A global society that claims to be built on the ruins of national laws has changed the marketplace into a vast bazaar, in which even governments rush to sell their regulations to the highest bidder. They had no real choice, since the 1960s drugs traffickers, those real pioneers of globalisation, never asked permission before trading internationally and intercontinentally in the world's most expensive and profitable commodities. But the only real result of its elimination was to encourage secondary outbreaks all over the world, as trafficking was taken over by the Sicilian and North American mafias. The networks' centre of gravity then shifted to the US, that apologist for free trade. The rest we know.
Crime is now big business, run by professionals who have learned all the rules of modern management.
Capable of a flexibility unmatched in the formal economy, they are able to exploit the scarce resources offered by economic, political and social instability anywhere in the world, transforming these into the basis of their profits. A brief definition of today's serious crime would be that it has the ability to take advantage of the differentials produced by the deficiencies in political, economic and social regulations anywhere in the world, at any time. An exodus of refugees fleeing a war zone is held to ransom by mafia-organised clandestine emigration networks. A country whose underprivileged resort to the synthetic paradise of drugs makes millions of addicts easy prey for dealers. A country where the gap between rich and poor is so great that the most wretched have only their bodies to sell is swooped upon by traders in women, children, workers or sources of transplant organs.