Organized Crime, a term that has been used selectively in the twentieth century to identify particular criminal coalitions that were often ethnically based and which others wished to define as especially dangerous illegal conspiracies. Generally speaking, the criminal groups identified as “organized crime” have possessed neither the hierarchical structure nor the power ascribed to them. But the label has, nevertheless, strongly influenced both popular attitudes toward the groups involved and the policies of law enforcement. The history of “organized crime,” therefore, must include both a history of criminal structure itself and of the use of the term.

From the 1860s until well into the twentieth century, certain types of gambling became increasingly coordinated in some urban neighborhoods. During and after the Civil War, policy gambling—a kind of illegal lottery—enjoyed wide popularity. Fans could bet on the numbers in bars, barber shops, newspaper kiosks, and other neighborhood outlets. At the same time, policy entrepreneurs backed the local retailers, so that the retailer retained a fixed percent of each bet while the backer(s) assumed the risk when betters won. By the 1880s, as horse racing became a national, professional sport, fans wished for an opportunity to bet off‐track as well as at the track. Off‐track bookmaking was coordinated much like policy, with bets taken in local retail outlets while bookmakers backed the local sellers. As a result, especially by the 1890s, policy and off‐track bookmaking syndicates had the support of betters as well as local businesses and politicians. The activities of these important criminal entrepreneurs were not yet labelled “organized crime,” however.

During the Progressive‐Era antiprostitution crusade, many reformers argued that the redlight districts in American cities could not exist without the systematic recruitment of thousands of young girls each year. They claimed that shadowy, organized networks of “white slavers”—often with an Eastern European Jewish background—lured innocent girls from American small towns, port cities, and foreign countries to become slaves in the cities' bordellos. Again, the specific term “organized crime” was not used, though the concept, with its exaggerations, was clearly present.

The term itself was first used in the 1920s, perhaps in John Landesco's Organized Crime in Chicago (1929). In the period of Prohibition, the press and movies, in their treatment of the bootleggers, often ascribed to the largely decentralized and independent bootleggers a mythical centralized control and power. Chicago, where the violence of bootlegging wars was capped by the famous 1929 St. Valentine's Day massacre and where Al Capone revelled in media attention, was the focus of worldwide attention. Capone was one of four partners who entered into partnerships with others to establish numerous relatively small bootlegging, gambling, and vice enterprises. Because he lived chiefly at his Miami home after 1927 and spent much of 1929 in a Philadelphia jail, Capone was perhaps the least important of the four partners. The media, nevertheless, defined him as the lord of Chicago bootlegging and a controlling figure in local politics. Such films as Little Caesar with Edward G. Robinson (1932) and Paul Muni's Scarface (1932) provided vivid images of the gangsters' power and ruthlessness and made Capone a symbol of “organized crime.”

The most important twentieth century development involving the split between the reality of criminal structure and the mythical uses of the term “organized crime” was the creation of the idea that “the mafia” coordinated crime in the United States. An important early step came in 1950 to 1951 when the U.S. Senate's Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime (popularly known as the Kefauver Committee after its chair, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee) held widely‐watched televised hearings in a number of cities and concluded officially that a secret society called “the mafia,” operated across the United States to oversee crime. In 1963–1964, Joseph Valachi, a long‐time member of a New York City Italian‐American crime family, testified before Congress and for the first time provided a public description of the structure of such groups. He was motivated to do so because, while in prison for drug dealing, he had killed a fellow prisoner and then sought leniency by agreeing to talk. More important, perhaps, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice published a report on Organized Crime (1967), based chiefly upon information gained from telephone wiretaps. The report claimed that 24 “Cosa Nostra” cartels in some 20 cities, with membership restricted to Italian Americans, controlled criminal activities in their own cities and cooperated across city boundaries in gambling, loansharking, and drugs. Building on such developments, Hollywood contributed vivid and exaggerated images of “the mafia” in movies like The Godfather (1972) and Prizzi's Honor (1985).

