ABSTRACT
This chapter considers definitional questions surrounding what constitutes organized crime as key to understanding the actors and activities involved. Typically, media representations focus on stereotypes of gangsters and criminal underworld figures. However, critical criminologists have inverted that view, implicating legitimate actors like the state, corporations, police, and the media in organized crime. Known as the ‘symbiotic model’, this perspective shows how although normal business practices are legal in a technical sense, they may have consequences that are not captured in criminal statutes but still cause harm or injustice; that is, ‘crimes’ in a broad sense of term. Examples here include a corporation causing environmental damage or exploiting child workers in countries lacking labor rights. Alternatively, legitimate structures might act as cover for illicit activities that may or may not fall within the scope of the criminal law. Nation-states and governments can also commit ‘state crimes’, such as genocide, mass murder and torture, as well as be implicated in terrorism, which has itself been linked to organized crime. Moreover, insofar as state crimes are programmed and systemic, they might be conceived of as ‘state-organized crime’. Finally, the chapter shows how the media have a role in feeding people’s macabre fascination with places where states crimes and other atrocities, like the Holocaust, have occurred, giving rise to the phenomenon of ‘dark tourism’, or travel to sites of death and suffering.
