ABSTRACT
When Edwin Sutherland first discussed white-collar crime, he stated that even prior to the modern corporations, white-collar criminality was present in America, the predatory business leaders of the nineteenth century known as the ‘robber barons’ being one major example. 1 He also recognized that ‘[c]ontrary to the assumption of later commentators, the modern gangster predated his bootlegger incarnation’. 2 The characterization of that modern gangster also includes the concepts of white-collar criminality and organized crime. 3 ‘From earliest times, landlords, merchants, and holders of administrative and executive power have used the relative immunity that their status gave them to engage in or sponsor activity that today would be described as organized crime’. 4 Those earliest times date at least to the early European and Mediterranean traders where many of the techniques for illicitly improving a merchant’s personal profits carried across the centuries to the North American shores years later.
