Organized Crime: A Very Short Introduction

Very Short Introductions #553

by Georgios A. Antonopoulos, Georgios Papanicolaou

In this Very Short introduction, Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios Papanicolaou uncover the reality of organized crime in our world today. Shining a light on the people involved in organized crime, Antonopoulos and Papanicolaou question whether the term "organized" is used to evoke the image, the operations, and power of a legitimate organization, such as a corporation. Discussing whether there are particular crimes that the label "organized crime" applies to, or if any crime can be organized, they also consider what happens when organized crime extends beyond borders. Using examples from across the globe, they analyse the different cultural traditions of organized crime, such as the Mafia, Yakuza, and Triads, and also the nature of organized crime, from arms trafficking and drug dealing to extortion. Finally they explore the methods and agencies in place to control and prevent organized crime.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Business, History, Crime, True Crime, Audiobook

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 22, 2018

Reviews

[Petra watched Buddhist nuns learn dancing today · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the light of reading Underworld: The inside story of Britain’s professional and organised crime I've decided to rewrite this review. Organized Crime, a VSI, should really be entitled: Organized Crime: A Guide to Careers. Would you like to be a lone operator who wouldn't lose status in their communities and risk very little such as buying illegal export cigarettes and selling them in your corner shop, and bringing in illegal immigrants so long as they are not the end of the chain (like lorry drivers from France) for instance.

Then there are the middle of the road careers, better money, bit more risk, less acceptance by the community. Trafficking girls to the UK and forcing them to be prostitutes, importing and selling guns (not in the US of course), various ATH scams where the money is sent out to the criminals' home country (usually Eastern Europe).

There are the high risk careers, these pay very well, where the police are actively looking to catch you (but generally aren't successful),. this is various positions in drug-smuggling, protection rackets (best stick to insurance companies, that's the legal version), organised burglary and robbery of banks, jewellers and celebrities who will splash it all over the Daily Rag.

In Russia in the 90s in order to stop the proliferation of protection rackets with their associated money gouging and violence, laws enabling legal security companies were enacted. This merely meant that some of the protection gangs morphed into business-suit wearing executives and still got the money off you, it was now a legal requirement to have insurance, before it had been for your own protection. Same difference, you still had to pay the same people.

Of course, you might want a totally risk-free, high-paying career in organised crime. This work require you to work regular hours, but you will gain much respect in your community. You will need a degree and legitimate work experience. Finance is best as loan-sharking is illegal when done by individuals, but perfectly legal when done by banks, building societies or pay-day cheque businesses, these careers offer many possibilities for fraud, scams and a bit (lot) on the side.

There are many careers in banking and dealing in stocks and shares where the only difference between crime and not-crime appears to be if it is done for a registered institution or one that passes under the taxman's radar. But there are ways around this. Insider trading is very common, no one much gets caught because so many are involved in the racket. Besides you can always pay people off. In the 90s with the explosion of capitalism in Russia, the oligarchs of today had made their money illegally and then set up their own banks, and now are quite respected owning football clubs and gigantic yachts that visit St. Barth's and St. Tropez.

Money-laundering can be both legal and illegal. Governments are generally complicit in much organised financial crime where the waters are, as above, murky. They make laws that look like they are trying to run a 'clean' country but in fact are only making ones for show. The US is a big noise in anti-money laundering, but Delaware, Wyoming, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota have financial secrecy laws so you don't have to leave home if you are an American.!

The laws pertaining to trust companies, especially in the Caribbean, are very strict, but it's all for show. Go to London instead, it's a favourite place for money launderers trying to look legitimate, they buy expensive property and restaurants. Due diligence is done, but there are plenty of accountants and lawyers who will help establish a legitimate paper trail for a non-taxable fee. There you are, another two organised-crime careers, accountants and lawyers!

