Organized Crime

Some of the most recognizable names associated with U.S. organized crime include "Lucky" Luciano (1892–1962), Meyer Lansky (1902–1983), Al Capone (1899–1947), and "Bugsy" Siegel (1906–1947). Legendary American Mafia or Cosa Nostra crime families include the Colombos, Bonannos, Genoveses, Luccheses, and Gambinos. Famous gangs include the Hell's Angels, the Bloods, the Crips, the Green Light Gangs, the Gangster Disciples, and the Latin Kings. These notable crime bosses, crime families, and street gangs span a time period from the 1920s to the 2000s.

The legends and stories of real life mobsters and street gangs have often captivated our nation's imagination. The entertainment industry fed this fascination with the The Godfather (1972–90) movies and the Home Box Office (HBO) cable television series, The Sopranos. Both depict the extravagant mob lifestyle of fancy cars, clothes, and ritzy homes. The characters of Don Vito Corleone and Tony Soprano, although fictional, have become the public's perception of what real crime families are like.

By the 1990s a number of organized crime units operating within the United States had home bases far from American soil. Chinese organized crime groups called triads, Hong Kong triads, the Russian Mafia, the Japanese Yakuza, South American drug cartels (organized crime groups growing and selling narcotics), and the Mexican Mafia represent just some of the organized crime groups operating and cooperating with U.S. crime outfits. In 2002 the FBI reported U.S. organized crime activities brought in an annual income of between $50 and $90 billion dollars—more income than any major national industry. Around that time worldwide profits for organized crime were estimated to be approximately one trillion dollars a year.

Organized crime is any group that has an organized structure of bosses, advisors, and working members whose key goal is to obtain money and property through illegal activities. Organized crime groups use extortion (threats of violence) and force to obtain money or property from a person or group. For example, an organized crime group may extort business owners in a neighborhood by making them pay a monthly fee for protection. If an owner refuses, his business may be vandalized or destroyed. Organized crime activities can negatively impact a community, a region, and the whole country.

RICO

In 1970 the U.S. Congress passed the Organized Crime Control Act. A central part of the act is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) section. RICO is law enforcement's most powerful tool against organized crime. Defined by RICO, racketeering is the act of participating in a continuing pattern of criminal behavior.

Authorities can charge a wide variety of crimes under RICO. These include murder; kidnapping; gambling; arson (intentionally setting a destructive fire); robbery; bribery (promising a person money or a favor in return for certain action); extortion; dealing in obscene matter (pornography); dealing in controlled substances or chemicals (drug violations); alien smuggling (moving illegal immigrants across the nation's borders); bribery including sports bribery; counterfeiting; embezzlement (to steal money or property, such as a banker using bank funds for his or her own use); mail fraud (fake offers through the mail); murder for hire; prostitution; sexual exploitation of children; theft from the interstate shipping of goods, such as from trucks, trains, or ships; transporting stolen goods across state lines; drug trafficking; and money laundering.

Organized crime offenses

Two of the most profitable racketeering activities of organized crime are drug trafficking and money laundering. Gambling, prostitution, and pornography have also been major moneymakers. In 2002 drug trafficking was the largest illegal organized crime activity both in the United States and worldwide. The three most commonly trafficked illegal drugs were cannabis (marijuana and hashish), cocaine, and heroine. RICO makes growing, smuggling (transporting illegally), receiving, buying, and selling illegal drugs a racketeering activity.

The term "trafficking" means dealing, smuggling, buying with the intent to sell, and selling a substance. For example, once a shipment of illegal drugs enters the United States, a dealer or trafficker pays the smuggler for the drugs. The first trafficker then sells the drugs again to a second trafficker who will transport the drugs to a location where a third trafficker pays the second. Each trafficker is a member of an organized crime group. The amount of money that changes hands goes up with every transaction so each trafficker makes a profit. The money received is called "dirty" money and it needs to be "laundered," or cleaned so it can be passed as legal money.

Money laundering involves specialists within the crime organization who get the dirty money into legitimate financial institutions while concealing where the money came from. Money laundering and global crime usually go together. Financial specialists within organized crime establish a series of bogus companies and deposit dirty money into their bank accounts, usually into banks outside of the United States.

Dirty money is frequently mixed with "clean" or legally obtained money in the bank accounts of legitimate companies, which happen to be owned or run by organized crime groups. This practice is called comingling, or mixing legal and illegal funds together, which makes tracking dirty money difficult. Organized crime money handlers try to completely hide the origins of illegal funds by creating confusing paper (receipt)
trails and often succeed in making dirty money appear to be legitimate company deposits or laundered money.

