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Illegal Entrepreneurship, Organized Crime and Social Control pp 57–72Cite as

North Brabant: A Brief History of a Hotbed of Organised Crime

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Part of the book series: Studies of Organized Crime ((SOOC,volume 14))

Abstract

In the past few decades, criminologists have established that street crimes are often concentrated in specific “hot spots”. The notion that the same appears to apply to organised crime draws much less attention. In the Netherlands, the province of North Brabant is viewed as a hotbed of large-scale drug production, drug trafficking and organised theft in particular. Going back in history, the province was notorious for large-scale smuggling from 1830 to 1962 and for being the home of rural gangs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This chapter presents a brief history of these types of illegal activity in North Brabant. It concludes that circumstances that varied in time presented criminals with new opportunities, and in grasping these they were able to build upon their existing networks of domestic and international criminal relations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In earlier work, I introduced the term “meso network” to distinguish between criminal groups (“micro networks”) and the entire world community of persons who engage in organised crime (“macro network”). Of course, the macro network is a theoretical rather than a practical concept. Although no formal barriers exist for persons who want to establish criminal relations, and Dutch drug traffickers for example maintain such relations all over the world, most members of organised crime groups do not maintain global relations. Generally, however, at the meso level they do have criminal contacts outside the scope of their criminal group and this allows them to cooperate with or even switch from one group to another (Spapens, 2012).

  2. 2.

    The word ‘chalet’ is more appropriate to describe a modern-day trailer. Although some wheels are fitted to the structure to comply with the legal definition of a trailer, it can only be moved with a low loader.

  3. 3.

    The informer did not give a precise definition of the Tilburg area. The city itself and the adjacent village of Goirle have about 250,000 inhabitants. If the surrounding area is included, that figure rises to approximately 400,000.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminal Law, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

    Toine Spapens

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  1. Toine Spapens
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Correspondence to Toine Spapens .

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  1. Teesside University, Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

    Georgios A. Antonopoulos

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Spapens, T. (2016). North Brabant: A Brief History of a Hotbed of Organised Crime. In: Antonopoulos, G. (eds) Illegal Entrepreneurship, Organized Crime and Social Control. Studies of Organized Crime, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31608-6_4

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