Research Paper on Mafia: Organized Crime vs Coordinated Crimes

Introduction

The name mafia was first used in 1863 to indicate the criminal organization in Sicilian, which later adopted the name Cosa Nostra, and is today used to refer to a specific type of organized crime (Varese 904). There is a difference between crimes that are organized and organized crimes. However, both of them operate in the world of illegal business, but organized crime involves planning, functional role division, and cooperation. On the other hand, crimes that are coordinated attempt to govern them by their efforts to acquire monopolistic control over the illegal economic endeavors. Absurdly, there is a positive externality that may come as a result of the monopolistic tendency of organized crimes compared to disorganized crimes. The logic in this is that when criminality is monopolized, there is a guarantee of greater control over violence (Varese 247). As Adam Smith once said, we should not expect a reduction in the rates of crime because of the public-spiritedness of the leader, but from their esteem for their interests. Both the legal and illegal organizations are in the race to maximize their profits in their respective environments. For the mafias, they complete this goal of profit maximization by providing illicit goods and services, while also using illegal activities in legal markets (Daniele & Ugo 139).

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Organized crime is illegal acts that are usually committed by criminal individuals or organizations who work together to achieve some goal. Some of the real-life organized crime include mobsters from Eastern Europe and Russia. The principal objective of organized crime is to make money using dirty ways. Trafficking people, prostitution, pornography, drugs, computer crimes, financial crimes, terrorism, and genocide are all the things that mafias would do to make money. Since the 1800s, organized criminals have been known as mafias, and from the early 1900s, such organizations have existed in the United States (Daniele & Gemma 22). Charles "Lucky" Luciano is one of the most famous Italian mobsters in the U.S, who came from Sicilia in 1907 (Tilly 128). He got credits from his act of helping to establish the current-day mafia, otherwise known as La Cosa Nostra, the organization of Sicilian and Italian. Mafias have been regarded as the leading national security threat in Russia due to the danger they pose to the economy and the political institutions (Sciarrone & Luca 52). The organized crime organizations today come to us from all the corners of the world. However, it is now under control more than it was before with the introduction of surveillance cameras and undercover cops.

How the Mafia Works

The mafia has been in control of everything from the top-level governments to the street corner drugs. They are glorified by televisions and movies, marked by their enemies' death, and chased by law enforcement officials making the mobsters live violent and usually short lives. At its core, the mafia is about one thing, and that is money. However, they still involve secret rituals, twisted webs of family loyalties, and complicated rules.

There is a hierarchy in organized crime, with decisions made by the higher-ranking members, trickling down to the other family members. Mafia is not a single gang or group but is made up of families that have at some time fought each other in bitter battles involving bloodshed. They have also cooperated at some time with the motivation of higher profits and even served on commissions that made significant decisions that affect all the families. However, in most cases, these families agree to stay out of each other's way (Sciarrone & Luca 44). The organizations are neither religious nor political. However, due to their Italian roots, they are deemed to be Catholic. However, part of the oath taken by a mobster when they become "made man" - members of a mafia family, is that the family comes first before God and birth family (Daniele & Ugo 139).

Below is a description of a structure of mafia that belongs to La Cosa Nostra, one of the most renowned mafia groups in Italy. Other groups emulate the same structure, but they may have variances in some ways. Each of the groups is made up of many gangs, known as families. Families can have as many people as more than 100 and as fewer than 10 (Varese 251). However, when a new family emerges at some point, the heads of the already existing families have to approve them. Still, at some point, a group can separate itself from the rest and form its power, and over time becoming recognized as a new family. Each of the families deals in different things, their dealings can, at some point, intermingle to a greater extent (Varese 251). This depends on the proximity of the families to one another and the commonality existing between their ventures.

Towards a Common Definition of Organized Crime

The definition of the term organized crime has been a source of contention and controversy for a long time, basically because the problem is approached in different ways by people from various regions and countries. However, organized crime needs a clear and common definition since it had a cross-border effect, and this could make cooperation between countries easier. Understanding the term is essential as it would help in determining whether a particular crime category is organized crime, and then deciding how to eliminate that category, then deciding on how to mobilize resources and evaluating the effectiveness of the resources in controlling and eliminating the crime (Daniele & Ugo 139).

