From Mafia To Organised Crime A Comparative Analysis of Policing Models

Critical Criminological Perspectives
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Anna Sergi
From Mafia
to Organised Crime
A Comparative Analysis of Policing Models
Anna Sergi
Department of Sociology
University of Essex
Colchester, United Kingdom
Critical Criminological Perspectives

ISBN 978-3-319-53567-8 ISBN 978-3-319-53568-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53568-5
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Acknowledgements
This book is probably my entire mind of researcher translated into

words. It is the results of different projects that have engaged me for
almost 6 years, since January 2011 when I started my PhD in Sociology
at the University of Essex and including the work I have carried out after
the completion of my PhD. It is very difficult to understand and
pinpoint how images, concepts, ideas, considerations, theories, models
and notions emerge and change in one’s mind, especially when it comes
to such complex and rich fields of enquiry. Certainly, thanks to all the
people I have talked to, from formal interviews to conversations I had on
train carriages with colleagues; thanks to observations of my own birth-
place, Calabria, and its idiosyncrasies; and thanks to my work environ-
ment, it has been possible to at least believe I had something to say and
to write in this context. I wish, therefore, to thank all those who
contributed, one way or the other, formally or informally, knowingly
or unknowingly, to this book; I certainly cannot contain them all in a
page. I take full responsibility of the mistakes I might have made and of
all its content.
For their contribution to the development of ideas, concepts and
research frameworks: at the University of Essex, thanks to Dick
Hobbs, Pete Fussey, Nigel South, Darren Thiel, Anna Di Ronco and
all the Administration Staff; at New York University, School of Law,
NYC, James B. Jacobs, Ronald Goldstock and John Gleeson; at the
v
vi Acknowledgements
Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, Russell G. Smith; at

Flinders University, Adelaide, Andrew Goldsmith and Marinella
Marmo; at the University of Melbourne, Leslie Holmes and Fiona
Haines; also in Australia, Stephen Bennetts, Adam Masters, Roderic
Broadhurst, Michael Madigan, David Bright, David Connery, Nick
McKenzie and Connie Agius; and in Italy, Maurizio Catino, Michele
Caianiello, Franco La Torre and Carlo Macrì. Thanks also to Anita
Lavorgna, John Dickie and Tristram Riley-Smith.
Thanks to Georgios Antonopolous for reviewing a first draft of the
book and for his support. Thanks also to Julie Ayling, Russell G. Smith,
Jay Albanese, Nigel South and Rocco Sciarrone for agreeing to review
parts of the book while I was writing.
Thanks to my interviewees; some opted to remain anonymous, I am
very thankful to them too: in Italy, Antimafia prosecutors Michele
Prestipino, Salvatore Boemi, Vincenzo Macrì, Roberto Di Palma,
Giovanni Bombardieri, Nicola Gratteri, Antonio Patrono, Anna
Canepa Alessandra Cerreti; also in Italy, Enzo Ciconte, Fabio Licata,
Giuseppe Lumia, Francesco Forgione, Bruno Giordano, Francesco Neri;
in the United Kingdom, Claudio Petrozziello, Steve Welsh, William
(Bill) Hughes, Richard Riley, Ken Macdonald, Allan Gibson, Craig
Turner, Roger Aldridge, Jonathan Fisher; in the United States,
Michael Gaeta, Polly Greenberg, Ronald Goldstock, John Gleeson,
Nancy Hoppock; and in Australia, Sandra Booth, Matt Warren, Clive
Small, Andrew Rogers, Calma Grace, Nick Sellars, Gregory Hough.
Thanks also to David Ellero and Luca Brioschi at Europol.
Thanks to Petr Kupka and Falko A. Ernst for the endless conversations
on the couch, or the train, or the bus or the phone about deconstructions
and reconstructions of organised crime, mafia and informal relationships.
Thanks to my father, Pantaleone Sergi, my mother, Teresa Papalia,
and my sister and her husband, Elida Sergi and Cleto Romantini, for
their patience, support and inspiration.
Thanks to my Calabria, for reminding me always that “We shall not cease
from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we
started and know the place for the first time” (T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets).
About this book
This book presents primary research conducted in Italy, US, Australia

and UK on countering strategies against Italian mafia and local orga-
nised crime groups. Through interviews and document interpretation,
the book wishes first, to interpret the interaction between institutional
perceptions of these criminal threats and historical events that have
shaped these institutional perceptions. Second, the book combines
analysis of policies and criminal law provisions to identify policing
models against mafia and organised crime that are constructed in each
country within a comparative perspective.
After presenting the policing models against mafia and organised
crime in Italy, US, Australia and UK separately, the author pushes the
comparison further by identifying both conceptual and procedural con-
vergences and divergences across the four models and within interna-
tional frameworks. By looking at topics as varied as mafia mobility,
money laundering, drug networks and gang violence, this book wishes,
ultimately, to reconsider the conceptualisations of both mafia and orga-
nised crime under a socio-behavioural and cultural perspective.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: The aims of this comparative research 1
2 Mafia and Organised Crime: The Spectrum

and the Models 21
3 Case Study 1: Italy and the Structure Model 61
4 Case Study 2: United States of America and the

Enterprise Model 101
5 Case Study 3: Australia and the Visibility Model 141
6 Case Study 4: United Kingdom and the Activity Model 177
7 Convergences and Divergences Across the Four Models 215
8 National Models and International Frameworks 265
9 Conclusion: A Socio-behavioural Approach in Policing

the Mafia–Organised Crime Spectrum 289
Index 309
ix
List of Figures
Fig. 2.1 The organised crime–mafia spectrum: a summary 46

Fig. 2.2 Country-based case studies and policing models 49
Fig. 3.1 The Italian structure model 92
Fig. 4.1 The US Enterprise Model 132
Fig. 5.1 The Australian visibility model 168
Fig. 6.1 The UK activity model 202
Fig. 7.1 Four-model of conceptual convergences and divergences 216
Fig. 7.2 Four-model of procedural convergences and divergences 223
xi
1
Introduction: The aims
of this comparative research
Background of the Project

This is a book about intentions. More specifically, it is about intentions
in policing systems against mafias and organised crime. The idea of
policing at the basis of this work is very broad and includes all mechan-
isms and procedures for control and order maintenance in response to
offending activities and harms associated to a certain threat. From
policy-making to repressive legislation, from prosecution regulations to
prevention strategies, policing is a complex governmental activity that
requires clear intentions at the policy level to be functioning in the law
and in the implementations of those laws. Intentions, in this book are
political, institutional, national and international ones; they originate
from the settling of discourses; some of them are flexible and changing,
others are static and long lasting. In terms of object of analysis, institu-
tional and political intentions in this book relate to policies against
mafias as forms of organised crime in four countries where I have
conducted research. In chronological order I have conducted research
in Italy (my birthplace), the UK (my place of study), the US and
Australia (during two visiting scholarships).
© The Author(s) 2017 1

A. Sergi, From Mafia to Organised Crime, Critical Criminological
Perspectives, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53568-5_1
2 1 Introduction: The aims of this comparative research
I have a legally trained mind that works through social research

methods of enquiry. This book is, therefore, a socio-legal project in
the sense that it presents both social and legal research, but – while
certainly adopting research methods for both – it does clearly lean more
towards social enquiry. Considering policies, intentions in policies and
legal responses lead to analyses of discourses, which are deeply embedded
in social practices and historical evolution (Melossi, 2001). The main
reason for the double nature (legal and social) of this project – and
probably its main achievement – is the attention to the difference
between the “law in books”, what policies and laws say, and the “law
in action”, how are policies and laws used in practice. In line with some
studies of comparative criminal justice (Pakes, 2013; Nelken, 2011), this
book wishes to be an empirical study of policing responses to mafia and
organised crime in Italy, the US, Australia and the UK.
This book is the result of five different research projects. The first and
certainly the most relevant is my PhD research project, conducted
between 2011 and 2014 at the University of Essex and titled “The
Socio-legal Identity of Organised Crime Policing in Italy and the
United Kingdom”. In my PhD thesis and in the publications that
followed, I have formulated two of the policing models in this book:
the Italian Structure Model and the English Activity Model. The second
project relevant for this study was conducted in 2013 during a visiting
period at the New York University School of Law, when the majority of
the interviews for the US model have been carried out. The third project
corresponds to a period spent within the National Crime Agency in
London in the first half of 2014 within the Global Uncertainties
Program of the UK Research Councils. The fourth project was con-
ducted during and after my first trip to Australia in Autumn 2015, for a
consultation period at the Australian Institute of Criminology in
Canberra and a visiting fellowship at Flinders University Law School
in Adelaide. These four projects have all resulted in journal publications
at the basis of this book. The final project relevant for this book
corresponds to my first book, titled ‘Ndrangheta. The Glocal
Dimensions of the Most Powerful Italian Mafia, written with Dr Anita
Lavorgna and published by Palgrave Macmillan Pivot Series in August
2016. In this occasion more interviews have been carried out in Italy,
Background of the Project 3
also with foreign authorities (e.g. at the US Embassy) and in European

institutions together with an extended collection of juridical data. More
details on data collection and analysis are provided later in this chapter.
The research questions at the basis of this book project are very
composite and can be summarised as follows:
1. What are the historical events that have been shaping the concepts of
mafias and organised crime at national level in Italy, the US, Australia
and the UK?
2. How are the concepts of mafias and organised crime conceptualised
across the four legal systems and among the institutions of the four
countries? What kind of differences are there in the way both concepts
are constructed in criminal law and criminal procedure?
3. What policing models do the four countries implement in the fight
against mafia and organised crime on the basis of their own concep-
tualisations of the phenomena?
4. How do policing models implemented in the four countries relate to
each other? What are the convergences and divergences among them?
5. How do the four policing models relate to, or are influenced by,
international instruments against, and conceptualisations of, mafia
and organised crime?
This book, therefore, is a contribution to studies on mafias and orga-

nised crime from a theoretical standpoint as much as it is a study on
policing and a comparative research in criminal justice. When unpack-
ing the research questions, other issues have emerged and have deter-
mined the boundaries of the research and therefore its results. This book
looks at criminal law profiles in all four countries and needs, for
example, to take into consideration that three out of four countries
analysed come from common law traditions while one, Italy, comes
from a civil law legacy. In practice, this has confirmed the choice of
placing Italy as the starting point for comparison against the other three
countries and essentially has fixed the initial focus on Italian mafias and
their movements. The mafia–organised crime spectrum developed in
this book does indeed depart from Italian gradations of the concept of
mafias, but its final objective is actually to detach the umbilical tie
between Italy and mafias and move towards more nuanced and con-
temporary conceptualisations of the mafia phenomenon in comparative
perspectives.
Notes on Research Methods

In qualitative research, decisions cannot be made a priori as the nature of
this type of research is “characteristically exploratory, fluid and flexible,
data-driven and context-sensitive” (Mason, 2002: 24). This is especially
true in comparative research where contexts are different from the
beginning and their difference is the object of enquiry. The research
questions at the basis of this project require an understanding of key
issues preceding the analysis of policing strategies and the evolution of
approaches against phenomena of mafias and organised crime in the four
countries. These key issues relate mostly to the conceptualisation of the
phenomena of mafias and organised crime, which, at the same time,
require a more strategic and deeper analysis of the phenomena them-
selves. In order to acquire this type of understanding, a greater ability to
capture the reality of the field of investigation has to be combined with a
greater intellectual effort to expand the area of investigation (Marvasti,
2004). The continuous intertwining between formal and informal inter-
views together with collection of new documents more or less directly
linked to the field of enquiry is certainly one of the strength of this
research but also makes it difficult to narrate the research design
coherently.
This book is made of building blocks, which follow, enrich and
modify each other continuously. Indeed, it is the product of different
research endeavours that did not happen at the same time. This, how-
ever, is not a limitation of the study but rather its strength. In fact, the
research for the PhD project (the comparison between Italy and the UK)
has been conducted at the same time and over a longer period of time
compared to the others; it has also served as starting point to conduct
research in the US and in Australia in a quicker and more focused way
later on. In practice this also means that it has been almost impossible to
Notes on Research Methods 5
consider data collection separate from data analysis as they both were
happening at the same time albeit for different contexts.
In essence, this research has been mainly based on textual data from
official sources as enriched and guided by both formal and informal
interviews and vice versa. As for the purposes of qualitative research
(Blaikie, 2000; Bachman and Shutt, 2011), interviews have allowed to
further explore the practicalities of laws, procedures and concepts in the
documents, while the documents have added validity to the data col-
lected through the interviews. Obviously observations, extra readings
and informal conversations have also played a part to develop my own
thinking and my own perceptions on the topic.
As it often happens in qualitative interviewing, the sampling process
of this project has been guided both by the need to target certain sources
to answer the research questions and by the need to produce a relevant
range of situations, which could enable me to formulate and sustain my
arguments (Mason, 2002). More specifically, my sample for the inter-
views aimed at being:
1. Purposive/Selective: the sample frame, especially at the beginning of

the data collection, was indeed chosen to serve the purposes of the
research questions, as first hypotheses of the research and of the
theoretical framework.
2. Strategic/Theoretical: the sample frame aimed at being meaningful
both empirically and theoretically. The initial sample has been
reviewed and enlarged or re-directed to develop and test theories
and arguments emerging for the research.
3. Representative: the sample frame has not been random, but it has
been identified with specific criteria in mind.
The interviews considered for this study are many and have been carried
out in different moments. A breakdown of data collection through
interviews in all four countries, therefore is best summarised by looking
at the institutions that I have approached, both by engaging with their
official documents and through interviews with people holding key
functions in those institutions. In some cases I have conducted meetings
with more than one person at the same time. Obviously, legislations,
both in criminal law and criminal procedure and other indirectly rele-
vant norms (i.e. money laundering regulation or confiscation proce-
dures) have been consulted in all countries prior to the interviews.
1. Italy (interviews and meetings between 2012 and 2013 and in 2015
in Reggio Calabria, Rome and Milan)
a. Direzione Nazionale Anti-mafia [National Anti-mafia Prosecution

Directorate]
b. Direzione Distrettuale Anti-mafia [District Anti-mafia Prosecution
Directorate]
c. Direzione Investigativa Anti-mafia [Anti-mafia Investigation
Directorate]
d. Commissione Parlamentare Anti-mafia [Parliamentary Anti-mafia
Commission]
e. Polizia di Stato [State Police]
f. Guardia di Finance [Fiscal Police]
g. Bank of Italy
h. Italian experts at Europol – The Hague
i. Judiciary
j. Academia
2. The UK – England and Wales – (interviews and meetings in London

and Liverpool in 2012–2013 and 2014)
a. Crown Prosecution Service, Organised Crime Division

b. Metropolitan Police, London
c. Merseyside Police, Liverpool
d. Durham Constabulary
e. Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) prior to 2013
f. National Crime Agency (NCA) since 2013
g. Home Office, Organised Crime Strategy Team
h. Lawyers
i. Academia
Notes on Research Methods 7
3. The US – federal jurisdiction – (interviews and meetings in 2013 and

2015 in New York City and Rome)
a. Attorney General’s State-Wide Organised Crime Task Force (New

York)
b. New York Police Department Organised Crime Control Bureau
c. The New York County District Attorney’s Office, Manhattan,
Major Economic Crimes Bureau
d. The New York County District Attorney’s Office, Manhattan,
Rackets Bureau
e. Federal Bureau of Investigation (including representatives at the
US Embassy in Rome)
f. Lawyers
g. Academia
4. Australia – federal and state jurisdictions – (interviews and meetings

in 2014 and 2015 online and in Canberra, Melbourne, Sydney and
Adelaide)
a. Australian Federal Police (Including representatives at Australian

Embassy in London)
b. Australian Crime Commission (now Australian Criminal
Intelligence Commission)
c. Victoria Police
d. New South Wales Police
e. South Australia Police
f. Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI)
g. Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecution
h. Academia
Conversing with experts and privileged observers within institutions,

sometimes in multilateral conversations (e.g. a roundtable discussion at
the Australian Federal Police in Melbourne with online participation
from offices in Brisbane, Canberra and Sydney) “can serve to shorten
time-consuming data gathering processes, particularly if the experts are

seen as ‘crystallisation points’ for practical insider knowledge” (Bogner
et al., 2009: 2). Considering the diversity of the contexts and the need to
be specific in all of them while also being able to build a comparative
work, all conversations, formal and informal, were basically “conversa-
tions with a purpose” (Burgess, 1984: 102). Moreover, because of the
nature of the topic, the different judicial contexts and the different
expertise of participants, the structure of these conversations has been
quite loose. It needs to be reminded again that the relevance of con-
versations and interviews is tied to the collection of documents, as
primary data to start the thematic and discourse analyses. Naturally, a
good proportion of the documents found through legal engines
(“National Archives”, Altalex.com, Lawpages.com, Westlaw.co.uk/.com,
LexisNexis, etc.) are official or semi-official sources containing “traces” of
the investigated phenomena and relevant events (Sofaer, 1999: 1109).
Therefore, studies, reports, bulletins, records from the same institutions
approached for interviews and meetings ensure consistency of sources.
Judicial documents, among which sentences and trial documents, were
also sought through law databases and archives. Moreover, confidential
investigation and prosecution files have been at times made available for
consultation in Italy and in Australia specifically, which did enrich data
collection in these countries.
The variety of research sources and the timeframe of this book project
make the book an original contribution to policing and comparative
studies control strategies against mafias and organised crime. The initial
approach to the data has been a constructive questioning – such as the one
suggested by Charmaz (2006: 47) – by asking “What do the data suggest?
Pronounce? Assume?” and “From whose point of view?” Thematic ana-
lysis, broadly intended as the “method to identifying, analysing and
reporting patterns (themes) within data” (Braun and Clarke, 2006: 79)
satisfied the preliminary needs of this research. Through the identification
of themes (diverging or converging), I have certainly improved on the
level of reflexivity that comparative criminal justice studies aim at
(Nelken, 2000a). It is evident that a good analysis should consider both
interpretive readings of data – which correspond in this case to the
thematic analysis – and literal ones (Mason, 2002). A second level of
Comparative Research in Criminology, Criminal Justice . . . 9
the analysis, which led to the writing process of this book, has, therefore,
gone further in literal and discourse analysis, through which intentions
and/or political agendas within documents or oral narratives were revealed
(Webley, 2010; May, 2001). Indeed, the analysis of discourse used in
institutional settings to present a crime issue is crucial to gain a better
understanding of its social construction (Carrapico, 2014; Stritzel, 2012).
At the very core of each strategic choice for the analysis across four
countries has been the focus on comparative criminal justice both as a
research method and as a guideline for the investigation overall.
Comparative Research in Criminology, Criminal

Justice and Criminal Law
Comparative research in criminal justice and criminology seeks primar-
ily to understand the differences and the reasons for legal choices in
national systems (Pakes, 2014; Nelken, 2011). Studies in comparative
criminal justice are essentially aimed at intertwining crime, justice and
culture (Nelken, 1994) and attempt to overcome stereotypes and
improve reflection on a given aspect of the criminal justice process
(Nelken, 2000a). This book, as said, aims – first and foremost – at
exploring similarities and differences in the systems of Italy, the US,
Australia and the UK for what concerns their policing strategy against
“mafia” and “organised crime”. However, instead of just looking at
policing strategies – with a particular focus on criminal law – this
study digs very deep in the way these labels are defined at the institu-
tional level, to fully problematise the phenomena and link them directly
to the objectives of this study.
At a first stage, a comparative study actively identifies significant
absences or presences of laws and/or procedures in the compared
systems, describing and framing foreign systems and how similar or
different they look (Nelken, 2000b). In this work the four case studies
(Italy, the US, Australia and the UK) represent this first level of
analysis by providing the deconstruction and reconstruction of each
country’s policing model. A second stage of comparative research
requires a deeper reflection on the emergence of new social meanings

(Hodgson, 2000), mirroring techniques (Rogowski, 1996) and dialec-
tic analysis (Puchalska-Tych and Salter, 1996) beyond initial descrip-
tions and frames. This study goes to a second stage of comparison in
Chapters 7 and 8 where absences or presences in the law are used to
comment upon institutional perceptions, intentions and outcomes at
the social level. Chapter 7 discusses convergences and divergences
among the policing models through the use of semiotic squares.1 In
this work, as I have also argued elsewhere (Sergi, 2015), the semiotic
squares have been used to overcome a binary logic of convergent-
divergent policies. They show the nuances of comparison without,
however, losing frames for meanings.
If the value of comparative research in legal cultures is found in the
possibility to go beyond superficial descriptions of criminal laws and
procedures (Pakes, 2010) it follows that mere descriptions of the
systems would not suffice, but instead the researcher should place
herself almost as a “participant observer” on all systems object of the
comparison, which does include a socio-cultural sensitivity to the
context observed (Hodgson, 2000). The researcher has to be prepared
to infiltrate the (legal) culture of different countries, as an anthropol-
ogist or a sociologist would do. This specific work, and my position
while researching, has been very much inspired by these considera-
tions. The attempt to permeate another culture “at the very least to
understand its institutional structures, laws and procedures”
(Hodgson, 2000: 140) means engaging with “its languages, customs,
ideologies, legal cultures and practices” (Hodgson, 2000: 141). In this
anthropological process, the researcher is necessarily influenced by her
own bias and, in my case, by my own training and knowledge, which
eventually shapes the focus; in this research – as we will see later on in
this chapter – this has meant choosing Italy and Italian mafias as
starting and core point of the comparison.
1
The semiotic square was introduced by Algirdas Greimas to better analyse paired concepts. At
the basis of the semiotic square is a visualisation of characteristics of a text, in terms of semantic
convergences and divergences. See Greimas A. (1987) On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic
Theory (trans. Perron PJ and Collins FH). London: Frances Pinter.
Mafias and Organised Crime: Prejudices and Complexity . . . 11
The ultimate value of comparative studies lies mostly in preventing

ethnocentrism and cultural relativism (Nelken, 2009). Ethnocentrism,
which is tightly linked to concepts such as nationality or culture, “refers
to sentiments that regard domestic arrangements as necessarily normal and
right, and other cultures or customs as weird or wrong” (Pakes, 2004: 3).
Most of this book is concerned with a field – that of mafias and organised
crime policing – that more than once has lent itself to ethnocentric
sentiments informing policies and strategies. Overcoming ethnocentrism
and cultural relativism is of paramount importance when wishing, as I do,
to advocate for international cooperation unburdened by superficiality and
approximation and really embracing the complexity of political and insti-
tutional positions instead. In this consideration lies the ultimate relevance
of this project.
Mafias and Organised Crime: Prejudices and

Complexity of Comparing Socio-cultural Crimes
As said, this book is about intentions in policies and policing models
against mafias and organised crime. This means that, in this book, both
mafias and organised crime will be treated as a label, which guides
policing approaches and legislation choices, but essentially does not
need a specific definition. It is precisely the constantly shifting identity
of organised crime (as opposed to mafia in an Italian context) in its
institutional classifications that first inspired this project. It is because of
the vagueness of the threat of organised crime that legislations and
policing strategies to fight it constitute an interesting object of study.
When national law, especially criminal law, attempts to portray the
reality of mafias and/or organised crime – the real nature of their
offending – with the purpose to contain/fight/disrupt them (i.e. policing
them) it has to deal with the challenges of multi-dimension and multi-
faceted labels, stereotypes and evolving perceptions of threats, which are
constructed as global, local and glocal (Hobbs, 1998).
On the one side, this book explores the relation between the
evolving perceptions of the concept of organised crime and the way
these perceptions can be or have been translated into legislative frame-

works of substantial criminal law. On the other side, it also looks at the
problems, the gaps and the challenges of this translation process. As
said, the core of this book is the exploration of institutional perceptions
and frameworks in a comparative perspective, without, however, limit-
ing the comparison to legal aspects. In fact, in order to unpack inten-
tions and strategies and describe the policing models in their unfolding
in the four country of choice, there is the need to look at the phenom-
ena these models target. Historical, sociological and criminological
perspectives on the labels that each country places on (Italian) mafia
or organised crime are presented as well. In this sense, even though this
is not a book about Italian mafias or organised crime groups in Italy,
the US, Australia and the UK, it must nevertheless provide a socio-
historical exploration of what these look like in order to discuss their
control mechanisms. It is therefore not only justified, but also necessary
to pre-judge, to a certain extent, the objects of enquiry, as they become
the objects of comparison. Pre-judging, in its literal sense, means to
hold assumptions prior to an empirical evaluation.
In this book, there are two main pre-judgements that I need to recognise;
they both relate to the focus on Italian mafias. The first pre-judgement
relates to the construction of mafias in strict correlation with the construc-
tion of organised crime. Notwithstanding the many and varied degrees of
analysis that this book undertakes in relation to the words and the worlds of
mafias, mafias are certainly pre-judged as dangerous groups for societies. This
is not solely because affiliates commit crimes, but also, and especially, because
they embody a system built on unruly accumulation of money or power,
which can supersede values of life and fairness, public health or order or
safety, unconcerned with progress, irrespective of transparency and equal
opportunities. Mafias also represent the protection and preservation of the
past – they are conservative forces averse to progress, attached to potentially
lethal ideas of honour and masculinity and concerned with material gains
over anything else. Moreover, the essence of the concept of mafia is in the
interdependence of the phenomenon with the local environment, which is
why its socio-cultural element cannot be dismissed. This is also why mafias
are usually equalled to ethnic-based forms of organised crime, a notion this
book tries to unpack and challenge.
Mafias and Organised Crime: Prejudices and Complexity . . . 13
The second pre-judgement relates to mafias as worse than “other”

organised crime groups, if not superior as in “more complex”. This pre-
judgement is partially rooted, as we will see later on in the book, in the
Italian legal classifications of the two phenomena (mafia groups and
“simple” criminal associations) as separate and distinct, for the purposes
of criminal law. This means that while not all organised crime groups
can qualify as mafia groups, all mafia groups are also organised crime
groups. Whatever “other” organised crime groups do not share with
mafias eventually makes them “simpler”. This pre-judgement is also
based on the consideration that mafias seem more difficult to extirpate
because they feed on socio-political influences and relationships and
therefore are more than “just criminal” organisations. These relation-
ships are built on social informal practices that feed onto cultural values
while manipulating formal norms (Ledeneva, 2006); it is not always
possible and not desirable to criminalise these behaviours as such, as we
will see. Maintaining these relationships also require a set of activities
that are a-criminal or pre-criminal, depending on the objectives and the
reach of the mafia group.
Notwithstanding these pre-judgements, “simple(r)” or “other” organised
crime groups – which can include networked forms of group crimes or
criminal conspiracies – are not necessarily less dangerous. For the purposes
of this book, however, the dangerousness of organised crime groups is
considered primarily a criminal and criminalised trait, while the dangerous-
ness of mafias is more nuanced and usually both criminal and cultural. In
other words, organised crime groups are dangerous as they engage in
activities, which are crimes or lead to crimes having financial gains or
other material benefits as ultimate goals. The harm they cause in the
commission of crimes might be composite and varied – as these crimes
might require movements and harmful facilitating activities – but their
relevance is still on the “criminal”, therefore “legally constructed” field.
Mafia groups, on the other side, even though they certainly engage in
activities that are constructed as crimes and related enabling or facilitating
activities, do not just exist for financial or material gain. The harm they
cause, especially but not only in their local communities, is both criminal
and social as social are also some of their goals – power, prestige, advance-
ment and preservation of certain anti-progressive values. This means that
mafia groups are not just Italian. Similarly, in Italy there are criminal
groups, which are not mafias. Obviously the difference between the two
typologies is not clear-cut – far from it – which is why this book attempts to
place characteristics and definers across the mafia–organised crime spectrum
that is not static but dynamic. The spectrum is just an intellectual exercise
that supports the analysis of the “law in books” and the “law in action” in
response to these complex phenomena. Indeed, the continuous discussion
of such pre-judgements is necessarily part of this book, and it requires the
scrutiny of social and cultural contexts of the criminal issues object of
enquiry.
As remarkably pointed out by Melossi, Sozzo and Sparks (2011: 3),
“we should expect each instance of ‘the criminal question’ to carry
the weight of its history and to display the obdurate legal, institu-
tional, linguistic particularities of the political culture of which it is
an intrinsic component”. Discussing policing systems against mafias
and organised crime, from a comparative perspective, means under-
standing the “historical embeddedness” of both mafia and organised
crime and the control systems against them. Obviously, historical
embeddedness cannot be conceived separately from social and cultural
traditions (Melossi, 2001). Crucially, if both crimes and control
systems are embedded in their own socio-cultural history and, there-
fore, situated within political and economic contexts, a question
emerges about the possibility to meaningfully compare them across
national systems. Issues of translatability, diffusion, transfer of con-
cepts and policies in criminology and criminal justice have been
widely explored and all will be relevant for the arguments in this
work. The case studies in this book, and the four policing models,
have been constructed in the attempt to show both the historical and
the socio-cultural embeddedness of both the criminal phenomenon
and its control strategies. Ultimately, this book wishes to compare
through complexity of concepts rather than approximation. I argue
that, although mafia groups are certainly embedded within the spe-
cificity of Italian historical, economic and socio-cultural contexts, it is
precisely because of this specificity that a comparison is necessary. In
ages of globalised “multiplicity without unity” (Beck, 2000: 11)
intelligible pluralist conversations like this one are certainly needed.
This Book 15
This Book
In an attempt to simplify the reader’s journey, I believe it is helpful to
summarise schematically what this book is about, to set expectations and
avoid confusion. As said, this book is about political and institutional
intentions to fight mafias and organised crime groups in four countries.
More specifically and in logical order:
1. This book is a theoretical effort to redefine the term “mafia” in relation

to the broader conceptualisation of the term “organised crime”. This
will be the description of both concepts across the “mafia–organised
crime spectrum” in Chapter 2.
This effort stems from two necessities. First, I believe the legacy of the
word “mafia” with its strong (Italian) connotations needs revisiting as
its meaning has become too fixed in institutional perceptions – mainly
outside of Italy – and does not allow for a dynamic conceptualisation
of the realities that the phenomenon “mafia”, both historically and in
contemporary days, includes. Second, the relationship between the
word “mafia” and the terminology of “organised crime” needs to be
assessed in light of the social dimensions of mafias, rather than just
their criminal constructions. This is how I construct the “spectrum”
which can be applied to describe criminal groups as well as their
presence in a given location. As it will be seen in Chapter 2, the
spectrum can go from “more mafia” to “less mafia” where “more
mafia” means the exhibition of certain social and political traits of
the group and “less mafia” instead is a residual form of “organised
crime”, with emphasis on the word “crime”. The focus is therefore on
“mafia” groups, albeit in relation to “organised crime”, precisely
because I want to stress the need to reconsider the meaning of mafias
as a useful concept when undressed of the heavy legacy that it still
carries in institutional perceptions.
2. When discussing “mafias” this book refers to two ideas: the concep-
tualisation of “Italian mafias” – as starting point for the analysis of a
more general “mafia” category – and some specific examples on

current mafia groups of Italian origin, recurrently the Calabrian
‘ndrangheta and Sicilian Cosa Nostra.
The mafia spectrum is built around a re-conceptualisation of mafias

through data and materials that, in different ways and from different
locations, refer to groups with an Italian connection. There are
various reasons for this. First, an outlook to other groups in the
compared countries would have required a different type of research,
much broader in scope, which I was unable to do in this case. Second,
as said, this book wishes to deconstruct and reconstruct a concept –
mafia – that is undeniably rooted in the understandings and
misunderstandings of Italian mafia groups as prototypical mani-
festations of organised crime. The specificity of Italian mafias at
times has allowed denying the possibility to compare them to other
forms and manifestations of organised crime. I challenge this denial.
I believe that an effort to reconceptualise and update “mafia” as a
useful notion for institutional and policy-making purposes needs to
depart from the Italian case and its ramifications, because it is here
that we find both the history and the evolution of the concept also
today.
3. This book is a comparative research in policing and criminal justice

models in Italy, the UK, the US and Australia (Chapters 3–6).
As argued in Chapter 2, differences in institutional perceptions and con-

ceptualisations of mafias and organised crime influence both policies and
legal approaches. This book will explore how historical events have influ-
enced institutional perceptions of mafias and organised crime and how
institutional perceptions have then affected policies, strategies and criminal
law as responses to past and future events. The analysis of such interplay is
the novelty of this book: it is a comparative research in policing strategies in
the countering of mafias and organised crime across four countries, while
considering different legal traditions and underpinning legal theories of
criminal law.
This Book 17
4. Conducting comparative research means engaging in deconstruction

and reconstruction of policies and norms. In this book, I choose to
explain this mechanism of deconstruction and reconstruction through
the use of models of policing, one for each country (Chapters 3–6).
This might be the most controversial aspect of the book. Neither the four
policing models in this book are predetermined schemes nor they promote
mutually exclusive categorisations. As said, these models are the result of a
first stage comparative analysis. More specifically, these models are a way to
make the comparison easier but still rich and specific enough for a second-
level comparative analysis. The models are the result of the following
reasoning: (a) the mafia–organised crime spectrum recognises different
aspects that various groups manifest in various latitudes in criminal and
social contexts; (b) the institutional responses to these manifestations differ
from country to country; (c) while it is certainly possible to just compare
laws and interventions in each country, I want to look at “intentions” – the
motivations behind laws and policing interventions; (d) in order to do this,
there is the need to look at the way institutional perceptions, law-making
and law enforcement processes interact with each other; (e) even though
national systems to contrast mafias and/or organised crime might reach
similar results and even depart from similar conceptualisations, my
research in each country has revealed that some concepts more than others
drive institutional perceptions, policy-making and finally policing models.
This is why the four policing models in this book carry names/labels
(Structure, Enterprise, Visibility and Activity); the labels represent the
most influential concept in each country. These models are not pre-
established categories and shall not be considered as mutually exclusive:
indeed, the models do share more than one characteristic. Describing the
Italian model as the “Structure” model, for example, helps us understand
what concept (structure) acts as the main “drive” of the policing approach
against mafias and organised crime and what concept (structure) reveals
something about the intentions of policy-making in the country; it does not
mean that the idea of “structure” is not important or relevant even in other
models or strategies against organised crime and mafias, for example, the
“Enterprise” model of the US. Rather, in other countries there is a different
concept, which is deemed more relevant. While on the one side these models
are not based on mutually exclusive concepts, they are indeed peculiar of the
country of reference at the point of forming the basis for a comparison.
5. This book is a comparative project that does not just aim at describing
and presenting similarities and differences, but also and more crucially
aims at understanding intentions and implications of similarities and
differences (Chapters 7–8).
Policing models that include different stages of the countering strategy from
policy-making to investigations to criminal law and procedure are the first
stage of the comparative effort. At the second stage, content and discourse
of emerging convergences and divergences across the four countries will be
analysed. These convergences and divergences are situated within interna-
tional frameworks and conceptualisations of the notions of mafias and
organised crime across borders and for international cooperation.
Finally, one of the overarching themes of the book is that there cannot
be a unique model to fight mafias and organised crime across nations.
Mafias and organised crime groups – as conceptualised and placed across
the spectrum and within international frameworks – might display social
and cultural elements that require specific social and cultural attention.
However, harmonisation of policing approaches as well as comprehension
of criminal phenomena is crucial for international cooperation because of
the transnational reach of certain criminal activities and groups. Integrated
models are possible and desirable when they are the result of comparative
and specific analysis rather than policy transfer and approximation.
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2
Mafia and Organised Crime: The
Spectrum and the Models
Between Criminology and Criminal Law

When we talk about organised crime and mafia the first important
distinction to make is a terminological one. There is in fact a clear but
often overlooked difference between the two concepts, which lies in their
identification as crimes. Organised crime is a crime, a criminal category,
a set of crimes or a list of crimes – whichever works best in national
settings. Mafias instead are phenomena – social, criminal, economic ones,
depending on the territory of reference. Mafias can be and are crimina-
lised, at least in part, in many countries, but what states have crimina-
lised are components of the mafia phenomenon, at times mafia
behaviours, more often mafia activities or, like in Italy, mafia groups.
An analysis of organised crime and mafia that wishes to be, if not
comprehensive (the massive literature on the topic would not allow
exhaustiveness) at least functional, cannot therefore dismiss the con-
sequences of criminalisation on the phenomena. The main drive for
writing this book is therefore still the observation that each criminal
(and criminological) phenomenon is deeply linked with its crimina-
lisation and that criminal law is deeply linked to institutional

22 2 Mafia and Organised Crime: The Spectrum and the Models
perceptions of the crime it targets. The way organised crime and

mafia are “received” by criminal law does influence their perceptions
outside of the law as well.
Criminal law is by definition the realm of interpretation and
exegesis. It is therefore fundamental to look at the use of language
in policies and laws. As we will see in the course of the book language
plays a crucial, at time perplexing, role in the way these phenomena
are shaped in criminal policies and institutional approaches around
the world. Criminal law, concerned with the specificity of the norm
and certainly with the interpretation of the language in the norm,
cannot dismiss the importance of “meanings” and “signifiers”. For
example, the study of how norms affect behaviours and perceptions
has been object of the so-called norms school which attaches the
study of “social meaning” to legal studies including criminal law
(Weisberg, 2003; Posner, 2000). As Weisberg (2003: 476) explained:
“when lawmakers make law, they do not just aim to directly control
behaviour through measurable, if not material, rewards and punish-
ments: they also hope to express certain social or cultural values they
attach to that behaviour”. With this in mind and with reference to
what said in the introduction to this book about comparative studies
in criminal law and justice, an analysis of the essential criminological
and criminal law traits of both organised crime and mafias is needed:
what we call their socio-legal identities. However, some general
principles of criminal law need to be conceptualised first.
Criminal law principles differ greatly between common law and civil
law traditions; for the purposes of this book this is an essential point as
most of the difficulties to conceptualise organised crime and mafia start
from the fact that Italian criminal law follows civil law doctrines while
American, British and Australian criminal law are formed within com-
mon law legacies. This is not just a technicality: as said earlier, criminal
law shapes meanings and defines interpretations. The leading syllogism
is: criminal law expresses and influences social meanings; social meanings
are attached to behaviours; thus criminal law is also attached to, and
influences, behaviours. Criminal law principles therefore can facilitate a
criminological understanding of complex phenomena like organised
crime and mafia.
Between Criminology and Criminal Law 23
Three are the main concepts rooted in the principles of criminal law
that we can connect to the criminological study of organised crime and
mafias.
1. The grounds for criminalisation: this refers to the wrongfulness of

organised crime and mafias.
2. The responsibility of participants: this refers to individual or collective
forms of criminal liability in terms of conspiracy or participation or
membership.
3. The constituting elements of the criminal conduct: this refers to the
specification of the constituting elements of criminal responsibility, as
defined above, as well as the core of the criminalisation in terms of
condemned behaviours.
As for point 1, the grounds for criminalisation, reference is made to the

concept of “wrongfulness” (Cancio Melià, 2008; Sergi, 2014). The
question is “what is wrong with organised crime and/or mafia?” This is
not a question of morals and not solely a question of knowledge of the
legal prohibition of a conduct. It is indeed a question of legal definition.
The way we classify the wrongfulness of organised crime is linked to the
way we define the threat posed. However, as noticed by Weihofen
(1967: 31), “if we are to employ the appreciation of wrongfulness as a
legal test, it is unrealistic to limit it to appreciation of illegality”. Indeed,
asking what is “wrong” with organised crime or mafia implies enquiring
about two things: first, what type of mens rea is needed – what type of
culpability level the offender needs to have to commit the legally wrong
act that is defined as mafia or organised crime; and, second, what type of
harm or potential for harm organised crime and mafia carry against the
system of values and principles protected by criminal law. In terms of
wrongfulness as mens rea – the mental status of the offender when
committing the actus reus, the criminal act – we know that complex
criminal charges, like those of organised crime, carry a general requisite
of intent or at least knowledge as proof of the offender’s state of mind
(Gurulé, 2013). On the other side, it is more complex to look at the link
between wrongfulness and harm. Indeed, the system of values might
differ from country to country and is constantly evolving. Criminal law
is by definition a public matter: it is a reaction to the violation of a

public interest (Ashworth, 2009). However, systems of values pro-
gress with changing forms of government, evolving human rights
standardisation practices and certainly through updates of criminal
procedures. What in one country is severely punished because of
religion, in another country might not be punished at all; what in
one country is against democratic values, in another country might
be a matter of security; what is against fair financial competition in
one country, in another might be against public order and so on;
this does not change the criminalised conduct, it merely changes its
“label”, its categorisation for purposes of the law.
The historical debates between instrumental and moralistic
approaches to criminal law come to mind. To an idea of criminal law
as an instrument or technique to reach certain pre-established goals
(crimes as mala prohibita) scholars have opposed an idea of criminal
law as based on the pure immorality (crimes as mala in se) of a given
conduct as good enough reason for criminalisation (Braithwaite and
Pettit, 1990; Moore, 1997; Devlin, 1965; Dworkin, 1994). In other
words, are phenomena like organised crime and mafia mala prohibita or
mala in se, or possibly both? Is there an inherent wrongfulness to
organised crime and mafia, something connected to the harmful immor-
ality of their conducts? And how do the conducts classified as organised
crime and/or mafia in criminal law injure the public and deny the values
we have set as a polity? These are difficult questions to answer, especially
in complex criminal scenarios, and the answers will be different for every
system. However, one consideration comes to the rescue. The political
character of criminal law, as a state function, cannot be dismissed. In the
difficulties of theories of criminal law, the practicality of its formation
eventually remains a political choice (Farmer, 2010; Thorburn, 2011)
and as such it can be analysed in its developments.
The difficulty to classify the wrongfulness of organised crime and
mafia also impacts on point 2, the definition of criminal responsibility
and on point 3, the identification of the constituting elements of the
criminal conducts. As for point 2, in organised crime cases criminal law
will differentiate between individual or collective responsibility and,
depending on the legacy of reference, common law or civil law, it
Between Criminology and Criminal Law 25
might define liability in terms of conspiracy – single or joint, pivoting on

the criminalisation of an “agreement” – or participation to a criminal
plan, or membership in a criminal organisation. This point is probably
the one where the legacy of legal systems creates the most visible
differences among states, often underestimated by criminologists or
analysts of criminal policies.
Independently from the results reached at trials, the criminalisa-
tion of conspiracy is not the same as the criminalisation of participa-
tion or even membership. The offence of conspiracy presumes the
willingness of at least two people to commit an offence in agreement.
In the law of conspiracy, the agreement defines the dangerousness of
the pactum sceleris, but the criminal responsibility is still individual
and still assessed against a substantial offence – you need a conspi-
racy to do something (illegal) (Sergi, 2015c). Conspiracy is about
doing, or willing to do, something illegal together. Different legal
systems provide for single or joint conspiracy in criminal procedure,
usually allowing the joinder of conspiracy charges at trial, but often
dropping the conspiracy charge when a substantial crime has been
committed and can be charged. For example, conspiracy to murder is
incompatible with the actual commission of murder; one excludes
the other. This is fundamental to notice: even if conspiracy attracts
charges based on the dangerousness of group activity, the actual
crime committed always prevails on the agreement to commit the
crime.
Slightly different is the situation in cases of participation to the
commission of a crime (in this case organised crime, mafia and related
charges). On the one side, this is still based on individual culpability and
requires the proof of a material conduct by the offender. On the other
side, it entails the pre-definition of the crime to be committed in
“participation”, that is, organised crime. A crime of “participation in
organised crime activities” needs to define what organised crime activ-
ities are first. Offences of participation often result in liability for joint
enterprise like in conspiracy charges. Indeed, the line between conspi-
racy and participation is not a clear one; participation in joint criminal
activities does require mutual assistance and therefore agreement anyway
(De Than and Elvin, 2016).
One step further, the offence of membership in unlawful association

reverses the culpability from the individual onto the enterprise/unlawful
association. The criminalisation of membership requires the criminalisa-
tion of a criminal enterprise; it is the enterprise that is criminal before
any individual can be its member or subscribe to its criminal plan. The
difference is clear: conspiracy and participation offences are individual
and target temporary or occasional behaviours, even if they might result in
long lasting connections. When the agreement or the mutual assistance in
crime end, then there is no crime; both the agreement and/or the mutual
assistance are contingent to the defendants’ presence and willingness.
On the other side, an unlawful association exists beyond individual
participation or agreement; its unlawfulness is a continuing status and
belongs to the enterprise/association/organisation as separate entity.
Certainly, the definition of criminal responsibility in terms of indivi-
dual or collective culpability in organised crime is not a trivial exercise
for criminal law: it defines the difference between organised crime/mafia
as stand-alone anticipatory crime (a crime where positions of personal
culpability do not change the criminalisation of the conduct, i.e. the
criminalisation of the unlawful association) and organised crime/mafia
as pluralist reactive crime (a crime that is defined by the degrees of
personal culpability and involvement in substantial crimes).
This distinction leads us to point 3, the constituting elements of the
offences. In the case of organised crime and mafia criminalisation, the
offence could be either an “organised crime” or “mafia” offence – unlawful
association involved in organised crime(s), or membership in mafia organisa-
tion – or conspiracy and/or participation in organised crime activities – such
as drug trafficking – that define organised crime as an umbrella concept. It is
fundamental to understand how the constituting elements of different
offences in criminal law define the phenomenon itself. When organised
crime or mafia are criminalised as stand-alone anticipatory crimes they will be
constructed as unlawful association, criminal enterprise, mafia-type associa-
tion or similar “entity”. The crime is one of illicit structures. If organised
crime and mafia are intended as plural, reactive types of crime defined
through individual involvement in a set of criminal acts, then the illicit
activity will be the substantial crime. This dichotomy of structure versus
activity will persist and guide this book as the most significant differentiation
The Socio-legal Identity of Organised Crime 27
operated by criminal law and also by criminological thinking to understand

the phenomena at hand.
Finally, even in cases where the organisation/association/enterprise is
criminalised for its illegal plan(s), individual material contributions to
the plan(s) might still need to be considered to prove the existence of,
and the membership in, a given criminal entity. This is the space of
organised crime and mafia as behaviours. When the criminal plan is
realised it can be proved through a number of manifested behaviours,
individual or collective. We will see in the following chapters how these
general principles of criminal law are applied in practice in national
systems and how they define the different approaches and conceptualisa-
tions of the phenomena of mafia or organised crime.
The Socio-legal Identity of Organised Crime

Today “organised crime” is a peculiar concept that has derived its
fortune in the Western world from the Hollywood images of real or
fake mafia bosses and their families, and has in time become the
legitimate, apparently neutral, word to encompass both mafia and
other forms of more or less formally organised criminality. The neutral-
ity of “organised crime” is, however, a myth. This book, however, is not
concerned with the picking and unpicking of terminologies, but rather
in what is below the surface of discourse, concepts and definitions.
Highly contested and politically charged, the concept of organised
crime has been described as an “empty signifier” (Carrapico, 2014: 11),
a “malady of modernity” (Hobbs, 2013) and “the phantom threat”
(Van Duyne, 1995). In general, there is discontent in the academic field
about the way organised crime is conceptualised and most of all, about
the imprecise way it has been used in criminal policy (Sergi, 2016a;
Campbell, 2013; Zoutendijk, 2010). It has been argued that organised
crime is like the psychiatrist’s Rorschach blot, whose “attraction as well
as . . . weakness is that one can read almost anything into it” (Levi,
2002: 887).
Organised crime means different things to different institutions and
countries; from a criminal enterprise driven by profit, to a semi-governance
structure seeking power; from a local network of drug dealers, to transna-

tional traffickers. Depending on the period and on the territory of reference,
organised crime has been understood and classified as illegal entrepreneur-
ship and professional crime, or illegal organisations engaging in a range of
different criminal and non-criminal activities. The organisational character
of organised crime has often been compared and contrasted to its entrepre-
neurial side. On the one side the “organisation” (the structure) of organised
crime and on the other side the “crimes” of organised crime (the activities)
(Paoli, 2016; Kleemans, 2014). The structure versus activity dichotomy that
we described for criminal law derives from here. Among the many char-
acterisations of organised crime, certainly fundamental from a socio-legal
point of view, is the paradigm of “disorganised crime” (Reuter, 1983),
which argues that the illegal provision of services and goods associated to
organised crime groups is actually disorganised when we look at the way
criminal networks work (Paoli, 2002). Criminal networks are disorganised
in the sense that they move in opportunistic ways and therefore cannot obey
to rigid structures (Wright, 2006). The response to this is a focus on the
actual provision of illegal goods and services, rather than a focus on the
networks providing them (Van Dijck, 2007; Van Duyne and Van Dijck,
2007). The concept of organised crime has developed a denotative and a
connotative dimension (Sheptycki, 2003). Organised crime is, at the deno-
tative level, the illicit economy of (complex) criminal markets and trades
while at the connotative level it indicates criminal groups and networks that
are classified as a global threat in criminal policies. Letizia Paoli (2016), in
discussing the definitional conundrum of organised crime, chooses to
differentiate between “determinants of criminal organisations” and “deter-
minants of criminal activities”. This differentiation allows her to present the
literature that looks at organised crime as “unlawful associations”, having a
collective identity – like mafias – sub-division of labour and restricted
membership (Reuter, 1983; Paoli, 2003; Paoli, 2002), where protection
represents a quintessential function (Gambetta, 1993; Varese, 2011). On
the other side, when organised crime equals criminal activities, the focus of
literature has been on the trades and trafficking of prohibited goods or
services (Hobbs, 2013; Edwards and Levi, 2008). There are obviously many
shades of grey in between. For example, Varese (2011: 12) emphasises the
crucial distinction between groups that simply trade on the market, by
“producing and/or selling illegal goods and services” and groups that,
instead, aim at governing the markets by “providing services of dispute
settlement, cartel enforcement and more generally governance of illegal
transactions”. This distinction mirrors a more widespread focus on what
criminal groups do rather than what they are presumed to be (Varese, 2011;
Campana and Varese, 2013). Arguably, shifting the focus on the actions of
criminal groups, rather than their structure, also justifies the growing
concern for the “seriousness” of organised crime in criminal policy together
with the increasing emphasis on the transnationality of organised criminal
activities of the past decades. These connotations obviously also impact on
the criminalisation of organised crime and its categorisation in the law.
When it comes to the seriousness of organised crime, recent scholarly
critique has been focusing on the analysis of policy discourse (Lavorgna
and Sergi, 2016; Sergi, 2016a). As we will see also in the case studies, the
conceptualisation of organised crime in policy-making, has been hugely
influenced by a broad and undefined notion of seriousness. Even though
some definitions of “serious crime” exist, they are mostly linked to
sentencing regulations. Serious crimes are punished with imprisonment
(e.g. the UN Palermo Convention considers serious crimes those
punishable with at least four years imprisonment), they are harmful to
the general public and they are sophisticated crimes (Edwards and Levi,
2008). Moreover, the use of a paradigm of seriousness to classify
organised crime – for which policy-makers describe organised crime(s)
as ontologically serious crime(s) or as a series of crimes that raise public
concern because of their seriousness – and has a number of conse-
quences. First and foremost to affirm that organised crime is serious
essentially means that organised crime is sophisticated and complex and
that such complexity should be reflected in the law (Sergi, 2016a).
Moreover, it means that organised crime is harmful – to various degrees
to individuals, society, public health, finance and so on. In clear support
of this juxtaposition between serious and organised crime is the rhetoric
of transnational organised crime. Transnationality either adds a layer of
seriousness (again, in terms of sophistication and complexity) to what
would otherwise be a national crime (e.g. domestic versus transnational
human trafficking) or adds nothing to crimes that are necessarily cross-
border, and therefore serious because of that (like the trafficking
of certain types of drugs where production places differ from dealing

places for example). The seriousness of organised crime is also found in
the level of sophistication and the degree of complexity of criminal
groups; do they control a territory? Do they cross borders? Are they
able to multi-task in a number of different activities? These are all
questions that criminal intelligence agencies ask in classifying the threats
of organised crime (CENTREX, 2007; Gottschalk, 2010). It has been
argued that to define organised crime “serious” helps securing convic-
tions against what would otherwise be a too vague category of offenders
(Campbell, 2013; Campbell, 2014); in other words, a crime, which is
somewhat organised, also needs to be serious enough to fall into the
“organised crime” categorisation. The focus on the seriousness of orga-
nised crimes allows looking beyond groups and individuals and eases
policing, investigation and prosecution.
Furthermore, the juxtaposition of serious to organised crime echoes a
security constructivism of the threat(s) linked to organised crime groups.
In practice, because organised crime is harmful and serious it requires a
national policing response, often through its inclusion within the national
security agenda (Carrapico, 2014). The connection between national
security and serious organised crime is one that has been criticised not
just because of its dubious theoretical usefulness but also because of its
practical implications, in terms of intelligence regimes, policing responses
and preventative countermeasures (Sergi, 2016a; Campbell, 2014). The
language of security applied to organised crime has been facilitated by
economic liberalisation and the globalisation of economy. Certain sectors
have been easier to manipulate by illegal entrepreneurs; the impact upon
the economy increases the perception of organised crime as a threat to
nations and borders (Friman and Andreas, 1999; Andreas, 2002). The
process whereby a threat is identified as a security issue or “constructed” to
create legitimacy and authority for dealing with that issue is the securitisa-
tion process (Wæver, 1995). The securitisation of organised crime creates
tensions between policy and law. In fact, national security is the reign of
criminal intelligence; it is concerned with surveillance of borders and
preventative policing based on disruption. Criminal law, instead, is con-
cerned with repression, deterrence and most of all the balance with human
rights. The ambiguity of the socio-legal dimension of organised crime
might lead to uncertainty in sentencing as well as creating space for social

injustice, when it comes to investigations and/or individuals’ rights (Van
Duyne et al., 2016).
However, organised crime is still, arguably, a crime typology and
de-criminalisation is not thinkable in spite of securitisation and the
extra-judicial nature of some financial crimes. We need to understand
what is the societal value that organised crime(s) violates and that jurisdic-
tions, on behalf of their societies, wish to protect. National security is
today certainly the most common value. Organised crime is often a crime
against national security, whereby national security entails a set of values
and beliefs such as territorial integrity, economic strength, external and
internal peace, socio-political stability and so on (Wolfers, 1952). These
values also outline a set of beliefs, such as good governance, democracy,
welfare, well-being and liberty whose reach and definitions are always
evolving and dynamic. National security involves secrecy together with
detainment of legitimate and organised political violence to maintain the
interests of at least one state: it refers to conceptualisations of state capacity
(Kirshner, 2013). Organised crime essentially amounts to threat against
national security because of its impact upon the economy and its links
with other threats to national borders (i.e. smuggling) and to terrorism
financing. Organised crime, in this sense, can also be a threat to demo-
cratic values, in forms of fraudulent competition and corruption in
politics and/or public sector for example (Buckley, 1999). National secur-
ity also implies increased sanctions to protect public safety by reducing the
risk of future crime (Pratt and Anderson, 2015). Within and outside
the umbrella of national security, as we will see later on in this chapter, the
values protected by criminal law when it comes to organised crime
(and partially also mafias) range from private property protection to
human security, from freedom of commerce and competition to border
controls, from public order to environmental safety, from public health to
national economy. All these values can be arguably threatened by corpo-
rate and white-collar crimes too, but these are not securitised in the same
way as organised crime is. The type of offenders associated to organised
crime and the types of activities make it easier for organised crime, more
than corporate or white-collar crime to be considered spiteful and harmful
to society.
The Socio-legal Identity of Mafia

Some of the considerations on the concept of organised crime can be
transferred to the concept of mafia. Mafia has been a precursor of
organised crime in public perceptions in the last century especially as
object of policy “crisis”; it is now a subset of the same notion it has so
heavily defined by comparison and contrast. It is undeniable that most of
the literature that has inspired and informed scholars across the twenty
and twenty-first centuries – and that has helped the formation of what is
today quite a deep understanding of both mafias and organised crime – is
indeed Italian-centric and later on US-centric. As we will see in the case
studies even today’s concept of mafia(s) in the Western world is ineluc-
tably linked to the national perceptions of Italy and the US. This does not
mean that “other” mafias or “other” perceptions of “other” groups beyond
Italian mafias have not been studied; it means that the essential image of
mafias is still linked to Italian mafias in ways, which transcend knowledge
and almost resemble Jungian archetypes. The way images of Italian mafia
are rooted into collective conscience is undeniable and visible to everyone.
This is mostly due to Hollywood’s stories and influence, with all the
difficulties in reconciling images and reality of “the Mafia”, as we will see
in the case study on the US.
In academic literature, however, the discussion about what is mafia
and whether or not it is an independent typology of crime or a mani-
festation of organised crime, is still on-going, also on the Italian side. We
will see some aspects of this debate in the rest of the book. However, we
can here briefly track the connection between the social and the legal
conceptualisations of mafia to help us understand differences and simi-
larities with the ones of organised crime.
Giuseppe Alongi, an Italian chief of police and writer, published a volume
in 1886 titled “La maffia nei suoi fattori e nelle sue manifestazioni: studio
sulle classi pericolose della Sicilia” [The Maffia, Its Factors and
Manifestations: Study of the Dangerous Classes of Sicily] (Alongi, 1977
[1886]). In this volume, it appears quite clearly how the perceptions and
the evolution of the mafia phenomenon are rooted in the territories, the scars
and the historical events of Sicily. For Alongi mafia is a synonym of “danger-
ous classes”, who exercised personal protection over feudal arrangements of
The Socio-legal Identity of Mafia 33
power and land ownership. Class struggles, governmental choices, stubborn

maintenance of feudal privileges and changing industrial necessities had
made Sicily, according to Alongi, a place where dangerous classes could
prosper. He says (Alongi, 1977 [1886]: 23):
Everyone can see that this centennial and almost impenetrable system of
high and low arbitrary acts could not avoid to produce the saddest effects:
it increased misery and made it scary; it killed public conscience and the
moral and juridical senses of people. And the idea of “useful” substituted
the idea of “good”; personal violence substituted collective justice.
Everyone was persuaded that private vendettas were the best way to
claim your rights and that laws and tribunals were nothing but an
administrative pleonasm, just irony. And because the government and
the rich were connected and could tyrannise the poor, then the only thing
left for the poor was to become delinquents, thieves and murderers to
secure protection and impunity and improve their social condition.
Aside from historiographical comments that critics can make upon this text,
it seems quite fundamental to notice how the mafia phenomenon, even
though it clearly was already inserted in a path of delinquency and deviance,
is essentially a social phenomenon, linked to the complexities of a dynamic
society. Together with the social, extremely local characterisation of mafias,
the economic side of the phenomenon has always been considered the other
side of coin. If mafias developed because of structural elements of society,
then they prospered because of economic exploitation. More importantly,
an analysis of mafias as economic systems contradicts early conceptualisa-
tions of mafias as anti-state or alternatives to states forces (Pantaleone,
1962). Indeed as noticed by Antimafia Prosecutor Giovanni Falcone –
killed by Cosa Nostra in 1992 – in his seminal book Cose di Cosa Nostra
(Falcone and Padovani, 1992: 34):
The State-Mafia relation [ . . . ] demonstrates clearly that Cosa Nostra is

not an anti-state, but rather a parallel organisation that wishes to exploit
the distortions of economic development, acting in illegality [ . . . ]. Let’s
not forget that the mafia is the sharpest, most flexible and most pragmatic
organisation you can imagine when it comes to dealing with institutions
and society as a whole.
The economic interests of mafia groups need to be considered intrinsic to

their very existence. Again, Falcone (Falcone and Padovani, 1992: 39) notices
that mafias are “not abnormal product of economic underdevelopment, but
product of distorted development instead”. It is therefore useful to analyse
mafia groups and their economic activities in line with economic develop-
ment, both legal and illegal. Gambetta (1993: 1) famously defined the
Sicilian mafia as “a specific economic enterprise, an industry that produces,
promotes and sells private protection”. The economic connotation of mafia
organisations has heavily influenced the part of the literature that more
generally looks at motivations in organised crime. Profit and money are in
fact considered the quintessential features of organised crime groups around
the world and what eventually differentiates “organised crime” from terror-
ism for example (Von Lampe, 2009; Holmes, 2007). Fundamentally, how-
ever, a too narrow focus on the economic dimensions of organised crime can
neglect the cultural aspects of mafia groups. Analyses of the subcultural
contexts in which mafia groups prosper have, however, led some scholars
to engage in apologetic justifications of mafia as a Sicilian attitude and
reaction to inequality and eventually denials of the phenomenon altogether
(Hess and Osers, 1973; Pitrè, [1889] 1993; Albini, 1971). Nevertheless, a
serious study of mafias cannot dismiss the cultural complexity of this phe-
nomenon. Paoli (2014; 2003) notices how both the Sicilian and the
Calabrian mafias possess a sophisticated cultural apparatus, made of symbols
and rituals and distinguished by two main subcultural codes: honour and
omertà.1 As we will see in this book, the cultural dimensions of mafias need to
be studied in relation to the culture of origin, not to justify the phenomenon
but rather to comprehend it. Authors tend to agree that mafias exploit
traditional cultural codes (Sciarrone, 2009), they promote subcultural con-
servative values – at the point of embodying a kind of ideology (Falcone and
Padovani, 1992) – and they essentially are conservative forces (Paoli, 2003).
To be at the same time money-driven economic actors and conserva-
tive social ones is the essence of mafia behaviour. To keep their
1
Intended as attitude to mind one’s own business as a sign of respect or out of fear of
consequences. See Omertà in the Global Informality Encyclopedia, at: http://in-formality.com/
wiki/index.php?title=Omertà for more details.
The Socio-legal Identity of Mafia 35
privileged positions (conservative drive) and to control competitors

