By Phil Williams

By 2040, organized crime may thrive like never before, exploiting climate crises, geopolitical conflicts, and technological advancements. Our latest report reveals a chilling forecast where criminal networks operate as shadow governments, shielded by authoritarian regimes and empowered by rapid technological evolution.

This “fifth wave” of organized crime, as coined by author Phil Williams, will capitalize on scarcity markets, leveraging disruptions in essential resources like water, minerals, and energy caused by climate change. Criminal networks are expected to infiltrate legitimate markets, blurring lines between lawful and illicit activities and using scarcity as a driving force for growth.

The report suggests that by leveraging emerging tools such as artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, and 5G technology, criminal organizations will achieve new levels of sophistication, making it difficult for law enforcement to counter their reach and resilience. Meanwhile, geopolitical tensions are likely to exacerbate the situation, as some authoritarian regimes utilize criminal networks as extensions of state power, offering them safe havens and strategic support in exchange for destabilizing activities abroad.

The findings raise urgent questions about global readiness to combat organized crime’s possible evolution. “The Fifth Wave” challenges policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and international organizations to rethink their approach to organized crime in a rapidly shifting world. It underscores the importance of proactive strategies that go beyond traditional crime-fighting tactics, advocating for comprehensive international collaboration, adaptive policy-making, and innovative technology to address this deeply entrenched threat.

As crime increasingly infiltrates legal economies, emerging as a powerful economic and social force, international collaboration and innovative strategies will be vital to mitigate this emerging threat. This threat requires an unprecedented global response.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2024. 30p.

Sergi, Anna

This research is linked to studies on the criminal mobility of the 'ndrangheta in Australia. Starting from extensive research in the field, and from a critique of the concept of ethnicity and its links with organised crime in Australia, this work reflects on the political interests of the Calabrian clans in Australia. Some clans can maintain ties with powers and professional elites also by exploiting "ethnic solidarity” within the migrant community

‘ndrangheta e “ricerca del potere”: riflessioni su mafia e potere politico in Australia. Rivista di studi e ricerche sulla criminalità organizzata, 6 (4). (2021) pp. 110-136

Sergi, Anna

Attention to the Calabrian mafia, the ‘ndrangheta, has been increasing across law enforcement authorities around the world. This paper aims at bringing forward a theoretical and operational conversation on how to best approach, from a policing perspective, what is a complex clan-based criminality able to operate simultaneously in different states. The paper will therefore formulate a preliminary framework for strategies focusing on the policing of mafia dynasties. It will do so by identifying how ‘ndrangheta clans can be studied as family dynasties, including in their assessment also the factors of family life (familiness) that can facilitate or obstruct the dynasty’s success. By looking at ‘ndrangheta clans as family dynasties, we can inform a framework that cuts through the most common policing aims and strategies against organised crime, as shared by states involved in current anti-mafia efforts.

‘Ndrangheta Dynasties: A Conceptual and Operational Framework for the Cross-Border Policing of the Calabrian Mafia. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 15 (2). (2021) pp. 1522-1536.

Sergi, Anna and Storti, Luca

This paper, which is the introduction to this special issue on ‘Spaces of Organised Crime’, aims to analyse the nexus between organised crime groups and territories. Such groups are able to exploit resources that circulate within territorial contexts in which they are embedded. They also operate concretely as entities that can take part to the transformation of spaces into places. Accordingly, we will lay out an analytical model about the processes through which organised crime groups contribute to create and shape territories. We show how these processes link with the main types of organised crime groups on a diferentiated basis. In the last section of this introduction, we present the papers included in the special issue and the logic connecting them to one another.

Shaping space. A conceptual framework on the connections between organised crime groups and territories. Trends in Organized Crime, 24 (2). (2021) pp. 137-151

Sergi, Anna

This article will present the results of a qualitative research into organised crime in the port of Genoa, Italy’s largest port, by looking at the challenges of policing the port space. Through the case of Genoa, the paper reflects on how organised crime manifests across three trajectories in seaports: trafficking through the port, infiltration in the port economy and governance of the port management. This paper argues that the space and geography of the port-city relationship are key to understand how and to what extent different organised criminal groups act in and around the port and within global drives. An integrated approach between urban criminology and organised crime studies is needed to better map the very complex picture of organised criminality in the port within the city.

