The is a research paper on Human Trafficking. Listed below is the instructions and grading rubric on how the paper is to be constructed. Please read the instructions very carefully and the grading rubric for they are very important.
Thailand is the country this assignment is about.
DUE: JANUARY 15, 2022 BY 10 a.m (EASTERN TIME) Saturday. NO LATE WORK!
Book References:
Reichel, P., & Albanese, J. (Eds.). (2013). Handbook of transnational crime and justice. SAGE publications.
Albanese, J., & Reichel, P. (Eds.). (2013). Transnational organized crime: an overview from six continents.
King James Bible. (1970). The Holy Bible. Camden, New Jersey. Thomas Nelson, Inc.
CJUS 810
Research Paper Assignment Instructions (DUE: 1/15/2022)
DUE: January 15, 2022 by 10 a.m. (eastern time) on Saturday. no late work!
Instructions (Research Paper: human trafficking)
· Each research paper should be a minimum of 6 to 8 pages.
· The vast difference in page count is because some countries and/or crime/topics are quite easy to study and some countries and/or crime/topics have very limited information.
· In some instances, there will be a plethora of information and you must use skilled writing to maintain proper page count.
· Please keep in mind that this is doctoral level analysis and writing – you are to take the hard-earned road – the road less travelled – the scholarly road in forming your paper.
· The paper must use current APA style, and the page count does not include the title page, abstract, reference section, or any extra material.
· The minimum elements of the paper are listed below.
· You must use a minimum of 8 recent (some countries/crimes/topics may have more recent research articles than others), relevant, and academic (peer review journals preferred and professional journals allowed if used judiciously) sources, at least 2 sources being the Holy Bible, and one recent (some countries/crime/topics have more recent than others) news article. Books may be used but are considered “additional: sources beyond the stated minimums. You may use .gov sources as your recent, relevant, and academic sources if the writing is academic in nature (authored works). You may also use United Nations and Whitehouse.gov documents as academic documents.
· Again, this paper must reflect graduate level research and writing style. If you need to go over the maximum page count you must obtain professor permission in advance! Please reference the Research Paper Rubric when creating your research paper.
These are minimum guidelines – you may expand the topics covered in your papers.
1. Begin your paper with a
brief
analysis of the following elements:
0. Introduction to the country (Thailand)
1. Analyze the nature of organized crime in the assigned area (you may narrow the scope of your analysis through your introduction or thesis statement if needed)
1. Analyze the impact of organized crime in the assigned area on the government.
1. Briefly propose policies that may be helpful in mitigating organized crime in the assigned area.
1. A Holy Bible comparison/analysis of the nature of the organized crime system, the impact on the country, or your proposed policy to mitigate the system.
The following is an outline of the minimum points to be covered in your paper – Crime Typology Topics:
These are minimum guidelines – you may expand the topics covered in your papers…
1. Analyze the nature of assigned crime/issue with respect to (at a minimum):
0. Scope of the crime/issue
0. Financial impact – if possible
0. Human impact – if possible
0. Analysis of various countries laws dealing with the crime/issue.
1. Briefly propose policies that may be helpful in mitigating the crime/topic on a specific country or transnational scale.
1. A Holy Bible comparison/analysis of the crime/topic
Page 2 of 2
Criteria Ratings Points
Content
Introduction
19 to >16.
0 pts
Advanced
The introductory
paragraph contains a
strong thesis statement,
research question (s),
and/or statement of
research purpose and
provides an overview of
the paper.
16 to >14.0 pts
Proficient
The introductory paragraph
contains a moderately
developed thesis statement,
research question(s), and/or
statement of research
purpose.
14 to >0.0 pts
Developing
The thesis statement,
research question(s) and
overview of the paper need
improvement.
0 pts
Not
Present
19 pts
Content
Analysis
20 to >18.0 pts
Advanced
The topic is clearly
presented and
discussed in detail. Key
terms are defined as
needed. Complex issues
are navigated with
precision.
18 to >16.0 pts
Proficient
The topic is presented and
discussed appropriately.
Key terms are defined as
needed. Complex issues
are recognized.
16 to >0.0 pts
Developing
The topic is unclear or fairly
clear but discussed too
broadly or does not meet
expectations. Contextual
factors are weakly
considered and lacking in
some significant areas.
Complex issues are
overlooked or handled
without care.
0 pts
Not
Present
20 pts
Content
Research &
Support
19 to >16.0 pts
Advanced
• Sources are evaluated
critically for applicability
in the paper.
• Research may
incorporate multiple
viewpoints of complex
issues. • Arguments
are correctly supported
with research.
16 to >14.0 pts
Proficient
• Sources are used
correctly. • Research is
aware of multiple viewpoints
of complex issues.
• Research is aware of
multiple viewpoints of
complex issues.
• Arguments are correctly
supported with research.
14 to >0.0 pts
Developing
• Sources are used but not
critically evaluated.
• Arguments incorporate
limited research but often
include personal opinion
without appropriate support.
• Sources are, at times,
not used appropriately.
• Research is not aware of
multiple viewpoints of
complex issues.
0 pts
Not
Present
19 pts
Content
Conclusion
15 to >13.0 pts
Advanced
The conclusion is strong
and clearly summarizes
the research presented
in the body of the paper.
13 to >11.0 pts
Proficient
The conclusion summarizes
the research presented in
the body of the paper.
11 to >0.0 pts
Developing
The conclusion does not
adequately summarize the
research presented in the
body of the paper.
0 pts
Not
Present
15 pts
Research Paper Grading Rubric | CJUS810_B02_202220
Criteria Ratings Points
Content
Christian
Worldview
15 to >13.0 pts
Advanced
Creates Christian
Worldview (CWV)
Section and applies
CWV elements and
support in explanation of
the training program with
specific biblical
references (book,
chapter, and verse).
13 to >11.0 pts
Proficient
Creates Christian
Worldview Section and
applies general CWV
elements and support in
explanation of the training
program with global
referencing to biblical
references (reference does
not have book, chapter, and
verse, rather, “the Bible
says type of references).
11 to >0.0 pts
Developing
Christian Worldview
mentioned. No specific
section in the paper. Only
general CWV elements and
support in explanation of
the training program with
global referencing to biblical
references (reference does
not have book, chapter, and
verse, rather, “the Bible
says type of references).
0 pts
Not
Present
15 pts
Structure
Mechanics
12 to >10.0 pts
Advanced
• No grammar, spelling,
or punctuation errors are
present. • Voice and
person are used
correctly and
consistently. Writing is
precise. Word choice is
appropriate. • Student
has proper page count.
6-8 double-spaced
pages (or more if page
count waived by
instructor) not including
title page, abstract, or
reference section.
10 to >9.0 pts
Proficient
• Few grammar, spelling, or
punctuation errors are
present. • Voice and
person are used correctly.
Writing style is sufficient.
Word choice is adequate.
• Student has 70% of the
proper page count of 6 page
double-spaced pages not
including title page,
abstract, or reference
section.
9 to >0.0 pts
Developing
• Several grammar,
spelling, or punctuation
errors are present. • Voice
and person are used
inconsistently. Writing style
is understandable but could
be improved. Word choice
is generally good.
• Student has less than
70% of the proper page
count of 6 page
double-spaced pages not
including title page,
abstract, or reference
section.
0 pts
Not
Present
12 pts
Structure
Mechanics
13 to >10.0 pts
Advanced
• Citations and format
are in current APA style.
• Cover page, abstract,
main body, and
reference section are
correctly formatted.
• Paper is
double-spaced with
1-inch margins and
written in 12 point Times
New Roman font.
10 to >9.0 pts
Proficient
• Citations and format are
in current APA style with few
errors. • Cover page,
abstract, main body, and
reference section are
present with few errors.
• Paper is double-spaced
with 1-inch margins and
written in 12 point Times
New Roman font.
9 to >0.0 pts
Developing
• Citations and format are
in current APA style though
several errors are present.
• Cover page, abstract,
main body, and reference
section are included though
several errors are present.
• Paper is double-spaced,
but margins or fonts are
incorrect.
0 pts
Not
Present
13 pts
Research Paper Grading Rubric | CJUS810_B02_202220
Criteria Ratings Points
Structure
Research
Elements
12 to >10.0 pts
Advanced
• Academic primary and
.gov (when necessary)
are used well and
include a minimum of 11
citations as listed below.
• 8 citation must be
recent (past 10 years
unless waived by
professor). Relevant,
academic (peer
reviewed) journals
preferred. However,
professional journals (no
more than 50%) and
.gov references may be
used for this
requirement. • Must
use at least 2 Holy Bible
citations. • Must use at
least one recent
newspaper article on the
country of study.
• Students may use
additional sources to
support their claims and
may use non-academic
sources as long as the
minimum requirements
above are met. • The
best 11 citations will be
graded.
10 to >9.0 pts
Proficient
• Research is aware of
multiple viewpoints of
complex issues.
• Academic primary and
.gov (when necessary) are
used well and include a
minimum of 70% of the
required 11 citations as
listed below. • 8 citations
must be recent (past 10
years unless waived by
professor). Relevant,
academic (peer reviewed)
journals preferred.
However, professional
journals (no more than
50%) and .gov references
may be used for this
requirement. • Must use at
least 2 Holy Bible citations.
• Must use at least one
recent newspaper article on
the country of study.
• Students may use
additional sources to
support their claims and
may use non-academic
sources as long as the
minimum requirements
above are met. • The best
11 citations will be graded.
9 to >0.0 pts
Developing
• Less than 70% of the
Academic sources required
11 citations as listed below
are used. Reliance on
popular sources is evident.
• An incomplete or
inaccurate reference
section is provided. • 8
citations must be recent
(past 10 years unless
waived by professor),
relevant, academic (peer
reviewed) journals
preferred. However,
professional journals (no
more than 50%) and .gov
references may be used for
this requirement. • Must
use at least 2 Holy Bible
citations. • Must use at
least one recent newspaper
article on the country of
study. • Students may use
additional sources to
support their claims and
may use non-academic
sources as long as the
minimum requirements
above are met. • The best
11 citations will be graded.
