Criminal Underworld Research Articles

Of deviance and patriarchy: Mechanisms of gender discrimination in public‐sector corruption

AbstractAlthough men are overrepresented among the perpetrators of high‐profile, white‐collar crime, examinations of public‐sector corruption typically reveal little‐to‐no gender differences in participation. Drawing from Steffensmeier's theory of gender inequality in the criminal underworld and Tomaskovic‐Devey and Avent‐Holt's relational theory of inequality, we argue that this apparent equality conceals systematically different patterns of engagement. We hypothesize that bureaucrats and other facilitators are more willing to collaborate with men than with women. Because public‐sector corruption markets are not male dominated, we argue that “gatekeepers” of both genders systematically exclude women from lucrative illegal collaborations. We further hypothesize that patterns of gender inequality are more pronounced in riskier and more profitable public‐sector corruption. We test these hypotheses with data from an original nationally representative survey conducted in Russia in 2018 using models that incorporate controls for explanations that locate gender differences in crime engagement in offender attributes. Our results demonstrate that gender differences in public‐sector corruption are a function of coordination among multiple actors. These relational dynamics advantage Russian men over women in that they are more likely to use less costly types of remuneration and to engage in high‐stakes exchanges with bigger material yields.

‘I am a Scaffolder’: Constructing Safety Knowledge and Machismo in ‘Dirty Work’

This article investigates how Hong Kong scaffolders navigate and make sense of everyday dangerous work which is stigmatized in a highly aspirational society. With the theoretical lens of ‘dirty work’, we examine what attracts the scaffolders into the occupation, how they perceive and navigate risk, and how they construct the knowledge that enables them to function safely as skilled craftsmen. We found that the sector attracts young men from disadvantaged backgrounds and with links to the criminal underworld, who respond to social stigma by constructing an identity of intrepid performers and enacting unsafe high-risk activities and brinkmanship. Yet, their traditional knowledge and practices now face obsolescence due to pressure to standardize safety training and practice, and also due to an internal crisis of occupational legitimacy. This article contributes to our understanding of the analytical lens of ‘dirty work’ in macho cultures.

The Dark Arctic

The snow-white Arctic is darkening physically and economically. Climate change is turning frozen seas into open water and blackening snow and ice as soot spreads and algae propagates. At the same time, the region’s shadow economy is expanding. Illicit activities like human trafficking and fishing have long thrived in northern peripheries beyond state reach, while Russia’s transition to capitalism in the 1990s institutionalized the black market. The invasion of Ukraine further tightened ties between Russian Arctic resource development and criminal underworlds. With the Kremlin continuing northern extraction to fund the war and circumpolar diplomacy fracturing, the entire region is at risk of environmental and geopolitical degradation.

We Write in Other People’s Blood: Troubling the Body Politics and Disability Representation of Yakuza 0

This paper takes Yakuza 0, a retrospective prequel and standalone entry to the Yakuza digital game franchise from Japan, as a case study for disabled feminine bodies vis-à-vis their male counterparts in game narratives. Of note is Makimura Makoto, a downtrodden Chinese-Japanese woman experiencing post-traumatic psychogenic blindness, who serves as the unwitting kingpin of the yakuza’s schemes. This paper posits that a reading of the game’s narrative (as supplemented by its gameplay mechanics) through the critical lens of disability studies offers a more affective and recuperative understanding of the game’s treatment of its marginalised characters. This paper first seeks to intervene in the game’s embodied and gendered power dynamics by attending to the body politics of its fictitious criminal underworld. Correspondingly, this paper troubles the game’s presentation of disability as a gendered performance, wherein feminine bodies disproportionately experience the material consequences and trauma of their disabilities, framed as pivotal narrative movements that spur the game’s male protagonists forward. Ultimately, this paper works towards a more empathetic reading of Yakuza 0 as a roadmap for how the franchise and digital games at large can address disability as a compounding, ever-evolving relational condition in addition to its physical and/or mental dimensions.

