Gangsters

 

Crime-when discussed as a business and measured in terms of that business’s turnover-has been increasing exponentially for years….The business of crime is soaring……

Jeffrey Robinson

The Merger

 

"Al Capone is remembered as a gangster and a brutal, cold-blooded killer. it is perhaps less widely known that Capone was also an accountant for a Baltimore construction firm before joining and eventually leading Chicago's North Side Gang. We don't normally associate the relatively humble and perhaps humdrum vocation of bookkeeping with mob icons like Capone. There are no scenes of Al Pacino struggling to balance the books or poring over financial statements in the films Scarface or The Godfather. But Capone's training as an accountant was instrumental in helping him organize a vast criminal business empire. The emphasis was on business -it's just that Capone's business happened to be in prostitution, gambling, racketeering, and selling booze during Prohibition, illicit trades where disputes were settled with machine guns rather than lawyers."

Raymond Fisman & Edward Miguel

Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations

 

 

  Raymond Baker calculated that overall illegal capital flight is equivalent to about half a trillion dollars a year. Therefore, together with criminal money, it amounts to a staggering $1 trillion a year, higher than the nominal GDP of the United Kingdom. Other estimates of the size of illicit financial transactions, also knows as the 'Gross Criminal Product', are very similar and set the value at between $600 billion and $1.5 trillion, about 2-5 percent of the world gross national product, of which narcotics range from $300 billion to $500 billion, smuggling of arms, other goods, people and counterfeiting between $150 billion and $470 billion and proceeds from computer crimes at $100 billion."

Loretta Napoleoni

Modern Jihad: tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks

 

"No area of International Affairs will remain untouched. Political and economic systems and the social fabric of many countries will deteriorate under the increasing financial power of international organized crime groups."

Louise Shelbey

(Director of American University’s Center for Transnational Organized Crime and Corruption. Wash. D.C.)

 

"Organized crime rings are also developing their own computer-hacking capabilities. Although they usually hire the computer experts they need, they have also reportedly resorted to intimidating people into cooperating. Through underground sources, I have learned of at least one incident in which a hacker received an "offer he couldn't refuse" (I should point out that he was apparently paid well for his efforts and probably did more work for them after his fears of bodily harm were put to rest.) Criminal organizations also have their own experts with outstanding capabilities. Admiral William Studeman, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, stated that the drug cartels have the technical capability to wage a very effective information war against the United States. They use this capability to learn of and undermine counternarcotics efforts around the world, including attempts to learn the identity of informants and undercover agents.

   The initial purpose of computer hacking in many criminal organizations was to facilitate money laundering. They sought the help of computer experts to enable them to make large financial transactions that went relatively unnoticed. The drug cartels and other organized crime rings then developed the capability to perform this money laundering themselves. Eventually, the Mafia-type organizations realized that not only could they launder their own illegally gotten gain but could steal it as well. Today, criminal organizations steal this money from banks throughout the world."

-Ira Winkler

Spies Among Us

 

"As long as we live in a world where a seventeenth-century concept of law enforcement that is still trying to come to terms with Twentieth-century technology, The twenty first century will belong to transnational criminals."

Jeffrey Robinson

The Merger: How Organized Crime is Taking Over Canada and The World

 

 

"There is not a single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia. According to Luciano Violante, chairman of Italy's parliamentary committee of inquiry into the mafia, Russia is now a kind of strategic capital of organized crime from where all the major operations are launched. he said that Russian mob leaders have held summits with the three main Italian crime organizations from Sicily, Calabria, and Naples to discuss drug-money laundering, narcotics trade, and even the sale of nuclear material. Russia , he added, 'had become a warehouse and clearing house for the drug market."

-David Remnick Lenin's Tomb

 

 

"The Russian mafia is making major inroads in Switzerland, according to a Swiss report. More than 150 people and 90 Swiss firms are suspected of having ties to the Russian mob, which launders money in the Alpine nation .

Suddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

 

"They (the Kremlin officials) will seek to exploit the new situation of 'openness' to send their own agent-running officers involved in criminal and economic activities abroad as illegals to build up their own networks along the lines of the Italian mafia which they know and understand. In this way they will seek to build up their penetration of and influence in the economic, financial and government sectors in the West. They will use this influence to assist their strategy of convergence with the West."