And so it goes on.... So if you would like your kids to finish school and get on the earning track without necessarily going to university, look for your local 'entrepreneurs' and have a chat. Equally applicable if you fancy a midlife career change. This sounds like a joke, but that's how the big crime gangs work - they recruit their kids and let them work their way up from minor misdemeanours all the way to bank robberies and jewellery heists!
__________

A story about an ex boyfriend, a pirate. Back at the millenium I was going out with a pirate. He had been a South African lawyer on the run and as he was well brought up had the right accent and could sail so he could legitimately be a captain, this was a good place to disappear to. One of his jobs was in Miami to take yachts conveying cocaine over to the Bahamas. He was employed by some African-American guys. Paid half on taking the job, half on delivery of the boat back. He asked them why they didn't do it, it was a day's sail? They said to look at them, big men, well-off, wearing designer clothes and gold chains - they said they would get searched, and of course, with racial profiling they would.

But M, they said, a guy in middle age, a lawyer with a posh accent looking wealthy that means wearing old shorts and t-shirts preferably from old rock festivals, but nothing new. If he'd been wearing a nice new polo shirt with some nice new shorts etc everyone would have known he didn't really own a boat and was probably more used to sailing on cruise ships. If you think about it, cruise ships are a treat for those who do not travel, yachts are kind of everyday for those who own one so why dress up?, everyone was going to accept that he was captain of the yacht and just cruising around. And so it proved to be. But he only did it once. He said he sweated too much getting into the Bahamas. He'd rather do 'salvage' where people on yachts in trouble negotiate to be rescued, up to and including giving up their boat or set up a fake yacht registration company. He did this, still does it, built a nice house... He said he'd always lliked working in the legal field, but preferably on illegal enterprises, they made more untaxable money.

Notes on reading. All to do with arguments, mostly economic, for and against legalising drugs Reading this, three things have become obvious
a) that if drugs, including heroin, were legal, their would be a massive downturn in crime as that is far and away their main source of income;

b) that if you are a big enough criminal or deal with vast amounts of drugs, then there will certainly be collusion between the government and the criminals, in some countries - Turkey for one - more overtly than others;

c) that if you are a really, really big criminal you will have high status in your own and possibly other countries, notably Mexico and Russia;

d) that governments pay lipservice to money laundering. There are extremely strict laws that are tightened ever further to try to prevent criminals from using trust companies (I know because I live on an island where this applies). However, should said criminals want to buy up a lot of extremely expensive property and restaurants, the governing country will not do due diligence (or they won't be diligent about it) so that's all right then. Notably the UK;

e) that some countries absolutely rely on drugs being illegal economically. Many industries from growing cotton for prison uniforms, to helicopter manufacturers and everyone in between are needed to keep the 'war on drugs' and not just lock up excessive numbers of people often with an enormous racial bias, but for overseas surveillance operations. In other words, it is a multi-billion dollar industry fighting drugs. Notably the US.

Note. Legalising marijuana makes economic sense because is not a cause of disease in the same way alcohol and tobacco are and therefore much less a drain on health services. Also because it is a locally-grown product and not much an imported one and can therefore by taxed at source and by the consumer. So for States and (marijuana growing) countries, it is a definite financial benefit.

Portugal had decriminalised all drugs. I would like to read a report on crime, prison populations, the impact economically on the country and health care.

Rewritten 1 January 2022

[Mizuki · Rating 4 out of 5]

（1）The book is informative so far.

（2）Organized crime organizations can have a lot of political, religious and historical roots.

（3） it reads like a textbook but I guess it is just the point.

[chantel nouseforaname · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you see me out here making money moves, you know why! JK!

This felt like a comprehensive look into the huge scope of organized crime from its development through the prohibition era to popular organized crime syndicates of the current day. Antonopoulos also went through the popular wares trafficked by each syndicate, the global impact of crime on various industries and groups, and also what kind of response communities have to organized crime from politicians to the locals, to cops, and more. It's not as cut and dry as expected as many communities rely on certain types of schemes to move things around or for economic stability/growth. As well as some political agents use organized crime to perpetuate their own agendas.

Another well-done issue of the A Very Short Introduction series.

[Kirsti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Did you know the Hells Angels have a chapter in Liechtenstein?

Overall, this book is a bit dry, but it was interesting to learn about organized crime in other countries, particularly Russia, Turkey, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, and the UK.

[Anita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good overview of the topic, highly recommend.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Oxford University Press 'Organised Crime: A Very Short Introduction' is solid enough but it reads throughout like an academic report to a government department. As a basic primer, it might be useful to someone entirely new to the subject but it cannot be said to be 'inspiring'.

