ORGANIZED CRIME

complex of highly centralized enterprises set up for the purpose of engaging in illegal activities. Although Europe and Asia have historically had their international rings of smugglers, jewel thieves, and drug traffickers, and Sicily and Japan have centuries-old criminal organizations, organized criminal activities operated as major industries are primarily a 20th-century phenomenon and are most prevalent in the United States, where organized crime has so vast an operation that it has been compared to a cartel of legitimate business firms. The tremendous growth in crime in the United States during Prohibition (192033) led to the formation of a national organization. After repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment put an end to bootleggingthe practice of illegally manufacturing, selling, or transporting liquorcriminal overlords turned to other activities and became even more highly organized. The usual setup was a hierarchical one with different families, or syndicates, in charge of operations in many of the major cities. At the head of each family was a boss who had the power of life and death over its members. See also Mafia. Wherever organized crime existed, it sought protection from interference by the police and the courts. Accordingly, large sums of money have been expended by syndicate bosses in an attempt to gain political influence on both local and national levels of government. Furthermore, profits from various illegal enterprises have been invested in legitimate business. In addition to the illegal activitiesprincipally gambling and narcoticsthat have been the syndicates' chief source of income, they may also engage in nominally legitimate enterprises, such as loan companies (in underworld parlance the juice racket) that charge usurious rates of interest and collect from delinquent debtors through threats and violence. They may also engage in labour racketeering, in which control is gained over a union's leadership so that the union's dues and other financial resources can be used for illegal enterprises. Real-estate firms, dry-cleaning establishments, waste-disposal firms, and vending-machine operationsall legally constituted businesseswhen operated by the syndicate may include in their activities the elimination of competition through coercion, intimidation, and assassination. The hijacking of trucks carrying valuable, easily disposable merchandise is another favoured activity of organized crime. In 1975 a federally sponsored study of such crime in the United States concluded that the total volume of activities controlled by organized crime amounted to more than $50,000,000,000 per year. The ability of organized crime to flourish in the United States rests upon several factors. One factor is the threats, intimidation, and bodily violence (including assassination) that a syndicate can bring to bear to prevent victims or witnesses (including its own members) from informing on or testifying against its activities. Jury tampering and the bribing of judges are other tactics used to prevent successful government prosecutions. Bribery and payoffs, sometimes on a systematic and far-reaching scale, are useful tools for ensuring that municipal police forces tolerate organized crime's activities. Another important contribution to the continuing prosperity of syndicate operations is that numbers rackets and other types of illegal gambling, which provide the economic base for some of the uglier forms of organized crime, are activities that many American citizens feel are not innately immoral or socially destructive and therefore deserve a certain grudging tolerance on the part of law-enforcement agencies.