transnational organized crime, by frank g. madsen
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This article was downloaded by: [University of Hong Kong Libraries]On: 14 November 2014, At: 13:39Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
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Transnational organized crime, byFrank G. MadsenAlexander J. Blenkinsopp aa Independent ResearcherPublished online: 02 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Alexander J. Blenkinsopp (2010) Transnational organized crime, by Frank G.Madsen, Global Crime, 11:3, 366-368
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2010.490704
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366 Book Reviews
market,4 there is a ‘promotion’ of a drug market, which is supposedly a homogeneousentity with a huge turnover. In fact, the estimate of the US$ 500 billion is reproduced here.The fragmentation of the drug markets as well as their regional, national and local peculi-arities make perceiving them as ‘a global drug market’ counterproductive from a policypoint of view. Data on the illicit drug business are often emotionally and ideologicallycharged during the production or interpretation phases. Figures often fit or serve specificagendas and ‘[m]any times, data are quoted without a reference to sources, at others iteven appears that figures are spontaneously produced, or invented’.5 This is the case withother ‘threats’ such as money laundering. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) of theG-7 was the first attempt to calculate the amount of money laundered as a first steptowards dealing with the phenomenon; however, this calculation was methodologicaldubious to say the least.6 One may wonder what sort of rationality is embodied in thoseinstitutions. To put it differently, what is largely ignored in analyses of this type is the cru-cial role the authorities play in creating the illegal markets that they pledge to quell.Jojarth is right in suggesting that ‘virtually all jurisdictions around the globe criminalisethe consumption, production, and distribution of mind-altering substances . . .’ (p. 93), butthis simply means that states are busy creating institutions to tackle problems of their ownmaking.
Of course, the above misgivings do not concern directly Jojarth’s accomplishment, norare diminishing its value. After all, the author situates the model within a specific para-digm and also boldly acknowledges its limitations by nodding to competing paradigms.We learned a lot from Crime, War and Global Trafficking: Designing the InternationalCooperation and we recommend it as an important study that deserves to be read by anaudience beyond the field of international relations. We are simply pointing to a ratherunintended outcome of our interaction with Jojarth’s text: it has reinforced our awarenessof the potentially deleterious effects of the vague discourse of ‘organised crime threats’that policy-makers, law enforcement and the media secrete today. So we return to our owntask of contributing to rational policy-making with renewed resolve.
Georgios Papanicolaou and Georgios A. AntonopoulosSchool of Social Sciences and Law, Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK
E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]© 2010, Georgios Papanicolaou and Georgios A. Antonopoulos
FGLC1744-05721744-0580Global Crime, Vol. 11, No. 3, May 2010: pp. 0–0Global Crime
Transnational organized crime, by Frank G. Madsen, London and New York,Routledge, 2009, 168 pp., US$28.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-46499-4
Global CrimeBook ReviewsIt is a daunting task to take as broad and complex a subject as transnational organisedcrime and give it an adequate treatment in only 130 pages of text. Madsen almost rises tothe challenge. His book is replete with fascinating case studies and introduces the field’skey concepts. It tends, however, to move at a breakneck pace, making some of its more
4. P.C. van Duyne, ‘The Phantom and Threat of Organised Crime’, Crime, Law and Social Change24, no. 4 (1995): 341–77.5. Francisco Thoumi, ‘The Number’s Game: Let’s All Guess the Size of the Illegal Drugs Industry’,TNI Crime and Globalisation Paper (2003): 2, http://www.tni.org/crime-docs/numbers.pdf6. See P.C. van Duyne, ‘Money Laundering: Estimates in Fog’, Journal of Asset Protection andFinancial Crime 2, no. 1 (1994): 58–74.
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trenchant points almost in passing. The book’s brevity makes it an appealing option forthose hoping to gain a general familiarity with the salient points in the field, and even thewell-versed reader is likely to learn something from the case studies and the personalexperience Madsen brings to bear upon the subject. But that same brevity also results infrustrating unevenness in the depth of Madsen’s analysis, with most topics receiving cur-sory discussion while a few others – and not necessarily those Madsen deems mostimportant – are subjected to ponderous examination.
Transnational Organized Crime does not have a single central thesis. Instead, severalthemes run through the work. Perhaps the most salient is that organised crime is ‘first andforemost a commercial entity’ (p. 14), a business phenomenon arising from consumers’demand for products and services going unmet due to criminogenic government prohibi-tions or excises. This is hardly a novel insight, but Madsen convincingly illustrates justhow strong the similarities are between organised crime and other commercial enterprises.For example, he shows that transnational organised crime succeeds through a complexchain of actions demonstrating ‘organisational talent’ on par with that of a successfullegitimate business. To make his point, Madsen introduces vivid case studies. In one, hedescribes the vast scale of cigarette smuggling, and the imposing logistical hurdles thatneed to be overcome to do it successfully. In another, he enumerates the multitude of stepstaken by different organised crime groups around the world collaborating to perpetrate acredit card scheme. The detail of these case studies illustrates Madsen’s extensiveresearch, which appears to have occurred as much in the field as in the library; Madsenserved as Interpol’s head of criminal intelligence, and as director of corporate security atthe pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb, before moving on to academia at theUniversity of Cambridge.