0 pts
Not
Present
12 pts
Total Points: 125
Research Paper Grading Rubric | CJUS810_B02_202220
CHAPTER 1
Historical Overview of Transnational Crime
Mitchel P. Roth
It has only been 30 years since the President of the
Societe Internationale de Criminologie, Denis Szabo, wrote in the preface to a book of essays by criminologists concerning new trends in transnational crime that “the 30th International Course in Criminology chose an uncommon subject—transnational crime—which is rarely examined within our discipline” (MacNamara & Stead, 1982, p. vii). Anyone who has attended a criminology or criminal justice conference over the past 20 years would be struck at how recently transnational crime was considered peripheral to the study of crime. In the 1990s, increasing focus on the globalization and increasing complexity of criminality has led many criminologists to specialize in the internationalization of crimes. This chapter chronicles the cross-border historical antecedents of modern transnational crimes and the processes that gave rise to them.
Defining Transnational Crime
One of the more challenging tasks for anyone seeking to identify transnational crime has been determining what “transnational crime” actually refers to. What has not helped the dialogue is that “the terminology is highly unstable and at least four terms overlap each other,” including transnational crime, transnational organized crime, international organized crime, and multinational crime (Madsen, 2009, pp. 7–8). Still others refer to this phenomenon as cross-national crime and cross-border or transboundary criminality. However, the issue becomes clearer once international crimes are subtracted from the equation, since the vast majority of definitions of international crime refer to activities that threaten global security, such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Of all the expressions that have been used, transnational has had the most adherents.
For much of human history, criminal activity has been a local or regional concern. Prior to the great strides in transportation and communication technology in the 19th century, the conceptual underpinnings of transnational crime were still years away. By most accounts, the term transnational crime from a criminological perspective emerged sometime in the mid-1970s, following the lead of the United Nations, which was brandishing the term in an attempt to identify types of crimes that transcended national borders. Like terrorism and organized crime, there is no accepted consensus on a definition of transnational crime. The expression was developed by the U.N. Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch in 1974 to guide discussion at a United Nations crime conference. Four years later, Gerhard Mueller—a prominent criminologist and chief of the U.N. Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch from 1974–1982—suggested that
it referred to a criminological term, with no claim to providing a juridical concept, and consisted simply of a list of five activities: 1) crime as business, organized crime, white-collar crime, and corruption; 2) offenses involving works of art and other cultural property; 3) criminality associated with alcoholism and drug abuse; 4) violence of transnational and comparative international significance; and 5) criminality associated with migration and flight from natural disaster and hostilities. (Reuter & Petrie, 1999, p. 7)
One high-ranking Interpol official contributed an “early informal” definition of transnational crimes, relegating them to crimes “whose resolution necessitates the cooperation between two or more countries” (Bossard, 1990, p. 3). In 1994, one leading authority asserted that “transnational crime is a crime undertaken by an organization based in one state but committed in several host countries, whose market conditions are favorable, and risk apprehension is low” (Williams, 1994, p. 96). Likewise, the authors of one recent study defined transnational crime as “those activities involving the crossing of national borders and violation of at least one country’s criminal laws.” Furthermore, they suggest that most examples of this form of crime are “economically motivated and involve some form of smuggling” (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006, p. 255, n. 3).
In 1995, the United Nations defined transnational crime as “offenses whose inception, proportion and/or direct or indirect effects involve more than one country” (U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime [UNODC], 2002, p. 4). It identified a laundry list of 18 categories of transnational offenses whose inception, perpetration, and direct or indirect efforts involve more than one country. These categories include money laundering, terrorist activities, theft of art and cultural objects, theft of intellectual property, illicit arms trafficking, aircraft hijacking, maritime piracy, insurance fraud, computer crime, environmental crime, trafficking in persons, trade in human body parts, illegal drug trafficking, fraudulent bankruptcy, infiltration of legal business, and the corruption and bribery of public or party officials.
There are legions of transnational criminals operating solo or with a handful of associates. However, the emphasis on transnational crime is heavily predicated on the activities associated with “transnational organized crime.” Over the past decade, it has become increasingly apparent that the notion of “organized” groups of actors in a traditional sense is a vestige of the past. Well into the 1990s, organized crime definitions were heavily based on the hierarchical nature of crime networks and syndicates. This became especially clear in 2000 when the United Nations in its Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNODC, 2000) defined organized crime
as a structured group of three or more persons existing for a period of time and acting in concert with the aim of committing one or more serious crimes or offences in accordance with this Convention in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or material benefit. (UNODC, 2000, Article 2a)
A serious crime refers to “conduct constituting a criminal offense punishable by a maximum deprivation of liberty of at least four years or a more serious penalty” (UNODC, Article 2b). Organized crime is regarded as transnational when it
(a) is committed in more than one State; (b) is committed in one State but a part of its preparation, planning, direction or control takes place in another State; (c) is committed in one State but involves an organized crime group that engages in criminal activities in more than one State; or (d) is committed in one State but has substantial effects in another State. (UNODC, 2000, Article 3.2)
Another way to view transnational crime is crime “that in one of several ways involves two or more sovereign jurisdictions” (Madsen, 2009, p. 8). While the tendency is to focus on violent or high profile crimes such as the drug trade and human trafficking, transnational crime also involves the more mundane, such as the parental dispute over custody of a child involving two countries. Crimes can also be organized and transnational, but do not actually violate international law, such as the smuggling of nontaxed tobacco products from country to another (Madsen, 2009, p. 9).
Definitions of complex terminology can be highly problematic. Indeed, it becomes even more so as transnational crime becomes more and more globalized. These problems are exacerbated when it comes to distinguishing virtual borders from geographical ones. Thus, one can hypothetically commit a crime in another country without leaving his or her home country, such as in the case of Nigerian advance fee fraud, better known by its criminal statute number, “419.” Definitions become even more useless when one considers formerly distinct forms of criminality such as organized crime, white-collar crime, and terrorist activities, which increasingly fall under the rubric of transnational crime. More recently, various academics and officials have expanded the definition to include new activities such as terrorism and cybercrime, but not without some debate. In the end, however, one must accept the fact that “computer networks and the Internet do not recognize international boundaries” (Fairchild & Dammer, 2001, p. 327) any more than drugs and human traffickers do.
Any historical examination of modern transnational crime will reveal that there are actually few new examples of transnational crime. The illegal trafficking and smuggling of weapons, migrants, illegal substances, and humans, as well as terrorism, tax evasion, environmental crimes, corruption, and financial fraud, have been taking place for decades if not centuries. What has changed according to several researchers is the scale of these activities and the increasing “deterritorialization” of crime as criminal actors make use of new advances in communication and transportation (Dandurand, Tkachuk, & Castle, 1998, p. 2).
Transnational Crime: An Historical Perspective
The prospective shape of transnational crime can be discerned in numerous crimes and smuggling networks in the premodern world. For example, from a historical perspective, many of the trade routes linking modern transnational criminal networks between countries were established centuries ago, long before national boundaries had been established. In fact, the classical overland trade route linking Byzantium (now Istanbul) to Rome through Greece and the Balkans into Western Europe is still used by modern drugs and weapons traffickers, and the so-called amber route, connecting the Black Sea to the Baltic, plays an integral role in smuggling and human traffic operations from China and other parts of Asia. Meanwhile, the water route across the Adriatic from Albania to Italy continues to bring various forms of contraband into Puglia in the south of Italy, and then north to the rest of Europe, and illegal immigrants and marijuana still follow ancient routes blazed during the Roman Empire into Europe from Africa through Morocco and Spain.
In similar fashion, ancient underground banking systems have operated next to legitimate banking systems for centuries. Different types of these systems have evolved in various parts of the world, including hawala (transfer) and hundi in South Asia and fei-ch’ien (flying money) in China (Passas, 1999). Initially conceived as noncriminal strategies to move money and goods quickly, they have been adapted by transnational criminals to bypass formal state banking systems and regulations, allowing them to move money without a paper trail. The best known of these, hawala, had its origins in early medieval commerce in the Near and Middle East, in an era marked by substantial long-distance trading, and played an essential security role during a time when brigands and pirates were on the prowl for merchants in transit by land or sea. This scheme protected merchants by allowing them to transfer funds based on trusted and Islamic propriety without the physical necessity of shepherding currency through foreign countries.
Sea piracy and the illicit trade in humans, usually in the form of slaves, are among the earliest examples of organized crime on a multinational or global scale; in fact, the slave trade has been described as the “world’s oldest trade” and can be traced back to the 3rd millennium; the trafficking of women, to at least the beginning of the Christian era (Chanda, 2007). Counterfeiting activities have been around as long as there has been a profit in it. In 17th-century England, the government selected Isaac Newton, “the smartest man in England,” as warden of the mint to avert what by the late 1690s had become a national crisis, because it became increasingly difficult to find “legal silver” in circulation (Levenson, 2009, p. 109). This grew into a major concern at the highest levels of power as the criminal underworld melted clipped silver into ingots to be sold on the continent, leading to an investigation by Parliament, which feared lacking sufficient funds to pay its soldiers on the battlefields of Europe. Newton’s solution was to reconfigure silver coins so that they would be much more difficult to clip, a process he was able to see through to completion by 1699.
Illicit arms, drugs, and human trafficking have received most of the focus of transnational crime studies over the past decade. More recently, Gastrow (1998) suggested that the smuggling of a herd of horses across the South African frontier to the German cavalry by a gang led by Australian immigrant Scotty Smith should be considered “one of the first transnational criminal operations in South Africa.” As early as the 17th century, French provocateurs were smuggling illicit weapons to various Native American tribes in the American colonies, as they contested the British for hegemony in the region. But examples can be found in many other fields as well. Not as well chronicled, recent research has focused on obscure topics such as smuggling binder wire into Canada from the United States in the early 20th century (Evans, 2011) and the trafficking of candelilla, a waxlike substance extracted from native Mexican plants used in the manufacture of cosmetics and other commodities. This practice flourished between the 1950s and 1980s, when the Mexican government strictly controlled its sale and production. A Texas entrepreneur stepped in and together with a host of candelilla makers, known as candeleros, created a “system of drop points and independent truckers” (Carey & Marak, 2011, p. 2) to smuggle the product across the border, much like drugs and humans are today. Ironically, it was not ended by law enforcement but by candeleros who discovered they could make even more money by selling their labor in the United States.
