ABSTRACT
Organized crime syndicates need to ensure a diversity of income and a minimization of expenditures to survive. They require the same kinds of mechanisms to manage their financial, human, and social resources as those of any legitimate corporate enterprise. Some of these involve investing in genuine business enterprises, which allow criminal gangs to evolve into sophisticated, multinational organizations that deal in criminality at the same time. This chapter will look at the resources aspect of criminal organizations. The traditional gangs have gone from localized, neighborhood enterprises to multinational ones, just like mainstream businesses, adapting to changing market forces and political climates. Drugs may be a staple for the criminals, but their range of activities has become a broad one indeed, including fraud, online gambling, and cooperating with terrorists for self-serving purposes. People and institutions are pawns in the gang’s overall game, which includes corrupting and manipulating lawyers, charter accountants, brokers, bankers, bureaucrats, politicians, police officers, judges, and labor union representatives. Without corruption, the gangs would have disappeared a long time ago.