Once clean or laundered money is moved into legally run businesses, it can be used freely. The types of legal businesses crime organizations commonly run include garbage disposal, meat and produce distribution, restaurants, garment manufacturing, bars and taverns, real estate, and vending machine companies.

Organized crime supplies goods and services that are illegal but which the public nevertheless demands. Illegal gambling or gaming is available in most states, while prostitution and pornography have been favored activities for hundreds of years. Prostitution rings recruit women who engage in sexual activities for money. Pornography is the business of supplying photography or books about sexual behaviors. Using children in pornographic materials is known as child pornography or the sexual exploitation of children.

Characteristics of organized crime

Organized crime groups, whether traditional mob families or street gangs, have a number of common characteristics:

1. Organized crime thrives on supplying illegal goods and services for which a large number of people are willing to pay. For example, in 1999 an estimated fifteen million Americans used illegal drugs, 75 percent of whom used marijuana.
2. The goal of organized crime groups is to make money; members also gain a sense of pride, power, and protection.
3. Groups have what is called a pyramid power structure like legal businesses. In legitimate businesses, there is a boss called the chief executive officer (CEO), under the CEO are vice presidents, treasurers, advisors, accountants, lawyers, technical staff, and so on. Organized crime has a boss, advisors who work closely with the boss and assign tasks to different crews, captains who run the different crews, soldiers who carry out the physical work and act out tasks from collecting money to killing people, and men with special skills.
4. Members are extremely loyal and committed; they go through initiation rituals, take oaths, and swear to secrecy.
5. Punishment for members who stray might be demotion to a lower rank or, depending on their offense, death.

During the mid-twentieth century, organized crime in the United States was dominated by the American Mafia whose "godfathers," meaning founders, were of Italian and Sicilian descent. In the latter half of the century, other groups appeared and grew in number, including motorcycle gangs, street gangs, and by the 1990s, organized crime units with home bases in other countries. The remaining portions of this chapter describe types of organized crime units doing business in the United States.

Early Las Vegas and the Mafia

Las Vegas in the early 1940s was not an attractive place to do business or live. It was a dirty desert town of rugged, rough residents. Travelers taking U.S. Highway 91 cut right through the city on their way to California. It was not a place for stopping over, until New York City organized crime bosses Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello sent well-known gangster Bugsy Siegel (1906–1947) to Las Vegas. Siegel's mission was to see if Vegas would make a great gambling spot for West Coast gamblers.

Nevada had legalized gambling in 1931 but no one paid much attention except local cowboys and men from nearby military bases. With Siegel's imagination and organizational skills and the Mafia's money, the first gambling palace in Las Vegas opened on December 26, 1946. The Flamingo, located right on Highway 91, was the first of many gangster-financed gambling houses in Las Vegas. The Desert Inn and the Thunderbird were built and along with the Flamingo ushered in a very profitable and legal business for the mob, at least under Nevada law. Highway 91 was transformed into the glitzy Las Vegas "Strip."

By the 1950s the Chicago Outfit had joined New York City gangsters in Las Vegas. The Outfit ran three major casinos—the Stardust, the Desert Inn, and the Riviera. The Hacienda, Sahara, and Fremont casinos were added by Chicago mobsters in the 1960s. The Stardust was home base to the famous "Rat Pack," a group of entertainers including Frank Sinatra (1915–1998), Dean Martin (1917–1995), and Sammy Davis Jr. (1925–1990). Tourists from the West Coast and Southwest flooded into Vegas for an exciting time of gambling, entertainment, and nightlife.

In the 1970s the presence of organized crime diminished in Vegas when the Nevada legislature allowed public corporations (corporations selling stock to the public) to own casinos. Gangsters made millions by selling their casinos. Millionaire Howard Hughes (1905–1976) bought the Desert Inn in 1967.

American Mafia

Prohibition officially became law on January 17, 1920, as the states ratified (voted approval) of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S Constitution, banning the manufacture, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages in the United States. Those in favor of Prohibition predicted its enforcement would be easy and inexpensive. It soon became apparent, however, that Americans were not prepared to give up alcohol. Beating Prohibition became a national pastime.

Gangs who had limited their activities to gambling and thievery before 1920 transformed into organized groups of "bootleggers," individuals who illegally brought liquor into the country and sold it to thirsty Americans. Bootlegging gangsters became millionaires. Prominent among them was Alphonse "Al" Capone, whose brief career as a Chicago mob boss made him into a legendary character. His income was estimated at over $100 million per year.

