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Organized crime is one of the largest business enterprises in the advanced industrial societies. While the United States has long been considered the center of organized crime, such activities also flourish in Canada, Japan, France, Great Britain, and other places with prosperous economies. Mafia is a term used to describe a number of criminal organizations around the world. The first organization to bear the label was the Sicilian Mafia based in Italy, known to its members as Cosa Nostra. In the United States, "the Mafia" generally refers to the American Mafia. Other powerful organizations described as mafias include the Russian Mafia, the Chinese Triads, the Albanian Mafia, Bosnian mafia, the Irish Mob, the Japanese Yakuza, the Neapolitan Camorra, and many others. There are also a number of localized mafia organizations around the world bearing no link to any specific racial background. Some criminal organizations, such as terrorist organizations, are politically motivated. An organized gang or criminal set can also be referred to as a mob.
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Such profitable endeavors as gambling, drug trafficking, bookmaking, loansharking, prostitution, protection schemes, labor racketeering, etc. have long been controlled by various organized crime factions. Organized crime groups also do a range of activities, such as skimming casinos, insider trading, setting up monopolies in industries such as garbage collecting, construction and cement pouring, bid rigging, getting "no-show" and "nowork" jobs, money laundering, political corruption, bullying and ideological clamping. Most of these activities are local or national in scope, but the increasing use of drugs since 1965 has led to the establishment of international networks of crime in order to move drugs from one country to another, to process them, and to distribute the billions of dollars in profits that result from their sale. In addition to that segment of the population made up of individual criminals acting independently or in small groups, there exists a so-called underworld of criminal organizations engaged in offenses such as cargo theft, fraud, robbery, kidnapping for ransom, and the demanding of “protection” payments. In many Third World countries, apart from the drug trade, the principal form of organized crime is blackmarketeering, including smuggling and corruption in the granting of licenses to import goods and to export foreign exchange. The newest growth sectors for organized crime are identity theft and online extortion.
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Today, crime is thought of as an urban phenomenon, but for most of human history it was the rural world that was crime-ridden. Pirates, highwaymen and bandits attacked trade routes and roads, at times severely disrupting commerce, raising costs, insurance rates and prices to the consumer. According to criminologist Paul Lunde, "Piracy and banditry were to the preindustrial world what organized crime is to modern society.” As Lunde states, "Barbarian conquerors, whether Vandals, Goths, Norsemen, Turks or Mongols are not normally thought of as organized crime groups, yet they share many features associated with successful criminal organizations. They were for the most part non-ideological, predominantly ethnically based, used violence and intimidation, and adhered to their own codes of law.”
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Organized crime most typically flourishes when a central government and civil society is disorganized, weak, absent or untrusted. This may occur in a society facing periods of political, economic or social turmoil or transition, such as a change of government or a period of rapid economic development, particularly if the society lacks strong and established institutions and the rule of law. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe that saw the downfall of the Communist Bloc and establishment of new systems of democracy and free market capitalism in the region created a breeding ground for organized criminal organizations. Most of the countries fell upon economic turmoil with their markets being flooded with western products that had previously been barred by the communists regimes at exceptionally high prices and a lack of interest in importing from Eastern Europe. This led to many turning to illegitimate means of making a profit, most of the time these efforts were backed by former secret service and police force who were now out of the job.
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