Organized Crime / Counterterrorism
AL CAPONE OR AL QAEDA?:
ORGANIZED CRIME AND COUNTERTERRORISM
AS LAW ENFORCEMENT PRIORITIES IN 2014
Should law enforcement in America prioritize fighting counter-terrorism or fighting organized crime? A full examination of the history and issues involved with both will, I would argue, make the answer clear: with the proper definitions involved of both terror and organized crime, it is the latter which genuinely deserves the attention of law enforcement, and the former which has become the stuff of paranoid post-9/11 fantasy. However, to a certain extent, we will understand the way in which definitional creep can effect both subjects: what is the difference between a terrorist organization and a transnational organized crime enterprise? Why do we not consider a Mexican drug cartel so powerful that it routinely executes scores of people to intimidate local populations not considered a terrorist organization? I would like in this paper to examine the definition and rough history of both organized crime and terrorism in America, and conclude by examining current law enforcement priorities and strategies to indicate our current direction is incorrect. Right now American law enforcement still has an emphasis on counter-terrorism, while the focus should be placed on organized crime, clearly defined.
While organized crime is nothing new, the federal and state effort to combat it through legal means -- thereby offering us a convenient definition -- is fairly new. It is true that the Prohibition era and after saw the rise of large-scale criminal enterprises, yet the irony was that there were no specific laws defining or targeting organized crime at those times when organized crime was arguably most powerful. Certainly organized crime in America dates to before the Civil War in the first half of the nineteenth century, and has found an attentive historian in Herbert Asbury, whose book The Gangs of New York details the prominence of armed street gangs going to war over territory and control of criminal enterprise in the 1840s and 1850s: however, the difficulty with looking at this early time period covered by Asbury is that, as he himself does not fail to note, local government in New York under "Boss" Tweed was itself so thoroughly corrupt that by contemporary standards law enforcement itself would qualify as an organized crime enterprise as well. To find a more modern sense of organized crime would require looking at the early twentieth century, when the passage of the Volstead Act and a constitutional amendment prohibiting sale of alcohol resulted in large-scale criminal enterprises developed to violate those now-repealed regulations. At this point in time, in the nineteen-twenties, criminal enterprises were largely united by ethnic origin, and could generally be identified as based on Italian-American, Irish-American, or Jewish-American. Such a pattern would continue well into the nineteen-fifties, when U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver held a series of hearings to indicate specific federal interest in organized crime, and afterwards. Before allowing the discussion to degenerate into some potential promulgation of ethnic prejudice, however, it is important to note that this is a subject that has been studied extensively and academically. Arguably the most useful theoretical approach to the subject came at the time of the Kefauver hearings, when the social scientist Daniel Bell published his study "Crime as an American Way of Life," which gave rise to what is today known as the "ethnic succession theory" or "social succession theory" as a means of approaching the topic of organized crime. Bell's 1953 thesis is still valid today:
…for the young criminal, hunting in the asphalt jungle of the crowded city, it was not the businessman with his wily manipulation of numbers but the "man with the gun" who was the American hero… [I]n the crowded slums, the gangster… was a man with a gun, acquiring by personal merit what was denied to him by complex orderings of a stratified society. And the duel with the law was the morality play par excellence: the gangster, with whom rides our own illicit desires, and the prosecutor, representing final judgment and the force of the law.
The desires satisfied in extra-legal fashion were more than a hunger for the "forbidden fruits" of conventional morality. They also involved, in the complex and ever shifting structure of group, class and ethnic stratification, which is the warp and woof of America's "open" society, such "normal" goals as independence through a business of one's own, and such "moral" aspirations as the desire for social advancement and social prestige. For crime, in...
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