Comparitive_Perspective_on_Organized_Crime

Comparative Perspective on Organized Crime Russian and Asian Organized Crime April 28, 2008 Russian and Asian Organized Crime Transnational organized crime involves the planning and execution of illicit business ventures by groups or networks of individuals working in more than one country (Reuter and Petrie, 1999; Albanese, 2004). These criminal groups use systematic violence and corruption to achieve their goals (Finckenauer and Voronin, 2001). Most crimes commonly include money laundering; human smuggling; cyber crime; and trafficking of humans, drugs, weapons, endangered species, body parts, or nuclear material. Transnational crime families use various activities to specifically weaken economies, various countries financial systems and undermine democracy (Voronin, 2000). These networks often prey on weaker governments not yet powerful enough to oppose them, prospering on all illegal activities, drug trafficking, one crime that will create immense profits. By carrying out illegal activities, organized criminals upset the stability of nations worldwide, by using bribery, violence, or terrorism to achieve their goals. From the viewpoints of the United States all criminal elements are looked upon in different views. In the United States the organized criminal families must be tried for their crimes against the law. However, in Russia as well as Asia, many of those illegal actions benefit their countries towns and villages. Granted, this is from the different criminal opportunities combined with family environment, but a crime is still a crime, regardless of the conditions of the population. Because of the proliferation of groups, not a specific organizational structure can be delineated as if it described one criminal organization. Russian organized crime has a far reaching range of influence and action on an international level. Russian immigrants are generally urban in origin, well-educated, and industrially and technologically skilled. Despite a language barrier, many have learned some English in Soviet-era schools, they have marketable skills. The Russian immigrant crime in this country did not grow out of the same cultural alienation and economic disparity experienced by other immigrant groups. Russian criminals did not begin their criminal careers as members of adolescent street gangs in ethnic ghettos, as did most of the organized criminals in the U.S. This characteristic is more defining of Russian organized crime in the United States than its violence is the predominant nature of its criminal activity. With the principal exceptions of extortion and money laundering, ROC had relatively little or no involvement in some of the more traditional crimes of organized crime, such as drug trafficking, gambling, and loan sharking. On the other side these varied criminal groups are extensively engaged in a broad array of frauds, and scams, including healthcare fraud, insurance scams, stock frauds, antiquities swindle. Forgery and gas tax evasion schemes are the least of the crimes the Russian organized criminal element are involved in. Russian organized crime is very adept at changing criminal activities and diversifying into new criminal markets. Financial markets and banks are the newest targets of criminal opportunity for Russian Organized Crime. Russian organized crime captures a variety of crime groups and criminal activities, the crimes and forms of criminal organization in the U.S. differ from those in Russia and elsewhere in the world. This is a result of different external environments and criminal opportunities. The structure of Russian Organized Crime does not look like either what is commonly understood to be the structure of organized crime or the term of mafia in the conventional sense of those terms. The networks are not highly centralized nor are they dominated by a small number of individuals. Those individuals, have influence and continue to occupy their positions on the basis of their personal characteristics. The networks lack continuing structures, since the structures are not simply small groups of criminals essentially acting independently of one another, but a broad connectivity among most of the participating criminals. They may not be a direct connection to a large number of fellow criminals, but they are indirectly connected to all. Allowing this gives the networks a great deal of flexibility in the organization of offenses, meaning they can be responsive to the opportunities for illegal undertakings that develop. Given such an opportunity, each member of the large networks can contact partners who are generalists or specialists. Being able to raise capital, and get access other needed resources. In this sense, the structure is very functional. The fluid nature of the structure may also explain the high level of internal violence that the network seems to experience. The lack of a more hierarchical structure means that no one can effectively control the use of violence or mediate disputes. Therefore the lack of formal subgroups will not weaken loyalty to past partners. U.S. authorities are more likely than their Asian counterparts to consider transnational organized crime activities to be the more serious organized crime problems in Asia. This could be explained by different focuses of the two countries, or attributable in some cases to the lack of knowledge and understanding of the local situation by the Americans. The U.S. has always had to depend on outside sources for any information, for any event, to establish an independent viewpoint. The problems of drug production and trafficking, trafficking in women and children for the purpose of prostitution, arms trafficking, and money laundering are all very serious problems in Asia. Americans know these activities have a direct or indirect impact on U.S. interests, undermining the stability and well-being of U.S. ally countries in Asia. The leading organized crime problems in Asia are similar to Russian criminal elements including but not limited to; drug production and trafficking, human trafficking in women and children, links among organized crime in politics with official corruption, and the penetration of organized crime into legitimate businesses. Interesting enough are the responses from Asian representatives, when asked about specific crimes impacting the United States. According to members of the faculty of the Fuzhou Police College in China, the principal forms of transnational crime involving China and the United States are kidnapping and human trafficking. Officials of the Bureau of Investigation of the Ministry of Justice of Taiwan stated the fake IDs being used to gain Taiwanese passports for travel to the United States, are being made by Chinese who are being smuggled here. These crimes are not seen as high priority problems in Asia, human trafficking and smuggling were indeed high-priority issues for most of the U.S. FBI officials indicate that such activities as trafficking in women and children, mostly for