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In 1996, the Dutch criminologists Fijnaut and Bovenkerk reported to a parliamentary committee on police investigation methods in organized crime cases that Amsterdam had to be regarded as a "centre" for both national and international organized crime (Fijnaut & Bovenkerk, 1996). Some of the criminal groups involved had allegedly built up economic positions of power in the hotel and catering sector, the gambling sector and the property sector, mainly in the inner city districts and especially in the red-light district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We often tend to think of criminal policies as essentially repressive. At first sight this assumption seems to apply straightforwardly in the case of policies against organized crime, especially those targeted at mafia type organizations. However, experience shows that these criminal organizations can be fought successfully also by means of measures which are not in themselves repressive, albeit they aim to favour repression in the last resort. Rather than "alternative," I prefer to call such indirect strategies to fight organized crime "complementary" to repressive measures, in the sense that the latter are always required, but can be more effective if they are complemented by indirect means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For much of the twentieth century the Italian-American Cosa Nostra organized crime families infiltrated and exploited American unions and those unions' pension and welfare funds. They exercised control by holding top union offices themselves and̸or by exercising influence, even control, over certain union officials. Either way, they drained union treasuries through bloated salaries, no-show jobs, embezzlement, and fraudulent contracts with service providers. They sold out union members' contractual rights in exchange for employers' bribes. They established and policed employer cartels, often smoothing the way for organized crime cronies to take an interest in some of the cartel's member firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of channels for legitimate contract resolution, violence emerges as an alternative regulatory mechanism between conflicting parties (Black, 1998, 1983). In criminal settings, forms of regulatory violence have been referred to in a number of ways (e.g., contract killings, criminal liquidations, or gangland killings). We use the term "account settlement" to represent lethal or violent conflict resolution methods in criminal settings.1 In this study, we examine fluctuation in an account settlement trend. Our empirical focus is exclusive to the Quebec context, in which account settlements represented approximately 17% of all homicides between 1985 and 1989 (Cusson, Beaulieu, & Cusson, 2003: 300). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just before the summer holidays of 2005, the Dutch National Criminal Investigation Service arrested ten members of a violent Chinese gang. All detainees were suspected of human smuggling, drug trafficking, extortion and liquidations. Police not only found large amounts of drugs and money, but also came across 24 automatic firearms, among which several Uzi's. The Chinese gang members were allegedly heavily involved in smuggling Chinese from their home country through the Netherlands to the United Kingdom. Smuggled immigrants had to pay up to forty or even fifty thousand euros for their journey and according to the police the gang members were prepared to use violence towards defaulters. In addition, the police suspected some of the arrested gang members of being linked to previously apprehended snakeheads of other Chinese smuggling organizations (Meeus, 2005). Since the turn of the millennium,the Chinese in the Netherlands have acquired the reputation of being involved in professionally organized human smuggling through Eastern European countries to the UK, using safe houses in harbour cities such as Rotterdam. The involvement of Chinese immigrants with human smuggling in the Netherlands became explicitly visible through the "Dover case." In this tragedy on June 18, 2000, 58 Chinese smuggled immigrants on their way to the United Kingdom suffocated in a refrigerated cargo container. The "Dover case" put the Netherlands on the map as a transit country for human smuggling although it wrongly focused solely on Chinese smugglers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On Monday, 31 October 2005, 36-old Dutch lawyer Evert Hingst was murdered in front of his house in Amsterdam. Among Hingst's clients were many noted and alleged criminals, including John Mieremet, who was once shot in front of Hingst's office. After this assault, Mieremet claimed that Hingst had tried to set him up. Mieremet was murdered 3 days after the liquidation of Hingst, on 2 November, in Thailand. Hingst, a fiscal specialist, had been accused of assisting criminals to launder their money abroad. He was imprisoned for several weeks after police discovered three firearms and a large sum of cash during a raid of his office in 2005. A suspect of money laundering, membership of a criminal organisation and possession of firearms, Hingst gave up his profession as a lawyer in July 2005. He had previously been arrested on charges of forgery of documents in 2004. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, the FBI reports that in 2005, 1.2 million vehicles were stolen at a value of $7.6 billion (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2005), while in Europe, Europol estimates that in 2004 approximately one million vehicles were stolen, of which at least 450,000, at a value of €6.75 billion, were never recovered (Europol, 2006). Despite the significant financial impact that vehicle theft has on victims, it has remained an area with very little academic or policy research. In some respects vehicle theft is just an aspect of property crime. Most victims, however, consider it a serious crime, and in the EU 92% of car-thefts are reported to the police (EUICS Database). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hawala bankers1 are financial service providers who carry out financial transactions without a license and therefore without government control. They accept cash, cheques or other valuable goods (diamonds, gold) at one location and pay a corresponding sum in cash or other remuneration at another location. This service is comparable with services provided by official banks and by non-banking financial institutions such as Western Union and MoneyGram, yet unlike these companies, hawala bankers disregard the legal obligations concerning the identification of clients, record keeping, and the disclosure of unusual transactions, to which these official financial institutions are subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2002, during the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (BCD) in The Hague, environmental groups held actions in several European countries: Germany, Finland, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. A cargo ship was boarded off the Dutch coast by Greenpeace activists who chained themselves to the ship, climbed the mast and displayed a banner saying "Europe, stop ancient forest destruction."1 The shiptransported timber of the Oriental Timber Company (OTC), the largest logging company in Liberia, West Africa. The next day, Greenpeace activists climbed the cranes in the Amsterdam timber harbour, preventing the Liberian timber from being unloaded. On the third day, the police arrested the activists, who were later released without charge. The environmental groups Greenpeace and Global Witness claimed that the Liberian timber on board came from a unique ancient forest in West Africa. The NGOs also claimed the timber trade was connected to arms trafficking. The timber companies concerned reiterated that their timber cargo was legal, as it had been logged and exported with the authorisation of the Liberian authorities, a fact conceded by the environmental groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though globalization is a term which is viewed increasingly more often in anthropological research as too abstract and vague, it still prevails in critical literature. In criminology, organized crime is presented as a number one example of the globalization process (in, amongst others, Fijnaut & Paoli, 2004; Galeotti, 2004; Mittelman, 2000). Globalization is usually defined in literature as a process which includes an extension of the market, a wide circulation of money, developed communication technology and world culture (Bauman, 1998; Beck, 2000; Eriksen, 2003). What criminology has brought to globalization studies is the recognition that crime in general and organized crime in particular is an inevitable part of the process. Galeotti distinguishes five main drivers for the globalization of organized crime: technological drivers (‘from increasing the ease of travel to introducing new illicit commodities to be soldè', 2004: 4); political drivers, when organized crime is expected to respond to various political developments, for example wars, natural disasters or ethnic tensions (ibid:5); economic drivers, in which organized crime reacts similarly to its economic environment (‘markets open and close', ibid:6); enforcement drivers, for example when operations of law enforcement agents are on the offensive and cause the perpetrators of organized crime to be more cautious or change their strategies; and internal drivers, namely changes in structures, for example, from ‘monolithic' groups to ‘loose networks of semi-autonomous criminal entrepreneurs' (ibid). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the analysis of data provided by the National Statistics Institute (Istat) and court records this essay examines the sex trade in Italy, with particular attention devoted to street prostitution. Changes recorded over the past decade will be shown to correspond to the progressive replacement of Italian criminal groups with foreign groups. What is more, these foreign associations appear to adopt different organizational models in recruiting immigrant women destined for the sex trade. Moreover it focuses attention on the types of relationships between Italian mafia-type associations and foreign exploiters. Considering the existence of indigenous mafia organizations rooted in the territory, at issue here is whether or not groups of foreign exploiters operate largely autonomously in managing street prostitution or, on the other hand, are affected by the "cumbersome" presence of local mafia associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human trafficking has gained wide attention in both developed and developing countries. It is now considered the third-largest criminal industry in the world as of 2006 after the arms and drugs trades, with profits reaching billions each year (Siobhan, 2006). According to FBI estimates, human trafficking generates $9.5 billion annually in the U.S. alone (Siobhan, 2006). It is a phenomenon that shows no prejudice toward race, gender, or geography, but a general preference towards the young and female. Trafficking victims are a diverse group, ranging from those who are aspiring to improve their life to those desperate to escape civil unrest. Some leave their home countries on their own, while others, often children and women, are "given" or sold to related or unrelated adults who promise education and employment opportunities. Invariably, they fall victim to forced or bonded labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changing fortunes of the smuggling operations of South Sinai Bedouin. The Bedouin are a link in the international drug traffic delivering hashish and other drugs to the inhabitants of the Nile Valley. The full-scale entry of the South Sinai Bedouin into drug smuggling began around 1950, and in less than two decades smuggling grew into a major industry. At its zenith it provided about 30% of the aggregate income of the Bedouin population. Then smuggling stopped almost overnight, for during the 15 years of Israeli occupation, from 1967 to 1982, the crossing from the Sinai Peninsula into mainland Egypt was too dangerous for the operators. During my fieldwork in South Sinai, which overlapped with the Israeli occupation, most of the Bedouin were working as migrant laborers and a handful entered the budding local tourist industry, so that the loss of income from smuggling did not cause them economic hardship. But the leaders of the smuggling gangs remained at home, and it was quite easy to meet them. They appeared to be inactive, but I soon realized that they were working hard at keeping the smuggling organizations alive: they fostered the ties with members of their former gangs and looked after their mountain retreats. They were convinced that the political and economic situation would sooner or later change, and that drug smuggling would once again become feasible. Other Bedouin too acted to forestall an uncertain future: they maintained orchards and small flocks, which at that time yielded no income, as an economic reserve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Italian public debate, Italian mafia organisations, and particularly the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, are still routinely portrayed as immensely powerful and almost invincible. The few observers who express less pessimistic views are harshly criticised by antimafia prosecutors and activists alike and accused of having lost contact with local southern Italian reality or, even worse, of serving mafia interests.1 At the same time, with varying degrees of good faith, most members of the law enforcement community, antimafia NGOs and academic and journalistic commentators insist upon the fact that after an unprecedented peak in the early 1990s antimafia fight has dramatically slowed down and weakened (cf. Bolzoni & Lodato, 1998; Lodato & Grasso, 2001). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term "mafia" comes originally from Sicily, where it refers to the private use of violence in public domains. Its etymology is controversial (Novacco, 1959). Whatever its feudal and patrimonial dispositions, mafia is a modern phenomenon: it developed in the slipstream of Italian unification when a modern state structure imposed itself on a predominantly agrarian society still largely feudal in its basic features. In the absence of effective central control over the means of violence, mafia took shape as an instrumentum regni of Italian politicians, who chose to rule Sicily through its dominant class of absentee landlords most of whom were residing in Palermo, long the centre of wealth and power of the island. (Incidentally, this may help explain why eastern Sicily always had a much lower density of mafia than the four western provinces, which formed the hinterland of the island's capital.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The core of this research project is the identification of the role of women inside mafia-type criminal organizations rooted in countries that have imported and maintained the Cosa Nostra organizational model or at any rate are characterized by similar associative structures: Japan, China, Croatia and the former Yugoslavia, Spain, Albania, Turkey, Germany, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, Russia, and the United States (some of these results are not reported in this book). As Fiandaca indicates in the Introduction, the need for this study originated from recent experiences in Italy that raised the awareness of the "feminine" role as an essential aspect for understanding the socio-criminal phenomenon of organized crime and therefore shifting the strategies for combating it. In fact, after decades of underestimation and dismissal, the importance of women's roles in mafia-type organizations in Italy, Cosa Nostra in particular, has recently been reconsidered beyond the stereotypes that have always hidden its significance. The initial studies had a socio-anthropological character and were written in a journalistic or psychoanalytic style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A woman described in the press in the 1940s as "the most successful woman in America" was not a Hollywood star or a novelist: she was a "gangster's moll." Virginia Hill, mistress and accomplice of gangster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, was, even by today's standards, a celebrity. The difference between her and other gangsters' mistresses was that she was not merely decorative, she actually worked for U.S. crime bosses Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano and, later, for Siegel. Hill's "success" says much about the American attitude toward organized crime. Popular mythology celebrates the outlaws who escaped from poverty and made fabulous amounts of money by beating the system. Even though Virginia Hill's life ended in suicide, the American public saw only glamour in a beautiful woman living a life of crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unprecedented crime wave in Russia in recent few years has struck all of society. As an effect of conditions in Russia today, female crime, including that by adolescents, has increased in levels of both activity and cruelty. Female criminal behavior has negatively influenced society and the family, undermining moral principles and adding to an atmosphere of depravity, corruption, and permissiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

German legislation has adopted the following definition of organized crime: The perpetration of crimes that have as their purpose the search for profit or power and that, singularly or as a group, are particularly significant and are carried out by more than two people who collaborate for an indeterminate period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before embarking on the central theme of this chapter, it seems necessary to dismantle a stereotype, widespread in theWest, that sees Japanese women as submissive, in situations of inferiority with respect to men, and relegated to a domestic role. History actually shows that Japanese women have participated actively in all the last century's social movements, in the battle for rights, in socialist or anarchist movements, and in environmental struggles; for example, women were active at the beginnings of the 1918 rice revolt, one of the most important prewar social movements. Even today, traces of the matriarchal system can be seen in some isolated areas of the country. On the other hand, the image of the "lady gangster," spread by some Japanese films, in no way reflects reality. The notion of organized crime in Japan has special connotations. The Japanese underworld has a long history but is radically different from the Sicilian Mafia, above all because of the fact that criminal organizations, as such, are not necessarily outlawed. The gangs that make up organized crime present themselves as mutual aid societies and solidarity associations with well-established commercial activities (offices, signs, etc.) unless the prefectorial council for public safety has designated them "violent organizations" (aswas the case with twenty-five gangs in February 2000) in conformity with the 1992 anti-gang law. At first, these gangs engaged in illegal activities such as illegal gambling, the sex trade, and drug dealing (principally ephedrine hydrochloride, or methamphetamine), but they also constituted an extralegal regulatory element in the criminal world. During the "speculative bubble" of the 1990s, the great crime "syndicates" entered even further into the legal economy, in which they had been traditionally present in sectors such as bars, variety theaters, and construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil is a federative republic with 26 states, a federal district, and 5,560 municipalities, 200 to 300 of which can be considered large. The geographic area of Brazil is 8,514,215.34 km2, making it the fifth-largest country in the world. States and municipalities enjoy a high level of autonomy, not as much as in the United States, but greater than what is common in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research has had to confront the invisibility not only of women and their links to organized crime, but also to organized crime as such. No specific studies exist on organized crime in Argentina that reliably show its existence or define its characteristics. The theoretical category of organized crime is at the center of a debate between jurists and criminologists, and its validity and applicability are controversial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One way to analyze the recent evolution of the female role in organized crime is to review the press coverage of that theme during the period from 1980 to 2001. The choice of this period—closely linked to the more general orientation of this research and constrained by the need to demarcate the area for finding and collecting material—was guided by the consideration that investigations and observations have shown this period to be one of the most interesting for the study of the phenomenon, since it is precisely during this time that the participation of women in mafia-type criminal activities seems to have become more visible and frequent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report reviews our hypotheses on the roles and functions ofwomen in criminal organizations. The conclusion makes up the preface to subsequent further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an initial view from a clinical psychological perspective, the first section of this chapter presents a general synthesis that is the result of many years of ongoing empirical research. The next section develops this perspective by presenting several theoretical elaborations on the theme of women in Cosa Nostra. The final section comments on the contents of the present research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme of the power and symbolic domination exercised bywomen inside mafia organizations is rather difficult to tackle, given the scarcity of available sources and lack of existing literature on the subject. Among the many possible approaches for its study,wehave chosen one that specifically examines the field of communication, asserting that the public image ofwomen from the mafia underworld is constructed and modified precisely through the exchange of communication, both inside and outside the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter contains the results of the analysis of the most important judicial sources regarding the Sacra Corona Unita from the years 1991 to 2001. From a methodological point of view, judicial material dealing with the goals of this research was selected dealing with legal proceedings involving women implicated and sentenced for crimes of mafia-type association and, in some cases, other crimes directly connected to the organization's main sectors of interest, such as drug dealing and trafficking, extortion, cigarette smuggling, gambling, and so on. A reading of the official documents to identify the most important women who have operated inside the syndicate based on their different methods, roles, and functions uncovered several cases and helped to identify similarities and recurrences along with differences and peculiarities that, in various ways, have characterized the role of women in this criminal organization; this criminal group, although similar in many aspects to other traditional mafia associations (e.g., the ‘Ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra), appears to be rather recent and, from the cultural point of view, deeply anchored in modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The case study analyzed here helps us to verify the hypothesis that, on one hand, although mafia women may participate in the forefront of several criminal activities, at times even filling leadership positions during periods of a power vacuum, on the other hand, they experience daily humiliation and violence within a system, male chauvinist by definition, like the so-called onorata società (the "honored society"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much debate has taken place over the last few years on the role of women in mafia-style criminal organizations. For a long time, popular opinion, the judgment of many experts, the evaluations of magistrates and judges1 and the testimonies of mafia men have centered around the idea that women in these environments play only the passive roles of mother and wife, substantially hidden from the criminal acts perpetrated by their men. These women in the shadows appear to be, for all intents and purposes, living in traditional and premodern conditions, subordinate to the dictates of a patriarchal world not much different, in terms of family and private life, from the rest of the "traditional" world—the rural world undergoing the process of urbanization—that is, passive and backward women. Recent developments beginning in the 1990s, connected in large part with the testimonies of men (and a few women) who turned state's witnesses and the destruction of previous organizational and family equilibria, have brought quite a different image into focus, one in powerful contrast to the earlier picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's globalized world, "local" variables no longer seem relevant when analyzing different social, economic, and political phenomena. Transnational characteristics seem more appropriate. The same applies to the specific study of organized crime. Generic and interchangeable terms such as "transnational organized crime" or "mafias" are now used to describe and analyze different criminal groups such as Colombian cartels, Chinese triads, and Italian organized crime groups, suggesting that local differences among gangs are no longer fundamental since, in order to survive in the global economy, they have all adopted similar economic methods and therefore have come to resemble each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our investigation into the role of women in organized crime sprang from the great tradition in Palermo of research on this subject—for example, the conference La donna nell'universo mafioso (Women in the Mafia Universe), organized by the Faculty of Educational Science in February 1997, and the works of Teresa Principato and Alessandra Dino, which include the outstanding book Mafia e donna, le vestali del sacro e dell‘onore (Mafia and Women, Vestals of Honor and the Sacred) (Flaccovio, Palermo, 1997), as well as the research of Umberto Santino and Anna Puglisi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]