One important feature of organized crime is that it means the method or process of committing crimes, not a specific crime type or criminal type. It is for this reason that there is a need for a distinct definition that can capture the "process" aspect, whereby criminal activities are carried out by certain criminals, increasingly within a transitional field. It is the "process" that adds the extra level of social threat and danger.

Organized Crime and Development

Organized crime in itself, and the many unlawful businesses and activities it creates in sub-national and national jurisdictions, as well as internationally present serious, real, and potential developmental challenge (Sciarrone & Luca 49). Depending on the members, the case, and the participants, criminal networks and groups include a broad range of non-state and state actors, and professional criminals like warlords, insurgents, lawyers, business people, police and military officers, politicians, and civil servants.

The strategies and activities of organized crime networks and groups and their organizational forms are adaptable, multiple, and dynamic. They may involve the use of violence and threats, but also a time they use non-violent transactions and interactions like bargaining and corruption, and pact-making between an array of unofficial and official power holders and their constituencies (Tilly 131). The organization and participation in criminal activities are motivated by the active quest for material and economic gains by illegal, institutional, and economic means, as well as other opportunity structures socio-economic relationships, strategic choice, and socio-cultural environment. Organized criminal activities have far-reaching, destructive, and corrosive impacts on fragile societies and states, and licit markets. Through such activities, political, economic, and social institutions get transformed, undermined, and reconfigured, resulting in the hollowing out of democracy and accountability, and loss of vast amounts of public revenue through stealing (Millett 282). It also leads to a fractured social cohesion and endangered security of states and citizens.

Economic Issues

There are a variety of activities involved in organized crime, ranging from drug trafficking, industrial-scale oil theft, extortion, migrant smuggling, cybercrime, illegal diamond and gold mining, and counterfeiting among many other lines of criminal businesses (Daniele & Ugo 136). These activities generate huge sums of money every year. Essentially, the activities are aimed at stealing intellectual and natural resources among other resources, hence depriving a state of enormous revenue amounts, and draining the productivity of a nation for the potential of sustainable and equitable growth, and for a nation's capacity to provide its citizens with services (Millett 283). The lost taxes come in the guise of other duties and taxes paid by the citizens, and that are not accrued by massive illicit financial flows out of developing countries and states, and in 2015, such amounts exceeded $1 trillion mark, offshoring bank accounts or tax havens in industrialized countries like Asia, America, and Europe (Varese 899).

Corruption rings that involve public officials at some point in the highest state and government levels usually play an essential role in tapping public revenue. There is, therefore, the need to appreciate the boundary between illegal and legal operations within criminal businesses (Millett 279). The interfaces are facilitated by corruption to varying degrees. Still, their ability to garner support through corruption is the one essential dimension in which the processes employed by the various organized criminal groups defer. The ability to corrupt allows one to buy security from enforcement, exclude enemies, and therefore amass capital. The greater the capacity to corrupt, the greater the capacity to remain invisible, or one being seen as being legit until the complete system is blatantly corrupt and has redefined pay-offs and so on as publicly documented commercial enterprise tactics (Sciarrone & Luca 40). The problem comes that on the most complicated integrated stage, the capacity to corrupt allows one to manipulate the definition of what is or is not defined as corruption. It is beneath such situations that the traditional difference between organized crime and corruption dangers becoming meaningless. As Ellis and Shaw observe regarding Africa, corruption is the goal of the maximum critical organized criminal agencies in Africa, no longer a facilitating interest as it is often held to be in the literature on organized crime in other places" (Tilly 125).

Mafia and Politics

In most cases, the mafia threatens politicians to acquire contracts from the government that is paid handsomely for construction, waste management, and other public services. Any individual politician who attempts to threaten such businesses usually finds themselves in danger through the mafias' favored tactics of arson, assaults, and threats. Among the 1,191 political attacks documented by Avviso Pubblico, these crimes by mafias made 70 percent (Daniele & Gemma 27). For example, after the strengthening of the anti-mafia in checks 2016 by the director of Sicilian on local firms applying to work in the park, he survived a night assassination attempt narrowly. Corrupt politicians mostly contribute to the organized crime problem in Italy by sharing with the mob illegal profits. Fascinatingly, none of such political violence was targeted at national figures. This is likely because attacking a national figure would create more exposure by the media. The Italian mafia rather typically targets the local officials. Of 2013 to 2015 documented 1192 attacks on politicians, for instance, 310 of them were mayors. Such stories regularly play out in the local newspapers, and Italians know this (Varese 243).