Near the end of the 1920s, gangs had become so organized they held a national convention in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 5, 1928. Twenty-three bosses, all of Sicilian families, gathered from New York City, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Tampa, and Philadelphia. Capone could not attend because he was not Sicilian, but he sent representatives.

Although mutually suspicious of one another, they discussed common interests, problems, and explored the idea of establishing a nationwide crime syndicate. A syndicate is an association of individuals or groups who agree to carry out certain activities. In another meeting held in May 1929 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, crime bosses from around the country divided up the United States into territories. Next they established a national "Commission," made up of one representative from each of the country's nine territories.

By September 1931, Charles "Lucky" Luciano and his allies—which included Jewish crime boss Meyer Lansky—were at the top of the New York crime scene. They were the victors of the Castellammarse War, a New York City gangster war between old line Italian and Sicilian Mafia bosses who had migrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The older bosses focused on settling old vendettas (bitter prolonged feuds), not on making money. The winning Luciano-Lansky faction concentrated entirely on making money and killed anyone who got in their way. Luciano was also responsible for energizing the nine-member commission. This change in direction and the activation of the commission is referred to as the Americanization of the Mafia.

New York City was divided among five crime families with approximately nineteen more family units around the country. The five New York City families became famous; each was named after their Godfather. The legendary families were the Bonnano, Columbo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese.

When the highly profitable bootlegging period ended in 1933 with the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment, organized crime syndicates (groups) focused on other criminal activities including gambling, loan sharking (charging very high interest rates on loans, usually very hard to pay back), prostitution, and drug distribution, a natural extension of bootlegging. Labor racketeering was another popular criminal activity. Gangsters worked their way into positions of power in a labor union and then stole from the union's retirement and health funds.

Keeping a relatively low profile, the national organized crime syndicate received little interference from the FBI, headed by J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972). Fearing a poor showing against the underworld, Hoover chose not to battle organized crime. Hoover insisted the mob did not exist in the United States. Organized crime grew and prospered across the country.

In 1951 the Kefauver Committee of the U.S. Senate conducted hearings on crime and concluded an organized Mafia did indeed operate nationwide. The Kefauver Committee was a special congressional committee created by Congress to investigate organized crime in America, including racketeering (obtaining money through illegal activities). In 1957 the New York State Police accidentally uncovered a large meeting of sixty organized crime bosses at a rural home in Apalachin, New York. As police moved in the bosses ran into the New York countryside to escape. After this incident, there was no denying the existence of an American Mafia.

The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Investigations gained considerable information about the mob from a defendant named Joseph Valachi in 1963. A member of New York City's Genovese family, Valachi was the first Mafia insider to give major information about the workings of the Mafia. For the first time, the American public learned about the commission and the internal structure of crime families in New York and across the nation.

During the 1960s, under the direction of U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1925–1968), the U.S. Department of Justice began a major effort to arrest and prosecute crime family members. At the time, government reports listed twenty-four crime families with five thousand members of Italian and Sicilian ancestry. About this time the American Mafia families became known as the Cosa Nostra. Cosa Nostra means "our thing" in Italian.

Throughout the 1970s crime families warred with each other for power. Members of one family would assassinate another family's boss; then the family of the murdered boss would seek revenge with another killing and so on. Murders were also often committed to prevent a member from testifying in a trial.

The first RICO convictions of mob bosses or heads of families came in 1980. Numerous other gangsters were convicted under RICO for crimes ranging from operating illegal garbage collection associations to loan sharking to murder. In 1985 the bosses of all five Cosa Nostra crime families in New York City received prison terms of at least one hundred years, dealing a major blow to organized crime.

In 1992 Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano (1945–) broke the mob's code of silence, like Joseph Valachi. Gravano, a high-ranking member of the Gambino crime family, testified against his boss, John Gotti (1940–2002). Gotti was sentenced to life in prison. Gotti's successor was his brother Peter, whose legal business was in trash collecting. Peter Gotti ran the Gambino family, which received monthly cash payments from violent thugs who controlled the Brooklyn waterfront where garbage was collected and transported to landfills. Peter, at age sixty-four, was sentenced to more than nine years in prison in April 2004 on charges related to waterfront payoffs.

Three decades of arrests and convictions of Cosa Nostra family members decreased the American mob's power. RICO proved to be a powerful tool for convicting organized crime members and resulted in long prison sentences. The code of silence, to never testify against another crime member, had been broken. Those who testified received much shorter prison sentences than if they had not cooperated.