(progressive drive), mafia groups need to preserve three conditions:
territorial sovereignty, political governance and secrecy (Siebert, 2003).
These three conditions need to be preserved at the local level especially
when the groups wish to overcome local boundaries and step into inter-
national trades (Sergi and Lavorgna, 2016; Sciarrone, 2002). Crucially,
these conditions are sociological elements of a definition of mafia and do
weigh on criminal law connotations. In other words, as the dimensions of
mafia powers are not just criminal but also social and at times cultural,
criminal law can take on sociological elements in its definitions (Dalla
Chiesa, 2010). Criminal law targeting mafia-type phenomena – and we
have Italy in mind here for obvious reasons – has evolved enormously in
the years. For example, it should not surprise that “public order” was and
still is the section of the Italian criminal code where we find unlawful
association offences, including mafia-type associations. “Public order” as
value protected in criminal law, comes from the idea that mafias are deviant
phenomena that affect the correct functioning of public life (Mantovani,
2007). Crucially, however, mafia scholars have often maintained that mafia
members are also concerned themselves with the maintenance of public
order, in terms of repression of deviant behaviour (as in non-mafia beha-
viour) (Arlacchi and Ryle, 1988). Here it is, therefore, one of the most
problematic aspects of mafia repression in criminal law: the fact that what
we are repressing might essentially aim at the same outcome as the legal
system does, albeit obviously for different reasons or via different means.
The twisted, almost topsy-turvy, system of values of what has been defined
a collective narcissistic mentality (Di Forti, 1982) has led some scholars to
suggest an approach against mafias as autonomous juridical systems
(Santino, 1994; Crisantino and La Fiura, 1989; Fiandaca, 1995). This
approach is quite dated, and it originates from an idea of mafia as anti-state
actor based, among other things, on the Weberian concept of the state as
solely detaining the monopoly of violence and therefore the ability to
maintain public order. If the mafia kills and/or exercises public order
functions then it opposes the state, even though obviously this is not all
it does or can do (Fiandaca, 1993). Scholars have warned (Fiandaca, 1995;
Gambetta, 1993), however, about the risks of considering mafias as auton-
omous juridical systems, with their own norms, sanctions, internal control
mechanisms, systemic and hierarchical discipline. This approach can lead

to an apology of mafias from a criminal law perspective or, even worse, to a
diminished responsibility of both state officials and mafia members. For
the purposes of criminal law and also criminological thinking, a more
appropriate view on mafias should not be based on their comparison with
the State, but on their comparison with business enterprises, by focusing
more on their criminal markets and influences on the legal ones
(Gambetta, 1993; Arlacchi and Ryle, 1988; Ruggiero, 1985). This shift
leads to the criminalisation of the role of mafias in legal and criminal
markets, their interference (infiltration) with national economy under
competition laws and last but not least the principles of democratic
institutions (Antolisei, 2008). If public order, economic well-being and
democracy are, in different ways and times, the values protected by
criminal law, it seems confirmed that criminal law conceptualises mafias
as complex social phenomena with a high potential of harming the public.
The Organised Crime–Mafia Spectrum

It should already be clear that the socio-legal identity of mafias and the one of
organised crime have some convergent as well as some divergent elements.
The way in which the two concepts have interacted in the past decades has
often been erratic and unclear, where policies have disregarded either the
sociological connotations of one or both notions or their criminal law
elements. In brief, there has been an overlapping of the two concepts,
when not a forced application of mafia traits on non-mafia manifestations
altogether. This overlapping, which might not be problematic on a common
sense level, might indeed have repercussions on the way these phenomena
are interpreted for repression and prevention of harmful conducts from a
legal perspective. We need to always remember that the criminalisation of
these notions changes the notions themselves.
I argue that in addition to considering mafias as species of the genus
organised crime (Varese, 2011; Varese, 2010), with a relationship of
specificity/generality, we can also consider the two phenomena on a
spectrum with a variety of hybrid possibilities in between. Whereas it is
The Organised Crime–Mafia Spectrum 37
probably impossible to define either “organised crime” and “mafia”

successfully and without criticisms, it seems more profitable to disas-
semble the characteristics usually associated to these phenomena to
understand how they are identified and set apart from each other. The
two concepts at each side of the spectrum (organised crime and mafia)
differ because of the basic assumptions, pre-judgements, at the basis of
this book as explained in the introduction and related to the different
dangerousness of mafias and organised crime groups as well as the
different relationships with politics, socio-cultural elements and power
in addition to financial gain. Conceptually, mafias are best understood
as “structures”, while “other” organised crime manifestations are best
understood as sets of “activities”. This obviously does not mean that in
some organised crime groups “structures” are not relevant or decisive,
as well as it does not mean that for an understanding of mafias
“activities” are not significant. We can, however, understand both
phenomena by looking at what mostly differentiates them.
“Organised crime” applies to a group’s capacity to both produce and
trade while mafia refers to a group’s capacity to also govern (Varese,
2011). This is to say that when an organised crime group (i.e. a group
exhibiting the traits described both above and below in this chapter)
produces, trades and also governs, I would use the “mafia” word. Other
conceptualisations, such as those related to organised crime as “crim-
inal networks” (Morselli, 2009), with the importance of “nodes” for
successful or unsuccessful activities (Hobbs, 2013; Coles, 2001), and
mafia groups as more or less rational “organisations” (Dalla Chiesa,
2015), support the placement of various phenomena across a mafia–
organised crime spectrum (OC–mafia or mafia–OC spectrum). For
example, if a group engages in one or more criminal activities, it can be
placed on the organised crime side of the spectrum, as it mirrors a
phenomenon where understanding criminal activities is more appro-
priate than understanding structures. An analysis of the functioning of
the network would be in this case functional to the understanding of
the criminal activity. Conversely, if a group exhibits not only a criminal
dimension but also a “will to power” (Paoli, 2008), rooted in the social and
the local, then it can be placed on the mafia side of the spectrum. An analysis
of criminal activities in this case would be functional to the understanding of
the mafia structure and its growth in power. We can essentially argue that at
the two edges of the OC–mafia spectrum are complex crimes (on the OC
side) and (political) power (on the mafia side). In order to understand how
one can think of an OC–mafia spectrum along these lines, we can focus on
four main aspects that touch both concepts in their socio-legal evolution and
help us understand, albeit through abstract categorisations once again, beha-
viours across both concepts, always keeping in mind the structure versus
activity basic differentiation:
1. Control of the territory (territorial sovereignty)

2. Ties with society
3. Secrecy and trust
4. Movement of groups and activities (mobility)
Territorial Sovereignty
Territorial sovereignty is quintessentially linked to both organised

crime and mafia. On the one side, to control the territory means to
exercise a policing function, normally attributed to the state. The
Weberian theory of state’s monopoly of violence as sole legitimate
exercise of control over the territory finds here its manifestation. If
criminal groups, broadly intended, exercise violence to secure control
and public order, then they can be recognised as non-state actors in
opposition with the state (Romano, 1918). Control of territory, in this
line of thought, can define groups ranging from guerrilla groups to
terrorist groups, from mafia groups to youth gangs. Control of territory
intended as affirmation of military power through potential or actual
use of violence in order to settle disputes as well as to subjugate local
population is the textbook example to explain mafia power (Von
Lampe, 2008; Von Lampe, 2016). Control of the territory, however,
can also be intended differently, as control of local economic actors,
both illegal and legal ones, both in urban places and elsewhere
(Ruggiero and South, 1997; Paoli, 2004). Moreover, scholars have
pushed forward the conceptualisation of territoriality to expand it
beyond its physical and/or geographical meanings. As noticed by
Dalla Chiesa (2015: 9), discussing contemporary typologies of (mafia-

type) territorial governance in the city of Rome (translated from
Italian): “the control of the territory, as affirmed in mafia history and
as traditionally represented in the imagination of any informed obser-
ver, is essentially impracticable in a modern ‘saturated’ metropolis with
a very high concentration of institutions”. Control of territory cannot
only mean violence or surveillance over economic possibilities. It
might include, instead, also the control of institutions – or of sizable
portions/sections of state buildings – thus the integration of geogra-
phical territories with other spatial territories, such as governmental
establishments or professional services for example (Dalla Chiesa,
2015; Varese, 2011). It could be argued, therefore, that rather than
focusing on “territory”, the focus should be on “control”. This is
fundamental also from a purely legal perspective. In fact, the law
needs to define the requirements for criminalisation. Whereas a
definition of “controlled territory” does not need to appear openly
in the law to be still part of the interpretation of the criminalised
phenomenon – as it is in the Italian case (Dalla Chiesa, 2010) – any
type of “private” (as in non-state based) violence, actual or threa-
tened, has to be part of the definition of organised crime. Violence to
mark territorial sovereignty is a shared characteristic of both mafias or
organised crime (Von Lampe, 2016) also across our spectrum. On the
other side, control of economic activities, as we will see, constitutes
the essence of sophisticated forms of organised crime leaning towards
mafia-type criminal enterprises and subsequent criminalisation of
their active infiltration of the legal sector (it comes to mind the US
experience) (Jacobs et al., 1999). Control of territory in terms of
“buildings”, “institutions”, “spaces”, is definitely something that
belongs to the literature on both traditional and contemporary
mafia groups. Here the lines between the illegal and the legal are
not only blurred and constantly negotiated (Ruggiero and South,
1997) but also territories represent the stage where ties with societies
root, develop and grow. When we look at both control of the territory
and ties with society, this is where we find the relevance of socio-
cultural aspects that give specificity to a certain group within its
territory of origin (Schneider and Schneider, 2005).
Ties with Society
Ties with society can be strong or weak, depending on a number of

aspects, among which, for example, the (cultural) origin of the criminal
group, its composition, its recruitment strategies and its connections
with various other sectors of societies. The strength of ties is one of the
core topics of social network analysis (Carrington, 2011; Campana,
2016) as well as studies on mafia governance and activities (Sergi,
2015b; Calderoni, 2012) and on corruption networks (Van Duyne,
2013), with illicit behaviours more or less systemic and endemic the
more criminal ties and privileges prevail. The spectrum of manifestations
of organised crime and mafias can differ quite substantially under this
aspect, at the point of radically affecting the raison d’être of the criminal
group. Whether we are looking at the behaviours of organised crime/
mafia (Sergi and Lavorgna, 2016), or at the organisation of organised
crime/mafia (Catino, 2014), or at the networks of organised crime/mafia
(Albini and McIllwain, 2012; Morselli, 2009), or finally at the activities
of organised crime/mafia (Von Lampe, 2016), we could be studying
these from the point of view of the quality of relationships/ties among
actors – the criminals and others, for example, entrepreneurs, politicians
– or from the point of view of the content of such relationships/ties – for
example, corruption, infiltration, patron–client relationships (Albini,
1971) or connivance. The relationships between/among criminal (or
allegedly criminal) groups or individuals and other groups in society
can be qualitatively strong or weak, in classical network theory
(Granovetter, 1973). The difference between strong and weak ties,
according to Granovetter’s theory, is in their origins: strong ties are
associated to homogeneous groups, while weak ties are heterogeneous.
This means that the value and strength of weak ties are related to the
connections to other social systems and groups not immediately avail-
able through strong ties. In practice, when analysing the strength of ties
in criminal networks, interactions and links among individuals can
originate as “friends of friends” (Boissevain, 1974) as well as group
obligations (Bourdieu, 1986). As argued by Kleemans and de Poot
(2008: 75), organised crime networks work within a social opportunity
structure with “social ties providing access to profitable criminal oppor-

tunities”. It does not surprise, therefore, that the stronger are the ties
available to a criminal group, the more that criminal group will be
successful (Morselli, 2005; Sergi, 2016b; Kleemans and de Poot, 2008;
Von Lampe, 2016). However, we need to consider also the content of
these ties. In other words, how much of these opportunities, contacts,
special friendships, obligations or networks in general, offer access to
“higher powers” (like finance or politics)? How much can existing ties
generate more ties, more power and produce a situation that could lead
to systemic/endemic corruption (Lavorgna and Sergi, 2014)? This is
indeed the core of mafia power, intended as a social context where
political proximity and an elitarian trafficking in favours lead to situations
where corruption (intended as the acquisition of illicit privileges through
illegal means) is not necessarily about infiltration, but rather connivance
and parallel governance (Schulte-Bockholt, 2006; Sciarrone, 2011). The
difference between infiltration and connivance is crucial in the OC–mafia
spectrum, as the former can be occasional, or made of different repeated
and similar activities in different contexts (e.g. the same criminal group
infiltrating different markets), while the latter requires, logically, a more
committed and prolonged engagement between the same actors (e.g. the
mafia politics nexus, where a certain party is prone to accept/welcome
mafia’s money or influence over time). It is fundamental to repeat that,
on the OC–mafia spectrum, the strength of ties can produce different
results. Take the following two examples: corruption of a public official
at the country’s borders, meant to facilitate the smuggling of illicit
goods, can be occasional, repeated, based on a strong tie or a weak tie:
it is nevertheless aimed primarily at acquiring an economic advantage.
Connivance with a political party is meant to facilitate the election of the
party which will grant the party as well as the criminal sponsors more
advantages, both economically (through access to public funds for
example) as well as politically: it is ultimately aimed at increasing
power and territorial governance. These two examples are both examples
of ties between criminal groups and societies; however, while in the first
case we could find both “other” organised crime groups aiming at the
generation of profits and mafia groups, in the second case we are
essentially talking about mafias alone.
Secrecy and Trust
The mafia “symptomatology” on the OC–mafia spectrum requires –

together with a flexible conceptualisation of the control of the territory,
cultivation of political proximity, trafficking in favours and connivance rather
than infiltration – also the protection from “death” (of the group) and the
assurance that, no matter what hits the group, the reputation and the ties will
endure (Sergi, 2016b). It has been argued that secrecy in organised crime
groups, especially mafias, “is not binary” (Paoli, 2003: 102), which means
that it did exist and it keeps existing. Secrecy is linked to the visibility of the
unlawful association and the degree of tolerance for its activities in society.
Secrecy is maintained, primarily, through careful recruitment strategies. For
example, blood ties can be considered a more reliable basis to recruit than
merit or opportunity, but criminal careers depend as much on a family’s
reputation than on individual abilities and opportunities (Francis et al., 2013;
Calderoni, 2015). Also, it has been argued that rigidity in recruitment
strategies, even if it works better for secrecy and protection, does not facilitate
business and hampers the ability of a group to effectively control criminal
markets (Paoli, 2008). Nevertheless, rituals of affiliation, even when anachro-
nistic, certainly fortify new recruitment and eventually benefit secrecy and
give a sense of order, especially in newly formed groups (Sergi, 2016b).
However, a group’s internal organisation, the creation and maintenance of
subgroups and the positioning of leaders in subgroups does not necessarily
follow rational and formal organisational charts (Calderoni et al., 2017)
notwithstanding the necessity to be protected from external interferences.
In the OC–mafia spectrum, there are at least two aspects of “secrecy” at play.
A group might be secret but perceptible and/or visible to communities in
which it generates fear, respect, intimidation and omertà. Secrecy is needed to
protect itself against law enforcement in addition to the protection of social
consensus. A group might be secret and neither perceptible nor visible to
communities; this might lead to communities’ denials and/or disbelief
towards any allegation of the existence of that group in the first place.
Secrecy here is needed to carry out the activities in addition to being a
protection mechanism. This distinction also mirrors specific strategies of
criminal groups, especially in terms of opposition or connivance with the
state, or in terms of hierarchies within the group and/or interactions with the
economy or the legal sectors. For example, Sicilian Cosa Nostra’s strategy of
terror in early 1990s (violent visibility) has been considered not only the
product of a specific opposition strategy against the state wanted by the boss
Totò Riina but also the “career suicide” of Riina himself within the majority
of members of Cosa Nostra, who did not fully approve this strategy (Dalla
Chiesa, 2010). Violent visibility of a criminal group is not generally considered
a trait of sophistication of the group but rather a transient characteristic or a
sign of an existing conflict in a given region, temporary as it is bound to
trigger law enforcement’s interventions (Paoli, 2003). Tacit visibility, on the
other side, is a sign of tight, more established control of territory – where
everyone knows or suspects who the criminals are but silence/omertà is the
rule, not by coercion but through social consensus (Sciarrone, 2006). Example
of groups which exhibited in different moments both violent and tacit
visibility strategies towards the state and local communities outside of the
Italian examples are some of the Mexican cartels, notably the Familia
Michoacana and their splinter group Los Caballeros Templaros in the state
of Michoacán (Aranda, 2014). These groups acted through exemplary use of
violence while establishing themselves as governing, “self-defence”, actors in
the territory and aiming at gathering consensus through community care.
Arguably, and to simplify, tacit visibility aims at protection from law enforce-
ment, thus it is a form of secrecy towards the outside. Violent visibility, on the
other side, aims at protection within the territory and against intruders,
through fear rather than consensus. In the exploitation of communities and
their silence, consensus is better than fear in the long term. Under this
perspective (successful) mafia groups will be characterised by consensus and
secrecy via tacit visibility to maximise social power and prestige. “Other”
organised crime groups will be characterised by secrecy via either violent
visibility through fear or tacit invisibility to maximise financial profitability of
their criminal activities.
Moreover, secrecy is a matter of trust. Dynamics of trust are quite crucial
in understanding how criminal organisations employ or exploit their social
capital, how ties are cemented, why certain relationships are more successful
than others and whether or not the survival of the organisation is linked to
violent or tacit forms of visibility. Obviously, because of the nature of
certain crimes, trust is what substitutes the lack of recourse to legal means to
enforce agreements, as agreements operate outside the law (Carrington,

2011). Whether trust is pre-existing to the formation of the criminal net-
work or it develops in the course of the criminal collaboration (Kleemans
and de Poot, 2008; Morselli, 2009; Von Lampe and Johansen, 2004),
certainly it shapes the reputation of the group and cements its ties when
interacting with other groups, with suppliers, with customers and various
others. The reputation of a mafia group will be dependent on trust and
ability to maintain secrecy via consensus; reputation of other organised crime
groups will depend more on a guaranteed flexibility of ties among members
and the ability to keep secrecy a priority no matter this flexibility, also
through strategies of violent visibility if needed.
Movements of Groups and Activities
Issues of secrecy and trust are problematised even further when criminal
groups or individuals belonging to criminal groups move or their activities
are poly-territorial. As we will see in more detail in the rest of the book,
mobility of criminal groups, either in terms of poly-territoriality of criminal
activities or in terms of mafia migration, is a by-product of globalisation as
much as it is an effect of capitalism (Ruggiero, 1985; Morselli et al., 2011).
When criminal groups or activities move abroad, questions about similarity
or diversity in comparison to groups and activities in the territory of origin
necessarily surface (Arsovska, 2015). These questions relate to the composi-
tions of groups before and after they moved, in terms of ethnic ties and
language use, their adaptation or hybridisation once they root elsewhere, or
the prevention mechanisms in place to prevent their rooting (or transplanta-
tion) elsewhere (Sciarrone and Storti, 2014; Sciarrone, 2014; Arsovska,
2015; Lupo, 2002b; Varese, 2011; Varese, 2006; Varese, 2005). In terms
of activities, the rhetoric of transnational organised crime – criminal groups
that commit various crimes across borders – has populated threat assessments
concerned about border security and shared criminal intelligence across
states (Van Duyne, 2011; Sergi, 2016c; Coyne and Bell, 2015). On the
other side, the political difficulties of framing and contrasting “ethnic”
organised crime (Lupo, 2002a; Lupo, 2002b) has confirmed the analysis
of criminal markets across borders as an easier object of analysis. There are
various aspects to consider in this case for the purposes of the OC–mafia
spectrum. First, we need to remember that shared language (foreign) might
be a way to ensure secrecy and reinforce ethnic bonds when groups, or
individuals belonging to criminal groups, are abroad (Sergi, 2016c).
However, the necessity to work with local actors on various types of licit
of illicit activities – according to each group’s reach into legal and illegal
markets beyond their original territory – and the difficulties of speaking the
local language satisfactorily might determine a loss of specificity for the
group. For example, a mafia group abroad might not necessarily replicate
its original structure, including its political reach, but it might act in the
territory of arrival as a profit-driven criminal group with a looser character for
a number of factors (Varese, 2011). Similarly, the opposite can happen,
where mafia groups replicate their organisation and keep their bonds with
their original territory through a network of political liaisons, shared cultural
behaviours and language preservation as much as possible (Sergi, 2015a).
For the OC–mafia spectrum, therefore, it is necessary to look at mobility
and migration of organised crime groups and mafia groups in terms of both
activities and structures, first of all by looking at the territories left behind,
the relationships between the original territories and the territories of
arrival, the degree of expansion in the new territories and the specificity
of the relationships between criminals and their communities both at the
departure and at the arrival. Mafia groups successful in the territory of
origin via secrecy, consensus, political connivance and control of territory,
might be more successful in their movements abroad as they might be able
to use their socio-cultural capital to liaise with similar others (usually
belonging to the same community) abroad for both financial gain and
political or social advancement. “Other” organised crime groups will have
the need to ensure the commission of criminal activities across borders and
they can use the flexibility of their ties, the ability to infiltrate and a strategy
of violence to make sure that they control the criminal market(s) they need.
We need to be asking what is that crosses borders, the identity and
reputation of the groups, their activities, portions of their activities or
their (dirty) money? It needs to be remembered that the interventions of
criminal law will necessarily follow the needs of the state of arrival while
international policing can effectively remain a joint or multilateral effort
across states instead.
The Spectrum
Figure 2.1 represents a more synthetic version of the OC–mafia spec-

trum, with the various keywords presented so far.
A group on the most extreme edge of the mafia side will be a group
best defined by its structure; physical and spatial/institutional control of
the territory, which leads to residual use of violence; a specific cultural
dimension; political proximity and connivance; high level of trust
through more rigid recruitment strategies (e.g. bloodline); different,
usually high, levels of secrecy but ensured through omertà and consensus
(tacit visibility) in certain territories; poly-crime engagement and poly-
territoriality based often, but not necessarily, on ethnic ties and shared
cultural and linguistic heritage.
A group on the most extreme edge of the organised crime side will be a
group best defined by its criminal activities; its localised (narrower) control
ORGANISED CRIME MAFIA
Control of Physical/ Spatial/ Socio-cultural

territory violence institutions exploitation
Political
Ties with Connivance
Infiltration proximity/
society (legal sectors)
governance
Secrecy Visibility Protection via

Recruitment
& trust (violent/tacit) reputation
Movements/ Poly-
Ethnic bonds/
globalisation Poly-crime territorial
language
of activities identity
Fig. 2.1 The organised crime–mafia spectrum: a summary

The Four Case Studies and the Four Policing Models 47
of the territory which might lead to high levels of violence; no socio-

cultural ties needed or not relevant for the business; occasional infiltration/
corruption rather than connivance; lower levels of trust which implies
instrumental, more flexible, recruitment strategies (e.g. opportunistic);
different, possibly high, levels of secrecy based often on threats and
violence (violent visibility); mono- or poly-crime engagement and poly-
territoriality (if exhibited) based on opportunistic networks.
The Four Case Studies and the Four Policing

Models
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a model is “a simplified
description of a system or process, to assist calculations and predictions”
and “a particular design or version of a product”. Both these meanings
are at the core of this analysis. On the basis of what said so far, the
policing models against mafias and organised crime for Italy, the US,
Australia and the UK, will describe the choices made at the political and
institutional level to fight mafias and/or organised crime in these coun-
tries, as emerging from legislation, political discourses and interviews
with law enforcement agencies and other experts. These models are both
a description of the strategies in place, from the points of view of
criminal law and institutional perceptions, as well as an account of
how these designs came to life – their evolution from an historical and
sociological point of view. As Robert Reiner (2000: viii) noticed: “poli-
cing is the aspect of control in any social relationship or group, which is
directed at the identification or emergency rectification of conflict and
deviation”; and “policing implies a set of processes with specific social
functions” by “creating systems of surveillance coupled with threats of
sanctions for discovered deviance”. To narrow the scope, within this
work, these models are “policing” models because I intend “policing” as
the institutional response to organised crime and mafias without, how-
ever, referring only to the work of law enforcement but including the
stage of policy-making and the drafting of criminal law as ultimate
means of control.
Each case study presents first the historical events that have impacted
upon social and institutional perceptions of (Italian) mafias and/or
organised crime in the country of reference. On the basis of these events
and institutional perceptions, each country will be “ranked” across the
OC–mafia spectrum. Afterwards, I attempt a connection between the
evolution of institutional perceptions and the law, and I deconstruct the
elements of the strategy to then “reassemble” them in what will be the
policing model. The models, therefore, aim at being a quicker and
clearer ex post elaboration of the socio-legal notions presented in each
national case study. The models do not aim at being exhaustive, as they
only present certain events and focus on certain criminal law profiles.
The models are not even mutually exclusive; the characteristics at the
basis of one model might very well be found in another model.
However, each model is “driven” by different central concepts
(Structure, Enterprise, Visibility and Activity), which shape the overall
policing strategy of each country. They will, nevertheless, provide a
platform for a more refined comparative exercise. As said in the intro-
duction, each model represents a first stage of the comparative analysis.
At the next stage, this project will go beyond the description of the
systems and compare legal and social perspectives on the way organised
crime and mafias are policed and approached in these four countries
overall. The figure below summarises the building of the policing models
in this work (Fig. 2.2):
The four policing models are not empty containers looking at abstract
notions of mafias and organised crime. As said, they are presented on the
basis of a “ranking” within the OC–mafia spectrum attributed to each
model/country. The “ranking” on the spectrum derives from the “offi-
cial” relationship that each country has with the concepts of (Italian)
mafia and organised crime. This “official” relationship is necessarily the
starting point of the analysis and originates from an evaluation of the
literature and of the contemporary conceptualisation of organised crime/
mafia in each country.
As said in the introduction to this book, there is a bias to consider in
this research, which relates precisely to its starting point: the bias lies in
my being Italian and in my education on “organised crime”, which is
clearly based on “Italian mafias”. This bias essentially implies that the
The Four Case Studies and the Four Policing Models 49
Social conceptualisation
Institutional
Historical
events conceptualisation
Criminal
policy
Policing models
Contempo Principles Consequences of

rary Criminal inspiring national such principles on
picture law reactions law and practice
Fig. 2.2 Country-based case studies and policing models
mafia concept and the Italian perspective are my primary term of

comparison: every comparison needs a starting point. This is why, as
said in the introductory section about methods, this study can also be
read as a comparison between civil law (Italy) and common law (the US,
Australia and the UK), as well as a comparison between the country that
“gave birth” to Western concepts of organised crime through the mafia
phenomenon and three other countries that in various ways have
received and differently or similarly conceptualised such conceptualisa-
tion and/or have dealt with the phenomenon of Italian mafias.
The OC–mafia spectrum sees mafias as “fuller” forms of organised
crime; this means that mafia’s characteristics include most of the char-
acteristics associated to a general definition of “organised crime” plus
some extra factors, such as the connivance with political powers and the
manipulation of cultural codes. This does not mean, once again, that
other forms of “organised crime” are not as serious and harmful for
societies, quite the opposite. As this book is concerned with the institu-
tional perceptions of the phenomena of organised crime in relation with
the one of mafia, I note with part of the literature in the field that the
definitions of organised crime are more general than those of mafias,

which explains my use of the word “fuller”.
We will see various reasons that “justify” the placement of each country
across the spectrum in the following chapters. An informed, but clearly
preliminary, assessment of each country is based on three aspects: first, the
common sense, that is, public, perception of the country’s relation with
“mafias”, intended as Italian mafias and “organised crime”; second, the
“official” picture of these phenomena in the country, that is, the presence
of groups exhibiting various elements of the OC–mafia spectrum as
described above and third, the classification of these elements, and the
groups that exhibit them, as “mafia” or “organised crime” groups.
1. Italy scores the highest on the spectrum. Italy, in commonplace “repu-

tation”, is the country where mafias, as a concept and phenomenon,
originated. Italian criminal groups also exhibit all elements of the mafia
characterisation, and they are openly called, also in the law, “mafia”.
2. The US, at the federal level, score high, but lower than Italy on the
spectrum. The US have had a crucial role in shaping the concept of
mafias (on the basis of Italian-American La Cosa Nostra) for a
Western conceptualisation of both mafias and organised crime.
Criminal groups in the US have exhibited or do exhibit many ele-
ments of the mafia characterisation, but not all of them are classified
as “mafia”, as the terminology of “organised crime” is today often
preferred to that of “mafia”, also for purposes of criminalisation.
3. Australia, again with specific reference to the federal level, scores low on the
spectrum, but not the lowest. In fact, whereas organised crime manifesta-
tions and policies in the country do appear to be mafia-free – and the
terminology of “organised crime” is preferred in law and practice – to a
closer look the mafia phenomenon (in the form of the Calabrian ‘ndran-
gheta) has been object of historical enquiry and recent academic and
journalistic interest.
4. The UK, with special reference to England and Wales, scores the
lowest on the spectrum as criminal groups in the country do not
exhibit many of the elements of the mafia characterisation. The
presence of mafia groups has been rejected historically and the mafia
label applied only in journalistic tones. In particular, the UK has the
References 51
“newest”, although not necessarily the most original, approach to

organised crime, which developed more recently, at least at the
national level, than in other countries.
In the first stage of comparison when disassembling and reassembling

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label”, a key concept – un fil rouge – to help us understand choices and
changes within a national strategy, in socio-legal terms. As said many times
so far, this label is the “drive” of strategies, laws and policies; it might not be
exclusively applicable to one country only, but in that country where it is
used it is more influential than in others. This master label has been
identified thanks to content and discourse analyses of interviews and policy
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been assigned the “Activity” label; Italy and the UK are placed the farthest
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label, which is conceptually closer, as we see, to the idea of “Structure”, while
Australia has been assigned the “Visibility” label, which echoes more the
“Activity” side of the spectrum. The Italian Structure Model, the US
Enterprise Model, the Australian Visibility Model and the UK Activity
Model are now object of separate, first stage, analysis.
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3
Case Study 1: Italy and the Structure
Model
Section 1 The Birth and Evolution

of Italian Mafias
The term “mafia” identifies a typology of organisation born in Italy since
the unification of the Reign of Italy in 1861 if not before; the word is
comprehensive of different features that various criminal groups have in
common as result of decades of coexistence with the Italian State. In
Italian history, mafia has killed people, extorted money, tendered for
public works and entered politics. It has been in the community, and it
has exploited communities. But as Farrell (1997) and Lupo (2009),
among many others, point out, an “old mafia”, looking for honour
and power, can be distinguished from a “new mafia”, whose affiliates
look for entrepreneurial success and financial prosperity, whose “origin”
dates back to the 1970s and that has now evolved into a pluralist and
very complex system of power. While obviously this separation is ficti-
tious as things move in a continuum, it is still useful to understand how
the mafia discourse evolved in Italy. More importantly, it is crucial to
understand that in Italy today next to “original” forms of mafia, rooted
in their environments of origin, there are international mafia groups and

62 3 Case Study 1: Italy and the Structure Model
new forms of mafia-type associations away from the traditional Southern

territories. These new manifestations of mafia-type organised crime
question and challenge the core of “mafia” as a criminological and
legal concept.
Mafia organisations were born mostly in the South of Italy and
expanded everywhere in the Republic in the past 30 to 60 years at
least. Their strengths are the capacity to quickly adapt to different
dimensions without losing their local roots (Paoli, 2003). They benefit
from a system of trust based on kinship and brotherhood, which has
made it possible to create that atmosphere of secrecy and impenetrabil-
ity cemented by the attitude to silence, the omertà. As Michele
Pantaleone (1962) said, mafia is the certainty that there is a parallel
justice where the mafiosi try to gain money and power through felonies,
while protected by silence, shielded by people around them. One of the
main issues, as Gambetta (1993) highlighted, relates to the role of
mafia associations in the newly born Italian state. In this context mafias
proposed themselves as an industry, meeting the demand for protec-
tion and – especially in the South – its supply. Although violence has
always been a feature of these organisations as means to keep their
power, mafiosi are “characters who specialise in protection, not for
violent entrepreneurs, but for entrepreneurs of violence [ . . . ] for
those who can choose to serve the interests of the more profitable
side” (Gambetta, 1993: 97).
The three main Italian mafias, Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the ‘ndrangheta
in Calabria and the Camorra in Campania, underwent very significant
changes across the decades, before and after the unification of Italy in
1861. It needs to be very clear that while on one side generalisations are
necessary to provide a basis for the analysis, reality is much more varied
than any generalisation. Both “traditional” and “new” mafia groups,
such as the Sacra Corona Unita or the Famiglia Basilischi (to mention
those who have been judicially called “mafia”) have been historically
linked to regional or local territories, and embedded in their culture of
origins while dependent, and feeding, upon their lands and the economy
of their lands. While on one side this has to do with the needs and
settings of societies and economies prior to the globalisation
revolution, it has at the same time crystallised a conceptualisation of
Section 1 The Birth and Evolution of Italian Mafias 63
mafias having different names according to their location and origin.

While mafia groups in Italy are different from one another for birth,
structure and activities, they however, share some traits, social behaviours,
which correspond to the mafia traits on the spectrum, albeit to different
degrees. For example, while in Sicily and in Calabria, Cosa Nostra and
‘ndrangheta clans, at their origins, started exercising controls over the rural
territory, in Campania, criminal groups controlled the urban setting, in
Naples, with activities mainly related to extortions (the so-called camorra)
and gang-style crime. Many seminal books are available on the birth of the
Sicilian clans and their peculiar history, and a massive amount of literature
is available on their evolution and their main traits (Dickie, 2007; Dickie,
2004; Finkelstein, 1998; Lupo, 2002; Catanzaro, 1992). The mafia in
Sicily, as both a social phenomenon and a criminal organisation having a
structure, a hierarchy of power and a set of distinguished local activities
has been object of fascinating studies (Gambetta, 1993; Sabetti, 2002;
Hess and Osers, 1973). Particularly, studies looking at events of the 1960s
to 1980s and the changes in the way the mafia became “organisation” (as
opposed as a way of being of Sicilian social classes), through blood shed,
mafia feuds and political involvement are considered as fundamental
historical stepping stones, to comprehend the social phenomena sur-
rounding the mafia in Sicily (Sciarrone, 2011; Lupo, 2011; Arlacchi and
Ryle, 1988). Crucially, since the criminalisation of “mafia association” in
1982, the common traits defining mafias as socially relevant phenomena
became legally relevant as well as we will see later on in this chapter. This
is also confirmed by the latest “Mafia Capitale” trial in Rome, which
started in 2014. The Courts will need to recognise whether a criminal
network operating in Rome through intimidation, corruption and proxi-
mity with public administration and politics, qualifies as a mafia-type
group in the law (Dalla Chiesa, 2015). On the other side, the crystal-
lisation of the mafia concept as territorially specific and linked to their
place of origin has frustrated the recognition of “traditional” mafia clans
when operating outside their locations, in the rest of the country or abroad
(Sergi and Lavorgna, 2016; Sciarrone, 2014; La Spina, 2014).
When it comes to historical events that have impacted on the way
Italians perceive the phenomena of mafia and organised crime, we find
that the social alarm linked to the Sicilian mafia reached its peak during
the 1980s and the 1990s, when the relationship between the state and
Cosa Nostra became so confrontational that Cosa Nostra (under the
leadership of Totò Riina) moved to terror strategies while the State
enacted some of the policies that still today make the Antimafia. The
1990s also saw the rise of the national profile of the Calabrian ‘ndran-
gheta. These two periods are therefore the defining moments for the
crystallisation of the mafia concept in Italy and for the challenges of such
crystallisations as well.
Focus 1: Cosa Nostra and the Italian State in the 1990s
To picture what was Italy like at the beginning of the 1990s is a very
hard task, as some of those events have not yet been fully disentangled.
The confusion of those years can be read throughout the lenses of three
major sets of events, which regarded both mafias and the political life of
the country: (1) the strategy of terror adopted by the clans belonging to
Sicilian Cosa Nostra between 1992 and 1993; (2) the investigation
known as “Mani Pulite” (Clean Hands) initiated by the Public
Prosecutors in Milan against corruption in the high spheres of Italian
politics; (3) a set of very profound political transformations, symbolically
known as the passage from the First to the Second Republic. This is in
line with Nando Dalla Chiesa’s (2010) theory of convergence of inter-
ests. Political events, legal choices and historical facts in Italy can be read
all combined when looking at the interests at stake from all parts. From
the convergence of political interests and mafia interests mafia power
grew while the functioning of the state was highly compromised. These
three sets of events, even though not exhaustively embracing all that
happened in those years, help to understand how and why this period is
the primary example to examine the convergence of interests between
mafia and the Italian state (Dalla Chiesa, 2010).
Historically, there are two events that have fundamentally pushed
Cosa Nostra in the spotlight and these events are the two murders of
1992 whose targets were Judge Giovanni Falcone and Judge Paolo
Borsellino, the first killed in an explosion on the motorway near
Capaci, Palermo, in Sicily in May 1992, the second killed in Palermo
in July 1992. Judges Falcone and Borsellino represented the Antimafia

in Sicily and in Italy, the Palermo squad that through a maxi-trial, some
years before the attacks, had severely affected the criminal organisation.
In fact, as recalled in literature (Dickie, 2013; Dickie, 2011), the maxi-
trial had counted a total of 474 charged individuals with 119 tried in
absentia; a bunker courtroom, near the Prison of Palermo, had been
built for the occasion; 360 convicted, 114 acquitted was the final result.
After having faced multiple internal mafia wars and multiple murders,
Sicily during the 1980s had already seen attacks against the authorities.
A number of other attacks, all linked to Cosa Nostra’s declared war
against the State (Falcone et al., 1993), had preceded and also followed
the murders of the two Antimafia judges in a strategy of terror that was
spilling over to the rest of Italy. Before the 1990s, the Sicilian mafia had
undergone a number of changes, which for various authors (Fiandaca
and Costantino, 1990; Lupo and Mangiameli, 1989; Gambetta, 1993)
represent the moment in which Cosa Nostra becomes “organisation”
and fully embraces its political and economic power at the regional as
well as national level. After the killings of the two judges, in 1993, other
explosions in Rome, Florence and Milan showed how Cosa Nostra was
willing to intimidate the State and the enactment of new Antimafia
legislations that had been following the attacks in 1980–1990 (Lupo,
2009). As noticed by the IV Antimafia Commission in 1993, “those
attacks were not intentional mass murders; they intended to demon-
strate the organisational ability of Cosa Nostra and its allies, in order to
start a negotiation and obtain leniency in the application of Antimafia
legislations” (Violante, 1994: 41). Partly out of judicial truth, partly out
of a very difficult historical reconstruction never fully completed, the
idea that the Italian State started to negotiate with Cosa Nostra to end
the strategy of terror, for some authors seems not only plausible but also
demonstrated by the facts that followed the attacks (Dalla Chiesa,
2010). Part of this negotiation could involve the arrest of the boss
Toto’ Riina, in very suspicious circumstances in 1993 and/or the analysis
of some legislative changes which according to various authors mirror in
some of the requests advanced by the boss Toto’ Riina in an handwritten
document (the Papiello) handed over to the prosecutors later on during
investigations (Torrealta, 2010; Intilla, 2011; Dalla Chiesa, 2010).
Cosa Nostra’s attacks can also be read in relation to the events within
the political and managerial class in the country at the time. In February
1992, a team of the Public Prosecutor in Milan officially started a series
of investigations under the name of “Mani Pulite”, Clean Hands, the
operation that started what in Italian history is known as the period of
“Tangentopoli” (Bribesville) (Della Seta and Salzano, 1993). The inves-
tigations uncovered networks between mafia clans and Masonic lodges,
games of power maintained through clientelism and political patronage
while the whole governing class was invested with suspicions and accu-
sations of bribery and corruption (Ganser, 2009; Dalla Chiesa, 2010). In
the meanwhile changes in the electoral system (from proportional to
majority-based) brought to new typologies of alliances among political
parties. This set of constitutional changes is commonly referred to as the
passage from the First to the Second Republic.
Political and social events – mafia and Antimafia-related – in the
1990s in Italy are notoriously intertwined in the minds of Italians. The
1990s represent the time in which the public formed a conscience of the
mafia as a criminal organisation essentially interested in finance and
politics and most of all not confined to Sicily alone (Santino, 1994). The
Antimafia Prosecutors in Caltanissetta, Sicily, in 2000,1 while delineat-
ing the facts of Tangentopoli and the attacks to Falcone and Borsellino
by Cosa Nostra as relevant to another case, declare how:
It seems confirmed that the profound changes in the system of connec-

tions among politics, mafia and public affairs happened between 1990 and
1992, in particular in Sicily [ . . . ] We can reinforce the hypothesis that the
strategy of terror was used to obstruct investigations on public affairs and
contracts everywhere in Italy, which would lead to uncovering other links
between politics and mafia before or during the investigations of
“Tangentopoli”. Here is the convergence of interests between “Cosa
Nostra”, willing to attack Giovanni Falcone – main author of the maxi-
trial that for the first time had brought behind bars mafia bosses – and
1
Operazione “Mandanti Occulti Bis”, Procura Della Repubblica presso il Tribunale di
Caltanissetta, R.G.N.R. DDA No. 4645/00, Richiesta di Archiviazione.
groups of entrepreneurs and businessmen, now indissolubly linked to the

interests of mafia clans.
Focus 2: The Expansion of the ‘Ndrangheta

Since the 1990s
Known today as the most powerful Italian mafia (Sergi and Lavorgna,
2016; DNA, 2016), the ‘ndrangheta is the mafia-type organised crime
group from the Calabrian region, at the toe of the Italian peninsula.
When we look at the ‘ndrangheta today, we necessarily have to refer to
the 1990s as the period when everything changed for the ‘ndrangheta
while staying nevertheless the same in Calabria. Like for Cosa Nostra
and Sicily, the sorts of the ‘ndrangheta in Calabria are not simply about
Calabria. Indeed, the changing face of Cosa Nostra after the maxi-trial of
the 1980s – after the heavy decimation of Cosa Nostra’s rankings by the
Antimafia authorities – and the evolution of drug trade and drug
consumption in Italy (Ruggiero and Vass, 1992; Becchi and Turvani,
1993) certainly facilitated the acquisition of prominent positions in
criminal markets by the neighbouring clans of Calabria when the autho-
rities were focused on Sicily (Ciconte, 2011). It would be, however,
narrow-minded to reduce the rising power of the ‘ndrangheta clans to
their position in the drug trade. Indeed, notwithstanding the late recog-
nition of this mafia in Italian criminal law – which happened only in
20102 – it is clear that the phenomenon not only was (and still is)
extremely entrenched in Calabria but also has been underestimated for a
long time (Paoli, 1994). It could be argued that while until the 1990s
the ‘ndrangheta phenomenon was perceived as a public order matter in
Calabria, in the 1980s and certainly in the 1990s it has started taking the
forms known today, by confirming its deep and symbiotic connection to
Calabria, as well as revealing its reach outside the region and outside the
country (Sergi and Lavorgna, 2016). Today there is a wealth of informa-
tion on the clans of the ‘ndrangheta, and there is consensus in
2
With the word ‘ndrangheta added to the offence of mafia membership in article 416-bis of the
Italian Criminal Code (law decree converted with Gazzetta Ufficiale 03.04.2010, No.78).
identifying the main drives that pushed this phenomenon in the spot-
light since the 1990s in a number of historical events. First, the violent
face of the clans, especially during the 1980s, the years of the kidnap-
pings for ransom. An uncertain number of people, between 190 and
230, were kidnapped all around Italy by Calabrian groups; this attracted
media’s and public attention and provoked a reaction from the state
(Sergi, 1991). Second, the difficulties of the Calabrian economy,
whereby a number of failed industrialisation processes made it extremely
profitable for certain individuals to access public funding while investing
in the legal economy (Forgione, 2008; Ciconte, 1996). Third, the
delocalisation of criminal activities in the North and Centre of Italy
(Ciconte, 2010; Sciarrone, 2014; Lavorgna, 2015) as well as abroad, in
Europe as well as in Australia or Canada or the USA (Sciarrone and
Storti, 2014; Sergi, 2015a; Calderoni et al., 2015; Sergi and Lavorgna,
2016), have prompted questions about the links between mafia move-
ments and Calabrian migration (Varese, 2011).
Moreover, during the course of the 1990s, Antimafia operations,
especially Operation Decollo I,3 Operation Porto4 and Operation
Olimpia,5 shed light, respectively, on the drug trafficking networks of
Calabrian clans, on the organisation of the clans for the exploitation of
local business ventures (such as the construction of the very important
port of Gioia Tauro) and on the internal functioning, recruitment and
roles of the clans as well as coordinating structures among them.
Since the 1990s the knowledge about what exactly is or makes the
‘ndrangheta has increased at the point of becoming predominant in both
public and institutional conceptualisations about mafias in Italy. Indeed,
whereas during the 1980s the Calabrian clans had made the national news
because of the kidnappings, we need to jump to the 2000s to find two very
visible and historically relevant events that brought the ‘ndrangheta in the
spotlight. First, the murder of Francesco Fortugno, Vice-President of the
Calabrian Regional Council in plain sight and daylight in Locri in October
3
Operation Decollo I, No. 1779-6541/2001 R.G.N.R. DDA.
4
Operation Porto, No. 35/96 and 84/97 R.G.N.R. DDA.
5
Operation Olimpia, No. 86/96 R.G. GIP DDA.
2005. There is however still uncertainty on the role of the clans in this event,
according to prosecutors in Reggio Calabria. Second, the mass murder of six
people on the 15th August 2007 in Duisburg, Germany, which became part
of the famous Operation Crimine in 2010 tracking the Calabrian clans
outside Calabria. The Duisburg events on one side showed to Italian autho-
rities and the rest of the world the strength of the mafia clans outside national
boundaries, and on the other side also led the authorities to focus on certain
issues of policing mafia clans abroad (Casaburi, 2010; Ciconte, 2011).
Following these events, in 2008, the Parliamentary Antimafia Commission
released its first report on the ‘ndrangheta (Forgione, 2008: 24) and noticed
how, differently from Cosa Nostra and before the events in Duisburg:
[T]he ‘ndrangheta has always avoided to expose itself, always avoided the
spotlight and media attention. The ‘ndrine [family clans] have fought
bloody wars among each other, they have killed thousands of people, they
have intimidated with threats and attacks against local administrators, but
they never realised any action able to attract national or international
attention for long.
Certainly, the idea of the ‘ndrangheta as a liquid mafia – moving endlessly

and powerfully and silently infiltrating everything and everywhere – has
been gaining momentum since 2008. Again, in the words of the Antimafia
Commission (Forgione, 2008: 23):
This is the secret of the ‘ndrangheta. It’s all in the tension between a
remote, rural and archaic here and a globalised, postmodern and techno-
logical there. It is all in the dialectic between the family dimension as basic
unit and the global diffusion of the operational network.
Indeed, both the media and state institutions, nationally and interna-
tionally, have now acknowledged the presence of the ‘ndrangheta in Italy
and abroad. This is also thanks to Operation Crimine,6 in 2010, which
has shed light on the international ramification of the clans. Indeed,
6
Operation Crimine, No.1389/2008 R.G.N.R. DDA.
Operation Crimine has confirmed how in the Southern part of the

Calabria, in the area around Reggio Calabria, the clans operate through
alliances of families united by blood and marriage and having coordination
structures and common strategies. In the city of Reggio Calabria the
presence of the clans is thick. In Calabria, the mafia phenomenon, as it
has been with Cosa Nostra in Sicily (Pignatone and Prestipino, 2013),
certainly is not only a criminal one, with the clans often assuming govern-
ance roles (Sergi, 2015c; Ciconte, 2013). Arguably, the actual ‘ndrangheta,
the one indicated through the singular name – the criminal organisation –
is indeed the one from the specific area of Reggio Calabria, in the south of
the region. In the rest of the region, however, the clans are very similarly
organised and indeed are still indicated with the same name ‘ndrangheta to
indicate a similar criminal behaviour across the region (Sergi and Lavorgna,
2016; Pignatone and Prestipino, 2013).
While learning from the problems in recognising and fighting the
‘ndrangheta abroad, or in the North and the Centre of Italy, and with
the necessity, nevertheless, to do so, the mutation of the mafia concep-
tualisation in Italy has been profoundly affected by the rise of the
Calabrian mafia, as both manifestation of transnational organised
crime and infectious mafia behaviour across the whole country.
The Hybridisation of Organised Crime and the

Different Dimensions of the Mafia Concept
In Italy the relationship between the conceptualisation of mafia and the
one of organised crime is a residual one. This means that every group
criminal activity that is not classifiable as mafia can automatically qualify
as “organised crime”. There is a degree of seriousness in the way organised
crime and mafia are classified. Mafias are more serious, more organised
and certainly more alarming systems of power and crime; organised
crime groups are looser, more opportunistic, feebler systems of crime,
even when the crimes they commit are harmful or serious ones. This has
two immediate consequences: first, the development of a countering
system essentially targeting mafias and their complexities, and second,
The Hybridisation of Organised Crime and the Different Dimensions . . . 71
the need to classify criminal groups as mafias in order to access the special
countering system and its benefits. These consequences also lead to an
overlapping of the conceptualisations of organised crime and mafias, with
a generalised use of the two terms interchangeably in common discourse.
It has proved problematic to agree on a working concept of organised
crime, separated from the one of mafias, during interviews in Italy.
Systemic problems in understanding and defining the characteristics of
the multifaceted criminal panorama in Italy emerge both from inter-
views and from monitoring of media and their language when they
“classify” mafia crimes or other types of organised crime (Di Ronco
and Lavorgna, 2016), as well as institutional reports in Italy (Sergi,
2015b). Generally speaking the differentiation between mafias groups/
members from other types of organised crime groups/members only
occurs when referring to legal definitions, as the law does differentiate
“simple” unlawful associations from mafia-type ones. Nevertheless, there
is a widespread – yet not always clearly expressed – awareness that the
nature of organised crime in the country is much more varied than the
one encapsulated both in criminal law and in social perceptions. Indeed
the conceptualisations of mafias and organised crime include hybrid
forms of criminality, such as migrating mafia groups – that is, mafia
groups establishing themselves outside their traditional territories, thus
operating differently – and mixed groups – that is, criminal networks,
Italian as well as foreign, that operate as autonomous entities together
with traditional mafias or among themselves (Lavorgna and Sergi, 2014).
These two categories, which at times might also overlap too, are certainly
problematic for a legal perspective, but mostly for a conceptualisation of
the phenomena they refer to.
In particular, when it comes to the first hybrid typology – migrating
mafia groups – the literature addresses this issue also outside of Italy, see,
for example, the case of the ‘ndrangheta in Australia or Cosa Nostra in
the USA in this book. Certainly, when it comes to conceptualising
Italian mafias and their movements, the first thing is to understand
where is the point of origin of groups, in line or in contrast with the
established perception related to the South of Italy. Indeed, there is
ambiguity in the conceptualisation of mafias: on one side the concept
of mafias in “traditional” settings is changing, on the other side, a
“traditional” meaning is still stable and present also in the conceptualisa-

tion of the migration of mafias. Essentially, it seems very complex to
describe how mafia groups behave outside of their home place when
their behaviour at home is considered dynamic and still at times proble-
matic to conceptualise in the first place. While Antimafia institutions
seem to be conscious of this ambiguity, the tension persists. For example
the ‘ndrangheta – which today is at the centre of many investigations
from South to North of the country – “has a very modern soul but a very
old heart”, as described by an Antimafia prosecutor in Reggio Calabria.
Indeed, on one side the major mafia groups, especially camorra and
‘ndrangheta, are often described as “dynamic”, “modern”, “innovative”
and employing “advanced methods” for infiltration in public affairs or
for money laundering schemes. At the same time they are still exhibiting
certain traits at the local level – essentially, their political skills (Pezzino,
1999; Sergi, 2015c) – which are extra or just different, but nonetheless
“traditional”, when compared to what they exhibit when they move. As
noticed in an interview with one of the major historians of the
‘ndrangheta:
The ‘ndrangheta is the only criminal group that right now has at least two
centres of power, one in Reggio Calabria, one in Milan. It should not
surprise that the presence of the ‘ndrangheta in the North of Italy has been
long denied; whenever mafias do not kill, people and authorities assume
that there is no mafia at all.
The denial reiterated for years the authorities in the North of Italy
together with the incapacity of many Italian regions – historically
mafia-free – to recognise first the contagion and afterwards the auton-
omy of ‘ndrangheta clans in their territories, is based on the myth that
mafias belong to the South as offspring of poverty and product of
Southern cultures. This translates, as we will see later in this chapter,
in a very clear difficulty from the courts in the Centre and North of the
country, to apply the legislation against mafia membership outside of
traditional mafia territories. Migrating/migrated mafia groups pose
indeed a number of interpretative problems also from a legal perspec-
tive. Conceptually, scholars have been studying mafia movements in
terms of colonisation, delocalisation, settlement or hybridisation

(Sciarrone and Storti, 2014; Sciarrone, 2014; Campana, 2013; Sergi,
2015a; Sergi and Lavorgna, 2016; Varese, 2011). Indeed, at times the
groups move and settle elsewhere, at times only their activities are
carried out or established elsewhere. As noticed by the DNA (2016:
259), mafia groups in Italy
seem to be delocalised, or projected or established, far from their places of

origin and far from where their core is, to invade other areas of the country
where they shoot less and invest more. To summarise, mafias today might
kill less but they are always alive and most of all, they make more money
than before.
The National Antimafia Prosecutors attempt to explain the evolution

and changing characters of “original” mafia groups (those from the
South), while at the same time noticing that their movements are
based on their traditional traits as much as innovative drives. Indeed,
it is peculiar to note how in Lombardia, where the presence of ‘ndran-
gheta clans has now been ascertained through Operation Infinito,
among others (Chiavari, 2011), “the logic of business goes with the
logic of belonging; a profit-driven infiltration now goes together with a
power-driven settlement; it is fundamental now not only to invest but
also to rule” (DNA, 2016: 28). Clearly, this reinforces the equilibrium –
rather than the tension – between tradition and modernity of mafia
groups, while still reinforcing the connotation of these groups as mafias.
When it comes to mixed networks, the situation is also quite complex
from an interpretative point of view as, firstly, the mafia conceptualisation
is problematic to apply to hybrid groups, and, secondly, the reference to
ethnic connotations appears to characterise other groups beyond Italian
mafias. Under this category we find both groups made of mafias and other
foreign or national groups as well as new groups having mixed character-
istics. Example of the first sub-type are the networks in the Emilia
Romagna region, surfaced through the so-called Operation Aemilia since
2015, while example of the second sub-type is the Rome-based group
known as “Mafia Capitale”, emerged during Operation Mondo di Mezzo
(the “world in between”) since 2014.
According to the Antimafia Investigative Directorate (DIA, 2015:

154): “a constant can be noticed in the less pervasive relationship of
mafia groups with the territories of Central and Northern Italy; this
leaves more space to other ethnic groups”. Also, continues the DIA
(2015: 154), “our own mafias and foreign groups do not move in two
necessarily separate directions; instead they manifest convergences,
whereas the latter become instrumental to more ambitious mafia crim-
inal strategies.” In Operation Aemilia7 the investigations have revealed
how next to settlements and activities of a ‘ndrangheta clan in the
Emilia-Romagna region, a Tunisian man and woman supported
money laundering activities, two Chinese individuals acted as front
men for the Calabrian clan in the management of a nightclub while
extortions were handled by an Albanian man. In this operation, the
interpenetration of foreign and autochthonous groups, especially in the
North/Centre of Italy, sees the former not subjugated to the latter but
often in positions of equal partnership. Indeed at the DIA in Rome an
analyst describes foreign groups as “usually subordinate to mafia groups
in the South, but often in full partnership with them in the North of the
country”. He continues:
Albanian groups, for example, they are everywhere in the country and they
often have equal standing to our own in some areas; Chinese groups are
also big on drugs, even though their clientele, so to say, tends to remain
limited to Asian migrants; then you have groups from North-Africa as
well, they are mostly involved in human trafficking and smuggling of
migrants, often with the cooperation of Italian criminals.
The interpenetration of local/autochthonous groups with more estab-

lished mafia groups and criminal others is also a peculiarity of Operation
Mondo di Mezzo8 in Rome. What the Antimafia prosecutors in Rome
call “Mafia Capitale” is an autochthonous network, originally within the
city of Rome, not an offspring of any other mafia, but often cooperating
7
Operation Aemilia, No. 20604/10 R.G.N.R. DDA Bologna, 17375/11 R.G.N.R. GIP.
8
Operazione Mondo di Mezzo, No. 30546/10 R.G.N.R. Roma.
with mafia clans in the Capital City. The network of Mafia Capitale is
peculiar in the way they conduct business as well as in their way of
“being” a mafia group (Prefetto di Roma, 2015). As noticed by the
Antimafia prosecutors in Rome9:
The traditional formula for mafias includes two dimensions, differently

combined depending on time and space: the control of the territory, from
where the power and the political dimension comes from; and the orga-
nisation of illicit traffics, which characterises mafias as enterprises that
operate in between the legal and the illegal worlds. It is this second
dimension that we need to consider in this case.
Mafia Capitale is therefore presented as a mixed group, which is at the same

time new – as their influence and reach into public administration and
politics is apparently superior to any criminal groups in Rome – but also
willing to mix with other “traditional” criminal clans and their methods in
the Capital. In fact, Operation Mondo di Mezzo revealed how not only the
criminal network active in Rome has established links with other criminal
groups including “traditional” mafias in the city but also how its success is
reached through a method of infiltration based on systemic corruption made
more effective by reputation of the group’s leaders in the city. Mafia Capitale
can intimidate because its corruptive power and its reach essentially incre-
ments its reputation and its efficiency (Commissione Parlamentare
Antimafia, 2016). As an extremely functional network linking public offi-
cials, entrepreneurs, politicians and criminals of various background (from far
right militia to drug traffickers to debt collectors) Mafia Capitale is presented
as the contemporary face of mafia-type organised crime: intimidating, using
corruption rather than violence, non-ethnic based and multi-tasking (Dalla
Chiesa, 2015; Sergi, 2016b). As noticed by the Court of Cassation,10 the
group known as Mafia Capitale “has infiltrated the ganglions of public
administration in the Capital City [ . . . ] taking the place of institutional
organs for the preparation and the decision-making process in public affairs”.
9
Operazione Mondo di Mezzo, No. 30546/10 R.G.N.R. Roma, p. 31.
10
Corte di Cassazione, sez. VI pen. 10 March 2015 [dep. 9 June 2015], no. 24535, p. 21.
As noticed by the Antimafia Parliamentary Commission, the key to under-

stand the phenomenon of Mafia Capitale is in the distinction between the
“traditional” mafia method based on intimidation through violence and an
“evolved” one based on “silent entrepreneurial subjugation-collusion and
penetration in the bureaucratic and political systems” (Commissione
Parlamentare Antimafia, 2016: 96). This mirrors in the words of interviewees
who explain the core of mafia power as a complex system where criminality is
only one of the components. As a Chief Antimafia Prosecutor in Calabria
observes:
There is in our nation, beyond Sicily and Calabria, a criminal system,

heterogeneous and integrated, which we have called in various ways . . . a
system, which could be called an associative delinquent pluralism where
mafia – at an ideal table representing this system – sits in a very specific
place next to others. At the table with mafia power – acting at times as
military force, at times as economic drive – sit entrepreneurs, politicians,
and professionals. When I talk about integrated system I talk about
something very modern and very up-to-date and something that the so-
called civil society cannot do without.
These words not only encapsulate the perception of the pervasiveness of

mafias in the country but also the centrality of corruption as platform to
understand mafias beyond their criminal(ised) platform. Indeed, the
observation that mafias are complex systems of multilateral powers
requires institutions, practitioners and experts to focus on all the dimen-
sions of these systems: the criminal, the social, the financial and the
historical dimensions. The impact and influence of mafias as complex
and flexible systems based on intimidation as much as corruption is still
the key feature that differentiates mafias from other manifestations of
organised crime and qualifies mafias as the primary concern for Italian
authorities. However, while the hegemony of mafia clans in their “tradi-
tional” areas is recognised and recognisable by authorities after years of
study and countering of the phenomenon, the complexity of the mafia
system elsewhere – either when mafia groups migrate or their activities
are delocalised or when they mix with other criminal groups – is not as
easy to see. Essentially “contemporary” mafia power can evolve at the
Section 2 Criminalising Mafias: Tolerability, Mafia Method . . . 77
point of “submersion” (DNA, 2012: 578) into communities and econo-

mies; this essentially means that mafias’ primary goal is not the military
control of the territory but rather ensuring access to a variety of sectors
and markets, both legal and illegal, through friendships, connections and
corruptive pacts. The complexity and the variety of relationships ensure
social support and validation of the network beyond the classic control
of the territory and the visibility of violence. It does not surprise that the
legal approach against mafia power – expected to adapt to mafias’
changes – struggles to capture all these dimensions, hybridisations and
complexities.
Section 2 Criminalising Mafias: Tolerability,