Policing the port, watching the city. Manifestations of organised crime in the port of Genoa. Policing and Society, 31 (6). (2021) pp. 639-655.

Sergi, Anna and Vannucci, Alberto

This paper wishes to explore some characteristics of the relevant interconnections between mafias/ mafiosi and masonic lodges/masons in the Italian context. The paper sets out to study these interconnections from a social science perspective rooted in sociological and neo-institutional studies of organised crime and mafias, but also in criminological approaches to social constructionism, in the form of symbols and narratives. We will present a case study to reflect on the roles that (deviant) masons can assume in contexts where both mafias’ and personal, political, or economic interests are at play. The case study shows how masonic alliances can augment networking and enforcing capabilities: we call this process masonic deviance amplification. Additionally, the case study confirms the constitutive power that narratives around the masonic world hold today in the Italian context.

The Secret Nexus. A case study of deviant masons, mafia, and corruption in Italy. The British Journal of Criminology, 63 (5). (2022) pp. 1165-1183.

By Clio Andris, Daniel Della Posta, Brittany N. Freelin, Xi Zhu, Bradley Hinger, Hanzhou Chen

The American Mafia is a network of criminals engaged in drug trafficking, violence and other illegal activities. Here, we analyze a historical spatial social network (SSN) of 680 Mafia members found in a 1960 investigatory dossier compiled by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The dossier includes connections between members who were ‘known criminal associates’ and members are geolocated to a known home address across 15 major U.S. cities.

Under an overarching narrative of identifying the network’s proclivities toward security (dispersion) or efficiency (ease of coordination), we pose four research questions related to criminal organizations, power and coordination strategies. We find that the Mafia network is distributed as a portfolio of nearby and distant ties with significant spatial clustering among the Mafia family units.

The methods used here differ from former methods that analyze the point pattern locations of individuals and the social network of individuals separately. The research techniques used here contribute to the body of non-planar network analysis methods in GIScience and can be generalized to other types of spatially-embedded social networks.

International Journal of Geographical Information Science Volume 35, 2021 - Issue 12: Spatial Social Networks in GIScience

By Anna Sergi

This paper will investigate narratives, traits, and expectations of Italian-American mafias in North America. The specific case study is the area of Niagara, at the border between New York State, USA and Ontario, Canada. In this context, the artricle will mainly explore narratives and traits of so-called “mafia” families in the city of Hamilton, and their apparent connections with other “mafia” groups on the other side of the borderland, in Buffalo and in Toronto. Through qualitative design adapted from grounded theory methodology with mixed data, including news stories, investigative files and interviews, this article shows how mafias in the borderland of Niagara are conceptualised as hybrid groups, employing different identity “flags”. Mafias appear isomorphic since they imitate each other's structures and (try to) obey traditional mafia rules, to adapt and survive. In line with GT methodology, this paper finally explores an emerging theoretical category, that of the mafia borderland. As a space and identity, mafia borderland helps to sketch traits and expectations of mafia groups in border areas.

Journal of Borderlands Studies, 1-23. 2022

By The Venezuela Investigative Unit

Ten years ago, Tren de Aragua was a little more than a prison gang, confined to the walls of the Tocorón penitentiary and largely unheard of outside its home state of Aragua in Venezuela. Today, it is one of the fastest-growing security threats in South America.

Tren de Aragua’s transnational network now stretches into Colombia, Peru, Chile, and beyond. It has established some of the most far-reaching and sophisticated migrant smuggling and sex trafficking networks seen in the region. And it has spread terror in host countries and among the Venezuelan migrant population, which it has ruthlessly exploited.

