The citizens of Great Britain should not complacently assume that the sort of organized crime now threatening to undermine the American political and economic systems cannot arise in their country. The American experience suggests that it is easy enough to ignore criminal organizations until they do something monstrous, or until they do something which affects us personally. Then we put ourselves full of righteous indignation, castigate our officials for failure to spread the alarm,and demand that our police save us from 'the growling cancer gnawing away in our midst.
Organized crime is already a problem in Britain. But the problem here is different from the problem in the United States, Canada, the Bahamas Islands, and Sicily. In those countries criminal organizations are confederated, and 'organized crime' refers, vaguely, to the confederation or to some aspect of it. Britain's problem is currently that of dealing with task forces of criminals organized for expeditions into the lucrative business of robbery, burglary, and extortion. In Britain 'organized crime' refers, vaguely, to these task forces and to the skills of the criminals participating in them. The variable usage of the 'organized crime' concept has obscured the similarities and differences among confederated crime and task forces, and among other varieties of criminal organisation. One objective is to uncover some of these similarities and differences.
Confederated crime is not now prevalent in Great Britain. As recently as 1966 or 67 participants in the American confederation offered technical assistance to underdeveloped British criminals and others but they did not succeed in achieving their goal - a lions share of the legalised gambling business. (This refers to the Kray's attempt to link up with the Mafia - John Lea) Moreover an attorney who defended the organizers of an extortionist gang operating in London at about this time has reported that the leaders 'had the impertinence to cross the Atlantic and seek invitation at the court of the Mafia, and they spun a very good story to the Mafia. They apparently, as it would appear on subsequent evidence, indicated that they ruled London, that the police were in their pay, that they were immune from arrest, and on the story I have told you you can get up a long way. You can shoot people dead in public and the police cannot touch you.
"Had the involved British criminals known as much about business methods as they knew about extortion, had the FBI and Scotland Yard been less diligent, and (later) had the gambling laws not been changed, the Americans could well have established branches here, as they have established them in Canada and the Bahamas. Referring to the Americans being courted, the defence attorney reported, 'They were interested, and as a result shortly before their [the leaders'] arrest the Mafia sent an envoy to London who was promptly arrested at the Mayfair Hotel, so he didn't think much of the Krays when he got to Brixton prison He said, "I thought you told me you ran this place" and there was a punch-up in the hospital".
Despite the fact that American criminals have financial interests, investments, and influence in Britain just as they do in other European countries Britain does not at the moment seem ripe for a take over. Neither does it seem ripe for develop- ment of a domestic criminal confederation of any significance. Later we shall see that the type of criminal organization well known in the United States contains positions for 'corrupters' or 'fixers', among others. Such positions must necessarily be linked with positions for corrupt government officials, and it appears that in contemporary Great Britain these are unusually difficult to establish.
Moreover, in recent years the British, unlike Americans, have not been prone to prohibit what they cannot abolish. This legislative restraint has restricted the market for illegal goods and services such as heroin and bookmaking, and, thus, has enabled the society to avoid paying a huge crime tariff in the form of confederated crime.
Further, in Britain, as in America, there has been a decline in the number of young men going into the lengthy apprenticeships necessary for organiza- tional perpetration of safe crimes such as picking pockets and shop-lifting, just as there has been a decline in the number of young men going into legitimate occupations requiring lengthy apprenticeship. What is left to create an 'organized crime problem' in Britain, then, is the kind of criminal organization assembled and staffed for extortionist action and long-term fraud and for specific forays such as bank robberies or lorry hijackings.
British criminals have most ominously learned that they can, by utilizing organization and planning as weapons, easily take the half million pound bundles of cash that financial institutions conveniently assemble and ship around the country on poorly guarded lorries and trains. Unless this arrangement is altered, Britain's reputation for minimizing the influence of bribery in politics and in criminal justice administration could well be tested. It seems reasonable to expect that the nation's wealthy, organized, extortionists and robbers wlll eventually try to use some of thc luscious fruits of their crimes in an attempt to buy immunity from arrest and prosecution, just as American aiminals have done.
After all, there are many so-called respectable aiizens who--because they have wealth--think they can buy anything, including justice. Should robbers and extortionists succeed in buying justice, 'organized crime' in Britain could well come to resemble 'organized crime' in America...
