Organising Financial Crimes: Breaking the Economic Power of Organised Crime Groups?

Abstract

The political assumption behind many components of the anti-organised crime strategy is that there is a serious threat that if we do not prevent them, organised criminals will seize economic and social power. In addition to any personal appetite for risk-taking¡ªwhich may be higher among offenders (and senior business executives, where the two categories are different, as I believe they usually are) than among the general public, police or private security personnel¡ªthe key problem is to relate criminal decision-making to the context in which individuals find themselves. The shape of the underworld and its relationship to the ‘upperworld’ depends on how many individuals are willing to engage in particular crimes (or, for some, crime in general), with whom and in what contexts; what structures of criminal association already exist in their ‘communities’; and how society is organised to combat the particular crimes in question: in other words, what the particular crime type requires in the way of organisation. Although there have been and may continue to be Mafia-type criminal associations in some countries, the majority of crimes, even transnational crimes, are organised in a more differentiated and subtle way by looser network structures which may fit into the definition of article 140 of the Dutch Code or RICO, but which are harder to destroy than a hierarchical pyramid of the traditional image. Within this broad framework, there are pockets of very major crime groups with transnational economic and criminal interests, which have hitherto eluded successful criminal justice intervention. However, given the illegality of what they do and the need for a certain level of secrecy, dispersed rather than centralised crime networks may represent the best way criminals have of dealing with law enforcement (and, where the crimes so impinge, intelligence agencies).