Piracy
No form of transnational crime illustrates the continuum of transnational crime past and present better than the ancient crime of piracy. In contrast to their precursors, modern pirates have taken advantage of high technology, bases in failed nation-states, potential alliances with transnational terrorists, and a global economy dependent on secure shipping lanes. Nonetheless, modern powers have proved no more able to fend off pirates, as demonstrated by the April 2009 standoff between an $800 million U.S. Navy destroyer and a handful of pirates in a lifeboat—the first incident in two centuries in which foreign pirates had captured a U.S. vessel for ransom (Gettleman, 2009; Mazzetti, 2009). The last time this took place was when the Barbary pirates of Northern Africa took sailors hostage in the early days of the American Republic.
Piracy was always a problem in the Mediterranean, becoming more endemic in the last century of the Roman Republic as a result of a miscalculation in foreign policy by the Roman senate in 2nd-century BCE. Formerly, the sea power of Rhodes had policed the Eastern Mediterranean until destroyed by the Romans. Rome, with no standing navy of her own to replace what it had destroyed, left the Mediterranean open to organized piracy. Pirates were headquartered in Cilicia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, dominating the Mediterranean with great fleets. No direct action was taken against them until 102 BCE. According to one observer, the reason the Romans had not vigorously suppressed piracy was that pirates had become the chief source of slaves for the ruling classes (Lewis & Reinhold, 1966, p. 325). By 69 BCE, the seas were almost closed to travel and trade, and pirates were able to strike at will along the Italian coast and even make forays into the harbor of Rome at Ostia. Famine and financial disaster beckoned if the pirates were not vanquished. In 67 BCE, the Gabinian Law was passed, granting Pompey some of the most extraordinary powers ever granted to any Roman leader—almost unlimited powers over the entire Mediterranean for dealing with the pirate menace. Within 3 months, the pirate menace and freebooting ceased to plague the empire (Lewis & Reinhold, 1966, pp. 324–325).
So by the Middle Ages, piracy was already an ancient occupation. As trade increased over the centuries, so did the volume of piracy. With the expansion of oceanic trade routes during the commercial expansion of the 16th and 17th centuries, pirates likewise expanded their routes, following the money trail from the Old World to the Americas. As the French, English, Dutch, and Spanish each carved out empires in the New World, competition between these powers to establish trade monopolies often led to war on the high seas (Karraker, 1953). The traditional years of the Golden Age of Piracy lasted between 1650 and 1730. An evaluation of this era offers a number of striking parallels to 21st-century transnational criminal activities. Illegal pirates as well as state-sponsored ones, called privateers, had vast economic incentives to participate in the looting of cargoes of gold, grain, jewels, wine, and even drugs. The import and export of these commodities was heavily controlled, and for a successful smuggling network to flourish it required the willing participation of corrupt officials and merchants, particularly when it came to laundering their ill-gotten treasures.
According to early English common law, piracy committed by English subjects was likened to treason, the highest felony of this period. Statutes were introduced that added trading with known pirates or furnishing them weapons as forms of treason. According to William Blackstone (1771/1962), the crime of piracy, or trading with known pirates, was equivalent to “robbery and depredation upon the high seas” (p. 66). Sir Edward Coke regarded these actors as hostis humani generis, whereby “they renounced all the benefits of society and government” when it came to justice (Blackstone, 1962, p. 66).
Slavery
Numerous historical surveys of transnational crime include slavery as one of the earliest
examples of international criminality. Although slavery can indeed be traced to antiquity, it was not statutorily illegal throughout most of history and, hence, not a crime. Indeed, it was an accepted fact in ancient Greece and Rome that slavery was a natural state for some individuals, leading Aristotle to defend it, noting that “humanity is divided into two: the masters and the slaves” (Chanda, 2007, p. 215). It is anachronistic to speak of slavery as transnational crime before the 18th century. Much of the problem is the result of confusing human trafficking with the human chattel slavery that characterized the transatlantic slavery, a connection that researchers have concluded “is tenuous at best” (Andreas & Greenhill, 2010, p. 49).
By the 1400s, the slave trade had become a legal global enterprise, and over a period of 400 years, 12 million slaves were forcibly removed from Africa and taken to the Americas (Ashcroft, 2001, p. 70). The very nomenclature of slavery has led to some of this confusion over its inclusion in various historical studies of slavery as transnational crime. For example, in the 18th century, the jurist William Blackstone interpreted forced slavery as a form of piracy, writing, “Taking any of the crew or passengers of a vessel for the purpose of selling them as slaves,” to be tantamount to the offence of piracy at common law; but “this had reference rather to the kidnapping of British subjects than the traffic in natives of Africa” (Blackstone, 1771/1962, pp. 68–69).
The British came early (compared to other Western nations) to the fight against international slavery and was the first to institute a ban on slavery and the slave trade, making it also the “first to criminalize international commerce in a particular commodity” (Andreas & Nadelmann 2006, p. 31). More important, at the same time, it became “the first to evolve into a far more ambitious regime aimed at the criminalization of all activity involving the production, sale, and use of that ‘commodity’ in every country” (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006, p. 31). From a transnational perspective, the strides made against the slave trade by the British provided tactical lessons that would later be adopted by opponents of the white slave trade, being that they also had to contend with the cross-border characteristics of the transnational trade in humans (Andreas & Nadelmann 2006, p. 34).
Global Prohibitions
Various prohibitions have provided some of the greatest stimuli for the development of transnational crime. This is clear as early as the late 17th century, when the English Parliament passed the Navigation Acts, designed to control what commodities could be imported into its North American colonies. By preventing any goods that did not originate in England from being shipped into the colonies, it in effect created a black market by prohibiting numerous luxury goods from other countries. To fill the void, gangs of pirates, smugglers, and black marketers of various nationalities were more than happy to fill the void. Many goods were smuggled in to evade high taxes. It has been estimated that perhaps five sixths of the tea consumed in the colonies had been smuggled in (Williams, 1961). The Navigation Acts passed between 1651 and 1696 did for 17th-century pirates and smugglers what alcohol and drug prohibition did for the development of 20th-century transnational crime. Colonial Americans seethed at the British monopoly on shipping and trade and had no disinclination about doing business with pirates, establishing in effect with them an unrestricted market for cheaper goods, undercutting legitimate markets in the process (Hoffer, 2000). According to Serrano (2002), “Prohibition is at the nub of transnational organized crime,” arguing that “more than any other form of state intervention, it is prohibition that has a particularly destabilizing effect upon the whole sphere of the illegal” (p. 15) by prohibiting certain goods and services and in the process creating illicit markets.
Smuggling
Smuggling as a form of criminality dates to antiquity, where the collection of tribute was an established practice. With the minting of coins and the creation of money, commerce and exchange became much easier, as did the collection of taxes or tariffs that enriched the coffers of monarchs. As far back as the Old Testament, customs were recognized as an important source of income and the right to collect them a form of political control as effective as tariffs and taxes in the modern era. In fact, the very word tariff testifies to the internationalization of trade over the centuries past. Almost 1,200 years ago, the Moors founded the town of Tarifa near Gibraltar on the Spanish coast. Here, they pioneered a system that revolutionized commercial trade. As international commerce spread from country to country, a predatory group of pirates made the strategically located town their command post. They stopped merchant vessels, levying tribute according to a fixed scale on all merchandise passing in or out of the straits that it overlooked. Mariners who reluctantly paid tribute at Tarifa soon lent the name “tariff” to this tribute. Over time, the governments of Europe adapted this idea and began making similar levies on imports, and a tariff system was well established in the Old World by the colonial era. From a modern perspective, because of “the substantial lowering of traditional trade barriers, global smuggling is increasingly about evading trade prohibitions and bans rather than tariffs and taxes” (Andreas & Greenhill, 2010, p. 5).
Human smuggling is among the world’s most common transnational crimes. In the United States, human smuggling went transnational in the wake of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Until 1916 and World War I (which stifled most transocean smuggling networks), a trans-Pacific smuggling network flourished bringing the first “illegal aliens” into the United States using a route that went through Cuba and then into Mexico. Much of the traffic was controlled by the 6 Companies, an immigrant fraternal society first organized in San Francisco in the mid-19th century. It was directed by representatives of seven major Cantonese families in San Francisco. Their smuggling network evolved into a commercial pipeline that besides the illegal smuggling of immigrants would later include opiates and various exports and imports (Perkins, 1978; Romero, 2011).
Drug Prohibition
Narcotics have been used for medicinal, recreational, and religious purposes for millennia. As early as the 1700s, Spanish authorities were legally taxing and selling the coca leaf to pay for New World expansion, while in comparison there has always existed a “strong bond between opium and criminality” (Booth, 1996, p. 227). Although it is most closely associated with China, the opium poppy actually was first cultivated in the Middle East and then India, not reaching China until sometime in the 17th century, when it was introduced by the Portuguese (Bresler, 1980, p. 10). For much of history except for medical use, opium has been an illegal commodity—even the centuries-long Indo-Chinese opium trade for much of its existence was “nothing more than a smuggling enterprise” (Booth, 1996, p. 227). The Ch’ing Emperor banned its sale in 1729, but failing imperial power left him unable to enforce the ban.
British merchants took over the opium trade in 1773 when the government of British India granted the East India Company an exclusive monopoly over India’s entire poppy crop. Excluding the use of opium for medicinal purposes, reports of opium addiction in China are scarce before 1800. By the early 19th century, British merchants were eager to buy tea, silk, rice, and other goods from China to feed the growing demand for these products in England. As matters stood, the Chinese had little interest in any of the goods offered in exchange by English merchants. But with the British East India Company in control of the Bengal opium fields, which were considered the best in the world at that time, the British devised a scheme in which it would inundate China with opium, creating legions of addicts among Chinese users who had no previous familiarity with the drug.
Chinese historians have pointed out that opium smoking was linked to the development of tobacco smoking, that opium smoking did not become widespread in China until the early 18th century, and that for the most part, it is a modern phenomenon. During this era, the tobacco was mixed with a weak opium concoction, making a substance called madak. Once the East India Company began importing large amounts of opium in 1773, hoping to “rectify the trade imbalance” mentioned previously, the weaker madak product was replaced by one much stronger (Jonnes, 1999, p. 43). The opium problem became serious enough that the Manchu imperial court issued a proclamation banning the opium trade. The British failed to follow this edict, and the Chinese responded by destroying about $11 million worth of opium, igniting the First Opium War (followed by another one in 1860). British victory forced China to reimburse it for the losses and to lift its prohibition on the trade.