Mafia Method and Control of the Territory
The interaction between the criminal activities and the various dimen-
sions of mafias’ conceptualisations represents the real nature of mafias’
actions, “la vera natura dell’agire mafioso”, in the words of Antimafia
prosecutors. The recognition of the social dimensions means also diver-
sified interests at play in policing approaches. In fact, the fight against
organised crime and especially mafias in Italy needs to involve the social
level, as socially embedded are the phenomena and their consequences
go far beyond the solely criminal realm. The way institutions react to
mafias and the real nature of their offending is largely based on the “social
tolerability” of the phenomenon. This means that the phenomenon is
tolerated – and known to the authorities – when criminal activities and
harm are still below a certain threshold. This could be because of law
enforcement strategies in using resources, or even because of common
benefits, convergences of interests, between political classes and mafia
groups acting as political actors (Dalla Chiesa, 2010). The social toler-
ability of the mafia phenomenon, according to a former president of the
Parliamentary Antimafia Commission, is linked to the accepted coexis-
tence of mafia power within local cultures, especially in certain territories of
the South of Italy. It seems like the “acceptance of mafias’ activities
and unorthodox rules, often endorsed by a weak political class,
is ived as ineluctable fate”, he affirms. As far as the phenomenon is

tolerated, the focus remains on the criminal offending within crim-
inal law and the justice system. Whenever this threshold is crossed,
by means of “extraordinarily emotional events”, such as a murder or
a political scandal, then the focus of the authorities might shift to
the other dimensions of the phenomenon. In practice, as law enfor-
cement’s resources are always bound to be limited, instead of chasing
every single criminal act forming the mafia “package”, authorities
have developed the ability to step back and look at the whole picture
instead, including political links and/or social impact of mafias’
behaviours and presence in different communities and markets.
Also thanks to highly emotional events linked primarily to the fight
against the Sicilian mafia in the 1980s–1990s, Italy has developed a
“double-track system”, a system where the legal weapons against organised
crime in general are actually geared towards mafias. The double-track
system, the Antimafia system, qualifies Italy’s primate at the top of the
mafia spectrum as it essentially reverses the relationship for which orga-
nised crime would be to mafia what a genus is to a species. The Antimafia
double-track system includes certainly the set of direct provisions – direct
responses to public concerns about the threat of mafia-style organised
crime. Indirect provisions, which are administrative in nature, complete
the system and allow a more thorough intervention (Paoli, 2007; Vigna,
2006). The double-track system has been established with law no. 8 of
1992 through the creation of the district (DDA) and national (DNA)
Antimafia prosecution offices. The Antimafia offices are considered the
main strength of the whole system. There are two main reasons for the
success of the specialist prosecutors in the Antimafia strategy. First, the
extremely tight link between prosecutors and the judiciary police they
direct. Second, the fact that Antimafia prosecutors are highly and legally
trained; by guiding and/or starting the investigation their specialised
training makes sure that there is no waste in resources in the way intelli-
gence is collected for reliable and valid evidence in trials. The strength of
the (Antimafia) investigation and pre-trial stages is the strength of the
whole system, especially when compared to the weaknesses of (mafia) trials,
which cannot count on specialist Antimafia courts, and are generally
considered too long, too complex, too consuming and inadequate for the
necessities of mafia cases. Furthermore, the dichotomy in the Antimafia

system is also mirrored in the parallel focus on both prevention and
repression, both parts of the strategy and both extremely crucial – as
interdependent – for a good functioning of the system.
Italian institutions agree upon considering article 416-bis11 of the Italian
Criminal Code (offence of mafia-type unlawful association, or mafia mem-
bership) as the most powerful component of the Antimafia legislation and as
historical turning point of the organised crime strategy in Italy. Introduced in
1982, with Law Rognoni-La Torre (13 September 1982 no. 646) following
the mafia murder of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa in Palermo, Sicily,
article 416-bis is placed after article 416 in the criminal code (offence of
unlawful association, or “simple” unlawful association), and criminalises
unlawful associations employing the mafia method. The mafia method,
11
Article 416-bis (Italian) Criminal Code. Mafia-type unlawful association.
1. Any person participating in a Mafia-type unlawful association including three or more persons
shall be liable to imprisonment for 5–10 years.
2. Those persons promoting, directing or organising the said association shall be liable, for this
sole offence, to imprisonment for 7–12 years.
3. Mafia-type unlawful association is said to exist when the participants take advantage of the
intimidating power of the association and of the resulting conditions of submission and silence
to commit criminal offences, to manage or in any way control, either directly or indirectly,
economic activities, concessions, authorizations, public contracts and services, or to obtain
unlawful profits or advantages for themselves or for any other persons, or with a view to prevent
or limit the freedom to vote, or to get votes for themselves or for other persons on the occasion
of an election.
4. Should the association be of the armed type, the punishment shall be imprisonment for 7–15
years pursuant to paragraph 1 and imprisonment for 10–24 years pursuant to paragraph 2.
5. An association is said to be of the armed type when the participants have firearms or explosives
at their disposal, even if hidden or deposited elsewhere, to achieve the objectives of the said
association.
6. If the economic activities whose control the participants in the said association aim at achieving
or maintaining are funded, totally or partially, by the price, the products or the proceeds of
criminal offences, the punishments referred in the above paragraphs shall be increased by one-
third to one-half.
7. The offender shall always be liable to confiscation of the things that were used or meant to be
used to commit the offence and of the things that represent the price, the product or the
proceeds of such offence or the use thereof.
8. The provisions of this article shall also apply to the Camorra, the ‘ndrangheta and to any other
associations, whatever their local titles, seeking to achieve objectives that correspond to those of
Mafia-type unlawful association by taking advantage of the intimidating power of the
association.
after years of jurisprudence and legal commentaries, shall be intended as the

power of intimidation originating from the associative bond within the group
and inducing both affiliates and externals to keep a behaviour of omertà
(Dalla Chiesa, 2015; Mantovani, 2007). The employment of the mafia
method generates mafia structures: a criminal group is a mafia group because
it structurally employs the various behviours defined as the mafia method.
Generally speaking, the criminalisation of unlawful associations, simple or of
mafia-type, promotes cohesion in the community by protecting public
security and democracy against individuals and networks who reject the
exclusivity of the legal system and that consistently, and with resilience,
plan criminal activities. In practice, criminal law punishes members of a
criminal group because they accept a long term and unspecified criminal
plan. This type of associative bond is considered criminal even if no criminal
act is committed (Sergi, 2014). Offences of unlawful association are offences
against reprehensible plans. As noticed by an Antimafia prosecutor in Rome:
The fact that you can target the association gives you the idea of the
strength, the power of individuals, it’s something more, even if sometimes
you can have the same results at trials by prosecuting and charging the
single criminal activity.
The courts often revisit the limits and connotations of article 416-bis,
especially with reference to the application of this provision outside of the
“traditional” mafia territories. There is a sociological dimension to article
416-bis, which from the beginning, has limited the application of the law to
places where it was easier to prove the existence of a criminal organisation
detaining control of the territory (Dalla Chiesa, 2010). However, neither the
existence of a “formal” organisation nor the “control of the territory” are
mentioned in the criminal norm, even though they have heavily impacted
upon its application and on the definition of what the mafia method actually
is. In the sentence for Operation Cerberus12 in 2014, the Supreme Court has
clarified that what differentiates article 416 (unlawful association) and article
416-bis (mafia-type unlawful association) is the method. The mafia method is
12
Corte di Cassazione, sez. VI, no. 18459 – 22 January 2015.
The use of the intimidatory power that originates from the very existence
of the organisation paired with a diffuse subjection in the social environ-
ment and therefore a general condition of omertà. [ . . . ] The condition of
omertà has to be essentially connected to the intimidatory power of the
organisation. If it is dependent on other factors then we have a simple
unlawful association offence.
Whereas there is an on-going conflict in the jurisprudence of the

Supreme Court on how the intimidatory power connected to a criminal
group can manifest, it is undeniable how the mafia-type unlawful
association is recognised through both active effects – the capacity to
intimidate – and passive effects – the condition of omertà and subjection
that it creates (Visconti, 2015). It is interesting to note how proving the
aim to commit specified crimes – thus “intent” as mens rea – is not a
spelled-out requirement of article 416-bis, which insists more on the
particular nature and intensity of the mafia bond, characterised by
intimidation and conditions of subjugation and silence. As explained
already in 2000 by the Italian Supreme Court13:
The proof of the characterising elements of article 416-bis of the Criminal

Code can be very well assumed inductively on the basis of the fact that the
criminal group presents all, or at least some, of the revealing indicators of
the mafia phenomenon, such as secrecy of membership, relationships
based on kinship, respect for hierarchies, the fact that the group bears
the costs of the justice systems, the diffused climate of “omertà” as con-
sequence and indicator of subjection to the criminal group.
Interviewees in Italy, however, also share concerns about the use of the
offence of mafia-type membership. A Judge in Palermo notices how the
offence is sometimes “abused [ . . . ] a double-edged sword, used as
skeleton key to start interceptions or to obtain pre-trial detention
orders”. And he adds: “when you get to trial it risks becoming a
problem, as it is difficult to prove – especially when you do not have a
13
Corte di Cassazione, Sez. VI, no. 1612 – 11 January 2000, Ferone, Rv. 216632.
consolidated experience from case law about the [criminal] association

itself as we have in traditional mafia trials instead”.
Indeed, the need to prove the existence of an association, its struc-
tures, its modus operandi through the manifestation of the mafia beha-
viours and the power of intimidation of the criminal organisation as a
whole, before being able to contest the criminal activities of its affiliates,
is both the revolution of article 416-bis and its most problematic feature
for the rule of law. Mafia behaviours are both manifestations of the
existence of the criminal organisation and signs of impact on the social
environment. As noticed (Turone, 2014: 54), “the evidence of the
general structure of the mafia-type association crime is usually reached
by proving specific conditions of fear being exploited by the group, and
by proving the consequent unlawful advantages”.
Indeed the special character of mafias, as social phenomena and
behavioural criminal models, is what characterises the Antimafia
system (Sergi, 2016a). This is confirmed by the struggles to qualify
new types of criminal organisations, such as migrated mafia groups or
mixed networks as mafia-type organised crime groups. As previously
noted, this is both the case of the ‘ndrangheta clans migrating/
migrated to the North of the country, or mixed criminal groups
such as Mafia Capitale in Rome. The recognition of these typologies
of unlawful association within the paradigm of the mafia membership
in article 416-bis of the criminal code, poses various dilemmas, both
juridical and sociological. As noticed in Operation Mondo di
Mezzo14 in Rome: “it is indisputable that in the sociological drives
of the offence [article 416-bis criminal code] there is the element of
control of the territory [ . . . ] However, the law does not require this
element, which could be absent”. The sociological elements of mafias,
their social dimensions and effects have been understood as ontolo-
gically linked to their territories: “they absorb power – social,
political and criminal power – from the control on the territor-
ies . . . they are parasites”, says a Chief Superintendent of the Police
in Reggio Calabria. This connotation, this behaviour, has certainly
14
Operazione Mondo di Mezzo, No. 30546/10 R.G.N.R. Roma, p. 32.
shaped the law as founding element of mafias’ power but not as legal
requirement. The mafia offence requires the existence of the mafia
method (intimidation, violence, subjection and omertà) used for
financial and political gains. The courts, in practice, attempt to
prove the financial gain in those cases where the territory has not
historically been mafia-infiltrated: the mafia behaviour is often not
even seen or recognised as such.
Even though the last paragraph of article 416-bis contains a clause
to apply the norm to “any other associations, whatever their local
title” – as long as they use the mafia method of intimidation, favour
omertà and exploit economic activities – the applicability of this law
outside of the “traditional” territories is still problematic, notwith-
standing many successful cases, such as the famous trial for
Operation Infinito15 in 2015 against ‘ndrangheta clans historically
present in the area around Milan. For example, the Tribunal of
Genova, which rejected the mafia membership offence for indivi-
duals belonging to the ‘ndrangheta in the Liguria region after
Operation Maglio 3, finds16
The impossibility to affirm, beyond reasonable doubt, that the fact that
[the defendants’] are ‘ndrangheta members implies [their] they “behave”
like ‘ndrangheta members and also that the ‘ndrangheta that today is in
Liguria has the same connotations of the ‘ndrangheta in Calabria for the
purposes of article 416-bis.
The difficulties of this Tribunal in this case are linked to a contested

differentiation between being a mafia member and behaving like one.
Each individual position in the specific territory of reference needs to be
assessed concretely. The judge concludes17:
The fact that in a territory there are ‘ndrangheta members does not
automatically imply that there is also the ‘ndrangheta as mafia-type
15
Corte di Cassazione, sez. II, no. 34147 – 21–30 April 2015.
16
Tribunale di Genova, no. 2268/10 R.G.N.R., no. 4432/12 R.G. GIP, p. 6.
17
Tribunale di Genova, no. 2268/10 R.G.N.R., no. 4432/12 R.G. GIP, p. 338.
association, with an autonomous identity and pursuing the aims of article

416-bis, through intimidation originating from the group, subjection and
omertà.
Commenting and disagreeing with this sentence, a National Antimafia

Prosecutor in Rome notices:
There is a clear difficulty to understand that you do not need to look for the
mafia method in individual behaviours to affirm the existence of the mafia
organisation. In Liguria the ‘ndrangheta does not need to behave with the
typical mafia method because it lives on reputation, reputation that comes
from elsewhere; they act with similar aims, but with different methods that
however all come from being and accepting the criminal association.
Mafia politics: Trafficking Favours, Corruption

and External Support
Even though criminal law is not the only resource in the fight against
organised crime and mafias in Italy, it is certainly the most pervasive.
However, as mafias are perceived first and foremost as cultural and socially
embedded phenomena before being criminal threats, institutional
responses have to be calibrated on social impacts. As noticed by the former
President of the Parliamentary Antimafia Commission in Rome:
Political institutions, in Italy, from time to time, have fixed a threshold of

tolerability of mafia interference in the public and social life, upon which
they have based legislative, political, cultural interventions.
What seems to be the agreed explanation of the mafia-politics links is

indeed the tolerability of mafia power by the ruling class and vice versa.
An osmotic exchange of interests, means and goals occurs between the
two. It is a “trafficking of favours” that includes and explodes the
definition of corruption. As stated by the National Antimafia
Prosecutors (DNA, 2012: 57) there is a “spontaneous interpenetration”
of different types of individuals into mafia dynamics. At the political
Mafia politics: Trafficking Favours, Corruption and External Support 85
level, this is demonstrated by the increasing numbers of town councils

dismissed for mafia interference (Mete, 2011; Mete, 2009; Sergi,
2015c). As also noticed by an Antimafia national prosecutor in Rome:
Here it’s always about corruption. Antimafia legislation is a specific

legislation against the use of mafia methods, but there are all those other
behaviours, which represent the substratum of mafias, and are even more
dangerous outside the territories of mafia origin.
The mafia-politics relationship is already a component of the offence of

article 416-bis and in general of mafia membership investigations; when this
link is not present, investigations are affected in terms of charges. Whenever
a connection between mafia interests and politics cannot be proved or
whenever there is no clear corruptive behaviour to be detected, the investiga-
tion might shift to simple criminal association (article 416 criminal code). In
practice, there seems to exist an assumption that, “organised crime activities
minus the ability to corrupt” – thus moving in between the legal and the
illegal – “is not really organised crime in the Italian sense”, as shared by high-
ranking senior official of the Italian police in Rome. A number of criminal
law provisions target the relationship between mafia organisations and
politics. For example, article 416-ter of the criminal code qualifies as a
separate offence the agreement between a mafia member and a politician,
whether it is the mafia member promising votes to the politician in exchange
of favours or other benefits, or the offer of favours or benefits comes from the
politician asking for mafia support. This protects “the free exercise of the
right to vote”, specifies an Italian Judge in Palermo, who also adds how “the
core of the mafia-politics vote-exchange is really about the promise to
support each other – mafia and politics – by using the mafia method and
the mafia reputation”. The tight link and the enduring perception that
mafias and political power do go together echo also in the jurisprudential
attempt to better define how these relationships work in the grey zones (in
between legal and illegal) through joinder of offences. The criminalisation of
the external participation in mafia affairs (“concorso esterno in associazione
mafiosa”) comes from a combined reading of existing legislation to punish
yet another type of behaviour (La Spina, 2014). This offence is based on the
joinder of article 416-bis (mafia membership offence) and article 110 of the
criminal code (conspiracy). It targets politicians, entrepreneurs and other

prominent individuals who, albeit not being officially affiliated to the clans
do benefit from supporting the clans’ activities in various ways. They do so
through abuse, exploitation and misuse of their political and/or privileged
positions to ensure exchange and trafficking of favours or other benefits while
offering a substantial contribution to the mafia group. Even though the
history of this offence is not new – the Supreme Court has formalised the
offence in 199418 and in various other occasions afterwards19 with the first
mentioning of the offence dating back to 198720 – its applicability in practice
is still very contested (Marino, 2016; Maiello and Fiandaca, 2014). On one
side jurisprudence confirmed how the contribution made by the “white-
collar” has to be “effective [ . . . ] an habitual association to mafia affiliates due
to kinship, business or personal relations. Occasional or sporadic contacts in
public events and communal gatherings”21 are not enough to qualify the
offence. On the other side, however, in December 2015 the Tribunal in
Catania rejected the offence altogether noticing how the contested conduct is
not recognised in criminal law even though it is recognised by jurisprudence.
Observes the Tribunal22 that the offence of external participation in mafia
business “does not exist [ . . . ] due to the legality principle, because the Italian
system is a system of civil law and not common law” whereby only what
stipulated in the law is effectively the law while the stare decisis and the
binding precedent principles of common law systems do not apply. This
discourse follows two other sentences, one from the European Court of
Human Rights, dated 14th April 201423 (“Contrada”) and one from the
Italian Constitutional Court, also in April 2015,24 both dealing with the
juridical position of external individuals in mafia association charges. In
18
Corte di Cassazione, s.u. 5.10.1994, no.16 Demitry.
19
Corte di Cassazione, s.u. 27.09.1995 no.30 Mannino; Corte di Cassazione, s.u. 30.10.2002
no.22327 Carnevale; Corte di Cassazione, s.u. 12.07.2005 no. 33748 Mannino.
20
Corte di Cassazione, 14.07.1987, Cillari, no. 8092.
21
Corte di Cassazione, s. VI, 05/05/2009, Bono et al, no. 24469.
22
Tribunale di Catania, Sezione G.I.P., Proc. Pen. No. 4888/07 R.G.N.R. – no. 3496/08 R.G.
GIP, p. 109.
23
European Court of Human Rights, S.IV, Contrada v. Italy, 14.04.2015, no. 66655/13.
24
Corte Costituzionale, no. 0048/2015, G.U. 01.04.2015.
Mafia politics: Trafficking Favours, Corruption and External Support 87
particular, say all three courts, the distinction between the intraneous and the
extraneous to a mafia organisation needs to be specific because each position
brings different juridical responses (in terms of applicability of security
measures and arrest conditions, for example). The notion at the basis of
this distinction, as reminded repeatedly by the Supreme Court,25 is that the
extraneous is only he who, without being part of the criminal organisation and
therefore without showing any affectio societatis, does causally offer efficient,
aware and voluntary contribution to preserve and strengthen the operational
abilities of the crime syndicate. However, as recently affirmed by the Supreme
Court,26 this distinction is indeed quite “nebulous” because of the not so
clear-cut nature of mafia organisations >today, also with the reference to the
“Mafia Capitale” case in Rome. Effectively, the offence of external participa-
tion could today be subsumed within the criminal association itself. As
concluded by the Tribunal of Catania27:
What would be today the reason not to consider as mafia associate some-
one who, even if not being formally affiliated to the mafia group, in
substance behaves as if he was, gaining benefits and, over the long period
of time in which he offers his services, does strengthen and contribute to
the mafia group itself?.
The debate is still open. Indeed, the fluidity, or rather liquidity

(Forgione, 2008) of mafia structures is well known to institutions and
authorities observing the phenomenon in fieri. This is in line with the
idea of organised crime as not only a criminal phenomenon but also
displaying a public and social face. When we look for this conceptualisa-
tion in the Antimafia system we certainly find it confirmed in law
no. 164/1991 (converted from Act No. 221/1991) for the dissolution of
local councils (municipal and provincial) and/or the impeachment of
mayors and/or presidents of provinces/regions whenever there is evidence
25
Corte di Cassazione, s.u 12.07.2005, no. 33748, and Corte di Cassazione, s.VI, 18.06.2014
no. 33885.
26
Corte di Cassazione, s.u 21.04.2015, no. 34147.
27
Tribunale di Catania, Sezione G.I.P., Proc. Pen. No. 4888/07 R.G.N.R. – no. 3496/08 R.G.
GIP, p. 117.
of connection with mafia families or infiltration of such mafia families in

local administrations. Even though not always used at its full potential and
with the caveat that this is an administrative, and not a punitive, action to
protect the correct functioning of democratic institutions (Mete, 2009;
Mete, 2013; Mete, 2011; Sergi, 2015c), this provision carries a very strong
message when it comes to the relationship between mafia groups and
politics. The Italian state, in order to express disapproval of certain
behaviours, needs to draw the line between what is mafia and what is
not, at times forcing a dividing line, which remains nevertheless fictitious.
As noticed by an Antimafia Prosecutor in Reggio Calabria, commenting
the dissolution of the City Council of Reggio Calabria in 2012:
I am not optimistic about this really. The dissolution procedure is most of the
time unable to fix the problem it wishes to target. Through the coerced
administration and the inquiry that follows, we might get some insight in
what are the weak areas of the local administration. However, it is often the case
that after the intervention of the state, the city or town goes back to what it was
before, sign that the issue, at least down here, is cultural and not just structural.
Indirect Measures: Taking Back the Money,

Taking Away the Power
After acknowledging that the approaches to organised crime in Italy are
in practice calibrated on the possibility to qualify a criminal group as
mafia-type and after confirming the overlapping terminology of orga-
nised crime and mafia in the country in institutional discourse, it
appears quite clear that the roots of Antimafia approaches and concep-
tualisations are as sociological as the criminalisation of mafias itself. The
symbolism of the Antimafia approach is certainly one of the character-
istics that qualifies the Italian Structure Model. It does not surprise, as
said before, that next to criminal law the Italian system can count on
a number of indirect provisions and that, at the same time, the
whole Antimafia system is tightly based on economic provisions, for
money laundering, confiscation and other patrimonial measures.
Unsurprisingly, the economic costs linked to mafias and organised
Indirect Measures: Taking Back the Money, Taking Away the Power 89
crime activities, have been object of specific analysis from the Banca
d’Italia since the post-war period (Pinotti, 2012). The focus of financial
investigations on the economic harm of organised crime, and especially
mafias, is mainly linked to their ability to exploit public and also
European funds (Sergi and South, 2016). A researcher at the Banca
d’Italia in Calabria confirms how:
The link with European funds is certainly relevant, but do not forget that
we know more about European funds because on those funds there are
more controls, and that these funds are more difficult to spend; colluded
or weak administration struggle to activate the procedures and stick with
them within the deadlines. [ . . . ] With national public funds, procedures,
controls and deadlines are different, there are no real deadlines, you
cannot lose public funds and there are less controls. I believe that the
link between organised crime and national public funds is probably even
more relevant, this is where you are more likely to find systemic
corruption.
Next to the economic costs and the harms deriving from activities of criminal
groups, it is also the wealth of criminal groups that has worried Antimafia
investigators and prosecutors over the years. This concern is linked not just to
the necessity to take back the proceeds of crime, because crime does not
(should not) pay, but also to weaken the power associated to (criminal)
economic wealth; this means that money-laundering legislation, for example,
needs to be both repressive and preventative. Indeed as noticed by a Colonel
of the Guardia di Finanza (Fiscal Police): “with the offence of money
laundering what we protect is public safety and public order; the value
protected by the preventative anti-money laundering system instead, based
on the cooperation of financial operators, is the health of financial markets”.
When it comes to confiscation, Italy has three types of confiscation
linked to mafia proceedings. Confiscation as security measure (article 240
Criminal Code); confiscation as punitive measure – contained in article
416-bis of the Criminal code (the mafia membership offence) and in
12-sexies law 1992, no. 356 and confiscation as prevention measure
(within law 159/2011, the so-called Antimafia Code). In particular,
Antimafia confiscations are known as “confisca allargata” (inflated
confiscation) as potentially applicable to the whole patrimony and not just

the assets directly linkable to the specific crime. The possibility of pre-
ventative, non-conviction Antimafia types of confiscation, which are
autonomous from proceedings of confiscation as sanction, necessarily
pose problems from a rule of law perspective. The law allows for a net
widening approach – for example, by permitting confiscation against
heirs when the mafia associate is dead – which might be problematic to
justify against the principles of fair trial (Lunghini and Musso, 2009).
The ground for confiscation is the social dangerousness attached to
mafia crimes and the necessity to stop further circulation of dirty
money. Moreover, the presumption behind preventative confiscation
is the social dangerousness of the individual as qualified by evidence of
belonging to a mafia group and of having assets more or less directly
available and whose origin is deemed to be criminal. As declared by a
former president of the Antimafia Commission:
Confiscation does not have to be understood solely as a sanction, an

instrument to punish and to affirm that “crime doesn’t pay”, for example.
This is fair and just. But it is crucial to ascertain that the fruits of crime
will not provoke any more damage or that criminals will not have the
power to inflict more harm, any harm, through their economic power.
Confiscation is, however, also a matter of taking away social prestige, by

inflicting a symbolic punishment where it hurts the most. As noticed by
an Antimafia prosecutor in Reggio Calabria:
Years ago, at the entrance or exit of every village, mafia families used to
build their own palaces. Today, thanks to the Antimafia legislations and
the possibility, for example, to confiscate assets also to the relatives of a
dead mafia member, this arrogance, this hubris, does not happen anymore.
The symbolism of these Antimafia provisions is certainly linked to the

social dimension recognised to the mafia phenomenon. As another exam-
ple, law no. 109/1996 has introduced the social use of confiscated mafia
assets. The idea behind this law is that the purposes of confiscation would
be frustrated without clear provisions on what to do with the confiscated
The Italian Structure Policing Model 91
assets. Indeed, in certain territories the pervasiveness of the mafia

phenomenon makes it easier for mafia clans to acquire their assets
indirectly after confiscation should they simply be resold. The social
use of confiscated assets is one of various indirect procedures of the
Italian strategy that wish to strengthen direct tactics as well as increas-
ing the symbolic value the Antimafia needs to display. Indeed, taking
away the money and the assets to convicted and non-convicted (yet)
mafia members, to their heirs and their extended family, to their “teste
di legno” – (“wood heads”) figureheads – means taking partially or
entirely away the leverage and social prestige granted by money. At the
local level, notices an Antimafia prosecutor in Catanzaro, this is even
more important to weaken mafia power and to display the Antimafia’s
presence and reach:
Social prestige is what makes relationships endure here; it’s about respect,
it’s about what they display and how they display it and about what others
know they can do or display. If you take away their prestige at the local
level, together with their money, in their territories, where they want and
need to stay, that is where you hurt them.
The Italian Structure Policing Model

The Italian Antimafia mirrors the peculiarity and resonance that Italian
mafias still maintain within and outside Italy. To a resilient and complex
phenomenon – often carrying symbolic features – corresponds a resilient
and complex counter-phenomenon, which attempts to address those
symbolic features while allowing dynamism and evolution of legal
interpretations (Fig. 3.1).
The Italian model is based on the preliminary and essential consideration
that the concept of mafias in Italy almost entirely trumps the one of organised
crime, in common use of the terminology and also at the institutional level;
when Italians say “organised crime” and refer to the Italian scenario, they
mean mafias. Nevertheless, due to necessities of criminal law, the Italian
model pivots around an institutional idea of mafias and organised crime as
different from one another because of their structure and their criminal
Italian Structure Model
OC & Mafia
Criminal law & prosecution
overlap
The mafia
method
The social dimension
OC as
socially
Association Targeting money and
embedded Indirect provisions
and external power
structure & participation
dynamism
Fig. 3.1 The Italian structure model
methods. Mafia groups are socially dangerous criminal organisations,

socially embedded and criminally creative; in their social dimension, they
are peculiar to Italy. In the South of the country it is even more unlikely
to have a conceptualisation of organised crime that does not overlap
completely with mafias; in the Centre and North of the country we
might find more hybrid concepts. Notwithstanding the changing para-
digms of what constitutes mafias today, Italian mafias are both a socio-
logical phenomenon as well as an object of juridical interpretation.
Under the former aspect, mafias are autochthonous and territorially
bound; however, considering historical evolution of all Italian mafias,
the meaning of “territorially bound” has been changing. Indeed, lately,
with the rise of the Calabrian clans as primary institutional and public
concern, mafias are, on one side, still linked to their territory of birth and
grow in their society of origin, but, on the other side, they are often
characterised by a paradigm of mobility, which gives a whole new
dimension to the idea of control of territory. The Italian model, while
struggling to adapt to the constantly changing nature of the phenomena
of mafias and other manifestations of organised crime in the country,
still operates a hierarchical division between the two: mafias are first class
forms of organised crime. Other organised crime groups, whether they
The Italian Structure Policing Model 93
are foreign criminal syndicates, cross-border networks, local groups,

even when they are not considered less dangerous or less serious, still
trigger a different type of response in the system. In other words, the
Italian model has been built and has developed as an Antimafia response,
against the mafia structures and the “mafia method”.
Criminalisation and Prosecution
Mafias are recognised and known as a phenomenon, which has more

than one dimension beyond the criminal one, into the social world, and
therefore needs to be targeted by looking at what exactly constitutes the
mafia phenomenon and the mafia as a structure. Whatever is not mafia,
therefore other organised crime groups not employing the mafia
method, is not considered as multi-dimensional in the Italian strategy.
Other groups might be easier to tackle under provisions dedicated to
specific crimes, such as drug trafficking offences, or simple unlawful
association, rather than Antimafia weapons against mafia structures
embedded in the local and exploiting cultures. Criminal law in this
sense, with the two different typologies of unlawful association offences,
simple and mafia-type, shapes this differentiation.
Furthermore, the overlapping of concepts of organised crime and
mafias in the Italian model also reveals that there exists a prejudice in
the contrasting legislation; indeed the strategy is a strategy based on the
fight against mafias. This is a sign that those drives (the feeling of
emergency liked to mafias’ violence for example) that historically have
led to most contemporary procedures have actually settled in the proce-
dure. To base the strategy upon knowledge of mafia groups at the point of
evaluating all other manifestations of organised crime in comparisons to
mafias, is the peculiarity of the Structure Model. The Model is not solely
based on the criminalisation of mafia-type and simple criminal organisa-
tions but also on the characterisations of the mafia method. It is the mafia
method the protagonist of criminal law, and not the mafia membership
itself. Actually, the mafia membership offence is defined and re-defined
through the constant judicial assessment of the mafia method in its
developing and dynamic interpretations. The existence of specialist
Antimafia prosecution offices reveals how the model invests upon a

constantly revised and constantly challenged knowledge of mafia struc-
tures as peculiar manifestations of criminal conducts that is specifically
Italian. On one side the legal boundaries are constantly tested and pushed,
on the other side, the numbers, and variety, of manifestations of the mafia
method, enrich the knowledge of the mafia structure in fieri.
In Italian criminal law the model based on the conceptualisation of
organised crime as (criminal) “structure” is fully realised. On one side,
the mafia method, being a collective behavioural requirement of the
criminal group for purposes of criminal law, reveals the structure of
the mafia group, as never static and always different. On the other side,
thinking and conceptualising organised crime/mafia as structures first
and foremost allows to constantly enrich the strategy by observing the
structures in action, the internal and external dynamics, the participa-
tion to what is a network of power and what is a business enterprise and
what is both. The criminalisation of the mafia method in Italy, the
judicial attempts to criminalise systemic external participation and the
evolving interpretations of the mafia-politics nexus, reveal a very
dynamic strategy pivoting around the idea of organised crime and
especially mafias as criminally relevant the more they are multi-dimen-
sional structures of power, money and relationships.
The Social Dimension in the Policing Model
The Italian Structure Model, as a policing model, also addresses the

social dimension of mafias, which is targeted through a number of
administrative, indirect policies. The focus on the social dimension
justifies, on one side, the creation of specialist local prosecutors who
develop, observe and interpret expertise on the characteristics of local
environments and manifestations of crime, and, on the other side, the
stigmatisation of the phenomenon also through legal provisions, for
example, confiscation procedures, dissolution of institutional offices
for mafia infiltration and the social use of confiscated assets. These are
only some of the various elements of the Antimafia targeting the
social harm of organised crime in the form of mafias.
References 95
The Italian Structure Model is based on a multi-dimensional

conceptualisation of mafias, from which we can also infer what is
not mafia and remains “simple” organised crime instead. The social
dimension of mafias – intended as enduring and culturally relevant
structures of power harming economic, political and social aspects of
a community – and the lack of such a dimension in other forms of
organised crime – is peculiar of the Antimafia strategy and
its dynamism. As noticed, for example, the justification of non-
conviction based and preventative confiscation is the social danger-
ousness of mafia investigations in addition to targeting the financial
damage of mafia activities. The social dimension of mafias also
justifies the symbolism in the Antimafia: indeed, a phenomenon
that affects society in such a multifaceted way, by interfering with
politics, with economic competition, with territorial development
and innovation, calls for a symbolic stand from the authorities. As
said the Italian model is centred upon the prosecution of criminal
structures, both mafias and non-mafia. An effective prosecution
means a higher likelihood of conviction, which is symbolic to com-
munities. A similar discourse relates to the symbolic meaning of
confiscations and asset seizures to show the relentless action of
Antimafia authorities in ensuring that mafias do not keep their
profit. The symbolism of the Antimafia, its preventative measures,
together with a repressive set of laws and procedures, makes the
Italian Structure Model extremely dependant upon its own idea of
mafias. However, this idea does not stay still, it evolves and it
constantly pushes institutional boundaries. The richness of this
model is in the sociological dimension of the mafia behaviour and
the resonance, and drama, of dealing with autochthonous mafias.
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4
Case Study 2: United States of America
and the Enterprise Model
Section 1 The Birth of the Mafia Conspiracy

Most scholars working on mafias, organised crime and criminal networks,
have rolled their eyes at least once, when approached with the too usual
comments about the Godfather movie trilogy, or the Sopranos or any other
similar cinema or TV endeavour to portray “the Mafia”. Little Italy in New
York – bleak representation of a crystallised Italy that is no longer real, or
probably never was real – is a constant reminder that history can indeed
preserve certain mistaken interpretations intact. What Little Italy in New
York and The Godfather have in common is a mask of authenticity worn and
kept to appeal to the public and to crystallise an image of “the Mafia” so dear
to Hollywood.
The US has created and built the international reputation of Italian
mafias, probably much more than Italians ever did. Such successful crim-
inal marketing depends in part upon the language hegemony – English is
certainly more diffused and understood than Italian – but also on political
intentions – which the US certainly had before Italy – to declare “war” to
organised crime syndicates. There are a number of significant differences in
the way Italy and the US approached the mafia problem, but certainly the

102 4 Case Study 2: United States of America and the Enterprise Model
main difference is, obviously, that Italy was fighting an enemy from within,
while the US fight against mafias was – at the beginning at least – perceived
as a fight against an alien “other”. It does not surprise, therefore, that in the
US the fight against organised crime has become most effective as soon as it
was supported by politics. The political dimension of the fight against
mafias has resulted in a conceptualisation of organised crime as ethnic-
based criminal conspiracies, which can prove problematic to criminalise
within the rule of law of a common law country.
From a perspective rooted purely in criminal policy and historical policy
discourse, the US, more than Italy, is the birthplace of “the Mafia” – with
the capital M and the determinative article “the” – intended as the family-
run criminal syndicates coming from Sicily that control various illicit
markets and spread its tentacles across all states and main cities in the US.
The peculiar history surrounding the fight against the Mafia, “La”
Cosa Nostra, in the US – which is object of seminal books on organised
crime history and control – swings between the problematic conceptua-
lisation of “Mafia” as product of immigrant – alien – communities (i.e.
Sicilians or Italians more broadly) and the following politicisation of this
conceptualisation within the specific frame of a securitisation process.
The securitisation process of organised crime in the US has been the
unavoidable offspring of the moral panic surrounding Sicilian/Italian
Cosa Nostra in the country notwithstanding the impact of 9/11 and the
changes of political concerns thereafter. As argued in classic studies on
securitisation, any securitisation process is directly linked to an intention
to justify special measures (Buzan, 1983; Wæver, 1995), in this case the
fight of an “evil” that does not come from within but is nevertheless inside
society. Moreover, the politicisation and securitisation of organised
crime in the country has been fed and reinforced through popular
culture (Stritzel, 2012). Various drives have eventually contributed to
create what Bigo (2008: 7) would call a “transnational truth” of what
first class organised crime is and how it manifests, forever linking both
mass perceptions as well as institutional control strategies to a crystallised
vision of the Sicilian Mafia in the US.
In a discourse on the evolution of the concept of organised crime in
the US, the main historical focus is necessarily on the peculiar saga of
Cosa Nostra, especially in New York and Chicago, from its first
Section 1 The Birth of the Mafia Conspiracy 103
manifestations to the moral panic and the trials based on the RICO Act.
A secondary, but equally important focus is on the (further) securitisa-
tion of organised crime as threat to security and borders post 9/11, as a
product of the “war on terror”.
Crucially, the ethnic connotation of earlier conceptualisations of
organised crime in the US has never left the institutional perception of
the phenomenon. Since 2001, when representations of immigrants as
threats to the sovereignty and identity of national states have been the
most studied case of securitisation discourses (Bigo, 2012; Bigo, 2001;
McDonald, 2008), the initial ethnic connotation of the Mafia, again
with capital M, in the US, has resurfaced and migrated into new hybrid
concepts such as transnational organised crime – as threat to the country
and cross-border security menace. The seed of securitisation in the
discourse around Cosa Nostra and the Mafia in the USA was planted
since the beginning. Already Donald P. Cressey (1969: 14) in his
uniquely influential “Theft of a Nation” wrote:
There is a tendency for members of any society of group to look outside

itself for the cause whenever it finds itself confronted with a serious
problem or, especially, with an evil. Any analysis of organised crime in
America, is affected, directly or indirectly, by this tendency. Even if all the
evidence were to point to the conclusion that the American organisation
[the Mafia, Cosa Nostra] is merely a branch of a foreign organisation, the
person drawing the conclusion would in all probability be accused of
“scapegoatism”. [ . . . ] Even concluding that organised crime is dominated
by Sicilians, Italians and persons of Sicilian-Italian descent brings the
accusation that the troubles of America are being tied to the back of an
ethnic group, the scapegoat.
Focus 1: The Mafia, La Cosa Nostra and the Ethnic

Elements of the Mafia Conspiracy
The history and vicissitudes of the Sicilian Mafia, also known as LCN (La
Cosa Nostra), in the US have been object of distinct and prolific literature
(Woodiwiss, 1990; Jacobs et al., 1994; Critchley, 2009). Precisely because
popular culture, and especially the Hollywood industry, has often bor-
rowed images, facts and stories from law enforcement and policy-makers to
ensure a sense of authenticity in the various plots (Stritzel, 2012), the line
between myth and reality on the Mafia in the US has always been a fine one
when it comes to perceptions.
For a timeline of events functional to an analysis of the evolution of
the mafia conceptualisation in the US, we need to rely on the author-
itative work of scholars in this specific field of enquiry. In literature,
there are four moments – on which scholars agree upon (Albanese, 1996;
Woodiwiss, 2015b) – that make the discovery and/or the making of (La)
Cosa Nostra as the number one enemy of the US.
1. The role of prohibition policies between 1920 and 1933 in the

evolution of criminal enterprises both of Italian-Sicilian origin and
others;
2. The importance of the Kefauver Committee between 1949 and 1951
in establishing the national resonance and in the building of the Mafia
conspiracy in the country;
3. The testimony of Joe Valachi in 1963 to the US Senate Subcommittee
on Investigations, which proved essential to the knowledge of the
structures of Italian-Sicilian criminal clans, from that moment on
known as “La Cosa Nostra” in the US;
4. The work of the President’s Crime Commission Task Force on
Organized Crime in 1967 to reconcile the terminology of “the
Mafia” with that of “(La) Cosa Nostra” as representative, the
former, of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) and, the latter,
of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), which, however
was very late (1969) in accepting that “the Mafia” even existed in
the US.
If these are the facts/events for an historical background (Woodiwiss,

2001), the behaviours of the institutions involved is, however, not
pacific in the interpretations of scholars who, starting predominantly
in the 1960s–1970s, have researched and published on this topic. The
predominance of an institutional picture of the Mafia, which already
from the Kefauver Committee had been built to create the single mafia
conspiracy of Italian descendants, is visible also in scholarly approaches,

which either denied it or confirmed it. From Donald P. Cressey (1969:
8) came the confirmation of the “alien conspiracy” theory: “while we are
confident that American organised crime is not merely the Sicilian Mafia
transplanted, the similarities between the two organisations are direct
and too great to be ignored”. Within this theory, which certainly became
the dominant one initially, American (La) Cosa Nostra is hierarchical
and ethnocentric. With Joseph Albini (1971), among others (such as
Francis Ianni), emerged the revisionist approach, also known as patron-
client approach (McIllwain, 2015), for which “mafia” was actually a web
of power ties based on local and ethnic networks. According to Albini
(1978: 288), “something happened to how America began to view the
origins of syndicated crime; syndicated criminals now became known by
a new name – Mafiosi”. Albini (1978: 288) questioned this historical
shift in the analysis of organised crime by asking:
Yet when examined scientifically, are these Italian syndicate participants

found to be different? The answer is no. They used violence; so had the
non-Italian participants; they used political pay-offs; so had the non-
Italian participants; they made vast sums of money; so had all the others.
What was different? They were described with the nebulous term Mafia.
Together with a discussion on the existence of a Mafia organisation and

its characteristics more or less linked to ethnic traits of Sicilian origin, the
debate in the US moved towards alternatives to the alien conspiracy, on
one side aiming to define what the criminal phenomenon of “the Mafia”
was and on the other side attempting to overcome the “xenophobic
legends” around Italians and Sicilians (Lupo, 2002: 252). Certainly the
“mafia mystique” – the creation of a label around the Mafia (Smith,
1975) – was powerful, but similarly powerful became the paradigm of
“illicit enterprise”. This theory, diametrically opposite to the alien con-
spiracy mainstream label of “the Mafia”, argued for an understanding of
organised crime as business, independent from ethnic traits, and certainly
not organised in a world-wide conspiracy like “the Mafia” was thought to
be. The illegal enterprise theory reads organised crime on a spectrum of
legitimacy, where legal and criminal businesses meet, thus allowing to
leave issues related to migration and ethnicity behind (Woodiwiss,

2015c; Smith, 1980). According to this theory, organised crime is a
criminal business operating within the principles of economic rationality
(Reuter, 1983). Different positions also emerged: Robert T. Anderson
(1965) argued that American LCN was the urban bureaucratic evolution
of the family-based Sicilian Cosa Nostra; Albini, again, (1971; Albini and
McIllwain, 2012) pledged for a more specific use of the word “mafia” or
its abandonment altogether: [in the US] “Mafia is a synonym not for a
secret criminal organisation but for a method of organized criminal
activity” (Albini and Rogers, 1998: 107).
Certainly the debate was heated at the point that also public perceptions
were heavily influenced by the Mafia conspiracy rhetoric. In 1971, on the
29th of June, 150,000 people gathered in Columbus Circle, the heart of
Manhattan, New York City. They protested against the label of the Italian
Mafioso – crystallised in Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather published in
1969 – and had the support of the Italian-American Civil Rights League,
which was lobbying against the equation of Italian/Sicilian culture with the
mafia label in TV, cinema and literature (Viscusi, 1998).
The actual extent of the mafia presence in the USA has always been,
and still is, quite problematic to assess, due to the different meta-
discourses around the nature and manifestations of the phenomenon.
In 1969 Cressey (1969: xxiv) declared that
A nationwide alliance of at least twenty-four tightly knit “families” of

criminals exists in the United States. (Because the “families” are fictive, in
the sense that members are not all relatives, it is necessary to refer to them
in quotation marks.) The members of these “families” are all Italian and
Sicilians descent, and those on the Eastern Seaboard especially, call the
entire system “Cosa Nostra”. Each participant thinks of himself as a
member of a specific “family” of Cosa Nostra (or some equivalent term).
As of today, the FBI1 estimates that in the US there are affiliates of all
Italian mafias (so not only Cosa Nostra): “there are more than 3,000
1
FBI – Italian Organized Crime – https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/organizedcrime/ita
lian_mafia.
members and affiliates in the U.S., scattered mostly throughout the

major cities in the Northeast, the Midwest, California, and the South.
Their largest presence centres around New York, southern New Jersey,
and Philadelphia”. The FBI privileges the specific name LCN (translated
as “this thing of ours”) rather than Mafia, which is a more general name
applicable to various groups. LCN is still described by the FBI website as
“the foremost organised criminal threat to American society” and as a
separate organisation from the Sicilian mafia. The FBI, which leads the
fight against organised crime in the US, organises its investigative efforts
through the Transnational Criminal Enterprise Section in the Criminal
Enterprise Branch of the Criminal Investigative Division. The
Organised Crime Section is divided into three principal units investigat-
ing (1) LCN and other Italian mafias; (2) Eurasian/Middle Eastern
groups and (3) Asian and African groups.
It is undeniable, by looking at the many sources available on this topic,
that the long-lasting and still contemporary perception, both institutional
and popular, of “organised crime equals Mafia” comes from the dominant
perspective built throughout the 1950s and 1960s. This perspective was
supported by the Presidential Task Force and strengthened in a series of five
conferences held in Oyster Bay, Long Island, on the definition of organised
crime and on law enforcement’s responses to it. Even when institutions
differentiated Cosa Nostra or LCN from the Mafia, this only reinforced the
conceptualisation of a mafia conspiracy. As noticed by Dwight Smith,
author of “the Mafia Mystique” (Smith, 1975) and proponent of the illicit
enterprise theory (Smith, 1980) in a recent interview (Woodiwiss, 2015c:
50), the ethnic traits of the mafia conspiracy, even when control strategies do
not explicitly mention them, form the stage for comparing other forms of
organised crime to the Italian-American Mafia: “look at all these criminals
behaving like Italians”!
Focus 2: 9/11 and International Organised Crime
As noticed by Frederick Martens, former Executive Director of the

Pennsylvania Crime Commission, in a recent interview (Woodiwiss,
2015d: 64), “as to why there has been little discussion, debate, or even
research into organised crime of late I think we just have to look to one date:
9/11. Everything changed on that day. Terrorism and terrorism intelligence
became the new game in town”.
In 2008, 23rd of April, US Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey
addressed the audience of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington, D.C. on the threat of international organised
crime.2 The Attorney General noticed how the last Organised Crime
Council had met in 1993 and how “it seems that there is a widespread
belief around the country that organised crime is no longer a serious
threat”. This is obviously not the case, continued Mr Mukasey, which is
why “earlier this year [2008], the Organised Crime Council met for the
first time in 15 years. It did so because the United States faces a new and
more modern threat, from international organised crime”. International
organised crime, continues the Attorney General, “poses a greater chal-
lenge to law enforcement than did the traditional Mafia, in many
respects”. Such a statement is followed by a description on the geogra-
phical sources of the “new” threat and its concerning degrees of
sophistication.
The Attorney General’s remarks in 2008 echo various other state-
ments from security actors in relation to the growing threat of transna-
tional or international organised crime in a growingly insecure world
after 9/11. In other words, the impact of the terrorist attacks of 11th
September 2001 has profoundly changed the institutional rhetoric of
organised crime in the US. After 9/11 the process of securitisation of
organised crime in the US reaches its peak, by introducing the language
of security to alert of new, more modern, greater threats to the country
from international criminal networks (Stritzel, 2014; Woodiwiss and
Hobbs, 2009). The language of security actors’ speeches on organised
crime and its threats to national safety since 2001 is, however, still
dependent on the construction of organised crime and the Mafia in
the second half of the twentieth century. As noticed (Stritzel, 2012: 563)
2
Remarks Prepared for Delivery by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey on International
Organized Crime at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington D.C., 23
April 2008, available at: https://www.justice.gov/archive/ag/speeches/2008/ag-speech-080425.
html.
“one could argue that the rather excessive references to the gangster story
genre actually replaced the provision of proof and/or reasons in secur-
itizing moves”. What Stritzel means here is that the politicisation of the
fight against organised crime – the Mafia – since the 1950s in the US has
served very well speech acts of security post 2001. In fact, each securitis-
ing speech act needs a sequence of claims, warnings and demands made
by an authoritative security actor, supported by the propositional content
of proof and/or reasons for the claim/warning (Vuori, 2008). The
process of securitisation of organised crime in the US, and the subse-
quent re-branding of “international” or “transnational” organised crime
are direct products of the political interest and strategic “war on mafia”
of the previous decades, following the events of 9/11.
As reminded by Prof. James B. Jacobs in a recent interview
(Woodiwiss, 2015a: 90) since 9/11, “the FBI’s main priority has quite
rightly shifted to counter-terrorism. The Cosa Nostra organised crime
families have been very significantly weakened and, in some cities,
eliminated, but organised crime prosecutions continue”. The events of
9/11, therefore, even though they marked a global shift towards counter-
terrorism, also affected the conceptualisation of organised crime, in the
US as elsewhere. International – or global, or transnational – organised
crime, in the US before anywhere else, became one of the “legitimately
recognised threats” within “the field of (in)security” (Bigo, 2008: 25).
The classification of international organised crime as a national secur-
ity threat in the US comes at the expenses of the mafia conspiracy
paradigm, which had defined a classification of organised crime as public
security threat (threat to people, order and properties) (Finklea, 2010). In
order to give credibility to the newly feared challenges posed by inter-
national/transnational organised crime groups, security speeches simul-
taneously discard “traditional mafias” while reiterating the reach of
global criminal networks both in terms of geography and in terms of
their hybridisation with other criminal actors (such as terrorists). This is
needed because after 9/11 “there has been a shift in law enforcement
attention and resources more toward counter terrorism-related activities
and away from traditional crime fighting activities – including the
investigation of organised crime” (Bjelopera and Finklea, 2012: 1).
“To be taken seriously by law enforcement and politicians therefore,
organised crime needed to look more like terrorism” noticed an FBI

superintendent during our interview. After 9/11 organised crime was in
need of rebranding for a clearer association and similarity with the more
popular terrorist threat.
Thomas P. Ott, Deputy Chief for International Organised Crime in
the Organised Crime and Gang Section within the Criminal Division of
the US Department of Justice, wrote in 2012 in the United States
Attorneys’ Bulletin (Ott, 2012: 3) that “while the LCN [La Cosa
Nostra] still remains a threat today in certain cities in the United
States, IOC [International Organised Crime] groups have steadily
emerged over the past two decades to pose greater challenges to law
enforcement”. The National Security Staff at the White House pub-
lished in 2011 the Strategy to Combat Transnational Organised Crime.
The White House confirms how the current strategy is built on past
experiences, namely “the U.S. experience with La Cosa Nostra”, but that
“today the threat from TOC [Transnational Organised Crime] is more
complicated because criminal networks are more fluid and are using
increasingly sophisticated tactics” (The White House, 2011: 13). In
order to support the policy discourse around “TOC” within the security
agenda, the White House (The White House, 2011: 1) declares, as key
priority of law enforcement, the need to “defeat transnational criminal
networks that pose the greatest threat to national security by targeting
their infrastructures, depriving them of their enabling means, and pre-
venting the criminal facilitation of terrorist activities”.
The securitisation of international/transnational organised crime, as a
different threat from “traditional” LCN and the Mafia conspiracy, and
because also linked to terrorist activities obviously occurs after the events
of 9/11, when organised crime and terrorism converged under the same
umbrella as inextricably linked by illegal finances and revenues and
inexorably threatening to borders and security (Makarenko, 2004). As
declared in the National Security Strategy of 2010 (The White House,
2010: 49):
Combating transnational criminal and trafficking networks requires a

multidimensional strategy that safeguards citizens, breaks the financial
strength of criminal and terrorist networks, disrupts illicit trafficking
networks, defeats transnational criminal organizations, fights government

corruption, strengthens the rule of law, bolsters judicial systems, and
improves transparency.
The institutional perception of organised crime as international and

cross-border threat, as opposed to traditional mafia threats in the coun-
try, is well engrained in post 9/11 security discourses. On one side
policy-makers and analysts indulge in erroneous attribution to what is
or should be considered “the traditional Mafia”, on the other side, the
security agenda requires the branding of its own strategies as “new
strategies” against threats that, like terrorism, are challenges for borders
and financial markets. In a paper prepared for the Congress by the
Congressional Research Service in 2010 we read: “the structure of
modern organised crime groups often does not exhibit the rigid hier-
archy of more traditional organised crime groups such as the Italian
Mafia” (Finklea, 2010: 2). Two years later, in 2012, the same institution
published another report with no mention of neither Italian Mafia(s) nor
(La) Cosa Nostra. However, the authors still use the traditional v. non-
traditional organised crime rhetoric (Bjelopera and Finklea, 2012: 3):
Organised crime groups are becoming more entrepreneurial or market

focused, reacting to changes in both illicit and licit economies. Of course,
they are still heavily involved in activities such as narcotics trafficking and
money laundering (which have been greatly impacted by globalisation),
but organised criminals are increasingly involved in less “traditional” high-
tech operations encompassing identity theft, counterfeiting of goods, and
various types of fraud.
The forging of a conceptualisation of organised crime as “international”,

“modern”, “new” and “non-traditional” stems from the necessity to
impose organised crime as a recognised threat within the US security
agenda. In this discourse, the US necessarily confirms, even when they
deny it or overcome it as well, the rhetoric of Mafia as ethnic-based
conspiracy, engaged in “traditional” crimes and belonging to a past of
popular culture between myth and reality.
Ethnic Ties Crystallised with Entrepreneurial

Skills in a Securitised World
The analysis of interviews and policy documents in the US has showed
how there is a perpetuation in the discourses on organised crime and mafia
of the tension between traditional organised crime and non-traditional
organised crime, where the former equals “the Mafia” (with the capital
letter or as LCN to indicate the “organisation”) and the latter are the “new”
international/transnational organised criminal networks. This tension also
brings about another dichotomy, between ethnic and non-ethnic groups.
This second dichotomy, in particular, embodies the successful return and
consolidation of the business/enterprise theory and paradigms. In 2000,
the White House published an International Crime Threat Assessment in
which both tensions were already quite visible. On one side, the White
House (2000: 9) confirms an ethnic-based understanding of organised
crime groups even in the new discourse on international organised crime:
Globalisation has enabled organized crime groups to diversify their crim-

inal activities. Colombian drug-trafficking organizations, for example, are
also involved in counterfeiting; Nigerian and Asian crime groups engage
in alien smuggling; Russian and Asian crime groups traffic women for
worldwide sex industries; and Russian, Asian, Nigerian, and Italian crim-
inal syndicates engage in sophisticated, high-tech financial crimes.
On the other side, by saying that “the phenomenon of international

organised crime is not new” because “Italian, Chinese, and Nigerian
criminal groups, for example, have long had members or cells in foreign
countries and international connections to obtain, distribute, or market
contraband”, the White House (2000: 4) draws the line between orga-
nised crime of “before” (ethnic and local) and organised crime “now”
(multi-ethnic and international). The report (2000: 5) establishes that
“their [traditional criminal groups’] international criminal activities were
more limited in scope, and their foreign cells operated mostly autono-
mously or performed a few specific functions for the larger group” and
that “for many organised crime groups, their international criminal
activities were more regional than global. For those with a more
Ethnic Ties Crystallised with Entrepreneurial Skills . . . 113
worldwide presence, their operations were mostly confined to countries

with a large ethnic expatriate population”. This is a clear reference to the
relationship between Sicilian/Italian and American (La) Cosa Nostra.
These dichotomies are confirmed also in interviews, when a Senior
member of the elected staff at NYC Police Department, with experience
of criminal defence as well, declares
then we moved beyond the Mafia, to include other organised crime

groups, including the very dangerous and violent Asian drug gangs, the
Russian Mafia, Japanese organised crime and more recently in this coun-
try, today, we have a big problem with gangs, gangs like the Crips,
primarily but not exclusively drug dealers but they can commit violent
crimes or economic crimes. . . .
The analysis of the language used to conceptualise organised crime also

reveals the crucial centrality of a discourse around illicit enterprises as
manifestations and expression of syndicated crime. As anticipated, the
theory of illicit enterprise is the theory that best translated into effective
strategic steps to investigate organised crime and eventually defeat it
(Smith and Salerno, 1970; Smith, 1969). As shared by an FBI’s super-
intendent in the interview, the FBI bases its fight against organised crime
on the Enterprise Theory of Investigation (ETI), which involves “the
identification of a criminal organisation, a criminal enterprise and its
criminal activities and the identification of the financial assets of such
enterprise to intervene with forfeiture”. The investigative approach
complements, as we will see, federal criminal law. If federal criminal
law – the RICO Act – confirmed the illicit enterprise paradigm is
because this paradigm has been considered the successful one for prac-
tical purposes since the 1960s. In the 1960s–1970s, the alternative to the
illegal enterprise approach was to target ethnic criminal groups, which
was not desirable – and eventually would have been very unpopular – on
a political level. Targeting the enterprise, instead, allowed and allows
focusing on market forces and economic activities rather than definitions
and connotations of criminal groups.
In contemporary conceptualisations of organised crime the theory of
illicit enterprise does not necessarily deny the ethnic-based element of
organised crime. The transnational character of modern criminal enter-

prises can coexist with ethnic ties. How can they coexist has been clearly
explained, for example, by Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer
in a statement before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and
Terrorism in 20113: international organised crime groups pose a threat
to national security and, differently from domestic organised crime
groups, “know no borders” also in the exploitation of ethnic bonds.
The Assistant Attorney General also adds that transnational/interna-
tional criminal enterprises might coincide with domestic ones, but
pose an additional challenge precisely because of the involvement of
other jurisdictions. These statements are in line with the words of
Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey4 who, in 2008, said:
We have more than 120 prosecutors, and the FBI has more than 500
agents and analysts, dedicated to fighting organized crime. These profes-
sionals are skilled in using techniques originally developed to fight LCN
and other domestic threats. We’re going to capitalize on that expertise in
our global fight.
Contemporary transnational criminal enterprises are more threatening

also because they share the platform with the growing threat of terrorist
groups, which too, can be considered international organised crime
groups. In other words, as noticed by another interviewee at the NYC
Police Department:
Obviously today, since even before 9/11, late 1990s, the latest organised
crime threat became the terrorist groups [ . . . ] In this country it took us a
long time to treat Al Qaeda and the other groups as international orga-
nised criminal enterprises as opposed to isolated terrorists or regional
3
Statement of Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer Before the Senate Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, Washington, D.C. – Tuesday, 1 November, 2011.
Available at: http://www.frank-cs.org/cms/pdfs/DOJ/DOJ_Breuer_TOC.pdf.
4
Organized Crime at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.-
Wednesday, 23 April, 2008. Available at: https://www.justice.gov/archive/ag/speeches/2008/ag-
speech-080425.html.
Ethnic Ties Crystallised with Entrepreneurial Skills . . . 115
groups. So, one of the things you would see today is the use of the Civil
RICO statute to essentially target support and financing of international
organised crime and terrorist enterprises.
In other words, transnational/international organised crime groups are

an additional threat to security because of convergence of individuals,
interests and finances with terrorist groups. These groups can certainly
be an evolution of domestic – traditional – criminal groups but, at the
same time, represent a new threat, because of unprecedented globali-
sation of the security field. The ethnic connotations of criminal
groups – the Asians, the Italians, the Russians, the Nigerians – on
one side, reiterate geographical references and, on the other side, echo
a conceptualisation of organised crime that is tied to the mafia con-
spiracy, still condicio sine qua non of the US strategy against organised
crime.
While in the past the illicit enterprise paradigm logically opposed an
ethnocentric approach to organised crime and mafias, the law – as we
will see – chose the illicit enterprise approach to criminalise organised
crime and specifically “the Mafia” without having to explicitly define it.
Today, describing organised crime networks – from mafia families to
gangs to drug traffickers – with the word “enterprise” is the common
language choice in US institutions and official policy documents with
reference to both tight ethnic groups and loose multi-ethnic networks.
As noticed during an interview with a former senior prosecutor within
the Organized Crime Task Force in New York City, “what you imply
when you talk about an enterprise is the continuity of a structure with a
common purpose that lasts overtime; this is for legal enterprises, so is for
criminal ones”.
More than just a linguistic choice and, clearly, a legal one, the illicit
enterprise paradigm has also penetrated the securitisation process of
organised crime: transnational criminal enterprises refer to significant
cross-border and financial threats to national security (Martens, 1991).
In short, transnational organised crime groups are international illegal
enterprises – intended as networks that through ethnic or business ties
share common purposes overtime. Seeing it from another angle, trans-
national organised crime groups represent a more alarming concern and
challenge for law enforcement because they raise issues of jurisdictions

and of border control, thus calling for security measures.
As confirmed in the White House’s 2011 strategy against transna-
tional organised crime (The White House, 2011: foreword), “transna-
tional criminal organisations have taken advantage of our increasingly
interconnected world to expand their illicit enterprises”. Moreover, in
the US, “historically, criminal groups have burrowed into local ethnic
communities, but now this is enhanced by the fact that they can leverage
Internet connectivity and extensive, international transportation lin-
kages from localities around the globe” (Bjelopera and Finklea, 2012:
18). On one side international criminal enterprises are “new”, they “are
able to operate increasingly outside traditional parameters, take quick
advantage of new opportunities” (Ott, 2012: 3). On the other side, as
shared during an interview at the NYC Police Department, “criminal
enterprises from Russia, China, Italy, Nigeria, and Japan have increased
their international presence and worldwide networks or have become
involved in more transnational criminal activities”. In a revival of the
alien conspiracy, ethnic-based approach – “most of the world’s major
international organised crime groups are present in the United States”
(Ott, 2012: 3). There is an entanglement between transnational/inter-
national enterprises threatening national interests also through ethnic
connotations of their memberships and affiliates, both locally and glob-
ally. It does not surprise to hear from a prosecutor serving in the
Criminal Justice Division of the State of New York’s Office of the
Attorney General discussing an health care fraud case that: “the partici-
pants were from the same ethnic group, essentially of Russian origin,
they had been recruited through a sense of cultural trust and familiarity
and because of their limited English and a lack of experience with US
laws”. Furthermore, “these characteristics [ethnic recruitment and cul-
tural trust] continue to be present in health care fraud schemes largely
committed by Eurasian groups”. Indeed, as noticed (Ott, 2012: 11),
“the common characteristics and ties that are shared between members
of the group and/or between known groups may be the most recogni-
sable indicator of an organised crime group”.
The contemporary conceptualisation of organised crime in the US
institutions, therefore, is unsurprisingly quite complex. Criminal
Section 2 Criminalising “the Mafia”, “La Cosa Nostra”, “the Mob” . . . 117
enterprises – as long-lasting structures and sharing common purposes in

the exploitation and infiltration of various markets – are both national
and international, they are still very much defined by ethnic elements
but they have become challenges to national security because of the focus
on counter-terrorism after 9/11. These enterprises are more or less
compared and contrasted to the “traditional” and domestic manifesta-
tions of organised crime par excellence, “the Mafia”, LCN, crystallised
within a contested – but still dominant in practice – alien conspiracy
theory and a hierarchical and ethnic-based approach to organised crime.
The conceptualisation of organised crime and mafia as enterprises
of crime certainly represent the reason for many strategic changes in
the law and in control strategies of the federal government in the past
40–50 years.
Section 2 Criminalising “the Mafia”, “La Cosa

