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Maguire, Morgan & Reiner: The Oxford Handbook of Criminology 4e

Chapter 23

There are several sorts of approach to the study of organized crime and its control, spanning political science, international criminal law and international relations, social network analysis, socio-legal studies, etc.

Clear analysis of the organization of crime is to be found in Naylor, R. Tom (2003), 'Towards a general theory of profit-driven crimes', British Journal of Criminology, 43: 81–101. A useful textbook (though conceptually underdeveloped) is Wright, A. (2006), Organized Crime (Cullompton, Devon: Willan), and good collections of essays may be found in Edwards, A., and Gill, P. (eds) (2003), Transnational Organized Crime: Perspectives on Global Security (London: Routledge); Reichel, P. (ed.) (2005), Handbook of Transnational Crime & Justice (Thousand Oaks, Cal.: Sage) and the annual European collections edited by Van Duyne and colleagues, published by Wolf Legal Publishers, www.wolfpublishers.nl/.

In addition to national governmental websites, useful websites and bibliographic sources include www.american.edu/traccc/resources/publications.html (especially for material on corruption and on eastern Europe), the Canadian Nathanson Center (www.yorku.ca/nathanson/default.htm); www.organized-crime.de/; www.assessingorganisedcrime.net/; and the United Nations (www.unodc.org/unodc/index.html).

A short historical overview that has never been bettered is McIntosh, M. (1975), The Organization of Crime (London: Macmillan). Also useful is von Lampe, K. (2006), 'The Interdisciplinary Dimensions of the Study of Organized Crime', Trends in Organized Crime, 9(3): 77–95. Key works on the Italian Mafia and Mafia-type associations are Gambetta, D. (1994), The Sicilian Mafia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press); and Arlacchi, P. (1986), Mafia Business: the Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso) (though this was given a certain piquancy by criticism of Dr Arlacchi's governance style prior to his resignation as Executive Director of the UN Drugs and Crime Programme at the end of 2001). These Italian issues are nicely if densely integrated into general organized crime literature in Paoli, L. (2002), 'The paradoxes of organized crime', Crime, Law and Social Change, 37: 51–97.

The threat assessment issues are more clearly divided between those who consider that there is a serious threat from organized crime (whether in a hierarchical or a networked form) and those who are sceptical and see it as a loose market mechanism. Good sophisticated exemplars of the former may be found in Williams, P. (2001), 'Transnational criminal networks', in J. Arquilla and D. Ronfeldt (eds), Networks and Netwars: the Future of Terror, Crime and Militancy (Santa Monica, Cal.: RAND) (and in other publications in the journals Transnational Organized Crime and Global Crime). Good illustrations of the sceptical position may be found in Beare, M. (ed.) (2003), Critical Reflections on Transnational Organized Crime, Money Laundering and Corruption (Toronto: Toronto University Press); van Duyne, P. (1996), 'The Phantom and Threat of Organized Crime', Crime, Law and Social Change, 24: 341–77; and Naylor, R. (2004), Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press) (and in other publications in Crime, Law and Social Change). A classic American sceptical empirical review is Reuter, P. (1983), Disorganized crime: Illegal markets and the Mafia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press). There has been a shift from historical 'organized crime situation reports' to more forward-looking 'organized threat assessments', and official annual Threat Assessments by the Council of Europe, Europol, and the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency are available from their websites and are cited in the References. There are also reports elsewhere, for example the US State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

For those interested in the financial aspects of organized crime and terrorism, good reviews may be found in Blum, J., Levi, M., Naylor, R. T., and Williams, P. (1998), Financial Havens, Banking Secrecy and Money-Laundering (New York, N.Y.: United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention); van Duyne, P., and Levi, M. (2005), Drugs and Money (London: Routledge); Levi, M., and Reuter, P. ( 2006), 'Money Laundering: A Review of Current Controls and their Consequences', in M. Tonry (ed.), Crime and Justice: an Annual Review of Research, vol. 34 (Chicago: Chicago University Press), and in Naylor's Wages of Crime (above). For particular focuses on terrorism, see contributions to T. Biersteker and S. Eckert (eds) (2007), Countering the Financing of Terrorism (London: Routledge) and Naylor, R. (2006), Satanic Purses: Money, Myth, and Misinformation in the War on Terror (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press), though these perspectives are heavily disputed.

For British material on the organization of crime and networks, useful articles are: Coles, N. (2001), 'It's not what you know—it's who you know that counts: analysing serious crime groups as social networks', British Journal of Criminology, 41: 580– 94; Hobbs, D. (1998), 'Going Down the Glocal: the local context of organised crime', The Howard Journal, 37(4): 407–22; and Hobbs, D. (2001), 'The Firm: organizational logic and criminal culture on a shifting terrain', British Journal of Criminology, 41: 549–60.

