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Samenvatting organised crime
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SELECTED ISSUES: ORGANISED CRIMELECTURE 1: CONCEPT & DEFINITIONS
1. INTRODUCTION: THE CONCEPT OF ORGANISED CRIME
➢ Main points:
1) Law enforcement is more than merely enforcing a rule/legal act
o Phenomenon → legislation → enforcement?
• Police has to follow the rules, but they do more than enforcement alone
• They have an impact on what politicians enact as law → they request
things, people,…
• This is the moment organized crime became a big thing → police needed
additional powers because we are up against an army of criminals
▪ But what are we up against really? The big bad wolf? But how
many wolfs are there, what do they look like,…? We do not know
▪ Bart de Wever: red pill (reference to ‘The Matrix’ = movie about
living in virtual reality) → if you take the blue pill, you see things
that you want to see, but it is not reality!
In Antwerp (thanks to De Wever) they started to take the
red pill → you see buildings being used as synthetic drug
labs, illegal dumpings poisoning water,…
What government institution are criminals most scared
of? Tax administration!
2) The concept of organised crime is a social construct
o Not a crime, but a criminal phenomenon → it is behavior that we agree is
organised crime!
• Serious crime, at least punishable by 3 years of imprisonment
o Crimes vs offenders
3) Enforcement and policies difficult without a clear view on the problem: usefulness of the
concept ‘organised’?
o We have no idea what we are up against (see cartoon)
1
,➢ Early 20th century
Political legitimacy
Scientific legitimacy (through research)
➢ Controversial concept inconsistently incorporating two notions:
1) Provision of illegal goods and services: drugs, human trafficking, weapons,…
2) Criminal organization: people organise themselves and pose a threat to society
Which one of these is the reason that we should be alert and why we need more forces?
➢ Temporal mismatch:
United States: peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s
Europe: much later
➢ Past 9/11
Lost some momentum but still high on the agenda
2. HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT
2.1. THE AMERICAN ROOTS
➢ Probably first used in the 1896 (annual report of the NY Society for the Prevention of Crime)
Protected gambling and prostitution
Illegal business dealings involving politicians, police officers, lawyers, etc. → illegal
activities connected with the upper world
➢ 1920s and 1930s
Development of illegal markets due to Prohibition → for example: alcohol was forbidden
so criminals saw an opportunity to start illegal businesses to sell alcohol
Serious efforts to define and discuss OC by both academics and commentators
No specific reference to separate associations of gangsters (yet) → Al Capone was a
gangster, but not connected to an organisation
Often synonymous with ‘racketeering’ (i.e. extortion, predatory activities and provision of
illegal goods and services such as illegal gambling, counterfeit documents and trafficking
in drugs and liquor)
o If you have a shop and a criminal says ‘you have a nice shop, I wouldn’t want
anything happen to it, pay me 1000 dollars a month and I will ensure nothing
happens’ → if you said no, your shop was destroyed (extortion)
➢ ‘The Gang’
First full scale treatment of OC → first assessment of oc
No hard structures
Links with the upper world (police, judges, lawyers,…)
Indispensable functions played by certain specialized persons/groups including doctors,
lawyers, politicians, etc.
o People with certain abilities : doctors, lawyers,…
2
,➢ Between 1929 and 1931
First federal government attempt to study OC (Wickersham Commission)
‘What’ = more important than ‘Who’ (i.e. based on criminal law categories, not on
criminals)
➢ After Second World War (1945)
Wickersham approach (i.e. ‘understanding of OC as a set of criminal entrepreneurial
activities with the frequent involvement of legal businesses and state representatives’)
abandoned
‘Who ’ = more important than ‘What’
o Ethnic connotation → ‘it was a foreign conspiracy’ → Italian mafia
From late 1940s onward, focus on foreign career criminals constituting well-structured
and powerful criminal organisations representing a threat to the integrity of American
society and politics
o Society gets the crime they deserve (Laccassagne)
• Why do these organisations exist? Why is it so easy to recruit people?
Because they are living in poverty, in dangerous neighbourhood,
unemployment, most children
• Bv: Brussel-Zuid: cleaned up the station, but where do these people go
to? Another place and this is when they recruited others
The main problem is the federal government, migration → migrants are out in the open
and have to survive on their own without help from the government
o We have to be critical about the government! It is not neutral
→ alien, parasitical corporation
➢ New organization-based approach (alien conspiracy) clearly enunciated by Kefauver Senate
Investigation Committee (1950)
Italian mafia-centred view of OC (La Cosa Nostra)
o Remained official standpoint for almost three decades !
o It is selection: some communities were being overpoliced → ofcourse you find
something, but what about the other communities?
Need for increased federal involvement in enforcement of gambling and drug laws
Federal Narcotics Bureau (later DEA) as major ‘moral entrepreneur’ of organisation-based
understanding of OC
➢ 1963 (Joe Valachi)
Testifies before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Cosa Nostra) on
public television
o Because he was terrified of someone in jail
o They asked him questions, but leading questions! Not open questions → they
wanted to confirm what they thought = confirmation bias
Enormous public impact → from then on: Italian mafia became a major threat to society
according to the people
Merger of the two concepts of OC and ‘mafia’ fully accomplished
3
, ➢ 1950s and 1960s
Consolidation of the mafia-centred concept of OC
Focus on NY City, but how ‘true’ and ‘general’ was this picture?
Proposal to specifically outlaw (prohibit) membership of La Cosa Nostra rejected
Uneasiness with mafia paradigm demonstrated by many law-enforcement officials at state
and local levels + members of Federal Organised Crime Strike Forces, established late
1960s and early 1970s
➢ 1970 (RICO Act US Senate)
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupted Organisations Act
o If one is guilty, all are guilty → extremeous open opportunity for law enforcement
to do whatever they want
Definition of OC in much broader terms than Cosa Nostra only to include less structured
gangs and illicit enterprises
➢ However…
Myth of powerful and centralized mafia organisation long continued to be claimed
whenever police budgets had to be raised or new legislation had to be passed
New legislation → increased power (e.g. wiretapping and eavesdropping, informants,
seizing financial assets, …)
➢ And…
Public perception dominated by mafia-centered view on OC
2.2. THE RISE OF THE ILLEGAL ENTERPRISE PARADIGM
➢ Past 1960s
Idea of alien conspiracy rejected by most American social scientists
o Ideological
o Serving personal political interests
o Lacking in accuracy and empirical evidence
Scientific attention shifted from ‘who’ back to ‘what’
Focus on the supply of illegal products and services
o Focus on the market place → rise of the expression ‘illicit’ or ‘illegal enterprise’
o The purpose of organized crime is to financially profit through crime and mainly
responds to public demand for services
• It is about supply and demand
• Same thing as businesses, but illegal
➢ Beginning of the 1970s: war on drugs
Instead of mafia → illegal enterprise → also see RICO Act
➢ Fighting drugs in the US, while drugs are pouring in from abroad?
4
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