections, their crime portfolio limited to bank and train robbery, and they failed to survive Jesse ’ s death in 1882. While there is a great deal of discus-sion about organized crime groups and their activi-ties, a review of the subject in law enforcement and academic literature reveals it is difficult to deter-mine what exactly is being discussed (Loree 2002). Indeed, the federal Organized Crime Act of 1970 (which contains the RICO section discussed in later chapters) fails to define the subject of its concern. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines organized crime “ as any group having some manner of a formalized structure and whose primary objec-tive is to obtain money through illegal activities. Such groups maintain their position through the use of actual or threatened violence, corrupt public officials, graft, or extortion, and generally have a significant impact on the people in their locales, region, or the country as a whole. ” The United Nations Convention Against Transnational Orga-nised Crime (Article 2(a)) states that an “ organised criminal group shall mean a structured group of three or more persons, existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of commit-ting one or more serious crimes or offences estab-lished in accordance with this Convention, in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit.

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  Double Crossed

  The Failure of Organized Crime Control

  • Michael Woodiwiss(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Pluto Press

    (Publisher)

  PART I Dumbing Down: Constructing an Acceptable Understanding of “Organized Crime” Introduction Before the Cold War there was no fixed understanding of the phrase “organized crime,” but the trend towards a reduced understanding of organized crime had already begun. Whole areas of American Organized Crime history were unknown or unrecognized by early twentieth-century Americans. Systematic crimes of fraud and violence against native and African Americans were either excused as the result of a “higher” racial law, or forgotten by the beginning of the twentieth century. The commentators and academics who did most to develop the literature on organized crime, did not, for example, consider the systematic criminal activity directed against native Americans and African Americans as crime let alone organized crime; “the Indian problem” and “the Negro problem” were not for them part of the “organized crime” problem. 1 * * * By the end of the nineteenth century, businessmen were the people of power in America and they were developing new ideas about the role of government. Their predecessors usually held that governments should do little more than maintain order, conduct public services at minimum cost, and subsidize business development when appropriate but otherwise do nothing to disrupt the laws of free competition. Twentieth-century businessmen, however, expected much more government involvement in the economy and society, and many became active participants in the era that would later be labeled “Progressive.” Business interests could not initiate or control all economic and social reform during these years but, as several historians have demonstrated, they could set outer limits on what would succeed. 2 By the time of the First World War, although mainstream American thinking had become pro-state, businessmen succeeded in ensuring that it also remained just as pro-business and dedicated to private profit as before

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  Transnational Organised Crime in International Law

  • Tom Obokata(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  2 At that time the term ‘organised crime’ was used to describe ‘illegal business deals involving politicians, police officers, lawyers or professional thieves’ and not gangsters or mafia-type criminal groups. 3 This changed in the 1950s, when the term was used to describe the Italian mafia in the US. Within the discourse of organised crime as a set of actors, two main models have been advanced by politicians, law enforcement agencies and academics. The first is a corporate model, under which criminal organisations are regarded as entities having highly centralised and hierarchical corporate structures. 4 This model was widely accepted among the law enforcement and political communi-ties in the US. 5 They were strongly influenced by the so-called ‘alien conspiracy theory’, which portrayed Italian mafia as ‘a coherent and centralised international conspiracy of evil’ that threatened the political, economic and legal systems of 1 L Paoli and C Fijnaut, ‘Organised Crime and Its Control Policies’ (2006) 14 European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice 307, 308. 2 M Woodiwiss, ‘Transnational Organised Crime: The Strange Career of an American Concept’ in M Beare (ed), Critical Reflections on Transnational Organized Crime, Money Laundering and Corrup-tion (Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003) 5. 3 Paoli and Fijnaut, above ch 1 n 3, 24. 4 A Cohen, ‘The Concepts of Criminal Organisation’ (1977) 17 British Journal of Criminology 97, 98. 5 L Paoli, ‘The Paradoxes of Organized Crime’ (2002) 37 Crime, Law and Social Change 51, 53. Concepts of Organised Crime 15 the US. 6 This view was endorsed officially by the Congressional Committee on Inquiry, headed by Senator Estes Kefauver, in 1951. 7 This was followed by a report of the Katzenbach Committee entitled ‘The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society’ (1967), in which organised crime was viewed as a large criminal corpo-ration supplying illegal goods and services.

