ABSTRACT
Organized crime is almost certainly one of the world’s oldest professions. As Mark Galeotti has pointed out, ‘in ancient Greece, olive growers whose groves
had been cultivated over generations were prey to protection racketeers. Ancient Rome supported a thriving and complex underworld, from smugglers and counterfeiters to pirates and confidence tricksters’ (Galeotti no date). Indeed, roaming bandits were prevalent in medieval Europe, while maritime piracy – which is currently a major problem in the Gulf of Aden and off the coast of Somalia – had earlier incarnations in the Mediterranean, South China Sea, and the Caribbean. It was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that organized crime emerged more obviously in various parts of the world: in Sicily and then in other parts of Italy; in China where secret societies with political agendas evolved into the Triads; in the United States (where organized crime has gone through a series of ethnic successions including Irish, Italian, Jewish, African-American, Caribbean, Russian, and now Mexican criminal organizations); and in Japan where the Yakuza became politically entrenched. Even so, organized crime was seen as a domestic law and order problem and not something that challenged the fabric of society.