Government enforcement had sent many high-ranking mob leaders to prison. A life of crime was no longer as attractive and a considerable number of young people from Cosa Nostra families chose to attend universities and pursue lawful careers. A greater number of crime family recruits came from uneducated kids who had neither leadership skills nor the loyalty of past members. The face of organized crime began to significantly change. New criminal gangs of black Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Chinese, Russians, and South Americans competed with the traditional American Mafia. Motorcycle, or "biker," gangs became a major rival of the mob.

Motorcycle gangs

Beginning as motorbike sporting groups after World War II, the freedom of the road and riding across the country attracted a rebellious, adventurous, tough group of young people. Biker groups became biker gangs proud of living outside the norms of the traditional American family life of the 1950s. Two movies propelled the biker life: The Wild Ones in 1954 and Easy Rider in 1969. In 1969 the Hell's Angels, an especially tough and violent motorcycle gang at the time, were hired for the security force at a Rolling Stones (a rock group from England) concert in California at Altamont Speedway. A fan was killed by the Hell's Angels during the concert. This murder gained national attention and Americans suddenly realized the violence associated with biker gangs.

During the 1970s outlaw biker gangs numbered about nine hundred. The largest biker gangs were the Hell's Angels, the Outlaws, and the Bandidos. Each improved its organizational structure and learned how to plan and carry out criminal activities for profit. Their most profitable activity was drug trafficking. By the 1980s the FBI ranked bikers right behind the American Mafia as the most serious organized crime groups in the United States.

By the 1990s, the Bandidos, Hell's Angels, and Outlaws all had chapters in other countries. Hell's Angels had organizations in twenty countries and continued to expand rapidly. Biker gangs with U.S. roots were active in Canada, Europe, South America, Australia, and Africa. Sometimes rivals but often partners in criminal activities, these powerful bikers often cooperated with the South American drug cartels and the Italian Mafia. Biker gangs launder their drug money into legitimate businesses and have become very wealthy.

Street gangs

Street gangs in the United States generally begin in the poorest areas of big cities. Racism, prejudice, and high unemployment among young people are the major contributing factors. Young people want status and the respect of their peers just as any middle-class or wealthy youth. Generally a gang is the best way to be respected and protected from other gangs. Gangs form in schools, parks, and on neighborhood streets, wherever groups of friends share similar lifestyles or ethnic backgrounds. Males make up 90 percent of gang membership. Violence and weapons are key components of street gangs. Large U.S. street gangs have become organized and profitable; selling drugs and guns are their chief moneymaking activities.

By 2000 several street gangs had grown large and were very structured and profitable. These so-called Super Gangs had spread nationwide. They include the predominately black American Crips and Bloods, and Hispanic gangs like the Green Light Gangs, Latin Kings, and Gangster Disciples.

Crips and Bloods: Black American gangs in Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century, two distinct periods of black American gang formation occurred in Los Angeles. The first was in the early 1940s until 1965, the second from 1970 continuing into the early 2000s. Between the early 1970s and 2000 black American street gangs steadily increased in numbers and membership.

During World War II, large numbers of black Americans migrated from the southern United States to Los Angeles for employment in the war industries, chiefly building aircraft. All-black communities in the central part of Los Angeles expanded. The first black gangs developed in the second half of the 1940s and 1950s in defense from white teenage gangs determined to attack and harass black youth.

By 1960 the black areas of central Los Angeles—Watts, Central Avenue, and West Adams—had grown together. Whites increasingly moved to the suburbs leaving the area predominately black. The interracial violence among black and white gangs turned into black versus black gangs. The western areas of the black communities were economically better off than the eastern half, so eastside gangs resented westside youths and fought west gangs. Most scuffles were hand-to-hand fights or with knives and tire irons. Murders rarely occurred. In 1960 only six gang-related murders occurred in all of Los Angeles County.

In 1965 poverty, unemployment, harsh Los Angeles police treatment of black Americans, and continuing discrimination boiled over into the Watts race riots the summer of 1965, when the police used batons on two black men being arrested. After the riots, the Watts community directed its youth into local clubs, looking for solutions to social injustices including police brutality. In 1965 the Civil Rights movement was gathering strength in Los Angeles. To lend support to civil rights activism, the Black Panther Party, a powerful black political organization, opened a chapter in central Los Angeles.