Nostra”, “the Mob”: Pride and Challenges
As reminded by the Congressional Research Service (Finklea, 2010: 4),
“through most of the twentieth century, U.S. law enforcement combated
what many consider ‘traditional’ organised crime networks operating
inside the United States, including the Italian Mafia, Russian Mafia,
Japanese Yakuza, and Chinese Tongs”. The fight and the successes
against “traditional” and ethnic-based organised crime groups, and espe-
cially against American LCN, are both the curse and the pride of law
enforcement in the US. Indeed, as noticed by the Deputy Chief for
International Organised Crime in the Organised Crime and Gang
Section, on one side “unfortunately, for many years the federal govern-
ment failed to even recognise the existence of the LCN and was therefore
slow to respond to the LCN’s extensive criminal activities in a compre-
hensive manner” (Ott, 2012: 2). On the other side, “after years of
persistent multi-agency investigations and prosecutions, the organised
crime program proved to be extremely successful – mobsters were
indicted, convicted, and imprisoned; their assets were forfeited; and,
ultimately, the LCN was severely weakened” (Ott, 2012: 3). The
successes against LCN have heavily influenced the perception of orga-

nised crime in the country. Attorney General Mukasey5 noticed in 2008
how:
Perhaps we are victims of our own success, because it seems that there is a
widespread belief around the country that organized crime is no longer a
serious threat. Most Americans think of organised crime only as a part of
America’s past; its modern role merely the subject of popular movies or
television dramas.
Law enforcement’s successes and subsequent perceptions of the US

winning the fight against LCN (Jacobs et al., 1994) have certainly
reinforced the enterprise paradigm. As noticed by Rebecca Pyne
(2012: 47), Trial Attorney in the Labour-Management Racketeering
Unit – Organised Crime and Gang Section: “the DOJ [Department of
Justice] has had longstanding success in prosecuting racketeering activity
engaged in by the La Cosa Nostra, under an enterprise theory that
targets the structure of the LCN family and its leadership”. The enter-
prise paradigm would not be as influential if it was not for its impact on
criminal policy and criminal law. As the Racketeer Influenced and
Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) – enacted as Title IX of the
Organized Crime Control Act (OCCA) 1970 – is certainly the principal
example of this, it is important to look at the legislative history of both
RICO and OCCA. It has been noted (Green, 1976: 499) that “since the
legislative history and the statutory language of OCCA do not concur,
opposing decisions on the scope of OCCA coverage have resulted from
the courts’ use of this analytical approach”. Notwithstanding former
FBI’s Director J. Edgar Hoover’s denial of the very existence of orga-
nised crime for most of his mandate (Woodiwiss, 2015c; Woodiwiss,
2015b; Woodiwiss, 2015a; Woodiwiss, 2015d; Jacobs and Dondlinger
Wyman, 2014), since the 1970s the Federal Bureau of Investigation
5
Organized Crime at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C.-
Wednesday, 23 April, 2008. Available at: https://www.justice.gov/archive/ag/speeches/2008/ag-
speech-080425.html.
Section 2 Criminalising “the Mafia”, “La Cosa Nostra”, “the Mob” . . . 119
(FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have been the most active
institutions in the fight against organised crime. After the Kefauver
Committee in 1950 and the news of a mafia meeting in Appalachin in
1957 (Albanese, 1996; Albanese, 2014), after Joe Valachi’s testimony in
1963 and after the President’s Crime Commission Task Force on
Organized Crime issued its report in 1967 – followed by Theft of a
Nation by Donald Cressey in 1969 – the alarm against organised crime
in the country was tangible and became a political matter for federal
institutions to deal with. Section 1 of Public Law 91-4526 sets forth the
legislative intent of the RICO Act:
It is the purpose of this Act to seek the eradication of organized crime in

the United States by strengthening the legal tools in the evidence-gather-
ing process, by establishing new penal prohibitions, and by providing
enhanced sanctions and new remedies to deal with the unlawful activities
of those engaged in organised crime.
In the same statement the Congress specifies how organised crime

engages in “unlawful conduct and the illegal use of force, fraud, and
corruption” and how the proceeds from criminal activities, such as loan
sharking and distribution of narcotics or other forms of social exploita-
tion give organised crime “money and power [ . . . ] used to infiltrate and
corrupt legitimate businesses”
Even though OCCA and RICO struggled to be fully understood and
used both in and out of court (Blakey, 1990; Lynch, 1987; Green,
1976), they represent the consolidation of the enterprise paradigm with-
out, however, abandoning the ethnic-based approach altogether, which
remained hidden in the legislative intent. Even though RICO does not
mention the Italian-American Mafia or (La) Cosa Nostra and certainly
was not enacted for the sole purpose to fight “the Mafia” (Goldsmith,
1988), since the 1970s both the FBI and the DOJ de facto equated
organised crime with Italian-American Mafia or LCN “crime families”
6
Public Law No. 91-452, § 1, 84 Stat. 922 (1970) (Congressional Statement of Findings and
Purpose).
or simply “the Mob” (Jacobs and Dondlinger Wyman, 2014). On the

other side, however, a multi-agency approach ensured the possibility to
effectively use RICO against a wide range of criminal enterprises, much
beyond the intended target of the Italian-American Mafia. As of today,
next to the FBI’s Organised Crime Control Program and the DOJ’s
Organized Crime and Racketeering Section in Washington D.C., each
US District Attorney’s office has one or more units dedicated to orga-
nised crime control, as do police departments; other federal agencies play
important roles as well. These are, for example: the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA); the Internal Revenue Service (IRS); the Office of
Labor Racketeering (OLR); the Bureau of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives;
the US Marshals Service and the Coast Guard. There are permanent
coordinating bodies such as the National Council on Organized Crime,
created in 1970, and the National Organized Crime Planning Council,
but obviously, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies can
establish joint task forces or agree informal ad-hoc cooperation (Jacobs
and Dondlinger Wyman, 2014).
RICO: Enterprise and Pattern of Racketeering

Activity
As shared in an interview with a senior prosecutor in the Organised
Crime Task Force in NYC, the shift from conspiracy offences to
enterprise conspiracy
was largely the result of one person, Blakey,7 who wrote the statute. When
Blakey wrote the statute the people here, who grew up in a common law
system thinking that you prosecute based on individuals and crimes,
resisted his interpretation of RICO, they said it couldn’t have meant
what he says it means. It took a while to get it adopted in the mind-set.
7
He is referring to Professor George Robert Blakey (born 7 January 1936, in Burlington, North
Carolina), an American attorney and law professor who drafted the RICO Act and wrote on the
subject of enterprise criminality during his time at Notre Dame and Cornell Law Schools.
RICO: Enterprise and Pattern of Racketeering Activity 121
Indeed, the problem targeted by RICO is a problem of complex con-

spiracies, as further specified in the same interview:
Once you get to complex conspiracies you get an end point when con-
spiracies occur over a period of time but you cannot tell whether there are
breaks or not, what the agreement precisely is or whether an old con-
spiracy ends a new one begins or there are lots of crime which appear
connected but you cannot prove the connection.
In the existing law of conspiracy, individuals’ relationships with an

organisation were “not only deemed irrelevant but it was deemed pre-
judicial”. Conspiracy “has tried and reached its limit with syndicated
crime. The answer was RICO”.
RICO was not the first attempt to criminalise organised crime and
specifically the Mafia in the US. In 1965, most notably, Senator
McClellan had proposed a bill to outlaw the Mafia and other organised
crime syndicates and which contained the following8:
Whoever after the date of enactment knowingly becomes or remains a

member of (1) the Mafia, or (2) any other organization having for one of
its purposes violation[s] of the criminal laws relating to gambling, extor-
tion, blackmail, narcotics, prostitution, or labour-racketeering, with
knowledge of the purpose of such organization, shall be guilty of a felony.
When the bill was deemed unconstitutional because it criminalised

status rather than conduct (Goldsmith, 1988), Senator McClellan
noticed: “we have to do it in a more indirect way and by taking many
trails that lead to the goal rather than taking a direct approach”.9 As
agreed, RICO ultimately “provided the ‘indirect way’ Senator
McClellan had sought to strike constitutionally at enterprise criminal-
ity” (Goldsmith, 1988: 784). The federal response, with large and
complex federal investigations and resonant federal Grand Jury trials
8
S. 2187, 89th Cong., 1st Sess., 111 Cong. Rec. 14,680 (1965)
9
Criminal Laws and Procedures, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and
Procedures of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, 89th Cong., 2d Sess. 32 (1966), at 32–37.
represents what has been described in an interview with a federal judge

in Brooklyn “the symbol that the war against the Mafia had started and
was serious”.
RICO has two main components: the enterprise and the pattern of
racketeering activities. Enterprise in RICO is broadly defined10: “enter-
prise includes any individual, partnership, corporation, association, or
other legal entity, and any union or group of individuals associated in
fact although not a legal entity”. Racketeering activities are criminal
activities of various types, as listed in s.1961(1) of the Act and punish-
able with more than one year imprisonment. There are four predicate
RICO offences: (a) investing racketeering proceeds in an enterprise; (b)
acquiring or maintaining an interest in an enterprise through a pattern
of racketeering activity; (c) conducting the affairs of an enterprise
through a pattern of racketeering activity; and (d) conspiring to commit
any of these violations. Through the vast jurisprudence on RICO, which
is impossible to reproduce here, we can trace some of the most salient
moments of its interpretation.
First of all, for RICO to apply there must be an enterprise, which United
States v. Turkette11clarified to include both legal and illegal enterprises (thus
also criminal groups). Specifically, as the primary scope of RICO is to target
the infiltration of organised crime in legitimate businesses, the Act reaches
out to both legal and in-fact associations to deal with the problem at its very
source (Low, 2003). An enterprise is a group of persons associated with the
common purpose of engaging in a course of conduct. As specified by the
Supreme Court in United States v. Bledsoe12 the enterprise needs a “distinct
structure” such as the “command system of a Mafia family” or the “hier-
archy, planning and division of profits within a prostitution ring”; an
enterprise must be more than an informal, minimal group, and not an
occasional conspiracy.
Second, there needs to be a pattern of racketeering activity, made of at
least two criminal offences among those listed in the statute occurring
10
18 U.S. Code § 1961 – Definitions – s.4
11
United States v. Turkette – Supreme Court of the United States, 1981-452 U.S. 576.
12
United States v. Bledsoe – Supreme Court of the United States, 674 F.2d 647 (8th Cir. 1982).
RICO: Enterprise and Pattern of Racketeering Activity 123
within 10 years from the first to the last. The pattern of racketeering
activity is a series of criminal acts and it has to be connected to the
existing enterprise. The “enterprise” engages in a “pattern of racketeering
activity”; this means that the existence of the enterprise is proved
separately from the criminal activities constituting the pattern and that
proof of one does not prove the other.13 There needs to be continuity in
the pattern plus relationship of the identified pattern with the enterprise
(Sergi, 2015). This has been stated by the Supreme Court in Turkette,
which established that an enterprise needs to exhibit a common or
shared purpose among associates, must function as a continuing union
and must also have an ascertainable structure, distinct but related to the
pattern of racketeering activity.14 As the “target of RICO is not sporadic
activity but sophisticated organised crime” – as shared at the NYC Police
Department – and organised crime keeps by definition a low-profile in
society (Low, 2003) it makes sense that RICO asks to look “at the real
story”.
That RICO was an arsenal against “the Mafia”, intended as hierarchical
organisation made of “crime families” united by a Commission, seems to
be pacific in the literature (Blakey, 1990; Goldsmith, 1988; Lynch, 1987;
Jacobs et al., 1994). Similarly, pacific is that the statute was not solely used
to fight “the Mob” and was considerably expanded – not without judicial
conflicts – much beyond traditional organised crime (Low, 2003).
Interestingly, the expansion of RICO beyond organised crime also comes
with a reduction of its use against organised crime when other routes can be
pursued. As noticed in an interview in the Criminal Justice Division of the
State of New York’s Office of the Attorney General:
As prosecutors when we sit around the table deciding what to charge in a

case that involved a group, organised group with some kind of hierarchy
[ . . . ], we ask ourselves “should we go for this? Should we go for this
charge or should we just charge the drug trafficking or witness
13
See, among others, United States v. Anderson, 626 F.2d 1358, 1365 (8th Cir.1980) and again
Turkette.
14
In United States v. Boyle, No. 07–1309 556 U. S. (2009), the Court stated that no reference to
“ascertainable structure” is mandated and that this precise language is not required for the jury.
intimidation?” And we would often say “No RICO”. And I think what
happened was that traditional organised crime started to fade and what we
were left with was a lot of drug trafficking and the penalties were really
severe and they were federal charges already. We didn’t need RICO;
moreover RICO charges have to be approved in Washington, they go
under lots of scrutiny, what you have to do bureaucratically to get it . . . is
it going to make a change in the penalty or is it going to complicate you
can achieve at trial ? . . . As we say, the juice has to be worth the squeeze.
The Hybrid Nature of RICO and the Versatility

of the Enterprise Paradigm
At a closer look, the revolution of RICO and its current strengths are not
in the criminalisation of “the Mafia”, but rather in the conceptualisation
of an anonymous/generic criminal enterprise. It is the criminal enterprise –
unnamed but specific enough – that has revolutionised the US approach
to organised crime. Even though neither “the Mafia” nor LCN were/are
nominated in the Act, the target was specific enough for the Act to be
effective. On the other side, the lack of “named” threat in RICO,
allowed for its hybrid character, as a tool against organised crime,
traditional and non-traditional, when state charges alone do not suffice
and when the crimes are not chargeable otherwise at federal level. The
hybrid character of RICO – as more than just a criminalisation of
organised crime as criminal enterprises – is already in its legislative
history. In the Congressional Statement of Findings and Purpose15 we
read: “money and power [of organised crime] are increasingly used to
infiltrate and corrupt legitimate business and labour unions and to
subvert and corrupt our democratic processes”. As noticed by Blakey
and Gettings (1980) this already indicated that RICO could be applied
to white-collar crimes and especially political corruption cases. Once
again, the possibility to apply RICO to political corruption and other
types of crimes beyond “traditional” organised crime reveals how the
15
Public Law No. 91-452, § 1, 84 Stat. 922 (1970) (Congressional Statement of Findings and Purpose).
The Hybrid Nature of RICO and the Versatility . . . 125
conceptualisation of organised crime in the country is certainly tied to a

perception of the power of crime families (Mafia families) to alter the
political process through infiltration and corruption. This conceptuali-
sation is mirrored in the way both the enterprise and the pattern of
racketeering activity are constructed in RICO. Specifically, the applic-
ability of RICO to white-collar, corporate crimes and corruption, has
two main aspects: first the inclusion of certain crimes, such as mail fraud,
in the RICO list of racketeering activities; second, and connected to the
first element, the civil side of the RICO Act. On one side “it is the
inclusion in the definition of criminal syndicates of such offenses as mail
fraud, robbery, and theft from interstate shipments, that permits expan-
sive intrusions of RICO into ordinary white collar crime” (Lynch, 1987:
976). On the other side “mail fraud remains the ‘true love’ of federal
prosecutors of white-collar crime [ . . . ] And because of civil RICO, mail
fraud is becoming the ‘true love’ of the commercial plaintiff’s bar as
well” (Low, 2003: 333)
As for the first point, it can be argued that the inclusion of a number
of offences related to white-collar crime and corruption as predicate
offences of the pattern of racketeering activities required for a RICO
charge, would not have occurred without the consolidated perception
that “enterprise criminality allows to capture the whole story . . . you can
tell the whole story, you want the jury to hear the whole story rather
than struggling to prove smaller state discrete cases, you can broaden the
evidence” as noticed in an interview in the Criminal Justice Division of
the State of New York’s Office of the Attorney General. Additionally, it
has been clarified by the Supreme Court16 how neither the enterprise
nor the pattern of racketeering activity needs to have an economic
motive and that the profit-seeking goal is one of the various identifiable
goals the criminal enterprise can have. As pointed out by the DOJ, the
lack of an economic motive requirement is one of the unique elements of
RICO: “it permits the Government to use RICO against groups that do
not have a financial purpose for example, political terrorists and other
16
National Organization for Women, Inc. v. Scheidler, 510 U.S. 249 (1994).
groups that commit violent crimes, such as murder or bombings, but

without an economic motive” (DOJ, 2009: 83).
Similarly, the civil aspects of RICO represent one of the unique ele-
ments of the Act. RICO provides an explicit authorisation of a civil remedy
(treble damages, section 1964.c) to persons injured by a violation of section
1962 (RICO offences) and also (section 1964.a) grants the Attorney
General of the US with the exclusive authority to sue for equitable relief.
In recent years RICO’s civil lawsuits have been expanded to include various
type of complex corporate crime in cases, which have been denounced as
“pestilence” to the national economy (Mitchell et al., 2008: 32). The
Supreme Court already in 198517 recognised and validated that “in its
private civil version RICO is evolving into something quite different from
the original conception of its enactors”. Overall, “the typical RICO civil
suit involves what could be viewed as ordinary commercial litigation
dressed up to look like a RICO violation by allegations of mail or wire
fraud” (Low, 2003: 596). According to the FBI18:
The civil provisions of the RICO statute have proven to be very powerful
weapons, especially the consent decrees.19 They are often more productive
because they attack the entire corrupt entity instead of imprisoning
individuals, who can easily be replaced with other organized crime mem-
bers or associates. [ . . . ] A civil RICO complaint can restore democracy to
a corrupt union by imposing civil remedies designed to eliminate such
corruption and deter its re-emergence.
It has been argued in an interview at the NY Organised Crime Task

Force, that civil RICO is the “direct result of a willingness to control
17
Sedima S.P.R.L. v. Imrex Co., Inc. – Supreme Court of the United States, 1985 – 473 U.S. 479.
18
FBI – Italian Organized Crime – https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/organizedcrime/
italian_mafia.
19
The DOJ’s Civil RICO Manual for Federal Attorneys (DOJ, 2007:157) defines a consent
decree as “a voluntary agreement, subject to the court’s approval, entered into by consent of the
parties to a lawsuit to resolve a lawsuit”. “The parties waive their right to litigate the issues
involved in the case and thus save themselves the time, expense, and inevitable risk of litigation”
United States v. Armour & Co., 402 U.S. 673, 681 (1971).
The Hybrid Nature of RICO and the Versatility . . . 127
organised criminal activity” therefore “everything that relates to the

criminal activity, including the money, is a target”; it follows that:
When the pattern of criminal activity becomes obvious – you have frauds
or business crimes – then it is only the proof of the relationship between
the pattern and an existing enterprise that will determine if you can use
RICO; basically you need to establish whether the enterprise is the victim
or the vehicle of the pattern and whether it is still distinct from the
individuals.
Arguably, some interpretative problems of civil RICO have emerged

because of the confusion between conceptualisations of enterprises
(legitimate and criminal) as vehicles to commit a pattern of racketeering
activity and enterprises (legitimate, not criminal) as victims of the crim-
inal pattern by another vehicle enterprise (Low, 2003; Oser, 1987):
logically, only the first case is referring to organised crime groups. As
the statute aims, first and foremost, at protecting legitimate enterprises
from criminal infiltration, pressure and influence, it is fundamental that
no confusion arises on which type of enterprise the case involves (vehicle
or victim) and whether an enterprise exists as a distinct entity from the
persons who commit the offences. This is important because through the
enterprise the relationship plus continuity condition is established: the
proof of the enterprise is what turns single criminal’s acts into the
pattern of racketeering activity.20
The hybrid and versatile interpretation of the concept of (illicit)
enterprise as a separate entity, distinct from the individuals who
effectively commit the predicate offences of RICO, confirms what
noticed by a federal judge of the United States District Court for
the Eastern District of New York: “RICO is not just a recognition
that conspiracy is not enough, it is a recognition that these are
more serious offences; it elevates the gravity of [syndicated] crime”.
He adds:
20
United States v. Weisman, 624 F.2d 1118 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 449 U.S. 871 (1980).
It is a fact that in a certain way the whole is greater than the sum of the
parts [ . . . ], therefore looking at the enterprise that produces the criminal
activity is the starting point of the response. [ . . . ] This is because of the
perception of organised crime in this country. We didn’t know much but
the fact that it was a crime-producing machine and we wanted to get to
that machine and all it did, money, power, drugs.
The Organised Crime Strategy Against “Non-

traditional” and International Criminal
Enterprises
Professor G.E. Lynch in 1987 noticed (Lynch, 1987: 969):
When the government undertakes to prove in a criminal trial that the

Mafia exists, and that jurisdictional disputes among its members are
settled by a “Commission” comprised of the heads of the five families,
more is going on than simply a determination of the culpability of a
handful of aging gangsters. Such a trial becomes at least in part an exercise
in public education and ritual denunciation of criminal activity.
The symbolic meanings attached to criminal trials based on RICO in the

US echo in this quote as well as in the words of the interviewees. It is
quite crucial to reaffirm that with RICO and the possibility to go after
the criminal enterprises that were the families of (La) Cosa Nostra, a
precedent has been set in the way the whole system thinks, also symbo-
lically, of “traditional” organised crime in terms of “the Mafia”.
When we look at today’s strategy and also when it comes to “non-
traditional” organised crime, we find three main issues – among many
worth discussing – that particularly enrich our discourse on policing the
mafia spectrum through the Enterprise model of the US. These are three
interconnected themes: the strategy against international/transnational
organised crime with particular emphasis on cybercrime today; the issues
of jurisdiction and in particular the extraterritorial application of RICO,
and the economic side of investigations in organised crime.
The Organised Crime Strategy Against “Non-traditional” . . . 129
As for the first theme, the White House’s strategy (2011: 3) against
transnational organised crime quite clearly defines first the difference
between traditional and non-traditional organised crime, and second the
rise of transnational “enterprises” of crime connected to cybercrime:
In years past, TOC was largely regional in scope, hierarchically structured,

and had only occasional links to terrorism. Today’s criminal networks are
fluid, striking new alliances with other networks around the world and
engaging in a wide range of illicit activities, including cybercrime and
providing support for terrorism. Virtually every transnational criminal
organization and its enterprises are connected and enabled by information
systems technologies, making cybercrime a substantially more important
concern.
In the Manhattan District Attorney Office, the Major Economic Crimes

Bureau, which focuses on criminal conducts committed in the financial
sector, obviously works very closely to the cybercrime bureau.21 It was
noticed how enterprise corruption (Article 460 – NY Penal Law, which
is the state law version of federal RICO for the state of New York,
known as “baby” RICO) is essentially aimed at targeting white-collar
crimes and fraud, increasingly committed through the use of the
Internet. Buying unregulated Internet currencies, credit card frauds,
spam advertising online, might be large-scale crimes, but it is quite
hard, according to the attorneys, to establish the existence of an enter-
prise with a common purpose, a distinct character from the pattern of
racketeering activity and an ascertained structure. On one side, enter-
prise corruption is a class B felony, so not the most serious classification,
thus easier to use. Enterprise corruption, as it is in the case of federal
RICO, “brings together the seriousness of the various aspects of the
offending”. On the other side, an attorney noted, “crimes committed
through cyber are not invariably referable to distinct enterprises”.
21
Interviewees at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office did not consent to be recorded. Notes
have been taken during the interviews and integrated afterwards for clarity and accuracy. Direct
quotes are therefore not possible unless they have been annotated as such.
The reasons for the success of the enterprise paradigm in the way
described so far are also the reasons for its difficulties with the changing
nature of crimes, which have been defined “non-traditional”. The his-
torical characterisation of organised crime as criminal enterprises clashes
with both the needs of investigation bureaus in cases of organised
cybercrime and the issues in terms of jurisdiction and competence of
law enforcement. Claiming jurisdiction in low-level crimes committed
in a pattern and with an element of cyber is of particular concern in
Manhattan, as agreed in the DA’s Major Economic Crimes Bureau;
jurisdiction and competence can be claimed when either the victim or
the perpetrator of the crimes are in the district or when in the “foresee-
able future” some aspect of the online activity will “land” in the district.
On the other side of the spectrum, the question of extraterritoriality in
RICO has been of interest for the courts dealing with transnational criminal
groups. RICO has been successfully used in cases involving criminal activ-
ities and/or defendants located outside the United States based on the idea
“that because a number of RICO’s predicate acts possess an extraterritorial
reach, RICO itself possesses an extraterritorial reach”.22 RICO’s extraterri-
toriality is still often debated, especially in civil RICO claims. Various courts
have often considered RICO inapplicable unless the “enterprise” was a
domestic one and/or carried out considerable part of its decision-making
process in the US.23 It has been argued (Ott, 2012: 17) that the reasoning of
civil cases in which the courts rejected RICO’s extraterritoriality is untenable
when it comes to transnational organised crime, because:
It would preclude the government’s use of RICO to target the leadership

of organised crime groups, violent gangs, terrorist organisations, and cyber
networks and fraud syndicates that emanate from around the globe, but
carry out their criminal activities in the United States and victimise
American citizens.
22
Morrison v. Nat’l Australia Bank Ltd., 130 S. Ct. 2869, 2878 (2010)
23
See, for example, Norex Petroleum Ltd. v. Access Indus, Inc., 622 F.3d 148 (2d Cir. 2010),
amended by 631 F.3d. 29, 31–33 (2d Cir. 2010); European Community v. RJR Nabisco, Inc., 2011
WL 843957, (E.D.N.Y. 8 March 2011); Cedeño v. Intech Group, Inc., 733 F. Supp. 2d 471, 472
(S.D.N.Y. 2010), which all rejected RICO’s extraterritoriality.
The US Enterprise Policing Model 131
RICO’s extraterritorial applicability is clearly supported in investigations of

money laundering and proceeds of crime reinvestments, where the pattern of
racketeering activity is more likely to have an international dimension. In
particular, since RICO, and in support of RICO, fighting money laundering
has obviously been at the forefront of the federal strategy against organised
crime, with the criminalisation of money laundering at the federal level in
1986 (Money Laundering Control Act 1986). Procedures for asset forfei-
ture, the money laundering statute and RICO, with its extraterritorial
application, are today the three most used tools in fighting organised crime
in the US, both against traditional and non-traditional organised crime
groups. Strong investigations on money laundering within or separately
from any RICO charges, still show a peculiar attention of investigators on
roles and specialisms of individuals in criminal enterprises, as shared again in
the Major Economic Crime Bureau of the Manhattan DA’s office. Money
laundering schemes necessitate facilitators to be carried out, such as bankers
or business associates or employees of legitimate companies. Financial inter-
mediaries might, at the same time, be both victims of organised crime
infiltration and criminal enterprises themselves. Fundamentally, economic
crimes and money laundering are connected to other crimes committed by
criminal enterprises, they are considered part of the whole picture that RICO
seeks to capture, they are part of the pattern of racketeering activity in the
predicated offences of the RICO Act; they are the economic manifestations
of organised crime. It is important to note that even though it has been
agreed that RICO does not require an economic motive at the basis of the
enterprise’s criminal plan (Low, 2003; DOJ, 2009), the profit-seeking
motive of criminal enterprises is nevertheless considered the main drive of
transnational and “modern” manifestations of organised crime.
The US Enterprise Policing Model

The US policing model against organised crime pivots around the theory of
illicit enterprise, which has become law through RICO and with the support
of the FBI’s investigations (Fig. 4.1). In the US Enterprise model, the
real protagonist, very similarly to the Italian one, is criminal law. The
US Enterprise Model
Traditional
OC: LCN is
an ethni
criminal Federal investigations
enterprise
seeking
money and
power
FBI & DOJ RICO
Non-
traditional Criminal enterprise Civil provisions and
OC: TOC and pattern of other applications
Multi-
groups are a racketeering beyond economic
agency
threat to activities motives
actions
national
security
Fig. 4.1 The US Enterprise Model
conceptualisation of organised crime as criminal enterprise migrated from

theory into criminal law and – through judicial interpretations – has been
changed and modified. It is quite visible that the US score quite high on our
mafia spectrum, because of the very peculiar history the country had with
American-Sicilian (La) Cosa Nostra as both a power and an enterprise
syndicate.
The Conceptualisation of Organised Crime
The way “the Mafia” (again, with capital M to indicate the organisation,
the syndicate, the conspiracy among the families) has been conceptua-
lised is still very influential both for public perceptions of contemporary
organised crime and in the Enterprise model. It is very telling that a story
from the FBI in 2009,24 titled “Move Over, Mafia. The New Face of
Organized Crime”, opens by saying:
FBI Stories 13/02/2009 – Move Over, Mafia. The New Face of Organized Crime, https://
24
www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2009/february/orgcrime_021309.
When you hear the words “organized crime,” the first thing that comes to
mind is probably the Mafia and its five major crime families in New York City.
But have you ever heard of the notorious Thief-in-Law Vyacheslav Ivankov,
the Solnstsevo organization, the Young Joon Yang gang, or the Black Dragons?
They’re involved in organized crime, too. [ . . . ]. These groups have much in
common with their Mafia brethren, beginning with their hunger for power
and profit. But what sets them apart is their reach. While traditional mobsters
mostly operate domestically, Eurasian and Asian crime groups are
transnational.
The idea of “the Mafia”, thanks to both popular culture and law enforce-
ment directions, is crystallised in contemporary perceptions. Not dissimilar
from the Italian Structure Model, the US Enterprise model is based on the
idea that organised crime is best understood by looking at structures,
families and groups as criminal enterprises engaged in profitable activities
in the illegal markets and with enough money and power to be competitive
(albeit by infiltration and corruption) in the legal markets too. The idea of
organised crime as “criminal enterprise”, with affiliates having a common
or shared (and criminal) purpose lasting overtime, is applicable to both
“traditional” organised crime (the Mafia) and non-traditional, new forms,
such as in transnational criminal groups. Notwithstanding the historical
origin of the illicit enterprise theory – as a theory opposed to the alien
conspiracy theory, which characterised organised crime as ethnic-based and
alien problem – today the term “criminal enterprise” is used with reference
to both domestic and international groups, both of single ethnicity and
multi-ethnic ones. Again, the FBI specifies this in the story above:
Eurasian criminal groups hail from dozens of countries spanning the Baltics,
the Balkans, Central/Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucacus, and Central Asia.
Although ethnically-based, they work with other ethnic groups when perpe-
trating crimes. Asian organized crime includes traditional enterprises like the
Chinese Triads, Chinese Tong, and Japanese Boryokudan (a.k.a., Yakuza), as
well as more loosely organised groups like the Big Boys Circle, the Asian Boyz
Group, and Vietnamese and Korean criminal enterprises.
The US Enterprise model is clearly the model born out of political

drives during the 1960s to declare war against “the Mafia”. As showed
in this chapter, it was very clear that the dominant view was “that an
‘organised criminal’ is one who has committed a crime while
occupying an organisational position for committing that crime”
(Task Force Report, 1967: 59). Today’s conceptualisation of transna-
tional organised crime, which is instead linked to the securitisation
process after 9/11, still measures up against that “traditional” con-
ceptualisation, therefore allowing for contemporary use of the word
and concept of “enterprise” with both traditional and non-traditional
meanings.
The Federal Approach and RICO
The settlement of the concept of the illicit enterprise has revolutionised

the approach to organised crime, especially at the federal level. Through
the criminalisation of the illicit enterprise in the RICO Act in 1970, the
policing system against organised crime in the US has embraced the
conceptualisation of “the Mafia” of that period, but it has essentially
chosen to focus on the behaviours of the Mafia families rather than on
their status. Focusing on the behaviours of criminal enterprises necessi-
tated a federal response because of the complexity of the phenomenon. In
other words, the federal approach allows and demands the employment of
more resources from the investigation phase all the way to Grand Jury
trials: declaring that criminal enterprises are separated entities from their
own members implies that more resources are needed to understand their
behaviours and capture the whole picture of their activities.
As said, investigative methods of the FBI are based on the ETI, which
poses an entire group at the core of the investigation rather than isolated
members. This is in support of the RICO Act, which necessitates evidence
of an enterprise engaged in a pattern of racketeering activity. In the US
model, intelligence gathering – including electronic surveillance, infor-
mants, undercover operations and cooperating witnesses – is conditioned
by the concept of the enterprise, for both strategic and tactical purposes.
In criminal law, RICO attacks organised crime in an innovative way
by focusing on the concept of enterprise as criminal subject rather than
solely on the commission of criminal offences by affiliates or on the
evidence of explicit agreements and conspiracies among criminals.

Notwithstanding the difficulties of accepting what is essentially a con-
struct, a virtual concept – the enterprise – as responsible subject of
criminal law, the success of RICO lies essentially in the codification
and in the crystallisation of organised crime as enterprise. RICO never
names any enemy or specific target, even though it is very clear that the
known specific enemy was “the Mafia”, the (La) Cosa Nostra families.
Significantly, the anonymity of the criminal enterprise has allowed
RICO to be applied much beyond the initial target. The hybridisation
of RICO has ensured its longevity and its centrality in the model even
after 9/11 and the changing classification of organised crime in criminal
policy and national security.
Fighting “Traditional” and “Non-traditional” Organised

Crime
Over the past few decades, US law enforcement has had great success
against the major crime families identified as LCN by using FBI’s
investigative methods and through the support of the DOJ and
Attorney General’s offices throughout various states. Most of the his-
tory of RICO is essentially based on the criminal law interpretation of
what mafia is, what mafia does and how it does it. It is fundamental,
for the evolution of RICO that the enterprise concept is not only
understood and accepted as a viable legal concept but also that it
keeps evolving to be applicable to contemporary manifestations of
organised crime. Thanks to the construction of RICO, and the notions
of enterprise criminality and pattern of racketeering activity, the Act
has moved considerably forward also in the way it has targeted what is
commonly indicated as “non-traditional” organised crime. The US
Enterprise model relies on RICO for complex enterprise criminality –
that is, white-collar and enterprise crimes – and for political corruption
thanks to the combination of RICO with mail and wire frauds. More
problematic has been the expansion of the civil provisions of the RICO
Act, due to the difficulties of detaching the notion of enterprise from its
criminal nature and attach it instead to quantifiable damage. Today, for
example, RICO struggles to capture complex manifestations of orga-

nised crime online, where the enterprise is difficult to identify, but does
recognise extraterritorial dimensions of transnational/international
criminal groups as the enterprise concept can be applied there instead.
In conclusion, this chapter has presented the Enterprise model, as
deconstructed policing strategy to describe how US law enforcement has
developed a conceptualisation of organised crime as mafia-infiltrated
enterprises and has built on this conceptualisation an arsenal against
criminal groups and networks. The US model is a highly complex
system where policing of organised crime is fundamentally (but not
only) federal and relies heavily upon codification and crystallisation of
concepts in federal criminal law. The Enterprise model is today the
result of various theories and analyses of mafia and organised crime, and
is the product of a continuous exchange between the institutional
perceptions of the phenomenon migrating into the law and bouncing
back to institutions after judicial interpretations.
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5
Case Study 3: Australia and the Visibility
Model
Section 1 The Identity of Organised Crime

Between Tradition and Modernity
As soon as one lands from the European continent, Australia appears with
lengths of dry land, a fractured territory and enormous distances. It also
appears very welcoming of diversity and still quite young, with pressing
needs for new information and thirst for knowledge about its own beauti-
ful and often very far apart inhabited spaces. Indeed, the geography of the
country plays a crucial role in the way crime is perceived, constructed and
policed. It is, in fact, the country of Royal Commissions, Parliamentary
Inquiries and endless multi-agencies reporting activities on various issues
on crime and justice. Curiosity, one might say, attempts to bridge the huge
distances among Australian cities.
When it comes to organised crime as well, Australia is not immune from
a difficult tiptoeing between curiosity and distance. As demonstrated by
Hufnagel (2013), when considering Australia, one has to remember not
only its federal constitution but also the differences in organisational
cultures and policing techniques that exist among the various jurisdictions.
Whereas police organisations in Australia were established at different

142 5 Case Study 3: Australia and the Visibility Model
times between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and each colony
had its own policing history, there is clearly legal convergence among the
various systems (Hufnagel, 2013). Organised crime has represented a
challenge for policing systems in Australia, especially in terms of cross-
border cooperation and information/intelligence sharing at both state and
federal levels. The territoriality and jealousy that still exist among state
police forces often frustrate the efforts made at the federal level to fight the
various manifestations of organised crime.
In Australia, like in the UK and differently from Italy and the USA,
organised crime has not been conceptualised around a notion of tradi-
tional mafia-type organisations, if not as a negative contrast, following
the US alien conspiracy rhetoric. For this reason Australia is third on our
mafia–OC spectrum. It was 1964 when a Commonwealth Police’s
investigation into migrant activities1 linked the threat of organised
criminal activities to migrants groups. In particular, the investigation
sought to “gauge the extent, if any, to which secret organisations, such as
the Mafia, have developed in Australia”, following a consideration that
“the current problems in Australia in migrant groups are limited to
Yugoslav and the small Italian community in the Mafia”. Decades
later, in 2002, a paper published by the Australian Institute of
Criminology (Morrison, 2002) reads:
The Indigenous groups in Australia do not foster traditions that have

generated any serious criminal activity. Immigrant groups have carried
with them some of the elements of organised crime but political inter-
ference and corruption has not been achieved on the scale reported in
Chicago in the early twentieth century, in Southern Italy throughout most
of the last 100 years, or in the republics of the former Soviet Union in the
last decade.
In the space of 40 years, the classic dichotomy between migration and

organised crime is stable in pre-policy discourse until the early 2000s.
1
Attorney’s General Department Commonwealth Police investigation into migrant activity – General
[organised crime, Mafia, criminal intelligence; 18 pp] Contents range 14 August 1964–October 1964
Series numberA432 Control symbol 1964/2403 Barcode 1111198.
Section 1 The Identity of Organised Crime Between Tradition . . . 143
This, however, changed as soon as the threat posed by Outlaw Motor

Cycle Gangs (OMCGs) gave a new flavour to manifestations of orga-
nised crime across the country. The interviews carried out in Australia,
however, confirm how there is a clear distinction between ethnic-based
groups and OMCGs. As noticed by an agent at the Australian Crime
Commission (ACC, today the Australian Criminal Intelligence
Commission, ACIC): “OMCGs are just one of the aspects of organised
crime in the country today, they work with other ethnic-based criminal
groups, which are still more traditional and therefore give a different
connotation to these gangs”. It seems therefore logical to unpack the
evolution of the identity of organised crime in Australia by looking at
two of the emerging trends from document analysis and in conversation
with the authorities: the emergence of domestic issues of crime and
security on one side and the attempt to measure the existence of mafia-
type ethnic-based criminal groups in the country, on the other side. The
former is represented by the policy and media focus on OMCGs while
the latter is visible through the historical evolution of the Calabrian-
Australian ‘ndrangheta.
Focus 1: The Bikies “Crisis”
The image of men riding motorcycles while also being responsible for
criminal activities is arguably the contemporary version of historical
pictures of bandits and brigands raiding towns and showing off manly
power over peasants. This visible side of organised criminality is clearly
not only Australian and definitely not new; more specifically, it is linked
to American urban places. Dulaney (2005) reports how the discourse
around the formation of such gangs, usually dating back to mid-twentieth
century, is actually based on very weak evidence. Also, the term “outlaw”,
Dulaney specifies, first came from the non-affiliation of certain motorcycle
groups to the American Motorcyclist Association, rather than referring, as
it is now, to the breaking of the law. On the Australian scene, the
Australian Crime Commission (ACC, 2013) specified how “it is the
criminal activities of OMCGs that distinguish them from recreational
motorcycle riding clubs, which are made up of people who get together
solely to ride their motorcycles and socialise”. Like any other criminal
phenomenon, the origins and evolution of motorcycle clubs need to be
understood within social and cultural factors. While arguably OMCGs
can be seen as a subculture built along military, disciplined and controlled
lines where affiliates share identity and a place in society, it is specifi-
cally on their “togetherness” and “potential threat of physical violence”
that interviewees in Australia place their blame. The visibility of
OMCGs – and the subsequent panic around “bikies” – is linked to
their feuds and public display of violence in certain moments of
Australian history. Both media and scholars refer to some of the events
that are well known to Australians when it comes to OMCGs. For
example, Ayling (2011b) refers to the notorious 1984 “Milperra
Massacre”. When gun shots were fired among 60 members of both
the Bandidos and the Comancheros gangs in a hotel parking area in
Sydney’s west, seven died and several were wounded, resulting in 43
people charged in one of Australia’s largest criminal cases (Harvey and
Simpson, 1989). Similarly, Schloenhardt (2008) starts his paper with a
short narration of the Melbourne shooting in 2007, when one man was
killed and two others were injured with the involvement of a member
of the Hells Angels. In 2009, a fight between OMCGs’ members
caused a murder at Sydney Airport, thus rekindling the moral panic
associated with bikies and subsequent political and juridical responses
(Ayling, 2014). Barker (2010: 135) has compiled a table collating
events of Motor Cycle Gang Violence in Australia. A total of 20 events
appear in the table, with a disproportionate amount happened in 1999.
This exercise confirms how every Australian state has more or less
experienced bikies’ violence.
Whereas the violent side of these gangs seems to be self-evident, the
involvement of OMCGs in serious and/or organised crimes appears to
be the ultimate realisation of fears linked to the images of these groups
(Shaw, 2002). As pointed out in one of the interviews at the Australian
Federal Police in Melbourne:
For the better or the worse, Outlaw Motor Cycle Gangs do conjure an
image of white men with long beards, long hair, ponytails and tattoos,
riding big motorbikes. Not only their “togetherness” is what gives the idea
of an increased and imminent threat of physical violence, but also it makes

it easier for them to acquire and keep a criminal reputation and get
involved in various criminal activities at different degrees of seriousness.
While it is understandable why this actual or potential violence is taken

seriously, the involvement of members of bikers’ gangs in organised
crime has been placed on a continuum, to indicate the different levels
of involvement in organised crime activities and the various degrees of
sophistication in planning and executing such activities (Barker, 2014).
This continuum has been further specified by the Australian Crime
Commission (ACC, 2013: 2):
Aside from these examples of group violence, most OMCG chapters do

not engage in organised crime as a collective unit. Rather, their threat
arises from small numbers of members conspiring with other criminals for
a common purpose. These criminally involved members are able to
leverage off the OMCG to aid their criminal activities, ranging from
social nuisance in residential communities through to their involvement
in some of the most significant criminal syndicates in Australia.
The differentiation between the group and its individuals on a conti-

nuum is crucial to understand where the bikies crisis came from and is
definitely part of the response to such phenomena. Arguably, individuals
exploiting a group’s identity are more difficult to control and police than
an entire group born with a criminal plan. To target these individuals
the ACC in 2013 has distributed graphics with information on the
groups across the country: 44 OMCGs, 179 chapters (regional groups)
for a total of almost 4,500 members involved in drugs, firearms, pros-
titution, money laundering, vehicle re-birthing, blackmail, extortion and
obviously violence. The info-graphics also include a publication of logos
and identification symbols of the groups while announcing an increase
of 48% in OMCGs’ chapters since 2007.
The connection between OMCGs’ members and organised crimes
seems to be rooted in drug distribution since the 1980s (Lauchs et al.,
2015). However, at this stage, only circumstantial evidence links illicit
activities with large incomes of OCMGs. The Australian Crime
Commission in their Organised Crime report of 2011 stated that

OMCGs used their own networks to participate in the drug markets.
Their use of violence is comparable to and, at times, less threatening
than that of other ethnic-based groups, such as the Lebanese gangs or
other Middle-Eastern groups with whom they cooperate for the produc-
tion, importation and distribution of mainly methamphetamines (ACC,
2011a: 51). The distinction between ethnic based criminal groups and
OMCGs is still a considerable element to qualify the sophistication of
bikies’ groups, their involvement in organised crime activities and defi-
nitely the threat they pose to society, beyond their violent outbursts.
Focus 2: The Calabrian-Australian ‘Ndrangheta
The Commonwealth Police’s (in existence until the Australian Federal Police
was formed in 1979) investigation into migrant activities2 in October 1964
seconded Colin Brown, from the Australian Security Intelligence
Organisation (ASIO), to the Attorney’s General Department for a very
specific project. The aim of the project was “to undertake a survey of whether,
and if so the extent to which, a secret society of Calabrians or similar society
has become established in Australia with the object of engaging in extortion
and organised crime”. This enquiry followed the alarm raised by John
Cusack, from the US Bureau of Narcotics, in August 1964.3 Cusack had
warned that there was an Italian Secret Society operating in Melbourne, in
Victoria, in New South Wales and South Australia and, to a lesser extent also
Queensland and Western Australia. He had been extremely careful in his
terminology and very cautious in using the word “Mafia”, which, as he
specifies “is Sicilian in origin and membership”. The Secret Society he
referred to, instead, “is exclusively Calabrian”, “it numbers at least 300
members, 200 alone in the Melbourne area” and “it is obviously a derivation
2
Attorney’s General Department Commonwealth Police investigation into migrant activity –
General [organised crime, Mafia, criminal intelligence; 18 pp] Contents range 14 August 1964–
October 1964 Series number A432 Control symbol 1964/2403 Barcode 1111198.
3
Italian Criminal Society – complicity in the distribution of forged currency Contents range
1964–1986 Series number A432 Control symbol 1968/2173 Access status Open with exception
Barcode 3190972.
of the ancient Calabrian Secret Criminal Society known as the l’Onorata

Società (the Honoured Society), N’Dranghita (Calabrian dialect for the
Honoured Society) also referred to by some as Fibia”. The Cusack report
to the authorities in Victoria had warned that, if left unchecked, this secret
organisation similar to the Mafia, “within the next twenty-five years . . . is
capable of diversification into all facets of organised crime and legitimate
business. This could very well include narcotics, organising gambling includ-
ing corruption . . . and organised usury”. The extreme clarity of John Cusack
and the (underestimated) reach of his findings and recommendations pre-
dicted the evolution of the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta in Australia. Not only
Colin Brown, in 1965, confirmed Cusack’s findings in his report titled “The
Italian Criminal Society in Australia” but also he clarified the extent of the
presence of this criminal society in the country, specifying numbers, titles,
rankings, locations and criminal activities. He also established a birthday for
the settlement of the criminal organisation across the country: in 1922 the
three (alleged) founders of the ‘ndrangheta in Australia first arrived in
Australia on the “King of Italy” ship in Melbourne (Sergi, 2015b). The
picture painted by Brown was not just gloomy, but also pointed to a
systematic presence of the Calabrian clans: they had settled across Australia
creating a structure that will later be recognised as the “Australian Crimine” –
the Australian chamber of control – by the Italian prosecutors (DNA, 2012;
DNA, 2014; Sergi, 2015b). It was not the first time that the authorities had
looked at the Italian and Calabrian communities to assess their involvement
in crime. As reminded by Brown (2017), between 1928 and 1939 local
authorities associated a series of murders and violent acts associated with the
“Black Hand Gang” in North Queensland. The media at the time and other
following publications (Harvey, 1948) had linked these acts to Italian
criminals, in between racist remarks and historical inaccuracies. However,
the links among the Black Hand, Calabrian communities and ‘ndrangheta
affiliates in those years are more than just circumstantial and point to a
situation similar to the one in the USA and Canada in the same period
(Brown, 2017; Bennetts, 2016).
While the historical accounts on the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta in
Australia still keep their almost nostalgic reference to “the Mafia” as
usually referred to in literature and tradition, the controversial nature of
the ‘ndrangheta in the country has not stopped receiving attention from
law enforcement and media throughout the decades. Australia is the first
and only country where “mafia” has always meant Calabrian ‘ndrangheta
and not Sicilian mafia (Sergi, 2016). This, however, has not always led to
a consistent and effective anti-mafia response and intervention. In 1991,
the Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence (ABCI) conducted another
assessment of the situation, which did not seem to have improved or been
resolved, but rather worsened and complicated (Macrì and Ciconte, 2009;
Sergi, 2012; Sergi, 2015b). A Royal Commission Inquiry, the Woodward
Commission (1977–1979) established by the government of New South
Wales (Gilligan, 2002), looked at the events surrounding the disappear-
ance of Bruce Donald Mackay in 1977, linked to Calabrian drug trafficker
Robert Trimbole and the criminal clans in Griffith, NSW. The
Woodward Commission made a number of recommendations regarding
drug crime that, however, were largely ignored by government, following
the fate of other Royal Commissions (Moffitt, 1985: 76; Gilligan, 2002).
The dubious value of the investigations into the Griffith-based drug clans
and the Mackay affair was complicated by the fact that Robert Trimbole
fled the country (Sergi, 2015b). However, almost 30 years on the Mackay
case is well known and it is one of the few historical events linked to the
Calabrian mafia clans ingrained in public perception. As shared in an
interview with a senior member of the New South Wales Police: “that is
how the story goes. Those two lines of houses in Griffith . . . seemed to be
where everything started and everything ended too. But after Mackay
things went kind of quiet again”.
The question of the continuity in criminal activities and criminal
structure between the 1970 and 1980s and today in the criminal groups
linked to, or descending from, the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta is a serious one
and cannot be taken lightly. There are reasons to believe that indeed there
is such continuity and that the clans, even if quiescent at different
moments in time, have never really lost their connection and the member-
ship to the ‘ndrangheta in Calabria. This is demonstrated by the recur-
rence of certain surnames in the affiliation and succession of the clans, by
the similar geo-localisation of mafia activities in today’s Australia when
compared to 30 years ago (if not to the 1960s) and by the appearance of
Australian-based operations also in Italian investigations (DNA, 2014;
DNA, 2011). While the Italian authorities have more than once warned
Organised Crime and Mafia: Between Forgetfulness and Visibility 149
about the existence of a chamber of control that strategically links

Calabrian clans with their representatives in Australia and vice versa
(DNA, 2011; Dickie, 2013), Australian authorities have never openly
confirmed this, although the Australian Federal Police tends to corrobo-
rate it in conversations. Media attention to the activities of the Calabrian
clans in Australia in the past years has been pointing at an existing
partnership among different clans all over the country (McKenzie et al.,
2015; Moor, 2013; McKenzie and Baker, 2009; Sergi, 2012). While drugs
have always been the main focus and arguably the main criminal activity
associated to the Calabrian clans, their actual reach in criminal market, the
extent of the connections with Calabria as well as the nature of other
criminal activities, still need to be properly examined and measured. In
particular, as an investigation conducted by Four Corners and Fairfax
Media in June 2015 has highlighted, the links among ‘ndrangheta (con-
victed/suspected) members, other individuals close to the Calabrian clans,
or allegedly affiliated to them, and elected political or public officials might
have been underestimated for years. Again, this should not surprise if we
consider the historical settlement of the clans and their historical proximity
to both the Labour and the Liberal parties since the 1970s (Bennetts and
Sergi, 2015; Small and Gilling, 2016). Such proximity obviously could
have become systemic as well as more fluid through ethnic hybridisation
and generational changes. The Italian Antimafia has investigated indivi-
duals who, in privileged functions, political and/or socio-economic, in
Australia have been developing relationships with the clans in Calabria as
well as with their counterparts in Australia (Sergi, 2015b). In Australia,
many of these figures are known to the authorities but have not been
under formal or advertised investigations as mafia supporters.
Organised Crime and Mafia: Between

Forgetfulness and Visibility
As said, the first thing that any researcher approaching historical and
sociological evolutions of phenomena of organised crime in Australia
could notice, is that, differently from the USA and also from Italy,
mafia-type organised crime in Australia seems to have always had a

Calabrian connotation. This, however, does not mean that other eth-
nic-based groups have not been labelled as mafias occasionally. This has
happened for Chinese Triads as well as for Japanese Yakuza members
(Commonwealth of Australia, 1995). When Colin Brown was given the
task to investigate Italian Organised Crime in Australia in 1964, a
parallel inquiry was carried out by Commissioner Whitrod in the
Commonwealth Police into the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood
and other organisations of Yugoslav mafia at the time present in
Victoria.4 Anecdotal references to Serbian mafia and/or Albanian mafia
(Robertson, 2014) among others, especially in the media, do conform
with well-established patterns in other countries to attach the label
“mafia” to what is in reality a reference to ethnic-based organised
crime groups (Beare and Naylor, 1999).
When it comes to mafia groups of Calabrian origin, next to their
historical presence, however, is also what can only be called a “selective
memory loss”, a certain forgetfulness of events and letting go of knowledge
acquired in the years. This forgetfulness occasionally, and cyclically, pro-
vokes panic and a renewed sense of threat linked to mafia-type “resur-
gence” each time modelled to fit the current trend in the criminal world.
For example, in 2008 the Australian Federal Police led what is known as
“the world’s biggest ecstasy bust” (Murphy et al., 2008), captained by
Calabrian drug traffickers linked with ‘ndrangheta clans in Italy. The
amount of drugs, 4.4 tonnes of MDMA, demonstrated the growing
attention of the police to such market across the country (AFP, 2008).
Indeed, in the AFP’s report for 2014–2015 (AFP, 2015) the seizures for
amphetamine and amphetamine-type stimulants (1,708 seizures,
4903.9 kg) as well as for MDMA (531 seizures, 1952.8 kg) still outnumber
other types of drugs (for example cocaine, 466 seizures, 392.7 kg). As
noticed within the AFP in Melbourne: “the market for certain drugs in
Australia is tremendously lucrative. If you think that street value is, I think,
4
Commonwealth Police investigation into migrant activity – General [organised crime, Mafia,
criminal intelligence; 18 pp] Contents range 14 August 1964–October 1964 Series numberA432
Control symbol 1964/2403 Barcode 1111198.
Organised Crime and Mafia: Between Forgetfulness and Visibility 151
4 times higher in Australia than it is in some parts of Europe for

amphetamines . . . ”. This has been confirmed by the UNODC (2011),
which indicates how ecstasy-type tablets in Australia have an average retail
price of 32.1 US$, while in the UK it would be 4.6 US$, in Germany 8.7
US$ and in Italy 22 US$ (per dose, not tablet).
This considered, the “world’s biggest drug bust” involving Calabrian
clans, not only fitted the on-going concern for the enormous quantity of
ecstasy arriving and being consumed in the country, but also rekindled
the conceptualisation of organised crime embodied by mafia groups of
Calabrian origin. It is not a case that this operation became the main
object of the Four Corners and Fairfax Media Investigation in 2015
(McKenzie et al., 2015). The link between ethnicity and drug trafficking
of this size and kind allowed for an instant reactivation of that connec-
tion between migrants and mafia crimes that had emerged in Griffith
since the 1970s/1980s. Furthermore, after the murder of lawyer Joseph
Acquaro in Melbourne in March 2016, again more or less unofficially
linked to the Calabrian clans in the city, the newly formed Australian
Criminal Intelligence Commission (which replaced the ACC in July
2016) has announced that taking down the Calabrian mafia is now a
priority (Moor, 2016).
The link between migration and (in)security have long been object of
discussion and scrutiny (Bigo, 2012) to discuss and understand how more or
less obvious racist stereotypes might inform security discourses and how the
connection between ethnicity and dangerous classes occurs (Bigo, 2001). In
the conceptualisation of organised crime and mafia in Australia the relevant
relationship seems to be not only one among security, migration and ethni-
city, but also, and more profoundly, one between security and the need for an
identifiable threat, which goes beyond ethnicity, but has been and still is
symbolised by ethnicity in certain occasions. In other words, while ethnicity
seems to be a catalyser for organised crime threats, especially mafia-type ones,
it also represents one the visible side of organised crime in Australia. As
discussed in an interview at the Victoria Police in Melbourne:
If you consider how much this country owes to migration from everywhere
in the world, it is impossible to believe there is no criminal dimension
linked to membership of ethnic groups. As far as I know, at various
moments in time, we have determined that ethnic links were more or less
overrated in Australian organised crime, but at the end of the day, in such a
multi-cultural society ethnic membership is always going to be factored in
by law enforcement when assessing organised crime or mafia groups, it is
after all the most natural concept to grasp, ethnic membership I mean.
In confirmation of these cyclic interests in the links between ethnicity

and organised crime/mafia, a 1995 report on Asian Organised Crime in
Australia (Commonwealth of Australia, 1995: 1) stated:
The particular criminal organisations use membership of the relevant ethnic

group as a key factor in determining who is allowed to participate, especially
at the more senior levels or in taking the major roles in particular crimes.
Ethnic group membership is sometimes seen as a key factor enabling ethnic-
group organised crime to be more successful than other groups. It is a matter
for debate, however, whether the ethnic factor is sometimes overstated in the
context of “Asian organised crime” in Australia.
A similar discourse, about the visibility of criminal groups because of key

identifying factors (such as ethnicity) can be made about OMCGs, with
their key recognisable factor being the use of violence and/or threatening
appearances. Scholars have already noticed how the perception, in the
media and fuelled by law enforcement as well, is that these gangs have
been growing relentlessly in strength and number and they have been
receiving special attention from governments Australia-wide (Ayling,
2011b; Ayling, 2014; Ayling, 2011a; Ayling and Broadhurst, 2014).
An organised crime inquiry in Queensland (QLD Commission, 2015:
24) at the end of October 2015 found that:
Outlaw motorcycle gangs are the most visible organised crime group
involved in the use of violence and extortion in Queensland. Violence
is used to extort money and assets from legitimate business owners,
non-affiliated drug dealers, rival gangs and people operating in gang
territory.
However, the Commission warned that the declared focus on outlaw

motor cycle gangs, as visible, violent, highly disruptive threats, has
Section 2 The Challenges of Multi-level Jurisdictions 153
meant that other areas of organised crime active in Queensland have lost
visibility as a result (QLD Commission, 2015: 2):
The evidence before the Commission suggests that the focus upon – and
resources solely dedicated to – the threat of outlaw motorcycle gangs by
the QPS [Queensland Police Service], has meant that other types of
organised crime have not been able to be appropriately investigated.
When it comes to the institutional conceptualisation of organised crime and

mafia crimes in Australia, therefore, we can notice the persistence of a very
fine balance between forgetting the threat and remembering it when it gets
(more) visible. In other words, Australian law enforcement, for various
reasons, conceptualise organised crime according to visible trends in the
market of illicit goods while focusing on visible threats linked to violence
and what seem to be concrete dangers. Mafia-type organised crime – and I
refer specifically to Calabrian mafia in this context – only became visible, for
media, law enforcement and policy-makers, at certain times and under
certain conditions. The visibility of trends is also sometimes initiated – or if
not initiated it is amplified – in political rhetoric, which then influences
policing priorities. This can be explained in consideration of the fact that
Australia has many governments and therefore many elections. Law and
order often becomes a, or even “the”, “hot button” issue during election
times. It does not surprise, therefore, that this crisis-driven approach to
organised crime and mafias in Australia swings between letting go of certain
threats and resuming others, depending on waves in criminal markets, media
attention and definitely visibility of the groups and their activities.
Section 2 The Challenges of Multi-level