sex, trafficking in human beings for the purpose of labor, and illegal immigration were transnational criminal activities of Chinese organized crime groups in the United States. Asian experts do not see this smuggling as an activity of traditional organized crime groups. A top criminal investigator with the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing told researchers that human trafficking was indeed “organized,” but that it was not a form of organized crime. He indicated the main destination countries for Chinese women were Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. A correspondent in Hong Kong indicated that none of the three most prominent organized crime groups in Hong Kong, the San Yee On, the Wo Shing Wo, and the 14K, are involved in human smuggling or human trafficking. Other authorities in Hong Kong have said trafficking is very limited in Hong Kong, that the vast majority of people moving transnational are smuggled. Human trafficking is one problem for which a seemingly vast difference in priority and perspective between Asian and U.S. authorities. The Asian authorities view the transnational movement of people as mostly smuggling, people wanting to leave China, paying smugglers to transport them to the United States. There is little or no coercion or deception in these cases, part of the reason for the Asian authorities’ lack of concern. Contrary to the opinions of many in U.S. law enforcement, this study found that the relationship between traditional organized crime groups, such as the triads and the yakuza, and transnational crime is tenuous. Asian authorities in China and Hong Kong indicated that human smuggling, for example, is carried out primarily by loose networks, groups with no ties to organized crime, borne from data from personal interviews with such smugglers. This difference in understanding about who is engaged in transnational crime may account for some of the disparity in priorities between criminal justice agencies in the East and West. Another difficulty has to do with what constitutes transnational crime. Asian authorities are reluctant to treat certain transnational activities as crime because they are beneficial to the local economy, and other people who are involved may not be gangsters or professional criminals. Such perceptual and communication problems pose challenges for collaborative research but are not insurmountable. By characterizing Russia and Asian criminal groups using generic terms, and referring to a variety of Eurasian crime groups, many of which are not Russian. The active Russian criminals in the U.S. are Armenians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and persons from the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union: Chechens, Dagestanis, and Georgians. Law enforcement are calling these groups various names from, Russian mafia, Russian mob, to Organizatsya, Bor, Bratva. Some of the group names refer to Russian geographical locations, such as Izmailovskaya, Dagestantsy, Kazanskaya, and Solntsenskaya. In general, most traditional organized crime groups, mafia-like criminal organizations in China, organized gangs in Taiwan, triad societies in Hong Kong and Macau, and jao phor in Thailand are local in scope. Three Chinese organized crime syndicates identified in a recent U.N. study are; the Liu Yong Syndicate, the Zhang Wei Syndicate, and the Liang Xiao Min Syndicate, all were local or regional in their scope, and without cooperative relationships with other organized crime groups. Traditional organized crime groups in Asia are longstanding, pre-existing groups that continue to thrive while transnational crime networks are developed in response to current criminal opportunities. Some of the traditional organized crime groups mentioned above have been in existence in Asia for centuries and are most likely going to continue existence. These groups have names, structure, territory, and a strong attachment to their environment, as a result are handicapped in taking advantage of criminal opportunities that are transnational in nature. The second group: the networks of transnational crime are more likely to emerge around specific opportunities. Very often, a nuclear or an extended family will initiate an operation in response to a new opportunity and people from the same village or at least the same ethnic group who are living in source, transit, and destination countries will be recruited to participate as members of a network that may dissolve after the criminal operation is successfully carried out. This distinction has implications for both research and policy. For research, there is a need to expand the current thinking about the causes of organized crime and about the risks and vulnerabilities that may lead to the creation of criminal markets. There is also a need to better understand how those criminal markets operate in order to provide useful information to shape strategies and tactics to disrupt them. For policy, law enforcement officials need to do more thinking “out of the box” of traditional, mafia-like structures in order to effectively combat the crime networks that are dominating transnational organized crime. The political turmoil of the 21st century and advances in technology make transnational crime a concern for the United States. Increased travel and trade and advances in telecommunications and computer technology have had the unintended effect of providing avenues for the rapid expansion of transnational organized crime activities. Policing objectives in the United States must extend beyond national borders to seek out and target this type of crime. Only through international collaboration and information exchange can the United States develop effective protocol and policies for countering these crimes and mount a serious opposition (Voronin, 2000). REFERENCES United Nations Centre for Inter-national Crime Prevention, “Over-view of the 40 Criminal Groups Surveyed,” Trends in Organized Crime 6 (2) (2000): 131–135. Zhang and Chin, “The Declining Significance of Triad Societies in Transnational Illegal Activities,” 463–482. The U.S. State Department’s Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report for 2004. “Sex Trafficking of Women in the United States” (a 2001 report to NIJ by Janice Raymond and Donna Hughes). “The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico” (a 2002 report to NIJ by Richard Estes and Neil Weiner). “Survey of Practitioners to Assess the Local Impact of Transnational Crime” (a 2003 report to NIJ by Abt Associates). Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia by Bertil Lintner (2002). Tri-State Joint Soviet–Émigré Organized Crime Project 1997: 9–10. http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/214186.pdf Finckenauer, James O. and Elin J. Waring, Russian Mafia in America, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. New York State Organized Crime Task Force, et al., "An Analysis of Russian Émigré Crime," Transnational Organized Crime 2(2-3) (Summer-Autumn 1996).