Epistemology and Sources of Knowledge
Organized crime is to a significant extent whatever the law-makers declare; its scale is measured by what the criminal investigators and public prosecutors pursue. However, while the rule of law determines that which is categorized an organized criminal activity or an organized crime group, the law is not the only relevant factor. There must be predicate or on-the-ground conduct (i.e., evidence of facts of operation in the case of criminal activities and persistence in time in the case of organized crime groups or enterprises). Not any coalescing of individuals or the plans of any rogue individual mature into organized crime groups and acts. Crucial information about how to succeed must exist and be shared among key individuals (e.g., how to avoid detection of the logistics of the criminal pathway, how to create safe physical venues within which to plan and regroup, how to secure advance warning of the law enforcement authorities’ counter-actions and strategies to arrest the crime and its actors) (Dittmar 2020). This information is essential to dominate a region, if not merely to become effective in the criminal operation.
Thus, the distinction between covert and overt criminal conduct needs reflection. A period of time after planning and eliciting cooperation among key actors must elapse before overtly exercising criminal operations. This below the tip-of-the-iceberg underworld activity may ultimately determine which organized criminal groups become notorious and effective and which fail to get off the ground or experience its members getting arrested prematurely (at least from the perspective of the criminal actors). To a significant extent, taking resources from the upperworld and redefining the character of these criminal proceeds is the transactional circuit.
Criminal activities may be raised in profile as comprising threats to the public weal and national security. Not all of these elevations in profile and threat assessments are valid and reliable (Lavorgna and Sergi 2016, 182). As public funds and society’s attention are taken and pushed from one existential threat to another (e.g., formerly, the five mafia crime families based in New York City; presently, transnational cybercrimes emanating from loosely affiliated individuals in dispersed geographies), the opportunity for fame and fortune exists for aggressive and self-promoting public prosecutors and criminal investigators—with the fame owing to the power of one’s public position and the fortune following dividend like in the private sector.
In brief and truth, little is known about organized crime groups apart from what authorities and scholars declare. The public at large can hardly correct for systematic biases influencing the work product. Peer review may cling too tightly to what was denoted brilliant years, if not decades, before, without the exercise of critical thinking applied to the current state of reliable evidence. The epistemology of organized crime and its groupings, local, regional, and transnational, is fraught with quantitative and qualitative errors and biases in reasoning. Studies are ordinarily not replicable, having been created under specific and limited geographic conditions of the past. Frankly, work products that articulate properly the limitations of what passes for knowledge would not likely result in promotions at law enforcement agencies or tenure in higher education. Humility has little influence there, and the modest succumb to the immodest, with truth a casualty of groupthink and tenure-track.
Information risk is inherently high. Predictive objective probabilities are compromised by special circumstances attendant to the variety of geographies, occupations, and commitments and integrity of law enforcement officials. For example, in a kakistocracy, not only would the rules of law not be applied to politically influential persons (cf. crony capitalism) but the rules of law themselves would be redefined to make the corrupt lawful (e.g., campaign contributions without quid pro quos that are not deemed bribes, and independent expenditures not formally coordinated by political campaigns that are not deemed corruptive) (National Conference of State Legislatures 2017). Conduct formerly prosecuted in the United States as honest services fraud was reduced in scope to apply only to schemes of kickbacks and bribes in violation of a fiduciary duty because honesty in fact was deemed unconstitutionally vague (Foster 2019, 2). That the highest court in the country could not define honesty may, assuming the risk of oversimplification, sum up the problem as no other brief statement can.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
—(Carroll 1872)
Corporations are persons; money represents speech; independent expenditures indirectly favoring a political candidate are due influence. Knowing about organized crime groups, including economic and transnational groupings, requires seeing the ordinary and comprehensible in the extraordinary and opaque: there is nothing done within the range of activities of organized crime groups that does not have its roots in common commercial transactions. Odd actions (e.g., the so-called pledge of omerta) are tangential conduct. That which comprises the essential substance of organized crime groups may be analogously found in social and country clubs worldwide; that which creates bonds among participants in an organized crime group is similar to that which holds together a police squad or prosecutors’ unit: we are greater than any one of us; to accomplish our objectives is to empower each of us. There’s a certain level of “rules be damned” potentiality in nearly everyone.
The political economy is influenced by its leadership class, which may direct with disproportionate power the formation and interpretation of the rule of law. Moreover, that which is known about organized crime groups, corruption, fraud, dishonesty, and official acts is to a significant extent that which has obtained a high priority within public policy discussions as determined by the leadership class without sufficient countervailing power to rebut or modify the controlling narrative. This, of course, is not to justify criminal activities such as murder and extortion, organized or not; it also is not intended as a valid excuse to ignore official corruption or wrongfully elevate threats beyond the actual gravity and frequency of social harms posed by the threat.
In practice, it may be the corrupting of public officials by organized criminals that may contribute most to a global and burgeoning criminal enterprise (Johnson 2020b). This may not be a popular narrative to discuss in the corridors of power within the legitimate political economy. How products, including investment vehicles, and how services, including gambling, offered through legitimate pathways, locally and lawfully, may blend without clear demarcation and identifiers into the illegitimate globalized network comprised of parasitical individuals. Politicians, bureaucrats, commercial entities, including financial institutions and professional service providers, are among the types of actors within the globally linked criminalized networks that extract financial resources along the supply chain. The key term is “networks” as plurality and multiplicity characterize the web. This is worse than complex; it is chaotic.
In theory, what is known with high levels of certainty (forever subject to adjustment) is that which survives rigorous, scientific, and peer-reviewed testing. In practice, what is known is that which is released as official crime statistics. If it’s not measured, it may not exist officially. The government has a monopoly on public prosecution and criminal investigation, with its results occasionally challenged in courts of law (assuming adequacy of financial resources on the part of the defendant) but mostly subjected to plea bargaining through deep-pocketed public prosecutors supported by institutions.
Moreover, scholarly approaches will invoke the expertises of psychology, sociology, and criminology, if not others also, to explain the origins, development, persistence, and redevelopment of organized crime groups. Undoubtedly, each of these expertises is helpful in its own way. However, the designation of organized criminal enterprise or gang is the result of actions and decisions of those entrusted with the design and implementation of the rule of law. There is certainly nothing sinful or morally suspect about organizing, and there is no shame in striving to obtain financial resources and a measurable influence in the affairs of the political economy. It is how these dedicated actions are defined and interpreted by society that create the appellation of organized crime group.
Frankly, the public at large abides without a sense of proportionality as the discourse is dominated officially. While one is free to discard or challenge the prevailing ideology, one is not at liberty to avoid the costs (e.g., status, publication history) from excluding oneself from the reference narratives composing the status quo.
Not only are the processes inherent in contemplating and furthering illicit objectives through unlawful means relevant to knowing about organized crime, but the processes determining what is prohibited (e.g., once, booze in the United States) and what is not (e.g., political campaign contributions and lobbying in the United States) are also material to ascertain context and proportion. Generally, what we know about organized crime groups is what we are told about organized crime groups through education, training, and interpretation of formal (usually, law enforcement) experience. One seeks and obtains the prevailing general consensus about organized crime groups through these mechanisms. One’s knowledge is overwhelmingly indirect, that is, organized crime groups are not empirically observable like the apparent rising of the sun in the morning. It is pieced together in reliance on self-serving cooperative witnesses, deal-seeking informants, public disseminations of criminal trials, and lofty and alarming pronouncements of the organs of the media and government, including legislators, executives, and judges, among other sources, who may be motivated largely by the prospect of increases to their budgets.
Both the validity and reliability of the evidence and data used to create and publish the theories and concepts implicated in ordinary discussions, Hollywood entertainment (e.g., The Sopranos, Goodfellas, The Godfather), and law-makers’ punishment regimes (e.g., the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, Title 18 U.S. Code Chapter 96) need reexamination. The effects from puffery, mythology, and rumor infect these discussions and analyses with unquantifiable but likely material error. The biases are systematic. Whether the reference narratives fill in the gaps resulting from primarily indirect knowledge or wildly supplement this domain of knowledge with unreal specters of evil geniuses and well-oiled nefarious organizational regimes is hard to discern, sometimes.
For example, the use of leniency programs (e.g., formal inducements such as lessening of punishment granted to accomplices that testify against other organized crime members) has been suggested to exert positive effects on prosecution and deterrence of organized crime figures in Italy (Acconcia, Immordino, Piccolo, and Rey 2014, 1137–40). Understandably, the positive effect on prosecutions would be an expected result from the introduction of accomplice and witness testimonies; however, the idea that the narrative becomes more valid and reliable from extension of prosecutorial favor does not seem clearly persuasive any more than the use of bribes and kickbacks assures the selection of the most responsible lowest bidder on a public procurement contract. The bias introduced by incentive systems, especially leniency programs under which prolonged periods of incarceration are at stake, is not readily overcome.
Of course, none of this is to aver that the five families in New York City did not exist and thrive for decades; indeed, they had international personal and professional associations to facilitate organized criminal activities, especially in Italy. However, what seems underemphasized is that these were five purportedly distinct criminal operations led by different bosses centered in one metropolitan area. Even in such a limited geography, there was space for many to make extralegally outsized profits and gains and exert significant influence in the legal political economy. Customer allocation (cf. antitrust law) in an expanding local economy was as much responsible for the persistence of these informally disparate criminal groups as any top-down influence of the big man syndrome. This is important because organized crime persists where the conditions are right and the men are willing—much more so than persistence due to the powers of great but evil men.
The five organized crime groups comprised a cartel that co-existed for much of the period—a fact suggesting that even illicit power in the heyday of the New York City mob era could be shared among several, casting doubt on the idea that any one of these families, bosses, underbosses, and corrupt associations in the political economy had the hegemonic capacities inherent in inflated accounts of five-family mafia infiltration and influence. These inflated accounts were substantially developed, supported, and disseminated widely through mass media, trade journals, and scholarly publications largely due to the direct and indirect efforts of public prosecutors prone to self-promotion, advancement and diversification of professional career(s), and plain unreflective errors in reasoning (e.g., lack of proportionality in analysis and synthesis of underlying data).
Moreover, the hyperbolic accounts of the dominant opinion-makers fed into other works of art such as film and television. Law and order was (and likely is) the overarching goal for the proper state of society—a state ostensibly and existentially threatened by larger than life figures created not only by racketeering investigators, public prosecutors, and federal legislators, but by commercial studios propagandizing and selling the boss and crew as viable threat to the peaceful state. Tougher laws brought more power, including the bully pulpit to play the man in the white hat— veritable savior of society from the ever encroaching yet covert and sinister influence of the (predominantly) men in black hats. One does not achieve social and elite status by crushing a bug, however, giant killing may do the trick.
The incentives of the sources of data and evidence (e.g., informants seeking sweetheart deals with the government), as well as the incentives of the racketeering investigators and film studios, compound the potential bias and error. Facts on the ground may be clear (e.g., a dead body washing up from the East River in New York City), but the background and context woven therefrom is invariably sewn and dyed to suit the storyteller. Importantly, what we think we know is not only derived from sources outside of our personal knowledge (i.e., assuming we are not global gangsters) but contingent upon the competency and integrity of experts with clear and underweighted personal and professional agendas leveraging an inadequacy of reliable data and evidence.
Some researchers have advised that multiple triangulations with respect to research may substitute as an alternative for data and evidence validity and reliability obtained from scientific methodologies such as regression analyses founded on competent and sufficient data. Thus, knowledge is the result of sifting through a multiplicity of theories, observations, sources of data, and methodologies (Arsovska 2008, 46). Of course, such an approach is vulnerable to biases in subjectivity notwithstanding snowballing across a diversity of expert panels: as reasonable individuals may differ in their conclusions and so may experts, especially in the social sciences where replication of studies may be fairly criticized. Sometimes, data and evidence do not drive public policy, but public policy and preferences of influential persons (e.g., economic elite, organized trade groups) may corral the production and distribution of generally accepted theories and official positions, hardening these into a false consciousness of knowledge where it really represents only expertized belief—policy directing and controlling the data.