For about a decade, British criminologists, police, and newsmen have been noting an apparent rise in the rationality of their nation's criminals. They have quietly warned, often in rather obscure publications, that this increasing rationality is becoming manifcst in a growing number of crimes and criminals said to be 'organized' or 'professionall. They have also warned that adjectives such as 'persistent', 'sophisticated', 'dangerous', and 'habitual' can properly be applied to an increasing proportion of all British crime and cnminals. But, unfortunately, the warnings have not been based on careful analysis of what is meant by terms such as 'organized' and 'persistent' with the result that neither explicit control policies nor careful research studies have been stimulated. In a recent paper, for example, Avison and McClintock in a single sentence used three terms suggesting criminal rationality:
"[Robbery] is an offence that has tended to become morc sophisticated and a high proportion of such offences now form an integral part of the development of professional and organizcd crime"
None of the critical terms is defined. Earlier, Avison used similar terms, also undefined, to describe the changing pattern of Britisb crime: The increase in well organized and lucrative crimes suggests to some observers that here is reflected the activity of a small number of persistent professional criminals, who are caught by the police only infrequently, if at all, and who thus can carry on committing many offences with more or less impunity... How much crime can fairly be said to result from the activities of such persistent career criminals?... If every principal crime involves the cornmission of three subsidiary crimes, the total professional activity would amount to just over 30,000 crimes annually, or about 3 per cent of the total annual volume of crime. It is high time, I this, that anthropologists, crimmologists, sociologists, systems engineers, economists, management specialists, biologists, mathematicians, corporation lawyers, and other specialists in the arlaIysis of organizations got on with the job of specifying what is sophisticated about sophisticated crime, what is professional about professional crime, what is organised about organized cnme, and what is planned about the planned crime committed with impunity.
A large proportion of all crime is to some degree organized in one way or another. What is needed i5 explication of the degrees and kinds of criminal organization, and of the kinds of behaviour patterns characterizing the criminals who participate in them. John Lambert has suggested, in general terms, that a preliminary to understanding and controlling organized crime is 'to present crime statistics in such a way to distinguish the planned depredation by a criminal minority from the mass of petty thieving of local delinquents'. But a preliminary to such statistic compilation is the sorting out of what is meant by terms like 'organized' and 'professional'. There must be constant criticism and reinterpretation of the categories into which crime statistics are lumped. Such categories do more than determine what police report. They determine what the police, other criminal justice administrators, and even researchers see. Consider robbery.
Some years ago McClintock and Gibson noted that the practice of squashing many forms of criminal behaviour together and calling them 'robbery' made it impossible for readers of crime statistics to see that two robberies might be as unlike as a hippopotamus and a pineapple. They identified five principal kinds of robbery, all related to the relationship between the offender and the victim in a very real sense, the invention of these categories--which are now used in the compilation of crime statistics by the British police- enabled theoreticians and practitioners alike to examine forms of robbery that had rarely been observed before the categories came into being. But now we need categories and correlated definitions which will enable us to perceive that the relationship between o`offender and victim is only one of the critical conditions present when a robbery is perpetrated. There also are variations in the degree to which robberies are 'planned' and 'organized', and differences in the degree to which rob beries are 'sophisticated'. Avison and McClintock have, in fact, recently tried to reinterpret the classificatory scheme in a way that would permit perception of relationships among robbers as well as relationships between robbers and the robbed. For example, Category I-robbery of persons in charge of money and goods--is said to denote 'planned robberies', and Category II--robberies in the open following sudden attack on ordinary citizen or stranger--is said to include 'less planned and sudden violent robbery of the ordinary citizen'. It is further suggested that planned robberies 'indicate the existence of a group of well-organized criminals, successful in their way of life, often ruthless in the execution of their crimes, who have settled down to a life in which crime pay' and the 'less planned' robberies in Category II are depicted as involving planning too: 'Typically, this kind of offence Category II involves two or three young men way- laying in a quiet spot a solitary man or woman in the dusk, or after dark, and snatching their wallet or handbag'. If two or three young men work in unison, there necessarily must be planning and organization, however elementary. The MccLintock-Avison scheme is thus shifted from depiction of offender-victim inter- action to concern for rationality and organization of robbery. What is needed, again, is categorization which opens our eyes to degress of rationality and organization among robbers.