In the process of identifying a “mafia” menace, newspaper reporters and criminologists created a history of the American “mafia” that mixed myth with fact. During Prohibition, successful bootleggers, although often young men from poor neighborhoods, learned to think in terms of national and even international markets as the importers and manufacturers made deals with processors and wholesalers so that booze could be moved from its multiple sources to its millions of consumers. During and after Prohibition many bootleggers and their business associates invested in gambling casinos and other gambling enterprises; with a broadened understanding of markets, they sometimes jointly invested in tourist centers like Florida, New Orleans, or Hot Springs. Concurrently, some Italian‐American entrepreneurs, beginning probably in the late 1920s and continuing into the 1930s and 1940s, formed local membership organizations. Like the Masons, Elks, and other fraternal orders, the organizations had formal initiation rituals for members and often acted like secret societies; like Chambers of Commerce or Rotary Clubs, they were a framework within which members, while generally remaining independent in their economic pursuits, could develop contacts, learn about business opportunities, and sometimes settle disputes under circumstances in which the legal system was not available to them.

After World War II, then, investigators discovered both the joint partnerships of independent entrepreneurs and the Italian‐American “families” (which they labelled “the mafia”). They then constructed a history based upon the assumption that the generally independent businessmen in the families were instead controlled by and worked for the profit of the “mafia” and that non‐Italian entrepreneurs were subservient to the Italians. In this history, the “mafia” rose to a central place in coordinating crime nationally through the power of Italian‐American bootleggers. On the one hand, this ignores the fact that entrepreneurs of Eastern‐European Jewish background dominated bootlegging. (Some 50 percent of leading bootleggers were Jewish, 25 percent were Italian‐American.) On the other hand, this ignores that many leading bootleggers (like Capone) were not members of “families” and that many of those who formed the families were not bootleggers. In the history, Lucky Luciano, after a series of assassinations in New York City, consolidated “mafia” control nationally. While Luciano certainly emerged, briefly, as a highly respected “don” in New York, it is an exaggeration to ascribe national power to him. After World War II, according to the dominant history, the “mafia” moved into and controlled the casinos in Nevada. No doubt many entrepreneurs who had operated illegal casinos in the 1930s and 1940s were leaders in the expansion of legal gambling in Las Vegas. But this history overlooks the predominance of Jewish entrepreneurs in the rise of Las Vegas as a national entertainment center; equally important, it overlooks that they were largely independent, acting in their own interests and not seeking profit for a “mafia.”

As the fight against the “mafia” menace became a central focus of law enforcement, the Federal government established Organized Crime Task Forces in many cities where Italian‐Americans were active in criminal activities. States and cities followed suit. Naturally, the focus of federal, state, and local prosecutions almost solely on Italian‐Americans, combined with the media attention, necessarily publicized the exaggerated notions of the power of “the mafia” while obscuring the complexity and diverse roots of criminal activities and generally ignoring similar activities by persons not of Italian‐American background.

In the 1970s, with the launching of the “war on drugs,” drug trafficking gradually supplanted “the mafia” as the focus of law enforcement and media attention. It became clear that Italian‐Americans could not bear the blame for the multiple drug trafficking activities that provided LSD, marijuana, cocaine, and heroin to a diversity of users. As a result, the term “organized crime” was now transferred to drug “cartels,” often centered in other countries like Mexico, Jamaica, or Colombia. This had the effect of again oversimplifying a complex problem while also externalizing America's drug problem by blaming it on powerful foreign organizations. At the end of the twentieth century, with the expansion of international banking and trade and the management of the international economy by computers, the term “organized crime” was expanded to encompass a variety of criminal activities embedded in the new economy, such as money laundering and investment fraud.

The term “organized crime,” introduced in the 1920s, has been applied to a diversity of criminal markets and ethnic groups. While criminal entrepreneurs often enter into joint ventures or use violence as part of market competition, the effect of the term has been to oversimplify the structure of complex and loosely coordinated activities, to suggest that a danger originates abroad, and generally to exaggerate the centralized power and control of those engaged in illegal pursuits.
See also Federal Bureau of Investigation; Hoover, J. Edgar; Police; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Temperance and Prohibition.

Bibliography

Mark H. Haller , The Changing Structure of American Gambling in the Twentieth Century, Journal of Social Issues 35, no. 3 (1979), 87–114.
Stephen Fox , Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth‐Century America, 1989.
Mark H. Haller , Policy Gambling, Entertainment, and the Emergence of Black Politics: Chicago from 1900 to 1940, Journal of Social History 24 (Summer 1991), 719–39.
David E. Ruth , Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918–1934, 1996.
Terry M. Parssinen and and Kathryn Meyer , Web of Smoke, 1999.

Mark H. Haller

ORGANIZED CRIME

Criminal activity carried out by an organized enterprise.

Modern organized crime is generally understood to have begun in Italy in the late nineteenth century. The secretive Sicilian group La Cosa Nostra, along with other Sicilian mafia, were more powerful than the Italian government in the early twentieth century. In 1924 Benito Mussolini's fascist government rose to power, and Mussolini orchestrated a crackdown on the Italian mafia. Those mafiosi who were not jailed or killed were forced to flee the country. Many came to the United States, where they flourished in the art of bootlegging and other criminal activity. Since the 1920s organized crime has crossed ethnic lines and is associated with no particular ethnic group.

Congress and many states maintain laws that severely punish crime committed by criminal enterprises. On the federal level, Congress passed the Organized Crime Control Act in 1970. The declared purpose of the act is to eradicate organized crime by expanding evidence-gathering techniques for law enforcement, specifying more acts as being crimes, authorizing enhanced penalties, and providing for the forfeiture of property owned by criminal enterprises.

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) (18 U.S.C.A. § 1961 et seq.) is the centerpiece of the Organized Crime Control Act. RICO is a group of statutes that define and set punishments for organized crime. The act's provisions apply to any enterprise that engages in racketeering activity. Racketeering is the act of engaging in a pattern of criminal offenses. The list of offenses that constitute racketeering when committed more than once by an enterprise is lengthy. It includes extortion, fraud, money laundering, federal drug offenses, murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, dealing in obscene matter, counterfeiting, embezzlement, obstruction of justice, obstruction of law enforcement, tampering with witnesses, filing of a false statement to obtain a passport, passport forgery and false use or misuse of a passport, peonage, slavery, unlawful receipt of welfare funds, interstate transport of stolen property, sexual exploitation of children, trafficking in counterfeit labels for audio and visual works, criminal infringement of copyrights, trafficking in contraband cigarettes, white slavery, violation of payment and loan restrictions to labor unions, and harboring, aiding, assisting, or transporting illegal aliens. RICO also includes forfeiture provisions that allow the government to take the property of parties found guilty of violations of the act.

Modern organized criminal enterprises make money by specializing in a variety of crimes, including extortion, blackmail, gambling, loan-sharking, political corruption, and the manufacture and sale of illicit narcotics. Extortion, a time-tested endeavor of organized crime, is the acquisition of property through the use of threats or force. For instance, a criminal enterprise located in a certain neighborhood of a city may visit shopkeepers and demand a specific amount of so-called protection money. If a shopkeeper does not pay the money, the criminal organization may strike at him, his property, or his family.

Blackmail is similar to extortion. It is committed when a person obtains money or value by accusing the victim of a crime, threatening the victim with harm or destruction of the victim's property, or threatening to reveal disgraceful facts about the victim.

Gambling and loan-sharking are other traditional activities of organized criminal enterprises. Where gambling is illegal, some organized crime groups act as the locus for gambling activity. In states where some gambling is legal and some gambling is illegal, organized crime groups offer illegal gaming. Loan-sharking is the provision of loans at illegally high interest rates accompanied by the illegal use of force to collect on past due payments. In organized crime circles, such loans usually are made to persons who cannot obtain credit at legitimate financial institutions and who can serve the criminal enterprise in some way in the event they are unable to repay the loan. Loan-sharking provides organized criminal enterprises with money and helps enlarge the enterprise by bringing into the fold persons who owe a debt to the enterprise.

