Chapter 11 Flashcards
Organized Crime
No longer like the Godfather. They still exist, but they’re now much more complex and much less family-oriented.
Organized Crime: Continuing criminal enterprise that rationally works to profit from illicit activities that are often in great public demand. It emanates from a continuing enterprise; its crimes are rationally planned; it requires force, threats, monopoly control, or corruption to insulate itself from prosecution; and often caters to public demand for illicit goods and services. There are fewer consensuses that organized crime has exclusive membership, has ideological objectives, is specialized in criminal activity, or operates under a code of secrecy.
Type: Provision of illicit goods and services.
Nature of activity: gambling, lending money, sex, narcotics, stolen property.
Contemporary example: Theft of intellectual property.
Harms: These are consensual activities, with no inherent violence in the activity itself, but it causes economic harm to the larger society.
Type: Infiltration of legitimate business or government.
Nature of activity: coercive use of legal businesses or government agencies for the purposes of exploitation; non-consensual activities, threats, violence, extortion of the business.
Contemporary example: Business and consumer fraud, corruption.
Harms: These activities are usually nonconsensual activities that are enforced through threats, extortion, and violence and overall cause economic harm.
There has been an evolution moving towards more sophisticated things. Moving from stealing physical goods to intellectual property (i.e. software codes). Moving from prostitution to human trafficking.
Enterprise Syndicates: provide goods and services. Enterprise syndicates have parallels to corporations, with specialist employees and capital investment.
Power syndicates: seek control and wealth through extortion or “protection” and other types of crime that provide no real services. Not as common because todays criminals find that the real profit to be made is in the provision of illicit services.
Can be placed in two different categories:
Social/Cultural: traditional mafia groups or Yakuza groups in Japan. With hierarchical structures with bosses and soldiers – traditional organizations.
Groups or networks that emerge to exploit a specific criminal activity: Groups come together not primarily because of social or cultural ties, but because they have access, connections, or the expertise needed to carryout the criminal activity, with no ongoing group structure.
Ethnicity trap: refers to the habit of using ethnicity to explain organized crime, when in actuality organized crime is committed by a wide variety of individuals.
Five types of structure and organization found within criminal groups:
1. Rigid hierarchy: single boss with strong internal discipline within several distinctions.
2. Developed hierarchy: regional structures, each with its own hierarchy and degree of autonomy.
3. Hierarchical conglomerate: a loose or umbrella association of otherwise separate organized crime groups.
4. Core criminal group: a horizontal structure of core individuals who describe themselves as working for the same organization.
5. Organized criminal network: individuals engage in criminal activity in shifting alliances; rather than being affiliated with a particular criminal group, they associate with various groups according to the skills they possess to carry out the illicit activity.
Human Trafficking
Human Trafficking: involves moving victims, using fraud or coercion to make them forced laborers or sexual slaves.
Three methods of controlling human trafficking victims:
1.Restriction of movement. Confiscating passports, visas, and identification documents. Constantly accompanying the victim, insisting on answering on behalf of the victim, or translating all conversations. Isolating the victim by not disclosing his or her location or address. Requiring the victim to live and work in the same location.
2. Harmful living conditions. Restricting access to food and appropriate clothing. Forbidding access to appropriate medical care. Not allowing time off or sufficient time to sleep.
3. Harmful working conditions. In exchange for work opportunity, charging a large fee that is difficult or impossible to pay off. Requiring unusually long work hours with few or no breaks. Restricting the number of days off. Providing little to no pay or irregular pay.
The United States evaluates the world trafficking situation annually as mandated by its Trafficking in Persons Act (TVPA).
Countries are ranked into three tiers based on observations made by the U.S. State Department.
Tier 1: Indicates that a government has acknowledged the existence of human trafficking, has made efforts to address the problem, and meets the TVPA’s minimum standards.
Tier 2: Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards.
Tier 3: Countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s minimum standards and are not making significant efforts to do so. Countries in tier 3 can suffer sanctions that include the withholding of non-humanitarian foreign assistance. Example: Cuba
Cybercrime
Cybercrime: the misuse of computers and the Internet to carry out criminal activity. Refers to the method used not the underlying crimes committed. Fraud is the most common example. Eg: lottery scams, bank account, identity theft. Cybercrime may also includes threats, extortion, stolen property transfers, etc. Objective: usually explicit financial gain.
Internet Crime Complaint Center (ICCC)- logs complaints from victims about crimes committed using the internet. Receives more than 300,000 complaints per year with a dollar loss of nearly $500 million.
