Criminal gangs face the same management trade-offs as ordinary companies
Some criminal groups run like rigid corporations, with job divisions, written rules and orders flowing down from the top. That structure carries real weaknesses: messages can be intercepted, paperwork becomes evidence, and one infiltrated low-level member can topple the whole organisation like a house of cards.
Organised crime covers structured groups that profit from illegal activity. Some simply supply what the state bans, such as drugs or firearms; others force people into dealing with them, as when gangs squeeze shopkeepers for protection payments. American law in 1970 described it as the unlawful activity of a highly organised, disciplined association, and running crime as a structured business is called racketeering. British police estimate that up to 38,000 people operate in some 6,000 such groups in the United Kingdom.
Researchers describe several shapes. Patron–client networks grow out of family, social and cultural ties, relying on tradition, personal loyalty and shared belief to enforce rules. Bureaucratic groups instead stress merit, impersonal duties and top-down control, and are highly exposed when leaders die, are jailed or fight among themselves. An entrepreneurial model looks at individuals or small crews who weigh legal, social and economic risks against likely profits and keep reshuffling alliances and activities to protect their gains.
Street gangs have been studied since the mid-twentieth century. Albert Cohen argued in 1955 that working-class teenagers joined gangs out of frustration at being unable to reach middle-class goals, while Cloward and Ohlin in 1960 suggested unequal opportunities produced different kinds of gangs, some focused on theft, others on fighting or drugs. Researchers still disagree about how formally gangs are organised: some drug-dealing gangs behaved like rational businesses with clear roles, while others proved loose, with little cohesion or shared purpose.
Shared culture and ethnicity can make trust and communication among criminals cheaper, which helps explain groups such as the Sicilian Mafia, the Japanese yakuza and 'Ndrangheta, but scholars caution against treating ethnicity as the only explanation. Nor is organised crime new: bands roaming the rural borderlands of central Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries met every modern criterion.
Source: Organized crime
