Organized crime has been officially defined by the Canadian police as "two or more persons consorting together on a continuing basis to participate in illegal activities, either directly or indirectly, for gain"; it has been defined by a former US organized crime boss as "just a bunch of people getting together to take all the money they can from all the suckers they can. Organized crime is a chain of command all the way from London to Canada, the US, Mexico, Italy, France, everywhere."




KEYWORDS


 




Crime




There is much more to organized crime in Canada and the US than the Italian criminal association known as the Mafia, Cosa Nostra or Honoured Society. In North America, just about every major national or ethnic group and every segment of society has been involved in organized crime. American criminologist Dr Francis Ianni has developed a theory explaining how organized criminal activity is developed and passed on in North America from one ethnic group to another, based on the length of time the group has been in North America, the language and cultural knots that bind the group, and the degree to which the group's members have been assimilated into the prevailing society.




For a long time many scholars and academics did not believe organized crime was highly structured or capable of sophisticated operations. Their scepticism derived partly from a reaction to the Hollywood portrayal of the Mafia from the 1930s to the 1950s, typified in its treatment of Al Capone ("Scarface"), and partly from the fact that documented, scholarly studies and books on organized crime did not exist.




All this changed because of the breakup of a national meeting in November of 1957 of several dozens of Mafia leaders in Appalachin, NY, and of the revelations at the US Senate "Valachi" (a Mafia soldier) hearings in 1963; because of the documentary evidence from police wiretaps and bugs in the 1970s, which allowed police to listen to Mafia leaders discussing their hierarchy and operations in both the US and Canada; and partly because of the establishment of the American Witness Protection Program, by which Mafia defectors and informers could build a new life.




Through various court cases and royal commissions and through television and newspaper expos̮̩s, the existence of a highly organized criminal network in Canada became known to the Canadian public in the late 1970s. In 1984 a joint federal-provincial committee of justice officials estimated that organized crime in Canada took in about $20 billion annually, almost $10 billion of which was from the sales of narcotics. (There is no way of estimating, however, the amount of dirty funds that are "laundered" in Canada by members of organized crime in the US and other foreign countries (see UNDERGROUND ECONOMY). The committee was formed in response to a 1980 report on organized crime by the BC attorney general's office, which claimed that organized crime figures in Canada had interests in the textile industry, cheese industry, building industry, disposal industry, vending-machine companies, meat companies, home-insulation companies, autobody shops and car dealerships, among others. The joint committee calculated that the sources of organized crime revenues could be broken down as follows: PORNOGRAPHY, PROSTITUTION, bookmaking, gaming houses, illegal LOTTERIES, other GAMBLING offences, loansharking and extortion, which together brought in hundreds of millions of dollars.




Other activities, such as WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES (eg, insurance and construction frauds and illegal bankruptcies), arson, bank robberies, motor vehicle thefts, computer crimes and counterfeit in credit cards raised the estimate to $10 billion; drugs accounted for the rest.