Organized crime is a topic of immense social, political, cultural, and economic interest. Hundreds of movies and television programs and thousands of novels have focused on organized crime; it has become an icon of popular culture. Journalists cover it with great regularity. National and international commissions have grappled with the complexities of this phenomenon. It consumes enormous law enforcement and criminal justice resources and effort. Yet, organized crime remains one of the most difficult crime-related terms to define with any degree of precision.
Definitions and descriptions of organized crime take many forms. There are legal definitions designed to facilitate prosecutions. There are criminological definitions designed to both operationalize and measure organized crime. There are descriptions of its attributes, its activities, and its forms or organization. But nowhere is there an accepted, agreed upon, comprehensive definition of one of the most prevalent criminal activities in the world.
Legal or juridical definitions are designed to define the parameters for investigations and subsequent prosecutions. The accepted federal definition is found in the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (Pub. L. 90-381, Title I, Part F b):
”Organized crime” means the unlawful activities of the members of a highly organized, disciplined association, engaged in supplying illegal goods and services, including but not limited to gambling, prostitution, loan sharking, narcotics, labor racketeering, and other unlawful activities of member of such organizations.
Similarly, California defines organized crime as follows (California Control of Profits of Organized Crime Act 1982, Penal Code Part 1, Title 7, 21: 186):
”Organized crime” means crime which of a conspiratorial nature and that is either of an organized nature and which seeks to supply illegal goods and services, such as narcotics, prostitution, loan sharking, gambling, and pornography, or that, through planning and coordination of individual efforts, seeks to conduct the illegal activities of arson for profit, hijacking, insurance fraud, smuggling, operating vehicle theft rings, or systematically encumbering the assets of a business for the purpose of defrauding creditors.
Two things need to noted about these definitions. First, they are tautologies, a not terribly useful definitional device. They define organized crime as ”organized.” Second, they define organized crime by the activities in which it might be engaged, not as an entity unto itself. In addition, they suggest some type of bureaucratic hierarchy that is engaged in conspiratorial activity but fail to specify either the nature of that bureaucratic organization or the conspiracy in which it engages. In other words, the legal definitions are of little use in understanding organized crime as either a social or criminological concept.
Investigating bodies have also attempted to define organized crime. Historically, the Chicago Crime Commission (1915), the Wickersham Commission (1929), the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967), and the President’s Commission on Organized Crime (1983) have all attempted descriptions or definitions. In its final report issued in 1986, the President’s Commission on Organized Crime developed a contingency model as a way of defining the activities and organizational form of organized crime. That model specifies five levels of organization and six characteristics of organized crime groups.
The five levels of organization are (1) the criminal group, (2) the protectors, (3) specialized support, (4) user support, and (5) social support. The criminal group represents the criminal core of organized crime. Protectors include corrupt public officials, business people, judges, attorneys, financial advisers, and others who protect the interests of the criminal group. Specialized support includes persons who provide contract services that facilitate organized crime activities, such as pilots, chemists, arsonists, and smugglers. User support provides the criminal group with their consumer market: persons who purchase organized crime’s illegal goods and services, such as drug users, patrons of bookmakers and prostitution rings, and people who knowingly purchase stolen goods. Finally, social support involves persons and organizations who create a perception of legitimacy for organized crime. Examples include politicians who solicit the support of organized crime figures, business leaders who do business with organized crime, social and community leaders who invite organized crime figures to social gatherings, and those who portray organized crime or its members in a favorable light.
The six characteristics used by the President’s Commission to delineate the operation of organized crime groups include the following:
• Continuity. The organization continues operation beyond the lifetime of any member or any change in leadership.
• Structure. The criminal group is hierarchically structured, although the form of that structure varies from tight hierarchies to extremely loose associations.
• Membership. The criminal group has identifiable members selected on the basis of ethnicity, criminal background, or common interest in an enterprise.
• Criminality. Like any business, organized crime is directed by the pursuit of profit along well-defined lines. In the case of organized crime, the criminal group relies on continuing criminal activity to generate income.
• Violence. Violence or the threat of violence is employed as a means of control and protection.
• Power and profit. The purpose of the criminal group is the pursuit of profit. Power is achieved through corruption and the threat of violence.
The definition supplied by the President’s Commission on Organized Crime is important because it includes individuals in the environment of organized crime who are not directly members of the criminal group but who are vital to the success of any organized crime enterprise and because it specifies the general characteristics of an organized crime group.
Scholars studying organized crime have also made considerable use of its attributes in their definitions. Jay Albanese reviewed working definitions of organized crime and selected the most commonly mentioned attributes in developing his working definition (1989, 4-5):
Organized crime is a continuing criminal enterprise that rationally works to profit from illicit activities that are in great public demand. Its continuing existence is maintained through the use of force, threats, and/ or the corruption of public officials.
Similarly, Kenney and Finckenauer (1995, 285) offer a definition making use of descriptive attributes:
Our working definition of organized crime includes the following characteristics: a self-perpetuating, organized hierarchy that exists to profit from providing illicit goods and services, uses violence in carrying out its criminal activities, and corrupts public officials to immunize itself from law enforcement.
Donald Liddick (1999, 50) also makes reference to criminality but specifies more clearly the types of organizations found in organized crime and the importance of environmental forces in his definition:
Organized crime [is] the provision of illegal goods and service, various forms of theft and fraud, and the restraint of trade in both licit and illicit market sectors, perpetuated by informal and changing networks of upper-world and under-world societal participants, who are bound together in complex webs of patron-client relationships.
Liddick’s definition adds to the others by attempting to specify the type and style of organization found in organized crime. This builds on seminal research conducted by Joseph Albini on the organization of organized crime. Albini (1971, 35) suggests that the key term in organized crime is ”organized” and that specifying the nature of that organization or association is the key to understanding the phenomenon:
It appears the most primary distinguishing component of organized crime is found within the term itself, mainly, organization ….
In a very broad sense, then, we can define organized crime as any criminal activity involving two or more individuals, specialized or nonspecialized, encompassing some form of social structure, with some form of leadership, utilizing certain modes of operation, in which the ultimate purpose of the organization is found in the enterprises of the particular group (Albini 1971, 37-38).
These scholarly definitions, and many others not discussed here, share several characteristics. First, there is recognition of some kind of social interaction between individuals composing a core criminal group. Second, there is a recognition of the pursuit of profit, primarily through criminality. Third, there is a recognition that organized crime conducts its business in a supportive environment, which entails corruption, market demand, and social support. Fourth, there is a recognition of continuity and persistence in the organized crime group. And finally, there is some consensus on the use of threats of violence and political corruption as means of doing business and protecting the enterprise.
It would seem that using the scholarly definitions and the observations of the President’s Commission on Organized Crime, we can at least arrive at a description of organized crime as it existed in the United States in the twentieth century. However, changes in world markets and politics fundamentally impacted economies, governments, societies, and organized crime as we entered the twenty-first century. Massive increases in international travel and trade, the weakening of political states, advances in technology, and the internationalization of finance all came together to offer organized crime new opportunities to pursue profits in new markets on an international scale. And as Letizia Paoli (2002) has observed, these forces have strongly mitigated against the development of large-scale, complex organizations. In fact, she concludes that in the global economy of the twenty-first century, there is an inexorable tendency in organized crime to develop as small groups of entrepreneurs who have only tenuous connections, or as she suggests, ”network crime.”
The concept of network crime is very compatible with the organizational descriptions provided by Liddick (1999) and Albini (1971). This tendency adds yet another complexity to attempts to define organized crime. Taking globalization and its impacts into account, the National Criminal Intelligence Service of the United Kingdom argued in 1998 that organized crime at the new millennium had four basic characteristics:
• Groups contain at least three people.
• Criminal activity is prolonged or indefinite.
• Criminals are motivated by profit or power.
• Serious criminal offenses are being committed.
Organized crime is a social phenomenon, and like all social phenomena, it is constantly changing and adjusting to new exigencies and conditions. As world economies and politics globalize, so does organized crime, and with that change its characteristics, attributes, structure, and definition change as well. Debate will continue on a twenty-first century definition of organized crime. But, as we entered the new millennium, a newer, more dynamic definition was already being proposed. It is, quite frankly, the best ”new” working definition we have and an appropriate way to conclude this discussion (Schulte-Bockholt 2001, 238-39):
Organized crime is identified as a group generally operating under some form of concealment with a structure reflective of the cultural and social stipulations of the societies that generate it; and which has the primary objective to obtain access to wealth and power through the participation in economic activities prohibited by state law. Organized crime is a form of crude accumulation based on the use of threat of physical violence, which emerges—and has emerged—in different socioeconomic formations across time and place, and is generated by the specific conditions of that time and place.