-Anatoliy Golitsyn  (KGB defector)

 

 

"The Soviets reasoned that if they could successfully infiltrate organized crime, they would have unusually good possibilities to control many politicians and would have access to the best information on drugs, money, weapons, and corruption of many kinds. A secondary reason was to use organized crime as a covert mechanism for distributing drugs."

General Jan Sejina  (Czech General)

 

"By far the largest and most important market for the recycling of dirty money is the U.S. "

Loretta Napoleoni

Modern Jihad

 

"WORLDWIDE WEBS: MAFIA’S REACH GROWS" by Llene R. Prusher….Special to the Christian Science Monitor….Israel serves as ‘back door’ to America…….

 

 

"….The World is confronted with a new and dangerous phenomenon: the emergence of what I have called New International Criminals….They are truly criminals without borders."

U.S. Senator William V. Roth Jr.

 

"The opening of the USSR will probably been seen by the underworld as the single most significant event of the 1990s. With this momentous event, a gateway into Europe appeared. Every organized crime group has made a move into Eastern Europe, feasting on the chaos of a major new market. "The World capital of organized crime is not Palermo any longer, but Moscow."

Luciano Violante

 

"Russia and the other countries of the ex-USSR are about to transform into states of the mafia. They are quite advanced on the road to this transformation."

Claire Sterling

Thieves’ World

 

 

"More seriously, the committee was old about a small group of criminals from Israel-about 1000 of them, loosely structured many not Israeli at all but Russian gangsters who posed as Jews to get out of the USSR-who were engaged in "a myriad of organized crime activities" including international heroin trafficking, frauds, phony bankruptcies, extortion, murder, and alien smuggling. The organization, described as a "highly sophisticated syndicate," had been identified across the United States, in Canada, Mexico, Europe, and South America. It was described as a ruthless mob: one Israeli immigrant who’d been arrested for credit card fraud lost his wife, son and nephew to the gang-they were murdered-while he was in custody."

Antonio Nicaso & Lee Lamothe
Global Mafia

 

 

"Gang members are highly mobile: after all there is only so much to steal before you wind up stealing from each other. The lack of ties Thieves have to any single place, their lack of emotional ties or family links, makes them like Gypsies, often striking out across the country moving from territory to territory with the assistance of static groups, stealing from , robbing, and conning the local populace.

Antonio Nicaso & Lee Lamothe
Global Mafia

 

"Patriotism isn’t a recognized concept in the Thieves; world; being Thieves of the world, there is no homeland to defend. The closed society Thieves have constructed extends to their families: wives only associate with wives of other Thieves; if the husband is killed or goes to prison, the wife might live with one of his associates. If the husband is free and on hard times, the wife may be ordered to get a job, steal or engage in prostitution. Daughters are expected to marry within the underworld; it is not only expected that sons become Thieves, it is considered natural progression. Dominance through violence and rape, particularly gang rape, is a hallmark of the ‘Thieves’ conduct both in the underworld and in Society. Murder is part of their policy of indifference (‘You today, me tomorrow!"), much as thieving is part of daily existence with no more effort required than it takes to have blond hair or be left-handed."

Antonio Nicaso & Lee Lamothe
Global Mafia

 

 

"No one seemed safe from Sergey and Taras Filonov; not the Asian gangs, not the East Indians, and especially not the bikers. But to paraphrase a traveler in ancient China: the road to Vancouver is lined with the bones of fools who thought they could muscle the Hell’s Angels."

Antonio Nicaso & Lee Lamothe
Global Mafia

 

"Triad links with the Yakuza go back a long way. A confederacy of secret fraternities, the Yakuza are not just criminal. They are historically ultra-right-wing and involved in terrorism, political corruption and extremist politics. Until about 1930 , they operated primarily in Japan, but as Japanese expansionism grew, they moved overseas to Japanese-occupied territories, not infrequently assisted by Triad societies which sold them opium, provided them with women and, in some countries, aided them in the systematic pillaging of national banks, monarchies, rich merchants, religious organizations and criminal fraternities. Under the guidance of Yoshio Kodama, a secretive Japanese billionaire, the Yakuza and Japanese military together accumulated the biggest treasure ever assembled, known now as Yamashita's Gold. Consisting of tons of thousands of metric tons of gold, as well as gems and other rare metals, it was buried all over the Philippines in 1944-45. About one third has been discovered, much of it by Ferdinand Marcos, who is thought to have used Hong Kong Triads to sell part of it on the gold market.

