Historical Overview: A Few Key Concepts
The intent of this manuscript is not to detail dates and moments of organized crime infamy. Who got murdered in whose barbershop while eating what Italian pastry is of little moment, presently. History is not so much for the remembrance of key dates and acts, but for the identification and memory of key patterns and attributes that persist. Thus, this overview functions more as a survey than a complete recitation of organized crime groups everywhere. After a few instances of conduct, murder is a bad ending; extortion is the power of intimidation and force; fraud is a clever way to steal; organizing to profit, gain, and influence—how is this a surprise? Some don’t obey the rule of law, especially where they think they will get away with it—does this shock the conscience? Organized criminals and their groups, tight or loose, pretty much function like one another (let me count how many ways I may steal from thee …).
Organized crime is neither a new nor a necessary phenomenon. Its occurrence, growth, persistence, and decay are contingent on social factors within the political economy, that is, as an organized activity, it needs cooperation and trust among members; as a crime, it needs the formal superstructure legislating and defining that which is criminal. Moreover, it needs to be enforced and counted; otherwise, organized crime would officially be nil.
While the roots of organized economic crime are understandable as a byproduct of disharmony within the society and the desire to secede from the social, market, and legal norms by which most others in the political economy abide, these roots do not necessarily lead to the trees and branches of organized economic crime. Sometimes, disaffection and alienation lead to despair unaccompanied by organized economic crime; something else happens to generate the cancer of (transnational) organized economic crime. There are catalysts.
Thus, it is important to distinguish between mediator variables, which explain how organized economic crime occurs, grows, and persists, from moderator variables, which explain the increase, decrease, or stasis in the levels of organized economic crime. Beyond the obvious circumstances (e.g., needing a jurisdiction that defines, enforces, and counts that which comprises organized economic crime), the jurisdiction at risk needs a pool of desperate individuals of a critical mass. These would-be offenders believe organized economic crime is their most viable option. This is not so much rational choice as exclusion from real opportunity. Of course, the wealthy in assets and the richly compensated by income cannot credibly be viewed as lacking real opportunity as much as lacking integrity, a moral compass, and concern for others. At a minimum, the desperate and the narcissist provide a potential pool of informal candidates for organized economic crime.
However, attendant circumstances vary, and so does the motivation for participating in organized economic crime. For example, the numerous employees of Wells Fargo bank that agreed to create customer accounts out of thin air to meet quotas and bonus targets were a bit desperate, a bit compromised morally, a bit shortsighted in attitude, and so on. The important point is that this is not a rational choice. If given fairly equal opportunity and largely equivalent return on investment of effort and cost pathways, few would choose the pathway of organized economic crime. It’s less rational choice than perception of no real choice in the matter, perhaps.
A society and attendant political economic wherein organized economic crime is rampant (and this applies to organized economic crime in fact and not organized economic crime as measured by criminal convictions and other manipulable proxies of the criminal justice system) is a society in decay and despair—where individuals of ill will have captured too much of the state.
Generally, when organized economic crime is discussed and analyzed, the dependent variable usually becomes the rate of organized crime over a given period. Thus, no convictions, no problem. In a significant part, this is due to the failure of the state to properly catalogue organized economic crime, preferring measures that focus more on street and property crimes (e.g., extortion, theft) and less on reportedly legitimate actors behaving badly (e.g., financial institution employees’ and their agents’ misconduct, consultants’ misconduct). Also, there’s no shortage of a colorful history of American-style mafia wrongdoing, including murders. Pardon the borrowing of an old saw, but “if it bleeds, it leads.”
Knowledge and understanding of the New York City mafia is nonetheless important, even if overstated and overextended. Real people were murdered; actual property was taken and extorted; illicit drugs and other contraband were distributed. Black and gray markets existed and exist, the New York City five families got more than their fair share. But it’s not just the American-style mafia that is relevant toward understanding organized crime groups as both a dependent variable (though preferably not measured exclusively in accord with official crime statistics) and an independent variable that causes inimical changes in the host society. The New York City crime families showed what brute force and intimidation are capable of producing and taking.
Moreover, there have been a multiplicity of officially recognized formidable traditional organized crime groups. These include the Italian mafias (viz., the Sicilian cosa nostra; the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta; the Neapolitan camorra), the American cosa nostras, the Japanese yakuza, and the Russian mafias (Sergi 2020, 184). These groups are depicted with conceptions and theories similar to the American-style organized crime networks. Like the New York City mafia, they are subcultures within the home political economy, which may be contrasted with the so-called emerging (transnational) organized crime groups that exploit new vulnerabilities (e.g., cyberspace) in the modern political economy. Their roots are not as deep into the past like the traditional organized crime groups. However, this distinction in typology is not mutually exclusive in relation to the criminal activities, that is, both forms of organized crime groups may engage in similar unlawful conduct (e.g., drug and firearms trafficking).
Three concepts are clear:
1. Organized crime has a longstanding tradition of operating domestically and internationally. It’s not new.
2. Organized crime groups should not be limited to those constructs depicting personalism and the big man syndrome (e.g., the Gambino crime family). That’s old school and not terribly relevant currently.
3. Organized economic crime groups, especially those that operate globally, pose an underappreciated threat that may dwarf the risks presented by organized crime groups.
Importantly, recognizing that organized crime is a species of corruption within society is essential notwithstanding the conventional narratives about traditional and emerging organized crime groups or even more modern theories depicting the nouveau bugaboo referred to transnational organized crime groups. As with corruption generally, organized crime is a symptom of the governance dynamics and institutional qualities at work (U.K. Department of International Development 2015, 79). In brief, a global economy implies extended access and additional opportunities for organized crime groups that have the technology to connect directly or indirectly with associates and independent contractors internationally.
Also important is the recognition that organized crime groups are more ad hoc than standing. Mostly, they exist for the job and not the career. The worker bees are more like informal contract employees (cf. the gig) than members of a permanent workforce, which gives weight to the elevation of the overall threat. However, pinpointing its key nodes and controlling persons is difficult, if not illusory, absent significant power to intercept and catalogue domestic and international communications (cf. the U.S. National Security Agency).
Determining causes for preexisting organized crime groups like the Italian mafias or the American-style mafia such as that formerly dominant in New York City, conventionally known as five crime families and commonly referred to as traditional organized crime, as well as so-called emerging organized crime in the form of transnational groups is difficult due to the opacity of the criminal markets. While highly specific tests and observational data may be used, including quantitative regression analysis of panel data comprised of convictions per capita over many years, the tests are not sensitive to all the organized criminal activities, charged or not. Moreover, the tests are characterized by the intellectual risk of allowing for too many false negatives; that a criminal justice system has not investigated and prosecuted conduct as organized crime does not support the inference that organized crime thereby does not occur. The lens’ focus of interpretation and inference is too narrow. This is an especially noteworthy and troublesome risk in consideration of the presence and persistence of organized economic crime, whether transnational or local.
Sound analysis cannot abide materially inaccurate and incomplete data and evidence.
Nonetheless, a panel of experts concluded that notwithstanding the disparate local and regional characteristics of organized crime centers and nodes, certain findings are likely persuasively supported:
1. There is not likely a significant specialized attribute to traditional organized crime. It operates like a conglomerate with multiple product and service lines (e.g., gambling, prostitution, retailing drugs).
2. There is likely a significant specialized attribute to emerging (transnational) organized crime. It operates within limited product and service lines (e.g., trafficking sex workers, manufacture and wholesale distribution of drugs, trafficking in undocumented workers).
3. There is likely significant overlap between traditional and transnational organized crime with respect to transportation services (i.e., logistics) (Finckenauer and Chin 2004, 25–26).
The picture created by snowballing through scholars’ and practitioners’ analyses is that of a complexity of organized criminal activities, sometimes specialized and opportunistic, sometimes generalized and semi-permanent, that is difficult to apprehend using the taxonomy of traditional, emerging, and transnational. The markets are black and gray; the underlying conduct is rarely transparent but for the occasional investigation and conviction whereby the defendants’ and witnesses’ testimonies need to be carefully and skeptically inquired of due to the attendant circumstances, including state actor careerism and bad actor exchanges of evidence favorable to the state for leniency.
The depiction of organized white-collar crime (e.g., financial institution “mis-selling”) as something separate and apart from organized economic crime, whether resulting in formal charges or not, goes beyond traditionally conceived ideas and measures of organized economic crime. Perhaps, with the recent law enforcement agency focus on transnational criminal activities will arise a more enlightened and logically consistent approach that interprets organized crime as corruption of markets (cf. antitrust law) and not merely a collective of desperate individuals of shared ethnicity. The problem goes way beyond the Russian mob.
While organized crime seems a market-based problem (i.e., the informal creation of alternative venues for goods and services, licit and illicit), this does not necessary imply that the proper unit of analysis for organized crime is entity- or enterprise-based. It is the organic creation, expansion, contraction, and change in shape of the network or web that comprises an indivisible context (e.g., field embedding the conduct), superstructure (e.g., distributed decision making), and infrastructure (e.g., information and communications technology) for organized criminal activities.
Within the data presently, the biases are systematic. They are not easily remediable, and they are not reliably quantifiable. Inaccuracy and incompleteness may need to be surmounted with other analytical methods that take conventional narrative with the proverbial grain of salt. This is not to deny the historical existence of the Gambino crime family but to properly weigh it in revised context (i.e., an incident to a lightly regulated political economy). Alternatively, one may accept and tolerate conventional narratives, overblown threats, and ignored social harms. Life as an ostrich (is for the birds!).
These arguments are not intended to prove that there is an equality of return on investment for all organized criminals. However, there is no big man. The most useful and poignant question to be asked under this line of inquiry is how do organized crime groups operate symbiotically with presumed legitimate commercial enterprises (e.g., answered in part by reference to the facilitators)? How do illicit sources of income and wealth contribute to the riches of the richest? Much opacity here, with the abiding presumption of legitimacy attaching to the wealthiest, notwithstanding the absence of any forensic audit having been conducted against the assets and income streams of these well-positioned individuals. Presumably, they are extraordinarily wealthy because of their smarts …