For good drugs-focused work on organization of crime, see Dorn, N., Oette, L., and White, S. (1998), 'Drugs Importation and the Bifurcation of Risk: Capitalization, Cut Outs and Organized Crime', British Journal of Criminology, 38: 537–60; Dorn, N., Levi, M., and King, L. (2005), Literature review on upper level drug trafficking, Home Office RDS OLR 22/05, www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/rdsolr2205.pdf; and Pearson, G., and Hobbs, D. (2001), Middle Market Drug Distribution, Home Office Research Study 227 (London: Home Office). See also the Royal Society of Arts' review of drug supply in the UK, www.rsadrugscommission.org.uk/pdf/supply_of_drugs_0605.pdf, and the drugs reports of the Beckley Foundation, www.beckleyfoundation.org/policy/reports.html. For an illuminating journalistic account, see Barnes, T., Elias, R., and Walsh, P. (2000), Cocky: The Rise and Fall of Curtis Warren, Britain's Biggest Drug Baron (London: Milo).

Those interested in the development of criminal techniques might find useful: Gill, M. (2001), 'The Craft of Robbers of Cash-in-transit Vans: Crime Facilitators and the Entrepreneurial Approach', International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 29: 277–91; Levi, M. (1998), 'Organising plastic fraud: enterprise criminals and the side-stepping of fraud prevention', The Howard Journal, 37(4): 423–38; and Tremblay, P., Talon, B., and Hurley, D. (2001), 'Body Switching and related adaptations in the resale of stolen vehicles', British Journal of Criminology, 41: 561–79.

Dutch criminology has generated some excellent criminological work, and a good overview in English is Fijnaut, C., Bovenkerk, F., Bruinsma, G., and van der Bunt, H. (1998), Organised Crime in the Netherlands (The Hague: Kluwer). For a more specialized study, see Zaich, D. Zaitch, D. (2002), Trafficking Cocaine. Colombian Drug Entrepreneurs in the Netherlands (The Hague: Kluwer Law International).

The policing of organized crime has been examined mostly in the context of drugs, but useful reviews include contributions to Beare (above), Harfield, C. (2006), 'SOCA: A paradigm shift in British policing', British Journal of Criminology, 46(4): 743–61; Levi, M. (2003), 'Organised and Financial Crime', in T. Newburn (ed.), Handbook of Policing (Cullompton, Devon: Willan), and Sheptycki, J. (2000), Issues in Transnational Policing (London: Routledge). For the policing of terrorism, see T. Newburn and M. Matassa (2003), 'Policing and Terrorism', in T. Newburn (ed.), Handbook of Policing (Cullompton, Devon: Willan).

For discussions of organized crime prevention, see, reviewing the Dutch experience, Bunt, H. van de, and Schoot, C. van der (2003), Prevention of Organised Crime: a Situational Approach (Cullompton, Devon: Willan), and Schoot, C. van der (2005), Organised Crime Prevention in the Netherlands, https://ep.eur.nl/bitstream/1765/7385/1/manuscript_proefschrift_cathelijne_4_december_2005_bladwijze.pdf; and, more generally, Levi, M. and Maguire, M. (2004), 'Reducing and preventing organised crime: An evidence-based critique', Crime, Law and Social Change, 41(5): 397–469. See also Hicks, D. C. (1998), 'Thinking about Organized Crime Prevention', Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 14(4): 325–51.

Finally, on terrorism, Richardson, L. (2006), What Terrorists Want (London: John Murray) is a well written and intelligent overview by an Irish-born academic working in the USA. Burke, J. (2004), Al-Qaeda (London: Penguin) and Atwan, A. (2006), The Secret History of Al-Qa'ida (London: Saqi) provide good, readable analysis based on journalistic ethnography and interviews. For stimulating, in many ways diametrically opposed accounts, see Napoleoni, L. (2004), T£rror Inc. (London: Penguin) and Naylor (above), Satanic Purses (2006). In a more conventional mode, see a review by Wilkinson, P. www.st-andrews.ac.uk/intrel/research/cstpv/pdffiles/Foreign%20Affairs%20Commission.pdf, and the attempt to apply situational crime prevention to terrorism by Clarke, R., and Newman, G. (2005), Outsmarting Our Enemies, New York: Praeger. There are a plethora of terrorism websites, mostly American, but British ones include: www.chathamhouse.org.uk and www.rusi.org/.