Global Crime Today
Crime is recognised as a constant factor within human society, but in the twenty-first century organised crime is emerging as one of the distinctive security threats of the new world order. As society becomes more complex, organised and interconnected so too does its crime.
Organised crime in the new century will be characterised by a struggle between an upperworld, defined by increasingly open economic systems and democratic politics, and a transnational, entrepreneurial, dynamic and richly varied underworld, willing and able to use and distort these trends for its own ends. In order to understand this challenge, this book gathers together experts from a variety of fields to analyse how organised crime is changing. From the Sicilian Mafia and the Japanese Yakuza, to the new challenges of Russian and East European gangs and the virtual mafias of the cybercriminals, this book offers a clear and concise introduction to many of the key players moving in this global criminal underworld.
This book was previously published as a special issue of Global Crime.
Dr Mark Galeotti is Director of the Organised Russian & Eurasian Crime Research Unit and Senior Lecturer in International History at Keele University.
First published 2005 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
Transferred to Digital Printing 2006
2005 Mark Galeotti
Typeset in Minion 10.5/13pt by the Alden Group, Oxford
All rights reserved. No part of this book maybe reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN 0-415-36699-2
Mark Galeotti
If the twentieth century was dominated by cold warswhich periodically erupted into the real thingand the war on terrorism has become the prevailing preoccupation since 9/11, then the struggle against organised and transnational crime will become a parallel defining security theme of the twenty-first.
The turnover of the global criminal economy is roughly estimated at one trillion dollars, of which narcotics may account for about half. Around 4 percent of the world's population takes illegal drugs, from inhaled solvents to the Asian betel nut. Five main commodities are dominant: opiates such as heroin (14 million users worldwide), cocaine (14 million), amphetamine-type stimulants (30 million), hallucinogens (25 million) and cannabis (140 million) . Furthermore, global organised crime is evolving, embracing new markets and new technologies, and moving from traditional hierarchies towards more flexible, network-based forms of organisation. To an extent, the legitimate world is a victim of its own success: globalisation of the legal economy has also globalised the underworld, prosperity fuels the demand for many illicit services, and improved policing ironically forces criminals to become more organised to survive.
The late Claire Sterling popularised the notion of a Pax Mafiosa, that the international organised crime groupings were working together efficiently and harmoniously and, in effect, dividing the globe between them . There is, of course, ample evidence of cooperation: Italian syndicates sell Latin American drugs in Europe, Russians buy stolen cars from the Japanese Yakuza, Albanians move Asian heroin for Turkish drug clans. It would, however, be a mistake to take this too far. Many of these accords are very loose, little more than mutually-profitable trades or temporary alliances of convenience. If anything, there is ample scope for future conflicts within the global underworld, as markets become saturated and the opportunities for further peaceful expansion exhausted.
In many ways, the traditional demarcations between national security and law enforcement concerns are becoming increasingly less meaningful. Serious and organised crime can directly affect national security resources, whether in plundering state budgets (with implications for defence expenditure) to undermining morale and discipline. Beijing's concerns about the criminalisation of its military elites was one of the main reasons behind its efforts to end their involvement in commercial activities. In Russia, penetration by organised crime has had a more direct and immediate impact, with special forces moonlighting as hitmen and weapons being sold, even to Chechen rebels.
In this respect, there is a direct carry-over, organised and transnational crime groupings acting as agents of instability and insecurity. The haemorrhage of weapons from former Soviet military stockpiles, a trade facilitated and often run by organised crime, fuelled the Balkan arms race and put high-order firepower into the hands of every faction, gang and militia. Organised crime is often powerful enough to create its own states-within-states, from the poppy fields of Uzbekistan's Fergana Valley to Morocco's cannabis-growing Rif region, undermining the integrity of their host states and of national borders. Of course, crime has long been used as a tactic to fund political insurgency, from Colombia's FARC to the Kurdish PKK. Yet many organisations, such as the remnants of the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso and elements of the Northern Ireland paramilitary forces, have in many ways lost their political rationale and become little more than organised crime groupings with a line in anachronistic rhetoric.
As some terrorists become criminals, so too are some organised criminal groupings becoming increasingly political actors, reflected in a range of activities, from lobbying to suborning or corrupting legitimate governments. This kind of criminalisation is already well entrenched in parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia. However, it would be foolish to pretend that this is never a problem in Europe and North America, where it simply tends to adopt more subtle guises .
The State of the Underworld
Despite setbacks both in Italy and the United States, the originalItalianmafia is still perhaps the world's largest and most sophisticated organised criminal phenomenon, both the traditional gangs of the Italian south, rooted in the culture of the man of honour, hard-hit by the Italian state's long-awaited challenge, as well as Mafia Incorporated, a vast, multinational commercial enterprise, which pours criminal earnings into both illegal and legal economic activity. Of course, this is distinct from the North American Cosa Nostra, twenty-five families and many smaller groups engaged in a wide portfolio of activities, from usury, narcotics trafficking and racketeering, to pornography, fraud and financial manipulation. Similarly, it has suffered serious setbacks but it is too soon to celebrate its demise, not least because the decline of the Cosa Nostra is both cause and result of the rise of a more disorganised, violent and competitive criminal environment rather than necessarily meaning a straightforward victory for law and order.
