Organized Crime

**Organized Crime**is a category of transnational, national or local groupings of highly centralized enterprises run by criminals who intend to engage in illegal activity, most commonly for money and profit. Some criminal organizations such as terrorist groups are politically motivated. Sometimes criminal organizations force people to do business with them such as when a gang extorts money from shopkeepers for so-called "protection". A criminal organization or gang can also be referred to as a mafia, mob or crime syndicate; the network, subculture and community of criminals may be referred to as the underworld.

## Typical Activities

Organized crime groups provide a range of illegal services and goods, often victimizing businesses through the use of extortion or theft and fraud activities like hijacking cargo trucks, robbing goods, committing bankruptcy fraud, insurance fraud or stock fraud. They also victimize individuals by car theft, art theft, bank robbery, burgulary, jewelery and gems theft and heists, computer hacking, credit card fraud, economic espionage, embezzlement, identity theft and securities fraud. Some organized crime groups defraud national, state or local governments by bid rigging public projects, counterfeiting money, smuggling or manufacturing untaxed alcohol or cigerattes and providing immigrant workers to avoid taxes.

Organized crime groups seek out corrupt public officials in executive, law enforcement and judicial roles so that their activities can avoid, or at least receive early warnings about investigation and prosecution. Activities of organized crime include loansharking of money at very high interest rates, assassination, blackmail, bombings, bookmaking and illegal gambling, confidence tricks, copyright infringement, counterfeiting of intellectual property, fencing, kidnapping, prostitution, smuggling, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, oil smuggling, antiquities smuggling, organ trafficking, contract killing, identity document forgery, money laundering, point shaving, price fixing, illegal dumping of toxic waste, illegal trading of nuclear materials, military equipment smuggling, nuclear weapons smuggling, passport fraud, providing illegal immigration and cheap labor, people smuggling, trading in endangered species and trafficking in human beings. Organized crime groups also do a range of business and labor racketeering activities such as skimming casinos, insider trading, setting up monopolies in industries such as garbage collecting, construction and cement pouring, bid rigging, getting "no-show" and "no-work" jobs, political corruption and bullying.

### Violence

#### Assault

The commission of violent crime may form part of criminal organization's "tools" used to achieve criminogenic goals due to psychological factors or may, in and of itself, be crime rationally chosen by individual criminals and the groups they form. Assaults are used for coercive measures, used to "rough up" debtors, competition or recruits, in the commission of robberies in connection to other property offenses and as an expression of counter-cultural authority; violence is normalized within criminal organizations and the locations they control.