Organized crime: Introductory notes

Periodically I will be posting short summaries of some of the main points covered in class on a given day. These notes may or may not bear any resemblance to what is actually said or done in class. I will not be posting general lecture notes on a regular basis, as these are telegraphic notes to myself which would probably be of very limited use to anybody else. --EDG

It is difficult to examine organized crime in an empirical and analytic manner, because the approach is in some ways constructed in advance by two very popular discourses: the discourse of moral panic and the discourse of exoticism. One thing this tells us is that organized crime has an important presence in both politics and culture. These discourses do not necessarily help much with understanding, however, since both of them come “already equipped” with a way of understanding the problem.

In this course we will not ignore the political and cultural elements present in the discourses that were just mentioned: they are important factors in the social life of organized crime. But the emphasis will be more on some other aspects of organized crime that may be equally important:

• Organized crime as a business
• Organized crime as a daily activity
• Organized crime as an element in the lives of neighborhoods and local communities
• Organized crime as a consequence of and competitor with governments
• Organized crime as an international phenomenon

What we want to find out is how criminal organizations operate, who participates in them and why, what the people who participate in them do, how they interact with other institutions, and what this all means.

Corruption is a phenomenon that is sometimes related to organized crime and sometimes not related. One of the questions worth addressing is the degree to which the activities of legal and illegal organizations resemble one another, and ways in which the two worlds intersect.

A distinction worth making at the beginning: when we talk about groups engaged in illegal activity, it is useful to label these as criminal organizations. These are profit-making enterprises similar to nearly any other business, seeking to make money by selling a product. What distinguishes them from other businesses is that the product that they sell is illegal.

This has consequences for the way that business is conducted. Any lawyer will tell you that the basic element of any contract is trust, but that if trust is violated, the institutions of law are available to enforce the provisions of the contract. This applies only to legal businesses: illegal businesses do not have access to institutions of the law to enforce their contracts. So in order to assure that their business can be conducted and agreements maintained, they seek out private protection. The institutions that provide provide private protection are referred to generally as mafias (this is derived from the popular name for a variety of groups operating in or originating from Sicily, but there are obviously other organizations of the same type). Of course, there are many situations in which businesses whose activity is not illegal may also want or be compelled to use private protection. Both illegal businesses and mafias are forms of organized crime, but they play different roles in the organized crime system.

This is of course not to say that mafias are simply private versions of institutions like police and courts. They are not subject to the same sort of regulation and control, and very often compete both with legal institutions and with other illegal organizations for control of the protection market. But to the degree that mafias do provide (however imperfectly and sometimes violently) a service that provides some benefit, this may go some way toward explaining both why some people participate in their activities voluntarily, and also why such organizations are to some level tolerated both by legal institutions and by communities. That is not to say that the consequences of organized crime are in any way positive for the communities in which such organizations operate, of course.

This approach will be developed in some detail by Diego Gambetta in his study of the Sicilian mafia. While not arguing that the mafia is in any way a legal or legitimate organization, he argues that it operates according to rules and by a rational logic. Read Part I of Gambetta for Friday's class, and we will discuss his arguments further then.