THE ROLE OF CONTROL IN EXPLAINING ORGANIZED CRIME

    The world of the Mafia and organized crime continues to intrigue many of us. The television series Sopranos has made the violent pump-and-dump sales scheme a prime-time television ritual. But now, federal law enforcement officials have uncovered the real thing. Men who are prominent stockbrokers, accountants, and even lawyers, all caught up in mob-led stock fraud, bribery, and extortion. This lifestyle is not just a television series to bring entertainment to millions, it is a way of life that has existed for seventy-five years. It is based on certain characteristics of the American economy, ethnic group, and politics, but changes in all of these areas means that they too are changing, and the form we know is at an end.

LITERATURE REVIEW

    For 40 years, J. Edgar Hoover denied that the Mafia even existed.  Only in the 1960s, did the bureau finally take on organized crime.  By then, the Mafia's influence extended into a multibillion-dollar syndicate, working through trucking, construction, waste disposal, gambling, and drug trafficking, being run by 26 families nationwide.
In Italy, an alliance was formed between the Mafia and the Christian Democrats, backed by the U.S.; the Mafia was saved from defeat by the communists." The political protection from the Christian Democrats allowed the Mafia to rebuild its power and establish a global organization producing twenty-one billion to twenty-four billion dollars in revenues in 1994."(Winslow 38)  Organized crime groups have benefited through economic changes found in the area of money laundering.  As global trade expanded after World WarII, major corporations and financial institutions created new and unregulated financial systems to make things easier for them to move goods and services internationally.  Today, trillions of dollars in currency, stocks, and bonds go across borders every day protected by strict secrecy laws and virtually nonexistent taxes.  These features are what organized crime groups want and have allowed them to accumulate unimaginable wealth. 

    When Nixon declared war on the Mafia in 1970, the worth of the organized crime leaders was in the range of five to ten million dollars.  By the mid-1980s, organized crime groups in the United States were making an estimated fifty billion dollars a year.  By the late 80s some drug cartel leaders made it on the Forbes magazine's annual list of billionaires.  Today, organized crime has so much economic power in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Thailand, Burma, and Russia.

    During the nineties both the United States and Italy have made remarkable strides in trying to curb organized crime by imprisoning gangsters and breaking down their business interests.  Many feel that it is safe it say that all though the Italian and the American Mafia are not dead, they both have been wounded.  At the present time organized crime is in a state of transition.  The Italian Mafia has begun to give way to a new group of blacks and Hispanics.  "During the next decade we will see the presently scattered and loosely organized pattern of their emerging control develop into a new Mafia.  This black and Hispanic involvement can be examined as part of the process of ethnic succession.  They, like other minorities before them, are inheriting a major instrument to social and economic mobility." (Iani 115)  The illicit activity organized for continuing profit rather than individual illegal acts, is the social mobility in American life.  "The question of organized crime in America cannot be understood unless one appreciates these three roles (1) the distinctive role of organized gambling as a function of a mass consumption economy; (2) the specific role of various immigrant groups as they one after another became involved in marginal business and crime; and (3) the relation of crime to the changing character of the urban political machines." (Bell 109)
With the rationalization of some illicit activities into the economy, the passing of the older generation that established these families and syndicates, the rise of the minority groups to social positions, and the break-up of the urban boss system, are all indications of organized crime that is fading away.  Crime remains as long as the desire and passion for gain remains.  For the past seventy-five years organized crime has been based on certain characteristics of the American economy, ethnic groups, and politics.  The changes in these areas mean that it too is heading for the end.
 

RESEARCH METHODS

Along with these causal types of linkages in the networks, there are also a number of "criminal relationships", links which develop out of joint criminal operations within a network.  Here is the activity rather than the people that foster the relationship.

Employer-Employee Relationship.  This is the most common by far, just as it is in the legitimate business world.  The employer hires the employee for a salary to do certain things that the employer requires of him.  In nearly every one of the networks we find many such relationships.  Our study revealed men such as Thomas Irwin who employed a group of thieves, and George the Fence and his employees in the whorehouse, Robert Mateo and the neighborhood women who worked for him, and Jimmie Mitchell who employed a group of pushers.

