ABSTRACT
Every time new signs of organized crime are discovered in modern, urban societies, with striking frequency some ethnic minority - either recent or still unassimilated immigrants or some indigenous minority such as Native Americans in the USA or gypsies in Europe - is singled out as the source of the trouble. In the 1980s, the construction business in French-speaking Belgium was infiltrated by Italian job contractors, and murders committed there were attributed to the Camorra of Naples. In 1996 the trade in black-market cigarettes in Berlin was in the hands of Vietnamese gangsters whose conflicts with each other led to outright gang warfare. In the UK, prostitution for a long time was in the hands of a small group of Maltese. A description of the groups engaged in the Western world's drug trade reads like a list of foreign and local ethnic minorities.! They include Colombian and Mexican cartels, the Cuba Connection, Chinese Tongs and Triads, Japanese Yakuza, Vietnamese gangs, Jamaican Posses, as well as Indian and Iranian groups. Ever since the drug trade was criminalized at the start of the century, its history has largely involved cosmopolitan minorities from the Balkans, the Middle East, Egypt and a few large cities in the Far East.l
If we take certain groups of emigrants as our point of departure, in any number of countries we repeatedly come up against the same organized crime groups. Nigerians specialize in credit card fraud and drug courier services, Russians go in for oil swindles, trafficking in women and extortion, and Turks and Kurds not only run the heroin trade in Europe but also smuggle illegal aliens.