In keeping with the commercial lens through which Madsen views transnationalorganised crime, his analysis is deepest when discussing money, particularly money laun-dering and the money supply. The futility of anti-money laundering initiatives is a majormotif of the book. He argues that anti-money laundering efforts erode rights (due to inad-equate procedural safeguards), attack symptoms (namely, efforts to conceal the origins offunds) rather than underlying causes (namely, the origins of the funds) and have financialcosts that far outweigh their limited efficacy in combating transnational organised crime.These points have already been made by Phil Williams and others, but Madsen uses casestudies and some interesting statistics to explicate them in a new light. As for Madsen’sextensive examination of the money supply, he seeks to substantiate Loretta Napoleoni’sargument that the growth of the U.S. money supply is connected to the growth of theillegal economy. Again, the argument is not Madsen’s novel creation, but he marshalsmuch evidence persuasively propounding the theory that dollars are fleeing the UnitedStates in the service of organised crime.
Discussion of money laundering and the money supply comprise almost one-fifth ofthe book. Interesting as they might be, they are not what Madsen calls ‘the clear andpresent danger’ posed by transnational organised crime: offences against the environment,and crimes such as human trafficking and ‘neo-slavery’ (p. 123). Oddly, Madsen devotesvery little of the book to these threats he deems most pressing, which is unfortunatebecause he counts them among his primary research interests and undoubtedly has manyinsights to offer about them. It is doubly unfortunate because Madsen still found the spaceto delve into a variety of taxonomic issues – for example, the precise distinction between‘transnational’ versus ‘international’, or the intractable question of how to define ‘terror-ism’ – even though they tend to be the least-interesting topics he addresses. That is not tosay that they should have been removed altogether; indeed, the author’s concern for disen-
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tangling conflated concepts is admirable. But one is puzzled when Madsen criticisesscholars ‘immersed in rather introspective definitional quarrels’ (p. 121), even as he him-self appears to participate in such debates. All in all, the reader is left with the strong sensethat the significance Madsen says a subject has is unrelated to the amount of attention heaccords it.
Along these same lines, consider another book’s themes: ‘deviant knowledge’, or thenotion that the misuse of knowledge – by professionals (such as accountants and attor-neys) who assist criminals and by civil servants who circumvent laws for political reasons– has enabled transnational organised crime to persist. Despite the considerable heedful-ness Madsen pays to definitions, nowhere does he actually define deviant knowledge. Theconcept arises multiple times in the book, underscoring its importance as a central theme.Madsen applies the term to many countries’ efforts to curtail grey markets through inter-diction and attempts to stem supply, even though those states know that ‘no gray markethas ever been defeated from the supply side’ (p. 47). He also uses the term to describe anincident in which officials from two European governments who possessed the evidenceneeded to extradite criminal suspects with possible terrorist connections chose not to do so– in contravention of an agreement to which both nations were party – because such anexpulsion would have been politically inexpedient. And in the book’s foreword, ThomasG. Weiss, the editor of Routledge’s Global Institutions series (to which this volumebelongs), specifically highlights deviant knowledge as an important subject that Madsentakes on. Unfortunately, one must rely on context to cobble together a definition, whichsignificantly impairs the reader’s understanding of the significance and nuances of theconcept.
Two other criticisms deserve mention. First, the writing is occasionally convoluted orverbose. On consecutive pages, one encounters a 97-word sentence and an 84-word sen-tence, respectively. Neither is easily parsed. Granted, those are extreme examples, butinelegant and lengthy sentences encumbered by multiple subordinate clauses are fairlycommon. Second, the book’s organisation leaves something to be desired. In particular,the subsections are not always ordered or grouped in a logical manner. For example, a sec-tion in Chapter 6 on different institutions’ initiatives against transnational crime containsthe following subsections: ‘Interpol’, ‘Europol’, ‘United Nations’, and ‘Enforcement andTechnology’. One of these is not like the others. Still, in keeping with the book’s generalpattern, the awkwardly located section on enforcement and technology contains a veryinteresting example: that of how German authorities and Interpol identified and facilitatedthe arrest of Christopher Paul Neil, a Canadian who digitally hid his face in photographshe disseminated of himself committing sexual acts with minors. One hopes that the non-sequiturs marring the book’s organisation do not distract the reader from the engagingcontent.
Transnational Organized Crime is worth a read. If nothing else, it provides a host ofinteresting case studies without requiring a large time investment by the reader. It alsotouches on a great many intriguing ideas. One hopes that in Madsen’s next book, the paceis slower, the organisation crisper and the focus clearer. Despite this work’s shortcomings,Madsen obviously has much to contribute to the study of transnational organised crime.
Alexander J. BlenkinsoppIndependent Researcher
Email: [email protected]© 2010, Alexander J. Blenkinsopp
FGLC1744-05721744-0580Global Crime, Vol. 11, No. 3, May 2010: pp. 0–0Global Crime
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