To date, knowledge (cf. myth, false belief) about organized crime is primarily ideologically based and maintained almost exclusively by law enforcement efforts and findings. Discussion and analysis about root causes and empirical evidence of the true risk factors contributing to its development are scarce. The approach itself may be questioned: instead of accepting without sufficient competent evidence panel opinions drawn from expert law enforcement officials, the researchers should refocus with a risk assessment perspective that incorporates private and public sector opportunities appealing to organized crime strengths and networks (Albanese 2009, 417). Ideology suppresses the discovery of knowledge of causes and effects that would empower analysts to answer the basic question—how do we know about organized crime? Perhaps, too much is omitted, and too much is falsely explained.
A focus on risks presented by the market and public institutions would demonstrate the banality of organized crime in many respects. It is a composite of rent extraction in high profitability opportunity structures (e.g., loan-sharking), a commission merchant in black markets (e.g., narcotics, human trafficking), and an enterprise able and willing, where necessary or desirable, to engage in violent activities, including making extortionate threats. Research directed with this focus would leave behind obsolete theories of organized crime as the other and reveal its commonality (but for the violence) with much of what transpires as legitimate small-to-medium-sized businesses.
Indeed, a strong argument may be developed suggesting strongly that organized crime seeks its own destruction through morphing into legitimate commerce (e.g., bootleggers in the prohibition era of the United States), Organized crime is less a way of life than a means of survival for many and thriving for a few. It is contingent of profitability, gain, and influence structures in the political economy. To know organized crime is to know how much legitimate commerce shares its attributes.
Knowledge about organized crime risk is comprised of empirical data about the structure and operations of groups of individuals, whether tightly or loosely associated, committing serious criminal offenses. Generally, undercover policing (including the use of cooperating witnesses and informants) and electronic surveillance (e.g., wiretaps, bugs) are the key law enforcement variables deployed to produce knowledge about organized crime (Jacobs and Gouldin 1999, 54).
Therefore, the public sector, including public prosecutors, law enforcement agencies, and independent regulatory agencies, is the primary source for such knowledge. Implicitly, this process of creating knowledge is influenced by careerism of public servants (e.g., building resumes); explicitly, this process is also shaped by factors outside of this source such as an independent and well-motivated media, pressures from non governmental organizations and civil society organizations, the civil law bar through its own private litigation (e.g., Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations civil actions originating in the United States), and grassroots’ expressions of policy preferences.
Thus, organized crime risk is created dynamically and subject to adjustment as conditions in the political economy change, including the reordering of priorities (cf. diversion of law enforcement and intelligence agencies’ resources to counter terrorism risk after 9/11 in the United States). Importantly, information about organized crime is subject to its own temporal and political biases and risks.
The public sector contributes to knowledge about organized crime (e.g., through effective and true criminal investigations and public prosecutions) and to false mythologies about organized crime (i.e., exaggerations about criminal groups’ structure and activities to buttress professional and political careers). Additionally, the public sector may be a part of organized crime (Rowe, Akman, Smith, and Tomison 2013, 5). Collectively, this information risk demands calibration of both official and popular conceptions and theories about organized crime’s scope and influence and actual conduct.
The public sector is the organ and source of the extant knowledge and mythology about organized crime groups. Through public sector action, the threat of organized crime is communicated and assessed, however inaccurately.
Additionally, analysts and scholars are found in non governmental and private sector nonprofit entities and institutions, which perform many legitimate roles in society, including the education of the public at large about crime and society. Key for-profit private sector entities and institutions include mass and specialized media. Of course, the attorneys’ bars such as the American Bar Association and state and local bar associations also provide education about crime and misconduct risks.
All of these institutions collectively provide a useful service to the public at large, though the availability of competing, if not deflating, reference narratives is not common. That is, the uninformed audience hears “one side of the story.” Moreover, the predominant narrative results in publication bias with authors that pretty much follow the status quo position more likely to have their voices recognized.