But the seizure of Tocorón by Venezuelan authorities in September 2023 directly attacked the nerve center of this network. Now, a new, more uncertain, era is beginning for Venezuela’s most notorious criminal export.

Washington DC: InSight Crime, 2023. 28p.

By C4ADS

The illicit synthetic drug networks that fuel the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States continue to evolve and adapt to changing incentives and pressures, finding innovative ways to exploit technology and increased global interconnectivity. The digital age, in particular, has had a transformative role in allowing synthetic drug networks to take root. Fentanyl networks are among the world’s first digital native drug networks. Global internet connectivity has opened a new era of drug distribution by facilitating direct-to-consumer transactions, rapid reaction to enforcement trends, and the delivery of retail, rather than wholesale, drug volumes through licit commercial delivery services.

C4ADS investigated these drug supply chains, conducting extensive multilingual analysis of Chinese corporate entities, the clear web, and social media, in order to better understand the methods by which they operate.

Washington, DC: C4ADS 2020, 45p.

By Europol and US Drug Enforcement Administration

The EU drug landscape is populated by a diverse range of criminal actors involved in the production, trafficking and distribution of a variety of illicit substances. These actors benefit from a number of criminal enablers and facilitators in their operations. In recent years, seizures of methamphetamine and cocaine linked to Mexican criminal actors have emerged as a prominent feature of the EU drug landscape. Mexican criminal actors and EU-based criminal networks have been working together to traffic both of these illicit drug types from Latin America to the EU.

This report delves into the activities of these criminals and their methods. Drug trafficking operations benefit from a number of different actors, such as brokers, cooks, envoys, intermediaries and money laundering service providers. Examples of the methods used by the criminals include the corruption of officials in the public and private sectors and the exploitation of legal business structures. The report also provides an outlook on potential threats that may develop in the future.

In the first initiative of this kind, Europol and the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) have issued this joint strategic product with the aim of expanding the intelligence picture on the involvement of Mexican criminal actors in the EU drug market.

The Hague: Europol and the DEA, 2022. 8p.

By Vanda Felbab-Brown

Colombia’s counternarcotics policy choices have profound impact on consolidating peace in the wake of the 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People’s Army (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia — Ejército del Pueblo, FARC) and on the building of an effective state. Strategies of forced or voluntary eradication of coca crops have proven ineffective. As evidence from around the world shows, a long-term comprehensive effort to promote alternative livelihoods for coca growers — integrated into rural development and supported by well-designed interdiction efforts, with eradication delayed until these alternative livelihoods are generating sustainable income — has the best prospects for producing peace and a capable state and for reducing drug production.

To achieve sustainable and robust reduction of illicit crop cultivation, Colombia must thus expand its timeline of drug policy and state-building intervention well beyond 15 years. To achieve any viable transformative effects, it will also have to concentrate resources to selected zones of strategic intervention and gradually connect them and expand them to encompass larger areas in state intervention efforts.

The alternative livelihoods approach requires a concerted effort to build international support, particularly with the United States. It also requires countering the objections of Colombia’s political right. Arguments can be framed around the ineffective and counterproductive outcomes of forced eradication, the demonstrated benefits of comprehensive alternatives livelihood combined with well-designed interdiction to reduce the power of criminal groups, and other counternarcotics priorities in the United States.

A zero-coca conceptualization that insists on eradication first and conditions development aid on prior eradication of coca jeopardizes peace-building and statebuilding. In Colombia and elsewhere in the world, it has consistently failed to produce a sustainable reduction of coca cultivation. Forced eradication undermines the peace deal with the FARC and the broader legitimacy and presence of the state by jeopardizing the state’s ability to establish meaningful presence in areas formerly dominated by nonstate armed groups and radicalizing communities and cocalero (coca cultivator) movements. Aerial spraying will only compound these problems; drones will not redress the negative political effects, even if somewhat increasing the precision of spraying.

Washington, DC: Brookings Foreign Policy , 2020. 30p.

