Posted: October 15th, 2022

Organized Crime

Organized Crime
Discuss why it is important for an organized crime organization to become involved in legitimate businesses. List the different businesses in which organized crime is involved and identify the most lucrative. Compare and contrast the various ways in which organized crime infiltrates and profits from the pornography and the prostitution business. List and discuss three methods commonly used by criminals to launder illegally earned money.

Please use one of these books as one of the sources:
(1) Organized Crime. Lyman, M. & Potter, G. Prentice Hall, 2014

(2) Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society. Friedrichs, D. Wadsworth

Organized Crime
Organized crime involves both transnational, national and local groups who conduct illegal activities majorly for-profit purposed. The other group such as terrorists are motivated by political reasons. Organized crime groups may infiltrate the business area by creating a new business or acquiring an existing business. They get involved in legal businesses to conceal illegal activities. This may include fraud and trafficking of illegal goods such as drugs and alcohol. They also invest in this legal business to conceal the origin of the profits from illegal activities and also due to insufficient opportunities to invest the money in illegal markets. This helps to ensure the continuity of these activities as they are financed from the legal businesses. They also engage in these businesses to maximize their social boundaries and gain control over various market sections mostly locally.
These areas are those that provide goods and services to the public such as education and healthcare centers. They also use these businesses to create jobs to the community thus providing respect for themselves that help to conceal their criminal backgrounds. Their main aim is to obtain profit these organizations target businesses to achieve this. They obtain the profit through acquiring their assets or even investing in them to gain profit. All these enable them to promote their illegal activities while avoiding being targeted by the law enforcers. Organized crimes are mainly involved in various criminal activities that includes money laundering. This involves the transfer of the money obtained illegally to illegal activities to conceal its origin. Misappropriation of assets which involves causing an organization to pay for assets they have not received. Embezzlement or receipts and also using the companies’ assets for personal use (Lyman, 2014).

Counterfeiting and contraband involves imitating a product or even their packaging to present it as the original product. Contraband entails the smuggling of these counterfeited products. Fraud and extortion may involve force, intimidation or violence to gain money from a premise. Human trafficking involves the use of exploitation through force and transporting people while they work against their will, Drugs, and cybercrime. Drug trafficking is the most lucrative criminal activity with a profit estimation of $320 billion. According to statistics, it is equivalent to 0.6 and 0.9 percent of the GDP. Cocaine and heroin are the most traded drugs with an estimated worth $85billion and $68 billion respectively. The criminal groups normally infiltrate the bars and night club businesses to conduct the illegal activity of forced prostitution. Most of these women are either kidnapped, smuggled, people coerced with the promise of getting work and even the use of violence or force.
These bars and clubs give the impression of legit businesses with routine dancing to conceal prostitution that is going on in the background. They also infiltrate pornography by the use of massage parlors as concealment. People then pay more cash for these services, these are mainly controlled by the crime families who even buy houses in their name but it’s a production area for these films. Criminals use shell companies to launder money, these companies do not have an asset and are normally not involved in the production. They appear as legit businesses to avoid suspicion this companies obtain the money from illegal activities. Smurfing is also another method that involves the breaking down of these large sums to small spread accounts to avoid detection. It’s also done through online auctions, sales or gambling where it’s converted into gaming currency then transferred into real, untraceable clean money (Wentworth,2018).

Reference
Lyman, M. D., & Potter, G. W. (2014). Organised crime (6th ed.).
Wentworth, I. (2018, August 28). Why is Money Laundering Illegal? Retrieved from https://www.delta-net.com/compliance/anti-money-laundering/faqs/why-is-money-laundering-illegal