The Securitization of Organized Crime in the US

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to reconstruct the process of securitizing organized crime in the US. Overall, the process of securitization here is marked by a gradual intensification that began in the 1950s with several political committee initiatives to define organized crime in the US. The committee hearings, particularly the Kefauver Committee hearing in the early 1950s, were highly public events interspersed with intensive media reporting and excessive live TV coverage. This public attention turned an essentially technocratic event of defining organized crime by crime professionals, crime experts and politicians into a public spectacle. In the context of the committee initiatives the coalition of support grew steadily, starting with grass-roots initiatives outside the realm of formal authority in the US, until a powerful coalition of leading politicians, journalists and influential bureaucratic actors, eventually headed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and, initially, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), could be established in the course of the 1960s. The chapter starts with a brief analysis of the political context and its processes of authorization in the US before turning to a closer examination of the language of securitizing moves in this context.