Last Gangster in Austin: Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia by Jesse Sublett

Reviewed by: Last Gangster in Austin: Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia by Jesse Sublett Jason Mellard Last Gangster in Austin: Frank Smith, Ronnie Earle, and the End of a Junkyard Mafia. By Jesse Sublett. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022. Pp. 212. Illustrations, notes, index.) Jesse Sublett's Last Gangster in Austin hinges on a single dramatic incident: an armed robbery gone bad in an Austin salvage yard in 1976, leaving one man in a monkey mask dead on the floor. That is not what the book is about, though. This singular crime becomes a kaleidoscope through which to view the intricate and intersecting biographies, criminal endeavors, and political fortunes of the figures in the subtitle, underworld character Frank Smith and crusading district attorney (DA) Ronnie Earle. Frank Smith was a bail bondsman, auto parts dealer, and ne'er-do-well, a "Don Corleone as reimagined for Hee Haw" (16). Ronnie Earle was a 1970s reform wunderkind, the youngest municipal judge in Texas before his DA election put him in place to prosecute Smith. A constellation of [End Page 604] associates and nemeses swirl around the two, a cast plucked from the noir genre that Sublett renders so well as hardboiled nonfiction. Ike Rabb is the owner of the Austin Salvage Pool and target of Smith's ire. Sherriff Raymond Frank had been a reformer in his own right before ties to Smith exposed his corruption. A real star of the book, whom Sublett often channels, is Austin American-Statesman beat writer Bill Cryer, whose articles testified to the quality of writing and depth of relationships that local journalism once fostered. Beyond this cast, "significant" Texas history figures cameo throughout, including LBJ's brother Sam Houston Johnson, Allan Shivers, Ann Richards, and Willie Nelson. When such figures appear on the page, they put the book's accomplishment in high relief. It is a rollicking narrative of a criminal underworld, yes, but Sublett's attention to characters otherwise invisible in the celebratory accounts of modern Austin shows that histories aiming to capture the life of a Texas city miss much when they fixate on who performs on its central stages rather than, say, who guts out a living in a salvage yard. Earle is the protagonist here in bringing Smith to justice, but the work of telling history from Smith's vantage point on the margins (or in the shadows) fills in the blind spots of so many other Austin stories. Last Gangster in Austin adds to what has become Sublett's extended literary universe of nightlife and hustles, shenanigans and sleaze, across mid-century Texas. Individuals from his other books put in appearances here: the Overton Gang from Austin Gangsters, co-author Broadus Spivey of Homer Maxey's Texas Bank War, Eddie Wilson from Armadillo World Headquarters, and even allusions to the tome that started it all, Sublett's own memoir Never the Same Again. In fact, the origins of this book lay in that first, as Smith's legal troubles swirled in the newspapers in which Sublett was researching his own experiences of 1976, when he had been wrongfully suspected of a violent crime. That experience, and a familiarity with the journalistic sources of the time, helped spark this book and led Sublett to engage in extensive interviews with surviving principals that he deploys to good effect. On its surface, the book reads as true crime and succeeds as such. It is also an exemplary microhistory with close attention to currents that broader accounts of modern Austin have missed, if not outright ignored. Historians may reflect on moments where the book could have aimed for larger themes—the Smith case as emblematic of the institutional failures and political corruption of the 1970s—but that can be the work of other studies and is typically implicit in Sublett's telling. A riveting character study, The Last Gangster in Austin stands out as is, as bold and individual as Smith's bright green Cadillac speeding away from the scene of the crime. [End Page 605] Jason Mellard Texas State University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

DETECTION OF RANSOMWARE ATTACKS IN NETWORK USING MACHINE LEARNING

The development of computer and communication technology has resulted in considerable changes from the past. Despite the fact that utilising new inventions benefits people, organisations, and governments greatly, some people are prejudiced against them. For instance, information security in file systems, information accessibility, and so on.Due to several groups, including the criminal underworld, professionals, and digital activists, including dread of the digital world, which has caused many issues for individuals and organisations, has reached the point where it may jeopardise national and open security. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) were created as a result to maintain a safe distance from internet threats. The new CICIDS2017 dataset was utilised to train the Support vector machine (SVM) computations, which are currently being used to identify port sweep efforts. Instead of SVM, we might use other algorithms like CNN, ANN, and random forest. Keywords: data security, information accessibility, digital fear, intrusion detection systems.

Роль песни в фильмах Леонида Гайдая

The article is devoted to Leonid Gaidai’s work with soundtrack. The emphasis is made on the analysis of both original and borrowed songs in the entire filmography of the director. In the first part of the article, the author analyses the principles of Gaidai’s work with various musical genres and outlines the range of musical genres and styles used by the director. The article investigates how their meaning (reputation) changes, refracted through the prism of the comedy genre, and discusses various ways in which the director interprets the genres of an old-time sentimental gypsy romance, folk and criminal underworld songs. The second part of the article reveals the role of songs in the dramaturgy of Gaidai’s comedies. The author demonstrates that with the help of songs, Gaidai creates an interconnected musical universe both within one film and between films. The study presents the analysis of the contrast between the visual-narrative side of an episode and its soundtrack and provides a detailed examination of how Gaidai challenged stereotypes as to what characters can perform what genre songs in a comedy film.

Containing Large-Scale Criminal Violence Through Internationalized Prosecution: How the Collaboration Between the CICIG and Guatemala’s Law Enforcement Contributed to a Sustained Reduction in the Murder Rate

How do post-conflict societies contain large-scale criminal violence when state security forces that committed atrocities during a civil war remain unpunished and become key players in the criminal underworld? This article explores the impact on violence reduction of internationalized prosecution (IP): cooperation agreements between an international organization and a country’s public prosecutors to dismantle state-criminal networks through judicial action. We assess the IP process by which the United Nations–sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and Guatemala’s law enforcement dismantled over 70 criminal structures led by death squads and the civil war military establishment. Using synthetic control models, we estimate that Guatemala’s IP process plausibly prevented the occurrence of between 20,000 and 30,000 homicides, from 2008 until 2019. Case studies show how IP contributed to violence reduction by removing criminal structures and deterring both state-criminal collusion and the state’s use of iron-fist militarized policies against crime.

“Greasy Thumb”—The Man Who Made the Chicago Mob

“Greasy Thumb”—The Man Who Made the Chicago Mob

Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World

Knowing Fictions: Picaresque Reading in the Early Modern Hispanic World

A strange case of gendercide: fascination, psychotic features, archaic elements, and phantasmatic metamorphosis

This is a strange case of murder: a mafia pentito, an informer, reveals after ten years that the death of a man which had been considered natural, had in fact been a murder. The victim, a loan shark associated with crime people, was the companion of his lover at the time. The strange aspect is the way in which the mobster, with a couple of hired killers and helped by the woman, organised the murder: a shot of pesticide while the man was lying in bed with the woman. This modality was suggested by a veterinarian friend of the mobster who claimed that the pesticide would not be detected. The interviewer's imagination/vision of a metamorphosis while he was interviewing the woman in a forensic setting; the dream he had immediately after the interview; the bizarre construction of the crime; the seductive abilities of the woman linked to the choice and the type of partners she had and the bonds she had created; and the almost dreamlike description of the crime itself, suggest the emergence of primitive mechanisms of mental functioning: splitting, the use of massive projections of partial aspects and projective identification. A fragile and hidden common thread is hypothesised in this work. A common thread whose core is the desire for the narcissistic realisation of a woman who, in order to achieve it, puts eros at the service of thanatos. A red thread that connects all the different events, the real and the phantasmatic ones: from seeking a role as a woman of the criminal underworld to the magic fascination of an archaic Sicily, evoking primitive mechanisms of functioning typical of psychosis.

‘Flash houses’: Public houses and geographies of moral contagion in 19th-century London

‘Flash houses’, a distinctive type of public house associated with criminal activity, are a shadowy and little-studied aspect of early 19th-century London. This article situates flash houses within a wide perspective, arguing that the discourses on flash houses were part of concerns about the threat of the urban environment to the moral character of its inhabitants. The article draws on an original synthesis of a range of sources that refer to flash houses, including contemporary literature, newspapers, court documents, and government papers. It demonstrates that flash houses were part of both popular intrigue about the perceived ‘criminal underworld’ and official concerns about the collusion between police officers and suspected offenders, since police officers allegedly frequented flash houses to gather criminal information. A detailed examination of this term reveals anxieties about the state of the metropolis, poverty, and criminality that were central to the early 19th-century consciousness. However, the discussion of flash houses in this context also demonstrates a powerful connection in contemporary minds between the physical spaces of the city and the risks that they posed to inhabitants' morals. While associations between the physical environment and morality have been drawn throughout history, flash houses represent a paradigmatic moment in this dialogue. This is because different moral concerns coalesced around the discourse on flash houses: anxieties about the criminal underworld, the potential for moral degradation of young people who frequented these spaces, and the corruption of police officers through contact with known or suspected offenders.

Conflict and Victimization in Online Drug Markets

ABSTRACT In the criminal underworld, transactions generate risk for the parties involved, but in contrast to legal markets, parties are unable to turn to legal recourse when cheated in a transaction. Past research has found that many strategies can be used to manage conflicts, including self-help strategies (vengeance, discipline and rebellion, avoidance, negotiation, settlement, and tolerance) and third-party interventions. In the context of illicit drug markets, ostracism and threats or actual violence are also strategies that have been observed. In this paper, we surveyed 49 online illicit drug market vendors to explore the conflict experiences of drug dealers who participate in online and offline illicit drug markets. The paper aims to describe the conflict and victimization experiences of online drug dealers and to understand the mitigating effect of technologies on these conflicts. The results indicate that conflict and victimization experiences are rare for online drug dealers, but there are still many situations that are not mitigated by the use of anonymizing technologies like those used on online illicit markets. We demonstrate how these conflicts differ between online and physical drug markets.

The Polish Shakespearean stage in the post-transformational era

The Shakespearean stage productions after 1989 reflected social, political and economic changes in the rapidly transforming Polish reality, which gave rise to a modern type of audience whose sensitivity was shaped by popular music, cinema, digital media and the mass culture. Contemporary Polish directors (Jan Klata, Maja Kleczewska, Grzegorz Jarzyna, Krzysztof Warlikowski) recognized that modernity and tradition can (and should) be combined onstage and that canonical texts can express new meanings in new forms. The new approach to the audience and the canon led to the development of the new aesthetics representing the ‘postdramatic theatre’. The new aesthetics gave new rights to the directors; for example, Maja Kleczewska set her Macbeth in a criminal underworld of the Polish mafia in the 1990s, imbuing her production with kitschy costumes and pop culture symbols. For the same reason, Jan Klata located his H. in the Gdansk shipyard, the birthplace of ‘Solidarity’, infusing his adaptation with the music of The Doors, Metallica and U2. In my analysis of the Polish Shakespearean stage in the post-transformational era, I offer a short overview of some key trends in dramaturgical aesthetics and the directors’ approaches to the adaptation of Shakespeare’s drama to the stage in the 1990s and 2000s. Next, I discuss in more detail the ‘postdramatic’ aesthetics of the modern Shakespeare adaptations based on the examples of two chosen artists, Maja Kleczewska and Jan Klata.

Cryptocurrencies as facilitators of cybercrime

The aim of the article is to show cryptocurrencies as facilitators of crime, especially cybercrime. While investing in cryptocurrencies is publicly discussed, their role in the criminal world is more hidden from the public, however, causes a lot of problems for law enforcement and regulatory authorities around the world. Criminals are interested in cryptocurrencies as targets for of their attacks, means of payment and as a method of money laundering. In this article, we discuss why cryptocurrencies have become a means of payment for the criminal underworld, what benefits they have from them, and what major challenges law enforcement is facing in that regard. The survey was conducted based on reports from authorities involved in the prosecution of cybercrime. We can conclude that the organized criminal underworld has a strong interest in cryptocurrencies and their popularity among ordinary, honest citizens, as in this way it is much easier for the criminals to conceal their activities and the origin of their assets.

Keep the dark web close and your cyber security tighter

The dark web still offers a safe haven for criminal activity – especially those sites operating outside the reach of Western law enforcement. Much of the dark web is devoted to cybercrime, from sharing techniques and tools to selling stolen data and credentials. Having an ear to the ground in this shadowy underworld can give organisations an edge in identifying and defending against threats, from new trends to attacks specifically targeting them. But acquiring access to these secrets is no easy feat, explains Ziv Mador of Trustwave. “The golden age of the dark web marketplace is over”. So declared Europol in September 2020, after the triumphant announcement of operation ‘DisrupTOR’, a sting that led to the arrest of 179 criminals selling drugs and weapons. 1 The operation, which saw co-ordination between Europol and law agencies across the world, is the latest strike against the virtual marketplaces that are the beating heart of the criminal underworld today.

Justifications for Decriminalizing Drugs

Drug decriminalization calls for reduced control and penalties compared to existing laws. Proponents of drug decriminalization generally support the use of fines or other punishments to replace prison terms, and often propose systems whereby illegal drug users who are caught would be fined, but would not receive a permanent criminal record as a result. A central feature of drug decriminalization is the concept of harm reduction.
 Drug decriminalization is in some ways an intermediate between prohibition and legalization, and has been criticized as being "the worst of both worlds", in that drug sales would still be illegal, thus perpetuating the problems associated with leaving production and distribution of drugs to the criminal underworld, while also failing to discourage illegal drug use by removing the criminal penalties that might otherwise cause some people to choose not to use drugs.
 In 2001 began treating use and possession of small quantities of drugs as a public health issue. This also decreases the amount of money the government spends fighting a war on drugs and money spent keeping drug users incarcerated. A number of countries have similarly moved to reduce the penalties associated with drug use and personal possession.

The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East, by Eleonora Sasso

Reviewed by: The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East by Eleonora Sasso Justin A. Sider (bio) The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East, by Eleonora Sasso; pp. x + 222. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, £75.00, $110.00. Among the varieties of exoticism practiced by the Pre-Raphaelites, the classical and medieval recreations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and company remain the most familiar, well-represented in recent scholarship. In this respect, Eleonora Sasso's The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism: Language and Cognition in Remediations of the East happily brings light to an underappreciated facet of their writing and art. Her study treats the aesthetic consequences of the Pre-Raphaelites' fascination with the Arabian Nights (c. 1706 to c. 1721)—a childhood favorite of many nineteenth-century authors—in order to position them as interpreters of the East for Victorian culture. The book comprises a brief introduction and four chapters, covering painting, poetry, and prose from the Rossettis to Ford Madox Ford (whose inclusion represents one of the book's better impulses). The central question Sasso poses is straightforward and compelling enough: how do the Pre-Raphaelites adapt the Arabian Nights? The answers are somewhat less satisfying, the book's salutary investigation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's (PRB) Orientalism hobbled both by a paucity of scholarly engagement and by the foibles of method. The Pre-Raphaelites and Orientalism is principally a study of intertextuality. It considers the ways in which images, themes, tropes, and topoi from the Arabian Nights—"its mystic aura, criminal underworld, and feminine sensuality"—find themselves transformed in the crucible of Pre-Raphaelite art (2). The Pre-Raphaelites, Sasso suggests, found in the Arabian Nights an entire grammar of the imagination with which to erect their own dream-worlds of sensual pleasure or political critique. One goal of this study is recuperative (or perhaps prophylactic): she argues that Pre-Raphaelite Orientalism does not, pace Edward Said, deepen and harden "the impenetrable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority" (2). She instead sees Pre-Raphaelite art as a "blended space," bringing together elements of East and West in order to produce new cognitive, aesthetic, and even political possibilities (4). On this fine distinction rests the book's contribution to discussions of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Thus, in chapter 1, Sasso paints D. G. Rossetti as "almost a precursor of cultural studies," committed to the celebration of diversity and the critique of British imperialism (13). The politics, it should be said, remain largely implicit in Sasso's readings. Rossetti's commitment to diversity emerges in the way he gives play to competing modes of representation (both Oriental and Western) within the blended spaces of his poems and paintings, maintaining rather than collapsing the differences among them. [End Page 508] The rest of the volume turns on similar kinds of figurative transformation. Chapter 2 treats the sensualism of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Aubrey Beardsley in relation to the hammam or bath scenes in the Arabian Nights. Many Victorians read the Arabian Nights in Edward William Lane's bowdlerized 1840 translation. Swinburne, for his part, preferred the more sexually frank and literal version by Richard F. Burton, a friend in flagellation, and his reading of Burton produced a "corporeal Orientalism" designedly provocative to Victorian sexual mores (37). (Sasso suggests, but does not pursue, an intriguing analogy between the literalism of the translation and Swinburne's interest in surfaces, his confusions of figure and ground.) Chapter 3 turns to the comparably more chaste imaginations of John Ruskin and William Morris, who admired the Arabian Nights both for its elaborate design and for the moral flavor of its parables. Sasso convincingly argues that their own modes of storytelling—from the instructive fables of Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust (1866) to the stories-within-stories of Morris's Earthly Paradise (1868–70)—were shaped by early reading in the Nights. Of particular interest to students of the Pre-Raphaelites will be the fresh attention paid to fairytales in chapter 4, an understudied PRB genre. (The chapter offers a useful complement to recent work by Molly Clark Hillard, among others.) The political dimensions...

From Decadence to Degeneration: The Big Sleep, its forceful plot, and a femme fatale 'still in the dangerous twenties'

Tasked with naming an exemplary decadent artist, scholars often turn to Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). In his epigrams, essays, plays, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde calls for an ‘art for art’s sake’ that underscores a broader assault on nineteenth-century lifeways. As his 1895 trial on gross indecency demonstrates, however, British society refused to accept aesthetics as a domain accountable to beauty alone or to condone the new masculine identities that his work championed. A modern novel, Dorian Gray anticipates both refusals, insofar as it shows the protagonist’s pursuit of sensation to be intensely compelling while warning that his decadent experience, however wittily expressed or secured by wealth, carries with it the potential for physical degeneration. Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1939) has long been treated as a terse, hardboiled novel by readers, and rightly so. Its mean streets—built up from the example of Dashiell Hammett—would therefore seem to be far removed from decadents like Wilde and the airy experiments of The Yellow Book. But Chandler (1888-1959), a Chicago-born American who came of age in turn-of-the-century London, is no stranger to the decadent movement; and his dark realism recalls Wilde’s project by depicting a set of characters whose lives of static privilege compel a descent into a criminal underworld. For Dorian Gray as well as for the Sternwood family, then, decadent experience leads to dissolution, and dissolution—however much it might resonate with social critique—compels personal and narrative degeneration. In the reading of The Big Sleep that follows, I return decadence and the science of degeneration to interpretive prominence so that the force driving Chandler’s strange double plot and its femme fatale’s criminal designs may be conceived anew.

Negotiating Violence and Protection in Prison and on the Outside: The Organizational Evolution of the Transnational Prison Gang Barrio Azteca

Barrio Azteca is a criminal organization that has significantly evolved since its inception as a prison solidarity group—first into a true prison gang and then into an organized criminal enterprise operating in the free world. Today, Barrio Azteca has declined in power and effectiveness in carceral settings but continues to play an important role in the wholesale and retail drug trade in the Paso del Norte area. Its organizational life cycle appears to parallel that of a licit enterprise, except that it primarily competes in the criminal protection marketplace. Thus, to survive and compete in the market for criminal protection, Barrio Azteca adapted to shifts in control dynamics, demonstrating uncommon resilience, first specializing in protection in response to changes in carceral violence and, later, expanding into the drug-trafficking market in response to violence in the criminal underworld both inside and outside prison. This article traces that history of adaptation and persistence, situating it within a synthesis of currently accepted theoretical models of criminal organizational evolution, and in so doing, provides the first organizational history of a prison gang—Barrio Azteca—published in the academic literature.