Viewed as a threat to the security of the nation, the FBI targeted the Panthers and other black organizations. The Los Angeles Panthers were greatly weakened and their political leadership dismantled. By 1970 Los Angeles youth had lost the adult leadership that had kept them working on community issues. Filling the void was a new gang organization period.

In 1969 fifteen-year-old Raymond Washington, a high school student of central Los Angeles, and a few friends formed a gang patterned after a 1960s gang called the Avenues. They named their gang the Baby Avenues and sometimes called themselves the Avenue Cribs, a reference to their young ages. The Cribs wore black leather jackets, earrings in their left ear, and often walked with canes. Before long, stealing and assaulting became the gang's chief activities.

Because of the canes used by gang members, a Los Angeles newspaper reporting on an assault called them the "Crips" for cripples. The Cribs latched onto the name Crips because a slang word crippin' meant robbing and stealing. Gang members lived the crippin' way of life, often stealing black leather jackets. The desire to obtain black leather jackets led to the first Crips murder in 1972. Crips attacked and murdered a sixteen-year-old Los Angeles high school student, a nongang youth and son of an attorney, for the leather jacket he was wearing. The murder, in addition to continuing Crips attacks, received sensational media coverage. To youth living in poverty, the gangs seemed to be a way to attract attention and through gang activity a way to prove manliness and power over others. More and more poor black youths joined Crips.

South Los Angeles schools were soon filled with gang fights and shootings. By the end of 1972 there were eight Crip gangs and ten others, which were responsible for twenty-nine gang-related murders. The Crips and other gangs were rivals, though the Crips outnumbered the others and constantly terrorized them. As a result, the non-Crips met on Piru Street in Compton and formed an alliance that became known as the Bloods. Los Angeles County reported thirty thousand gang members and 355 deaths in 1980.

By 1996 twenty-one communities in Los Angeles County had 274 gangs. Six communities—Los Angeles, Compton, Athens, Inglewood, Carson, and Long Beach—had 225 of the 274 gangs. The gangs were highly structured and focused on making money much like the American Mafia. The business of choice was drugs. By the 1990s the Los Angeles gang epidemic had expanded into urban areas along the West Coast and across the nation. Many of the gangs were extensions of the Bloods and Crips. Wherever unemployment, poverty, and racism existed, gangs could attract members.

Hispanic gangs

Just like black Americans, Hispanics flooded into Southern California during the World War II years in search of war industry jobs. They crowded into the poor Mexican neighborhoods and Hispanic street gangs grew. By the early 1940s gang members had adopted a specific form of dressing, wearing what was called a "zoot suit." Originating in El Paso, Texas, and catching on in Los Angeles, the zoot suit consisted of pleated baggy pants, a long loose fitting coat, highly polished shoes, and a long chain hanging from the belt into a trouser side pocket.

In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s Hispanics moved into various housing projects in East Los Angeles. Fights between gangs were common, generally over protecting a gang's territory or "turf."

Hispanic gangs continued growing in membership in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Gangs preyed on gangs, fighting turf battles, and often victimizing innocent residents of their communities. Residents, fearing retaliation, would not help law enforcement investigate gang violence. Around 1980 Hispanic gangs began to sell drugs supplied by the Mexican Mafia to make money. Selling drugs was so profitable for the gangs that even more young Hispanics wanted to join.

Community violence escalated with 452 gang-related murders in Los Angeles County in 1988, with 50,000 reported gang members in 450 different gangs. Seven years later in 1995, there were 1,500 different gangs with 150,000 members located in the Los Angeles area. Although the Crips and Bloods were part of these figures, most of the street gangs were Hispanic.

The Mexican Mafia began requiring a tax on the sale of drugs supposedly to help members in prison. Some street gangs refused to pay the tax and called themselves the "green lighters"—tax free and proud of it. Soon they were known as the Green Light Gangs. By 2000 Hispanic gangs were better organized, operated in cities around the country, and were the fastest growing kind of U.S. gang.

Midwest and East Coast gangs

Chicago in the 1920s was home to Al Capone and his mobsters, most of whom had Italian roots. They grew enormously wealthy during Prohibition by supplying alcohol to the public. The Mafia in Chicago was commonly called the "Outfit." At the start of the twenty-first century, the Outfit was still operating in Chicago and its suburbs. In addition to the Outfit, street gangs organized during the 1940s and 1950s. The Latin Kings, predominately Hispanic, became one of Chicago's most violent gangs.

