ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the mainstays of organized crime business, including the services of money laundering and usurious money lending, better known as loansharking. It also focuses on crimes that often skirt the boundaries between the licit and the illicit, and several other categories of syndicate activity, business and labor racketeering and organized theft and fraud schemes. The chapter reports traditional businesses of organized crime including money laundering and loansharking, human smuggling and trafficking, and labor racketeering in a variety of industries. Organized crime groups have had a long relationship with the American labor movement, particularly in their involvement in the affairs of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA). One mob observer has noted that members and associates of organized crime groups 'have long used just about every method they could dream up to turn an illegal buck'.
