Organized crime

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Organized crime refers to transnational, national, or local groups of centralized enterprises that engage in illegal activities, most commonly for profit. In the UK alone, police estimate that organized crime involves up to 38,000 people operating in roughly 6,000 different groups. That is a city's worth of criminals, operating not as lone wolves but as structured enterprises with their own hierarchies, rules, and long-term strategies. What drives people to build these parallel institutions? How do they sustain themselves across decades and borders? And what happens when the line between the criminal underworld and the legitimate state begins to blur?

• 2. Structure and Models

  ›

  Patron-client networks are the oldest and most flexible model of criminal organization. They build on family, social, and cultural traditions, relying on tight-knit fraternal or nepotistic value systems, personalized activity, and collective decision-making to hold themselves together. Communication flows through relationships rather than memos.

  On the opposite end of the spectrum sit bureaucratic and corporate criminal operations, defined by the rigidity of their internal structures. These groups favor a complex authority structure, an extensive division of labor, meritocratic promotion, and written rules rather than cultural tradition. The trade-off is vulnerability: written records can be seized, informants at lower levels can collapse the whole hierarchy, and the death or imprisonment of a key figure can send the entire organization into crisis.

  A third model is the entrepreneurial approach, where individual criminals or small groups make rational, calculated decisions about which criminal activities to pursue and which associations to maintain. This model treats the criminal operation much like a business: weighing legal, social, and economic risk against potential profit. Opportunism is central here, with groups frequently reordering their criminal associations and the types of crimes they commit to maximize efficiency and protection.

  Research by Hannigan and colleagues estimated that youth street gangs in the United States increased by 35% between 2002 and 2010. Miller's 1992 definition frames a street gang as a self-formed association of peers, united by mutual interests, with identifiable leadership, acting collectively or individually to conduct illegal activity and control territory. Klein, studying in 1971, found that more social-worker interventions actually led to greater gang participation and solidarity rather than less.

• 3. Historical Roots

  ›

  The word "thug" dates back to early 13th-century India, when gangs of criminals roamed from town to town, looting and pillaging. Criminologist Paul Lunde put it plainly: "Piracy and banditry were to the pre-industrial world what organized crime is to modern society."

  In Ancient Rome, an infamous outlaw called Bulla Felix organized and led a gang of up to six hundred bandits. When the French Revolution created strong nation states, criminal gangs that had roamed the rural borderlands of central Europe were pushed toward poorly controlled regions like the Balkans and Southern Italy. It was in Southern Italy that the seeds of the Sicilian Mafia were sown, an organization that historians consider the linchpin of organized crime in the New World.

  In Ming and Qing China, a figure called the fence (銷贓者) occupied a peculiar and essential role: buying and selling stolen goods, acting as a liaison between the criminal underground and the wider community. Fences did not operate in a vacuum. They maintained networks of connections across both respectable society and the criminal world, and in some cases members of the local elite became fences themselves, using their social capital to protect bandits and eliminate threats, even driving a provincial commissioner named Zhu Wan from his post in Zhejiang Province and eventually to his death.

  During the Victorian era, criminal societies in London's underworld developed their own ranks, families, slang, and argots. One of the most notorious crime bosses of that era was Adam Worth, nicknamed "the Napoleon of the criminal world" and the inspiration for the character of Professor Moriarty. In the United States, historians Brian J. Robb and Erin H. Turner traced the first organized crime syndicates to the Cochise Cowboy Gang and the Wild Bunch in the Old West.

• 4. Violence as Instrument

  ›

  Murder within organized crime has evolved from the honor and vengeance killings of groups like the yakuza and the Sicilian Mafia, where large physical and symbolic importance was placed on the act, to a much less discriminate form of expressing power, enforcing authority, and eliminating competition. The role of the hit man has remained consistent across that history, whether because of the efficiency of hiring a professional or the need to distance leadership from the act itself.

  After killing victims, gangsters often attempt to destroy evidence through a range of methods: hiding bodies in landfills, using industrial processes such as chemical baths, infiltrating legitimate body-disposal systems like morgues or funeral homes, or abandoning remains in remote areas where degradation and animal scavenging can contaminate the crime scene. In some cases, however, organized crime groups do the opposite entirely, placing victims' bodies on public display as a form of psychological warfare against rivals.

  Vigilantism is another dimension of organized criminal violence that rarely fits a simple moral frame. During the roaring twenties in the United States, Italian, Irish, Polish, and Jewish gangsters had violent confrontations with the anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan, which was itself enforcing Prohibition. FBI informant Gregory Scarpa kidnapped and tortured a Klansman into revealing the locations of bodies of civil rights workers murdered by the KKK. Jewish mobsters including Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, and Jack Ruby were hired by the American Jewish community to defend against the German American Bund, going as far as attacking and killing Nazi sympathizers during Bund meetings.