One insight (although dealt with rather tentatively by the authors) is that our perceptions have been over-defined by, first, American reactions to the very specific experience of Italian-American organised crime and by, second, the emergent special interests of 'law enforcement'.

A sub-text of the final chapter is a frustration that law enforcement's propensity to secrecy makes it difficult for academics to get access to the data that they think they require in order to understand what is going on 'out there'. A suspicion is that law enforcement's political narrative may be flimsy.

Although the book is largely descriptive with little or minimal opinion, the final chapter more than hints at an uncomfortable truth - that organised crime is really not that organised except insofar as the market is organised ... it is just another aspect of human aspiration.

This leads us to some uncomfortable thoughts because, in the end, criminality is not defined in terms of moral good and evil so much as what the law dictates. Any assumption that the law is the same as justice or morality is as dodgy as the equation made between education and intelligence.

In general, there is some consonance of terms. Most people most of the time can reasonably prefer the order of the lawful State over the disorder of a market without restraints especially when the human condition creates desire for things that are harmful to it.

The discomfort comes from a number of factors - one is that criminal behaviour can be a reasonable response to aspiration in any system where aspiration for things (including security) is unavailable to some people but normal for others (within the system that law protects).

We might add here that the desire for 'bad' things - like addictive drugs or tobacco - may be driven by legitimate anxieties and pressures that the system as a whole will not deal with. Even human and sexual trafficking may be far more a negotiation with crime by the vulnerable than we might think.

Protection (revisited later as extortion) may be the least worse outcome where law enforcement itself has failed to provide it. Loan sharking would not need to exist outside a world of low wages and vulnerable small businesses. Criminals mostly exploit the already weak or exploited.

The authors flip things on their head a little further by pointing out that many criminals simply want things and do a cost-benefit analysis on the various non-legal means of ceasing to be weak or exploited themselves. They are, in short, just business people working in a parallel system.

Another factor is that we should be in no doubt that order (in the form of States) originated in what we would call crime if extortion is a crime. Most of our state structures are derived from older forms where tribute was exacted for 'protection' and eventually became 'taxation'.

In other words (and we do not have to be an anarchist to accept this), exactly who benefits from the State structures dependent on taxation and how and what they define as criminal is highly relevant to any attempt to match any concept of good and evil to the law.

Finally, in the struggle between order and criminality, order is not averse to extreme and cruel measures sanctified as law if and when it can get away with it. One matter not covered very much in the book is organised political crime or 'resistance' but this really needs considering.

If the State under pressure can start banging people up for a Facebook post and turning them into 'criminals', frustrated and excessively exploited or marginalised communities can turn to criminality to finance resistance or create their own authority.

The response of the prevailing global neo-liberal community has been to try to force the abandonment of any notion of resistance or national liberation but retain the political dimension by creating a super-criminal category of 'terrorism'.

The category may have back-fired as the complexity of Hamas' or Hezbollah's resistance has been understood better under what amounts to a state terrorist operation against their communities by Israel but it has also enabled States to impose extreme measures on their own populations.

The abstract problem here is that, whereas lawful states can define criminality by fiat, there is no universally valid international legal structure that has not ultimately been a measure of the American interest (now under severe pressure). The 'rogue state' category has been invented to deal with this.

Globalisation, which may prove to have been order's fundamental strategic error in maintaining itself viably, has intensified the ability of aspirational actors to work the global market system and driven 'order' to go trans-national and build a sledgehammer bureaucratism under US influence.

Similarly, the New World Order's attempt to define itself as a global police force seems to be in ruins as 'rogue states' and 'terrorists' have proven resilient with increasing sympathies for their predicament from significant domestic minorities who are otherwise law-abiding.

This presents a fascinating crisis of definitions where the temptation of the system is to start criminalising aspects of political dissent at home. This threatens to worsen the situation as elements amongst those targeted may start to see unlawfulness as a reasonable response to unjust legality.

On balance, one should very much be part of the faction of humanity that seeks order over market chaos but if that order fails to deliver what people aspire to, is inept at controlling the market in general and becomes tyrannous in defence of order, then we have mounting problems.