The 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission, in many respects, kicked off the transnational crusade against illegal drug trafficking. As the first multinational drug control initiative, it brought together representatives from 13 countries to formulate a plan to curtail the illicit trafficking and consumption of opium. Its limited impact was in no small part because participants had permission only to make recommendations and therefore were not imbued with the power to make treaties. Nonetheless, the commission encouraged participating countries to enact national legislation that would address the problem domestically. Between 1912 and 1914, some of the countries sent emissaries to meetings held at The Hague. In any case, the 1909 meeting stimulated countries to pass statutes regarding domestic drug use and laid the foundation for the adoption of the 1912 Hague Opium Convention.
As early as 1918, a U.S. Treasury Report noted that suppliers were using a national organization to smuggle drugs through the Canadian and Mexican borders. When Great Britain banned the use of cocaine, hashish, and barbiturates for nonmedical purposes in 1920, with the Dangerous Drugs Act, and criminalized the use of cannabis in 1928 (the United States followed in 1937), the opportunities for transnational crime were vastly expanded.
In 1925, the League of Nations attempted to implement a prohibition resolution but had no luck because of the noncooperation of opium-producing companies. Turkey, which had not attended the 1909 conference, had seen its power considerably reduced with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I. As a result, the country had become more dependent on the opium trade as the world’s biggest producer and was unwilling to sacrifice this source of income (Bovenkerk & Yesigoz, 2007).
No international crime illustrates the transnational nature of crime like the links required by the global drug trade, a relationship that has been active for more than a century. America was already one of the leading consumers of legal narcotics when the Harrison Narcotics Act was passed in 1914, in one fell swoop criminalizing the nonmedical use of opium, morphine, and coca leaf derivatives. It has been well documented how criminals stepped into the void to provide addicts with illegal narcotics. Among the first to see the opportunities in the transnational trafficking of illegal drugs were Jewish gangsters who organized a smuggling network with the leading supplier of the day, China; this was followed by the building of laboratories to dilute and package narcotics for market and forming distribution networks to get product to addicts. In 1923, a kilo (2.2 lbs) of pure heroin could be purchased from its Chinese source for $3,000. Diluted and divided into 15,500 multigrain capsules, by some accounts it could turn a profit of $300,000 (Volkman, 1998). In the late 1920s, the formidable American gangster Arnold Rothstein moved into the transnational narcotics trade (his final criminal enterprise) and was soon sending emissaries to Europe and Asia to purchase opium for transport into the United States. Since heroin, cocaine, and morphine were still available from legitimate pharmaceutical companies in Europe, he was able to purchase large quantities of the drugs for the American market. But he would not live to see the success of the global narcotics trade.
During Japanese expansion into China in the 1930s, one of the Rising Sun’s strategies for conquest was to flood China with opiates. Indeed, the estimated 8 million Chinese opium addicts seemed a much more alluring market to international drug traffickers than the mere 100,000 addicts thought to reside in the United States (Jonnes, 1999, p. 95). Federal Bureau of Narcotics chief Harry Anslinger went as far as describing the Japanese invasion strategy to undermine the Chinese people “morally and physically” with opiates as “chemical” warfare (Jonnes, 1999).
During the years between the world wars, Turkey and Yugoslavia monopolized much of the opium market, and since opium products were prohibited for consumer use throughout a number of Western countries, a lucrative black market developed and trading became the domain of multinational gangs. Paris was originally the distribution center, but this changed in the 1920s when factories were shut down by police and the epicenter moved to Marseilles, establishing the foundation for the so-called French Connection.
In the mid-1930s, a number of the global opium-trafficking networks were run by Jewish and Greek smugglers, insular networks that were difficult for outsiders to penetrate and well connected internationally due to their participation in various legitimate trading markets. Many of the traffickers came from countries carved out of the Ottoman Empire as well, including Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria. According to a 1933 Federal Bureau of Narcotics report, 40% of the drug smugglers identified in China either were of Greek origin or were Eastern European Jews, Serbians, or Armenians (Bovenkerk & Yesigoz, 2007, p. 39). In this same decade, Corsican smugglers established the French Connection.
In the years leading up to World War II and the subsequent Chinese Civil War, American gangsters purchased heroin from Shanghai. But the world conflict made this untenable. After the Maoist Revolution eradicated the opium scourge after 1949, many drug networks moved their bases of operations to Hong Kong. But the war and its revolutionary aftermath shattered the Far Eastern heroin market, until it reemerged in the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s.
The lack of Asian narcotics in this era “reinvigorated” Middle Eastern and Mediterranean drug operations. Most of the heroin business was concentrated in the hands of independent operators in France and operating in conjunction with French Corsican gangs in Marseilles. The French Connection served as the epicenter of the international heroin trade for years. Corsican criminals, long interested in what was then French Indochina, had remained in the region after the French left in 1954, in an unsuccessful attempt to control drug routes through Saigon to Hong Kong and Malaya (Booth, 1990). Between the 1940s and 1960s, Hong Kong and Marseilles were considered the heroin refining capitals of the world. But in later years, this activity became more dispersed as opium/heroin-trafficking networks were reestablished in Europe and Southeast Asia.
By the 1960s, there was a tremendous increase in transnational narcotics trafficking. However, in 1972, the opium trade was thrown into turmoil when Turkey proclaimed a poppy ban. Until then, crime groups in Corsica had purchased opium base in Turkey to be shipped to Marseilles, where it was refined prior to smuggling into the United States (the French Connection); the opium base was then shipped from Turkey through Lebanon, where it was refined in Beirut.
By contrast, the Peruvian crude-cocaine industry expanded during WW II to meet medical demands in the United States. Following the war, with few legal markets after 1945, several manufacturers turned to making their product available to the underworld. Following the war the rise in drug addiction increased the demand for illicit cocaine (Gagliano, 1994, p. 148). By 1947, Peru was the primary source for illicit cocaine traffic in Western Hemisphere with the United States as the main outlet. Cocaine was often trafficked into the United States through Cuba, where American mobsters had established a base of operations in Havana for narcotics and gambling activities. But until 1973, the South American cocaine trade remained small and based in Chile until General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. Subsequently, Pinochet would play a role in destroying the drug trade by arresting or deporting dealers and allowing the Colombians to step in and take over. Whether cocaine, opium, marijuana, or purpose-made synthetic drugs, transnational traffickers have consistently played a role in bringing these illicit drugs from regions where cultivation is legal or less restricted to markets in countries where the restrictions were more onerous.
Alcohol Prohibition in the United States
The Mexican border has long been a sanctuary for outlaws and a staging ground for border smuggling networks. One authority observed that “Contraband was a central fact in colonial New Spain as in independent Mexico, where up to half of all silver left the region bound for the Philippines without passing through a customs house” (Carey & Marak, 2011, p. 33). During the first decades of the 20th century, opiates were smuggled across the border from Mexico (where it was still legal) in response to the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914. As one observer put it, “Prohibition on one side of the U.S.-Mexico border and legal commerce on the other created the conditions for drug trafficking” (quoted in Owen, 2007, p. 147). During the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920, a flourishing weapons traffic brought ammunition and rifles south across the border, much in the way guns are trafficked to narcotics smugglers today. It was not much of a stretch for bootleggers and affiliates to smuggle tequila across the border using many of the same trails as the drugs and weapons smugglers that preceded them. It has often been asserted that modern transnational organized crime came of age during the American Prohibition era between 1920 and 1933, when Mexican and American smugglers took advantage of the black-market demand for market needs.
One of the seminal events in the internationalization of crime was the inauguration of alcohol prohibition in America in 1920, signaling an almost 13-year period of opportunity for criminal cooperation between foreign nationals and Americans, linking their countries in an illicit network that brought alcoholic beverages and related commodities into the United States from a number of countries and continents. During the 1920s, the majority of imbibers made do with a variety of homemade but dangerous alcoholic concoctions. However, society’s upper milieu was unwilling to risk their lives with homemade liquor and was willing to pay more for liquors properly distilled and blended. This in turn led to an international trade that offered higher profits but was logistically more complex and expensive.
Often lost in the historical discussion of interethnic cross-border crime prior to the 1960s is the relationship between Mexican and American smugglers on the Texas border, where “smuggling had existed as long as there had been an international border, the only change being the commodities smuggled” (Harris & Sadler, 2004, p. 421). According to one study of the Texas Rangers during this period, the suppression of the liquor traffic from Mexico remained one of the mounted law enforcers’ “highest priorities” (p. 499). The low price of Mexican mescal made it an attractive source of illegal liquor to bootleggers on both sides of the border. Costing only $2 to $3 a gallon in Mexico, it could then be sold for $10 a quart in Texas (Harris & Sadler, 2004). Mexican liquor smugglers, called Tequileros, smuggled Mexican tequila, often on horseback as they cooperated with bootleggers in their automobiles. But the U.S. government saw these forays in a very different light than the intrusions of bootleggers from Canada; the government regarded them as “transgressions to American sovereignty” and often responded with deadly force, making the first two decades of the 20th century among the most violent up that point (Diaz, 2011, p. 59).
Placing more emphasis on the Mexican Tequileros, federal law enforcement and the Texas Rangers teamed up to successfully suppress their smuggling, only to be confronted by “more sophisticated and more violent gangs” who took their place (Diaz, 2011, p. 75). In fact, during the Prohibition era, Anglo bootleggers killed more law enforcement personnel than the horseback Tequileros. According to one authority, since most of the American bootleggers drove cars, their hands were typically concealed as officers approached their cars, allowing them to get out their guns and get the drop on police officers. In addition, since they drove the myriad roads and highways of south Texas, bootleggers typically had a clearer shot at anyone following them, in contrast to horseback smugglers who were often traipsing through the scrub brush with their hands impossible to conceal (Diaz, 2011, p. 75).
Transnational alcohol smuggling networks flourished along the Eastern seaboard and the Canadian border during Prohibition as well. Lucky Luciano and his stalwarts recognized that to obtain the best liquor they needed to set up huge smuggling operations that required purchasing the genuine article in Great Britain, Canada, and the Caribbean. This entailed the purchase of large ships to transport the beverages to the 3-mile limit (which before the 1980s referred to the limits of a nation’s sovereignty over territorial waters). A “Rum Row” was established off the coasts of many American coastal cities, where ships lined up beyond the 3-mile territorial limit as they waited for swift boats to pick up cargoes coming from Great Britain and the Caribbean to transport illicit booze to shore, where they were met by an army of trucks responsible for delivering it to the warehouses of wholesale bootleggers. Others established liquor smuggling bases outside the country’s borders in such far-flung locales as the Bahamas, British Honduras, Mexico, and even Papeete, Tahiti.