Political corruption has diminished as a focus of organized crime. In the first half of the twentieth century, some organized crime groups blackmailed or paid money to politicians in return for favorable legislation and favorable treatment from city hall. This sort of activity has decreased over the years as public scrutiny of political activity has increased.

The most recent major venture in organized crime is the manufacture and sale of illicit narcotics. This practice was prefigured in the activities of organized crime from 1919 to 1933. During this period alcohol was illegal under the eighteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and the manufacture and sale of liquor was a favorite activity of organized crime groups. The manufacture and sale of illegal liquors, or bootlegging, was extremely profitable, and it gave organized crime a foothold in American life. Many organized criminal enterprises subsequently imitated bootlegging by selling other illegal drugs.

Violence often accompanies organized crime. Many crime syndicates use murder, torture, assault, and terrorism to keep themselves powerful and profitable. The constant threat of violence keeps victims and witnesses silent. Without them, prosecutors find it difficult to press charges against organized criminals.

The modern notion of organized crime in the United States has expanded beyond the prototypical paradigm of family operations. Organized crime in the early 2000s refers to any group of persons in a continuing operation of criminal activity, including street gangs. To combat the violence and other illegal activity of street gangs, federal and state legislatures have passed laws pertaining specifically to street gangs. Many states provide extra punishment for persons in street gangs who are convicted of certain crimes.

On the federal level, a street gang is defined as an ongoing group, club, organization, or association of five or more persons formed for the purpose of committing a violent crime or drug offense, with members who have engaged in a continuing series of violent crimes or drug law violations that affect interstate or foreign commerce (18 U.S.C.A. § 521). Any person in a street gang convicted for committing or conspiring to commit a violent federal crime or certain federal drug offenses receives an extra ten years in prison beyond the prison sentence for the actual crime.

Despite stringent punishments, organized crime is difficult to eradicate. It tends to occur in large cities where anonymity is relatively easy to maintain. The size and hereditary makeup of many enterprises make them capable of surviving the arrest and imprisonment of numerous members. Many organized crime participants are careful, efficient, and professional criminals, making them difficult to apprehend.

Another reason organized crime is so durable is that the participants are extremely dedicated. The group looks after its own and there are serious consequences of betrayal. Members of organized crime groups often take an oath of allegiance. For example, members of La Cosa Nostra stated, "I enter alive into this organization and leave it dead."

further readings

Abadinsky, Howard. 2003. Organized Crime. 7th ed. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Bonanno, Bill. 2000. Bound by Honor: A Mafioso's Story. New York: St. Martin's.

Goodwin, Brian. 2002. "Civil Versus Criminal RICO and the 'Eradication' of La Cosa Nostra." New England Journal on Criminal & Civil Confinement 28 (summer).

Jankiewicz, Sara. 1995."Comment: Glasnost and the Growth of Global Organized Crime." Houston Journal of International Law 18 (fall).

Lyman, Michael D., and Gary W. Potter. 2004. Organized Crime. 3d ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall.

cross-references

Capone, Alphonse; Drugs and Narcotics; Eighteenth Amendment.

CRIME, ORGANIZED

CRIME, ORGANIZED. Organized crime is a term that has been used selectively in the twentieth century to identify particular criminal coalitions, often ethnically based, that others wished to define as dangerous criminal conspiracies. The criminals identified to be part of "organized crime" have seldom possessed the hierarchical structure or the power ascribed to them. Yet, labeling them as "organized crime" often influenced popular attitudes and the policies of law enforcement. A history of organized crime, then, includes both a history of criminal structures and of the selective use of the term.