Joint Venture.  A second type of substantive criminal relationship is provided in the partnership and joint venture type of linkage in criminal networks.  The partners or associates share equally in the risks, responsibilities and profits.  This relationship differs from the employer-employee relationship in that the two individuals involved are in association without a dominant-submissive relationship; there are no fixed leaders or followers.  In some cases, however, one partner does seem to have greater authority and perhaps more influence than the others.  The childhood gang often operates in this fashion and it appears that older group does also.

Buyers and Sellers.  A third type of relationship is that which occurs between the buyer and seller of goods.  This type of relationship is, of course, very important in the narcotics, boosting and stolen car trades.  However, we have found in most of our networks that this type of relationship exists in a number of the activities of networks.  In some cases, it is a well established pattern such as those where illegally acquired goods such as guns or cars are sold either through a middleman or directly as part of the network.  In others it tends to be episodic, as when an individual or group learns that someone has some "hot" goods to sell.

Related to the buyer and seller of goods relationship is the buyer and seller of services relationship.  In all networks this involves chiefly a specialized criminal skill, such as locksmithing: Other skills such as prostitution or numbers running are less specialized but still important in the networks which include these activities.  In the buyer and seller of services relationship, there is usually an established pattern so that the same locksmith, for example is used repeatedly.

Leaders and Followers.  There is also a complex linkage that exists between a leader of an informal gang and his followers.  The most significant examples of this appear in prison life, although it does appear in other networks in some form.  This relationship seems to be too informal to maintain a stable operation except in prisons where incarceration keeps inmates in close, continuous association.  Here our data are too thin on hierarchical placement, dominance, submission and other organizational features to allow us to do more than speculate that these informal relationships represent first stages in the formalization of leadership in organized crime networks.

Esprit de Corps.  Another type of linkage is that which exists among and between fellow employees, or among and between followers in a gang.  Although this type of relationship seldom brings a criminal venture into existence, it is often on this type of relationship that the success of a venture rests.  Poor coordination of effort and a lack of cohesion in the group seem to have doomed some of the criminal efforts described in our networks.  For example, Luis Santos was a leader of a gang whose downfall was caused by this lack of cohesion.  In a traditional legitimate business relationship this would be described as morale, or esprit de corps, within the company.

Finally, with the identification of the causal links which lead to the information of networks and the criminal links which sustain them helps to clarify the nature of criminal networks and the functional bases on which they are organized.  With any legitimate organization, criminal networks require a code of rules which regulate relationships between the network and the outside world.  It is the code which keeps the network functioning, defines relationships, and establishes who is inside and who is outside the net. 

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

    Organized crime is more than just a criminal way of life; it is an American way of life. It is a variable and a persistent institution within American society with its own symbols, its own beliefs, its own logic and its own means of transmitting these from one generation to the next. Organized crime is often looked at on a continuum that has legitimate business on one end and organized crime on the other. Through the continuum, organized crime is viewed as a functional part of the American social system. For immigrants and migrants, they have found it to be an important means of economic and social mobility.

    Organized crime or the "Mafia" as many would call it is a definite way of life. It's not just a movie or a television series portrayed on HBO. Granted these shows might seem real but they are merely a dramatization of what the Mafia life is really like. Many of today's depictions of the American Mafia are in the comic mode, like The Sopranos, Analyze This, and Mickey Blue Eyes. The Mafia has become the paradigmatic pop-culture expression of Italian-American ethnicity for several reasons: the aura of glamour, the sometimes tragic movie mobster, and perhaps the most important the enduring appeals of the outlaw. Although real Mafiosi are venal and violent, films and TV too often have presented them far more sympathetically than they deserve.

REFERENCES

Bell, Daniel.  Crime As An American Way Of Life.  "Antioch Review" Vol. 50 Issue ½   p.109 (1992).

Brown, Stephen E., Esbensen Finn-Aage, Geis, Gilbert.  Criminology.  Ohio: Anderson Publishing Co.  2001.

Ianni, Francis A.J... New Mafia: Black, Hisanic and Italian Styles. "Society" Vol. 35 Issue 2   p 115 (1998).

Kaplan, David E.  Getting it right: the FBI and the Mob.  "U.S. News & World Report" Vol. 130 Issue 24 p. 20 (2001).

Schmalleger, Frank.  Criminal Justice Today.  New Jersey:  Simon & Schuster. (1999).

Winslow, George.  Capital Crimes: The Political Economy of Crime in America. "An Independent Socialist Magazine" Vol. 52 Issue 6 p.38 (2000).