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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice

Volume 24 Number 3 August 2008 263-273

© 2008 Sage Publications 10.1177/1043986208318225

http://ccj.sagepub.com hosted at

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Risk Assessment in Organized Crime Developing a Market and Product-Based Model to Determine Threat Levels Jay S. Albanese Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond

The risk posed by organized crime is a central concern of governments around the world. The infiltration and control of legal and illegal markets and products is a major concern in nearly every country. New agencies and initiatives are under way in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Belgium, and elsewhere, with the specific purpose to better predict and detect organized crime activity. This article proposes a model to assess the risk of organized crime. It employs a different unit of analysis from most current models, focusing on illicit markets rather than groups, and it offers a practical alterna- tive for determining the presence of organized crime in areas that may or may not have a history of organized crime involvement.

Keywords: organized crime; risk assessment; prediction; illicit markets; threat assess- ment; criminal markets

Definition of Organized Crime

It is important to be clear about what we mean by organized crime. Too often, dis- cussions of organized crime lack focus because it is not clear what precisely is being talked about. Definitions of organized crime have been offered by a wide variety of authors and researchers over the years, and an analysis of those definitions is presented in Table 1. It can be seen from Table 1 that authors have identified 11 different char- acteristics of organized crime in their definitions. When these are broken down, however, it is seen that 5 characteristics are most typical: organized continuing hier- archy, rational profit through crime, use of force or threat, corruption of public officials for immunity, and public demand for services. There seems to be less consensus about whether organized crime holds a monopoly over particular markets, has restricted membership, is nonideological, specializes in certain activities, has a code of secrecy, or engages in extensive planning of its activities.

A definition based on the consensus of these authors (see Table 1) would read, “Organized crime is a continuing criminal enterprise that rationally works to profit from illicit activities that are often in great public demand. Its continuing existence is maintained through the use of force, threats, monopoly control, and/or the corruption

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of public officials” (Albanese, 2007, p. 4). The precise size of the enterprise or group is not important to the definition; two persons are the minimum required to engage in a criminal conspiracy, so any group of two or larger suffices.

Organized crime can be described either by the activities it engages in or by the groups involved. Continuing criminal conspiracies that constitute organized crime require insiders and outsiders to connect suppliers with customers and also to protect the enterprise from law enforcement. Therefore, organized crime groups need to obtain the product (e.g., drugs, stolen property) and make it easily available to customers (e.g., movement from source to destination) while obtaining some “insurance” when members are caught or convicted (e.g., the need for corruption of public officials to protect the enterprise from disruption). All successful organized crime groups require these elements to survive and make a profit.

The Risk of Organized Crime

Determining the risk of organized crime requires specific local assessments rather than global judgments. To say that organized crime is a problem in the United States, for example, is too broad a statement to be useful because it overlooks the huge vari- ations within the country (i.e., some locations have no organized crime problem, whereas other locations within the country have serious organized crime problems). Global assessments of organized crime abound: “Transnational organized crime continues to grow in the absence of a comprehensive, integrated global counter strat- egy. . . . There are more slaves in the world now than at the highest point of the African slave trade” (World Federation of United Nations Associations, 2007). More than $1 trillion is paid each year in political bribes (World Bank Institute, 2007). Global