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  Organized Crime

  A Cultural Introduction

  • Antonio Nicaso, Marcel Danesi(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As a result, in 1970, the Congress passed the Racketeering Influence Corruption Organization Act, better known as RICO. In its statement of finding and purpose, the Act reads as follows (cited in Wynn and Anderson 1982: 10):

  The Congress finds that (1) organized crime in the United States is a highly sophisticated, diversified, and widespread activity that annually drains billions of dollars from America’s economy by unlawful conduct and the illegal use of force, fraud, and corruption; (2) organized crime derives a major portion of its power through money obtained from such illegal endeavors as syndicated gambling, loan sharking, the theft and fencing of property, the importation and distribution of narcotics and other dangerous drugs, and other forms of social exploitation; (3) this money and power are increasingly used to infiltrate and corrupt legitimate business and labor unions and to subvert and corrupt our democratic processes; (4) organized crime activities in the United States weaken the stability of the Nation’s economic system, harm innocent investors and competing organizations, interfere with free competition, seriously burden interstate and foreign commerce, threaten the domestic security, and undermine the general welfare of the Nation and its citizens; and (5) organized crime continues to grow because of defects in the evidence-gathering process of the law inhibiting the development of the legally admissible evidence necessary to bring criminal and other sanctions or remedies to bear on the unlawful activities of those engaged in organized crime and because the sanctions and remedies available to the Government are unnecessarily limited in scope and impact. It is the purpose of this Act to seek the eradication of organized crime in the United States by strengthening the legal tools in the evidence-gathering process, by establishing new penal prohibitions, and by providing enhanced sanctions and new remedies to deal with the unlawful activities of those engaged in organized crime.

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  Transnational Organized Crime

  • Frank Madsen(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 It is not within the scope of the present work to consider the motivations behind such governmental and non-governmental criminalizing efforts. Nevertheless, the following points need to be made:

  (i) Basically all criminalization by bi- or multilateral agreements or international prohibition regimes is the promotion and international codification of norms generated in the Occident and in particular in the United States.

  (ii) NGOs and other transnational moral entrepreneurs promote and export norm sets based on ethical considerations without clarifying whose ethics they are promoting and without explicating why that particular set of norms is superior to other sets of norms and deserves to be internationally accepted.

  The concept of organized crime

  The concept of organized crime was born in the United States in the nineteenth century; nevertheless, there has been little agreement throughout history as to the contents of the concept. The two criminologists, Goldthaite Dorr and Sidney Simpson,4 claimed in their 1929 publication that organized crime consists in two activities, criminal fraud and the protection racket , thus concentrating on the behavioral aspect of organized crime instead of on racial and ethnic aspects. Unfortunately, the U.S. government, and a large part of scholarship, did not follow this advice, but concentrated on a perceived collective identity rather than on behavioral characteristics. There seems to be little doubt that such an approach by the U.S. government was much influenced by the then-recent St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 in Chicago, in the course of which a crime group of Italian origin, under the leadership of the later rather notorious criminal Al Capone, killed seven members of a rival group of Irish origin in what appeared to be an execution; this event quite understandably caused a public outcry.5 The perceptual outcome was based on a view of organized crime as a closed ethnic group, often of Italian origin, based on tribal or family relationships, etc. The choice of relying on the so-called “Sicilian syndrome” or the “alien conspiracy” model has gravely impeded scholarship in relevant conceptualization of the subject-matter.6 The Sicilian syndrome is based on important studies of Sicilian organized crime over the last 150 years7

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  Murder and Mayhem

  Crime in Twentieth-Century Britain

  • David Nash, Anne-Marie Kilday(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  This chapter will be constructed of three sections. The first will provide a chronological overview, focussing on the development of the key forms associated with British organised crime. The second section will explore historiographical and criminological approaches. The limited nature of historical research in this area has already been noted. However, this sec-tion will also consider the development of the problematic true-crime genre, which has been largely responsible in providing an organised crime ‘narrative’ on which both historians and criminologists have relied. The third and concluding section will further explore the issues raised Organised Crime, Criminality and the ‘Gangster’ 215 in the preceding sections by using two case studies: the first focussing on the gambling and protection rackets connected to the racecourses during the interwar period and the second, on the rise of project crime from the 1950s and ‘60s. 2. Chronology The definition of organised crime is far from clear cut. Alan Wright has suggested that there might be a distinction between the ways in which crimes, such as burglary for example, are organised and what we might think of as more professional organised crime activity. 7 Referring to historically contextual definitions, Clive Emsley has suggested that the ‘professional criminal’, a term which was used from the later nineteenth century, ‘was someone of ability who had made a rational choice in his way of life and who skilfully used the expanding opportunities provided by faster communication and new technology’. 8 Hence, the terminology of the ‘professional’, the ‘career criminal’ and the organisation of crime were frequently associated with the processes of modernity. Originally the term ‘organised crime’ was used in connection with terrorism, and particularly in relation to events in Ireland in the 1880s when Fenian activity in Britain had escalated.

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  Advanced Introduction to Organised Crime

  • Leslie Holmes(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Edward Elgar Publishing

    (Publisher)