From the 1860s into the twentieth century, certain types of gambling received increased coordination in many cities. During and after the Civil War, policy gambling—a type of illegal lottery—became widely popular. Fans could bet on the numbers in bars, barber shops, newspaper kiosks, and similar retail outlets. Concurrently, entrepreneurs backed the local retailers, so that the retailer retained a fixed percent of each bet while the backer(s) paid off when bettors won. By the 1880s, as betting on horse racing also became popular, off-track bookmaking was coordinated much like policy, with bets placed in local bars and other hangouts for men, while bookmakers backed the local sellers. As a result, especially by the 1890s, policy and bookmaking syndicates enjoyed the support of bettors, local businessmen, and the politicians who sought their votes.

Outside the South, the Irish were heavily involved in the policy and bookmaking syndicates. Among the earliest and most famous was John Morrissey. After winning a disputed boxing match in September 1853, many recognized him as the American champion until October 1857, when after a successful title defense, he retired. He used his fame to open gambling houses in New York City and during the Civil War put together a major syndicate to back the rising policy gambling in the city. In Saratoga Springs, New York, during the summer racing season, he also operated perhaps the finest casino in the world and found time to serve two terms in the state legislature and two terms in the U.S. Congress. However, criminal entrepreneurs like Morrissey emerged too early to be labeled organized crime.

The term "organized crime" was first used in the 1920s, perhaps from John Landesco's Organized Crime in Chicago, a book-length section of the Illinois Crime Survey, published by the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice (1929). But the concept of powerful bootlegging gangs was popularized by newspaper stories and by movies about Al Capone (and other bootleggers). They were key factors in ascribing to the often decentralized and independent bootleggers a mythical power. In the same decade, activities such as labor and business racketeering were also called "organized crime," capturing the fears of elite businessmen and lawyers that the urban underworld was becoming organized bureaucratically like legitimate businesses. A fear that some criminal activities were now more dangerous because more organized continued as an undercurrent among some criminal justice professionals and academics through the 1930s and 1940s.

From the 1950s into the 1970s, the danger from "organized crime" was reinforced by identifying it with a belief that an Italian American "mafia" exercised nationwide domination of crime. In 1950 and 1951, the idea received popular dissemination when the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime (popularly known as the Kefauver Committee after its chair, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee) held televised hearings, which were America's first big TV event. Listeners were fascinated as the Committee moved from city to city and allowed the public to hear various alleged crime kingpins respond to the grilling by the staff and members of the committee. Perhaps the high point was the testimony of Frank Costello. In eight days during March 1951, he refused to allow his face on camera, but the audience could hear his gravelly voice and watch his clasping hands as he responded defiantly, evasively, or honestly to the committee.

In 1967, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice published a report on organized crime, based chiefly upon FBI wiretaps. The report claimed that twenty-four cartels, consisting solely of Italian Americans, cooperated across the nation in the coordination of gambling, loansharking, and drugs. Combating this menace became a central focus of law enforcement. The U.S. Justice Department established Organized Crime Task Forces in many cities where Italian Americans were active in criminal activities. States and cities cooperated. The news media reported the investigations in detail, while novels and movies such as The Godfather (1972) provided the public with vivid and exaggerated images of the power of such men. The focus of federal, state, and local prosecutions on Italian Americans, combined with media attention, increased the idea of the power of such groups, while obscuring and ignoring the complexity and diverse roots of criminal activities.

In the 1970s, with the launching of the "war on drugs," drug trafficking gradually began to supplant the "mafia" as the focus for law enforcement and media attention. It became clear that a so-called mafia could not explain the extensive drug trafficking that provided marijuana, LSD, cocaine, and heroin to a diversity of users. The term "organized crime" was extended to foreign drug "cartels" or to powerful and profitable domestic drug organizations. Again, the effect was to simplify a complex system but also to externalize America's drug problem by suggesting that powerful foreign organizations were at fault. More recently, the expansion of international banking and trade, combined with the management of the international economy by computers, has expanded the term "organized crime" to encompass money laundering, banking and credit card fraud, and other criminal activities embedded in the new economy. After the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings by Middle Eastern hijackers on 11 September 2001, terrorism was added to other transnational crimes as part of international "organized crime."

The term "organized crime," introduced in the 1920s, has been applied to a diversity of criminal activities, generally ethnically based. The effect has often been to simplify an understanding of complex and loosely coordinated activities, to suggest that the activities constitute a foreign danger to the United States, and to exaggerate the power of those engaged in the activities labeled "organized crime."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fox, Stephen. Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Morrow, 1989.

Haller, Mark H. "Ethnic Crime: The Organized Underworld of Early Twentieth-Century Chicago." In Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait. Edited by Melvin G. Holli and Peter d'A. Jones. Chapter 19. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1984.

———. "Bootleggers as Businessmen: From City Slums to City Builders." In Law, Alcohol, and Order: Perspectives on National Prohibition. Chapter 9. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Lacey, Robert. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. New York: Century, 1991.

Reuter, Peter. Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984.

MarkHaller

See alsoBootlegging ; Drug Trafficking, Illegal ; Organized Crime Control Act ; Tweed Ring .

organized crime criminal activities organized and coordinated on a national scale, often with international connections. The American tradition of daring desperadoes like Jesse James and John Dillinger, has been superseded by the corporate criminal organization. Firmly rooted in the social structure, it is protected by corrupt politicians and law enforcement officers, and legal advice; it profits from such activities as gambling , prostitution , and the illicit use of narcotics.

Organized crime is not limited to Western countries. The Japanese have the very public and active Yakuza and Boryokudan. During the Cold War the Russian Mafia used its connections in the Communist party to establish a vast black market network, and in the power vacuum that followed the fall of Communism the brutal group became even wealthier, more influential, and more successful.

The Prohibition Era

The organized-crime syndicate in the United States is a product of the prohibition era of the early 20th cent. The efforts of federal officials to enforce the unpopular Volstead Act (see Volstead, Andrew Joseph ) of 1920 generated the growth of highly organized bootlegging rings with nationwide and international contacts. Although loose alliances were joined among such groups as the Al Capone mob of Chicago, the Detroit Purple gang, and the Owney Madden ring of New York City, gang wars and gangland killings were distinctive features of the 1920s. Powerful gangs corrupted local law-enforcement agencies, even gaining access to high-ranking judges and politicians, such as mayors Frank Hague in Jersey City, N.J., and James J. (Jimmy) Walker in New York City.

Ultimately public revulsion, furthered by the Wickersham Commission investigation of 1930 (see Wickersham, George Woodward ) as well as by many municipal exposés (such as that of Judge Samuel Seabury in New York City), led to a crackdown on political corruption. After the repeal (1933) of prohibition, surviving organized crime leaders turned to new avenues of profitable crime, such as labor racketeering, gambling, and narcotics traffic.

The Syndicate

The era of the 1920s had taught organized crime leaders the value of strong political connections and the disadvantages of internecine warfare, but it was not until the 1930s that Lucky Luciano (with Mafia connections) and Louis Lepke Buchalter created a tight interstate criminal organization called the Syndicate. It included many crime figures from all over the country in an invisible government, apportioning territorial boundaries, allocating the profits from crime, and punishing those who violated their decrees. The notorious Murder, Inc . enforced Syndicate decisions.

With the trial and the conviction of Luciano, the smashing of Murder, Inc., and the execution of Buchalter, organized crime in the United States appeared to be ended. Luciano was eventually released from prison and deported to Italy, allegedly for services rendered on the New York waterfront during World War II; there, he was reputedly connected with the international drug trade.

The Kefauver Investigation and the Knapp Commission

In 1950–51, the crime-investigating committee of Sen. Estes Kefauver revealed that organized crime, albeit under new leadership, was still operating. Perhaps a more alarming aspect brought to light by the committee was the aura of respectability achieved by top racketeers who, by removing themselves from direct contact with criminal activities and maintaining legitimate business fronts, had insulated themselves from criminal prosecution. The Kefauver investigation led to a flurry of law-enforcement activity, particularly attempts to deport foreign-born crime kings such as Luciano.

In Nov., 1957, a routine police check in remote Apalachin, N.Y., uncovered a convention of gangland leaders from all over the United States and abroad. The resulting rash of investigations revealed the power and extensive operations of organized crime. The inadequacy and inability of local law-enforcement agencies to cope with organized crime was underscored by the Knapp Commission, which uncovered relations between New York City police and organized crime. The President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1967) estimated that twice as much money was made by organized crime as by all other types of criminal activity combined.

Recent Years

Recent analyses of organized crime point out its similarities to multinational corporate structure: it too has made the transition to a service economy, diversifying and establishing an international commodities market. A 1988 U.S. report on the Cosa Nostra affirmed the bribing of public officials and labor unions, and periodic meetings of the 25 main families to settle disputes. In recent years, Hispanics, Chinese, and other groups have gained a foothold in organized crime through the sale and distribution of drugs in U.S. cities. The collapse of the Soviet Union also helped precipitate the growth of international crime, especially the worldwide trafficking of human beings for prostitution, indentured labor, domestic slavery, child labor, and other illegal practices. Meanwhile, in the last decades of the 20th cent. the traditional Mob increasingly abandoned such blue-collar crime as extortion and construction and trash-removal rackets while continuing its activities in gambling and loan-sharking and turning to such white-collar crime as health insurance fraud, sales of fake telephone cards, and stock swindles.

Bibliography

See G. Taylor, Organized Crime in America (1962); H. Messick, The Silent Syndicate (1966); D. Cressey, Theft of the Nation (1969); R. Salerno, The Crime Confederation (1969); H. Messick and B. Goldblatt, The Mobs and the Mafia (1972); F. Ianni, Black Mafia (1974); A. Block, Organizing Crime (1981); P. Maas, The Valachi Papers (1986); J. Mills, The Underground Empire (1986); A. Vaksberg, The Soviet Mafia (1991); G. Russo, The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America (2002); S. E. Scorza, compiler, Mafia: The Government's Secret File on Organized Crime (2007); M. Glenny, McMafia: A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld (2008); S. Lupo, History of the Mafia (2009).

ORGANIZED CRIME

The term Russian mafia is widely used, but Russian-speaking organized crime is not all Russian, nor is it organized in the same ways as the Italian mafia. Russian-speaking organized crime emerged in the former Soviet Union, and during the decade after the collapse it became a major force in transnational crime.

Because Russia's immense territorial mass spans Europe and Asia, it is easy for organized crime groups to have contacts both with European and Asian crime groups. Russia's crime groups have a truly international reach and operate in North and South America as well as in Africa. Thus they have been among the major beneficiaries of globalization. Russia's technologically advanced economy has given Russian organized crime a technological edge in a world dominated by high technology. Moreover, the collapse of the social control system and the state control apparatus have made it possible for major criminals to operate with impunity both at home and internationally.

During the 1990s, Russian law enforcement declared that the number of organized crime groups was escalating. Between 1990 and 1996, it rose from 785 to more than 8,000, and membership was variously estimated at from 100,000 to as high as three million. These identified crime groups were mostly small, amorphous, impermanent organizations that engaged in extortion, drug dealing, bank fraud, arms trafficking, and armed banditry. The most serious forms of organized crime were often committed by individuals who were not identified with specific crime groups but engaged in the large-scale organized theft of state resources through the privatization of valuable state assets to themselves. Hundreds of billions of Russian assets were sent abroad in the first post-Soviet decade; a significant share of this capital flight was money laundering connected with large-scale post-Soviet organized crime involving people who were not traditional underworld figures. In this respect, organized crime in Russia differs significantly from the Italian mafia or the Japanese Yakuza—it is an amalgam of former Communist Party and Komsomol officials, active and demobilized military personnel, law enforcement and security structures, participants in the Soviet second economy, and criminals of the traditional kind. Chechen and other ethnic crime groups are highly visible, but most organized crime involves a broad range of actors working together to promote their financial interests by using violence or threats of violence.

In most of the world, organized crime is primarily associated with the illicit sectors of the economy. Although post-Soviet organized crime groups have moved into the drug trade, especially since the fall of the Taliban, the vast wealth of Russian organized crime derives from its involvement in the legitimate economy, including important sectors like banking, real estate, transport, shipping, and heavy industry, especially aluminum production. Involvement in the legitimate economy does not mean that the crime groups have been legitimized, for they continue to operate with illegitimate tactics even in the legitimate economy. For example, organized criminals are known to intimidate minority shareholders of companies in which they own large blocks of shares and to use violence against business competitors.

Crime groups also engage in automobile, drug, and arms smuggling. The involvement of former military personnel has given particular significance to sales of military technology to foreign crime groups. Weapons obtained from Russian crime groups have been used in armed conflicts in many parts of the world, including Africa and the Balkans. Foreign crime groups, especially in Asia, see Russia as a new source of supply for weapons.

There is, in addition, a significant trade in stolen automobiles between Western Europe and the European parts of Russia. From Irkutsk west to Vladivostok, the cars on the road are predominantly Japanese, some of them stolen from their owners.

Tens of thousands of women have been trafficked abroad, often sold to foreign crime groups that in turn traffic them to more distant locales. Women are trafficked from all over Russia by small-scale criminal businesses and much larger entrepreneurs via an elaborate system of recruitment, transport facilitators, and protectors of the trafficking networks. Despite prevention campaigns, human trafficking is a significant revenue source for Russian organized crime.

Russia's vast natural resources are much exploited by crime groups. Many of the commodities handled by criminals are not traded in the legitimate economy. These include endangered species, timber not authorized for harvest, and radioactive minerals subject to international regulation.

Despite the government's repeated pledges to fight organized crime, the leaders of the criminal organizations and the government officials who facilitate their activities operate with almost total impunity. Pervasive corruption in the criminal justice system has impeded the prosecution of Russian organized criminals both domestically and internationally. Thus organized crime will continue to be a serious problem for the Russian state and the international community.

See also: mafia capitalism; privatization

bibliography

Handelman, Stephen. (1987). Comrade Criminal: Russia's New Mafiya. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.

Satter, David. (2003). Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Shelley, Louise. (1996). "Post-Soviet Organized Crime: A New Form of Authoritarianism." Transnational Organized Crime 2 (2/3):122–138.

Volkov, Vadim. (2002). Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002.

Williams, Phil, ed. (1997). Russian Organized Crime: The New Threat. Portland, OR: Frank Cass.

Louise Shelley

organized crime All profitable crime is socially organized, but this term is usually reserved for situations where a large number of people in a hierarchical structure are engaged in an on-going pattern of criminal activities. The most common activities are extortion and the provision of illegal goods and services, such as drink, drugs, gambling, money-lending, and prostitution. All of these involve continuous relations with the victims or clients, who have contact with the lower echelons of the organization. To be successful, therefore, organized or syndicated crime involves some degree of corruption or intimidation of the police or other agents of law-enforcement. It is often thought to be synonymous with a secret society, such as the Tongs of the Chinese diaspora, the Camorra of nineteenth-century Naples, the Mafia of Sicily, and Cosa Nostra in the United States. It seems more likely that if such societies exist at all, they do not actually run criminal activities, but rather act as fraternal organizations for some of the racketeers. The myth of the secret society helps the criminals by intimidating victims and helps the authorities because it justifies police ineffectiveness. It is often fuelled by racism, though criminal activities themselves are usually ethnically mixed. Organized crime is associated with violence and threats in the course of extortion, but also in the maintenance of control over subordinates, struggles for power within groups, and struggles for monopoly control between groups.

ORGANIZED CRIME

ORGANIZED CRIME. SeeCrime, Organized .

crime, organized See ORGANIZED CRIME.