Organizations like the Yakuza, 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra, the Irish Mafia, etc, are part of many countries, to bigger or smaller fashion.
But to someone from those countries, what do you think was the original/historical cause for such organizations to develop?
My country - Portugal - has some degree of presence of these organizations but, to my knowledge, we never developed our domestic version of a crime syndicate. And we are not a bunch of choir boys. Something just kept things from forming. And that intrigues me.
So, what is the understanding of someone from a country where the organizations exist?
There is no country in the world that does not have organized crime.
This (OP’s) is the kind of sentence youd read from a textbook from 1980.
Yes. The answer for everyone is yes.
The question they’re trying to ask is: In your country, how much of the government does organized crime own?
a corruption metric is a different question, and there’s a chart for that.
In America, we have three kinds of organized crime. Executive, Legislative, and Judicial.
*4, Corporate.
He already said America.
5, naval
In my country all governmental branches belong to one single crime organization.
That is institutional corruption, not organized crime. The two can touch and even overlap to some degree but are the same.
That is a semantic difference. And the difference seems to decrease everyday.
4 if you count police, and they operate as a gang/mafia(thier unions) and they do commit all sorts of crimes.
Doesn’t every country have some degree of organised crime present?
Like they may not have glamorous crime families like the Mafia but wherever there’s crime, there’s organised crime groups.
I would say yes. I couldn’t think of a country without organized crime. It doesn’t always have a fancy name and maybe it is very lowkey, but this I’d take as a sign of being well organized.
Organized crime, in my understanding, implies structure, reach and even some degree of a social facade to clear money and move interests. Not a group of individuals constantly on the crosshairs.
Yes, exactly…
Everywhere, probably. Here in the UK we have the Wombles. Everyone knows Great Uncle Bulgaria is the leader, but the police do nothing. I don’t think he’s ever been arrested even.
Pretty sure that’s every country
Organized crime is an interesting topic. In my opinion it’s existence shows a disconnect of the needs of the people and their government/social structure. Every country has some amount of “organized crime”. There is no exception. What does differ is the size, power, and wealth of the criminal syndicate.
The larger and more severe the disconnect between the people’s needs and government, the more extensive and structured these criminal organizations become.
For example gangs often form in an regions where opportunity is limited or a group of people are being oppressed. Inner city gangs are a good example of this. They form as a form of protection and a chance for opportunity. These opportunities are usually supplying things that are illegal but still in demand.
If government bans or fails to provide something with a very high demand (like prohibition of alcohol in the U.S. and just about everything in the Soviet Union) the criminal organizations grow in wealth and sophistication.
The only effective way to stop these criminal organizations is fulfill the demand and provide other opportunities for the individuals. For example the U.S. legalized alcohol. This dramatically reduced income to criminal opportunity. Under FDR support structures, fair wages, education, and all sorts of opportunities were created (for whites). The opportunity for individual people through criminal activity declined and most of them left the criminal organizations. In darker skin colored groups where opportunity remained limited, criminal activity remained higher.
Organized crime can be dramatically reduced by providing opportunities to all individuals.
Alternatively a complete collapse and takeover by the criminal organizations like the Soviet Union to Russia is also a option.
I share this view as well.
Yes, we have a government
Is there anywhere in the modern world that doesn’t have organized crime? Just because people ain’t being arrested for it doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t exist. It could mean they’re not being caught or own the law.
You’re right, it exists everywhere. Just because if isn’t Al LCapones everywhere, it exists.
Organized crime, in my understanding, is not something that collapses with the death of a member or two or through a well placed intervention of authoritites. It has structure by itself, transcends generations, develops its culture, has a public, visible face, either for popular support or fear engineering.
Vatican City. (I know, I know “the church counts”. Hur-hur, very funny Lemmy)
Maybe a few Pacific island nations, just by virtue of there not being enough people to support it.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/16/1219839096/cardinal-vatican-embezzlement-trial-guilty
Just because it’s white-collar doesn’t mean it’s not organized.
Wow, okay, I stand corrected. Just embezzlement wouldn’t count, but it sounds like there was quite the network doing things elsewhere in cooperation, at least per the prosecutors.
It’s pretty weird to imagine that, of people who chose to become priests, there’s enough who want to directly extort and scam the Vatican, that they can find each other and start a group.
Also, TIL Vatican City has a jail.
Organized crime is in basically every single country in the world
But do all have homegrown societies? My country, to my knowledge, does not nor has ever had such organizations. We started getting some degree of them when we had a large influx of eastern europe imigrants that were followed by criminal organizations but they don’t have enough footing here to become influent.
You sure? https://ocindex.net/country/portugal
Probably yes, it exists in any country, but most are pretty low profile. Attention is bad for business.
I’m from Italy, organised crime flourish where the state doesn’t reach. Then they expand, just like corporations, infiltrating the political parties.
Organized crime exists everywhere. In the places that don’t have a stereotyped reputation for it, the organized crime groups are either better at hiding or have more control over the local government and don’t get investigated.
For instance, in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos internet scams are a significant portion of the economy. In Laos the scams revenue represent about 68% of their GDP:
Local governments have tried to crack down on the scam centers, but the operations are so large that basically everyone in the country is either involved directly, or knows someone personally who is.
“These are massive pieces of infrastructure, set up very publicly. You can go to borders and observe them. You can even walk into some of them,” says Tower. “The fact this is happening in a very public way shows just the extreme level of impunity – and the extent to which states are not only tolerating this, but actually, these criminal actors are becoming state embedded.”
The point being, most of the time there isn’t a “crime family” like in movies and TV shows. Organized crime is business, and in a lot of places it’s business as usual.
I have bad news:
If your government has “private sector” organized crime under control, they have simply taken over the organized crime. Society abhors a vacuum.
I mean, a government itself is just a big racketeering scheme, with an anthem and good public support. If you look at how they actually function. Edit: And if you think that’s necessary and right or not.
If they took control of whatever smaller racketeering group’s operations, then that’s just a a new tax, which doesn’t really make sense.
That sounds too much of a conspiracy theory to hold any value as an argument.
Are you stating that by default if a nation does not have organized crime, then the state itself is a crime organization?
That implies all individuals within such country are criminals, without excuse or exception.
There is still some around here, but not like in the past, nobody was shaking us down for protection money in our little storefront (that used to happen in the same neighborhood) but a lot of the drugs still come through those organizations and there are still gangs around - there was a police standoff with a biker gang a few blocks from my house once, they shut down the streets.
I guess the US is too big and disorganized.
Now - LA in the early 1990s - I stayed there awhile and holy crap, anything people say about gangs during that time is true. The police were a big violent gang, the prisons had gang riots, I knew people in gangs even though it wasn’t my world, it was widespread. So disorganized organized crime, there was a lot of that back then