Jurisdictions
Organised crime in Australia is considered a threat against national security,
notwithstanding the different matters that are raised by violent gang feuds
and/or social embeddedness of mafia clans across the country. A recent
Australian National Organised Crime Response Plan (OCRP) firmly
disposes that: “serious and organised crime groups are more complex and
pervasive than ever before. These groups are well resourced, highly adaptive
and have diversified their operations across multiple crime types and
jurisdictional boundaries” (Australian Government, 2015: 4). Organised
crime, therefore, is also “serious”, which is a theme further explored in the
next chapters and which raises questions about the measurements of harm
by various law enforcement agencies.
Moreover, the Australian Crime Commission had identified different
threats visible within emerging and established illicit markets. Law
enforcement’s responses pivot around initiatives to target these threats
(ACC, 2015b; Australian Government, 2009). The system is complex
and based on multi-lateral partnerships among agencies. In fact, the
political arrangements of Australia do not allow for anything different. A
federation with nine jurisdictions, of which six national states, two
national territories and the Commonwealth, necessarily encounters pro-
blems related to allocation of tasks, sharing of information and intelli-
gence collection. Conversations at the ACC and the AFP have
confirmed how working together with state police forces can prove
problematic in cross-borders investigations, when it is often unclear
who has jurisdiction and therefore power of directing investigations.
The “territoriality” of national police forces across Australia does not
relate only to organised crime but touches upon all areas of criminal
justice (Hufnagel, 2013). However, when it comes to countering orga-
nised crime, the situation is complicated by the existence of a federal
model deprived of federal reach: in fact, without a federal offence of
organised crime the primacy of Commonwealth law enforcement agen-
cies over national law enforcement cannot be justified (Sergi, 2016). As
noticed at the AFP in Adelaide:
The Commonwealth does not include organised crime as an umbrella

threat for criminal law. Sure, the Commonwealth is responsible for things
close enough to organised crime, like cyber and drugs, or anything that
can harm the financial interests of Australia. But at the end of the day,
there is an overlapping with state police forces when it comes to under-
standing how criminal networks work, in their domestic and cross-border
dimensions.
Section 2 The Challenges of Multi-level Jurisdictions 155
The National OCRP 2015–2018 (Australian Government, 2015) recog-

nises this challenge – the overlapping of state and federal components of a
response to organised crime groups – and proposes a two-fold solution.
One is the focus on intelligence and intelligence sharing between
Commonwealth and state law enforcement and police forces; the other
is the formation of task forces to tackle specific cross-border threats – such
as Outlaw Motor Cycle Gangs.
Arguably, also the placement of organised crime in the national
security agenda aims at filling the gap created by the lack of an over-
arching commonwealth criminal law offence for organised crime. In fact,
through the national security focus, intelligence gathering becomes the
preferred and indispensible way to assess and tackle the “seriousness” of
organised crime. As predicted in the Response Plan one of the challenges
in the next years will be to “upgrade the national criminal intelligence
system”, which means investing in technology to provide agencies with
“streamlined access to national information and intelligence holdings”
(Australian Government, 2015: 18). This is necessary because organised
crime is indeed serious and it causes different types of harm to commu-
nities (Australian Government, 2015: 2):
Serious and organised crime affects our community, economy, govern-

ment and way of life. Everyday Australians can feel its effects through a
variety of means such as sophisticated investment scams and online
attacks, clandestine drug manufacturing laboratories in suburban areas
and acts of violence between criminal groups on our streets.
As “many information sharing impediments faced by agencies are cul-

tural rather than legislative” (Australian Government, 2015: 17), but
nevertheless there are still legislative impediments, one might wonder
how cultural barriers, on top of legislative ones, can indeed be overcome
across jurisdictions. A territorial conservationism of state police forces
does strengthen that forgetfulness discussed earlier in this chapter as it is
often paired with the existence of barriers to share intelligence and
policing strategies. “We have limited resources and therefore a limited
reach; but we could definitely use some of these resources to find out
what others have been doing, what others know that might be relevant
for us as well”, said an agent of the AFP in Adelaide. As it has been

evidenced, the necessity to justify “business cases” for resources on the
basis of strategic intelligence, the recognition of the complexities asso-
ciated with performance measurement, and institutional competition
among agencies for limited public resources is connected, also in
Australia and for the AFP in their fight against organised crime to the
logic and the globalisation of new public management in policing
(Mann, 2016).
As it often happens with intelligence-led policing systems (see e.g. the
British experience), labels become even more important than actual
results (Sergi, 2015a). In Australia, the label of transnational organised
crime (across Australia and from outside Australia), for example, is a
powerful one and it directs the focus on many criminal activities of
paramount interest for all Australian jurisdictions, following a trend
occurring in other states around the world, as we specify later in this
book. For example, the production, sale and increased use of methylam-
phetamine (especially in “ice” forms) or money laundering schemes
(ACC, 2015b) are new areas of interest for transnational criminal
organisations. However, to say that transnational organised crime groups
have now an interest in the meth trade and in money laundering
schemes across Australia risks becoming an empty statement, while
distancing criminal policy from actual policing. On one side the
Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission – and before the
Australian Crime Commission – acts in its federal capacity as over-
arching intelligence gathering machine; on the other side its function-
ality is based on the premise that “serious and organised crime is
necessarily transnational and global in nature” (ACC, 2015b: 8). If
this premise fails, we go back to the impasse of territoriality of state
police forces. There is, therefore, a requirement to keep fighting orga-
nised crime cross-border, because if it is only at state level, intelligence
cannot function at its best. As affirmed in April 2002 at the Council of
Australian Governments (COAG) Leaders’ Summit, transnational orga-
nised crime has national significance, which means that it represents a
threat, risk and harm to multiple Australian jurisdictions (COAG,
2002). This “national terminology”, however, further complicated the
work of the ACC (Coyne and Bell, 2015: 83). Even though it does not
A Fractured Criminal Law System 157
appear very clear whether the ACIC provides information or intelligence

or both, it seems nevertheless clear that the conceptualisation of transna-
tional organised crime by the ACC first and now the ACIC is what
influences and informs policy-making (Coyne and Bell, 2015). During a
conversation at the ACC offices in Canberra I was reminded how the
agency can coercively “summon someone for an interrogation” as part of
its “special coercive powers to acquire information otherwise unavail-
able”. This shows the interventionist function and active policing powers
of the ACC (ACC, 2009; ACC, 2011b; Rogers, 2009). On the other
side, the Australian Federal Police, since its creation in 1979, has aimed
at becoming a national organisation against both transnational and
cross-border crime through intelligence collection, prevention and even-
tually reactive policing (Coyne and Bell, 2015), to enforce criminal law
across states and protect national interests (AFP, 2011). However, the
(limited) nature of Commonwealth criminal law and the scarcity of
resources in the past years have diverted the federal attention to more
imminent and visible threats, such as terrorism, rather than organised
crime.
A Fractured Criminal Law System

As it is often the case, when a common, visible target is identified, the
response from policy-makers tends to be as visible and directed to the
target. However, criminal law obviously must justify its responses on the
basis of the protection of societal values according to the rule of law.
In Australia, responses that follow on the forgetfulness/remembrance/
visibility paradigm described before necessarily fall into a crisis-driven
design and focus. As pointed out by Ayling (2014: 86), “the cascade of
lawmaking by Australian states, ostensibly to deal with the phenomenon
of organised crime broadly” has actually been “designed primarily to
target OMCGs”. More than in the USA and to a certain extent more
than in Italy, the visibility of a violent/visible threat informs policies
that, however, still aim at being more generally applicable beyond their
immediate remit. However, the results that any policy can achieve are
necessarily interlinked with the functioning of the rest of the criminal
justice system, which, in the Australian fight against organised crime, as

seen, starts with intelligence efforts to overcome the problematic rela-
tionships among jurisdictions.
Even though intelligence agencies, the Australian Criminal Intelligence
Commission more specifically, hold the delicate role to create unity through
intelligence collection across state borders, it is also through criminal law that
Australian responses to organised crime have been decisive in shaping the
concept and perception of the phenomenon/a. Through what Ayling (2014)
calls the “criminal law plus” system, the criminalisation of organised crime
manifestations has been central in the recent years. However, the lack of
uniformity in the application of criminal law makes it very difficult to set up
a consistent law enforcement response.
Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia base criminal law pri-
marily on common law supplemented by statutes. The federal jurisdiction,
the Australian Capital Territory, Northern Territory, Queensland, Tasmania
and Western Australia, on the other side, are instead based on criminal codes,
similar to civil law traditions. Notwithstanding the different origins, there is
“considerable convergence” in criminal law systems across Australian juris-
dictions (Bagaric, 2013: 293). When it comes to organised crime, the first
thing to remember is that while the AFP is both a policing and a law
enforcement agency with both a criminal law and a security mandate
(Coyne and Bell, 2015), the interests protected at the federal levels do not
include a federal offence for organised crime In fact, the constitution of the
Commonwealth does not grant any general power to legislate in relation to
crime. Nevertheless, the external affairs power granted by section 51 (xxxix)
of the Commonwealth Constitution (Powers of the Parliament) allows
incidental powers in relation to a number of subjects, for example, customs
and excise, taxation, insurance, social security, etc. Drug trafficking offences
as well as counter-terrorism offences, for example, have been federalised
through the principles in section 51 related to customs, influx of criminals,
and generally speaking, external affairs (Bronitt, 2011). As noticed (Connery,
2013: 13):
The Commonwealth also has critical responsibilities for crime prevention

and prosecution. They include responsibility for banking, telecommuni-
cations and border security, [ . . . ] general constitutional responsibilities
A Fractured Criminal Law System 159
under the Commonwealth’s executive and foreign affairs powers. There’s

a significant external dimension to organised crime too: foreign states can
be sources of illegal goods and bases for crime perpetrated in Australia.
Links between domestic and overseas criminal groups add to that
dimension.
Criminal law principles for participation in crime (both principal and

secondary) and joint criminal enterprise are present throughout jurisdic-
tions, including federal common law, and are relevant in organised
crime cases. The Cth Criminal Code Act 1995, as compiled on 5th
September 2015, regulates offences against the laws of the
Commonwealth; section 3 wishes to codify the general principles of
criminal responsibility under laws and against the interests of the
Commonwealth. Interviews at the AFP have identified difficulties in
using these provisions, considering how their work “is a difficult balance
between the resources we have and the federal interests”. With reference
to Division 390 of the Cth. Criminal Code Act 1995, federal interests at
play must prove to be financial as well as concerning security across state
borders, as noticed in the AFP in Melbourne:
When we led Operation Inca against the ‘ndrangheta in Melbourne for

what became the world’s biggest ecstasy bust, we could do that because the
amount of drugs were enormous, so to affect the financial interest of the
country.
Part 9.9 of the Cth. Criminal Code Act 1995, titled “Criminal
Associations and Organisations” and placed within the Chapter on
“Dangers to the Community”, provides offences for association with
someone engaged in serious organised crime activity, for providing
material support to a criminal organisation, for facilitating the commis-
sion of offences by a criminal organisation, for directing a criminal
organisation. An organisation for the purposes of these offences “consists
of 2 or more persons; the organisation’s aims or activities include
facilitating the engagement in conduct, or engaging in conduct, consti-
tuting an offence against any law that is, or would if committed be, for
the benefit of the organisation” (Cth. Criminal Code Act 1995, Part 9.9,
Subdivision B, 390.4 and following ones). Commonwealth offences can

be analysed as participation offences, where liability is still individual
and “criminal organisation” is a linguistic choice to mean joint
conspiracy.
State criminal law systems have brought the participation offences to
the next level, through anti-association laws, clearly aimed at Outlaw
Motor Cycle Gangs (Ayling, 2011a; Ayling, 2014). Anti-association laws
are not homogeneous across Australia, they are primarily offences against
proscribed associations, and they do not target mafia-type organised
crime. For example, Queensland had an anti-association law in 2009
with the Criminal Organisation Act Qld, which was similar to statutes
in other states (South Australia, New South Wales, Northern Territory,
Western Australia, Victoria – not the Australian Capital Territory). Like
in other states, the act relied on court declarations of organisations
followed by court-imposed control orders. In 2013 another act fol-
lowed,5 based on the recognition of (26) criminal organisations as
declared by the Attorney General within a list – Criminal Code
(Criminal Organisations) Regulation 2013. This allowed the govern-
ment to proscribe the organisations to be regarded as criminal, by
criminalising public associations – without any criminal plans or activ-
ities to be occurring or to result from that gathering – among “partici-
pants”. Criminal liability is based on the membership to the proscribed
organisations. Similar legislations, known as “bikies laws” (Ayling and
Broadhurst, 2014; Fitzgerald, 2015) in other states provoked heated
reactions both in courts and in media/public opinion (Rule of Law
Institute of Australia, 2014; ABC, 2015). Together with consorting
laws, which criminalise the association with members of proscribed
organisations and their presence in certain places, the criminalisation is
about criminal status rather than criminal behaviour (Sergi, 2016).
When it comes to prosecution, obviously state laws call for state
prosecution. At the federal level, the remit of the Commonwealth
5
Criminal Law (Criminal Organisations Disruption) Amendment Act 2013, section 60A. CODA
introduced a new criminal offence: Participants in criminal organisation being knowingly present
in public places. This offence relies on a list created by CODA, which is now part of the Criminal
Code 1899 (Qld).
The Financial Approach 161
Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP) covers serious drug offences,

terrorism and other organised crime manifestations (fraud, money laun-
dering, human trafficking, etc.) among the crimes within the remit of
the office. Significantly, the CDPP’s function is one of support to
referring and investigating agencies, through a practice area, which
clusters together organised crime cases and terrorism cases with a clear
focus on drug networks (CDPP, 2015). As criminal law follows the
conceptualisation of phenomena, it does not surprise that the response
to organised crime seems fractured as fractured is the concept of
organised crime throughout criminal law in the country. Also, con-
sidering the impossibility for the Commonwealth to enact criminal law
unless it falls within a certain type of “protected federal value”, a
discourse on values protected by criminal law is indeed even more
crucial in this case. Notwithstanding the efforts of the various federal
and state law enforcement agencies to patch the fractures, the existence
of competing laws in overlapping jurisdictions mirrors the existence of
competing concepts of organised crime groups and activities across
Australian jurisdictions.
The Financial Approach

The Australian Crime Commission stated that “although organised
crime has continued to operate in traditional illicit markets, such as
the illicit drug markets, it has been innovative in infiltrating legitimate
industries to yield and launder significant criminal profits” (ACC,
2015b: 7). Money laundering is therefore both an activity of organised
crime groups as well as “an intrinsic enabler of serious and organised
crime [ . . . ] as a way of legitimising or hiding the proceeds of their
criminal activities” (ACC, 2015b: 12). In order to legitimise or hide
proceeds of crime organised crime groups are said to both exploit and
establish “complex business structures that create opacity of wealth, to
set up offshore structures used to channel funds from Australia, or to
hide wealth for the purposes of evading taxation” (ACC, 2015b: 24).
Not surprisingly, anti-money laundering policies are connected to unex-
plained wealth, confiscation of proceeds of crime and obviously
international illegal trades, as also confirmed by the AFP’s strategic

priorities: “leading the Commonwealth’s efforts to disrupt organised
criminal groups by restraining and seizing their assets and unexplained
wealth” (AFP, 2015: 9).
The Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 dedicates Part 10 to
money laundering offences under the “National Infrastructure” rubric.
The offences are to be read in combination with the Anti-Money
Laundering and Counter Terrorism Financing Act 2006 and Rules
Instruments (2007), constantly under review and applying to businesses
as well as individuals. Like in most countries, Australian law enforce-
ment conceptualises organised crime through money and profit. As
affirmed at the ACC in Melbourne “money laundering is what blends
all together and it can be as diverse as you can imagine, through
legitimate businesses or gambling or art trafficking or investments in
night-time economy or real estate”.
As money is considered the common element, and ultimate goal, of
organised crime manifestations – which are motivated by accumulation
of profits – also in Australia the strategy of “going after the money” is the
obvious choice. In February 2010, the Cth Crimes Legislation
Amendment (Serious and Organised Crime) Act 2010 included specific
reference to provisions in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 for unex-
plained wealth and also allowed for non-conviction based restraint and
forfeiture of instruments of serious offences. As analysed by Bartels
(2010) the policy discourse on different confiscation schemes is directly
dependent on the discourse on organised crime with particular focus on
ensuring national consistency and avoid asymmetries across jurisdic-
tions. In fact, both the Commonwealth Organised Crime Strategic
Framework (OCSF) and the National OCRP aim at strengthening
multijurisdictional approaches, coordination, information sharing and
joint activities to fight organised crime and money laundering.
Unexplained wealth legislations and confiscation procedures are both
preventative measures against future investments and actions to ensure
the appropriate detection of “organised criminals”. Australia, as we also
see in Chapter 7 of this book, has a unique approach to unexplained
wealth: those who exhibit any kind of unexplained wealth are asked to
prove the origin of their wealth. A new act of Cth Parliament approved
The Financial Approach 163
in February 2015 amended the Cth Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA)
with provisions on unexplained wealth as already introduced by the Cth
Crimes Legislation Amendments (Serious and Organised Crime Act)
2010. It confirms the burden of proof on the recipient of the order, by
also requiring him/her to pay back the unexplainable/unexplained amount
(section 179E Cth POCA). The reversed burden of proof on the defen-
dant aims at not assuming the link between the unexplained wealth and
any “(i) offence against a law of the Commonwealth; (ii) foreign indictable
offence; (iii) State offence that has a federal aspect” (section 179E.1.b.
POCA). Nonetheless, the links between unexplained wealth and orga-
nised crime are clear in the minds of policy-makers. As noticed by
Goldsmith et al (2014), unexplained wealth regulations need to be seen
as attempts to pull away from conviction-based (criminal) forfeiture and
move towards non conviction-based (civil) confiscation, which avoids the
problems of criminal procedures and the prevalence of financial expertise
over criminal law. Unexplained wealth regulations, in Australian federal
law, strengthen the relationship between confiscation and organised crime
investigations independently from the results of prosecution. As noticed
within the AFP in Adelaide, in fact, “these people [the ‘organised crim-
inals’] might even be easy to spot in fancy cars or expensive properties, but
we cannot act on suspicion, we need to either prove their involvement in
criminal activities or question their wealth in relation to their own
declared means”.
The AFP, the former ACC (now ACIC) and Australian Taxation
Office in February 2011 launched a Criminal Assets Confiscation
Taskforce (CACT) to enhance the identification and the pursuit of
potential (criminal) asset confiscation. The message was “taking the
profit out of crime”, which match the motivations behind the unex-
plained wealth amendments of POCA in 2010 (Bartels, 2010). Within
the CACT, the AFP has taken on the leadership by commencing
litigation on behalf of the Commonwealth and becoming the obvious
point for collection of referrals from the rest of the country or abroad
(AFP et al., 2011). Through an intelligence-led approach, asset recovery
and confiscation have interestingly become the proactive side of financial
investigations into organised crime cases. On the other side, the
Commonwealth unexplained wealth regime allows to confiscate without
the need for a criminal conviction or any evidence of the link between the
property and a criminal offence. Arguably, however, unexplained wealth
orders assume a more symbolic meaning, when suspicion raises questions
of asset ownership and places on individuals the burden of proving that
ownership. In 2013 the Coalition Policy to Tackle Crime read: “We will
strengthen unexplained wealth legislation to strike at the heart of organised
crime by taking away the profits and assets of criminal syndicates and
thereby undermine their business model” (The Coalition, 2013: 10). The
link among organised crime activities, proceeds of crime and unexplained
wealth seems to be fundamentally entrenched in the current approach.
Policing Organised Crime in a Whole-of-

Government Challenge
The 2013 Coalition Policy to tackle crime also announced how, if
elected, “a Coalition government will establish Local Anti-Gang
Squads to tackle organised crime and outlaw bikie gangs at the local
level using national tools, resources and intelligence” (The Coalition,
2013: 2). Moreover, the Coalition specifies that not only “organised
crime and outlaw bikie gangs are a massive cost to our community in
many different ways” but also that “a local approach to dealing with
organised crime will be more effective if it can tap into national support,
resources and intelligence” (The Coalition, 2013: 6–7). This is in
response to the Labour’s proposal to form a federal anti-gangs taskforce
instead. However, at a deeper level, whether through local anti-gangs
squads or through a federal task force, the underlying impression is one
of emergency/ad hoc response, short term rather than long term, inde-
pendently from outspoken motivations.
When looking at organised crime policing in Australia, there are three
main recurring challenges: (1) the difficult coordination of multi-agency
law enforcement due to jurisdictional divisions; (2) the overlapping of
gangs/organised crime discourse (i.e. the elevation of bikies’ groups from
gangs to organised crime groups); (3) the problematic identity of orga-
nised crime in the law, swinging from conceptualisations of criminal
Policing Organised Crime in a Whole-of-Government Challenge 165
activities, conspiracy, and participation to proscribed criminal organisations,

without any specific collocation for mafia groups, which are, however,
present in policy discourses.
The difficult coordination between federal and state institutions is at the
core of every decision and every action against organised crime groups. In
fact, while on one side there is agreement that organised crime groups are
transnational threats to public safety and national security that deserve a
federal response, on the other side organised crime groups are locally visible
and therefore remain national concerns. The whole-of-government strategy
that the AFP wishes to embrace – by captaining task forces and by acting as
the institution in charge for international cooperation procedures – is crucial
to Australian policy. The Australian Public Service Commission’s
Management Advisory Committee (APSC, 2004: V), for example, recog-
nised how:
The challenge is to ensure that the collective decision-making of the

Australian government is based upon the best-informed articulation of
the challenges faced and a strategic assessment of the relative merits of
different approaches to how they might be addressed. For this, a compre-
hensive whole of government approach is required.
If whole-of-government approaches are not new in the Australian public

service landscape, they still depend on prioritisation of the threat and the
results one wishes to achieve. The AFP stressed the need to operate in a
“whole-of-government capacity as the best way to become the federal
organisation to combat transnational crime”. However, as crime threats
at the state level may be different to the aggregated threat to different
jurisdictions (Coyne and Bell, 2015), the whole-of-government chal-
lenge is often expressed through the use of task forces and ad hoc
coordinated projects to involve different federal and state agencies.
This is, for example, the case of the Attero National Task Force,
where 15 agencies, representing all state and territories police forces as
well as federal law enforcement, border security and regulatory agencies,
led by the AFP, joined forces in 2012 against the Rebels Outlaw Motor
Cycle Gang. Attero was endorsed and approved by the Australian Crime
Commission Board, representing Commonwealth, State and Territory
law enforcement and key national security and regulatory agencies as a

unified force against nationally significant crime. The endorsement of the
ACC board – chaired by the AFP Commissioner – implied the employ-
ment of the ACC’s special coercive powers when directing and contri-
buting to investigations. As agreed at the agency, ACC’s special coercive
powers (similar to those of Royal Commissions) – such as the power to
summon a witness and compel him or her to provide evidence –
guarantee that “certain investigations are pushed beyond usual law
enforcement methods, as sometimes, for certain crime types, this is the
only effective way”. That is essentially the meaning of nationally signifi-
cant crime, where the terminologies of gangs and organised crime overlap
almost completely, between local and transnational dimensions and
where federal powers exceed traditional law enforcement methods.
Another example could be the Australian Gangs Intelligence
Coordination Centre, hosted by the ACC since 2013, which comprises
staff from the ACC, the AFP, the Australian Taxation Office, the
Australian Border Force, the Department of Immigration and Border
Protection and the Department of Human Services and whose mandate is
primarily to provide “dedicated intelligence capability for the AFP-led
National Anti-Gangs Squad (NAGS)” while aiming “to develop and main-
tain the national and transnational picture of criminal gangs impacting on
Australia” (ACC, 2015a).
In terms of (criminal) law, the tension between federal and state
responses, somehow overcome at the investigative level through intelli-
gence coordination and task forces, translates into those anti-association
norms more or less officially aimed at bikies but certainly posing both
juridical and social problems. The “naming & shaming” of (proscribed)
organisations corresponds to the recognition of the criminal nature of
groups (primarily OMCGs) as nationally significant threats. Here the legal
interpretation is interesting: anti-association laws are indeed more than
“anti-status” laws, as they are incidentally given a “criminal enterprise”
status as well. The law on conspiracy at the federal level (section 11.5(1),
part 2.4 Cth Criminal Code Act, 1995), together with the doctrine of
joint conspiracy in common law and the legislation on unexplained wealth,
establishes this connotation. As reminded by criminal lawyers (Bagaric,
2013), the doctrine of common purpose establishes the existence of a joint
The Australian Visibility Policing Model 167
criminal enterprise: there has to be an agreement (express or implied),

therefore a conspiracy, between or among the parties concerning the scope/
purpose of the criminal enterprise (section 11.2, Criminal Code). The Cth
Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 resumed this by stating that one of the objects
of the Act is “to prevent the reinvestment of proceeds, instruments,
benefits, literary proceeds and unexplained wealth amounts in further
criminal activities; and to undermine the profitability of criminal enter-
prises” (section 5.d-da POCA). This implies that the profitability of a
criminal enterprise is linked to successfully concealed criminal wealth,
which again echo a more general approach against organised crime as
financial threat to the nation. Linking criminal enterprise to unexplained
wealth, and confiscation of proceeds of crime to anti-association laws is as
far as Australian policy goes into the conceptualisation of organised crime.
When mafia-type organised crime groups fall into the category of organised
crime through one or more of these gateways, then the law is equipped to
fight mafia behaviour. This means, by contrast, that anything that is not
captured within these categories – that cannot be criminalised under anti-
association laws or escapes unexplained wealth orders – falls beyond the
scope of the strategy.
The Australian Visibility Policing Model

The Australian Policing Model against organised crime – as exercise in
the de-construction of regulations through policy discourses and re-
construction of such discourses in terms of conceptualisation of the
phenomena at hand – is largely dependent on the visibility of trends
and priorities set up at the federal and state jurisdictions (Fig. 5.1).
Fig. 5.1 shows the main components of the model.
The Conceptualisation of Organised Crime
The core of the conceptualisation of organised crime in Australia originates

from the tension between federal and state crime trends that are manifested
and visible threats. This is in line with the analysis of the concept of organised
Australian Visibilty Model
OC as Whole-of-government
security approach
threat
(federal)
Trends/
OC as a
priorities Individual focus
visible &
local Anti-association
Task Unexplained wealth
crime laws
forces
issue
(national)
Fig. 5.1 The Australian visibility model
crime between forgetfulness and remembrance of threats. On one side, in

fact, the Commonwealth places organised crime within the national security
agenda, characterised by allocation of resources to agencies like the ACIC
(ACC before) and the AFP while promoting a focus on transnationality and
seriousness of the threats (Australian Government, 2015). On the other side,
when it comes to state law enforcement, the focus is on the streets and on the
visibility of the threat, with a focus on crime types and protection of state
borders. However, also considering the vagueness of concepts like transna-
tional and serious organised crime, the state level – driven by responses to
visible threats – considerably affect federal priorities. This is perfectly encap-
sulated by the emphasis on Outlaw Motor Cycle Gangs, which are certainly a
state priority but have been elevated at nationally significant crime threat. To
say it differently, the Australian Visibility Model is based on the consideration
that the visibility of the threats associated to organised crime affects both
criminal policy and institutional conceptualisations of organised crime in the
country. The visibility of different manifestations of organised crime mutates
as criminal trends mutate. As criminal trends can mutate both at state and
federal levels, priorities and responses have to adapt to changes quickly. The
The Australian Visibility Policing Model 169
Organised Crime assessment in Australia (ACC, 2015b) is based on the

identification of different threats, grouped within clusters (such as different
illicit markets or key emerging threats). These threats are the visible threats. In
this model, it must be repeated, “visibility” often implies crisis. The
Commonwealth response plan is organised around initiatives to target
those threats. Whereas organised crime is understood generally as a set of
various (serious) criminal activities, such as trafficking of drugs or firearms,
money laundering or cybercrime, federal law enforcement works with prio-
rities such as intelligence coordination and design of whole-of-government
approaches to overcome cross-border challenges. State law enforcement, on
the other side, responds to public expectations on taking organised crime (as
violent, visible threat) seriously, for which again, the focus on bikies is the best
example. When it comes to mafia groups, as comprehensive criminal label,
the official and institutional response is still quite immature notwithstanding
the recent remembrance and visibility of the threat. The risks to label ethnic
organised crime within migrants’ communities are perceived as high and
potentially leading to discrimination; the long running history of the
Calabrian ‘ndrangheta in Australia has challenged the way law enforcement
sees mafias. On one side the Australian clans of Calabrian linkages cannot be
classified as proscribed associations, because they do not have a clear identity
under one “label”: this way they escape anti-association laws. On the other
side it seems unclear how mafia activities cross state borders, especially when
it is not about drug trafficking. While the Victoria Police, the South
Australian Police and the AFP in Melbourne in Adelaide seem aware of the
activities of Calabrian clans in both states, for example, their conceptualisa-
tions of such groups resist the mafia label, at least openly, for political
correctness on one side and the lack of federal commitment on the other side.
Between Federal and State Policing
There is clearly a two-direction link between federal and state prio-

rities, at policy level. State crime trends invoke task forces; intelligence
sharing across states’ and federal institutions inform and at times
create crime trends. However, as criminal law does not always allow
a direct correspondence between visible priorities and its own system
of values, the criminalisation of organised crime is still anchored to

individual states’ responses within the overarching mandate of federal
law. The tension between federal priorities and state visible trends
mirrors in the fractured response to organised crime in states’ criminal
law, despite existing convergence among state systems. Anti-associa-
tions laws, more or less openly aimed at countering OMCGs, are one
of the products of this tension, but also satisfy the state need for
criminalising identifiable/visible/recognisable threats. However, anti-
association laws keep the criminal responsibility focused on the indi-
vidual and their status, on the membership to previously declared
unlawful associations and, therefore, on the recruitment and the
formation of such associations. This type of anti-association law
does not represent the criminalisation of organised crime per se –
intended as set of criminal activities and behaviours – but rather the
criminalisation of its “visible” manifestations (as arguably you can
only proscribe an unlawful association you can detect). Membership
in a proscribed association certainly carries a social stigma through the
application of criminal law; its enforcement perfectly suits the neces-
sity to point the finger to the visible enemy. Organised crime in this
model is a category of crime at the federal level – a container of
different serious and usually transnational crime priorities – and it
does not lead to the criminalisation of an enterprise engaging in
patterns of illicit behaviours (such as in federal US RICO).
Considering that the focus is kept on individual membership in
unlawful association and not enterprise criminality, the individual
accumulation of criminal wealth constitutes the visible side of finan-
cial provisions specifically through unexplained wealth orders. In fact,
incongruity between someone’s lifestyle and his/her declared assets
and income is an identifiable/visible/recognisable sign of a criminal
lifestyle. Moreover, targeting unexplained wealth protects the financial
interests of the Commonwealth, thus representing both a state tool
and a federal protection.
The Australian Visibility Model is mostly successful when visible
crime trends at the state level are classified as federal priorities. This
potentially explains why, despite the events that have surrounded the
Australian-Calabrian mafia clans, policy-makers and have not recognised
References 171
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entrepreneurs somehow supporting criminal activities – are often visibly
wealthy and therefore more easily targetable through financial regula-
tions rather than criminal procedures.
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6
Case Study 4: United Kingdom
and the Activity Model
Section 1 The Identity of Organised Crime

Between Street Crime and National Security
Great Britain has always known gangs, certainly since the end of the
Victorian age, but probably even before (Morton, 2002; Emsley, 2011;
Sharpe, 2004). Notorious families, like the Krays or the Richardsons in
London, but also groups in Glasgow or Birmingham, however, were
more often than not, considered local issues, linked to the urban space,
rather than full blown, coordinated, threats to the nation (Levi, 2004).
On one side, acquisitive crimes, often serious and sometimes organised
were committed all over the country; on the other side, gangs often
fought for hegemony on certain territories and illicit markets, thus
engaging in violent and bloody street wars (Hobbs, 1995a; Wright,
2006). With popular focus on the caricatures of the gangster image
(Wright, 2006: 172), embodied by the Kray brothers in particular,
Britain in 1950s, especially in the cities, grew accustomed to a fictional
Italian-American “Mafioso” model (Hobbs, 2013a). This fictional por-
trayal of organised crime was supported by the family size of crime firms,
who based their power on the charisma of leaders who conducted their

178 6 Case Study 4: United Kingdom and the Activity Model
business through emotion rather than calculation (Hobbs, 2013a).

These entrepreneurs of crime became highly competent in certain illegal
markets, especially in the urban space. Prostitution, gambling and
extortion were the precursors and the definers of small-scale organised
crimes, always linked to certain parts of the city, always local. These
oligarchies of crime, while certainly organised to some degree have never
been considered as rational organised crime groups, strategically involved
in a criminal plan (Hobbs, 1998; Wright, 2006) and object of national
political concern. Since the 1980s, family-based firms could not keep the
parochial dominance they once enjoyed (Hobbs, 1995b). On one side,
neighbourhood criminal firms were shrinking and quickly adapting to the
uncertainties of changing boundaries and changing markets. On the other
side, the status of some crime families and their links to the former
working-class city were shattered by unpredictability in trade as well as
by deregulations and abolition of traditional restrictions of Britain’s
commercial zones wanted by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who
“effectively deregulated the criminal marketplace and normalized entre-
preneurship in all its manifestations” (Hobbs, 2013a: 93).
From the local gangsterism of the 1950s–1970s, the 1980s/1990s saw the
transformation of family crime firms into small entrepreneurial systems of
crime. Professional criminals moved towards an “entrepreneurial trading
culture driven by highly localised interpretations of global markets”
(Hobbs, 1995b: 115). British cities transformed the local character of
crime groups into a glocal phenomenon (Hobbs, 1998). Very much in line
with the rest of Europe, in the mid-1990s, political attention, in the form of a
Home Affairs special committee, classified organised crime as a matter of
national concern (Home Affairs Committee, 1994). More importantly,
“alien conspiracy” affected the perception of organised crime groups. On
one side, there was no British organised crime to identify and on the other
side foreign ethnic-based crime groups seemed the obvious enemy to blame
(Woodiwiss and Hobbs, 2009). Between the 1990s and the 2000s, in fact,
manifestations of British organised crime swung between a constant nostalgia
for the times of the Krays, with new emerging crime families – and the
dissolution of traditional family structures led by professional criminal
figures (Hobbs, 2013a). With no leaderships, no long-lasting commit-
ments from the “locals”, British cities and illegal markets allegedly
Section 1 The Identity of Organised Crime . . . 179
became more attractive for foreign criminals (Chinese Triads, Yardies,

Colombians, Italians, Turks, Russians, as indicated by the NCIS
(1993)), in a British version of the alien conspiracy theory from the
United States (Woodiwiss and Hobbs, 2009). With various actors on
the stage, organised crime in Britain gained those traits that still char-
acterise the phenomenon today: flexible, mobile, at times transnational,
highly networked, small-scale and specialised.
The magazine The Economist, on 18 September 2003, published an
article about a trial for drug trafficking in Snaresbrook Crown Court,
East London (The Economist, 2003); the case involved foreign groups
trafficking heroin. Interestingly the article commented on the state of
organised crime in the country by saying that “the increasingly rainbow-
coloured character of organised crime is a clue to its maturity” and
circulated a complaint from senior police officer Chris Fox who declared
that “mass migration has brought with it a whole new type of crime,
from the Nigerian fraudster to the Eastern European who deal in drugs
and prostitution”. The perception of organised crime as an “imported”
threat and as an adaptable profit-driven arena was fuelled by a growing
preoccupation towards the effects of globalisation and mass migration
that have left the old-fashioned British criminal firm with a marginal
role in the organisation of illicit trafficking in the country.
When looking at Great Britain, therefore, not only the tension
between local and global, but also the dichotomy organised/flexible
have characterised the intersection between history and policy evolution.
From street gang life, Britain has moved to the abstract stage of national
security. The link between the two phenomena, however, has never been
completely severed. As specified by the Home Office (2013: 14) in the
Serious and Organised Crime Strategy of 2013:
We make a distinction between organised crime groups and urban street

gangs. The differences are primarily about the level of criminality, organisa-
tion, planning and control. But there are connections between gangs and
organised crime: urban gang members may engage in street drug dealing on
behalf of organised criminals and some gangs aspire to and may become
organised crime groups in their own right. Areas of high gang activity in the
UK tend to be areas where organised criminals are most active.
Amid street gangs, entrepreneurial crime firms and foreign/transnational

phenomena of organised crime, there has never been in Britain a pre-
occupation for mafia crimes. Rather, the need to distance British orga-
nised crime from mafia organisations (or their American and Italian
stereotypes/typologies) has always emerged quite clearly. This, however,
does not mean that the UK has never known mafia-type criminality, in
the conceptualisations this book is adopting across the mafia–OC spec-
trum. As identified by Campana (2011) the presence of representative of
a camorra clan in Aberdeen was linked to a series of both illegal and legal
activities between Scotland, Northern Europe and Italy. However, as we
will see further in Chapter 7, the institutional perceptions of organised
crime, especially the one in England and Wales, does not seem affected
by these events in Scotland. When choosing the historical focuses for
this chapter it became evident how the absence of signalling national
events shaped national conscience and concepts of organised crime.
From the analysis of interviews and documents, however, emerged the
relevant role of urban centres for the evolution of gangs and organised
crime conceptualisations in the UK. The realities of cities, more than
specific historical events or criminal groups, have shaped the concept of
organised crime at national level in Great Britain. This is why the two
historical focuses in this chapter shall be two main cities, Liverpool and
London. While London has been chosen for its peculiarity as global city
and capital of the country, Liverpool has been indicated as one of the
most peculiar cities in the North of the country, and one of the most
interesting, together with cities like Manchester or Birmingham, from
the point of view of “organised” criminal activities.
Focus 1: Liverpool
Liverpool has often been depicted as a violent city where street crime is
gun crime and gang feuds are everyday business (Kokosalakis et al.,
2006; Garcia, 2006). It has been noticed how in the past two or three
decades “the perception that Merseyside was some sort of criminals’
playground spiralling out of control was seemingly endlessly repeated”
(Murden, 2006: 469). In 2012 the president of the UN’s International
Narcotics Control Board said that Liverpool has no-go areas similar to
those in Brazil or Mexico, where drugs and crime are taking over. Local
police and law enforcement denied fiercely and confirmed to be one of
three areas (with Birmingham and Manchester) in the UK to receive
the highest amount of funding under Home Secretary Theresa May’s
plans to tackle gang and youth violence (Brown, 2012). The role of the
media in perpetuating the image of Liverpool as a city attempting a
rebranding through culture, but eventually still tied up in ugly stories
of crime, has been a concern for both locals and scholars (Boland,
2008).
Notwithstanding the lack of a structured and comprehensive
analysis of Liverpool’s (organised) underworld at an academic level,
it has been argued (Lavorgna et al., 2013) that Liverpool suffers of
two main problems when it comes to organised crime. On one side,
youth gangs are proliferating in some areas of the city, committing
common crimes and engaging in street violence; on the other side,
instead, the city has been home of some of the most productive
criminal masterminds and the most sophisticated criminal networks
in the country – mainly involved in drug trafficking nationally and
internationally.
Gang-life includes anything from teenagers joining criminal groups to
violence escalating in the streets out of petty or serious arguments. The
reference to delinquent criminal groups is not a characteristic of
Liverpool alone; gang crime has been considered the symbol of fractured
Britain (Goldson, 2011). Youth gangs mainly represent a problem of
antisocial behaviours, street crimes and public safety (Shropshire and
MacFarquhar, 2002). They look disorganised or moderately organised,
they have strong identities based mainly on locations, versatile offending
patterns and show amplification of criminal behaviour over time (Klein,
2001). The increasing violence of street youth gangs in the recent
decades is the public face of crime portrayed by the media in
Liverpool (National Geographic, 2010). In the eyes of the media,
these groups of teenagers have often caused “respectable” people to
abandon the neighbourhood and they hinder the progress of the city as
they cause social disorder (BBC Inside Out, 2008). Economist, in November
2015 published an article on young people and guns collecting the voices of
former gang members, law enforcement and charities in the city. The article
(The Economist, 2015) reported:
Whereas London’s teen gunslingers are a footloose, erratic lot, and easy to
catch, Liverpool’s are organised, and knitted closer to the family firms that
run the city’s crime scene. [ . . . ] There, kingpins also employ teens in jobs,
which involve opportunities to pilfer weapons, picking them up or hiding
them (“‘Soldiers’, they call them round here,” says one Toxteth resident).
[ . . . ] These mafia-like groups, generations old, come with status: “It’s the
family name that carries them,” she says. This may appeal to teens who,
according to locals, are dogged by police handing out antisocial- behaviour
orders, which leaves them with scarce job options beyond shelf-stacking.
The picture of social exclusion, gangs, gun trade and youth crime in
Liverpool, therefore, appears mixed up with higher levels crime firms:
there is, for example, a link between young people in gangs, firearms and
drug trade (ACPO, 2007). Liverpool has a reputation of being one of the
main hubs of drug trafficking, importation and smuggling in the UK, also
thanks to the presence of the most successful drug traffickers and criminal
networks, exploiting the port and local gang life (Pearson and Hobbs,
2004; Marsh et al., 2012; Lees, 2011). Groups like the Liverpool Mafia, for
example, have made the history of the city. The Liverpool Mafia was a
drug-dealing alliance emerged after the Toxteth riots in 1981 between
white middle-aged bank robbers and young black gangsters (National
Geographic, 2010). As reported, (Townsend, 2008):
Under the control of a shadowy former docker called “The Banker”, it

became the richest gang in the UK. Strong links to corrupt port officials
and haulage contractors ensured its status as an accomplished smuggler. As
cocaine’s popularity soared, links were forged with the notorious Cali
cartel, a Colombian cocaine-supplying gang. The cartel was grateful to the
Liverpool mafia, whose contacts and own distribution network allowed it
to crack the European market.
Leaving aside journalistic sensationalism and semi-historical commen-

taries, it seems correct to assume that the evolving nature of crime
groups in Merseyside cannot avoid remembering those criminals that
have dominated the underworld of Liverpool and have made its criminal
history since the 1950s (Sergi, 2012); people like Charlie Siega, Michael
Shower, Stephen French, Tommy Comerford and more recently Curtis
“Cocky” Warren (long-standing Interpol’s target and in the Sunday
Time Rich List in 2007), Colin Smith (Cocaine King) and
Christopher Welsh Jnr (known as “Scouse” Escobar) who after his
sentence in 2013 was found importing drugs to Liverpool and through-
out Scotland from jail (Humphries, 2015).
Even though the media have been reporting how organised crime
groups in Liverpool have established direct and successful links with drug
cartels in Latin America (Townsend, 2008), the size and characteristics of
drug importations and trafficking in Liverpool and the actual reach of
Liverpool criminals outside the city boundaries have not been comprehen-
sively assessed. The lack of analysis or report on the status of drug trade
specific to Liverpool should be a serious warning to law enforcement and
politicians in the area. From a preliminary read of news, press releases from
Merseyside police and the NCA and snippets from court cases, Liverpool’s
underworld confirms its historical link to charismatic gangsters (Smith,
2013) but still appears quite chaotic and not too diversified in terms of
criminal activities (mostly drugs and related or connected offences, like arm
trade and money laundering). On the other side, however, Liverpool’s
criminal networks also emerge as internationally active, especially domi-
nant in the cocaine market but also competitive in the heroin one (Wall
and Chistyakova, 2015), enduring and well connected with other criminal
groups in Europe (the Netherlands and Spain primarily, but not only).
This distinguishes them from other crime networks in other urban areas of
the country, more local and territorial. As noticed by the Merseyside Police
(2013: 7) “those involved in Merseyside organised crime groups have a
disproportionate impact on crime across the region and nationally”.
Focus 2: London
Criminal groups in London are not easy to map. The city changes at
every corner and so do social structures, interactions and networks,
including criminal ones. Historically, crime groups in London have
been centred in the East End, which once was, more or less truthfully,
the reign of the Kray brothers (Southwell, 2009). As the city changed,
and working-class neighbourhoods evolved also thanks to new migrants,
various criminal networks, firms, settled from South to North London.
Differently from Liverpool, where criminal groups have often had an
international dimension also because of the port, London criminal
groups appear historically more territorial and more family-based.
However, while on one side London groups are locally rooted, on the
other side, the city is often portrayed as the stage of complex transna-
tional money laundering schemes, as well as being considered one of the
hubs of transit criminal networks from all over Europe (Wall and
Chistyakova, 2015). This is also linked to the “availability” of languages,
in London, as a distinctive trait of many criminal networks (Sergi,
2016b). As noticed by a public prosecutor: “there are over 30 languages
spoken daily in the streets of London and some of them are not easy or
common languages”. Not only the presence of different languages but
also the ethnic configuration of various London boroughs certainly
affects the criminal composition of the city. Multi-ethnicity is, however,
a characteristic of the whole country. Recent studies have attempted to
identify criminal specialisation patterns across ethnic groups also accord-
ing to their location and most of all to illicit markets (Silverstone, 2011;
Silverstone and Savage, 2010). For example, Turkish groups in North
London (especially in the area of Tottenham) are active and dominant in
the heroin market, but other nationalities, especially Nigerian,
Colombian and Dutch, are also present on the scene of drugs in the
city (Mills et al., 2013). Chinese, Russian, Romanian and other Eastern
European groups appear involved in large-scale frauds (Wall and
Chistyakova, 2015). The presence of cross-ethnic groups in different illicit
markets is a characteristic of London, but also representative of Britain
more generally. As reported by the Home Office (2013: 40) “in London
the Metropolitan Police assesses that foreign nationals comprise at least
25% of high-harm offenders (including organised crime group members)”.
London is, therefore, distinctively transnational in the composition of
criminal networks; it is still local in the geography of the different clans
and crime firms that, notwithstanding their chaotic and flexible structure,
appear often linked to specific areas of the city (Hobbs, 2013a).
The transnational character of London crime groups, apart from the

multi-ethnic composition of groups, is also linked to the most profitable
illicit markets. The city is not only one of the financial hubs of Europe –
therefore linked to large-scale illicit financial activities – but also it has
been dubbed the cocaine capital of Europe (Casciani, 2015). More
specifically, the European Drug Monitoring Centre for Drugs and
Drug Addiction (EDMCDDA, 2015), from an analysis of wastewater
in the city of London, ranked the city first for cocaine use and very high
for use of cannabis and ecstasy as well. The city of London police force –
which is also the lead investigator for economic crime in the UK and acts
as main partner for the Economic Crime Command of the National
Crime Agency – clearly links complex fraud investigations with orga-
nised crime cases (Croft, 2015). As reminded in research (Talani, 2013),
the city of London is a necessary choice for money laundering schemes,
being one of the financial centres of the world and a very important
offshore centre. Professionals in the city are employed daily by criminals,
willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, to trade criminal
money (Talani, 2013). Money laundering investigations and scandals
that have “shown the reach and depth of the world’s drug-trafficking and
money-laundering businesses” and, as in the case of the bank HSBC,
have “battered London’s reputation as a global financial centre”
(Rathbone, 2012), especially crucial in the period of the financial crisis.
When it comes to the local nature of criminal groups in London, we
must notice how, in addition to “famous” families like the Sabinis, the
Krays and the Richardsons, the criminal history of the city counts many
other family names, such as the Brindles and the Arifs in Stockwell
(Bennetto, 1995). In particular and more recently, the Adams family in
the area of Islington, has been indicated as one of the most resilient and
established criminal groups in the UK. Not only have they appeared on
the news very frequently in 2014 and 2015, but they have been around
for almost four decades (Gottschalk, 2009). Their criminal career has
nothing to envy to a mafia portfolio, as the Adams family’s members are
considered professionals of violence and extortion, murderers, highly
connected drugs importer and money launderers (Tweedie, 2007).
Through a well-oiled and functioning system of corruption of public
officials, intimidation, hidden alliances and lack of self-publicity, the
Adams family has grown in specialisation and reputation everywhere in

London in the 1990s (Lashmar, 1998). Operation Beregon in 1998, as
explained by investigative journalists in July 2015 (Gillard, 2015),
indicated the participation of the Adams family members in a money
laundering scheme in the Bank of England, with concerning links to
terrorist and other criminal groups outside of the UK. The entrepre-
neurial vocation of the group, their success in the drug trade since the
1980s and the governance of the Islington borough through violence
and intimidation have been confirmed in various arrests and police
operations across the years. On one side, the Adams family confirms
the centrality of charismatic leaders in crime firms in British settings –
the whole group is considered “the realisation of Terry [Adams]’s
entrepreneurial vision” (Gottschalk, 2009: 17). On the other side, this
group also represents the link between the local and the global in today’s
British/English organised crime scenario. Through connections with
Dutch crime networks, escape routes in Spain and more or less direct
links with drug traffickers in Latin America, the Adams family strength-
ened their “reputation” in London. Their criminal specialisation in fraud
and money laundering has been advanced thanks to drug and extortion
money, as the family appears truly glocal and even mafia-like in
character.
Gangs, Not Mafia. Disorganised Crime

and Glocal Groups
Notwithstanding the acute and sharp focus on gangs and organised
crimes, Britain rejects the idea of mafia-type organised crime based on
the conjecture that mafia-type groups ought to be hierarchically orga-
nised. As a senior prosecutor noticed, discussing the setting up of the
Organised Crime Division of the Crown Prosecution Service (also cited
in Sergi (2015b: 663)):
I don’t think we have really sat down to analyse for ourselves what we
meant by the term organised crime, what we really meant was serious
Gangs, Not Mafia. Disorganised Crime and Glocal Groups 187
crime, serious crime activity and often, almost invariably, if you have very
serious sophisticated criminal activity it’s going to be organised, preme-
ditated and planned by groups of people who come together for that
purpose, in other words, if you are looking at very serious complex crime,
you are likely to be looking at people, gangs, committing it and so, in a
sense, I used to think of it in terms of being gang crime as much as
organised crime.
It is common in policy documents in England to list crimes that are

serious and organised (Wall and Chistyakova, 2015; Sergi, 2015b) and
give an idea of organised crime as disorganised, flexible, opportunistic
and small size (Edwards and Jeffray, 2014). Even when organised crime
is serious and sophisticated and uses corruption to infiltrate public
services and the legal sector (HM Government, 2014), the word mafia
does not fit English/British conceptualisations. The problem with orga-
nised crime in the country is more related to its criminality, the scale of
risks and harms for community, the scale of trafficking networks, the
concealing of proceeds of crime and the illegality of activities in general.
This means, in practice, that control of territory through extortion,
intimidation and violence, exploitation of social and cultural networks
to corrupt and acquire power and the resilience of the associative bond
are in the UK historically classified differently. The most common
classification of criminal groups with these characteristics – which are
also “mafia” characteristics within the mafia-OC spectrum in this book –
actually fits the category of “gangs”. Gangs have been in the UK what
mafia has been in Italy: the peculiar autochthonous social issue with a
criminal dimension; local but also specific to the national territory as a
whole; which has called for a targeted policing response and has, in the
years, profoundly shaped the perception of any phenomena loosely
involving groups of people committing crimes. As also confirmed by a
prosecutor and barrister in London:
There are other organised crime gangs, of Turks, Kurds, Eastern

European groups that act in mafia style in their countries and they
bring their mafia-style activities, their mafia style allegiances, their
mafia style feuds to London. There is a subset of mafia-style criminal

activity, which tends to be from incomers.
When mafia-style “gangs” appear, therefore, they are explained within alien
dimensions, as mafia is confirmed as extraneous concept to UK policing.
Furthermore, even though the overlapping of the language of organised
crime and gangs is not decisive, a differentiation is still made in policy-
making. When considering the sociological analyses of both concepts we
find more than one corresponding feature, which leaves us to think that
organised crime and gangs are indeed two peas of the same pod and that
the overlapping of the concept is somehow justified. Miller (1975: 121)
defined gang as an association of peers, organised, having specific lines of
authority and acting “to achieve a specific purpose or purposes which
generally include the conduct of illegal activity and control over a particular
territory, facility, or type of enterprise”. Similarly, Ball and Curry (1995)
stressed the social dimension of gangs by saying that:
The gang is a spontaneous, semi-secret, interstitial, integrated but mutable

social system whose members share common interests and that functions
with relatively little regard for legality but regulates interaction among its
members and features a leadership structure with processes of organiza-
tional maintenance and membership services and adaptive mechanisms for
dealing with other significant social systems in its environment.
Both these definitions do not conflict with the more recent Eurogang
conceptualisation that defines a gang as “durable, street-oriented youth
group whose involvement in illegal activity is part of the group’s iden-
tity” (Weerman et al., 2009: 20). The not-so-subtle difference between
organised crime and gangs, therefore, lies in three main traits: serious-
ness, reach and age. While gangs are generally intended as youth crime,
local and street-oriented, organised crime groups evoke serious crimes,
potentially hidden and potentially outside the local and beyond the
streets. As shared during an interview at the Metropolitan Police in
London, organised criminals “have got some identity, whether it is
tight or loose, and they have got common purposes when committing
a crime, they may be working at a particular crime or be broad-based in
Gangs, Not Mafia. Disorganised Crime and Glocal Groups 189
their criminality”. Organised crime groups, for law enforcement in the

UK, are diverse and fluid in terms of their location/geography, in
relation to the typologies of crimes they commit and the harm they
cause to communities, their level of sophistication and the seriousness of
the threat they pose. Whether a group is local, national or international
obviously affects policing responses, because location/geography com-
bined with the level of sophistication of the group will weight differently
on risk and harm assessments to determine the seriousness of the threat.
In the local dimension, organised crime groups and gangs overlap, even
more so when their structure or activities remain loose and/or limited to
street level. It can be argued that in the UK organised crime means
serious crime with a degree of organisation; the farther it goes from the
street the farther it goes from the concept of gangs too. As the degree of
organisation is intrinsic to certain serious crimes (such as money laun-
dering or drug trafficking) (Sergi, 2015b; Campbell, 2014; Campbell,
2013), the seriousness of organised crime groups is largely dependent on
their ability to organise their activities and act beyond the street level. In
other words, on the one hand there is visible reluctance to name any
criminal group “mafia” as for an ancestral fear of “contagion” from the
worst type of organised crime (as the term is still largely based on the US
perception). On the other hand, the emphasis on the disordered char-
acter of crime groups at the local level (Hobbs, 2013a; Hobbs, 2013b;
Wright, 2006) and the interactions between members of organised
crime groups with street level (youth) gangs seem to be core issues to
identify organised crime, British-style. While police forces are necessarily
focused on the local level, intelligence services have a national security
remit. There is promiscuity between low-level gang groups and those
groups that, because of seriousness and sophistication of criminal activ-
ities, have been labelled as organised crime groups. This is mirrored in
the fragmentation of the response from the various institutions in law
enforcement, and the difficulty to understand the actual threat and the
dimensions of organised crime as such. Whereas gangs have been a
policy issue in Great Britain for much longer than organised crime
(CJS, 2009), their predominantly local character has somehow served
better the intentions and capabilities of territorially based policing, typical
of the country (with 43 local police forces in England and Wales).
Gangs are locally dealt with, they are usually considered more chaotic,
more violent than organised crime groups and subject to power struggles
over territories (Bennett and Holloway, 2004). Interestingly, even though
organised crime groups and gangs are in theory considered as different
issues by law enforcement – with organised crime being a national security
threat and gangs being a social problem or a public order issue, mostly
related to youth justice – they share common language in institutional
approaches and they have been brought together in more than one
occasion both in official documents and for policing strategies. For
example, the Home Office Strategy for Organised Crime published in
2011 and titled significantly “Local to Global: Reducing the Risk from
Organised Crime” implies that gangs are low-level crime phenomena,
while OCGs are superior in sophistication and criminality (Home Office,
2011a: 15).
Low-level criminals can progress into organised crime through contact via
criminal networks or in prison. Drug traffickers may see members of street
gangs as disposable foot soldiers willing to take the greatest risks in street
level distribution. Street gang members may see this as an opportunity to
earn a reputation and move into organised crime.
At the same time the organisational structure of the Metropolitan Police

Service, dated December 2012 (Met Police, 2013), as discussed in
interviews, reveals that gangs and organised crime are part of the same
specialist area of operation. In terms of identity, organised crime is
defined through the characteristics of organised crime groups, which
are considered different in nature – more serious, more structured, less
violent, purposeful – and more sophisticated in terms of their offending,
if compared to street gangs in the country. Organised crime is a matter
of national intelligence and security and this affects policies and prac-
tices, as noticed in the interviews at the Home Office:
From a policy maker perspective, the characterisation of organised crime

by this government as a threat to national security for us is a key element,
which informs our approach, opens a number of doors, has a number of
consequences.
Section 2 Policing Through Intelligence 191
In English law enforcement, when we talk about organised crime, what

we really mean is serious, planned, premeditated gang crime, whereby
gang crime means, in the words of a senior police officer in London
“group crime with an identity; if the crime is serious then the group is an
organised crime group”. As confirmed by the 2013 national strategy:
“areas of high gang activity in the UK tend to be areas where organised
criminals are most active” (Home Office, 2013: 14). In any case, a key
element of the perception of organised crime is its criminality, its roots in
the “underworld”. Organised crime in the UK seems to be understood as
an entirely criminal phenomenon manifested in recognisable criminal
activities, serious ones predominantly to justify the national security
dimension (Lavorgna and Sergi, 2016); the conceptualisation of orga-
nised crime beyond its criminality, in the legal/licit world, the “upper-
world”, is a “new” trend just emerging in institutional perceptions, due
to increased attention on corruption and reinvestments of the proceeds
of crime (Pyman et al., 2011).
Section 2 Policing Through Intelligence

With the evolution of the concept of organised crime, also counter-
ing strategies have evolved. As before in this book, recognising what
is the drive behind institutional changes and legislation updates helps
identifying the rationales at the core of official strategies and, even-
tually, makes it possible to predict change and understand the
motivations behind convergences and divergences with other
(national and international) choices.
In “A new approach on fighting crime” (Home Office, 2011c: 7) the
Home Office declared:
The Home Secretary has set the police one simple mission: to cut
crime. How police forces pursue that mission will be left to their
professional discretion, and from 2012 they will be accountable to
their communities through Police and Crime Commissioners, instead
of the Home Office.
This statement is significant for two reasons. First, it establishes the main
priority of police forces, which is crime reduction. Second, it stresses
how this goal shall be pursued at the local level through directives
provided by the Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs), elected for
the first time in November 2012. The changes occurred within the
police are fundamental to understand the shift in organised crime
policies too. In a country like England, where police forces are many
and diversified, of course the approach to national crimes will be affected
by plural and often fractured responses.
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), which took over the
work of the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National
Crime Squad, was established in 2006 with the Serious Crime and
Police Act 2005 and has terminated its mandate in late 2013 when
substituted by the National Crime Agency (NCA). The advent of the
NCA has not been welcome, as all the interviewees, apart from those at
the Home Office, agree that the NCA was/is only a rebranding of
SOCA, a product of the Coalition Government as much as SOCA
was a creation of the Labours when in power. Indeed, in terms of general
mandate there is very little difference in the way the supporting legisla-
tion for both agencies has been formulated. In the Court and Crime Act
2013 the NCA is presented as an intelligence agency as much as SOCA
was in the Serious Organised Crime Act 2005. However, whereas the
NCA has a crime-fighting function, SOCA was mainly presented as a
harm reduction and disruption agency. The latest organised crime
strategy (Home Office, 2013: 10) in confirmation and continuity of a
fact sheet published alongside the new Crime and Court Bill (Home
Office, 2012: 2), specifies that:
[The NCA] will develop and bring together intelligence on all types of
organised crime, prioritise crime groups according to the threats they
present and, in conjunction with the police, then lead, coordinate and
support our operational response.
The Crime and Court Act at section 1(4) and 1(5) provides that the
NCA has both a crime-reduction and a criminal intelligence function.
Previously, the Serious and Organised Crime and Police Act 2005,
Section 2 Policing Through Intelligence 193
introducing SOCA, at section 2(1) established that SOCA had the

functions of “preventing and detecting”, and contributing to the reduc-
tion of organised crime and its harms. For SOCA, the very significance
of harm was, however, problematic. As put it in one of the interviews
with a former member of the board of directors at SOCA, “no one ever
defined harm; so not only SOCA was not telling anyone what it was
doing, but it was trying to affect something which was never defined”.
SOCA published a harm matrix in the Annual Plan of 2010. The
framework identifies three typologies of harm in terms of geographical
range – individual/local, community/region, UK/international – and
five characterisation of these harms – physical, social, environmental,
economic, structural (SOCA, 2010: 24). This framework, however, does
not define harm, but rather its features. To say it with the words of the
same interviewee at SOCA, “there was a harm matrix, but that was
like . . . it didn’t tell you what the elephant was but it gave you some of
the descriptive features of the elephant”. This approach fuelled the
critiques against SOCA; other concerns revolved around the difficulties
to establish accountability and to evaluate the targets identified accord-
ing to uncertain categories of risk (Bowling and Ross, 2006). The NCA,
therefore, by abandoning the harm reduction approach (subsuming it in
the more general prevention strand of the new strategy) and by empha-
sising a broader crime reduction approach instead, has aligned with the
criticisms of police forces against SOCA (Sergi, 2015a). As stated during
an interview at the Metropolitan Police in London: “the new National
Crime Agency . . . hopefully they will become more . . . law enforcement,
on the policing side of things instead of only the national intelligence
side. I think that forces are becoming more and more community-
based . . . ”.
Furthermore, the NCA employs intelligence towards disruption.
Disruption does not aim at preventing specific crimes but seeks to deter
criminals by policing and prosecuting any illicit activity that becomes
visible (Kirby, 2013). In this sense, “the majority of disruptive interven-
tions go together with an increased risk of detection”, as shared by a Senior
Manager at SOCA, now at NCA. Harm reduction and disruption are
essentially two versions of crime prevention techniques through the use of
criminal intelligence. Crime prevention depends on prioritisation of
threats, categorised through intelligence. The National Intelligence Model

