2023
organised crime
,LECTURE 1: CONCEPT & DEFINITIONS
AGENDA
- Introduction
- History of the concept
o The American roots
o The rise of the illegal enterprise paradigm
o Europe
o Transnational organised crime
- Defining organised crime
o The problem of definition
o Legal definitions in the US
o Legal definitions in Europe
o Transnational organised crime and international initiatives
- Discussion and conclusions
INTRODUCTION
Main points:
- Law enforcement is more than merely enforcing a rule/legal act.
o Phenomenon à legislation à enforcement?
o Example Marihuana
§ It is still forbidden in BE, it’s condemned à police is trying to detect marihuana use and
people who have more than 3 grams
§ In other countries: marihuana is being decriminalised
o Law enforcement is there to enforce a rule/ legal act, they belong to the executive part
(legislative, executive, and judicial)
§ Legislative: politicians who develop legislation
§ Executive: police to watch that people obey the rules
§ Judicial: controlling the legislation, is it constitutional?, punish people
o Law enforcement also influences legislation
o Police is also influencing legislation
o Example: human trafficking, we see a lot of people popping up that are here illegally and don’t
want to be there (red light districts) à enact legislation and going to enforce it
o 2004: mobile crime groups à we called itinerant organised crime and made a definition for it
§ à policies were developed to combat a specific phenomenon
o Law enforcement is more than, … it is also influencing and helping enact legislation
- The concept of organised crime is a social construct.
o Not a crime, but a criminal phenomenon.
§ All the things together = OC
§ OC was presented as a new criminal phenomenon
§ Stealing something is something you can see, OC is a thing you cannot see
o Crimes vs. offenders.
§ Is it serious because it is organised or because the nature of the crime?
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, § Focus on the offenders (how many people are involved) of the crimes or the nature of
the crime
- Enforcement and policies difficult without a clear view on the problem: usefulness of the concept
‘organised’?
o The fact that we are calling it OC is just useless, because we don’t know what we are fighting
against
o Everyone has an idea what OC is, pictures of what it is à empirical research, what it is in reality is
very often not what we think it is
THE CONCEPT OF ORGANISED CRIME
- Early 20th century
o For political legitimacy and scientific legitimacy
- Controversial concept inconsistently incorporating two notions:
o Provision of illegal goods and services
o Criminal organisation
- Temporal mismatch
o United States: peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s
o Europe: much later (not with Italy bcs more problems with the mafia)
- Past 9/11
o Lost some momentum but still high on the agenda!
o European Agenda on security 2015-2020 à priorities: terrorism, OC and cyber crime
o Since 2021: OC is a threat to Belgium
1. HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT
- Organised crime is competing with the state, and is providing an alternative state, for income. Vb: poc
doctor? No you can come work for me and in three years you’ll buy a villa ….
- Oc was originally equated with racketeering (syn): a ‘racket’ means a dodgy job, a scheme, ex. writing a
summary of courses and selling it online (not legal, author rights). It became racketeering bcs it was
connected to other shady business. Racketeering is now considered as illegal practices very often
connected to predatory, violent, extortionist practices as well. Vb; Zeggen in een winkel heb je insurance?
Nee? Geef mij jou geld en ik bescherm jou, wil je niet? Oei er is iets kapot!! Kijk nog iets… betaal mij zoveel
en ik sla je winkel niet stuk
1.1. THE AMERICAN ROOTS
- Probably first used in the 1896 (annual report of the NY Society for the Prevention of Crime)
o To refer to gambling & prostitution operations that were protected by public officials à Protected
gambling and prostitution
o Illegal business dealings involving politicians, police officers, lawyers, etc.
- 1920s and 1930s
o Development of illegal markets due to Prohibition
o Serious efforts to define and discuss OC by both academics and commentators
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, o No specific reference to separate associations of gangsters (yet)
o 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 F.e.: Al Capone: bootlegging, investigating in alcohol and liquor and other criminal activities à
convicted for tax fraud
- ‘The Gang’ (Thrasher, 1927)
o First full scale treatment of OC
§ (First time that someone from an academic view started looking at OC)
o No hard structures
o Stressed its links with the upper world
§ it is about professional criminals with connections
o Indispensable functions played by certain specialized persons/groups including doctors, lawyers,
politicians, and corrupt officials.
- Between 1929 and 1931
o First federal government attempt to study OC (Wickersham Commission)
o ‘What’ = more important than ‘Who’ (i.e. based on criminal law categories, not on criminals)
§ à Looking at activities: focusing on what instead of who
- After Second World War
o 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
§ à they started thinking about OC as a series of activities
o ‘Who’ = more important than ‘What’
o 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 (Foreigners that were committing OC, serious crimes and they worked together by
venturing crimes)
o à Alien, parasitical corporation
- New organisation-based approach (alien conspiracy) clearly enunciated by Kefauver Senate Investigation
Committee (1950)
o Italian mafia-centred view of OC (La Cosa Nostra)
§ Italians are visited by judges, FBI, … on occasion someone snitches
§ Snitches get stitches
§ Valachi wants to break the circle of omerta and tells everything the police wants to know
§ His testimony was watched all over the US
o Remained official standpoint for almost three decades!
o Need for increased federal involvement in enforcement of gambling and drug laws
o Federal Narcotics Bureau (later DEA) as major ‘moral entrepreneur’ of organisation-based
understanding of OC
- 1963 (Joe Valachi)
o Testifies before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (Cosa Nostra)
o Enormous public impact
o Merger of the two concepts of OC and ‘mafia’ fully accomplished
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