Top Five crimes reported to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center:
1. FBI-related scams: scams in which a criminal poses as the FBI to defraud victims.
2. Identity theft: unauthorized use of a victim’s personal identifying information to commit fraud or other crimes.
3. Advance fee fraud: criminals convince victims to pay a fee to receive something of value but do not deliver anything of value to them.
4. Non-auction/ non-delivery of merchandise: purchaser does not receive items purchased.
5. Overpayment fraud: an incident in which the complainant receives an invalid monetary instrument with instructions to deposit it in a bank account and send excess funds or a percentage of the deposited money back to the sender.
Organized Crime in Selected World Regions
Europe: EU has 27 countries in the Union. Longstanding traditions of smuggling and underground economies have combined with the new ease of travel, expanded communication, and a common currency to create a serious organized crime problem. Many non-European groups operate in Europe because it is a highly developed continent and therefore has both high demand and money to patronize illegal goods and services. Most organized crime groups do not specialize, they operate in a range of illicit activities as the opportunity, supply, and demand warrant –more like different groups networking rather than organizing.
Asia: Central Asian countries are developing countries with a combined size about half that of the United States. Corrupt governments, long standing ethnic divides, and geographic locations between major drug-producing regions place Central Asia at high risk for organized crime. 25% of the 380 tons of heroin manufactured in Afghanistan each year is trafficked north through Central Asia and into Russia. Organized crime is less documented in most otherworld regions compared to Europe.
Major issues: Smuggling and human trafficking.
South Africa: Organized crime believed to be responsible for $8 billion in “dirty money” that flows through South Africa’s borders each year. Organized crime in South Africa involves a loose and highly interchangeable association of people, which includes corrupt government officials and businesses.
Central Africa: current instability is connected to trafficking in minerals and other forms of contraband. Illicit trade in gold from the Congo is estimated to be worth $120 million – ten times the value of the county’s legal gold exports and twice the value of coffee its largest agricultural export.
Corruption
Corruption: abuse of a position of power for illegitimate private gain. It is defined under law in various ways, including conflict of interest, embezzlement, bribery, political corruption, nepotism, or extortion.
Corruption and organized crime are linked. They rely on each other to maintain their power, influence, and profitability.
Many factors contribute to corruption. A weak government that is poorly managed and cannot enforce its own rules; Weak accountability in government agencies; Low pay of civil servants; Corruption in the criminal justice system; and the influence of organized crime.
Four Initiatives implemented by the United Nations to reduce corruption:
1. Providing technical assistance to member states to strengthen their legal and institutional anticorruption framework.
2. Supporting and servicing international groups of Chief Justices on strengthening judicial integrity.
3. Developing and disseminating anticorruption policies and tools.
4. Enhancing interagency anticorruption coordination.
Efforts to measure the extent of corruption have increased in recent years. The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) was produced by Transparency International and examines the perceptions of businesspersons and analysts both inside and out of 180 countries worldwide. It’s an indicator of high level corruption.
International Crime Victimization Survey.
World Economic Forum’s Survey: provides an estimate of businesses victimized by organized crime. Showed organized crime is more prevalent in less affluent countries.
Controlling corruption has clear implications for controlling organized crime.
United Nations Convention against Corruption. Ratified by 160 nations. Focus on prevention, criminalization, international cooperation, and asset recovery. Prevention measures include binding safeguards to promote transparency in government procurement, recruitment or personnel based on merit, and efforts to raise public awareness. Requires countries to establish offenses that cover a wide range of acts of corruption.
Responses to Organized Crime
Transnational organized crime can only be challenged effectively when governments cooperate against it. Multinational cooperation is increasingly important as organized crimes become more sophisticated. Eg. U.S. indictment that described a sophisticated heroin trafficking enterprise that linked conspirators in Pakistan, Thailand, Canada, California, and the Washington DC Area. Payments for shipments were made through an underground paperless banking system called hawala.
United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. Best example of international cooperation against organized crime. First international instrument of its kind. By ratifying the document, countries commit themselves to adopting a series of measures that include criminalizing participation in a criminal group, money laundering laws, extradition laws, mutual legal assistance, specific victim protection measures, and law enforcement provisions. Has been ratified by 168 countries.
United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. It’s an important first step toward legally binding agreements among nations.
Cali cartel: one of the biggest cocaine-trafficking organizations in history.
Another important element in defending against organized crime: a public that is intolerant of the phenomenon and its impact on their lives.