Human/Sex Trafficking
By some accounts, the number of people illegally crossing borders in the 21st century, often under coercion, has no precedent in human history. Officials and academics tend to treat human trafficking as a plague of recent globalization. Although the nomenclature describing it has changed, in fact it is probably as old as history. In 1933, one investigator wrote,
There are now just as many, if not more souteneurs [French idiom for pimps] and traffickers exploiting women and children, whether of the white or Asiatic race . . . It seems that since the time of my own investigations, the extent of the traffic in singing girls [Mutsai], sold, pawned, or voluntary prostitutes, has not abated one iota” (De Leeuw, 1933/1943, p. 10).
Human trafficking has been criminalized only since the mid-19th century, while international cooperation against human trafficking received its greatest stimulus in the early 20th century during the crusade against the so-called white slavery. The term, first introduced in the mid-19th century, initially referred to “the entire system of licensed prostitution.” During the last decades of the 19th century, white slavery became analogous to all prostitution for many observers, while a more accepted definition included “recruitment to prostitution by force or fraud” (Andreas & Nadelmann, 2006, p. 33). Foreign governments have been cooperating against international sex trafficking since at least the turn of the 20th century, when the International Conference for the Suppression of Traffic in Women met in England. Five years later, representatives of 13 countries agreed to coordinate their activities by signing the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic in 1904. In 1910, the Second International Convention for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic agreed to punish any person who facilitated the entry of females under the age of the 20 into the sex trade or procured an adult by force or fraud (Winick & Kinsie, 1971, p. 269). From 1930 to 1933, the League of Nations ran a Commission of Enquiry into the trafficking of women and children in Far Eastern countries. Several resolutions were considered for further regulating this trade before World War II intervened (Winick, & Kinsie 1971).
During the second half of the 19th century, thousands of destitute young Jewish women from Eastern Europe were coerced into prostitution, an endeavor that took them from small Jewish villages, commonly referred to as shtetls, to frontier colonies in Latin America, South Africa, India, and parts of the United States by a criminal gang of Jewish mobsters led by Zvi Migdal (Vincent, 2006, p. 29). Prior to this, women were typically procured for brothels in closer proximity to major European cities, the Middle East, and Constantinople (p. 29). However, by the late 19th century, a “vice circuit” had been set up that was of global proportions, as pimps trafficked women from Asia and Europe to ever-expanding markets, taking advantage of improvements in transportation and communication to fill markets in America and the Far East “where there was a chronic shortage of women” (p. 29).
During the 19th century, procurers went as far as Japan to find poor girls in small villages and shipped them to brothels in Australia, India, and Singapore. Likewise, thousands of Chinese girls were kidnapped from their homes during the mid-19th century and shipped to California brothels and were forced to service Chinese workers in the gold camps or railroad camps where they were building the transcontinental railroad. Unlike their counterparts, Jewish pimps in Eastern Europe “confined their dealings [for women] to the Jewish community” (Vincent, 2006, p. 30). While Japanese pimps kidnapped victims, and French procurers recruited in French cities, Jewish pimps recruited for prostitution through false promises of marriage and used local matchmakers. This ruse became so common after World War I that the League of Nations issued warnings about it. By the end of the Great War, sex trafficking had become such a serious transnational problem that when the Treaty of Versailles was convened in 1919, it affirmed this crime as an international offense. Although Article 282 did urge members to punish this crime to the full extent of the law, it was more bark than bite, and ultimately “in vain” (p. 11).
In 1914, an American government report asserted that the “majority of men exploiters of prostitution in New York City are foreigners by birth” (Kneeland, 1913 p. 79). It also confirmed the aforementioned research that most of the brothel owners “did not come directly to America,” with many traveling through Europe to recruit young women before taking them to numerous destinations. During the Boer War, Johannesburg in South Africa proved a favorite destination until authorities chased them out. They then set their sights first to South America and then to North America, leaving a “trail of seduction and corruption” that could be traced through Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Canada, Alaska, and American urban centers (Kneeland, 1913, p. 80).
According to one League of Nations Report on the Traffic in Women and Children, the push-and-pull factors of human trafficking were as discernible in the 1930s as they are today, noting that “the demand for foreign women governs both the extent and direction of the International traffic” (quoted in De Leeuw, 1933/1943, p. 245). In the 1930s, these conditions included “a large surplus of men over women,” “temporary markets for prostitution arising from occasional or seasonal movements of population” (such as in the case of soldiers and sailors), the “arrival of a body of troops in a community” (creating a demand for foreign women), and spurious offers of employment (pp. 245–249). While many of these methods of recruitment seem familiar, modern human traffickers have an even greater arsenal of techniques, thanks to the Internet and globalization. In 2005, the 3rd Summit of Heads of State and Government—the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings—developed a definition of sex trafficking that would have been just as applicable to the challenges faced by the League of Nations, defining it as
the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, or the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another for the purpose of exploitation. (Council of Europe, 2005, p. 32)
However, this definition is much more inclusive than any definitions from the earlier 20th century, because not only does it target sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, and practices similar to slavery, but it also includes one of the newer transnational crimes, “the removal of organs,” a crime made possible today only because of the great advances in medicine and technology.
New Shape of Transnational Organized Crime
During the Cold War, military security trumped all other worries when it came to competing superpowers and their allies. Following the demise of the Soviet Union, attention was shifted to transnational criminals, which seems to have supplanted the Communists as the international bogeymen threatening global security. Indeed, there has been a rush to judgment by international law enforcement and government officials to proclaim highly developed transnational organized criminal organizations a direct threat to political sovereignty and the very notion of the state. However, this ignores the fact that most illicit activity is accomplished in a clandestine manner that precludes the collection of data to support these fears. Much of the hysteria is derived from inflated estimates of various transnational criminal activities, leading some critics to suggest “Official numbers from government agencies and international organizations are highly problematic yet go largely unchallenged” and that many “measurement claims” do not hold up to careful scrutiny (Andreas & Greenhill, 2010, p. 5). Indeed, Andreas and Greenhill are among those who argue that the inflated crime statistics and profit estimates of transnational criminals lack credibility and have contributed “to the construction of a dominant narrative about transnational crime as an enormous growing global threat” (p. 5).
Countries around the world continued to shift much of their national crime-fighting agendas and sources toward counterterrorism activity during the decade after 9/11. The end result, particularly in countries such as America, Great Britain, and other Western nations was that this allowed transnational criminal networks to continue to operate under the radar, much as they have always done. What one expert lamented in 1994 (Williams) still holds true nearly 20 years later; that is, “The very nature of transnational crime presents unique problems,” challenges that continue to hamper an understanding of the complex nature of transnational crime as well as the ability to develop effective crime prevention strategies.
Transnational drug trafficking continues as it has for almost a century. The development of new “purpose-made” drugs and their requisite precursor chemicals have created new markets for transnational crime. Globalization has changed the face of source and transit cities, and in some cases transportation routes, but the markets remain the same—affluent America and Western Europe. Meanwhile, many of the source cities have shifted to Africa and Asia. The Nigerian, or African, connection has become increasingly entwined in the transnational drug trade as Nigeria, once the hub of the 19th-century West African slave trade, emerged as a major transshipment point for Southeast Asian heroin bound for Europe and America. In 2000, an International Crime Threat Assessment published by the U.S. government characterized Africa as ripe for transnational crime, noting that sub-Sahara Africa’s lack of effective border security combined with the corruption within the police and security services made the region an “inviting operational environment for international criminals, drug traffickers and terrorists.” Moreover, it stated that “Major Sub-Saharan cities with extensive commercial, financial, and sea and air transportation links to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia are hubs for international criminal activity” (quoted in Berry & Curtis, 2003, p. 2).
Today, one would be hard-pressed to identify a new form of transnational crime. The illegal trafficking of weapons, migrants, illegal substances, and human beings, as well as terrorism, tax evasion, crimes against the environment, financial fraud, and corruption of public officials has been going on in one form or another for decades, if not centuries. What has changed is the scale of these activities, thanks in no small part to deregulation procedures in transnational exchanges as well as the free movement of goods, information, and people, all requirements for free-trade initiatives and the demands of globalization (Dandurand et al., 1998).
By most accounts, the emergence of new technologies and other factors related to globalization “have lowered the barriers to entry in some criminal activities, and have as a result diversified the nature and types of activities that criminal groups are involved in” (UNODC, September, 2002, p. 6). Transnational crime remains a growth industry, with future opportunities emerging with each new breakthrough in technology, communication, and transportation. Among the more alarming threats are the opportunities that will accompany the increasing aging population of the Western world. According to Madsen (2009), one potential area of expansion is in the realm of supplying “replacement organs from willing or unwilling organ donors.” By most accounts, the first documented case of coerced organ donors was reported in India on January 28, 2008, when officials exposed a case in which hundreds of organ donors had been duped by false promises of work, or coerced by threat, to donate kidneys for payments of $2,250 (Madsen, 2009, p. 124). The benefactors were rich clients, who paid 10 times that amount for the organs. But at least the donors reportedly all made it out alive, in contrast to undocumented reports coming out of South America where “donors” are kidnapped off the streets and killed in order to harvest kidneys and other organs. Nonetheless, globally, there remains a huge gap between supply and demand for organs (“The Gap Between Supply and Demand,” 2008). But most evidence still remains anecdotal, due in no small part to the fact that the increasing numbers of poor people in the world often remain complicit actors and donors in the lucrative trade. What’s more, organ trafficking is not just a problem in developing nations, as evidenced by a recent case in the United States, where poor donors were selling organs to wealthy recipients through middlemen in New Jersey and Brooklyn (Sherman & Margolin, 2012).