(NIM) introduced in the UK in the 1990s by the NCIS (National
Criminal Intelligence Service) is organised around three levels of crime:
single-jurisdictional (local), multi-jurisdictional (cross-border) and inter-
national (serious and organised crimes) (CENTREX, 2007). The NCA
hosts the Intelligence Hub, which produces an agreed and unified national
picture of serious and organised crime in the country (Home Office,
2011b). The agency works around a set of priorities – crime threats –
within an overall strategy. The strategy, set up in 2013 by the Home Office,
is based, interestingly, on the same principles guiding the CONTEST
strategy for counterterrorism and on the so-called 4Ps model. The 4Ps
are Pursue, Protect, Prevent and Prepare and guide the medium and long-
term approaches of the agency. While Pursue and Protect are more based
on traditional crime control techniques, Prevent and Prepare are the result
of a combination between traditional policing and strategies of disruption
based on behavioural sciences, technology-led and intelligence-led policing
(Home Office, 2013). A very similar approach is the one of Scotland,
especially after the unification of eight police forces into a single organisa-
tion, Police Scotland, in 2013. The Scottish strategy for Serious Organised
Crime 2015 focuses majorly on harm to communities and individuals and
builds a response to reduce harm based on four objectives, the 4Ds –
Divert, Deter, Detect, Disrupt – operated by a Task Force involving
both the Ministry of Justice and all the other law enforcement agencies.
“There is”, in Scotland, “evidence to suggest that Serious Organised Crime
has a disproportionate impact on Scotland’s poorer communities, contri-
buting to social and economic inequalities” (The Scottish Government,
2015: 6). Indeed, as noticed by a Senior Police Officer of Police Scotland,
“what happens in rural parts of Scotland, the interaction between migrant
settlements and seclusion of the territories, is something we need to be
mindful about”. Between England and Scotland, increased gathering of
information and intelligence respond to both harm and crime reduc-
tion goals: in the long run, crime prevention and disruption are
preferred to arrests and prosecution, which “risk missing the point
and give a very narrow snapshot of what is the situation of organised
crime groups in the country”, as declared by a Senior manager at
SOCA first and now at the NCA.
Criminalising Organised Crime(s) 195
Criminalising Organised Crime(s)

The Organised Crime Division (OCD) has been created in 2005 within
the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to form, alongside Special Crime
and Counter Terrorism, the Central Casework divisions. As with the
former Casework Directorate set up in 1998 (HM CPS Inspectorate,
2009), the three divisions were meant to deal with specialised areas of
crime and justice, especially in view of SOCA’s launch in 2006.
In terms of charges, when substantial crimes cannot be prosecuted,
the charge of choice for cases of organised crime has historically been the
“umbrella” of conspiracy offences. The first time conspiracy offences and
organised crime have been linked was for the purposes of the Report on
Organised Crime in 1994. At the time, the Home Affairs Committee
suggested that there was a need to think about the introduction of an
offence punishing the membership or participation in a criminal orga-
nisation (Home Affairs Committee, 1994: pp. lix-lx). While the
Association of Chief Police Officers was quite keen on the idea, the
CPS at the time was more favourable to keep the focus on conspiracy,
which was easier and more flexible to use (Home Affairs Committee,
1994). Until today serious and organised crimes have been prosecuted
when single crimes could be prosecuted (Sergi, 2014a). As the HM CPS
Inspectorate specified (2009: 13):
The types of offence dealt with by OCD reflect the strategic approach
taken by SOCA to tackling serious and organised crime and concentrate
on offences involving drugs, money laundering, theft and fraud, human
trafficking, counterfeiting, the use of false documents and firearms.
Eventually, in 1994 the Home Affairs Committee did consider as a valid

option the introduction of a new membership offence – on the line of RICO
in the US – because its exclusion seemed inconsistent with the will to focus
on prevention and on a better understanding of the threats and of the
phenomenon of organised crime overall (Home Affairs Committee,
1994). However, no official step has ever been taken in that direction and
RICO was never fully analysed in its full interpretation and potential within
the British system either. Levi and Smith (2002) highlighted some issues
with the law of conspiracy when used for fighting organised crime, calling
especially for a reform of the law on interceptions, which does not allow the
use of intercepted materials as evidence in court. The offence of membership
was again rejected in 2004 upon creation of SOCA (Home Office, 2004).
The offence of conspiracy in England and Wales is a common law legacy
and is an inchoate crime punishing any agreement to commit an unlawful act
or a lawful act through unlawful means (Grande, 1993; Law Commission,
2007). The essence of conspiracy is the proof of a criminal agreement.
Interestingly, when a group of people commit a series of offences over a
long period of time, prosecutors are almost bound to proceed on the basis of
several substantive counts: proving a single conspiracy at the basis of the
broad criminal activity could be almost impossible in practice (Ormerod and
Hooper, 2012). “There is no association when you cannot see the crime, I
mean, when they don’t commit a crime together they are not associated”,
said a barrister in London, rejecting the idea of guilt-by-association and
noticing how conspiracy is still easier to use because it only needs circum-
stantial evidence requirements (Simister et al., 2010). When a plurality of
crimes can be seen as part of one plan, then joint conspiracy rules allows to
group offences and offenders in the same trials (Sergi, 2015c). However, it is
not possible to prosecute both the conspiracy and the single crimes, without
giving valid motivations (The Law Commission, 1976: para. 1.86).
In the interviews with prosecutors/barristers there was a generalised per-
ception that conspiracy offences are adequate for targeting crimes linked to
organised crime. Indeed, conspiracy is actually preferable to membership or
participation offences, which conversely are perceived as unnecessary legal
strains because they punish conducts before they become fully criminal. The
idea of conspiracy suits very well the focus on organised crime as set of serious
crimes requiring agreements and premeditation. A membership offence
would require a shift of logic towards criminalising a group’s intentions rather
than individual crimes. This means that the membership offence, as for
example the one in the law against terrorism1 (Walker, 2009), brings a
1
An example is section 56(1) of the Terrorism Act 2000: “A person commits an offence if he
directs, at any level, the activities of an organisation which is concerned in the commission of acts
of terrorism”.
Criminalising Organised Crime(s) 197
different understanding of the nature of the offending, which does not fit the
usual grounds of English criminal law based on individual penal responsi-
bility within common law (UNODC, 2004). There seems to be, however, a
misconception about membership offences in the discourse. They are equa-
ted to offences of affiliation in a proscribed criminal organisation (as it is in
terrorism law), rather than intended as enterprise criminality. Eventually, as
proscribing specific organisations seems not possible in organised crime cases
(as no criminal network can be named and eventually proscribed), criminal
law pursues other ways.
A very interesting middle ground between conspiracy offences and
membership in organised crime groups – intended as above – has been
found in 2015 with section 45 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, which
not only introduced the offence of “participating in activities of orga-
nised crime groups”, but, in so doing, legally defined organised crime in
England and Wales. This new law presents more than one problem and
has been criticised by professional bodies – for example lawyers and
accountants – for the way it uses the word “organised”, “serious” and
“activity”, for its assumptions about motivations of organised criminals,
restricted to financial gain or profit, and for its overlapping with other
existing laws (Sergi, 2016a; Campbell, 2016b). The new offence targets
both direct and indirect participation in criminal activities of an orga-
nised crime group, especially those in supporting roles. As explained
(Home Office, 2014):
The new participation offence in England and Wales is intended to

provide a new means by which the NCA, the police and prosecutors can
tackle serious organised crime. The new offence can be used to target not
only those who head a criminal organisation and who plan, coordinate
and manage, but do not always directly participate in the commission of
the final criminal acts; but also the other members of the group and
associates who participate in activities such as the provision of materials,
services, infrastructure and information that contribute to the overall
criminal capacity and capability of the organised crime group.
While it is too early to assess the effective reach of the new offence,
it seems that with the criminalisation of participation, rather than
unlawful association, the law in England has avoided the issue of

collective responsibility that unlawful association charges (like in
Italy) or illegal enterprise conspiracies (like US RICO) bring. In
the new law penal responsibility is still individual and the legislator
has maintained the focus on the seriousness of organised crime
activities (punished with at least 7 years imprisonment), while
confirming the connotation of organised crime as national security
threat. In fact, as there was no real call from law enforcement to
change the law, this change can be a understood as a policy
manoeuvre to introduce a label of “organised crime” also into the
law, in order to benefit from the stigma that single-named national
security threats carry (Bigo, 2012). Indeed, notwithstanding the
apparently innovative character of this new offence and considering
the institutional perceptions of the phenomena of organised crime
in the country, this law seems still quite anchored to the crimina-
lisation of organised crime activities (as opposed to structures),
intended as serious crimes committed by criminal groups, loosely
equated to trafficking networks or gangs (Campbell, 2013; Sergi,
2015b; Sergi, 2014b).
Proceeds of Crime, Criminal Lifestyles and

Corruption
A study conducted by the Home Office in 2013 has examined
criminal histories of offenders convicted for organised crime, largely
focusing (73%) on convictions for drugs importation and supply
(Francis et al., 2013). Criminal careers in organised crime have
been linked mostly to violence and financial gains; while the former
is easily understandable, the latter, from a legal point of view, needs
more exploration. In fact, for criminal law, the link between money
and criminal activity is found in the interdependence between
financial opportunities and proceeds of crime. This interdependence
governs money laundering offences and/or provisions to tackle unex-
plained wealth. In both cases, affirm the prosecutors, the financial
Proceeds of Crime, Criminal Lifestyles and Corruption 199
gain needs to become visible in order for a link with a criminal

activity to be established and satisfy legal requirements.
Money laundering is one of the activities historically linked to orga-
nised crime in the UK (Home Affairs Committee, 1994). As reminded
by Levi (2004), the need to convert proceeds of crime into justified
financial resources motivated and still motivates prevention mechanisms
against organised crime. Indeed, the UK has been one of the most
advanced countries in applying a strong anti-money laundering regime,
even though it was first intended only against drug retail (Levi, 2004).
In “Extending Our Reach”, a Home Office report of 2009, the
government supported a shift towards more stringent tax investigations
(the so-called Al Capone Strategy) and other administrative measures
(indirect measures) against organised crime. This strategy linked money
laundering and drug trafficking together in an inclusive definition of
organised crime. In particular, as organised crime is often difficult to
capture, investigate and prosecute, administrative and financial investi-
gations (taxes primarily) “can be used against offenders [ . . . ] at the top
of criminal enterprises who have distanced themselves from the criminal
activity which generates their money” (Home Office, 2009: 47). Money
becomes the visible manifestation of otherwise hidden/distant (serious)
organised crimes.
This is reflected in the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA), the
most relevant legislation for both money laundering offences (part 7 of
the Act) and confiscation procedures. Money laundering is both a result
and an activity of organised crime; this is not problematic in practice,
but it might create issues in terms of definitions and perceptions of
organised crime: drug trafficking actors are not the same individuals
involved in money laundering: they require different types of expertise
and carry different types of risks. Nevertheless, the law connects orga-
nised crime(s) and money laundering in the so-called lifestyle offences,
sanctioned by section 75 of POCA. A defendant has a criminal lifestyle
if the offence: is a lifestyle offence (drug trafficking, money laundering,
directing terrorism, people trafficking, arms trafficking, counterfeiting,
intellectual property offences, blackmail and conspiracy offences); con-
stitutes conduct forming part of a course of criminal activity; is com-
mitted over a period of at least 6 months and the offender has benefited
from it. More specifically the threshold for “relevant” benefits amounts
to £5,000. Whether or not a defendant has a criminal lifestyle is
determined by the Crown Court upon issuing a confiscation order
targeting the relevant benefits (part 2 POCA). Moreover, part 5 of
POCA regulates High Court’s civil recovery of wealth that, evidence
shows, was obtained through criminal activity (unexplained wealth).
The existence of unexplained wealth alone is not sufficient to proceed
with civil recovery; the enforcement authority has to demonstrate the
links with unlawful conducts. The burden of proof, therefore, is on the
institution and not the defendant. A proposal to reverse this onus and to
introduce unexplained wealth orders on the model of Australian ones
has been advanced in summer 2015 by Transparency International UK
(Martini, 2015) and has been followed by an action plan which sets out
the possibilities for new legal powers in the area (Home Office and HM
Treasury, 2016).
With a reversed burden of proof, unexplained wealth not only can be
linked to criminal activities, but it can also be used in corruption investiga-
tions. Corruption – usually considered, like money laundering, as both an
enabler and a manifestation of organised crime(s) in the UK – does not
always enjoy a stand-alone profile in criminal justice cases of organised
crime (Sergi, 2015b; Campbell, 2016b; Campbell, 2016a). This is because
corruption is often the bridge between the illegal activities of crime groups
and their legal dimensions. The NCA considers organised criminal groups
as necessarily able, money-wise and power-wise, to corrupt. However,
corruption here means essentially “public sector” corruption, as shared
by a senior manager at NCA: “unless it [organised crime] can corrupt it
can’t get anywhere, it cannot exist in isolation, it has to get in there [the
legal sector] also to defend itself . . . if you look at what constitutes orga-
nised crime, corruption is always going to be there”. A contrasting view,
based on the perception of crime groups in the country as unable to reach
high levels of corruption, could lead to reconsidering the conceptualisation
of organised crime as national security threat. If the capability to corrupt is
a quintessential feature of organised crime groups in the country, then it is
one of the reasons why organised crime damages national financial security
(NCA, 2015); if this view is not corroborated by data, then the whole
argument falls apart. However, notwithstanding an improved
The UK Activity Policing Model 201
understanding of the links between organised crime and corruption, in UK

policing “counter-organised crime and counter-corruption communities
travel in separate, parallel universes” (Pyman et al., 2011: 21). The UK
Anti-Corruption Plan 2014 has been the government’s response to bridge
this gap. As a result of consultation, the NCA has developed an
International Corruption Unit, which investigates on money laundering,
corruption and bribery both national and international.2 While reinforcing
the national impact of corruption and bribery, the new plan focuses on the
local and the public: “Organised Crime Groups are known to try and
corrupt local officials to consolidate their status in communities. Therefore
more is being done to ensure robust processes and bring more transparency
to local government than ever before” (HM Government, 2014: 31).
Alongside an enhanced focus on public sector corruption, both at national
and international level, the UK Government in 2014 advocated for an
enhanced scrutiny of individual wealth and asset disclosure. Through
corruption, therefore, the link between organised crime activities, their
proceeds of crime and harm to the communities – as recurring aspects of
the UK’s approach – finally comes to the surface, even though it still leaves
political aspects of corruption under-researched.
The UK Activity Policing Model

The response to organised crime in the UK, with specific focus to
England and Wales, is targeted at the activities of organised crime rather
than the structures. This, for the purposes of this book, implies the
placement of the UK at the other side of the mafia–OC spectrum when
compared to Italy. Figure 6.1 summarises and presents the main char-
acteristics of the British, mostly English, policing approach to organised
crime: the Activity Model.
2
International Corruption Unit at the National Crime Agency – http://www.nationalcrimea
gency.gov.uk/about-us/what-we-do/economic-crime/international-corruption-unit-icu
UK Activity Model
OC as Intelligence
(Local)
Activities
Harm/
Disruption Prosecution
OC as
National Conspiracy Single Offences
Prevention/
Security
Protection
Threat
Fig. 6.1 The UK activity model
The Conceptualisation of Organised Crime and Mafia
There is in the UK a very clear conceptualisation of organised crime

groups as disorganised entities moving in flexible illicit markets. This has
been confirmed by research, and it does shape institutional perceptions
too. The perception of organised crime in the UK is linked to hotspots
of gang crimes in the major cities and to a significant prominence of
drugs crime, number one criminal activity associated to criminal net-
works and serious organised crime. Gangs represent the primary home-
grown organised crime phenomenon, which moved from being a matter
of public order to being a matter of national security the more it was
associated to serious criminal activities. The focus on criminal activities
– linked to the disorganised character of organised crime groups in the
country – justifies the low score on the spectrum for mafia-type crimes.
As in the UK, mafia is, for right or for wrong, considered to be ethnic-
based, generally hierarchical and endorsing regulations and specialisation
of work among affiliates, the lack of all these characteristics in organised
crime groups in the UK keeps the mafia label away. An English
prosecutor started our interview by saying: “Here we don’t have the

mafia you know, our groups are more fluid, more network-based more
opportunistic”, thus identifying everything that in his opinion mafia is
not or is less: not/less fluid, not/less network-based, not/less opportu-
nistic. Similarly, a judge in Liverpool Crown Court said in a judgement
against a member of conspiracy to supply drugs and involving a murder
in 20093: “You were prepared to use violence to enforce drug debts. You
were all involved in gang-related activity, which is all too reminiscent of
Al Capone and Chicago in the era of prohibition . . . Manchester is not
the Wild West but you all treated the streets as if it were”. Again, there is
the need to distance gangs’ activities from mafia-type activities.
However, the more complex nature of these crimes emerges anyway;
in the same case the judge continued “Your reactions to the ver-
dict . . . suggest to me you could not care less . . . it was almost as if you
regarded the badge of a guilty verdict as being a mark of honour in the
cause for which you had shot”.
When looking at criminal cases in organised crime networks in the
UK, we find that not only they change significantly from county to
county, due to a fractured system of different police forces and strategies,
as we will see also in the next chapter, but also that the cases are only
traceable through a list of activities classified as “organised crime”.
The Classification of Organised Crime
As the name says, the fulcrum of the Activity Model is the fact that the
definition of organised crime is not single but multiple, being organised
crime defined as set of activities, a set of crimes. The focus on the
activities is what causes all the other choices presented in the model.
The activities linked to the definition of organised crime are criminal
activities of different nature committed by groups of people, indicated
mostly as serious gangs and mostly linked to urban areas. Organised
crime is what organised crime does. This does not easily cover or include
3
Liverpool Crown Court, Judge Mr Justice Brian Langstaff, Case No. T20087213, 07-04-2009.
those semi-legal investments or corrupted behaviours, which might

facilitate or be part of criminal plans. In fact, even though there seems
to be a growing interest in the interactions between phenomena of
corruption and (traditional) organised crime activities in the country,
de facto the legislation and the official strategies do not connect corrup-
tion, sleaze, malpractices and unethical behaviours, with serious/orga-
nised criminal activities. As said, notwithstanding the association with
ideas of gang crime and violence in its visible street-level manifestations,
organised crime has been in the recent years classified as a national
security threat. The choice to shift to national security can be justified
with the necessity to support the establishment of a large-scale national
strategy (with SOCA first and the NCA afterwards) able, if necessary, to
coordinate the otherwise too fractured local police forces. Being orga-
nised crime a unique type of national security threat – affecting national
economies but also impacting local communities – the most contem-
porary policing approach aims at being national but also able to disrupt
local criminal activities.
In order to be effective both at the national and at the local levels, the
Activity Model needs first of all to focus on the criminal acts. The UK
strategy highly relies on intelligence as the best way to map criminality
on a large scale and to understand where and how to intervene, by
boxing interventions in the four Ps (or Ds in the case of Scotland).
Through intelligence the agencies present the national picture of serious
criminal threats, which will then shape the way policing strategies are
coordinated at the local level. The central role that police forces have in
England and Wales with investigations and intelligence being at the
centre of policing strategies from the local to the international is the so-
called golden thread of policing (Home Office, 2010: 23). The focus on
intelligence, since agencies like the NCIS, the NCS, SOCA and now the
NCA, has been enriched with new targets, such as harm reduction or
crime prevention, aimed at disruption and crime reduction even though
arguably one of the characteristics of organised crime groups is the
ability to survive and reform after disruption (NCIS, 2000: 8). As seen,
the focus on harm reduction has created a number of definitional
problems for intelligence-led policing actors, because of the necessity
to reformulate strategies according to a target, which not only did not
have a clear definition but also has always been too difficult to measure.
The NCA substituting SOCA has in theory abandoned the rhetoric of
harm reduction to go back to prevention and disruption as more general
focus of a national strategy within the more general reform of policing.
The Criminalisation of Organised Crime(s)
Prosecution has never had a prominent position in the strategy against

organised crime in the UK. This is linked to the prominent roles of
police forces in the country and the fairly recent evolution into a
national prosecution mentality, with the Crown Prosecution Service
established “only” in 1984 and the Organised Crime Division born
“only” in 2005. Even though the relationship between prosecutors and
intelligence agencies is not considered problematic, the content of
prosecutions mirrors the difficulties in understanding the threat of
organised crime as a collective crime. In criminal law, notwithstanding
the most recent changes brought by the Serious Crime Act 2015,
organised crime is a category composed by different criminal activities
committed by individuals who participate to those activities. In practice,
it follows that the prosecution stage will be about single offences when
completed and conspiracy charges instead should the criminal activity
result unfinished or the single offences too difficult to prove. The lack of
collective penal responsibility like in unlawful association/enterprise
offences mirrors the conceptualisation of organised crime as an offence
of participation to serious and (more or less) organisable/organised
crimes by gangs. It is, however, in the legislation related to money
laundering that we find the most accurate definition of organised
crime in an effort to picture not only the group-based criminal activity
but also by saying something about a prolonged criminal lifestyle. The
focus on careers of crime, even though it is not a new concept (Hobbs,
1997; Hobbs, 1995a) does help expanding the conceptualisation of
organised crime in the country. From a threat coming from violence
on the streets linked to gang business, organised crime has evolved first
into a matter for professionals of crime, then a threat to the financial
health of the country when this professionalism, though
money laundering and concealing of proceeds of crimes, has attacked

finance more directly. Notwithstanding the evolution that the criminali-
sation of criminal lifestyle has brought, the model still remains anchored
to criminal activities, visible and therefore attackable by the state.
Finally, it does not surprise to find that corruption is seldom con-
sidered as more than just an enabler of organised crime and as a
constituent/endemic part of organised crime groups’ relationships with
society. On the one hand, the distance of organised crime from power
(political power) allows a conceptual distance from discourse of mafias.
On the other hand, considering corruption as only an enabler of orga-
nised crime or by keeping the focus on public sector corruption allows a
conceptualisation of organised crime as a set of solely criminal activities,
with a national security dimension (its financial side), but still needing a
local focus for police forces.
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7
Convergences and Divergences Across
the Four Models
Section 1 Convergences and Divergences

By looking at the four models for policing and controlling mafias
and organised crime in Italy, US, Australia and the UK, the first
thing to notice is that it is indeed still quite helpful to differentiate
control models in terms of the “structure versus activities” para-
digm (Sergi, 2015a). In terms of the mafia characterisation, the
Italian Structure Model sits on one end of the spectrum, the fullest,
the English Activity Model sits on the other end, the emptiest, but
there is certainly a lot in the middle. In an attempt to simplify, the
US Enterprise Model shares more with the Italian Structure focus
than with the English Activity one, while the opposite is true for
the Australian Visibility Model. As said, the elements of the models
are not mutually exclusive; they are just more predominant in one
country rather than the others. It now becomes necessary to dig
even deeper in the contexts of all four models by looking at them
together to understand not only where do normative prescriptions
come from, but also what changes perceptions and institutional
conceptualisation towards one or the other end of the spectrum.

216 7 Convergences and Divergences Across the Four Models
The second level of the comparative effort, which follows the pre-
sentation of the models separately, is an attempt to cluster terminologies
and categories of analysis not through approximation, but through
harmonisation. The following sections will highlight convergences and
divergences in both the conceptual and the procedural frameworks of
the four national policing models. The point is always the same: asses-
sing the influence of institutional conceptualisations on criminal policies
and procedures and vice versa.
Conceptual Convergences and Divergences
Figure 7.1 shows the interaction among the four models and their
conceptualisations of the phenomenon/a of organised crime or mafias
through keywords and categories. The more a category is close to one or
more models or the connectors among them, the more that category is
Italy USA
Structure Model Enterprise Model
Structure-based offences
Grey area
Patterns of behaviours
Corruption Infiltration
Socio-cultural dimensions
Folow the money

Mobility Trafficking (drugs) OC as Business
Glocalisation/Transnationality
Seriousness Sophistication
Gangs Conspiracy
Dangerousness
Violence
Harm
Activity-based offences
Australia UK/England
Visibility Model Activity Model
Fig. 7.1 Four-model of conceptual convergences and divergences

Section 1 Convergences and Divergences 217
considered strong in that policing scenario. Obviously, as we are talking

about ever-evolving conceptualisations and constantly changing institu-
tions, the grouping should not be considered static but dynamic. The
interpretation of categories given here is one of the various interpreta-
tions possible, and it specifically serves a socio-legal comparative analysis.
Follow the Money and Criminal Activities
At the centre of the conceptual convergence are three main items:

“follow the money” is certainly the main one; the focus on drugs as
the main manifestation of organised crime follows, while the reach of
organised crime leads policy-makers and institutions to conceptualise
manifestations of organised crime activities as inherently glocal or trans-
national. These elements are not only shared by all the four models but
represent the core of their convergence. In particular, this means that
these three concepts are powerfully and equally present in all four
models. The “follow the money” perspective relates to economic inves-
tigations, financial crimes and most of all, the idea that the best way to
weaken organised crime groups of whichever type is by targeting their
criminal assets. Whereas there are divergences – for example, in the way
legislations handle some confiscation procedures, as seen later in this
chapter – this is the area where the four systems converge the most. The
focus on criminal assets follows the conceptualisation of organised crime
as a business, and most of all, of the profit-orientation of criminal
groups. In the US Enterprise Model, this is clearly a product of the
terminology of “enterprise”; in other models, targeting proceeds of crime
is both a way to prevent further criminal activities as well as recovering
illegally acquired assets. Convergence operates at the level of financial
preventative measures, confiscation of proceeds of crime and anti-
money-laundering regulations. Even though some elements of diver-
gence are still present, they do not affect the perception of organised
crime as “business” and can be considered as procedural differences that
do not alter policies and results. For example, the need to “follow the
money” in order to dismantle organised crime has been a strategic
priority in the UK since the times of SOCA, in 2005, while POCA
was already in place since 2002. The UK 2009 report “Extending Our
Reach” has been fundamentally constructed around the notion of eco-
nomic costs of organised crime and organised crime harm to businesses
and market competition. Australia, as said, has a strategy for combating
organised crime, which identifies money laundering as an intrinsic enabler
of organised crime activity. On the Italian side as well, the need for a
financial approach to organised crime is very clear in the Antimafia Code
(Law Decree 159/2011), where patrimonial sanctions as well as financial
prevention measures are described in length. These provisions have been
part of the legislations since 1950s as personal preventative measures and
later on, in 1982 were expanded to cover mafia associations (Hamilton,
2012; Vettori, 2007). Antimafia prosecutors repeatedly affirm how in Italy
next to the proceedings against mafias are the proceedings against assets,
which are parallel, intertwined and yet autonomous from the mafia
proceedings. The idea, which informs non-conviction based confiscation
and other forms of civil recovery is that there is “an intrinsic dangerous-
ness of the assets linked to the mafia phenomenon”, as noticed by a
Europol analyst in the Hague talking about the Italian Antimafia tools.
Trafficking (Drugs)
Furthermore, the illicit market of drugs – among other “trafficking”

and illicit markets, such as human trafficking, arm trafficking, coun-
terfeiting and large-scale fraud – is the privileged realm of organised
criminals; simply speaking, drug trafficking, as noticed by a Victoria
police officer in Melbourne, “could not exist if it wasn’t at some level
organised, right? How else would you manage to get something down
here [in Australia] otherwise?” Similarly, at the Met Police in
London, it was noticed how “the most sophisticated and globalised
networks must carry out the most complex illicit traffics of drugs”. It
is therefore the trafficking dimension of the drugs trade that requires
some degree of organisation especially if it happens across borders.
This simple concept mirrors the activity-based approach to organised
crime. As the UK’s Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of the Crown
Prosecution Service (HM CPS Inspectorate, 2009: 13) noticed:
The types of offence dealt with by the Organised Crime Division OCD
reflect the strategic approach taken by SOCA to tackling serious and
organised crime and concentrate on offences involving drugs, money
laundering, theft and fraud, human trafficking, counterfeiting, the use of
false documents and firearms.
That “drugs” are one of the overarching elements of convergence is also

easily seen in the fact that each state has an ad hoc legislation against
drug trafficking, independent from the legislation on organised crime. In
Italy, article 74 of the D.P.R no. 309/1990 punishes unlawful associa-
tions involved in drug trafficking; the US approach to Drug Trafficking
Organisations (DTOs) is object of a specific multi-agency program (as
we will see in more details later on in this chapter); the Australian
Federal Custom Act covers the importing of drugs, while each state
has its own laws governing the manufacture, possession, distribution and
use of narcotics; in England and Wales, s.170 of the Customs and Excise
Management Act 1979 punishes importation and exportation of a
controlled drug, while other legislation punishes the production, posses-
sion and use. S. 34 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 clarifies
what exactly “drug trafficking offence” means by collating all the rele-
vant norms in the system. Since the UK Serious Crime Act 2007
(Schedule 1), “drug trafficking” appears as one of the founding crimes
for Serious Crime Prevention Orders.
Even in those models classifying the threat as national security, the
institutional view of organised crime and mafias has been shifting
towards a more street-based dimension, where the impact of organised
crime is in the social, economic and political fabrics. This is why the
focus on drug importation and trafficking never cease to be part of the
conceptualisation of organised crime. This is mainly due to the increas-
ing convergence of what organised crime does even when we cannot
agree on what it is. In countries like Italy and the US – where the
structure of criminal enterprises and mafias are paramount for the
definitional evolution of policing models – illegal activities connected
to organised crime are more or less the same of those in Australia and in
the UK. In Australia, as we have seen, criminal markets and visible
trends drive the model, while in the UK the model is essentially built
against what groups do rather than how they are. In the UK and in
Australia the seriousness of illegal activities commonly linked to organised
crime, such as drug, arms or human trafficking and fraud, makes the
dangerousness of organised crime groups. In Italy and in the US, serious-
ness is a concept indirectly connected to the ability of a group to corrupt
and infiltrate legal businesses, politics and institutions.
Glocalisation/Transnationality
All models share the perception that the transnationality of illicit markets
is an indicator of increased seriousness of criminal networks. In addition,
transnationality has also allowed overcoming what is considered “tradi-
tional” organised crime, by sharing experiences across borders. It does
not surprise, therefore, that in models where illegal markets define the
strategy we find statements like the following during a meeting in the
Metropolitan Police in London:
Family-run, Mob-style mafia groups like those in The Godfather and The
Sopranos, once thought of as the defining stereotype, no longer dominate
organised crime. The nature of the modern-day crime landscape is such
that those old-style traditional groups are no longer so prominent.
And again, when transnationality meets tradition, with manifestations of

glocalisation of mafia groups and activities for example, the difficulties to
qualify this mix are extraordinary. On one side, the idea of criminal
groups remains attached to their territories – see the importance of the
conceptualisation of the phenomenon of gangs in the UK. On the other
side, the glocal character of traditional groups, such as the Calabrian
‘ndrangheta in Australia, is likely to create a crisis that differently from
local ones (e.g. the Australian “bikies”) will necessarily employ foreign
conceptualisations and foreign policing issues which profoundly change
local institutional views.
To a certain extent, and in line with the evolution of terminologies of
transnationality and seriousness pivoting around illegal markets of orga-
nised crime, institutional views across the models have also moved
towards a progressive abandonment of the conceptualisation of orga-

nised crime groups, and especially mafias, as “secret societies”, also
prompted by a slow process of opening up of secretive policing since
the end of the Cold War (Hannessy, 2007). The conceptualisation of
organised crime groups as secret societies is, however, not completely
forgotten when it comes to mafia groups; it does represent a point of
conceptual convergence between the Italian and the Australian model.
In Italy, “mafias have been considered secret organisations, due to their
rituals and their exclusivity and ability to camouflage in the community
since forever”, said a former Chief Antimafia Prosecutor in Catanzaro,
Calabria. Even today, when the wall of silence has been repeatedly
pierced, secrecy is still a distinguished element of mafia power, even
though it might be a secrecy only in membership and not in intentions
or vice versa (Sergi, 2016d). During Operation Mamma Santissima1 –
an explosive investigation into the links of mafia clans, masonic lodges
and other political and financial powers in Calabria, which follows, in
2015–2016, decades of investigations on the same topic – the prosecu-
tors reminded what already found in Operation Bellu Lavuru2:
In order to protect themselves from external attacks, the ‘ndrangheta has

changed its traditional structure, and created a directive body, to whom
only a restricted number of people can participate. They are called “the
Invisibles” and they are those who count (those who make decisions)
within the organisation (and have links with masonic circles). Because of
privacy and delicacy of their position, they might not be known to those at
inferior levels.
That there is an element of secrecy in the ‘ndrangheta is also one of

the most problematic aspects of the ‘ndranghetisation process – the
unprecedented attention to the movements of the Calabrian clans
outside of Calabria (Sergi and Lavorgna, 2016). Especially in
Australia “investigating the Italian secret society’s major role in the
1
Operation Mamma Santissima, No. 9339/2009 R. G. N. R. DDA + No. 5448/2010 R.G. GIP +
No. 50/2015 DDA Reggio Calabria.
2
Operation Bellu Lavuru, No. 1130/06 R.G.R.N. DDA. Reggio Calabria.
nation’s illegal drug market will be one of the first tasks undertaken
by the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission”, as reported in
the Herald Sun in July 2016 (Moor, 2016) in repetition of what
already said in the previous years (Moor, 2013).
Today’s difficulties to deal with the ‘ndrangheta and the ‘ndranghetisa-
tion process is the key convergence between Italy and in Australia in
general. The focus on mafia migration is also a legacy of the American
conceptualisation of mafias. Italy and the US share the experience of
dealing with an “enemy from within”. Even though the American experi-
ence with “La Cosa Nostra” has been characterised by alienation of the
threat, an effective strategy to fight LCN has been reached when the threat
was internalised as a wholly American, albeit of foreign origin, problem.
According to the FBI’s Attaché in Rome:
Italy has its autochthonous mafias; they grew from within; there is some
sort of intuition that comes from this. In this sense, yes Italians will always
be different – but as soon as the US realised that those Italians were
actually also Americans, well then everything changed for us too.
Finally, the differences between Italy and the rest of the world especially
in cases of mafia movements have given origin to a sense of isolationism
among Italian authorities (Sergi, 2016d). As noticed by a Chief
Antimafia Prosecutors in Reggio Calabria:
Europe is not paying attention. You hear all sorts of policies and agree-
ments are in place, but truth is that half of the time European countries
don’t know what they are dealing with. They don’t see the gunshots and
they think all is quiet; they don’t understand the new faces of mafias. It is
disrespectful to Italy when other countries choose to look the other way.
It is also this isolationism and the distinctiveness of mafia’s autochthonous

and socio-cultural characters in Italy that will determine some of the
peculiarities of the procedures of an effective policing model in the
country.
Procedural Convergences and Divergences
When it comes to law and procedures, conceptual convergences and

divergences weigh differently. Some of the conceptual convergences do
lead undoubtedly to procedural ones, but the connection between the
two categories is not always intuitive (Fig. 7.2). The “follow the money”
convergence, for example, is found in the centrality of provisions of
money laundering, confiscation and unexplained wealth regimes.
Similarly, the convergence on trafficking and on drugs as prototypical
crime of organised leads to criminalisation and prosecution of drug
trafficking networks and related activities. The convergence on transna-
tionality and glocalisation, instead, does not necessarily lead to conver-
gent policies at national level.
Italy USA
Structure Model Enterprise Model
Structure-based offences
Grey area Infiltration/Corruption
Prosecution
Criminalisation of Continuity
Indirect procedures
Multi-agency approaches
Prevention Seriousness
Folow the money
Drug Networks
Local partnerships
Intelligence
Unexplained Wealth
Violence
Criminalisation of status and agreement
Harm reduction
Activity-based offences
Australia UK/England
Visibility Model Activity Model
Fig. 7.2 Four-model of procedural convergences and divergences

Intelligence versus Prosecution
The main divergence between the models lies at the core of their
strategy. The Activity Model in the UK and the Visibility Model in
Australia place intelligence at the core of their strategy, the former
with the National Crime Agency (since October 2013) and the latter
with the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (Australian
Crime Commission until July 2016); if intelligence “works” then the
rest of the strategy follows. This leads to an approach mostly focused
on extrajudicial interventions, which, on one side, keep the secrecy
of the operations quite tight and, on the other side, are heavily
focused on prevention and disruption. On the other side of the
spectrum, the Italian Structure Model and the Enterprise Model in
the US have centred the strategy around prosecution; Italy with the
Antimafia District and National Prosecution Directorates and the
US with the Department of Justice’s divisions and task forces on
organised crime in the Attorney’s General offices. Through strong
prosecutions both models reach important results at trial. This is
possible (a) because of the prominence of criminal law (article 416
and 416-bis in Italian Criminal Code and the RICO offences in
federal law in the US) and (b) because of the stigma attached to
maxi-trials and, more generally, mafia-related operations. The
Intelligence versus Prosecution dichotomy – which obviously is not a
clear cut distinction as all models eventually rely on both at some
point – is the flip side of the Activity versus Structure contrast.
Multi-agency Approaches
In all models, a multi-agency approach to organised crime investigations

and prosecutions – usually at the national level – either through institu-
tional partnerships or task forces is the consequence of conceptualising
organised crime or mafias as serious and complex threats, whether in a
collective sense (the mafia clan or the criminal enterprise) or in terms of
serious criminal activities (drugs, money laundering, human trafficking
and so on). In Italy, multi-agency approaches are an expression of the
double-track system that the Antimafia strategy has in place: from

investigations to prosecution together with prevention and security
measures, both financial and personal, the criminal justice system splits
in two. The Antimafia is a different path where ad hoc institutions work
together with a special set of laws and procedures; this is because mafias
are dominant and serious issues, therefore countered through a special
Antimafia set of weapons. On the other hand, in the US, the UK and
Australia, task forces can be the response to specific events or specific
criminal trends. Examples are the Purana Task Force set up in 2003 in
the Victoria Police to contrast a series of “gang-style” killings in
Melbourne and the Trident Gang Crime Command within the
London Metropolitan Police that, set up officially in 2012, had in reality
emerged since late 1990s following community pressures about a series
of killings in the black community. The Organised Crime Task Force in
the Attorney’s General Office of New York State set up in 1970 and the
Scottish Serious Organised Crime Taskforce set up in 2009 are examples
of multi-agency cooperation meant to be lasting and ongoing partner-
ships offering specialist and long-standing approaches against a specific
problem. The different core focus on intelligence or prosecution there-
fore does not affect the call for cooperation, originating from the com-
plexity and sophistication (or seriousness) of the phenomena at hand.
Cooperation is often advertised to the greater public. For example, we
can monitor the NCA’s pages on social networks like Facebook or
Twitter, or the ones of Europol, providing information and advertising
the latest operations. Also by making sure that Antimafia’s, FBI’s and
AFP’s investigations get in the news institutions reassure that “some-
thing is being done”. At the backbone of the advertisement of the
policing responses and the need for public reassurance is also the
stigmatisation of the phenomena as “serious threat”.
Stigmatisation and Symbolism
In Italy, the stigmatisation of mafias has migrated into symbolical

Antimafia procedures, for example, the prison regime. Law No. 356/
1992 had already introduced a harsher treatment for offenders sentenced
for mafia crimes but law 279/2002, amending article 41-bis of the
Prison Rules (Ordinamento Penitenziario), established a hard prison
treatment for mafia convicts still in place today. Article 41-bis of the
Prison Rules provides a special treatment for high calibre mafia members
in prison and is a sign of the harsher treatment reserved to prominent
members of a criminal association. The DNA has repeatedly declared
how extremely important it is to have the Antimafia prosecutors guar-
antee the right application of this norm, because of the very complex
balance with human rights provisions and because it is essential to
maintain its preventative aim – through incapacitation. The DNA has
declared that article 41-bis of the Prison Rules is best used when
prosecutors are more successful in their work, by linking once again
success to a higher rate of arrests and convictions (DNA, 2012: 368):
Today it is certainly high the number of prisoners subjected to this regime;

this depends on the quality of recent investigations and on successes that
the State realised against mafias; these successes have brought to the arrest
of a greater number of bosses of criminal associations and a consequent
increase of prisoners subjected to the special regime of article 41-bis.
Obviously, the symbolism of the Antimafia strategy is linked also to the

prominence of article 416-bis, the mafia membership offence (Sergi,
2015b). It is the same symbolism that anti-association laws and control
orders have had in Australia because of their stigmatisation of outlaw
motorcycle gangs as national security threats (Ayling, 2011) or RICO
has had against the Italian-American mafia (Goodwin, 2002). Arguably,
also the recent Serious Crime Act 2015 in England and Wales, whose
section 45 criminalises participation in organised crime activities, comes
with a symbolic stand against organised crime from the executive power
(Sergi, 2016a). Even though there is certainly a procedural convergence
in the symbolism of countering organised crime for purposes of public
reassurance against the seriousness of the phenomenon, criminal law is
where we find conceptual divergences in action. In fact, the differences
here are subtle but substantial.
Criminalisation
The Structure and Enterprise models share an approach against the

continuity of collective criminal offending, by focusing on the real
nature of organised crime or mafia offending. The dangerousness of
collective offending and the subscription to continuous criminal
plan justify individuals’ criminal responsibility even in absence of
specific indictments for other criminal activities. Focusing on the
real nature of the offending gives a more realistic view on what
organised crime is and what it (they) does (do). The Activity and
the Visibility models are strongly holding on to the conceptualisa-
tion of what organised crime does, which precedes what organised
crime is. In this sense, what we find in the new English participa-
tion in organised crime activities (section 45 Serious Crime Act
2015, England and Wales) as well as in the different anti-associa-
tion and consorting laws in Australian jurisdictions, is a criminali-
sation of individual responsibility within a vaster criminal
conspiracy, still keeping the focus on individual conducts and
status. More specifically, anti-association laws in Australia allow a
charge based on criminal status and not criminal conduct. De facto,
this only allows for a prejudicial “guilt by association” charge that
does not capture the real nature of offending, but solely the formal
nature of proscribed associations. As seen in the second chapter of
this book, criminalisation of organised crime in different jurisdic-
tions needs to clarify the remit of the terminology of participation,
membership and association in order to be harmonised, as these are
not interchangeable concepts and are tightly linked to the social
values that the law seeks to protect.
Divergences in criminal law also reveal a different approach to other
issues conected with organised crime and mafias, such as corruption
and the crime-politics nexus for example. The full potential of crim-
inalisation of such complex phenomena could not be realised without
the clear identification of what exactly is the “seriousness”, the “wrong-
fulness”, behind mafias or organised crime groups and their activities.
Are these phenomena considered serious because they stir violence and
might shed blood while also compromising the economy and fuelling
illegal markets, or is there also a dangerousness of these groups linked
to their twisting the correct functioning of democratic institutions?
This is a conceptual question at the core of criminal law in all models
and it is indeed the core of the mafia–OC spectrum. In the Structure
and Enterprise models, the real nature of offending needs to consider
that mafia power is often protected and reinforced by other powers,
such as politics or financial entrepreneurship, but does not necessarily
merge with them. Very clearly noticed by an Antimafia Prosecutor in
Milan:
The strength of the ‘ndrangheta, however, lies not only in its military
strength (which is extremely dangerous) but in the network of plots and
conspiracies that this mafia has been able to establish with entire portions
of the so-called “civil society”: politicians, businessmen, professionals.
This represents the “know-how” of the ‘ndrangheta and this is what
makes it particularly powerful and insidious. It is not, therefore, enough
to target the military wing; you need to cut the ties with the “grey area”
that is, with those individuals who, although not organically in the
criminal structure, encourage its success through their contribution and
increase its social strength and its economic force.
Also, as specified by an Antimafia Prosecutor in Rome:
The complexity of the criminal situation of a city like Rome, for example,
lies not just in the presence of mafia power, different mafias, different
powers by the way, but most of all in the systems of corruption. These
systems are intertwined with mafia clans, they might use the mafia
method, they might merge with them, but however reprehensible these
corruptive behaviours are we should not forget the difference between a
system of corruption and a mafia system.
As said in Chapter 3 Italy has developed a new criminal offence

(concorso esterno di persone in associazione mafiosa) through extended
interpretation of current legislation, including, but not limited to,
article 416-ter criminalising vote exchange during political elections
between mafia and politicians. Even though the external participation
to mafia association is not completely overlapping with section 1962(c)

of RICO – that makes it unlawful for any person, including a public
official to conduct or participate in the conduct of a criminal enter-
prise, in law or in fact – the scope of the two offences is very similar.
The Structure and Enterprise models, more than just targeting the
criminal dimension of groups or enterprises, seek to capture their
patterns, their behaviours made of different criminal, legal, semi-legal
activities.
On the other side of the spectrum, the Activity and the Visibility
Models criminalise forms of indirect individual participation in orga-
nised crime activities (e.g. section 45 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 in
England and Wales) or consider a person who takes part in the affairs of
a criminal organisation in various ways a “participant” (e.g. section 60A
of the Queensland Criminal Code). Obviously both these models also
criminalise corruption, but such criminalisation is often linked to mon-
itoring misconduct and promoting transparency in specific sectors, such
as various public sectors or the business sector (Smith et al., 2016).
Corruption is therefore a singular criminal conduct that organised crime
groups can choose to employ. As reminded by a Metropolitan Police
intelligence analyst in London, “corruption is an enabler of organised
crime, much like money laundering; it can certainly be instrumental for
organised crime groups but the criminal activities of the groups pre-exist
the occurrence of corruptive acts”. Essentially, even though corruption is
an instrument and enabler of organised crime, in the Activity and
Visibility models, the systematic use of corruption is not recognised,
by the law, as an endemic, necessary, feature deserving status in orga-
nised crime offences.
Prevention
The criminalisation of behaviours leading to patterns of offending,

which to any degree includes corruption and political/administrative
proximity, would allow all models to operate towards a more general
aim of prevention applied to the harms of corruption and organised
crime together. We can notice how where the organised crime strategy
conceptually targets corruption of financial and political institutions,

such as in Italy and in the US, prevention strategies pivot around the
financial and socio-political aspects. For example, the Italian provisions
regulating the social re-use of confiscated mafia assets (articles 45–48 of
the Antimafia Code, law decree 159/2011) represent the “ultimate
prevention technique, considering how easy it would be for relatives or
middle-men to re-acquire the assets after confiscation if we were to allow
them somehow”, as noticed by a former Antimafia Parliamentary
Commissioner. Similarly, there is a mandatory certification (so-called
Antimafia information permit) that companies in Italy have to obtain
from the local Prefect office in order to carry out public works or to
engage with public administration, in observance of article 90 of the
Antimafia Code, law decree 159/2011. In the US, financial provisions
attacking illicit capitals intend to prevent further political corruption as
well. As noticed by an interviewee in the DOJ’s Criminal Division in
Washington DC: “it is a very dangerous situation when criminals have
access to large amounts of money. In the US, La Cosa Nostra used its
control of the pension funds of labour unions to fund its criminal
activities and further its power also in the political arena”.
The focus on prevention mainly originates from the difficulties of
prosecution and the complexities of allocating resources to large scale
and long-term investigations into groups and networks often across
borders. Prevention is a goal shared by the four countries in the fight
against organised crime and mafias, but in heterogeneous ways. The
convergence here is one of intentions before being one of means and
approaches. In the Activity Model, for example, prevention comes in the
form of disruption and preparation, as established in the 2013 Home
Office Strategy applying the 4-Ps (Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare)
strategy used in counterterrorism also to organised crime. It is very clear
that crime reduction and crime fighting go together with prevention
strategies in the English Model, even at the times of SOCA when the
aim of the institution was officially “harm reduction”. Certainly, pre-
vention refers to disruption approaches, where disruption is “the strategy
based on the idea that it is possible, if not expected, to use intelligence to
engage in actions that prevent crimes from being committed by tackling
a problem ahead of times”, as noticed by a former SOCA senior manager
in London. Prevention also refers to financial instruments – in terms of

civil confiscation for example or financial restriction orders – and to
social ones – such as family law provisions for children at risk, youth
gangs programs, travel restrictions and so on. As seen in the previous
chapters, the national security connotation in the UK, Australia and to a
certain level US leads to significant similarities between the countering
of terrorism and the countering of organised crime(s) (Home Office,
2013; Queensland Government, 2016; The White House, 2011). In
this sense, prevention can be intended as a risk-based disruptive
approach against individuals or activities potentially dangerous to the
country’s welfare. Particularly telling in this regard is the reaction to the
2002 shooting at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. As reminded
by the Queensland Taskforce on Organised Crime Legislation
(Queensland Government, 2016: 27):
The Australasian Police Ministers’ Council resolved to adopt “laws

allowing the Commissioner of Police to refuse and revoke handgun
licences and applications on the basis of criminal intelligence or any
other relevant information” [ . . . ] Although the perpetrator at Monash
University had suffered from paranoid delusional disorder and was not
alleged to have any links to gangs, the use of criminal intelligence to
refuse or revoke firearms licences was justified on the basis of preventing
organised crime.
“Follow the Money” Procedures
From the convergence on prevention also come the other primary

convergences, i.e. money laundering, confiscation and unexplained
wealth provisions. Definitely, money laundering and the links between
proceeds of crime and unexplained wealth are the main areas of con-
vergence across the four models also thanks to international frameworks,
as we will see in the next chapter. In particular, we can take the example
of the offence of self-laundering, or laundering of “own proceeds” –
targeting the offender who tries to hide the illicit origins of the proceeds
that he/she got from the predicate offence on his/her own. As noticed by
an English barrister and Crown prosecutor:
Self-laundering can be used when you want to avoid suspicious activities

reporting, to do things yourself. If you are a drug trafficker or a career
criminal and you have somehow avoided to be charged for your crime,
laundering your own proceeds might be the only way to keep the low
profile.
All countries have adopted their own version of this offence. British
POCA, s.327, does not differentiate between laundering one’s own
property and other people’s property. Similarly, the Australian
Criminal Code criminalises self-laundering at Sections 400.3 – 400.9.
In Nahlous v R3 and Thorn v R,4 Australian courts have criticised the
practice of “double charging” both self laundering and the predicate
offence when the criminality of the money laundering offence is com-
pletely absorbed by the predicate offence. However, the CDPP,5 in line
with the CPS in the UK, stated that, if necessary, both charges can be
advanced to reflect the overall criminality of the case through careful ad
hoc judgement. It is also interesting to notice that Italy was very late in
criminalising self-laundering; the offence, now article 648 ter.1 of the
Criminal Code was only introduced in January 2015 with law 186/
2014; a National Antimafia prosecutor in Rome indicated this as an
unconceivable delay. In the US, 18 U.S.C. § 1956 & 1957 had crim-
inalised the laundering of someone’s own proceeds of crime, but the
framework, including forfeiture schemes, for such proceedings has
evolved considerably since then (Gallant, 2005).
Another procedural convergence in all models is the regulation of
confiscation as tool to prevent money laundering as well as to punish
individuals convicted of organised crime-related offences. All models
have legislation in place to retrieve criminal assets in organised crime
3
Nahlous v R [2010] NSWCCA 58.
4
Thorn v R [2009] 3 NSWCCA 294.
5
Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutor, Litigation Instruction no.10 May 2013.
cases, however labelled. In Italy, confiscation is directly linked to the

mafia membership offence by section 7 of article 416-bis of the Criminal
Code. This is similar to the US, where asset forfeiture is linked to
RICO’s criminal conviction as well as civil RICO. Conversely, in the
UK confiscation follows the proof of “criminal lifestyle” under section
75 of POCA. The Enterprise and the Structure models see mafias and
organised crime groups as criminal entities accumulating wealth, thus
the link between criminalisation and confiscation is ontological.
Conversely, the “criminal lifestyle” of UK POCA introduces in the
Activity model the requirement of “pattern of criminal activities”,
which is not present anywhere else in the legislation. In conviction-
based confiscation, the Activity Model converges with an idea of “con-
tinuity” of criminal structures that is normally associated with the
Structure or the Enterprise models. Australian POCA, as well, regulates
various confiscation schemes that aim at both collecting proceeds of
crime or the equivalent after conviction, and, within section 116, at
repaying the Commonwealth of the benefits that a person has derived
from a serious offence and (in some cases) from other unlawful activity.
Interestingly, and in echo of Italian legislation on the social use of
confiscated assets mentioned above, under section 298 of Australian
POCA, confiscated proceeds of crime can be re-invested in programmes
for “relevant purposes”, including crime prevention and law enforce-
ment programmes.
On one side confiscation and forfeiture are prevention tools in all
models. On the other side, they represent the direct product, once again,
of the institutional perception of the seriousness of mafias and organised
crime. Seriousness in this case translates into dangerousness of reinvesting
proceeds of crime, laundering money and using clean funds to further
criminal activities and reach. It should not surprise, therefore, that all
models, in different ways, provide for forms of “expanded” or
“extended” confiscation linked to organised crime cases. Article 12 sexies
of the law decree 306/1992 in Italy introduced the possibility to con-
fiscate money or other assets for which the convicted person cannot
justify the origin or when he/she is the owner or the beneficiary of
unexplained wealth. The law also punishes fictitious ownership of assets
by third persons or frontmen. It is interesting to note that the
“enlargement” of confiscation is done here through reversal of burden of

proof, typical of civil confiscation procedures. In Australia, article 116 of
POCA provides for the court to issue a pecuniary penalty order requir-
ing a person to pay an amount to the Commonwealth if that person has
been convicted of an indictable offence from which he/she has derived
benefits and/or if the person has committed a serious offence. The court
may treat as property of the person any property that, in the court’s
opinion, is subject to the person’s effective control. This echoes also
states’ law, where, for example in Western Australia, the Northern
Territory, Queensland and Victoria property can be forfeited regardless
of whether the offender can show that it was acquired lawfully and
without any connection to criminal activity (Queensland Government,
2016). South Australia as well has proposed a “total confiscation” of
property against convicted drug offenders.6 The primary justification for
this proposed law is that “outlaw motorcycle gangs and their members
are notoriously involved in drug trafficking”.7 In the US, Civil RICO
provides district courts with the authority to impose extensive equitable
relief orders (DOJ, 2007). When Civil RICO is used in a private law
suit, the private litigant, not the state, can sue for treble damages for
injury to their business or property. Civil RICO was indeed designed to
augment criminal remedies through powerful civil ones as declared in
the Senate Report8:
Where an organization is acquired or run by defined racketeering meth-

ods, then the persons involved can be legally separated from the organiza-
tion, either by the criminal law approach of fine, imprisonment and
forfeiture, or through a civil law approach of equitable relief broad enough
to do all that is necessary to free the channels of commerce from all illicit
activity.
6
Proposed s 6A(1) of the Criminal Assets Confiscation Act 2005 (SA), proposed by Criminal
Assets Confiscation (Prescribed Drug Offenders) Amendment Bill 2015 (SA) cl 6 (as at the first
reading speech in the House of Assembly on 11 February 2015).
7
South Australia, Parliamentary Debates, House of Assembly, 11 February 2015, 45 (JR Rau,
Deputy Premier, Attorney-General).
8
Senate Report. No. 617, 91st Congress, 1st session at 78–83 (1969).
Section 2 The Mafia Spectrum: Focus on Structures and Activities 235
Finally, in the UK, confiscation orders, as indicated in the CPS’s

Legal Guidance for UK POCA 2002,9 could be orders in nominal
amount against serious and/or organised criminals; this could be
increased, under section 22, provided that the financial circum-
stances of the person are regularly reviewed (especially if the defen-
dant is expected to be in possession of further assets within a short
space of time). The CPS’s Asset Recovery Strategy demands the
prioritisation of assets originating from organised and economic
crimes. Because of the seriousness and dangerousness associated to
organised crime, all models have adapted their strategies, in different
ways, to maximise the deterrence and disruption of organised crime
activities through reinvestments of proceeds of crime.
Section 2 The Mafia Spectrum: Focus on

Structures and Activities
The next level of comparative analysis considers four main focus points,
which are transversally relevant to the various conceptual convergences
and divergences presented above. First, the issues of mafia mobility
intended as colonisation and/or delocalisation of criminal structures
and activities. Second, the nature of provisions targeting the social
dimension of organised crime and mafia structures. Third, the crimina-
lisation of mafias and organised crime with references also to drug
organisations, and fourth, money laundering and confiscation targeting
the accumulation and re-use of proceeds of crime and criminal wealth.
Focus 1: Mafia Mobility
As said in previous chapters of this book, a paradigm of mafia mobility is

profoundly altering the current conceptualisation on (Italian) mafias. It
9
Crown Prosecution Service, Legal Guidance Proceeds of Crime, http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/p_
to_r/proceeds_of_crime_act_guidance/#a16
is safe to say that mafia mobility, especially in Italy, means primarily

‘ndrangheta’s mobility especially in institutional perceptions. It follows
that the Italian Structure model’s conceptualisation of mafias, in parti-
cular the ‘ndrangheta, not only needs to be revisited but also has been
scrutinised in the attempt to find conceptual tools to export abroad. In
other words, if mafias move, it makes sense to consider how the Italian
model conceptualises mafias in the first place. This, however, does not
call for a mere translation of policies, but rather for a smart interpreta-
tion of concepts and their application in foreign systems. When talking
about mafia movements we find again the dichotomy between structures
and activities.
Mafia mobility can involve individual or collective movements of people
– intended as replication, imitation, transplantation, colonisation and/or
reproduction of criminal structures – or of acts with reference to the
initiation, exportation or finalisation of sections of one or more, deloca-
lised, criminal activities. The first typology of mafia mobility is therefore
concerned with moving criminal structures and ends up being a national
problem, even though it might obviously be shared by more than one
nation at the same time. The second typology is instead a problem of cross-
border policing and as such demands international cooperation and policy
convergence. However, distinctions are clearly not so clear-cut. The heri-
tage of a US-based discourse on mafia movements – in terms of alien
conspiracy theory – still echoes in the way investigators respond to what
they see as the “mafia threat”. Let’s see some examples of contemporary
“mobile” mafia threats.
On the 11th of February 2014 a joint effort between the FBI and the US
Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, together with Italian
Antimafia Prosecutors and Italian Police in Reggio Calabria, has culminated
in 24 arrests, 17 in Calabria and 7 in New York City. The Operation was
dubbed “New Bridge” to echo Operation “Old Bridge”10 that in 2008 had
seen, as a result of various operations in the past two decades, the FBI and
the Antimafia Prosecutors in Palermo work towards 90 arrests across the
US, Canada, and Sicily. Interesting are the comments made on both sides of
10
Operation Old Bridge, proc. no. 11059/06 RGNR DDA Palermo.
the ocean about the 2015 Operation New Bridge, which, instead, is about
the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta and the links between the clan Ursino from
Gioiosa Ionica in Calabria and the Gambino Family in New York. One of
the Italian prosecutors on the case commented: “the ‘ndrangheta, just has it
has happened in Canada, is taking over Cosa Nostra and the Sicilians in the
USA”. A US attorney of the Brooklyn office noticed: “the ‘ndrangheta is
akin to the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, it is an
exceptionally dangerous and insidious criminal organisation whose tentacles
spread well outside of Italy, so of course they seek to establish a foothold in
New York”. One year later, on the 7th of May 2015, in Operation
Columbus11 the same authorities made other arrests between New York
and Italy. More than just a substantiation of the presence of Calabrian
clans in the LCN families of New York, Operation Columbus was the
confirmation of the “authoritative role of leadership that the ‘ndrangheta
families detain in international drug trafficking”, as noticed by a prosecutor
in Reggio Calabria.
Different story in Australia. When on the 15th of March 2016, lawyer
Joseph Acquaro was found dead in Melbourne, newspapers all over the
world reported the news with sensationalism followed, however, by
negationism – a form of denialism described by Lupo (2009) for the
Sicilian mafia in the US and, as Bennetts (2016) confirmed, applicable
to the ‘ndrangheta in Australia. A BBC article12 about the murder
exemplifies that. The journalist notes how on one side the ‘ndrangheta
is a ruthless criminal conspiracy (sensationalism): “there is a paradox at
the heart of Melbourne’s Calabrian mafia, the so-called ‘Ndrangheta. It’s
a secret society that relies upon building a public reputation for ruth-
lessness”. On the other side, however, authorities downplay its presence
in Australia (denialism): “the Honoured Society was never quite as big
and influential in Australia as people thought, former Victorian police-
man Brian ‘The Skull’ Murphy says”. In line with Lupo (2008: 191), the
denial or the downplaying of the presence of migrated mafia groups due
11
Operation Columbus, US District Court E.D.N.Y. F. #2014R00552 and Proc. No. 2082/2014
R.G.N.R. DDA Reggio Calabria.
12
Lawyer’s murder hints at secrets of Australia mafia, BBC News Australia, 26th March 2016
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-35858567.
to the dangers of criminalising an entire ethnic community abroad is a

“liberal progressive” variation on the denialist theme in the US, which
can very well apply to Australia in relation to the ‘ndrangheta.
In brief, it is incredibly difficult to understand the true nature of mafia
movements abroad between a sensationalist approach that seeks to prove
a “mafia conspiracy” and the liberal progressive denialism that seeks
avoiding labels of ethnic communities. This can be noticed in the UK as
well, whereby claims of mafia presence are followed by denials of
authorities. In an article in the Daily Express in 2014,13 following the
completion of a Transcrime project funded by the European Union
Commission and released later in 2015 (Transcrime, 2015), we read:
The European Union has found the Camorra, originally based in

Naples, to be in force in the Scottish city of Aberdeen. The deadly
Italian crime syndicate is made up of family networks on the continent
and is said to have killed more people than any other crime organisation
in Europe.
This is followed by a declaration from Former Aberdeen City