  In Colombia, the drug lords of the Medellin Cartel formed a paramilitary vigilante group called Muerte a Secuestradores, meaning Death to Kidnappers, to defend against insurgent groups including the FARC and M-19. They kidnapped and tortured the leader of M-19 before leaving him tied up in front of a police station. Later, both the Norte del Valle Cartel and the Cali Cartel formed a group called Los Pepes to bring down Pablo Escobar, bombing the Medellin Cartel's properties and working alongside the Search Bloc until Escobar was killed and the cartel dismantled.

• 5. Money, Laundering, Counterfeiting

  ›

  The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that in 2009, money laundering equaled roughly 2.7% of global GDP, which translated to approximately 1.6 trillion US dollars. Generating that money is one problem; making it usable is another.

  Money laundering operates in three stages. Placement involves moving criminal funds into the legitimate financial system in small amounts to avoid suspicion, a technique sometimes called smurfing. Layering disguises the trail through false paper trails and the conversion of cash into assets. Integration is the final step, sometimes called "spin dry": the money re-enters the economy as clean, taxable income through real-estate transactions, sham loans, and false import and export deals.

  The Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental body established to combat money laundering, acknowledged that a sustained effort between 1996 and 2000 to estimate the total scale of laundering failed to produce reliable figures. Despite this, anti-money laundering efforts in 2001 managed to seize assets worth $386 million.

  In 2007, the OECD reported that counterfeit products had expanded well beyond films, music, and software to include food, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, electrical components, tobacco, and household cleaning products. The scope had shifted: most repossessed counterfeit goods were now household items rather than luxury goods, and production had moved to an industrial scale.

  Al Capone became one of the most notorious examples of financial crime within organized crime, though his downfall came not from murder charges but from tax evasion. In 1931, he was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $215,000 in back taxes along with accrued interest.

• 6. Drug Trafficking and Human Trafficking

  ›

  Three major regions anchor the global drug trade: the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos, Thailand), the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan), and Central and South America. The most prominent international drug syndicate in the Asia-Pacific is Sam Gor, also known as The Company, which is made up of members of five different triads and is understood to be headed by Chinese-Canadian Tse Chi Lop, born in Guangzhou, China.

  Tse's biography captures the transnational reach of modern organized crime. He immigrated to Canada in 1988. In 1998, he was convicted of transporting heroin into the United States and served nine years. Sam Gor is alleged to control 40% of the Asia-Pacific methamphetamine market while also trafficking heroin and ketamine, and the group is reported to earn at least $8 billion per year. Tse has been compared in prominence to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and Pablo Escobar.

  The US Drug Enforcement Administration's 2017 National Drug Threat Assessment classified Mexican transnational criminal organizations as the greatest criminal drug threat to the United States, identifying six cartels with the greatest influence: the Sinaloa, Jalisco New Generation, Juarez, Gulf, Los Zetas, and Beltran-Leyva cartels.

  Human trafficking presents a separate but intertwined economy of exploitation. Estimates from 2001 placed the number of people in sexual slavery at between 400,000 and 1.75 million, depending on the organization reporting: the International Organization for Migration estimated 400,000, the FBI estimated 700,000, and UNICEF estimated 1.75 million. Contemporary slavery more broadly was estimated to affect between 12 million and 27 million people, with most being debt slaves in South Asia. Human trafficking is described as the fastest-growing criminal industry, predicted to eventually outgrow drug trafficking in scale.

• 7. Crime and the State

  ›

  In the United States, the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 defines organized crime as the unlawful activities of a highly organized, disciplined association. Criminal activity structured as a process is called racketeering. The US Department of Justice noted in 2012 that since the end of the Cold War, organized crime groups from Russia, China, Italy, Nigeria, and Japan had increased their international presence and that most of the world's major international organized crime groups had a presence in the United States.

  Bribery alone is estimated to involve over 1 trillion US dollars annually worldwide. A state of unrestrained political corruption is called a kleptocracy, literally meaning rule by thieves. By their nature, narco-states and states with high levels of clientelism either become heavily involved with organized crime or foster it within their own governments. In failed states that can no longer perform basic functions like education, security, or governance, organized crime, governance, and war sometimes operate as complements to one another rather than opposites.

  The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 includes a specific target to combat all forms of organized crime as part of the 2030 Agenda. Whether computational tools can help reach that goal remains an open question. Machine learning models have been applied to study and detect urban crime and online prostitution networks, and data from platforms like Twitter and Google Trends has been used to study public perceptions of organized crime. The first known attack on critical industrial infrastructure using malicious software was discovered in mid-July 2010, when security experts found a program that had infiltrated factory computers and spread to industrial plants around the world, an event described as an attack on the very foundation of modern economies.