The label attached to a criminal offence makes a difference, be it 'robbery', 'robbery of persons in charge of money and goods', 'planned robbery', 'organized robbery', or something else. It is important, then, that the labels denoting 'organization', ' professionalisation', and 'sophistication' among crime and criminals be clearly depicted. First of all, rigorous definition is essential to rigorous research and, thus, to clear understanding. For too long, vague definitions of the criminal categories being studied have made it all but impossible for one researcher to check on or build on the rcsearch of another. 'Delinquency', 'homicide', 'sub-cultural delinquency', and 'white-collar crime' are among the labels that are only sloppily defined in the criminological literature. The 'organized crime' and 'professional crime' labels, are currclltly uscd, can in no sense be said to give direction to cumulative research.
Secondly, thc label given an offence poses serious problems for criminal justice administrators. For example, the legal label 'robbery' does not by itself differentiate the behaviour of an armed hold-up man, the behaviour of a youth who forcibly takes a football from some children on a playground, and the behaviour of a team of men who, occupying specialist positions in a diviision of labour, hijack a van loaded with cash and currency. The generality of such a label makes it necessary for police and other criminal jusnce atlmin;strators informally and discretely to decide whether gxoss injustices would be done by handling all three kinds of beha~riour in the same way, and then to implement the decision.
Statutory laws do, of course, separate out in a haphazard way various 'degrees' of homicide and various situations in which, robberies are committed. Under California law, for example, a man who commits a robbery could be charged with any one of over fifty offences, depending upon the circumstances. These range from kidllapping with bodily harm (where, for example, the robber orders his victim to move a few feet and then smashes him on the head), to robbery with great bodily harm, to train robbery, and to wearing a mask. Such categories are useful for securing conviction d guilty pleas, but they make it necessany for prosecutors, judges, probation and parole workers, aIld prison officaials to make informal and discretionary decisions about thc 'real' crime of a man charged with, say, kid2lapping or wearing a mask. Smce 'organized crime', 'professional crime', 'sophisticated crime', and 'planned crime' are not even legal labels in California or elsewhere- they cannot, as we shall see, be officially used in criminal justice administration.
Thirdly, the label attached to an offender or offence determines to a large degree how the person or the behaviour will be dealt with by the authorities possessing the power to allocate money and men for doing so. A 'robber' is handled di`erently from a 'juvenile delinquent' even if the behaviour of the two actor is nearly identical. And, contrariwise, the job of coping with, say, a lone robber whose offence is well planned and well rehearsed is quite different fi om that of coping with a robbery organization whose members are fungible. The existing legal pigeonholes make us insensitive to the many varieties of organized crime, criminal organizations, and networks of criminal cliques. Should legal labels for 'organized crime' and 'professiollal cxime' be developed, offences in these categories will be dealt with by methods different from those currently used to prevent and repress other varieties of crime. As Mr Justice Frankfurter year ago said of journeys into law, 'Where one comes out on a case depends on where one goes in'.
It should not be assumed that the police will be able to solve the problem of organized crime once the various forms of this phenomenon have been called to their attention by those of us who like to try to define, identity, and explain. It might well be that democratic societies simply are unable to dcvise law- enforcement technology and methodg for coping with organized crime or, for that matter, with intelligent criminals. Mary McIntosh, whose explorations of what she called 'professional crime' are among the most perceptive and fruitful of all such explorations, has put the matter succinctly and well:
"When we bewail the increased use of violence in modern thieving, the cool-hcaded military precision with which jobs are planned, the way in which inside employees are often softened up and corrupted to give informaiion, we should remember that these changes do not result from a general lowering of moral standards that can be corrected by stricter schooling or harsher punishments. The changes result rather from changes in the nature of property and of our protection of property. As there is more large-scale convertible property, so there is more large-scale theft. As we develop safes, armoured cars, security forces and ghost squads, so thieving develops further in directions we find unpleasant."
I do not suggest that we can avoid having some concentrations of valuables-- though the extension of credit banking may help - nor do I suggest that we should stop bothering about protecting property; but we must recognize that in doing so we create the conditions for escalation in criminal technology and organisation. Although organizational analysis has in recent years developed into a complex science in its own right, only a few elementary distinctions are sufficient for gaining a preliminary understanding of the systems context of organized crime.
First of all, there is the distinction between 'informal' organizations and 'formal' organisations. The former are stabilized patterns of interaction based on similarities of interests and attitudes and, occasionally, on mutual aid. In an informal organization interaction patterns have become routinized to a degree such that it can be said that there is a cluster of role relationships, each consisting of reciprocal rights and obligations. But the persons playing the roles do not necessarily perceive this structure as serving collective purposes, as is the case in formal organization In all cases the positions comprising organizational structure exist independently of the persons occupying those positions at any given moment, but in informal organizations the structure has not been made very rational.
The set of social relationships is not rationally designed for the purpose of making profits, winning battles, defending against enemies, performing rituals, committing crime, conferring status, or anything else. Street corner groups and neighbourhood associations of such groups, often called 'delinquent gangs' are good examples of informal organizations. They have their own standards of property, their own attitudes toward a variety of phenomena, their own opinions about various issues ranging from pot to politics, and, perhaps, a common defence against outsiders. Some of the participants might have shared the danger of arrest or the pains of imprisonment. But such groups and association, like friendship groups, have not worked out a structure for the achievement of collective ends. The structures of formal organizations are rational. They allocate certain tasks to certain members, limit entrance and influence the rules established for their own maintenance and survival. Formal organizations, criminal or otherwise, have three principal characteristics, all of which suggest rationality.
Since identifying the organizational features of any given unit is more a problem of specifying ranges on continua than defining types, it is proper to say that some organizations are more organized than others. Because 'organization' in this context is equivalent to 'rationality', it is equally proper to say that some crime-committing bands are more rational than others.
As we shall see, the degree of rationality affects the character of the crimes committed. There is some degree of organization even in a group of two-middle class girls who, on the way home from school, drift into Woolworths and shoplift some lipsticks. Somewhat the same degree of rationality might characterize two or three youthful purse snatchers who waylay a victim at a bus stop. There is a bit more organization when three or four men practise team shop-lifting, with each man having responsibility for part of the operation. Then there are the robber bands and pickpocket teams that have rather precise divisions of criminal labour and rather careful co-ordination of the occupational activities of each member, but only loose control of each member's life style. Further along the continuum is the confederation of criminal groups in which concern for securing immunity from the penal process and for organizational discipline are both exaggerated.
Some hair-spliting is necessary. 'Organization', referring to rationality, is not the same as an organization' referring to rational differentiation of parts and functions. In any large city there is likely to be organization among the criminals who, whether working in an organization or not practice crime as an occupation but this 'underworld' is itself an organization only in the broadest and vaguest sense of the term. In discussing legitimate society, Moreno long ago observed that 'networks' form a sort of'permanent structure, a container, a bed' that binds groups of individuals together irrespective of geographical distinctions Similarly, Spaulding years ago defined the network as 'a set of relatively stable emotional linkages between persons which result in selective channels of communication through which information and emotions may be rather freely transmitted to the members of a community so linked'. And in one of the early empirical studies of social stratification in a community, Warner and Lunt located several thousand cliques ill a town of some 17,000 persons, then noted that 'overlapping in clique membership spreads out into a network of interrelationships which integrate almost the entire population of the community into a single vast system of clique relations'
Such linkages bind criminal cliques together just as they bind together--with varying degrees of cohesive - neighbourhood cliques of delinquent boys, and the noncriminal cliques of a school, a town, and a nation. The values, norms, attitudes, motives, rationalizations, and beliefs linked together by networks among criminals con- stitutes criminal culture or, as it is now fashionable to say, 'criminal sub culture'. The argot terms shared by cliques of criminals is evidence of this special culture. Indeed, one astute observer has claimed 'the underworld cant or argot serves to define and transmit from person to person all the activities, roles, instruments and ideas that are involved in craft crime.
To engage in craft crime a man needs the language to conceptualize the activities and so on' It could well be argued that 'the underworld' is an informal organization resembling neighbourhood associations of de- linquent boys and cliques of delinquent boys, but on a grander scale. Nevertheless, the behavioural image produced by this conceptualisation unrealistically and incorrectly shows thousands of criminals linked together in nation-wide alliances, and even in international alliances. Further, the 'underworld' concept in- accurately suggests that the world's actors can readily be dis- tinguished as either good guys ('upper') or bad guys ('under').
