Organized Crime: Defined

Transnational crime and organized crime are concepts that have gained and continue to gain an international and domestic profile. However, there is no one definition of organized crime. The difficulty is that the concept of organized crime relates more closely to the method by which crime is committed than to a specific type of criminal activity. In a sense, it is the process by which a group of individuals commits crimes. Michael Woodiwiss provides us with an historical map to the widely accepted understanding of organized crime that has spread throughout the international community. He documents what he argues is the bias in what became labeled as organized crime. The view was largely driven by the U.S. preoccupation with the main Mafia crime families in ...