In practice, we should not be romantic about criminals. Sometimes they deliver 'goods' that really should never have been under state sanction. The case study of alcohol during prohibition is probably one of humanity's greatest examples of unintended consequences on these lines.

Far more often, they supply 'bads' - addictive drugs, faulty counterfeit products, low priced tobacco, unnecessary protection (extortion), financial redistribution from the most vulnerable in society to themselves, exploitative labour, access to non-consensual sex and so forth.

Getting the balance right between meeting the aspirations of all humanity equally, dealing with the trade in oppressive and dangerous 'bads' and maintaining a 'good' (that is, smoothly functioning) market system is not easy. A certain balance was seriously broken with imperial neo-liberalism.

It would have been good if the authors had been bolder in addressing this tension which is essentially political but, as a basic overview, even if unsatisfactory in places, this will serve most newcomers to the subject well enough.

[Hank Hoeft · Rating 3 out of 5]

Organized Crime: A Very Short Introduction is a solid volume in the Oxford University Press' "Very Short Introduction" series. It is divided into five chapters: (1) a definition of "organized crime" (which is more slippery than one might think), (2) a description of 8 different organized crime entities from all over the world, (3) a description of the main illicit activities engaged in by various organized crime entities, (4) a discussion of anti-organized crime efforts by world law forces, and (5) a summing up of the book.

I have two criticisms of the book. First of all, I was startled by the final chapter, and the authors' apparent apologist justification for organized crime, along the lines of, "organized crime is by definition illicit, but it wouldn't exist if it didn't provide goods and services in demand, and if the practitioners weren't driven to engage in illegal (anti-social) activity if they had other pathways to economic success." Really? After going into some detail about human trafficking, drug dealing, extortion, and other acts of violence, this is the conclusion the authors reach?

The other criticism is one I never thought I'd level at any "Very Short Introduction" book. I trust Oxford University Press has proofreaders, and the two authors both have positions at Teesside Collgege (one a professor, the other a reader) and both serve on editorial boards of various criminology journals. So I was astonished to see so many grammatical errors in the text, including sentence fragments and sentences that for the life of me, I could not decipher what was supposed to be communicated. C'mon, guys, you should be better than that.

[Gebo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating short little book. It's a brief overview, but so many little tidbits of information. For instance, I didn't know that the Hell's Angels was started by a group of WW2 pilots.

[Øivind Schøyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was okay. I felt some of the material was presented kind of passively. Fine as an audiobook.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Love your Leaders and the Total State will bring salvation to your nearest ration store.

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Does what it says on the tin…

An eye opening, academic-lite text that talks through the definitions of and factors surrounding organised crime.

Dry but very informative.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very dry.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The criminologists Georgios A. Antonopoulos and Georgios Papanicolaou published Organized Crime: A Very Short Introduction in 2018. The first chapter defines the concept of Organized Crime and gives a brief history of the field of Organized Crime studies. The second chapter examines “organized crime structures around the globe” (Antonopoulos & Papanicolaou 9-49). I found this chapter interesting to read. The chapter looks at organized crime in Italy, in the Italian American Community (Antonopoulos & Papanicolaou 14-18), Great Britain, Russia, Turkey, Latin America (mainly in Mexico and Columbia), China, and Japan. This section also includes a section on outlaw motorcycle gangs (Antonopoulos & Papanicolaou 45-49). Chapter 3 is “the business of organized crime” (Antonopoulos & Papanicolaou 50-90). Chapter 4 is “controlling and preventing organized crime” (Antonopoulos & Papanicolaou 91-103). Chapter 5 is the two authors' concluding thoughts on organized crime. They write “Declaring ‘war’ is no substitute for the creation of a sound institutional design backed up by substantive and extensive knowledge of the various manifestations of organized crime when it comes to effectively addressing the problems posed by it” (Antonopoulos & Papanicolaou 110). The book contains a section entitled “references and further reading” (Antonopoulos & Papanicolaou 113-125). The book has an index. The book has illustrations. I read the book on my Kindle. I found Antonopoulos and Papanicolaou’s introduction to organized crime to be a well-done introduction to the field of organized crime.