   Today, the Yakuza exists wherever there is an expatriate Japanese community, especially in Hawaii and California. Inevitably, they have come into contact with the Triads, but how closely is hard to establish, although in Hong Kong there have been instances of positive liaison. In 1978, Japanese police arrested Yakuza couriers importing amphetamines from the 14K and, in 1985, the 14K were found to be associated with a 'speed' and heroin shipment seized from the Yakuza in Honolulu, who had taught 14K chemists how to make it in Hong Kong. In Taiwan, the Yakuza are closely associated with the Triads, with whom they share anti-Communist sentiments. Closer criminal co-operation is now being forged and bodes ill for the future."

Martin Booth

The Dragon Syndicates

 

  "Of the Triads' new criminal enterprises, one that is best called 'cyber-crime' has as great a potential for profit as narcotics with hardly any of the risk, and it could go bigger, for the targets are the computers upon which international commerce is utterly reliant. It started in the 1970s with simple hacking. Computer access codes were bypassed down telephone links allowing the illegal electronic transfer of funds at the speed of a keystroke. It was bank robbery without explosives or the combination of the vault. In time, computer-software engineers invented 'firewalls'-programmes and systems which prevented access to sensitive areas of a computer network; these changed daily, even hourly, and were therefore virtually unimpeachable. Today, hacking is outmoded. In its place are Dos (Denial of Service) attacks.

   Dos is a highly secretive criminal activity, Law-enforcement agencies are tightlipped about it and finance companies refuse to admit they have cyber-robbed for fear of losing customer confidence. It involves state-of-the-art military weapons and programmes at the cutting edge of computer technology. Three means of attack are used: the HIRF (high-intensity radio frequency) gun, the EMP (electromagnetic pulse) cannon and the logic bomb. HIRF and EMP weapons were used in the Gulf War to disable Iraqi communications systems and avionics computers. No bigger than anti-tank bazookas, they 'fire' bursts of electronic power which disrupt computer circuitry, even from a distance of hundreds of meters, and can destroy hard disks. Logic bombs are encrypted algorithms (tiny programmes akin to computer viruses) which are 'hidden' in computer systems by 'sleepers', usually temporary office staff who infiltrate companies. When activated by a telephone call, or upon a predetermined date, they 'lock out' the computer system by encrypting data held on hard disks so no one may access it. The computer has been hijacked, the company denied access to its business. At this point, the hijacker contacts the system' owner and demands a ransom in exchange for the code which will reverse the encryption process. Sometimes the mere threat of DoS is enough to force a victim to pay up. In effect, it is the ultimate twenty-first-century protection racket."

Martin Booth

The Dragon Syndicates

 

"Over the years triad members have developed numerous methods, such as passwords, phrases, poems, hand signs, gestures, seals, slang, and jargon to show their adenoiditis. Traditionally, the initiated members were taught those means of identification so that they could easily identify themselves and communicate with each other. In Hong Kong, most means of identification are commonly used throughout the triad community. For instance, the Fung, Lao, Po and Yan  are universal verses, which can be used by all triad members in Hong Kong. Some means of identification, however, are specifically for the identification of a particular society. In Hong Kong, well-organized triad societies normally have their own "title" verse. For example the title verse of the 14K is: "The name of our family rises high as the phoenix dances and the dragon flies, like a bolt from the blue the title of our family rumbles over the land, with K Gold as our mark, china with the righteous 14 guard."

-Chu Yiu Kong reports

 

"...unique forms of greeting and identification....When two yakuza meet for the first time, each of them will take up a pose. Stepping forward slightly, bending his legs, putting his clenched fist on the right femur, and stretching out his left are each will recite at length his place of origin, present residence, the name of his oyabun, and his own name in stilted archaic language. When he has finished, the same type of greeting is repeated by the other party."

-Hiroki Iwai

 

   "As technology advanced and borders became increasingly porous after the Cold War, it became increasingly evident that international crime in all of its various forms threatened U.S. national security interests. Sometimes the threats were direct. Terrorists groups like Al Qaeda, no longer as dependent on state sponsorship, began targeting Americans at home and abroad. They also engaged in a host of criminal activities apart from terrorism, from arms trafficking to people smuggling to securities fraud. Vast networks of criminals based in Russia, Nigeria, Latin America, East Asia and elsewhere went global, infiltrating the United states as one of the world's most lucrative targets. Hackers halfway around the world broke into U.S. computer systems, including sensitive systems belonging to the military and intelligence agencies. 

   International crime also poses indirect threats to U.S. national security. Criminal syndicates have corrupted government officials undermined democratic governance, and hindered economic development in many countries. This has been well documented in post-communist states like Russia, developing countries like Nigeria, post-conflict societies like Bosnia and countries of particular concern to the United States like Mexico. In Columbia, groups engaged in drug trafficking, terrorist activity and other serious crimes even challenge the government itself for control over territory and the population, just as typical communist insurgencies did a few decades ago."

William Wechler ( See article Law in Order  in Spring 2002 The National Interest)

 

   "By 1990 radical Muslim émigrés from Albania became the new Kings of the drug underworld on the East Coast. Skender Fici ran a travel agency in New York that served as a front for a billion-dollar business in narcotics. Fici was well served by his countrymen, including Ismail Liva. Caught with a stash of $125 million in number-four heroin, Fici and Liva ordered a hit on the New York detectives who arrested them and the federal prosecutors who had managed to send them to prison."

   Members of the LCN families and other ethnic crime groups freely admitted their fear of the Albanians. Speaking anonymously to a reporter from City Paper in Philadelphia a prominent member of the "Kielbasa Posse," an ethnic Polish mob, maintained that his organization was willing to conduct business with "just about anyone," including blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Russians, and even Chechens, but they refused to go anywhere near the Albanian Mafia. "They are too violent and unpredictable," he said.

   In addition to taking over the drug business, counterfeiting and forgery, prostitution and sex slavery rackets, illegal weapons and firearms sales, and the underground commerce in human body parts, the Albanians, like their LCN predecessors, gained control over major ports of entry into the United States. This development accounts for the fact that America has witnessed a 40 percent increase in the flow of drugs from the golden crescent wake of 9/11."

Paul L. Williams

The Dunces of Doomsday

 

"Using a chatroom, Atta (9/11 mastermind) sent messages in German from America, posing as a student, to "Jenny" , his fictitious girlfriend. The real recipient was Mr. bin al-Shibh (Ramzi bin al-Shibh). In al-Quada's code the World Trade Centre was "the faculty of town planning" (Atta hated skyscrapers, preferring traditional Islamic architecture), the Pentagon was "the faculty of fine arts" and Congress was the faculty of law." In a final telephone call Atta told Mr. bin al--Shibh the chosen date for the attacks. "Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down." he said, meaning 11/9"

 

See Article "When The War Ends, Start to Worry" by Michael Bronner...The New York Times August 16, 2008

   "While the Russian "peacekeepers" who entrenched themselves in the conflict zones in the 1990s (and who will now likely resume their posts anew) have proved ineffectual and uninterested in maintaining stability, they've been highly successful in protecting an array of sophisticated criminal networks stretching from Russia through Georgian territory. South Ossetia, in particular, is a nest of organized crime. It is a marketplace for a variety of contraband from fuel to cigarettes, wheat flour, hard drugs, weapons, people and recently, counterfeit United States $100 bills "minted' at a press inside the conflict zone.

 

   Far more dangerous contraband than fake bills is bartered in the conflict zones. On a bleak winter day last year, I hitched a ride from Tbilisi , the capital, to the "administrative border"-the semi-porous line of control that swoops deep into Georgian territory from the Russian border demarking the contours of South Ossetia. I was investigating one of the most serious nuclear smuggling incidents in years-an offer of up to 3 kilograms of bomb-grade highly enriched uranium..."

 

"The basic revolutionary strategy took shape in the years 1954 to 1956. As detailed by Sejina, there were five principal thrusts in the modernized strategy. First was the increased training of leaders for their evolutionary movements....

   The second step was the actual training of terrorists. Training for international terrorism actually began as "fighters for liberation." The term "national liberation' was coined to replace revolutionary war movement as a two-way deception: to provide a nationalistic cover for what was basically an intelligence operation and to provide a label that was semantically separated from the communist revolutionary war movement.

   The third step was international drug and narcotics trafficking. Drugs were incorporated into the revolutionary war strategy as a political and intelligence weapon to use against the bourgeois societies and as a mechanism for recruiting agents of influence around the world.

   The fourth step was to infiltrate organized crime and further, to establish Soviet Bloc sponsored and controlled organized crime syndicates throughout the world.

   The fifth step was to plan and prepare for sabotage throughout the whole world. The network for this activity was to be in place by 1972."

-Joseph D. Douglass, Jr. Red Cocaine

 

"We are making these drugs for Satan-Americans and Jews. If we cannot kill them with guns, we will kill them with drugs."

-Fatwa of Hezbollah

 

"Throughout the country, small groups of cops are the gangsters."

-Joseph D. McNamara (former police chief of San Jose, California and Kansas City, Missouri)

 

"Today, most gang members rarely leave an insular 10-block radius, keeping the violence contained to South Central (Beverly Hills sits only six miles away-Hollywood only five miles) With over 15,000 milled in the past 20 years, gang-related deaths in South Central outnumber those from terrorism in Northern Ireland. "If this amount of killing were going on in any other country, the U.N. would be sent in," quips one of the experts interviewed in the film. A Rand Corporation study reveals that children in South Central LA exhibit greater levels of post-traumatic stress disorder than those of Baghdad. In a haunting moment in the film, an interviewer must wait until sirens and helicopters pass before he answers a question. They don't stop for several minutes."

film ; Made In America

 

Article: Neighborhood In Japan Files Lawsuit in Bid to Oust Mafia  by Norimitsu Onishi New York Times November 16,2008

   ********************

 

Book: "Red Mafiya" by Robert Friedman

Book: "Red Cocaine" by Joseph D. Douglass

Book: "Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World's Most Successful Industry" by Paul Lunde

Book: Mafia: The Complete History of a Criminal World" by Jo Durden Smith

Book: "Gomorrah" by Roberto Saviano

Book: "The Dragon Syndicates" by Martin Booth

Book: "Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate" by Diego Gambetta

Book: "Rothstein: The Life, Times, and Murder of the Criminal Genius Who Fixed the 1919 World Series" by David Pietrusa

Book: "Double Deal: The Inside Story of Murder, Unbridled Corruption, and the Cop Who Was a Mobster" by Michael Corbitt with Sam Giancana

Book: "The New War" by Senator John Kerry

Book: "Chinatown Gangs: Extortion, Enterprise, and Ethnicity" by Ko-in chin

Book: "Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia" by Bertil Lintner

Book: "Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World's Most Successful Industry" by Paul Lunde

Book: The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld" by Herbert Asbury

Book: "Hot Money and the Politics of Debt" by R.T. Naylor

Book: "The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America" by Gus Russo

Book: "The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld" by Herbert Asbury

Book: "Mob: Stories of Death and Betrayal from Organized Crime" Ed. by Clint Willis

Book: "Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style" by Letiza Paoli

Book: "Thieves World" by Claire Sterling

Book: "Smart Mobs" by Howard Rheingold

Book: "The Merger: How Organized Crime is Taking over Canada and the World" by Jeffrey Robinson

Book: "Gangland: The Lawyers" by James Morton

Book: "Gangland International: An Informal History of the Mafia and Other Mobs in the Twentieth Century" By James Morton

Book: "The Purple Gang: Organized Crime in Detroit, 1910-1945" by Paul R. Kavieff

Book: "The Outfit: The Role of Chicago's Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America" by Gus Russo

Book: "Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks" by Loretta Napoleoni

Book: "Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy" by Moises Naim

Book: "The Cult At the End of the World" by David E. Kaplan & Andrew Marshall

Book: "McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld" by Misha Glenny

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