  1 This chapter begins with a very brief history of OC, and then examines the definitions provided by various “official” institu- tions, both international and in individual states, before considering some of the best-known academic definitions. Following this, some of the principal differences between OC and closely related concepts are elaborated, and the range of activities in which OC engages is listed, before drawing conclusions. 2 ADVANCED INTRODUCTION TO ORGANISED CRIME 1.1 Organised crime in historical perspective As noted above, OC is not a new phenomenon. Many readers will think of Chicago in the 1920s and the Al Capone gang as an early example of OC, but there is evidence of this type of criminality much earlier. For instance, the Sicilian mafia dates from the early nineteenth century, while Albanian OC has existed since at least the sixteenth century. But OC has been traced back much further to ancient Rome and ancient Greece, with early “godfathers” such as Clodius and Milo in the former, and OC in the latter being compared with the Sicilian Mafia (Wees 1999; but see Fisher 1999 for an argument that the scale of OC in ancient Greece may have been smaller than usually assumed); there is also evidence of OC in the Ottoman Empire (Gingeras 2014: 21–2). Indeed, in a controversial but thought-provoking analysis, Charles Tilly (1985) – developing the argument made by Saint Augustine in his fifth century work City of God that states are merely “large bandit bands” – argues that the modern state has its origins in a particular form of OC activity involving extortion for the purposes of war-making (namely, violence). There are some important differences between most earlier forms of OC and what has emerged in the past hundred years or so, however. For instance, there is far less piracy and highway banditry nowadays than in the past, though Somali piracy in the 2000s demonstrates that this form of OC activity has not completely disappeared.

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  New Crime in China

  Public Order and Human Rights

  • Ronald Keith, Zhiqiu Lin(Authors)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  per se, is defined by CL97 Article 26 as ‘a long-term and relatively stable organization that consists of at least three persons and that is formed for the purpose of jointly committing crime’. This provision identifies both the leaders and organizers of a criminal organization as principal offenders and stipulates the same penalty for both. In effect, both categories of offenders were to assume entire criminal responsibility for a crime committed by an entire criminal organization. However, this complicates the established differentiation in criminal law between the leaders of an organization and the secondary offenders who play a minor role in the organization and its criminal activities. Obviously, the underlying intention of Article 26 was to punish severely all of the individuals involved in criminal organizations. This organizational approach to organized crime is rather unique to Chinese criminal law and its preference for heavy penalties across a wide range of criminal liability.

  In the West, the definition of ‘organized crime’ was also the subject of considerable controversy. Michael Maltz provided ten different definitions of organized crime. These incorporated constitutive elements emphasizing developed organizational structure, hard-core organized criminal activity, specific language and rules, the presence of a ‘top man’, and the criminal conspiracy of a criminal syndicate.16 Based on these definitions, Maltz defined organized crime as ‘a crime committed by two or more offenders who are, or intend to remain associated for the purpose of committing crimes’.17 He further elaborated the definition/typology of organized crime using a 5 by 6 matrix. Maltz sought to incorporate the elements of organized crime, listed in his ten definitions, with an emphasis on the means and objectives of the crime that does not entirely depend upon organizational structure.18 Essentially, organized crime in the West presumes ‘crime’ committed by criminal syndicates, the purpose of which relates to their own financial interest.

  Comparatively, ‘organized crime’, in Chinese criminal legislation, stipulates three different types of organization that have different purposes. This suggests that the concept of organized crime in Chinese criminal law is more loosely and broadly construed when compared with its Western counterpart. Many ordinary crimes committed by more than two offenders, which are not considered criminal in the Western context, are regarded in China as organized crime, and such crime has often attracted severe punishment under the CL97. Again, this confirms the Chinese intention to punish severely any crime committed jointly by more than two persons in order to protect society.

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  Redefining Organised Crime: A Challenge for the European Union?

  • Stefania Carnevale, Serena Forlati, Orsetta Giolo, Stefania Carnevale, Serena Forlati, Orsetta Giolo(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  Although analytically distinct, we also observe a rise in references to the ‘harmful’ consequences of organised crime (Figure 2, 13.8 per cent and 10.5 per cent respec-tively). Rather than trying to specify what organised crime is, several authors define organised crime by the harm that it causes. The rise of references to harm is likely to be related to the emphasis on harm reduction in other realms of the criminal justice system, such as drug use, prostitution and the public’s protection against violent and sexual offenders. 45 In conclusion, Figures 1 and 2 suggest a trend towards a higher level of gener-ality within definitions of organised crime. From the 1950s onwards, organised crime was narrowly depicted as a highly structured entity, often a synonym for a single crime group, the Italian-American mafia. As this perspective came under sustained criticism in the 1970s, a more general term, ‘enterprise’, came to be pre-ferred by many scholars of the phenomenon. Since the 1990s, an even more gen-eral term has appeared in the von Lampe data set, namely ‘network’. As organised crime is being defined more broadly, it loses specificity, paradoxically leaving it more open to political interpretations; or else the analysis of specifics is subsumed by practical concerns such as its harmful effects. The organised crime label can now be applied to any criminal activity deemed harmful or ‘serious’. B. Activities We now turn to a review of what organised crime does, as it emerges in the defini-tions analysed. Figure 3 summarises some key words—‘monopoly’, ‘the provision of illegal goods and services’, ‘illegal activities’ and ‘predation’—used by authors describing the activities of organised crime. 38 Federico Varese 46 Schelling, ‘What is the Business’ (n 18) 72 and 73. 47 Reuter, The Organization of Illegal Markets (n 32) 31. For an example taken from illegal abortions, see T C Schelling, ‘Economics and Criminal Enterprise’ (1967) 7 (Spring) The Public Interest 61, 75.

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