As noted previously, international prohibition regimes have provided a plethora of money-making opportunities for transnational criminals. According to Madsen (2009), the
increased use of trade embargoes and trade sanctions under international law will supply organized crime with ample opportunities for revenue because they will invest their commercial and organizational skills in providing the goods and services which cannot be supplied by legitimate trade. (p. 124)
International treaties focusing on the illicit traffic in ivory and weapons have stimulated related efforts by criminals to smuggle these items for profit. One criminal network was recently spotlighted for harvesting ivory in Africa, before smuggling it through Kenya and Tanzania bound for China and Thailand. In an unrelated case, two Manhattan jewelers pled guilty in June 2012 to marketing more than $2 million worth of illicit ivory carvings. In 2011 alone, 24 tons of ivory were seized by authorities around the world, making it “the worst year for elephant poaching” since an international ban on commercial ivory trading went into effect in 1989 (Halbfinger, 2012, p. A17).
One arena where progress is being made is in the smuggling of antiquities; countries have begun cooperating to curb the trade in looted artifacts, making it more difficult to sell them in certain markets. American and British museums are among those that are now unwilling to purchase cultural treasures unless they can identify a chain of ownership past 1970. As one expert put it, “Looting is driven by the art market, by supply and demand” (Blumenthal & Mashberg, 2012, p. 19). However, while this prohibition has driven up the value of these types of objects for individual collectors, it prohibits many major museums from buying them. Auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s have tightened their policies as well. In another case, in Pakistan in July 2012, police seized a large number of ancient Buddhist sculptures that would have sold for millions on the international antiquities market.
Regional conflicts, civil wars, and failed states have stifled the creation of mechanisms for fighting transnational crime from Mexico to Somalia and from Central Asia into Eastern Europe and a number of other far corners of the world. These conflicts and lack of able leadership continue to hinder the creation of any meaningful treaties or embargoes. However, the shrill rhetoric and “apocalyptic tone” (Edwards & Gill, 2006) of officials and the media have created a mind-set that transnational criminal groups are threatening world security. A more thoughtful examination of the history of transnational crime would take issue with what passes for “conventional wisdom.” One recent analysis of this issue argues that not only are these fears of “illicit globalization” and the “loss of state control” overtly alarmist, they are “misleading and suffer from historical amnesia” (Andreas, 2011, p. 3).
This chapter demonstrates that the process of globalization is not just a recent phenomenon and that it has been going on for many centuries, albeit on a much smaller scale. The reality of a shrinking world dates back at least to 1519 when the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan became the first person to circumnavigate the world and establish the first global linkages, initiating trade on a global scale. Following his voyage, other innovations followed that cut sailing times even further. But not until the steamships of the 1780s was there a noticeable reduction in time and increased speed after almost 2,000 years of maritime travel (Chanda, 2007). Until the 20th century, transnational crime was mostly based on the same activities of the previous centuries. But when it came to global communication and transportation, few significant innovations before the 20th century were capable of stimulating new opportunities for international crime networks outside of simple cross-border smuggling operations. What set the stage for global innovation was the passage of various prohibitions that created markets for criminalized commodities, such as in the case of narcotics, alcohol, and other goods. The connections between criminal actors in different regions and territories predate the modern state, but what distinguishes each era’s transnational crimes are each era’s advances in technological innovation and the opportunities it creates.
1 Transnational Organized Crime Networks Across the World
Jan van Dijk
Toine Spapens
Introduction
This chapter discusses the network perspective on transnational organized crime (TOC). A distinct feature of transnational crime networks is that they complete parts of the “criminal business processes” in different countries. In the case of ecstasy, for example, the chain may involve Dutch producers who procure precursor chemicals from China and Germany, manufacture the pills in the Netherlands and Belgium, export the product to Australia, and launder the money in the Virgin Islands. Cross-border illegal activities require coordinated actions by individuals and groups, sometimes from all over the world, sometimes just from neighboring countries.
The network perspective on organized crime emerged in the 1990s (Kleemans, Brienen, & Van de Bunt, 2002; Kleemans, Van den Berg, & Van de Bunt, 1998; Klerks, 2001; Sparrow, 1991). Its main argument is that most organized crime groups are loosely knit collectives with constantly shifting members instead of the well-organized and hierarchically structured “firms” as depicted by, for instance, Donald Cressey (1969). We may therefore view transnational crime networks as collectives of criminals based in different countries who maintain criminal relations.
We first discuss the network perspective on organized crime and present a typology of criminal networks. Then we give an overview of the extent of organized crime in different parts of the world, using a composite index of social indicators of organized crime activities. We use country scores on this index for a quantitative analysis of the impact of institutional controls on the extent of organized crime in individual countries. Next, we elaborate on the concept of transnational crime networks. In the final section, we critically examine the popular notion of Western policymakers that globalization processes allow criminal firms originating from individual countries to expand their criminal activities across the world. The chapter ends with some conclusions regarding the likelihood of such criminal globalization.
Criminal Groups as Networks
Criminologists use the network perspective for mapping crime groups such as narcotics supply networks, youth gangs, and terrorist networks (see McGloin & Nguyen, 2011; Sageman, 2008). Recent network studies on organized crime for example concerned the Hells Angels in Canada (Morselli, 2009), the Italian mafia (Calderoni, 2011; Campana, 2011), and from a historical perspective, the Al Capone organization (Papachristos & Smith, 2011).
The focal point of these studies is predominantly the criminal group because limited availability of data and the lack of suitable analysis software led researchers to focus on relatively small networks. Although a lack of access to primary data, most notably police investigations, continues to be a problem, technical analysis tools have improved considerably. The recent study of the Al Capone organization, for example, included 1,500 persons and 6,000 different connections among them. Social network analysis of crime groups has proved to be a useful tool for describing criminal networks and for understanding the various roles of their members. Police analysts use similar techniques for mapping crime groups under investigation, for instance, by using Analyst Notebook or comparable software.
The term network organization usually refers to horizontal organizations with few hierarchical levels and a high degree of flexibility in both internal and external relations. In 2002, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) collected data on 40 groups from 16 countries, including the United States, Africa, and Russia. The groups analyzed were seen as representative of their countries by national experts. The researchers distinguished five different types of networks (UNODC, 2002b; van Dijk, Shaw, & Buscaglia, 2002). Their typology includes the following:
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– The criminal network (defined by the activities of key members, prominence in network determined by position and skills, personal loyalties primarily important, coalescence around criminal projects, low public profile, network reforms after exit of key individuals). A Dutch network of drug smugglers and a Nigerian network involved in different types of crimes were examples of such groups included in the sample.
· – The standard rigid hierarchy (single leader, clearly defined hierarchy, strong system of internal discipline, often strong social or ethnic identity, violence essential to activities, influence or control over defined territory). Examples of such groups originated from Italy, China, Colombia, and Eastern Europe. They make up a third of the 40 groups.
· – The regional hierarchy (single leadership structure, line of command from center, degree of autonomy at regional level, geographic/regional distribution, multiple activities, often strong social or ethnic identity, violence essential to activities). A notable example of such groups are outlaw motorcycle gangs such as the Hells Angels with chapters in different countries.
· – The clustered hierarchy (number of criminal groups, governing arrangement for the groups present, cluster has stronger identity than constituent groups, degree of autonomy for constituent groups, formation strongly linked to social/historical context, relatively rare). An example of such a group is the “28s prison gang” of South Africa.
· – The core group (core group surrounded by loose network, limited number of individuals, tightly organized flat structure, small size maintains internal discipline, seldom has social or ethnic identity). An example was a Dutch group involved in the trafficking of persons.
· The UNODC researchers have collected further data on the secondary characteristics of the networks/groups (van Dijk et al., 2002). The results showed that most groups operate across borders. Of the groups, 70% carried out criminal activities in three or more different countries. Many even operated in five or more. Most are involved in multiple criminal activities. Of the 40 groups analyzed, 30 used corruption and 33 routinely employed violence. Of the 40 cases, 30 showed evidence of the investment of profits from illegitimate activities in legitimate business activity. These results suggest that organized crime groups in most parts of the world are indeed operating in more than one country.
· The results also show that only a minority of these groups is structured as the rigid hierarchy described by Cressey in his early assessment of the mafia in the United States (Cressey, 1969). Cressey claimed that organized crime in the United States consisted mainly of a nationwide alliance of 24 tightly knit criminal mafia “families” led by capos (bosses) who commanded “soldiers,” “buffers,” and “button men” and were advised by consiglieres.
· An important question is what determines the structure of a criminal network; criminologists assume that the (political) context in which criminal networks operate is an important factor. Mafia-type syndicates, which are large and often structured as standard or clustered hierarchies, seem to have developed, and may still thrive, in countries where state authority is weak, corruption levels are high, and consequently, enforcement is lax (cf. Paoli, 2011; Paoli, Greenfield, & Reuter, 2009). In such circumstances, dominant criminal groups may even develop into an alternative for the state, by offering protection to citizens (Gambetta, 1993; Varese, 2001). According to Paoli (2011), Italian government authorities came to terms with the representatives of mafia power until at least up to the mid-20th century. They delegated to the latter the maintenance of public order over wide areas of western Sicily and southern Calabria, where the authority of the central government was scarce and even the personal safety of state officials was in danger. Mafia-type organizations also prevail in Russia and Mexico (Fijnaut & Paoli, 2004; Gonzalez-Ruiz, 2001). In Eastern Europe (e.g., Bulgaria and Albania), a limited number of major criminal groups seem to monopolize criminal activities in certain areas (Bezlov, 2005). The main criminal organizations in these countries are fairly stable, and their territories are known to the public.
· In most other parts of the world, the organized crime scene seems to be in a state of flux. Crime networks tend to be relatively small and decentralized to cope better with the risk of apprehension and prosecution. Most notably in Colombia the notoriously powerful Cali and Medellín cartels have since long been disbanded and superseded by hundreds of smaller, more flexible, and more sophisticated cocaine-trafficking organizations. We can see this transformation at least partly as an adaptation to the gradual improvement of law enforcement and adjudication by the courts. Much of the organized crime, including smuggling of migrants, in mainland China seems also in the hands of small to medium-sized, locally active groups that do not fit the traditional concept of the highly organized ‘triad” (Zhang, 2001; Zhang & Chin, 2001). According to the researchers, the use of violence against customers during transportation or in countries of destination is rare because this could hamper future activities in their geographically limited recruitment areas back home. Nigerian organized crime is highly improvised and has therefore even been characterized as “disorganized organized crime” (Shaw, 2002).
