Why Smaller/More Flexible Cell-Like Nodes and Networks?
While organized crime had been traditionally conceived as a secretive, rigorously structured, top-down controlled organization, the actual unlawful activities may be committed by much smaller groups linked loosely and transiently to larger organizations that covertly assist in providing resources and weapons. There is a downstream and upstream pathway to organized criminal activities, all of which attempt with more or less success in conveying a patina of legitimacy society wide. To be immediately perceived as illicit is to signal ominously to law enforcement agencies.
The tenuous links and pathways may be transnational. There’s little real patriotism to organized crime at high levels (cf. profit maximization of legitimate capitalist economic enterprises); there’s offshoring. However, this mutual assistance and dependence should not be interpreted to suggest that transnational organized crime is monolithic or a single phenomenon (Migration Policy Institute 2018). This would pose a threat to its very existence and persistence. Moreover, this is not to suggest that transnational organized crime groups are concealing their uniform and monolithic structure and operations; instead, it just does not exist.
The idea of any small group of individuals creating a transnational criminal group operating globally and extralegally would be practicably impossible, given the surveillance tools and financial resources at the beck-and-call of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. (The possibility that one or more influential transnational organized crime groups could have been covertly detected and tolerated with a wink-and-a-nod, for whatever reason, may form the substance of another inquiry …)
Importantly, organized crime leadership faces challenges from the state (e.g., law enforcement agencies) and competitors (e.g., legitimate commercial enterprises). The ebb and flow of what reaches the attention of the public at large is not really discernible; the public is ignorant, notwithstanding the best of intentions and competence. Recognition and measurement of organized crime are not formally adequately disclosed through crime statistics and otherwise. The problem of organized crime is more analytical than empirical. However, some attributes are beyond reasonable dispute.
Organized crime has been defined as “glocal,” local in nature and global in reach, at least with respect to London, which may serve as the “laundry of choice” (Sergi 2018). Criminal activities and proceeds need to be cleansed of the organized crime taint, however imperceptible. This may fairly characterize much of modern day transnational organized crime. Financial centers such as London provide all the necessary professional facilitators and the cleansing network.
For example, Chinese transnational organized crime organizations vary in structure and size, with flexibility and adaptability key to effectiveness (Berry et al. 2003, 1). Opportunism demands loose confederation more than rigid hierarchy, especially where law enforcement and intelligence agency tools and techniques result in broad surveillance of information and communications, which comprise the lifeblood of the act of organizing, whether for legitimate or illicit ends. Organized economic crime as conforming to the ExxonMobil model is (and likely was) more myth than fact; its treasury department cannot be reached via telephone or e-mail. Properly, the focus for understanding organized crime and mitigating its risk lies in apprehending the mechanism of the utilitarian pragmatic network analogous to the contact-making and influence-peddling of commercial (insurance) brokers and/or bundlers in the context of political fundraising. The knowledge and skills of the financial services professionals are indispensable, whether the crimes originate in China, the UK, or the United States.
Flexible and fluid cell-like criminal networks operate under the principles of expediency and convenience, creating a self-protective defense mechanism that does not threaten their reason for existence (Williams 2001, 75). Generally, each of the cells is useful but not essential. No one cell threatens the whole criminal enterprise, and each cell extends its own (illicit) influence across its own patron-client relationships in the political economy: favors are granted and received with informal but real rights and obligations attending these transfers of consideration akin to a creditor-debtor state of affairs without the incriminating documentation of contracts and need for appeals to courts of law or equity.
Organized crime is capitalism on steroids. Socially acceptable capitalism in the United States, for example, offers traditional financing through banks and debtor-creditor relationships mediated by the rule of law. Organized crime transcends these constraints, becoming a hard currency provider for those that cannot use banks and are desperate enough to assume the risk of its range of sanctions (e.g., loss of limb or life) when unable to repay the borrowed currency. In a sense, organized crime is pure in its abandonment of rule of law; in its ability to thrive without state subsidy; in its capacity to generate a range of transactions characterized by dog-eat-dog and vicious relationships, without resort to a legal right of mercy or debt forgiveness. It is this terrible character and cancerous reputation of organized crime that help it to intimidate and succeed, notwithstanding any state’s formal position on the matter.
Organized crime could not succeed without desperation among individuals located within its venue and jurisdiction (cf. its glocality).
The criminal networks grounded in the gig economy are not modeled on publicly reporting entities like Lyft and Uber. Enterprises, public and private, licit and illicit, depend on the availability of a pool of unemployed and underemployed individuals seeking pathways of independence. These may appear as opportunities inside and/or outside lawful enterprises. The gigs are impermanent from the perspective of the organized crime associate and the independent contractor driver (or other service provider), but the operations, structure, and forms of membership persist through spacetime using the financial metrics and related rubrics of specialized jargon common in the upperworld of the political economy. Assets and income matter.
In the case of organized crime, the generalized jargon consistent with generally accepted rules of law, accounting, and financial reporting applied in the case of lawful enterprises is not used. There are no periodic audits and reviews, consolidation of financial reports, or segment analyses. The specific gig may be short-lived, but the means and methods of extracting value from customers and victims are long-lived and merged into the asset, income, and equity accounts within the political economy, though not attributed accurately and completely to the entities responsible for the underlying transactions.
The smallness of each gig composes an immaterial element of organized crime, whether measured broadly, locally, or glocally. Multiples of these capillaries facilitate the creation of criminal proceeds; facilitate the washing of these proceeds; facilitate the allocation of these proceeds to leadership, middle management, and rank-and-file alike but not in magnitude. However, there is no paymaster; no finance department; no compliance officers. The paradigm of organized crime as ExxonMobil may close the loop, however, accuracy is sacrificed for convenient (and profitable) myth.
While the focus on smaller networks using a microeconomics (or similar) approach toward measuring and mitigating the effects of organized crime groups is not altogether novel, it tends not to address threats such as elite fraud and grand corruption. There is no Mr. Big, but not all organized crime individuals are equal. The use of data warehousing (e.g., the collection and examination of suspicious activity reports) and network analysis (e.g., the study of disclosed patterns among beneficial owners) techniques may be more effective in detecting some surface-level transnational organized crime than in discovering high-level cooperation among leaders in the affected political economies (Levi 2012, 47). An analytically useful and broader methodology that investigates not only agency and individual actions at the lower levels in organized crime groups but investigates the leadership in structuring the global pathways of organized crime, including often attendant political corruption and organizational fraud, could uncover heretofore ignored facilitation processes.
The venues and jurisdictions of offshore finance are commonly known by financial intelligence units. However, there is a structural impairment of attribution: the financial institutions housing the accounts may be known, but the account details are inadequate at best, fraudulent or non existent at worst. What is lacking is the competency to group accurately and completely the distributions from the accounts. The beneficiaries’ relationships with the ultimate controllers need development.
Analysis inclusive of the biases resulting from uneven data collection across jurisdictions and shifting legislative and executive priorities of law enforcement and regulation would be helpful. Who prioritizes, makes, and enforces the laws should be examined with quantitative techniques (e.g., regression analysis) and qualitative tools (e.g., qui bono), though, of course, these methods are not mutually exclusive. Together, these analytical methods might reveal the underlying global and structural dynamics that explain why and how organized crime groups have transformed into gig-like operations. Likely, such an approach, if undertaken independently, impartially, and with adequate resources, would reveal transnational organized crime groups as a political problem with national security implications (Naim 2012, 101). The gig-like nature of organized crime allows it to hide and resurface without detection.
Indeed, the organization and operation of criminal groups, whether conceived as a limited joint venture or continuing illicit enterprise, present risks to property (e.g., theft by deception), person (e.g., extortion), and state (e.g., terroristic activity). Assessment of the risks posed by organized crime groups are not limited to persons in their individual capacity but extended to states (and corporations) in their governance capacity (Choi 2014). From the perspective of the target, whether the custodian of tangible property or bureaucrat vested with state secrets, the vulnerabilities of the guardian or security system, especially those dependent on the integrity and due diligence of humans (cf. automated systems of control), are subject to exploitation by organizations of criminals (more so than by an independent, rogue individual).
Gig-like infiltration may be barely or even entirely unnoticeable by the state’s surveillance system. Victims at high levels can disguise transactions more effectively (e.g., contributions and not bribes) than victims at low levels, who are unlikely to receive the official attention required to remediate the threat. Gig-like infiltration may be fast and fluid, exploiting the targets’ vulnerabilities as opportunistic contingent assets.
Thus, the gig-like cellular structure resembles the old school neighborhood (traditional) theory and conceptualizing about organized crime groups, except the former is looser and flexible where the latter is grounded and fixed. The cell replaces the neighborhood, and the gig substitutes for the method. There is less commitment to the physical neighborhood and much exploitation of technology and cyber-connections. However, in whatever form the organized crime group is operationalized, the specialized function of the pursuit of profit, gain, and influence outside (but sometimes drawing upon) the rule of law is the overarching attribute (Lombardo 2013a, 34). Thus, the neighborhood is expanded through high tech information and communications technology; the hard currencies are converted into electronic liquid flowing from shore-to-offshoreto-shore accounts for use in obtaining hard assets (e.g., real estate).
The need for social and community proximity is displaced in part by the information and communications technology. Moreover, the nature of the gig commitment shrinks to short-term over long-term capacity to pursue fairly immediate profits, gains, and influence notwithstanding the rules of law. After all, the long-term is only a series of short-terms, manageable through gig development, dissolution, and redevelopment.
The organized criminals need not be neighbors to collude: social distance has been bridged through virtual (computer-based) linking among individuals, locally-, regionally-, and internationally based, resulting in a matrix more similar to terrorist cells than neighborhood social clubs. This is an attribute providing immeasurable strength and opportunity for growth; for capacity to change and adapt; for the ability to hide and lie dormant.
Moreover, the initiation and build-up of organized crime groups survive the threat and breakdown imposed by law enforcement and other means due to the facility of forming cells inside and outside of neighborhood and jurisdictional borders. Simply, the cell provides a superior structure, though not without its own risks, including the ability to vet the required competency skills face-to-face.
However, the desperate character of those who knowingly enter the domain of organized crime groups has its own control mechanism. These individuals are familiar with the reputation of the high managerial agents of organized crime; they are also cognizant of the occasionally brutal character of those implementing the desires of the managing agents. They assume the risk.