Council leader Barney Crockett to the newspaper: “the Mafia’s
presence in Aberdeen was no secret. However [ . . . ] there is no
involvement in public works of any description. Members of
Aberdeen’s 600-strong Italian community have denied the city is in
the grip of gangsters”.
The issue with mafia mobility, once again, is the result of the
mismatch between the institutional and public perceptions of orga-
nised crime and especially of the mafia phenomenon, still mistakenly
anchored to the attributes of what mafia should be, it is expected to
be: a criminal syndicate or criminal secret society (the structure) that
perpetuates itself through ethnic bonds in order to engage in large
scale and serious criminal conspiracies (the activities).
13
Mafia strongholds found in Aberdeen and London, claims EU, 20th August 2014, http://www.
express.co.uk/news/uk/501585/Mafia-Stronghold-Gang-Aberdeen-Scotland-SNP-London-EU-
Europe.
Focus 2: Social Dimensions of Mafias and Organised

Crime
Just like any other complex criminal phenomena, organised crime

is conceptualised certainly in its criminal specifications, but also
with reference to its impact, the harm, and its roots into social
fabric. Mafias in Italy are understood through the social dimension
together with the criminal one – as the Structure Model needs to
consider the extra-criminal and the pre-criminal aspects, and the
context in which the criminal activities flourish. In Italy, social
dimensions of mafias are manifested through the political nexus –
especially in local governance – or in the exploitation of cultural
social codes. In the Enterprise Model in the US the social dimen-
sion of organised crime is in the relationship between infiltration
in, and corruption of, the legal economy and the laundering of
the proceeds of crime through other non-criminal activities. In the
Australian Visibility Model – and to a certain extent in the UK Activity
Model – organised crime can have a social dimension in terms of harm
and impact to local communities as well as public sector corruption.
Crucially, the ethnic dimension of organised crime might play a role in
the way the social manifestations are conceptualised but for dissimilar
reasons.
In Italy the social dimension of mafias has shaped certain admin-
istrative and/or indirect provisions, which necessitate an understand-
ing and a pre-judgement of the mafia context. For example, under
family law provisions in the civil code, the Youth Tribunals can
order the loss of paternal authority and the subsequent separation of
the child from his/her home in case of gross negligence of parents
(article 330 civil code); they can also order separation from home
when the conduct of parents and the family context are prejudicial
to the child’s education and well-being (article 333 civil code). These
provisions have been recently applied in mafia cases especially in
Calabria, through a Protocol between Antimafia authorities and
youth justice ones. It is very clear in the documents of the Youth
Tribunal of Reggio Calabria how the knowledge of the mafia context
and its sub-cultural dangers for the child influences the judgement of
cases. In discussing these proceedings with an Antimafia Prosecutor
in Reggio Calabria, his take on these provisions is also very pragma-
tically based on the certainty that mafias (in this case, ‘ndrangheta)
have a social dimension, which impacts on the culture and the
education of the children. He says:
We were filming what [name of mafia boss in prison] was doing or whom
he was meeting during prison visits. There goes his 4-year-old daughter
who starts singing on the table songs with references to mafia, ‘ndrangheta
stuff. Not sure if it was staged for us, because he knew we were watching
or not. But it gave me the creeps; she was 4 years old. How can a 4-year-
old grow up that way, in that family . . . not just her parents, everything
around her? This is why we immediately alerted the Youth Tribunal, for
her own protection.
The prejudice of both the Youth Tribunal and the Antimafia in Calabria
feeds the Structure Model. The authorities’ knowledge of the criminal
system – structure – in place, allows them to justify interventions at the
local level to interfere with the perpetuation of that mafia subculture that
they already assume permeates the context.
Cultural elements that define the social dimensions of organised
crime phenomena are also part of local policing initiatives in the
UK. Durham Constabulary, for example, has launched in 2011
“Sledgehammer”, an ongoing operation to dismantle organised
crime groups in county Durham and Darlington while building
community resilience and awareness. Detectives in Durham use the
famous “Guess who?” game to encourage residents to be more careful
of what their neighbours are doing and to pass on any information
about suspicious activities anonymously to the police. Detectives in
Durham say that this campaign is meant to raise awareness that
organised crime might be happening next door and it can come in
many different forms, from sudden display of wealth, to suspicious
movements, to violence. A component of this tactic is also a partner-
ship with other local authorities to intervene with a range of programs
(such as “Stronger Families”14 or “the Haggrid Project”15) to support

children in troubled families with educational programs, to divert
children from criminal careers, dishonesty and bullyism. While cer-
tainly aiming at preventing crimes and involvement of youngsters in
criminal activities, the focus here is rather on using a tough approach
on organised crime in the area. Indeed, as declared by the Chief of
Durham Constabulary in 2012 to the newspaper the Mirror16:
I want to make the message of crime-fighting straightforward. We talk

about tackling criminals, I want them caught, arrested, to know we are
watching them. We send them birthday cards, knock to say, “We are
watching you.” We photograph them in their burgling clothes so we know
what they look like, then we go and tell them.
The social dimension of organised crime in Durham coincides with its

local manifestation, which is not too dissimilar to the mafia context
described above for Calabria. It does not, however, originate from a
saturated environment that is considered toxic to communities at the
point of being considered as a pre-existing dangerous (sub)culture. It
comes, instead, from a strategic policing tactic of local crime prevention,
based on getting criminals off the streets, with charges for less serious
crimes if necessary. Indeed, considering the fragmented setting of
English police forces, local policing develops the Activity Model against
organised crime on the basis of territorial priorities. In the case of
Durham, the strategy chosen aims at getting tough on organised crim-
inals by targeting them from every possible angle, including the social
one if needed, in a zero tolerance variation of that Al Capone strategy
praised by the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit and the Home Office in
2009 (Home Office, 2009).
14
Durham County Council – Stronger Families Programme – http://www.durham.gov.uk/
strongerfamilies.
15
Durham Agency Against Crime – HAGGRID Project – http://www.daac.org.uk/index.php/
projects/haggrid.
16
“I have my foot on the necks of the criminals”: New no-nonsense police chief vows to “get in the faces”
of crooks – http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mike-barton-durham-police-chief-1368130.
Different kinds of manifestations of the social dimensions of organised

crime that migrate into institutional policing responses are visible in the other
two models as well. For example, in the US, the historical relationship
between organised crime families, especially LCN and labour unions, has
been object of specific analysis in terms of social harm (Jacobs, 2006; Jacobs,
2014; Jacobs and Cooperman, 2011; Jacobs et al., 1999; Jacobs and Peters,
2003) as well as forming basis for one of the RICO charges. Labour rack-
eteering and infiltration of labour unions, both national and local, are
considered as foundation elements of the presence of LCN, especially in
New York City where both the number of unions and the number of
racketeers has been quite typical (Jacobs, 2006). As declared by the Chief
of Investigation for Manhattan District Attorney in 2006 “every industry I
have ever seen the mob taking control of started with its influence in the
union” (Jacobs, 2006: 74). Corruption in labour unions and labour
racketeering, and not just the one involving “traditional” organised
crime groups in the States, “have done immense, probably irremedi-
able, harm to the labour movement’s social, political and economic
goals and to that movement’s status in US society” (Jacobs, 2011:
1). Indeed, as noticed in an interview with a former senior officer of
the Organized Crime Task Force in New York, “the victims of
labour racketeering are not just the employers, but certainly the
union members too, their benefits, their rights, their stability”.
While apparently more isolated than the street-level manifestations of
the social dimensions of organised crime in the UK and the totalising
grips of mafias in certain areas of Italy, the social harm linked to labour
racketeering has certainly been and still is an essential drive for the
policing of organised crime in the US (Blakey and Goldstock, 1980;
Jacobs, 2011; Jacobs, 2006). In April 2015 the FBI announced the
(federal) conviction obtained by the Eastern District of New York
Attorney’s Office of a member of the Genovese Family.17 The charges
related to the family’s control over the New Jersey waterfront including
17
Genovese organized crime family associate sentenced to 28 months in prison for racketeering
conspiracy – https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/newyork/news/press-releases/genovese-
organized-crime-family-associate-sentenced-to-28-months-in-prison-for-racketeering-conspiracy.
the nearly three-decades-long extortion of port workers. As already

noted by scholarship in the field, “the public inconvenience occasioned
by illicit strikes and work slowdowns, the violence [ . . . ] and the loss of
union democracy” are certainly social manifestations of organised crime
in labour racketeering, together with “the long-term effects [ . . . ] on the
nation’s overall well-being” (Blakey and Goldstock, 1980: 342).
Recently, there have been discussions about the role of organised
crime in trade unions also in Australia and in particular the possibility
to introduce RICO-style legislation also in Australia to combat labour
racketeering specifically. The Trade Union Royal Commission in 2015
has rejected the necessity to introduce RICO based on the idea that a
specific law is not needed as other norms are in operation and are
adequate to the task.18 The problem does not seem to be perceived
with the same degree of seriousness as in the US nor as a qualifier of
organised crime activity. However, the social dimension of organised
crime is probably best seen in this country in the history and the context
around Outlaw Motor Cycle Gangs (OMCGs). As maintained by
Lauchs, Bain and Bell (2015: 3)
Almost all members of clubs have convictions but we have to differentiate

between organised crime-associated offences and barbarian culture
offences. Barbarian offences are those that match the traditional notion
of an outsider subculture that acts in a manner unacceptable to society and
represents radical freedom.
The social dimensions of OMCGs is in their constitution much more

than their criminal nature, as reminded by scholars (Barger et al., 2000;
Barker, 2010; Veno, 2010) and by national newspapers describing the
traits and characteristics of the clubs.19 While on one side, the counter-
ing of OMCGs has become a matter of policing a deviant subculture, on
18
Trade Union Royal Commission – Chapter 9 – Building and Constructions 2015 – https://
www.tradeunionroyalcommission.gov.au/reports/Documents/Final-Report/Volume-5/V5-CH-8.
pdf § 209.
19
By their colours: Outlaw motorcycle gang identification guide, 10 October 2013, http://www.
abc.net.au/news/2013-10-04/bikie-gangs-by-colours/4999510.
the other side, the weight of their social dimension is still difficult to
include in the Visibility Model. A Victoria Police officer in Melbourne
notices “there is something in the structure and the nature of these clubs
that attracts people with similar criminal inclinations, not just locally
but nationally and internationally”; these groups, however, still remain
“rooted in their tribal culture of violence and honour, marked with
tattoos and denim or leather jackets, so to speak”. In practice, the
policing of OMCGs in Australia cannot forget, but still struggles to
include, the essential nature of these clubs, their origins and the pecu-
liarity of each chapter, their perpetuated image and certainly their way of
acting in their local environments. Their criminal nature might fit the
“Visibility”, but their social one is historically relevant and often
neglected in policing strategies concerned with the criminalisation of
status rather than behaviour.
Focus 3: Criminalisation of Mafias, Organised Crime

Groups and Drug Networks
The Structures versus Activities dichotomy of the various degrees of the

OC–mafia spectrum is quite visible in the four policing models when it
comes to criminalisation of criminal behaviours in this field. As
described in the previous chapters, the criminalisation of mafias can
happen either with the Italian mechanism – through criminalisation of a
“named”, and dynamic, threat – or with the US one – through crim-
inalisation of an “anonymous”, but specific, threat. The distinction
between naming or not the “mafia” word is not indifferent for the results
of policing approaches. As mafias are qualified forms of organised crime,
an anonymous criminalisation qualifies the policing approach as an
unqualified strategy against organised crime instead. Another way of
exploring this dichotomy is by looking at the relationship between
criminalisation of criminal structures and impact of such criminalisation
on the recognised social dimension of the phenomena targeted. For
example, how much difference is there, if any, between the impact of
the Italian Antimafia offence (mafia-type unlawful association offence,
article 416-bis criminal code) and the impact of the organised crime
offence (simple unlawful association, article 416 criminal code)? Or, how
different are the criminal enterprises targeted by one of the RICO charges
from the provisions to target drug trafficking transnational criminal net-
works in the US? In other words, by understanding the way policing
models qualify the threat of mafias and/or organised crime institutionally
and then in criminal law, we can also understand the way other connected
threats – for example drug trafficking – are approached. On the one hand,
systems that criminalise criminal structures will necessarily develop inter-
pretative tools to qualify both the inclusion and the exclusion of a threat,
i.e. criminal structure, within the legal requirements for the criminalisa-
tion of structures. On the other hand, a system that conceptualises
organised crime majorly in terms of activities will need to interpret what
constitutes an activity of organised crime – in terms of seriousness, for
example, or current trends of criminal markets, as taught by the British
and Australian models. As always things are not so cut and dry. Two very
good examples for this discourse, albeit obviously not the only possible
ones, are, on one side, the Italian “mafia aggravating factor” (article 7 law
decree 152/1991 as converted by law 231/1991) and, on the other side,
the policing of transnational drug trafficking in the US.
“Article 7” – as it is informally indicated by the Italian Antimafia
– allows the criminalisation of two conducts. First, an objective
conduct: the use of the mafia method by an individual who is not
affiliated with a mafia group or does not act within a mafia group,
but nevertheless uses the name and reputation of a known mafia
group to intimidate and instil fear in other subjects. Second, a
subjective conduct that does not require a successful commission of
the criminal activity: the intention to commit a crime to specifically
support or facilitate the activities of a known mafia group (Merenda,
2015). In a recent operation against a mafia clan in the North of
Calabria (in July 2016), the Antimafia prosecutors and the judge for
preliminary investigations in Catanzaro20 have charged a number of indi-
viduals with the mafia aggravating factor. The Tribunal21 notices the
20
Tribunale di Catanzaro, sezione GIP GUP – RGNR No. 4084/15 DDA + 3028/15 GIP.
21
Tribunale di Catanzaro, sezione GIP GUP – RGNR No. 4084/15 DDA + 3028/15 GIP, pp. 95–96.
importance of the social dimension to determine whether or not the

aggravating factor can be successfully employed:
The ways through which the single individual can use the name of the
organisation can be the most diverse and concretely they vary also because
of the “mafiosity” of the territory and of the awareness, within civil
society, of the existence and the presence within the same context of a
more generalised mafia power.
The Tribunal, in describing how these behaviours can manifest, adds

that they “require a quid pluris, which is represented by the objective
capacity that the violent or intimidating conduct by the individual
immediately leads the passive agent to feel that dangerous organisations
are ready to intervene and support his behaviours”. Whether or not
specific criminal organisations exist will then make a difference in the
charge within the two typologies of article 7. For example, in July 2016
Antimafia Prosecutors requested a 50 years sentence for four Nigerian
citizens arrested in 2014 in Ballarò, a district of Palermo, Sicily, for
various violent crimes. More than just violence, however, the prosecu-
tors claimed the group acted through the mafia method, like Italian
mafias, using the abovementioned article 7. This followed a number of
investigations in which the prosecutors have noticed an interesting
partnership between Cosa Nostra families and Nigerian clans in Sicily
(e.g. Operation Golden Eggs in 2011, related to drug trafficking
between Italy and Nigeria, saw the arrest of 67 from Italy, Nigeria,
Ghana, Tunisia with the two main cartels of Nigerian and Sicilian
individuals with hubs in Palermo, Catania and Messina). On one side
the Nigerian clans are autonomous organisations, they have been pro-
secuted as unlawful associations involved in drugs and human trafficking
(among other things); on the other side, their partnership with local
mafias has progressively granted them a mafia connotation now recog-
nised by the law: they stock and deal drugs while keeping control of the
territory on behalf of the Sicilian clans (Sergi, 2016c). The danger posed
by Nigerian criminals behaving like mafia clans in Sicily defines once
again the social harm of mafia-controlled territories. While it is unlikely
that foreign criminal groups would be permitted to reach any degree of
supremacy in Palermo – because of the longstanding, historically rooted,

power of Cosa Nostra – their presence and their support to the clans has
reached a level of social dangerousness that the prosecutors need to
criminalise as mafia.
On the other side of the spectrum, with an approach that does not
consider the social impact/dimension among the requirements for the
criminalisation of conducts, but still focuses on harm reduction, is the
US federal strategy against the drug trade. As seen in Chapter 4, the
relevance and predominance of transnational organised crime today in
the US does overlap with the fight against drug trafficking. The US have
a distinctive approach to drug trafficking organisations, with a specific,
often institutionalised, reference to Colombian and Mexican cartels
(The White House, 2011). In US federal law, drug trafficking networks
(Drug Trafficking Organisations, DTOs) are often treated separately
from organised crime groups (Bąkowski, 2013); this is also exemplified
by the FBI and the DEA being two different bodies of the Department
of Justice, with the FBI tasked in the countering of national and
international organised crime (Italian, Eurasian/Middle Eastern, Asian
and African criminal groups), while the DEA, with a specific mandate
originating from the war of drugs, has essentially assumed a specific role
against organised, transnational, drug traffickers. Moreover, the
Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF)
Program, established in 1982, is the centrepiece of the Department of
Justice’s long-term drug enforcement strategy. The OCDETF
Program includes the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives (ATF); the US Marshals Service (USMS); the
Internal Revenue Service (IRS); the US Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE); and the US Coast Guard (USCG) ─ in cooperation
with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, the 94 US
Attorneys’ Offices, and state and local law enforcement agencies. This
program seeks to provide national and multi-agency oversight against
the largest national and international drug trafficking organisations. As
noticed by the US Department of Justice (DOJ, 2013: 4) “after more
than a quarter century of operations, OCDETF continues to be the
vehicle to maintain the fight against today’s violent Mexican drug cartels
and other emerging threats”. In fact, the program is aligned with the
2009 Southwest Border Strategy, as well as the 2010 Department of
Justice Strategy for Combating the Mexican Cartels. Both strategies aim
at “systematically degrade the power of the Mexican drug cartels, while
simultaneously improving the capacity of the Mexican law enforcement
institutions to confront the cartels domestically” (DOJ, 2013: 9).
Federal law respects these separations and the existing cooperation.
Together with RICO, the Controlled Substances Act (1970) is based
on a series of schedules: drugs are categorised and controlled to
varying degrees (US Code, Section 812). The transnational organised
crime strategy and the drug trafficking one start from the premise
that there surely is overlapping but not total similarity between the
two phenomena. While drug traffickers are more often than not
transnational organised crime groups, the opposite is not necessarily
true: organised crime can be local. Drug trafficking organisations are
considered “more fluid, activity-specific, more prone to quick
changes in organisations, and generally speaking, in the US today,
are equated, for better or worse, with Mexican cartels as it used to be
with Colombians”, as noticed by a federal judge in Brooklyn.
Organised crime groups, especially “traditional” ones, can be local,
can engage in finance or white collar crimes and can evolve differ-
ently. This helps us understand the shift from conceptualisations of
traditional organised crime and drug trafficking organisations leading
to the contemporary focus on transnational organised crime.
Focus 4: Proceeds of Crime, Money Laundering and

Unexplained Wealth
As noticed in the previous sections and previous chapters, money

laundering provisions often navigate on different yet parallel routes to
organised crime strategies. In terms of discourse, generally speaking,
models with a focus on the structure side of the spectrum tend to absorb
money laundering and criminal wealth more clearly and more directly
within the institutional conceptualisation of organised crime. On the
other side, models mostly linked to the activity side of the spectrum
conceptualise criminal wealth connected to organised criminal activities

and money laundering as a type of criminal activity in itself often linked
to organised crime, as enabling activity.
The Banca d’Italia (Italian national bank) considers that “for the
Italian case, the risks of money laundering are high because of the
significant presence of organised crime, corruption and tax evasion”
(Visco, 2015: 4): the relationship between money laundering and
organised crime is consequential. This is confirmed also by the fact
that in Italy it is the DIA, the Investigative Antimafia Directorate
that, together with the Fiscal Police, monitors suspicious transactions
in order to secure the implementation of the preventative provisions
for money laundering, notwithstanding an internal distinction
between what pertains mafias and what relates to other types of
criminality. As noticed by the DIA (2015: 196):
The existing synergy with the DNA [National Antimafia Prosecutor] has
marked a positive turnaround, with 1799 suspicious activities reported, of
which 247 sent to local DDA [District Antimafia Prosecutor] to be
immediately used at trial, and the remaining 1552 kept by the existing
shared working group to be used with other finalities [preventative mea-
sures] according to the Criminal Procedure Code.
The links between organised crime – mafias – and money laundering, indeed,
has led to the creation of shared platforms among Antimafia institutions,
with a view to link investigations, trials and prevention measures.
A similar approach, with an overlapping of money laundering and
organised crime discourses, can be found in the United States’ Civil
RICO procedures (18 U.S.C. § 1964(a)). Action can be taken to obtain
equitable relief when (1) a defendant committed or intended to commit
a RICO violation by establishing, with preponderance of evidence, the
same elements as in a criminal RICO case; and (2) that there is a
reasonable likelihood that the defendant will commit a violation in the
future. Defendants are usually legal enterprises – with outstanding
numbers of applications against labour unions – but authorities must
consider whether “an organised crime group participated in any of the
predicate racketeering offenses or exercised corrupt influence over any
proposed enterprise, defendant or related entity” (DOJ, 2007: 4). As

previously seen, in the Enterprise Model the infiltration and corruption
of organised crime groups into legitimate businesses shape the whole
approach to organised crime. RICO outlaws the acquisition or conduc-
tion of the affairs of an enterprise through the patterned commission of
a series of underlying federal or state crimes. Basically, “every RICO
predicate offence is automatically a Section 195622 money laundering
predicate offence” (Doyle, 2012: 2). Any crime that is a RICO pre-
dicate offence is basically also predicate offence – a “specified unlawful
activity” – for Section 1956.
On the other side, in activity-led models, while the link between
money laundering and organised crime is still an obvious one, we find
that this link is established through the characterisation of money
laundering as “serious and organised” criminal activity. As noticed in
an interview at the Australian Federal Police, with reference to the Eligo
Taskforce,23 “money laundering is the common element in pretty much
all serious and organised crime; it enables criminals to avoid prosecution,
evade taxes and reinvest to make further profit and fund further criminal
activities”. With similar remit, the Joint Money Laundering Intelligence
Taskforce was launched by the UK National Crime Agency in 2015.
The NCA (2015: 4) declares:
Money laundering is now considered a high-priority risk in its own right.

It is essential for the realisation of criminal proceeds across almost all types
of serious and organised crime and its sheer scale presents a strategic threat
to the UK’s economy and reputation. High-end money laundering, in
particular, is a major risk.
22
18 U.S.C. 1956. Section 1956 outlaws four kinds of money laundering – promotional,
concealment, structuring, and tax evasion laundering of the proceeds generated by designated
federal, state, and foreign underlying crimes (predicate offenses) – committed or attempted under
one or more of three jurisdictional conditions (i.e. laundering involving certain financial transac-
tions, laundering involving international transfers, and stings).
23
The Eligo National Task Force is an Australian Crime Commission Board approved task force
made up of the Australian Crime Commission, the Australian Federal Police, AUSTRAC, key
Commonwealth agencies and State and Territory law enforcement.
In structure-led models, money laundering and organised crime (mafias,

drug trafficking organisations, criminal enterprises and so on) are onto-
logically linked, as investigating mafias and organised crime cannot
exclude investigating illicit wealth and money laundering. In activity-
led models the relationship between the two phenomena is obvious but
it is one of risk; unlawful wealth is the necessary product of organised
crime activities, while money laundering is a risk, a further, autonomous,
criminal activity linked to unexplained wealth. In other words, organised
crime does generate unlawful wealth, which in turn can lead to further
money laundering investigations.
The difference between these conceptualisations is subtle but not
trivial, and eventually leads to some legal and procedural divergences,
especially in terms of civil confiscation. All four models in this book
adopt non-conviction based frameworks allowing civil recovery and
forfeiture together with unexplained wealth provisions (which only
Australia officially addresses as UWO – unexplained wealth orders).
However, certain technicalities of the procedures reveal a different con-
ceptualisation at the basis of the norms.
The Italian patrimonial preventative measures, which are considered
extrajudicial proceedings (in Title II of the Antimafia Code (articles 16 to
34, law decree 159/2011), are indicated as one of the most innovative and
revolutionary elements of the Antimafia strategy, precisely because of this
marriage of the concepts of money laundering and mafias/organised
crime. Indeed, Title II of the Antimafia Code gives investigators a two-
stage power to attack unlawfully obtained wealth. First, police forces can
start enquiries and dictate the seizure of assets of an individual under
investigation for mafia-related crimes, even if this wealth is not in Italy,
including wealth referred to his/her relatives and heirs, if the person is
dead. Secondly, if the individual (or his/her relatives/heirs) cannot justify
the origin of the assets under enquiry, the authorities can proceed with
(non-conviction based) confiscation. In the Italian model the burden of
proof is reversed and ultimately placed on the individual who, simply
speaking, is asked to prove the authorities wrong and to contradict the
assumption that if one is investigated for mafia crimes is necessarily also
investigated for money laundering. As noticed by an Italian Judge in
Palermo, Sicily:
This is what we really mean when we say follow the money; of course
mafia members have money and this money is largely illicit, of course they
will launder it, of course your best bet is to confiscate it before the criminal
trial, if any, is over; otherwise it might be too late and you might not get
you what you ultimately want, which is to stop the reinvestment!
The onus of proof is instead typically left to law enforcement in the

English model in civil confiscation. ARA v Green24 [2005] in appli-
cation of the UK Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (section 240 expla-
natory notes rules Civil Recovery for unlawful conduct) showed that
“a claim for civil recovery could not be sustained solely upon the
basis that a defendant had no identifiable lawful income to warrant
the lifestyle and purchases of that defendant”. Prosecutors need to
prove that property derives from crime “by evidence of the circum-
stances in which the property is handled which are such as to give
rise to the irresistible inference that it can only be derived from
crime”, as argued by the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division, in R v
Anwoir25[2008].
In Australia, the concept of the reversal of the burden of proof in
specific circumstances can be traced to the Cth. POCA of 1987, with
reference to criminal confiscation. All property belonging to a person
convicted of a serious offence would be confiscated within 6 months,
unless the respondent was able to show that that property or parts of it
were lawfully acquired. It does not surprise then that also non-convic-
tion based civil forfeiture (and unexplained wealth orders) within
Australian POCA 2002, similarly to the Italian experience, allows the
reversal of the burden of proof on the property owner.26 However,
similar to the UK experience, mere ownership of unexplained wealth is
not sufficient for an order. The state must establish, on balance of
probabilities, that a person has committed an indictable offense, even
24
Director of the Assets Recovery Agency v Green and others [2005] All ER (D) 261 (Dec).
25
R v Anwoir and others [2008] EWCA Crim 1354.
26
Section 179E(3)POCA Australia states: “In proceedings under this section, the burden of
proving that a person’s wealth is not derived from one or more of the offenses . . . lies on the
person”.
Criminal Behaviours, National Labelling and Policing Models 253
though an actual conviction is not required, which is the same require-

ment of civil recovery under Part 5 of UK POCA 2002.
Approaches to non-conviction based confiscation and especially to
unexplained wealth reveal how conceptualisations and prioritisation
of organised crime policies do have a central role in proceeds of
crime recovery. Certainly, the dichotomy between structure and
activities here is not a precise factor for differences in procedures.
It proves, however, still relevant to look at this dichotomy when we
seek to understand the underlying justifications for provisions and
policing choices at national level.
Criminal Behaviours, National Labelling

and Policing Models
As final exercise to “test” the validity of looking at policies and institu-
tional perceptions through the construction of models and their com-
parison, it is interesting to see how national policing model
operationalise old and new phenomena connected to organised crime/
mafia through the values and the concepts at the basis of their own
models even when these phenomena are not necessarily only a concern
of the country analysed. The examples of environmental crimes in Italy
and gang violence in England and Wales well represent this process of
operationalisation and labelling of a phenomenon within national mod-
els and their driving values. The process is the following: a criminal
behaviour (which is of national or even international concern, such as
environmental crimes or street violence in the UK) receives a label in a
specific state (e.g. “ecomafia” in Italy, “gang violence” in the UK). This
label fits within the national/local perceptions of a phenomenon (mafias
in Italy as synonym of structured and serious organised crime, gangs in
England as prototype of organised crime groups). If a legal intervention
follows (a new law or regulation for example) and it is based on that
label, this is precisely the manifestation of the policing model at
work. The result is that, even though everyone can agree that the
problem targeted is not specific of a certain country (both environ-
mental crimes and gang violence are problems in various states), the
specific labelling of the phenomenon for purposes of national poli-

cing models and perceptions draws substantial distinctions and
develops national relativism.
National Labelling: Ecomafia in Italy
In Italy, environmental crimes have a name, “ecomafia”, independently

on whether or not any mafia group is involved. The use of the word
ecomafia has been a strategy of the past years, promoted by the NGO
Legambiente, to raise awareness on environmental crimes (Legambiente,
2015; Fontana, 2014). By adding the mafia connotation, environmental
crimes are presented as serious and dangerous for the country, as mafias
are automatically associated to serious and dangerous threats in the
Structure model. Environmental crimes have been object of growing
interest in both criminological research and criminal justice responses
(Ruggiero and South, 2010; Marcus, 2011; South, 2009). Once again,
even though the criminal activity in itself would be arguably enough to
attract a response from the legislators, the association of these crimes
with mafias makes them impossible to ignore. The long and problematic
“crises” (even though it has been over 20 years) that some Italian regions
have been enduring because of corruption in the waste management and
illegal waste dumping, for example, are well known and often associated
to either the Campanian camorra (Greyl et al., 2013) or to the Calabrian
‘ndrangheta (Sergi and South, 2016). In particular, camorra groups in
Campania have been quite aggressively developing a criminal specialisa-
tion into the green economy. For example, thanks to the support of
other mafia-type groups in the neighbouring region of Basilicata, the so-
called Famiglia Basilischi (Sergi, 2003; Sergi, 2016b), and also in
Calabria, by working with ‘ndrangheta clans (Sergi and Lavorgna,
2016), camorra groups have monopolised green activities in the south-
ern part of Italy, from illegal waste dumping to illegal storage of radio-
active materials, solid and liquid waste of high nuclear activity (Guardia
di Finanza, 1996; Commissione Parlamentare Antimafia, 1997). Even
though other criminal groups are active in illegal waste dumping and
other forms of green crimes in both the South and the North of the
country (Sergi and South, 2016), the clans in Campania are the ones
associated to the emergency since the early 1990s. The emergency in
Campania and the birth of the “ecomafia” label led, with many
difficulties and delays, to the approval of a new law on environ-
mental crimes in 2015.27 The report of Legambiente in 2016 con-
firms how the Campania region is still at the top of the list of
regions with the highest number of eco-crimes. Legambiente (2016)
uses terms like “green corruption” and “eco-criminal entrepreneur-
ship” to explain how the phenomenon of environmental illegality is
not just linked to mafia groups but rather to an extreme convergence
of interests between criminals and professionals, public officials,
white-collar criminals, bankers, politicians and other institutions.
Legambiente sees with favour the introduction of the new set of
general criminal laws in 2015. The use and the weight of the label
“ecomafia” in the preparation of the new law are linked to illegal
waste dumping and related health and environmental issues in
Campania, so they are specific. The national newspaper “Il
Corriere della Sera”28 – in reporting the approval of the new law
with a picture of the Terra dei Fuochi in Campania – shared a quote
from the President of the Commission on the Environment in the
House of Commons: “the law that introduces environmental crimes
in our criminal code is an important step to promote legality and
support a clean economy. Thanks to this law it will be easier to
avoid disasters like those of [ . . . ] the Land of Fire (Terra dei
Fuochi)”. The national newspaper L’Espresso in July 2016 reports
the first important sentence against an entrepreneur working with
the Casalesi clan, one of the most important camorra clans in Casal
del Principe, Campania. The man is called “the inventor of the
ecomafia”; sentenced to 20 years for mafia-type unlawful association,
environmental disaster, poisoning of water and extortion, he is one
of the faces of the Terra dei Fuochi in Campania (Ferrari, 2016).
27
Law 22 May 2015, no. 68.
28
Ecoreati, il via libera alla legge. Il Senato approva tra gli applausi – http://www.corriere.it/
politica/15_maggio_19/ecoreati-via-libera-legge-c5611c14-fe50-11e4-bed4-3ff992d01df9.shtml.
The connection between the new crimes against the environment in

Italy, the birth and evolution of the label of “ecomafia” and the
specific reference to the events linked to the camorra clans in
Campania, is the perfect example of the Structure model at play.
The impact of these events on actors like Legambiente and the
creation of the label of ecomafia to push the political agenda and
take these criminal behaviours seriously have rooted and settled into
institutional perceptions at the point of becoming law also targeting
phenomena beyond the one creating the crisis.
National Labelling: Gang Violence in England and Wales
Another example of this process can be observed in England and Wales

for what concerns gang injunctions. These are a civil tool that allow the
police or a local authority to apply to the County Court, High Court or
Youth Court for an injunction against an individual in order to speci-
fically prevent gang-related violence and gang-related drug dealing.
Section 34(5) of the English Policing and Crime Act 2009 defines
gang-related violence as:
“Violence or a threat of violence which occurs in the course of, or is

otherwise related to, the activities of a group that:
a) consists of at least 3 people; and,
b) has one or more characteristics that enable its members to be identified
by others as a group.”
Section 34(5) of the Policing and Crime Act 2009 defines gang-related
drug dealing as:
“The unlawful production, supply, importation or exportation of a con-

trolled drug which occurs in the course of, or is otherwise related to, the
activities of a group that:
a) consists of at least 3 people; and
b) has one or more characteristics that enable its members to be identified
by others as a group.”
This provision has followed an increased concern over gang violence in the
past decade, signalled by the murder of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool
in 2007 (Sergi, 2012; Treadwell and Gooch, 2015). Following the 2011
London riots and a renewed interest in tackling gang violence, changes to the
2009 act were made to include youth gang violence as well. After the Serious
Crime Act 2015, criminalising “activities of organised crime groups”, the
government issued new guidance on gang injunctions (HM Government,
2016b). A gang injunction aims at preventing the individual – and/or
protecting him/her – from engaging in, or encouraging or assisting,
gang-related violence or gang-related drug dealing activity. As
explained “gang injunctions allow a police force or local authority
to target the activities of every gang member at the same time,
maximising disruption and deterrence” (HM Government, 2016a:
7). Moreover, according to the same guidance notes “practitioners
often define three types of gang: peer pressure groups; urban street
gangs; and organised crime groups” (HM Government, 2016a: 7).
The overlapping between the language of gangs and of organised
crime, as already seen, is typical of the English Activity model. The
seriousness associated with gang violence is the reason behind the
gang injunctions. As noticed in the Home Office in 2015 when
presenting the changes to gang injunctions in the Serious Crime
Act 201529: “evidence from police and local authorities shows that
urban street gangs often engage in street drug dealing on behalf of
organised criminals, and some gangs aspire to and may become
organised crime groups in their own rights”. Once again, the
degree of sophistication and seriousness is what differentiates street
gangs and organised crime groups. While on one side these injunc-
tions were meant to target street and youth delinquency (Treadwell
and Gooch, 2015), the overlapping with organised criminality
reflects the enduring conceptualisation of the phenomenon of orga-
nised crime in the Activity model, for which organised crime
29
Serious Crime Act 2015. Fact Sheet – Gang Injunctions – https://www.gov.uk/government/
uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/431337/Fact_sheet_-_Gang_Injunctions_-_
Amendment_on_Gov-UK_-_01062015.pdf.
groups are sophisticated, serious and more dangerous types of gangs

whose activities are mostly related to drugs. The policing approach
that follows this conceptualisation, the Activity model, looks at the
seriousness of the activities of the group and at their prevention. As
reminded by the Local Government Association, local organised
crime groups in the UK are gangs, and serious and organised
crime includes a wide range of offences (2015: 8):
There is significant overlap across the activities of OCGs and urban street
gangs and many gangs evolve into OCGs. Gangs tend to be less organised
and more concerned with perpetuating a threat of violence or harm across
a particular area (these areas are very small and can often be identified by
postcode) related to the gangs core activities.
Within this conceptualisation, gang injunctions are part of the Prevent

strand of the Serious and Organised Crime strategy launched in 2013 by
the Home Office, together with various local partnership interventions,
civil tools and powers such as the Serious Crime Prevention Order
(Home Office, 2013).
Both these national examples are expressions of a process of operatio-
nalisation and labelling of a criminal behaviour within national models.
When we observe a problematic or criminal behaviour in a country, this
behaviour is operationalised through national conceptualisations that,
together, form and serve the policing model of the country. This does
not mean that other countries do not share the same or similar problems,
but it means that in the response offered to a certain problem at national
level there will be a perceived, often unnecessary, national or local relati-
vism that distance phenomena and countering strategies across countries.
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8
National Models and International
Frameworks
International Frameworks, Cultural Relativism

and Mutual Legal Assistance
The struggle of harmonising policies across borders without reducing
complexity of law and society when mirroring into each other’s policies
and when engaging in comparative approaches in the globalised world
is what drives countries to rely more on international and supranational
legal frameworks (Muncie, 2005; Nelken, 2011). Next to the obvious
necessity to rely on international law for matters related to public or
private disputes across borders, international frameworks –conventions,
regulations and directives – serve at least two very important purposes.
First, they offer a platform where problematic issues – such as definitions
of crimes and phenomena – get translated in a language (usually English
or French) that is “official”. Second, they set standards. For the policing of
organised crime both these aspects might be problematic. In order to
identify and overcome legal asymmetries, international frameworks set the
basis of common countering standards through approximation of
concepts and reduction of interpretative complexities of the law, especially
criminal law, rather than concretely working towards mutual

266 8 National Models and International Frameworks
understanding and, thus, harmonisation. This is, for example, how the
Italian mafia-type unlawful association offence is often understood as
“membership offence” (UNODC, 2012; UNODC, 2004a); membership
offences, however, are offences that proscribe “named” organisations more
than complex participation offences based on collective, and not indivi-
dual, responsibility (which is the mafia-type offence in Italy).
Standardisation processes are a result of policy transfer. Policy
transfer can be considered one of the most visible results of the
effects of globalisation in criminal justice systems, primarily in
Western societies. Certainly, it has become more usual for states to
look at similar others (e.g., in the Anglo-Saxon world) in order to
find out and adopt “what works” in crime prevention and reduction
elsewhere. Nevertheless, as policy transfers are clearly not mono-
directional or mono-dimensional (Karstedt, 2001), important diver-
gences in policy-making still exist after the “transfer”; it has become
more and common to rely on international frameworks and agree-
ment to smooth such divergences. As noticed by Muncie (2005: 12):
“policy transfer is rarely direct and complete but is partial and
mediated through national and local cultures (which are themselves
changing at the same time). Policy transfer can be viewed as simply a
pragmatic response where nothing is ruled in and nothing ruled
out”. It is a seductive thought that we can learn what works from
others in a pragmatic and almost mechanical way, but it is a very
short-sighted thought the one that considers agreement on universal
standards possible without cognisance of local and peculiar cultures
and contexts. Throughout this book, I have hinted at the risks of
standardising concepts to communicate complex issues – such as
“organised crime” or “mafia”. I do advocate the need to embrace
the complexity of terms, even when it leads to making unpopular
choices, by, for example, resuming discourses on culture and “criminal”
culture specifically. Embracing the complexities of criminal(ised) phe-
nomena implies looking at the linkages between these phenomena and
the law and – because the law is national – at the social and cultural
specificities of the law at national level. The value for combining the legal
and the social analysis (via institutional perceptions) is that, by looking at
how criminal law and social conceptualisations interact, we can draw
International Frameworks, Cultural Relativism and Mutual Legal . . . 267
judgements over socio-legal phenomena without reducing their

complexity.
Harmonisation and the Seriousness of Organised Crime

in International Frameworks
It has been argued that cultural relativism precludes meaningful adop-

tion of international agreements (Harris-Short, 2003). In the field of
policing of organised crime and mafias, specificity certainly proves
fundamental to tackle the complexity of the phenomena that one
attempts to counter in order to overcome relativism. As already noticed
by scholars (Paoli, 2002; Calderoni, 2012) there is a paradox in the
approximation of organised crime legislation, which international frame-
works cannot seem to resolve. Indeed, international frameworks, while
attempting to overcome ethnocentrism, adopt what is necessarily a
simplified language, often translated from any national language to
another (usually English). This simplification facilitates standardisation;
it allows mutual comprehension of the most common grounds by
leaving out specificities and cultural differences that, however, do even-
tually affect the application of principles and policies in practice. When
we look at international frameworks and agreements in the field of
organised crime, we find confirmation of this paradox in the fact that
mafias are forced out of international discourses at the point of almost
disappearing as, more or less knowingly, considered as product of
(Italian and few others’) cultural relativism.
When it comes to international frameworks and agreements to sup-
port mutual recognition in criminal matters, (dis)organised crime is the
rule, while mafia is not. As noticed by Sheptycki et al. (2011), in Europe
the idea of organised crime based on ethnic solidarity (i.e. mafia-type
groups) does not seem to hold against empirical data. Moreover, the
authors add (Sheptycki et al., 2011: 10):
Contrary to stereotypes against foreigners and diasporas, the evidence thus

suggests that the migration of some mafia- type groups can take place, but
that it is rare and highly localised. Empirical evidence furthermore
suggests that if some organised criminal activities are hierarchical in form,

they are the “exception rather than the rule”.
Mafias are not the normality because they are conceptualised as strategic,
long-term planning groups and usually hierarchical and rigid in nature.
As noticed by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, while
there is no internationally accepted definition of “organised crime”, the
one adopted by the UN in the Palermo Convention 2000 “is a rather
broad definition, which does not consider organised crime solely in
terms of mafia-style organisations with a strict hierarchical structure”
(UNODC, 2009: 13). Certainly, as “transnational criminal activities are
a product of often ephemeral local opportunities” (Bąkowski, 2013b: 5),
and mafias are conceptualised as not ephemeral instead, then mafias do
not logically represent the average and “normal” form of organised
crime, whichever the definition of organised crime might be. If mafias
are not the “normal” or the “usual” manifestations of organised crime
activity, then it follows that international frameworks – especially those
promoting harmonisation of policies – will focus on the more general
concept of organised crime instead.
Scholars have been critical of this approach, as approximation does
not allow for deep engagement with the phenomena behind the
concepts (Mitsilegas, 2001). In particular, Calderoni criticises the
legislative framework proposed in the European Council
Framework Decision (FD) 2008/841/JHA of 24 October 2008 on
the fight against organised crime. The FD 2008/841/JHA repealed
Joint Action 98/733/JHA on participation in a criminal organisation
and followed the United Nations Convention against Transnational
Organized Crime of 2000 (the Palermo Convention1). By criticising
the process of approximation of criminal law in the EU more
1
General Assembly Resolution 55/25 of 15 Nov. 2000. See also United Nations, “Interpretative
notes for the official records (travaux préparatoires) of the negotiation of the United Convention
against Transnational Organized Crime” A/55/383 Add. 1 of 3 Nov. 2000; UN Office on Drugs
and Crime, “Travaux Préparatoires of the negotiations for the elaboration of the United Nations
Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols thereto” (2006); UN
Office on Drugs and Crime, Legislative Guides for the Implementation of the United Nations
Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and the Protocols thereto (2004).
generally, the author (Calderoni, 2012: 1366) concludes that the FD

does not work because: “a) its provisions are so vague that most EU
Member States do not need to change their national legislation to be
formally compliant with it and b) the FD does not address the
relevant inconsistencies between laws on organised crime”. Indeed,
while the FD attempts to define concepts like “criminal organisa-
tion” and “structured organisation”2 (article 1) and wishes to crim-
inalise participation in a criminal organisation, it does not add
anything that could help harmonisation of concepts. In other
words, as every country in the EU is likely to already use either
conspiracy offences or offences of participation in organised crime of
different type, the FD simply reiterates national differences without
attempting any re-conceptualisation of organised crime across bor-
ders. In terms of implementation, the FD did leave things unaltered
and still subjected to Member States’ own conceptualisations as the
EU lacks direct influence on national criminal law systems.
Criticisms advanced against the FD are twofold: first, the vague
nature of the offences, incompatible with principles of legality,
clarity and proportionality in criminal law (Joutsen, 2005); and
second, the definitional approach that describes what criminal orga-
nisations are and are not without touching upon their conducts or
behaviours. Much like in the UN Palermo Convention, the FD does
not describe the modus operandi of the criminal organisations that it
wishes to tackle. Not only there is no reference to violence, intimi-
dation or infiltration in the legal economy, but both legal tools do
not refer to criminal continuity, as enabled through trust, reputation
2
Article 1 Council Framework Decision 2008/841/JHA of 24 October 2008 on the fight against
organised crime
Definitions
For the purposes of this Framework Decision:
1. “criminal organisation” means a structured association, established over a period of time, of
more than two persons acting in concert with a view to committing offences which are punishable
by deprivation of liberty or a detention order of a maximum of at least four years or a more serious
penalty, to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit;
2. “structured association” means an association that is not randomly formed for the immediate
commission of an offence, nor does it need to have formally defined roles for its members,
continuity of its membership, or a developed structure.
and social networks. In practice this means that organised crime is

defined through structures that, however, appear static and not
dynamic; their definition might need to remain static and abstract,
but it is their dynamism that concretely “produces” organised crime
(s).
Some dynamism of organised crime in these frameworks is given
by the transnationality of criminal activities and the stress placed on
their seriousness. Specifically, the Palermo Convention defines orga-
nised crime as transnational and its transnationality as serious.
Within the work of the UN General Assembly, we find that transna-
tional organised crime is often victimless, it is unlikely to get
reported to local police forces, it is cross-border, it can seriously
harm communities, it is a serious challenge to the rule of law and it
affects some regions more than others. Most of all, the UN’s vision
of organised crime is market-driven. In the Palermo Convention
“organised crime” is any serious offence committed by a group of
three or more people with the aim of making money. This broad
definition encompasses a range of activities, not just those of career
criminals. As noticed: “for many of these activities, the organising
principle is the invisible hand of the market, not the master designs
of criminal organisations. Looking at the world through this broader
definition, it is often the groups that come and go, while the market
remains constant” (UNODC, 2010: 19).
The EU has been quite prolific in the fight against organised crime as
internal security threat (Carrapico, 2014). Within the EU framework,
organised crime is certainly a serious offence committed by people in
concert and the reference is still made to profit-driven activities. The
reference to serious crime is meant to broaden the scope of action. For
example, Europol’s mandate originally required that there had to be
“factual indications that an organised criminal structure [was]
involved”3; in 2009 this was broadened to cover “serious crime affecting
3
Convention based on Article K.3 of the Treaty on European Union, on the establishment of a
European Police Office (Europol Convention) – Official Journal C 316, 27/11/1995 P. 0002 –
0032 – http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:41995A1127(01):EN:
HTML.
two or more member states”.4 This is a more general trend across EU

discourse. As explained (Bąkowski, 2013a: 1): “in recent years, the use of
the term ‘organised crime’, once predominant, has declined in favour of
‘serious crime’. This change marks a shift of focus from the structure of
criminal groups to the harm they inflict on individuals and societies”. More
importantly, this shift has not happened in a vacuum. It was required to fit
within the legislative framework of the EU, especially after the Lisbon
Treaty. Article 83(1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European
Union provides for the EU Council and Parliament to “establish mini-
mum rules concerning the definition of criminal offences and sanctions in
the areas of particularly serious crime with a cross-border dimension
resulting from the nature or impact of such offences or from a special
need to combat them on a common basis”. Seriousness is therefore
embedded in the legal foundations of EU criminal law. Article 83(1) also
establishes that “these areas of crime are the following: terrorism, traffick-
ing in human beings and sexual exploitation of women and children, illicit
drug trafficking, illicit arms trafficking, money laundering, corruption,
counterfeiting of means of payment, computer crime and organised
crime”. It is not quite clear how some activities such as drug trafficking
differ from organised crime or whether organised crime is mentioned last as
a residual category for anything else not mentioned before. Within these
international frameworks countering strategies against organised crime
prefer the focus on the seriousness of criminal activities; the focus on
criminal structures (among which mafia-type groups) is residual and
reappears only when mafia-crimes are “elevated” to serious crimes as well.
Mutual Legal Assistance and Policies Against

Organised Crime
The diversity of definitional approaches that both the Palermo

Convention and the EU Framework Decision cannot overcome is not
necessarily a problem in itself. However, it means that, in the absence of
4
Council Decision of 6 April 2009 establishing the European Police Office (Europol) OJ L 121,
15.5.2009 – http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:32009D0371.
prescriptive criminal law applicable across borders, especially at regional level

(Europe), states have to try and operate across principles of mutual recogni-
tion and/or mutual legal assistance (MLA) in criminal matters. MLA is
critical to criminal investigations and proceedings and is available beyond
international agreements such as the ones in force throughout EU Member
States. In the conclusions of the Tampere European Council in 1999, it has
been established that the principle of mutual recognition should become one
of the cornerstones of the space of freedom, security and justice: “criminals
must find no ways of exploiting differences in the judicial systems of Member
States” and there should be “no hiding place for [ . . . ] the proceeds of crime
within the Union”.5 Tools like the European Arrest Warrant, the EU
Freezing Orders, the EU Confiscation Order, among others, do not require
correspondence and reciprocity in criminal law, as they are aimed at stream-
lining the proceedings of MLA across EU Member States. This is, for
example, also the case of the European Investigation Order (“EIO”), a
European directive aimed at rationalising the process for MLA between
participating EU Member States entered into force on 22 May 2014. The
current status of the UK, at the time of writing negotiating the exit from the
European Union following popular referendum on the 23 June 2016
(“Brexit”), makes it virtually impossible to comment on the status of intra-
European cooperation between Italy and the UK specifically, not just with
regard to MLA but also to law enforcement cooperation via European
institutions such as Europol and Eurojust. The risks linked to Brexit, how-
ever, exceed the purposes of this chapter and this book.
Another example of enhanced mutual legal assistance in criminal
matters related to organised crime policies is in the field of confiscation
procedures. In December 2016 the European Commission adopted a
proposal on the recognition of freezing and confiscation orders across
borders with a view to update the current framework based on the
2014 Directive on the freezing and confiscation of instrumentalities
and proceeds of crime in the European Union and the Framework
Decision on confiscation of crime-related proceeds (2005). The general
5
Tampere European Council 15 And 16 October 1999 Presidency Conclusions –
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/summits/tam_en.htm.
idea of the proposal is to make sure that whenever a competent

authority in one EU country decides to freeze or confiscate property
in another Member State, it can request the other Member State to do
so by filling in a standard form. The authority in the other Member
State must recognise the request and execute the freezing or confisca-
tion order within short time limits and with limited possibility to
refuse the request. This proposal comes together with proposals on a
new Directive on money laundering and on the standardisation of rules
on third party confiscation across Member States: all these provisions
are part of the European Security Agenda adopted in April 2015,
which exceeds the purposes of this book. Previously, the EU Council
Framework Decision 2006/783/JHA of 6 October 2006 had ruled on
the application of the principle of mutual recognition to confiscation
orders. As noticed within this FD, at paragraph 7:
The main motive for organised crime is financial gain. In order to be

effective, therefore, any attempt to prevent and combat such crime must
focus on tracing, freezing, seizing and confiscating the proceeds from
crime. It is not enough merely to ensure mutual recognition within the
European Union of temporary legal measures such as freezing and seizure;
effective control of economic crime also requires the mutual recognition of
orders to confiscate the proceeds from crime.
As reminded by Borgers (2016) in international frameworks beyond the

EU, confiscation is mentioned always as a way to strengthen the fight
against other forms of serious crimes, such as money laundering, drug
trafficking or organised crime in general. However, the recovery that
follows confiscation is necessarily seen as an independent matter for
national states.
When it comes to unlawful associations and related criminal
phenomena that operate transnationally (with specific differences within
and outside the EU) supporting the recognition of the various criminal law
systems is probably the best option. Whereas it is arguably easier to think of
international cooperation and legal assistance throughout the shared space
of the European Union internal policy, outside of the Union there are
similar principles. Indeed Mutual Legal Assistance frameworks do work via
bilateral or regional agreements, also within the models provided by the

UN who “encourages Member States, within the framework of national
legal systems, to enact effective legislation on mutual assistance, and calls
upon the international community to give all possible assistance in order to
contribute to the achievement of that goal”.6
Within the available frameworks at the international level, it needs to be
reiterated how the same considerations made in our comparisons of policing
models still apply: procedural divergences are dependent on conceptual ones
to be effective. In conversations with the various authorities in the four
countries of this research, bilateral and regional agreements prove to be
more successful than international frameworks’ and cross-borders standardi-
sations. While harmonisation of criminal procedure is reached more or less
autonomously among states and at times successfully – usually by focusing on
sets of crimes and responses – conceptual convergence – and therefore the
core of criminal law interpretation – tends to approximation rather than
actual understanding and effective communication of the issues involved.
Transnational Crimes, “Moving” Mafias

and the Difficulty of “Labelling”
Framing “Mafia” in International Frameworks
Interestingly, the “mafia” word has recently started to appear in EU

documents, for example the EU Council conclusions adopted in
June 2013 on setting the EU’s priorities for the fight against orga-
nised crime between 2014 and 20177. This was followed by the EU
Parliament’s Resolution no. 2013/0444 calling on Member States to
create national bodies for investigating and combating criminal and
mafia-style organisations in order to work with Europol and with the
6
Model Treaty on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters (Adopted by General Assembly
resolution 45/117, subsequently amended by General Assembly resolution 53/112) A/RES/45/
117 68th plenary meeting 14 December 1990, p.143, via https://www.unodc.org/pdf/model_
treaty_mutual_assistance_criminal_matters.pdf.
7
EU Council Decision no. 12095/13.
Transnational Crimes, “Moving” Mafias and the Difficulty . . . 275
support of the EU Commission towards an “anti-mafia operational

network”. The main purpose is to exchange information on the
structural aspects of mafia activities, on criminal and financial inves-
tigations, on the location of assets and on attempted infiltration of
public procurement procedures. In addition, Directive 2014/42/EU
of the European Parliament and Council Resolution of 3 April 2014
on the freezing and confiscation of instrumentalities and proceeds of
crime in the European Union were welcome by Italian Antimafia
even though their effectiveness is still unclear. Arguably, this interest
in mafias was also prompted by the settlement of the conceptualisa-
tion of organised crime as “serious”. As mentioned, the conceptua-
lisation of seriousness has been a crucial step for organised crime
policy-makers, not only to allocate resources usually tied to national
security threats (Lavorgna and Sergi, 2016) but also to reinforce the
perception that organised crime groups increase in sophistication
especially when they operates transnationally. On the one hand, it
seems problematic to accommodate the controversial concept and/or
definition of mafia-type organised crime within international frame-
works; as seen, the term is not neutral and it immediately conjures
references to certain ethnic groups and therefore creates discomfort
due to what is perceived as cultural relativism. On the other hand,
however, mafia groups and their crimes can be subsumed within a
“seriousness” paradigm, which allows to avoid discussion on their
organisational structures and, even more problematically, their
“socio-cultural” behaviours.
Policy evolution at the EU level and also internationally, directly or
indirectly, is linked to conceptualisations of Italian mafias in building
notions of both mafia and organised crime. As a consequence, the Italian
Antimafia holds a crucial role in sharing their best practices. EU
Parliament library briefings adopt Professor Federico Varese’s concep-
tualisation of mafias (Bąkowski, 2013b: 2):
Italian OCGs exercise a level of control over their regions of origin which
is unparalleled in the EU. They are thus considered “mafia- type” orga-
nisations, i.e. protection rackets aiming to be the sole supplier of protec-
tion for all transactions in a given territory.
Moreover, and more recently, a EU Council Resolution8 in December 2014

took a stand against mafia-style serious and organised crime groups by
conceptualising mafia-style groups as “network based”. In this resolution,
the Council recognises Italy’s primary role in the fight against this type of
criminal groups, granting Italian authorities the lead for coordinating the
project, considering Italy’s primary role in the fight against network-based, i.
e. mafia-type, groups. A media release from 2012 by Interpol,9 in the
occasion of the Third Experts Meeting of the Digest of Organized Crime
Cases project, praised “the importance of cooperation between
INTERPOL’s 190 member countries” and noticed how “Italy’s cooperation
with INTERPOL had been ‘especially close’ in the aftermath of the Italian
judges’ assassinations”.
In 2013 Europol published a threat assessment on Italian mafias in
Europe. The threat assessment described four Italian mafias (Sicilian mafia,
‘ndrangheta, camorra and Apulian mafia groups) and some of their activities
in Italy. It also noticed how the “seriousness” of Italian mafias is their ability
to operate “under the radar” whenever they act outside their territories. Says
Europol (2013: 16):
Considering that several other OCGs [Organised Crime Groups] were

reported as active in a greater number of Member States, one might think
that Italian organised crime is not a relevant threat for the EU. This would
be a false impression. The fact that the Italian organised crime activities
are so clearly under-reported is evidence of the insidious threat it poses to
the European Union. Its activities may be less visible than in the case of
other major organised crime groups, but the intelligence picture – of a
network of contacts and activities throughout Europe – is clear.
Conversations at Europol confirmed this view, which – it should be noted

– is also formed on the basis that some of the analysts are Italian and with
8
Council Resolution Brussels, Creation of an operational network – @ON – to counter mafia-
style serious and organised crime groups, Justice and Home Affairs Council meeting Brussels, 4
December 2014
9
Interpol, 11 June 2012 – Media release – Italy’s fight against mafia a blueprint against transna-
tional organized crime, INTERPOL Chief tells Palermo meeting – http://www.interpol.int/
News-and-media/News/2012/PR048.
experience of policing mafias in Italy. Says a project manager in the Top

