Double Cross

• Published date: 01 March 2007
• Date: 01 March 2007
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567706298914
• Subject Matter: Articles

Double Cross

States, Corporations, and the

Global Reach of Organized Crime

Andreas, P., & Nadelmann, E. (2006). Policing the Globe:

Criminalization and Crime Control in International Relations.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Baker, R. W. (2005). Capitalism’s Achilles’Heel: Dirty Money and

How to Renew the Free Market System. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

DeVito, C. (2005). The Encyclopedia of International Organized

Crime. New York: Facts on File.

van Schendel, W., & Abraham, I. (2005). Illicit Flows and

Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of

Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Wright, A. (2006). Organised Crime. Portland, OR: Willan.

A U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) report (Wagley, 2006) released in March

2006 gives an up-to-date version of the contemporary official wisdom on international

organized crime. Entitled Transnational Organized Crime: Principal Threats and U.S.

Responses, it examines “the growing threat of transnational organized crime to U.S.

national security and global security” and claims that “many criminal organizations ramped

up their operations and expanded them worldwide” from the end of the cold war and the

advent of globalization. In its discussion of definitions, the report differentiates between

“traditional crime organizations” with their “hierarchical structure” and “more modern

criminal networks” with their “more decentralized, often cell-like structure” and stresses

the ways in which organized crime overlaps with terrorism and “narco-terrorism.” It

believes that the three largest international threats to the United States are the smuggling of

nuclear materials and technology, drug trafficking,and trafficking in persons and concludes

that “stronger international law enforcement and more effective government partnerships

with the private sector both may be central to effectively combating transnational organized

crime” (Wagley, 2006). In sum, it is a simplistic “good guy vs. bad guy” view of organized

crime, seeing the problem as consisting of outlaw forces threatening mainstream society, a

view that receives support from only the weakest of the books to be discussed, The

Encyclopedia of International Organized Crime.

Seven decades earlier, the U.S. government and most serious commentators had a far more

sophisticated view of organized crime almost directly opposite to that of the CRS: Corrupt

elements were part of mainstream society rather than outsiders threatening mainstream soci-

ety. President Herbert Hoover’s Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, for

example, set out in 1929 to come to an objective understanding of the nature and extent of

organized crime, free from the interference of politicians, government officials, and moral

45

International Criminal

Justice Review

Volume 17 Number 1

March 2007 45-51

© 2007 Georgia State University

Research Foundation, Inc.

10.1177/1057567706298914

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