·
Analyzing Organized Crime and Its Determinants with the Use of Statistical Indicators
The U.N. 2000 Convention against Transnational Organized Crime urges member states to collect and share information on trends in organized crime. Around the turn of the last century, various attempts were made by international organizations such as Europol and Interpol to quantify the number of groups involved in organized crime per country. This counting of the most prominent organized crime groups was predicated on the notion that organized crime is mainly the work of stable and hierarchically structured groups known to law enforcement agencies. As explained earlier, this notion now seems dubious in most parts of the world where small and constantly changing networks seem to be dominant. The diversity and flexibility of criminal networks complicate attempts at counting their numbers as a way of measuring their prevalence. In one Europol study in the 1990s, for example, the Italian authorities listed only 4 criminal groups in the country whereas the Netherlands counted 600 different groups. This was a clear indication of methodological and definition problems, and the counting exercise was subsequently abolished.
An alternative approach, more in line with the social network perspective, is the construction of social indicators of organized crime activities rather than of groups. In an explorative study on organized crime indicators—or “mafia markers”—van Dijk has collected statistics on each of the main defining elements of organized crime (van Dijk, 2008). Although definitions in national legislation show great variation, criminologists as well as the international law enforcement community describe organized crime as criminal activities for material benefit by groups that engage in extreme violence, corruption of public officials, including law enforcement and judicial officers, penetration of the legitimate economy (e.g., through racketeering and money laundering), and interference in the political process.
One of the most common activities of organized crime is racketeering, including the collection of protection money from businesses. Since 1997, the World Economic Forum (WEF) has carried out annual surveys among business executives of larger companies to identify obstacles to businesses, which includes a question on the prevalence in the country of organized crime defined as “mafia-oriented racketeering, extortion” (WEF, 2004).
Another source of cross-national data on perceived organized crime is risk assessments made by international business consultancy companies. The London-based consultancy company Merchant International Group (MIG) assesses investment risks in over 150 countries, including the prevalence of different types of organized crime (MIG, 2004). The risk assessments concerning organized crime from MIG were found to be strongly correlated to the perceptions of business executives of the WEF surveys. To facilitate further statistical exploration, a composite index was constructed based on the averaged rankings of countries on the WEF surveys of 1997 to 2003 (WEF, 2004) and the assessments of organized crime prevalence of MIG. The resulting index refers to the level of different types of organized crime activities, such as extortion and drugs, arms, and people trafficking, as perceived by potential victim groups and/or independent experts.
As mentioned earlier, instrumental violence, corruption of public officials, and money laundering are regarded as other defining characteristics of organized crime. It is indeed hard to imagine a country where organized crime is rampant without significant amounts of these mafia-related phenomena. Statistical indicators were selected for the prevalence of each of these three defining characteristics of organized crime as well. Police-recorded homicides divide roughly into emotional attacks on intimates and cool-blooded killings executed by organized crime. The perpetrators of the first category are in most cases arrested. The perpetrators of the second category are not. To develop a proxy measure of “mob-related violence,” rates of unsolved homicides were calculated by deducting numbers of convictions for homicide from the numbers of police-recorded homicides. The resulting country rates of unsolved murders per 100,000 population were found to be fairly strongly correlated to the perceptions of organized crime, just mentioned. Similarly, a proxy indicator of “high-level corruption’’ was derived from studies of the World Bank Institute and indicators of money laundering and the extent of the black economy were taken from the WEF surveys among business executives. All three indicators proved to be strongly correlated to the others. These findings support the construction of a composite organized crime index combining the five interrelated proxy indicators: perceived prevalence of organized crime, especially racketeering; unsolved homicides; grand corruption; money laundering; and the extent of the black economy.
Table 1.1
depicts the mean scores on the Composite Organized Crime Index (COCI) of world regions. To allow a more detailed diagnosis of regional problems with organized crime, the table presents both the absolute scores of regions on the composite index as well as the rank numbers on the five source indicators used.
As can be seen in Table 1.1, organized crime was least prevalent in Oceania (mainly Australia and New Zealand) and most prevalent in Central Asia and the Caribbean. The ranking of regions according to the composite index and those according to the five constituting indicators show a high degree of consistency. Outliers are the relatively high rank numbers on informal sector and money laundering of Central America. Among the high-crime regions, South Africa shows surprisingly low rank numbers on homicides. The latter result could reflect that organized crime groups in the region, which tend to be highly flexible and fluent, are less prone to the use of extreme violence than groups in, for example, Eastern Europe.
The combination of data from different sources allows the calculation of scores for a large number of individual countries. In Asia, rates are the worst in parts of South Asia (Pakistan, Bangladesh), but China and India are also rated unfavorably (even more than Italy with its notorious problems in the southern part of the country). In the international literature on organized crime, India is rarely the focus of attention. Research on Chinese organized crime mainly focuses on Chinese expatriates. Limited available research findings on homeland China point to collusion between corrupt communist party members and local gangs in remote areas (Zhang, 2001).
In Africa, Nigeria, Angola, and Mozambique stand out with the highest scores. Nigerian organized crime activity in both the country and the region has been well documented (UNODC, 2005). Gastrow (2003) gives a detailed account of how organized crime threatens to penetrate state and businesses in Southern Africa, notably in Mozambique. In Latin America, Haiti, Paraguay, Guatemala, Venezuela, and Colombia show the highest scores. High scores are also observed in Jamaica. Within Europe, organized crime prevalence increases diagonally from the Northwest to the Southeast, with levels being low in England and Germany, higher in Spain and Italy, and by far the highest in Russia, Albania, and Ukraine.
The surveys of the World Economic Forum from 2003 to 2010 on one hand indicate incremental improvements in some of the new member states of the European Union such as Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria, as well as in Russia and Georgia (World Economic Forum, 2012). On the other, the situation in Central America, most notably in Mexico, is worsening. It is also in Central America that statistics on homicides have been on the rise, in contrast to most other world regions (Alvazzi del Frate & Mugellini, 2012). The latter finding confirms the close link between trends in organized crime and lethal violence.
Organized Crime and Institutional Controls
The metrics on organized crime prevalence across regions and countries presented previously allow us to put to the test the hypothesis of criminologists that high levels of organized crime controlled by large-scale pyramid-type criminal groups tend to flourish in countries where state institutions are weak. Statistical analyses have confirmed the link between institutional failure and organized crime. The results revealed a strong link between a composite measure of police performance and the index of organized crime (van Dijk, 2008). Where police forces operate more professionally, levels of organized crime tend to remain relatively modest. A telling example is the near total elimination of organized crime in Georgia after the enactment of new legislation and the establishment of an antimafia department in the national police around 2008 (van Dijk & Chanturia, 2012). Case histories have revealed the crucial role of independent and competent prosecution services and judiciaries in tackling organized crime and corruption (Joly, 2003).
SOURCE: World Economic Forum, Global Competitiveness Reports, 1997–1998 to 2003–2004 (see WEF, 2004); Merchant International Group (2004); World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (1996); UNODC (2002a); Buscaglia and van Dijk (2003).
The relationship between the rule of law, including perceived independence of the judiciary, and the level of organized crime therefore also deserves attention. For this purpose, we used a composite measure of the rule of law developed by the World Bank Institute (Kaufmann, Kraay, & Mastruzzi, 2003).
Figure 1.1
shows the relationship between country values on this index of the rule of law and our composite index indicating country levels of organized crime. The two variables were found to be strongly correlated (r = 0.79). Multivariate analyses confirmed the relationship between the measure of judicial independence and levels of organized crime (Buscaglia & van Dijk, 2003; Sung, 2004). The critical factor determining the extent of organized crime is the quality of institutions responsible for the rule of law, including competent police services and independent courts complying with standards of professional integrity. These results signify that weak criminal justice systems promote levels of organized crime at the country level. We rarely observe high levels of organized crime in countries with strong policing and effective maintenance of the rule of law.
Figure 1.1 Quality of Rule of Law (including independence of the judiciary) and Prevalence of Organized Crime (Composite Organized Crime Index) Per Country
SOURCE: van Dijk (2008); Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi (2003); see http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/governance/govdata
Conceptualizing Transnational Organized Crime Networks
As mentioned earlier, scholars usually apply the network perspective to study individual crime groups (“micro networks”). However, we must not forget that such groups do not appear from out of the blue but crop up from a larger network of actors who are willing and able to contribute to one or more illegal activities. “Criminally exploitable ties” that enable them to exchange information on future illegal activities connect these individuals. Similar to social media communities such as Facebook, this network of criminal relations is theoretically a global “macro network,” because there are no regulations that prevent (potential) criminals from establishing connections (Spapens, 2006, 2010). In practice, however, it is clustered locally.
Starting from the concept of the macro network, a TOC group, or micro network, may be considered, on one hand, as a group of actors moving from one country to another to execute illegal activities. The notorious “Pink Panther gang,” a network originating from Serbia suspected to have conducted more than 100 robberies of jewelry stores in more than 20 countries, is a noteworthy example. On the other, we may view a TOC network as a (temporary) collective, or micro network, composed of a small number of members of the global macro network who live in different countries. A central leader may coordinate such a micro network from a base in one country, but it may also be a fluid-project organization where business relations instead of hierarchical ties prevail. The sections have indicated that loosely knit collectives of the latter type are more dominant than are rigidly controlled hierarchical groups. It is therefore an important question whether it has become easier to establish and maintain criminal relations across borders and to set up actual criminal business processes.
The criminal macro network comprises entrepreneurs, investors, workers, and different categories of facilitators, including technicians, accountants, and legal counselors. Crime groups consist of a mix of actors who possess the necessary qualities to complete a specific illegal activity. Afterward, the criminal relationship usually stays intact and can be used to plan new crimes.
Only rarely do individuals join criminal groups (or terrorist groups for that matter) as complete outsiders. Rather, they typically first join the macro network by establishing criminal relations with persons who are already involved in criminal acts. Prisons are very important places for (transnational) criminal networking. Detainees obviously have the proper “credentials” and track record in crime. Moreover, given the circumstances, there is ample time to develop a relationship of mutual trust. In one case, a Dutch and a German drug courier developed a friendly relation in a Spanish prison where both served a sentence. Upon release they quickly brought their former bosses into contact—a Berlin wholesale drug dealer and a Dutch importer of cocaine—which just as quickly resulted in regular shipments from the Netherlands to Germany.
