Citation
Tupman, B. (2014), "Organised crime yesterday and tomorrow", Journal of Money Laundering Control, Vol. 17 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/JMLC-11-2013-0041
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Organised crime yesterday and tomorrow
Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Money Laundering Control, Volume 17, Issue 1
As part of the 31st Symposium on Economic Crime at Jesus College in September 2013, Bill Tupman organised and convened a days programme on “Organised crime: yesterday, today and tomorrow. Over 30 speakers presented their thoughts on a variety of topics, some selected by Bill, some by the speakers themselves. Speakers had between 8 and 12 minutes to present their thoughts, but a future issue of the Journal of Money-Laundering Control will give one or two an opportunity to express themselves at greater length. The discussion that follows summarises the material presented.
Images of the past distort our perception of the present and make the future invisible. In the industrialised world, we have an ethnocentric view of the way crime is organised, derived from a distorted view of Western experience. One speaker even denounced the US model that permeates our notion of organised crime as a paranoid fantasy. Presentations on crime under the Caliphate, in India, South-East Asia, post-Communist Russia, Brazil prisons and favelas provided different perspectives from the Weberian hierarchy of J. Edgar Hoovers fevered imagination.
The image of “the Other as source of crime is nevertheless a common cross-cultural theme. In the Caliphate, Kurds were accused of constituting a common criminal network, but so too were poets who had lost their patrons. Against this the more centralised system of the Assassains was a reminder of the school of thought that organised crime is a “state within a state, challenging another Weberian shibboleth, that of the states monopoly of coercive force. The state-sponsored Barbary Pirates of Tangiers and the North African coast served as a reminder that not only weak states produce organised criminality. At least Sir Francis Drake only committed property crimes, at least from a Spanish point of view. The Barbary pirates enslaved Cornish and Irish villagers in their raids, and only an international approach to slavery and piracy brought their crimes to an end.
One of the most important lessons brought out by speakers was that the relationship between organised crime and government is a curious one. One speaker presented a continuum from confrontation via acquiescence to interpenetration. To paraphrase: “one persons organised crime is anothers state policy. Several speakers demonstrated that loose networks have always coexisted with smaller, tightly centralised hierarchies. Another theme raised was that successful counter-crime policy has often included physical force as well as legal remedies.
A strong Italian team of lawyers and academics warned of a major feature of organised crime today: the spread of organisations and networks into the diasporas. In the case of Italian networks, not just into the USA, but Australia, Canada, the UK and other parts of Europe. Chinese, Japanese, West African, Indian, Somali, English and Dutch groups all have a cross-border profile for purposes that include avoidance of detection. Cross-border judicial networks are required for successful prosecution as well as common standards on admissibility of evidence, which in turn requires a degree of overt judicial supervision. Asset freezing and confiscation may be used as short-term measures, while public-private partnerships with banks, security companies, telephone and internet providers are increasingly used as ways around the absence of a cross-border judicial framework.
The future of organised crime is already written. We will find out over the next five years what the bad guys have been up to at the cutting edge in the previous five. There is a growing feeling that we have to start looking 15-20 years ahead to catch up with the present. Cybercrime is sexy right now, but are we looking in the right places even for the cybercriminal? The assumption has been that lone adolescents commit cybercrime in their bedrooms, but as Africa becomes the latest home of the cellphone, a new threat is emerging from angry youngsters wishing to take revenge on the wealthy North. It is argued that such people have a different value set to the usual suspects and will behave in unpredictable and unexpected ways. Governments and organised crime are also interested in the possibilities of cybercrime, cybersubversion and cybersurveillance. The dark web/deep web/Tor server is already in place and paedophiles have already fled there. But the deep web was created by intelligence services to provide a communication area free from surveillance by the governments they wish to bring down. Western intelligence services could probably tell us lots about the future of cybercrime as they have already started to create the software which will escape into the wild, just like Stuxnet, Flare and Duqu.
But if the past and present teach us anything, it is that the majority of crime will be awfully familiar. Nigerian 419 emails are just the old advanced fee fraud using the internet as a means of communication. Because the internet has become a shopping mall, all the normal high street scams are part of that shopping experience. “Identity theft is just old-fashioned impersonation. The real future of organised crime will involve the same old mixture of diasporas, loose networks, families and the occasional hierarchical group disposing of violence. A certain amount of profiling the possibilities of adapting traditional crimes to the blend of post office, bank and shopping catalogue that is the internet would save a lot of hand-wringing.
Is there the possibility of something “new out there and if so, what would it look like? 3D printers certainly offer new possibilities for duty evasion and the easy creation of banned products. But is that just smuggling made easy? Firearms can be made, but theres more money in cigarettes. Can you copy tobacco? Cannabis? Heroin? Probably. Then they will. Virtual reality will probably take over the sex business in the next ten years. Will that be a crime? In some jurisdictions, yes. In others, no.
There was much more material from prosecutors and investigators, mostly consisting of demands for more powers and more laws. Had Alistair Munro been there, he would have repeated his unforgettable demand of 20 years ago. “No more laws! we need to involve civil society and the NGO alphabet soup in the fight against organised crime. It is cheaper and much less of a threat to privacy and civil rights.
September 2013
Bill Tupman
ECPR Standing Group on Organised CrimeDepartment of Politics, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK