Prosecuting the Money Launderers Who Act for Organised Crime

Abstract

The forces of globalisation have had a profound effect on the world's economies and it should come as no surprise that they have given new opportunities for organised crime and new challenges for legal systems and law enforcement. While the phenomenon of organised crime is not new, it has been growing in recent years and is now generating and laundering huge illegal profits, subsequently investing them in legal business. Strategies against organised crime will be shaped by the mental models used to understand it, and anyone whose mental model of organised crime is derived from the Chicago gangsters of the 1920s or the Mafia godfather of cinematic fiction is using the mental model of a bygone era. Organised crime today must be understood using a business model and hence viewed as businesses, producing illicit goods and services, which vary in size and scale on a continuum from small, local businesses to multinational corporations. The business model assists in analysing the structures of organised crime and, by applying it, one can postulate for example that, at the latter end of the continuum, organised crime groups will, like all multinational corporations, have their own managing directors, finance directors and other corporate officers. The unprecedented challenge now facing law enforcement authorities is to develop effective strategies to combat these multinational corporations of organised crime.