The micro networks that execute an actual criminal “business process”—for example, the trafficking of 100 kilos of heroin from Turkey to the United Kingdom—may exist for only one operation. They may also develop into more stable and longer lasting organizations, particularly when cooperation remains fruitful and law enforcement does not interfere. Of course, members of micro networks usually also maintain criminal relations with other members of the macro network, with whom they are at the time not actively in business. An analysis of 48 crime groups involved in ecstasy production in the south of the Netherlands, for example, revealed many connections between the members of different groups. Although the composition of the project organizations changed constantly, the names of key indigenous criminals and their extended families stayed very much the same (Spapens, 2006).
Although the macro network is theoretically global, it is of course impossible for all actors to be in direct contact with each other. Instead, comparable to other social networks, the criminal macro network divides into geographical clusters. A first explanation for this is that business processes of organized crime mostly require unskilled labor, which is readily available nearby. Maintaining an international network for the recruitment of such coworkers serves no purpose. In most cases, international relations are of use only for criminal “entrepreneurs” looking for business partners in other countries.
A second explanation is that criminals must conceal their illegal activities, and this includes discussions of future criminal projects. For this reason, the preferred mode of communication are face-to-face meetings, either at people’s homes or at places such as shady bars and brothels; the use of telecommunication is avoided to prevent the police from listening in. Such personal meetings are, on average, less easily organized when geographical and social distances increase. Of course, upper level criminal entrepreneurs will readily travel to another continent to discuss a concrete business deal, but flying all over the world just for networking is another matter. In addition, international criminal networking requires language skills, which not all criminal entrepreneurs possess. Language barriers and cultural differences further complicate the required establishment of trust between potential criminal partners from different countries.
Consequently, density of criminal relations is higher locally than at the international level. As mentioned previously, in the ecstasy production scene in the south of the Netherlands, many actors know each other at the local level, but only a relatively small number have the ties that enable them to engage in large international business deals (Spapens, 2006). The result of this is that most TOC that involves the trafficking of goods and persons is “glocal.” It concerns entrepreneurs striking international deals who usually depend on local accomplices to execute parts of the criminal business processes.
Following from our assumption that most TOC starts with establishing an international criminal relation, ongoing globalization has obviously made it easier to form and maintain such ties than it was two or three decades ago. For example, international hubs for lawbreakers developed. Many Dutch criminals, for example, bought a house or an apartment in a sunny place, such as a Spanish costa, one of the islands in the Dutch Antilles, or, more recently, in Dubai and Thailand, and fly there every few months to relax. Some towns, such as Marbella in the 1990s, thus developed into meeting places for criminals from different countries with many opportunities for networking.
Globalization also made it easier to execute cross-border illegal business processes. This first applies to the trafficking of illegal goods and contraband. The growth of international trade has increased opportunities to conceal such goods. A container filled with used tires that ships from Rotterdam to Accra, for instance, will not attract special attention, and criminals may use it to also transport some stolen car parts. It has also become less complex and cheaper for traffickers to move across the world. There is little in the way of drug couriers who travel by air from South America to Europe, for example, to take extensive detours on their way in order to hide where their journey started. Furthermore, increasing mobility also made it easier for itinerary crime groups to move around and expand their hunting grounds. We already mentioned the Serbian Pink Panther gang. A few years ago the Amsterdam police, for example, apprehended a group of Brazilians who had come over to the Netherlands solely for committing burglaries.
The Internet has opened up new opportunities for organized crime networks to operate across borders without physically crossing them—for instance, by offering illegal services or by committing fraud and theft (Aas, 2007). One example is an illegal sports betting ring in the United States, run by the Gambino “family” in which the group had partly replaced the traditional street bookmakers with websites that gamblers could enter with a password in order to place their bets (“Gambino Captain,” 2008). Online gambling also globalized match fixing. Gamblers may now wager on practically every sports event in the world, even amateur matches, and the risk that someone may find it favorable to manipulate the outcome of a game has grown accordingly. Other examples of new opportunities created by the Internet are the theft of identities and the stealing of credit card information.
Although criminals have always succeeded in operating across borders, increased globalization has unmistakably influenced TOC. In sum, more crimes now have an international dimension, even common crimes; more crime groups are operating across borders; the diversity of transnational crime networks has increased; and new transnational crimes have emerged whereas others were “modernized” because of improvements in information and communication technology. The question remains whether such developments imply that TOC groups originating from one country are introducing new types of crime and (violent) modes of operation to countries that did not have a substantial organized crime problem before.
Do TOC Networks Spread Across the World?
The most important perceived threat of TOC networks is the risk of organized crime syndicates spreading their wings across the globe and turning into crime multinationals (see Castells, 1998; Strange, 1996; United Nations, 2004; Williams, 2003; Woodiwiss, 2003). Criminal conglomerates operating globally from safe havens where controls are weak are often presented as destabilizing factors, a threat to the national security of Western nations, and a worry for authorities (Godson, 2003; UNODC, 2010). These notions of an “alien conspiracy” have powerful policy implications, engendering a discourse on the need not just of international cooperation in criminal justice but of a harsh, warfare-like approach similar and linked to the “war on terrorism” (Findlay, 2008; van Dijk, 2012). We examine the validity of these notions and the resulting political concerns from the perspective of social network theory.
Theoretically, foreign crime groups could undermine other societies in three basic ways: by moving to another country to provide additional illegal goods and services or take over the markets of existing providers; by setting up shop abroad for the purpose of committing predatory crimes, including extortion; and by investing “black” money (i.e., money from crime that has not yet been laundered) in legitimate economic activities in other countries. Each of these threats involves the movement of activities of existing criminal networks to other countries. To what extent such export of criminal activity actually takes place is difficult to assess. The mere presence of foreign criminals, however, is by itself no evidence of expansion into other countries.
The police, for example, may establish that the leader of a group of Chinese criminals operating in Europe regularly flies to Hong Kong. Does this mean that he is going there to talk with his Triad bosses to receive “orders,” or is he independently running his illegal activities and traveling there just to meet his business partners? The police will usually be inclined to assume the first, but of course, it is impossible to establish whether that is correct.
In practical cases not involving itinerary gangs, we always observe connections with the local underworld when foreign criminals appear on the scene. An example is the Chinese “businessman” Zheyun Ye (probably an alias), who appeared out of the blue in Belgium in 2004, posing as a trader in fur clothing who sought to sponsor football clubs to market the product. His real aim, in which he was partially successful, was to fix matches in the Belgian soccer competition, so that he, and presumably others, could place large bets on the scores. Importantly, Ye immediately teamed up with a Belgian named Pietro Allatta who had served a 4-year prison term for illegal labor brokering. Allatta was connected to Carmelo Bongiorno, a notorious criminal who had been convicted for the murder of a journalist in 1994. The Belgian police arrested Zheyun Ye in 2005 after he had harassed a girl and her mother in the Brussels Hilton hotel but let him go after interrogation. He immediately fled, presumably to China and has not appeared in public since. Hence, it is also impossible to answer the question whether Ye had been working on his own or had been part of a more or less orchestrated cross-border criminal operation (Spapens, 2012). Soudijn (2006) made similar observations with regard to the “Snakeheads’” who were smuggling Chinese nationals to Europein the 1990s and the first half of the millennium. The police often believed that these operations were masterminded from China, but actual proof of this was lacking. On their turn, the Chinese police were convinced that the main organizers were operating from other countries instead!
From a theoretical perspective, it appears to be highly challenging to a criminal network to move into another country to engage in illegal markets already controlled by local crime groups. To begin with, they can expect fierce resistance because the established providers will not go “bankrupt” without a fight. Next, in countries with homogeneous populations, foreign criminals stand out, and their illegal activities may more readily attract the attention of law enforcement. Newly arrived foreigners usually lack the network relations that enable them to enter into corrupt relationships with law enforcement officers or judges.
In countries where institutions are weak and law enforcement constitutes less of a problem, the opportunities of foreign groups are not favorable either. Here, the absence of functioning institutions is often more than offset by the presence of powerful, hierarchically structured criminal networks used to defend their monopolies with the use of violence. Finally, we may view the investment of illegally acquired assets abroad, either in legal businesses or in illegal activities, as a specific threat. Although there is little information from a scholarly perspective, examples show that knowledge of the local situation and good contacts on the ground seem to be prerequisites when criminals invest in legal businesses or property abroad. When it comes to investment in illegal activities, we may once again assume that criminal relations are the key to success. In practice, foreign groups providing illegal goods or services almost always enter into mutually profitable partnerships with local criminals and use their network for executing illegal activities abroad.
With regard to predatory crimes, however, the situation may sometimes be different, for these do not require local partners and do not necessarily threaten the business of the existing local networks. Examples of this are the extortion of Chinese shopkeepers in the Netherlands by a Chinese group and of Italian nationals in, for instance, Australia and Canada by the ‘Ndrangheta, a criminal organization in Italy (Forgione, 2009; Gratteri & Nicasso, 2007). However, if such groups expand their activities to other markets, they establish criminal relations with local lawbreakers. Albanian crime networks that started to appear in Belgium in the mid-1990s are an example. At first, these groups focused on committing predatory crimes, such as theft and burglary (Farcy, 2002). Within a few years after their arrival, they also started to traffic narcotic drugs and smuggle Eastern European immigrants in cooperation with local crime groups. The aforementioned group that extorted Chinese nationals living in the Netherlands also smuggled immigrants and was involved in ecstasy production and trafficking, in which cases they cooperated closely with Dutch criminals. The establishment of new criminal relations also implied that ethnic homogeneity of both the Albanian and Chinese networks soon decreased.
Conclusion
In conclusion, globalization of both economical and social relations, through migration, increasing mobility, and the revolution in information and communication technology, has offered unprecedented opportunities for TOC. It is now definitely easier to establish and maintain cross-border criminal relations, to commit predatory crimes over larger distances and to carry out certain illegal activities on the Internet, such as fraud and illegal gambling. However, we must not overrate the effects of globalization on the criminal world. It is not sensible for a crime organization from another country to try to put established local criminal “communities” out of business. In practice, cooperation with local criminals and joint ventures instead of competing with them remains to be an essential ingredient for success. Organized crime seems to have become more transnational under the influence of globalization but not to have lost its strong social roots in local settings (Hobbs, 1998). In the fight against TOC, international cooperation is most certainly required, but the fight should continue to be framed primarily as a domestic law enforcement concern that requires a coordinated response rather than as an external or global threat to national security.
School of , Liberty University
Author Note
I have no known conflict of interest to disclose.
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