ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an outline of American and international efforts to conceptualize and combat organized crime. It focuses on to use the American experience to illuminate the quagmire in which many countries find themselves when faced with a poorly understood phenomenon. The chapter argues that making the term 'organized crime' synonymous with gangster or Mafia-type organizations will not help in efforts to combat a problem that is increasingly damaging and destructive but is rarely so structured and never so separate from legitimate institutions as the common use of the term implies. The Kefauver Senate Investigating Committee was an important part of Mafia control process when it highlighted organized crime in 1950 and 1951 and gave undeserved substance and respectability to Mafia mythology. There are ways of limiting illegal markets, and controlling illegal behaviour in legal markets, but these do not gel with an American ideology that dominates current global discourse.
