Entrepreneurship and Organised Crime provides a much needed and original overview of the boundary between legal and illegal entrepreneurship. It will appeal to a wide variety of readers interested in new perspectives on entrepreneurship. The text is clearly structured and systematically explores the basics of organised crime as an entrepreneurial business enterprise. Petter Gottschalk draws upon several theoretical strands including organisational, sociological, managerial, historical, and practical perspectives in providing an insight into organised crime activity. Julia Davidson, Kingston University, UK Entrepreneurship and Organised Crime tarnishes the conventional clean and wholesome depiction of entrepreneurs by bringing to life the lived and messy realities of entrepreneurs who operate illegal businesses. Moving beyond the standard textbook positive and celebratory portrayal of entrepreneurs, this volume addresses in a highly readable manner both the entrepreneurial aspects of criminal endeavour as well as the criminal aspects of entrepreneurial endeavour. It is an essential and compelling read for scholars of entrepreneurship and criminology. Colin C. Williams, University of Sheffield, UK Entrepreneurship and Organised Crime provides a fresh and realistic insight into the problem of organised crime activity and the role of entrepreneurs in illegal business. Petter Gottschalk takes a close look at how some entrepreneurs choose to develop criminal business enterprises. Stage models for criminal entrepreneurs are presented, and entrepreneurial leadership and management are discussed. This book illustrates how so many issues for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship are similar in legal and illegal business. At the same time, all the cases in the book show how different many of the individual criminal entrepreneurs are. In sum, this book provides a pragmatic view of another kind of entrepreneurship not frequently discussed in a neutral way. This book will be warmly welcomed by scholars and researchers looking for a different perspective of entrepreneurship or interested in criminology. This will also be a good reference tool for students at police academies.

This book covers organized crime groups, empirical studies of organized crime, criminal finances and money laundering, and crime prevention, gathering some of the most authoritative and well-known scholars in the field. The contributions to this book are new chapters written in honor of Professor Dick Hobbs, on the occasion of his retirement. They reflect his powerful influence on the study of organized crime, offering a novel perspective that located organized crime in its socio-economic context, studied through prolonged ethnographic engagement. Professor Hobbs has influenced a generation of criminology researchers engaged in studying organized crime groups, and this work provides a both a look back and this influence and directions for future research. It will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with a focus on organized crime and financial crime, as well as those interested in corruption, crime prevention, and applications of ethnographic methods.

Entering the shady world of what he calls "violent entrepreneurship," Vadim Volkov explores the economic uses of violence and coercion in Russia in the 1990s. Violence has played, he shows, a crucial role in creating the institutions of a new market economy. The core of his work is competition among so-called violence-managing agencies—criminal groups, private security services, private protection companies, and informal protective agencies associated with the state—which multiplied with the liberal reforms of the early 1990s. This competition provides an unusual window on the dynamics of state formation.Violent Entrepreneurs is remarkable for its research. Volkov conducted numerous interviews with members of criminal groups, heads of protection companies, law enforcement employees, and businesspeople. He bases his findings on journalistic and anecdotal evidence as well as on his own personal observation. Volkov investigates the making of violence-prone groups in sports clubs (particularly martial arts clubs), associations for veterans of the Soviet—Afghan war, ethnic gangs, and regionally based social groups, and he traces the changes in their activities across the decade. Some groups wore state uniforms and others did not, but all of their members spoke and acted essentially the same and were engaged in the same activities: intimidation, protection, information gathering, dispute management, contract enforcement, and taxation. Each group controlled the same resource—organized violence.

Organised crime activities have received increased attention throughout the world in recent years. Drug importation and trafficking, fraud (including fraud against the revenue, identity fraud, credit card fraud and maritime fraud), money laundering and people smuggling are all examples of criminal activities that are diverting billions of dollars from legitimate businesses and into the hands of criminal enterprises. The growth of these phenomena has accompanied the growth of international business, with criminals using many of the mechanisms that allow for increased trade to further their aims. All of these activities share one commonality, they are organised and they often rely on some form of official corruption to succeed. Law enforcement officials wishing to counter these activities need to understand the criminal organisations, how they arise, organise and operate. An understanding of criminal entrepreneurship is needed. This book seeks to explore and explain organised crime from a theoretical as well as practical perspective, drawing on international experience and scholarship.

Organized crimes (e.g., weapons trafficking, drug distribution, white collar crime) persist globally due primarily to the power of modern information and communication technology (e.g., computer-based networks in the open and dark webs) to facilitate organization and the enhanced liquidity provided by electronic transfers (in effect, e-capital) to distribute criminal proceeds in the same covert and high-speed manner used by the so-called legitimate commercial enterprises. Offshore banking in tax secrecy and tax haven jurisdictions facilitates both the socially accepted process commonly known as tax avoidance, for example, and the notorious practice commonly known as tax evasion: the former is lawful; the latter is illicit. The dirty secret of how transnational organized economic crime persists lies in global finance, especially transactions using the U.S. dollar in safe havens (e.g., the West uses the Cayman Islands; the East uses Cyprus). Regulators, monitors, auditors, and other specialists in conducting transaction review do not readily and timely tell the difference between high valued transfers that involve true sales of licit goods from high valued transfers that involve the laundering of proceeds from human trafficking, drug distribution, arms sales, and so on.

When criminal activity is as straightforward as a childs game of cops and robbers, the role of the police is obvious, but today‘s bad guys don‘t always wear black. In fact, the most difficult criminals to cope with are those who straddle the gray divide between licit and illicit activity. Many of these nefarious sorts operate on the fringe of soci

This handbook explores organized crime, which it divides into two main concepts and types: the first is a set of stable organizations illegal per se or whose members systematically engage in crime, and the second is a set of serious criminal activities that are typically carried out for monetary gain.