Arrested members of the Latin Kings often ended up in East Coast prisons in Connecticut and New York, where they formed the Almighty Latin King Nation. By the early 1990s, numerous Latin Kings were in the prison system and also had hundreds of members on the streets of New York and New Jersey. One of the nation's most notorious street gangs, the motto of the Latin Kings was "once a king, always a king." Latin Kings are associated with the People Nations, a loose organization of dangerous gangs including the Vicelords, Bishops, Gaylords, Latin Counts, and Kents.

The Gangster Disciples, originating in Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, also spread to the East Coast. Highly organized and specializing in drug sales, Gangster Disciples were found in most East Coast cities by the end of the 1990s and became the largest Folk Nation gang. The Folk Nation is a collection of gangs who banded together as protection from the Latin Kings. Members of the Folk Nation include the Black Gangster Disciples, Spanish Cobras, Black Disciples, Latin Disciples, Two Sixers, and Internation Posse—made up of many ethnicities but joined together as protection from the Latin Kings.

The Bloods and the Crips also sent gang members to the East Coast. Spreading out into neighborhoods across New York City, the Bloods attracted many members. By 2000 the Bloods were the most violent East Coast gang. Youth affiliated with the Los Angeles Crips traveled east in the 1980s and within a decade had a major presence along the East Coast.

Impacts of global organized crime

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, organized crime in the United States was far different than decades earlier when a few powerful Mafia families dominated the country. Modern organized crime activity still includes the American mob, motorcycle gangs, and street gangs but has an increasing number of gangs based in foreign nations.

A major concern for the FBI has been the worldwide cooperation of organized crime groups, forming international partnerships of mutual interest. Major international crime syndicates who partner with U.S. groups include the Russian Mafia, Japanese Yakuza, Chinese Triads, Mexican Mafia, South American drug cartels, West African and Caribbean groups, as well as the continued cooperation of Italian and Sicilian organized crime. In addition to Chinese and Japanese crime operations, many smaller Asian groups are based in Taiwan, North and South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos.

International crime groups still deal in their traditional criminal activities but continue to expand their range of goods and services. Drug trafficking remains a top moneymaker, but weapons, diamonds, luxury cars, and even natural resources such as oil from Russia can all be smuggled and traded illegally. Because of the vast profits involved, money laundering has become the number one crime worldwide. Drug profits alone were close to $100 billion each year in the early 2000s.

Organized crime has also benefited from advances in electronic technology. Information speeds around the world ignoring borders and trade restrictions. Hacking into the computer systems of businesses and financial institutions has become a favored organized crime activity. Criminals can extort a business or a nation with computer viruses. In addition, there is identify theft, credit card fraud, bank fraud (see chapter 6, White-Collar Crime), counterfeiting, creating fake identification such as passports, and many more crimes made possible by computer technology.

To deal with organized crime and its worldwide connections, the FBI established its Organized Crime Section. Responsibilities are subdivided into three units: the La Cosa Nostra/Italian Organized Crime/Labor Racketeering Unit; the Eurasian Organized Crime Unit; and the Asian/African Criminal Enterprise Unit. Through these units the FBI attempts to disrupt and shut down international and U.S. organized crime.

For More Information

Books

Lunde, Paul. Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World's Most Successful Industry. New York: DK Publishing, Inc., 2004.

Lyman, Michael D., and Gary W. Potter. Organized Crime. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004.

Sanchez, Reymundo. Once a King, Always a King: The Unmaking of a Latin King. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2003.

Siegel, Dina, Henk von de Bunt, and Damian Zaitch, eds. Global Organized Crime: Trends and Developments. Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2004.

Sullivan, Robert, ed. Mobsters and Gangsters: Organized Crime in America, from Al Capone to Tony Soprano. New York: Life Books, 2002.

Thompson, Hunter S. Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga. New York: Modern Library, 1999.

Web Sites

"About Organized Crime." Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).http://www.fbi.gov/hq/cid/orgcrime/ocshome.htm (accessed on August 20, 2004).

American Foreign Policy Council.http://www.afpc.org (accessed on August 20, 2004).

"Gangsters, Outlaws, and G-Men." Court TV's Crime Library: Criminal Minds and Methods.http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters-outlawsgmen.htm (accessed on August 20, 2004).

"International Organized Crime." Michigan State University School of Criminal Justice.http://www.cj.msu.edu/outreach/security/orgcrime.html (accessed on August 20, 2004).

National Alliance of Gang Investigators Associations.http://www.nagia.org (accessed on August 20, 2004).

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.http://www.unodc.org/unodc/index.html (accessed on August 20, 2004).