By Kathii Lynn Austin and Brian Freskos

The U.S. and Mexico are grappling with daunting security crises stemming from the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of guns over the U.S. southern border every year. These weapons are empowering Mexican transnational criminal organizations and inflicting substantial suffering in both countries. This report underscores how reducing cross-border gun trafficking is crucial for achieving the goals of the U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework for Security, Public Health, and Safe Communities — a bilateral security agreement announced nearly two years ago. By implementing our recommendations, the U.S. and Mexico can more effectively combat illicit gun flows, saving lives, and improving prosperity.

California: Pacific Council on International Policy, 2023. 85p.

By Michael Levi

Money laundering has ascended the enforcement and criminological agenda in the course of this century, and has been accompanied by an increased focus on legal professionals as ‘enablers’ of crime. This article explores the dynamics of this enforcement, media and political agenda, and how the legal profession has responded in the UK and elsewhere, within the context of ignoring the difficulties of judging the effectiveness of anti money laundering. It concludes that legal responses are a function of their lobbying power, the determination of governments to clamp down on the toxic impacts of legal structures, and different legal cultures. However, it remains unclear what the effects on the levels and organization of serious crimes for gain are of controls on the professions.

Trends in Organized Crime volume 24, pages96–110 (2021)

By Emilia Ziosi

Honduras has been Central America’s focal point for drug trafficking towards the United States for years as the region’s main transit country. Recent court cases held in the United States have revealed the symbiotic relationship between state actors, business elites and drug trafficking organisations in contemporary Honduras, uncovering the blurred boundaries between the licit and illicit, the upper and underworld in the country. In this article, a drug-trafficking family – ‘Los Cachiros’ transportista (transport) group – is analysed as a case study with the aim of exploring state actors’ involvement in cocaine trafficking.

Drawing on publicly available official judicial documents, this article explores the interpenetrations between formal and informal institutions in the country, arguing that state actors’ involvement in the drug trade in Honduras goes far beyond protection, and has evolved into a powerful network of public, private and criminal actors that has been able to capture the state’s basic sovereign functions with the aim of protecting and promoting their own private interests. In doing so, this article takes forward the state-crime nexus literature. Building on Hall’s (2018) networked approach in the study of illicit economies, this article proposes a conceptual framework to re-theorise the state-crime nexus as a transnationally networked set of relations, which considers the role of external states as actors of power within a country’s state-crime nexus. Looking at the unique relationship between Honduras and the United States, I argue that the concept is useful to understand the role of the United States as a transnational actor of power within the Honduran state-crime nexus.

Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 4(2), pp. 144–159.

By David Soud, Ian Ralby and Rohini Ralby: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

Gold flows within Venezuela can be categorized under two broad headings: centralised and dispersed. The centralised flows carry a portion of production from the country’s myriad small mining operations to the government-monitored trading hubs. Centralised flows reportedly include gold transfers from the Venezuelan Central Bank to foreign governments and other entities in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and elsewhere. While these flows of gold out of Venezuela might be considered legal, companies are still expected to carry out enhanced due diligence to ascertain whether conditions of extraction and trade are associated with actual or potential risks of severe human rights abuses, conflict financing and other financial crimes as per the OECD Guidance, as well as environmental harm.

In contrast, dispersed flows are those that leave the country from mining areas by various other routes. The Venezuelan military and political elites, Colombian militant groups, and domestic gangs are reported to be key actors in both categories of domestic gold flows. Gold from dispersed flows departing Venezuela appears to be laundered primarily within the Latin America and Caribbean region, mainly in one or more key regional transit hubs. Laundering networks can, however, extend across the globe and actors connected in other continents. Since many of the high-risk gold flows out of Venezuela involve regional transit hubs as well as distant transit countries and destination markets, any approach to mitigating the risks tied to Venezuelan gold should include regional and international coordination among both government and industry actors. This consideration is heightened by the evident involvement of transnational criminal organisations and designated terrorist groups in exploiting mining communities, extracting gold and laundering it into the legitimate supply chain. The resulting picture is preliminary but also revealing. The role of the maritime space in high-risk gold flows needs more attention; so does the role played by Free Trade Zones (FTZs) in facilitating gold flows and related financial crimes. A few recommendations on how best to address the risks that characterise Venezuelan gold flows conclude the report.

Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2021. 68p.

By Anastasia Austin and Douwe den Held

The Dominican Republic prides itself on its openness to the world. As one of the first countries to open up during the COVID-19 pandemic, it seeks to be ever welcoming to tourism and business. But criminals may feel welcome as well. In this three-part series, InSight Crime dives into the infrastructure, the trafficking networks, and the corruption facilitating organized crime in the Dominican Republic.

Washington, Insight Crime, 2022. 26p.

By Mark R. Mallon

Informal entrepreneurship represents a common mode of business formation globally and entails starting and operating a business without registering it with legal authorities. Despite the size of the informal sector in many countries, the motivations for entrepreneurs to operate non-registered ventures are not well understood. Although formal institutions play an important role, we argue that the decision to operate a non-registered new venture is influenced by a pervasive informal institution around the world: the practice of extortion payments to organized crime. Because criminal organizations foster the development of norms and beliefs cementing extortion payments as an institution, we posit that entrepreneurs will use non registration as a buffer to avoid extortion costs preemptively. We further explicate that this choice is contingent upon founders’ access to resources and ventures’ product-market strategy, which shape visibility to organized crime and the ability to resist extortion and, thus, alter the need for non- registration as a buffer against institutionalized extortion. Our analysis of over 8,000 new ventures operating in 39 economies largely supports these arguments. This study identifies a novel causal mechanism in the nomological network of informal entrepreneurship, namely, the prevalence of organized crime, and informs a multilevel theory of how entrepreneurs choose the type of organizational form for their ventures. Finally, it illuminates the importance of shadow institutions—illegal and not widely accepted practices—which may operate as unique but often overlooked types of institutions that shape entrepreneurial and organizational decisions.

Journal of Management, 48(1): 2022.

By Inés Fynn

“If you see something you have to be blind, deaf, and dumb, that’s how it works here”  “If you keep silent, you don’t mess with them, and they won’t mess with you”  “Everyone here knows what to talk about and what not to talk about”  The above statements exemplify the coping strategies of people living in communities affected by drug gangs. Despite differences in the gangs’ modus operandi, silence is a common factor in how communities respond. The current understanding of criminal territorial control overlooks the role of communities and their silence in shaping how criminal organizations operate. This research aims to explore how drug  gangs establish commitments of silence with communities, how these commitments vary, and why some are more enduring than others. Organized criminal groups often establish localized systems of private order that challenge the territorial reach of the state (O’Donnell, 1993). Comparative politics research has recently focused on criminal governance schemes to analyze the logic of territorial control of drug-trafficking organizations. Criminal governance refers to local orders led by criminal organizations that impose formal or informal rules and restrict the behavior of criminal and non-criminal civilians (Lessing, 2020). However, despite community members dealing with drug gang operations daily, these studies fall short in incorporating the central role of communities in shaping drug gangs’ operations.

  Santiago de Chile, Chile .   Instituto de Ciencia Política Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile , 2023. 178p.

By Paolo Campana  & Federico Varese

In this paper, we explore the determinants of co-membership in organised crime groups in a British police force. We find that co-membership of OCGs is higher among individuals who share the same ethnicity and nationality; who have committed acts of violence; and who perpetrate the vast majority of their crimes in the same area. We also find a homophily tendency in relation to age and gender, and that task specialisation within groups is driven by the type of activity. We interpret some results as conforming to the argument that recruitment from a small area and similar ethnic/national background increases cooperation and reduces the likelihood of opportunistic behaviour in a context of rather effective policing. Our findings do not conform to the suggestive image of OC members as ‘urban marauders’ and OCGs as large and powerful multinationals. OCGs tend to be small, localised and formed by people with the same background.

Global Crime  Volume 23, 2022 - Issue 1: