Organized Crime and Enforcement

Organized crime presents certain unique challenges for law enforcement in the 21st century. As noted by Bjelopera & Finklea (2012) in their report to Congress on the history of organized criminal activity in the United States, modern organized criminal networks tend to be more fluid and less hierarchical than organized associations of the past. Organized crime networks are also more apt to outsource critical aspects of their operations, which can make building a unified case a challenge for law enforcement agencies (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.1).

Diverting resources to combat terrorism have also left law enforcement agencies in the United States with fewer financial resources to combat other forms of organized crime, although some of the methods to trace both types of organizations, such as patterns of money laundering, are similar between both of these types of illicit associations. Organized crime is defined as "criminal activity that, through violence or threatening people, seeks to the extract illegal or legal rents from the community" (Calderon 2015).

Organized criminal organizations may include the Italian Mafia, Cosa Nostra, or any number of less well-known illegal groups. Unlike terrorist organizations, organized criminals are primarily driven by the need make a profit, not by an ideology. They may have equally rigid systems as terrorist entities in allocating power and controlling the activities of members, as well as punishing those who deviate from group rules (Finklea, 2010, p.3).

In general, organized crime involves criminal activities including but not limited to "prostitution, undocumented immigration, illegal substances, stolen goods, piracy, illegal gambling" that the public are prohibited from obtaining by legal means and providing them illegally (Calderon 2015). Organized crime may also involve purveying stolen goods at a cheaper price or using extortion (for example, demanding that legitimate businesses pay for 'protection').

Organized crime poses a threat to the community through the threat of violence and by threatening legitimate businesses and reducing trust in and respect for the law if authorities cannot contain its spread. Additionally, as noted by Finklea (2010), there is an overall negative effect of organized criminal associations' illegal activities due to a loss of tax revenue that could be gained through legitimate purposes, such as when organized crime groups sell illegal goods or when they engage in identity theft.

In the United States, in recent years the most common method of policing organized crime has been leveraging the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) of 1970 which prohibits so-called racketeering activities (Finklea, 2010, p.3). RICO has been used against a variety of groups and specifically prohibits activities involving illegal interstate or international activities including: "murder, kidnapping, gambling, arson, robbery, bribery, extortion, dealing in obscene matter, or dealing in a controlled substance or listed chemical" (1A).

But in the future, given the increasingly international nature of organized crime, looking beyond traditional, domestic forms of enforcement may be required. Money Laundering Despite the fact that investigating terrorist versus organized criminal organizations has drawn greater interest and public attention in recent years, there is often a fair amount of overlap between the types of crimes that fuel organized crime and terrorism, including money laundering.

Money laundering is necessary for all organized criminal organizations to ensure that their illegal funds appear to be legitimately obtained and to avoid detection (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.9). Online banking has made money laundering considerably easier than it has been in the past. For example, Mexican drug traffickers make ample use of "digital currency accounts," fake e-businesses, and even online role-playing games that require monetary transactions (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.9). The more innovative the methods, the more difficult such transactions can be to track.

Prepaid cards can also be used to transport money out of the country (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.9) More old-fashioned methods are still in use, such as shell organizations. Shell companies are technically legal entities but they serve no other meaningful purpose than to conceal illicit activities (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.9). Not all shell organizations exist solely on paper; sometimes organizations may be legitimate but are still used as fronts for concealing the bulk of the funds actually propping up the organization.

For example, to use a fictional example, the drug dealer of Breaking Bad uses a chain of car washes to conceal the profits from his business ("Money laundering," 2016). Other common techniques used even before the digital era include so-called smurfing, or depositing small sums of a large amount of ill-gotten gains to avoid notice.

Using offshore accounts in nations with more lax laws about tracking funds (or who may have law enforcement agents more amenable to be bribed or who are actively involved in the scheme) is also popular as a way to conceal the origins of large sums of cash ("Money laundering," 2016). Drug Trafficking Ever since the beginnings of modern organized crime, drug trafficking has played a critical role in generating funds.

The Italian Mafia was involved during Prohibition in the trafficking of alcohol, which was then illegal in the United States and has since been active in selling illegal drugs. It is only one of many criminal organizations involved in this field. For many organizations, particularly in Latin America, trafficking in drugs provides the bulk of the organization's revenue (Calderon 2015). In a number of nations, particularly in Mexico, organized criminal drug trafficking has infiltrated law enforcement, making it even more difficult to control the spread of drugs across the nation's borders.

Organizations retain their dominance "through kidnapping, extortion, and establishing protection rackets" (Calderon 2015). This also highlights how organized crime can be linked to national security issues as well as to attempting to limit the flow of drugs across the nation's borders (Calderon 2015). It can be difficult to work with nations where organized crime has an active role in bribing or otherwise engaging in corrupt activities with law enforcement agencies themselves.

Mexico has become a particularly problematic issue for policing drug trafficking because of the fact that it has become a popular site of drug retailing as well as drug trafficking. Its increased wealth and a growing middle-class population has strengthened the presence of illicit traffickers due to the fact that more Mexicans are capable of supporting the market as well as the nation providing a route of convenient transit (Calderon 2015).

Organized crime has grown increasingly emboldened and difficult to contain and drug-related violence has spilled over into middle and upper-class communities. Organized Crime: A Study in Diversity No single nation or ethnicity can be uniquely singled out as being problematic and singularly responsible for organized criminal activity, even though certain groups have been historically associated with organized crime, such as Italians and the Mafia.

The international nature of organized criminal activity and waves of migration have created a variety of cells which support many types of organized crime spanning from drugs to other types of fraud. While some criminal organizations such as the Italian Mafia are associated with a diverse range of criminal activities, others have been more associated with specific types of fraud.

For example, Armenian criminal groups have been found to have been implicated in widespread Medicare frauds, thus while some "ethnic diaspora communities" have been more involved in the drug trade, this is simply one of many forms of organized criminal activity that groups may specialize in (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.18). In another example, Chinese organized crime networks in Kansas were prosecuted in 2009 for trafficking in women and forcing them to engage in sexual slavery without pay while working in so-called massage parlors (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.18).

This is also yet another example of how supposedly legitimate businesses can conceal illegal organized activities. Trafficking in human beings, both for the sex trade and cheap labor further underlines the international nature of organized crime. Organized Crime and Technological Changes Technology has acted as facilitator of fraud schemes which have always been a vital element in the growth of organized crime.

The Internet has facilitated so-called boiler room activities such as one organized by Cosa Nostra which persuaded investors to buying shares of fictional companies using the Internet (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.12). The elderly are particularly vulnerable to such schemes given that they are often more trusting and lack skepticism about information disseminated online.

But anyone can be vulnerable to identity theft and the treasure trove of available online information has enabled even smaller organizations to perpetuate largescale crimes using credit card numbers, Medicare accounts, Social Security numbers and other types of personal information. In an investigation by Verizon and the U.S. Secret Service (USSS) in 2009 alone "85% of compromised computer records were attributed to organized crime" and "94% of all compromised records in this study were in the financial services sector" (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.13).

The online trading portal eBay has also been a popular site of illegal activity concealed by an apparently innocuous front, and organized criminals have used legitimate accounts to sell fictional merchandise and thus reap profits (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.13). Other organized crime schemes make use of a hybrid of traditional and online formats.

In one scheme perpetrated by the Russian mafia, an employee at a gas station used his position to obtain credit card numbers from customers; an Armenian crime group perpetuated a similar scheme using information obtained at restaurants and bars (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.14). Once again, this skimming technique is not particularly novel but the ability to shop online, use funds online, and to obtain information about users makes any type of identity-related information considerably more useful.

The mediation of the online format and the fact that more and more consumers engage in transactions online also makes it easier for organized crime to profit off of the information more quickly and on a mass scale, and gives additional tools to hide their identities. E-fencing is yet another example of a common technique to get rid of stolen merchandise which existed before the Internet but which has become more profitable as a result of the availability of online transactions.

Criminals can sell illegally-gotten gains through legitimate channels such as eBay and can also increase their profits -- from an estimated 30% of the legitimate retail price fencing at a physical location to 70% online (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.14). One of the great advantages cybercrime offers to perpetrators is its disorganization -- quite simply, perpetrators do not need to have leverage a visible threat against those whom they are attempting to extort, as is the case with a traditional mob 'shake down' or threat of violence.

Infiltrating an organization's online security can be done from anywhere (Bradley, 2015, p.1). Diffusion and a lack of coherent networking are an advantage in the online age and allow organizations greater flexibility in concealing their activities. Giving authority to groups outside the home country of origin can also shield organizations because of questions of jurisdiction and the difficulties of finding a coherent money trail (Bjelopera & Finklea, 2012, p.21). Finally, the greater internationalization of organized crime makes it difficult to locate informants with complete knowledge of the entity's operations.

With greater 'outsourcing' of criminal behaviors, one so-called cell may have little knowledge of what other components of the 'chain' are doing. Newer.