Organised Crime Groups Team – Serious and Organised Crime Unit:
It is not a problem of lack of knowledge about Italian mafias abroad, most

of the time it is about the fact that countries in the EU, apart from Italy,
are countries of destinations of funds from various criminal groups.
Second, criminal activities like drug trafficking are complex and certainly
multi-actor. It is no use to focus on the fact that the amount of drugs
arriving, let’s say, in Holland are shipped by Calabrian mafia groups from
Bolivia, let’s say. As drugs arrive in Holland they are not going to stay
there and if they are they will be dealt with by other groups, the bikers
maybe or other more on the street, so what is the point of focusing on the
Calabrian mafia in everyday policing?
A very similar point can be made for other countries outside the EU,
whereas claims of the transnational dimensions of (Italian) mafias have
increased because of the visibility of certain crimes these groups are
involved in. However, the criminal behaviours normally associated
with mafias – such as the control of the territory, racketeering, political
corruption and infiltration – might not be visible abroad, or (like in
Australia) they are not easily recognisable. Obviously the need to justify
the use of (usually limited) resources of policing forces requires sacrifices
and prioritisation: investing in policing what is not visible or manifested
is more difficult to justify. Outside of the EU, where international
frameworks are often advisory and consultive tools to promote coordi-
nation and harmonisation of policies, there is a more pronounced
tendency to approximate the language of mafias and organised crime
and equate organised crime activities with mafia activities.
The Terminology of “Mafia” and “Organised Crime”

in International Settings
To dig even deeper in this relationship between transnational crimes and

mafia groups outside of the regional area of the EU, there are some
interesting things to notice. First of all, the language used; mafias are
often indicated as organised crime typologies, which are even more
problematic when they are transnational because they usually are “tradi-
tional” – and “national” instead. As noticed by Interpol (2014: 14):
The word “mafia” has become synonymous with organised crime from
Russia to Latin America, not just the original organisations that carry the
name [ . . . ] These groups resemble our traditional picture of organised
crime groups in name only.
[...]
The best-known organised crime groups, such as the Italian Mafia (in
reality three distinct groups: the Neapolitan Camorra, the Calabrian
N’drangheta10 and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra), the Chinese Triads and
the Japanese Yakuza have their own characteristics, based in their cultures
and countries.
The traditional and national character of mafia groups leads to a certain

flexibility in the use of both vocabularies of mafia and organised crime. Italian
organised crime means mafia(s), but the words “organised crime”, which do
not carry the negative meaning of the word “mafia”, are to be preferred. The
word “mafia” and related legal terminology are examples of what experts in
translation and communication call “culturemes” (Nord, 1997; Whithorn,
2014). Katan (2009: 79) defines culturemes as “formalised, socially and
juridically embedded phenomena that exist in a particular form or function
in only one of the two cultures being compared”. Culturemes are essential
drives of legal asymmetries. The word “mafia” is used widely in English
language – thanks primarily to the US experience and legacy – as a fixed and
simplified term, while in Italy the term is semantically and conceptually more
dynamic and complex (Whithorn, 2014). The word “mafia”, as fixed legacy
of the US, understandable for, but not shared by, Italians, carries a negative
meaning. This explains why, for example, interviewees in the UK, after
learning that I was Italian, were very quick at pointing out that “when we
talk about organised crime here we don’t talk about the mafia like in Italy”
(from an interview at the Home Office). The prejudice that accompanies the
word “mafia” makes it a negative term to which “organised crime” is
10
Mispelled in the original text.
preferred, especially in international frameworks where standardisation is

necessary for harmonisation. However, the negative connotation also
comes from yet another issue, which is the equation of the “national”
character of mafias to its “ethnic” origin. One thing is to discuss the Italian
mafias as Italian phenomena in Italy. Another thing is to discuss Italian
mafias as Italian phenomena outside of Italy.
The Internationalisation of the Mafia Label

and Its Ethnic Problem
The national character of mafia groups, which seems pacific in international

language, leads to the ethnic characterisation of these groups. In turn this
might lead to labelling and profiling of (Italian) citizens abroad, as seen in
the previous chapters for the US, historically, and, recently, for Australia.
The challenge of admitting that mafias are also transnational criminal
threats lies in translating what mafias are outside of their national boundaries
without losing cultural specificities on one side, and without labelling entire
populations and migrant communities on the other side. At the interna-
tional level, this challenge leads to two steps. A first step is precisely the use
of a (apparently) more neutral terminology of “organised crime” even when
talking about Italian mafias: Italian mafias become Italian “organised
crime” instead. A second step is the focus on activities. Promoting coopera-
tion against certain enabling or defining activities across borders, such as
corruption or money laundering or drug trafficking, is preferred to a focus
on groups or individuals, which, instead, might lead to discrimination.
The first step has seemingly innocuous consequences, but it is of
importance. For example, that the Australian Federal Police has an
Italian Organised Crime (IOC) team is not a problem in itself. The
problem arises when one tries to understand what exactly Italian
Organised Crime means in the mandate of this team and one discovers
that most of what their work implies is essentially countering the
Calabrian mafia, the ‘ndrangheta-type criminal affiliations across the
country, as described in Chapter 5 of this book. While, on one side, it
seems restrictive and potentially insulting (for Calabrians) to call the
team Calabrian organised crime or Calabrian mafia, it is nevertheless
rather useless and not less insulting perhaps to dub it Italian as there is
no such a thing as Italian organised crime per se. The difference is subtle
but clear. Calabrian organised crime or Calabrian mafia refers to the
“ndrangheta clans”, intended as mafia groups rooted into Calabrian
socio-cultural contexts and manifesting a discrete set of mafia behaviours
in Calabria, Italy and elsewhere. The same is not valid for Italian
organised crime. There is no such a thing as an “Italian” way of doing
organised crime unless we refer to vague and imprecise movie versions of
mafia behaviours. It seems, therefore that the attempt to neutralise what
is perceived to be defamatory ethnic terminology (Calabrian organised
crime or mafia is too specific and upsetting for the large Calabrian
community of Australia) ends up creating another prejudice, based on
wrong and uncertain premises. In Australia, the preference of an uncer-
tain and vague label like “Italian organised crime” and the avoidance of a
more precise but problematic “Calabrian mafia” label surely and right-
fully comes from the willingness to prevent the negative labelling of
migrant communities; the wish is to avoid the ethnic stigmatisation that
the US experiences with Sicilians. As mentioned before in Chapter 5, a
2002 paper published by the Australian Institute of Criminology,
claimed that it is a “myth”, especially in Australia, that “ethnicity is a
valid dimension for describing organised crime” (Morrison, 2002: 2).
The wish is to be politically correct. This, however, proves to be
unsuccessful; by using the adjective “Italian” instead, the stigmatisation
is simply made more imprecise. The risks associated to targeting ethnic-
based organised crime – the stigmatisation of communities – are still real
albeit veiled. As noticed by a senior police officer in New South Wales:
Naming the threat, when there is an ethnic element to it, let’s say the
Calabrian ‘ndrangheta, carries the risk that you are misunderstanding it in
the first place and that you end up placing the blame over entire commu-
nities. If you name the threat than you have to do or show that you are
doing something about it specifically, and this won’t be well received.
Neutralising the negative connotation of the word “mafia”, however, is

not simple either. The ethnocentrism and the cultural relativism of
Italian authorities are results of such an attempt. Ethnocentrism can be
intended as the tendency to look at the world from the perspective of

one’s own culture by assuming that elements of this culture are superior
to others. Cultural relativism refers to the belief that values of a culture
cannot be fully translated in other languages or in other systems because
they carry a symbolism and a meaning that is only true and meaningful
to the culture of reference. Italian authorities have showed a tendency
towards ethnocentrism when it comes to mafias and Antimafia across
borders. There is almost a “negative pride” in the way Italian prosecutors
think and explain mafias (Sergi, 2016). The difficulty to translate the
Antimafia terminology and the challenges to coordinate with different
legal systems abroad have created and strengthened a sense of isolation
among Italian authorities in relation to foreign partners. “Europe is not
paying attention, we are left alone in our fight against mafias abroad”
says a Calabrian Antimafia prosecutor. He continues:
Mafias are a priority only for us, their strength and composition disappear
or dilute when they are abroad, so it is very difficult to go to colleagues and
ask them to do something about it: we are often dismissed as if we were
children obsessing over a toy or something, like we see the mafia every-
where or we have an agenda of some sort.
The second step to overcome the use of the problematic implications of

mafias in international settings is by focusing, again, on the activities and
the manifestations of an already simplified “organised crime” threat.
International frameworks that, for example, wish to promote coordi-
nated actions against global or cross-border manifestations of corruption
or money laundering do so by pointing at convergent aspects of criminal
activities in different settings and locations and by focusing mostly on
the harms and the costs of such harms to communities. For example, the
United Nations Development Program (UNDP) has anti-corruption as
a main focus area with obvious links to the UNODC and their anti-
corruption capacity. The UN Convention against Corruption – much
like the Palermo Convention against Transnational Organised Crime –
was approved in 2003 and it is the tool of reference for both programs.
The foreword of the UN Convention against Corruption recites
(UNODC, 2004b: iii):
Corruption is an insidious plague that has a wide range of corrosive effects

on societies. It undermines democracy and the rule of law, leads to
violations of human rights, distorts markets, erodes the quality of life
and allows organized crime, terrorism and other threats to human security
to flourish.
Moreover, in the preamble (UNODC, 2004b: 5) we read how the

parties to this Convention are “concerned about the links between
corruption and other forms of crime, in particular organised crime and
economic crime, including money- laundering”. It does not surprise to
read a similar statement in the Palermo Convention whose preamble
(UNODC, 2004c: 2) says that the General Assembly is:
Strongly convinced that the United Nations Convention against

Transnational Organised Crime will constitute an effective tool and the
necessary legal framework for international cooperation in combating,
inter alia, such criminal activities as money-laundering, corruption, illicit
trafficking . . .
Similarly, the UN Global Program against Money Laundering, Proceeds

of Crime and the Financing of Terrorism (GPML) was established in
1997 as a result of the mandate given to UNODC through the United
Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and
Psychotropic Substances of 1988. In 1998, the Political Declaration
and the measures for countering money laundering adopted by the
General Assembly at its twentieth special session broadened the scope
to cover all serious crime, not just drug-related offences. In 2008 the
program was expanded to also include countering the financing of
terrorism (CFT). The reference to the other conventions and the other
“global” issues is key to GPML as well (UNODC, 2011: 11):
Anti-money-laundering is a central component in addressing crime and

corruption of all kinds by reducing the monetary return. UNODC is the
guardian of three UN conventions, which are all linked to AML, the
Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic
Substances, the Convention against Transnational Organised Crime
(UNTOC) and the Convention against Corruption (UNCAC).
On Transnational Policy Convergence 283
Moreover, the Financial Action Task Force on Money-Laundering

(FATF) in 1990 (revised and updated in 1996 and 2003 and 2012),
which issued the famous 40 Recommendations fostering the role of the
financial sector in national systems and to intensify cooperation in the
fight against money laundering (plus other eight Recommendation for
counter terrorism added in 2001 and a 9th added in 2004) promotes a
risk and harm-based approach to money laundering. Confirming again a
focus on transnational crime, FATF ([2012] 2016) recommends that
“countries should criminalise money laundering on the basis of the
Vienna Convention and the Palermo Convention. Countries should
apply the crime of money laundering to all serious offences, with a
view to including the widest range of predicate offences”.
An expressed link among crimes that are/can be transnational and are
therefore a global concern reiterates the need to consider these threats
more “serious” as they are presented as interconnected and ontologically
cross-border. On the other hand, these links increase the degrees of
approximation of policies. The meaning of organised crime – when used
in international frameworks targeting transnational crimes – is never
problematised even when its definition is contested. The term “mafia”,
instead, is too charged with negative meaning notwithstanding the
efforts to neutralise the stigma. When and if international frameworks
inform policies, these approximations – and the emptiness of terminol-
ogies in international frameworks that follows – are bound to resurface
and might collide with national legal specificities.
On Transnational Policy Convergence

In October 2016 the EU Parliament has passed the proposal, advanced
by an Italian member, to adopt a European Action Plan to eradicate
organised crime, fraud and corruption by seizing assets to criminal
organisations and re-use them for social purposes. The EU
Commission was asked to draw up “blacklists of any undertakings
which have proven links with organised crime or engaged in corrupt
practices” and to “bar them from entering into an economic relationship
with a public authority and benefitting from EU funds”.11 It has been

observed, during the plenary sitting,12 that “the dangerous nature of the
intimidatory power that can be exerted by the mere fact of belonging to
an association is not a priority in comparison with combating ‘target
crimes’ (the crimes that an association exists to commit)” and that this
has left an operational gap at European level. Crucially, this proposal
wishes to introduce a transnational mafia offence, as organised
crime – including mafias – is now a “global threat”.13 By translating
the Italian Criminal Code, this offence wishes to target
a particular type of criminal organisation whose participants take advan-

tage of the intimidating power of the association and of the resulting
conditions of submission and silence to commit offences, to manage or in
any way control, either directly or indirectly, economic activities, conces-
sions, authorisations, public contracts and public services, or to obtain
unlawful profits or advantages for themselves or any other persons.
Also Italian, in this proposal, is the call to introduce anti-organised-crime

certification for companies to be exchanged automatically at EU level and
the following introduction of “blacklisting” as an effective method to
dissuade companies from engaging in corrupt activities and as a way to
provide a good incentive to improve and reinforce internal integrity
procedures. Other calls to promote business transparency rules across
members states, to adopt specific legislation against political corruption
and to establish indicators for compliance across States point at a Europe-
wide response against mafia-type organised crime led by Italy. The refer-
ence to professionals, bankers, lawyers, entrepreneurs and their supporting
11
Press Release – European Parliament – MEPs demand new EU rules to improve fight against
organised crime and corruption – Plenary sessions – page 1 – http://www.europarl.europa.eu/
pdfs/news/expert/infopress/20161020IPR47883/20161020IPR47883_en.pdf.
12
European Parliament – Plenary Sitting – 7.10.2016 – REPORT on the fight against corruption
and follow-up of the CRIM resolution (2015/2110(INI)) Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice
and Home Affairs Rapporteur: Laura Ferrara – page 6 – http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/
getDoc.do?pubRef=-%2f%2fEP%2f%2fNONSGML%2bREPORT%2bA8-2016-0284%2b0%
2bDOC%2bPDF%2bV0%2f%2fEN.
13
Ibid. page 10.
On Transnational Policy Convergence 285
roles in the new modus operandi of criminal organisations in Europe

echoes Italian legislation on the offence of external participation in mafia
affairs (concorso esterno in associazione mafiosa) (Continiello, 2016).
Even though the four countries in this book are not equally bound to
the EU, the analysis of policy trends inside the EU - which is closer to
Italy - is a good example of policy transfer in international settings. This
mirrors a trend of emulation of policies, which, as we have seen at
different times in this book, has been led by the US, especially in the
focus against “aliens”, against corrupted businesses/enterprises, and against
money laundering certainly promoted by the UN (with the Palermo
Convention among others) (Beare and Woodiwiss, 2014). This emulation
of policies has often led to convergence of policies not on the basis of real
shared experiences of dealing with organised crime but because of political
expedients to support and demand compliance. The analysis of such
political expedients would require an independent study on the direct
and indirect results, advantages and disadvantages, of policy transfer,
which exceeds the remit of this book. However, a specific example can
illustrate the point. The US Government in 2016 has published a report
in which countries have been classified in three tiers according to their
compliance with the minimum standards set by the US Trafficking
Victims Protection Act 2000 for the elimination of human trafficking
(see page 49), which are generally consistent with the Protocol to Prevent,
Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and
Children, supplementing the United Nations Convention against
Transnational Organized Crime (Palermo Convention). Under this Tier
Placement, tier 3 countries, who are not making efforts to be compliant at
all, might be subjected to restrictions of funding on non-humanitarian,
non-trade foreign assistance, as well as cuts to cultural and educational
exchange programs from the US government or might face the opposition
of the US to assistance from international financial institutions (US
Government, 2016). This political expedient might drive the tier 3
country to make an effort in the direction indicated by the US, but the
result of this compliance is unlikely to involve well-thought and effective
adoption of meaningful - and context-based - policies.
When it comes to national or international policy and policing, the
needs to adopt generalised concepts and the factual or logical mistakes
and imprecisions of this adoption make policy labels eventually ineffective.

This is complicated by the fact that these conceptualisations tend towards
approximation and are not behaviourally and culturally specific of local
contexts. Throughout this book, the analysis of national political inten-
tions has shown that, not only intentions are often quite unclear, but also,
that the analysis of the socio-cultural context in which they develop is
crucial to understand how pressures, crises and particular interests inter-
mingle. In international settings, the tendency to converge in transnational
comprehensive policies needs to be carefully examined, as it is the product
of national intentions too. What countries consider problems and solu-
tions varies in places and times. Even though a solution works in a certain
place and time it does not necessarily mean that it is right elsewhere or at a
different time. The eagerness to promote transnational solutions to trans-
national problems or problems constructed as such might seem like a
logical step. However, as comparative projects like this book tend to
show, unless we understand the ways our own cultural assumptions work
and how they shape concepts and policies, especially in translation, we are
unlikely to understand others and the way other policies are made and how
they work. In this framework, transnational solutions to organised crime
and mafias, without cultural specificity, are always bound to remain super-
ficial and to be prone to expediencies that have more to do to financial and
political calculations than with the fight against harmful conducts.
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9
Conclusion: A Socio-behavioural
Approach in Policing the Mafia–Organised
Crime Spectrum
Cultural Differences and Legal Asymmetries

The premise of this work is that no country is an island and we all mirror
into each other’s policies, borrow from each other and learn from others’
best practices and mistakes. No matter how many borders and walls we
build, a comparative work in criminal justice will always identify con-
vergences and divergences in the way social issues are approached.
In the current globalised world, political strategies and policy options
pursuable by states have been constrained by shifts in political economy
that, by relying on capital mobility and information exchanges, have
fundamentally eroded the foundation of redistributive welfare states
(Beck, 2000). In practice, this means that convergences of policies have
been observed throughout different criminal justice systems that mirror
into each other and tend towards homogeneous results (Muncie, 2005).
Fundamentally, the necessity of mirroring techniques lies in the
increased awareness of national challenges and successes. Convergences
and divergences in criminal policies can be based on structural and/or
conceptual similarities or differences between states or jurisdictions. The
uniqueness of national responses to phenomena like organised crime and

290 Conclusion: A Socio-behavioural Approach in Policing . . .
mafias can arguably solely be seen as the product of cultural differ-

ences and legal traditions. The mirroring technique, together with
the influence of international frameworks on legal traditions and
cultures, has become the flag of a much needed interconnectivity
in the globalised world, but it makes every national state and its
challenges and struggles less unique. However, notwithstanding
international frameworks and the rise of global criminology as a
field of enquiry beyond the comparative research method (Nelken,
2011), cultural differences and legal traditions still exist and they do
deserve attention to avoid superficial generalisations and allow proper
harmonisation of policies. In fact, control activities against mafias
and organised crime will always be doomed to fail should they fail to
consider the potential dangers and also benefits of legal asymmetries
and their connections to social and cultural drives. As shown in this
book, even though the Italian fight against mafias is primarily a
matter of national concern, Antimafia institutions have to take into
consideration the ability of mafias to move money, assets and people
abroad; even though this is outside the Italian jurisdiction it still
matters for a correct functioning of the policing model in Italy.
Conversely, if Italian authorities fail to “communicate” to other
countries the characteristics at the basis of mafia behaviours – or
they fail to communicate how to spot these behaviours – even when
procedures converge, cultural differences will make it extremely
problematic to work towards similar goals abroad and work
successfully.
If we agree with Professor Nikos Passas that neoliberal policies and
globalisation contribute to the activation of economic as well as cul-
tural criminogenic asymmetries (Passas, 1999a), then we need to con-
sider the impact of such asymmetries in the shaping of criminal
opportunities in the Western world and, at the same time, in the
reshaping of conceptualisations of criminal conducts. Criminogenic
asymmetries can be defined as “structural disjunctions, mismatches
and inequalities in the spheres of politics, culture, the economy and
the law” (Passas, 2002: 26). Cultural differences, therefore – which
manifest in language, traditions, social conducts and mutual recogni-
tion of those conducts – do affect the way criminalisation is achieved.
Cultural Differences and Legal Asymmetries 291
It is also true, anyway, that criminalisation does affect the way crimes
are reintroduced into, and received by, institutions and the public.
Legal asymmetries are indeed criminogenic, in the sense that they
create anomies and criminal opportunities and, at the global/transna-
tional level, loopholes in the legislations countering certain problems
(Passas, 2002; Passas, 1999b). This is clearly the case of Italy and the
offence for mafia-type unlawful association, which is certainly a unique
crime, effective because it targets a national autochthonous phenom-
enon and because it is rooted in the social dimensions of that problem,
obviously not transferrable because of the same reasons. If, on the one
hand, we can overcome certain legal asymmetries in substantial crim-
inal law through inclusive criminal procedures, on the other hand, it
appears more difficult to communicate cultural differences and recog-
nise cultural influences over the law. This is, once again, a discourse on
means and results, substance and methods. Even if we can reach the
same results – for example, 10 years in prison sentence – in criminalis-
ing similar conducts, it does not mean that in doing so we actually
understand each other’s cultural and social reasons to implement a
certain policy; at times not even specialist linguistic translation delivers
sufficient levels of accuracy in the depth that criminal law would
require to fully integrate with national cultures or at least awareness
of cultures. In light of all the aforementioned, I will conclude this book
by arguing that forms of policing through cultural awareness could
support better results in comparative and international policing, by
countering the tendency towards approximation of language and by
adding substance to policy transfers. In order to do this, the first issue
is to challenge an obsolete and fixed idea of mafias, which, more or less
directly, has been contrasted with the one of organised crime. I argue
that the two phenomena can be reconciled if we consider the spectrum
at the basis of this book. For this reconciliation to make a difference in
policing, I believe the concept of mafia needs to be rehabilitated and re-
defined within a cultural perspective. I will identify the benefits of a
socio-behavioural approach to redefine mafias under cultural lenses
and advocate for a policing strategy that, also across borders, considers
this approach. This, I believe, is the beginning of promising research in
the field.
Socio-behavioural Approaches to Mafias

and Organised Crime
The policing models in this book assess the links between criminal law
and institutional perceptions through a comparative analysis of criminal
policy discourses. As seen, when we attempt to differentiate between
conceptualisations of mafias and organised crime through this method,
the link between institutional meanings and social contexts affects poli-
cing strategies. Throughout this book, I have critically looked at the
labels of mafia and organised crime in institutional perceptions in order
to unpack meanings and values behind them. Notwithstanding the
differences between labels and concepts of organised crime and mafia
as presented in the mafia–OC spectrum in Chapter 2, it is virtually
impossible to separate the two concepts, in their historical and political
legacies. Considering group crimes in their context of reference through
a cultural and socio-behavioural perspective seems vital to study what we
identify as either mafias or organised crime.
A socio-behavioural perspective on organised crime and mafia is a
perspective that embraces both structures and activities, not by preferring
one to the other for strategic convenience, but by combining the two as
they influence each other on the ground. This perspective looks at the
social behaviours of groups and individuals within specific cultures of
references. Looking at social behaviours does not equate these behaviours
with a specific culture; rather culture is one of the components of these
behaviours. Following the lines of thought developed by Geertz 1973) and
Schneider (1976), we can understand “culture” as a system of collectively
held notions and values, understandings, and attitudes, which are not fixed
or static, but dynamic and evolving in our everydayness of shared symbols
through which people communicate. In this sense culture is inclusive of the
“new” and not exclusive of the “other”; it can be particular and specific but
can also be hybrid; it can, crucially, be understood as an exercise of
“translation” of language and practices when shared. It has been argued
that it is more relevant to understand what culture does, more than what
culture is (Chryssochoou, 2004). Culture underpins social behaviours and
social relationships. A culturally aware socio-behavioural approach to
Socio-behavioural Approaches to Mafias and Organised Crime 293
phenomena of mafia and organised crime, therefore, can consider the

following aspects:
1. An outlook at the social context(s) in which the criminalised phenom-

enon/a both originated and still exist(s); this includes an historical
reflection on both the criminalised phenomenon/a and its/their per-
ceived social conductors, enablers or inhibitors.
2. An outlook at the cultural characteristics and manifestations of the
phenomenon/a, which includes an outlook at what characterises, if
anything does, the (criminal/social) group’s dynamics with reference
to the culture of origin. In other words, this requires asking what do
the alleged/targeted criminals share, if they do, with the culture of
their society of origin? And more crucially, if we were to consider the
cultural elements of their individual and social behaviours as relevant
components of their criminal activities, would criminal law operatio-
nalise the phenomena in the same way?
3. An outlook to the effects of criminalisation of certain conducts on the
phenomena, the individuals and the groups targeted, as well as on the
culture and the social context of reference.
At national level, such an approach helps overcoming the difficulty to

translate certain legal categories into policing practices. For example, in
Italy, prosecutors and courts have struggled to apply the legal requirements
of the criminalisation of mafias to social contexts of the northern regions –
historically considered mafia-free – even though mafias are object of extensive
juridical interpretations within criminal law provisions applicable all over the
country. This difficulty is also linked to the cultural elements of the southern
mafias. In a famous anti-mafia operation, called “Fiori della Notte di San
Vito”1 [The Flowers of the Night of San Vito] in 1994–1996, the prosecutors
and the courts in Milan found themselves dealing with a mafia clan (the clan
Mazzaferro) fully operational in Brianza, the area in the north-west of
Lombardia, between Milan and Lake Como, and with links to Calabrian
1
Operation “Fiori della Notte di San Vito”, DDA Milano, RGNR. No. 4/1995, 2455/1995,
2506/1995 GIP.
‘ndrangheta clans. The presence of the ‘ndrangheta in Lombardia has been

ascertained in the late 2000s in Operation Crimine, Operation Infinito,
Operation Decollo and Operation Insubria among others (Sergi and
Lavorgna, 2016). The point, however, is not the recognition of the ‘ndran-
gheta clan’s operational interests in the North of Italy but the difficult journey
to recognise that clan as a “mafia-type” association within the legal definition.
The clan is found in a social context far from its cultural roots in the South of
Italy and this complicates the way it is approached. As we read in the sentence
concluding the first degree trial of the case2:
The law [article 416-bis of the Criminal Code] is a law of danger . . . it

condemns those who unite for these aims [control of territory, control of the
economy, control of public administration through intimidation and omertà],
because this is the danger. This does not depend on whether or not their project
is realised; it also relates to the social context where the group operates. For
historical reasons, the North of Italy is less vulnerable than the regions where
the mafia phenomenon was born and is still rooted in cultural customs.
What seemed difficult to observe in the North of Italy was the presence of
the “traditional” values of solidarity and honour that, according to the
Tribunal in Milan, are fundamental to define and recognise the ‘ndran-
gheta in Calabria. What was, and still is, easier to detect, instead, is a
criminal network heavily engaged in drug trafficking. Thanks to their
involvement in the drug trade, individuals had gained their autonomy
from “original” clans in Calabria. The Tribunal, however, observed, in the
first trial3:
This is precisely the point: the ‘ndrangheta and the clan Mazzaferro were not
born with a specific plan in mind to commit a specific crime, like drugs,
kidnappings, robberies or else. The real aim of the ‘ndrangheta is mutual
assistance, is about offering the right ways, the right connections, the right
2
Operation “Fiori della Notte di San Vito”, Sentenza N. 2991/1997, depositata 19.01.1998,
Tribunale Ordinario di Milano, p. 13.
3
Operation “Fiori della Notte di San Vito”, Sentenza N. 2991/1997, depositata 19.01.1998,
Tribunale Ordinario di Milano, p. 72.
people for every circumstance, each in their own territory whose control needs
to be secured.
Through a socio-behavioural approach, we can understand the degree

of penetration of the group within the community we are examining
and judge the “dangerousness” or “seriousness” of that penetration
from a criminal perspective. For example, in the appeal trial for
Operation “Fiori della Notte di San Vito,” the Court spends con-
siderable amount of time in the description of participation to “cer-
emonies” and “public meetings” of the defendants. Their
participation to weddings, baptisms, funerals, dinners, engagement
parties and so on is a “validation of the affiliation to the mafia
association [ . . . ] as moment of the associative life that they cannot
miss”4 out of respect for others and as networking occasion. In one
instance the court describes how bar meetings are observations of
culturally relevant shared practices also outside the Calabrian
territory:
There were weekly meetings, on Saturday usually, of men of the clans,

usually in a bar to avoid phone conversations and to be close without
being noticed. Every clan had their own bar and the manager often was
also an affiliate and acted as reference point for other clans when they needed
to get in touch with someone, without risking sharing addresses or phoning
numbers. Meetings at the bar were occasions to drink, play cards or pool,
and also communication, discourses of the ‘ndrangheta, which is an intri-
cately oral system, needs various discourses to be diffused, known and
transmitted.
The way individuals talked to each other about meeting at the bar, without
even specifying which bar, was considered indicative of the affiliation; the
participation to such bar meetings on Saturdays can be considered as the
minimum requisite to be active in the clan and up to date with what was
going on and does echo habits of the clans in their hometown in Calabria
4
Operation “Fiori della Notte di San Vito”, Sentenza n.3070/1999, depositata 16.05.2000, Corte
d’Appello di Milano, p. 589.
(Meli, 2015). These are the types of social behaviours infused in culture
and whose meaning is rooted in culture.
While the understanding of any (criminal) group’s dynamic can
always be subjected to an observation of the social interactions, and
therefore behaviours, among members and between members and exter-
nals, the exploitation of shared behaviours within a specific cultural
system is typical of mafias and can be less visible in other criminal
groups more or less organised to commit crimes. In other words, it is
important to look at the social behaviours of criminal groups in society,
from a social psychology perspective, but social behaviours are not
necessarily characterised by references to a single, or identifiable, cultural
heritage. In other words, not all social behaviours are expressions of a
specific or single culture, but rather belonging or coming from a specific
culture means sharing social categorisations and common understanding
of social and behavioural practices (Chryssochoou, 2004). When dis-
cussing organised crime and mafias in a social psychology perspective,
then we can observe that when shared cultural roots define the links of a
group with a society and cultural roots are exploited for criminal
purposes, then the group is on the mafia side of the spectrum. Under
this perspective, cultural aspects of mafias are always social behaviours of
groups and individuals in groups. Conversely, if there is no systemic
exploitation of cultural roots or if this exploitation does not define the
group’s dynamic, then the group is more on the “organised crime” side
of the spectrum. In other words, the relationship between the cultural
and the criminal side of a group draws the line between a policing
approach targeting structures and a policing approach targeting
activities.
Let us see an example of the relationship between cultural and criminal
characteristics in defining (and identifying) a mafia group. As said, the
importance, and the exploitation, of social gathering, festivities, ceremonies
and rituals of a certain culture for the existence and the fortification of the
group are essential to the understanding and the qualification of mafia
phenomena. This is for example the case of the “Madonna della
Montagna” in Calabria, a religious celebration in the Calabrian mountain
of the Aspromonte in early September. According to Operation Crimine, this
celebration – dear to many Calabrians – is also the occasion for ‘ndrangheta
members – who also share Calabrian traditions, as they are Calabrians and
live in Calabria – to meet, congratulate each other on new achievements and
agree on new strategies and partnerships (Sergi and Lavorgna, 2016). This
festivity is also celebrated, with many similar rituals, among Calabrian
migrants in Australia: it “is not venerated in a church, but in a locale that
Calabrian migrants feel belongs to them, an appropriation of the Australian
landscape [ . . . ] at the edge of the Reggio Calabria Club car park in
metropolitan Melbourne” (Papalia, 2008: 65). Noticeably, the Reggio
Calabria Club has been indicated in many occasions as a popular hangout
place for ‘ndrangheta members in the city especially following the world’s
biggest drug bust of 2008 (see Chapter 5) (McKenzie et al., 2015) and the
murder of lawyer Joseph Acquaro in 2016 (Bucci et al., 2016). On one side,
“by its direct association with the sublime symbol of the Madonna della
Montagna, the Reggio Calabria Club has become the pre-eminent sacred
Calabrian space” in Melbourne (Papalia, 2008: 67). On the other side,
during the bail hearing for Pasquale Barbaro,5 afterwards convicted for the
2008 drug case,6 “surveillance material will reveal a plan by Mr Barbaro and
others to attend the Reggio Calabria Club on 24 July 2008 to murder
Michael Barbaro”.
On the other side of the mafia-OC spectrum, when the links of a
group with a society are best defined not by the exploitation of culture
but by the seriousness of their criminal activities and by the individuals’
behaviours to pursue profits through those activities, then the group can
be residually considered on the organised crime side of the mafia–OC
spectrum. A socio-behavioural approach is still valid to understand
groups’ dynamics but it is not culturally relevant. In Australia, for
example, the Federal Court describes what organised crime behaviour
means within this framework in a case of 20007:
5
Magistrates’ Court of Victoria – In the matter of the Bail Act 1977 (Vic) and in the matter of
Applications for Bail by Pasquale Barbaro, Case No.s X02285456 Y01046940, 2 August 2010,
page 18.
6
DPP (Cth) v Barbaro & Zirilli [2012] VSC 47 (23 February 2012).
7
Federal Court of Australia, Wan v Minister for Immigration & Multicultural Affairs [2000] FCA
1822.
It was contended that organised criminal behaviour [ . . . ] was the type of

behaviour that is of concern to major crime investigation authorities such
as the National Crime Authority. That authority defines organised crime
as “a systematic conspiracy to commit serious offences”.
In the UK, looking at phenomena labelled as organised crime from a

socio-behavioural point of view also makes sense to understand the social
context and to reconsider the use of labels. In a recent civil case of 2013,
Times Newspapers Limited v David Hunt,8 Mr Hunt sued The Times by
challenging an article that portrayed him as an organised crime boss
involved in a number of serious crimes. The High Court had to
reconstruct the behaviour of the Claimant and had to look at his real
and alleged behaviours:
It is the Claimant’s case that by the late 1980s his name was being
“abused”, in the sense that he was being falsely associated with criminality
without any proper factual basis. It was one of his complaints in the trial
that he had acquired a reputation for dishonesty and as a man of violence,
that this reputation had been fostered by the police, and that it was false
and without foundation. He accepted in evidence that people had used his
name to threaten others, but explained: “I think this is where the situation
has got out of hand . . . because I had a good name in my area as being a
good person and a gentleman, and I believe people took that out of
context, in their advantage in maybe doing drugs etc, and this is where
the reputation has come from without me knowing.”
The Court’s socio-behavioural assessment, notwithstanding the civil

nature of the trial, is quite symbolic for an understanding of crime in
context. The behaviour of the claimant who “came across as mild-
mannered and courteous”, collided with his found capability of “sudden
violence when his interests were directly threatened” which pointed out
to his status: “a so-called ‘crime lord’ might well take such a course with
a view to protecting his own area or ‘patch’”. In this case, the individual
8
Times Newspapers Limited v David Hunt Case No: HQ10D02588 High Court of Justice
Queen’s Bench Division 4 July 2013 [2013] EWHC 1868 (OB) – 2013 WL 3353667.
A Redefinition of the Mafia Concept for a Cultural Integration . . . 299
and the social behaviours of the claimant are certainly relevant to define
the crime. We do not know whether any specific cultural aspect was
considered throughout the case, but the seriousness of violent acts, the
claimant’s reputation and the way he behaved in the territory all point to
an individual integrated in his community. Certain (serious) crimes can
happen anywhere, but the relationship with the community needs to be
assessed from a social and then a cultural perspective too. Looking for
socio-behavioural aspects of criminal groups allows considering culture
as one of these behaviours but not as a necessary characteristic to qualify
the crime and the group committing the crime. If there is no element
pointing at (the exploitation of) culture but nevertheless certain social
behaviours (across the spectrum) can be identified, then the group is,
residually, organised crime.
From a policing point of view, this perspective necessarily shifts the
focus from a legalistic approach, which looks at criminalisation and the
reasons of criminalisation of either or both organised crime and mafias,
to a sociological – culturally aware – approach on the contexts of such
criminalisation.
A Redefinition of the Mafia Concept

for a Cultural Integration of the Models
Looking at a criminal group from a culturally aware socio-behavioural
perspective means taking into considerations a different range of ele-
ments – broadly indicated as “culture” – defining the core of a certain
society from where the criminal group originates or where the group has
rooted. The group might use and twist these cultural elements for
criminal purposes or to cement relationships and if so, it can be con-
sidered a mafia group. As lucidly put by David Garland (2011: 24),
Cultural categories, habits and sensibilities are embedded in, and consti-
tutive of, our political and economic institutions. The study of culture
does not begin where the study of power and economies leaves off – it is a
constituent part of any political and economic analysis.
Even though we need demarcations between cultural, economic, legal

and political domains, for purposes of social research and analysis, we
should always remember the synchronicity of all these aspects in a given
community. In other words, we should not forget that when individuals
and groups, including criminal ones, give sense to their actions and
attribute webs of meanings to their interactions, these meanings are
necessarily dynamic, hybrid and subjected to change, no matter our
attempts to crystallise meanings in law or policy or sociological
interpretations.
For the purposes of this book, therefore, the final question is whether,
and how in practice and not just theoretically, we can differentiate
mafias and organised crime through a socio-cultural perspective. In the
spectrum presented at the beginning of this book, mafias and organised
crime were presented as socially embedded, as local phenomena essen-
tially differentiated on the basis of their degree of penetration and
control of society and their ability to use this control to move beyond
and outside that society. I argue – after having studied mafia groups in
Southern Italy, in the rest of Italy and abroad – that a re-qualification of
the mafia phenomenon is needed to start integrating concepts of orga-
nised crime and mafias for policy and policing purposes, especially from
an international cooperation perspective. This means depriving the
concept of mafia of its special Italian character, its ethnic meaning and
its static structural connotations as hierarchical system of power based on
traditional values and on control of a physical territory through violence,
intimidation and thanks to omertà. Ultimately, I argue that for such a re-
qualification, we need to differentiate the idea of culture from concepts
of nationality and ethnicity in order to make sense of mafias and
organised crimes as socio-behavioural phenomena, with different degrees
of cultural characterisation. More specifically, nationality (Italian orga-
nised crime) needs to be equated more with citizenship than with
ethnicity. Ethnicity and culture as well are not overlapping concepts:
ethnicity refers to the common heritage of a group of people, usually
within a nation (including language and history for example), while
culture, as previously said, can be understood as a set of dynamic
behaviours in social contexts, originating often from common nation-
ality and common ethnicity but made hybrid by constant interchange
A Redefinition of the Mafia Concept for a Cultural Integration . . . 301
with other environments and other ethnicities in a variety of social

contexts. From the study and the comparison among the four countries,
their models and their institutional intentions, perceptions and choices
as presented in this book, I can identify four steps to qualify mafia
organisations in contemporary and dynamic forms, located at the one
hand of the mafia-OC spectrum (Sergi, 2016).
1. Mafias are both territorially specific criminal organisations and cul-

tural systems acquiring “criminal reputation” in the legal world as well
as in criminal markets.
2. The criminal reputation of these organisations or systems is both
cause and effect of the power to intimidate that they manifest thanks
to the real or threatened use of violence and/or a stable system of
trafficking of favours.
3. These organisations or systems are criminal because – due of their
associative bond and their criminal reputation – their affiliates can
systemically circumvent the law and enjoy different types of benefits.
4. The affiliates of such organisations or systems enjoy a certain degree of
protection from non-affiliates in the territory due to the fact that they
share with non-affiliates cultural practices typical of the territory or
the social groups originating from a territory. These practices also
induce omertà, as attitude of non-intervention, in the community.
These practices can be understood as social behaviours.
There are two main conceptual consequences of this perspective. First,

the belief that certain phenomena – like mafias – are “original” to certain
places and cultures and not others becomes unrealistic. In fact, mafias
can form in any culture provided that there is
1. the systemic usurpation, exploitation and/or the twisting of cultural

values and socio-cultural behaviours shared within a territory;
2. the exploitation of social norms for the acquisition of privileges –
either financial or political or social;
3. the intimidating power originating from reputation; and
4. the exploitation of social relationships to build consensus in local
communities.
Second, the differentiation between mafias and organised crime is cul-

tural. If every criminal group can be understood through analysis of their
social behaviours, then mafias are those groups that exhibit and exploit
cultural practices for illegal purposes. Their socio-behavioural traits will
be characterised by reference to their culture of origin as preconditional
and conditional part of their illicit behaviours.
Conclusion: Towards Policing Through Culture

As showed in this book and in the models analysed, at the back of
what has been called ethnic organised crime always corresponds the
fear that we are discriminating against an entire culture and, in so
doing, a whole ethnic group. The overlapping between culture as set
of social practices and ethinicity is common in policing strategies.
Countering strategies will try and avoid the ethnic stigmatisation and
will try to focus on criminal activities or criminal markets instead.
The risk of stigmatisation comes from years of studies of the mafia
phenomenon that have looked at an erroneously homogeneous
Southern Italian culture as a factor of mafia development. In his
famous Mafia and Mafiosi: The Structure of Power, Henner Hess
(Hess and Osers, 1973: 127) defined the mafia as “neither an
organisation, nor a secret society, but a method”. Being a mafioso,
for Hess, means assuming a certain set of behaviours, whose traits –
in 1973 – were wrongly associated to the Sicilian culture as a static
bloc, as a whole. Notwithstanding this error in judgement, it is
important to notice that Hess did indeed anticipate Italian under-
standing of the mafia phenomenon as the mafia offence in 1982 will
qualify the mafia method as distinguishing factor between a mafia-
type criminal organisation and a “simple” (non-mafia-type) one.
What Hess, however, considered fundamental for an understanding
of mafias is the cultural embeddedness of the phenomenon and the
distance between the actual manifestations of the phenomenon in
the local and the “mafia conspiracy” of those years. The mistake that
Hess made, alongside other scholars advocating a cultural approach
Conclusion: Towards Policing Through Culture 303
to mafia (Putnam, 1993; Banfield, 1958), is in the assumption that

culture can be defined as static and equated with ethnic ties. This
equation is particularly problematic for law enforcement as it can
lead to forms of racism and discrimination of ethnic groups, espe-
cially abroad. However, social psychologists today tend to dispute
this assumption on the basis of a dynamic conceptualisation of both
culture and ethnic traits (Christopher et al., 2014). If culture is
made of social behaviours then it is dynamic, hybrid and hetero-
geneous; it follows that ethnicity is not a good indicator of cultural
homogeneity especially when social groups and individuals move.
Ethnicity cannot be simply equated to nationality or citizenship
and neither to culture, in a globalised world where migration is
the norm and not the exception.
I argue that an effective countering strategy needs to acknowledge the
fear of labelling ethnic groups and overcome it by considering the
cultural elements of the mafia phenomenon and more generally, the
socio-behavioural aspects of organised crime. Introducing “culture” as a
viable tool to support policing work can be problematic, both at home
and abroad (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2004). It requires a definition of
culture, and one of ethnicity, able to exclude stigmatisation, discrimina-
tion and racism and include social relationships and social behaviours as
indicators of viable investigative paths. For purposes of policing, asses-
sing social behaviours, values and experiences, shared within a certain,
identifiable group implies shifting the attention from the static and
historical aspects usually associated to “ethnicity” to dynamic, hybrid
and contemporary manifestations and evolutions of culture from a social
psychology perspective. While the use of social and behavioural sciences
is not completely new in policing of organised crime groups (Sergi,
2014), the extent to which cultural studies can be embedded in official
techniques of investigation and policing against mafias and organised
crime is still unclear and remains the open question left by this book as
potential way forward in researching these matters.
****
This book does not start where it ends. The questions the research was
asking at the beginning, about comparative policing and criminal justice,
have led to unexpected fields of enquiry, rooted in social psychology and
cultural studies. The starting point of this book was a deconstruction of

institutional perceptions of labels of organised crime and mafia; the end-
ing point, instead, is a requalificaiton of the phenomena of organised
crime and especially of the phenomena of mafias under socio-behavioural
and cultural perspectives. Probably the most visible and important limit of
this work is that this is neither a book about (Italian) mafias and organised
crime groups nor purely a book about countering strategies. This book
wished to look at the labels of mafias and organised crime and at how
these labels are constructed by institutional intentions (or rather by often
murky intentions). This is not a book about organised crime markets or
organised crime phenomena per se, but rather a comparative research on
policing phenomena of organised crime and mafias departing from more
or less accurate narratives as constructed in interviews and in policy
documents. The data collected for this book has been considered as
symptomatic of the nation and the institutional culture of reference and
the analysis has been organised in the models described. The full remit of
international and supranational agreements and policies, especially against
financial aspects of serious/organised crime across borders, albeit acknowl-
edged, has not been fully considered in this research as it exceeds the
purposes of a comparative work on labels and policy intentions. A
comparative work can take various points of view: this specific one has
deemed more necessary to dig deeper in what – at the end of the research
– appeared as the primary source of misunderstanding, that is, the “idea”,
the “notion” of mafia.
In this book a bias is certainly visible: not only the mafia phenomenon
is approached from an Italian perspective, but also it works as a master
category against which everything that does not match its requirements
is considered residual – and left as “organised crime” – instead. This
choice has been justified many times throughout the book, but is never-
theless a construction worth being conscious about.
While certainly aware of the economic and political changes that have
occurred and can occur for policies against crime to be shaped and to be
adopted and enforced, this book focused on the legal perspective of the
fight against mafias and organised crime. I have used criminal law as
both the example and the cause of institutional and social constructi-
vism. With the legal perspective and the focus on criminal law, this book
References 305
is dense with descriptions and information specific to the countries object

of comparative analysis, to advocate the possibility for a cultural perspec-
tive in policy analysis and development that does not become ethnocentr-
ism. This book leaves the readers with more questions than it answers,
hinting at a number of fields of enquiry – security studies, political
economy, international relations, international cooperation in mutual
legal assistance, international law, policing studies and social psychology
– that, however, could not be fully explored. Moreover, the book ends
with an open question, related to ways in which cultural awareness – from
a socio-behavioural perspective – could inform policing techniques and
approaches. This is the landing point of this research and will hopefully
become the starting point of my future projects.
Finally, the value of this book is in its comparative efforts, even
though scholars of each country mentioned in this monograph might
eventually find some gaps in the models presented and in the description
of national policies. Through comparative analysis, which acknowledges
the bias of its starting point and attempts to overcome it, this research
project shows that more comprehensive and more nuanced conceptua-
lisations of criminal and social phenomena can indeed be achieved. This
is done not through language simplification, policy approximation and
reduction of cultural complexity, but rather in the opposite way through
an analysis that acknowledges and departs from complexity of cultural
and social settings and uses differences to reach a deeper understanding.
Only through a deeper understanding of differences we can reach sub-
stantial – rather than formal – sharing platforms in policies and therefore
effective cooperation in policing.
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Index
A Attero National Task Force, 165

Aberdeen, Scotland, 180, 238 Attorney’s General Office, 224, 225
Acquaro, Joseph murder, 151, 237, Australian Crime Commission, 7, 143,
297 145, 154, 156, 161, 165, 224
Activity Model, 2, 51, 201, 202, 203, Australian Federal Police, 7, 144,
204, 215, 224, 230, 233, 239, 149, 150, 157, 250, 279
241, 257
Actus Reus, 23
Alien conspiracy, 105, 116, 117, B
133, 142, 178–179, 236 Banca d’Italia, 6, 89, 24
Anti-association laws, 160, 166–167, Bikies, 143–144, 145–146, 164,
169, 226, 227 166, 169, 220
Antimafia, 6, 33, 64–69, 72–80, 82, Black Hand, 147
84, 85, 87–91, 93, 94, 95, 149, Borsellino Paolo, 64
218, 221, 222, 224–226, 228,
230, 232, 236, 239, 240, 244,
245–246, 249, 251, 254, 275, C
281, 290 Camorra, 62–63, 72, 83, 180, 237,
Antimafia Code, Italy, 251 238, 254–255, 276, 278
Approximation of policies, 283 Civil law, 3, 22, 24, 49, 86, 158, 234

Perspectives, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-53568-5
310 Index
Civil RICO, 115, 125, 126, 127, Cosa Nostra, 16, 33, 43, 50, 62–67,
130, 233, 234, 249 69, 70, 71, 83, 102–107,
Cocaine, 150, 182, 183, 185 109–111, 113, 117–119,
Colonisation, 73, 235 128, 132, 135, 222, 230,
Common law, 3, 22, 24, 49, 86, 102, 237, 246, 278
120, 158, 159, 166, 196, 197 Counter-terrorism, 109, 117, 158
Commonwealth Criminal intelligence, 7, 30, 44, 143,
of Australia, 150, 152 148, 151, 155, 156, 158,
Comparative criminal justice, 2, 8–9 192–194, 222, 224, 231
Conceptual convergences, 216, Criminalisation, 21, 23–26, 29, 31,
223, 235 36, 39, 50, 63, 80, 85, 88, 93,
Conceptual divergences, 226 94, 124, 131, 134, 158, 160,
Confiscation, 6, 88, 89–91, 94–95, 170, 197, 198, 205, 206, 223,
161, 162–163, 167, 199–200, 227, 229, 233, 235, 243,
217–218, 223, 230–235, 251, 244–248
252, 272–273, 275 Criminal lifestyle, 170, 198–200,
Confiscation, criminal, 6, 89, 90, 205, 206, 233
161, 163, 167, 200, 217, 232, Cultural awareness, 291
233, 235, 252 Cultural relativism, 11, 265, 267,
Confiscation, non-conviction 275, 280
based, 162, 163, 218, 251 Culturemes, 278
Connivance, 40–42, 45–47, 49
Conspiracy, 23, 25, 26, 86, 101,
103–107, 109–111, 115–117, D
120–122, 127, 132, 133, 142, Delocalisation, 68, 73, 235
160, 165–167, 178, 179, Department of Justice, USA, 110,
195–197, 199, 203, 205, 227, 224, 247
236, 237, 269, 298, 302 Disorganised crime, 28, 186
Control of the territory, 38, 39, 42, Disruption, 30, 192–194, 204, 205,
46, 75, 77, 80, 82, 246, 277 224, 230, 235, 257
Corruption, 31, 40–41, 47, 63, 64, Double-track system, 78, 225
66, 75, 76, 84, 85, 89, 111, Drug Networks, 161, 244
119, 124, 125, 126, 129, 133, Drug offences, 161
135, 142, 147, 185, 187, 191, Drug trafficking, 26, 68, 93, 112,
198, 200, 201, 204, 206, 123, 124, 151, 158, 169, 179,
227–230, 239, 242, 249, 250, 181, 182, 185, 189, 199, 218,
254, 255, 271, 277, 279, 219, 223, 234, 237, 245–248,
281–284 251, 271, 273, 277, 279, 294
Index 311
Drug trafficking organizations, 112 Follow the money, 217, 223,

Duisburg massacre, 69 231, 252
Durham Constabulary, 6, 240 Fortugno Francesco, 68
E G
Economic crimes, 7, 113, 130, 131 Gangs, 38, 93, 113, 115, 130,
Enterprise Model, 17, 51, 101, 143–146, 152, 153, 155, 160,
128, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 164, 166, 168, 177–182,
215, 217, 224, 227, 228, 233, 186–190, 198, 202, 203, 205,
239, 250 220, 226, 231, 234, 243, 253,
Enterprise Theory of 257–258
Investigation, 113 Gioia Tauro, 68
Environmental crime, 253–255 Globalisation, 30, 44, 62, 111, 112,
Ethnicity, 106, 151, 152, 115, 179, 266, 290
184, 280, 300 Glocalisation, 220, 223
Ethnocentrism, 11, 267, The Godfather, 101, 106, 220
280, 281, 305 Governance, 27, 29, 31, 35, 39–41,
EU framework decision, 271 70, 186, 239
European Arrest Warrant, 272 Grey area, 171
European Union, 238, 271–273,
275, 276
Europol, 6, 218, 225, 270, 272, 274, H
276, 278 Harmonisation of policies, 268, 290
External participation, 85–87, 94, Harm principle, 22
228, 285 Harm reduction, 192, 193, 204–205,
230, 247
Hybridisation, 44, 70, 73, 77, 109,
F 135, 149
Falcone, Giovanni, 33, 34, 64–66
Famiglia Basilischi, 62, 254
Family ties, 42 I
Federal Bureau of Investigations, 104 Illicit enterprise, 105, 107, 113, 115,
Financial Action Task Force, 116, 127, 131, 133, 134
FATF, 283 Infiltration, 36, 39–42, 47, 72, 73,
416-bis Italian Criminal Code, 67, 75, 88, 94, 117, 122, 125, 127,
79, 224 131, 133, 171, 239, 242, 250,
Fiscal Police, Italy, 6 269, 275, 277
312 Index
Institutional perceptions, 10, 12, 15, La Cosa Nostra, 50, 102, 103–104,
16, 17, 47, 48, 49, 136, 180, 105, 110, 111, 113, 117, 118,
191, 198, 202, 236, 253, 256, 119, 128, 132, 135, 222, 230
266, 292 LCN, 103, 106, 107, 110, 112,
Intentions, 1, 2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 114, 117–118, 119, 124, 135,
17, 18, 101, 189, 196, 221, 222, 242
230, 286, 301, 304 Legal asymmetries, 265, 278, 289,
International frameworks, 18, 290–291
265–268, 271, 273, 274, 275, Liberal progressive denialism, 237
281, 283, 290 Liverpool, 6, 180–184, 203, 257
International organised Liverpool Mafia, 182
crime, 107–110, 112, London, 2, 6, 7, 177, 179–180,
114–117, 247 182, 183–186, 187–188,
Interpol, 183, 276, 277 191, 193, 196, 218, 220,
Intimidation, 42, 63, 76, 80–84, 225, 229, 231, 257
185–187, 269, 294, 300
Italian Criminal Code, 35, 79,
224, 284 M
Italian mafia, 2, 3, 10, 12, 14–16, 32, Madonna della Montagna, 296–297
48, 49, 50, 61, 62, 67, 71, 73, Mafia, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8–18, 21–28,
91, 92, 106–107, 111, 117, 235, 31–50, 61–95, 101–113, 114,
246, 266, 275–279, 290, 304 115, 117, 119–125, 128, 132,
Italian organised crime, 150, 276, 133, 134, 135, 136, 142, 143,
278, 279–280 146–153, 160, 165, 167, 169,
170, 171, 180, 182, 185–189,
201–203, 215, 216, 218, 219,
J 220, 221, 222, 224–230, 232,
Joint Money Laundering Intelligence 233, 235–242, 244–247,
Taskforce, 250 249, 251, 253–255, 266, 267,
268, 274–281, 283–286,
K 290–296, 299–303
Kefauver Committee, 104, 119 Mafia behaviour, 21, 34, 70, 82, 83,
Kray brothers, 177, 184 95, 167, 280, 290
Mafia Capitale, 63, 73,
74–76, 82, 87
L Mafia conspiracy, 101, 103, 104,
Labelling, 253, 256, 258, 274, 106–107, 109, 110, 115,
279–280, 303 238, 302
Index 313
Mafia method, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 191, 198, 200, 202, 204, 206,
84, 85, 93–94, 245, 246, 302 219, 226, 231, 275
Mafia-OC spectrum, 37, 142, 180, ‘Ndrangheta, 2, 16, 50, 62, 63–64,
201, 228, 292, 297 67–70, 72–74, 79, 82–84, 143,
Mafia, Italian-American, 12, 14, 21, 146–150, 159, 169–171,
32, 48–49, 50, 62, 67, 71, 73, 220–222, 228, 236–237, 240,
92, 101, 103, 106, 119, 226 254, 276, 279, 280, 294–296
Mani Pulite, 64, 66 ‘Ndrangheta in Australia, 71, 147,
MDMA, 150 169, 220, 237
Melbourne, 7, 144, 146, 147, 150, ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria, 62, 67,
151, 159, 162, 169, 218, 225, 83, 148
237, 244, 297 ‘Ndrangheta in Italy, 69
Membership offence, 83, 85, 89, 93, ‘Ndrangheta in the USA, 71
195, 196, 197, 226, 233, 266 ‘Ndrangheta mobility, 235
Mens rea, 23, 81 ‘Ndranghetisation, 221, 222
Metropolitan Police, London, 6, 9/11, 102, 103, 107–111, 114, 117,
184, 188, 193, 220, 225, 229 134, 135
Mob, 117, 120, 123, 220, 242 New York City, 7, 106, 115, 133,
Mobility, 38, 44, 45, 92, 235–236, 236, 242
238, 289 Nigerian Clans in Sicily, 246
Money laundering, 6, 72, 74, 88, 89,
111, 131, 145, 156, 161, 162,
183–186, 189, 195, 198, 199, O
200–201, 205–206, 217, 219, OC-Mafia Spectrum, 38, 41, 42, 45,
223, 224, 229, 231–232, 235, 46, 48, 49–50, 187, 244
248, 249–251, 271, 273, 279, Omertà, 34, 42, 43, 46, 62, 80–81,
281, 282, 283, 285 83, 84, 294, 300, 301
Multi-agency approach, 120, 224 Onorata Società, 147
Mutual legal assistance, 265, Operation Aemilia, 73, 74
271–272, 274, 305 Operation Bellu Lavuru, 221
Operation Crimine, 69–70, 294, 296
Operation Fiori della Notte di San
N Vito, 293
National Crime Agency, 2, 6, 185, Operation Infinito, 73, 83, 294
192, 193, 224, 250 Operation Maglio 3, 83
National security, 30, 31, 110, 114, Operation Mamma Santissima, 221
115, 117, 135, 153, 155, Operation Mondo di Mezzo, 73–74,
165–166, 168, 179, 189–190, 75, 82
314 Index
Operation New Bridge, 236–237 Procedural convergences, 223

Operation Old Bridge, 236 Procedural divergences, 251, 274
Operation Porto, 68 Proceeds of crime, 89, 131, 161–164,
Organised crime, 1, 2, 3, 4, 6–9, 167, 187, 191, 198, 199, 201,
11–18, 21–32, 34, 36, 37, 38, 206, 217, 231–233, 235, 239,
39, 40–51, 62, 63, 67, 70, 71, 252, 253, 272, 275, 282
75, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 88–89, Professional criminals, 178
91–92, 93, 94, 95, 101–136, Proscribed associations, 160, 169, 227
141–147, 149–171, 177–206, Public order, 24, 31, 35–36, 38, 67,
215–240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 89, 202
247–251, 253, 257, 258, Public safety, 31, 89, 165
265–286 Purana Task Force, 225
Organized Crime Task
Force, 115, 242
Outlaw Motor Cycle Gangs, 143, Q
144, 152, 155, 160, 243 Qualitative research, 4, 5
P R
Palermo Convention, 29, 268, 269, Racketeering, 118, 120, 121, 122,
270, 271, 281, 283, 285 123, 125, 127, 129, 131, 134,
Participation in criminal 135, 234, 242–243, 249, 277
activities, 197 Reputation, 42, 44, 45, 50, 75, 84,
Pattern of racketeering 101, 145, 182, 185–186, 190,
activities, 122, 125 200, 237, 245, 250, 270,
POCA Act, Australia, 233 298–299, 301
POCA Act, UK, 232, 234 RICO Act, 103, 113, 119, 125, 131,
Policing models, 2, 3, 10, 11–12, 14, 134, 135
17, 18, 47, 48, 49, 216, 219, Rome, 6, 7, 39, 63, 65, 73, 74–75, 80,
244, 253, 274, 292 82, 84, 85, 87, 222, 228, 232
Policy transfer, 18, 266, 285
Politics, 31, 37, 41, 61, 63, 64, 66,
75, 84, 85, 88, 94, 95, 102, S
220, 227, 290 Sacra Corona Unita, 62
Prevention, 1, 36, 44, 79, 89, 95, Secrecy, 31, 35, 38, 42–47, 62, 81,
157, 158, 193, 194, 195, 199, 221, 224
204–205, 219, 224, 229–231, Securitisation, 30, 31, 102–103,
233, 241, 249, 258, 266 108–110, 115, 134, 171
Prison, 190, 225, 226, 240, 291 Self-laundering, 231, 232
Index 315
Semiotic squares, 10 Transnational Organized

Serious Crime Act 2015, UK, 197, Crime, 268, 285
205, 226–227, 229, 257 Trust, 38, 42, 43–44, 46, 47, 62,
Serious crimes, 29, 188, 189, 196, 116, 270
198, 241, 271, 273, 298–299
Seriousness, 29–30, 70, 129, 145, 154,
168, 188–189, 198, 219–220, U
225, 226, 226, 233, 235, 243, Unexplained wealth, 161–164,
245, 257, 267, 270, 271 166–167, 170, 198, 200, 223,
Serious Organised Crime Agency, 6, 231, 233, 251–253
192 Unexplained wealth orders, 164,
Sicily, 32–33, 62, 63, 64, 65–66, 67, 167, 200, 251, 252
76, 79, 102, 236, 246, 251 United Nations, 268, 281, 282, 285
Social construction, 9 Unlawful association, 26, 28, 35, 42,
Social tolerability, 77 71, 79–82, 93, 170, 198, 219,
Socio-behavioural approaches, 291 244, 246, 255, 266
Sophistication, 29–30, 43, 108, 145, UNODC, 151, 197, 266, 268, 270,
146, 189, 190, 257, 275 281, 282
South of Italy, 62, 71, 77, 294
Standardisation of policies, 266
V
Stigmatisation, 94, 225,
Violence, 31, 33, 35, 38–39, 43,
226, 280
45–47, 62, 75, 76–77, 83, 93,
Structure model, 2, 17, 51, 61, 88,
105, 144–146, 152, 153, 155,
92, 93, 94, 95, 133, 215, 224,
181, 185–186, 187, 198, 203,
233, 236, 239, 254–256
204, 205, 227, 240, 243, 244,
Structure vs. Activity, 63, 253
246, 253, 256–258,
269, 298, 300
Violent visibility, 43–44, 47
T
Visibility model, 51, 168, 170–171,
Tacit visibility, 43, 46
224, 227, 229, 239, 244
Tangentopoli, 66
Terrorism, 31, 34, 108, 110, 114,
129, 157, 161, 197, 199, 230, W
271, 282 War on drugs, 113
Ties with society, 38, 39, 40 War on terror, 103
Traditional organised crime, 111, Whole-of-government
112, 117, 123–124, 133, 204, approach, 165, 169
220, 242, 248 Will to power, 37
Trafficking of favours, 84, 86, 301 Wrongfulness, 23, 24

From Mafia To Organised Crime A Comparative Analysis of Policing Models

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Critical Criminological Perspectives

More information about this series at

Critical Criminological Perspectives

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover illustration: Anna Sergi

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This book is probably my entire mind of researcher translated into

Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, Russell G. Smith; at

This book presents primary research conducted in Italy, US, Australia

1 Introduction: The aims of this comparative research 1

2 Maﬁa and Organised Crime: The Spectrum

3 Case Study 1: Italy and the Structure Model 61

4 Case Study 2: United States of America and the

5 Case Study 3: Australia and the Visibility Model 141

6 Case Study 4: United Kingdom and the Activity Model 177

7 Convergences and Divergences Across the Four Models 215

8 National Models and International Frameworks 265

9 Conclusion: A Socio-behavioural Approach in Policing

Fig. 2.1 The organised crime–maﬁa spectrum: a summary 46

Background of the Project

© The Author(s) 2017 1

I have a legally trained mind that works through social research

also with foreign authorities (e.g. at the US Embassy) and in European

This book, therefore, is a contribution to studies on maﬁas and orga-

Notes on Research Methods

1. Purposive/Selective: the sample frame, especially at the beginning of

a. Direzione Nazionale Anti-maﬁa [National Anti-maﬁa Prosecution

2. The UK – England and Wales – (interviews and meetings in London

a. Crown Prosecution Service, Organised Crime Division

3. The US – federal jurisdiction – (interviews and meetings in 2013 and

a. Attorney General’s State-Wide Organised Crime Task Force (New

4. Australia – federal and state jurisdictions – (interviews and meetings

a. Australian Federal Police (Including representatives at Australian

Conversing with experts and privileged observers within institutions,

time-consuming data gathering processes, particularly if the experts are

Comparative Research in Criminology, Criminal

requires a deeper reﬂection on the emergence of new social meanings

The ultimate value of comparative studies lies mostly in preventing

Maﬁas and Organised Crime: Prejudices and

these perceptions can be or have been translated into legislative frame-

The second pre-judgement relates to maﬁas as worse than “other”

1. This book is a theoretical effort to redefine the term “mafia” in relation

more general “maﬁa” category – and some speciﬁc examples on

The maﬁa spectrum is built around a re-conceptualisation of maﬁas

3. This book is a comparative research in policing and criminal justice

As argued in Chapter 2, diﬀerences in institutional perceptions and con-

4. Conducting comparative research means engaging in deconstruction

Braun V and Clarke V. (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology.

Nelken D. (2009) Comparative criminal justice: Beyond ethnocentrism and

Between Criminology and Criminal Law

© The Author(s) 2017 21

perceptions of the crime it targets. The way organised crime and

1. The grounds for criminalisation: this refers to the wrongfulness of

As for point 1, the grounds for criminalisation, reference is made to the

is by deﬁnition a public matter: it is a reaction to the violation of a

might deﬁne liability in terms of conspiracy – single or joint, pivoting on

One step further, the oﬀence of membership in unlawful association

operated by criminal law and also by criminological thinking to understand

The Socio-legal Identity of Organised Crime

structure seeking power; from a local network of drug dealers, to transna-

of certain types of drugs where production places diﬀer from dealing

might lead to uncertainty in sentencing as well as creating space for social