But in the United States, at least, the activities of many criminals are so loosely linked with the activities of so-called 'respectable' governmental officials and businessmen that it no longer makes sense to try to depict a separate 'underworld' at all. Accordingly, ie seems preferable to use 'underworld' as at most an example of organization rather than as an example of an organization, informal or otherwise. There are networks of criminal organiza- tion that are properly described as criminal confederations and, thus, as organizations themselves..
But these organizations do not extend to entire communities as the 'underworld' concept would have them do so. Any given organization is a system of positions that exist independantly of their current incumbents, whether the positions are arranged hierarchically or in some other order. Hence, any criminal organization worthy of the name has been designed in a way that it continues to violate the law, or tries to do so even where there are changes in the personnel occupying the positions in its division of labour.An English judge has in an elementary way noted this essential point. 'A young man can now "go into" crime in much the same way as he can go into the legitimate professions', he says. 'The gang is there already organized with its rigid rules and monopolistic tendencies, much as the Chambers are there for the young barrister to enter and in which to serve his apprenticeship'.1 In this sense, 'groups', 'gangs', 'bands', 'troupes', 'rings', 'syndicates', 'cartels', and 'confederations' that have crimi nality as their objective are all criminal organizations and, thus,forms of organised crime.
I have deliberately omitted 'corporation' from this list. A corporation is a legal entity, and this fact e`effects its crime committing character in ways that cannot be gone into here.a Corporations do commit crime, as everyone knows, and as Sutherland showed long ago. Conceivably, a corporation could be legally chartered to engage in criminality, but this would require wholesale fraud and corruption on a very grand scale, and I have been unable to find a case in which this has occurred. The more usual pattern is for a corporation to seek and be chartered for legitimate objectives and then to develop within its boundaries an illegitimate organization dedicated to crime.
This seems to have clearly been the case among 29 American electrical equipment corporations in the I950s. At least 45 top management executives of these companies occupied positions in a 'cartel' or 'confederation' dedicated to systematic violation of the laws prohibiting fixing prices, rigging bids, and dividing markets. It seems clear that the corporations created subsidiary criminal organizations whose positions (i.e., division of labour) were such that incumbents had to violate the law if they were to do their jobs. In fact, some of the executives occupying these positions claimed that when they violated the law, they were merely carrying out their corporation duties. The federal prosecutors argued that the corporations themselves were guilty of breaking the law and that they were rationally organized for this purpose. It is worth noting, in the light of this argument, that the Internal Revenue Service permitted the corporations to list as 'business expenses' the substantial fines they paid. Never- th eless, the analogy is with a person who commits crimes oc- casionally or regularly and thus is a criminal.
The distinction is a difficult one, but it seems theoretically correct to analyse organized crime within, say, General Electric rather than to try to depict this legitimate corporation as a criminal organization. From this perspective, the organizational arrangements among the criminal organizations within the 29 electrical equipment companies bore a striking resemblance to the organizational arrangements between the several units in the American criminal cartel and confederation often called 'Cosa Nostra', and the criminal organizations themselves each bore some resemblance to traditional working parties of criminals. Legitimate corporations set up by criminals as 'fronts' for criminal activities probably have much the character of the legitimate electrical equipment companies at the time their progeny-like subsidiary criminal organizations were in full flower.
The principal differences between the many kinds of criminal enterprises seem to stem principally from variations if the degree to which an 'announced objective'--profiting from crime or some form of ie--is rationalized. Any delinquent or criminal organization might provide non-delinquent and non-criminal services to its members, and it could be argued that such provision is an 'announced objective' of some such organizations. For example, so called 'delinquent gangs' and other illegitimate groups might accord prestige to persons who have difficult,v in achieving prestige in legitimate systems. However, I must focus on the ways organizations serve the delinquent and criminal interests of their members. A criminal organization might fulfil some of the functions of a non-criminal organization, but, by definition, its degree of permanence will necessarily reflect the degree to which its members have been able to use it to make crime profitable. The degrees of skill and hard work required of the persons occupy ing the positions in the division of labour making up a criminal organization reflect similar concern for illicit gains, as do the degrees in the scope of employment (the range of personal a`airs which are of concern to managers) and the degrees of safety from arrest and prosecution enjoyed by the participants. Consideration of such characteristics is obscured by current uncritical usage of terms like 'organized crime' and 'professional crime'. _