Organised Crime
By Alan Wright
Devon, UK: Willan Publishing, 2006
This book begins with an excellent ‘mapping’ of the various discussions and debates regarding the organised crime concept. All of the historical literature is referred to and this literature is brought up to date with an acknowledgement of the more classic roots to the current focus on interactions and patterns of relationships across and among criminal organizations. The opening chapter accepts somewhat unquestioning the rhetoric of threats and risks that criminal groups pose to ‘political, economic and social stability within communities’. The reader must then wait to see if the author can deliver evidence of these ‘threats’.
The reader is then somewhat surprised to go from this introduction dissecting ‘organised crime’ to a chapter of gangs. While one might argue that youth/street gangs are organised crime---one might as easily maintain a distinction between these two sociological categories. Chapter 2 reviews the classic sociological literature on ‘gangs’ from Thrasher (1927) up through Decker and Van Winkle et cetera but in my view the topic has strayed fairly far from an analysis of organised crime—to be brought back on the last page with the inclusion of Gambetta and a discussion on his ‘protection’ and a recounting of the killing of Falcone. The chapter ends by broadening the concept of organised crime even further by including a discussion on corporate crime. If the title of the book was not 0rganized Crime, all of this discussion might have fit under a general heading of criminal violence.
Chapter 3 moves beyond the violence theme to acknowledge that organised crime both uses and incorporates so-called ‘legitimate’ players—including politicians, government officials, business people in what Punch called ‘dirty business’. However this theme quickly shifts back into the ‘good-guys’ vs. ‘bad guys’ presentation of organised crime. The author states that this chapter will cover four aspects, starting with a discussion on the impact of organised crime. One thing we must all know is that it is much easier to use the rhetoric of ‘harm’ than to provide any evidence of this impact. This chapter does not acknowledge this difficulty but rather trots out the various claims that have been made. The author makes the claim that organized crime is a challenge “to the viability of national economies” (p. 51). As evidence of this threat, the dated (1997) 'guestimate' of the billions of dollars generated by organised crime is provided. It is claimed that organised crime generates an ‘economic burden’—when, where, how? The example that is provided is of bank and stock-market frauds with a discussion on the BCCI. Certainly some countries are disproportionately impacted by organised crime and the quoted work by Louise Shelley (and F. Thoumi) documents this direct impact on the role of the state. It is however less accurate to widely generalize about this impact.
Before Chapter 3 ends, we are once again back into a discussion as to what qualifies as ‘organised crime’—a discussion that ought to have terminated with the first chapter. The author is free to inflict his own definition and define the breadth of the term, however, having done so it is time to move on with the book.
We learn that white-collar crimes, corporate crimes, fraud, work-place crimes (Bopal, etc.), financial scandals, professional crimes, business crimes are all part of organised crime. This is an important argument and could have become a larger part of the book’s focus. As it is located, it merely prolongs the definitional preoccupation of the book. The chapter ends with an uncritical and dated section on money laundering. Anti money laundering and anti terrorist-financing has become an international crusade. The literature in this section is largely from one 1997 source.
Chapter 4 provides a somewhat dated overview on drug trafficking. Chapter 5 reverts to ‘traditional’ organised crime and provides extremely dated information on groups such as the Camorra, Sicilian Mafia, and Triads. Chapter 6 takes us right back to the early ‘alien conspiracy’ debates that were discussed in chapter one. Chapter 7 focuses on non-traditional organised crime groups and could have combined with chapter three to make an excellent book.
In total, there is some very good information included. A weakness in my opinion is in the lack of ‘flow’ to the book and a somewhat disjointed sense of what the book is really about. A book that makes the argument that the ‘concept’ (organised crime) is increasingly irrelevant because of the multitudinous new, on-going, criminal configurations together with our greater awareness of what even the traditional ‘organised crime’ really looked like, is extremely valuable and provides a message that must be repeatedly told so that it gets steeped into the political and policing institutions. This argument is there, but gets somewhat lost.
MARGARET E. BEARE
York University |
